Cobb

Don't Look Now: It's Pakistan

I get mail. This morning's batch included this map from The Institute for the Study of War. 

Nothing quite spells war out like maps. And this one shows which armies are where. What is quite obvious here is that the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan has American forces staring down Pakistani forces. We've got the Frontier Corps in brown and the regular Pakistan Army in green.

Long ago during campaign season, Barack Obama made all kinds of threatening noises about Pakistan. Back then, Musharraf was in trouble but how much was anybody's guess. Bottom line was that Bush had been making friendly noises in support of that military leader. But all sorts of chaos has destabilized Pakistan, and nobody has really controlled this border area. The ISI of course has been playing both sides and it must be said with certainty that OBL is holed up somewhere in there with lots of outside help. Obviously, it's in the interest of many countries to keep us tangled up and looking for Bin Laden. So how ugly does this situation get, and to what extent is Obama going to push? It's beginning to be interesting enough for me to look closer.

My kind of president would be very clear on the war aims and transcendant goals for the region. And I think he would be doing so with some large public military alliance with India.

Brown v Whitman

Jerry Brown is serious. Meg Whitman is full of rhetoric. Neither of them deserve my vote and neither will get it. I listened to about 20 minutes of this so-called debate on the radio on my drive home. When I got home, I found my 13 year old daughter transcribing the rhetoric using a pencil, paper and DVR. She says they're both childish, blaming each other for the problems of the state. 

The only interesting moment of the entire farce was Brown qualifying quite precisely what the limits are to the Governor's power in speeding up capital punishment. The answer, throw better lawyers at it. And he was right of course. The other interesting moment might have come if I had the stomach to wait for it, but it was implied in much of what Whitman was saying in her nominal comparisons between California and Texas. Texas has no state income tax and they're not broke. California does have state income tax and we're broke.

Whitman flubbed her question about her experience negotiating with labor unions. She said she'd negotiate, and then she said she'd punt to the initiative process. There was supposed to be a third leg to that stool but she started blustering. It's all rather fraudulent, I think, and perfectly astonishing how someone supposedly as intelligent as she is is reduced to the exact same caricature of a blowhard candidate. 

She's weak, and she's going to get stomped. It's astonishing that she actually clicked the wayback machine and brought Rose Bird into this campaign. And then she had the temerity to suggest that the $800 fee for an LLC being waived would spur economic growth. 

Where's Duncan Hunter?

Nobody Knows

From Marginal Revolution

We do know that the Fed purchased many of its mortgage securities from the GSEs, especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  We also know that these GSEs have cost the taxpayers at least $148 billion so far and may end up costing $400 billion in one "worst case" scenario.  How much larger would the GSE losses have been if the Fed had not taken these mortgages off their books?  The Fed also bought toxic securities from the banks and one imagines that the Fed got the short end of that stick.  How much larger would bank losses have been without these purchases?

That would be an interesting question for the Administration. How much money will you allow the Fed to lose? How much have they lost already?

On the Necessity of Knuckleheads

(from the archives, June 2004)

Spence, whom I salute again, mentions the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High Five for Stuxnet

Right about now, Iranian IT dudes are pacing in panic because the US and Israel have unleashed the most obscenely devious piece of cyberwar kickass ever seen. It's called the Stuxnet Worm and it targets Iranian SCADA networks exploiting four, count'em four zero-day holes in the Windows systems that run their Siemens plant control software. Word is that over 3,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges have been taken offline. 

So here is the part where I two a couple ounces of speculation. US cyberwar specialists put together a heavy duty worm and Israeli special forces delivered it. Delivered it? I read that the initial delivery mechanism is a thumb drive because it's too big to simply email - not that factory control systems would be generally running email. But in order to target the right systems, it is best hand delivered to close proximity.

High five to the authors of this weapons grade cyber attack. The Obama Administration gets props for something they must have had something to do with, but can say nothing about. Clearly, the disadvantages of having the existence of this kind of cyberweapon out there in the virus defense world outweigh Iran having nukes. But now that this kind of scary smart bug exists, well, it's a whole new virus ballgame. 

I have been listening to my network tell me how little time Israel had to make a move before the Russkies started fueling the Iranian nuclear plant suspected to be the heart of their program. It turns out that Stuxnet has been wild for a couple months. 

How much it has bollocksed up the works for Iran is anybody's guess, but it's clearly going to cost them. Nice going our side.

Seed Vs Feed

In 'The Diamond Age', what is made clear is that the advance of technology, even to ends that appear miraculous, matters of culture still matter. Everything remains earthbound and there is not a post-scarcity scenario in action. Contrast this with Banks' Culture. At the human scale, entire solar systems may be post-scarcity and the only limits lie in the realm of the laws of physics at the galactic level - computability speed, mass and energy conversion are supreme but the human body does not bear any of those burdens, thus human culture needs few restraints on behavior. The conflict between civilizations at the planetary scale in Banks' Culture may be dramatic, but only for their impact on the galaxy. With Stephenson, they are everything and so culturally specific transcendent values take center stage.

In a key passage, the great Confucian mandarin in the book sums up China's encounter with the West. It resonates with certain things Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in one of his books about the nature of Chinese self-dependency in the culture of rice. The Mandarin says that technology is *yong*, an outer manifestation of an inner force, the *ti*. Chinese adaptation of Western technology never worked - it sowed chaos - because Western technology was an expression of a cultural property, cleverness for its own sake, that was alien to the Chinese way. The value of planting rice and working hard and reaping those rewards were so deeply ingrained, that when the technology arrived (in Stephenson's future) of what essentially was a Star Trek replicator for rice, it destroyed the Chinese balance. What they call Filial Piety became threatened, thus the need for the Confucian to seek The Seed.

The Western technology established that which we today essentially call The Grid. It is an infrastructure of service, hierarchically organized and controlled that distributes the stuff of life. You could get most everything, but so long as you were hooked up to The Feed, the authorities knew what you were getting. In this world, only the elite few had access to the resources of The Feed without oversight. The implication in such a hierarchy is as we expect, an aristocracy of merit. Nobody with enough money and brains to build something like an aircraft carrier would do so to the detriment of society - it wouldn't be in their interest to subvert.

The unfulfilled possibility of The Seed in such a world is that any individual would be able, independently of The Feed, be able to grow whatever it was they wanted instead of depending upon the metered and monitored energy from society's grid. This would be a technology matching the Chinese *ti* of growing rice. Any peasant could build nukes if they wanted. Such an idea threatens the Western Feed idea because there is not perceived a benefit of doing things the old-fashioned way if there is a more clever and easy way of accomplishing the same end. With value attached to the hierarchy of society, the Western individual is radically 'free' at the lower socioeconomic level with relatively little diminishment. That freedom comes at a price, he needn't conform his behavior to those of the elite, and therefore must balance his freedom against the conforming aspects of power. Even individuals who bring their own regimes into power ebb and flow taking the entire society in different directions.  The Chinese in contrast must bear his full dignity independent of his standing in society. He grows his rice, he is a full man. Society doesn't change from the bottom up, because there is relatively little power inheritable to the common man. A newer way to grow rice is not a potential revolution in China as it would be here. They are not all seeking to be clever, but to measure themselves to the discipline. Don't show off your Kung Fu. 

This vein is rich.

As the Subrealist often intones like John the Baptist, American society is threatened by any number of catastrophic scenarios that portend to leave us in that well-understood trope of Zombieland. If the electric grid fails, if the oil stops flowing, if the unemployment rate goes about 20%, Americans will lose what little civility they have and Bedlam erupts. I sense something different within my extended association with a different sort of American, in spirit if not in person, which has its analog in the Chinese *ti*. I've called that aspect of my own character many different things, primarily 'organic', and it remains expressed in the Gadsden Flag on my blog. It is that value I place in a kind of yeoman farmer, hunting lodge by the lake, 'howdy' speaking on the John Muir Trail sensibility. It's what I feel like when I put on my red plaid, my Keens and carry a cigar torch, LED flashlite and CRKT M16-13Z in my cargo shorts. It is also expressed in my philosophical explorations here, as I have never been content to be a mere political consumer but have sought to reconcile public debate with first principles. I want a perspective on the world that survives off the grid, it is part of my true education, not just that which conforms me to What's Happening Now. This is one of the reasons I get so aggravated when I am accused of attempting to fit in with bohunkery when I defend the autonomy of the Tea Party (now the latest craze of the con-Cobbian). You may need to recall that my family holds property in South Dakota, where my mother now lives. That's about the establishment of my blood in American soil, not kissing Palin's ring. 

I appreciate the possibilities enabled by Dyson's Utopia, and I would like very much to see some decentralization of power, especially away from the American government, lest it become too much like France - with an implacable Feed of union graft and entitlement. My dreams tend towards the outline of making software millions and taking it to buy land and learning to live off that land without abandoning the sophistication of Western *ti*, the inheritance of my cosmopolitan roots. So my generation and that of my children is aimed at the transition from urban peasantry and the semiotic swamp to the undeniable reality of exurban self-sufficiency, or at least some shabby form of gentry.

Part and parcel of this growth is a continuous sort of hacking, of getting behind the curtains of that which is presented for the empty vessel of the urban peasant. Making my mind immune to the seductions of mass marketing, mass politics, mass spirituality, mass morality and the economic enticements made to the proletariat. This is about determining the costs of independence and weighing the value of being king of a small hill to being a prince at a higher elevation of a mountain on which you have no claim. 

I expect history to be my guide with the explicit understanding that by way of merit, I might inherit, and that by way of skill, I might find fellows of like mind. That somewhere in history is a model I may better appreciate. What is clear to me is that agitation by the masses to secure an ever higher quality of Feed is, in the end, voluntary slavery. It is in this way of thinking that I am convinced that there are few differences between a safety net and a fishing net. 

And so I have come around to this. 

If the politics of the American future are of the same basic principles of the current neo-liberal social democracy, than it will be for the permanent establishment of The Feed. And in that are dangerous aspects of a command economy. The Seed, that which provides for its own organic development, will always constitute a threat and while my bearing finds subversion a threat, perhaps the greater threat to liberty is The Feed. I hope and expect that the true lessons of the American Revolution will suffice to remind us of a better way.

The Worship of Mammon

 

All Prayer Is Public

All prayer is public prayer except that portion which we cannot prove exists.

It has taken me many years to humble my critical impulses and lower my head in sympathy with those engaged in public prayer. For about as long as I can remember, I refused to and would affix my eyes directly on the person praying as if they were revealing to me personally their most intimate and sincere thoughts. And so I have come to be something of a silent critic of prayer recognizing much in the ways and means people have when I have been present.

The most annoying thing about all public prayer is, of course, the demand by those attuned to the individual praying, that all other activity cease and that all focus and reverence be given to that individual - bolstered by the presumption that anyone not rapt is blasphemous. I tended to try and catch such roving eyes with my own - policing the head-bowing police as it were. I would match my righteousness against theirs anyday.

I must admit that I have never been the sort of Christian who spent much time or emotional investment in the power of prayer. The laying on of hands was always part and parcel of my early churchgoing and my skepticism was thorough. You would think that some of those bulldog faced church marms might bother to lay their own hands on their own ample chins and hips on occasion, but seemed month after month to remain unhealed.

In the end I find the epiphenomenon of prayer to be more socially significant than prayer itself. You might not get what you want from God, but Heaven help the bastards who spoil the moment of silence.

So it comes as no surprise that this is exactly what I have come to expect from those interminable discussions about the value of praying for the cancer-stricken Christopher Hitchens. It's all about the shushing noises associated with it, and whatever controversy can be ginned up by invoking the meaning and validity of prayer itself. It seems to me that if one honestly believed in prayer, then one would pray and leave it at that.

I myself have mentioned at least once, that from time to time, I will send a lightning burst of prayer to The Man Upstairs in a reverent blink of the eyes. He can of course, and without the necessity of employing encryption software, instantly verify my identity, spell and grammar check the content, and determine the true intent of what I am trying to communicate as well as why I bothered in the first place. All of the signifying I do with my hands and my head are not for the benefit of God but for the heathens and chalkline walkers around me.

But this is not prayer proper. Proper prayer invokes the spirit of Matthew 18:20. It means gripping hands in a circle and putting somebody on the spot to publicly assess and account for the emotional center of the group, and thereby dedicate whatever must come towards the greater glory and honor of His name. Prayer of this sort is instantly making church.

So I think those who have raised the question of prayer over the withering body of Christopher Hitchens are trying to erect a church and a congregation around him, one which some might hope he will soon lack the power to escape of his own volition. It is a cruel trick aimed at a man who is for the moment quite well enough to evade, and gracious enough to accept. How loud will such meta-prayer become before the righteous among us should start shushing back?

I approach this from a somewhat rude and flip angle, not because I don't respect giving thanks to God for the blessings of life or in meditative prayer. I respect proper church-making prayer as well, and am honored to take that role. People who know me, know that I know God has a sense of humor and that I invoke that in my prayerful contexts as well. But it is my character to ask rude questions of those who tend to believe they are unimpeachable. And I sense much of that arrogance in those who wish to incant their syllables in a backhanded fashion. The temptation towards triumphalism is great in those convinced that Hitchens and the rest of us are bound to meet God's judgment on terms not of our own choosing. And inherent in that prayer are such nags as we are all familiar. "Be with Christopher, O God, and strengthen him through your mercy as only you can, not these crackpot doctors. Show him who's boss, O God. Let him be as the theif at Jesus side and steal Heaven before it's too late."

There must certainly be a righteous and proper way to pray for Christopher Hitchen, as unfaithful to the meaning of his Christian name as he is. But that is not for our ears, is it?  So who are we to say exactly if and how such a prayer must go?

Milking the Preventable

Since I'm on all sorts of mailing lists, I got two interesting missives back to back. First, I'll quote the one from Change.org:

Big news: UNICEF just announced that the number of children under the age of five dying each day has significantly dropped over the past year: from 24,000 to 22,000.

We're asking you to take action today and help make that number ZERO.

We know you believe that 22,000 children dying from preventable causes each day is 22,000 too many. They die from causes most of us will never have to worry about - such as starvation, unsanitary living conditions, no access to clean drinking water, or lack of a five-cent vaccine.

We are making remarkable progress toward a world in which no child dies from preventable causes, and can see a light at the end of the tunnel. But without a strong commitment by the U.S. government, we will never reach zero. Please urge Congress to fully fund our committment to UNICEF this year to help save millions of children's lives and protect their futures.

From measles campaigns in Pakistan to emergency food in Ethiopia; from hurricane relief in Haiti to anti-malarial bed net distribution in Nigeria - UNICEF's work is having a huge impact. And with this latest announcement comes more hope - we can see that the drop in child mortality is actually accelerating.

In a very concrete way, the news about a drop in child mortality demonstrates that global investment and strategic partnerships are putting comprehensive child survival strategies in place that get results. Over the last 50 years, UNICEF and its partners have helped reduce the worldwide child mortality rate by more than 50%. This pace of improvement is increasing, and we are getting closer to a day when zero children die from preventable causes.

Please write Congress today and urge continued strong support of UNICEF so that we can continue to reduce the number of preventable child deaths around the world.

Now a quote from PJ O'Rourke:

"The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can’t pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can."

The irony is that, of course, liberals don't necessarily want destabilizing budget deficits, and conservatives don't want dead children. But nothing can be clearer than how such emotional appeals to engage Congress on missions of mercy are the modus operandi of progressive activism.  What's galling about this example is the aim towards Zero Tolerance, which any reasonable person should see as extreme.

What indeed is preventable? Congressional spending?

Mediaglyphics

In 'The Diamond Age', Stephenson predicts that in the future there will be a universal language of 'mediaglyphics' for the illiterate. It will enable future urban peasants to get through their lives without the need for a certain kind of thinking. The following commercial works very well without narration. Even though there is some reading done, you don't need much to get the idea.

 

Open Thread Thursday

And some fragments.

Stuxnet Worm - Target's Iran's SCADA

Obama's Wars - Woodward is at it again.

 

Confucius Again: The Five Virtues

My second reading of 'The Diamond Age' finds me much more interested this go-round with the principles of Confucian philosophy as expressed in the actions of Dr X and Judge Fang.

I like these:

• Ren is the virtue of benevolence, charity, and humanity;
• Yi, of honesty and uprightness;
• Zhi, knowledge;
• Xin, the virtue of faithfulness and integrity;
• Li, correct behavior, or propriety, good manners, politeness, ceremony, worship.

It's interesting the split. Honesty and uprightness seems to imply many of the others, and integrity seems to imply most. But that they are differentiated suggests that there are many shades to them, and interesting stories and lessons for each.

One of the passages that strikes me in today's reading of the book is the following:

Pretty interesting that.

Requiem Unfinished

(from the archives: Sept 2006)

If I could turn time's hands to days before the quaking of the ground
And rewind screaming engines, fires, clouds of concrete and that massive sound
We could not be wiser, nor could we imagine sleeping that our fate
Might rest between this fiqh or that Islamic dream of mighty Caliphate

Could we have known a thousand soldiers born to die a martyr's death
Would cross the globe advancing every opportunity to plot our death?
We made no time to mind what Sunnis thinks a Shi'ite might be all about
And for this lapse a nation's grasp of deadly enemies remains in doubt.

Of Hezbollah and Ikwan
Of Yemenis and Taliban
Zawahiri, Zarkawi, Ahmadinejad
Haditha, Mosul, Fallujah, Samarra & Baghdad
Sunni, Shi'ite, Alawite,  Fatah & Hamas
Madhi Army, Baathists & Egyptian Madrassas
Tora Bora, Peshawar, Al Jazeera, Al Anbar
Dhimmitude & Burkas and I've gone only half as far
And half as deep as I must go before I sleep...

And in my homeland marching all about the common ground I see
A million doubting fingers pointing left and right as if there couldn't be
An enemy more intimate or willing to run through the beating heart
Of liberty's sweet promise just to jealously defend their party's part

Within this house divided may we tell
Recalling lives upon that day destroyed
The tragedy of why the towers fell
The blind sheik's eye, the gaping moral void

Remember how we vowed that we'd obey
The call of duty rising in us all
To honor them defending all the way
Our very finest freedoms from the fall

So to that end we brandished every sword
And used but few available to us
Charging ahead on Colin Powell's word
To hell with those who won't get on the bus

Our Eagle's fury venged with wrath but blurred by righteous mourning tears
So many dead fell hapless to our shock and awe and mounted muslim fears
That we might satiate a hunger to devour nations fueled by christian hate
And so joined in the foolish fatwa muslim madmen lining every state

They came to fight like lemmings wailing to Iraq after Afghanistan
From Syria and Iran hailing, brainwashed brigand boys their first jihad
Joined up to displaced Baathists and al Sadr how they ran
To meet their doom under the hand of Odierno run roughshod

Yet to this tale of desparation we add blue-thumbed voting hope anew
For in the truth of liberation there is mighty public work to do
Such work begat a Constitution. Iyad Allawi stood before the house
With sovereignty delivered now Maliki's bosom wears new freedoms blouse

Blind blind my brothers I must protect their ignorant souls from their perverse goals
Deaf deaf my sisters mumbling yadda into their decaf, immune from the draft
Dumb dumb my cousins sitting on their arms claiming enlightened pacifism
Weak weak my neighbors shriek a cowards yellow streak backbiting when I speak
All my relatives live in relativism
And nobody asks why until they die

I cannot finish
I cannot stop
There is no art in the frustrated hand
I can only press forward a new tack
Until perhaps they understand
There is no turning back

Confucius & The Society of Laws

“If the people be led by laws, and uniformity among them be sought by punishments, they will try to escape punishment and have no sense of shame. If they are led by virtue, and uniformity sought among them through the practice of ritual propriety, they will possess a sense of shame and come to you of their own accord.” (Lunyu 2.3; see also 13.6.)

It is interesting that I come across this quote in my reading. It is yet another way of expressing what I was talking about here.

Now I'm curious to understand xiào, Filial Piety.

Neil Farage

I just needed to get a reference for Neil Farage in the blog. I'm sure all of you have seen his blistering critique of EU President Von Rompuy.

Death and Dishonor

"If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels."
-- John Donne 

I'm still riffing off the idea of Hitchens that some civilized people must remain to civilize religions, or at the very least police them. I am not convinced, as Hitchens is, that this is a permanent matter. I observe that we simply have a poor set of self-selected clergy on the whole, and that the organization of organized religion is not quite as our regimes of say bond trading. Hitchens' Boesky is the Pope, and so it goes. 

If you ask me why I don't like Islam, it is because I don't think it scales. What is truly admirable about Islam is that it appears to me to be the kind of religion I would invent were I to live on a desert island with 1000 others. And apparently this is a sentiment shared around the globe, because Islam does a fairly fantastic job of working in tribal areas like Afghanistan. And in such tribal areas seeking to add a bit of supernatural gloss to their authority and mores, Islam accommodates such pre-civil taboos such as tyranny over women. Without much getting into it, tyranny over women is appropriate in desert island situations so long as they are the sort of women who can't do pull-ups, kill snakes or stand still when spiders crawl over their bare feet. To the extent that women don't feel compelled to manage such tasks, it falls to men, and in reciprocity men will define power in such brutally ignorant terms. That's the basic exchange when it comes to the basics, and such arrangements work in small clans and tribal situations. But I think Islam doesn't scale, and thrives best in such enclaves. But then again, so does any faith, fable, superstition, or wives tale. And for the counter-exemplary women who flip the snake over the bar, snap it in two after 10 pull ups, then squeeze the blood out of it's dead head to drown the spider on her big toe, well they tend to be one in 10,000. And in many places around the world, they get stoned.

If you read Robert Fisk's latest piece in the Independent, you will come to understand how gruesome stoning is. All the heinous details are there. 20,000 women per year are murdered for preposterous reasons around the world. 

This is the evil that men do. My point is not to suggest anyone indulge in any sort of outrage, but to toll the sad bell that reminds us that although life is precious, there are a million convolutions of logic inspiring men to forget that. And if there is anything to the universality of the defense of liberty and human rights, then there are a few good ideas that counter all those convolutions. At our best, we will fight with that in mind. 

Here in America we do have our liberty, and we also have our million convolutions and corruptions of moral logic over our million channels over the air and through the broadband. Each tiny corruption is a small piece of evil doing its work chopping away not only our virtue but our ability see the virtue of justice in action. We can watch horror movies and then just go home and watch romantic comedies to soothe them away. Americans watch the true crimes of these killings and those of every other preposterous rationale around the world as if they were nothing more than lessons and fables. We can excuse ourselves from the action of justice as if we were grossed-out teenagers at the slasher flick. Eww. Let's get outta here. So the skill of intervention atrophies. Justice is considered but not clear and present. 

I sometimes have difficulty explaining my friends why America is exceptional. It is a combination of complex interweaving threads that makes for that fabric. It's not just "we are a Christian Country". It's not just "we revere the Founder's and Original Intent". It's not just that we are a Global Policeman. It's the emergent force we can be and it is the reason men like Robert Fisk write to us in our language, alerting us to what happens out there. America is expected to do something, to act, to bring justice. Because we can. Because we must. America is a civilization, and here, like no other place, we civilize ethnics and languages and religions into a highly robust plurality. We have secured the blessings of liberty.

Our domestic liberty is our wedge of gold, and as we withdraw our forces from the world, we hoard it without coining into the money of moral intervention. The world dies without justice, in small bloody pieces. So are we in a Long War Against Terror or not?

You Are Here

Unemployment in California is at 12.5%. The pension fund for the LAPD goes insolvent in two years. Southern California Edison is giving away free lamps, and so the people will line up.

People were civil. The lamps were good looking - there were 12 models to choose from - all looking like they were fresh from Home Depot. The proctor said there were 8300 units available at this particular location in Torrance. We got there at 12pm. They were to close at 1pm, but as he walked down the line that stretched 400 yards, he assured that everyone would be served. If the news were otherwise in the hot sun, there would have been a minor riot.

We had our shopping carts and our old junk lamps, destined for the two large dumpsters. It was a cars for clunkers exchange in the market of home furnishings. Specifically, not only do you get the new compact flourescent bulbs, but a whole new lamp to put it in. And as an added bonus while you stand in line you get to read all of the propaganda interesting energy information from Edison. One of the bright orange signs informed me that on quart of ordinary motor oil can pollute 2 million gallons of fresh water. That's not permanent, because there are all sorts of ways oil is decomposed in water - but these are things only highly educated people know.

I hate crowds. For me, he only thing worse than being in a crowd of ordinary people is standing in line with a crowd of ordinary people trying to get something ordinary done. Whenever I find this happening to me, I am thankful for my audiobooks which I keep with me at all times. So I stood in line and occasionally chatted with the Spousal Unit and the First Daughter over the narration of The Diamond Age, a favorite book of mine with which I am renewing my acquaintance. I can be awfully Victorian. Interspersed with these thoughts as well of those of thirst was the entire theme of unemployment and breadlines of course. In the way that I case bars for the men I might have to fight, I looked at the crowd and imagined them all indigent in a post-catastrophic era. What would I be responsible for in such a situation. As the proctor reassured those of us beyond yard 300 from the entrance to the exchange's own line loops, I thought about the riot. I would have to ask for training. I'd find the military guys, and ask.

The First Daughter asked how Edison can afford to give this stuff away. My guess is that they are on the verge of being mandated to build new peaker plants, which would be a big capital expenditure, not to mention regulatory and political nightmare. So better to spend a million distributing tech that lowers power consumption in your customer base than spend a few tens of millions to build infrastructure.

--

Doc's theme is to return to where we never were, the Great Plains. How do you live off the land? How do you own land that you can live on? These are skills we don't have here in the great urban centers. None of us function well without electricity. We are practically slaves to it. And so we are the urban peasants, standing in line being given a new and cheaper way to be plugged into the grid owned and powered by Edison.

Halo Reach: Full Satisfying Circle

Aha.

Halo Reach is a very fine conclusion to the Halo series. And I say that strictly based on the aha moment I had coming to the close of the campaign. The discovery of my player's identity as the Master Chief, the one chosen by Cortana, late in the game was just  magical. I said "I got it".

I have to say that makes Reach the most consistent and satisfying prequel I've ever played, watched, or read. History comes alive in the Halo universe on Reach. I say this having the benefit of one aspect of the Halo universe that goes very often without much fanfare, and that is the I Love Bees audio drama. Over the past couple weeks, the first previews of the final installment played. One of them was a live action trailer showing families on Reach the first day of the Covenant invasion - at the moment the battle began. It immediately drew me in emotionally to the idea of humanity threatened, and echoes of I Love Bees surfaced. That, my friends, is fine sci-fi.

Reach is the saddest installment. And while I'm sure it will end on a note of hope as the Pillar of Autumn escapes the doomed planet, there is nothing that quite has the emotional impact of fighting with a squad that gradually gets ground down to one. There is urgency in the arc of the story that is missing from most of the ODST. Only in a few parts of that mission were soldiers involved in protecting civilians. The most dramatic of these scenarios is actually in the Halo Wars RTS where the player is responsible for protecting evac ships. That theme is resumed, if only through cut scenes, in Halo Reach - and again, it adds an element of tragedy. Where ODST finds one wandering solo through a maze of confusion in New Mombasa, puzzling things out with plenty of time - the tragic urgency of Reach penetrates your gaming skull.

Reach has everything. It's hard to imagine how many features they packed into the game. When you compare it to the prior Halo games, it makes you think - wow, they sure have gotten better over the past 7 years. It also makes you appreciate how much compute power is packed into the XBox 360 as a platform, and how extraordinary it is to have the network capabilities it has. There are all sorts of vehicles, there are a huge number of different game types. There is a broad selection of skill loadouts that allow you to change tactics on every respawn. There are multiple cool ways to play co-op or competitively. There are custome games - and it all works well without any degradation or much change in the feel of the overall Halo playing style. It very much feels like Halo, even though I still want to melee with the B button.

Somewhat new to Halo is a lot more flying. From personal jet packs, to VTOLs to space fighters, there are many ways to engage aerial combat. The space fighting is inspired. Speaking of which, Reach has a gigantic moon. What's up with that thing?

Anyway, it's good that Halo is back. They grossed 200 million in the first week and there are half a million players online at any one time on average this week. Not bad.

The Party That Won't Stop

When Move-On.org first started out, it was an email list. I joined. I can't recall all of my feelings and thoughts around the drama of Bill Clinton. I was pretty much expected very little but high minded principles in politics back in those days - not quite realizing how useless Washington would become in that regard. That Clinton was a womanizer, a queer sort of grinning, guilty one, only confirmed what I already new about him. He was put on this earth to seduce, and of course Clinton's seduction of Joe Klein initiated an era. It all seems so long ago when the Hollywood types jumped on that bandwagon of post GHWBush youthful enthusiasm about politics. We got The West Wing, a smart TV show in primetime about the operations of the White House. One of the cable networks made a fictional show about a candidate named Turner or some such name. Carville & Matalin were all the rage, and there was this feeling that there was energy and dynamism about, and smart good looking people were making tough and sometimes brilliant decisions. We had in America, what we thought to be rational exuberance. Then Clinton lied.

Not an ordinary political lie, but a butt ugly bare naked lie. He was brought down to a sentence. A word. Is. The curtain fell, and all the little sharp little fictions people had been swallowing twisted perpendicular like a fishbone in the throat. But not for me. There were higher more important principles at stake besides 'character' which can always be assassinated. Those who knew said Clinton's character was dead on arrival, and the Starr chamber said it was poisoned going back decades in Arkansas. I said, yeah whatever. So I was ready for Move-On's message. Get over it. He's a prick, yeah we know. That's not so important as...

Being part of Move-On was interesting because it aligned me with people who also claimed that more important matters faced the country and that a non-stop campaign against the President ending in impeachment would be a waste of the nation's time and energy. It turned out that no matter who I thought belonged to Move-On, it was just another minority, and impeachment happened anyway. And the nation didn't fall off a cliff. It just missed the sort of opportunities that slimy officials can't deliver on. It took me falling hook, line and sinker for a perfect Clinton speech that materialized nothing but good feelings in my head for me to realize how I'd been played. I could point to the speech and say - see? This is the kind of statement that shows a good policy direction and... I was correct, but I wasn't right. I had been seduced. 

I still belonged to the group many years after all of those facts. Move-On didn't itself move on. It launched other new media Progressives who all seemed to transmogrify into what is now the Huffington Post and the defunct Journo-List. The echoes of the sentiment found their place and now these days, you can be sure that there's a networked minority interest group everywhere. 

I also understood what launched the Tea Party. And many years before, after I heard an interview with Rahm Emmanuel  while I was driving in San Francisco, I heard put into words the truth about the seedy shambles of the Clinton White House. The question of character was finally explained to me in a way I could accept - because before that time I could never distinguish between principled opposition and a vast right wing conspiracy. I liked Emmanuel. He seemed to be the genuine thing that Joe Klein projected onto Bill Clinton, with regard to smarts. So when the Tea Party started talking about character and honor in the White House, I now knew how to process that. Plus I had the GWBush example. Nobody Progressive liked W's background, but also nobody could fault his bearing. And still, we all recall how Kinsley at Slate skewered the Bush diction. It was all such a downer after having the romance of a master seducer to now be faced with a straight talking cowboy, who's not really a cowboy. All those romantic Christmas tree lights that adorned Clinton couldn't be hung on GWB's tree, and journalists were left with the tangle. 

The Tea Party started with the idea of what materialized in Sarah Palin. An ordinary non-teflon politician. Non-marketable. Easily parodied. Bohunky. Honest. Plain but attractive. A heroine in house shoes. If Progressives want to know what Sarah Palin feels like to the Right, the answer is Erin Brockovich. And the single cause is simple. Stop spending our money, Washington. We don't trust you with it.  Taxed Enough Already. Plain but attractive. The Tea Party wasn't like Move-On. It wasn't in pursuit of a set of high minded 'more important' goals, it said what the goal was straight in its name. Give me back my money. Stop asking me "help me help you". I don't want your help. I want my frickin money back.  

The Tea Party's online presence presented a challenge to the Right which didn't have much history in the online world, but dominated the airwaves. But that network worked its way around. But what the Tea Party did have that Move-On did not have, was the kind of energy that got people out in the streets. There were torches and pitchforks in this crew, there was throw the bums out. It was redolent of the movement for term limits that swept through the nation. 

It's interesting how these things start. They all have their reasons and they all have their sentiments. Sometimes you can't put it all together immediately, but better in retrospect. And of course nobody can predict what the dynamism of such popular movements will bring besides confusion to the traditions. Carville and Matalin didn't need Move-On and they weren't part of the Journo-List.  But I can tell you this. It's going to be a long time before the Tea Party ends. 

FUMH

Enderle explains some of the reasons that Mark Hurd is considered a pariah in the industry. Now fled to the barbarian king Ellison, Sam Palmisano of IBM is starting to pitch crap at a weakend HP and Hurd in particular. 

It rankled CEOs from Palmisano to Michael Dell to be compared to a guy who by most measures was slowly killing his company to maximize quarterly returns.  A kind of vampire, Hurd represented the inordinate power financial analysts had and how they were forcing decisions that were crippling long term. However any company that didn’t listen to analysts was pounded in the market with an expensive impact on executive bonuses and longevity.  It was understandably upsetting for Palmisano and others to see Hurd receive massive rewards for sucking the life blood out of HP while their better parenting went largely unnoticed and often unrewarded.

Aha.

And so now some of the reasons why this website exists are becoming clearer. The news there is that Hurd is getting booted off the board of News Corp.

I can tell you that it is music to my ears to hear that this particular kind of exec is getting flamed. HP is one of those great loved companies to engineers, and the very idea of having a finance goober run the joint into the ground just by tweaking numbers to please Wall Street analysts is horrid. So now that this one has outed himself as an asshat. To earn the appellation 'The Turd' takes some doing, even among vulgar grouches. But now the saga has taken root in my attention sphere.

I've always admired HP. They're having it rough up there.

Iraq Peace Dividend

When all the soldiers come back from Iraq, where will the extra money go? I think it's already gone. It went to TARP.

Carlin says that we haven't had a peacetime economy since the end of WW2. So maybe he's never heard of Google or Apple. How much would you say the military industrial complex uses Macs and iPhones? Oh by the way, for the record, here's a little research.

If you invested in Lockheed Martin and Raytheon the week before 9/11 and kept your money in those two until now, you would have made 179% and 184% respectively. That's about the same as if you bet your money on Microsoft where you would have made 182%. All three of these are way better than the S&P which got you 104%. But Oracle would have gotten you 229%. Google would have gotten you.. OK well Google didn't exist on 9/11. But it would have gotten you better than 400% if you bought it in 2004. Now Apple stock was at $8.64 just before 9/11. Think about that for a minute. Today you can buy that for 276.57 after a 2 for 1 split. You do the math.

We just haven't had big enough wars to make a real difference economically. But I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise. Is there any warmonger that's made as much money for investors as Steve Jobs?

Waitresses and Grandmothers

• Mildred
• Maggie
• Maude
• Ester
• Edna
• Harriet
• Lois
• Lucille
• Minerva
• Flo
• Gertrude
• Agatha
• Patience
• Eunice
• Virginia
• Ruby
• Dorothy
• Blanche
• Mabel

 

The Pro-Colonial

Dinesh D'Souza has got Newt Gingrich's pique in his characterization of Barack Obama as an anti-colonial. It rings mostly true to me, but I wasn't blown away by the insight. It doesn't take much to interpolate Obama's worldview given his attraction to Black Liberation Theology. There's always some Franz Fanon in there. 

But here's the other side. What is the perception of the pro-colonial that Obama is supposed to be the counter to? Let's imagine for a moment that everybody who likes Obama's direction is not strictly an America-hater per se, and that they actually have an articulate version of what America does specifically wrong in its strategic foreign policy. Let's for example take Fareed Zakaria's sort of basic containment attitude towards Saddam's Iraq as something more than an anti-neocon reactionary position. 

Where and how is America disqualified over five presidencies from being the world's cop because of its colonialism? How does Obama incrementally disable that without dismantling the Pentagon? What is the American colonial position?

The Intellectual One-Drop Rule

If there's a matter that haunts me regarding race in America, it is the sense many Americans have arrogated unto themselves to claim an implicit understanding of what is best for black Americans. The great irony of this matter is that it is genuinely considered sincere and well-meaning. What's interesting is that what was once a broad sentiment has been reduced to a small cadre of black critics. What's sad is how irrelevant and obnoxious some of them have become.

I have recently purchased a box set of DVDs from PBS of Juan Williams' landmark documentary Eyes on the Prize. And in listening to the narrative, I am reminded of a term that has rather disappeared from American English. I have no idea how or if it was written properly. One might consider it to be a specific pronunciation of the term 'Negro' in the Southern dialect. But what it sounds like is 'nigrah', accent on the first syllable. In my youth, when I heard the term more frequently, I considered it to be a contraction of 'nigger' and 'Negro', and I interpreted it as the term that white Southerners used when they were thinking 'nigger' but were speaking to an audience who would consider it morally loaded. The term was one of a provincial paternalism, because it was almost always prefaced by the possessive term 'our', especially in the oft-repeated context of law and culture. Northerners and other 'outside agitators' were to blame, said the Segregationist Southerner of messing with the minds of 'our nigrahs' and thusly disturbing the peace of Jim Crow Segregation.

As I grew up on the West Coast, I never heard the term used anywhere but on TV in the context of the righteous indignation the more 'progressive' and 'liberal' of us must have. So as Bin Laden is, so was Bull Connor and all his baby bulls of the radical Islamofascism of the day, Jim Crow. Nevertheless, out here there were plenty of people who had new ideas of what these dark skinned people should be and how they should conduct themselves in society. It wasn't enough, when I was growing up, to merely be thankful for Civil Rights victories and to integrate into American society under the protection of the specifically amended law. It was de rigeur for the 'so-called Negro' to take up a new identity. I've recently called this thing black radical autonomy. That may be somewhat harsh but perhaps necessary to understand the breadth of the gap I perceive between the old colored man and the New Black Man. I am apt to use the often observed comparison of Muhammed Ali to Floyd Patterson - or even Muhammad Ali to his old self, Cassius Clay. It wasn't enough for the Negro to evolve, he needed to be transformed into a new sort of creature - the Black Man. It was famously enshrined in the poem Die Nigger.

The difficulty with that evolution, necessary in its context is that it has formed the basis of what I have decided to call Jim Crow Jr. But the operating characteristic of this regime of truth is its aim of a permanent claim of authority on the thinking of anyone calling themselves or who once called themselves 'Black'. It is, for all intents and purposes an intellectual one drop rule. If you ever thought orthodoxically black, then you are for all time wedded to and responsible for Black Thought. No matter what Black Thought must become, you must become part of it as well. It is a never-ending Struggle that must always continue and always occupy proper, moral men's minds.

Except that it can't, it doesn't and it becomes more ridiculous with every passing day that it tries. Black Thought requires an immanent apocalypse, a shadow force of Klan-like proportions, a rhetorical threat used to hush dissent. There is no endgame, because in the end, the only real game is about control of the putative Black mind. Once I thought: "I'm beginning to think that it is reasonable to believe that the end of black politics will come when we have a black President, rather like the end of Irish Catholic politics." But then we got one and he's not really Black and there are other evasions. But eventually, all will have to admit that Black Politics is a fiction, or essentially a useless tangent absorbed into whatever sentient neo-liberalism that emreges from America's Democrat Party. All of it boils down to the same invective. These here are 'our nigrahs', and everybody else ought to keep their hands off because we know what's best for them. 

Dick Feynman once said, that simply because you've lived under the effects of gravity for your entire life is not a sufficient condition to make you understand gravitational physics. And with that warning in mind I have always looked at race as an intellectual problem. My own history of being black is only tangential to what my research and discovery help me to know. And so I have always wrestled with the intersections of that knowledge and my own identity. But having ignored race and de-emphasized it for so long in other pursuits it only recently occurs to me that it really doesn't matter what experience I claim. There's always a black ball rolling somewhere, and it's not always useful to find it, hop on top of it and gain balance. It doesn't matter how black one claims to be or how intense one feels ones soulful roots, it's only ethnicity. Ethnicity is rarely more than tribal, and such claims are not useful in working out the problems of this republic. Nor is seeing things as if most claims were tribal, because they are not. What I observe is a constant dissonance among people who never want to *be* racist or support racist agendas, and yet the subtext is that there remains a persistent bad faith. That is the tragedy of American race relations - a perpetual pollution - an obsession always seeking that one drop of causality, always passionately disturbed at a lack of unity, against a perceived unity of the Other-Americans.

It must be, in the end, a peasant fascination. That only re-generates opportunities for intellects to exploit in every generation. We are fortunate to have a tradition of emergence and defense of civil rights by hook or crook in this land that while it may seldom produce bravery, it always promises freedom. There is something natural to natural aristocracy and that concept does not lie dormant but renews its truth despite meddling and advocacy one way or another. So people *do* finally realize they belong to themselves here in America. May that continue.

 

 

Rauf Relents

Without admitting it's any of his fault for being provocative, Park51's crusader for squishy Muslim cred has begun washing his hands. 

If he had it to do over again, the Imam behind the "Ground Zero mosque" would have ditched the plan.

"I would never have done it," Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf told Christiane Amanpour on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, when asked if he would have proposed it knowing the controversy it would spark.

"I'm a man of peace," he said. "The whole objective of peace work is not to do something that would provoke controversy."

Well, I told you so. But of course he won't leave without some backbiting. It's all Palin's fault that we all can't get along and I can't build whatever I want. Not to take the reporting of the Daily News too seriously, it's all rather cheesy for him to start saying what upstanding citizens American Muslims are (as if he represented). 

"We are Americans, too," the Imam said. "We are doctors. We are investment bankers. We are taxi drivers. We are store keepers. We are lawyers. We are -- we are part of the fabric of America."

As contrasted to the fabric that said no, and you're not going to get any money or political support from our swath. Rauf will now go sit in a corner with Rev. Wright and try to figure out what's wrong with America for not appreciating the salience of his vision. The answer is, of course, nothing so long as you keep your ambitions from making you think that you're more important than you are.

There are 30 mosques in Manhattan but only one that's been trashed by zealotry. Rauf needs only blame himself for hitching his rhetorical harpoons to the great white whale of 9/11. Now the fork is stuck in him, and he's done.

My Tribute

Well, it's that time of year again. Time to remember the dead. Time to rededicate the living. Time to unroll that long parchment of human suffering and remind ourselves whether or not we have been appropriately serious. The answer is no. That's why the tributes come out, and this is mine.

What strikes me this time is that there are only a relatively few people who matter when it comes to this stuff. And try as we might to capture the proper sentiment and send the proper message, these are efforts that mostly fail. As a writer, I know that it's not good enough to be good enough. There is only one good enough, and that is when somebody tells me that they are feeling the exact same way I feel, but they've never been able to put it into words, and finally my words helped them express that exact same thing.

That happens rarely, and it happens on a one to one basis when it really matters. The rest of the time we are consumers of drama. I hate to say it - hell I hate to admit it. But that's what we Westerners with spare time to analyze and evaluate - that's what we do. I try to put my spare time to observe and report to good use here at Cobb. I try to use my spare brain cycles for the betterment of my fellows out here. But I know that I do a little drama search every once in a while, looking for some pique. It's difficult for me to say how much of that comes naturally since I have lived a long time and seen and heard a lot of stuff. Maybe it's appropriate that most of the news doesn't attract my attention. But on the other hand, maybe sometimes I'm skimming the mundane for some action and heat. Everybody is going to say something about it. I know I have to as well. And will it connect to somebody in an important way? Impossible to say. What's important to say about 9/11 that hasn't already been said? Or are we just all here to remind ourselves, whew, that was really something?

Next year, Doc has plans for us all to go. Whatever I do, I'm going to make sure that I'm on vacation this time next year. Ten years. That'll be something. But I do want to go. I want to be there with the millions. It was one of the most extraordinary days in my life. In the weeks before, we were talking about school shootings and OJ, and wasn't all that stupid and sickeningly vapid? But they were the best tragedies we could muster. Societies need to survive tragedies in order to survive. When we get unravelled about one murder, or ten, something is very un-robust about us. The collapse of the WTC helped remind us how deeply we can suffer and still stand. Anybody that consumes drama, especially the vulgar and petty drama of our pop entertainment culture, needs a kick in the teeth every blue moon. That's what we got, and how. And when we got it, a lot of us were reminded - I know that I was - that war is always with us. War is always with us. And it's just basic and human to remind yourself through pilgrimage, who your neighbors really are.

For me it was Bill Whittle who's essay called Tribes made me know my place in a nation that fractured about the significance and usefullness of the American Payback. We all learned pretty well that some Americans were kicking themselves in the teeth and said we deserved another one or two. Surely our own anthrax poisoner was one of them. Forgot about him didn't you?  Whittle reminded me that some of us don't need to be kicked, just nudged, and then there are those who never have to be reminded - they never forget that war is always with us because they are always fighting the bad guys.

I've set my lot with some of those we now call 'first responders' as part of the Gray Tribe. I could do more. I hope my writing helps - it's what I do with my spare time, maybe keep us mentally alert when we otherwise might be inert. Inside my head, I'm running and charging up into the dangerous parts of arguments and philosophies and ideologies. They're not burning buildings or crossfire zones, but mine is a certain kind of courage, I hope. I know the America I am a part of and I have almost unlimited confidence in it. We're going to need that during hard times.

If we can remember that war and conflict is never ending; if we can recall that courage is always necessary; if we can have the presence of mind to focus on real tragedy instead of trumped up drama, then we might not be so foolish. We might know where we are in this big old globe. We might be living in the moment - ready to live, ready to die. Ready to say the right thing and do the right thing and be the right one...

It's funny that I wasn't thinking about spiritual matters, but a phrase came to mind.."always and everywhere to give thanks to you Almighty God". I heard it in my mother's words when we spoke last week 'this will bring glory to Jesus' she said, whatever hardship that was. This is evidence of a mind in focus, dedicated to the purpose of bringing energy to morality every miserable moment. This is our ultimate calling, to be vessels of the best of human spirit, which is God's spirit, which is the spirit of a proper nation, which is the discipline of a proper society, which is the re-energizing spirit of all that is noble and true. That's what we're trying to be.

And of course it brings us into conflict with ourselves. And we know it.

This tribute is not really a tribute. I'm feeling like Lincoln. There's no way I can dedicate or consecrate. That blood has already been spilled. I'm just recognizing. I'm just looking into myself for a moment because this was real. It stays real. Hopefully it will keep us all real.

 

 

 

Magellan Star: Thanks America

A nice example of the United States of America being the world's policeman.

The M/V Magellan Star is a German-owned cargo ship. U.S. Marine commandos stormed the ship off the Somalia coast on September 9, 2010, reclaiming control from pirates who had seized the ship and taking nine prisoners without firing a shot.^[1] At the time it was captured by pirates the ship was traveling from Bilbao, Spain, to Singapore with a cargo of anchor chains.

Drama Junkies

The news is that protests against an event that never actually happened have turned deadly. This is the Arab Street, or so it seems. It is my presumption that this excellent photo from the NYT will be accompanied by an editorial chorus of "now look what you've done", but really. Who is responsible? Nobody is responsible, and nobody really wants to be. That's the point of protest.

Tangentially, there was an explosion in San Bruno, California last night. A gas main broke and turned a neighborhood into a blowtorch. As I watched video footage (gotta see a fire) I noticed something typical. The mayor of San Bruno was given several seconds of airtime to say "I've never seen anything like it." And then one of the residents were given a few seconds to say "I thought it was Judgment Day." The NTSB will be on the scene today and then as the story trails off into the mediasphere we will hear about "ongoing investigations" and "preliminary findings".

What we don't get on the news the day of the event somebody who says with authority, "I know exactly what this kind of thing is, I've dealt with it many times before." That person would be wise, unemotional and undramatic. But we info-consumers want something to put a little zip into our heartbeats.

And then it gets out of hand. And nobody is responsible.

 

Society of Laws

If you asked me to tell you what's wrong with America, then I'd say the biggest thing is that we are more a Society of Laws and a Nation of Men, than a Society of Men and a Nation of Laws. There is a point, which may or may not be fast approaching when all of our legendary institutional checks and balances fails to counteract that fundamental and growing flaw.

What do I mean by society of laws?
A society of laws is what a classroom becomes when the nerd teacher loses control and respect from the students. Everything becomes run according to laws which are used over and over again. This turns people into finks and breeds distrust as well as the kind of person who does well in such environments. It doesn't matter how fair or unfair the laws are. What matters is that they overrule human emotions to a socially dysfunctional degree. Things become overly complex. Common sense fails to work. Arguments that could generally be solved are not. Bureacracy rules. The human spirit is crushed.

What do I mean by a nation of men?
A nation of men is what a sport becomes when the ref stops calling fouls and the coaches stop calling plays. The superstar players start cheating and hiding their cheats so that they appear to be playing by the rules, but actually aren't. Their ability in the game soon has nothing to do with the rules of the game and nobody can catch up to them. As the corruption becomes known, it throws the entire practice into distrust. The game becomes unlovable, the heroes questioned.

We should be a nation of laws, where no matter how powerful and talented you are, people's love and admiration for you cannot overcome the rules. We should be a society of men, where respect and common sense are the things that keep people in line.

Burnt Koran = Free Speech

If you can't burn a holy book, what's the point of living in America? And while we're at it, why not put a gay bar across the street from Park21? And dogs. Why not dogs? Don't these people have any sense of humor? Humility. Well we can't expect that, but humor at least.

Slow new day. Slow ideas day.

Me and George Spell

326 
March 9, 1969 
The Wish 
Ossie Davis in "The Wish". Hoss's desire to aid a drought-stricken farmer is complicated by the ex-slave's pride — and Hoss's color. 
Written by:  Michael Landon 
Directed by: Michael Landon 
Guest stars:  Ossie Davis (Sam Davis), George Spell (John O. Davis)

I was up for this part. Pops rejected the opportunity over a controversial line of dialog in the script. The line: "I wish my father was white."

The story was about a black farmer who got some land and some knuckleheads were trying to drive him off it. I'm the kid who is found in town wishing on some 'wishing candles' that my father was white, because then he wouldn't have problems as a landowner. Hoss and the gang come to the rescue. 

This was to be a breakthrough program, and the idea sounds OK in retrospect, but 1969 was 1969. George Spell went on to become a minor celebrity in the hood, and he hooked up with Renee R. upon whom I had a massive crush. 

Now you know a very interesting and unique story about my very short career as a child actor. 

How Does The Internet Change How I Think?

How does the intenet change how I think?

I have always been influenced by the idea of a computer as an augmentation of mind. So there has always been a body of knowldege and expertise which I have considered to be 'computer work', which is, in effect not to be considered worthy of my time. So while I have always had enormous curiosity, there is a point at which I stop and say - ah, this is something for a computer.  But I've also recognized how a well-designed system can walk you through the knowledge of another person and give a sort of experiential learning that is different from reading a book or watching a video recording.

So no the whole, computing is not a necessarily inferior way of gaining knowledge. It has strengths and weaknesses that can be analyzed. It uses different methods to accomplish the imparting of knowlege, of alerting one to changing situations, of expressing beauty and of recording experience. It requires a new kind of literacy.

The Internet is, in many ways, still very primative to my sensibilities. There are a great number of processes that still have not been optimized or augmented by computing networks. It's still very easy to imagine beyond the current capacities of the networks. So I have two quick concepts that I have evolved that I'd like to share that are aspects of the quality of computer mediated communication that help me think.

The Forbin Error
One thing which is clearly in evidence that we didn't know about massive computing 30 years ago is the extent to which it is part of human agency. I'm still not sure we understand all of the implications of this evolving way of looking at mass computing. Clearly in the old days, Colossus was the nightmare scenario. We believed that computers would begin thinking and that all of the kind of thinking we do would be replicated and automated and so that computers would assert their will and implement computer agency which conflicted with human agency. So the scary idea would be that computers would connect of their own volition and begin sharing strategies to control the other machines in our lives. But we now know that computers, in every respect, are agents of human desire because they are built and fabricated by humans. We make them 'want'. So we now know that WOPR or the MCP from Tron are not real possibilities. What we didn't expect is that criminal organizations would have access to botnets which might eventually do the same evil things we expected from the ghost in the machine.

The Aesthetic of Wisdom
I have been online reading websites since the days before search engines and cgi-bin. So I am very much aware of the evolution of design and content by all sorts of communicators. I have developed a sense of where I'm going to find things which goes beyond that which a search engine can provide. It's like being able to read the architecture of a neighborhood or city. You can tell sophistication from pretense, you can tell good design from ornament, you can make judgments about traffic patterns. You can tell business from blight. So there is a new skill of discrimination that I have learned which is not necessarily directed at the content itself. The presentation of material is a meta-framework giving me an indication of what quality of content I can expect, and that is an important sort of judgment to have. I know this when I compare my sense of it to the older generation, who are not stupid, but don't pick up the clues that will tell them if a site is a parked domain, or a low quality adsite, or a possible warren of viruses.

Next, The New First Person

Rights and Wrongs in IT and Software

Ceolas writes about The Industry:

Performance based? Nope, it hasn't been performance based for almost ten years. It's seen a loss of innovation and invention. Microsoft's former VP elaborated the problems within the company in an op-ed in the NY Times that have killed it's future, what he didn't mention, was the fact that Bill Gates has always only been a one trick pony who got lucky, and isn't interested in invention and innovation so much as denying others with the ability, the opportunity to succeed where he has failed. He also didn't mention the fact that the preceding decade has been one where Gates displaced US citizen workers with cheap Indian and other visa workers. Un/under educated, and in no way skilled or talented. Anyone who works in the industry knows that while they might like to act like sharks, they're incompetent and capable of doing little more t han steal the efforts of others. Everyone knows the real story behind the failure of the Indian tablet pc. It was a stolen prototype, one that hadn't been fully developed. India's tech house of cards will fall, because it's based on a lot of hot air and theft. Everything they touch, they foul.

 

A lot of this is right, and I would like to discuss it.

First off, Gates and Microsoft are not the spark of the industry, they are a marketing powerhouse and a very hermetic universe. They are almost incapable of innovation because everything is done the Microsoft way. My experience is that they are simply too thick to be agile and that they spend all of their time selling to mass markets. At Microsoft scale, they are a one size fits all company, and even when they break things up, like the different versions of Windows 7, it's still just too huge. There are very few people who think the way I do who expect much from Microsoft in terms of cutting edge. There are many boring things that Microsoft does well, but few truly exciting things that Microsoft does that win over hearts and minds of techies like me. They have just been too obstructionist too many times and so it is no surprise at all that a company like Google could just come through and steal every bit of glory Microsoft ever had. 

There was a sense two years ago, when I spent a lot of time in Redmond, that MS spends a great deal more time being a defensive company and that their captive audiences really make MS believe that they change the world. Microsoft is starting to show its age. They should voluntarily break themselves up. And they should make a tiny, new OS.

As for the Indian quotient. I have to say that there are just too many flavors to make broad statements, but I know where the dissatisfaction is coming from. I don't blame the Indians so much as I blame corporate IT for outsourcing their own brains. And corporate IT has just discounted itself below the threshold of where people with software skills are willing to work. And this is what leads to the incredibly sclerotic world of enterprise software, where good ideas take forever to materialize and Oracle, SAP, IBM, and a handful of pretty unimaginative business models are entrenched. 

The New Apple TV & Things

It's wantable. Two reasons and an implication not explicity spoken by Steve Jobs.

1. It's cheap enough to be a disposable item. It's quiet enough to make me abandon my XBox as the alternate video source. I like Boxee, but it takes too much power for my worthless netbook to handle streaming to my TV. Boxee takes over everything and doesn't quit gracefully. I think it's time to admit once and for all that we need dedicated hardware. This is the right price.

2. It's small enough to take travelling. That means I'm going to check into my Marriott room and unplug the HDMI behind their flat screen and plug my Apple TV in, whip out my iPhone and stream the movies I have via AirPlay. How sweet is that? Very.

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What's new and significant about this release of Apple stuff is that they have clearly turned the corner as a consumer products company, and they have simply destroyed Sony. Mushed Sony's face into the pavement. And they are still, evidently passionate about their product innovation. Apple is where Nike was a year or so after they went huge. Apple has gone huge and they've kept the quality high.

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I thought about something this morning. I overheard the words 'clock radio'. I have a clock radio, but I only use it as a clock, and not even an alarm clock. That's in my phone.

The Sort of People for Whom My Message Does Not Resonate

I've been reading over at Belmont and there are various assessments of why Wall Streeters have turned on Obama according to a recent poll. The resulting consensus seems to be that Obama is either a stealthy ideologue or a feckless politician. I think he is the latter by training and the former at heart. Reading through the comments reminded me of some of the things I wrote about Obama as a member of the Talented Tenth.

It also bears tangential mention that the sort of ideologue Obama is, relates directly to the sorts of people he believes that he owes his efforts to. My sense of this is that as the kind of Leftist he is, that he identifies with a permanent, disenfranchised majority, in fact, the majority of humanity. And so his willingness to be feckless with people one might ordinarily see as useful, say General McChrystal for example, only serves his greater aim which is to hand out Thanksgiving Turkey in Harlem. Obama walks with criminal kings to feed his common touch, and he'll shoot them all for the legitimacy of his welfare program. For him as a Democrat, it's the perfect setup because the entirety of the American government steals taxes from the rich to give to the poor.

Joe the Plumber is one of those people for whom his message does not resonate, because Joe has the nerve to deny the free turkey. Obama spits because Obama knows Joe's no gangster. You better take this turkey, boy. I'm the only free lunch you get, and if you think you can hang with the monsters I deal with, then you'd shut your ambition up.

So let me go down memory lane and see if my assessment of Obama from a Talented Tenth perspective holds up in this new light. But there's a trick that I'm going to do. I'm going to change my use of the term 'black' to 'common' and 'white' to 'elite'. So if you understand that the 'commoner' is put upon and needs rescue (in the way liberals and reactionaries think of black Americans), and you understand that 'elite' means implicitly corrupt (in the way liberals and reactionaries think of white Americans) then you'll see exactly what I mean. With only those slightest edits, read on:

I once wrote that the common electorate always wants more government because history is that it got none. And so there is a perception that only when common folks step up and demand government concessions will they ever get treated equally. This is taking the rhetoric of politicians very seriously, especially those associated with unions and machines. Common folks are hungry for patronage, why not get their share? It's all dirty. And that's what politics as usual means, and if the majority of politicians are elite, well then obviously elite folks are getting their patronage. If Cheney can have Halliburton and Iraq, why begrudge Obama and Wright? It's not like we're killing people to steal oil and get rich. Any documented corruption in American government is subject to such reasoning, where is common people's payoff?

Obama is therefore on the hook to deliver some genuine common patronage to his constituents, those he directly works for and those commonners who have adopted him symbolically. And thus he is obligated to take on the mantle of commoners who speak truth to power and demand some common grease. But today that is done in the politically acceptable language of multiculturalism. Obama is in the position of answering the questions once and for all "What do you people want?" Everybody knows it.

So if social justice can and equality can mean proportional representation in colleges for commoners and all other underrepresented minorities, then Obama has to be the man to deliver those. In every aspect of Obama's policy, one can interpret that it means more for those who never got their 'fair share' of government largess. If you have to tax the rich elite bastards, so what? They've already got the American Dream, we live the American nightmare. Sure it's self-serving, and Hillary Clinton is not?

The employment of Wright and Wright's church serves the purpose of keeping such principles of 'social justice' in mind and letting Obama know what kind of flack he's going to get for enabling it. And everybody who has a gripe against social justice, just because a common man is giving it to common Americans is going to have to face the wrath of Christian ministers who are not afraid to call America on it. From a purely Christian perspective, America is evil. This is not unpatriotic, it is the disambiguated 'America' of power, wealth, corruption, and world domination. This is America from the perspective of people who have hardscrabble jobs and have no idea how the economy works except that it doesn't give them a break. All of Ron Paul's people have the same idea. You have to do something radical to give the little guy a break, and only a new kind of politician can do that.

If you care about 'social justice' and 'equality' then Obama is your man. And you know the System is going to try any way it can to beat him down. Is this the politics of resentment? Yes. It is also largely the politics of impatience. There remains a presumption that there is a polycarbonate, transparent aluminum ceiling established for those who don't sell out the poor and powerless in America. Not so much that there is some absolute deprivation in lower middle-classness or minority exile, but that such Americans would do better if they had *their* president in power, who could arbitrarily stop the war, lower gas prices, get us all free health care or otherwise do whatever he wanted as the People's President. That is a sentiment that will always have a constituency in America, and Obama is their draftee. It's the job he really wants.

Everything that every American doesn't participate in equally is suspect in this liberal framework, and Obama seeks to adjudicate this. He is prepared to believe that all resistence to him is prejudicial and misguided, and he has ample precedent as one of the upper class to believe that to be true.

That holds together pretty well, although with Wright it gets a little queer in the middle. I don't think Obama has been able to successfully update his moral appeal in response to the times. He's still ideologically bound to the the Wretched of the Earth, which is why he will give lip service to the idea that Muslims are hated and feared in America and that they must press for their Constitutional Rights at every turn. Not that that's working. Instead, he is surfing the waves of crisis as opportunities. Not working well either.

The dominant dialog out there, as I said, is the conflict between those who have bought into Obama's fundamental idea of America and the more traditional one. On the Obama side, America is only exceptional in its Robin Hood potential, and that every other common bloke wants and needs his stimulus turkey. Stiglitz, unheard of and unread by Democrats before 2008, now trundles the water of the Government Supply Side, thus enabling Obama's moral and correctional agenda. On the Other-American side, romantic notions abound.

I still believe that the country can be divided right now into those two factions. Those who see Obama as fighting a never-ending battle, even as President, against the forces arrayed to deprive the common man of his stimulus turkey; and those like me who want no part of his American Gangster game and abuse of government - those who will take their chances with the sharks, and are not willing to pay protection taxes to the great loving arms of Obama.

 

James Lee: Dead

There was a radical misanthropic Malthusian loose yesterday. He was well on his way to becoming a suicide bomber, but thought his radicalism was more acceptable than that of your ordinary Jihadi. So he made a point to put together his final screed, and decided to hang around long enough for a twitter storm.

Why the focus on changing media rather than government?

Protected Minorities

BAM. Quote of the day from Wretchard:

The deep dark secret of political correctness is that there are no consistent rules. Rules depend on who you are. It is a status driven system. The key to advancement within this system is to change your place within the order. a > hello > 37x > d > burble is one day’s order. The next it could be hello > a > 37x > d > burble

It’s not a system of laws. It’s a system of men. Once you grasp this, then you know the right buttons to push. The trick is to position yourself as a high status person then you can reap the rewards of the ordering system. It is perfectly ludicrous. But never let yourself burst out laughing. Carry it off with a straight face.

And the key phrase. "It's different when we do it."

Hawley's Sack Lunches

Since I maintain red and blue friends I get nonsense and sense from both sides. And like most people with email, I get emotional spam from friends and family. Thinking briefly about some stuff I just heard about the Other-Americans on the Right, I thought I'd share the kind of stories that I get that bring people on the Right to tears. I'm not sure what Progressives think when they hear Glenn Beck talk about 'honor'. I think it's pretty hokey myself. Hokey like baseball, mom and apple pie. Here's a toast to the average, ordinary, hokey common decency of the common man who is a patriot, and a meme that's percolating through the Right, as we speak.

--
 I put my carry-on in the luggage compartment and sat down in my assigned seat. It was going to be a long flight. 'I'm glad I have a good book to read. Perhaps I will get a short nap,' I thought. Just before take-off, a line of soldiers came down the aisle and filled all the vacant seats, totally surrounding me. I decided to start a conversation.  'Where are you headed?' I asked the soldier seated nearest to me. 'Petawawa. We'll be there for two weeks for special training, and then we're being deployed to Afghanistan

  After flying for about an hour, an announcement was made that sack lunches were available for five dollars.. It would be several hours before we reached the east, and I quickly decided a lunch would help pass the time... As I reached for my wallet, I overheard a soldier ask his buddy if he planned to buy lunch.  'No, that seems like a lot of money for just a sack lunch. Probably wouldn't be worth five bucks.  I'll wait till we get to base.'

  His friend agreed. I looked around at the other soldiers. None were buying lunch. I walked to the back of the plane and handed the flight attendant a fifty dollar bill.  'Take a lunch to all those soldiers.' She grabbed my arms and squeezed tightly. Her eyes wet with tears, she thanked me. 'My son was a soldier in Iraq ; it's almost like you are doing it for him.'

  Picking up ten sacks, she headed up the aisle to where the soldiers were seated. She stopped at my seat and asked, 'Which do you like best - beef or chicken?'

  'Chicken,' I replied, wondering why she asked. She turned and went to the front of plane, returning a minute later with a dinner plate from first class. 'This is your thanks..' After we finished eating, I went again to the back of the plane, heading for the rest room. A man stopped me. 'I saw what you did. I want to be part of it.  Here, take this.' He handed me twenty-five dollars.

  Soon after I returned to my seat, I saw the Flight Captain coming down the aisle, looking! at the aisle numbers as he walked, I hoped he was not looking for me, but noticed he was looking at the numbers only on my side of the plane. When he got to my row he stopped, smiled, held out his hand and said, 'I want to shake your hand.' Quickly unfastening my seatbelt, I stood and took the Captain's hand.. With a booming voice he said, 'I was a soldier and I was a military pilot.. Once, someone bought me a lunch. It was an act of kindness I never forgot..' I was embarrassed when applause was heard from all of the passengers. Later I walked to the front of the plane so I could stretch my legs. A man who was seated about six rows in front of me reached out his hand, wanting to shake mine He left another twenty-five dollars in my palm.

  When we landed I gathered my belongings and started to deplane. Waiting just inside the airplane door was a man who stopped me, put something in my shirt pocket, turned, and walked away without saying a word. Another twenty-five dollars!

  Upon entering the terminal, I saw the soldiers gathering for their trip to the base.

  I walked over to them and handed them seventy-five dollars. 'It will take you some time to reach the base... It will be about time for a sandwich .

  God Bless You.'  Ten young men left that flight feeling the love and respect of their fellow travelers.

  As I walked briskly to my car, I whispered a prayer for their safe return. These soldiers were giving their all for our country. I could only give them a couple of meals. It seemed so little...

  A veteran is someone who, at one point in his life, wrote a blank check made payable to 'The United States of  America ' for an amount of 'up to and including my life.' That is Honor, and there are way too many people in this country who no longer understand it.'

 

Jail

One of my volleyball buddies went on jury duty in Compton.

Part of the selection involved questions about whether or not people had issues with police. It turned out that a whole lot did. It was interesting to hear him talk about the percentages of folks who had been in  jail, had fathers in jail, boyfriends in jail, cousins in jail, friends and neighbors in jail.

I spent about 90 minutes in jail on a traffic warrant back in 85 or so. I was in my own cage while my friend gathered $177. Other than that, I've had no reason to go. Not to visit, not out of curiosity. I consider myself streetwise but I have no more patience with The Element than I ever had. I'm probably less forgiving and less afraid than the average No Jail Joe.

 

Rally Rally

There is some fractured fraction of America that is looking at each other through prisms of bigotry. It's rather perplexing to see, but I'm not really very concerned about it. While we still are running at 10% unemployment, there is not enough anger in the streets for pitchforks and torches. Instead, Americans are angry at the Other-Americans and are throwing around big words of virtue as their own calling and calling the rest bigots.

Everyone, it seems, has a Million Men like themselves, and until we've had forty such marches on Washington, we're all just watching a parade. Being in Washington is symbolic, but it's difficult for me to imagine what kind of march would instantiate or change legislation on the books. Lobbyists march on Washington every day - they don't waste time around a reflecting pool.

There is only one thing here that marks a departure, which is that the Right is doing a dance with the devil of populism. It is the sort of populism that the populist Left wants nothing to do with. It puts the Progressive Elite on the defensive in an interesting way. Now more than ever they are questioning the intelligence and moral sanity of the common man. This puts them in the position of do-gooders whose doings are rejected by the people it's supposed to be good for. That is, if they could get anything done.

Who will do right by the common man? That is the question.