Cobb

The Concise Obama Critique

Spence pointed me to this, with which I agree 100%:

One thing that struck me about this comment is how it cut to the heart of what I think is wrong with the Obama presidency and how it contradicts his campaign.  It's a problem even deeper than ideology, because it goes to where the differences in ideology come from.  Put simply, Obama's campaign was one long exercise in upward counterfactual "thinking"--if, indeed, one could even call it "thinking".  It was more like imagining: imagine that things will be dramatically better, because we all know that they can.  And each of you can help by imagining that in your own way, and then pitching in....

There were limits to this, clearly.  And I pointed them out at the time.  There wasn't really a whole lot of content.  But there was, at least, this upward counterfactual logic which just by its form embodied a promise.

But Obama's entire presidency has been entirely the reverse.  It's been aboutdownward counterfactuals. It's been about settling. "Well, this isn't exactly what you want, but imagine how much worse it will be if we don't at least do this."  That has been the logic of virtually everything the Obama Administration has done. And not just the finished legislation, but of all the pre-compromising, of the exclusion of idealistic voices--or even just long-suffering, hard-working, scientifically informed and/or militant ones.

Now, I'm very much a wonkish sort who's into how things work.  And it's simply a fact that neo-liberalism is not how things work.  So I tend to look at what Obama does and say, "Well, that's just more screwed up neo-liberal BS."  And that's true.  But it's also true that neo-liberalism means settling.  It is, at it's very essence, a philosophy of settling. "Well, yes, you want X, Y and Z," the neo-liberal says. "And so do we.  So does everyone.  But you can't just go ahead and DO it the way you want to.  You have to adapt.  You have to use more conservative means.  But don't worry, it's still for progressive ends."  And this argument, by its very essential logic is a form of downward counterfactual thinking: If you don't do this.... It's Tony Blair accepting Margaret Thatcher's most famous dictum: "There is no alternative."  Only he says, you can still make it work for progressive ends.  But then it doesn't actually work out, and the process of downward adjustment continues, grows deeper, based on the argument, "Well, if not, imagine how much worse...."

And throughout all of this what is always being lost, piece by piece, bit by bit is the wild-eyed exuberance of limitless hope and aspiration.  What's being lost is vision. What's being lost is the mindset of upward counterfactuals.

That's the bottom-line difference between how Obama campaigned and how he has governed.

 

The Willie Lynch Metaphor

Offered without comment from the Kwaku Network:

http://content.postnewsgroup.com/?p=10716

What will America do with 36 million Black Americans now that there is no more cotton to pick?  Even in states like Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, Black people are not involved in the planting, growing or harvesting of cotton.  This is now done by White and Latino men and women who drive machines that plant and pick the cotton, as millions of Black men of working age stand idle on street corners.  For Black people in America, there is no more cotton to pick.

Black people were brought to America as slaves to pick cotton, tobacco and sugar cane.  America’s dilemma today is: what to do with 36 million Black American descendants of slaves who were shipped to American shores 400 years ago for their economic value yet whose heirs today have lost that value?  While America might have once considered shipping Black Americans back to Africa, that is no longer a practical or palatable option.

So America has a serious problem that demands a solution.  What will America do with 36 million Black Americans who have lost their value to the American economy?  As the world moves towards science, technology, engineering, math and medicine (STEMM), fewer than fifty percent of Black boys graduate from high school in the United States.  Many of those who graduate are given diplomas that qualify them for low-wage jobs or no jobs at all, street-corner hustling, incarceration and violent death.  At best, the majority of Black students in America get an education that prepares them to only pick cotton – if there were cotton for them to pick.

The Good Old Days

Two Goliaths Going Down

Assange vs McIntyre
It turns out that Assange is trying to take credit for busting out the East Anglia fraud. But Steve McIntyre straightens out that nonsense. 

Lesner vs Velasquez
Lesner, the invincible, has just shown that he can fall as fast as he can rush his opponents.  It's an interesting reminder of the differences between sport and battle. 

 

Race In America: Dancing On The Third Rail

(from the archives April 2005)

It's interesting to read these in retrospect. I see it all rather as a sleeping dog I might have let lie, and find I'm not so interested that progress in that area needs to be my concern. I was essentially, at the time of that writing, through the existentials of black conservatism, but still primarily interested in the negotiations between racial identity politics. It's difficult for me to say that there's another way to deal with that whole domain because philosophy is not democratic. The answer for me is philosophical which takes me out of caring what the masses do. It's liberatingly irresponsible. 

Part One

The problem with learning and caring is that you can never shutup, even when you want to. Even when it's better to let people be wrong, and misinterpret, to be committed to what you know to be true forces one, in the end to add another straw to the camel's back, hoping it will balance the odd one someone else put on a moment, or a millenium before.

So it is with race in America. The conversation never stops.

What I understand about race in America is that it involves two sides, and that neither side can win. Black and white are like twin brothers wrestling on the floor. But I think the most true thing about race in America is that it inhabits all of our metaphors. There are so many stories and so many reasons and so many prayers bound up in the drama of race. For anyone who truly cares about the American condition, the state of our union, the meaning of our values, race is always intrinsic, ever puzzling, ever revealing, ever punishing.

I shake my head because I have not yet reached that time in parenthood during which my children rebel. So my instinct remains at the patient-explanation-for-your-own-good level rather than the, fine-do-it-your-way-you'll-see level. And so I am taking an hour or so to respond at length to some straws I see poking out.

Two cats respond here at Cobb on the regular. One is Dave, the other is Chap. I don't really know them. I don't really know anyone in cyberspace, and it's difficult to explain how much of an in-your-face person I am, how I am such an acute observer of people. The web and all computer mediated communications represent to me an abstract medium for the expression of (more or less) pure thought, and it is perfect for certain things, but doesn't begin to approach what I can remember when watching a man or woman walk or listen to them speak or read their faces. So I am something of a bull in a china shop of ideas out here on the web, I am an arrow on a path. I redefine and correct, and I don't listen as much as I would face to face. And it is that gap bewteen the person and the virus of an idea inhabiting their minds which may or may not express itself clearly in the digital realm, that I both recognize and obliterate. So if it sounds like I am beating up them, or whitefolks, or blackfolks, I am, but only in digital bits, only in the realm of ideas. I am a great respecter of people, but when I see a bad paragraph, I am compelled to attack. I don't know that I will find one, but don't hold your breath. This is not about you guys in particular, it's sorta about your being a part of this thing that I and the Brotherhood, and America is going through. I understand your stake as Americans in the reconciliation between all of us.

The best defense, they say, is a good offense. And I really have no need nor cause to be defensive. I'm already here, on the other side of the mountain of personal achievement that unleashes a man's spirit. I have been unleashed for a dozen years and then some. It is how I have managed to take the diary I had been writing in college, to the public - to stand in front of hungry patrons and recite poetry from the heart - to write the unspeakable memo, to correct the man who thinks he knows it all. I care deeply for people, but I only answer to God. Engagement with me is an exercise in honesty, it's about how real I think I can get with you, it's about how much truth you show that you can handle. Sooner or later we get to that place called intimacy. It's a quick jump to there when I write. And I am true to myself and therefore not false with my readers.

So what is this racial thing and why do I bother? I thought about that at the baggage claim this morning after a good 4 hours of sleep. Why is it that this black experience thing is so difficult for my white cousins to understand? Why do I appear obsessed? Why even use such a word? The first answer that passed back through my mind was that it only seems obsessive if you don't see the value in it. But like breeding sows or birthing cows, somebody has to stick their whole arm into uncomfortable places, and once you have learned to do so everything is different. I think whitefolks depend on blackfolks to stick our arms up into race, and they take our civility to be a sign of forgiveness. That's partially true. But there is also a science of husbandry in this, we bring it along generation by generation. But that is always done by engagement, and never by distance.

Represent
Speaking for myself, and I think for many in my generation, much of black culture has been about representation. We have been engaged in a struggle to be a different we. We were like stowaway children under the tarp of the horsecart of the Underground Railroad. Our parents rode shotgun with their hats down low, not speaking too loudly less they draw too much attention. And yet we were their joy and it was our brightness, sheltered within our humble homes, that gave them the courage to take that road to freedom. But my generation crawled out from under the tarp and started talking loud. Yeah! We're free, and guess what you don't really know about us? We've been representing black culture, we've been blackety blackety black black y'all. We've been painting the white house black, and we've dared you to say anything about it. And it was necessary, God knows what the world has been missing in the wake of our parents' silence. And you've been discovering it from Eddie Murphy to Joe Jett to Serena Williams to Condi Rice. The Negro is dead. Blackness is about busting out of jail, about bringing music to the Nowhere Man, about never letting anyone forget about our flavor and unlimited potential.

The success of blackness is demonstrable but its task is not complete. It will take another two generations I think. When my grandchildren purchase banks in Chile or Ghana perhaps. When there's a country club in Georgia where two black ex-presidents hang out. When the Kwaku Foundation awards it's million dollar grant for the 40th time and the networks celebrate. These are my expectations of a fulfilled African American destiny. But lots of African Americans have their own. These hopes and aspirations were forged in different fires and every family's history shapes them, but there is a direction to it, and a common kind of struggle when it comes from African American history. In our generation, it has been to represent - to come out and be loud and proud. As Rick James said, we're bustin' out of this L 7 square, done braided our hair and don't mind if you stare.

The Balance
James Baldwin said: 

Take no one's word for anything, including mine-but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration, There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.

 

And so I know that American destiny is not complete until African American destiny is complete. And we keep working, we blacks and whites, we keep working each others nerves until we reach a settlement. Today the settlement is an accomodation, a compromise, a tenable peace which is both uneasy and comfortable. We still live in a society where OJ makes a difference. We still live in a society in which Colin Powell's wife fears for her husband's life. We still live in a society in which Camilla Cosby was considered crazy when she said race mattered in the murder of her son. And whitefolks know very well, as they look at their own families and friends and associates, that something about them is unfinished and unreconciled to the rest of America. It's nothing a simple as 'discrimination'. Hell, nobody I know is a racist. Everybody I know hates racism. But only few can talk about it in mixed company for more than a minute.

Online is a different story. I've proven that, because I wanted to and I paid close attention. But the fact remains, there is still dissonance, sometimes it is as clearly defined and significant as the street between a white gentrified enclave and the beat down streets of chinatown. Sometimes it's as subtle and insignificant as choosing the right beer when ordering Thai food in New Orleans while listening to reggae music. I don't mean to be cavalier, but I'm not sure that we know what to do with our Multicultural ethos or exactly what it buys us in the post 9/11 world. I'm not sure we know what to do with our new sensitivities. Today, 3000 gay couples had their marriages annulled by legal fiat in the state of Oregon. Online we can talk about all this stuff, but what do we do?

Joy To The World

I read somewhere that Christmas isn't mandated by the Church as a high holiday. It's truly not a solemn occasion. If you think about that which might be a co-opted pagan celebration, this one has probably been the one that most often does not use Christian symbols. Happy Birthday Jesus doesn't quite fit so much as Happy Birthday Baby Jesus. And so the word Joy best describes what this time of year is all about. Joy to the World. 

It's not actually even a message we Christians are likely to be known for. There's always an evangelical hook in there somewhere - or for me in my blend, a Jesuit mind trick. Proper Christianity challenges your mind and soul, but in late December the challenges are more about getting a parking space and all other sorts of preparation for joyous celebration. This year we got duck. 

Right now, everything is as perfect as it gets. All the family phone calls have been made and all the news is good. People are healthy and in good spirits. Them that had no jobs, now got jobs. Some travelling has been done and old faces have been seen, warm embraces had in defiance of winter and quiet talk over hot drinks have given us another chance to pause, smiling and look down at the table for that moment when we say to ourselves nodding, "that's really good".  The confessions are done as well. People like to come clean around this time of year. According to the guy on the radio, almost nobody breaks up on Christmas Day, but starting at Black Friday if your affair is in jeopardy, be prepared to handle the truth. The truth is that we know and we admit it finally, that human beings can be awesome, and sometimes we have to just let go of our fears and tell the honest truth. We play that game when the family is in a good mood and as parents we promise to forgive confessions of mischief - we call it BOL, for blurt out loud. Blurt. That's a good and giggly word. You just can't wait to talk about everything so that you can tell your good news, and feel good and prepare for the joy. 

There's a kind of inevitability about Christmas joy. This year it was a long time coming. As it turns out, I'm between jobs and have had lots of time to think about other things, a good seven week sabbatical it turns out. Christmas couldn't sneak up on me this time; it felt like it took forever to get here. I started singing carols in public last week, and although I didn't burn a CD for the car, I did have it on the home system. The first thing I did yesterday morning was I listened to several renditions of O Holy Night. Whitney Houston, Celtic Woman, Celine Dion, Susan Boyle, Charlotte Church, Mariah Carey, Carrie Underwood, NSync, Alicia Keyes, another Mariah Carey version. Right there in bed on my iPhone via YouTube. No matter how many times I listened to it, I still love the song. I still don't know all the words, but man when they get to the 'fall on your knees' part, it just melts me when they do it right. And yeah I have to say, Mariah does it best. You know the words are coming, and it still gets you in the gut. Advent. What a wonderful word. 

We're at that family age with three teenagers. They know what they want, we know what to get them. It's wonderful watching all the bubbly subterfuge as we raid the bag of ribbons and wrapping paper. Everybody snatchs the roll of scotch tape from my desk and scampers off to their rooms to wrap another gift. We color code the sticky bows, if it's red it's mine. It seemed to take almost no time at all to get the tree and decorate it and now it's surrounded. There have been sleepovers and videogame parties. We baked cookies and made many runs to the stores. 

.and that's all I'm writing this morning...

Merry Christmas, and may your thoughts be more coherent and complete than mine. Pass the eggnog.

QR Fever

I have been seeing these things around and thought that thy were nothing more than what FedEx and UPS use to make it easy to scan their packages from all directions. That may or may not be the case, but when I saw one on a jumbotron in Times Square last weekend, I knew something was up. I did a little searching and now I'm drinking the Koolaid, I've downloaded the app and I'm making the change to my business card. Is this cool or what?

A BDS Review Question: Blood for Oil

What did Barack Obama do to stop all of the Bush cronies from getting the oil we went to war for in Iraq? Just thought I'd ask. 

October 2006 we heard stuff like:

Despite George W. Bush's ostentatious bucking up of the Iraqi government yesterday, it is very likely that there will indeed be an American-engineered coup ousting Maliki and installing some sort of strongman-led  "national unity government" in Baghdad soon, probably before the end of the year.

In fact Maliki has been in office for four years. 

The Crow Cafe's Only Victim

was Nulan.

 

Last edited October 25, 2008

Intro and Concept

I am opening up a new category to the Cobbian oevre called 'Wanna Bet?' I am prompted to do so by the constant doom and gloom predicted by my bete noir and sparring partner (who may or may not be on my side but improves my punching game nonetheless) Craig Nulan.

I will entertain any and all comers to Mortimer & Randolph style betting (1 US Dollar) on any subject or prediction with which I have a significant enough difference that it gets my ire up. So. Come wid it bad bwoy! Put your money where your mouth is.

I will will publish all such bets in the Research Notebooks sidebar. They should be of a nature such that they are independently verifyable, and have a reasonable date attached to them.

Bets With Craig Nulan

Cobb: Wanna Bet?
http://cobb.typepad.com/cobb/2008/10/wanna-bet.html

1. Total reorganization of the world financial system to begin in December 2008 at the Bretton-Woods II conference and to be completed by no later than the martial law stimulating crisis loose lipped by Joe Biden the other day. Let's say summer 2009.

2. Incremental replacement of U.S. greenbacks with "redbacks" or some alternative that penalizes cash hoarding - no later than October 2009.

3. Declaration of martial law in selected municipalities and possibly states/regions when some of your plaid flannel shirt minions who drank too much Black Helicopter kool-aid during the 90's go buckwild with some of their 250 million privately owned firearms and explosives when they can't get at their "cash - no later than August 2009.

Martial Law

I take this bet.

Total Reorganization

I don't know how anybody can define 'total reorganization of the world financial system'. This is just too vague. I can't take this bet.

New Dollars

I think that's easy. Some other form of cash used in the US. I would stipulate that this New Dollar would have to be counted in a separate money supply metric from M1. I take this bet for sure.

---

You owe me a dollar. [email protected] is my paypal.

The Cobb Somalia File

(from the archives - Last edited May 2, 2008)

Standoff with Somali pirates shows limits of naval response | csmonitor.com
http://features.csmonitor.com/globalnews/2009/04/10/standoff-with-somali-pirates-shows-limits-of-naval-response/

“Twenty years ago we had a strong government, with maritime forces and armed forces, and ships to defend our waters,” says Abdi Haji Gobdoon, spokesman for the Somali government. “There was never any problem like this.”

“At the moment, we have no ability to protect the waters or defend against the pirates,” he said by telephone from the Somali capital. The fledgling government controls only a small portion of the capital, let alone its 1,879 miles of coastline. He added that requests for financial assistance or technical help had been made repeatedly to donor nations, but continued to fall on deaf ears.

“No one wants to help us with this. I don’t know why, because it is a problem for everyone now,” he said. “They send ships but we need stability on land.”

Somali girl 'pleaded for mercy' before Islamists stoned her to death for being raped | Mail Online
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1081214/Somali-girl-pleaded-mercy-Islamists-stoned-death-raped.html?ITO=1490

According to Amnesty International, the girl was 13 and had been raped by three men.

Officials say she was 23 and had confessed adultery before an Islamic court.

The stoning, which took place on October 28, is the first public killing in war-torn Somalia for two years.

Convicting a girl of 13 for adultery would be illegal under sharia law but the authorities said she had lied about her age. Print and radio journalists who were allowed to attend the execution put her age at 23.

Amnesty and Unicef, the UN children's agency, said that the girl, identified as Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, was raped while travelling to see a relative in Mogadishu, the Somalian capital.

Her family is said to have tried to report the crime to the militia who control Kismayu, only for Aisha to be arrested and accused of adultery. None of the men she accused of rape was detained.

Information Dissemination: French Naval Forces Nab Pirates at Sea
http://informationdissemination.blogspot.com/2008/10/french-naval-forces-nab-pirates-at-sea.html

There are various news reports of activity off Somalia today, looks like the French are still active.

The French Navy intercepted the pirates in two small boats about 115 miles (185 kilometers) from the nearest coast, finding anti-tank missiles, other weapons and ship boarding gear on the boats.

The nine were handed over to Somali officials, and French officials received assurances that the prisoners would be treated according to international conventions.

Another news report quotes the state minister of Puntland Abdi Qadir Yusuf as saying “We received nice (criminal) pirates from French navy forces today and we will put them on trial soon.”

Poor vs Poor

When you give to the poor in America, are you really giving to the poor?

Yeah Whatever, But Are You Gay?

Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? What's your mission in Afghanistan? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? Are you gay? 

The Foolishness of Wealthy Fools

Pope Boniface III reigned in officer in the year 607AD for fewer than 10 months. 

I've long been thinking about royalty and the lessons of royalty in the context of what moral framework any human should use if they don't want to be consider, or to think like a peasant. I have been particularly concerned with those enticements made to Americans of no great talent or social position to secure their [manufactured] consent. Call it the marketing of democracy. And of course I've been thinking about such enticements in the context of what someone in my economic position or better actually gets back from those more recent entitlements in the post-Roosevelt era. 

But what really struck my fancy this weekend, as I spent a bit of time in NYC, and especially on Fifth Avenue in the men's department of Bergdorf's and on the sidewalk in front of Tiffany's was the extent to which much of our rich folly is more or less permanent. 

The first thing that I thought was that it will take an awful lot of destruction to empty out NYC. 

But here's the other thing. If we're talking economic destruction, and not a WMD attack, there is a good lot of brain dead inheritance that can keep certain aspects of NYC working. IE Real Estate. It takes relatively little skill to be a landowner, and if you neither buy nor sell, but merely sit on the property and collect rents, well a simple amount of prudence is all it takes. Lefrak City remains Lefrak City. 

Now here's the third thing. From a Gapminder perspective, the average American peasant is still two orders of magnitude wealthier than several billions of humans on the planet. There are certain lots of arcanities he needs to know in order to negotiate our society, but in a way they are the same as the brain dead inheritance of NYC real-estate. 

Such notions were foggily fixed in my mind as I wrote the following:

I think all of this goes to show how little of our education in the first world is actually practical. Whenever I read of how stupid Americans are, I instantly think of how intelligent they actually need to be. It is a question central to the matter of progress and the degree to which the learned population is actually willing to profit from their relative advantage. 

It certainly stands to reason that if the washing machine, for example, had never been invented and people had to wash their clothes by hand, they would have much less free time to educate themselves idly. And I believe this to be the case for most of the conveniences we enjoy, more recently Google, Wikipedia and even Wikileaks. 

How stupid are all of us, and how intelligent do we really need to be? I say we really don't need to be as intelligent as we need to be self-suficient. So long as we have human bodies and minds, there are fixed dispositions we are bound to provide or have provided for us. After all, we are killer apes and there will always be trees we will climb, chests we will beat, poo we will fling. 

There is something special though, I think, about those we allow to lead us, and I think it has everything to do with the mastery of such lattices of thought those of us with luxurious spare time indulge. Reading Swift, I am much reminded of how, in Gulliver's Travels, he must negotiate his position from total ignorance of a culture to some basic mastery of it. I am particularly noticing his use of the term 'people of quality' but first in describing their physical attributes - noting as he does the particular [im]perfections of their proportions. To wit:

He is taller by almost the breadth of my nail, than any of his court; which alone is enough to strike an awe into the beholders.  His features are strong and masculine, with an Austrian lip and arched nose, his complexion olive, his countenance erect, his body and limbs well proportioned, all his motions graceful, and his deportment majestic.

Passing the physical sniff, we allow for the ineffable - that of learnedness, or dignity, or class, or whatever our fashion might be. As I consider the realms of liberal arts education and the subjects they take up at great exhobitant cost, I wonder exactly how one might calculate the amount of waste in some global terms. What does a PhD in History give us that Boniface III doesn't? Or what did Boniface III give the world that a PhD in History does not? I would naturally be of the opinion that neither would give us so much as did Faraday or Liebniz, but that's my bias. 

I think our occupations are mostly self-serving and that we entertain ourselves with the fetish of accomplishment. It has been many years since I considered much of our cultural diet mostly a semiotic swamp, and I tend to forget that I have some interest in returning to that view, which started off as cynical disbelief and returns to me as sad disappointment. 

The Academy of La Puta

(I'm reading Jonathan Swift and could not resist the following passage that had me howling with laughter)

 

We came at length to the house, which was, indeed, a noble structure, built according to the best rules of ancient architecture. The fountains, gardens, walks, avenues, and groves were all disposed with exact judgment and taste. I gave due praise to everything I saw, whereof his Excellency took not the least notice till after supper, when, there being no third companion, he told me with a very melancholy air that he doubted he must throw down his houses in town and country, to rebuild them after the present mode, destroy all his plantations, and cast others into such a form as modern usage required, and give the same directions to all his tenants, unless he would submit to incur the censure of pride, singularity, affectation, ignorance, caprice, and perhaps, increase his Majesty's displeasure. That the admiration I appeared to be under would cease, or diminish, when he had informed me of some particulars, which probably I never heard of at court, the people there being too much taken up in their own speculations to have regard to what passed here below.

The sum of his discourse was to this effect: that about forty years ago certain persons went up to Laputa, either upon business or diversion, and after five months’ continuance came back with a very little smattering in mathematics, but full of volatile spirits, acquired in that airy region. That these persons, upon their return, began to dislike the management of everything below, and fell into schemes of putting all arts, sciences, languages, and mechanics upon a new foot. To this end they procured a royal patent for erecting an academy of projectors in Lagado; and the humor prevailed so strongly among the people that there is not a town of any consequence in the kingdom without such an academy. In these colleges the professors contrive new rules and methods of agriculture and building, and new instruments and tools for all trades and manufactures, whereby, as they undertake, one man shall do the work of ten, a palace may be built in a week of materials so durable as to last forever without repairing; all the fruits of the earth shall come to maturity at whatever season we think fit to choose, and increase a hundredfold more than they do at present; with innumerable other happy proposals. The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection; and, in the mean time, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes. By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair; that as for himself, being not of an enterprising spirit, he was content to go on in the old forms, to live in the houses his ancestors had built, and act as they did in every part of life, without innovation. That some few other persons of quality and gentry had done the same, but were looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies to art, ignorant, and ill commonwealth's men, preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement of their country.

His lordship added that he would not by any further particulars prevent the pleasure I should certainly take in viewing the grand academy, whither he was resolved I should go. He only desired me to observe a ruined building upon the side of a mountain about three miles distant, of which he gave me this account that he had a very convenient mill within half a mile of his house, turned by a current from a large river, and sufficient for his own family, as well as a great number of his tenants. That about seven years ago a club of those projectors came to him with proposals to destroy this mill and build another on the side of that mountain, on the long ridge whereof a long canal must be cut for a repository of water, to be conveyed up by pipes and engines to supply the mill, because the wind and air upon a height agitated the water and thereby made it fitter for motion; and because the water, descending down a declivity, would turn the mill with half the current of a river, whose course is more upon a level. He said that being then not very well with the court, and pressed by many of his friends, he complied with the proposal; and, after employing a hundred men for two years, the work miscarried, the projectors went off, laying the blame entirely upon him, railing at him ever since, and putting others upon the same experiment, with equal assurance of success, as well as equal disappointment.

Brilliant.

We came at length to the house, which was, indeed, a noble structure, built according to the best rules of ancient architecture. The fountains, gardens, walks, avenues, and groves were all disposed with exact judgment and taste. I gave due praise to everything I saw, whereof his Excellency took not the least notice till after supper, when, there being no third companion, he told me with a very melancholy air that he doubted he must throw down his houses in town and country, to rebuild them after the present mode, destroy all his plantations, and cast others into such a form as modern usage required, and give the same directions to all his tenants, unless he would submit to incur the censure of pride, singularity, affectation, ignorance, caprice, and perhaps, increase his Majesty's displeasure. That the admiration I appeared to be under would cease, or diminish, when he had informed me of some particulars, which probably I never heard of at court, the people there being too much taken up in their own speculations to have regard to what passed here below.

The sum of his discourse was to this effect: that about forty years ago certain persons went up to Laputa, either upon business or diversion, and after five months’ continuance came back with a very little smattering in mathematics, but full of volatile spirits, acquired in that airy region. That these persons, upon their return, began to dislike the management of everything below, and fell into schemes of putting all arts, sciences, languages, and mechanics upon a new foot. To this end they procured a royal patent for erecting an academy of projectors in Lagado; and the humor prevailed so strongly among the people that there is not a town of any consequence in the kingdom without such an academy. In these colleges the professors contrive new rules and methods of agriculture and building, and new instruments and tools for all trades and manufactures, whereby, as they undertake, one man shall do the work of ten, a palace may be built in a week of materials so durable as to last forever without repairing; all the fruits of the earth shall come to maturity at whatever season we think fit to choose, and increase a hundredfold more than they do at present; with innumerable other happy proposals. The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection; and, in the mean time, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes. By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair; that as for himself, being not of an enterprising spirit, he was content to go on in the old forms, to live in the houses his ancestors had built, and act as they did in every part of life, without innovation. That some few other persons of quality and gentry had done the same, but were looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies to art, ignorant, and ill commonwealth's men, preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement of their country.

His lordship added that he would not by any further particulars prevent the pleasure I should certainly take in viewing the grand academy, whither he was resolved I should go. He only desired me to observe a ruined building upon the side of a mountain about three miles distant, of which he gave me this account that he had a very convenient mill within half a mile of his house, turned by a current from a large river, and sufficient for his own family, as well as a great number of his tenants. That about seven years ago a club of those projectors came to him with proposals to destroy this mill and build another on the side of that mountain, on the long ridge whereof a long canal must be cut for a repository of water, to be conveyed up by pipes and engines to supply the mill, because the wind and air upon a height agitated the water and thereby made it fitter for motion; and because the water, descending down a declivity, would turn the mill with half the current of a river, whose course is more upon a level. He said that being then not very well with the court, and pressed by many of his friends, he complied with the proposal; and, after employing a hundred men for two years, the work miscarried, the projectors went off, laying the blame entirely upon him, railing at him ever since, and putting others upon the same experiment, with equal assurance of success, as well as equal disappointment.

Coherent Racial Animus

I used to talk about hate crime, and I came up with a pretty good standard. For most people whose opinions and common sense I respect, the consensus is that if you're going to get shot in the head, the race of the person who did it doesn't really matter. Murder is murder. 

My key phrase from that discussion was 'racial animus as proximate cause', because while I have some reasonable tolerance for an academic discussion, I respect the law a lot more. Stare decisis being what it is (a damned good and civilizing principle) I tend to take that razor to new racial research. I have a hard time believing, as that goes, that it's easier to get an anti-racist law from fresh theory and research made in countries with a great deal more racial violence than our own. Over here we flip-flop and re-legislate every four years. It's retarded. Then again we have a lot of bored and obsessed academics, and a surfeit of faith in scientific socialism in the US. Call it exceptionalism.

So here's what the chart means.

The more power you have, the less you need a coherent racial reason to do what you do. The inverse is also true. The more powerless you are the more you need a coherent racial theory to do what you do.

So I'm also thinking of generators of racial theories and audiences for those theories. As you go to the right, the theories become more coherent. If you are powerful, you're attitude is going to be 'whatever'. In the upper class, you may be cognizant of race but "it doesn't matter if you're black white, red green or purple". In the middle class, you may require a some general principles, like affirmative action. Down the power curve in the working class, you need something sophisticated like a theory of intelligence as might be provided by the Virginia House of Burgesses or The Bell Curve. In the underclass, where you have no power, a simple color bar enforced by law is what you need. As your individual power to manifest your racial discriminations decreases, you need more racist social infrastructure.

 

B1 & The Pre-Boohabian

The following is an excerpt from an experimental broadsheet I published in 1992 to a few people. How many I don't recall, but probably those I hung with in the black New York literary / performance poetry circles. It's interesting to look at it now in context with what Cobb has become vis a vis the alternative to journalism, and the length and depth at which I could sustain a conversation about the African American experience, then and now. 

It has been suggested that I do so introspection and as I ran across this, I thought it would be a good opportunity to consider and even talk about where I was then considering where I am now. This was all written 18 years ago. Wow.

 

September 1, 1992

=========================================================================

This is the first issue of B.

As editor and current sole contributor I introduce B to you without a great deal of fanfare. The current objective of B. is to communicate it's existence as a continuum of communicative instruments which attempt to utilize a variety of media and movement in integrated expression of the African American experience as it occurs.  The purpose of B in the long term is to serve as a reliable and permanent diversified primary source for current and future reference.

In my view the editorial style and physical limitations of what we call newspapers force researchers into particular ways of seeing things that lack the authenticity of the voice of people, African Americans, especially. The very manner in which newspapers and televised journalistic reports are assembled are biased to profess the false objectivity of journalists who themselves have become a very powerful class of Americans. This bias for me has become unendurable and I find it most annoying to parse through a multiplicity of papers to get at the truth. Having done so, the truth I arrive at seems much the product of oppositional cross-examination of institutions with much to hide. Yet often there are odd spots of writing I happen upon which ring with the flavor of authentic experience. It is this type of information that gives me the confidence that the world is indeed populated by human beings who can understand and explain it and do so out of genuine curiosity and love.

B intends to be full of authentic works of genuine intent centering at this point on African American contemporary experience. Much of the flavor of African American culture is lost and or destroyed by the positioning of journalistic efforts presenting a 'positive' or 'revolutionary' or even 'educational' stances. In addition to what I have already mentioned about 'objectivity' in the day to day chronicling of the experiences of us in the world,  these tropes deaden the experience of reading into unidimensionality. B by its orientation and physical nature will seek to overcome such unidimensionality.  By extension this loss of 'native intellect' and 'flavor' masks the strenuous efforts of journalists and editors to be disinterested. Yet it is precisely the interest which provokes people into being interested and that is what B seeks to capture at the source. Contributions to B are fairly free as B seeks to be what everyone who contributes wants. In  Certainly this multimedia project will have it's own bias, but since I have stated it clearly (I hope) above, we can start cleanly.

One more note before I get into whatever comes next here. B is experimental. B belongs to its readers who are its contributors who are its editors. In short, B is a public journal of its readers - truly of the people and for the people. B seeks to be an extended editorial page which is constructed such that it becomes gradually intellectually liberating for its participants. Thus in some ways B can be seen as a club and all as equal members as they contribute.  As editor I seek to structure B according to my own evolving sense of liberation pedagogy following the theory and works of Paulo Friere, bell hooks and Cornel West. These three intellectuals currently most convey formally to my knowledge the spirit of what I am personally attempting to meliorate through the many facets of B. nuff said.

If you all will indulge me, I present my contributions to the first issue of B.

John Cleese Explains It All

It's all in your head.

Tron Legacy

The first thing to know about Tron Legacy is that it will inevitably be compared to The Matrix. That is what kind of success this film is. 

There's three kinds of FX to look for in any good action / sci-fi flick. There's the kind that's fast and furious that makes you say, holy cripe did you see that? The best thing to do with these is show 'em and then slow them down and show them again. This works with explosions and radical extreme martial arts tricks and car wrecks. Tron has got 'em. Then there's the kind that are awe inspiring beautiful jaw drop scenes that make you say whoa that's awesome. The best thing to do with these are give them some violins in crescendo and then bring on the full orchestra. This works with things like the outside of a space ship or a mind-bending cityscape, or the inside of a chamber of horrors. The third kind are the details of something in a short scene where you just want to freeze frame and check out the still to appreciate the art direction. 

Tron Legacy has got all of that, in spades. 

I want to say that Tron Legacy is, visually, the coolest movie since The Matrix. OK well maybe Avatar, but Avatar was not nearly as cool, Avatar was beautiful. Tron is beautiful like a matte black Brabus Mercedes. It is really that cool. It pays homage to the original Tron. It pays homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey and it goes places the like of which I've never seen, except perhaps in Mass Effect 2. So basically what I think is that this film is going to win a bunch of awards, best art direction and best costumes. 

 

If you are a Tron guy, you're going to dig this flick and you won't be disappointed. If you've never seen the original Tron it will matter only a little bit. The movie stands on its own and doesn't get too monology and bogged down with all sorts of explanations. From a computer science perspective it tips its hat appropriately to the geeky, less credibly geeky than Die Hard 4, but more credibly geeky than The Matrix series. 

What the movie is, is cool fun. It's very righteously PG13 and doesn't stretch things at all trying to fit into those size shoes. It has got just the right amount of Father & Son stuff. Not to the creepy extremes of that Lost in Space remake, but enough to be both emotional and not too heavy. In fact, the whole movie has some lightness to it that's a bit surprising. It just does not take itself too very seriously and strikes a fine balance between being it never goes into that edgy sexy gritty stuff. You even understand the bad guy is not trying to be a bad guy. They have kept Tron simple without being simplistic and maintained the essential fun value - wouldn't it be cool to be trapped in a computer world? Yes and no, and they have that just right. 

You see there are some visuals in this film that are truly stunning, and not just on the 'hey look isn't that cool' level although there's plenty of that. There are actually moments when you look and see pieces of an art film right in the middle of this father and son tale, and it evokes Kubrick and well, OK let's be frank it rips straight outta Kubrick's 2001 in Frank's White Room, but this one lets us live in it for a while. Very cool. It's full of glamor shots and is not afraid to let the camera linger, but is still tightly edited at certain moments just when a scene is about to zoom back and let your eyes feast for a moment. I get the feeling that when this comes out in DVD, there will be lots of bonus material. I'm hungry to see it all again and again. 

The music is bomb. Just explosive, slamming action movie boom boom boom that you haven't heard since Blade. 

The costumes are perfect, and wouldn't you know somebody already has motorcycle leathers hooked up in Tron style. The babes in this movie look like babes, double babelicious, like a cross between a younger, hotter Trinity and the Robert Palmer girls. The baddies are menacing in both appearance, movement and sound, and it's cowboy simple. The good guys wear black and white, the bad guys wear black and orange. I've read that they spent much dinero on the costumes and it has worked out to perfection. Flynn, the father, has a look that's a makes him look like a futuristic Zen Moses. 

 

What's wrong with it? Well the denouement is pretty lame. The movie climaxes ten minutes before the end and everything settles to a happily ever after. Loose ends remain but not in a teasing fashion. If I know anything about movies of this sort, this will be a smash hit and there will be a sequel, but they didn't do anything but clunk-up the ending, short and sweet, so that you're not guessing if there's going to be one. Also, this is not a dark and sinister movie. For anyone who is expecting Tron's Grid World to manifest itself with the noir foreboding of 'Dark City' or the haunting psychological subtext of 'Inception', there are two words you should keep in mind before you go to the theater: "Disney Movie". (Recalling that at the beginning of this review I said 'Holy Cripe'). 

This is a movie for boys and dads. It's not so much of a movie for girls and families in the way that Spiderman was. It won't be a hit on that level. But cool girls will love this movie because there's a very cool girl in it. Yes, a girl who can fight and drive a fast car and fly a jet and wear the bomb leather suit and boots. Yes a girl with warmth and a heart who doesn't pretend to be a heartless harpy or just fight other girls. A real heroine along the lines of Lelu in The Fifth Element, but cool.

The best thing about Tron Legacy is that there is an absolute minimum of corn and no cheese at all. It's a difficult thing to do given the sophisticated tastes of action and sci-fi movie audiences. It's way better than GI Joe, which wasn't too bad after you accepted the cheese level. It's way better than Fantastic Four which got really annoying. Now I happen to like The Island even though it has a lot of guy-running-away-from-bad-guys-with-girl-in-tow stuff going on. Tron is a bit more visually stunning but more consistent. So you can indeed enjoy this action-packed adventure without a letdown, now that you know what I've told you. 

The star of the show is Tron's Grid World itself which works very well in 3D. So while I'm generally a 3D skeptic, I say go for it. There is never a moment when you don't know that you are in the Grid World. It is deliciously glassy and synthetic. Even the obsidian rocks have a sort of shine. It is predominantly dark, but not noir, high contrast but not disturbingly so, which is why the club music themes work so very well. 

This is a definite must-see film that should live up to its massive hype. I recommend it highly. I saw an early release and I'm going to go see it again, at least once. 

In Queens

Woke up this morning, with a blue moon in my eye.

Entartete Schwarze Kunst

Black cultural production in the late 20th century blossomed as a generation of black Americans insisted on self-representation in the arts and media. In some ways it could be seen as the long awaited result of social pressure first established in the Black Arts Movement of the late 60s, but was also a part of new multicultural theories and the Culture Wars of the 80s.

Toni Morrison was one of the leading figures in this battle, representing to my mind the high art. As part of the culture wars, multiculturalists and others fought to change the agenda and content of Western Civilization as taught in universities. It was very common for the standard curriculum to be characterized as the study of DWEMs, dead white european males. There was something wrong with that, and they set out to change.

What is the result of that change and what has the assault produced in American culture? What are the signs of success or failure?

From my reading of history, the decline in the civility and the increase in vulgarity of American popular cultural production is a result of larger forces, primarily the sexual revolution and the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era. For me, these represented the launching pad of a continuing countercultural movement of the Baby Boomers, the most wealthy and spoiled generation of Americans ever. As they represented the mainstream, white liberals of the Boom made political ties with black civil rights ambitions over mutual disgust of their parents' and society's racism. This resulted in an amplification of the counterculturalism of the rising, post-civil rights black middle class. It is from this black middle class, infused with black power and black nationalist themes, that defined and put a priority on black cultural production.

From my conservative perspective, the most important consequence of the counterculturalism adapted by the black middle class were two. First was the growing acceptance of single parenthood. Second was the radical autonomy of black power as manifest in political anti-Americanism. These phenomena represent self-inflicted wounds and provide additional cultural friction to that of anti-black racism and serve as an effective barrier to the progress of those African Americans. I argue that there are strains of black cultural production that serve to encourage these countercultural ideas and that they spite the efforts of enlightened high art that those like Toni Morrison must have intended. These strains have come to dominate both the substance of black cultural production and continue to add to the dissonance in the perception of African Americans. They have both amplified and confirmed racial stereotypes about African Americans.

Particularly in popular music, I observe that the denouement of the R&B form, eclipsed by hiphop, represents a great loss. Themes of romantic love, devotion, political consciousness, environmentalism, spirituality, marriage, and brotherhood are nowhere nearly as common in today's black popular works as they were during the reign of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind & Fire, Ashford & Simpson and Al Green. While Jazz, Gospel and the Blues have retained their character for the most part, R&B and hiphop have become progressively more popular and vulgar in the American mainstream. As well, hiphop music *without* lyrics has been influential on both Jazz and Gospel. 

There is no way that I could comprehensively cover this subject, and it feels rather silly to single out hiphop for blame. Its devolution is self-evident and its recovery may still be possible. But I must recognize the failure inherent in the promotion of these wildly successful commercial forms of vulgar entertainment as part and parcel of black culture. If there is merit in any multicultural criticism of the Western Canon, what must be done to properly represent actual progress in black cultural production, and how can that occur amidst such a degenerate wallow?  

When I was in thrall to the possibilities of America supporting and engaging my generation's creative ambition and works, beacons like George C. Wolfe, Spike Lee, Gregory Hines, Wynton Marsalis, Anna Devere Smith, and Hinton Als held great promise. But few of them have enjoyed the success of Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Tyler Perry & Kanye West. What are we to make of this? Is it necessarily the case that black cultural production does indeed follow the Western model of high, middlebrow and low art? I say yes, that is the path that has been have chosen. It is therefore inevitable that within that context, African American class tastes will select along the same lines and the unifying racial themes espoused by the original Black Arts Movement will not survive African American class stratification. In the same way the white American middle class supports and is represented by lowbrow rock & roll (the third horseman to sex and drugs) to the exclusion of literature,  the black Americans will support and be represented by lowbrow hiphop to the exclusion of literature and other edifying forms. 

The Inevitable Racism of Liberty?

The substantive ideals of American conservatism—limited government, states’ rights, individualism, property rights, and the prioritizing of liberty over equality—when applied consistently inevitably result in racism...--Anon

This is the most stunning and revealing argument I think I've ever heard someone say with a straight face. Because if this is provably true then I'm going to have to accept racism rather the way I accept the cholesterol in steak. I don't care if it's not good for me, I'm going to just take my little pill and eat all the steak I want. Just like Cipher in The Matrix.

This sounds to me like a preposterous argument because it suggests that (and this is my immediate counter) that if these were principles at the heart of a post-colonial African nation, that it would necessarily be a racist nation. One must note that this is a blanket statement that does not say that the race of those benefiting from or implementing those ideas is material to the resultant racism, but that racism itself is a result of those principles.  

I do agree that these are the substantive ideals of American conservatism, which is why I am in rapt attention. I also find the statement addresses the level of abstraction which is right up my alley in that (maybe I'm repeating myself) it doesn't suggest the imperfections of the humans in charge have anything to do with it. In other words, if you weren't trying to be a racist when you came up with those five operating principles, so long as you achieve them you will inevitably be a racist. 

Did I say this sounds preposterous? At once I am tempted to find someone out at Claremont to mail it to for a righteous fisking, and I am embarrassed to even dignify it. Be that as it may, it's a square topic for Cobb, and I'm biting.

I put the emphasis on liberty because it seems to me that limited government and states rights are means to an end, with the end being [individual] liberty. I suspect we will get into matters of collective freedom vs individual freedom, as well as the very premises of the point of consent of the governed vis a vis why systems of law and government are preferable over anarchy in the first place. There's probably good stuff to discuss in that vein. I'm also interested to find out a more precise definition of six pounds of racism, because we're going to have to weigh out the balances here. Which is to say how much racism can a society bear? How much property rights can a society bear?

As an example of the latter, I would very much agree that a society that chops off somebody's right hand for the commission of a robbery of $100 would be horrendously unfair and would not serve the purposes of individual freedom - one would question whether such a definition of liberty is just. Note my brackets on [individual] liberty above. One could say that the collective freedom of people who have $100 and don't steal $100 is well served by a society with a death penalty for that level of theft. But nobody could say that serves individual freedom.

That's So 20th Century

I suspect that the appeal of this kind of activity is going down.

Spinoza's God & Evolutionary Convergence

 "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings." -- Albert Einstein

There are two notable takeaways for me in reviewing this video by Steve Paulson. The first is the extent to which notable thinkers have used the term 'Spinoza's God'. The second is the alternative evolution.

I rather like the idea as expressed by one of the interviewees, that humanity is inevitable. I believe that the term that he used was evolutionary convergence. It gives me something to consider that both supports and refutes aspects of Vinge's & Kurzweil's Singularity. 

On the one hand, Iain Banks has already determined a very plausible evolution between human and thinking machinery. What we will continue to do is to enjoy what it is our bodies will want to do. That is to say that no matter what consciousness emerges from AIs, human beings will still be trapped in human bodies and most of what we do with our brains will have to do with the combined experience of our sensations and compute ability. Consciousness beyond the context of the human body is something that may give us a sense of contentment, and it may deliver for us the sort of focus needed so that we might compute something useful in our minds. But those things will always serve to deliver us human contentment which will always be in the same shape, as we are shaped by the physical bodies in which our brains are embedded. Along those lines, one of the more fascinating predictions of Culture are the additional glands that can be bio-engineered and put under control of the mind. If you could excrete into your own body at will substances that could alter your moods and emotions with precision, why would you waste any time calculating sums, or solving logic puzzles?

Humanity being inevitable, there is something inherently valuable in conscious intelligence. We may still yet be on the road to our own evolutionary destiny but it won't necessarily be the Singularity. Is the fact that we all wear clothing some sort of singularity between ourselves and cotton? Or are we in a singularity with our own microbes? The alternative evolution in all of the interviews was very earth focused, but it is the mind-body conscious intelligence that makes the difference - that is the profundity. But to play a hand in that evolution, as we build AIs like we build houses and other domains and augmentations puts us in control. It will not be until we are capable of transcending our senses that we evolve.

The highlight was the notion that humanity is the epitome because we incorporate that which is advanced in every other species. Respiration is an evolutionary component. The 'miracle' of design is in these components. Vision is an evolutionary component. Hearing, touch, digestion, echolocation. All of these remarkable biological subsystems are what evolution is about. Having redundancies in combination with a broad selection of these subsystems are what makes us dominant. We are accelerating evolution just by eating. We have more of the subsystems, more of the failsafes, that's why we win.

The Logarithmic Shadow

If you've listened to any gangsta rapper for long enough, you know that he will eventually tell you that he could have you killed. Generally, the person who would do the killing would be one of the rapper's former associates, and the price of the deed will be relatively small.

Knowing that there are people who would never kill and that there are others who would kill for cheap, or even free, poses an interesting problem. It is the problem of absolute vs relative value. This is a problem that I have found particularly troublesome in my rise through American society. It cuts several ways.

I characterize this problem as 'the logarithmic shadow', for my lack of the generally accepted term. I observe that people abstract in such a way that small differences are seen as large and large differences are seen as small. The truth of the differences are obscured in shadow, as exemplified by logarithmic scales.

Hacker's 20%
Andrew Hacker, the famous social scientist, took a survey in his book 'Money'. He found that when he asked people of various income levels what their ideal raise would be - a raise they would say could take care of all of their financial needs, the answer was more or less universal. It was 20%. People's expectations are relatively finite.  For the man with $10 shoes, those costing 2 dollars more would be all he desired, but for the man with $200 shoes, he required 40 dollars. 

Look at it the other way. For the man driving a Ford, he would need to get a BMW in order to be complimented. But for the man already driving a BMW, he'd probably need to buy an Aston-Martin to get a similar compliment from his peers. 

The Cocktail Party
A welder is invited to a cocktail party celebrating the opening of the new building he helped construct. He happens to overhear a conversation between an architect and an attorney, both who make a great deal more money. The architect makes an aesthetic statement about the beauty of a particular archway in the lobby of the building. The welder knows that there were many difficult welds used in the steel of that arch. In fact, one of his subordinates injured himself. The attorney takes the architect's statement and elaborates on the beauty. The welder pipes up, smiling with pride, yeah it cost Joe his finger. The conversation halts, abruptly with embarrassment. The subject is changed.

The Cookie vs The Credit Card
A new technology called e-Commerce becomes available so that ordinary people can shop online. In order to accomplish this, a technology called a 'cookie' is stored on the buyer's computer.  It just so happens that a very sophisticated thief can get personal information from you by hacking your computer and accessing this cookie. People are horrified by the possibility. Yet every day these same people speak to travel agents to book their business travel. These travel agents know their favorite airlines, hotels, car rental, and meal preferences. Whenever people go to restaurants, they willingly hand their credit cards over to waitstaff who make much less money.

Flies on the Belly
Marta is a starving sick illiterate child in a poverty stricken country with a population of 2 million.  A healthy altruist comes on television to tell us that for a mere $20 a month, Marta can get food, clothing, shelter and education. Tens of thousands of people respond netting $20 million in contributions. Two years later the same commercial comes on television. Nobody wants to contribute any longer.

--

These are all paradoxes of perception. I could probably structure them more properly were I to spend more time, but they all illustrate to me the difference between effort expended and results achieved, between things of equal import that can generate asymmetric reactions. I am coming to understand very specific kinds of flaws in human perception owing to the fact that I have had a career in translating such perceptions into computer aided systems of representation. A precise translation still often yields misinterpretations. People cheat in over- or underemphasis in order to communication something of value.

What is particularly fascinating in all of this to me are the border conditions of perceptual change and the manner in which shifts are communicated. 

Facebook vs Arpanet
The first time I sent an email, I was still in college. It was through a system called DECnet. I was part of a small project, assisted by a guy named Richard Z. White who was working at Raytheon. We established what was then called NSBENET. It worked for a short period of time, then went unused. Even among college engineering students, it was considered geeky and complicated.  A few years later, in 1985 or 86, I began sending email messages in the current way we do, client server store and forward GUI based email. In fact, I wrote back in 1986 how cool it would be if we could have our computers store and forward digitized music. At the time, CDs were first being sold, and I can remember a time when it was almost impossible to get reggae music on Compact Disk. The social context of spending many hours in a week in front of a computer screen was decidedly declasse. Today, a generation of parents who have probably experienced email for the first time in the late 90s are fretful of how many hours their children spend on Facebook.

--

This is the cross-fertilized field of cognition, economics and philosophy. It is fascinating to me. One last example.

The Ignored Prospectus 
Ever since 2007 behavioral economics has become a dominant theme in discussions of what's going wrong in the market. People who have relied on the 'efficient market hypothesis' have now been faced with evidence that the invisible hand is a lot more clumsy and slow than they ever thought. That's because people, whose behavior ultimately determines the price of things in the market, often misperceive risk. These aggregate misperceptions establish themselves as market prices which are not efficient and they generate bubbles which certain conditions can conspire to sustain. There is probably no better example than Greenspan's indictment of 'irrational exuberance'. If there is, it's probably 'too big to fail'. Both are examples of unsustainable prices for which 'the efficient' market did not correct precisely because the aggregate perception expressed a desire that was contrary to rationality. In other words, if enough people suspend disbelief, you can sustain castles made of sand longer than rationality dictates and 'efficient' markets are not exempt.

So one of the many studies coming out to explain where we went wrong had very definite conclusions about how people perceive risk. You could draw very specific warnings out in the language of any security for sale, and people will generally ignore those expert warnings in favor of their feelings on the matter. It's rather like a reverse transferrance. No matter how big the warning label, once people have decided to buy, they go with their gut.

--

I expect upcoming books by Taleb and Ariely to aid my consideration at length of how people's cognitive errors manifest themselves with regard to how they take up information. I'm particularly interested in this from the perspective of abstracts of big data. There are many phenomena that we have heretofore been physically unable to probe, owing to the massive amounts of data. As our technical ability increases, and more computer mediated interpretations become the norm, what kinds of cognitive errors will we make?

The Democratic Dashboard of the Future

I'm surprised to have found this interactive tool which portends to be the way of the future of democracy. According to the tool, I solved the federal budget deficit with a combination of tax increases (31%) and spending cuts (69%). It took all of ten minutes.

There are a number of problems with the tool, but those problems could be worked out with a little bit of elbow grease. This is probably the single greatest thing the NYT has done in the past 5 years. Note their qualifications:

Notes: These suggested cuts would need to be implemented gradually over the next 20 years, some taking effect well before 2030 in order to keep the deficit, and thus interest payments on the national debt, at a manageable level between now and 2030. All figures are adjusted for projected inflation and expressed in terms of 2010 dollars. The baseline for this exercise assumes that all current policies continue, even those scheduled to expire, like the Bush tax cuts.

By SHAN CARTER, MATTHEW ERICSON, DAVID LEONHARDT, BILL MARSH and KEVIN QUEALY/The New York Times | 

Send Feedback

Sources: New York Times analysis of data provided by Alan Auerbach and William Gale; Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget; Tax Policy Center; Congressional Budget Office; Sustainable Defense Task Force; Cato Institute; Economic Policy Institute; National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform; Joint Committee on Taxation; Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; Social Security Administration

What they failed to do is to provide briefing statistics for each of the decision points in the mix. If they had done so, this would have given a complete interactive tool for distribution. Nice job though. 

Student Loans: More Toxic Debt

Just wow.

http://www.collegescholarships.org/research/student-loans/

Weird Science

Obsidian Wings bloviates a bit about Science being Democrat.

I say the following:

Eugenics isn't science, right?

As a conservative, and as one who respects science but doesn't 'do' science, one always has to ask whether or not science is on the side of morality. The difference in political philosophy, if it is not a moral matter, is only a kind of self-interested partisanship. So therefore if there is a disconnect between principled science and principled conservatism one should ask which is more value laden. My implication is simple, scientific discovery is amoral, political philosophy is not. If we are to be moral human beings first, then don't let the tail of science wag the dog of humanity.

And remember Cliff Stoll.

What I don't understand is why this so-called 'scientific community' manifests itself so often in athiest partisanship. As Duff so ably illustrates, there is not often any 'scientific' argument for public schools to teach theology. So I am routinely amazed that this simpleminded creationism vs evolution argument rules the day, a la 'the science is in' and further discussion is terminated. But to be against teaching theology in public schools is nothing more or less than anti-intellectual. If this is the hallmark of what passes for healthy debate among the Republican-less scientific community, I'm not sure we're missing much.

I grew up as a Progressive and I understand the affinity between the sentiments of scientific discovery and progressive politics. But that too is a bias that shouldn't remain unquestioned. How it is that the spin initiated by the Kerry campaign managed to distort the truth about what actually transpired in the realm of stem cell research is a perfect example of how these biases have ossified into what folks in the intelligence business call 'pretexting'. Now it is almost an axiom of faith that Republicans are 'anti-science', and the open source Left blogosphere employs a million eyeballs to find bugs in the conservative system. What's so astonishing is the shallow level of bugtracking that satisfies their 'curiosity', which is why you know what Sarah Palin said last week about North, oops I mean South Korea. And why minds like Christopher Hitchens is fact-checking numbskulls like Glenn Beck, all as proxies for dealing with actual intellectual equals, such as those associated with Stanford and Claremont.

In the end, it doesn't really matter how many Republicans are doing what science we need, just as it didn't matter how many Hungarians were doing the math at Alamogordo. Unless you are filming a reality show.

I'm fresh from watching Dan Nocera's presentation on artificial photosynthesis, and I watch, TED, SALT and Fora.tv all the time. I am amazed at how much self-congratulation passes for intelligence in many of the audiences for such material in contrast with the real science that Nocera has demonstrated. It only goes to show me how so much of this obiter dicta serves the purposes of political and social engineering rather than real engineering. I think Nocera put it nicely. How did all of those audiences forget economics? Why did money become the enemy of the Left?

But let's migrate back a bit to the matter of political philosophy, because it is at that level we should ask the question of exactly how much science it is we actually need. Maybe it wasn't science or scientific for me as a kid to grow up and want to be an astronaut. Maybe the entire aerospace industry and NASA in particular was nothing more than a big fat barrel of pork and PR campaign designed as a cover for developing better ICBMs. After all, the whole thing went broke and we stopped way short of Arthur C. Clarke's imagination. Was manned space exploration science? Were we right to pursue it in the first place, or did we really get nothing more than 'space age' consumer goods out of that whole deal? Today, Elon Musk is the aeronautical ass kicker. He has individually out engineered Detroit and Houston for a fraction of the cost. How much science did we get out of that and how much do we really need? Where does all the money go for the great discoveries? Is Bill Gates really a friend of science? Then why is he trying to rid the world of malaria? Where is the cure?

What I'm getting at is how does this kind of logic survive, the logic that ignores economics and puts the entire edifice of Republicanism at the feet of 'Christianists'. How credible are such anti-Republican screeds when there are such simple matters they omit from their arguments? How indeed has this so-called 'scientific community' come to represent and defend such arch Lefty positions? I think it's because of something I implied today, which is that scientificky Progressives are actually more Libertarian than they think and that they find more comfort with Democrats. But theirs is not a principled stand but one that is co-opted by a crafty Left Old Guard. 

 

Dooomed!

(artlessly copied whole cloth from David P Goldman)

I’ve been warning for months that a few state and municipal bankruptcies (actually, a few states and a great many city bankruptcies) will be required to slay the beast of government-union pension liabilities. The total size of the muni bond market is about $2.4 trillion. Unfunded pension liabilities (calculated with a realistic discount rate) are almost as high, according to one study. Now comes James Pethokoukis of Reuters to tell us of a “secret GOP plan” to bankrupt local governments and crush the government unions.

Congressional Republicans appear to be quietly but methodically executing a plan that would a) avoid a federal bailout of spendthrift states and b) cripple public employee unions by pushing cash-strapped states such as California and Illinois to declare bankruptcy. This may be the biggest political battle in Washington, my Capitol Hill sources tell me, of 2011.

That’s why the most intriguing aspect of President Barack Obama’s tax deal with Republicans is what the compromise fails to include — a provision to continue the Build America Bonds program.  BABs now account for more than 20 percent of new debt sold by states and local governments thanks to a federal rebate equal to 35 percent of interest costs on the bonds. The subsidy program ends on Dec. 31.  And my Reuters colleagues report that a GOP congressional aide said Republicans “have a very firm line on BABS — we are not going to allow them to be included.”

In short, the lack of a BAB program would make it harder for states to borrow to cover a $140 billion budgetary shortfall next year, as estimated by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. The long-term numbers are even scarier. Estimates of states’ unfunded liabilities to pay for retiree benefits range from $750 billion to more than $3 trillion.

I’m not going to trade in Capitol Hill rumors, but whether there is a secret plan or not, the US federal government is in the same position that Germany is with respect to Greece — the creditors (in this case public employee pensions) have to take a massive haircut for the numbers to add up. The delayed effect of the real estate collapse (which is still getting worse) is going to hit local revenues next year due to massive downward adjustment in tax assessments. This is the killer:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-08/plunging-home-prices-fuel-property-tax-appeals-swamping-u-s-cities-towns.html

It’s cities, not states, that live off real estate taxes. Local government was riding the real estate boom along with everyone else but it takes a couple of years for the price collapse to work its way through tax assessments. What’s going to happen is two, three, many Harrisburg bankruptcies. The cities will collapse and the states will push them over the edge (like NY State with NYC in 1974). They’ll make a horrible example of a couple of states — California and Illinois — others will hold the line as the cities go down like ninepins

There are nearly 11 million local government employees (not counting 3.56 million part-time), or a full-time equivalent of 12.2 million. Full-time equivalent for states is only 4.4 million. So most of the savings (and union-busting) has to come from local governments in the first place.

There’s a limit to how far they can take this: Banks and insurance companies together have about $700 billion of munis. You can wipe out mom and pop (did so already with the auction securities market) but a 40% haircut would take out about $300 billion of financial institutions’ capital — not pretty.  And that’s not to mention the spillover effect on other markets. That’s yet another reason not to own the banks’ common equity.

	Individuals	Mutual Funds1	Banking Institutions	Insurance Companies	Other	Total
2010
Q1	1,034.3	959.1	269.2	444.4	137.6	2,844.6
Q2	1,033.3	955.2	255.5	444.1	145.0	2,833.1
	36.5%	33.7%	9.0%	15.7%	5.1%

My best guess is that two states go down — Illinois and California — and lots of Democratic city machines. In lots of states, Republican governors and state legislatures will actually win support by running against the machines.

If you have to own munis, own the better-quality states–in fact, own bonds that have first claim on revenues rather than General Obligation debt. The municipal bond funds are loaded with School District of West Squashbug and the general obligation bonds of Death Gulch. Even if you own bullet-proof munis (and I own some myself) be prepared to take a big mark to market hit as the crisis plays out.

 

Raise Your Hand If You're White

And pray tell us what it means to you. 

Like most Americans, I have a choice of voting for a more or less consistent political philosophy or doing so to make myself feel good about myself. For now, Republicans come closest to having that which resembles mine, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Republicans have taught me some very important lessons about political philosophy. But none of their candidates or office holders, outside of Duncan Hunter, Chris Christie, Mike Pence and Jon Kyl have given me anything approaching inspiration. I view most partisans as civilians. Nuff said.

Hitch has something snide to say of defenders of the Tea Party for whom he has discovered a trail of literature of ignominious descent. There's something of this kind of civilian populism to be regretted - rather like the foolishness of viruses and botnets that infect millions of Windows PCs of the improperly defended masses. But I'm rather stuck in that corner that says, we cannot go and re-engineer a better public. We've got what we've got. If there is something good to say about useful idiots of the Tea Party it is, by and large, their anti-incumbent bent; something I've always said. Nor have I ever thought of them as more than an unruly crowd bearing torches and pitchforks. It still remains to be seen whether or not Steele's GOP apparatus can tame them or the candidates they and other Republicans sent to Washington this midterm. 

That said, the new Congress has done in short order two things I would have them do, which is to undo the repeal of DADT and keep the Bush Tax Cut. I further expect them to give Obamacare hell. I don't expect Obama or this Congress to do anything particularly smart about economic reform, which is too bad. I suppose we'll have to wait for Mitt Romney 2 to hear anything intelligent. But that leaves in place the big bad spectre of racial this and racial that in American politics, or rather in the meta-politics. I realize that in my upper middle class fantasy world, there isn't much racial hurly burly, but somewhere knees must be doing something more than jerking. Somebody needs to explain it to me in terms of a legislative agenda.

Counting noses is symbolic. Allen West is symbolic. But he's also a real person with real strengths. Here's something interesting that John McWhorter wrote that passed under my nose this week:

"The black conservative is responsible for making people question an idea that racism must be extinct before black people can overcome. Understanding that our goal is to thrive despite racism rather than fetishizing it is, in fact, the central ideological plank of people deemed 'black conservatives.' This is a coherent position, but that can be hard to perceive, given the way that race has been discussed in our land over the past 40 years or so. There are two places to go. Some black conservatives believe that black uplift can happen in the logical sense only with a revolution in black family mores, and that short of this, nothing can or will change. I find that view unduly pessimistic, and yet sound." 

There is the paradox here which I think I explained well in the Intellectual One Drop Rule. The short description is that it is essentially a racial reduction of African Americans to think they are politically beholden to African Americans. It defies the definition of individual liberty and it incorporates what Toni Morrison calls the problem of the rescued. 

'The problem of internalizing the master's tongue is the problem of the rescued. Unlike     the problems of survivors who may be lucky, fated, etc. the rescued have the problem of   debt. If the rescuer gives you back your life, he shares in that life. But if as in Friday's case, if the rescuer saves your life by taking you away from the dangers, the complications, the confusion of home, he may very well expect the debt to be paid in     full.' -- Toni Morrision, 1992

Unlike Morrison I don't believe the debt to language is anywhere so profound as political quid pro quo. In fact it's rather ironic that Morrison herself has become required reading to a greater extent than blacks have been required to vote Republican. But such matters beg questions about what is considered in the best interests of blacks as part of that group they supposedly represent. 

Getting down to cases. Here is Christopher Hitchens:

Most epochs are defined by one or another anxiety. More important, though, is the form which that anxiety takes. Millions of Americans are currently worried about two things that are, in their minds, emotionally related. The first of these is the prospect that white people will no longer be the majority in this country, and the second is that the United States will be just one among many world powers. This is by no means purely a “racial” matter. (In my experience, black Americans are quite concerned that “Hispanic” immigration will relegate them, too.) Having an honest and open discussion about all this is not just a high priority. It’s more like a matter of social and political survival. But the Beck-Skousen faction want to make such a debate impossible. They need and want to sublimate the anxiety into hysteria and paranoia. The president is a Kenyan. The president is a secret Muslim. The president (why not?—after all, every little bit helps) is the unacknowledged love child of Malcolm X. And this is their response to the election of an extremely moderate half-African American candidate, who speaks better English than most and who has a model family. Revolted by this development, huge numbers of white people choose to demonstrate their independence and superiority by putting themselves eagerly at the disposal of a tear-stained semi-literate shock jock, and by repeating his list of lies and defamations. But, of course, there’s nothing racial in their attitude …

Is it like that?

Dissonance & Faith

Dissonance is a keyword in the story of my life. For me, it is the experience of living the truth of the false claim that blue is not blue. It is the experience of the epistemological nightmare, of hearing people tell you after you have explained something profound with precision that you have nothing to say and are at any rate incapable of saying it. 

I have, like you, wished that I could read people's minds and that they could read mine, because I hate dissonance. So writing has become an indispensable part of my life. I have, in my adult life, always considered myself a writer - a writer for people and for machines with the emphasis on people. In every opportunity to write software for machines, I have always discounted the value. Software that doesn't engage the end-user was never interesting to me. The machine was a logical substrate. It was never my desire to escape the complications of humanity. In fact, I never grew to learn enough of the mathematical universe to appreciate the ability to get a computer to think mathematically, nor enough about any scientific discipline to feel rewarded by shaping the computing tool. What I have learned instead are matters of finance and ethics. 

Roger Ebert writes about the experience of being mute and of being blind, and then conveys a letter sent to him by someone rendered mute by surgery. Both the blog entry and the letter are longish, but I understood them implicitly. In my ethical journey, the first intellectual country was characterized by the landscape of race. What I discovered early on was how the hunger of those wanting to understand and sympathize led them to jump to whatever seemed to lead them to a proper conclusion, to forge instantaneous brotherhood at the first hint of commonality. But this kind of sentiment was never sufficient to bear the burdens of reform implicated by the scope of anti-racist politics and action. Most everything became symbolic. The dissonant supply and demand of dialog on the matters of race in America sometimes ossified over time into the kind of hostility that could be called racism. That characterizes our epistemological nightmare well, because it isn't true racism but most people do not possess the words to make this clear. They only possess the sentiments appropriate towards the ethics of anti-racism. Smarter folks substitute culture for race and welcome culture wars often to the point of the political and the politics of difference underlies a great deal of what sparks frustration in American public life. This is all dissonance to me. It is dissonance until it is crime. 

I don't believe that man is a social animal in the way many do. I think that we are evolutionarily hardwired to be constrained in our affairs to Dunbar's Number. Everything else is maintained by hegemonic forces and, of course, ignorance & incuriosity. You have your number of Facebook friends, and that's about it. You either fit the profile of the person you always wanted to be or you suffer from the ignominious underachievement. You don't need to communicate to more people, and in fact you cannot. You can only be leveraged by the impersonal, which means you will be interpreted. The French have a verb for that. Connaitre. Connaitre is for people. Savoir is for things. Both verbs mean 'to know'. When you write a program and compile it, the computer knows what you are telling it - almost instantaneously. Savoir. You, on the other hand, will be interpreted. 

You will be interpreted.

Interpretation is imprecise, and there are for humans very distinct advantages to being interpreted. For in dissonance is the ability to play both sides of the coin. Human social identity should be worn, as James Baldwin wrote, loosely like the clothes of the desert. Give a little room for the mind to shape the body. Let some ambiguity in. We don't want to live in a bot-mediated world. We want to live in a world where we have permission and license to be what we want to be, to go where we like and to behave as we please. If we strive to achieve a precise goal and redefine ourselves in pursuit of that goal it is only to ultimately attain that freedom. At least, that's my philosophy. It is about the Dosh Point. 

Next year I'll be 50. I'm slimming down and realizing that I look more like I did at 35 then at 45. I've been a bit too chubby for a bit too long. Dr. Sakurai tells me, even after I shed 20 pounds this year, that I'm too fat. He's over 80 years old, so perhaps I should listen. Do you see all of these unambiguous numbers? Why do we try to express ourselves that way? 

Dissonance is a permanent factor, and I've been thinking about the epistemological problems of the age. It's a constant itch for me since I have continually evolved my thinking and so span political, geographical, religious, class and racial lines. I've gotten to the point at which I'm convinced that I have achieved a level of mature wisdom which is the result of years of writing and thinking. I've more than done my 10,000 hours on the blog, writing for people. Now I get people. I am people. People are me. Like Chaka Khan. No, actually deeper still without the flash, like the people who wrote it. Ashford & Simpson. 

Humans have faith, but they often forget their faith in themselves, in humanity. We need to interpret each other with faith in mind. Then the nightmare dissolves. 

 

Sex In The News

First item - Republicans blocking repeal of DADT
I think this is good news, because I basically like the policy of DADT. Homosexuals do serve in the military but they cannot advertise their sexual orientation. It's essentially private. I'm sure there are all kinds of reasons advocates might come up with in defeating this policy, but to my way of thinking it necessarily politicizes homosexual identity. In other words, it makes it gay. Do homosexuals all want to be gay? Does the gay agenda serve all homosexuals? I think not. So, I hope the block works.

Second item - Assange arrested for 'rape'.
Julian Assange is facing what basically appear to be date rape charges. He has violated the 'sexual integrity' of two women, and it turns out that this may include actions which are not penetrative. According to what I've read, if you force a woman's legs open and do nothing else, you might face this charge. It's essentially sexual assault, not rape. My impression is that this is a law for the dainty, and that Assange is most definitely guilty. I wonder if he'd care if somebody would distribute the evidence.

Third Item - Age of Consent
In a great lecture presented by Dan Ariely I have come to understand something about 'deviant globalism'. According to Ariely, the enabler and accellerant for black markets are border conditions of national / cultural values. When it comes to the global sex trade, it is the difference between legal ages of consent. I just came to understand that until recently, the age of sexual consent in Canada was 14 years old. I'm also quite fond of his term 'moral pollution'.

Nocera Approaches Dyson's Utopia

Freeman Dyson, many years ago, said the most simple and radical thing I've ever heard. It was the biggest idea. The second biggest idea I heard, also many years ago came from Nicolas Negroponte. He predicted the downfall of broadcast television. His explanation was simple. Everything is going to go digital because Moore's Law will make digital cheaper, and since video is digitally bulky, it's going to be easier to send it through cables than over the air. The content will follow the cheapest path. To be more comprehensive, he said that the phone companies and the broadcast companies would switch places because it was ironic to him that voice was going over wires and video was going over the air. It hasn't finished happening, but the simple beautiful truth of it is becoming manifest.

Freeman Dyson's idea was even larger. He said the way to go is to personalize energy distribution. Most of our energy is lost because it is centrally generated and hierarchically distributed. If you could find smaller energy sources and distribute them equally, it would alleviate the need for pipelines, high tension wire, truck and train transportation of energy. We'd save huge amounts. Moreover we could start living at a more reasonably human rather than sardine scale. 

Dan Nocera has obviated a couple of basic assumptions about energy production and seems to be on the way to demonstrating how fuel cells can power all of our needs. Most excellent 

Here's long version.

The Fungible Job

Ezra Klein sez:

So, the deal Obama got might net the economy 2.2 million jobs -- but a better deal could've gotten us 2.7 million jobs at the same price. That second deal wasn't on the table, of course.

So what is a 'job'?

To ascertain the jobs created by these provisions we use multipliers provided by theCongressional Budget Office and economist Mark Zandi. We average the low and high estimates from CBO and the Zandi estimates. We then apply a rule of thumb, based on CBO’s estimates of the macroeconomic impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which posits that each 1 percent of gross domestic product creates 1 million new jobs, to arrive at our the jobs estimates.

So what they're saying is that the effect of taxation can, through the use of multipliers, be expressed in terms of 'jobs' which is essentially a statistic derived from GDP. So these aren't real jobs being created, they are an expression of money. Just wanted to make that clear. These are potential jobs, or it is tax savings that potentially might create jobs. But of course neither Klein nor any economist can promise that such jobs would be created, every profit or gain does not automatically cause new jobs, just as every loss does not automatically cost jobs. 'Jobs' is just a term to appeal to people who want to understand the economy strictly in those terms. 

The political spin on this, which Obama used in his speech, is to suggest that there is no economic proof that giving tax cuts to the wealthiest American individuals and estates will create jobs or improve the economy. So Ezra Klein is obviously arguing that one side of the volleyball net is higher than the other side. I presume you do see the ironic double standard. The deal that was off the table costs jobs just by changing taxation on the rich, but no hypothetical deal Republicans can come up with could gain jobs just by changing taxation on the rich.

Obama takes the opportunity to blame the obstructionists a bit more honestly by focusing on the deficit, but he does so without breaking out the net amount that the Bush Tax Cuts actually give to that wealthy 2%, which is 133 Billion, not 700 Billion. The Bush Tax Cuts were aimed at all Americans, the middle class part being the meat, based on the conservative principle that all Americans deserve to keep more of their tax dollars. No surprise that Obama is replaying his populist spin, which is easy to do when you don't talk about spending. 

The problem is that the government spending Obama has focused most upon, government sponsored healthcare insurance, doesn't cut costs or help the economy. It certainly doesn't improve unemployment. But then again maybe somebody has some multipliers that will help explain how Obamacare will create 'jobs'. 

What's more worrisome to this conservative is the ease with which Klein accepts that Obama is the head dealer and what he should be dealing is jobs. If only we could shut up the opposition.

Leon Kass

From Wikipedia

Leon Richard Kass (born February 12, 1939) is an American physician, scientist, educator, and public intellectual, best known as proponent of liberal education via the "Great Books," as an opponent of human cloning and euthanasia, as a critic of certain areas of technological progress and embryoresearch, and for his controversial tenure as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005. Although Kass is often referred to as a bioethicist,^[1] he eschews the term and refers to himself as "an old-fashioned humanist. A humanist is concerned broadly with all aspects of human life, not just the ethical."^[2]

Kass is currently the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the College and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and the HertogFellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His books include Toward A More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature, Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics, and The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis.

This is the dude who was in charge of GWB's bioethics committee. The guy liberals would argue did not exist when they parroted the line that Bush was 'anti-science'. 

Unstoppable

Unstoppable is my least favorite film from Tony Scott. It's not that Denzel is wrong, or that trains are wrong, or that the drama was wrong, it's just that the whole Tony Scott formula just didn't bring this off. 

The problem is, simply stated, you actually have to suspend a bit of disbelief because of the lack of a bit of dialog that could have saved the movie, maybe. You see, you know that in a film you have to set up effects to give a train moving at speeds safe enough to film look as if it were unsafe in the story. But you can't do anything cheesy like speed up the film. So you can shake the camera, blur the focus, amp up the sound, do quick cuts and pull out of a top hat any number of filmic miracles. Tony Scott has a large bag of tricks, but when you see the train rounding a curve a whole lot sharper than the one that's supposed to be the apocalyptic curve - you have to say wait a minute. So how about explaining why sometimes the train is going 70 and sometimes it's going 40? Not once did anybody talk about hills or grades. So I'm thinking they must know that Pennsylvania is all flat or something and that if they put hills there, it would lose authenticity. So. The this runaway train goes arbitrarily fast or slow with no reason. That kinda blows it.

Everything else is reasonably perfect. The thing is, Scott has destroyed what might have otherwise been a very good blue collar drama. The tension between workers and their bosses, between old and young employees, between companies and media, between competence and incompetence, between father and daughters, between man and estranged wife all were done to perfection. The runaway train could have just been an excuse to make those portrayals in an excellent film. But I cannot get that scene out of my head where this train scoots slowly around a curve, supposedly on its way to high speed oblivion. 

It surely was the fact that I was in one of those glamorous new Arclight theaters with only 12 other people in the audience that calmed me. The Spousal Unit jumped at all of the jump points, and we both winced at the wince points but there was nobody else in the audience to cheer at the cheer points and the whole edifice fell flat. 

I liked Denzel's other train movie much better. Sorry Tony, but you should have let it go after Pelham 123.

The NYT's Deal with the Devil

I've been thinking, like everyone else about the implications of Wikileakery. It suddenly occurred to me as I was reading an article in the NYT about details of the purloined letters how hypocritical the Times is. I wonder exactly how they explain themselves.

As a semi-regular listener to Dan Carlin, I know that there was an earthquake in the world of journalism back at the trial of William Kennedy Smith in 1991. You may recall that the star witness against Smith had her face masked by a blue dot to protect her anonymity. Well one day one of the cameras malfunctioned or somehow caused the blue dot to disappear and some enterprising journalist took advantage of the situation and identified the witness. The earthquake happened when other news organizations published the results without independently verifying the identification. They simply cited the enterprising journalist's scoop and published the discovery in their own copy. The story was simply too hot not to, or so they said. According to Carlin, this marked the beginning of the end of journalistic integrity and why most newspapers don't have so much original content. 

I've always noticed the extent to which AP reports have infiltrated the old media. And what ever happened to Reuters and United Press International? Somehow, newspaper staffs have gotten outsourced and a great deal of breaking news comes not as exclusives to newspaper organizations, but from the AP squad. This state of affairs is particularly galling when it comes to the reporting of conflict. There may be onerous burdens placed on journalists reporting embedded with troops, but at least they can be first hand witnesses. When only a few proprietary journalists report for many newspapers through this method of citation, the end result is that a few facts become a lot of editorial spin.

The blogosphere portended to offer the perfect solution from having grown up as nothing but unleveraged individuals doing the talking. Any blogger seeing something at their ground zero could be a credible witness and they wouldn't be subject to the economic pressures of buying stories from news services to compensate for low advertising revenues. It turned out however that bloggers had some of the same lazy tendencies of news organizations, they just cited the words of some other writer without doing independent fact checking. Of course it wasn't the matter of facts or corruption of journalistic integrity that bothered the big newspapers, it was the nerve of these bloggers to take readership away from the old media. Thus a battle was born. 

Today the NYT is not sending its own reporters to embassies all over the world to report on the work and status of American diplomats. It is using the stolen notes provided by Julian Assange's Wikileak organization. This organization has almost instantly acquired the status and standing of Reuters and the Associated Press. Why? Ultimately for the same reason the blogosphere has credibility - it all represents first hand accounts by individual writers at their own ground zeros. But if anybody can claim that their work has been inappropriately cited, surely the prima facia case would be that presented by a diplomat whose cable was stolen by PFC Bradley Manning, the military stool pigeon now in the brig for his heinous operation. 

I'm sure that the New York Times has a sophisticated consequentialist rationale for publishing this stolen property, but there has clearly been an egregious violation of integrity and ethics. I cannot find a way to respect any claims that paper might inveigh against bloggers. 

Five Minutes of Funk + 7

What's wrong with liberal thinking in 12 minutes.

Wedding Porn & Male Rings

So I was looking to make a new avatar of myself and I found an anime site with ads for something I haven't seen before. It was Victoria Secret -style wedding dress models. Wowsers. So 'Wedding Porn' is the first thing that came to my mind. Wouldn't that be something? If you think about it for a while, when is the last time you saw any pop culture marketing or style that made something very attractive and sexy about a woman in a wedding dress? Maybe you and I don't watch the same channels, but I can't recall it ever. Not even when I used to watch House of Style with Cindy Crawford on MTV many years ago.

A search of that term took me to the Offbeat Bride blog where I happened upon a very grownup and obvious patch of text:

I think wedding rings on a dude (especially your own dude) are sexy! Every time I saw that flash of metal on his finger I gave me a thrill — it's all sexy "grown up" of him.

But when I stepped back and looked at the reality of the situation I saw that, honestly, that ring spent more time spinning on the table in front of him, or in his mouth, than on his finger. And I just saw how uncomfortable it made him. He really HATES wearing jewelry, and he complained that the air conditioning in the recording studio where he works made the ring so cold that his finger ached.

Now, I could've bitched and nagged and guilted my husband into just accepting his be-ringed fate, but I had realize that, even though that ring gave me a thrill, it's not at allworth his discomfort for one minute.

And what's the point of it really? 'It's symbol to show that he's devoted and faithful to me,' is what I came up with. But isn't it okay that the symbol just be that he freaking MARRIED ME!? I mean, what more do I need? This man stood in front of family, friends, and a few complete strangers, and exchanged vows with me — do I need more than THAT? And the answer was, obviously, no. There doesn't need to be a physical symbol when his vows alone and my trust in him are enough to show me (and everyone else?) that he is devoted and faithful to me.

So, no, he doesn't wear a ring, and I'm okay with it. But I'll keep wearing mine because I think it's purrrrty.

I have that kind of weird love hate relationship with my wedding ring, which is btw my second replacement. It's my favorite because it is comfortable. Like Muslims, I have a thing against wearing gold. For me it's mostly aesthetic - say 65% but the other 35% doesn't like the flash at all. I do have a negative connotation with wearing the stuff. I don't suppose I'd do very well in India on that score. This ring I have now is fat and heavy brushed tungsten steel. It's very comfortable, but. I have this thing against the marks rings leave on my fingers. I hate the greasy tan line it creates. 

I love wearing my ring when I'm dressed to impress and I consider it in the context of the watch I'm wearing. But for sports or camping, it has got to come off. On the whole, I consider my wedding band much more in the context of what it is as jewelry than what it represents as a symbol of the Sacrament. I do like, and have said, that because of its composition it's like my Marriage, unglamorous and unbreakable, but that's about it. It physically looks nothing like the one I put on my finger 16 years ago that I lost on a ski trip in 2000. It does resemble the first replacement which was a very traditional fat silver band that I kinda ruined opening a bottle of beer. Yeah, I know. 

Isn't it interesting how typical, malleable and shallow many of these symbols of marriage are? They could be done a lot better if people have any imagination.

 

Middle East Government by the Numbers

Govt	Total Pop	%
Absolute monarchy	26,713,330	3.5%
Autonomous republic Palestinian National Authority Fatah	2,500,000	0.3%
Autonomous republic Palestinian National Authority Hamas	1,376,289	0.2%
Constitutional monarchy	44,713,998	5.8%
Federal Constitutional monarchy	5,432,746	0.7%
Federal republic	798,000	0.1%
Islamic republic	272,397,923	35.2%
Jamahiriya	6,036,914	0.8%
Military junta	3,291,000	0.4%
Parliamentary democracy	81,379,000	10.5%
Parliamentary republic	31,498,190	4.1%
Presidential republic	67,786,985	8.8%
Provisional government	4,401,009	0.6%
Republic	4,224,000	0.5%
Semi-presidential republic	220,605,846	28.5%
Grand Total	773,155,230

Bolton!

If John Bolton runs for president in 2012, we are in for a real interesting campaign. There are few individuals so brutally honest as Bolton and so wise to the tricks of foreign policy. Word is that he's seriously considering a run.

That makes Bolton, Chris Christie and Mike Pence. Not the same old thing.

The Locus of Humanity

Yesterday I found a new open source map website. I love looking at maps and over the past week or so have been eyeballing rivers in Africa and big waterfalls around the globe. This new map program shows something I hadn't seen in many years, the routes of the electric grid. So I followed the Pacific DC Intertie up to its source at the Columbia River at The Dalles. I remembered that Google built a data center up there to be close to abundant hydroelectric generation. 

The northern terminus of the Pacific DC Intertie is a substation called Celilo. It is named after the falls on the Columbia river that were dammed up 50 years ago. There are videos of natives fishing there as a reminder of what went before and has been lost to modern technology. Where there once was a ramshackle array of wooden platforms and nets to allow people to fish there now stands a complex hydroelectric power plant, locks and spillways spanning the Columbia River. What used to feed a village for hundreds of years now provides electric power for millions. Man uses river. 

Without getting deeply into Bentham or Mill, it is a standing axiom that there is something good in the ability for knowledge to be applied in harnessing the powers and bounties of nature for the benefit of mankind. Progress serves humanity. But where is humanity and which humanity should be served? In particular, why should it be considered right and proper to put a fisherman out of business and put a power company in business? I would say that the best use of the river would be the way that was chosen back in the 50s when the project was approved but there is the matter of consent.

Democratic consent is a tricky thing. At the heart of the matter of Julian Assange's assaults on diplomatic secrets is the question of informed consent and the democratic process. It necessarily brings to mind the matter of responsibility and accountability. Whenever the law and the government act to dispossess one party for the sake of another there are critical questions about standing. 

Another way into this comes from Russell Kirk whose, The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky, I have been listening to periodically. Kirk says that there are no such thing as human rights, but that there are only civil rights. This is a very consequential argument and I am tending to agree with him. I will spare you the details of the implications on my thinking, but suffice it to say that it will put me deeper on the side of radicals and undoes some of the foundations of the premises of the Old School. In short, Lincoln gets knocked down a peg and King up, for if there is no comfortable mezzanine of 'human rights', there is no excuse for the suppression of civil rights. Any constitutional republic should spell them all out and guarantee them, period. There is no comfort in being a 'person' who doesn't fully enjoy the full reciprocal diet of rights and responsibilities of the nation. 

Let us then forget for a moment that there are currently maintained by our State Department at least 300 different status codes for foreign nationals who are granted permanent residency in the United States. Let us forget for the sake of argument the millions of illegal aliens protected as persons living in the US. Let's ignore the distinction in this essay between a prisoner of war and an enemy combatant. You are either a full citizen with full civil rights or you are not. You are either equally protected under the law or you are not. Does this black and white distinction appeal to you? If so, you are in the camp with Russell Kirk. It is thus consequentially hairy, then to consider the implications.

It is that hair suit that is itching me as I read through George W. Bush's memoirs. At stake is my reputation and fidelity to the cause of geopolitical neoconservatism. So far, what's likable about Bush among the many things, has little to do with any convincing he might do about the prospects for a philosophically sound foreign policy - but we already knew he depended on the PNACians. Still, if the endgame is, and I hear no one suggesting substantially otherwise, full citizenship in a democracy, neither Bush nor we need to get pedantic about the details. If 'human rights' of African slaves in America could ever be thought to be insufficient. If Reconstruction in America was a 'recognition of human rights' but still not enough, then by that same principle we should seek full and permanent enfranchisement for everyone everywhere. Black and White.

At Cobb, we've been over the matter of Westphalian sovereignty. I'm for it. I'm a nationalist. I'm against one world government. I'm for ethnic diversity. I'm for single national languages. I'm for full and equal citizenship for all with no permanent exceptions. That means no illegal aliens. That mean no Native American homelands. That means loyalty oaths. That means equal protection under the law. And if I had it my way, then there'd be a separate circuit of courts for everyone who is not a citizen. It might even mean conscription, but that's another debate. You might imagine why an American of African and French descent would be so adamant about a single standard of citizenship, given the this nation's history. The subtleties of legal standing are compromises of the American ideal.

This matters most when it comes to the issue of the legitimate use of legal and political power. Without the consent of full citizens, democratic rule is a farce. All good intentions, all brilliant ideas, all matters of fact have no moral force if they are applied without democratic recourse. That's supply without demand. That way lies tyranny. 

So I think of those native fishermen standing on their rickety platforms across the mighty Columbia as I see them woefully presented in the videos about Celilo. I wonder if those who consider their fate with sympathy would grant them sovereignty over the fate of the river on a blood and soil basis, or if they would ask for a democratic show of hands. I think also, by the way, of the ill-fated HavenCo in the Principality of Sealand. The global everything may be in question in these days of economic uncertainty, but the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States provides a standard towards which we have done the good work of liberty. If there is a greater standard somewhere encapsulating and empowering a nation to defend my civil rights, I doubt that I'll find it in the sentiments that would preserve a fish farm in the Pacific Northwest, or in the statement of purpose of Wikileaks. 

Let me remind you:

WikiLeaks is a not-for-profit media organisation. Our goal is to bring important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists (our electronic drop box). One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth. We are a young organisation that has grown very quickly, relying on a network of dedicated volunteers around the globe. Since 2007, when the organisation was officially launched, WikiLeaks has worked to report on and publish important information. We also develop and adapt technologies to support these activities.

WikiLeaks has sustained and triumphed against legal and political attacks designed to silence our publishing organisation, our journalists and our anonymous sources. The broader principles on which our work is based are the defence of freedom of speech and media publishing, the improvement of our common historical record and the support of the rights of all people to create new history. We derive these principles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In particular, Article 19 inspires the work of our journalists and other volunteers. It states that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. We agree, and we seek to uphold this and the other Articles of the Declaration.

There is a simple question that must be asked. "You and what army?"

It will not be an army of soldiers, or an army of accounts, lawyers, academics or an army of spies. It will be an army of all of those and more supported by millions of people. That will comprise the necessary defense needed to maintain in the face of the collection of nations Assange has sought to embarrass and undermine. So it begins. 

I'm prepared to call this Chapter Two in the ongoing drama awaiting the fate of the nation state. It comes at a time when economists are debating and governments in Europe are in the midst of a great crisis determining whether or not international unions can long endure. The odds are in favor of the nations, although it seemed a lot less clear on September Eleventh, Chapter One. Non-state actors may give us iPads or IEDs or state secrets. These things may portend to change the world, but do they really and are we really so loyal to those who produce them?

There are multinational corporations, there are NGOs, there is the World Court and there is the UN. There are all sorts of globalist enterprises. There are even things called Universities who have for centuries educated people from all over the planet and been the source of learning. But these are not things men have defended by their sacred honor and with their lives as home. This they have done for God, King or Country, usually requiring at least two out of the three. 

In matters of international diplomacy, there's more at stake than fish and electricity. Any man who plays at this level needs to be prepared to die. When you say you're speaking for humanity, it's an awfully tall order. It helps if you have been democratically elected by full citizens. I believe that it's going to continue to be that way for at least two centuries to come. 

GWB: Up Close & Personal

facebookguests on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

It only takes a moment to see where the man comes alive. Start around minute 11.

Brunhilde