Cobb

Fallacy: Each One Teach One

A little Monday morning mythbusting.

First of all, who taught you to teach one? If they were so good, why wasn't the problem solved in your generation?

The biggest political myth is that the middle class can make the poor into the middle class. Only the wealthy can make someone rich. Only the rich can make someone middle class. The middle class can take care of their families, and the upper middle class can do a marginal bit more. But that's all. Let me give you an analogy.

If you're middle class in America, you probably own a car. And you rightly notice that billions of people around the world don't have a car and never will be able to afford one. You are truly blessed, so you decideto give back. You drive kids back and forth to soccer practice. You help your cousin move his house. You take a friend to the airport at the spur of a moment. You carpool to work. All that makes a difference but you are not in the transportation business. On a good day of being a good samaritan with your car, you may favorably compare with a bad day of being a taxi driver, but that's about it. You are never going to compete with somebody who makes their living as a bus driver, and FedEx? Don't even think about it.

Yet people in the middle class still have convinced themselves that if everybody were as generous with their own automobiles as you are, in your spare time, it will change the world. If you run your car off a cliff it will wreck your world, but the transportation industry won't notice. Similarly, the politics of uplift, each one teach one, and unity are all falacious thinking. You cannot change the lives of millions of people in the each one teach one phase.

I mention this to underscore an old quote of a rather famous dude named Malcolm X. You may have heard of him.

The platform that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, our religious leader, stands on is the platfrom of complete freedom, justice and equality for the 20 million black people or so-called Negroes here in America. And he teaches us that because of the seriousness of the condition that our people now find themselves in that it is absolutely impossible to solve our problems with means other than religion. And he teaches us that the religion of Islam is the only religion that will instill within our people the incentive to stand on our own feet. And instead of trying to force ourselves upon whites or force ourselves into the white society or blame the white man for our predicament and constantly beg him for what he has, he says that the only way that we can solve our problem is to unite together among ourselves, among our own kind, clean ourselves up, rid ourselves of the evils that we've become addicted to here in this society and try and solve our problem ourselves.

So if the question of uplift and unity comes to a matter of values, then how can 'each one teach one' manifest itself to this level? Make no mistake that Malcolm is saying that black Americans need to convert to Islam in order to solve their problems. That is the sort of institution, a worldwide religion, that is in the transporation business. One preacher or teacher does not make an institution. It makes a middle class person proud of their beneficial, but marginal, effect on other people. 

I just wanted to make that clear. And if that one didn't work here's one more:

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll eat forever.

Give a fisherman a loan for a boat and he can feed himself, his family and sell more fish in the market. With sales tax on the fish you can pay a policeman to protect the fish market from theft. Grow the fish market through hard work and the man can pay off his loan save for a new boat, hire new fishermen and expand his fleet.  More fish allows him to trade with the next village. More spare time allows him to learn new ways of fishing, making his business more efficient, cutting costs, raising profits. Teach a man capitalism and you build a fishing industry.

Village metaphors only work in villages.

Dogging the Dainty

Of course I've been following the brutal chaos on the other side of the world, still I have time to do restaurant reviews. And then I came upon this angry rant by someone I know to be a leggy blonde but will remain anonymous. If Googling the following text (or Wikileaks) gets her back to me I will be cut from her social network, but that's ok because I have redundancies. But you really have to think about what gives when people can write the following, a review of a dance club called Voyeur.

I am bitter about the fact that I have to put one star in this review. They get ZERO stars. Less then, if that's possible.

This is the WORST club in LA.  THE WORST.  Let's get reviewing:

-Drinks - Weak, expensive, tiny, mostly ice.  It will cost you $100 to get even a little buzz.

-Staff - Rude, bitchy, inefficient, slow

-Promoter/door guy - SO UNBELIEVABLY RUDE.  I WILL NEVER, EVER, GO NEAR THIS CLUB AGAIN BECAUSE OF HIM. I went with one other girlfriend, and we are both 26 and were dressed very well.  I have been to a ton of clubs in LA and have NEVER been treated this rudely by ANYONE.  And for no reason.  We were both stone cold sober when we got there and completely polite.  Someone should tell him he's a 40 year old promoter and needs to get the fuck over himself. Not to mention when we finally got in, it wasn't even half full.  On a FRIDAY NIGHT!!!!  

There were two sweet gay guys standing next to us who said they had been waiting for HALF an HOUR.  While the asshole door guy let others fly through.  When we left they were still outside.  REALLY? Being shitty to the GAYS in WEST HOLLYWOOD???  Not on my watch bitches!!!!

-Crowd - If you like 19 year old crackheads doing blow in the bathroom and a very large amount of super douchy, ugly ass guys walking around like they are God's gift, then you'll LOVE it.  Otherwise go ANYWHERE ELSE.

I always have fun when I go out.  Always.  This was the single worst experience I have had in the time I have lived in LA.  If you are looking for a fun club go to Eden, Supperclub, Playhouse, Industry, etc.  If you are just looking for a chill place to hang out go next door to the Surly Goat.  The staff are awesome, the prices are HALF what they are at Voyeur and the drinks are TWICE the size.

Dear Voyeur,

I fucking HATE you.  Close.

So, uhm. Jeez what can I say after that? Somebody let the UN know about this place.

Idiom: Not So Much

You've heard it, I've heard it. It's all around. The new popular construction in English contemporary-speak is the phrase 'not so much'. I call it as a step in a positive direction from the older phrase which it seems to be replacing: "It is what it is." I see it as a movement towards people starting to be more judgmental or at least more open in socializing their judgments. Whereas "It is what it is" betrays an air of resignation, "Not so much" requires a bit more context. 

You might say, for example, "I found a lot of comfort in the new Ford, but in the Chevy not so much." That's a better response to the question "How do you like the new Chevy?' than "Meh, it is what it is." 

I recognize that these tips are not going to make you a Churchilian orator, but every day you can be 10% better. And now you're going to start hearing people everywhere saying it, 'it is what it is?' not so much.

The Optimism in Hell's Handbasket

I'm drawing a bead on current events in Egypt. And I appreciate what chaos will have wrought in the long term. This small piece from Fernandez at the Belmont is right on time:

A rise in oil prices is not in itself a good or a bad thing. It all depends on whether you let the market react as it should. It should bring more oil into production, create the demand for nuclear power. It should. But it might not if regulation prevents it Remember carbon dioxide is now a pollutant.

Food too should work in favor of the producers. But you can’t use food ‘as a weapon’ in the same way you can use oil as a weapon. Nor can you, like a starving man, steal a barrel of oil like a loaf of bread. That’s immoral, even if you need it to run the dialysis machine for your sick child.

If anything the unrest in the Arab world should have been an opportunity — like Iran’s unrest was an opportunity — had the US been poised to use it. But the unrest was a bug, not a feature; born I think of the assumption that Arabs were different from us. They didn’t want freedom, they didn’t want markets.

What the next years are going to prove, I think, is that nothing comes out of the ground or into the mouth without markets and price signals. Democracy is really the political expression of property rights; of self-possession. In the short term I agree with those of my friends who say, “this is the end of the Hezbollah”, but only in the sense that Pearl Harbor was the end of Hitler.

In the short term people will want food they can’t get; oil they can’t buy; to sell oil they can’t sell. And in their desperation they will blame — the Jew. That’s what the Jew is for. And when that doesn’t work, there’s always America to hate.

If you don’t mind waiting out history, it’s the best of times. If are hoping to vacation in the Middle East this summer, it’s the worst of times. But the beginnings of recovery are in the mind. They are always in the mind.

The current administration is but an expression of a vast fantasy. I will grant there is enough blame to go around. But since we are speaking in the main, the fantasy central of the world is the soon to be deceased transnational liberal politically correct, end of history project.

Until that idea is grasped and rejected we will stay in the short run; in the worst of times. Only when we get the idea right — and it is not a sophisticated idea — simply one in which common sense is allowed to be valid, will we come into the best of times.

It is a vote for enough rope, to let the kid fail, to deliver the right cynicism from the opera box. VDH expresses a similar sentiment on the domestic front in his Oddball Club. 

In the present wide-open society, we assume that soon we are going to be rear-ended by someone without a license, insurance, or registration, or another is going to confront us for money, violently if need be. We expect a rendezvous like that on the horizon and expect that our reaction to it must be stoic. When my house was broken into, when my car was rear-ended, when I was run down on a bike, I accepted the culprit had his reasons for such a resort to criminality or indifference to statute, and accepted that to say otherwise was more trouble than it was worth. I made private adjustments to prevent a recurrence, as do most oddballs.

Collapsing with the Swiftness

I watched Anderson Cooper stumble over his words last night because I wanted to see what CNN was saying about the collapse of Egypt. Fouad Adjami was the only literate person on the sceen. All of the journalists right about now sound like bad Oracle salesreps. They have some general idea what the software is supposed to do, but really only understand the art of the deal. These journalists sound so much more like journalists on these days that the news doesn't fit. They talk about the quality of the images. It's all down to the business of talking and filling the screen with faces, but are we learning anything? Not so much.

There has basically only been one idea circulating in my head over this matter of Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia, which is the speed at which collapse occurs. I've reflected back on the days, a couple years ago, when I was at Microsoft and watched the heads at CNBC say that what has become the drubbing of our financial sector would only take about 600 billion dollars out of our accumulated wealth. They were off by a factor of five, I would guess. So how many years will it take for anything to collapse? It never takes years, it only takes years of neglect bu the collapsing comes swiftly, like a thief in the night. Either you are or you are not prepared. 

The only people who seem to be prepared for the future are those people who have none. The rest of us imagine that the one we have will continue. The folks at Intuit tell me that my employer took out too much of my Social Security last year. I'm pretty much resigned to expect that I won't get any of it back, and that may find me out on the street like the lunatics in Egypt. Yeah, they're lunatics. They are the same lunatics that were in Iran a couple months ago. Only the people with no future are out there trying to make one just by showing up, yelling at police, throwing rocks, taking pictures, turning a car over, burning a building, dragging a dead body from the middle of the road. That seems to be all that ever happens. What would you do? I think I'd buy my guns and ammo ahead of time, get my shortwave transciever hooked up, find some ex-military guys, get my women out of town. There's gotta be a playbook somewhere. I can read. None of the lunatics can read. I wonder if I ever wrote it down and gave it a number for Cobb's Rules. If the poor and oppressed could work the system, they wouldn't be poor and oppressed. They can't work the system when it works well enough to oppress them, they can't build a system when it doesn't. Whomever gets them to shut up, leave the streets and go home where the power doesn't work and the water doesn't run, will become the new system.

It always comes down to the Slice doesn't it? What level of outrage the military officers, engineers, doctors and literates can tolerate. Everybody else goes, more or less, with the flow - where the bullets are flying away from you, the electricity and painkillers to you. That's all the masses need to grant political consent. The first rule of maintaining democracy? Keep the streets clear of garbage. For that, you need people to work the infrastructure. Egypt uses pigs. Mubarak's government has been walking on stilts for years. Easy to tip over. 

I'm making friends at 2600 and may go to Defcon this year. These are the people who could rebuild the internet from scratch, who might be found if they could be found, looting Fry's and building a packet radio network, resurrecting Fido and policing their IRCs with smarter bots than anybody in the FCC could possibly understand. I'm getting face-time with them because today it only costs 12 bucks to buy a pair of 4GB flash chips from Amazon.com. Tomorrow who knows? America is full of the same lunatics, but with a larger Slice, and with many more in close proximity to the Slice, armed and sensible, unafraid and hostile to the Mubaraks of the world. 

I watched the film Buried last night. Lesson: It takes less than two hours to get somebody to tell you the truth which is that you're a pawn and only a very small number of people really care if you live or die. I wish the lunatics who voted for Obama could learn that lesson with the swiftness. Does anybody still believe his geopolitical vision is any better than Anderson Cooper's? Are there still people who remain confident in his 'Middle East Peace Process' who don't get paid to say so? 

Right now what matters is what the Egyptian Army decides to do. What the Egyption ISPs decide to do. If they were partners with the American Systems Administration Force, they guys in the Pentagon would know the frequencies and codes on their communications systems and  recognize their voices on the air. They could be in confident contact right now, and the Commander in Chief would be in the loop. But arrangements would require the presumptions of empire, a presumption that Barack Obama would never hold. He believes in natural law, but not that rights are the gift of the strong. And so he has faith that the lunatics in the streets everywhere will arrange themselves into the proper queues and that peace will establish itself. He's a dreamer that Obama and he and his brain dead hack Secretary of State are sleepwalking through yet another crisis, like spectators of the NFC playoffs who care more about the commercials at the Super Bowl than who wins. 

Violence never solved anything, goes the mantra. Speeches do? 

Speeches only work in the hegemony over the Slice, and then only when the Slice is being paid with regularity. Obama doesn't have money for Egypt. He doesn't have money for anybody, and people are waking up to that reality. The only question is whether or not he has the audacity to use troops, which he doesn't. So he is essentially out of equation. America sleeps once again. Wake us when you have a new leader, Egypt. He can come to Disney World. Shake hands. Take pictures. Maybe even get a bow out of our lame duck Commander in Chief. You can play whatever song you like on the piano at the White House. We don't care. Really, we don't. 

Daddy's House Is Full Of Love

When I was 13 years old and my afro was long enough for me to see my own hair I won a dance contest. I'm sure that there were some bellbottoms and pop locking involved. My prize? It was a 7Up electric popcorn popper, which was about as cool then as an iPod is now. You see in 1974, dance contests were socially important as was 7Up. It sounds funny, but I know it to be true and I am about as proud of that accomplishment now as I was then - it got me the girl. 

I just finished reading the WSJ article by Amy Chua about the Tiger Mom. The story has been on the periphery of my mediasphere and intervened at a low level yesterday afternoon. As I was driving home from work I remembered that I am about as happy as I can be, basically except for the fact that I would horribly miss watching the rest of my family's life play out, I would die happy today. What's importantly implied in that fact is that I am confident that I have been a successful parent. The Spousal Unit and I are tremendously proud. So yesterday found me considering for the nth time, but for the first in the 'Tiger Mom' context, thinking about writing up book about 'parenting', a verb that didn't exist when I was a kid. I think that I would name the book, Daddy's House is Full of Love. So here's a brief sketch of the big themes I can pop off the top of my head. 

Themes and frameworks is how I do things, and The Unit and I have collaborated in our own way just about every practical arrangement. So while you could say that we are nominally rule based, our rules come in terms of phrases that we can all recite, like the title. But the themes are how we work.

Royalty
Royalty is a theme in our house and in our family. That means we parents are King and Queen. This is not a democracy in any stretch of the word. We are benevolent dictators with the right to be tyrannical. We have never had to be. But everybody knows that we can. 'Because I said so' never has to be said because the way we have run things, there has never been any example or assumption that there was another way out. You are loyal to the king and queen, period. 'Or else' doesn't even have to be said. We simply stare our kids down and state things matter of factly. Sometimes, the 'No' comes out before the question is stated, but we always listen. We always consider, and we let our logic in making decisions out in the open. The result is that we don't hear 'But what if I don't want to do it?' instead we hear an alternative. Not an extensive bartering negotiation that goes back and forth, but a concise promise. And so we run off a checklist to see if our requirements are met based on the following rule:

Do what you have to do, and then you can do what you want to do.  

And then the right things happen. This also means that you can never play 'Uncle Bill'. Uncle Bill is my internal way of remembering a story told by Bill Cosby about a stingy relative who couldn't wait until his nieces and nephews screwed up so that he didn't have to deliver on the miraculous promises he made to them. We don't play carrot and stick. We play duties and liberties. 

The other part of Royalty is extended family. When the Spousal Unit and I had access to luxurious living conditions in Georgia that put 3000 square feet of new construction for the price of about 9 months of our combined annual income, we were apart from family. So we decided that we would take the hike to California so that our kids could grow up with their cousins. Right decision. Our kids are close to their cousins and they know each other well. It is a different quality of play and looseness that they have with their kin that they don't have with other kids. It's respectful but ends up in horseplay. There always ends up being a knot of girls tickling each other on the floor. 

Best Friends
Each of our three kids has a best friend. And these best friends have been so for quite some time. We have always played intelligence officer roles when it came to relations between our kids and others in the neighborhood. We asked our kids to know kids by first and last name, and who their parents are, where they live, and to give their relationships hierarchies. We literally had them draw up lists for concentric circles. C-Zero was family. C-One was the closest circle of friends. You know them, their personalities and you like them and they like you. You know where they live and their parents recognize you. For our kids they each had about 3 or 4 C-Ones. C-Twos were kids that you saw on a semi-regular basis. Maybe at Church, maybe in Scouts. If you didn't see them for a month, maybe you would wonder what happened to them. They are on your team, in your class. You speak. C-Threes are everybody else. C-Ones can come by our house on the regular. Your best friend is always welcome.  C-Twos can come over with permission and they are greeted and introduced at the door. C-Threes, not so much. 

Yes we do sleepovers. With the best friends, it's a regular thing. We are on a friendly basis with the parents of the best friends, even as they have changed. Our youngest has several C-Ones. Our oldest has one, but they are the closest and longest of best friends, as much as boys admit. But he has many more C-Twos, some older nerdy geeks that give my wife the creeps. 

Grades In School
Every C is a problem. Every B is an opportunity. Every A is a celebration. A D stops the world. And we never see Fs.  We require a 3.0, period. We mostly get Honor Roll. For that we celebrate. Your job, we told the kids early on, is to succeed in school. Outside of this house, that's basically all you have to worry about. 

I don't know much about raising girls, but I've learned a lot. I do know about boys, being the oldest of four. I raised my son to be what I have striven to be, a scholar-athlete-geek. It worked but it turned out that he did so with a lot more mellow personality than I expected. I'm more hard-boiled than he is, but some of that is by design. Every day when I dropped my kids off to school, which was basically every day of their elementary years I gave them the following sendoff:

Be smart, be friendly, keep sharp, stay focused. 

The verbs may have changed, but the four adjectives never did. I tell my children, because I absolutely know it to be true, they are some of the best people I know. And why wouldn't they be? They reflect what I find important and valuable in people, and the three of them express the complete spectrum each contributing a unique combination of strengths, virtues and values. I take them places and walk with pride amongst them. That is the vituous circle that has become easier as time goes by. Which gives me a moment to think about something else I recognized early on that changed my approach to being a father.

Babies are completely uncivilized. Part of my responsibility is to civilize my kids, which brings us to the transition. I'll soon be send my puppies into the world. Where I have to be tough is to let them fail and start regarding them with the cold disdain that the world does, and give them an inside track. That's all for now...

 

 

Obligatory SOTU Seriousness

Somebody said that Obama sounds like a college professor. Exactly. Which is why in the end I kinda had to stop listening. I find it quite difficult to find anything approaching much more than good sounding ideas that get squashed like bugs when they meet the real world and so he grabs sledgehammer style armtwisting power and makes a hash of what might have been good policy. Then like Spence says, he compromises his way out, cursing the devil in his loyal opposition and saying the best that could possibly be done has been done. That's the pattern. 

I didn't hear a bad idea, not one, in all the time I listened. I just don't believe he can really do much very well. And what characterizes it for me were two things. 1. He wants to get rid of loopholes in the corporate tax code and reduce to a flatter lower corporate tax. 2. He went to some obscure place in the midwest to say he was going to spend a couple hundred million on some worthy cause. The second is obviously pandering, and with no real money to speak of. The first is impossible to do in two years without more of the same, professor.

I'm starting to think that at long last we have got our William Jennings Bryan / Adlai Stevenson President. All the leadership of a college town department egghead. All his drama is gone. He talked about high speed trains, fer chrissake. Didn't we hear that Donald Fagen song in 1982?

(Sigh)

It's a good thing I don't care about politics much. I'd be pretty bummed out right about now. I'm just waiting for the drama of chance. Did you hear there might be cold fusion? Did you hear Yemen and Tunisia might collapse? And why doesn't somebody just shoot Hosni Mubarak? I'm sick of his old ass. Meh. I'm listening to Hardcore History again, Rome, Nazis. Nothing contemporary has the shock and awe. Maybe Rand Paul is actually worth listening to. 

OK I promised I'd be serious. But if the President is serious about taking loopholes out of the tax code, how does he expect to incent businesses to do anything? Is he just going to write executive order-style regulation like he tried with Wall Street compensation? Rule by fiat instead of incent with tax breaks? Really?

The Ten Great Video Games That Changed Everything

1. PacMan

2. Myst

3. Doom

4. Halo

5. Grand Theft Auto

6. Tetris

7. Warcraft

8. Virtua Fighter

9. Donkey Kong

10. Second Life

--

None of these are the best and they have all been superceded in what they can do, but each was a game changer in their own way. They each had a twist to them that changed the way people thought about video games and gaming. 

Obviously PacMan started this off. It was the beginning of the end of the domination of pinball machines and the first compelling videogame that intrigued a generation. There were other games in that era that were more innovative after the fact of PacMan. The great arcade games of the day, Asteroids, Defender, Atari Football, Zaxxon, Missile Command, Galaxians and Centipede were all the greats. But PacMan was the one that showed it could be done, that video oriented electronic games could beat pinball. But it was Donkey Kong that pushed the obsession to the next level and made Nintendo the King. There was no other game that sucked down so many quarters and hours after PacMan and brought a new generation into the arcades.

It took decades, really, for pinball to give up the ghost. And it probably wasn't until the early and mid 90s with the rise of the fighting games that arcades all over America realized that the money was all about the video. Virtua Fighter was the game that took button mashing to a new era. Now I am showing my bias because Street Fighter, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat were the other kings of the arcade in the days when The Fugees were singing 'Mona Lisa', but the sophistication of Virtua Fighter was the game that put a third dimension into arcade fighting.

On the techie level I'd be remiss to not give honorable mention to Castle Wolfenstein but it was Doom that changed gaming on the PC and got people shooting at work. Well, if you were in the computer business. Which takes us back to Tetris, a simple, beautifully obsessive game that showed us that.. well I don't know what it showed us. How easily we could be seduced by a simulation of gravity? 

Warcraft I just threw in there because I know it's big, but I never touched the thing. Most PC games, in their early incarnations just made me dizzy and gave me headaches. In fact, just watching a video of Doom makes me feel ill. It's why I stayed in the arcades and never gave much time over to PC gaming until, Myst.

This list and idea exists because of Myst, which I think more than just about any other game, completely blew away all the competition and made everybody aware of how fantastically beautiful, musically engulfing and intellectually challenging a video game could be. Myst was the siren call of the future and we knew finally that we were in a new era. Pong and PacMan were invented to keep us all seeding the market with money so that Myst could be born. Myst, single-handedly created immersion.

Grand Theft Auto was the sandbox game that proved that virtual gaming could be purposeless and sometimes it was better just to do nothing but be bad. It shifted the mind. I didn't arrive at the series until Vice City which was nowhere near as good as San Andreas, where it all got perfected, but it was GTA that made the sandbox real.

Halo made the XBox. It also marked the beginning of a universe that actually bore some reality to mature science fiction. Second Life was immersion part two. And that's about all I have to say about that.

Mario. Zelda. Tomb Raider. Final Fantasy? All kiddie garbage. I'd put the Sims in there before any of that stuff which I think is all at the level of Super Monkeyball and Sonic the Hedgehog. 

Madden. Half Life. Metal Gear. Resident Evil. All honorable mention, but then I'd have to talk about Starcraft and Sin and Black & White and Civilization and whole bunch of other very good, even excellent franchises. But they didn't change the world. They just gave it flavor, and bottom line they dont make the top ten. I gave you Warcraft so get off me.

Now in the modern era of gaming, which basically means the current dominating consoles PS3, XBox360 and gaming boxes, I have some choice choices. But that's for another day.

Front Page News, Main Street USA

I think this is the most press anybody on our family has gotten in a long time.

The Semiotic Swamp Returns

When I was 31, I read American Mythologies. It was one of the great intellectual moments in my life, an dit helped me to understand the power of what I can probably describe at length but will not. Let's just call it 'virtual truth'.

A great deal of what I experimented with in my early web writing days was a riff on this problem, which was that there was very little 'authentic' culture in American culture. There are signifiers built on top of symbols, which leverage metaphors that are bolstered by analogies all based on myth and urban legend - and this is what most Americans believe. Education is all trivia. You can't walk into a bar with physics degree and find a mate. You have to play the game and it is a mind-numbing game because everybody is hooked into American 'culture' and not much of it is real. This was my attitude towards that called the semiotic swamp. I followed Umberto Eco and Marshall Blonsky for a time and insisted that they knew what was up. Foucault's Pendulum was my favorite fiction just before reading Blonsky. But the invention of the Internet was about to happen, in the mainstream. So I invented Boohab, who was the perfect kind of character to inhabit such a realm, a post-modern racial essentialist. In a world where influentials like Howard Rheingold encouraged the reality of virtual life led by the guiding light of McLuhan who's mantra was 'the medium is the message', there needed to be a black trickster out there keeping it real.

A lot of people resented the idea of bringing racial realism to the new digital frontier, but the fact that I did so persistently was very useful. I sought to inform my experiment with a bit of philosophy which I found in a book called The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. I excerpted something I thought was very important from that moment when there was still a question in the public mind about whether or not blackness belonged in cyberspace.

 

"According to Heidegger, we notice the eclipse of the truth of being occuring already in Plato's metaphysics. Once the truth of being becomes equated with the light of unchanging intelligibility, the nature of truth shifts to the ability of statements to reflect or refer reliably to entities. With the steadiness of propositional truth comes the tendency to relate to being as a type, a form, or an anticipated shape. With being as a steady form, entities gain their reality through their being typified. Already in Plato we see the seeds of the Western drive to standardize things, to find what is dependable and typical in them. Truth as the disclosure process, as the play of revealing/ concealing disappears behind the scene in which the conscious mind grasps bright objects apprehended as clear, unwavering, rational forms. As humans develop the ability to typify and apprehend formal realities, the loss of truth as emergent disclosure goes unnoticed. All is light and form. Nothing hides behind the truth of beings. But this "nothing" finally makes an appearance after the whole world has become a rigid grid of standardized forms and shapes conceived and engineered by humans. As the wasteland grows, we see the devastation of our fully explicit truths. We see that there is, must be, more. The hidden extra cannot be consciously produced. Only by seeing the limits of standardization can we begin to respond to it. We have to realize that each advance in typifying and standardizing things also implies a trade off. When we first reach forward and grasp things, we only see the benefits of our standardization, only the positive side of greater clarity and utility. it is difficult to accept the paradox that not matter how alluring, every gain in fixed intelligibility brings with it a corresponding loss of vivacity. Because we are finite, every gain we make also implies a lost possibility. The loss is especially devastating to those living in the technological world, for here they enjoy everything conveniently at their disposal -- everything that is, except the playful process of discovery itself."

It turned out that only applied to the static web. When the web became dynamic, and populated with jillions, emergent disclosure returned. As it became even larger and more distributed, and as it will be in the future, the only findable stuff will be more and more static. People will need larger narratives to deal with its interminable complexity. The web itself will sustain more and more of these narratives. Certifications will become more important and/but they will tend to be more localized. "Word is bond" will become more important.

But my point here is that for the most part, people will require more and more skill to make sense of all of this meta-literacy. I happen to think it raises the value of war. But during peacetime, the swamp is filling up and overflowing.

This morning it took me almost an hour to find Ms Dewey, and I had lost her before. Her real name is Janina Gavankar and as Ms Dewey she exemplified the sort of woman that is my perfect mate in look, attitude and all that. I used to worry for most of my life that the woman I married would suffer a heartbreaking fate if I were to find 'the perfect woman' sometime during the course of life - and I had this odd premonition that it would happen around when I turned 35. It never did happen with the exception of the fictional Ms Dewey with whom I promptly developed a completely nerdy crush. And so I was a bit extra frustrated when, this morning for some reason, I could not for the life of me remember her name and none of my usual methods could suss her out of the incredible shitpile that is the world wide web. I finally found her.

 

 

It turns out that Ms Dewey was the creation of a marketing outfit known as EVB, short for Evolution Bureau. They are also the creators of Serenading Unicorn

 

And so we are most definitely way, way down the long tail. At some point it must be asked whether or not large fictions are not more useful than small ones. But I'm going to leave that as an exercise, depending upon how many people respond to this particular essay.

I no longer have much of a cultural project out here in cyberspace. I went from the responsibility of Mellow Mike to put a black foot out here, to the provocations of Boohab to get all post-moderny and interactive, to whatever it was I was doing at Slate, Salon, & Utne, Brainstorms, The Well, Electric Minds and then finally to Meanderings, Vision Circle and now Cobb. I have come full circle to the sort of peeved skepticism about the quality of knowledge purveyed on the Web, now that there is so much and the cost is so low. I perceive that the big hunking narratives are larger and more false and that the smaller ones seem more infinitely clever. It's different but the effect is the same. Truth is hard to find. That's because it's so easy to get everything else, so much of which is layered like the Juicy Fruit advertisement, upon very little else but the simple longings of an individual. There's nothing universal in that at all, which is why we'll all end up killing each other. I know it's difficult to understand why that's my conclusion, but trust me on this one. I'll explain it all later.

In the meantime, I will continue to write here, while writing more software code, and attempt to keep my perspective on the world historical, and ignoring that which is right in front of my face.

Howard Dean's Rhetorical Patronage

(from the archives, December 2003)

I've written here in Cobb that there is a dirty little secret in black politics. Perhaps some of Dean's campaign team has taken an object lesson. Those African Americans who hold out for hope in the world of politics of all places have apparently been placated by Mr. Dean's clever rhetoric.

What is astounding about this sleight of hand is that Dean has gotten away with getting endorsements without having made one documentable campaign promise. Sensible people expect politicians to dissemble, and those things that are sacrificed first are campaign promises. So what kind of fool gives the benefit of the doubt to a politician whose not even willing to make a promise? There is nothing so irresponsible as a man who makes no promises and states no case, something most of us recognized when pressing Clarence Thomas. But if there is, then it is the voter who trusts such a man. Fools following liars.

Let us start with the gushing of the Black Commentator.

Howard Dean�s December 7 speech is the most important statement on race in American politics by a mainstream white politician in nearly 40 years. Nothing remotely comparable has been said by anyone who might become or who has been President of the United States since Lyndon Johnson�s June 4, 1965 affirmative action address to the graduating class at Howard University. 

 

BC seems to desire nothing more than acceptance of Dean as a mainstream candidate so that his vague histrionics can give air to BC's studied radical notions. BC is clearly anti-corporate, but do they actually expect Dean to endorse that form of economic strategy?

The core of BC's economic mythology is plain. 

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences � deep, corrosive, obstinate differences � radiating painful roots into the community, and into the family, and the nature of the individual.

 

These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression.

If there is some sense of special failure blacks might have in their poverty, then the Black Commentator would have one believe that some measure of dignity could be recovered in the knowledge that the President 'feels you'. In this way, the black man who gets the 50k job is only half a black man when the president is a [racist, divisive] Republican, but is made whole by the [warm fuzzy Democrat] president who is sympathetic to a radical interpretation of racial history.

 

This is the farce at the heart of Dean's legitimacy in the eyes of the Black Commentator. They refuse to separate economics from racial politics, therefore it is not sufficient that African Americans themselves know the facts of history. There has to be a Great White Father who also sees it that way. Blacks don't recover themselves, they do so under the aegis of a friendly politically revisionist history. This is all Dean delivers: talk and promises to talk.

I said it once, and I'll say it again:

I challenge anyone to show exactly what it is that the Democrats have done for African Americans that they haven't done for everyone else. Whatever you find, I will bet my nickel that it doesn't get any larger than a quarter of a billion in any one program out of the Federal budget. But what the Democrats do that the Republicans don't is insure that they say a lot of nice things about blackfolks. The dirty little secret is that this covers a lot of what the black electorate will settle for. If you ask someone who hates the idea of Black Republicans what it is that the Democrats will give blacks that the Republicans won't, it will all come down to warm and fuzzies. Try it. Get them to name programs when they disagree. Materially, most folks are hard pressed to talk about black patronage in dollars and cents. But they know what kind of rhetoric they like. Ask how much federal money goes to support HBCUs. Nobody knows. Ask what kind of support Affirmative Action should get and you'll hear a litany of legalese words, qualifications, provisos, tests, and other verbal requirements. What a twist of fate! It's not all about the Benjamins.

 

Check out his speech yourself. At least six paragraphs begin "We're going to talk about..". That wouldn't be so bad if the paragraphs weren't so damned thin. But then again, Dean has to prove himself mainstream, otherwise the formula doesn't work. That means he has to sell out principles for the sake of wide acceptability. I keep telling blackfolks that this is the fundamental problem.

Yet the BC keeps hope alive:

Where does this leave Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich? Exactly as they are, preaching the same social democratic, anti-racist, pro-peace message as before, for as long as their energies can sustain them. Dean�s political leap would not have been possible in the absence of Sharpton�s energetic Black candidacy and Kucinich�s principled, progressive white voice from the Left. At this historic juncture they dare not go anywhere. Dean has picked up the torch that Sharpton and Kucinich have been carrying and they must stay in the race to make sure he doesn�t set it down.

 

If there is any mark of delusion, there it is plainly and simply. To imagine that Dean couldn't survive without Sharpton and Kucinich makes about as much sense, as my old feminist buddies used to say, as a fish without a bicycle.

I am willing to bet money that this infatuation will be short-lived. It's too bad that the Black Commentator and those who follow this rationale are so soft-headed and willing to compromise. But that is their fate, tied as they are to the ritual of hope and disappointment which is the standard fare of the African American voters and the Democratic Party.

I know George W. Bush's weaknesses, and as a hard headed Republican, I'm not afraid to call him on them because I am vested in his practical success. Practical success is the difference between Cobb and the dreamers over on the Left. Apparently everybody can have a dream. It's just a matter of time before Dean reveals his dreams to America. "I too have a dream", he'll say. I'll hold back my puke until that moment. But it's coming.

I have one last barb to pitch. Where is the Congressional Black Caucus in all this? I haven't been looking, but if their opinion mattered enough, it would make news loud enough to hear. Considering small incidents that make enough news for Jesse Jackson to be mentioned, I'm sure I hear quite enough. And my ears are telling me that the CBC's opinion doesn't matter

 

Exit Through The Gift Shop

Cobb readers may recall that I used to have a running argument with Sprite about what art is and is not. She's not Sprite any longer, she's Gremmie and we no longer have that argument. It has not been resolved to anyone's satisfaction and neither of us care enough to engage it. Whatever catches the eye is pleasing enough.

I have begun to wonder if any artist captures the spirit of the times and I've made an attempt here, and will continue, to use visual art to reflect some aspect of this literary creation. People always have time to look, but seldom have time to read and rarely have time to study. So I imagine lots of people do what Gremmie and I do, which is agree not to disagree but to say 'whatever' to the question of art. 

There's an artist for that. His name is Mr. Brainwash. I just watched the documentary about him. It was good.

My opinion of MBW is that he is a pop artist who is the kind of success that The Simpsons are. You cannot really compare The Simpsons to I Love Lucy although both are sitcoms. The Simpsons aren't people, they're cartoons. MBW's creations aren't creations, they're icons. They are so two dimensional that they're almost one dimensional. They lack drama. And I've seen enough of the man who created them to understand what his creations are meant to inspire, which is nothing but the sensation of having consumed art. It's like going to see a movie.  Even his irony is flat.

There is a point in the film in which those artists who served as the inspiration for Mr. Brainwash, or worked for him - I can't remember which - wondered if everything he created was a big joke and if so who the joke was on. Nobody could tell, which illustrates the spontaneous meaning of the entire production. It's a production, and it will mean something finally when enough people react to it. The point is not to invest meaning or design into the production, but to arrange it in such a way that becomes a self-fulfilling thing. A curiosity which finally means nothing more than the fact that it made you curious. Like jingling keys above a baby. 

The emotional weight of the film is found in the speechless energy that characterizes afficionadoes of production as art. Half the significance, if not all of the significance of street art is that it is illegal and ubiquitous. Any old pique will do, but the point is not to draw your attention to the craft so much as to draw your attention to the fact that there is great risk in producing subversion time and time again. There is no solution, no comtemplation of the art that gets you anywhere. You are merely to be stammered by the sheer perversity of it, by the fact that it slaps authority in the face, that the artist is on the run. 

That's about it. Here is how a subversive operates. He is all instinct and no intellect. He has no plan other than to be famous through his productions which are immediately void of meaning, and yet significant to some fragment of that short attention span society. The more you see of it, the less you expect, until finally you are insulted. 

 

Post Black & Blue

A thoughtful essay here provokes good thinking. A two key paragraphs with a few others between them are the focus of my response.

First:

Historically, Black voters associate the expansion of federal power with emancipation and civil rights.  They associate states’ rights and localism with slavery and segregation.  In American history the association between states’ rights and the oppression of Blacks hasn’t always been watertight.  States like Massachusetts invoked states’ rights to oppose the execution of federal laws designed to force the return of fugitive slaves to their ‘owners’.  Much of the anti-slavery opposition that propelled the Republicans into office in 1860 sprang from the belief that an out–of-control Supreme Court was going to invalidate the northern states’ personal liberty laws banning slavery within their frontiers.  Still, people like me who think centralized federal authority is a problem today need to recognize the blindingly obvious truth that the enemies of Blacks have historically sheltered behind the cry for states’ rights.

Second:

If we start talking about cutting government employment, scaling back unsustainable government pensions and similar ideas, we need to be clear: we are going to be striking at the economic foundations of a substantial chunk of the Black middle class.  As readers of these posts know, I believe that these changes are coming whether we want them or not; the question is what happens to Black America as these changes take place – and how can an upgrade to a less bureaucratic, more flexible and entrepreneurial society work to strengthen rather than undercut the Black middle class?

I think these are questions that black Republicans have been dealing with, albeit in a provocative way, for the past decade. Neither of these ideas have been ignored, but neither have the subtle implications of them been adequately explored by the Democrat Left. Part of me is saying, well it's about time you guys started talking like this...

What I noticed quite some time ago was that local control has evaded black communities. This was because, largely in the pre-civil rights era, black individuals could not necessarily depend upon the fair and equitable honoring of contracts in the private sector. I don't know how to quantify this statistically, but it always brings me back to a phrase my father used to use all of the time. Whenever I got very upset about something he would say 'you don't have to make a Federal case out of it'. But I noticed that this was exactly what the black interest seemed to require. And the people who were making the federal cases were, by and large those black leaders who had been elected to Congress, a direct result of politically favorable gerrymandering of federal electoral districts into the shapes required by racially discriminatory housing patterns.

The federal case walked hand in hand with the monolithic black community. There could always be found, one black community lead by one black congressional rep unified on a small set of agendas. The result, to my reckoning, was a great increase in those federal, state and local municipal and civil service jobs that essentially made the black middle class of my parents' generation. In my generation, the generational imperative was to integrate the private sector, namely 'corporate America' and with it, breakdown barriers at those places we used to call 'predominately white colleges and universities'. My generation was an American diaspora in the making, and as we got started in the 80s we called for an end to the Black Monolith, questioning the very idea of Black Unity and blackness itself. So if you want to hear another reason for the term 'African American' that's in it too. We were Americans of African descent out and about in America, not necessarily defined by the coerced political agendas of a necessary racial unity. Anyone who raises a skeptical eyebrow on the progress made by the Congressional Black Caucus understands implicitly this [then] new dynamic. Younger black Americans would succeed more independently than ever.

What happens to black America as government subsidies of all sorts eat at the base of the large government sectors employing big fractions of the black middle class will be just what black Republicans have been predicting - blacks stuck on 'the plantation' will find themselves, to extend that metaphor, in the same place as their forebears when all the work ran out. History tells us that we should expect another Great Migration. We don't often hear about the miserable fate of the sharecroppers left back in Alabama when their adventurous relations hiked north to Chicago. We tend to focus on the positive aspects, such as the creation and eventual success of the Urban League. It's hard to think about black America today without thinking 'urban'. What is now second nature was awfully strange in the 1920s when half were still back down on the farm. What happened to Aunt Jemima and Old Black Joe? They were replaced by city slickers - nothing reminds me of this social upheaval so much as the film Carmen Jones.

So there is a disaggregated plurality of black Americans, some of whom remain staunchly dedicated to the Blue, but there is equally a number who never got sufficient patronage and made their own way. The question remains; to what extent can any prospects of the black middle class today be laid at the feet of political patronage despite what took place under the boom days of integration and Affirmative Action? Moreover and callously, what is the price of disassembling that federal case / black unity monolith when black America itself is not particularly inclined to or frankly able to respond as a political block? Barack Obama is the perfect example of someone who was not empowered by and consequently not particularly accountable to the black political block. The diffuse benefits given by Obama himself and those like him tend towards a non-racial constituency, the drone incantations of social democracy: education, welfare, healthcare, labor.

I have no real expectations that the private sector will have any plan for a faltering black middle class suffering from government cutbacks. Those folks will be, by and large, out in the cold. All Americans will have to adopt to those changing business models that are employing more and more of us with no such things as government pensions and job security. But this shoe has been falling for a long time.

I do, on the other hand, feel quite sanguine about the ability for the black middle class to adapt. Some of us have even managed to survive as Republicans.

Klansman

The Boohabian Standard for Hate Crime

The Boohabian Standard for Hate Crime	Deadlinks refreshed Jan 2003
about the Standard | about Boohab

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Richard Kim - The Truth About Hate Crimes Laws The Nation, June, 1999 Michael Bowen - Hate Crime: Healing vs Curing November, 1998	Georgia Bias Crimes Information and Documentation Act 'Bias crime' means any crime that hinders any person's exercise of the enjoyment of rights ... because of the status of a person...
Stop Hate Arguments about the even-handedness of HateCrime reporting from Parterre.	Senate Bill S1529 - Hate Crimes Prevention Bill of 1998

The Basic Idea:
To win a hate crime prosecution, the prosecution has to show a clear expression of group hatred through the felony. It is not a "hate crime" merely because the perpetrator hates people of that group. The crime has to be intended to communicate that hatred of the group to the victim. The idea that police search for hidden hate motivations is antithetical to the notion of hate crime. Hate crime statutes don't enhance your punishment merely for thinking bad thoughts. They enhance your punishment for committing your crime in a manner that creates added psychological injury to the victim and society.

---

 

Racial Identification	NO, but	In any ordinary crime, the race of the suspect should not be identified unless: The charges brought against the subject are specific to a hate crime OR The suspect remains at large and the police have requested the media to broadcast information for the purposes of enlisting public assistance in their apprehension of the suspect.
Mandatory Sentencing	NO	there is a difference between having a hate crime law in one's quiver as a district attorney and having mandatory sentencing to force the hand of judges. it's clearly up to the discretion of district attorneys as to which laws they will prosecute. I am in favor of hate crimes as aggravating factors to crimes already on the books, not as a new class of crimes in and of themselves.
Reporting of Arrests	YES	Reporting of hate 'crimes' is a different matter and should be mandated. Even if racial/sexual/religious animus as proximate cause to a crime is not proven in court beyond a reasonable doubt, the public should be informed about arrests made on those grounds. In other words we shouldn't put the cart before the horse and try to establish a rule for prosecution until we can establish a standard for definition in arrests. Although prosecutorial choice is important (they need to make whatever case they can) it shouldn't be the record of prosecutions which informs the public, rather the record of arrests/complaints. What I don't want to see is a situation in which someone could point to a year of statistics based on the rate of convictions which may grossly understate the prevalence of hate crimes themselves. Nor do I want to see judges forced to add penalties in cases where proximate cause is subject to broad interpretation. I would like to see information made available to the public which is credible as regards the incidence of hate crime such that communities can take action. If indeed a town like Bensonhurst *is* hostile to blacks, then that community should not be able to hide behind an 'aberration' excuse. If a district attorney is prosecuting only one kind of hate crime and not another, then that kind of information should be open to public scrutiny.

Much of this applies to terrorism, fwiw. 

LA [G]Unified School District

Yesterday, over in Gardena, about a mile from where I work, one teenager shot two others. It was an accident, but it was a school shooting. Today, about 20 miles from where I work, there was another school shooting. How many days ago was there an assassination attempt in Arizona? I don't know, but it's enough to put politicians into overdrive to *do* something. I think the something will inevitably be bad, if it's allowed to happen.

For the record, I say this is a criminal justice problem. No legislation or executive action is required. Those two branches of government should sit down and shut up. Bring the guilty parties to justice, nuff said. I mean, we know that aggravated assault and attempted murder have been crimes for thousands of years. We don't need to hear anything new. We don't need to do anything new. But we've got peasants addicted to new, so new they will get.

For Gardena High School it's likely going to mean metal detectors and searches, TSA-style. I'm trying to think of a more obvious sign of social failure but I cannot. 

The 4000th Orgasm

One of my peeves is the extent to which our culture has been overrun by what I'm saying amounts to a bunch of louts with cheesy business models. Ahh the amoral marketplace. Can it only dominate an amoral population? Hard to say, and I don't even know why I ask such questions. But the signal effect that gets to me about this cultural bogard is the lack of good stuff in the long tail that's free. Or maybe it's the difficulty I find in finding all that good stuff. 

Part of the difficulty is that consumer markets are profitable for the cheesy louts because they are taking advantage of human nature. To wit, romantic comedies will always be a source of profits in the movie business, so long as you can find cute actors playing shy, confused and oblivious to what's right in front of their faces. Just like in horror flicks, we sit there impatient for the movie to get to the good part, but being deliciously teased is what makes a rom com something other than porn, despite the fact that the money shot is, after all, the money shot - even if it's only implied. In other words, sex sells. 

But how much can sex sell, or how much should sex sell? Those who know me find that I have long subscribed to Aldous Huxley's defintion of an intellectual (and tried to be that), someone who after all finds something more interesting than sex. I doubt that he meant eating as that something, but thinking, but he was clearly immersed in some context of society that must have seemed to him what ours seems to me: overrun. 

Did I mention the demographic? Oh. I should have, it was a lurking assumption. If you want to maximize your market you go for the bell curve, a target market with disposable income for your cheesy business model and an easily identifyable human attribute waiting to be indulged. So is American culture obsessed with sex because so many louts sell it, or because our demographic is sexy? Dunno. What I do know is this: It's hard to be a fan of Vladimir Horowitz when you're in your 20s. I was and still am, though I still haven't bought the Deutsche Grammophon box set. Maybe for Christmas, I'm still diggin' on Ella's. It's hard because Horowitz is dead and not sexy, and it might take a little doing for you to appreciate what he does (did) so well. A little doing means Apple doesn't pony up the electricity, servers, bandwidth and all that so you can preview it on Apple TV from the comfort of your living room. Vladimir Horowitz is not a hot meme and is never going to be a hot meme. You have to seek him out. If you have sought out Vladimir Horowitz or perhaps somebody even a bit more obscure like one of the authors mentioned in Niall Ferguson's history of WW1, you're likely going to have to do it the hard way. 

If you have sex three times a week for 20 years you would still have several hundred orgasms to go to reach the magical 4000. Much likely more if you're a woman. You might never get that many. I've been thinking about this because I'm a guy, and most guys do it for the bang. In that I'm like most guys, if my theory about guys' purposes is correct. But I'm also like Huxley, who might likely suggest that sex is a fairly interesting human activity, for what it's worth, but there are much more interesting things to consider. With that distance, I can objectify it like RBIs or some other statistic. Since I think economically, I also think about the marginal value of the nth bang, which for me is starting to rapidly diminish. I know some of my readers may think I'm a bit odd (although the thought crossed my mind of using the word 'queer') in that I don't find sex particularly.. compelling. For me, I'd say that sex is like driving fast. It's a dangerous game that's exhilaratingly boring. You do it because you can and because you're used to having the privilege. You are simultaneously amused by how simple and stupid it is and repulsed by how people get wrapped around its axle. What is the purpose in having a 'healthy' attitude towards sex? To make yourself sporting, I think, and to provide the louts with market share.  See how blunt I am? I happen to think that sexual bluntness is unbecoming, and by my style I'm alternately a rake and a coquette but that was back around number 1200. A long time ago, when it mattered. 

I'm fascinated in the same repulsed way about how the mattress manufacturers have managed to sell us another statistic about ourselves. To hear the louts blather, we all have a 'sleep number'. Well, we also must certainly have some inflection point at which the marginal utility of another sexual encounter heads south, and suddenly the overrunning of culture by the louts and their cheesy business models goes 'whoosh' right over your head, or under your feet as the case may be. All the gyrations on 'music' videos seems pointed to a completely alien demographic. When I got married 16 years ago, it's true, I really stopped buying a certain kind of shirt. I have not purchased cologne in a very long time. In fact, I think I may have the last two bottles of Kouros on earth, or at least the oldest. 

So there's all this energy and money and ego out there in the culture selling and influencing and intimating everything about what's supposed to be so.. compelling about sex, all the personal drama, all that 70s Me Generation stuff that's rolling back around, and it's all beginning to look extra strange to me. 

Let's take this into one more dimension which is the dimension of 'sexual liberation'. At what number might we suggest that an individual is sexually liberated? I mean all have come to recognize what the government tells us our caloric intake should be. We've been roundly seduced into what Michael Pollan calls 'nutritionism'. We know what vitamins and minerals and calories and carbs and anti-oxidants are supposed to do. But are we hungry? I mean statistically how much do we have to eat to qualify as off the critical list for the UN Special Committee on Hunger? There must be a number for that. Similarly there must be some amount of sex we have to get in order not to be sexually repressed. There's a certain amount of bang we have to get, presumably for the least amount of bucks if any at all, such that we pass. When are we into the meat of the curve? (Now there's a double entendre for you.)

You see it's not enough for the louts with their cheesy business models to exploit our own anti-Huxley-intellectual hungers but the culture has to make us 'healthy' in our attitudes. But we all know deep in our hearts that there's just something wrong with the fine print in the Viagra commercials when it has to be said that one should consult your doctor to see if sex is alright for you, you old horny bastard. We know somehow that there's a limit. Or do we actually think porn stars might really be making all those noises because they are.. compelled. It seems to me that somewhere after 2000, nobody should be able to tell you anything or sell you anything about sex. At the very least, you should know that you're being sold. And yet I continue to be amazed by the prodigious amounts of time, energy and money are expended on capturing the attention of the bazillions all upon the basis of this 'healthy' sexual identity we're all supposed to possess. It's unhealthy. 

So there are 1200 channels on my television, and 1200 times that many coming over the internets. I'm old and tired but not jaded. I've still got Vladimir Horowitz and Bud Powell and Art Tatum and others similarly lightning fingered. Although it's difficult, the bandwidth for high culture is crowded out by the lazy loudmouths, it's not impossible to get off the beaten track and put aside all that co-opting of basic instincts. But it must be hard for the new suckers of Me Generation marketing to imagine themselves beyond the faux diversity of the same sexy sales. But the crazy thing is that it's even harder for me, approaching 4000 to care about what so many evidently care about. 

Then again, I've managed to speed quite a bit without getting wrapped around the axle. 

 

Stuxnet Demo

Related: SCADA Hacks

Integrated

The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed. -- William Gibson

The Last and Only Funk

Toejam & Earl was the one and only funk themed videogame to make it to the XBox. Everything else is derivative. Props to the man who saved these.

 

Classic Bloviation in Long Beach

There is, my gentle friends, a difference between bloviation and blather. Bloviation is the process of expounding upon passionate intellectual subjects without any sense of purpose. Blather is the product of purposesful rhetoric that has no real intellectual substance. While I enjoy bloviation, I try my damndest to stay away from blather.

After enough alcohol, any discussion of a serious subject descends into bloviation, or bloviated debate. At some point, bloviated debate devolves into blather. I had the good fortune last evening to get into an almost unending zone of bloviation that never dropped off the precipice into the blather zone. My interlocutors were, The Large Professor, Red and Doctor V.  (The Kid left early).

Doctor V offers me a challenge which I am eager to understand completely and I am wary of earning his distrust. You see, he represents the humanist I think it should be my duty to reform. He is a person centered person who requires a revolution. The sort of expectations he has of people and society are both annoyingly high and benign. And so as with most humanists, he requires a thorough undoing of what has evidently been done wrong. It probably wouldn't go too far afield to say that the good doctor is a Liberal, but I am no longer interested in means, so all those political matters are tending towards the insignificant. I hope earnestly that I can learn the proper meaning of revolution and understand exactly how much directed chaos we can sustain for the sake of Progress. But I sense that our great difference may lie in the following matter of principle.

Mankinds great challenge is not with the nature of civilization, it is with the very existence of civilization.

It is for that reason I seek to concern myself not with matters of reform but with the consequences of that with which we don't control. I am conservative because I doubt that we can control what we learn and direct in society in revolutionary ways. But more importantly our economics and wars reflect exactly what mankind actually does, all intentions aside. To talk about reform and making humanity better without any consideration of war and deprivation as the means to that end is naive and shortsighted. My humanist friends don't seem to recognize that they are the scions of victory in war and business, and they are deluded by the promise of improving that which has been achieved by war through peaceful means.

Which puts us on the doorstep of the Large Professor, who is a cherub of deliberate delight. But I'll talk more about those guys next time.

Harry Dresden After Six Books

Harry Dresden is an instinctual hero, and he is so because he survives. He is a  blockheaded, stubborn, self-absorbed, overpowering man guided by simple instincts - to protect the weak- who is beleagured by his burden and often overwhelmed. But he manages to triumph against all odds by being resigned to his mortal fate. He is not angry, nor vengeful. He is not often misunderstood. He is only awkward from having been orphaned and has come to love the people of the city of Chicago as his own without them acknowledging his gifts and many good deeds. He treads an arcane path having been born with a mystical talent and has nurtured this talent and stretched it to his limits through trial by fire, and he has saved the world. You see, Harry Dresden is a wizard, and his talent is magic.

I speak of the character Harry Dresden whose sixth file, Dead Beat, I have just completed to the narration of a cat named Marsters scripted by a dude named Butcher. Marsters *is* the voice of Harry Dresden and Butcher is the mind, and they have created a combination of fiction that is as emblematic as any in the literary sci-fi world. 

Dresden started off as a sighing, beleaguered mystical gumshoe who stumbled around within the well marked boundaries of the hard boiled detective novel. But somewhere around the middle of the third book, he suddenly burst beyond those boundaries into a ragged but elegaic prince. He not only got the girl, he saved the city, then lost the girl. He not only resisted temptation, he faced his own deep psychological weakness and admitted his desire for the prize offered. Dresden has metaphorically died and been resurrected into the same tired bones and in each episode has reached new heights and depths. Surely there is a narrative type at work that keeps the drama ripe for human consumption, but there is an unremitting yet slowly twisting core that surprises us with its simultaneous ability and lack of depth. In almost every way, Dresden is on the verge of being anti-heroic, but he is unable to restrain his desire to do the right thing. He is the man who never had a woman or children, who never managed to be a father and consequentially he is inevitably and shamelessly drawn to save them at his own peril. He is the man shouting the loudest "Women and children first!", adopting them in their moment of terror against any foe. 

Harry Dresden is an American urban gothic practitioner. He seems to take no great pleasure in eating or drinking, except in drinking in the curves and features of the odd number of beautiful women who plop into his world, but almost never into his arms. He's not excited by fast cars, deep contemplation of the universe, art appreciation or spectator sports. He's something of a loner. A guy with a cat who lives in a basement with no electric lights, computers or stereo equipment. He harbors suspicions about the people who protect him. He pisses off the few that understand him, and he of course always confounds and destroys his enemies, the nefarious characters of the Never Never and their minions who defy the Laws of Magic.

One could say that the Dresden series is like Harry Potter for grownups. The challenges facing Dresden have gotten exponentially more difficult and consequential each outing. There is more death and destruction with Dresden responsible for more and more each time, but Dresden has become more complex and faces greater internal perils each time. In Dead Beat, for the friendship of a woman who seems to be his last friend, Dresden makes a deal with a metaphorical devil - he delivers the equivalent of Dr. Mengele's research to a literal queen vampire. Unlike Potter, Dresden has no arch-rival he is fated to confront. In the end it may be himself. He finds himself offered no honor or official position in which he can see dignity bestowed. Instead, he merely survives the calamities he gets worked into either by his own hardheaded morality or conniving parties in conflict.

You see Dresden is a member of the White Council of Wizards but has been on something like a lifelong probation for having killed his own Jedi Master in his youth. It was self defense, for his master had gone over to the dark side. The White Council is now engaged in a global war with the three courts of vampires, the White Court of life draining seducers, the Red Court of bloodthirsty shape shifters and the Black Court of nightcrawling monsters. Dresden himself is partly responsible for escalating the millenial conflict and has all types of prices on his head from various factions. As he has survived, he has been exposed to the most extraordinary circumstances, even for a wizard, and events have consipred to have him in a position to have been offered eternal life. Literally strung up in a dungeon with a knife at his throat he was offered the choice between death or treachery in the form of one of the original thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas. He touched the coin and locked it away, but its spirit has been working away at him, giving him the unexpected dark power of Hellfire. Moreover, he has discovered that he has a brother and that brother is an expatriate of the White Court of Vampires. With each episode, Dresden is exposed to more and more dark knowledge and must find ways to use it in an ever escalating war between great powers with whom his relationship grows increasingly complex.

Dresden is the superman in the middle, and he knows too much. He can't win, he survives despite of himself and he cannot get out of the game.

An Excess of [Self] Righteous Indignation

Part of my reason for disengaging in what we Americans have been calling 'politics' has to do with my desire to see beyond the angry disonnance and the identity games and come to a (more) distilled understanding of the actual principles in conflict. I may come to find this to be futile, but it's better than being engaged in the pointless bickering. I have started to regard most atheists as part of the same formula, all derivative of the proper atheists. And this morning I found the exact spot to turn off a podcast from 2600, but more on that later.

Meanwhile check out this:

A new set of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology finds that atheists and agnostics report anger toward God either in the past or anger focused on a hypothetical image of what they imagine God must be like. Julie Exline, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University and the lead author of this recent study, has examined other data on this subject with identical results. Exline explains that her interest was first piqued when an early study of anger toward God revealed a counterintuitive finding: Those who reported no belief in God reported more grudges toward him than believers.

At first glance, this finding seemed to reflect an error. How could people be angry with God if they did not believe in God? Reanalyses of a second dataset revealed similar patterns: Those who endorsed their religious beliefs as “atheist/agnostic” or “none/unsure” reported more anger toward God than those who reported a religious affiliation.

Exline notes that the findings raised questions of whether anger might actually affect belief in God’s existence, an idea consistent with social science’s previous clinical findings on “emotional atheism.”

OK. So now you know.

By the way, I fall into that large category of the chastened after false hope. After all, I was once a Progressive. Now I am an aprogressive. I do, however, still believe in morality.  

The podcast I turned off was from the 2600 webcast and went on as many do with the usual back and forth among chums. And then the narrator, who had been doing a pretty good job suddenly made the podcast all about himself. You see he was horribly inconvenienced by airport security. If there's one thing  that anger me more than bourgeois self-pity, it is loud self-pity masked as a civilizing critique. This dude was full of it, and I don't quite understand how people get so far along in life without realizing how insignificant is their discomfiture.

Challenge In Nigeria - 1948

The Post Industrial Business Model

One of the reasons that I have a sort of ambivalence to environmentalism as we know it, is because of my wariness of the alternative. To have a world that is free of the costs of industrialization of materials for the purposes of manufacturing is to have an economy leveraged on information tech. Of course there are other growing economies but most of our focus is on infotech; biotech not so much.

Part of the inevitable necesity of buying and selling in the digital world is the establishment of your presence. Right now there is not a good way of doing that, which is why we have all sorts of privacy concerns. The presence that you establish in cyberspace is distended and distributed and primarily out of your control. It is going to be quite some time before you will be able to control your cyberpresence, and until that combination of techologies, social conventions and laws coalesce, there are going to be myriad 'valid' ways in which you can be represented and approached. Nothing illustrates that quite as starkly as those thought experiments we use now to talk about privacy issues with regard to datamining. For example:

You did actually have that mid-life crisis and get divorced. At the child-custody hearing, your ex-spouse’s lawyer quotes a study showing that football-loving upper income Republicans are 27% more likely to beat their children than yoga-class-attending moderate Democrats, and the probability goes up another 8% if they ever bought a jersey featuring a defensive lineman. What’s more, several of the more influential people in your network of friends also fit angry-male patterns, taking the probability of abuse up another 13%. Because of the sound statistics behind such analyses, the judge listens.

What we have in social media and databases are a new mineral to mine, refine and sell as product. It is access to you. It is basically an attempt to commodify something that is practically infinite - human interest in other humans. When you look at a growing fraction of the entertainment business, you'll find that a nearly inexhaustible supply of energy and money is thrown at capturing the strange proclivities of celebrity. There seems no end of the trivialities that people will pay to know. For the most part these are silly and harmless but they are part and parcel of the same kind of basic human curiosity. And here in America we have a generation that's getting smarter and smarter at monetizing human curiosity.

If you think that Wall Street does nothing productive, imagine a world where 30% of the consumer economy was spent buying and selling the decendants of reality TV online, on mobile, in cars, at work, everywhere. Imagine every highschooler's senior project is trying for the first of 500 times to make a viral video about themselves. Imagine that the only way to instantly get a job is to become the kind of curiosity that is Ted Williams. Imagine that your 15 minutes of fame becomes your permanent resume. 

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It's difficult to tell people how long the long tail is. What I believe is that skill will overcome and that at some point in the future, the sort of value that only comes from discipline, dedication and wisdom will rule. But we are a long way from that, and we do not yet own our own reputations. There is a class of exploiters out there to be wary of, they have got our cognitive proclivities nailed. Their audiences will ultimately eat them alive, like Julian Assange's, but it's going to be a long and tragic road.

 

Demand

It never ceases to amaze me how certain old hacked arguments serve as fundamental excuses to do or say more than the the consequence bears. To me in the end it all represents nothing much more than uneconomic thinking - a kind of rationality that appreciates reason, but cannot stand the fact that everything isn't always reasonable. It is, I imagine, at the very least some measure of healthy hope and faith in mankind, but often more resembles religious devotion of the intolerant sort. 

There are two arguments I have in mind at the moment, the first being oddly placed as a point against today's Republicans. This is that the fact that slaves held in America were counted as 3/5 of a person indicates a fundamental flaw with the Constitution. I don't really mean to go much into that debate, but I have recently been reminded that the Bill of Rights was not ratified until the end of 1791. That was two years after the Constitution itself was adopted, superceding the Articles of Confederation which had been authored in 1777 and enacted in 1781. So the very essence of what we consider our freedom, the right of free speech, our First Amendment right wasn't manifest until 15 and a half years after the beginning of the Revolution, a violent rebellion which itself could be counted as begun with the murder of Attucks in 1770.

Did it take 21 years for America to recognize the right of free speech? No. It took the process that long to officially ratify that which they held in their hearts for all that time. 

But the central argument I wish to counter is the idea that American consumption make us immoral when it in fact employs the world. You should by now be familiar with the anti-American syllogism which begins, America has only 5% of the world's population but consumes... and then some multiple of that 5% and the subsequent admonishments for us to cut back, repent and beg the global south for forgiveness. Except that the global south are doing their best to supply us with what we desire, and so earn their fortunes. 

That is the sum essence of my argument, easily refutable if one cares to I imagine. But it does honestly puzzle me to determine how the American standard of living does such presumed damage to the standards of living elsewhere on the planet. I've paid attention to one commodity it can be said we rather hoard and gulp at absurd volumes and that is chocolate. You'll scarcely find any American who is abashed by their desire and few who would think that giving up chocolate will 'save the planet' and 'help the developing world'. But there is no other crop I can think of whose production is more worthy of the sorts of environmentalist alarms we hear applied to all of our 'excess' appetites. World cocoa production is an increasingly expensive proposition, supply struggles to meet demand, comes from Third World countries like Cote DIvoire and Cameroon, is controlled by wealthy families with names like Ghirardelli, Mars and Hershey and multinational conglomerates like Nestle. What's not to protest? 

But if Americans suddenly stopped eating chocolate, would they stop being so 'evil'? If Americans stopped buying second cars or expensive cell phones or different clothing for every season of the year, who would be better off? If Nike stopped making shoes in China, what would those Chinese do? Who is going to pay to re-educate the shoe factory worker? Who is going to find out what Americans are going to buy so much of next that it employs people on the other side of the globe?

I am often amazed at the arrangements that make it possible to build something made from raw materials in one country, assembled in another and shipped as product to a third. Yes, a preponderance of that global traffic ends up at Walmart, Sears and Target. There's surely a pile of it here in my house. I'm affluent. I buy stuff I want but don't need. I'm upper middle class. I signify about the brand and the quality rather than be satified by the function. I'm wasteful. I replace rather than repair. This is a cultural thing. It generates surplus work. I certainly could save, I could stop my conspicuous and constant consumption of multiple streams of household goods and services. I could go downscale, and often plan ways to do so. But I'll take down a lot of folks with me, and so would you if you stopped buying.

The difference between December and January in the IT business is often budgetary and often holiday related, both are cultural. They way people buy consulting services up in the domain where we bill like surgeons and attorneys often depends on conventions of lumping several hundreds of thousands of dollars together into non-trivial decision packages for funding projects. The demand is out there but the supply waits for the word 'go'. It's more reliable than fishing, but just as frustrating. There is nothing, and then within a week or two, there is everything all at once. We all wait for demand to speak up. We watch with anticipatory fever as it digs into its pocket and produces the moola. We sit around by the phone waiting for his minions to tell us when he's ready to bargain with us for what we do. We stand on the corner waiting to flag him down.

But what if he decides to just stay home and watch TV? What if he decides to sit on his zillions and just play golf with his friends instead of fund our fabulous idea? What if he decides that he's trying to cut down all the time we've been learning to bake cake?

Human appetites are predictable. What do we want? We want everything and we want more of it. We demand. And in demanding, we create reasons for others (who are ourselves) to make themselves useful. In the honest exchange is a circle of life. It is economical. It goes to the core of why we do things, the choices we make and our convoluted decisions. Our demands are real, and they form the essence of human necessity. It is the call that cannot be ignored and the service that cannot be refused. It is our way to satisfaction. It cannot be arbitrarily branded as evil simply because of the fractions of who demands and who supplies and from whence these human actions come. The only righteousness supply and demand require is an honest exchange and a fair price. 

If I Were To Go Nutty

Rabbi Hillel says when there is no hero, you be the hero. I've often considered myself that, or at least possessed of enough ego to be, but I've never flirted with the idea that I had some destiny that narrowed my focus to a singular act of purpose that might justify something like what today's nutcase has done. I've always wanted to do too much, and I've always to much enjoyed the pleasant surprise of life to ever reduce myself to an extreme act of pinpoint power. I even acknowledge my best ideas and do only a little to move them forward. It's ok for me to live for others - I have learned to serve. 

But not being possessed of a great number of possessions, I began experimenting with my own imagination. I can recall the mid 80s when I became confident that I would not be able to transfer to Stanford, and realized that I would not be able to prank my way through ample spare time. I wouldn't have a real boat to bump my drunk friend off in jest, so I had to invent one in my mind. If it wasn't to be Yale for me, I would go metaphorically sailing with Buckley and God. So it has not been beyond me to entertain personal fantasies unbounded by the physics of reality; I indulge in fantasy. If my writing would be without any purpose or shape, I probably would write more of such fantasies.

What if?

What if some circumstance beyond my imagining came to convince me that my redemption, or the fate of something critically symbolic came to rest on a choice of mine to perform an assassination? That idea has crossed my mind. I've most often thought of it in the context of Robert Nozick's book in which he suggests that a man approaching death might volunteer, owing to the inevitable imminence of his own death, to make such a sacrifice that would ruin his own life. It is rather fortunate that old men most often cannot be persuaded to care enough to even keep their knees flexible through the means available to them and for the most part enjoy the liberty from responsibility that old men take. Who knows what trouble we'd have if chess in the park were not enough for Geri's cohort? But an old man might decide to go out with a blast, and as such an old man, I might. Who would I take with me?

That doesn't matter to me so much as my desire that my reasons be made clear should I not survive. Now that I think about it, I most certainly would desire to have my day in court, so as to give audience to whatever profound motivation made me act. 

Still, I am convinced that in our society, such as it is, very few acts of complicated bravery could survive the contempt of contemporary news. One could not expect the likes of today's yuppies to recognize anything involving blood. They're even afraid of sugar. But even a complaint such as this I'm making about them would be lost. I could only hope that the impact of such an act would survive in the memory of another generation who might interpret my message more properly. On the other hand, how simple it would be to have me whitewashed, and my writings all redacted. 

If I were to go nutty, I would have no redemption. The act itself would have to be entirely worth my sacrifice because I cannot imagine the whole truth of any motivation to ever reach the light of a reasonably sane public. If I were not nutty, I would be made to appear nutty and perhaps this very text might be used as proof. So I'll hash it. 

I've probably said, after 7 years of blogging and lord knows how many rants into USENET, enough foolishness to discredit my entire self. But then again there is the context of all those years, that nobody would bother to read. And those that know me enough to love me, well what could they do? 

My saving grace, in the end is rather pitiful. It is that I don't care enough to go nutty over anything other than symbolically. The rest of me is bound in canonical human emotions and typical of mankind's history. I'm easy enough to figure out because I have hewn to recognizable conventions. I am indeed a family man, a professional, a patriot, a Christian. People know enough of those things to expect in me a reasonable man. So I'd have to be particularly and extraordinarily nutty for assassination. And that would force anyone with intelligent curiosity to get through Cobb and other utterings for a reason that seems consonant with my peronality and ambition. 

If I were to go nutty, people could see it coming and they'd be sucking their teeth long before I climbed the bell tower. I'm no Anakin. You wouldn't be surprised, nor would I. So... I can't even speculate about how I might go nutty. I know me. I'd implode first. Hmm. I guess that's pretty boring... But one thing you could be relatively sure of, I'd be a lone nut. I'd do it for me. There's nothing any of y'all could do for me..

Under My Rock

Under my rock are my worms, damp straw and fungus smells. It's yawning time. 

Time to shed a few holiday pounds and look out for rainbows. And once again I'm late. I should know that the day that we put up the tree should be the day before we take the picture and two days before we send it to the shop to be replicated. But we have mailmerge nightmares my wife and I, so you'll be getting our yuletide greetings some time next week via the snails. Barring complications. It's so hard to move things in meatspace.

It has been over a year since I've put off spending the four hundred dollars to replace the window in the back right seat of the Transporter. Damned BWM parts. And it's a sucker's bet to think there will be no more rain and put it off for another quarter, but I'll probably take it. I don't know why I think it something of an honor to have the sloppiest BMW, or why I'm attracted to shabby gentility. Just weird, I guess. If I could have the FJ tomorrow, I'd be happier, but I'm happy enough.

People don't change much. They just go through a lot and you can see which way they're leaning because of it. I'm starting to strech just a bit after having been ducking and flinching for a while. It's a long story that's none of your business, but if the past few weeks are any indication, business for me is headed in a much better direction. And I get to depend on me, and that makes it the better of most worlds. I'll have autonomy and those other things. I have managed to find a way to work in my own home county, which turned out to be more important than I thought and easier than I thought. 

I'm changing my focus very quickly and it has worked so well that when I think of Cobb, I can't think of anything to say. Instead, I'm reading and researching and putting my notes together, and very little of them have to do with the Cobbian Categories. No Critical Theory, no Domestic Affairs, no Local Deeds nor even Matters of the Spirit.

I'm running away from famousity of the sort I was heavily invested 3 and 4 years ago. So that means repurposing my website and business card. Soon come. But I still live in a strangling web of memory. I cannot change that I was X in 2000 and Y. Say "WADOT" and the images are still the same. Say "Indique Heights" and the memories remain. I am that I was, although I am different. 

If I have learned anything, it is not to attempt to represent a promise or to signify potential, but to only show them what you've done. That means spending all the time doing the work, not knowing you can do the work and pointing a flashlight to lead people to it. Enterprising people will find you. They usually do, sometimes even when you're under a rock.

And so I now also have purpose. And I find that I am working harder and with more satisfaction than I have in a long time. I almost feel an obligation, because my obligation to myself is also my that thing that others have invested in me. In otherwords, I have managed to secure a position in which people are invested in my self-interest. It is different than being a team player, not in opposition, but different. 

Feeling a new me which is the potential of the fully funded kid I thought I could never be, and at the end of the tunnel is lots of time, which is already slowing down. 

Affluence

Spy Delivery

I know, as much as just about anyone can know, that there's going to be an iPad G2 sometime this Spring. Why? Because photos and drawings and all sorts of bits and pieces of evidence keep showing up on the web. I use a variety of tools to keep me informed. It's rather awesome. Just this evening came evidence of a new iPhone. There's not much new technology involved conceptually in this regard. It's merely publish and subscribe. I subscribe to people whose judgment I find valuable, and they have their sources and methods.

The company being infiltrated in this case is Apple Computer, and I gather this will continue for the next several years as their success in the computer industry is just the gelling of a lot of old, good ideas that nobody else seems to have bothered to keep trying. Xerox used to have this kind of comprehensive vision of building hardware, software, networks, peripherals. So did DEC. And IBM used to have it, but now they don't. So Apple stands alone, making themselves a target and thereby accumulatings spies. 

This serves to remind me of things more important than phones and computers whose creation and deployment is infinitely more consequential. I'm talking about military hardware. And since I have never gotten over my childhood fascination with nuclear energy and the Soviet Threat, I never quite forget that there are organized networks of intelligence organizations who also publish and subscribe. Some of it, open source. 

So now I know about the J-20.

 

The Problem With Humanists

The goal of the humanities should be to disappear and be replaced by sciences, i.e. to become capable of doing useful, practical work in the world. Humanists should be striving to become scientists. What's dysfunctional is that many of them have rejected this ambition, have rejected the very idea of science, and are bent on remaining humanists forever. Thus they condemn themselves to doing research that can never be useful for anything except the advancement of their own careers. -- Benjamin Geer.

I came across this bit of wisdom over at Ian Bogost's site, with his great essay entitled The Turtlenecked Hairshirt. To wit:

If there is one reason things "digital" might release humanism from its turtlenecked hairshirt, it is precisely because computing has revealed a world full of things: hairdressers, recipes, pornographers, typefaces, Bible studies, scandals, magnetic disks, rugby players, dereferenced pointers, cardboard void fill, pro-lifers, snowstorms. The digital world is replete. It resists any efforts to be colonized by the post-colonialists. We cannot escape it by holing up in Berkeley waiting for the taurus of time to roll around to 1968. It will find us and it will videotape our kittens.

It's not "the digital" that marks the future of the humanities, it's what things digital point to: a great outdoors. A real world. A world of humans, things, and ideas. A world of the commonplace. A world that prepares jello salads. A world that litigates, that chews gum, that mixes cement. A world that rusts, that photosynthesizes, that ebbs. The philosophy of tomorrow should not be digital democracy but a democracy of objects.

If we want the humanities to become central, it is not the humanities that must change, but its members. We must want to be of the world, rather hidden from it. We must be brutal. We must invoke wrath instead of liberation. We must cull. We must burn away the dead wood to let new growth flourish. If we don't, we will suffocate under the noxious rot of our own decay.

And then if you go to the Democracy of Objects, you quickly get into matters that are most definitely over my head. What are the chances that I should actually read and understand Spinoza? Hmm.

 

All I Got For Christmas

I got some really great Christmas gifts. 

First and foremost, I got myself a new watch. It's a Fossil but it looks very sweet. I seem to never get myself right when it comes to watches and martial arts. It's complicated, but I'me very happy with this one, and I deserve jewelry, finally.

Secondly, I got Ella Fitzgerald's box set. Four CDs and 77 cuts. It's just a miracle. I seem to recall getting into it about conservative fantasies about the 'good old days', well now I've got all the evidence I need. What Ella Fitzgerald did in 1962 singing songs from then back to the 20s is all the good old days anybody needs to know. 

Thirdly, I got the Twain book. Haven't started that bad boy, I've been finishing off Harry Dresden (#6). Speaking of reading, I did finish Bush's Decision Points. There was very little in it that surprised me. Bush was pretty much as transparent a president as we have ever had, and that is what I've always like about him. In the same way that I was ultimately disappointed by Colin Powell, I was disappointed by Bush. There are just things that don't intrigue him, and maybe that's the kind of man that needs to run things - one who is not curious for curiosity's sake. Time will tell - I mean when I read about Romans, none of them seem particularly complex, with the exception of Constantine of course, but that's another story. I also did finish the ancients part of Will Durant.

My favorite Christmas present was Apple TV. 

I'm not going to spend a lot of time telling you how great it is. It's as great as an iPhone is great and it finally does what I've wanted my XBox to do, my Iomega NAS to do, and my Orb server to do, and XBMC to do, and Boxee to do, none of which did enough right. Apple does it again. Apple TV is really all that. If there's one flaw, it's that it doesn't do 1080p, and when you come out of it and watch broadcast HiDef, you really notice it. I'd also wish it did Picasa, but that will probably never happen. Still, it has been enough for me to reawaken my Flickr account. It's that good.

My trip to NYC was very cool, glad to meet the people I met and family I haven't seen. Glad to be able to love NYC for a few days and then get the hell out. I should have had a better dinner at least one of those nights, but the whole thing was a spur of the moment deal. That was a good present to myself as well. 

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That's all.