Cobb

Barack Obama, American Respect & Black Love

"We're gonna move on up one by oneWe ain't gonna stop until the job is doneCan I say am I black enough for yaAm I black-a black-a black enough for ya?"-- Billy Paul

via cobb.typepad.com

Back when people weren't quite as mindless, there was a credible way to talk about race and culture.

Or Leave It

My (new) boss gave me something to think about the other day as we were eating Bahn Mi at the local Pho joint behind Walmart. He said, why don't you go and work in Singapore for a month, you know, when we get the right engagement? I love my new boss. Finally, somebody who thinks like me. What have I been doing all these years?

Thsi morning's Bloomberg News had me reading about a gent from 'Middle Africa' who owns a pineapple farm there. He got his loan from Ecobank in which Mark Mobius is a stakeholder. 

Pineapples grow in Africa? Mark Mobius is still around, in Singapore? I clearly have been out of touch for a long time. My latest podcast download from the RSA featured an enviro-wackjob who nonetheless provoked me into thinking that it might not be a bad idea to live in Asia. I might like it better than I like a lot of things that I don't like in America. 

I say 'in' America rather than 'about' America, because the things that I love 'about' America I love anywhere they can be found, like a good Bahn Mi, and enough wifi to get me Bloomberg News on my iPad, and people who ignore Donald Trump, and a nice hotel room with all sorts of pillows. And obviously everything that's in America isn't what America is about. I think that's something a certain class of obnoxious and objectionable Americans don't understand, and I'm happy to leave them behind - just to get their noise out of my head.

I have a lot of what I call external imperative noise in my head these days. It makes me a very inefficient me. I'm going to air my brain out in the next couple of weeks. It should be good.

In the meantime, it makes sense to keep in mind what it is that Asians and Africans are trying to acheive and at exactly what cost. It might very well be a low cost with a high reward, and it seems to me that I need to figure that out. 

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario. Bernie Madoff is the tipping point, or worse yet, the tip of the iceberg and the guys at Zero Hedge are right - that the only thing left to do is wait for the rest of the sucker to pony up. The affluent and lumpen rich get soaked over the next decade and the the Obamaheads get exactly what they want, a big fat stupid undifferentiated middle-class with very little more prosperity than there was in 1952. Which was good if your idea of luxury was a Packard. America goes back to Fred and Wilma-style one car, one kid families and you have a great ocean of grey equality. There will be haves and have-nots, but no more have-mores like me. We'll all be in Singapore with Mark Mobius. 

That's a crazy scenario. There's no way I have the capital to be a baby banker chasing waterjug moms in Emerging Markets. But I can start to think along the same lines as my (new) boss, who has coders in South America, family in Bangalore, and an office in Lower Manhattan. 

Privacy & The Dead Hooker

Over the years I've been thinking a lot about privacy and its opposite, 'famousity'. These are things gained and lost by degrees, but people tend to forget that. The simple association I wish to make today is about the matter of fact way I believe that privacy does not automatically lead to safety.

There are few transactions more private than sex, and few sexual transactions more private than the illicit kind. But there is something about a murdered prostitute that should make you think about serial killers. There is a kind of privacy that draws attention to itself, like the privacy of the President Obama's health records. Call that secrecy. Similarly, there is a kind of like of privacy that draw attention away, like dressing as a typical tourist at Disneyland. Call that plainness. 

This subject is, of course, tangential to both the breach of the Playstation Network and of iPhone location services data in plain sight. For the hundreth time, I say that you give away private information all the time, ordering a pizza with your credit card. There was a time when people used to fear Caller ID. Can you remember that? 

There is a sort of privacy we lose by degrees, but that is not the same thing as becoming less secure by the same degrees. One can be secure in the open, and one can be secretive and attract all kinds of danger. Let's not confuse privacy with security. 

One last example. You are in the woods, alone, in a cabin. There is no cellphone coverage, no wifi, no television, no telephone, and the nearest mailbox is five miles down the mountain. You're quite private. But are you safe?

 

Obligatory Seriousness on the End of Birther Madness

I hear that there's an official request from the President of the Uniteed States to the appropriate bureaucracy in Hawaii providing a birth certificate, putting to rest all rumors to the contrary. There's really only three things to say about this.

1. It illustrates that if the President wanted it done, it would be done. End of story. Therefore, he clearly didn't want it done.

2. Birthers need to STFU.

3. Birthers will not STFU. They will go find another conspiracy theory. 

There are always parallels made between Birthers and Truthers. Some odd bunch of peasants who don't deserve franchise have managed, in our brain dead mediasphere to make headlines. That's nothing new. I think the better comparison is made between Birthers and the people who assumed that Dick Cheney was trying to make money from Haliburton and had secret meetings with energy people in his office. In both of these situations there is a level of contempt in the Oval Office that spits contemptuously at the presumption of irate citizens. 

Clearly Obama was working on a principle. 

 

Don't Forget The Nukes

Back when I was considering rescuing hiphop from itself, I wrote a poem in the mode of Public Enemy's 'Don't Believe the Hype'. It started like this and went downhill from there:

 don't forget the nukes

blast!

caught you livin in the fast lane

well here it is again, another birth pain

just another trillion or three under the deep sea

comin up with a mirv to fricasee me

some deny it defy it try to forget it

but their taxes buy it on credit

but can i grab the mic and say it clearly

there's my forty acres, we paid dearly

--

I never forget the nukes completely, but sometimes I need to be reminded. This morning, waiting for a doctor's care I watched the following video. 

--

It rather hit me like a ton of bricks that the possibility for a massive explosion was possible and covered up. It reminded me of the salient phrase from last week which will get into Cobb's Rules. Don't plan for the small emergency, plan for the Black Swan emergency. When all of your emergency plans rule out the unthinkable, it means you haven't done enough thinking. And the inevitable result is that you cover your ass, lie and fudge. That creates risk by definition, and when you hide that risk you don't get to choose whose life it affects. That's where my head is at these days - the consequences of not thinking of the biggest big picture - of not considering your own mortality in it all. So it does not surprise me that the Party official who covered up the scope of the disasters committed suicide.

I think all of us have, or should have after watching this documentary instead of something dumb and funny on television, a deep sense that we should be getting rid of nuclear weapons. It is a political consensus that is awaiting some common sense talk. When you recognize that 600,000 Soviets fought in the war against Chernobyl we shouldn't have any problem or fear making similar efforts in containing proliferation. 

A Rude Question for White People

I'm disappointed with Adam Serwer. Ever since I started following his blog at American Prospect, he seems to have gone short attention span theatre on me. I know that when you're in the zone, you can keep up with every little thing, but a lot of crap creeps in. For example, I have no reason to expect that any sensible American would pay attention to anything Donald Trump says, and yet he has bought the attention of millions. So one of the things that slipped through Serwer's keyboard was this retweet:

Harvard. RT @KathaPollitt I know, they wouldn't let me in because i'm white. And not a law student. But mostly because I'm white.

My immediate answer is, well hell Katha, if you want to represent that way, you're exactly as white as you want to be. My general goodwill position is equally reflective. If there is something in 'white' that is not racial, then it is entirely the choice of the individual. Same thing counts for 'black'. We all pretty much parotted the same thing all through the 90s and 00s. Race is a cultural construct. That means it can be constructed and of course as the drooling pomo scholars know, it can be deconstructed. But what if Katha is not in charge of her whiteness, at all? What if blackness is an American essentialism and so is whiteness? What if they are inescapable? What if white Americans can never be anything but what non-whites say they are? 

Not that I like getting into the subject, but I cannot avoid the question. How white exactly are white people and do you 'as a white person' believe that you are in control of your whiteness?

If you are in control of your whiteness, what exactly do you want it to mean? Does that work for you? If you are not in control and want to escape your whiteness, what exactly is it you want to leave behind? Can you? If you're somewhere in the middle, how do you see it in other white people?

My opinion, which I'm sure I will have to explain two or three times, is that of course every American inherits a reductionist racial identity and that it is up to them to shed that skin. For some people it's important for others it is not. I say racism is primarily in the gaze, not in the being, so I have reversed my Race Traitor (as in Tim Wise) position on whiteness studies. I no longer say that white people must invest a great deal of thought and energy into undoing their identity for America to be what it should. That applies equally to black Americans and everyone else. The first step in demonstrating your racism starts with such prescriptions as "I cannot fulfill my human potential until  ____ people do the following.."

So white people. What's up with being white? You know who you are. 

Illogical Hateration for the Other King

This weekend I went cruising through the old 'hood looking for people who have forgotten me and I have forgotten. This time, for the first time in a while, I felt that my hooptie was a bit too shabby to show off. But I was feeling very good anyway. My old street looks small, but maybe that's because more people have cars parked on it. I suppose that's a good thing. 

I spent the most time at Rancho Cienega Park. Sometimes we called it Rancho, but most of the time we called it Dorsey Pool. l spent a lot of time reminiscing about the good times we had there and most significantly about the great moment I had remembering something in particular about the pool. I have several fond memories of the place, but I just want to go into one which was about the lifeguard. I will never remember his name, but he was one of the first young adults I met in the neighborhood that had visions beyond. I remember one time that he walked a bunch of us over to Thrifty and bought us all triple cones, and it was no problem for him. He was nice, he was cool, he was smart. But most of all, he understood jazz. So he would play stuff like (I presume) Roy Ayers at the pool instead of the normal stuff. But there was one particular song that he played that I loved. I remembered the intro for many years afterward but never knew the song. Like the beginning of Flashlight or Strawberry Letter 23 there was that palpable excitement. It couldn't less than 25 years later when I discovered that the song was by Herbie Hancock, a version of Watermelon Man, now as then one of my all time favorite Jazz Fusion songs. But I'll always remember The Lifeguard at Dorsey Pool.

But I don't have any similar memories, nor am I inclined to consider many about the person of Celes King III who died at the age of 73 in 2006 - give or take. I did know that he occupied this building on Santa Barbara and then King Boulevard right next to a police station, and like many other mysterious men and women of color was said to be one of the great leaders of Black America by such publications as Ebony Magazine. He was a bailbondsman and from that came his fortune.

Celes King III was many other good things, but from my point of view no great thing. If I knew the name of The Lifeguard I would name Dorsey Pool after him, but as it stands it has been named after Celes King. Somewhere in the annals of the meetings of the bureacrats of the 10th District there is the glorified set of whereas clauses that show why above all other men in history that pool should be named after Celes King. Such words will never be emotionally compelling to me. I just won't be able to get over the fact that he made money as part of the "Prison Industrial Complex". 

I know he was CORE. I know he helped a lot of people. In fact, I think he was a Republican too. I have that vague feeling that I wrote about him somewhere back in the mists of time. But Google doesn't remember and there is no Wikipedia about the man, so I speak my ill and that's what we get. 

The Rancho Cienega Pool was by far, the most beautiful building in my neighborhood. It cost a quarter to swim there when I was a kid and 50 cents if you were over 18. Now kids under 18 swim free and adults cost 2.50. There used to be three panels in the roof that could retract and let the sun directly in, but that mechanism has been broken for decades. And oh by the way right next door are the Arthur Ashe Tennis Courts at which Venus and Serena spent a lot of community time doing clinics, or so I'm told. So King is in good company. One day, they may restore the pool to its former glory. I hope so, and maybe King's good name might aid in that restoration. But I tell you what. I hope I get to be that big a millionaire first, then they could rename it after me. 

Big Time

Can you find the successful black man in this picture? It's going to be really hard to find him, but not for the reason you might think. It's not because the resolution on the picture is not high enough. It's not because it's whites-only night at the ballpark. It's not because there's no such thing as a successful black man in Amerikkka. It's because the successful black man in this picture is the founder of the company whose sign you see in the middle of the frame. He's there, but he's not actually where you might expect him to be. 

Apeshit

Just in case anybody forgot.

A Note About Royalty

In my world of thinking, I tend to agree that men are motivated by three things: Fear, Glory and Greed. This is an old idea of Aristotle's or somebody whose name fits into that same ancient bucket. Is interchangeable with Honor to my way of thinking, and in a small enough community, all your honor is glorified. But for the majority of us peasants, most of our good deeds go unnoticed. 

In these days of fame and media celebrity, one can be glorified without being particularly honorable. That is something of a problem for peasants who don't realize their position as peasants. After all, if you can get rich by being a buffoon, what is the point of dignity? Part of the Peasant Theory is to remind us that rights are a gift of the strong, and we must attend to whether the strong are righteous or else we will find that our 'rights' are merely arbitrary favors. Therefore we must consider with our own best thinking whether the strong are actually honorable. 

Not so much in American meritocracy, but in much of human history, ordinary people are bestowed titles and honors by the powerful, and the powerful are often royalty. We are fortunate to understand that royalty is expected to be honorable, and therefore there is honor in service to royalty. It does sound awfully feudal, and it is. We humans understand feudalism in its essence - I would say that it is something we know innately. We study history attending ultimately as to whether kings were bad or good. It is the focus of all our literature, broadly speaking. 

So all of us in the English speaking world ought to have some interest in the goings on between this or that royal family. While I confess that I've been completely out of the loop in that regard for the sake of honor, we all ought to be as interested in the Royal Wedding as we are with any major election in the West.

 

Tracked!

If honesty is the best policy, then here are the facts that my iphone knows about my whereabouts. It's actually not that scary is it? 

If you haven't heard, our illustrious new Senator Franken has decided to go after Apple for having this information on your iphone. It being somewhat persistent give an opening to those of us concerned with privacy. But here's the thing - once again. If you go to a restaurant and pay with a credit card, you are giving information away to a complete stranger, or two or three, as it changes hands. Are you that interesting? Is your money? Is your location? Sure it's easy for hackers to get your info, just like its easy for mechanics to steal your car.

My point is, no matter how important your private information is to you, it's even less important to the overwhelming majority of people. 

It turns out that I found some fairly interesting things about my Mac and iphone today with regard to where stuff goes on my machines. Also, the best guess is that the information that persists is done in error. All this app that takes my data to this visualization has is a few days of information. I was actually hoping for a lot more to show up, but maybe I did something wrong. Either way, I'm pretty much broadcasting from Foursquare anyhow.

Easter Disabilities

Time for chocolate!

The Sunset Mission

I haven't been to many funerals, but this marks the fourth year in a row that somebody I know has died. Chances are there will be two deaths one of these years and then I will be a different man. This time around, death evoked a sort of strange sadness, an inexplicable hilarity and an embarassing dissonance. I reflect at arms distance.

Two or three weeks ago I began writing a journal entry on Dissonance. I didn't finish it for a while and the ideas in my head dissapated. I came back around and then pushed it out the door, backdated appropriately. It is only slightly ironic that no comments have emerged. I didn't alert Facebook. But that sort of solitary feeling I had then has come in and out of focus as I read Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden and Charles Stross' Bob Howard. Howard, much more than Dresden is located, in a whirlwind of un-self knowledge as a trembling practitioner of arcane arts that are connected to unthinkable horrors. Both Dresden and Howard, by a combination of bad luck and usefull skills wind up working in parallel worlds with the rest of us civilians. Many are the days they wish they didn't know what they know, and everyday as they walk amongst us muggles they suffer a solitary dissonant distance.

When I got married in NYC, my cousin was the DJ and although I had the CD track listings fairly well documented, it did happen that an inappropriate cut of music interrupted the flow of our nupitals. The incongruity of the song was jarring.

So I'm at the funeral and this is what happens. 

The dearly departed was not buried in the ground but entombed in a mausoleum. The service was brief, in one of the marble corridors. To my left and right are three foot squares that go from the floor to the 21 foot ceiling, each either blank or with the plaques of the dead and a holder for flowers. I can read the names and the dates and the seven word epitaphs as I walk towards our ceremony. There are words said. I recognize the rite. There is a song sung. I know the lyrics. There is a long mourful saxophone solo played echoing off the polished walls and floor. I've never heard it before and it goes long enough for me to believe that it is not a song at all. And yet, it sets all of the tone perfectly. It makes you want to have known someone in life who would play for you in death, and never worry about a CD player or a program guide. The pallbearers take the coffin and place it on the device, and rows of men in dark suits look at the wood of it. It is dark brown with brass, but the device looks like something that belongs in an auto mechanic shop. 

The ceremony ends and the gravediggers engage the device which begins to scissor lift the coffin three squares up the West wall of the mausoleum. It groans like an old elevator filling the hall with the moan of its electric motor and the gravediggers adjust the safety bars with clanging as they ride up. The noise is startling and the crowd mumbles. The gravediggers are outfitted in dark blue coveralls and they move with a practiced casual efficiency. You immediately know they are in a union. They mix the tub of spackle as the device rises higher. They stop at the crypt and lock a mechanism in place. The push the coffin in on heavy rollers and it sounds like the clatter of the giant aluminum storage containers they roll into aircraft, and it is just about as solemn as the movement of freight. One of the gravediggers follows the coffin in. He must have a secret exit. They place the slab, and then jack down the device. It makes even more noise going down than up. It's all inappropriate noise, jarring and incongruous. 

I must go. I move to another hallway of the Sunset Mission Mausoleum. It is where the more expensive crypts are. There are fresh wreaths. I sit alone, exhausted. I really didn't know the man that very well. We were distant family but he never gave me a lesson to carry on. None of this makes sense. It's just that sad. All of the old men there, I second-guessed them saying who's next, hopefully not me. Who will come? What song will they play? I sit sprawled out with the program in my right hand and the tears come very, very slowly. I am wearing dark sunglasses. Inside. I hadn't seen Frank since the last funeral, or was it a wedding? Just as I walked away from him, I recognized him staring halfway up the marble wall. Half of his life is entombed in the very same hallway; the mother of his two sons. I sit alone staring at my shoes. The fragrance of the gardenias is overpowering, and the people in the other hallway are now back to conversational volume, and now I sob. There is no rhyme or reason here. It's all just inappropriate. 

The sax player espies me in my state, he shuffles up to me in his red and brown houndstooth jacket, fedora and bluetooth. He offers words of comfort, that I remain to carry on. I sniff a thank you and he moves on to the next corridor. I don't have anything to carry on, but the musician must have thought I was a son. I am not. I am a grandson-in-law and I didn't know Edward's name was Edward until today. I never got past the family appellation. And suddenly I feel as though I'm a minor character in a disjointed French dramatic farce. 

And everything is hilarious. I begin to chuckle and then I am laughing like a madman - like a murderer let go on a technicality. Nothing makes sense and nothing has to make sense, all that truly exists is the lot of us desperately trying to make sense of things. We're pattern making, socializing, inference engines spread across the inversions and chaos of life trying to pinky-swear our way towards confidence. But there's always a gravedigger. Even when there's no grave, there's always a busy, harried, gravedigger into whose eyes you can stare for a moment and tell that he'd rather just have a sandwich. 

I don't care for the irreverent. I'm done laughing and I'm ready to drive away. Nobody came with me so I get out to the car and curse the heat. Nothing's funny any more. I drive to the next node of the day's ritual and arrive before the crowd. There is Jack Daniels, bleu cheese and carpaccio. I have all I need and I want to get seriously plastered, but I cannot. There are other distant relatives in town from another arm of the family and I have obligations to the living. I beg off early and head to the 405. 

I've never felt so full every little moment and of nothing in particular. I've never felt so moved by the idea that it might just be completely impossible to make sense of anything in human life. I cried because I was truly alone in the Sunset Mission and I knew it, and I laughed at the idea that anybody could make that better. I'm not quite old enough to worry that I might be next, and yet somehow I know that I'm as ready to die as I'll ever be. I'm not quite sure that the acceptance of my inevitable death makes me appreciate life any more - so many of us fuck it up so completely. So many of us exist trying to get a clue and never communicate jack. So many of us spend our entire lifetimes never connecting with any permanence.

I feel only the need for judgment in the immediate. Ghost Dog Samurai life in the moment, ever telling the whole truth to yourself and acting on what you know to be true. That very well may be all there is. 

Missions fail. 

It could not be proper for me not to draw a lesson, even that there are no stories worth retelling and that all human meaning is the integrity of action. But that is the square I land on, naked without a homily. You can life your entire life and nobody knows you but you and your faith that God knows you, or your faith that there is no God to know you. Either way the last hands that touch your body will very likely be people you could never know. Make of it what you will. Make of it whatever you can.

Robin Hanson on Collapse

GCR 2008: Robin Hanson - Catastrophe, Social Collapse and Human Extinction from Future of Humanity Institute on Vimeo.

While we're on the subjects.

Staring Down the Barrel

I love the mechanical coolness of firearms, but somehow I haven't managed to get one. I'm rather in a survival mode of thinking these days, sensitive as I am to the lies and distortions coming out of Japan as regards the actual status of their reactors, and the to the lies and distortions coming out of Washington as regards the actual status of their deficit reduction plans. The latest news is that somebody in Texas with the last name Bass, has got the temerity to take delivery on 1 billion dollars worth of gold. Not trading futures, taking delivery. This, I gotta see.

Anyway, my experience with guns is mixed. I remember not having one and witnessing an armed robbery, wishing I had one, and then regetting the knowledge that I would have not hesitated to use it. I remember being under fire from the retaliation of somebody who just got robbed and who couldn't shoot straight and I was mad as hell. I remember shooting a couple different pistols at a range and realizing how difficult it actually is to shoot straight, and I remember being bored to tears plinking with a bolt action .22 and wanting a serious sniper rifle. 

What kind of gun should I get? 

I've answered the question several different ways. For self-defense the answer is none. Pepper spray and eskrima are all I need. For that I'd have to spend a few bucks and then a few years for the second level. There's a blade ops meetup in the area. I'm not really that interested. Pepper spray is plenty. 

For traveling and shooting with gun enthusiasts, some match 22 pistol is what I hear. Never followed that up. 

For home defense, it's all about Mister Mossberg. Not interested. 

For concealed carry, I don't know if I can get that in California, and I almost never go anyplace I feel the need to be strapped. But I figure a snub .38 revolver. 

So really I'm most interested in getting something for the cool factor and the mechanical knowledge of how to take it apart, put it back together and gather some competence in firing the weapon. But also for the fraternity of Second Amendment free men. And I've sorta answered that question in two divisions.

In the pistol division, I like the Baretta P92. In the rifle division, I like the AR-15. What do you like? What should I get?

A Conservative View of the Shaquanda Cotton Story

From the archives. April 2007

One of the best discussions of a controversy at Cobb:

Shaquanda Cotton & You

Abandoned Amusement Parks

There are more than you would think, and the only thing we are missing is nostalgia.

These days I have been gathering a different kind of junk to fill my garage. I'm putting together emergency go-bags and survival kits. I spent a couple hours browsing last weekend at the local Fry's and REI to check out the gear. My next major purchase is going to be a good two-way radio. Funny when I think about how I want that vs my desire for an iPad - a thing that gives me no more function than I already have. I go to Consumer Reports and there are no listings for walkie talkies. And that's not odd either. After all, what is CR, but something you spend money on to help you spend money?

It started with me looking for Marineland. It was the world's largest oceanarium (yes there are words for such things) back when it opened.

Coincidently, 'All My Children' goes off the air this year after 41 years. That is a thing I never paid attention to, nor much respected people who did. And yet it was just another frivolity that stands as a kind of ironic testament of the strength of America. America is still a country where people can afford to waste money, and yet with systems in place that are brutally honest. It seems like an irony that you can go to prison for stealing a car worth $500 measly bucks, or do five years in the penitentiary for stealing $100 cash with a $50 gun, and yet we have a Federal government that has spent 20 years worth of everybody's future taxes already and it doesn't get shut down. Last time I checked the debt was something like $36,000 per household. Yet somehow you have to marvel that we had that much to steal, and still we hate theft. We can still get our emotions involved around the principle of very small things. We can care about that $500 car that much. People talk about 'my' soap opera. We are an ownership society.

There's a great documentary by Niall Ferguson about the divergent paths of the New World. The English idea of property and landed gentry vs the Spanish idea of property and the rights of the crown. The English idea of property was inherently more democratic, so more people had the right to make money first through ownership of land. Naturally we should all be quick to point out the difference between more pople having the right and everybody having the right, but more is much better than 'select few'. The point of natural rights is that success is possible *from* everybody but not *by* everybody. The important thing to note here is that that when more people can have and do have, more people can fail and the costs of failure don't decapitate society. It is a fundamental feature of robustness.

As well, one can naturally expect that some of the many who  succeed do so in a surfeit of goofy ways. That's the downside of having an ungentrified aristocracy of merit. Lady Gaga, whomever she is, merits the attention of the vapid millions. But how could she outlast any other goofball amusement park? Lion Country Safari seemed like a good idea at the time. People could be amused by feeding sardines to seals, once upon a time. But when times get tough, all that crap fails. Well, most of it. And still people will hold true to the principles, no matter how small the amounts.

So if we have an earthquake in California (ya think?), people who let the water run in the shower for ten minutes just so it can get warm enough while they're running water in the sink to shave their faces, all in order to be presentable for meetings that accomplish one or two things after lunch, will scramble looking for a clean, clear pint to drink. Water is still water.

Land is still land and groceries are still groceries. Houses made of bricks will always be better than houses made of straw or sticks. Amusements will be abandoned, staples will not.

These days I'm thinking about the value of things I know and the absolute value of things I have.

Future Coup - Surviving Nero

 If Petraeus said he'd run for President, the Right would forget about Sarah Palin in a heartbeat, and we would have a President an order of magnitude (or two) more educated, worldwise and honorable.  I think we'll have a military coup before we have a lamer who can completely ruin the country. If it has come to Donald Trump, and even Haley Barbour, who's not entirely awful. I think patriots in the armed forces will start to think twice...

Who *should* be president and how big a screwup would it take for us to have an American Ceasar?

Oh Yeah, Jazz

I recently fell into a Jazz discussion via a debate between Stanley Crouch and James Mtume over the importance of Miles foray into electronic jazz fusion. I forgot that such debates still raged, and I have found some old soulmates in the process.

My hunger for jazz has been rather weak and I haven't looked for anything new for a while. Everything is just a new interpretation of the Standards and I'm happy enough with that. I got the Ella Fitzgerald boxed set for Christmas and that has been the last outstanding thing, although I am really hooked on the latest Stanley Clarke. But basically, other than Laswell and McFerrin, I haven't bothered to make a move to get any jazz and am happy with my casual listening. 

Every once in a while, I might get a Chick Corea or Herbie Hancock. The smooth jazz doesn't bother me much although I absolutely hate the 4/4 version of Take Five. But I've met a new writer Nashira Priester and she's connected via Facebook to Greg Tate and suddenly I am reminded of that whole world of the music/cultural production and criticism. 

Hmmm.

Straight Dope on Fukushima

...given the lack of transparency, given the lack of implementation of the design changes, given some of the other shortcomings that we've heard of in terms of radiation suits and radiation badges, I don't think it's unreasonable to question if TEPCO should be allowed to continue to operate nuclear power plants. Now, I'm not yelling, I'm not screaming, but I don't think I can be any clearer in saying that I don't trust TEPCO, and I'm not sure anybody else should either based on what's happened during this accident. "
-- Cdr. Mark L. Mervine, Nuclear Engineer (USNR, Ret.)

Following up on my Radioactive Fish investigation, I've been trying to find some better, and now the best information I can find on regular updates from Fukushima. Something that's comprehensive, expert and not dumbed down. So far I have found Mark Mervine who has recorded 19 or 20 interviews that can be found on Vimeo. That's going to be my first source.

I found nothing good at INPO and the USNRC that satisfied me. I knew INPO because I put together a reporting system for them for a power company that operated nukes in CT back in the 90s. Anyway, here's the blog.

 

Wall Street Itself Is A Commodity

Of all the things I could blame on Obama, there is one that I cannot, and it is his or anyone's ability to give the wealthiest Americans any reason to maintain some sense of patriotism when it comes to the NYSE. I'm sure that there are some conversations I probably should have heard over the past few months on Bloomberg, but I decided that the $100 subscription to the podcast was not worth it. Maybe this quarter, considering whatever bonus I might keep after I buy my iPad, I'll think about getting jiggy in the market again. 

As you know, the NYSE is being sold to Germans.

If that doesn't make you stop and think what's going wrong in America, then reconsider the fact that Budweiser is not owned by Anheuser Busch. Remember that? Nothing is American but brand names it seems, and nobody in America makes anything except cool ideas. We don't even make money any more. Wall Street is for sale.

I don't quite understand how or why this happened which is really strange considering the rules about foreigners owning American banks. It seemed to be a no-brainer to keep the Feds out of the banking business to allow any number of international investors to buy Wamu or Wachovia, but there were rules. Not real rules, I suppose, but the kinds of rules that apply in dorms at the LSE - you know, conventions that keep the kids thinking they are really and truly civilized, but are actually nothing more than dormhouse rules. 

There is one sparkling hope, which is that Germans maintain the sort of grounding we have seen in Merkle over her regime, no foolishness when it comes to big finances. Perhaps as well there will be a sort of cultural sensibility in the new ownership which will be a bit more intolerant of the sort of monkeyshines (to put it mildly) that have ruined so many fortunes and created so many empty ones. But I don't know, and I haven't studied that level of high finance in quite some time. Sadly, I haven't developed the sort of gut I would have hoped to when I began studying economics several years ago, and I feel rather like the guy who can only program Excel macros, trying to make sense of what Larry Ellison does. 

I do remember when the Obama administration attempted to put a certain set of shackles on executive pay and the quickness with which that was both shouted down and evaded. I have no confidence that there is anyone who might have been more capable than the vengeful and powerful Eliot Spitzer in putting the appropriate bite down on people with f*k you money.  And I know a bloody lot will starve before anybody short of a Vladimir Putin clamps down on the anybody like George Soros. 

I listened to a podcast last night that actually put into words the kind of resignation many Americans might someday fear. "At least in an empire, where you have no vote, you don't feel so disgusted that your government is screwing you over." Living with no choice is always easier than living with a choice. It's so tragic that so often so many poor choices are made. 

So I guess it's time to resubscribe to Zerohedge. 

Lauren Booth - Just Wow

Dalit Goddess English

Transcendent value or shameless exploitation?

Crumbs

Radioactive Fish

"..and then he looked right through me as if I wasn't there."
-- Killing Me Softly

My research is incomplete, but I'm not convinced that there is a such thing as radioactive fish. Let me tell you why.

Ionizing radiation does not work like a poison, it doesn't stay. It is actually kinetic energy of electromagnetic particles. The best way to think of how radiation kills you is to think of a million tiny water needles running through your body over a period of exposure. They are so small that you don't feel them, but they leave a trail of dead cells in their wake. Depending on what cells they hit, they do different kinds of damage. In red blood cells they do lots of damage, they just bounce off of bones. Once these 'water needles' run out of their kinetic energy, they disappear, or melt away like water. The point is that they don't leave any trace of themselves behind, that is, if they are the tiny ones like electrons or gamma rays.

Neutron radiation is different. Neutrons are big enough to knock atoms out of balance and kick out another neutron and destabilize them. Neutron radiation is the key to why nuclear power works. One neutron hits another neutron sometimes with enough energy to kick out some electrons and more than one neutron. In elements like Uranium where there are big huge numbers of neutrons, you could create a chain reaction. That's all nuclear fission is, like a bowling ally infinite loop that creates bowling balls. Collisions and collisions.

How long can an unstable atom spit out more neutrons and energy? That's it's half life and it depends on the atom. It's like certain atoms carry a grudge if they get hit by a neutron. They have long half lives. Cesium is like that. Iodine is like that. Obviously Uranium is like that. Water, on the other hand is not like that. In the first place, it doesn't have a lot of neutrons. That's why when the Japanese nuke plants got out of hand, they doped the water with Boron. Boron is neutron greedy and it doesn't get unstable. But normally neutrons don't do much to water. 

Something that is irradiated doesn't necessarily become radioactive itself. It depends on if it gets hit by neutrons or not, and then if it does get hit by neutrons is it the stuff that carries a neutron grudge.  And this is where you have to make the distinction when it comes to fish. So far as I know fish are made of materials whose atoms don't have long half-lives. I mean if they did, how could the fish live?

In a nuclear reactor, the worrisome part are heavy elements that are radioactive. In Japan, some of these heavier elements which I believe to have been present in the feul cores escaped after the explosions. What is not clear to me is how the reactor containments have not been breached (as I keep hearing) and yet these more heavy elements escaped. Some logical clarity and less dumbed down reporting would be helpful. At any rate, it's suff like that, carried away in particulate matter (smoke) that lands on fruits and vegetables that cause the radioactivity 'of' food. It's not the radiation, it's the contamination by heavy radioactive material. In other words, toxic waste.

So we get more to the question of fish, and in particular the role of seawater in this ecology. The engineers generally use and reuse purified water to cool the reactor core and drive the turbines. That's a closed loop system for the most part, but still, the water does not stay radioactive even though it is exposed to neutron activation. The half life of water is about 7 days, and as far as I can tell it doesn't get very radioactive. Perhaps not at all. But the thing is that for the emergency, the engineers have used seawater to cool the reactors. To the extent that seawater contains various salts and trace elements with longer half-lives than water itself, this is the 'poison'. Sulfur, for example has a half life of 88 days. But in average seawater, sulfur is about .091%. Magnesium, on the other hand has a half life about 10 minutes, but there's more magnesium in seawater than sulfur. .129% So now you're beginning to see the start of a math problem.

If you have 10,000 tons of seawater exposed to x amount of neutron radiation (as a fraction of the total ionizing radiation given off by the nuclear core) what fraction of that will be absorbed by the trace salts in that seawater when dumped into the ocean? And by dumped into the ocean that means 10,000 tons of seawater in an area roughly the size of the region fished for your sushi flavor of choice. I can't imagine that a generic fishing boat is going to be within 10 miles of shore, and 10 miles of ocean can contain how many tons of water? So then you have that whole dispersal question and how many drops carry out into the fisheries. So you have some fraction of radioactive mineral salts and their half-lives to account for and guess how much of that gets into fish...

You should clearly see that even when the seawater pumped out of Fukishima is seven million times what it 'should' be, there are a lot of factors dispersing that radioactivity, including the fact that radioactive material itself degrades.

On the whole as a class of environmental disaster, this is, in my view, two orders of magnitude smaller than the blown oilwell from last year in the Gulf of Mexico. It's the radioactive smoke from an explosion, not largely contaminated seawater that's the problem, and the cesium and iodine on the fruits and veggies (particularly spinach) is the most dangerous stuff, not the seawater.

So eat your fish.

 

Paul Tillich

Pops and I had an interesting discussion today. He struggles with the idea of the omnipotent, everpresent and omniscient God because it means that God willed the great Japanese tsunami, which is a quite disturbing matter to him.

As I discussed this, I came explain my unoriginal idea of God as the substance of the universe, which made a great deal of sense of me when I first heard of and considered the Gospel of Thomas. Paul Tillich notably says:

He deprives me of my subjectivi­ty because he is all-powerf­ul and all-knowin­g. I revolt and make him into an object, but the revolt fails and becomes desperate. God appears as the invincible tyrant, the being in contrast with whom all other beings are without freedom and subjectivi­ty. He is equated with recent tyrants who with the help of terror try to transform everything into a mere object, a thing among things, a cog in a machine they control.

He becomes the model of everything against which Existentia­lism revolted. This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control.

This is the deepest root of atheism. It is an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theologica­l theism and its disturbing implicatio­ns.

It is interesting to consider that this might be the deepest root of atheism, since the problem of what Tillich calls 'theological theism' is so easily understood. And if this is all Nietzsche was killing, you'd wonder what was so great about the discovery. 

Two Harvards

I don't know that I ever wrote about a particular day that I can still remember clearly. It was the day that I went to the Harvard Business School orientation seminar at the Airport Hilton some time back around 1985. I had become something of a star at Cal State, making Dean's list, holding 18 units, having gotten my third internship at Xerox, being the chapter secretary for my frat, national officer for NSBE and the Engineering School's rep to the Student Finance Committee. And my girlfriend was bangin' too. I saw the future with perfect clarity, and I knew my path.

Now this HBS seminar happened to be given by one of the black Harvard organizations, and it was led by a young woman who was in the Public Health specialty. And I learned some very important lessons that day. The first was that there was a (light skinned) black woman who felt her duty to tell all of us perspective masters candidates that racism was alive and well in Boston and at Harvard. She told the tale of unendurable pain of being questioned all of time about whether or not she was an actual Harvard student. 'They take one look at me and assume that I'm from Northeastern'.

I was sitting in the front row and I turned around to see the reactions of the others in the room. I caught two reactions and that was all I cared about. My own impression, as you might guess, was to do all I could to suppress a verbal slap. Here she was at Harvard and she had the nerve to complain. WTF! 

The first reaction was something I didn't expect at all, but man was I happy about it. There was a super cute girl who was from Spain in the room. If you can imagine Rosie Perez with firey red hair done up 80s style, that would be close. She was like an Almodovar bombshell and she was giving me the eye. Holy smokes. We exchanged big grins. Man was I going to enjoy Harvard. 

The second reaction was from a black man who looked to be soemwhere between 28 and 32. He was wearing a suit, although I seem to remember him in a vest and tie with his jacket over the back of his chair. Or maybe he was wearing braces, like many MBA types did in the mid 80s. Either way, he was shaking his head slightly. At the end of the seminar I spoke to him. He intimated to me that he was running something on the order of a $400 million budget at Ford Aerospace. I was tremendously impressed, and although he had other reasonable things to say I heard all I needed to hear. 

I knew that at my school, there were seven year students who were officers in the Black Survival Union who had no compunction in telling anyone who would listen how corrupt the system was. I just never expected to hear the same kind of noise out of Harvard. It reinforced something I realized. Sometimes people are their own worst enemies, and Joni Mitchell never lied. 

Sometime later, I fell off my own fast track and never made it to Harvard. It wasn't until six or seven years that I got a chance to actually live in Boston, and I spent some time poking around Cambridge. By that time I had the twin experiences of having someone with an MBA report to me, and having had Microsoft recruit me, both being rather dual-edged. Watching 'The Social Network' last week reminded me of running through the streets of Cambridge and making social connections from a different perspective. Remind me to tell you some Boston stories...

To that dude and that babe. Thank you. You reminded me that I always have me.

Solitary

Today I am home alone. Last night I was home alone. I looked around and I played my time travel game and then I did exactly what I wanted to do until I could no longer stay awake. I settled into bed at about half past midnight listening to a Dan Carlin podcast knowing that I could sleep in.

My time travel game is something I play from time to time. About a third of the time, I take an historical figure from the past and introduce him to the marvels of the present. It challenges me to figure out what they might have known and what they might find intriguing about our current situation. But most of the time I just take a younger me from the past and update him on my own life and circumstances. That variation allows me to check myself and see if I'm living the way I should be by my own standards. Most of the time it's all good, which is why I still play.

Last night's installment was about the marvel of two Big Macs for $3.50 and the slide show presentation I made of my sixteen year old daughter. Then parts of it were about GPS and flat screen hi-def. I was talking to my 24 year old self who was reading Henry Miller. Sometime during the day I had used the phrase 'Monsiuer L'Econome' in a conversation about backtracking my overtime for the first quarter. I owe paperwork. But I used to be very wary of bean counting, as any fan of Henry Miller would, and the thought of paying rent back in 1985 brought on some interesting dorm-room conversations between myself and my two frat brothers. So the first thing I told Mike was that D. was correct when he predicted that I was never going to get into Harvard Business. I had the nerve to consider myself fortunate in that regard in retrospect over the drama of 'The Social Network' that I watched last weekend. In fact I have been meditating on the portrayal of Zuckerberg in so many meetings where he is giving people the least amount of consideration possible - how many times have I done exactly that? Scary. I hope that I am not trying to be an asshole but I have absolutely no assurance that I am not.

That is why I am writing this essay this morning when I could be a bit more productive considering that I owe about 4 more hours of work for my quota of 40 this week.

I shaved my head again after two years. I'm trying to let go of that thing inside me that wants to be the practice director of a consulting firm. I'm covering up the grey that I wanted to show off a few years back. Right now I am getting back to my core energies as a high geek programmer. It's slowly working, but this quarter I'm stepping it up.

On Cobb, folks have been coming at me with what I consider to be half-assed arguments. And just last night I heard words said of Christopher Hitchens that I beleive are also true of me. He assumes that you know much of what he knows and so writes in ways that imply what he believes to be obvious with an pithy set of words that lack necessarily short declarative sentences. I do that with my writing. I do that with my speaking. I'm convinced it makes me appear to be something I am not, which is an asshole.

A couple years ago I thought it was important to balance this sort of dissonance with a number of video clips. So when things got hairy on the blog, I would cut a YouTube. I may or may not return to that practice. The question for me is whether or not I'd be wasting time explaining again what I have already explained.

I can be selfless, but not a nullity. I must decide the balance and in the end I have to just say what I mean to say and not take any real responsibility for whether or not people get it. I do the work and leave the commentary for people who desire to do that. I am shedding my managerial layer in life and trying to focus on being a doer, a producer, a solver of problems. There are personalities much more fit for the socialization of ideas, I truly do not have the patience for it. I could grow it and I could do what I call 'heads up work'. But I'd rather not. I appreciate those who do it - I've been in sales, I've done it. But I prefer 'heads down work'. I have great powers of focus and concentration, and when the time is right, I can do some pretty cool, fairly precision crafting of logical paragraphs and code. It's what I do. That's why people call me. Nothing new this, code vs documentation. Selling vs building.

But I rather accept the dissonance now, sometimes all you have to do is be calm and honest, say what you say with a straight face and let people who want to go ballistic have their trajectory.  

Comments on the Arab Spring

In 2004:

An American plane carrying components of Libya’s nuclear weapons and missile programs arrived Tuesday in the United States as Moammar Gadhafi follows through on a pledge to dismantle the program.
The plane landed at McGhee Tyson airport outside Knoxville, Tenn., carrying about 55,000 pounds of equipment, including stock to enrich uranium, centrifuge parts and guidance sets for long-range missiles, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.The equipment likely will be evaluated at the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant in Tennessee. The “most sensitive documentation” associated with Libya’s nuclear program arrived by plane last week, McClellan said.Also, the spokesman announced that Libya had begun destroying chemical munitions.

So if Kadafi had turned off and turned over his entire WMD programs into the custody of your presidential administration, what would you do? I think it would be fair to transfer 55,000 pounds of conventional stuff. A tank or two, some armored personnel carriers. But I'd say, wait a year or so and then we'll send you a diplomatic type guy with some arms connections, and they can't be American built - but we'll get you some good quality Russian stuff. This is something the President of the US could arrange, and I think GWBush probably did and I don't see what's so wrong about that. 

Such is the sort of business that establishing diplomatic ties entails. You give conventional carrots in exchange for nuclear sticks, plus money one assumes. You do so without moving warships or tasking spy satellites, sending 'advisors', flying fighters, bombers or heaven forbid putting boots on the ground, as all Obamites are loathe to ever consider. 

Here's what Bush had to say in 2006:

Working with Great Britain and Pakistan and other nations, the United States shut down the world's most dangerous nuclear trading cartel, the AQ Khan network. This network had supplied Iran and Libya and North Korea with equipment and know-how that advanced their efforts to obtain nuclear weapons. And we launched the Proliferation Security Initiative, a coalition of more than 70 nations that is working together to stop shipments related to weapons of mass destruction on land, at sea, and in the air. The greatest threat this world faces is the danger of extremists and terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction -- and this is a threat America cannot defeat on her own. We applaud the determined efforts of many nations around the world to stop the spread of these dangerous weapons. Together, we pledge we'll continue to work together to stop the world's most dangerous men from getting their hands on the world's most dangerous weapons. 

...the nation of Libya has renounced terrorism, and given up its weapons of mass destruction programs, and its nuclear materials and equipment.

Nice work, if you can accomplish it. And it is the standard by which the Obama Administration will be judged, a standard I imagine he'll have some difficulty in attaining. 

It won't be long before you'll hear repeated that the US is incapable of positively influencing the affairs of the world, which is understandable given the paucity of imagination and moral willpower in the hearts and minds of such people likely to say so. But the stark fact of the matter is that the US led overthrow of Saddam Hussein's criminal family is exactly the sort of action required to changes the strategic landscape of the Middle East. Kadafi's own mafia is also legendarily infested and will be quite hard to eradicate. Good diplomacy won't do it. So by definition we are at something of an impasse with regards to the sort of political will it takes to kickstart democratic processes over there.

There is a reasonable standard to assume for the engagement of America's force projection, but understand how that works when looked at from the other angle. You can say that America will not use its military except for those extreme condititions - if Kadafi for example mounted a campaign of genocide. From the other angle it can be said of the same policy that America tolerates all injustices up to the level of genocide from foreign tyrants. Indeed, Americans against the Iraq war didn't even like to acknowledge Saddam Hussein's own campaign of genocide against the Marsh Arabs or his use of poison gas at Halbja via his notorious henchman 'Chemical Ali'. 

So now that Obama is marginally against Kadafi, I'm hearing bodewash about how much the Bush Administration's Curt Weldon was for Kadafi. Now I'm beginning to understand why Americans have a reputation for being ahistorical. 

Of course I hold with Christopher Hitchens, arguably the most influential voice I listen to, despite the inane accusations associating me with Tea Parties, Glenn Beck and the KKK, that if Saddam Hussein were still in power, this year's Arab uprisings could never have happened. 

We will watch over the next few years how the prospects for liberty will hold together in the Middle East. In Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere there will be battles and deals. And as history demonstrates, the biggest rewards often follow the biggest efforts and the biggest risks. Clearly Obama makes no great plans for the Middle East. So we shall depend on luck.

Justice Denied

From the halls of Congress:

Instead of swift justice, President Obama worries that a military tribunal will offend the Muslim world. What about the effect of this needless delay on the morale of the American people. America has captured the mastermind who attacked and killed us in our homeland and here we and he sit. We have been through enough! We are tired of waiting for these admitted killers to get justice. We are tired of more pain added to the wounds of 9/11. When last month we heard that President Obama will reinstitute Military Commissions, we were encouraged momentarily, only to learn that this administration will not try the 9/11 cases. We are denied even the courtesy of an explanation … It hurts.

 There's another Obama Gonna What for you. Complete and utter waste of time, just for the sake of satiating the mindless appetites of those who obsessed over GTMO. 

Finally, sweet reason prevails, and demonstrates that Obama was its enemy.

Cottontail

Obligatory Seriousness on Terry Jones

Terry Jones is the evangelical whose grandstanding and staged burning of the Koran has got him in a lot of hot water. He should drown in it, no less than other clerics who think that America should take political cues from their faith. But some people, especially atheists, have suggested that he be tried for incitement, reckless endangerment and even murder. Why? Because some nutcases on the other side of the globe used his provocation to set them off on innocents, namely UN staffers in Afghanistan. That logic, to charge Jones, is absurd, but there's nothing particularly defensible about Jones.

I am impressed witht he fact that Jones prepared his act for maximum effect. He could be considered a symbolic terrorist, manipulating media to outrage, insult and injure a particular class of people. But that's only a moral and ethical definition - we are fortunate that it is not a legal definition. Where would it stop? As shrill as this act is, it is very little more than a staged act by one individual. It is not a political movement by many people over a long period of time. If one were to bend the rules of causality to accuse Terry Jones of murder, how many executives of Planned Parenthood should be next? 

In the end, Jones made people of a certain mindset do what they were aiming to do, none of which is justifyable. I am stuck with an analogy of Malcolm X whispering in Emmett Till's ear - "Hey, go whistle at that white girl."  You can see how vile that would be of Malcolm to send Till to some dangerous fate, but you still couldn't accuse him of murder. Murderers are murderers, period. But those who send innocents off to murderous environments are far from being guilt free.

High Flight

 

I'm thinking about old TV & local stations on Los Angeles, KTTV (11), KTLA (5), KCOP (13) and KHJ (9). And of course KCET(28) and Channel 52. High Flight. I can't remember which station played this one before signing off, but when I was a kid, it was the most inspirational thing I can always remember.

20th Century Affluence

This video is a short work of creative art which brings to mind several allegories of first world desire. The automobile has been perfected and now serves far beyond its utilitarian purpose. Nevertheless the basic performance of transportation, even without style, is evident in the Ferarri. It executes transportation excellently. This Ferrari, however, like many others, is for the elite. It is performance yes, but it also speaks to other - shall we say virtues? - that the 20th century man aspires to. You can hear all that alluded to in the music, in the selection of backgrounds.

The Ferrari empowers. In the 20th Century, overcoming distance over snow, through deserts, in the rain, these were the abilities of the powerful man. For a price, Ferrari offers these abilities. That is what this marketing tells us. The Ferrari is a tool that helps us be all that we want to be. I deconstruct this slowly to remind us of what we already know. I only have to say 'red Ferrari' to me contemporaries and all the vision appears. So the video does not challenge, it invites us to luxuriate in what we already know we want; it serves to remind us that there is a tradition of power and greatness that we are invited to join.

There are, as we know, problems with automobiles. Not even Ferrari makes cars for consumers that are made of Titanium which would never rust. It still eats gas. It still takes up space. It still has too many bretheren on the road with which it still all to often collides with fatal results. It still pollutes. It still dominates the Western economies, but not as much as it used to.

There is another way to be empowered, and it is the way that the 21st Century will be marked for. It will be information technology rather than transportation technology that offers great abilities. The Apple may become the tool that helps us be all that we want to be. It won't be the desert road that daunts us so much as the area in the desert with no 'bars' - no signal. As we built the railroads so we have been building cell towers, and as once looked out at wilderness where no paved roads or telegraph wires existed, so now we define the boondocks as areas of the planet which are neither wired nor appropriately wireless.

Hands on the steering wheel with the flappy paddle shifters will be replaced by hands on the touch screen with high resolution. The engineers who today are building networks with Cisco will be forgotten as are the men who surveyed mountain passes to plot roads. Once the infrastructure is all there, it will be all about the vehicle, not the substrate. Sure, there will be perfected networks just like there are racetracks, but the average Joe will be stuck in network traffic. 

I watch the Ferrari commercial. I watch the Apple commercial. I've always wanted and hoped that our world would turn virtual, that we would have access to the world's thought as we have mastered access to its four corners, five continents and seven seas. I'm just thinking now how appropriately luxurious it is that Ferrari's logo still bears the outline of a horse. Once upon a time in the 19th Century, it was the horse that empowered. 

Progress is not what I'm evoking here, but change and the economies and cultures that attend such change. 

We Are Powerless Because We Are Landless

A Letter from Robert T. Bowen
Black World/ Negro Digest, August 1970

Dear Black Americans: . . . And now the tumultuous 60’s are gone. All over this country and all over the world men are taking a look at what happened and what it means. Perhaps more than anything else the recurrent conclusion is one of intense and unprecedented human change. We have seen men do things which even in the occasional wildness of our dreams we did not see them do. New blood spilled, new tears cried. Change and struggle. Oppression and abuse. The order of the day, the law of too many places.

It is no coincidence that much attention during the 60's was on Black people in America. The high- pitched demand for freedom and justice was heard everyday and in countless forms.

And right now the decade which we have just entered is faced with the monumental task of resolving the imbalances which for too long had been a way of life for Blacks. What of it, one migl1t say. The problem has always been here and there is little reason to think that drastic changes are just around the social-political corner. Perhaps so; but there is no precedent in human behavior which restricts man’s thinking to problems. Progress and movement and development are each tied directly to solutions. If our concern, then, is legitimate and if we are truly worthy of the designation, Black men, our attention must shift to solutions. lf human imagination was sacriliced during the 60’s to poverty, employment, housing, education, etc., then the commitment of the 70’s must be the reawakening of that same imagination. This we have to do, but not for the sake of proving that we are as good as somebody else or that we have not been totally defeated by all that has been heaped upon Blacks in America. At this point in history we really don’t have to prove anything to anybody . . . except ourselves.

Now . . what about ourselves? What are we supposed to do? Are we foolish enough to review the 60's and become so dismayed by our actual immobility that we idly follow the same useless pattem of getting nowhere with rapidity? Are we still going to demand better street lighting, faster rubbish collection, black Santa Clauses, and a host of other mundanities? ls this what the struggle has come to mean after all this time? Hopefully, we are able to respond in the negative.

Amidst all the rhetoric of the past I0 years we have heard talk of “self-determination.” Basically this involves the “freedom” of a people to decide how they want to order their lives. This never was (nor is it presently) the choice open to Black people. For years most of us have missed this absolutely critical point. What we have been haplessly doing is responding to the dictates of others. Even integration is a response on our part! Responses to others is not self-determination.

The heart of the entire matter is our “position” of powerlessness. There is no haste on my part here to proudly allude to the phrase “Black Power.” We saw the term move from a verbal dynamic to something short of a uniquely American joke; moreover, the fact of numbers (from 22 to 40 million Blacks) has certainly not been our salvation; and by now even the most outspoken elements of our people are fatigued with the diluted mystique of “soul.”

I am not attempting here to negate each and every part of the putative Black Experience. I am suggesting, rather, that our histori- cal trek has been unbelievably bogged down because of our reluc- tance or unwillingness to concern ourselves with the real bases for human freedom. It all comes down -or moves up-to one critical concem: LAND. It would not be an oversimpliication of our plight to say that we are powerless because we are landless. A people not in control of the land they inhabit is a people at the mercy of others. Generally speaking, this in and of itself may not be so very bad. ln the particular case of Blacks in America the matter has revealed itself to be both critical and dangerous. Black children in the rural South, for example, are not malnourished because white people are inherently evil. No, Black children “function” with little or no nourishment because Black adults don’t grow the food. And unemployment ligures are so high amongst us not because American industry and organized labor are infested with racism, but because we are not in control of the factories. We have always been at the mercy of those whose concern for our well-being could be questioned. And almost every significant statement we (individually or collectively) have ever made has been addressed to that same atmosphere of indifference.

In America we have become a clear and present social problem, and social problems are never solved. Furthermore, this country in reality has no obligation what- soever to “resolve us,” the key social problem. If our condition exists to prove that the American Constitution is a lie, then America canlivewiththeliewithminimal diiliculty. But the question is can we live with it? Are we willing to hang around and shout or write inanities simply for the purpose of demonstrating that what is proclaimed is not real? Our children would never forgive us and there is no cause for them to do so. For much too long we have declared our responsibility to “the country” without giving even a fleeting thought to our responsibility to ourselves. We should have done this willingly and consistently. It would have been obvious and common human sense. Has the American tragedy made us lose even that? Contrary to what is usually said there are not many ways of looking at our perpetual slippage. We have just exited the Era of Errors during which there were both blatant and subtle manifestations of folly. That we are still faced with the same issues clearly proves that all meas- ures taken were stop-gap measures or less. We cannot allow this to happen again. lf history must repeat itself, so be it; but let that repetition not be at our expense. We must have land. We must dedicate ourselves to building.

I have purposely avoided use of such terms as “states,” “nation,” “separation,” “exodus," etc. Because of the great clouds of programmed confusion regarding words, most of us are immediately inclined to respond in the negative to these words. That’s the way we have been trained, and up to now our behavior has been rather consistent with our training. In addition, I have not pointed to the experiences of other peoples who have taken control of their own destinies and have subsequently moved from the position of pawns to the status allorded to men. Again, we are inclined to say why their experience is so terribly different from our own here in America. And finally, l have not requested a written response or commitment from you (although I would be pleased to hear your ideas).

All that I do ask is that you psychologically remove yourself from the futile morass of American “race relations” long enough to consider the fact of land ownership and control by Black people. (The Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Longs, “Indians” and hundreds of midwestern farmers understand exactly what this means. There is no reason whatsoever why we shouldn’t as well.) Despite all the guilt-ridden optimism now in evi- dence, the 70's don’t have to be years of promise. And in spite of the “great black hope” which from time to time swells our own hearts, we don’t have to be free simply because America is attempting to search her troubled soul. Our victory-however we come to seriously define it-will come only because we have made the dedication to do what has to be done. Not in the tired terms of conferences and seminars and ever-growing organizations. Not by the questioned virtue of new. legislation or expanded poverty programs or retraining projects.

We will truly know manhood and live as men are destined to live when the land on which we walk and watch our children grow is the land to which we can point and with deserved pride say, “This is ours.”- Robert T. Bowen


Robert T. Bowen is founder of the Institute for Black Studies in Los Angeles, Calif.

Colors of the Wind

Palace Coup or Quagmire

The nice thing about the Libya engagement is that Obama's ambitions are so shallow and tactical that it's really easy to say where it's right and where it's wrong. I'm in agreement with Ross Douthat who lets us know three things. The only way to save the rebel cause is to get to a ceasefire soon. The only way to get a ceasefire soon is to decapitate Kadafi. The only way to decapitate Kadafi without boots on the ground is to have the CIA do it (they don't wear boots) or have Kadafi's own generals do it.

So isn't it interesting what that means? It means we have to get buddy buddy with Kadafi's own generals, but somebody nobody really knows. In other words, we have to pay somebody high enough in Kadafi's dictatorship to run the country and turn him against Kadafi. Can there be a more corruptible individual than such a toad?

This, my friends is why I have been saying that GWBush's greatest achievement was to put the US Military out in the sunshine. Now we are back to the Reagan era with all sorts of murky plausible deniability and working with shady characters via the CIA.

Boots are not as bad as you think.

A Rude Question About Black Neighborhoods

It wasn't true in fact that Mr. Arnold had my parent's permission to whip us, and I cannot remember him ever trying. But there was no question that Mr. Stanley, Mr. Arnold, Rev. Robinson, Mother Sadie, and Mrs. Myers were in close enough communication to my parents that our wrongdoing was almost always seen and certainly punished. We did get chewed out twice, but not beaten twice.

So there is the urban legend about black neighborhoods where this was the case, and it is always said with some nostalgia for a more well-behaved past. As well, it is popular to raise this mutual old school parenting in the Hillary Clinton aphorism about what it take to raise a child. A village eh?

Isn't that just tribal?

Michael and Bernard

I am embarassed to talk about Bernard Kinsey now that it's April. That's because I didn't return his phone call from February. 14 months ago, I enjoyed an old school evening back in my old neighborhood attending a review of the Kinsey Collection for Black History Month. What I should have done was go again this year and do my small part in writing up once again that which the Kinseys have done to preserve critical parts of American history in a collection of artifacts of historical significance. 

Last year, the Kinseys were proud to announce that their collection was set to be featured at the Smithsonian in the upcoming Fall. This year I don't know the exact fate of the collection, but I do know a certain something about it. It's the kind of thing I would expect, automatically, for black old money to take care of. Boom. But it is not taken care of and for that I have regret.

It is presumptuous of me, but then again, I'm me, not to have the significant kind of role in this matter that my ambition has demanded of me. Starting with my own father's collection and with my association with Dr. & Mrs. Alfred Ligon, there is a part of me that weeps for not having become the wealthy philanthropist I always wanted to be. When I looked at Ebony magazine back in the day, my hero was the black man who ran the Ford Foundation, Franklin A. Thomas. But somehow, for all the blackified recognition I got here and there, I never got the hookup, nor did anyone I know really get it. A lot of us have done very well, don't get me wrong, but all the young, gifted and black never got the Aggregation program together. The meeting on Wednesday night, as much as everybody talked about it, never got off the ground. 

It didn't hit me until I was about 26 that black unity was never going to work out. I understood it intellectually, but emotionally I viewed it as a problem until I was 32. And even though I gave up on the impractical dreams of Chocolate City (or at the very least a nationwide network of Brewster Places, hooked up with the Boule) I've always felt that there should be some black old money taking care of certain significant business. Right now that sentiment centers on a private initiative that could build a museum for the Kinsey Collection which, among other things contains personal letters written by Zora. 

That intellectual understanding recognizes that Michael Jordan, sitting on hundreds of millions, is not likely to reach out to Bernard Kinsey and build that museum. Unless he reads Cobb and is moved to tears thinking of something more purposeful to do than selling underwear. I am embarassed by my poverty in this regard. And at the same time I recognize that Kinsey himself hasn't made the Jordan connection either. It's that kind of thing that is painful leaven and why I have put aside dreams of Aggregation. 

Michael Jordan and Colin Powell probably could hang out. But do they? Do they have an obligation to? What about Spike Lee and Wynton Marsalis? At some point the speculation gets ridiculous, and yet if Kinsey's original print of Equiano's book falls into anonymous bureaucratic hands, whose fault is that? 

I would be remiss to not mention the fact that it was Paul Simon who introduced us to Ladysmith Black Mombazo, and even though we knew Hugh and Miriam before, somehow a generation who didn't play Sun City didn't get the word out to KJLH and V103. I can't tell you how many black folks paid the price of the ticket at Newport all those Jazz Festivals ago, but does it really matter? The facts survive, the people survive, the artifacts will survive and with any luck the curators will have the right love. 

The world is still worth living in, even when it's not black owned and operated. 

The UN Frets

In the news:

The U.N. Security Council and the Secretary-General have expressed their strong condemnation of an attack on a U.N. compound in northern Afghanistan on Friday that killed seven staff members.

Several hundred demonstrators had gathered outside the U.N. compound in Mazar-e-Sharif to protest the burning of the Muslim holy book - "the Quran"- by a pastor in the U.S. State of Florida 10 days ago.

U.N. Peacekeeping Chief Alain Le Roy briefed the council on details of the attack, which he received from the U.N.’s top diplomat in Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, who went immediately to Mazar-e-Sharif to oversee the investigation.

"There was an important demonstration, and part of the demonstrators rushed into our compound with weapons; and they stormed the compound, they put fire on it and they killed several of our staff."

There is nowhere in my world, outside of openly declared mortal combat that such behavior is acceptable. As this underscores what I believe to be true of the 'Arab Street', that not only are they peasants, but that they are superstitious, illiterate peasants. Some of the worst kind. If the UN is to survive as an intstitution, it's going to have to remember that cultural relativism doesn't work. Which sort of Western democracies will serve to remind them? Ours?

Harold Cruse: The Last Organic

Harold Cruse was one of those rare scholars who wrote so much about things nobody ever talks about that you have to stop every 20 pages or so just to absorb it. It has been quite a while since I read 'The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual' and 'Plural But Equal' so it's difficult for me to disaggregate his lessons from my thinking. Very little of it seems to have distinguished itself in my memory as distinctly belonging to Cruse. But there are some distinct ideas.

Cruse was one of those who asserted that the Brown case was improperly decided. Seperate and unequal was certainly a problem, but the problem was not with separate, but with unequal. Cruse argues that the law should have been used to force the equal funding of public schools in black communities, instead what arose in the ethos of integration was a double strike against blacks. Firstly, the very assertion by Brown that black and white kids be integrated degraded the quality of all public schools by generating white flight. Anywhere there were significant numbers of blacks, many whites left the public school system and created new private schools. It has been noted that many private schools around the South were founded in 1954. This not only hurt blacks but damaged the public support for public schools.

Secondly and somewhat more on point with how many black nationalists feel, the thrust of integration undermined black independence. The famous proximity premise, has by all measures pretty much been discredited. Black students don't become better people simply by sitting in the same schools as white students. The 'goodness' of whites doesn't 'rub off'. There are plenty ways to argue around the matter of the proximity premise, but I essentially don't buy it either. Some of the weakest ideas which have become ossified into the conventional thinking are the root of the fallacies surrounding the Diversity industry.

As many of you might guess, I could bust a gut talking about black political dependence on white liberal spew a la Howard Dean. There is a low intensity war between Integrationists and Aggregationists. (Separatists don't stand a chance.) Perhaps Cruse's passing will re-ignite a debate on the merits. As an Old Schooler, I might seem conflicted, but if you understand that I am an elitist than you'll see how I'm for Aggregation for me and those like me, and Integration for the rest of you who can't afford to do any better. I still say bomb the ghetto.

Many folks are acknowledging Cruse's way of seeing integration. The NAACP famously started questioning the wisdom of Brown along Cruse's line of thinking. What's odd about that is that they seem ill-prepared to do anything about it but give blackfolks a reason to complain. The NAACP is not organized to assist in aggregation, but perhaps they only see their job as 'raising the issue', which is fair. I'm not so sure anyone expects anything more. The question of aggregation is open, and I've seen some efforts going on here in Los Angeles, with regard to the charter school movement. These are mostly done in partnership with other non-whites with conservative lip service support.

Charter schools are all experiments as far as I can see and I'm all for school reform (primarily skills-based promotion starting at middle school). Cruse also speaks of the Blair Bill which, had it been implemented when the idea first arose, the progress of African America would have had a 100 year headstart. I agree with Cruse with respect to colorblindness. In fact I have spent many years arguing in public debates that colorblindness is the moral equivalent of racism in this country. It was most likely Cruse that got me started on this angle.

It's difficult for me to tell how and where Cruse might be influential, because quite frankly, black public intellectuals are not so ready to engage the public outside of the academy, or specifically here on the web. This is an old complaint of mine and I've worn a groove in my mind repeating it, even though it's not as true as I'd like it to be. But I think I've internalized enough of his ideas about pluralism and equality to be an adequate representative outside of the professoriate. I trust my man Spence's judgement that I have been properly informed. If I had the time, I'd certainly reread him, and I'll probably do some skimming this weekend. I'm also going to take the opportunity to see where his name pops up in the 'sphere. Watch this spot for updates.

I think that the most important thing to understand about Cruse is that he regrets the amount of dependence blacks have assumed on the general fairness of society based upon the political alliances between the Negro leadership and white liberal race politics. It has resulted in laws and ideas that have suppressed the vigor of black independence. I agree with him there. Clearly I am interpreting him through an appreciative and conservative lens but I think when we get to the heart of arguments like matters of pluralism vs assimilation or what is meant when people talk about 'equality', Cruse's thought on the matter will be salient. Cruse is exceptional because he writes books that don't read like academic treatises, but deliver scholarship nonetheless. He's a comfort-busting individual thinker worthy of emulation and much respect. Ahh, I guess I can't just put him into the past tense so easily can I. None of us should.

via cobb.typepad.com

Inverted Totalitarianism

A great phrase. Without looking at the definition Chauncy deVega uses to lament the devolution of the American body-politic into what he sees as Red State retardation, I have a very opposite (I think) view. Consider his assertion follows the setup:

Liberalism, which is stronger in richer, better-educated, more-diverse, and, especially, more prosperous places, is shrinking across the board and has fallen behind conservatism even in its biggest strongholds. This obviously poses big challenges for liberals, the Obama administration, and the Democratic Party moving forward.

But the much bigger, long-term danger is economic rather than political. This ideological state of affairs advantages the policy preferences of poorer, less innovative states over wealthier, more innovative, and productive ones. American politics is increasingly disconnected from its economic engine. And this deepening political divide has become perhaps the biggest bottleneck on the road to long-run prosperity.

This is the formula for a reactionary politics that does not serve the collective good. Here, the tail wags the dog and the most frightened, least resourced, and most backward voices rise out of the polity. Elites who have long been disconnected from the masses manipulate this anxiety into a politics that serves to gut the social safety net and chase down the chosen bugaboos of the Right--the "evil" unions, "liberals," "intellectuals," teachers, Muslims, immigrants, racial minorities, gays and lesbians, "overpaid" public employees, and/or anyone who is not a "real American."

I have come to regard the red state of mind according to its strengths which is precisely counter to totalitarianism. But I need you to start thinking about cheap trash properties out in the middle of nowhere and the habits people would need. Start with my John Boyd quote, that in order to be free you must either be rich or reduce your needs to zero. It never occurs to people dedicated to the collective good as deVega that one can be prosperous by reducing their needs to zero.

In the red state of mind, you *should* be disconnected from the masses. That's the only way you guarantee that you are not a party in their exploitation. You get out into the woods and you don't turn on the radio, so you don't miss public radio. Instead, you're growing your own vegetables, hunting your own meat, fishing for your own fish, tending your own herbs and spices. Mending your own wool sock rather than buying them from China inverts totalitarianism, global dependency, national dependency, community dependency. It makes one independent. It makes one king of his own castle, lord of his own land, master of all he surveys.

Poorer, less educated, less diverse all seem to be horrible deviations from a proper norm, but only in America. Because in the small towns just inside the Indiana border where the well-maintained Ohio roads suddenly get all gravelly, they still make more money than in 5/6ths of the world. They still have 12 years of free education, polio vaccines, orange juice in the winter, and electricity that hasn't failed in 75 years.

Of course liberalism is shrinking, because the promises it thinks it can make to Americans who cling to Bibles and guns are too expensive and its benefits are so marginal that it finally realizes(?) it will never change all of those minds. There is no more low hanging fruit. There are no more economic rabbits (except in IT industrialization and bioengineering) to pull out of hats. There are already so many chickens in so many pots that the Left has to attack the chicken industry for operating so cheaply.

Somebody wrote of the culture of Japan in the post-tsunami aftermath that of course there was no looting and that everyone cooperated. Japan pulls together into a uniquely cohesive society, but same thing makes it fragile because there are not hundreds of acceptable ways to do the same thing. Japanese make smaller cars and live in smaller houses because they prefer the urban lifestyle that brings millions of them together in the ways they prefer to organize. They like to follow the same rules for everyone, the exact opposite of the American cowboy spirit. 75 years ago there, they all serve an emperor.

America resists totalitarianism because we have the opportunity to get out of Dodge. There's someplace to go. We can migrate from the South to the North. We can move from East to West. And there are times when we want to be left alone, off the grid, answerable to nobody, off the plantation. It means we have to buy a truck that resists the dents and can go offroad, not a hybrid made for the carpool lane. It means we need to shop at the one Costco in the county once a month, not stroll through the galleria of shops in the CBD. It means we leave our email unanswered, not follow every tweet. It means we try not to follow the fashion of the top 40 as it changes every week, but maybe memorize something our great grandparents would have recognized. It means going downscale, spreading out and being robust and not being affected by the global supply chain that cascades its failures to every Tom, Dick and Harry because your name is Eustace.

There's a story about the MBA candidate who decided to accept at the Ivy League. Just after he graduated, he took a fishing vacation in a small village in Mexico and fell in love with the place. He moved to NY and worked on Wall Street to pay off his expensive loans. He hated his job after a time but kept it so that he could pay for a house in Connecticut near where he could fish. Still every summer he would fly with his friends down to Mexico and catch marlin but he never got the big one.  He worked overtime and took Spanish classes at night so that he could retire early and buy that little house in the fishing village. He neglected his family to climb the ladder and become a partner in the firm. Finally when he was 45 he paid off his house, quit his job, divorced his trophy wife, lost the equity in the house, suffered a heart attack and moved to Mexico. His vacation finally became his life. He realized finally that he could have done the same thing 20 years ago. It was the price he was willing to pay ruining the lives of all the people he hated in NYC. He bought freedom very expensively only to reduce his needs to zero. It wasn't until he became the captain of his charter boat a few years later that he could see in the eyes of his old fishing buddies who still lived in NY how they were slowly dying. None of them made partner the way he did and every summer when they came to fish, they lamented that they would never be rich enough live in a Mexican fishing village.

We will never know if red state of mind, independent America is as happy with their disconnected lives as those in the urban liberal cosmopolitan feng shui. But we will always know that riches are limited and that everybody cannot be better educated, richer, and more sophisticated than average. We will always know that the road towards totalitarianism is straight, well-paved and is designed for mass transit.

What is conservatism? It's a lot of things. But it's important to understand the limits of centrally standarized, synchronized, culture of singular progress of upward mobility. It always needs the attention and support of the masses, and it fails spectacularly.