Cobb

Never Learned to Swim

I do not know if my late grandfather knew how to swim. But perhaps if I researched my family history I might learn a lesson of oppression. I doubt it however. That's because my grandfather was orphaned by the flu epidemic of 1918, and no matter what is said about the conditions of blacks in Connecticut in the 20s, it was certainly worse for foster children. Not that I would take any such stories of oppression to heart. It's not like me, and it surely would not be what Chico would have wanted me to consider at length. 

But since I've been talking about the lack of the Southern Negro and in parallel never shy to criticize any lack, weakness or dysfunction calling itself 'black', I thought I would update and exemplify a lack that doesn't require a degree in comparative anthropology to comprehend. It is a story that might be familiar published in the wake of the Olympic victory of the now forgotten Cullen Jones.

Nearly 60 percent of African-American children cannot swim, almost twice the figure for white children, according to a first-of-its-kind survey which USA Swimming hopes will strengthen its efforts to lower minority drowning rates and draw more blacks into the sport.

Stark statistics underlie the initiative by the national governing body for swimming. Black children drown at a rate almost three times the overall rate. And less than 2 percent of USA Swimming's nearly 252,000 members who swim competitively year-round are black.

USA Swimming is teaming with an array of partners — local governments, corporations, youth and ethnic organizations — to expand learn-to-swim programs across the United States, many of them targeted at inner-city minorities. One of the key participants is black freestyle star Cullen Jones, who hopes to boost his role-model status by winning a medal this summer at the Beijing Olympics.

I introduce this as a family matter as a typical tactic of the political Right. You remember the old axiom - the Right uses the strenghts of the family as a defense against the dysfunctions of government, the Left uses the strengths of the goverment to overcome the dysfunctions of the family. While I suppose we could always meet in the middle in the form of institutions and charities and those old 1000 points of light, I must say that I'm always biased in favor of self-determination. 

Like any other gripe of the emergent, it is easy to cite statistics and point fingers and come up with a perfectly logical activist agenda. It's not so easy to accept the equilibrium as it stands. But I think this simple case illustrates the differences in approach. Clearly there is something amis that can be corrected, but how? Now let's see how deep a fight we can get into over this.

Bagger Vance

Will Smith. Him say:

For me, it was something that I’ve always believed. I’ve read the Declaration of Independence. I’ve read the Constitution. I have the preamble memorized. It’s something I’ve always believed in, and when Barack Obama won, it validated a piece of me that I wasn’t allowed to say out loud – that America is not a racist nation.

I love that all of our excuses have been removed. African-American excuses have been removed. There’s no white man trying to keep you down, because if he were really trying to keep you down, he would have done everything he could to keep Obama down. Yes, there are racist people who live here, absolutely. But they’re not the majority anymore.

I’m an African American, and I was able to climb to a certain point in Hollywood. On that journey, I realized people weren’t trying to stop me. Most people were trying to help me. Before Obama won the presidency, it was like, I’m the exception. Tiger is the exception. Michael Jordan is the exception. Bill Cosby is the exception. But there’s something about being the leader of the free world, with every other position on earth below that. You can’t argue with that. If Barack Obama can win the presidency of the United States, you can absolutely be the manager at Saks.

Come on. It was such a fantastic experience for me to be able to say out loud that I love America and not be called an Uncle Tom. That I can stand out, and I can say out loud that I love this country and not get funny looks.

I don’t think we are African Americans, Irish Americans or Japanese Americans anymore. I think Americans are a new race of people. We are Americans of African descent. We are Americans of Irish descent.

It’s a whole new world.

Off 166

The Buyback

I've discovered a clever tool for discovering ethnic enclaves. It's called American Enclaves and is published as a software demonstrator from a visualization company. I've been poking around in it for the past couple hours and looking, in particular, for black enclaves in the rural South, notably joints like Lowndes County, Alabama.

As I've been considering the fate of the Southern Negro in some sympathy for the commenters on the King In Stone thread, I was trying to get some handle on the matter of what was built, for what purposes and how long they lasted. More specifically, what was the patronage and institutional legacy of the NAACP, SNCC, CORE and the SCLC in the South where they were most active?

Bluntly, I'm discouraged that I will find property outside of what I understand Morgan Freeman has purchased around Charleston, MS. But property is what I have been thinking of, apropos my recent comment on the previously mentioned thread.

I think that psychologically, African Americans lack for a blood and soil claim on an American city. We have the Lorraine Motel, the Audubon Ballroom, Harper's Ferry, Tulsa OK, Tuskeegee and a host of claims on tragic defeats that symbolically dwarf those won in our favor. Blacks still question today whether or not the Civil War was fought in any measure for their freedom.

American history doesn't seem to provide us with a plaque which might read 'On this site in 1907, black residents defeated the KKK in a gun battle and survived the ensuing seige...' It would be something I might have expected to find at the city hall of a small town in the South in a predominately black area with a legacy of self-rule going back to the Civil War. But I gather Jim Crow was a bit too successful for all that.

Nevertheless, when you look at somebody like Morgan Freeman who apparently has enough dough to finance an army, you get the idea that he might at least be lording over some estate upon which he might even be a fair employer. Surely, he is the biggest fish in 500 square miles of Charleston, and chances are that his heirs will do just peachy.

I have not, unfortunately, had any such luck even in passing through Alabama and Mississippi to find any part of it mildly interesting or attractive. I've heard that Huntsville is nice and has been attractive to engineers, plus I do have a friend who does a good business out that way. Still, overall the place still gives me the creeps, very much unlike Georgia whose charms I was able to see firsthand. The New South is acceptable within reason, but it also begs many questions of judgment and has a legacy it cannot outrun, especially as I say, without that blood and soil claim. New Orleans is much closer to my heart and family history, but how can I deny the fact that I grew up somewhere else? There were good reasons for that black flight.

When I look at the Enclave app, it is rather strange to see how small black Los Angeles seems demographically, and yet how familiar it is to me. Just the other night I hung out at Jamie Foxx's night at the Conga Room and was reminded of how many times I have brushed close to those who have now inherited the mantle of black entertainment here in its capital.

Conclusions: Plus up feudalism. Remain wary of political empowerment, rhetorical patronage. Note 2 standard deviation definition of enclaves  - s/b selectable in the tool.

It Bears Repeating

Steve Jobs & The Batcave

About 4 years ago my youngest daughter asked me what job I would do if I could do anything I wanted. I thought about it for a while and then told her that I would design lairs for evil scientists who wanted to take over the world. I'm pretty sure that's what Steve Jobs and I have in common. 

Over at Bogost, Ian suggests that Jobs was a corporate fascist.

That's what everyone loves about him: he tells us what he wants, and he convinces us we are going to like it. And we do, not because he's right (despite popular opinion), but because it's so rare to get such definitive, brazen, top-down, abusive treatment in this era of lowest-common-demoninator wishy-washiness. It doesn't matter if he's right because his design sense is so definitive, it outstrips truth in favor of legend.

I think it does matter that he's right, but it took him a long time to be right enough. Jobs is something no other great computerist is, which is an enemy of interoperability. He alone had the nerve to build a set of products that needed nothing to do with the rest of how the world did computing. And from that basic premise of purity, everything else follows.  Jobs basically said, I don't need to cooperate to build something I would love. He is your basic idiosyncratic perfectionist, and to my way of seeing things, exactly like every other entrepreneur who said, I built the thing I wanted and I hoped everybody would be just like me.

All his presentations have been about telling us how excited he is about the thing his company built just for him to his most exacting standards. And he had been doing it for years until all the right things clicked. There is so much weirdness in Apple's closet. By what standard is the original iMac anything but atrocious? The NexT cube, that was beautiful. And back in those days (take it from an old Xeroid) computer companies built everything proprietarily. There was nothing wrong with that, ever. Except Oracle took market share from IBM and began the necessity for interoperability standards in the lucrative world of enterprise computing with SAP and others contributing to make corporate IT what it is today - an ungodly mess. But Apple didn't give a crap about all that. They wanted to make what they wanted to make. Quadras. PowerMacs. And when Power Computing came around and made it cheaper and faster, Jobs killed them. Murdered them.

Apple is now like Mercedes Benz or BMW. It is the single mass market premium brand for computers. It's fair to compare Apple the brand to any luxury car brand for whom its parts are hard to find and not quite interchangeable. That Jobs stood alone is more curious than anything, because for the most part we're suckers for that obsessive who builds the spare-no-expense, ultra-hip, status symbol of perfection with its own walled garden of accessories. 

I want to compare Jobs to Ferdinand Porsche or Enzo Ferarri or Frank Lloyd Wright or Dean Kamen, but I don't have the patience to make the appropriate contrasts. Except I do want to stress that had Kamen's ideas for the Segway pan out, he would have continued on to the sort of fame Jobs new enjoys. There's no comparison though. Kamen is by far the more prolific of the two and towards greater ends. 

Affirmative Action vs Black Families

One of the main focuses of the Cultural Revolution was the abolishment of the Four Olds: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas.-- Wikipedia on the Cultural Revolution

via cobb.typepad.com

I was looking back in the blog to find what I had written about James Farmer and Malcolm X and I found this instead.

Abstracts

Nick & Val

If you want to get married today, chances are that the romantic songs you want played at your wedding were written yesterday. Of course Mendelssohn's Wedding March was written over 160 years ago and Wagner's was written just a few years later. But most of the folk you and I know would like to include a bit of the music they fell in love to.

The passing of Nick Ashford doesn't prompt my usual deadpan. And yet I tried to love them as performers more than they deserved. They wrote great songs, some of my favorites for the Brothers Johnson, but their own productions all seemed to drag on too long. They were not the singers you wanted to be, they were the lovers you wanted to be.

Better than Peaches & Herb, better the Captain & Tenille, better than Patti Austin & James Ingram, better than Rick James & Teena Marie, Nick & Val were tops. The world has only produced two possibly superior duets and that would be Gaye &Terrell and  Flack & Hathaway.

Apple Without Steve

Apple without Steve is like a metaphor without a simile. You always think of them together, but they are actually two separate distinct things. The problem is that it takes a bit of thinking to distinguish the two, and admit it, you'd rather be lazy. 

I have hated Apple because of things that Steve Jobs did, most notably killed Power Computing. But also, Apple completely failed to provide a good business computing platform by going its own stupid way away from ODBC. But the things to love about Apple have much to do with decisions that are now already evident in the culture and product line. Apple makes premium products. Steve Jobs, however brilliant he may be, is not the originator of insanely great ideas. Those ideas are all out there and everybody with a computer science brain knows them. The only question for Apple's intermediate future is whether or not its new CEO will be able to continue to make premium products and execute them well. 

The rest of the computing industry will pull its own weight with products downstream of Apple's quality, but with equivalent functionality. You can't stay in business if your product can't match features with what consumers can afford. 

As I've said, the future of Apple is the legacy of Sony. They will become the world's transcendent prosumer supplier. They will infiltrate the world of media content creation, distribution and consumption with tools that interoperate completely within their walled garden. That means the reinvention of televisions, cameras, phones, etc. They will obsessively focus on human factors, ease of use, elegance and high performance. As soon as you can envision that global market, it's a no brainer to see what Apple can possibly do.

It's difficult to believe that Apple could possibly do worse than it has before Jobs set them on this track. With Amilio, Scully, Gasse, we got into the various guts of Apple. But now with Johnny Ive running design, that kind of thinking has been transcended. Let Hackintoshes do what they must. but the product is hardware and an experience with hardware. Sony has done it. Samsung is doing it now. So what it's all about now is execution, and what's good news is Tim Cook is all about execution. 

What nobody can do that only Steve could have done was to corral the music industry, the film industry, telecom compaines and the book publishing business and convince them that their future is with Apple. You have to be larger than life to do such things. Alfred P. Sloan was that big. Walter Wriston was that big. Michael Bloomberg is that kind of man. But such greatness is not necessary for a company to be great, it is necessary for a company to become legendary. Apple can be great for many years to come without Jobs as CEO and ultimately without him as Chairman. 

Aside from all that, it's all about Bezos. Remember I told you so. 

Clubbin'

via cobb.typepad.com

MLK In Stone

Someday in our family history it will be recorded that on the day of its inauguration, my neice performed with her orchestra at the dedication ceremony of the MLK Memorial in Washington. And we will have pictures and video and memories to commemorate the realization of the event. The event will live on in the memories of millions and the words and curves cut out of stone will stand for generations. It is the solidification of the promise of liberty and it is a symbol that will endure.

I read the other day the acute observation about the low hopes of people who kept saying that they never thought they would see the day when America would have a black president. It puts me in mind of the kind of black I used to be which was that I always wanted some other black people around. I never wanted to be the only black person around, that way I could be myself instead of trying to represent a good model. After some time I didn't care if I was the only black person around or if people who weren't black didn't know a good role model. It took me some time to realize that it wasn't my responsibility to be a symbol. It is only my responsibility to be true. There have always been, and there will always be great black men and women from whom a perfect example can be taken, and when you stop to think about it, they were just being true. It is the presence of truth we require, not the presence of symbols. 

I belong to the fraternity whose efforts initiated this moment, and I made my contribution. So there are multiple ways in which it is personal to me, this dream made real in rock. But I have my life in America and I have the lives of my family and friends as witness to the daily reality of the defense of my liberty. I know what it is to have the security of a society that will rise to the defense of my rights. I always knew the day would come. 

We are called to remember the deeds of a man of courage, who stood up for what was right in the face of a society out of balance - a man whose deeds forced it to realize that it was out of time. A man who grew up in America, the one nation whose very inception contained reason enough to fix whatever it might become to the contrary.

It is not a statue or words that makes liberty real. It is the spirit of a people, the commerce of a society, the discipline of minds, the steadfast expectations of hearts. It is the unswerving dedication of a nation to exemplify its own creed and to fulfill its explicit promise. Every man woman and child who visits that monument or even contemplates its significance should keep that dream alive in their lives by repeating a pledge in their hearts. You know the pledge. 

Put your right hand over your heart. Ready? Begin. 

 

The Obvious Other Side

Rose and her colleagues conducted four different studies that included surveys and observations of nearly 2,000 children and adolescents. The researchers found that girls had positive expectations for how talking about problems would make them feel, such as expecting to feel cared for, understood and less alone. On the other hand, boys did not endorse some negative expectations more than girls, such as expecting to feel embarrassed, worried about being teased, or bad about not taking care of the problems themselves. Instead, boys reported that talking about problems would make them feel "weird" and like they were "wasting time."

Males believe discussing problems is a waste of time, MU study shows

Sticks and snails and puppy dog tails. Boys like to talk about car crashes and who could beat between Batman and Superman. Boys like to talk about how they got that scar on their shin and that enormous turd left on Mr. Green's lawn by that stray dog. Boys like to talk about blood and guts and death. Girls don't. 

It's not that boys don't like to talk about problems or their feelings, it's that that somebody decided that boy problems and feelings were inherently stupid and uncivilized. So which university is going to publish that study? Do you want to know how that makes me feel? Hmm. It makes me feel like smashing somebody's head into a wall - either that or having a big bowl of Capn' Crunch at 10:30pm. 

The Pseud

There has been something of a controversy about pseudonyms on Google+. This is something I know about, outside of that particular controversy. Interestingly, I have decided in one way what to do that forces me to deal and I think forces others to deal as well. 

I have dealt with identity online for just about all of my professional life, which to be technical about it, started around 1984 when had my second internship at Xerox. That's when I got my first email account, learned JCL and first got my hands on a Xerox workstation, the legendary Star. That summer, I opened up the icon on the desktop that said 'Organizations' and I saw Shinjuku. My mind blew. It wasn't long thereafter that I started talking on bitnet, the Xerox corporate internet (CIN), [email protected] and a host of other proto-internets. Naming conventions and pesuds were part of the early netiquette but it was finally my introduction to the Well several years later that took this to an artform.

By the time that I got to the Well, I had been on Prodigy, Compuserv, several fido BBSs, some legendary others not so. My favorite, of course, was Panix. I was accustomed (especially on Compuserv) of not using my name and getting into the sorts of discussions that would generally lead to fistfights face to face. That and a combination of things led me to be specifically provocative by adopting a pseudonym known as Boohab. One of the most interesting things about the Boohab is how I was consciously attempting to be postmodern and wear postmodern gear while actually being a bit less clever and a bit more postmodern than I thought I was. Somebody whose rationale I couldn't completely grasp (and who has since abandoned the Internet) was able to get the highest Google page rank on Boohab by making a bad example of me. The work of Boohab, was something I did not want directly associated with me personally, and that is primarily because I knew it was something that could overshadow everything else about me were I to become as famous as the implications of the work might become. 

After the Boohabian project, I wanted to be myself, and found someplace to do so, but later found something more public, blogging, which would push me into the spotlight again. This time, I found a pseud, Cobb, that was closer to me but not fully me. It was just another part of me and still is. Even as Cobb, I have mutated my face and orientation as a blogger, but I've left the pseud intact.

On Facebook, another major departure, I did something fairly unusual, which was to use my full legal name: Michael David Cobb Bowen. The idea wasn't purposefully to have an anchor person but something close to that. I only use my full name and signature on things like being a witness at a wedding or a funeral - the big life and death moments that deserve my full attention. But I'm out there, you see. I've been writing online in public and private spaces for over 20 years. I have changed so many ways, I recognize that any segment of Mellow Mike, or [email protected] or mdcb@well or the me I was at Cafe Utne or Slate's Fray or CafeLosNegroes are all just fragments of the whole person. Nobody could stitch all that together and make sense of it without scholarly infrastructure. And in one way I do hope that I earn the honor and privilege of a biographer or harried researcher, but for the most part I don't expect to be made sense of longitudinally.

So while I sympathize with those who want a pseud, I have come to terms with the fact that a pseud is mostly used as a mask, which is a fragment of a deception. There is indeed a greater truth to be found in the integration of all one's internet writings even if it is not accomplished during your life. There's that, and the fact that we now know who Deep Throat is, and most of our business pales in signficance. 

It makes sense for the people at Google to make the strong suggestion for real names. Those who have other than personal issues for wanting to use a pseud would actually be fairly foolish for using Google plus to communicate that which needs communicating in secret. But for those who, like Boohab, just want to avoid fistfights by saying online things they are afraid to say face to face... well, there are other places for that sort of thing and I doubt that G+ is going to replace them. 

There is the small problem of being hacked by people who mostly don't care to do you harm, and the real problem of being hacked by people who do. I find it difficult to believe that a pseud on G+ is going to indemnify you from either sort. And while it is certainly possible to anonymize yourself through being clever with security tools and methods, I have a hard time believing that these are the people who are doing the complaining about Google policy. 

All that said, I'll leave you with two notes. The first is that if you want to be anonymous, you're probably better off using the name of somebody already famous. Searches for that name will bring back so many hits that your actual use will be buried. The other is The Last ID.

 

Azn

I grew up in Crenshaw, which was everybody knew, a black and Japanese neighborhood.

Freddie and Keith were my first Asian buddies. Keith was Hawaiian and Freddie was Japanese. I knew Keith in the first grade and Freddie somewhat after. Keith was all smiles and full of energy and popular. Freddie was chubby, shy and laconic. Freddie and I lived on the same street, his was a single mom, and he rode a tricycle a little bit longer than anybody else our age. I never knew where Keith lived, and never saw him after school, but Freddie and I were closer friends. I don't know why and I don't know how long into our friendship, I hit Freddie. He ran home, told his mom, and I never saw him again after school. Well, maybe once or twice, but that was basically the end of it. 

There are probably more short stories like this I could tell end on end, but maybe they have that same theme. The friendship between blacks and Asians in LA is as varied as the number of different types of Asians, and yes everybody hates Koreans. At least, they used to. But on the whole the relationship is genuine and fragile. Whenever you try, you really can't make anything of it. 

I think there is a kind of social capital that black Americans have gained in a completely different way than whatever Asians have gained. When I think of Asian Americans, I almost never think of them as multicultural compatriots in a shared struggle for social capital. That has worked and can continue to work with Latinos, especially those who called themselves Chicano. But there has never been an Asian Chicano. Well, there's Margaret Cho, and that's about it. It's something I have variously found frustratingly disappointing and oddly attractive. But one thing I have long understood is that worse than blacks and worse than browns, Asians have never managed to be the authors of their own social acceptance. Asian culture was and remains all in the eye of the beholder, not in the aim of the creator. It all gets swallowed up in perception.

Here in SoCal, there are so many Asian groups that every place else seems freakily devoid. The idea that I might turn on a radio station and never hear Mandarin, Japanese or Korean on the AM dial seems uncivilized, as does any person who can't tell those languages apart. But let's face it. All us gringos care much more about the food than the people, that is except for the dudes with jungle fever, be they our dudes or their dudes. 

Almost all Asians I have known have attempted to compensate for a lack of social capital via ultra competence. I have never been able to determine, not that I care much, whether this is a personal matter, something that bespeaks a particular tradition, or was merely a reaction to racial stereotypes. It is not an intimation which I have been privy. I have known Keiths and Freddies. They either make it, or they don't, but either way, the intimacy has been lacking. 

I have known Asian men to get riled about banana chicks in their midst. I have known Asian women to find their roles stultifyingly austere. But I cannot know if I get that particular flavor of complaint straight, or through a black man filter.  And of course I have gotten my share of discussion about the 'model minority' role - whether real or imagined. What I haven't gotten much is a sense of Asian Americans to their native countries, if they have anything more than a passing familiarity with them. I notice this much more for the yellow Asians than for the brown Asians. Indians, are a completely different sort with which my experiences are more extensive. I know what Indians act like around Indians. So let me speak in broad general useless terms about that for a moment.

Once upon a time in Las Colinas, I was working for one of the most successful Indian companies in America. It was chock full of Indian nuts, and had some informal claim as the highest per capita PhD in Texas, if not the Fortune 500. So one day we were having a big meeting and one of the project managers was late, and we were sitting around waiting. Somebody asked who was he? And the answer was "oh. some white guy named Bob". It was funny, because that description suddenly made it easy, in this company, to identify him. But what was even more striking to me at this company was the extent to which the Indian social hierarchy, heretofore invisible to me, made itself visible. And since that day, although I have not given it more specific attention in a pattern-matching way, I have noticed how quickly such hierarchies are established stateside. It is my estimation that Indians here in America on work permits, are quite appreciative of the extent to which they are accepted into our creaky meritocracies. But really, I'm not talking about them here and I don't consider them Azn.

The Azn I wish I knew better are my associates from highschool, most of whom tread a fine line between conspicuous invisibility and innoffensiveness. Every once in a while I'll find an Asian dude my age driving a fabulous car, and I get this feeling that he's a cool, competent fellow I might knock back a few drinks with. But he's just on his way somewhere. These men have not become the sports announcer on TV, the over solicitous real estate agent, the friendly guy at the end of the bar. One of them, however is my General Practitioner, a Felix Unger type who wears his gloves and washes his hands a bit too often. But this fete manque doesn't bother me much - it's an empty spot like that trip to Berlin I never made. I was just going to be a tourist anyway, but it would have been nice to know I was welcome to learn the language and make friends. 

The problem with Asian Studies is the same problem as with using multiculturalism to solve the Race Problem - fighting fire with fire. There's always some esstialism involved. You always have to invoke some ancient Chinese secret to overcome the 'gaze'. There's always some black magic the Negro must use, some Judo for the Japanese. And for what? To get in the White door, as if it led someplace. There are always a hundred doors and a hundred keys. The problem is the fixation. Well, actually the problem is that the fixation is over-productive. You see Asian Studies, and American Studies and multiculturalism all work. They all work like that pill in the recent movie "Limitless". They work like Robert DiNiro playing a confident, powerful guy with the capacity to get in your face and make you suffer. They work like hammers and nails. 

One of the things you never hear about when these discussions come up is what to make of Asians who are Christian. I have never set foot inside a Korean or Philippino Christian church. But I know they are around. In Gardena, two towns west of where I live, I'm sure I could easily find a dozen Christian churches with Asian congregations. Where is the exchange? What does it mean to all of these racial and cultural signifiers we are trying to make sense of if and when there is that fundamental sameness? One of the favorite project managers I have worked with was a Taiwanese army seargant (boy you could tell) who sent his son to the same private Catholic highschool I attended. I remember so many times he would be shouting at the kid over the phone in Chinese. I felt sorry for the kid, rather the same way I feel sorry for any kid whose parents *and* teachers are Catholic. Where is the forgiveness? Where is the Christian fellowship? I suspect with some conviction that these might as well be different sects, as wholly other as Mennonties and Mormons. Yet I also suspect that there is a great story waiting to be told that will come from Thomas Sowell before it comes from Bill Moyers.

At bottom there will have to be a kind of studied indifference by the keepers of the culture that will inform our best sensibilities. I have found that kind of attitude works best when people get bent about American identity. Until then, we will have to stock our mental inventory with Dat Phans and Margaret Chos and Amy Chuas and a half dozen other riffs to satisfy the idiot level of stereotypes. We have to let all of the seminars take place, and try to reconcile Connie Chung and Tiger Woods. We'll have to have that conversation with the guy at the end of the bar, or commiserate/brag about our idiot/brilliant kids with the dad at the Friday night game.  It will become American, whatever that means, and then we'll talk about the bad old days when it was so difficult to watch the remake of the Green Hornet. And in the end it will all mean exactly what it's supposed to mean, nothing. Until we go to war with China. 

Speaking of which, I am reminded of the bottom line of Dr. Frayser, my dad's old friend. He is one of the kindest individuals I know, a real old school gentleman - the kind of man you expect to meet on a sunny day on Martha's Vineyard with his walking stick, straw hat and dog, knowing he as retired from fixing hundreds of human babies in his hospital. And because he was so absolutely gentle, his dictum was striking in its finality. He said, you know the reason why we respect Japanese and buy all of their products? Because we know they will fight us to the death. In the end, the only way to accept another human is to know that they can and will do anything you think you can and will do. The implications are simple and clear, and reiterate my indictment of Asian Studies. 

If the purpose of any study is to cultivate respect, admiration, acceptance and to break whatever is holding up that glass ceiling, then you enter a particular room with a particular shape and use particular tools to get a particular result. The problem is with the definition. You and I know what an Azn is. But that man is actually nobody in particular. 

 

 

 

 

Ndugu

Never to be ignored again.

Cow Poke

Spent all day yesterday tagging, branding, fixing and inoculating cattle.  Just wow.

Taking Science on Faith

All my life I have been fascinated with that thing I now call 'scientific animism'. It is, literally, taking the scientific process for granted and accepting that our 'betters' are doing things in our best interest without hesitation. The classic example I have been using is the matter of transferrance which is the process by which humans essentially judge a book by its cover. If the label on the cereal box says you are getting 100% of your Vitamin A, you believe that the cereal inside the box actually does contain Vitamin A, and that it's good for you even though you yourself cannot prove that such a thing as Vitamin A exists, and you don't know exactly what it does in the human body. 

There is no perfect knowledge, but the fragmented sets of knowledge we live with are surprisingly incomplete. 

My kids got pertussis shots last month. Pertussis is Whooping Cough. I've never even seen a video of somebody with it. We all know the first clue that somebody is off their nut when they start suggesting that government immunization is all part of a plot to enslave us. But to a certain degree, that degree by which we are truly ignorant of the workings of the things that make up our world, we are enslaved. So it has always been a difficult challenge for me to consider what degree I should know things I have proven for myself and trust things I take from others on faith. 

I do not use algebra in real life. I use logic. It happens to be one of my strengths - so much so that Aaron Hawkins used to call me Tuvak. Or was that Evil Tuvak. It was a while ago, admittedly. The miracle of our urban aggregations is that a person can use something like logic, with little else, and provide a comfortable living for themselves. Whereas logic on a desert island might just drive one mad. It doesn't have to be logic. Of course it could be personal intuition, or the ability to play guitar, or bake spectacular desserts. The point is that you can trade on that single skill and use your relative position in society to take some time out and figure out the natural order of things.

People talk as if getting away from a computer or the internet is, in and of itself, a healthy thing. You'll hear that fashionable statement become more taken for granted as truth. The great irony is if one actually understood more about what the internet is good for, you'd not take such fashionable statements as truth or 'science'. Figuring out the natural order of things is one of those things the internet is actually very good for - provided you have some discernment.  

All this is about leverage. You simply need to know how to turn your radio on and off. Then you can talk about what the talk radio talkers talk about without understanding the first thing about how radios work. It's fascinating and dreadful at the same time.

Here's my question. Does society advance when it delivers extraordinary goods to relatively stupid people? If so which society is best? Is that based upon the quality of the goods delivered or the relative ease with which people in that society can take advantage?

Chris Crawford: Efficiency vs Effectiveness

Listening to the entirety of Crawford's Dragon Speech is truly going back in time to the very verge of the computer revolution. He is just about two years my senior in terms of the sort of intro the both of us got into computing, and demonstrates exactly the sort of personality that dominated the thinking about the future of what has become the computing universe.

 

"That is the basic problem that we face. The expository lecture is efficient."

When I listen to Crawford, especially as he speaks about Alan Kay, I am really kind of shocked into self-recognition at the kind of approach we took in thinking about how computing could change society. I think of Crawford as rather oblivious to the market, and in comparison, the current generation is obsessed with the market. 

This is something of another opportunity for me to suggest that today's social software tends to be democratizing in a simplistic and rather shallow way. We are finding hundreds of ways to get 17 cents worth of attention from tens of millions, rather than 1700 dollars worth of respect from hundreds of thousands. Which will advance us? How much effectiveness will we get out of the kind of interactivity that is become the defacto market standard on the web? I think part of the answer is how little traffic Crawford's website has garnered. 

At the very least, somebody ought to transcribe the Dragon Speech. It is an excellent marker in history. Crawford was thinking what we were all thinking. Now that we have the technology, Bioware is the closest to what Crawford dreamed. As great as Mass Effect is, is that the story we have always really wanted to tell?

 

The Last Economy

 

Evry 1nc ina while i wondr f teh intrnet is makng us stoopid. Bt mbbe itz jus chng. U no how kidz txt eachothr w abbrs n sht. Like nt even spelng words out. Still. U nvr no. Thngs chng. 

How far can the next economy go, and what will it be made of? Dunno. I cn tell u wht it wont b.

Lady P From London

Pauline Pearce has here moment of courage:

The Viral

The Considered

Begging Questions of Medical Ethics

This afternoon I read about seven medical experiments that medical folks secretly wish they could do. I love the little para in Wired Magazine that's part of the intro. 

Most scientists will assure you that ethical rules never hinder good research—that there’s always a virtuous path to testing any important hypothesis. But ask them in private, perhaps after a drink or three, and they’ll confess that the dark side does have its appeal. Bend the rules and some of our deepest scientific conundrums could be elucidated or even resolved: nature versus nurture, the causes of mental illness, even the mystery of how humans evolved from monkeys. These discoveries are just sitting out there, waiting for us to find them, if only we were willing to lose our souls.

What is at the bottom of the nature vs nurture argument, I contend, is an answer not worth pursuing. Because why? Because ethically speaking, we already understand what Aldous Huxley made abundantly clear in 1931, of the fundamental injustice of eugenics. And we should understand that 'universal' health care need only provide the basics to be of great benefit to society, despite the ridiculous overreach America will soon be paying for. 

That's the essential point. 

I want to try a perverse point, which is that the rich and powerful will go burn babies alive if they're convinced it will prolong their wealth, power, life etc. So the scientist might as well go whole hog. You see, I distrust the ethics of the mechanism that brings the fruits of such knowledge to the masses with its false modesty and utilitarian promises. 

Cow Clicker

It has been over a year since I last played Mafia Wars. I collected billions of stuff, and I think it has one truly great educational aspect. As you collect millions of dollars a day, you recognize how big a trillion dollars truly is. Aside from that, I follow Ian Bogost to keep my head straight about what is and is not a waste of braincells with regard to gaming. 

His Cow Clicker is a classic meme. Know it.

People of (Armed) Quality

My current understand of Seventeenth Century Europe is fundamentally complete thanks to Neal Stephenson. What strikes me most interestingly now is the extent to which their problems with matters of succession and civil society were much more intractable than ours. Obviously they had to wait until their monarch died, or in the case of Charles I, was executed. But in the meantimes, there were large segments of society that appeared to get on in their diehard partisanships without the benefit of an electoral, or fund raising process. 

I am always astonished by what I see as the credulity of middle class Westerners who expect corporate responsibility. I myself has been part of that large crowd who believed that large groups of literate people could affect change through the aggregation of will into integral institutional power. Accent on the word integral. Corporate institutions lack integrity by definition - it is because they are not truly capable of tyranny. At the same time corporate business is, in its neoliberal evolution, becoming a more group-thinky comfortable place for literate people, and a more wishy-washy gathering of marketmakers. How does this happen?

My short answer is that the nature of today's collaborative white-collar work specializes people into sublimation and takes away their ability to get the gestalt of their business. People are reduced to working within a narrow context of human experience and lose the ability to make judgments. We live in a society that increasingly says 'Dont try this at home' and among individuals who more often say 'That's above my pay grade'. I wouldn't go so far as to say we're being infantilized.. how about juvenalized?

So I am attracted to the idea of minimum rulesets and 'empowered' individuals. I use the term 'empowered' because I think a broad spectrum of people understand that it means giving people leeway to carry out decisions they heretofore were not allowed. I put it in quotes because I don't believe in 'empowerment'. 'Empowerment' is affirmative action, a staircase you are pointed to, a promotion within a fixed structure, and one can be empowered a thousand times without really gaining power. It is the removal of the rulesets and leaving people to their own devices and consequences that sets men free, not showing them how to polish their resume and get to the next level. 

It is this concept of People of Quality that intrigues me because there is an implied presumption that they were free to do as they pleased. An armed gentleman was expected to take his own life into his hands, and live by his word, not so much by his pledges of allegiance to abstract laws. People of quality conducted themselves as humble and obedient servants of the wills of people to whom they gave their word. Or at least that's the flavor I get. 

My atheist friends would remind me how clearly this feudal arrangement of lordship followed a hierarchy up to God, and that the sort of implicit hierarchy that people of quality maintained could not be broken - thus reducing the peasantry to immutable lowness. Tying all that to matters of birth and blood (as manipulated as that could get) put even greater restraint on those not well-born, favored or talented. Who indeed could defy those with the superior understanding of the Word of God? It is no wonder the Protestant Revolution was so bloody. 

At any rate I am taken by the prospect that people of armed quality retain the same relationship to peasants and to the law as ever, and that the fear and loathing men who would have their own weapons and their own Bibles making themselves accountable to only those they want, and not some altruistic common good of the masses - this fear and loathing is nothing more than peasants have always felt towards the gentry. Now dig that you NPR slurpers.

Good Comeback

Cracked me up.

All Mobs Are Similar

So I just finished skimming the US Air Force document on handling civil unrest, which outlines things like tactics for all levels of protest. The cool paragraph tells the story of how the planners of a protest decided to use women, children and the elderly as the body of the protest and called in media, expecting to get great coverage of riot cops busting putatively innocent heads. Instead, the Air Force sent in uniformed female officers who were unarmed. 

But the other thing is that I read all of the tactics and came to understand how three months of training could turn any reasonably fit man into a riot cop. And starting with the 36 inch riot baton, a helmet and a sheild, much could be done to suppress random violence. Random violence is what you can expect from a mob - anything more would be dealing with terrorists, which is what I would be by certain definitions, aware as I now am about US Air Force riot control tactics. Fortunately I'd much rather drive a convertible hot rod than go to anarchy school. 

On the smarter end of the engagement, I thought how exactly I might go about diffusing the pretense of civil protest, and while it runs quite afoul of the typical tactics and one strategic rule of riot control, I can't resist its possibility. 

Imagine that first thing in the morning of Day Two of the purported riots. You, as The Man, erect the following: In a large town square close to where things are burning and bricks are being thrown, you setup just that kind of unarmed female circular cordon. In the middle of that cordon, you have bright lights and cameras going 24/7 focusing on a dais setup in the middle. On the dais are a dozen judges, also preferably female and elderly hearing complaints from the crowd. If you have a complaint, then you must come in front of the lights and speak in public inside the cordon. Protesters are then realtimed into the permanent record.

How long could violent protesters garner any amount of sympathy from the public if such a dais were maintained? 

London Falling Down

This should be brief, because when I get involved and specific it only seems to do me good, and I already know what I think.

Fernandez over at Belmont makes (as usual) an excellent point about the extent to which any society can bear up under questioned legitimacy. This is precisely the point I was making, from the POV of Constitutional legitmacy and how much the Left expects to 'reform' it towards a (utopian) endgame. CNu is convinced that today's sans-coulletes (pardon my French) are not going to wait for reform and will enjoin a new racialized civil war. I know (speaking of vitae) that as a security dude, he gets paid to think the unthinkable, and as a radical fly in the flyover buttermilk, he has some reasons to believe that he is surrounded by clones of McVeigh. But nevermind all that, what's up with London is what's up.

Myself being informed by the likes of Mark Steyn and Jared Diamond, I am prepared to write of various swaths of social democrat Europe. But if Steyn's predictions are to come true, then the interesting tipping point will be to see whether it is religion or left liberalism that tips the balance of trust away from the current governments.

Is it the hostility of fundamentalists to the common law at most erodes confidence in Western government? Or is it the oppositionalism of Prorgessive politics that engenders a greater distrust? Or are the 'yoot', inherently rebellious with no sense of guiding principles, the energy of dissolution?

Get Up & Do My Thang

There's so much I can say about this video; it captures the energy and spirit of a time when there was so much more healthy creativity in the pop world. I've been chasing down the original System (Don't Disturb This Groove, You Are In My System) and then moved down the timeline towards that renaissance in Hiphop that became the New Jack Swing. 1988-90 were the landmark years. Do The Right Thing. (Redhead Kingpin too). Bobby Brown. Robert Townsend. Magic Johnson. Robin Harris. Guy. De La Soul. Queen Latifa. BDP. Public Enemy. Kwame. Janet. EPMD. Beastie Boys. NWA. Eric B & Rakim. LL Cool J. Rob Base. Salt n Pepa. Self-Destruction. Soul II Soul. Tracy Chapman. Take 6. Biz Markie.

Piracy

An old friend is considering all of the aspects of piracy and is trolling for some juicy tidbits on the subject for a seminar, nay maybe even a symposium on the subjects. I thought about different areas of interest from the typical to the recondite to the ridiculous.

My biggest interest is hacking public institutions. I'm curious as to what sorts of attacks might do other than to destabilize. Beyond just the coolness and power of assymetrical attacks, can a reasonable case be made for a constructive kind of destruction? It's dicey.

On the one hand, I am reticent about the kind of reporting / Woodward & Bernstein attitude that does less to inform than to cast doubt on national institutions. That entire cant of journalism strikes me as craven, because I don't see it ever shedding light on the virtues of the institution itself. It's always in the vein of the lone whistleblower whose deadly secret must take down the entire enterprise, rather than illuminate the inevitable failure that requires new energy to repair. Once you have decided that the tobacco industry is immoral, for example, you'll have 30 years of crusading journalists tearing it down brick by brick. That sort of thing is what I distrust. 

On the other hand there can never be any slack in understanding the length to which human beings will corrupt themselves, and a dispassionate cold-eyed stare is a requirement. Moreover there should always be some agency involved in undermining that which is corrupt working hand in hand with proper rivals. Let there be a collection of underdog tobacco companies who are doing it right. Reveal their virtues, and strike at the heart of the devils. 

--

Some piracy is not. Rather it is the sort of competition required. Speaking into this grey area, I think about the add for LifeLock in which the CEO gives out his Social Security number over the air - defying the conventional wisdom which is ossified into our trust in a broken security and ID system.  I can think of that as a kind of assymetrical attack that undermines confidence in the status quo.

Back when I was about 30, I used a similar device by always saying my salary and debts and credit aloud in a kind of effort to undermine the respectability of such numbers. I think ultimately that was wrongheaded, but it made perfect sense to me at the time and did overcome 'silences'. I still have a lot of that ethic alive in me. It's unresolved. 

--

Corporate espionage, according to somebody I know who knows, is much much larger than most people are aware. Patent trolling and intellectual property wars rage. I think there is a kind of intrigue in that area of American life that we probably spend more time moralizing against than actually understanding. And it is that aspect of piracy that requires some airing such that we can begin to support the kind of robustness we need in all aspects of our lives. 

One of the things that I understand that I don't think a lot of people understand is the nature of the fence. I'll tell the brief story and shutup. I read a story about some clever kids who figured out exactly how to hack the subway fare cards of Boston's T. They got away with it until they began to try to profit from their enterprise. Technically it wasn't stealing until they tried to sell these fare cards. The same is true about the law against counterfeiting DVDs - or at least it was when I asked my brother the cop about it a couple years ago. It's not illegal to sell disks on the street, but it's illegal to copy the artwork that advertises that the content is a bootleg. The ethical boundary between hacking and theivery is all about making a market, of engaging buyers and sellers, not in the hacking. 

The implications for corporate espionage and breaches are now thrown into a different light. The way that hackers can profit are by demonstrating flaws in systems - rather the way Penn & Teller show how magic tricks work. But if the corporation refuses to play along, it does in some way force the hand of the hacker. 

So the ethics of free market competition would dictate that people sharp enough to discover flaws in security ought to be promoted. But if a hacked entity decides to keep things secret and not improve their system by admitting its weakness & committing to its improvement, then it is a kind of anti-intellectual dumbing down of security and meritocracy. Enough of this sort of corruption makes the hacker the real heroic character. 

 

Reggie Watts

I couldn't make this up. What if you had an entertainer who was a combination of Bobby McFerrin, Robin Williams, Tay Zonday, Bobcat Goldthwaite and Stephen Wright? You'd have Reggie Watts on a bad day. This man is completely and totally spontaneous - even moreso than Eddie Izzard, but without Williams' mania. OK. Enough 'splaining. Just check this out. 

The China Outlook

I met with my new partners last night and they outlined to me some of the plans which have netted them a great deal of investor interest, actual cash, and American execs poking them on the shoulder saying "Can we work for you, please?". I have to say that this is one of the most exhilirating weeks I've had in my life.

So the outlook for me taking the position is excellent. The prospects for making a nice pile of Yuan is also very good, and the experience of my partners in China at or near the top of the pile is quite encouraging. One of the commenters at Dresner says that China is a civilization masquerading as a nation-state. That's quite possible. I'm looking at it as a very very large corporation with a set of executives that we all desparately hope know what they are doing.

A couple things are clear, and several other things I'm learning are new. The first thing is that the more you believe in the greatness of a nation being defined by the industriousness of its middle class, the more you will have to admit that China is well on its way to inheriting that mantle from the United States. As a corrollary to that, it should be well understood that the closeness with which we deal with the UK is likely to be replicated after we 'get over' the transition. In this, the era of the global small business, the consequences could be that such a transition will happen without an armed conflict. This is my hope, and quite frankly, my investment.

I imagine that there may still be some purists after a fashion who might suggest that Sony is not an American company or that Toyota doesn't make American cars. And yet I think they would have a very difficult time convincing others that Spiderman is not an All-American film or that the Prius doesn't appeal to uniquely American sensibilities. I hardly think of the Netherlands when I fill up at a Shell station. Who says 'Royal Dutch Shell'? But the reality is that such institutions are deeply engrained in American life. What we eventually got over with the Japanese, we must inevitably get over with the Chinese. And so if and when it comes to banking or military might, that might not be so easy, but at the commercial level, I think we'll handle things just fine.

As a market, the American middle class, rounds out to about 70 million households. In China, those with equivalent purchasing power is about 4 times that. I'm not certain that the current status of the corporation, short of what Wal-Mart has achieved over the past ten years with its brilliant use of information technology, is ready to handle such a market. It's easy to say that the same ideas will work, but I strongly believe that a great number of business plans, and companies organized around such business plans, will not scale. I believe that selling to a global market of say 700 million, there are only a few corporations who are ready willing and able. So as this market of consumers evolves in China, nothing great American corporations take for granted will work of necessity. Nor will businesses born and bred in China necessarily have the magic to handle this expansion. What I think is going to happen is that there will be many companies who are successful initially, but will get slashdotted by too much success. It's one thing when your call center can handle 5 million calls to complain about your product's failure, but what about 50 million calls the next year?

Here's the surprising anecdote. Not 7 years ago, GM built with about $3 billion several state of the art automobile assembly plants. And why wouldn't they make them state of the art? China pays good money. What you don't hear is that now, something on the order of 40% of GM's global revenue (or is it profit, I don't remember) comes from those new plants. When GM went there, they understood that they would be catering to the upscale crowd. So they figured that the Chinese would want Cadillacs. No. The most popular GM car in China for the bling bling set is the Buick. That's what they love. Hmm. Maybe Tiger Woods knew something we didn't after all. Maybe not.

The moral of the story is that the Chinese consumer economy may be as familiar yet as strange as the Buick. Perhaps Pepsi will beat Coke over there. Maybe their favorite NBA team will be the Houston Rockets but because of Juwan Howard, not Yao Ming. Remember that we called it 'space' and the Russians called it 'the cosmos'. Modern China will be the same as, but different from the US. And like two overlapping circles, there will be some that is mutually exclusive, and I think a lot which will be excitingly brand new.

Let's keep one thing in mind, the Chinese, like almost nobody else, want to be like us and better. That means they are heading in the same direction. They don't hate us because we send a few billion to Israel. To them that is a pittance in a pot. They don't hate us at all. They envy our economy and infrastructure and they're working hard to get their own up to speed and beyond. They run their country like a corporation, not a democracy. Right now they're spending. Think about it.

via cobb.typepad.com

From the archives, about 7 years ago, I was in a venture to make money in China. It imploded, but I learned a lot.

America Unfinished

The American Revolution was in 1776. The Russian Revolution was in 1917. Was America too early? Were the Founders simply not evolved enough?

CD rants on about the 'special debt' MLK says was owed to the Negro. From my way of thinking, the Negro thought his own way out of the existential beartrap of race, except of course for those who didn't and still cherish the Negro Solutions proposed 50 years ago by the likes of Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph. Those of course were socialists and Rustin's arc proved to be prophetic with regard to the intervention that Progressives believe they are executing on the nation. 

It brings me to some questions about the extent to which various diehards feel that the American experiment is permanent and why exactly they stick it out.

 I'm interested in your outline of the dimensions of that special debt, and exactly how 'America' is supposed to pay it. I say that very idea is socialist. I wonder, in consideration of that, how much you would suggest that the American Left is completely unimpressed with the idea of a completed America - ie that the sort of republic America is supposed to be is so wide of the premises of the Constitution, or of the proper ends of enlightenment that King's experiments as well as those of such activists after him, are just the beginning of an evolutionary process.

That being the case is it nothing more than America's wealth that keeps them here? I mean if the Constitution was nowhere near good enough, why not start fresh elsewhere? What is the special promise of America? Is it perhaps the flexibility of its body politic? Do Progressives believe they can morph America into the shape that Marxists failed to accomplish in Europe and Russia? 

What is the endgame?

I think Progressives beleive that their progress does not end, that there are going to appear more steps in Maslow's hierarchy they will be able to deliver once they eliminate, through the miracles of the scientific method, all traces of the lower needs from the world's populations. In other words, utopia, or at least six or seven more Constitutional Amendments. 

Socialists & Racism

If there is anything true about the epithet 'sell-out' it is that it doesn't take much financial renumeration to pull former comrades heads out of the collective ass of the collective. I prefer the term 'pinche vendida', which is most appropriate to the drama of the petit bourgiosie. 

There is a principle fallacy that I believe most Westerners adhere to and I am investigating it because of its many corruptions. Interestingly, it comes from a gut instinct I learned as a black nationalist in distrusting white liberals. The fallacy is that the middle class via political activism can make the poor into middle class. It ain't true, or at least it cannot be done without the sort of transfer of wealth on the pain of riots or similar legal fiat that I find reprehensible. At least some radicals have the honesty to say thier intent is to afflict the comfortable, another euphemism for "(fuc | soa)+k the rich". Understand that I find such honesty and aim to be an honorable calling, but make no mistake, I'm not on that side. 

With this in mind one must qualify any political program whose honest goal is 'upward mobility' for the masses (read 'deserving poor'). For the socialist program there is that interesting matter of race, and this is where the histogram above comes into play. Notice the particularly long tail of the households doing more than $75k. This is something I believe to be uniquely American, but I'm open to dispute about that. Still the real meat of this graph is the purple part with the 60% of American households doing less than 57K in 2005 dollars. I boldly assert (and here's where you can dispute me again if you care to) that this is where the Left is focused and sniffing up the ass of that Left, the mainstream anti-racists of America. The reason is because it is in this realm that racism has its greatest effect on the fortunes of Americans.

As anyone with a racial agenda will quote you, there is a well-known economic statistic about the fortunes of the white high school grad vs the black collegian with two years of undergraduate studies under their belt. I would be happy to remind you that people with such educational prospects, by and large don't often get past the 60%. I would think it amply fair to say that those people are about average. So when, on average, the white dude with highschool and the black dude with college are compared and this is given as proof of how racist America is, you are likely to get a shrug from me. Why? Because that level of achievement is not something I find particularly inspiring. But let us give the Leftists their due. In fact let us stipulate that this is the core of economic racism in the United States.

Those of you familiar with the film Brazil and Orwell in general should understand quite well how much energy has been spent spelling out the effect of dystopic authoritarianism on the fate of the common man. It is of course reasonable that the Left and Right focus on that meaty part of the histogram in the context of democratic politics. So how much social mobility does the entire program of the socialist program get to the meat of the American public? I'm going to be hugely generous, and say 25% And I'll tell you why I'll say 25% - because it's outrageous to think the American public wouldn't vote themselves a 25% raise if they could, or that socialists would smack down the capitalists among us to foot the bill if they could. While I'm at it, let's take a look at what credit the Left gives itself. If you pile those 150 things on top of each other do they add up to a 25% raise? Go ahead and add them up - it's really a great list. 

But I bet you that if you ask a black partisan how much of that benefit goes to their constituents they will still come back with a demand for the same half dozen things. Better education. Better jobs. Better healthcare. Better housing. Better policing. Better political representation. And they will tell you the bottom line is that right in the meat of that demographic a 25% raise would deliver all of that. Take a poll yourself. Ask a householder at 57K how much of that big list he'd give up for a $14,000 raise.

So what good does all the anti-racist agitation of the Left do their constituents? Very small marginal amounts that can only be measured in pyschic dimensions, which is about all the comfort I think they can give, because any marginal benefit to a middle aged householder in the meat(grinder) of the American economic demographic is good patronage. So if someone can be convinced that racism cost them a $2000 raise, well that's catastrophic economic structural racism - not really but you certainly have the attention of somebody in the the 57K demographic. 

How racist is the American Left? It doesn't matter because it's all relative. Like the hunter who doesn't have to outrun the bear, the American Left only has to be less racist than the American Right, by whatever measure because in the middle it's a game of inches. One notch over on the histogram is world historic for the man in the middle, and it is quite simple to show the operation of simple bigotry as monumental to the man of modest means. Black kids locked out of a country club swimming pool in suburban Philadelphia? Huge for the man in the middle. Monstrous for the poor. Asset forfeiture for stop & frisk in a single corrupt police force. Tragic for the man in the middle. Obscene for the poor.  

It doesn't matter whether the Left or socialists stop this bullcrap. It matters that they draw attention of their potential constituencies to these pint-sized atrocities. It matters that they will attempt to work on behalf of the poor who may not actually be beset by these problems, and that they will proclaim loudly that a $500 beef is RACIST!!! 

It has been a long time since I've been interested in anti-racist activism, and I have despaired of any hope. I recognize that the rhetorical patronage delivered by race hustlers is all that gets delivered. And I also understand what they fear the most, which is that by and large Americans in the middle won't give a damn about race. But it doesn't take much racism at all to keep them in the victimology business.

Kinda makes me yearn for the days of black power.

Loussier Arabesques

This is beauty. It makes me think of the French in my bloodline and the African in my bloodline were destined to be expressed this way.

Conservative Cultural Criticism Made Clever & Hip

Trompe L'Oeil

Part of my intellectual curiosity dircles around the what I call informational thermodynamics. That is essentially a notion about the amount of energy required to keep a certain idea accurately alive in the minds of people. This is powerful enough notion but it is complicated by this, the fact of trompe l'oeil, which simply states that the human mind is subject to predictable failures.

These failures are part of our biology. The way we naturally think makes us take shortcuts. We abstract so that we can make up for the limited amount of brainpower we can muster at any time. What I hope is that Taleb's work will bear this out. Clearly he's ahead of the pack in his Fooled By Randomness (notebook). As much as we can know, many things are opaque, and man do I love his idea about intervention bias.

What occasioned this note is that I'm discussing jazz with Jewel and on the subject of Loussier we got to the object of Pachelbel. There is something classical about the fundamental chord changes of songs that humans find aesthetically pleasing. Oh snap. Now I have to read Benzon. But as the classic YouTube rant shows, Pachelbel is everywhere. 

--

Somewhat separately but related is puttering. When do our own idiosynchracies start to become obvious to us, even in our most intellective behaviors? I noticed this in my father the other day as he got his new computer and then proceded to become fascinated by the old photos that he moved onto it. He continued this routine about three times and I suddenly realized he was puttering. He remarks about how many thousands of pictures he has. He then says that some day he's going to really start organizing them. He then laments about what a huge and awesome task that will be. He start looking at one set of photos and gets engrossed. The next day he goes out and takes more photos. 

Last week he gave me 40GB of pictures with the admonition that under no circumstances should I load them up to the cloud. He doesn't want anyone to see them. His audience is himself. It has been this way for 15 years, I'm sure. 

--

And finally there is the observation that I tend to make more often that so much of global consumer culture privileges marketing. I do not chew gum, and I mean almost never. If I have five sticks a year I can't remember. But Ironman and I noticed yesterday that we have lots of different kinds of gum, and it's all in the packaging - but in the substance of gum itself, nothing at all is new in the past 40 years except for that new brand that can change flavor. Marketing, I now more completely understand, is the art of making the old seem new, to make the dull shiny. Transferrence is our predictable failure. 

 

The Tea Party Downgrade

"They did it, not me."
-- Obama Administration

So.. let's see if I understand this correctly. The biggest grass roots political movement in the past 20 years names itself Taxed Enough Already. They elect people to Congress beating other candidates who said we can raise taxes. Their representatives gain a majority in the House based on that simple idea, don't raise taxes, and our brilliant president thinks he can pass a law raising taxes so that he doesn't have to cut government back so much. The president fails to win a negotiation against this political force and so he throws up his hands and says they control things, not me. I'm sure the President's supporters still call that kind of rhetoric leadership. 

I know. Obama really didn't see it coming. They were so busy listening to Tina Fay's charicature of Sarah Palin that they thought they could just browbeat those 'teabaggers' into submission. They thought they could make jokes about Boehner and that the House would cave in to Obama's aura and do his bidding. 

Maybe he thought it would be just another Obamacare. Or maybe he thought SEAL Team Six would do him a favor of some sort. Or maybe he thought that if he could show some profit from TARP, he'd make his point about stimulus and everybody would come around. 

I think America is waking up to the idea that this set of ugly, nasty, stupid, foul citizens who say 'keep your hands out of my pockets, bitch' are serious, and they're not backing down. Not for nobody. 

 

A Few of My Favorite Jazz Things

At some point I am going to redesign or slightly modify Cobb to take into consideration the two or three latest Epicurean interests, music, coding and reading. The reading thing is mostly done, but I hope to get something in Google plus that can make for instant book clubs. After all, I'm really only interested in what I'm reading now.

But this week I'm in a listening mood and am experiencing music in a magical way in the spirit of both Recovery and Discovery, thanks to the attorneys over at Spotify who have managed to get the music I know into the hands of programmers who can finally do the right thing we have been waiting for since the dawn of Napster. 

My first musical surprise came as I was listening to Billy Cobham. Now Cobham, if you don't know, is a jazz drummer who would be something of a star if it weren't for the superstars of fusion. He's at one remove, in my way of thinking, from Lenny White, but still better from my point of view than Alphonse Mouzon. I first encountered Cobham when I was about 19 or 20 and trying to get my first grip on jazz as a more serious listener. At the very same time, I was sucked into the vortex of Stanley Clarke. But Cobham had an album out there in collaboration with several other musicians I did not know called Alivemotherforya. And I did play "Anteres" to death on my newly purchased Walkman. So I'm looking for that album last night and I come across his top hits according to Spotify. First cut, meh. Second cut 'Red Baron', holy heart murmer. It's 'Words of Advice' from my favorite album of all time.  Stunning.

I leave it on the Cobham channel and now and then I get music that pulls me away from the work I'm doing. I listen to a lot of music while I write or code or eat or clean up my room or drive, and only rarely is it so dense and beautiful that I simply must pay attention. Now I have some Billy Cobham, an artist who is hard to know. 

I should say as well, that I was in the mode to chase down some Mahavishnu stuff. Just previously, on Thursday as a matter of fact, I found multiple versions of 'No Mystery' which is becoming my favorite song from RTF, even though nothing will ever replace 'Romantic Warrior'. And as usual, 'Birds of Fire' does almost nothing for me. So I'm thinking that there's a trend here. There is no doubt that if I look up Bobby McFerrin, the number one hit will be 'Dont Worry, Be Happy' which is about as unrepresentative of his work as possible. But let's forget Mahavishnu's orbit for a moment so I can give some due to Bobby. (Except to note the fusion connection with Chick Corea)

First of all, check out this video and understand the spirit of the man. If you did watch the entire thing, that's actually enough to give you a clue as to what his music is like these days. You'll hardly make a better musical investment than listening to Beyond Words, his breakthrough album of 2002 which completely blew my mind. 

For Christmas, I got *the* boxed set of Ella Fitzgerald live in LA back in 65 I think it was. Stunning performances. I wore out 77 tracks in a month and a half. Gotta bring that up again... 

 

Here's a Trend I Understand

Swiss Francs are more valuable than dollars. True or false?

A Provocative Thought About MLK's Legacy

Whenever the Republican Party quotes Martin Luther King Jr. about character versus skin color, there is an odd reaction. It suddenly occurred to me that the net of that reaction is that would be defenders of King against 'co-optation' by the Right launch immediately into the histrionics about the Poor People's Campaign and King's weighing in against the War in Vietnam. So when the Right gets King's message about race correctly, enemies of the Right are quick to move the goalposts - well, they say, King wasn't ultimately about race.

So what was he about? The answer must inevitably be socialism. Which makes credible, some limited degree of McCarthyism against him. Do you see where I'm going here? 

If the enemies of the Right must backtrack on their racial premises of King's legacy, they justify the argument long made but never accepted that opposition to him was not singly a racist complaint. 

On the other hand, one could more credibly say that King was a pacifist. A turn the other cheek kinda guy. But then that blunts the interpretation of his 'not fearing any man' in his last days signalling some possible alliance with the Black Power movement. 

Either complicated way, you simply cannot deny the fact that the American Right is not defined by racism.

The Rock I Don't Get

I grew up in an era called 'crossover'. It was the early 70s, before America's bicentennial when every public mural had different color hands shaking. The years presaged the Rise of Lionel Ritchie and all the mediocre goodness that ensued. At some point I might be forgiven for hanging out with the sort of kids that liked Jackson Brown and The Eagles, instead of Aerosmith and Foghat, but it all sounded foreign to the rhythms of my blues. 

Over the years, I have participated in what I call Recovery, which is essentially feeding my adult mind with those things that perplexed me as a youth. It's one of the dualistic aspects of a rather persistent memory. More often than not there are fine rewards to grasping the subtlety of some arcane bit of music that escaped my younger ears. Sometimes I discover that there is basically no sense to be made of that stuff. 

On the nonsense front we have matters like the lyrics of McArthur Park, the proferred profundity of Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder, and the all the greatness that is supposed to be the stylings of Eric Clapton.

Clapton is a real puzzler because I don't generally have the patience to listen to enough of his stuff to figure him out. And I've never heard him do any rendition of a standard that make me say aha. Cocaine? Please. I Shot the Sheriff? An insult to the great Bob Marley. Layla? It sounds just as good when Weird Al Yankovich does his version. 

At some point I will probably listen to an entire song by Jimmy Buffett, but probably not until I retire and have absolutely nothing better to do. 

Somebody did tell me that I would like Jethro Tull. The same person told me that I had the personality to appreciate a band called Rush. It turned out that Aqualung is probably my all time favorite song to play on RockBand. But Rush I have yet to hear out.

Sometimes it's a near miss, and such is my experience with Pink Floyd. Of course I loved The Dark Side of the Moon, and sometime you might ask me about my altered state enjoyment of Animals. But it took me years to finally hear Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Comfortably Numb. Maybe The Wall was a very good album but only it wasn't the only album you knew of them. 

This is, largely the tip of the iceberg. Now that I have Spotify, I expect that I can do a great deal of Recovery. So I can tell you, for example that I am hearing A Sacerful of Secrets for the first time. OK. That's interesting. I wonder how long it would take somebody largely unimpressed with Earth Wind and Fire to hear 'Runnin' for the first time. 

 

Wonders and Signs

For the past two or three weeks I have been immersed in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it has been a fascinating character study. I am still singly struck by the life of Jack Shaftoe who became great by winding up in a great number of scrapes. It is the kind of life I could not imagine for myself and  yet in a small way it is the amount of traveling and performing recondite tasks for forgetable bureaucracies that have made me. I like my work, for the kind of sense of completeness it gives when properly done, but I can't say that in the historical scope of things that my work, or anyone's work, much matters.

I've been reviewing at a high school level, which is about all anyone needs to know, the particulars of the Russian Revolution. Or more precisely the two revolutions of 1917. It is a wonder to think that any cabinet member of the Kerensky government in its three configurations might ever be considered at length. Who would know what it took to become the right appointee at the right time? Those close to those doing the doing would know, and most everyone else would never know. That's how the circles of trust have operated. 

I grew up in an odd time in American history, a time when most people believe and thereby gave permission to those who proclaimed that we lived in an era of progress. Moreover it was an era of scientific and social progress defined well in advance of the eventuality. All of the murals had the psychedelic colors of the future, round and pleasing like the shapes of the 7up Submarine. We had already decided what the future was going to be and were so sold on that vision that people still ask why certain dreams didn't come true? Where's my flying car? Where is the colony on the Moon? Where is fusion? Where is world peace? Why didn't the population boom happen? Why didn't Rachel Carson's predictions come true? Hasn't capitalism ruined the world? Why haven't we run out of oil? I once heard an excellent explanation of all this. It was the idea of Pop Culture. 

Pop Culture was more than just the simple thing we think of today. It was, in many ways, the ultimate expression of democracy. It was the idea that by making high artistic concepts accessible to the average Joe, in quickly recognizable forms, that we would extend the benefits of liberty, education and all of the previously exclusive intellectual and aesthetic prerogatives of the ruling class. This is one of those extraordinary ideas that's much deeper than the meta discussion of Andy Warhol. It's one we still grapple with, and I see its evolution in much fascination with network effects and smart mobs ideas which are influential with the digerati. 

So to circle back a moment, is it really true that a high school education is all we need to understand the Russian Revolution? At a certain level, yes. At a Pop Culture level this is probably true. We can all understand the negative connotations of 'Siberia' without reading Solzhenitsyn. Most human beings never will read him. But is that enough for the purposeful wisdom necessary to foreclose the possibility of embracing another version of Siberia? Probably not. 

Here's the other thing. As beneficiaries of real progress and the disintermediation of various gating organizations, we Americans have come to expect more personal power. We can all have in our pockets more compute power than the entire NASA space flight control center of the Apollo Program. We can buy the sort of automatic weapons and communications gear that could enable a single regiment to beat all of Lee's Army. But how would we communicate the wisdom?

I'm saying we could not via Pop Culture or through any but the most demanding disciplines. And that is the sort of thing one tends to believe after having read a 2800 page set of books, which oddly enough I didn't actually read completely - so much as read and listened to via audiobook - a combination I find quite compelling.

We must be suspicious of mass communications and recognize what our literacy demands. 

Mercury in Retrograde

We had a power outage this morning onsite. A thoughtful gent tells me that this might be related to Mercury being in Retrograde, which will continue to be the case until 8/26. I have seen enough systems to know that sometimes a dumb explanation is better than none at all, and immaterial causality is better than explicitly wrong causality. So I have begun to pepper my vocab with phrases like 'swing a dead chicken' and 'the plate in my head' more often. And even though I did buy a nice I Ching generator for my iPad, never have I considered astrology.

But do you remember this?

 

Wow. I know every lyric. And I used to swim in that soup as a teen. Incredible.

A Safe Statement

From Allen West:

Congressman Allen West (FL-22) made the following statement tonight on the passage of the revised Budget Control Act of 2011.

"A year ago no one would have thought it was possible that the dominant conversation within the United States Congress would be about cutting spending.

For the first time in American history tonight, the United States House of Representatives raised the debt ceiling with equal to or exceeding spending cuts.  It is imperative now that we alleviate the anxiety of the American people and our capital markets and instill a sense of confidence and certainty regarding our fiscal policy. This will assuredly lead to long term sustainable economic growth and American jobs.

The task before us now is to follow through with a plan that was a 70- 75 % common sense solution,  and execute it to 100 % perfection.  I remain committed to ensuring this is the dawn of a new era in fiscal responsibility in America."

I can live with that statement. So far West has said very little that I can disagree with.