Cobb

Why Are You Afraid of Socialism?

 

The difference between socialism and communism is not important. What is important is whether or not the ruling elite believe in the masses or not.

I am reading the book that I never learned in school which is Robert Conquest's The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Published in 1990, Conquest took materials previously unavailable for his original written in 1968 with a view to the provisional title 'I Told You So You Fucking Fools'. Conquest was Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitzen. Not prophetic, merely accurate in such a way as to be practically immune to wishful thinking. 

What emerges is a picture of a society at war with itself, which is always the case of revolution. But what I am taking awy from this read is not something merely awful because of the ways and means through which Stalin himself destroyed the nation and the people, but based on the inevitable injustice of the precepts of the revolution itself. This was new, a surprising revelation to me.

You see the vanguard, be they Menshevik or Bolshevik were ultimately the leaders and definers of the revolution. As it happened, the Bolsheviks 'won'. And so great was their need, it was a revolution after all, to destroy the basis of power of the enemies, that they were willing to jail and kill their countrymen along the lines defined by the revolutionary vanguard. Ulitmately, and principly, all was done for the liberation of the peasant from their capitalist overlords. And so (being very terse here with history) it was inevitable that 'land reform' was part of the process. Collectivization: take from the rich and give to the poor, all in the name of 'the people'. But which people? Which indeed would, by revolutionary defintion, become right and proper leaders of the new ruling class, ie those in charge of collectivization? It had to be organized. It had to be scientific. It had to be orderly and disciplined in order to fulfill the goals of the revolution - otherwise there would be no need for collective power or its exercise. If you left it to *all* of the people, they would become capitalists again. No. There was a need for organized force to insure the proper level of equality.

The problem was that there were different classes of peasants over which to rule. In particular there was the matter of the Kulaks. These were those peasants of the most capable strain - those who had managed to save money and manage what little business they had, oppressed as they were by the landed gentry. And so with the coming of the revolution in 1917, the Kulak welcomed the Bolsheviks as they delivered crushing blows to the landowners. But the Kulaks were not given requisite power in the vanguard who ordered them around more arbitrarily than those bourgeios nationalists they replaced. And where did the farm products of the Kulaks and the peasants go? Well to feed the revolutionary army, and the political vanguard of course. Within one year it became civil war, and the Kulaks thus became the enemy of the people. 

Peasants were starved to feed the revolutionary army on behalf of the peasants and the vanguard could not afford to let the revolution die - after all this was not merely a solution for Russia, but for the whole of mankind. It became clear to the leaders of this revolution that Kulaks and those poltically like them would have to be suppressed until the proper new peasant could take his place. Meanwhile the vanguard would suppress the opposition. The Bolshevik party line became all the truth the system could sustain, given the peasants willingness to make war against it. It was this fundamental inversion of democracy that foreclosed any possibility of the Soviet system to produce anything even vaguely resembling justice. The ensuing cruelty, show trials, purges and pogroms were but external and inevitable expressions of the fundamental cancer within. 

What is further shocking about Stalin's rule was the extent to which the Party destroyed its own fathers. Conquest details the arrest, detention, torture, confession, trial and execution of Bolshevik after Bolshevik by the Bolsheviks and their replacement, bureau after bureau, region after region. 

Imagine, if you could, the idea that Americans for Obama would have all the Clinton Administration shot, starting with Rahm Emmanuel and anyone who supported him. This is how it went in 1930 Russia. Old heads of the 1917 revolution were being put to death in 1937, no matter how high they had been. The only survivors would be the blindly obedient, and the executors. 

 --

What is there to fear from socialism? The answers are easy to determine. You merely need to discover who is arrogating it upon themselves to call the status quo unfair and how far they would go to revolutionize. The status quo is always defined by the people who are making the decisions that the people live with. In a free market, that's everyone who participates in it. To shunt aside the market for political reasons is to find fault with the people who sustain it, who must inevitably be suppressed. Those who would take power on behalf of 'the people' will inevitably have to form a sustained, organized, scientific, disciplined new order. A new ruling class, with new powers... for the new people. 

OK & Stoic About It

 

As I move forward in this, the final third of my planned life (whatever happens after I'm 75, I basically don't care), I am discovering the ways in which all the life I've lived is different or similar to the ways people have lived throughout history. Right about now I'm discovering my stoicism.

 

About 15 years ago, I put together a 'hyperbio' which was about 300 phrases, each tied to a specific memory, that I had grouped into about 7 phases of my life. At the height of my corporate professional career and the beginning of my corporate management career I considered adding the 8th phase. In 2000 I got ganked by the Feds and in 2001 I got laid off from Hyperion and there was 9/11 of course. I still hadn't gotten full custody of my son, and I had lost my last grandmother. So thinking about how to end phase 7 and begin phase 8 meant that now that I was over 40 I was going to have to consider death, loss and failure. So what to call phase 7? Should that include the death loss and failure through 2001 to start anew with phase 8, or should it end on a high note and phase 8 be the beginning of death, loss and failure? It was a lot on my mind as I flew Southwest Airlines every week with bumpy landings at BUR. 

I didn't resolve the ontology problem, but I did change the way I think. Ever since 9/11 I have asked, as a part of my morning routine, what broke while I was sleeping? And those of you who have worked with me may recognize that hangdog look on my face, and how I actually brighten up slightly when I am working on something that's broken. Failure makes me laugh, because in some ways it is the comeuppance of incompetence. Except, of course in IT, you generally don't get to know exactly who screwed the pooch, how or when. We're all organizationally firewalled and only blame goes over the transom. So I came to expect SNAFU, even find comfort in it. It's a horrible dualism to deal with in a world of technological improvement where people want ever increasing slices of their lives digitized. It is at once progress and chaotic dissolution. 

When I was the admin at Xerox Centre, I had the audacity, just ask David Bradley, to wear a disk drive head assembly on my keychain. it was my digital red badge of courage, having mounted a disk pack incorrectly and listening to flying heads grind into the platters and then crash in a cyclone of crumbled bits of aluminum and burning FeO₂. Somewhere around that time, in the late 80s, I was losing my patriotism over the flubs of the Reagan Administration in disbelief over news reports about the runways lengths in Grenada and then finally over Iran Contra. But I was still much too young to be a stoic - I lived at the beach.

But now I understand that thing Taleb calls the Dumbell Strategy, which is to pursue seeminly contradicting aims simultaneously in recognition that he who plays both sides manages risk. But it is not being two-faced, but being antifragile, the difference between which are the stuff of wisdom. There's no easy way to explain it, and I won't until I read his book which is due out in six months or so. But I am indeed finding parallels of this thinking in history and coming to terms with what has been said by the likes of Epictetus and Cryssipus as well as the gods of OODA. 

I am of the opinion that all human folly ends in war, if the folly is big enough. That is because stupidity rarely fails from killing things and epic stupidity, that which is powerful and sustained by cowardice and/or credulity inevitably kills people. Evil *is* rather banal in that you can see it coming a mile a way. Stupidity, on the other hand, usually presents with the symptoms of inattention.  Expect Inattention; it is legion.

What does it all mean? It means that when I have a miserable week, as I had just the other week, starting with a funeral I really was unprepared for, a backlog of work I had committed to and failed to deliver, and an increasingly busified schedule full of tasks everyone hates like auto repair, tax preparation and helping kids study for finals at midnight; there is a solution. That solution is to listen to the tribulations of the thousands of Bolsheviks being falsely accused, tortured into confession, summarily tried and executed of being bourgeois nationalists, which is basically everything I ever wanted to be. Robert Conquest is my staid and sometimes deeply ironically arch guide through that horror - the details of which when I first encountered them 9 years ago sent me to sleep weeping. And now, like the whiskey I once could not stomach, I consume it for comfort.

I'm OK. I can handle it. 

I try to be both concerned and unworried. What I hate most of all is not the bad news, but being blindsided by it. I am comfortably down Miller's Alley and concerned (but not worried) about those things that are reasonably within my ambit of capacity to change. I reckon that to be a Stoic approach, but I'll let you know how Stoically correct I am. At the same time, I'm a Californian which means I do not intend to be fat or lazy or overly concerned with the quality of affairs in the public square, that which our meddlesome liberal friends insist on calling 'Zocalo', and will, I suppose until their Yankee inflected Spanish fails to deliver them from being dragged foot-first up the coming ziggurats of political human sacrifice ot the greater glory of La Raza. I'm going to the jazz concert anyway. I'm going jogging anyway. I'm going to eat in my walled garden like an Epicurean anyway. That's how I roll. 

I'm becoming convinced, as I'm sure the Stoics were, that Vulgaris populus ago in obscurum. Ordinary people live in darkness. Being OK is slightly better than that, especially for one such as I who is not likely to curse the darkness. That's part of the dumbell strategy. That is part of living up to Boyd's theory of liberty. 

“The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom — you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero.” 

But Taleb adds the kicker. He imagines, and we expect that he will describe, systems that benefit from failure - not creative destruction, but perhaps one can think of them as twin OODA loops, one for success and one for failure. Here is Taleb:

Seneca was the wealthiest man in the world. He had 500 desks, on which he wrote his letters talking about how good it was to be poor. And people found inconsistency. But they didn't realize what Seneca said. He was not against wealth. And he proved effectively that one philosopher can have wealth and be a philosopher. What he was about is dependence on wealth. He wanted the upside of wealth without its downside. And what he would do is--he had been in a shipwreck before. He would fake like he was a shipwreck and travel like he was a shipwreck once in a while. And then he would go back to his villas and feel rich. He would write off every night before going to bed his entire wealth. As a mental exercise. And then wakes up rich. So, he kept the upside. In fact, what he had, my summary of what Stoics were about is a people who really had, like Buddhists, an attitude. ...

And my definition is a Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking. Very different than the Buddhist idea of someone who is completely separated from worldly sentiments and possessions and thrills. Very different. Someone who wanted the upside without the downside. And Seneca proved it. And the way you get there, Seneca is suggesting, is through mental exertion. Through renunciation--some of it's action, but some of it is the way you look at your life and what you prepare yourself for and how you affect your expectations.

Righteous.

Startup Money After Bad

When I see reasonably intelligent and civilized young, single people who talk with upspeak my immediate reaction is 'Val'. For my international readers, a Val is short for Valley. You may be familiar with the term. If not, check out the YouTube.

So I watched this attractive young woman on television - one of those tech talk shows, and she started spewing about her experience at forgettably cutesy spelled dot com which was funded. Funded means you and 12 other twentysomethings with a cool idea managed to convinced somebody with 100 million dollars that you're worth 4.5 million and you have a year to prove it. And 85% of you fail, some spectacularly - meaning you make it for 3 years and get another 40 people and 12 million dollars and *then* fail. It's a story as old as most old dogs.

What surprised me was how instantly it occured to me that she and 12 of her friends would be an unlucky 13 as soon as she started speaking. The very idea of of spending about five million bucks on any endeavor headed by people with less than 5 years work experience, no kids, overpriced undergraduate educations and caffiene fetishes just seems ridiculous right off the bat. And yet we all know it happens. It happens a lot. It shouldn't happen much at all - but it's how a lot of us think about money and work.

There is a small part of me that wants to start a conversation: The only reason I'm not a Silicon Valley millionaire is because... But I don't want to go there or even think I'm going there. It just seems obvious to me that certain things ought to fail. I'm pessimistic today. 

Be Careful What You Wish

You might just become predictable. 

Newt's Decency

I knew that Gingrich won the NC primary, but I didn't know until tonight that he threw CNN's John King to the gators. 

Gingrich is the most peculiar of the candidates. On the one hand, he is an insider's insider having been the Speaker of the House. In that role, ushering in the Contract With America, he went balls to the wall on Federal spending in a game of brinksmanship that brings back chills. On the other hand, he has been making rounds in the media brainstorming ideas that make even Robert Reich say, hey am I really talking to a Republican here? He has a real personal life, meaning he's not *even* trying to look like some Stepford President. (and I'm probably abusing the metaphor). Conservative ideologues and hardliners dont' think he's 'Conservative' enough - and what that means is that Social Conservatives don't think so, which to my reckoning is a plus.

But this is really about Gingrich's moment in thowing the media to the dogs and putting them on notice that he will not be cowed by their bull. Everybody on the Right knows that the media has been soft bigots for the low performance of President Obama on a number of critical issues. So finally he took the stage and reversed the sexual chokehold that the Hollywood Left thinks is a game-changer for what they presume conservatives to be, and left them tapping out. We've even had a little bit of that screwy perception here at Cobb, but it can be instructive to show exactly what kind of Conservatism Gingrich will demonstrate in his campaign. 

This may have been the moment, as with the Army-McCarthy hearings, that the decency of the people asking questions has been astutely brought into focus.

Harold Bloom and The Western Canon – The Books and School of the Ages

shamelessly stolen from Pops

Without fear of contradiction or being accused of unwarranted hubris, I start here by saying that I have something in common with the illustrious and famed critic, Harold Bloom.  First, we were both born during the 1930s.  But as it is commonly known, there are countless (albeit dwindling numbers of) folks who can claim that spirited decade as the point of their earthly entry.  Second, our surname begins with the same letter.  However, “B” is a common letter for last names, so that’s no big thing.  And, third, we have/had an attachment to Yale University.  I was born at Grace-New Haven Hospital on Chapel Street, a few blocks from that esteemed institution; and grew up on Dixwell Avenue in the Elm Haven Housing Project, a scant mile north of the university.  Still, geographical proximity is a no brainer and few flags can be waved because of it.  Anyway…now that our questionable but unplanned kinship has been duly established, I’ll move on to other concerns.

I must say that I consider myself to be a late Bloomer in that my familiarity with Haughty Harold [and I say this with unfettered admiration] comes many years after reading other lesser known literary critics.  But Bloom has a special “touch” which I find appealing, unique and off-putting all at the same time.  I am kinda sorta sadly nearing the end of his well known and widely read The Western Canon – The Books and School of the Ages.  Tradition and common sense might suggest that I wait until (finally!) closing the well-worn cover of the tome before attempting to craft any kind of assessment or review.  But I am thoroughly convinced that neither his style, reach, wisdom nor attitude will diminish by the time I reach “endgame.”  If nothing else erudite Harold Bloom is nothing if he isn’t consistent.  I find reading him as much a labor of literary love and just plain and simple labor.

Bloom has a way of more than casually hinting that those who venture to read him should [make that must] likewise read extensively or, at the very least, be vaguely familiar with the broad sweep of literature that he has absorbed over the years.  I am convinced that this is an all but impossible undertaking.  I am furthermore convinced that he was reading prenatal hieroglyphics on the lining of his mother’s womb well before his rush into the waiting world – or perhaps some waiting New York library– on July 11, 1930.

A personal contradiction and wake-up call immediately came to my mind after reading his early (p 16) observation that “…literary criticism, as an art, always was and always will be an elitist phenomenon.”  If there was/is anything that I did not and do not need it’s the well-intended machinations of elitists of any and all genres.  Years ago I had read with measured albeit real disdain, E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy – What Every American Needs to Know.  It galled me that someone would have the (excuse the intentional redundancy) gall to actually construct a list of what one should read in order to be – and I did not excuse the expression – culturally literate.  It stuck me as paternalistic on the one hand and highly presumptuous on the other.  But I suppose that’s another review for another time.

Fast-forwarding to bombastic Bloom, I self-queried: “Why am I wasting my time with this Elm City academia elitist dude?”  And I had and have no sane and sensible response except that there was and is something about what he does so well that I continued to pour through his insightful and enlightened pages with no small measure of struggle coupled with appreciation.  To my surprise and delight I very early learned of Bloom’s virtual worship of no less a literary giant than William [the Bard] Shakespeare.  One cannot even casually think of Harold Bloom absent frequent and unabashed reference to Shakespeare.  Whether extolling the contributions to world literature of Emily Dickinson, Dante, Milton, Beckett, Neruda, Proust, Molière or Cervantes, Bloom magically and intentionally weaves his views around the accompanying indispensability of – what I will designate – William the Great.  My conscious bias comes from an earlier not-to-be debated list of Hillhouse High School English class readings.  We read lots of Shakespeare.  Period!  And in those days, the word “canon” was better understood as the “cannon” that would be leveled at the posterior of students rebellious enough not to memorize and, on occasion, act out what the Bard had penned centuries before.  So, in terms of relative familiarity, Bloom most competently treads on turf that isn’t all that strange or unattractive to me.  He places an unbending emphasis on originality, which can also be viewed as unprecedented creativity.  For example, he says  Shakespeare:

 “…wrote the best prose and the best poetry in the Western tradition”

and that he

“…will not make us better and he will not make us worse, but he will teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves.” 

Wow! Not even parents can achieve this result!

Harold Bloom cannot be faulted for readily falling into line with some all too often accepted and unchallenged contemporary thinking on topics or persuasions.  He will and does find himself at odds with those in and out of academia over such matters as social justice, multiculturalism and most assuredly feminism.  He doesn’t spend much time addressing these issues but then neither does he back away from his occasionally combative convictions.  Whether this makes him a stubborn literary elitist or the skilled provocateur of a good argument is the choice of the reader.  Just as it is the reader’s choice to “buy into” his predispositions on a headache-inducing list of authors and insights, which he takes for comfortable granted.

To his quasi-credit – at least from my perspective -- Bloom asserts “the Canon will never close” even with the caveat that “it cannot be forced open by our current cheerleaders.”

 There is a small measure of contradiction to his non-stop journey through the broad literary landscape when Harold the Hun offers this morsel of reassurance to the reader:

 “No one has the authority to tell us what the Canon is.” 

 I cannot help but wonder then what good purpose is served by some 500 plus pages of Bloom making a rather convincing case to the contrary.  Perhaps hanging out in New Haven for too long has its New England downside…a well-earned Yale PhD in tow notwithstanding.

Finally, one might ask, is Harold Bloom “worth” reading?  Well, to quote someone Bloom probably wouldn’t, I say:

    “You betcha!!”

Shen Yun, Falun Dafa & The Will of the Divine

I forget how civilized I am because I have been raising children for 18 years. 

Last evening I broke my fast for the first time in about 4 years, put on the long black coat, expensive scarf and headed out with the Spousal Unit to reacquaint myself with the high arts. The last time, we went to see Dudamel's premier at the Disney. This time it was Shen Yun at the Segerstrom and the arts were not quite so sophisticated, but high nevertheless.

It was my first time to the South Coast art complex, home of the South Coast Rep and the Pacific Symphony Orchestra. The architecturals are most appropriately dramatic if not arrestingly splendid. As we had a quick drink and dash of excellent sushi at Leatherby's Cafe Rouge onsite. I just had to marvel at this little plop of class right in the middle of Corporateville California, headquarters of Taco Bell. It was quiet and plush and the people were well-appointed and polite - not meaning the staff who get paid to be so, but the patrons. Eegads Maggie!

Across the way at the Segerstrom it was more bustling with the sort of crowd one would expect to find at a high school graduation; the older two generations in moderate attire with the appropriate proportions suitable for an English & Chinese presentation. My Mandarin sucks these days, but I do pick up the occasional phrase and can tell a Northern accent from a Southern. We shuffled in with the pack and found our seats convient to both viewing and quick egress. And so it began. 

Both the Unit and I were expecting something rather different than what we beheld. It was her idea to see dancing acrobats, but instead we saw acrobatic dancers that were only occasionally acrobatic. What was a complete surprise was the component of moral suggestion that was part and parcel of the program. You see, Shen Yun are cultural ambassadors for the Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong. If you've never heard of Falun Gong, what you basically need to know is that they are on the outs with the Chinese authorities and all of the backscatter you hear about 'the human rights record of China' can be quickly characterized as the news we get here in the States as the various brutalities heaped upon the Falun Gong. 

I was certainly aware that the Falun Gong was in this sort of trouble, but hearing Shen Yun present itself as the oppressed Falun Dafa, I figured there was more than one Falun the Red Chinese have beef with. Not putting the two together could be attributed to the Lawrence Welkian presentation of the matter. You could easily mistake the whole affair for a Sunday Matinee for families. It aint Sarafina! So as I write this without knowing the body counts for the Falun Gong it is a bit difficult for me to determine how forced are the smiles on the performers. But that is as it should be because despite the three or four expressly political narrative dances, there was a lot of performance to take in.

Most of the pieces were, from an analytical point of view rather energetically staid as can be expected of classical Chinese that was certainly composed to entertain royalty. I could get that feeling watching the various dances that these were very much of the sort designed to make you think 'aah these are my handsomest people, and see how they all dance in unison for me'. You would notice that they all had at least sevens and eights in their groups of dances. A soloist would never command the stage for more than a few moments, and romantic duets were rare as well. 

Nevertheless, the most memorable ensembles were those that set the modern students against the snaky agents who, covered in black, summoned themselves into wolfish crouching circles around brightly colored innocents. And so there it is as I left it without much more immediate curiosity about digesting Chinese history or current events. Instead I reflected on the oft repeated fact that Shen Yun is the largest troupe representing classic Chinese dance in the world. It illustrates the simple that the Chinese government is, in this regard, at war with itself. Nobody needs 500 years of recourse, much less 5000 given that actual progress does happen in 10 generations. There are limits to the logic of conservation. But still.

Two Notes from the Encroaching United Police States of America

Note One:

Progressive Insurance (run by a noted political Progressive) has introduced 'Snapshot', which is a device that you snap into your automobile to 'prove' that you are a safe driver. It obviously collects telemetry and throws your human experience over the transom to some digital Wizard of Oz algorithm that determines what discount you should get. 

Note Two:

We have been notified by the City of Redondo Beach the dates, times and locations of Christmas Tree recycling. The Spousal Unit called in this morning to verify the times and then was prompted into giving her name, address and homeowner status. It started to sound like a 911 call, but we just wanted to know why the trashman didn't pickup the tree. 

Short Brains

I saw an excellent quote today that was narrowly focused at the guys at Lytro, and it's something I had an inkling of when I saw the last video I watched of them. Check out the quote from G+:

..I get frustrated when engineer-oriented folks try to design things without thinking about the history, legacy, existing interaction rituals, behaviors and relevancy to normal humans and basically make things for themselves, which is fine — but then don’t think for a minute about the world outside of the square mile around Palo Alto. It could be so much better if ideas like this were workshopped, evolved, developed to understand in a more complete way what “light field imaging” could be besides something that claims camera-ness in a shitbox form-factor with an objectionable sharing ritual and (probably — all indications suggest as much) a pathetic resolution/mega-pixel count. 

 

 

I now coin the term 'short brains'. These are those folks who are bright enough to figure out that bourgios conventions don't necessarily apply to themselves, but have not enough respect for history and the way ideas, skills and powers manifest themselves through societies.

The President Sings

I actually did not believe I would see this in my lifetime. <br><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/T-hDt2E8MoE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

Key & Peele and House of Lies

Chapelle? Already?

I live under the rock that is literature and so a great deal of what happens in pop culture just goes whoosh. I have no idea who Cat Deeley is, so when I watched the 'Amsterdam' episode of House of Lies, I didn't get it. But, I was watching House of Lies which says I'm not too far off the planet.

I dig Cheadle. He seems like the kind of dude I could chill with if only he wasn't rich and famous or if I was. So much for that dinner date - still I'm sure we would get each other's jokes. For some reason, I tend to like his latest dimensions of badass. You could click that up to a latent black man thing. The first of the two was his film Traitor, which I think is his best role yet. I didn't like Talk To Me and well, Hotel Rwanda is what it is. The problem of course is that you can't tell me that Cheadle has to do all the shy guy roles when you have Paul Giamatti doing 'Shoot Em Up'. See what I'm saying? So this new dimension of badass is equally over the top. I haven't determined if I totally like it or if it's going to annoy me after four episodes because right now it's a very Hollywood view of my tangential industry, management consulting. It's close enough to be funny as in insider joke funny. It's hyperbolic enough to be funny as in youre so ridiculous Lucy. It's patently sinful of course, after all, it's on Showtime and HBO owns Showtime. You've got to be that kind of Hollywood sick to get those reprobate producers to finance 'entertainment'. What a bunch of vampires. We'll see.

In the meantime there's a new skit duo that are as funny as... Hmm. When's the last time we had a skit duo that wasn't Saturday Nite Live or Penn & Teller? Well, now we have one: Key and Peele already being compared to Dave Chapelle. Their Obama's Anger video has gone as viral as Baracka Flacka Flame, and so it comes as no surprise that the New Yorker Nuyorkican slum village crowd will glom onto it like Eldridge Cleaver's slacks. I get the feeling that they'll be bored too soon, because Key and Peele are probably not going to go there - there being the edgy place that gives comics like Chapelle and Rock a moment to work up a politically tinged sneer. Which means they are going to be short-timers with great talent like Tommy Davidson and David Alan Greir, two other intelligent men who refuse to clown or hoorah on cue. I get the feeling that they write their own stuff too. That means two seasons.

I'm such a cynic. But at least I'll get to laugh. Does Comedy Central still bleep everything? 

The Galston Memorandum

I have reached the point in my research where I pretty much know the outlines of the useful arguments in my areas of interest down to the level of citable text. That is to say, I've become pretty good at identifying thinkers and theories. The rest is technojargon for academic researchers and world class practitioners, of which I am neither. Technojargon is expensive because researchers and practitioner's time is valuable and the temptation to instruct is often overcome by practical incentives. In other words who's got time for writing a book when there's time to get paid actually building stuff? For those who can't actually build - whose job it is just to write books.. well those books cost even more. 

McWhorter today commented about comments by somebody named Rick Santorum. I don't know Santorum in the way most Americans do, and don't really care to. Santorum was quoting (or paraphrasing) William A. Galston who made a point very clear back before 2002:

Former Clinton advisor William Galston sums up the matter this way: you need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty—finish high school, marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of the families who do this are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor.

Anyway, the researcher at Brookings published his findings earlier than 2008, I have an article from City Journal in 2002 that cites Galston, who worked for Clinton, BTW. Still, what's more interesting to me is that I read this exact same prescription back when I was in college in the 80s. The author? None other than Thomas Sowell.  
 
So here's your interesting situation. You have a white Republican in 2012 talking about something a white Democrat said 10 years earlier which was just a repetition of something a black economist said 20 years earlier, and people here on the Root 30 years ignorant of a solution that has been out there for a generation pretending to be insulted by a common sense truth that my dead grandparents knew.  

You can't get the actual Galston research is secreted behind the firewall of academic publication as I mentioned before but you can get an idea of where to purchase it if you check here at Google Scholar. 

And keep in mind that American poverty is pretty damned good, which is why sociologists have to study people at 185% of poverty. 

The Bob Rubin Problem

Bob Rubin:

His most prominent post-government role was as Director and Senior Counselor of Citigroup, where he performed ongoing advisory and representational roles for the firm.^[1] From November to December 2007, he served temporarily as Chairman of Citigroup^[2][3] and resigned from the company on January 9, 2009. He received more than $126 million in cash and stock during his tenure at Citigroup.^[4] 

The Bob Rubin Problem serves to put a face on the ethical problem of public bailouts of private errors. He defies the Hammurabic Code of liability.

Anti-Fragility

An excellent podcast by Taleb. 

http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2012/Talebantifragility.mp3

Best Skyrim Parody

American Domination

A lot of good stuff here. Just basic geopolitical perspective that our media fails to deliver. His first point about the diffusion of the US is right on time. I can verify first hand that Austin is very different than Minneapolis is very different than Miami is very different than Milwaukee.

The regionalism of China and the history of Japanese change, as well as the motivations behind their military actions in Manchuria is a history most Americans know nothing about.

Mr. Unsmooth

David Frum has a theory about why Mitt Romney is so awkward. 

 

JS Mill: Liberty in Discovery

Reading from the Catholic Education Center, a definition of liberalism & progress:

It would be impossible to give a definition that captures (at a proper level of detail and complexity) all of the different aspects and phases of liberalism. Rather than define it, I will read a single passage from J.S. Mill’s On Liberty (1859). If this text does not capture the soul of liberalism, then I suspect that nothing will. Mill wrote that:

There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices and set the example of more enlightened conduct and better taste and sense in human life. This cannot well be gainsaid by anybody who does not believe that the world has already attained perfection in all its ways and practices. It is true that this benefit is not capable of being rendered by everybody alike; there are but few persons, in comparison with the whole of mankind, whose experiments, if adopted by others, would be likely to be any improvement on established practice. But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist; it is they who keep the life in those which already exist....There is only too great a tendency in the best beliefs and practices to degenerate into the mechanical; and unless there were a succession of persons whose ever-recurring originality prevents the grounds of those beliefs and practices from becoming merely traditional...there would be no reason why civilization should not die out...[6]

This is something I understood a while back, but I never used the word 'progress'. The way in which I oppose Progressivism has nothing to do with questioning Mills premise here, but exactly to the extent which Progressives assume that the pace of government is adequate to the task - which is in my view oxymoronic. Government policy assumes, by definition, ossification of best practices into law, which we all know cannot be practically undone at any rate sufficient for the process of discovery to be sustained. Rather it makes for a sinecure for those corporate entities who, through their marketing, infantilize the population. 

Discovery is what the common man needs to exercise within the millieu of his class. His own experience is the best teacher as he discovers not only the enlightened selections of his superiors, but the alternatives to those which make his advancement a choice as opposed to a prescription. 

Notice additionally the way in which Mill shows his appreciation for the good things in life which already exist. This must be the place for conservation of classics, best done by those swift enough not to be overly impressed with novelty and change for its own sake. 

--

This is all in the context of writing skeptically of Dawson's rejection of technology, or more specifically technocracy. There too I am in agreement. But what I think neither Mill nor Dawson appreciated is the extent to which the democratization and decentralization of technology enables individual agency. That must be the gating criterion. And I then cede the conversation in principle to Richard Stallman's Four Freedoms. 

I think it is possible to generalize what Stallman is saying to all of the sorts of technology that Dawson might oppose, and that should be the test. That being the case, there is always the probability of discovery long after the inventors have died - so long as the spirit of invention and discovery is maintained. 

So today I just discovered and converged some very important concepts. It has made me an even greater proponent of Open Source, not only in software but in the context of the Force of Education. 

Meme Alert: Avoid Ghetto

Just so you know we are living in Orwellian times, you have to understand the codewords for the people who decypher the codewords meant for people who communicate in codewords. In other words, beware of calling people who look for race racist because it will get you called a racist. It's all a conspiracy. And now I am participating just to get a word in edgewise before the nonsense of this latest blather in the chatting classes goes viral. 

You see, last week, Microsoft was awarded a patent for an add-on technology for GPS that routes you to where you want to go depending on what you wish to avoid or consider. Today those people are saying those people are enabling those other people to be what they already are, racist!

Long ago, before the GPS satellites were in place and only truck drivers for big logistics company, it was considered quite the computing miracle to get a machine to determine the shortest route between two points on a map. But now anybody can get that for free. Why not add value to map routing by including some crime stats or demographic stats or weather stats or traffic stats? Or better yet, to quote from the patent's text:

..resolving conflicts between an information source with a financial interest and an informations source without a finacial interst and producing a direction set based upon the information source that does not have a financial interest in providing the direction set; collecting information concerning routes of other people, and using the collected information to update the pedestrian-based rout in real time.

In other words, social GPS routing, so you can pick the way to the beach that your friends go, or so you can pick the non-profit route, or you can basically do the Aerosmith remake of your choice and Walk This Way. 

I expect that the technology is obviously pretty cool, but since guys like me who are skeptical and analytical are a demographic minority, Microsoft and its licensees are going to need some cute and expensive marketing to overcome 'avoid ghetto' and its Orwellian 'racist' implications. 

Of course we've been through this before with the NUDnicks, and we'll probably see it again from this shallow generation. But you know the technology is there so it's just a matter of time before it is wired to do what this blockhead person suggests: 

"A more useful app would be for young black men to be able to map blocks with the highest risks of their being pulled over or stopped on the street by police," Chinn said. "That phenomenon affects many more people than the rare occurrences of random violence against motorists driving through 'bad' neighborhoods."

How about the Ice Cube Social GPS? 

 

It doesn't take more than a moment's thought to recognize that the blockhead gut reaction has already been satisfied by various Bulworthian ghetto tours. Or has gangsta video disappeared from the airwaves? And doesn't anybody remember the overblown Detroit meme? Isn't this all Michael Moore's fault anyway?

Rahm Before 2008

The Democrats' "New Direction". Listen to the whole 8 minutes. Did Obama do any of that? Especially note where he suggests the partition of Iraq. Amazing. 

Utah Republican

Mia Love. Surprised? You shouldn't be.

So Sue Me (Danger Will Robinson)

Classic:

Washington, Jan 6 (Reuters) - The American Bar Association president's suggestion that unemployed law-school graduates have no one to blame for their predicament but themselves elicited a range of reactions from law professors and administrators at a major law-school conference, with many expressing dismay at what they called insensitive and misguided remarks.

In an interview with Reuters Wednesday, William Robinson, who became ABA president last August, said, "It's inconceivable to me that someone with a college education, or a graduate-level education, would not know before deciding to go to law school that the economy has declined over the last several years and that the job market out there is not as opportune as it might have been five, six, seven, eight years ago."

Some at the conference of the Association of American Law Schools -- the largest annual gathering of law professors -- called the comments tactless.

"A lack of concern for law graduates -- or anyone, for that matter -- looking for a job in this economy smacks of questionable character," said Robert Ashford, a professor at Syracuse University College of Law who founded the AALS's Section on Socio-Economics, which focuses on economic issues in the legal profession and in legal education.

Others said Robinson was unfairly picking on students.

 

Hacking Stratfor & The Western Street

My first reaction to 9/11 was 'This is the beginning of the end of the nation-state as we now know it.' I may be right, and that's a scary thing for a nationalist like me. I was impressed by the possibilities of assymetrical warfare and the ability of non-state actors to foment insurgency and anarchy. However I am not particularly impressed with the idea that assymetrical warfare causes disproportionate spending. After all, a billion mosquitoes over ten generations could never amass the assets required to produce the single barrel of DDT that exterminates them all. The miracle of assymetry is its impact on the perceived legitimacy of the Leviathan state. 

Even before I came up with my Peasant Theory, which originates with the idea that some cataclysm could stagger confidence in Western democracy, I began questioning the swiftness with which intelligence services can act in such a way that informs the electorate. We experienced the rapid spread of the WMD meme despite the fact that it was a term of art never before used in presidential elections. Who knew who the peers and proper critics of Scott Ritter and el Baradei were before their reports became politicized? The blogosphere, ever partisan, expanded the influence of individual analysts like Juan Cole, Robert Fisk and later Michael Yon but who were the professionals who did this every day? 

Enter STRATFOR and open source intelligence. It rapidly became evident that consumers of strategic intel could not depend entirely on partisan sources and needed much more and more credible information to make rational political decisions. I subscribed to those free services STRATFOR offered as well as those of a broader variety of milbloggers, even as far as Russian ex-military sources. A new era had begun.

But in some ways we were, with our internet searches and bloggy trackbacks, still a sort of democratic movement of outsiders not necessarily connected with the reigns of power. No matter what we could learn about Saddam Hussein, the new geopolitical prosumers were not going to change the content or context of Colin Powell's speech to the UN. We could only hope to second-guess wisely after the fact and be satisfied with our own growing sophistication. And in that regard we were as vulnerable to disinformation as any member of the Arab Street. We may have the advantage of critical literacy and experience in analyzing multiple media sources, but when it came to matters like L'Affair Plame, with its official secrets, insider politics and selective leaks we were all ultimately blind. The best state intelligence agencies will always have that advantage over everyone else. We may have STRATFOR as the Arab Street has Al Jazeera, but those too have their own weaknesses.

Along comes Anonymous, the anarchic hacking collective to demonstrate more of the power of assymetrical attacks. They have hacked STRATFOR and distributed the names of its subscribers and are presumably holding identity information of all of them. It is not coincidental that the black hat security experts of Anonymous have access to IT WMDs. There are no real treaties and only the vague outlines of anything that might police this Hobbsian domain. Anonymous, Lulz, Anti-Sec and others have characters as varied as Jesse James, Billy the Kid and other legendary outlaws of the old American frontier - and they are testing the security of every Wells Fargo Stagecoach, locked in battle with white hat Pinkertons and outgunned sheriffs at every turn. Who is to say when and how the conflict will be resolved?

We are left with several dilemmas. If those like STRATFOR who exist outside of the state intelligence apparatus (if it can be trusted that they are not fooled by CIA disinformation) cannot be secured, then what good are they? Second, how can Anonymous, whose members are secret and who are accountable to nobody be a trusted political actor? Anonymous can claim, as it has, that it is not actually responsible for the hack.

The single advantage we have is the understanding that black hats are not generally known to sustain disinformation campaigns themselves. For example, a 'dox' attack is one that exposes an individual's secret information in order to publicly shame or discredit them. The credibility of the attack is based in the premise that the revealed information is in fact authentic and certain bona fides of system information that could only be known to system owners (or successful crackers) could know. The point is generally to demonstrate the insecurity of the target and thus discredit their security with regards to their trustworthiness on security matters. But that's rather inside pool for which there is little credibility for the average Joe. 

Chris Kyle: The New and Last American Soldier Archtype

The first chapters of American Sniper are a perfectly suited introduction to the aw shucks, God, Country Family school of American kickass manhood. It is mind-bendingly simple to understand exactly why this nation will continue to be greatly defended for generations to come, because anyone who reads Chris Kyle's book and knows where Kyle is coming from (I do!) will recognize in a heartbeat the kind of Texas cowboy we will always have millions of. Kyle himself would never tell you that he's a one man army, but he is just the kind to fill the top ranks of the best army on the planet so long as it's funded.

There's only a little to say about the metastory here, as I will be slightly intrigued but much informed and entertained by the story to come. That is that you see in Kyle's story, the new soldier - the prototype by which humanity will be defended for generations to come.

He is not an outsider. He is not from the dregs of society. He loves his father and his family - his is not desperate for approval. He rises to the challenges of defending his country, and it makes all the difference that he is a volunteer and that this remains a free country. So long as our military institutions retain their transgenerational links, then they will be the fuel that will power militaries of the future. We must hope and indeed pray that armies comprised of such free men will remain victorious from here on.

It's corny. It's easy to understand. Because of that we are most fortunate. We retain the formula. He's just a fighter and he hates to lose. He understands that he has become a weapon and he is serious about his patriotic committment. His mission is a job and he is remorseless and relentless. He understands the deal of morality he has made, and he values an American life first. That is the kernel of it. The rest is training and experience, and now his knowhow is plowed back into instruction. That, my fellows, is a professional, and that is what we want our military forces to be. 

Are those Raybans or Oakleys?

Pinker's Non-Violence

There's a great deal to say about this book and that's primarily because there's great deal in it. It is the kind of compendium of argumentation one would expect to come out of a single mind which correlates with a number of similar types of theorists but it defies common sense and theoretical plans in ways that make its own thesis mockable. Which is to say it's bound to be a controversial and important book for years to come as we come back to it rather in the same way we came back to Fukyama after 9/11.The thesis? Stop worrying about The Bomb because in just about every way you can measure, humanity has grown up and we are all non-violent now.

I've had just about all I can take of Pinker as he marches into the current events section late in the book. I may finish, but I've certainly read enough to find some extraordinarily good stuff. What Pinker has done in many ways is that he has justified just about everything I've considered in my eschewing the domestic noise over the body counts of the Civil Rights Movement as its justification. He has opened up the real can of facts about the thing I've been calling War TV - getting real about the body counts and the relative importance of mortality in estimating how much moral outrage is appropriate given the nature and history of war. So it's rather disappointing that he spends so much time exemplifying this and that in terms of gender and race relations in contemporary America rather than something socially much more world historical like the One Child Policy in China.

Pinker sometimes annoys me by confusing the map with the territory. Granted, you must not suspend disbelief as he goes through the statistics about violence - and he does so in every category in every country in which they are available, but when statistics fail to show motive he inserts his own narrative which I think tends to be overly progressive. Pinker also betrays a biased understanding of how history unfolds. He most definitely comes from the Great Man school. Have too recently read Esdaile's account of the Napoleonic Wars as well as several histories from Ferguson (Warburg, Civilization, Pity of War, Ascent of Money) most everything Pinker gives as a reason for conflict feels incredibly reductive. As well, he all too often falls into contemporary metaphor for example, citing Tom Lehrer's song "Who's Next" to describe the public's attitude towards nuclear proliferation. That's ok for bloggers. Not so much for historians.

To his great credit, Pinker eviscerates a good deal of wishful thinking and illustrates how attitudes and mental illusions cloud the way people interpret facts and news. I think that at an individual level, Pinker has got it nailed. But I don't think he does any justice to the ways and means by which polities express themselves and wield the powers that move the great powers. This is the missing piece in his narrative that I think moves too quickly from statistical correlations and causalities to conclusions about whys and wherefores. He has done, as far as I can tell, a very credible job in interpreting the statisics and analyses to which he has availed himself, but the arc of his story is far too ambitious to support the theory he proposes. Nevertheless, the entire subject of violence has been kicked up a notch and the challenges he presents to sociology is rather immense. Number one on this chart is his disabuse of the 'hydraulic theory' of violence - that every suppression of violent behavior in one segment of society or humanity must be countered by an escalation somewhere else, or that aggression suppressed boils under the covers only to explode somewhere else. In this, he explodes myths about war in Africa, the nature of rape and speculation about our long peace' lacuna, like the idea that WW3 is next.

Number Two myth that Pinker explodes is particularly salient. Pinker challenges the unquestioned association of violence with poverty. The argument is simple and clear. The third world remains poor, remains young and remains 'restlessly' male. But the incidence of civil wars change dramatically over time even though these 'structural variables' do not. 

What dampens my enthusiasm about Pinker's book is that I think he extrapolates a bit too far with his ideas about civilizing processes, specifically when making the case about nukes. His use of Hobbesian Leviathan ideas work in conjunction with his ideas about personal honor codes and self-help justice, but when he extends them to the progress made on nuclear disarmament I think he completely misses the boat. I think that it is entirely reasonable to give credit where credit is due with regard to nuclear disarmament and the failure of the Cold War to end in nuclear winter. And he is right to chastise the maintainers of the Doomsday Clock to change their criteria so that it's always a minute to midnight. But nuclear disarmament talks were the reason new regimes were set in place to make great power war less likely. Such diplomacy does not trickle down. So all the multifarious reasons the rape of women within the context of marriage has been criminalized has nothing to do with the multifarious reasons Russian troops did not engage American troops in Vietnam.

In short I don't see any overarching theory that can explain the reduction in violent human behavior than exactly the allegory he uses in his title. 'Better Angels'. There are too many specific angels to describe the whole heavenly host. And that is proper. Perhaps vio But where he goes to make the cases that he can are excellent and not to be missed. I do tend to agree that his theory ought to be 'The Nationalization of Violence' and spend more time examining the very specific ways that societies, cultures, groups and individuals disempower themselves of violent recourse for the sake of national identity - presicesly the give and take of individual sovereignty and the defense of rights. That would be a book we could sink our teeth into.(Because it would support or debunk a further explanation of why political philosophy does or does not work to reduce war.)

Because the social contract has changed so much between the 17th/18th century Europe and today in so many sovereign polities one cannot make much use of those statistics. But we could look at the trade offs between individual defense of liberties & honor codes vs those formalized by government powers in a variety of nations. I just felt throughout that South America just didn't figure into any of his calculations and the nature of the crimes perpetrated by dictators there in recent history were given short shrift merely because they didn't involve enough Europeans or interest enough European statisticians. So he had no narrative to make up and left power laws to describe all their conflicts.

So basically what you are left with is a chunky soup of a book that masquerades as a meal. Everything that is wrong with the book is everything wrong with aggregating micro and uneven distributions of statistics into a grand narrative that self-admittedly can make no predictions. It's almost a theory but more often than not sounds like wishful thinking in the gaps between very strong and pointed debunking arguments. If Pinker is the best in the world, he shows exactly how far we have to go to understand ourselves. If not, then he puts statistics to good use, and overuse showing why we need more historians like Esdaile and Furguson. 

I Paid My Debt to Society

After 15 years, I have settled my beef with the IRS. Well, I should say that I retired my debt. I continue to loathe and fear them like the blood sucking monsters they are. I have lived a very fine life even pulling that extra wagon, but now I will be able to sprint. The ankle weights are off.

Oh wait. Can they see this?

It's funny how I've always mocked Hollywood celebs who die broke from their financial foolishness. Not long ago it was Wesley Snipes who had some idiot excuse for not paying taxes. Well, I got busted too, but now I'm done. The gangsta feds are paid in full. I'll go about my business.

So this is, finally, my last 'coulda woulda shoulda'. I have corrected all of the major errors of my life with the exception of the fat on my belly. Hello 2012. 

Obama's Fascist Temptation Revisited

About four years ago, when I cared a great deal more passionately about the foolishishness of the American electorate I was stunned to discover a sort of childish petulance that needed to be slapped around, but was instead coddled by that rudderless gadfly who soon became the Democratic Nominee and then President. I had reasons to be somewhere between upset and merely despondant at the man himself, but I was clearly revolted and disgusted by his shallow partisans and their Black Eyed Peas remixes. I wondered out loud if a man who clearly had no political philosophy outside of expedience would take advantage of such a shallow set of questioners such as those lobbed to him by the mainstream press. You remember calling me shrill, don't you? Yes, because I used the same term as Jonah Goldberg.

Today I think is a good time to look back and play gotcha, and I'm going to do it with a particularly snarky article (this one by New York Magazine). Well, actually I'm not going to reprint it, except to excerpt the following bits.

Then why is Obama doing this to us?
Actually, Obama says he won't ever use the power to detain American citizens indefinitely, because, in his words, doing so "would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation."

So if he thinks the law is so bad, did he sign it as a prank? Ha ha, you thought I was going to shred the Constitution! That's pretty funny, actually. Not as good as the classic Elijah Wood episode ofPunk'd, but almost. 
Is MTV literally the only channel you watch?

Sometimes MTV2.
Obama actually threatened to veto the legislation at first, but after the language was softened enough that he could essentially ignore it, he signed it. Also, it was embedded in the National Defense Authorization Act, a larger bill that funded the military, and he couldn't very well appear as if he didn't want to fund the military, especially in an election year in which the GOP will likely try to portray him as some kind of peacenik.

But if he's not going to use it, then it's all good — no harm no foul.
Except that the next president might not have a problem with detaining American citizens indefinitely, and now that the bill is law, he or she will have the explicit authorization to do so.

There have got to be some smarter liberals out there than this fake dialog exemplifies, but it demonstrates the nature of what passes for political debate in major media. The essential gravity is that Obama is to be trusted but nobody else can be, when in fact it is clear that Obama was elected on the strength of his campaign's rhetorical opposition to just this sort of legislation. I understand that we're all supposed to be cynical about what politicians do and say, but reactionary cynicism is just as bad as ignorance; in either case you shutup and let injustice happen. 

The cost of abandoning the GWOT policy of GWBush is already manifest in the deteriorating situation in Iraq and there will be no simple way to arrest that. And I tend to believe that the significant Al Qaeda threat in America has been crippled to the point at which a strong President could ask Americans to keep calm and carry on. But ours is not the sort of President that asks average Americans to perservere, he sees himself as the deliverer of cosmic justice, a rescuer, a Robin Hood. And so this is how he selects to keep his halo lit.

This is the President who leads from behind the polling of the least thoughtful Americans, and he has squeezed every internet nickel from them with his populist slogans and ran the most expensive presidential campaign in history to conjure up the biggest government budget in history which creates the biggest deficit as a percentage of GDP in American peacetime. I wish he had a real political philosophy. That way we could hold the electorate more responsible to him by disciplining their expectations within the context of proven ways to run goverenment. But what we have is an electorate that has become trained to hew to the words of anyone sufficiently radical who casts doubts on the status quo without having a demonstrated and superior alternative with any philosophical or practical pedigree. It is a cycle of desparation rooted in unreality and only connected to the enthusiasm of the mob.

That is the road to fascism. The question is whether or not Obama can craft out something that disciplines the electorate to its benefit. If he cannot but continues his populist themes, he will have taken one step closer to "power of the people by any means necessary, embodied by me". 

Let's watch how he elbows through the next crisis and with what justifications.

Snow Country for Old Men

Doc sends his regards from South Dakota. He took his youngest there for dog sledding. He's reading Thoreau and sends me a handwritten note:

The most gratifying work is that produced of your own hands. Four days of wood cutting, snow removal and leaf burning is infintely more gratifying than putting LA's crooks through the revolving doors of State's criminal justice system. What an elaborate joke. What gratifies me the most pays the least, heck it doesn't pay me a dime and herein lies life's mystery. If I live well, correctly, in the country, I'll never have to work for strangers again.

I have yet to see the beloved country but I hope to this year. By the time I'm ready, the snow will be gone, but with any luck so will be 20 pounds of my own fat. I am determined, once again, to lift the heavy weight and fall back into my body again.

For most of my life I've been extra athletic, but in a way that seemed oxymoronic to me. I was of medium height and slim with broad shoulders. I always thought I should have more of a gymnast's body, instead I had a cyclist's body - not quite enough meat on the chest and arms for my druthers. Still, I had extraordinary stamina, could play all day and eat without end. At my top conditioning I rode about 50 miles a week on my bike and got in about five hours a day of beach volleyball over the weekend. That condition was something I purposefully persued, reducing my life to simplicities. 

There have been two times after my 30th birthday when I purposefully persued fitness and one time, two years ago when I figured I could just diet my way into health. I know myself too well now. I have to hit the dusty trail and feel the pain. So it's on. 

I'm going to get up tomorrow at 6am and run. No matter what. My reading list is going to get shorter and I'm going to develop my symphonic vocab. I'm done talking and expecting so much from talking. 

 

Four Forces

It has been some time since I've written in my section on Matters of the Spirit. And even though I have the KJV and the NIV on my Kindle, it has been a while since I've done much reading of the Bible. And no, I haven't been to church all month, nor much this season. For the grace of God I am not trying. Yet I remain engaged with matters of the spirit in my heart and mind and certainly every day am thinking about our great endeavors in the affairs of men.

I begin with a story about my girlfriend back in 1980 when Jamaica Funk was at the top of the charts. She asked me if I was afraid of Hell, and I said no. She asked me how I resisted the temptations of sin, and I made it clear to her that my relationship with God was structured as the Jesuits gave me structure, which was the evocation at all times to be Christlike. It was clear to me then that I had absolutely no difficulty in the pursuit of that moral ambition and understood that while I might fail from time to time, that my aim was right. From that, whatever righteousness I might possess would be evident to God and by his grace I would do well. I never trusted a preacher who called his flock 'saints' and invited all those who had accepted Jesus as their personal savior to stand or sit or perform some deed. In fact, I've always had a theological problem with the idea of Christ the Redeemer as Personal Savior. It seemed too immodest considering what deeds needed doing in service to His example. But I was aligned. All I ever wanted was to be good. I didn't need Heaven nor Hell. It seemed to me, a frivolous question, and by and large it still does.

Having a religious education beats a month of Sundays in church. It taught me how to think about God and morality and worldly ambition and a number of related matters. I was fortunte to have had things explicitly discussed. Today I hear mostly silence, even in all the talk about religion. Most Americans will never have what I had, which was a Catholic priest as a biology teacher and a computer science instructor who had been to Divinity School. The conflict between rationality and Christianity never entered my mind as a fundamental problem but as a philosophical debate about epistemology. But more importantly, what I came to an early understanding about my religion was that it was about the moral foundations of justice.

Everybody comes from somewhere on their way to somewhere else. Their measure of ambition often determines their speed. We are often admonished to 'remember where we came from'. Well, before I came from a Jesuit prep school, I came from a black neighborhood. More importantly I came from a family that was intellectually engaged in the Black Arts Movement. And specifically we celebrated Kwanzaa and heard extra clicks on our telephone calls in the years after 1968 when America was on fire. There is a passport photo of my mother and siblings. You see, we were prepared to leave. As it became clearer to most Americans that burning down the nation was a distinct possibility unless integration happened, there were certain Black Nationalist dreams that had to die hard as well. Our family closed down the Institute For Black Studies and went to church. My mother could never go back to the Catholic she had been. She went evangelical, in fact a rather millenarian flavor not quite to the handling of snakes, but far into faith healing, speaking in tongues and jumping Holy Ghost dynamics. I didn't take the Foursquare Church in stride, but there was the music. My father did not find it too difficult to return to his Episcopalianism. I chose LA's upscale Episcopalian slice of Christian lifestyle, that was leavened with the harder edge of my Catholic schooling. Crossover for me was relatively smooth. I had several flavors of Christian experience by the time I chose for my Confirmation. 

And so from these traditions of social justice and struggle I emerged whole and in no way confused about my moral ambition, purpose or identity. So it was easy to answer my girlfriend's question. What remains is not doubt so much as curiosity. Still, life throws us curveballs for which we are not prepared, and every once in a while I have to go back to where I came from and think my way to the present. Sometimes I backtrack, sometimes I'm smug and sometimes I don't even want to think about it. 

This afternoon, I received a note from one of my many associates in thought and spirit, David Theroux. And he asked me to consider his essay. In doing so he reviews some familiar ground implicit in what I have learned about matters of justice and liberty and what Christianity has to do with any of that. It is an area I think far too many Americans have not considered at length and I find in his essay a good provocation and framework for knowing some of what is important to know about secular humanism. I use the term with a smile because I used to mock the very concept before I was in any ways a Conservative. But let me excerpt a small piece and move forward. 

However in the Renaissance, religion became viewed as a “private” impulse, distinct from “secular” politics, economics, and science.[7] This “modern” view of religion began the decline of the church as the public, communal practice of the virtue of religio. And by the Enlightenment, John Locke had distinguished between the “outward force” of civil officials and the “inward persuasion” of religion. He believed that civil harmony required a strict division between the state, whose interests are “public,” and the church, whose interests are “private,” thereby clearing the public square for the purely secular. For Locke, the church is a “voluntary society of men,” but obedience to the state is mandatory.[8] 

There's a lot to unpack in just this paragraph, but it is I think, the central portion that must be made clear. In all things, I strongly believe that people should strive to be independent and self-reliant. I say this with as much forcefulness as my own inheritance allows me to speak as a descendant of slaves. A free man, in order to keep his freedom, must owe no debts of purpose or identity. Of those things, he must be self-possesed. What I have described autobiographically is some part of the experiences that made me just that. I am not morally indebted to a single politics, a single church, a single race, or any such singularity beyond whose gravity I have no hope to escape. And yet from every institution and experience I know that there is a singular moral law to which all of humanity is ultimately indebted and responsible. 

 To my way of looking at things, there are four primary forces in the world which leverage our aiblity to pass instituional knowledge and power. They are government, religion, education and commerce. I would like to elaborate on these and had written up another 500 words which were unfortunately lost. But the nut of the matter is that to see these forces in balance needs a philosophical recognition of which roles in human life each should take and in what proportion. The proper conservative wishes to see these balanced in such a way that government - the single institution of those four which posesses the only legitimate monopoly of coercive law and force of violence should take a minimum of autonomy from its consenting citizens such that their debts of purpose and identity remain more closely aligned with institutions they have more autonomy in controlling. In this way of looking at institutions, the separation of church and state is a necessary but only minimum requirement. All four should have overlap and interdependence but not be controlled by the others. I see Theroux's argument as a specie of that which says the four forces are out of balance.

Brad & Amy Talk about Sex

Here.

I riff off the following:

Imagine two rowboats, both adrift at sea. The first rowboat has no oars. They can see an island in the distance. Somebody calculates the distance to it, and the rate at which they're drifting, and concludes that they have only half the food and water they'll need for everybody to reach the island. The conclusion is obvious*: at least half of them have to be thrown overboard. And the sooner it happens, the fewer of them will have to die.

Now imagine the other rowboat. It has plenty of food and water, and it has oars, but it has a different problem: it's leaking, and fast. Somebody does the math, and they conclude that they can all make it to the island in the distance. But they can only make it if everybody who can row, rows, and if everybody else bails water as fast as they can, and if they cooperate in sharing the rowing, bailing, and resting cycles; if anybody is selfish, if anybody doesn't cooperate, nobody will make it.

Call the first rowboat "America." Call the second rowboat "the Netherlands."

That's the metaphor that came to my mind after spending a couple of days deciding how to explain Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex, by Amy Schalet (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Even though the book has nothing to do with rowboats, and only indirectly to do with the overall differences between Americans and the Dutch. What the book is really about is the regulation of teenage sex by their parents. You see, as someone who grew up in both the Netherlands and the US, baffled by the differences between the two, and who went on to do her Ph.D. research in the sociology of adolescent/parent relationships, Schalet has dedicated an entire book to trying to explain a major difference between two different cultures that were substantially identical as late as the late 1950s: democratic capitalist republics who won their independence from colonial imperial masters around the same era, dominated by conservative Protestants, who went through the same Great Depression and two World Wars, and the same sexual revolution when contraception and antibiotics were made widely available, and the same economic shock after the OPEC crisis. But in the years after that, huge social differences appear, and Schalet concentrates, as her academic speciality, on one of them.

 

I generally don't like to compare America with little Scandinavian countries because I believe the the matter of scale requires that every sociological subject have a different class of solution. But...

It's easy for me to see that the concept of a 'proper family' is what's guiding parents. Speaking as an American with three teens living at home, my answer has been to stress abstinence before adulthood. I do not see any benefit whatsoever in allowing people who are not consenting adults to act as if they were. In other words, I use the term 'statutory rape'. In the same way, I don't particularly expect that the experience of a babysitting job adequately prepares anyone for being in the workforce. In short, my attitude about teen sex is that more people are talking about it than are actually doing it, and those who are doing it are doing it all wrong.  The idea that taking all of the risk out of the consequences that might lead to a shotgun wedding or herpes via a safety net sounds Orwellian to me. I like the idea that sex is complicated and dirty - that getting naked is not easy and casual.

I expect at long last that the results of the sexual revolution in the West will turn out to show a skew in our societies as much as the One Child policy in China. It is inconceivable to me that the historical norm has been so out of touch with reality and that the benefits of feminism are simple but have been overweighted. In short, I don't believe in social liberation through sexual freedom, but rather through the evolution of property rights. Women and children are not property and freeing them from those traditional constraints were necessary and sufficient to greater liberty - however to assert the additional demands of radical feminism (ie to properly have men 'deal with their female side', or question the roles of men & women in family life) was a gross error with significant detrimental consequences for the concept of family. And I think it is becoming more clear that having women think of sex outside of marriage as a liberating thing has worked primarily to the advantage of polygamous men.  

So the very idea that this is a lifeboat kind of situation begs the question of the centrality of sexuality in our humanity and exactly what sort of benefits we have gained by focusing on upending our attitudes and trying new practices. It is my opinion that focus on sexuality tends to be dysfunctionally individualistic, and so it is not surprising that it brings into question those sacrifices necessary for family stability. Why is teen sex so important? I think it has to do with the improper way many Westerners conceive of freedom.

 

Alienation of the Deeps

Somewhere in my RSS feed is a writer named Nicholas Carr. He has written a book called 'The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains'.  I don't have to read it to know that he is right. I would have to read it to know precisely how to talk about it at the dinner party I'm never going to be invited to. I have the internet instead of dinner parties. And I have to presume that my blog is in the deep end, but I cannot be sure. At some point there must be some advantage to having this thing online rather than in binders on my shelves. I may come to figure out when that point arrives.

In the meantime, during a surfeit of indoor alone time over the long weekend, I watched the entire Firefly series, finally had my fill of Skyrim and began to watch the crapulous series 'Doctor Who'. The latter has given me a whole new appreciation of Charles Stross but generally downgraded my estimation of the literacy of the entire UK. It turns out that there were exactly two moments in the Firefly series, which I found very enjoyable, that has been presaged by conversations I recall being the odd man out. And so for just a few moments of communal appreciation in retrospect, I have eaten 14 hours of entertainment. Part of the problem is I can't remember exactly whom I was talking to. No matter. There is always the Chinese bits and through that perhaps I can get my daughter to follow the series behind me.

I also watched the first half of Dustin Hoffman's Marathon Man, which I had never seen and look forward to finishing. It just so happened that YouTube's Travel Film Archive had sent me an update and I was looking at videos of New York back in time. With Steven Pinker in mind, and also a brief listen of West Side Story in the back of my head, it was refreshing to consider how unviolent NYC is now compared to the 70s. I do have a recurring meme that we will be reliving the 70s when the economy gets worse than it is now, but I must confess that watching Marathon Man reminded me of how awful it used to be. In one way, I think today's incivilities are more hypocritically passive-aggressive and byzantine.  In another way I miss the overt hostility of yesteryear's horn-honking, bird flipping  screw yous. Overall, however, we are more civilized. Maybe the future is Singapore.

Sunday night extended into Monday night and I sat twiddling my mind's thumbs at a seemingly endless selection of depths to plumb. But I am starting to believe that I am at the ends of my edification. It simply makes no sense to me to go delving into yet another Dwemer ruin only to find another collectable, either in the real life world of literature or in the electronic sandbox. I am overbrained and becoming arcane, making myself irritable and insulting.

In one scene from Marathon Man, Roy Scheider (who used to be one of my favorite actors), attends an opera at the Palais Royale. He disturbs a gentleman in the loge who is following the score. Yes, following the score; he has the sheet music of the performance in front of him. How extraordinary. I think that I should never see such a thing, and today I feel that I would never want to be such a thing. It is so alienating.

We have to pick our alienations.

Before web 2.0. Before the web itself, there was the world of BBS. They were like phone numbers scribbled on bathroom stalls - for a good time, dial. And there would be some small flock of weirdos who didn't seem so weird because you were all in the same predicament, like a collection of barstools awaiting the asses of the lonely, it was welcoming and isolated. You ordered up conversations like cocktails, and there were regular topics like common mixes of booze. A bit of indulgence bore friendship, as much as a co-drinking stranger is a bar can considered a relationship - as much as a bar can be considered a place to start one. The world is a ghetto, why not online too? That was considered the progressive sentiment in 1990. Today there is gratification of the same flavor to be had all over the web, leaving us old jaded pioneers pleased but indifferent. There are a million people out there to connect with - but it's really like walking Fifth Avenue now. Where did all of these people come from? How can they be content just staring into windows? Where did all the bars and coffeeshops go? What is there really to talk about anyway?

I feel more often than not that our civilization really has no place for old men who are not rich and powerful, and am wary of approaching that barrier. I'm not sure exactly how to live. Outside of being a jolly uncle and picking out which grand- name I should eventually adopt, there are no yellow brick roads for me to follow. I despair of becoming anyone's eminence gris; what a disgusting denoument.

So I don't know. It is perhaps my impending far life crisis, and I am healthy enough for the moment to believe I have a choice.

Does wealth equal power?

 

Does wealth equal power?

Published on Marginal Revolution
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That request was the first on the list and it came from Ezra Abrams, who wrote:
Wealth is equal to raw naked power: the power to fund PACs; the power to endow university chairs to influence people; the power to tear down neighborhoods and erect shopping malls. to what extent does the increase in wealth and income of the upper x% (relative to median or some other broad measure) mean that too much power is concentrated in the hands of too few people one amusing example is from Kahnemann’s thinking fast and slow. Small schools show the best results b gates poured money into small schools However, what gates didn’t realize is that this is a small numbers artifacts; small schools show the best and worst results cause with a small school you can deviate from the mean …there you have raw naked power having a huge influence on educational policy
I disagree with most of that. The scholarly literature suggests that campaign finance reform doesn’t matter as much as people think.
The big banks control our government less than some critics have suggested.
Academics are quite liberal/democratic, yet college students seems to be slightly more conservative than the American public as a whole. The major impact of endowed chairs is to cement the roles of Harvard, Princeton and comparable schools as intellectual leaders.
Bill Gates influenced computer operating systems a good deal, but since he earned his money I’m not sure he has had a big impact on final outcomes. (The anti-malaria campaign may yet pay off.) He also has moved away from the “small classroom” idea, after he viewed the data. Fiscal pressures — not pressures from the wealthy — probably mean the idea will lose out anyway.
There are several reasons why wealth does not translate into power so easily. First, effective philanthropy is extremely difficult to achieve, especially if that philanthropy is trying to counteract prevailing social trends. Nor should it be assumed that non-profits are always the drivers of change. Second, the wealthy in groups do not always coordinate very effectively, to say the least. Each is used to being in charge (remember when the Lakers had Karl Malone and Gary Payton as well as Bryant and O’Neal?) Third, many of the very wealthy choose to consume ego rents rather than effectiveness. Fourth, “democracy” and “the market” control large chunks of modern life, and it is hard for outsiders to commandeer those processes. Most of the major functions of government are there because people want them to be there, for better or worse.
The best way to think about wealth and power is with some ideas from Harry Eckstein. There will be, for reasons of spontaneous order, a general concordance between the status and influence of groups in the broader world, and the power of those groups when it comes to government. American economic policy, for instance, really is more pro-business than in much of Europe, and that does stem from the more commercial nature of our republic. That said, the ability of the rich at the margin to control policy through intentional acts, either individually or in groups is much overrated.
Wealth does protect you from the depredations of others, such as being treated very badly by the police or legal system. In this defensive sense wealth can give you a good deal of power.
Overall the quality of argumentation and evidence on this topic is extremely low.
Addendum: Iceland, by the way, doesn’t want the money of the Chinese billionaire.

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