Cobb

Your Government Grave

So I hear that there's a hullabaloo at the Supreme Court this week. Perhaps a bit of well needed closure, or at the very least some properly considered caustics for the presumptions of the Social Democrat in Charge. 

I was rather stunned at the brazen way in which Obama used tricks with cloture and other parliamentary arm twisting to get his monstrous health insurance mandate passed into law. But everybody, no matter what they say, wants to be an imperial president. Considering the corruption of Congress, I'm not sure such would be emperors can be blamed. But that's not the way it's supposed to work and now we are met on the governmental battlefield testing whether such arbitration can long endure. 

 

The Economics of the Science is In

I'm liking the mocking of English of the credulous. That's why I left it at 'the Trayvon Martin'. Anyway, since I've turned off my economic radar, I had to do a little remembering back on whom I used to read for those several years and I found the following off Mankiw's blog:

Who Is Your Leviathan?

The problem with libertarians and the problem with Anonymous and the problem with Facebookers is all the same sort of problem. They have no Leviathan under which their prerogatives are defended. 

This is a problem that I have no answer for, but here is the first way I think about it.  In the Old West, we think about whether or not law and order can succceed based on the character of the Sheriff. The Sheriff will or will not, based upon his gut and the resources available to him, defend your narrow ass from the various card sharks, snake oil salesmen, horse theives, claim jumpers, savages, lynch mobs, rapists, murderers, and outlaw gangs of the untamed wild West. But you should learn to carry your own Winchester.

When Doc first became LAPD one of the first things he noticed and communicated to me is the extent to which cops get on the scene five to ten minutes after the fact. It's almost never ever an intervention. It's a forensic reconstruction. What did you see? What was the order of events? What were you doing here? 

It has been a while since I've been blogging on the regular. One of the reasons is that I have very few loose ends and questions remaining on the Cobb project. But one of those has to do with the material floor of all jibber jabber. OK so we have this new internet thing and we can all have all the conversations we want and answer all of our questions, etc, etc. But who do you call when people start shooting? Who or what has got your back when all of you ideas and money are just marks on paper? When everybody loses faith in everything, what do you have? This is a question I began asking when it became clear to me that it wasn't 300 Billion or 600 Billion that was at risk when Lehman and Bear Stearns went under. Around 2007 when I first heard of Roubini, I decided that I wanted to stop driving a BMW and start driving a Hummer. I started preparing for bad case scenarios - not worse case, and no I did not develop a taste for zombie movies, but I noticed people that did.

Peasant Theory came out of that. What does anybody have a reasonable chance to expect? Just last night I finished a book by Paolo B. It was a light book (Ship Breaker) that took up an interesting angle that I fundamentally agree with. Humans are somehow hardwired for feudal hierarchies. Loyalty matters. In many ways, it may be the only thing that matters, especially given human ability to lie and adapt. We only need a certain amount of pleasure and a certain amount of pain to bind us to reality, everything else can be invented. I'm going to leave it at that and not try to qualify this out towards grand theory.

Some entity called The Rude Dog reminded me that the blog is more about my own questions and my own tracking answers through the collective minds in argumentation here than it is about any public service. I am writing what I don't see written anywhere else and thus like the man who invents for himself rather than for a market, I'm pleased with perfecting what I want. Your mileage may vary. But I think I should use this opportunity to ask that question of the various entities who have some investment in Cobb by virtue of their past participation.

So I will begin asking you. I'll come up with a series of questions, the ultimate of which will be who is your Leviathan?

For me, my Leviathan is in fact human curiosity. I never learned how to cook, but I did learn how to find things out and tell stories. So I will always be responsive to questions of what and how and sometimes why in a world that I think doesn't ask enough or bother to find out enough - primarily because as I said, most people need just enough pleasure and just enough pain to find their reality and the rest can be made up. The fact that I envision scenarios in which all of that gets inverted is just like me.

The problem with most literacy is that it doesn't need roots in reality. The problem with most education is that most people don't agree with it. So there's a whole lot of thinking in the world that isn't truly defended and is therefore ultimately inconsequential. I'm not sure if that's what Michel Foucault was on about, but I'd bet he understands this concept.

 

 

Running From the Devil

For some time, I entertained the fantasy of 'The Beloved Community', and I have spoken about it at Cobb in the fair terms of 'aggregation'. It has been some time since I've given that idea any lip service. But there are a few things that are abundantly clear to me in contra-distinction from my efforts *towards* anything resembling an 'Afrotocracy'.

One. I have disclaimed the pretensions of the Talented Tenth, and have not been proud of them since 1986, roughly when I left college. So one should not confuse my attraction to elite blacks with any attempt to re-establish or reform any such Talented Tenth regime, formally or informally. Put simply, I like rich blackfolks primarily for aesthetic, not political reasons. Powerful blackfolks, I don't particularly care for. I remained in a quandary about that until I read Drylongso, around about 1992. So yeah I wasted a lot of time in those six years thinking about black cultural production, but it was mostly aesthetic.

Two. I doubt the existence of any particularly organized pan-American Boule. My experience suggests to me that Oprah Winfrey did not keep council with Franklin A. Thomas who had no particular connection to Skip Gates who didn't bother with Colin Powell who didn't have dinner with Art Shell, etc, etc. I think the best that can be said is that we all listened to Miles Davis, but only for a few albums.

So in conclusion, I will point you to the biggest beef I ever had with black popular opinion over the value of the life of Tookie Williams, and make it personal. I'm not trying to be part of the leadership of the new school, and had absolutely no difficulty passing up on the Obama bandwagon for all that represented in that direction. I've just been running from the devil, trying to save my soul. And I did it.

Today's Blackification

Trayvon Martin is a punctuation mark in the book of life. A comma, or perhaps a semicolon. His erasure upsets grammarians, and a bad sentence is a bad sentence, but I'm reading above syntax. 

In fact, for blackification purposes, one might be curious to know that one such as myself is not particularly influenced by the fate of random black teenagers in random southern towns. So I swear to you this moment that I don't know the name of the any of the Jena Six and cannot recall the name of Shaquanda Cotton's Texas town.  It was Texas, wasn't it? Such snuffed candles do not light my path through history with all due respect to John Donne. 

However there are some blackfolks I've been considering of late whose fate seems lost to the hoodie class and their fetish defenders. As I might have mentioned, I'm spending more time thinking about aerospace, rocket science and the long now. A couple weeks ago I bought a 5 disc boxed set of video covering NASA starting with Friendship 7. I recall actually meeting several black astronauts when I was in college when such matters were important to me. But just to remind you where I'm coming from with regard to blackfolks... When I was a freshman, I went to the library and grabbed a copy of Who's Who Among Black Americans. There were something on the order of 35,000 entries in that book. I basically swore that day that my social involvement was done - if the only black people I met were people from that book, I would be perfectly happy. After all, I did have to get married one day. So I did in fact meet Guy Bluford, Ron McNair and Mae Jemison. And then that was done. 

Several others are at Wikipedia which is of course doing a better job of putting such things in front of the public than any of the so-called black leaders. There are 14 who have been in space, 11 more than once. But on any day at any college campus, you'll probably find more professors who can sing the lyrics to Gil Scott Heron's "Whitey on the Moon" than name five black astronauts. Hell, I know the lyrics to Whitey on the Moon and I still haven't memorized the names. But my priorities are straight.

I'm secondarily impressed with the progress of my own family. My son has been accepted into the business program of Cal State Fullerton, which was legendarily run by a woman by the name of Jewel Plummer Cobb. No relation but her biography is no joke. Look it up one day. She too was about the hard sciences. We'll see about Boy, he's recently attracted to economics and Freakonomics in particular. The Scholar is insisting on taking challenging courses for her senior year as she bucks up her already nice GPA, and the Sprite is breaking her own records in track. She's a sprinter, hurdler and long jumper. 

But I've come to meet another branch of the family that goes back to the old days in New Haven, who have been doing quite well for themselves for quite some time. I'll call him Uncle Mack because what I've come to know about him leaves me with little doubt that somewhere in one of his many closets is a full length mink coat. Uncle Mack lives one of the most exclusive suburbs in New Jersey in a castle of his own design. So far as I can tell those ceilings are 20 feet above ground and there's at least 6,000 square feet on the first floor. Uncle Mack wears French cuffs at home and reminesces about the days when Atlantic City was newly revitalized and high rollers actually tucked in their shirts. I brought up the Tyson Spinks fight on my iPad.

There used to be a club on Amsterdam Avenue that was all that when I lived in NY. I met Mike Tyson there and found I was a half inch taller. When you go back to those days, when Eddie Murphy filmed 'Boomerang', there wasn't a black American living who didn't have some metaphor of black power that didn't include Mike Tyson. He was the unstoppable force and the inevitable symbol. Uncle Mack loved to see him fight in Vegas and Atlantic City and had good seats, but not as good as some Jamaican drug dealers. There's always a bigger fish, but not always a better flavor. Uncle Mack has done better with his wealth than Iron Mike.

Finally, I've been considering the possibility that Condi Rice might find herself on Romney's short list for Veep. Either way, I listened to an hour long interview through the Hoover Institute and found how easily she grasps the motions of the geopolitical world. She is one of the great women of our time, who stepped up and made her mark. She has returned with passion to Stanford and is certainly the only living Secretary of State who bothers to teach undergraduates. I'd say the future is bright.

I know why it is difficult for some black Americans to keep their eyes on any prize worth having. They have been distracted by those in control of short attention span theatre, who are by definition not interested in knowledge. But I have plenty of confidence that human nature triumphs and that people will unplug from nonsense when the time is right.  I'm not on a mission any longer to prove something or even exemplify something about a proper blackness. Like Popeye, I yam what I yam. I am a writer, and this is what I'm thinking about black America today.

Oh yeah, and I hear Tiger had a good game, and I realized that Ron Artest lives in my neighborhood, and I'm feeling Lewis Hamilton not being happy with 3rd place.

Another Hunger Game

It is with no irony whatsoever that I recognize that this weekend has produced some 160 million dollars in box office reciepts for a film that depicts a post-apocalyptic America in which teens engage in deathmatches. This, is 70s style malaise reflected in the trope of disaster films. 

I have been considering a cruel solution to the moral perniciousness of this feral fetish and it pushes me towards the Swiftian. Call it a Wahabian imperative which just happens to coincide with what I see to be the purposes of liberty. It is a hitlist. When Bill Clinton, whom I never trusted as a candidate was elected President, I took some consolation in the fact that at least he wasn't old as dirt. These days I am both encouraged by the fact that I'm getting old but increasingly annoyed by the old ass folks sucking all of the oxygen out of the public square. So let's identify some targets. If you want real change, get rid of the following people.

All of these people are over 55 years old and have been famous for more than 20 years. Get rid of them.

Martin Scorsese, Cher, Marv Albert, Barbara Walters, George Will

Donald Trump, Daniel Schorr, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Jim Hill

Dr. Phil, Oprah Winfrey, Haley Barbour, Bill Clinton, Tom Cruise

Howard Stern, Rosie O'Donnell, Cokie Roberts, Al Gore, Bono

 

--

You get the picture

Obligatory Seriousness on the Trayvon Martin

A nation mourns its youth, gone away, gone astray, dying by the bullet. And painted in stereotypical black, we have another stereotypical tragedy that cannot be anything but grist for a cycle of protest, outrage, sadness, disappointment and resentment. It quiets down until another bullet gives another HBO writer of 'The Wire' another million dollars. Because that's reality.

One day, America will let its black families mourn their loss in peace. Until that day, scribble another name in grafitti sharpie - the name of the innocent: Trayvon Martin. 

What is forgotten at this moment in time is the politics behind all sorts of pseudo-para-police forces that have always been a flawed concept, but last time around had another group of politically misled people jumping up and down with anticipation. I'm talking about Philadelphia and I'm talking about Sylvester Johnson. What I said:

This is evidence that in Philly (which from my experience, fits the profile) that social segregation is alive and well. I use the term 'social segregation' lightly because I'm fleshing it out. It's basically that the idea of separatism is alive. People *expect* that there is something fundamentally different about black crime, and therefore that there must be some kind of separate solution to it. People then accept that there is fundamentally something different about how black suspects and criminals must be treated and how black families must be organized etc. This is a regional / social / cultural /political thing that's working its way back to Jim Crow. The idea of equality is being undermined from both sides of the law.

Something like 'support your local police' just doesn't work with the black community in Philly. Instead some bizarre hybrid of protest politics and  God knows what else is informing this situation.

I agree that black residents of Philadelphia should expect and deserve equal protection from police. But that also means they should give equal respect for and collaboration with police. I hope this idea never gets off the ground. It's nothing more or less than a call for an ethnic militia, the root of all unrest in the modern world. 

I expect that in the ebb and flow, that black politics is angling more towards an anti-militia sentiment, and perhaps especially an anti-ethnic militia sentiment now that The Man is of African descent. But surely that sentiment is not necessarily logical because this time around it's correct. After all, if that were the case, we would expect to hear a great deal more calling for the head of the President over 16 dead civilians in Afghanistan... but I second-guess people I don't even listen to. 

The answer is for all peasants to support their local police, always. Because this is precisely what happens when knucklehead peasants attempt to take the law (that they don't really understand) into their own cotton-picking hands. 

Obviously George Zimmerman, the shooter, needs to be arrested, tried and convicted. Obviously he will get the benefit of some over-zealous public defender and the slack in the criminal justice system. But I think he should get 2nd Degree Murder conviction, and 20 years. But adding the circumstances of impersonating an officer and acting under the color of authority, I could see the combination get him 40 years, although if I were the family, I'd like to have him pilloried and stoned. 

But Zimmerman will not be stoned because we seem to have lost our perspective of what good people deserve and what bad people deserve. Something is inverted when you get umpty million saying 'I should never have to go broke because I don't have health insurance' but not 'Death to Zimmerman'. 

So I ask the question I've been meaning to write about but haven't gotten around to: Who is your Leviathan?

Or in political terms, are you safer today than you were four years ago?

Occupy Turns the Hoodie Corner

The most serious Occupy organization, the New York General Assembly, has announced support for a 'Million Hoodie March'

Wednesday, March 21 6:00pm
Million Hoodie March for Trayvon Martin
Union Square
Throw on your hoodies and come gather in Union Square to show your support for justice for Trayvon Martin, the Florida 17-year-old whose killer hasn't been charged! A black person in a hoodie isn’t automatically “suspicious”. Let’s put an end to racial profiling! March 21st is the UN International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Facebook. http://interoccupy.org/march-21-a-million-hoodies-march-for-trayvon-martin-nyc-6pm/

I won't belabor the number of things that are wrong with this except to mention that it demonstrates that the organization has devolved into something typical. This demonstrates an inability to remain focused on the actual problems on Wall Street that can be identified as policy recommendations backed up by popular support. 

Turning the hoodie corner = jumping the shark. Occupy has officially wobbled quietly into the dark night of surrender, perhaps realizing that their supporters have short attention spans. Racist! Squirrel!

 

Deuling Tesla Coils

This actually reminds me of Close Encounters.

The Disappearing of Greg Smith

Greg Smith is about to disappear. The reason why is because we live in an era of cowardice and deceit. The reasons for this era are beyond the scope of this essay, however I predict that Smith will disappear. He will go into that same place where I like to think I live, which is the domain of integrity and courage. It's hard for me to tell because life is a battlefield full of smoke and confusion.

Those who are supposed to be responsible to bring such matters to our attention have not, and so it was on Mr. Smith alone to reveal what we all needed to know. Some might pretend that not all of us need to know that there are moral capitalists possessed of integrity and courage, others pretend that there is no such thing. But those of us who try to have integrity and courage know such acts when we see them, and we understand how painful it is to undertake them. I am like you Mr. Smith, in case you may not have realized how many brothers you have out here in the smoke and confusion.

He will enter the realm of people who are unashamed of bronze medals and runner-up status - those of us who sense the butterfly wing's difference between the efforts required to stand on podiums and the massive difference between the accolades given by those who have no sense of the effort.

Listen to me, I am under the influence of NASA. I purchased a five disk boxed set documenting the endeavors of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. Last night I watched astronauts - men on a scientific mission enthralled with glee with the spectacle of geology of the Hadley Rille. I watched the extraordinary efforts of men in service of mankind when lives were at stake and millions of eyes were watching. And they were happy, and having the time of their lives. We were right to consider them heroes, even though, by Apollo 15, they were not standing on the podium.

There is an old poem about the strongest and fastest man and to whom life's battles are given. Greg Smith has decided to take no more from the man who thinks he can disrespect his customers and thereby pervert the only morality capitalism possesses which is the mutual benefit of parties.

This is how the decline happens. It happens as those who assumed no good are rewarded with bad news and the myth of evil and incompetence becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. But we know not to listen, for we are the disappeared. No film at 11. 

By the way, it is my opinion that the Volker Rule was all that was needed but purposeful obfuscation has ruled the day, and I agree that Smith is toast. 

Article: “We Have to Pass the Bill So That You Can Find Out What Is In It”

“We Have to Pass the Bill So That You Can Find Out What Is In It”

http://www.chequerboard.org/2012/03/we-have-to-pass-the-bill-so-that-you-can-find-out-what-is-in-it-a-continuing-series/

(Sent from Flipboard)

Sent from my iPad

Article: Visualized: Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG E-Cell bares all

Visualized: Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG E-Cell bares all

http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/15/visualized-mercedes-benz-sls-amg-e-cell-bares-all/

(Sent from Flipboard)



Sent from my iPad

Symbolically Throwing Away My Vote

In a contest between Romney and Obama, the country loses. Both posers are interested in selling their image and putting a lid on things. Romney because it sounds like the only thing he would say, and Obama because it's what he wishes he could do. That is to say Obama can do the first thing and Romney can do the second, neither of which is particularly good for America at this moment in history. So I think today that I'm going to follow Taleb and cast a vote for Ron Paul, the nutcase crackpot. Why? Because only a nutcase crackpot like Paul (being very specific) has the nerve to base his entire campaign on a few salient facts and properly directed wishful thoughts. 

Let me take a tangent and speak about videogames. 

In Skyrim and all the other best crafted RPGs, you spend a long time wandering around taking odd jobs and dodging authority until you get enough skill to take on more and more powerful characters. At some point, you don't decide which boss you want to support, you decide which boss you want to kill. When you become adequately powerful, even the swarms of police and guards are too weak to contain you. In any case, what you never do is sit around studying positions and strategies and then cast your vote for a proxy who will change the world for you.

You can only see the world by killing the obstacles in your path one by one.

Once you've done that and only once you have done that can you understand the world you have changed through your actions. As I apply this to democratic politics in the context of our bourgeois elections and campaigns aimed at the rhetorical level of peasants, I realize that my symbol is just as good as my vote. Except I get to symbolify as much as I want, here on the blog. In other words, I've recognized the value of killing obstacles blocking my view of the world, and for me, 99% of them are financial. Therefore what I need to do is make every effort to kill financial obstacles. That means voting for Ron Paul because only Ron Paul will create the conditions under which the proper disaster will occur in the short term. Obama and Romney on the other hand will sustain a stasis field which will behave like Wile E. Coyote walking on air over a deeper and deeper ravine.

Since I'm in the 5% and in an industry that grows organically by objective improvements, my primary concern is that new money keeps flowing, and also that I can take advantage of chaos and failure. I cannot advocate chaos and failure because it is not in my nature to be a vulture. 

 

One Step Closer to War TV: LRA Crisis Tracker

For some time now, I've been promoting neoconservative ideas about geopolitical grand strategy with concepts such as The Last ID,  Least Favored Nation, Global Felonies and WarTV. 

WarTV

When you show some idiot cracking his nuts from a fall off a skateboard onto a handrail, you generally have to have a disclaimer 'dont try this at home'. When you show somebody's head smacking the pavement after having been shot with an automatic rifle, the warning is superfluous. Slapstick is what it is, and so is brutality. If we showed enough of War TV, our regular instincts would jump in and we would not need the editorial so much. 

Just the other week, a girl fight in a McDonalds had the chatting classes afire with a thousand opinions, clustered into three categories. But wasn't that a waste of bandwidth, or testimony to how civilized we actually are over here in the States? I tend to believe the latter and I do so by keeping our mortality stats in mind.

War TV. It will be coming.

I've also jumped on other bandwagons like Gapminder. The point is that I think it will be inevitable that the next generation of geopolitics can and will be crowdsourced by our bourgie tastes. The important question will be Who Is Your Leviathan? But I'll finish that essay in the future.

In the meanwhile the meme of Kony 2012 is yet another instance of the American instinct towards bourgeois neoconservative intervention. One of these neat tools that helped this lightning movement along is the LRA Crisis Tracker. Check it out. Oh and it wasn't invented by Vivek Kundra. 

I should also bring to your attention that this is structured data (experts talking about something) which is what I do for a living. Facebook and Twitter are unstructured data (nobody in particular talking about everything), which is what makes today's billionaires.

The Ballad of the (Non) Conservative

I hung out with an old friend the other day and he said some things that reminded me, although he's Jewish, of stuff my old black friends say all the time. It has a chorus that doesn't particulary annoy me, but it gets my attention. It goes a little something like this.

 

I haven't seen anyone get the chair that didn't deserve it yet.
No, I don't believe abortions should be so very easy to get. 
And what kind of fool believes that you can spend your way out of debt?

That's how I feel, but don't call me conservative.

I should be able to send my kids to any school I choose.
Immigrants should be instant citizens if they pay armed forces dues.
Don't get me started about exported jobs, that always gives me the blues.

Just keeping it real, but don't call me conservative.

Yes I pay too much in taxes, and it doesn't make me feel any better if some millionaire pays more.
Public school education is a joke, and half the women on TV are dressed like a whore.
The federal deficit is obscene and nobody really knows the score.

You know that's the deal, but don't call me conservative.

Politicians must think I'm stupid to believe their every lie.
If Bin Laden had bombed the Statue of Liberty Afghanistan would fry
I used to like Obama, but now I'm not so sure about that guy.

That's what I know, but don't call me conservative.

I got nothing against gays, I don't see what's the big deal.
I pull my weight and I don't hate, you don't hear me squeal.
Some times I wish an ordinary guy could be the squeaky wheel.

Just call me Joe, but don't call me conservative. 

They legalize maraijuana but not a new pipeline for gas
Going to the moon in a rocketship is now seen as a thing of the past
And all I hear about China is that they're going to own my ass

If I'm mad at that, does that make me conservative?

 

Lulz Smacked Down

So like most of the early adopters, I joined Google Plus. Unfortunately, most of the people who started adding me into their circles, and the most verbose people I added into my circles had a network effect of pulling me into the Occupy discussion. The good news was that since I'm hanging out with hackers more and more, I had some hacker tangents as well. The bad news was the overlap between hackers and Occupy was annoying, and I said as much. The interesting news is that with the infiltration and subsequent arrest of Lulz members, almost all of those people have disappeared from Google Plus.

The general news is of course that LulzSec has been pwned by the FBI and its ringleader has turned defector for consideration of leniency.  This comes to me as no surprise. Much of the noise surrounding Anonymous, Lulz and Wikileaks comes from people who demonstrate little legal or political sophistication. They surely didn't know how outgunned they are. 

I made an AnonymousCowardly remark over at Slashdot the other day.. let me see if I can find it. It was my last word prior to the bust.Nope. Can't find it. Anyway, I've never been impressed that the political end of Anonymous capabilities have been properly aimed for the benefit of democracy. I think they remain incapable, and I believe they are learning the hard way that democracy requires exactly the openness that is resisted at the core of their being. All of this appropos my musings on 'famousity'.

Castle in the Reeds

mbowen by iphone.

Of Sluts, Sex and Silence

Let us first have a moment of silence for the 7000 civilians killed in Syria.

Ok now let's talk about the sex life of collegiate women and what it means in American peasant politics. And while we're at it, let's talk about how one man's insult means everything and how his apology means nothing. But before that lets talk about how another man's untimely death provides an opportunity for his political enemies to Write his obituary and how .. Nah let's not. I believe that the portsiders are against the privatization of anything, including and especially sexual behavior.

If you have a civil libertarian bone in your body consider the following. I don't want sexual behavior made public and I am against any agenda that seeks to politicize sexual behavior. I don't think you'll find that there are any sex crimes whatsoever that the American Right defends. So why is there a political agenda to saturate the public sphere with the sexual details of certain Americans? If I had read what the media has published about the woman who is now famous for being insulted by Rush Limbaugh, chances are that I would know more about her sexual history than I do about my own mother's. It's not because my own mother doesn't have a sexual history, it's because it's none of my business, none of your business and none of America's business. Whomever she is, she shouldn't have to opt out of having her personal information shared. I don't want my personal information shared. I don't want you to ask and I don't want to tell. But there is a political agenda out there that says we must ask and we must tell, and they're willing to change the law in order to do so. They have. 

All they want to do is talk about sex. And they won't shut up. It has gone too far. 

Bookchin Seeing Me

 

An artist named Natalie Bookchin has sampled Cobb Video as part of her project entitled "Now he's out in public and everyone can see".

 

Now he's out in public and everyone can see is an 18-channel video installation that weaves together found fragments from online video diaries in which vloggers recount a series of media scandals involving African American men. The multiple stories, originally circulated and enflamed by networks of corporate and viral media, intersect around themes of racial and class identity. Together they form a collective-told narrative that explores popular attitudes, anxieties, and conflicts about race. The work aims to create a critical context for otherwise isolated and scatter-shot online voices, drawing links, making connections, and locating tropes between individual rants, responses, and interpretations. The montage produced by the multiple monitors in the gallery space mirrors the composite story, as well as the composite racialized subject under scrutiny. Where the typical viewer of online video is a single isolated person in front of her screen, the installation produces an active social space where multiple viewers interact with and complete the narrative as they navigate the space. 

Folks informed me yesterday that my mug was in the LA Times and so it is true. As far as I can tell, she's taken samples from my Kwanzaa Contextualized video shown below in its entirety. 

 

I checked out the video last night and I think it holds up rather well after all of these years. I've essentially said just about all I have passion to say on the subject of Kwanzaa and as far as I can tell, the controversy has waned over the years. I can't tell for sure but I don't get many hits on that stuff as it swings around into focus - surely no comments. It's odd though that the video only has a couple dozen hits. I'll put this and that out on G+ and see what percolates up this week.

Meanwhile, Bookchin's other work that I was able to sample was very clever and smoothly edited. It was about people getting fired and I think it demonstrates the remarkable similarities that we experience in our encounters with trying to be useful. I'll keep an eye out for Bookchin.

Goings On

I am in New Jersey, America's first industrial suburb. I am working in a white collar factory in a beige building on the back forty next to screeching high tension wires. I'm happy and content.

This month I am the mule, hauling moolah for the partnership by being billable and writing small scripts to replace various incompetencies and inefficiencies. I am reimagining the world through my greater systems vision rather like the poet Michael Jackson. As he said in 1986, you're just another part of me. The unglued crusty but eminently recoverable part. My yi jing this morning is #46 - Sheng - Growing Upward. In the middle of the nourishing grows the gradual. I am nourishing my company and we gradually grow. New Jersey is a good place to do so. It is that part of industrial society that never lets you forget its roots, the grassland in the context of the factory, the woods off to the side of the refinery, the meadow that echoes the machinery, the backyard of the shipyard. It is the boxed garden state.

I have stumbled onto an old friend whom I haven't seen in 10 years. It was a miracle that he was stationed two cubicles away from me here at my new nourishing encampment. We will eat together. He will cook. I will bring stories. This is my gift - the gift of patience. Patience for the sake of wisdom which over observes and attempts to make lessons of every consequence.

I will reconnect with another long unseen compatriot of questing spirit. He is the man who understands the cognitive power of melody and rhythm. He interprets the silent, secret conversations written into the urban landscape in the language of spray can glyphs and discarded babydolls. He consults the mighty who wrestle with unseen runes within digital oceans. He purses his lips and blows. He lives in New Jersey and his name is on the bell. We will walk through Liberty Park and contemplate the skyline above the crumbled twins.

Bloomberg's Keene and Pruitt remain the smartest men in broadcast media, and Bloomberg has recognized the wisdom of returning to the free podcast, and so I am returning. RAND gives free pdfs as well. Knowledge is gaining foothold, like classical music and free software. Yay.

 

Tinker, Tailor, Crouching, Hidden Plot

My advice is read the book. 

This has to be one of the most ill concieved expositions in a movie I've seen since Time Code. It didn't help that I had a big fat drink before the show and it just creeped along for 30 minutes before