Cobb

The Gay Mafia

In the news, activists for the cause of gay-marriage have struck what they hope to be a steamrolling blow to the fast food business Chick-fil-A. It starts with the same standard deception used countless times before which is to implicate homophobia in any outspoken defense of marriage. Basically if you don't love it, you must hate and fear it. The Weekly Standard's Mark Hemingway identifies the deceptions of CNN's reporter. I will report the lengthy details here:

But Terry Mattingly at the website GetReligion (where I am an occasional contributor) notes that if you look at the original context of the interview, Cathy wasn't asked specifically asked about gay marriage nor did he say anything about it. Here's the actual interview CNN and others cited from the Biblical Recorder and that was carried by the Baptist Press:

“We don’t claim to be a Christian business,” Cathy told the Biblical Recorder in a recent visit to North Carolina. He attended a business leadership conference many years ago where he heard Christian businessman Fred Roach say, “There is no such thing as a Christian business.”

“That got my attention,” Cathy said. Roach went on to say, “Christ never died for a corporation. He died for you and me.”

“In that spirit … [Christianity] is about a personal relationship. Companies are not lost or saved, but certainly individuals are,” Cathy added. “But as an organization we can operate on biblical principles. So that is what we claim to be. [We are] based on biblical principles, asking God and pleading with God to give us wisdom on decisions we make about people and the programs and partnerships we have. And He has blessed us.”

And here's what Cathy says about marriage:

The company invests in Christian growth and ministry through its WinShape Foundation (WinShape.com). The name comes from the idea of shaping people to be winners. It began as a college scholarship and expanded to a foster care program, an international ministry, and a conference and retreat center modeled after the Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove.

“That morphed into a marriage program in conjunction with national marriage ministries,” Cathy added.

Some have opposed the company’s support of the traditional family. “Well, guilty as charged,” said Cathy when asked about the company’s position. “We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit. …

“We are very much committed to that,” Cathy emphasized. “We intend to stay the course,” he said. “We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles.”

To say that Cathy condemned gay marriage is stunningly dishonest. And yet, Cathy's had to endure headlines such as, "Boston Mayor Blocks Chick-fil-A Franchise from City over Homophobic Attitude" -- and that headline comes from Time, which is allegedly one of the more responsible media outlets. 

There are a number of falsehoods animating certain activists for gay marriage:

1. Chick-fil-A considers itself as a corporate agent of Christian dogma
2. Defense of marriage is anti-gay
3. Chick-fil-A is anti-gay
4. That if an individual or company has anti-gay sentiments, that it will necessarily discriminate illegally.
5. That any company with anti-gay sentiments can be legally enjoined from doing business in a city.

These falsehoods should, by any reasonable standard, wreck the gay marriage activist politicking, but stranger travesties have happened. The very fact that such lies and innuendo have survived are a testament to how compelling the sentiment is in support of the destruction of Chick-fil-A and all that it represents in the minds of these activists.

Glenn Greenwald is following the matter at Salon. 

In the past, I've not bothered with much mockery of activists for the cause of gay marriage, but this kind of politics is ridiculous in the extreme. I may have too many people in my circles who say too many foolish things, but I am taking steps to distance myself from their breath. And so falls away my respect for the Gay Mafia, their populist deceptions and their wag the dog inversion of common sense.

Obligatory Seriousness on Aurora

Senseless violence. As perpetrated by human beings, there is no such thing as senseless violence. The only senseless violence is that done by nature. A hurricane is senseless. A volcano is senseless. A tornado creates random and senseless violence leaving human devastation with no reason whatsoever. Human beings are never senseless - they do things with purpose. Murder is purposeful, never senseless. Every man who aims a gun has a purpose, and a reason.  I would hope that anyone who wants to debate the fate of shooters in America never makes this mistake of using the term 'senseless violence'. 

I cannot address this unique murder except through the context of two ideas, one which is certain and the other which is not so certain.

The uncertainty stems from the probable lack of any good data on the incidence of mass murder in other countries. Here in America, we have 17,000 murders (or so) per year, the overwhelming majority are done one at a time to people known by the assailant. So ordinary murder is not such a big deal as far as press stories with political legs, but this sort has gotten up and walked around the block a couple times. How many mass murders are there in the world? Or is America exceptional? 

The United States experienced 645 mass-murder events — killings with at least four victims — between 1976 and 2010, according to Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox. When graphed, these incidents show no obvious trend. The numbers go up and down and up again. The total body count: 2,949.

For the sake of reference, Los Angeles in 2008 showed 384 homicides.  

I always begin and end with the premise that all men are created equal. This means I have a very difficult time with criticisms of American society that don't have some baseline outside of American society. And I look at the political activism of reasonable people with history in mind. What are the possibilities that the ideas tossed around among the American chatting class this month can actually hold water against everything that has gone before? Or are people just convinced?  

I write this essay in the context of obligatory seriousness because it is something that in light of the first idea, I cannot be certain how ultimately serious it should be taken. Is it more important than any other sort of mass murder in the world? I have heard many people express outrage directed against what they percieve to be an unusual defect unique to America. My bias is not to believe the defect is so unusual. Perhaps it is self-evident that Americans have access to a higher quality of manufactured goods than any other population - our guns kill better, but I don't think that's really the problem. Is there something about America that produces more psychopathic killers? Or do our psychopaths merely have access to better technology? Does America have more psychopaths per capita, or are they just more free to move about unimpeded in society? These questions have not been answered to my satisfaction. 

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The certain idea is actually the more disturbing one, because what is certain is that the end game of gun control is disarmament. Disarmament is never universal, it is always directed at a certain party. Disarmament is selective and compelled. The effect of gun control is to disarm certain Americans. Well, which? The answer, more often than not, begins and ends with political bias. Try 'gun-nuts'. Try 'NRA supporters'.

I suppose that I am as guilty as Jason Alexander in ranting over this story. Consider the difference between the reactions of the Left and Right in response to the matter of of the Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan. Or of Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner. Or of Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho. Jason Alexander and others are quick to explain out that the Aurora shooting should prove that there is no defensible logic for the support of publicly available assault rifles. That claim invokes rather complicated proofs, not the least of which is an explanation of how Cho killed more than twice as many people with a couple of pistols. 

At any rate, I find myself at a particular loss to get excited over this except to guage the energy and logic of those motivated to hang their disarmament hats on this particular peg. Or as I expressed it more passionately: 

It's not a gun-nut problem, it is a matter of law applied to the public because of the acts of one. What I'm more interested here is how your political lot can agitate to remove +Eric Raymond 's freedom because of one lunatic. Suddenly in your eyes, we all become 'gun-nuts'. How can you not see that prejudicial bias working against the principles of liberty?

How indeed?

George Jefferson: Dead

Sherman Hemsley was probably a very interesting man, but we don't know anything about him. At least I don't. It would be nice to find something about the complexities of the actor who played George Jefferson; I simply remember his cackle. And of course there's the theme song. Who doesn't know the lyrics?

It never occured to me that the apartment of the Jeffersons could possibly be worth wanting. Where I come from, only the poorer people live in apartments. Wealthy people had houses with swimming pools. Where was George Jefferson's swimming pool? I grew up in Los Angeles, and it must be said that there were only four people in all of those proto-black television shows that could be called attractive. That would be 

• Thelma Evans - Good Times (but who names their child Thelma?)
• Michael Evans - Good Times
• Dwayne Nelson - What's Happening! (but stupid and superstitious)
• Lamont Sanford - Sanford & Son

We all wanted Lamont to get together with Thelma and have their own TV show. Quite frankly, Lamont Sanford was the only full-grown man with reasonable emotions, intelligence and good looks. All the rest of them, as far as I was concerned, were charicatures of characters. They should have all been skits on the Flip Wilson show.

George Jefferson got Whitey.

There was only one other character, who came to become a stock character of the Seventies, who could get Whitey on a regular basis. That was the always loud, always angry black police sargeant. George Jefferson got Whitey in two doofus forms. One was the effete neighbor Tom, and the other was the bumbling doorman Bentley. The joke wore thin. The show wore on. 

Geez, there's not much else to say is there? The rest is personal because I grew up at arms distance to black Hollywood and am not unfamiliar with both Canebridge or the Al Fann Theatrical Ensemble, the twin powerhouses of black talent pumps into the maw of the Industry. There was also PASLA an acronym whose meaning I forget but whose people I remember every time I roll west up 54th Steet off Crenshaw.  There were so many kids around my age just breaking barriers in the 70s on their way into mainstream music, TV and film that I almost got caught up in the stampede. But what Hollywood wanted was a corral of scruffy black moppets - cabbage patch kids, modern day Little Rascals. 

Of course there were better and there were worse. I can't remember anyone saying anything bad about Sounder, or Brian's Song. But having been involved in the making of Julia and back stage for a bit at Gunsmoke, I knew the likelihood of something approaching the basic reality of my own family life was not bloody likely to get on the air, although I did get onto an episode of the Louis Lomax Show. Hmm. 

What Sherman Hemsley must have known and suffered through in Hollywood certainly informed Robert Townsend. There was nothing approaching my demographic until his partners in crime made the scene, and no moment captured the attention of my slice of that until Bobby Brown's My Prerogative video. The energy and dynamism of that sweet spot of the New Jacks. Things were finally accurate enough to be called 'real'.

I never met a black entrepreneur like George Jefferson, but I knew of his counterparts in the Civil Service and political stomping grounds which were my father's domain. I saw scrappers in beige three piece suits who approached the smooth sophistication of the king of all proto-black television - Barney Miller's Ron Glass, and others who were frighteningly more like Idi Amin, grinning tyrannical satraps. George Jefferson in real life would have cursed up a hurricane. A short, unattractive one like Hemsley would have been an engineer or a doctor - but they got the insufferable ego right. Never underestimate the moxy of a black man who gets Whitey. 

I suppose that I could get into an argument about what expectations anyone should have about the social significance of black Americans' first experiences and adventures in broadcast television. I'm content to say that it was what it was. I was much happier to see the likes of Max Robinson, Bryant Gumbel and Bernard Shaw, real men, not characters written for comedic effect.

Jack Daniels

My favorite commercial.

Scandinavian Crime

Every once in a while, especially when we come to the leftish fetishes of gun control, violence in general, infant mortality and gay marriage, some nimrod attempts to lecture me about how pathetic America compares, statistically speaking, to various Scandinavian countries. 

I think it is most appropriate to compare Scandinavian countries with North and South Dakota, not the entire US. See how important they look now. But since I'm about to defend gun nuts on principle, I might as well get this video up for reference. You see.. Lego is.. whoops. I have been lied to and told that Lego is the biggest company in Denmark. And until 3 minutes ago, I like a fish, believed that nonsense not having taken 10 minutes to check it out for myself. So while the main point of this artifact is blunted. it doesn't change the fact that Lego did bring 3.1 Billion Euros in revenue to Denmark and these folks in the video are self-evidently un-criminal. Still, I would consider this task, accomplished while forced to listen to Swedish disco, to be a prison sentence.

The larger point however is that it makes very little sense to compare the US to Scandinavia, and I don't need Lego to prove that.

A College Without Football Is Like A Library Without Frisbees

If you mentioned, a year ago, the name 'Joe Paterno', I would have given you a tossup between a basketball or a football coach. Don't ask me which school or even if he was NBA or NFC West. I just know he was some legendary dude for some sports reason. It's not that I don't like sports, but that other, more adult things occupy my mind. I am often skeptical of any activity that is improved by beer.

It turns out that Paterno is, like his name suggests, a father figure to any number of alumni and members of Penn State University, and under his heretofore unimpeachable authority and leadership, a whole lot of nasty business transpired. Nasty as in news at six gut wrenching scandal. I try, as I write this, to not sound dismissive of such events as destroy families and neighborhoods. At the same time, the misplaced trust in the institution of football is something that deserves our best mockery.

I am finding it more convenient and appropriate for me to push towards a stripping away of all pretenses of honor that any number of activities provide for the common man. Which is not to say that I wouldn't want it to be there - loyalty to an ideal is very important. And quite frankly I think people will be loyal at any rate. However, when it comes to the business of erecting statues and other awards of virtue, I think we should be quite wary of what it is that sport should represent. I think perhaps the Olympic standard is more appropriate - or even the motto for ABC's Wide World of Sport. We span the globe to witness the thrill of victory; the agony of defeat; the human drama of athletic competition. That's it. That's plenty. We should not be looking for heroes, role-models, or patriotic leadership. We should admire that people wear colors and look good in parades, but not take those parades too seriously. 

Just last week, the chatting class was all atwitter about the fact that designer Ralph Lauren's uniforms for the American Olympians were manufactured in China. I believe a particular Senator made deroggatory gestures while wearing an Italian designer suit. 

But I want you to imagine, if you could, how ridiculous it would seem to have in the center of your downtown, a marble statue of Travis Pastrana. In case you didn't know, Travis was the first human being to perform a double back somersault with a motorcycle. There are fewer death-defying athletic achievements than that - climbing Everest perhaps. But there will be no statue. Pastrana's tributes come in the form of YouTube videos of the actual stunt. Nobody sends their young men to go serve under the tutelage of Pastrana. In fact, for all of the X-Games sports there are, both summer and winter, there are no colleges I know that pay for facilities, faculty and staff for skateboard, bmx or snowboard strivings. There is no august governing body. There is no Commissioner of Vert Ramp. There is only the pure athleticism of those who participate and the vicarious thrills of those who watch. These are our purest sports.

I learned recently that the political origins of the Tour de France had much to do with getting manly men prepared for the rigors of war in anticipation of France's vengeance upon Germany after their Franco-Prussian defeat.  And so many tropes about its honorees were conformed to such martial glory. 

My angle in this originates from the claim of the ancients that men are motivated by three primary forces, greed, fear and glory. It is the seduction of glory that most often concerns me in my Peasant Theory. You see, I am convinced that we sell ourselves short for the glory made possible to those of us not born of nobility. We become, like King Lear, easily flattered into madness thinking ourselves glorious.

What true honor can we have not knowing the deceits of those we honor from our distance?

You may have heard me tell the story of the Dread King Mandingo, an American Studies professor at a prestigious East Coast university. He held the party at Spike Lee's in Brooklyn at attention when he told the story, oh so deliciously, of how he turned the tables on those rich white kids. Their parents told them all their lives that they must have an education and they put a life savings into getting their offspring to matriculate. But here stands the Black Man with the power to deny! 

Oh the dread power of college, they snipe and spit out arrows of knowlege.
To peirce the gut and mind at once, suffer foolish little dunce! 
For through our ivied private hell, we well but scold and mold you well.
With colors, letters, papers, song, to prove cetera maters wrong. 

Here's your new daddy. His name is Paterno. He is great. Suffer unto him through the discipline of... of football. They say it builds character. I don't know anything about Joe Paterno, and that should be obvious from my lack of deference. But whatever he was aside from the actual material coach, the teacher of moves that atheletes adopted and made successful on the field of virtual battle - all of that is lost. Honor and glory are fleeting and even more fleeting is the association with it. They are like blessings of the air. How can you bless the air that is sweet one day and putrid the next? It should serve as a warning to those who put on airs or seek the rarification of 'be' rather than of 'do'.

The NCAA will take a lumping from various quarters. It should. There are other institutions better suited for the maintenance of sporting youth, and the XGames prove that can be done with the mere corporate sponsorship of Mountain Dew, DC Shoes and Go Pro cameras. I remember quite fondly that my AAU number was 33528662. But in the meantime, there will be sanctions and recriminations and the inherent conflict between the missions of higher education, athletic excellence, patriotic honor and actual virtue will destroy such things as they stand. You obvioiusly cannot mix those combinations in today's  universities for much longer. 

A toast to creative destruction. 

Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau?

	Hobbes	Locke	Rousseau
State of Nature	The state of nature is a state of war.  No morality exists.  Everyone lives in constant fear.  Because of this fear, no one is really free, but, since even the “weakest” could kill the “strongest” men ARE equal.	Men exist in the state of nature in perfect freedom to do what they want.  The state of nature is not necessarily good or bad.  It is chaotic.  So, men do give it up to secure the advantages of civilized society.	Men in a state of nature are free and equal. In a state of nature, men are “Noble Savages”.  Civilization is what corrupted him.
Purpose of Government	To impose law and order to prevent the state of war.	To secure natural rights, namely man’s property and liberty.	To bring people into harmony. To unite them under the “General Will”.
Representation	Governments are designed to control, not necessarily represent.	Representation ensures that governments are responsive to the people.  Representation is a safeguard against oppression.	Representation is not enough.  Citizens cannot delegate their civic duties.  They must be actively involved.  Rousseau favors a more direct democracy to enact the general will.
Impact on Founders	Governments must be designed to protect the people from themselves.	1. Governments must be designed to protect the people from the government.  2.Natural Rights must be secured.	1. Governments must be responsive and aligned with the general will.  2. People make a nation, not institutions. 3. Individual wills are subordinate to the general (collective) will.

I found this very interesting table somewhere on an academic website. Now that we've covered some bases about the possible overlap of secular law and canon law, let's examine the reasoning of these three dudes.

Forward Unto Dawn: The Halo Movie

The difference between a video game and a feature film is immersion. Video games with cinematics and excellent mattes and backgrounds approach the scale and grandeur of film - well, not really. What film does excellently is almost a cliche but it puts your characters in a super dramatic backdrop that expands the emotions conveyed by the actor. I think of Audrey Hepburn in the empty luxurious apartment in Charade.  I think of zooming into the car chase from the aerial shots of John Frankenheimer in Ronin. To get immersion, where it's your own emotions experiencing the narrative AND scenic drama is a holy grail which has not yet been found. Yet the days are approaching when the narrative drama of video game immersion and scenic drama of film are used in tandem in order to portray a universal story. By universal, of course I mean epic scale drama with key cores of protagonists taking their audience through multiple stories over the course of years. Halo is, of course, one such universe. This is the future of fiction. It is the medium for our children.

ViHart is one of the people to whom I subscribe. I like the way she thinks. I know the way she thinks because she understands the new media. Like hiphop, her youtubery incorporates its metadata into its content.  She reflects the wisdom, newly discovered by me, of Edmund Snow Carpenter who says:

If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. But artists don't address themselves to audiences; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear & are affected. 

Brilliant. 

So 343 is making, at long last, the Halo movie. Their aim is to complement the Halo universe with the kind of live action drama that cannot be accomplished in video games. They continue the very grabbing human drama in the live action shorts that preceded Halo Reach. I especially liked this one:.

What will come into being is the next installment of the video game franchise, continuing drama in the Halo universe accompanied by that thing the movie studios could not manage to accomplish, making a Halo movie. As much as I admired the sneak previews of the movie that was proposed several years ago, I now see that the new digital series: Forward Unto Dawn, will be more suited to those of us who have heard & been affected by what the artists of Halo have already said. It will put faces, in particular, into focus.

Every one of these external forays into media other than the game itself has been, in my view, a success. I still have vivid memories of the serialized audiobook of I Love Bees, which came out in between the original Halo and Halo 2.

The preview trailer of Forward Undo Dawn, just released over the weekend, has already had over 2 million views. The Halo Movie is already a success. 

Playtime - Jacques Tati

One of my favorite movies of all time.

Paralympic Buzzkill

The only thing I want to see are Paralympic bloopers. I want to see a Paralympic fail reel. The agony of defeat for people with no feet. 

These days I am making friends with my libertarian sentiments. The reasons are manifold but I won't get into them right now. Understand, however, that the motivations for this idea come from that liberartian network of neurons in my political brain. 

I've been watching the Tour de France this week, and it is a stunning testament to the, dare I say it, triumph of the will. I've always considered it the world's most competitive sport, in which hundreds of men race through a fortnight of greuling trials and many hundreds of miles only to be separated by mere seconds at the finish.

Having been a mediocre cyclist, I have been there. In my 20s I possessed almost precisely the kind of ideal body for cycling. 5 foot 10. 167 pounds. Genetically big calves, great lungs and idiotically steely determination. Socially I thought the idea of cycling 100 miles with a bunch of cyclists to be ridiculous. So I stayed mediocre. But I got close enough to the sport to understand both its appeal and its challenges. The challenge is to push your body to the very limit of its endurance, to get on the bike and stay on it, to pace yourself and then punish yourself, pace and then punish again - to the point at which you can begin to hate yourself for eating a small banana instead of a large one. And.. well, that's the appeal too. Being a cyclist changes how you look at people's bodies.

If you actually believe in the greatness of the human spirit and you have an idea of what people are capable of, you cannot fail to be impressed by what the world's greatest atheletes do. Well, except for swimming. Swimming is catatonically boring. The only good thing about swimming is that it enables surfing, because surfing is awesome. But sports are changing as the human body is changing and progressively getting healthier and our ability with machines are changing. That's why we have the X Games. We are missing what great swordsmen were like. We are missing the athleticism of the ancient warrior, but we are gaining the athleticism of the motocrosser, the BMX stunter, the wakeboard aerialist. In our lifetimes, the improvement of women's gymnastics has been stunning. I expect to see a double back summersault on the balance beam in my life, which in the 70s was the most difficult trick in floor exercises.

We are often told however, that there is some extra measure of courage demonstrated by athletes with missing body parts. I don't buy it. A man who has half a right leg who runs a marathon on a fitted spring cannot possibly be facing greater fear or danger in his event that that which caused his crippling. 

What impresses me when I watch videos like those of Andrew Dickey is the implicit knowledge that there are great failures to match every triumph. You fail more often trying front double pikes from the 1 meter springboard in practice than you score on the dives at a meet. You look at that hill and you shift down into the girly gears more often than you stand up and keep up the bike's momentum. I'm sure Dickey has more scars than a few, just like Travis Pastrana has broken so many bones that he approaches Evel Kneivel. I confess that I'm more impressed by people who wreck perfectly healthy bodies in search of sports perfection than those who start with wrecked bodies in search of sports mediocrity.  It's the old saw about excellence vs achievement.

Getting my grandmother to stop smoking was an achievment. Keeping ex-felons obeying the law is an achievement. Two year olds tying their own shoes is a remarkable achievement. I think the guy who plays Mortal Kombat with his face, because he has no thumbs, is a real champion, not that anybody much cares about Mortal Kombat. I mean what happens if you fail beyond embarrassment? What I want to see is the fat kid stand up after crashing through the fourth hurdle in the 110 meter event. That's remarkable. What I want to see is the anorexic shotputter dislocate her shoulder. What I want to see is the one-legged skateboarder bail on the rail. Wheelchair basketball? No. Goalball? No. Boccia? No. I want to see blood and guts.

I know that we are in evolutionary times when it comes to sport. I also know that a lot of the sports we have evolved to popularity are often not athletic in the least, some border on the merest of cognitive pursuits. So we have time and bandwidth for a lot more events. I think the man who gets up on a bucking bull is courageous and the one-armed man who does the same thing is slightly more. Because we know the bull mostly wins. 

So. Show me the slo-mo fails. That's what I want to see. Real Drama.

A Musical Psychological Test

Listen to this music. What does it make you think?

Junkman's Paradise

What if you lived in a country where people threw away perfectly serviceable technology? What if, with the mind of a 23 year old, you could build everything you needed to survive? What if, with information freely available on the internet, you could learn everything you needed to take care of yourself?

I thought about this when I was driving a BMW and the economy turned south. Why am I invested in this luxury, I thought to myself. I gotta make it simple. Doomsday scenario simple. Industrial strength, low maintenance simple. And that is what I've striven to do. It may be the only way to survive the next economic crunch. 

BTW. I make my living expecting that the entire industry I grew up in decides to be cheap.

The Impossibility of Secular Peace

Let us imagine in the abstract what it is that the religious take to be 'Gods Peace'. In my Episcopalean tradition one of my favorite blessings was given in the context of Phillipans 4:7 - the peace that passeth all understanding keep your hearts & minds in Christ (who lives and reigns forever).  And Christians are to know that God's peace is different in substance than man's peace. (John 14:27). I am not one to quote the Bible chapter and verse - considering the dozen odd English translations alone, the letter of the law is vauge. I am invested in the spirit of Christian ethics. 

But if God's peace is different than man's peace, are we then speaking of personal or geopolitical peace? I immediately and perhaps ultimately believe that the two are definitely not the same thing. There is little question in my mind that God's peace is personal. It is what I experience at Communion. Every Time. 

But something about the idea of Hell threw me a curveball. Because if Hell is a geopolitical hell, as in, a real hot place at the center of the Earth, and not a metaphysical personal hell as in the inescapable madness of a meaningless existence without the possibility of spiritual transcendence and redemption, then we have a problem here. 

Hell is 'required' as the punishment of a kick ass god. If you're good, he lets you off the hook is all. That is a different interpretation of the Christian God than what I have. That is the Elohist, Old Testament, Destroyer of Sodom. The King of Kings who brings down the mighty, literally. In short, this is no dude. This is the God of Abraham aka Allah the Merciful. 

So let's cut to the chase, shall we? If we are to live under secular law, is the peace provided by men sufficient for the religious? Is Humanism good enough? No. If you stop a war between men (and I use war because it's easy to see it as the greatest sin of mankind, deserving of something on the scale of Hell) you can still go to Hell. Such acts, outside of the aegis of religious law and doctrine are all those things that fall outside of the scope of religious salvation. 

Now Jesus Christ said blessed are the peacemakers. But blessings are not enough. Blessings are for sneezes. Salvation is the bottom line, isn't it? God demands God's Peace, or else it's off to Hell for the lot of you heathens, no matter what good you do for secular peace. 

Right?

The Logarithmic Shadow - Redux: An Open Question for Dubner & Levitt

I've called this phenomenon 'the logarithmic shadow' because I beleive that incremental desire follows a log function. Could it be that this is all called marginal value?

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How much do economists (and the economy) depend on the idea (reality?) that rich people don't want what poor people have?

For example, when I was a kid, I spent lots of money on PacMan. At the time, I could never imagine spending $100 on a binge - but I wanted to. I just didn't have the $100. Now that I have it, I'd never waste it on PacMan. Forgetting the 'signal wealth' stuff and the fact that PacMan can be had for free. How is the price of a quarter good for PacMan in such a way that it's cheap enough for poor folks, and 'too cheap' for rich people. 

How can anything be 'too cheap' for rich people? Why don't we actually always go for the cheapest stuff? Most importantly, how can this fact be communicated to class warfare conspiracy theorists? If the rich get richer is it always bad news for the poor? Don't super-rich people want rich people to be suckers, not poor people?

More Prius Hate BTW

An Intricate Question for Martin Amis

The good folks over at Goodreads have invited me to pose a question for Martin Amis. It's an honor I will do the dubious thanks of writing in longhand over here at Cobb. The opportunity to be drawn to the attention of the man I find to be one of the last and greatest of this generation is.. an invitation to which I will oversubscribe.

My interest in Amis is not coincidently related to my writing skeptically about the pursuit of religion here in the West in the Sun God Theory which is inspired in part by a story he wrote called The Janitor on Mars. I began reading Amis and other British writers somewhere back around 1990 when I got a little tired of T. Boyle and happened upon a journal called Granta. Or that's what I recall at the moment. Additionally of course, I was long tired of those more or lesss flat characters which were to be the role-monkeys for a man such as me, black and I wondered what there was worth conserving in all of Western Civilization. Reading Borges can do that. Since I was accustomed to reading out of school and out on a limb, picking up Amis wasn't difficult and was greatly rewarded. London Fields, Time's Arrow, Dead Babies, Money, Einstein's Monsters, Heavy Water and finally the book that broke my life in two Koba the Dread. 

Amis has the great advantage of good company, something you rarely get without the right tackle in your box. And who would know what bait to use without hearing a sea story or two from the keepers of all that? It's not much fun reading directly out of the Prentice Hall Guide to English Literature. That advantage I percieve manifest in the company of men of wit and taste who actually try to be, unpretentiously, men of wit and taste. We over here have Woody Allen. I don't mean to complain much but Amis has had his headstart, the kind which obviates the heedless sensing and searching for a young man who wants to be something other than a rebel, a dropout, a sports hero, a billionaire or a gawdawful professional. We're connected by the language to the imaginations of millions, except the millions all watch TV and movies circumscribed by the vocabulary of an eighth grader; an American eight grader. I suppose that's why most of the time I'm listening to histories narrated by Simon Prebble. Somewhere in time, men were more than this.

So it falls to men of imagination who haven't had to hack through too many literary jungles to remind us of our possible virtues and our present failures. CYPHER: Gee-zus! What a mindjob. You're here to save the world. You gotta be shitting me. What do you say to something like that?

The rest of us, meaning me, are tired. After 4000 orgasms and 600 books. Meh, I'd rather compute. The adrenaline is not coming from those worldly pursuits. In fact, I think I was sold a bill of goods on adrenaline. It turns out that gin is just as good. So we read a bit of Martin and a precious few others narrowing in on something ineffable. But it's all too private and for me that's all it ever was. All the celebrity and community has been doled out to narcissistic sociopaths whose vices remind us to play it close to the vest and be happy that we're not actually James Bond, the last man. It's hard to be free. It's hard to be free when men of imagination stand in the margins society, when virtue seems idiosyncratic, when we need writers like Martin Amis more than they are able to save the world. 

It's YouTube that can remind us that the spark lies in odd places. Some kid plays the guitar, or stacks cups, or does the robot and you gasp. There are supposed to be writers like there are piano virtuosos, and we're supposed to mob them or at least wave a lighter. But I guess most people want to just dance and not read, and I suppose that's what has gone wrong. I would be more declarative but I'm not so sure as a man like Amis must be.

And yet I could not, for the life of me, find anything to do with The Pregnant Widow but fall asleep. Can it be that the days of men are numbered? Maybe it was just a bad book, maybe I've already exhausted my disgust for those enticements that were supposed to be so spicy to the Boomers and so have no use for it said in more righteous English than my own.

So after all that, my question is simple. Are we not men? What will it take to move us off our asses? ls David Petraeus the last among us all that both think and act? Is there room in our world for men, or has our imagination on the whole, failed us? Are we unpledged ronin to a dead daimyo whose legacy is lost to the wind? I have lived my entire life in an era whose greatest hero is a man who made us to stare at perfect metal and glass boxes - the titan who built the wealthiest company on the planet by making us all look at i- stuff. A kingdom of introversion. A black hole of short attention spans spewing Hawking radiation of bucks to the Martyr of Silicon Valley. 

But the question is more particular. It is about a Europe about to crumble. It is about an America, that like a nuclear gas turbine, can run on anything that burns. Neither seems to serve any principle well and the unprincipled way of life seems to dominate. We all play act at manly virtue fearing we can never really afford it.  Except.

Except in our reading. In our listening for inspiration. In hearing the moment in a sweaty apartment on Houston summer night of the echoes of 20 million dead told true in the wake of the madness that inverts society and is born in the bearing of the man who must finally face death unafraid. Oh yeah, there's that. But how to make it public. How to make what we know to be true be the living way that rules the day? 

I suppose we gather our courage inches by inches, word by word and action by action.

Is that a question? 

Martin Amis is coming to America. Or perhaps he is here, I don't read the New Yorker or watch Charlie Rose enough to know. Is this the last refuge for a man who knows what freedom should be like? Here's the hard question. Can we rely with much certainty that we will rescue from mediocrity that which ought to support the best in us, or should we hack it out in the sticks? Does the Western city still work? Is it a metropolis or an aggregation of oddity? This seems to be a conversation I can only have here at midnight from my desk. Do you see my problem?

 

 

 

That Culturally Embarrassing Moment

In one of the books I'll never write about the Emergent Americans is a small chapter on the tell-tale existentials. One of the examples has to do with the man who plays tennis at the club but still dreams about being an NFL quarterback. One day he takes his kid to a picnic, throws him the long bomb and realizes his kid is running in the wrong directions and can't tell a post pattern from a buttonhook. Ugh. Embarrassing. 

I had that moment this weekend and it reminded me of Cobb's Rule #14. When people are confused, they overuse their strengths. This derives from 'people don't have weaknesses, they overuse their strengths' which is a nice way of saying 'the idiot who only has a hammer sees every problem as a nail'. Same premise. Different language. 

And so it came to me with a sudden ferocity that over the years I have only taken one of my kids out to the basketball courts. That's the one whose knee you can see on the left of the picture heading to the get the rebound she knows is inevitably coming when the old man stops dribbling outside of the three point line. My other two lovely children are standing around like the clueless newbs they are. 

We had a good game of Horse nevertheless. Then the the volleyball kids started hitting a volleyball around and the cheerleader started doing handstands. My wife took more pictures. I started thinking about how and whether or not to write this essay.

From a Wish To a Cure

Yesterday I bought a fifth of gin, a bag of Doritos, a six pack of blood orange sparkling water, and a package of dishwasher soap tablets. We were running low so I stopped by the local Vons. As I swiped my card and entered my numbers, I noticed that there were shopping bags for sale. If you live in a less politically correct district than I, let me explain. The moms in our community have been convinced that neither paper or plastic shopping bags are environmentally friendly enough. The truly sustainable solution is to not use anything disposable. In this matter they are correct. It is a solution that scales. 

The proper shopping bags are generally made of canvas and can hold heavier items. Most moms have a couple. I'm sure that we have at least four. But what really caught my eye on this two dollar item was its baby blue color and its slogan written in Chancery Script with nice curly underlines and glittery stars. "From a Wish to a Cure". I was given to know that if I purchased this particular bag, I would be contributing to fund cancer research. 

What immidiately flew to mind was the enormous break in logic, but the absolute symmetry in rationale. How do you save the environment? Well, if everybody buys a bag instead of sending disposable bags to the dump... How do you cure cancer? Well, if everybody buys a bag instead of sending disposable bags to the dump...

I encounter this kind of consumerism all the time. It annoys me dispropotionately, and I always get so angry about it that I cannot give it a decent name so that I can refer back to it when I see another example. I suppose I should call it the Wishful Thinking Economy. But that's so broad...

--

I told my daughter yesterday that she should apply to colleges that weigh essays heavily. It's because she's a very good writer and a lousy test taker. She used to be bad at math, but now loves algebra because she's now very good at picking out the duplicity and inconcistency of her social studies classes. When exactly did History become Social Studies anyway?  My longer lesson was that I wanted her to understand what I understand, which is that picking an alternative lifestyle does not change the shape of the world, you just get expert at dodging the real world. Math always exists, reductionary tests always exist. Dodge the scantrons today, but know they lurk. 

You know the cliche. "Nobody" uses algebra in the real world. Yeah, nobody in the unemployment lines. These days, there are adverts for jobs that pay 80,000 for two years experience programming Java. Something you can learn in two years. Or at least it seems that way to me, if you've decided not to court the alternative lifestyle. 

So there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who seek the alternative lifestyle where you don't have to learn whatever it is you didn't get the first time around in high school, like science or History or PE, and then there are those who capitalize on your ignorance by giving you 'solutions' to buy at Vons. 

--

It turns out that Chrysler, back in the mid 50s, perfected the gas turbine engine. Jay Leno has one of the 6 remaining. There were several dozen prototypes that the company ordered destroyed. According to the author I saw on one of the many videos I watched yesterday, it was the oil embargo and new CAFE standards that killed the program. 

So we had a smogless vehicle 40 years before the Prius, made in America. 

On the Insufficient Morality of Capitalism

Progressives have a problem. Aside from their mendacious populism and occasional inversions of propriety, their problem is that they depend upon the economic success of capitalism yet remain in denial of this. Since few Progressives here in America will admit to the broad overlap between their forms of altruism and Christian ethics, they have an unhealthy relationship with scientism and shallow atheism. This rather seals their fate as mostly appearing to be old crypto Marxists with a post-modern lisp. And if that's not them then they're joined to the hip.

The only thing worse than and old Progressive is a young Libertarian, neither of which can be relied upon to instantiate anything of long-standing intitutional value - aside from the idea of permanent revolution. 

So how do we resolve this problem, or is it not possible? Creeping socialism can only creep so long - you cannot dim a candle incrementally. Sooner or later, starved of oxygen, it will cease to burn. You see the analogy - Progressives as demonstrated by the presidency of Obama, must turn away from their 'nemesis' of free market capitalism and appoint a few 'socially-responsible' corporations (or 'green' or 'too big to fail') or some other non-economic appellation. 

The problem is that Progressives don't seem to have any sense of balance. 

Implications of the Boson

Apparently, we've all been living in the Higgs Field. This week it has been proven beyond the shadow of five sigmas. That's the kind of knowledge I prefer - I can take my time and absorb it, it's not going to shimmy away or change its stripes. 

And yet now the Higgs throws us the long anticipated curveball, extending the chart of subatomic particles rather as the periodic table kept marching on through our lifetimes.  The Higgs is now sticking out there making all of the previous standard model graphics out of date and breaking their symmetry. 

So now what? The Higgs boson (and what letter shall it get?) now shows why fermions have mass, but it is not the graviton. So that search will have to continue. We understand that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but.. if the universe is not moving does that make it have infinite mass? And why exactly does every field have a particle? Well, those are physics questions and they are interminable.  

There doesn't seem to be any immediate practical benefit from this new confirmation as far as I can see. The Higgs only acts, apparently, on these fermions and only at Plank lengths. And there has to be further study on exactly what this boson does when it decays. Making it show up has taken lots of energy, so now they're going to continue to explode atoms and see how the boson goes on. 

I'm even further intrigued by quantum confinement which is the theory that explains why three quarks that weigh only 8GeV when separated, weigh more than 50 times that when squeezed into a the tight space of a neutron. Quantum mechanics are frightfully non-intuitive.

What has all of this made you (re)consider? 

The Sun God Theory

Several years ago I entertained the theory that the Sun is God. It's a bit Fredkin-esque, but I'd like to repeat it for the purposes of archival.

Ed Fredkin was one of the early eccentrics who conceived of the universe as digital automata. If I'm not mistaken, Stephen Wolfram tread a similar path. 

Here's my idea. God is the Sun and everything we think about the God's mysterious ways can be encapsulated in the ways and means that the Sun does what it does. Except we are a bit too primative to understand what the Sun actually does, much less can we divine it's purposes. However thin the theology is, what is less questionable is the matter of physics.

If we can believe in evolution then we should be able to imagine the almost infinite combinations of molecule positions in the middle of a star's fusion. If it is reasonable to think of a star as a gigantic state machine, then at any moment, the position of all of its atoms could have meaning. What if the noise coming through the radio as the static created by the Sun was just a single word we simply do not have the capacity to decode? What if there is a message in that, not for us, but for other stars? Or what if divine intervention could be the work of neutrinos, or sunshine? 

I would certainly entertain any proof of the sun being non-sentient, and I can think of a few ways to begin such a proof. When I originally thought of this, I thought of the entire outer layers of the Sun just being a protective shell around an Earth sized intelligence at its core. I'm not sure that it is within our power to disprove that, but then I wouldn't know exactly where to look. Well, actually, I'm too lazy to go disprove what I think to be a very cool idea, at least as cool as faster than light travel. Still, when you look, there are a lot of non-obvious things about the Sun. 

The problem with the Sun god theory is that is rather inverts the anthropomorphism of the all powerful God. I mean it would be rather sad to think that what humans want, need and have defined as the mission and purpose of God was of little substance outside of our local volume of Solar System. We want our god to be God of the Universe, but what if he was just a dude in a planet sized reverse Dyson Sphere in the middle of Sol? Worse, what if he were a robot with a bad sense of humor left behind by a bigger robot? 

If we found god-like powers in a local god, would we keep looking for a bigger god? I suspect the answer to that is yes, which is part of the twisted sense of humor embedded in human nature. But the point of all this speculation isn't to throw a curveball to our current theology so much as it is to contemplate the awesome compute power of a star-sized state machine. Just wow on that. 

On Race Traitor

I hung out a little over at Dean Esmay's joint and said..

I'm talking about a formal movement started by Tim Wise. The basic motto was 'Treason to race is loyalty to humanity', but something of the ugly presumption was that whites had more to lose and more to gain by becoming traitors to their race. The multicultural angle bought into the idea of the term 'African American' = cultural whereas 'black American' = racial. And the intended target of this sort of multiculturalism was the undifferentiated white person who has unconsciously subjugated their ethnic roots to become white. 'How The Irish Became White' being the seminal text in this matter. So the Race Traitors and Tim Wise rode this angle on the premise that if you *ever* identified yourself as white instead of 'German American' then you were part and parcel of a racist conspiracy to demonize every white ethnicity in the Klan era. In other words, in order to become a 'real' American, someone in your family had to pass Klan muster around that time in the 20s, and nothing essentially has changed since then except that you are now unconsciously white. All of your frustrations with what America has become stem from your inability to rescue any authentic cultural value from the ethnicity you have disabused. So if you, mr whiteboy, were authentically multicultural, then you'd be just 'un-American' enough to understand where all the other 'un-Americans' are coming from. Thus your duty to a post-racial world is...blah blah culture.. blah blah. recognize other culture.. blah.

The problem with all of this is that it runs afoul of the premises of modernism and equality *without* regard to race and culture - some fundamental tenets of the idea of nationalism. But this problem gets ignored from the Race Traitor POV because American nationalism has contained so much racism. IE that 'true' nation has yet to be born..etc the melting pot melted white and boiled all the authentic flavor away.

This makes for a moral component to cultural identity which is precisely the goop on the bottom of every multiculturalist shoe. It requires a very tight parsing between race, identity, culture, morality and citizenship - a mix that two decades of American Studies *still* hasn't worked out. In the end their fundamental contradiction is with the Constitutional implication and legal explicits of Civil Rights Law. To wit, we are supposed to be equal *without regard* to all the identity parameters. Multiculturalists must say we are equal *with special regard* to all the identity parameters. And so they are stuck with the obvious flaws, like it's ok to say that you hate women if you are a gay man.