Cobb

The OPSEC Blowback

Just in time for election season, exCIA officials out themselves to call Obama a blabbermouth and tell him and his administration the STFU. Brings back echoes of the Ulsterman Conspiracy and the headaches of Leon Panetta.  Here follows the cheesy video.

 

What's interesting is the extent to which we must speculate that the US divulging responsibility in the STUXNET attacks on Iran were or were not violating OPSEC. I happen to be in political favor of that attack, but there may be some way (even for the exceptions of cyberwar) that the reveal compromises.

It seems to me that upon a moment's reflection that there must be laws in place to keep what is actually secret secret. Leaks are either prosecutable or not, and who will investigate but Congress? So ultimately this is a politcal vote of no confidence for many in the intel business. It's not the first time I've heard complaints about naming SEAL Team Six, for example. And yes we did have a whole lot of Hollywood SEAL fiction last year. I suspect that the number and designations of the teams must have changed in order to let that amount of info out, but if you don't know and you don't trust Obama.. These are the military professionals, not professional hacks and flacks.

Against Historicism

I picked up Harold Bloom last night. He's got quotable quotes that say brilliantly and concisely what I needed to have heard several years ago, but better late than never. 

To recap. Several years ago maybe 4 or 5, I decided that I was never going to go watch another movie where the main character had a badass expresssion on his face & holding a gun in the movie poster. And I realized that while my favorite movie was 'Ran', I really hadn't read/watched enough Shakespeare or history. Around about that same time, I realized what a scholar Winston Churchill was. That too was about the time I found Larry Arnn and began looking at Western Civ in a bigger picture context. What I hadn't done is get rid of the political bug and so while I've been getting more serious reading done on that program, I've dragged along many of my political interests as well.

One of the first of many excellent lessons learned was the nature of the Marxist materialist view of the world as well as some echoes of the historicist matter as well. But it was the materialist, ie anti-spiritual, anti-religious aspects that held most of my attention. So I filled out the 'godless commies' thinking in my reperatoir, in defense of Western religious freedom. In parallel with that was the very important understanding that your soul and your character is really none of the government's business and that went categorized under the general buckets of 'new man' and Michelle Obama's 2007 UCLA speech. More recently I have been trying to get a grasp on the weakness of the New Atheism which cosigns a lot of Progressive politics.

But then I found myself watching more gun movies. My venture into sci-fi has kind of unwound because basically it's all about Stross, Stephenson, Banks & Bacigalupi. Meiville not so much and maybe not at all. Dunno. So I've been uneasy for the last few months and really bored with my historical stuff. I mean Koestler's Darkness At Noon was brilliant, and I really enjoyed the massiveness of Robert Conquest's great work. But my Civil War history lost my interest, as did the history of Eisenhower. So once again, I started back towards the Big Books. And that's why I'm reading Pynchon. 

But Pops dropped off the massive Yale Shakespeare last weekend, and he's been reading Bloom (at my suggestiong). And I decided to spend my Audible credits on two from Bloom. Boom.

Bloom within an hour reminded me of a number of authors I have rather forgotten. I'd dabbled with them but never gone as far as I might have. Chehkov, Mann, Coleridge, Maupassant. What's wrong with me? But he really zinged me in 'How to Read and Why' with suggestions about the attitude I should take with me towards reading. What surprised me the most was that as I was just now rummaging through an old diary of mine (circa 1990). that used to be my attitude. 

The biggest problem I have had in my intellectual career is that reading books has always been for me a zero-sum game with my sociability. I stay at home over the weekend and read 300 pages, that's a whole weekend I make myself happy and one step less engaged with everyone in front of me. What do I do on Saturday night when the rest of the people are drinking beer and watching the game with friends? I'm reading, with no friends and alienating myself from the beer crew. Which is perfectly fine with me: in 1990. Then along comes the internet and I become convinced that I can catch up to the fete manque of where ever Yale humanities dorm bull sessions go after graduation. So I invent all sorts of online personnas (about eight including Cobb, now 20 years gone) for my projects using the internet as social media as I have been since 1993. 

Bloom may be curing me of all that. Obama deserves credit as well. I couldn't sustain the fiction that by adding to myself I might be communicating better with whomever out there. It's just me cranking out my writing because I must - for me - for selfish reasons. And now I'm about to be 100% cool with that. And I don't expect to find that place I used to call the 'noble arena' - I discounted it long ago, now I'm about to release it. 

Two years ago I went Epicurean. I knew I had to get rid of politics four years ago. Now I think I'm somewhere between Epicurean and Stoic. If I remember correctly, the Epicureans were more public with their findings and the Stoics didn't give a rats if you were 'in' or 'out'. What may ultimately make that determination is how I resolve to deal with Historicism.

Historicists are those people behind every multiculturalism. So the Culture War and those things that drive the agenda of those who must Minister to Peasants, is based on what Bloom considers the uselessness of expecting people who read literature to 'get it' in some way that positively and predictably affects society. Guess what? Society has nothing to do with it. You're either individually fortunate to find the individual whose self-improvement has worked or not. Reading the great works is about self-improvement. Period. It is actually about *be* and not *do*. And I can get into that, because I have discovered what all the Peasants do, and it's merely survival. 

Historicists want to craft a framework for the interpretation of history. They're the ones that are compelled to leash the humanities curriculum to *something*. And it has all been identity bullcrap. Formulaic. Unimaginative. And that's what I have been pissed off about. The complete lack of imagination in all of the public discourse I've been part of for so long. 

So mark my milestone readers. I am once again off the chain. Unleashed.  My mockery factor is going up. Which means I'll probably be able to renew my friendship with Sean Paul, the Agonist. Maybe now I'll understand him better. And maybe I'll be a lot more subversive than ever before. We'll see. 

National Socialist Civil Rights

This morning, as every morning, I woke up with a song in my head. On August 27th, that song was Deuchland Uber Alles. Part of it, I think had to do with the fact that I went to bed last night watching the Motor Trend 2012 Driver's Car Award which went to the new Porsche 911 Carrera S. Or maybe it was the Olympics. Or maybe it was the fact that my youngest daughter is now reading about WW1 (All's Quiet). Either way, the granduer of the song, and my growing fondness for Mahler (starting with #5 of course) provoked an interesting question. 

If Germany had won WW2, would black Americans have greater or fewer civil rights by now? 

In part, the rhetorical question seeks to debunk the racial qua racial aspect of complaints against racism. Racism doesn't exist because whites are white. It exists because whites are politically racist. It isn't about one's 'aryan' qualities that makes one more or less racist, rather about ones need for a theory of race in politics and government. 

That in turn raises the question of whether or not the extermination of Jews as part and parcel of the plan of the Third Reich was an ultimate goal, or an enabler, or both. Was it a domestic question or not? I'm not sure of the answers to these questions even though I did read, some time ago, the book Fatherland. 

But tangential to the direct question is whether or not the UK would have fragmented & what the character of the British we Americans would be fond of, which goes back to how much of the global order we now know and take for granted would have emerged under the triumphant but exhausted Third Reich. Would Hitler have initiated his own Marshall Plan? Was Vichy France actually so terrible? Is it conceivable that the Germany we have today, which is by all appearances kinder, gentler, more reasonable and civilized would be similar under the National Socialists? What differences in European Socialism, or the sort Barack Obama seeks to establish as a Neoliberal Social Democrat today would be evident as the Third Reich evolved? These are all variations of the question of whether or not Hitler's fascism would have survived and scaled in the post-war era. Surely the Japanese, holding out as long as they did, would not have capitulated as Axis partners and their influence would have been served as well, in the post-war era - the Italians, not so much.

Ultimately, it is a question of the ways in which, philosophically, National Socialism itself regards the citizen and what levels of provisional citizenship Germany would have given to Americans, and much of that depends upon what level of recognitions Americans would have demanded of themselves.

It might be argued that the American defeats in Korea and Vietnam generated a new kind of abashed unity among Americans, and that such a defeat in WW2 would have all Americans demanding the most rights possible for all Americans under German rule. It could also be argued that given any opportunity for advanced rights under a German system, American whites would gladly accept second (or third) class citizens for all American ethnics the Germans bothered to classify. I find it difficult to believe, without researching the matter, that triumphant Germans would leave the matter open to interpretation. There most definitely would be classes of citizens in the Global Third Reich, and you would be held to them.

It is that notion of the Teutonic persnickety factor that suggests to me that whatever rights were granted to the American Negro, he would have them in short order and have little more than that in the long term. And so that is my position. Now what exactly might those rights be? Would they have been enough? Would we have been satisfied? How effective could any protest against them be in the short term, in the long term? And so where would we be today?

Now here's where the question gets a lot more tricky and interesting. Considering the status and tone of the debate on race today, and especially with the particular significance given by writers like T. Coates at the Atlantic about latent racial cultural politics in America:

What we are now witnessing is not some new and complicated expression of white racism—rather, it’s the dying embers of the same old racism that once rendered the best pickings of America the exclusive province of unblackness. 

What are we to make of the inevitable(?) progress in anti-racist politics? In other words, if black Americans understood white supremacy so well, is there anything at all so different about the white supremacy of the Third Reich, of Jim Crow of Apartheid that would have disabled the sort of progress we have seen in America? Would the Black Panthers, MLK and Malcolm X sufficed? Would black America have come up with the right formula no matter who the white overlords were and how they manifested their dominance? I don't see it difficult to imagine black and white resistance against Nazis building, as it were, a second Underground Railroad - a different kind of Civil Rights movement. On the other hand, it's also not so difficult to imagine a horde of white American Nazi sellouts led by the like of Charles Lindbergh. You may feel free to speculate.

Apple Crushes Samsung

I've been trying to figure out, for the past month or so, what is so fabulous about Android as an operating system. I'm basically convinced that the answer is, Google created it and Google can do no evil. But outside of the basic open way in which Google has licensed it's mobile OS presumeably (I must presume due to the nature and tone of the general complaints of Android developers) it's just another operating system. 

We in the US have a patent office that essentially supports the actions of unsavory characters known as 'patent trolls'. Whey they do is buy up relatively simple ideas and then trade and sue in a contentious marketplace. 

I'm going to have to give automobile analogies to expose my bias and illustrate what I think is going on.

We have a nation of tens of millions of people with the surplus income to buy a new generation of electronic devices that do somewhat interesting things. And we have hundreds of thousands of developers who stake their careers on coming up with new interesting things to put into these devices. These developers work, by and large, from the designs set forth by a small handful of companies you could conceivably call The Big Three.  The analogy is an eager public who can buy cars, and hundreds fo thousands of mechanics and well, three big automakers. The King today is Apple, and Apple just invented a new kind of luxury car that has power windows, power brakes, moving seats, automatic transmission and crazy styled fins on the rear. It turns out that the difference between windows that crank and power windows is a patenable idea, even though any one of those hundreds of thousands of mechanics could build power windows from scratch.

Well, in this environment where you can patent not only power windows but the style of the buttons on the power windows and the color of the felt in the door that wipes the windows as they move up and down, Apple is making all the legal hay it can make over the fact that others of the big three have decided to make luxury cars as well. And guess what, all these copycat luxury cars have power windows, power brakes, power seats, automatic transmissions and fins. 

The reason all this matters is that Apple's luxury car was originally considered overpriced. All those mechanics laughed when they heard the luxury car was in the works, and they laughed when it came out. Nokia, they said, was the industry genius when it came to phones. Nobody will pay for all that stupid luxury. Well they predicted wrong, and this new category of luxury car became very profitable. It didnt' do much more - it just made simple things everybody already had on their cars easier to do. 

But then, seeing the success, they did the same thing, and they called it innovation even though the design of power window buttons is not really innovative and most anybody can design one. 

The complaint of Android developers and the failure of Samsung to defend its own 'innovation' is that now Apple will have a virtual monopoly on the market they created - of high priced premium designed luxury smartphones and tablets. The irony is that those thousands of mechanics can't really think of a new way to use the Android operating system, or can they? Is it just Samsung? 

The Amazon Kindle uses (last time I checked) the Android operating system. If Apple decides to go to war against Amazon, matters will really heat up. But what I read into today's decision is that the patent infringment charges were very specific on a product by product basis. In other words, there were plenty of products using Android that were not infringing. 

From my point of view, it seems completely right and proper that developers should complain about any legal and regulatory constraints that lead to monopoly. But there are two qualifiactions on that. The first is whether or not these 'innovations' are really that. You see if somebody patents a power window button, what's to stop you from making a power window lever, or drawstring, or voice control, or dial? It is ultimately a matter of superior or inferior design and if Apple has the exclusive rights to the superior design, then how can they be wrong? So I find it hard to buy the idea that Apple's defense of rights stifles innovation. 

The second qualification is whether or not the thousands of developers who voice this complaint are actually capable of building something materially different. To use the automobile analogy again, all of the mechanics are complaining that the patents for piston rings cost them money and stifle innovation. But that's only because they are thinking about the market leading engine technology. Rotary engines, the kind used in Mazdas don't use pistons or piston rings at all. If you were truly innovative, you'd put your own engine out there. But most mechanics are incapable of building engines from scratch, they need prior designs.

At some point in the future, the market is going to show that the marginal value of Apple's luxury products is minimal. As it stands, Apple's strategy strands their own products into the bargain bin a mere three years out. Apple's strength is that they deliver their innovations to the market like movie studios deliver summer blockbusters. And those blockbusters and their sequels deliver the big profits up front, and then dwindle in value over time. The complainers want the big summer movie audience. Whoops, two analogies. 

There's something else here too, and this to me is the more important thing. That is that I smell a sense of entitlement in the air.  The basic theory underlying all digital computing is that any one 'Turing complete machine' can emulate the exact same functions of any other 'Turing complete machine'. Which is saying that any computer can compute anything any other computer can compute. The possibilities are limitless, but the market opportunity is not. 

I believe that there are programmers right now at JPL or CERN, scientific programmers, who could build systems of increible beauty, capability and longevity. But instead they choose to serve other purposes than consumer markets. The idea that such programmers are limited by the decision against Samsung today strikes me as preposterous. To make a third analogy, what we have seen is the vindication of the Big Mac. Nobody else can use three slices of bread with sesame seeds and the same special sauce. The hamburger market has patented the sliced pickle, and it's really a shame that pickles and sesame seeds can be patented, but people do eat more than hamburgers. And maybe these wannabe market leaders ought to learn to cook something different, really different for a change.

 

Obligatory Seriousness on Lance Armstrong

There is an organization called the USADA that seems to be bending the rules so that they can erase Lance Armstrong. I am curious not so much to find the truth of whether or not Armstrong doped, but to figure out exactly what purpose it serves for the USADA to execute its aim to clawback his rewards after 17 years. 

Actually that's a rhetorical curiosity. I've already made up my mind that referees don't get infinite instant replays. The statute of limitations on sport should be the season. If you cannot determine by the end of the season who is the legitimate champion of the season, then don't give an award. If you cannot determine, by the end of a game, if all the rules of the game were followed, then declare the competition null and void. 

I am convinced that Armstrong is being unfairly persecuted, and furthermore that every sport that has doping rules should ensure that they are immediately enforceable. If Armstrong outsmarted the USADA, then too bad. My bias is that this agency is doing to its sport what boxing governing bodies did to theirs which is to draw into profound relief its inability to hold the respect and admiration of its chartered participants.

I'll keep my ear out for what the cyclists, teams, trainers and coaches have to say. 

Nice Notes from a Neo-Victorian

Ever since I read Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, I have considered myself something of a Neo-Victorian. That means I am a person who likes a hierarchical society with long standing traditions, fiscal prudence,  a consolidated cause & effect worldview, a firm utilitarianism, an unwavering appreciation for natural materials and the natural world, the submission of the personal to the principled, emotional restraint & modesty, dedication to the life of the mind and discipline in all things. Stephenson illustrates these values at length, and I believe that he holds them as well as I witness them in his more admirable protagonists. 

As we come into a finalization of the first epoch of the Information Age it occurs to me that American society has its share of Neo-Victorians and their adversaries. Let's call them Pagans for a moment and leave it at that.

Now I just consumed the entirety of Downton Abbey this year, and something struck me this morning about the way the regal family spent their days with regard to the information that they sent and received. Obviously since they were upper class, they did not receive a great number of people into their home. But they did get the news of the world from that channel, on most pressing matters, and then through personal correspondance for matters of a personal nature, and then impersonal stuff was gotten through the newspapers and various rumor mills associated with the lower class gossip and intrigues. In the TV series a great number of scenes began with the head butler or one of the daughters receiving a note. And this too reminded me of the film Dangerous Liasons. The content of these letters often drove the plot and suspense as they were slowly revealed to the audience who would know in advance of the various characters what news was what.

American Pagans are reminding us all to get away from our computers, texting phones, gaming consoles and television sets and go outdoors and Do Something (physical). Presumeably because there is nothing of value in our personal notes.  Whereas the Cult of the Tanning Booth and the People of the Tramp Stamp are always eager to exercise their bodies in multiplicative ways, we Neo-Victorians, also known derisively as Geeks, Nerds and Bookworms tend to stay close to our information portals. As the pagans take umbrage to our love handles, spindly arms, blotchy skin, pale faces, long whiskers and/or bed heads as deterministic markers of unfitness, we look askance at the vacuity of their social media. I can't think of anyone who has a habit of actually reading good literature who stoops to hand gestures in self-portrature other than in mockery of those for whom various combination of fingers signals real meaning. 

Simply because it's written doesn't make it virtuous, but one cannot deny that literacy leads to law. What does physicality lead to? More importantly, where does it lead today and do we really need that? 

Anyway, I'm very pleased with the ability for our emails to communicate in our personal correspondance great volumes, and I tend to subjugate the medium for the meaning and the message - never conflating the two. I cannot discount what I get from the web, et al, any more than one might dismiss one's university education. It just moves in a different time and space. 

Paglia on Religion & Art in America

Religion and the Arts in America CAMILLE PAGLIA

Shamelessly copied whole cloth from a lecture delivered on 6 February 2007 as the 2007 Cornerstone Arts Lecture at Colorado College. It was videotaped by C-SPAN and broadcast on its American Perspectives series on 3 March 2007.

At this moment in America, religion and politics are at a flash point. Conservative Christians deplore the left-wing bias of the mainstream media and the saturation of popular culture by sex and violence and are promoting strategies such as faith-based home-schooling to protect children from the chaotic moral relativism of a secular society. Liberals in turn condemn the meddling by Christian fundamentalists in politics, notably in regard to abortion and gay civil rights or the Mideast, where biblical assumptions, it is claimed, have shaped us policy. There is vicious mutual recrimination, with believers caricatured as paranoid, apocalyptic crusaders who view America’s global mission as divinely inspired, while liberals are portrayed as narcissistic hedonists and godless elitists, relics of the unpatriotic, permissive 1960s.

A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts. While leading conservative voices defend the traditional Anglo-American literary canon, which has been under challenge and in flux for forty years, American conservatives on the whole, outside of the New Criterion magazine, have shown little interest in the arts, except to promulgate a didactic theory of art as moral improvement that was discarded with the Victorian era at the birth of modernism. Liberals, on the other hand, have been too content with the high visibility of the arts in metropolitan centers, which comprise only a fraction of America. Furthermore, liberals have been complacent about the viability of secular humanism as a sustaining creed for the young. And liberals have done little to reverse the scandalous decline in urban public education or to protest the crazed system of our grotesquely overpriced, cafeteriastyle higher education, which for thirty years was infested by sterile and now fading poststructuralism and postmodernism. The state of the humanities in the us can be measured by present achievement: would anyone seriously argue that the fine arts or even popular culture is enjoying a period of high originality and creativity? American genius currently resides in technology and design. The younger generation, with its mastery of video games and its facility for ever-evolving gadgetry like video cell phones and iPods, has massively shifted to the Web for information and entertainment.

I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion. Let me make my premises clear: I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat. But based on my college experiences in the 1960s, when interest in Hinduism and Buddhism was intense, I have been calling for nearly two decades for massive educational reform that would put the study of comparative religion at the center of the university curriculum. Though I shared the exasperation of my generation with the moralism and prudery of organized religion, I view each world religion, including Judeo-Christianity and Islam, as a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe. Knowledge of the Bible, one of the West’s foundational texts, is dangerously waning among aspiring young artists and writers. When a society becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics (as has happened in the us over the past twenty years), all perspective is lost. Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.

Rape is Rape, Unless

Unless you are trying to redefine the meaning of sex in every context imaginable. Who is trying to do that? Who is trying to bring new definitions of morally legitimate forms of sexual consent into the political sphere? Why? 

Ask yourself a simple question. If you were to discover that there were about 12 different definitions and degrees of rape in law in America now, would you say that there need to be more or fewer laws? If you are not sure, would you agree or disagree that experts should be consulted on the matter? How certain are you that the average person know what rape is and will make a good judgment on the matter enough so that America can be considered a just society when it comes to rape?

If the question is up in the air for you at this point, then you should acknowledge that there is room for debate and that is exactly why people who disagree should run for office.

By the way, do American prisoners get charged for rape, or is that still a joke?

Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad has become something of a phenomenon around here. Just about everybody I know is in the midst of taking in the universe of Mr. Walter White. I too haave been bitten by the BB bug.

There are several elements in play that make Breaking Bad an exceptional dramatic series. But on the whole, I think what makes it work for me is that there is nothing gratuitous about it. There is a kind of lack of extremes and a fairly light amount of artsy filmmaking that plays just right. 

I find myself attracted to the Breaking Bad series despite myself. Having once been a follower of a number of HBO & Showtime series, the latest being the first season of Dexter, and some fraction of the first season of Burn Notice I have sworn off the genre. It was as I was watching Andre Braugher's entree into the arena that I began to recognize nastier aspects of the formula. Take a bad guy, make him smarter than everyone around him, and humanize his dirty business as he attempts to make his life work by focusing on the personal battles he must face. I surmised at length that this was a particularly seductive and unctious blueprint which gradually wore down a viewer's moral sensibilities by alternately shocking and soothing. Some genius writers figured out how to make good people cheer for the bad guy, and see him as the product of the system, a kind of necessary evil. A good evil. Evil with a human face. 

Before The Sopranos, nobody had figured out how to captivate American audiences in quite this way.  The bad guy was always pretty straightforwardly bad, and you basically liked him for his badness. Lt Butnz from Hill Street Blues and Detective Sipowitz from NYPD Blue came close. They were essentially good guys with bad ethics, but they were working against the worst of the worst - so there was an easy way to justify this. On the other hand shows like NCIS, JAG, but most importantly Law & Order (especially SVU) and CSI, the the wildman formula was reversed. A clean, bright, superstar collaborative team could indeed handle even the most heinous crimes while maintaining sterling ethics.

But on the fundamental side of soul-poisoning was Oz, The Sopranos, followed by Deadwood, Baugher's short-lived Thief and most recently Boardwalk Empire. Fundamentally bad guys doing fundamentally bad things with rationalized ethics. I adopted an attitude about protecting my soul and at some point decided to stay away. (And watched 24, CSI Miami & House instead)

The Wire stands as a exception in all of this, as does The Sheild. Both of these shows had such great actors and so many interwoven subplots with large casts, that even though they were ostensibly about one person, there was so much more going on that some of the fundamental poison could be overlooked. With The Wire however, my patience waned after a short period just before, I am told, the series got really good and became something of a social commentary on what 'black' life is really like. I didn't really have patience with that attitude with The Corner, despite my admiration for Charles Dutton. But there can be no denying of the actng talent of Idris Elba. What set The Wire apart critically was that it was one of the rare shows that broke through the 'Ron Glass Ceiling' by having a critical mass of intelligent middle-class black charaters that must inevitably conflict over nuanced matters. American audiences can count those shows on one hand. Yet that was not enough of a draw to keep me interested in Stringer's schemes or McNulty's quest. Instead I found myself much more drawn to Michael Chiklis' drama of trying to outwit, on a day by day basis, an entire police department doing good work, and panicked deception in order to maintain a coverup of an extraordinarily dirty deed done long ago. Here was an angle on the formula that hooked me. A good guy who has done horribly wrong and tries desparately to hold it all together in order to survive and do future good. This involved family, like the Sopranos, and a persistent antagonist that changed each season, unlike any other dramatic series (except perhaps Harry Potter's defense against the dark arts instructors). So the Sheild, despite its soul-staining brutalities, passed my defenses.

I should also say of Boardwalk Empire, Rome and what I surmise about Game of Thrones is that they all were in their own way costume dramas derivative of HBO's original groundbreaker Oz. You put everybody into a period Hell and watch how they sizzle. All soap operatic melodramas with extreme sex, violence and duplicity. Bam. 

Breaking Bad, by its excellence and uniqueness, demonstrates something new that illustrates all of these other dramas and in many ways surpasses them. But I think I'm going to finish out the fourth season before I say anything further.

Tony Scott: Dead

The death of Tony Scott at 68 is something that upsets me because I liked his movies so much. Tony Scott made two of Denzel Washington's best movies Deja Vu and Man on Fire. Deja Vu was the most emotionally resonant time travel movies ever filmed, and Man on Fire is by any measure one of the best action films of any type. 

I heard the news today that somebody jumped off the Vincent Thomas Bridge - I was driving home from my short getaway weekend. When I discovered an hour ago that it was Tony Scott, I immediately thought of what he must have thought in picking that bridge for his final chapter, the scene from To Live & Die in LA. It's difficult for me to disassociate that connection in my mind - it's a filmic way to think. 

It's true that Unstoppable was probably his worst film but we can only guess at the reasons he jumped. If he was pushed, Hollywood will be on fire about it for years. As it stands, it's a dramatic exit for one of the all time great action directors. 

Funny. That's about all I have to say.

The Slice vs The Anti-Slice

As part of my Peasant Theory, I claim that there are three classes of Americans. There are the 2% ruling class, the 90%  peasant class and 8% are 'The Slice'. The Slice are those people who actually know how to make things work, and they serve at the pleasure of the ruling class. Or, to think about it in another way, the 8% Slice are those people who actually *do* use algebra every day in their real lives. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not use algebra and are not asked to use algebra, repair the machines and conveniences upon which our lives depend, etc. 

But we also have 'The Alternative-Slice', who are the over-educated segment of the population whose resourcefulness is not employed due to the simultaneous facts that:

• The peasant class does not demand their services due to a lack of understanding of how they might benefit.
• The ruling class is quite satisfied with that demand lock-in.

Consider a baseball analogy. Imagine you are going to attend a baseball game, and so as the owner of the stadium you need to hire chefs. In the world of cooking skills, and the world of baseball game attendees, all that is required and expected are hot-dog level skills. Despite the fact that fresh pizza, sushi, rock candy, pineapple lemonade and oyster po' boys would all make for superb ball-game fare, you can rely on the lowball tastes of the baseball fans to guarantee you only need to hire three master chefs instead of seven. The three you hire are 'The Slice', the four you do not are ''The Alternative-Slice''.

The greatness of this country can be seen in the surplus of Slice candidates. We have a built-in reduncancy and competitiveness. But the fragility of the country comes from that same fact. The Anti-Slice is underemployed or suffers from the fact that they are out of the mainstream. If they continue long enough, out of favor or the employ of the ruling class, they become contrary, and unless and until their desires are met, they harbor all possibilities and potential for subversion and revolt. They may become more than the alternative but in word and deed the Anti-Slice. 

I see the operation of Slice, Alternative-Slice and Anti-Slice in most political, technical and social discussions of the day, and I recognize that the national failure is the fault and responsibility of America's ruling class. I tend to see the Alternatives attempt to crowdsource their funding and popularity and the Antis work oppositionally to the mainstream.

Zero Sum Class
Someone dismissed my class operation as a zero-sum game. It is and it isn't. Let me explain the way in which Slice skills and positions are zero-sum as a natural phenomenon. 

Consider The Transcendental Etude #10 by Franz Liszt. I first encountered this extraordinary piece of music when I was a sophomore in college, back in 1984. It was in fact this very performance by Andre Watts that stunned me for life. My awareness of its existence was created by my desire to improve myself and my expectation that I would eventually be bored by peasant music - even though I would go out on the weekends and dance to Midnight Star. The complexity of Liszt's etude and the relative sophistication it takes to appreciate it, as compared to that of No Parking on the Dance Floor is easy to see. As of this writing, Watt's performance on YouTube has existed online for 33 months and recieved about 65,000 viewings. Midnight Star on the other hand has been in place for 30 months but has garnered more than 10x that audience. But the important gating factor on the matter has to do with the number of musicians capable of performing the music. It's quite possible to be a peasant and enjoy classical piano concerts; Bunin playing Chopin outranks both. It is not possible to call Watts or Bunin peasants. 

Let us then focus on the fate of extraordinary musicians. The existence of YouTube forces us to because we are clearly in a period of transition. How likely are the proprietors of Google likely to build another such music hall and program such as that which cultivated Watt's original Lincoln Center performance? I heard it on KUSC back when Los Angeles had two classical FM radio stations. Is it likely that the rulers at Google might, through their desires change the way music is delivered, and marginalize the Slice of Lincoln Center performers and make the likes of Watts a reactionary Alternative or Anti?  Perhaps in their quest to unseat New York as an elite cultural center, they just might. 

Let us go one step beyond the performers and their venues, to the composers themselves. The genius of Chopin and Liszt is not generally open to question (unless you are part of an Alternative or Anti faction of the Slice involved in the criticism of Western music). If for some reason the American ruling class were to completely marginalize classical piano, you would end up with a natural zero sum. You cannot instantly create performers as capable as Watts or Bunin. You could not replace the works of Chopin or Liszt. They stand as the pinnacles of musical composition - they are not simply interchangeable commodities. So long as the ruling class seeks to preserve the world of piano etude composition, performance and appreciation, there is a zero-sum phenomenon that is unavoidable. 

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I argue therefore that the moral integrity of the ruling class is essential to the establishment and maintenance of a purposeful and public-minded Slice, the default of which creates telented elites at war with each other for the limited resources available to them. At this point in American history, the Slice is divided and the ruling class is distant. I have questions as to how American institutions would survive a necessary transition in power from an ascendant meritocratic Slice/Alt/Anti class. There is chaos at the top.

Concern

I remain convinced that the politicization of sexual preferences, stances, orientations, flirtations & confusions will come back to bite citizens in the ass, and not the friendly way. That is precisely because I find very little LGBT activism that isn't oppositional. With all due respect, the *dog* is rather tired of the condescending *tail*. 

It seems to me that too many political activists will not parse the difference between 'without regard to sexual orientation' and 'with special regard to sexual orientation' and spend billions of calories trying to define that precise weight of 'special'. The majority of such activists find repose in a general state of outrage, offense and dismay with those who neglect to 'get it'. 

In the parallel of race, I coined the term 'six pounds of racism' and asked how healthy are those who can bear that burden. It is impossible to quantify six pounds of racism (in either old or new money) which is precisely the point. It depends. Society should be robust enough to handle any infinity of gradations of 'it depends', but politics and law tend more heavily towards GS-scales. Who here is prepared to face the charge of misdemeanor homophobia or the ramping up of that division of Homeland Security? 

Those of us who are not impressed with sexual acrobatics are aware of what you wish for. How wary are the wishers?

 

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Concern is the respectful sympathy to those who face the prospect of danger.

The Octopus Conundrum

This picture is hilarious. It illustrates an interesting problem that political activists have. As part of my ongoing development of the Peasant Theory, I am interested in a kind of bottom line question which is 'Who is your Leviathan'? That question brings to the front, the issue of loyalty to the validity of an idea. But even before an idea is propagated, people have to perceive a problem. And so the Octopus Conundrum asks 'Do you have a leg to stand on?"

I mean everybody has an alternative, and that generally involves breaking one of the rules of the institutional they seek to destroy or reform. In the parlance of the OC, the problem is the octopus and the resources of the institution in question are the legs. It's easy to tear off a leg, because that's how political problems are presented. Our democratic political process comes ready made with legs ready to tear off. Just Vote No.

It's not very often somebody brings their own octopus leg.

Chinese vs British Ceremony

I'm one of the few people I know who found the opening ceremonies to be thoroughly enjoyable. Some of that owes to the fact that I am something of a Neo-Victorian. There's a lot to that but I'll leave it for another day. 

The Chinese on the one hand orchestrated a mass of performers to master a single skill and aggregate them into synchopated rhythm. The British on the other hand put together a series of vignettes chronicling history which involved a wide variety of characters performing different roles to create. To watch the Chinese ceremony is to witness 1000 drummers drumming & dancing in uniform. To watch the British ceremony is to witness 1000 people in 50 different groups with 50 improvisations off 50 drummers in 50 different costumes. I admire the British complexity, and I am put off by the Chinese uniformity.

Consider the possibility of something going wrong. Imagine that one of the parade of Chinese drummers gets violently ill in the middle of the ceremony. Your eye would immediately pick him out of the crowd as his spot on the grid went awry. And you would know deep in your heart that his failure would mar the entire act, and that he would face endless shame, humiliation and even punishment for being the puzzle piece that fell out. 

Now consider that same violent illness attacking one of the Mary Poppins clones, or one of the factory workers in the British illustrations. The entire affair would procede without most people noticing at all. It is that kind of robust and multivariate performance that allowed the British to even choreography sheep into the ceremony. 

In short, the British allowed people to be people and sheep to be sheep. 

 

Olympic Journal - Day 12

Jeter's Tatoo
I bet my son a nickel that the reason that American sprinter Carmelita Jeter was wearing the full red body suit for her event was that she had a tatoo that she didn't want the world to see. I like Jeter and I was trying to figure out whether or not she was as ripped as the other track women. It turns out that, hell yeah she's ripped and that yes she has a tatoo but it's nothing to be ashamed of. That's where I'd put mine, a lightning bolt on the outer thigh.

May Traener
Well I truthfully cannot keep track of all the hypenated women's names that we have out there. In fact it's starting to sound like South America with some of these females. That's all good for what it's worth, but awfully damned confusing. I suppose we have Joyner-Kersee to blame for a lot of this, not to mention Briscoe-Hooks. Richards-Ross is the latest and isn't she just a sweetie? Hmm, maybe, maybe not, but she's got the hair going on and that big Chanel bling earring thing too. Gotta say, I'm liking her personality, but Alysia Montano is the winner in that department. Felix is good looking - well their all good looking, but hmm. Who do I like best? I guess Felix. We've already forgotton Tarmoh from the Oregon trials. Too bad. International media is deadly. So when Al Michaels tells women to smile it sounds really annoying and cruel, but to get dissed in media is even crueller and media don't care. So when you smile for the camera, I know I love you better..

Oh yeah. Go May Traener. Great work. True champions. Blam. USA USA USA!

The Underwater Camera
It doesn't exist in prime time, and that, n's and b's, is the only reason to watch water polo. So I won't.

Erik Kynard
Where can I get some of those socks, yo? He can single handedly bring back high tops and tube socks. It's really too bad he didn't get the gold. And why are we not seeing and hearing Dwight Stones? Didn't they even bother to ask him into the booth? Speaking of which, what happened to Liam McHugh? He ripped it for the Tour de France. 

 

Olympic Journal - Day 10

I'm watching a lot of stuff from a couple days ago and trying to catch up. But there are a few things worth mentioning.

Usain Bolt
A lot has been made about the Jamaican sprinters and that's just playing the meta game. Bolt is the real deal, and a proper champion. I have to say that no matter how many swimming medals Michael Phelps wins, it always feels to me as if swimming just hasn't matured. When there are still 15 year olds breaking world records and three or four athletes dominating the sport years on end, I get the feeling that there's a great deal more evolution for the sport. Bolt is a much more phenomenal star than Phelps. He makes you think about what we've never seen yet in the sport. I must say that I've always liked tall sprinters rather than the short, juiced-up ones. I take Linford Christie over Ben Johnson. And so Bolt is the evolution of Christie, a stronger Christie, and I think he sets the standard for the new class of sprinters future.

Lin Dan
It took long enough to make the Badminton look interesting. I've had to fast forward through more hours of badminton than I ever have in life to witness the men's singles final at long last. All the way to the wire there was drama and the tightest competition between the world's number one and number two. The Chinaman was finally victorious over the Malaysian.

Women's Beach VB
Is this all USA vs China? I have to say that the women's beach volleyball this year has been more exciting than the men's. Not just because Rogers and Dalhauser failed before the Italians, but that the play has just been more riveting with May's team. A lot of crazy digs and bootleg plays have made the games quite stunning, and the Chinese women fought until the end. 

Lolo, Gabby, Dawn & The Image
Two ends of the spectrum in the meta game. On the one hand, Gabby wins her events in style with a bit of grace for one so young, but gets destroyed in the press. Now people are telling her to control her image. The total flip-side is that Lolo Jones can't win for losing and the press and sponsors have and continue to love her. But let's face it, Lolo has the ripped torso a zillion women and men want and she's got an elegance that almost no other female athlete at the games possesses. She's got a compelling story and she's got polish. Gabby on the other hand reminds you of Sandy Cheeks from Spongebob. She's all spunky and clunky - and what a name. Gabby - perfect for the post-balletic twirlers of the modern Olympics, all- wrist braces and chalky and feet that pound clunk after the double pikes. There's no getting around that acrobatics have ruined much of women's gymnastics - the tumbling routines are as routine as breakdancing headspins. What did we ever really see in all that? 

Now that Lolo has her second non-medal event (four is the lonliest Olympic number) I hope she stays popular, because I like her, genuinely. Gabby, if she can grow up normally - as if any American female gymnast could, should be back in Rio. Until then she'll have to defend herself from the sorts of Hollywood & marketing types that create and destroy. Somebody is going to drop a gold brick on her doorstep.

Dawn Harper reminds me of one of my first girlfriends. No matter what kind of gold lay in her heart, she could never transcend her hood-ratly appearance. Not that Dawn is unattractive or improperly ghetto, it's just that she got that Jamie-Lee Curtis hardbody that dudes kinda like and kinda fear at the same time. I also bet that she's just too cocky to shutup about beating Lolo, no matter how gracious she tries to smile for the camera. I like that in a champion, and I think she and Deion Sanders would make a perfect couple. But it took Deion a long time to be accepted as a champion and I don't think Dawn will get enough time in the sun to make any mistakes. But that's what happens to the overwhelming majority of American Olympians, win or lose. 

It seems that the only way to gain any permanent respect is to become a coach, and considering what has been said about Bob Kersee, that's not much of a bright prospect. How can we make Track & Field a better profession? 

Cobb's Olympic Journal

All I care about these days are the Olympics. I am a huge fan, and for the past several days most of my spare time has been taken up by watching. I will blog here in a serial way to keep up with what I think is noteworthy.

While much of what I'll care about is the content, I expect that I will break meta over the interpretation of all that transpires. That's because the metastories of the Olympics carry too much weight and I think that most of them are mishandled. That has led me to believe that our carrier, NBC is getting hit for all the wrong reasons. Yet them being old media, there is something we need to do from the mass of eyeballs side. 

Here are my overall impressions so far:

1. London.
London has done a perfect balancing act. It is my perception that the city has done just enough to draw attention to itself as a host city, but not so much that it has become too much of a distraction. The venues are marvelously tidy or expansive as the case may require, but almost nowhere has any unnecessary attention been drawn to the facilities or the providers of them. No security screwups (aside from the bottle thrown at Usain Bolt). If London has been employing the Ring of Steel, it was worked brilliantly.

2. Opening Ceremonies
I have two brief comments in contradistinction to what blather comes by me.

A. The ceremonies were world class, dramatic, beautiful, complex, mature and full of wonder. Except for one flaw. Giant babies are *always* creepy.

B. If you wanted to see the ceremonies in real-time, you should have bought yourself a ticket.

3. Heroes
I have three or four people whose character and performance I will remember. The first and foremost is Bradley Wiggens, the cyclist. I think he's is appropriately awesome, and his example will make me think twice about ever mocking the physique of somebody built like Ichabod Crane. Wiggo is a righteous dude, a regular bloke, and true sportsman. 

The second is Hiromi Miyaki the <48kg women's weightlifter who took silver. What an astonishing performance. She is an impressive mighty mite, and shouts out her gung ho attitude.  Something about her captures, for me, the true spirit of the games. Not a lot of fanfare, but she faces the crushing weight. 

I have a soft spot in my heart for the steeplechase, but these 3000 meters seem to be a lot easier for today's competitors than for those in Olympics past. And so now I have to pass the baton off to the 10,000 meters. You really couldn't ask for a more storybook performance than that delivered by Mo Farah in front of his countrymen, and what a show of pure joy in celebration. 

 

 

Gore Vidal: Dead

I read Gore Vidal a little bit too young to make use of what he wrote or break too lofty in comments on his passing but there were a couple ideas that he has to want to be that I still recall the first was the idea of a scholar squirrel. 

His rant against the cowardice of the professoriate was a great comfort to me in understanding how the prestige of various academics obscured the fact that there were indeed facts about history that they couldn't bear to present in full context. But that was about the extent of it and quite frankly Vidal in the end disappointed.

What annoyed me about Vidal was that he decided to take his pen and run away home, except that he made his home somewhere in Southern Europe. France or Italy, it mattered little. Essentially, he turned in his card and decided that America was no longer home. From that distance, lobbing rhetorical bombs reminded me of nobody so much as Stokely Carmichael aka Kawame Ture. I may not be forgiven for not keeping up with Vidal, but it's patently obvious to me that he didn't have the stomach for living in America. One wonders which cowardice is more odious, that which can't bear to be associated with America or that which succeeds in the fraudulent portion. Vidal criticized all the scholar squirrels, but then left them in charge of his ex-nation.

Considering that America hasn't self-destructed before his death, I guess Vidal's cowardice is all the more apparent. Then again, there may be some idyllic perfection in Southern Europe that we are all just too stupid to recognize. 

Vidal was clearly at peace with the degradation of the nation he claimed to know so well. But isn't that the sort of Merovingian elan such an elitist native son given to the thrills of sexuality ought to be expected to possess? Nothing quite so awfully truthful as a sardonic old queen, eh? Especially about awful things that have the ring of truth. It doesn't make one a hero. Shakespeare's Aaron never told a lie and for his truths could spare the life of his bastard got off the evil queen. I suppose that's the best light to illuminate Vidal's legacy. He'd have us barf it all up - with the likes of Kofi Annan in charge.

The world does not, perhaps, need heroics nor courage. Gore Vidal might be a suitable boy for that world of boys and girls who needn't do anything but wish away war and sun themselves in Mediterranean light. But Rabbi Hillel said, when there is no hero, you be the hero. That calls for presence of mind and body and dedication to some risky propositions. None of which seem to be at issue for Vidal at his remove from a nation lying in the lee of the winds of property ownage, civil liberties strewn about like so many trailer parks. 

He said, back in 2001:

Once alienated, an 'unalienable right' is apt to be forever lost, in which case we are no longer even remotely the last best hope of earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens are kept in line by SWAT teams and whose way of death, not life, is universally imitated. Since VJ Day 1945 ('Victory over Japan' and the end of World War II), we have been engaged in what the great historian Charles A Beard called 'perpetual war for perpetual peace'. I have occasionally referred to our 'enemy of the month club': each month a new horrendous enemy at whom we must strike before he destroys us. I have been accused of exaggeration, so here's the scoreboard from Kosovo (1999) to Berlin Airlift (1948-49).

You will note that the compilers, Federation of American Scientists, record a number of our wars as 'ongoing', even though many of us have forgotten about them. We are given, under 'Name' many fanciful Defense Department titles like Urgent Fury which was Reagan's attack on the island of Grenada, a month long caper which General Haig disloyally said could have been handled more briefly by the Provincetown police department. In these several hundred wars against communism, terrorism, drugs or sometimes nothing much, between Pearl Harbor and Tuesday 11 September 2001, we always struck the first blow.

It's achingly familiar. How about this?:

Jews, blacks, and homosexuals are despised by the Christian…majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world. Since our own Christian majority looks to be getting ready for great adventures at home and abroad, I would suggest that the three despised minorities join forces in order not to be destroyed. This seems an obvious thing to do. Unfortunately, most Jews refuse to see any similarity between their special situations and that of the same-sexers.

Is there nothing but irony in Vidal's screeds against Christians and Christianity? Perhaps so. But you would think a more reasonable atheism would have emerged from his diatribes against the 'sky gods'. In that too, I took some measure of distance against monotheism. In fact, it more clearly places my initial discovery of Vidal back in the late 80s as I first gave the faith vs reason arguments full run in my head, as well as the delights of polytheism. 

But there is no discipline but the aesthetics of those celebrities whose names don't leave our memories with the swiftness that their arguments lose their coherence over time. And we are left with nothing but memories. 

I think of how obvious the minds I was raised on have failed utterly to recognize what liberties would be generated by those of us who have crafted bit by bit, the information revolution. I just have to grudgingly admit to myself that the men of letters have long abandoned the town squares they have claimed to defend. And now Vidal lies dead, another dead man whose letters will be decomposed, debated and deleted in his absence. 

I'm No Joker

There is little difference between disarming people by taking away their guns, their bullets or their right to vote. If what you want is a citizenry that becomes physically incapable of causing a ruckus, then the instrumentality of disarmament is of no consequence. It is the presumption that people need to be pacified which is of utmost concern.

Liberals, and those people who were most upset about W's declaration of war on the Axis of Evil, as well as those people who aim for nuclear disarmament ought to understand this presumption quite well. If you go out romping and stomping about some entire country of people who need to be stopped NOW, then it should not be surprising that people will be alarmed at the inherent arrogance. So when I hear people proclaiming loudly that they understand human nature and what ought to be done because of that, it makes me blink and think. How about you? There is almost no argument I have ever heard in defense of gun control that doesn't first begin with the argument and presumption that there is something wrong with America, they understand that, and the way to stop it NOW is romping and stomping all over the right to bear arms. No difference. 

So when it came to war, wasn't it surprising that the biggest POW camp we ever saw in Iraq was Abu Graibh? Something must be wrong with a program of pacification that doesn't fill a nation the size of Iraq with dead men, given what we know American shock and awe can do and did on some tiny island like Iwo Jima. No, what we did was counter-insurgency. We even let Iraqi men keep their own weapons. Perhaps we weren't at war really, but just out to get the bad guys. Afghanistan has no mass graves. That ain't war. Nothing happened to North Korea - we even let them come to the Olympics. Or, in the same way that the War on Drugs is quite far from my mind here in sunny, pleasant, affluent Redondo Beach, perhaps the 'war' is very targeted, and very specifically lethal.

I don't bother worrying my tuchus about mass murder in the US. That's part and parcel of my understanding of the facts. The facts are that 30,000 Americans kill themselves every year. Suicide. 40,000 is the number for automobile deaths. The number for murder? Want to guess? 17,000. 

When it comes to mass murder, by the way, I tend to remember that it wasn't too long ago when America had the popular nuttery to enact the 18th Amendment. And because of that the FBI got a good workout in homeland security against moonshiners and their gangster patrons who were armed to the teeth. I don't remember that much of my high school history, but even that domestic terror was eventually handled. Yeah we changed the law back, which was a good idea for those same pacification reasons I stated earlier, but we sure did grow the FBI. So there has never been a time in the past 80 years or so when we really couldn't handle the 'fire next time'. David Koresh is about as bad as it gets. Oh yeah, and the Mexican drug gangs. But that's not really my problem. So yeah. I shrug mass murder off, but I do everything to maintain my inner peace and I always buckle my seatbelt. 

People talk all the time about how we're losing civil liberties all of the time. I'm wary, but I just don't see it. I have a feeling we're more losing civility, and that's because odious people keep taking liberties with their perversions, one of which is the kind of hate-baiting that wants to make it a crime to each Christian fried chicken. But that's just more noise, and people do have a right to get out of hand and make loud, uncivil noise. 

I have a constitutional right to get out of hand, by bullet or by ballot, so I defend those rights, and I stand to mock those who think they know enough about me to pacify and disarm me. I'm no joker and I won't be disarmed without a fight. 

A Spy in the House of Racist Jokes

Since I belong to an abnormally large number of distributions, including the Kwaku Network which is that one I refer to from time to time as the black backchannel, I get all sorts of mail. I get Progressive mail from groups like Move On, and I get whatever CNN and the WaPo deem of special interest to black intellectuals and bloggers, I get mail from Stratfor and the Institute for the Study of War. I get mail on Israel and stuff from Libertarians. I get included in Data Warehousing groups, hacker groups, Occupy groups and organizational management groups. I get mail from Katrina contractors and Twitter spammers. I get mail from law enforcement and national security groups and just about every freaking retailer on the planet. I also get mail from oddball individuals including attorneys who think I'm their client, doctors who think I'm their patient, headhunters who think I want to work for their clients, and writers who think my blog is a good place for their creations. 99% of the time, I never respond. I just read this instead of ever watching network news. I get to know what I want to know. 

But the other day, I got an email from one of the above groups which included a very tasteless and juvenile joke about saggin' people.  (If you have a difficult time understanding, spell saggin backwards). I expect that the excrement will impact on the reticulating cooling device some time within the next week - or maybe not. That is because, although there is a public website where this sorry joke originates, I'm not particularly interested in outing the culprits. Interestingly enough, I find some ethnic jokes funny, but this one is merely pathetic.

So it struck me as something of a perverse test of nerve. Having been a race man for many years, I know very well what my tolerance for BS is, but it certainly varies from topic to topic. I don't particularly waste my time on the obvious, except when current events seem to demand obligatory seriousness. But what about you? Do you feel it is your responsibility as an x-person to speak out whenever something offensive or damaging to x-people is done?

For the moment, I am a spy in a house that harbors someone who is spreading tacky junk. I'm not particularly cool with it, but I'm also not making a fuss. Interesting position.