Cobb

Brownies & Boggarts & Sprites

Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning is a combat RPG set in a vaguely familiar world of blathering humans, wanton devils, plotting gnomes, condescending fairies, and implacably territorial beasts, all mixed up into destabilized factions. The factions all use some arrogant spokesman to seduce you by honor into a plot to destroy their enemy whomever it will be, usually the devils and the beasts, while cursing and marveling at your ability to be the badass that you are. 

You wander from quest to quest, gathering nuts in May, keys, flowers, salts, loot, armor and weapons found in tree stums, rock piles and three variations of pirate chests 'o gold, some of which are booby cursed. 

The vaguely familiar world is massive, and lies in the midlands of modern three dimensional computer animation.  The world is filled with tudorish villages and medievalish castles and brackish swamps and caves. There are verdant fields with gigantic trees and ancient ruins, arid plains with dusty work camps and flooded mines, and boggy swamps with sour mists and oboes playing minor chords. 

And the creatures! Oh my heavens the creatures. There are three kinds of two headed giants, and two other kinds of giants aside from that. There are 30 foot beasts that slither three lengths in a fraction of a second belch up slimy procreations that hatch weilding tridents that shoot lightning. There are monsters whose faces split open vertically and spit green venomous clouds of stinking, stinging insects. There are shrieking black wraithes who dodge everything you throw at them and then come back from the near dead. There are glowing animate trees that fire corkscrewing roots at your feet and arrows of light at your face. And sometimes they gang up on you, with wolves, or bears, or brownies or massive doglike creatures with electric bites that drain your mana.

However.

In Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning, you are the most badass, world wrecker in the realm. I can distinctly recall Blair Herter say that the fighting system for The Dark Knight was the most satisfying... HA and double HA. No Jedi or Sith, no Prince of Persia or God of War, no Dragonborn, combo ninja acrobat, Vault refugee nor Black Operative has weilded such destructive whoopass through any territory as.. as... whatever it is you named your elf. OK perhaps I exaggerate, but I can tell you without qualification, in the world of RPGs there has never been such an engaging fight system. Only Borderlands comes close. 

You see all of those beasts and quests are just an excuse for you to use bows, chakrams, longswords, greatswords, daggers, faeblades, ice traps, grenades, throwing knives, hammers, poisons and the traditional three elements of magic, fire, ice and lightning to hack, slash, bash, quake and incinerate your way through legions of hapless foes, and zombies too. 

It's the fightingest RPG of all time, but wait, theres more. 

You know how it is in every RPG, you choose a race and a bloodline and a primary skill and god and you level up and level up and level up. In this one, you can undo all of your skill points and re-level up from scratch. Even the weapons that you embue with gems and properties can be undone and reconfigured. In short, you get to be every kind of badass the game allows. You can be God Wizard on the Sorcery scale, God Assassin on the Finess scale or God Warrior on the Might scale, or any combination in between. 

Therefore this is a fighting game. If you were expecting crackling good storytelling, wonderous voice acting, and anything resembling a sense of humor appropriate to the vaguely familiar worlds of Seelie Fae in the Sidhe, forget it. The job done is admirable to a fault, the fault being that in the end you don't really care about all the wonderous lore of the joint. You just want to get that 249 unit ice hammer and smash the shit out of those fat red one-eyed giants who belly bumped you. 

But there's also the Niskaru, in case you get cocky. These creatures are like a combination of speed, death and death and speed. If there are two of them, be on your toes. If there are two and their boss, you had better hope some idiot giants or other NPCs have walked into the battle space, or else you're going to be swilling cures and freezing the action every five seconds to pick another combination of weapons, poisons, distractions and prayers.  Beware the crossroads of Southern Klurikon. You have been warned. 

No I haven't finished, but I expect more of the same in Alabastra, the final kingdom. 

Neal Stephenson & The Neo Victorians

CLANG is the most interesting project I have seen in quite some time. It's an idea that is at least as large as Guitar Hero and I plan to participate fully. As many things as Stephenson does, his appearance in the Kickstarter video was pleasing and inspiring. I say inspiring because as long as I have been reading NS, I didn't expect him to be as personally involved in the implications of the larger themes of his writing as he is. What do I mean about his appearance? I mean his NeoVictorian attire. As you watch this video, note the action when Stephenson takes down a combattant with his cane. Very cool. 

 

Revolution: Mommy Apocalypse

Well, it's official. Men with stubbly beards are back. They are the new swag. It's called 'swag' these days - you can read that as 'fashionable manhood'. It's not quite up to the manly standards of Commander Riker, but it's doing a bit better than the metrosexual standard we have suffered since the disappearance of Burt Reynolds, no disrespect to Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, Daniel Craig and Jason Statham. We're about up to 85% of the Mid 80s Winston Man who was about 85% of the Marlboro Man. So things are looking up, mostly - almost to the point at which I can watch prime-time television without having to suppress my gag reflex. 

Now that I'm thinking about leading men for a hot minute, I think I can safely say that we have finally gotten rid of William Hurt, Chevy Chase and the rest of the boarding school boys club of actors which forced the careers of all the other actors, save the above, into weird corners of manhood where only actors like Danny Devito, Dennis Franz and Joe Pesci could have balls. But let me not get distracted.

The subject of discussion is JJ Abrams' new show Revolution. It has a fabulous premise and it needs to grow up really quickly. And it needs to start moving with some speed, or else it will be a terrible waste. I don't know if Abrams is trying to back out of his reputation for shows that go in seven directions at once or what, because right now things are so damned ploddingly linear it's practically Gilligan's Island. 

What have we got? We've got a semi-rebellious, semi-heroic, semi-motherly girl with a crossbow. She can be really good but she's got nothing on Abrams' other heroines. I guess he wanted to do young and Brave and all that Hunger Game flavor.  Check. He's got Giancarlo Esposito as a smiling borderline sociopathic military commander who actually cares about his cause. Good move. You've got uncle badass with deep secrets about the origin of the plague, which is this case is a suspension of the laws of physics such that electricity doesn't work the way it used to. You've got dead dad, and presumed dead mom, and kidnapped asthsmatic baby brother as the emotional cellar for the heroine. Check. And you've got bearded fatboy ex-Googler semi-wastecase in the wasteland, and British babe with long braids, jeans and white shirts as hangers-on in the great Trek. There are boatloads of potentials here, BUT.

Here is yet another apocalypse where all of the cops, engineers, first-responders and Denzel Washingtons have just disappeared. The only rebels we recognize are women and slightly less than Mad Maxes. So basically all the rednecks (which lies deep in every American male psyche) have sold their souls to the evil, brutal and criminal Monroe Militia. Oh, didn't I mention that? No women carrying guns or water for them. Just dudes with scars on their faces and/or pitiful souls. 

So for the purposes of demoralizing macho, we have an excellent platform. She ain't Laura Ingram, she's a hunter, not a farmer. But she's civilizing the wild frontier as are, I suspect, all of the women in this series so far, with nary a naughty wench to be seen. You see it's all about family, because it's all feudal now. 

Here's the crux. Deeper in the emotional celler of our heroine (named 'Charlie') is the drawdown scene where her mom fired on the man who threatened her toddler life in a hostage exchange for a little red wagon full of the family's only food. Dad had the perverted thief in his sights, the thief said 'I dare you' and Dad couldn't manage to fire. Mom, with an appropriate tear and shaky hands wound up doing the deed. One shot, one kill. Motherhood is a mutha!  

There are swords. There are lots and lots of swords. For that alone this is a superb vehicle, but even though it trawls at 10pm, it definitely is on the PG-13 track. Which ought to be good considering the gratuitous depravity of most of the premium channels, but well... The first commercial break advertised Clinique. So that just about says it all, huh?

We are being patient for some good storytelling, but we have been warned. 

I like the whole fuedal narrative, and there is no doubt that war and revolution are coming. Who's your Leviathan is the entire subtext I'm reading into this, but I think there's an opportunity here to be flagrantly wrong or right about some fundamental feminist and other social questions. And that, my dears, is what's particularly enticing about this new dramatic world, if it can stand up and walk. 

Searching the Universe for Vile Rats

I read somewhere the other day that EVE Online is a thinking man's video game. Maybe it's just another level of sophistication in pursuit of making things go BOOM, or taking fragging to space. Either way, I'm intrigued. It shows every indication of being ridiculously complex. 

My Macbook seems to be for crap when it comes to 'PC gaming'. I thought I would give MMO gaming a chance, having pretty much done everything there is to do on my XBox. And so I took half the weekend to install and run EVE Online. You may recall that one of the staffers in Libya who suffered at the hands of radical islamists went by the handle of 'VileRat' in that universe. Well, if that's the kind of grownup I might meet in the MMO world, I'm all for it. As some of my readers know, my gaming has taken a nosedive since the death two of my best friends online. I understand and sympathize totally with those who have felt the loss. But my machine was no help. Once I downloaded the six GB it was a real clunker in the Barbie section, so I pretty much gave up. 

But the other night, having a bit of insomnia and free time allowed me to consider downgrading my video quality. It turns out that pretty much every problem had to do with the Barbie screen and the game runs fine. So I've created a couple of characters and joined a corporation and am off to do what's called PVP with my gang. 

--

On further review, I have found it nearly impossible to get over the psychological barrier of playing games on the same machine I use to do my daily work, and my writing. It's just too much time in one place. Unless and until I can get this deal working on my big screen with an XBox controller, I'm just not going to do it. Mouses are for work, all intrigue of vile rats notwithstanding. 

Bleak

I'm reading and about 40% through Charles Dickens' Bleak House. What strikes me most is that there is in Dickens' mind such a minute and detailed accounting of character that it's rather frightening to consider how little we might do in comparison. Much of Bloom's criticism inflects my perception to trust the story more than the author but one cannot help but notice how perceptive one must be to manage all the recondite nuances without prejudice. I am comparing and contrasting with my almost recent going through of the Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes mysteries as examples of Victorian literature in pursuit of a more thorough going understanding of our mutal history, much of which was spurred on by my less recent review of Stephenson's Baroque Series. I expect that this interest will continue as I feel less and less bound by contemporary social and political imperatives - I'm ready to unbelong. 

What matters then is character somewhat limned by deportmant, but character over all. 

I am writing, and may finish today some reflections on Neal Stephenson and his Neo-Victorianism and implications of.. well let me do that because there's little sense in writing more about Bleak House until I complete it, which won't be for another week. 

Stephenson holds my attention because he is, like I am, invigorated by the lacuna of modern self-sufficiency and looks to history to reconstruct that bit of human knowledge which our contemporary conveniences have obviated for the sake of the masses. I am certain that he has seen, via Anathem, the value of a monastic discipline in education and what a social lack of that produces. He, better than most writers I have ever encountered understands the value of practical knowledge - what the Enlightenment has done and how a lack of disciplined education will undo. It will not undo humanity, but the Humanities. And so in that gap which arises from the failure to mass educate, he inserts his literature, and lately a corpus of tools that go beyond literacy. 

As a backgrounder, understand that I strongly believe that the masses and those who lead them for better or worse will fail to correct their failures until they are lying in its detritus. The wasteland must be upon us for our bearing to adjust - and that is born of the beeline for convenience which has been the impetus for the vast majority of our social change in the 19th and 20th centuries. We have educated without enabling and have left it to the Lords to oversee. But they too have been outstripped and do not, I assert, with any constancy maintain the integrity of their realms. And so we live on the brink of disease and disaster amongst a lot of men who have forgotten not only the recipe for survival, but indeed how to be men. We have gone beyond feral motorcycles to zombies. We know that the motors will not survive.

Like my old friend Charles Cameron, I'm paying attention to the millenarians and listening intently to those people who believe the world is about to end, or atleast collapse in parts of Europe and the United States. It might be a bit corny to say so, but I think that all such Westerners with a bit of motherwit are going to survive very much more like Guy Ritchie's version of Sherlock Holmes than any Mad Max. I say in fact that there will be a style and a virtue and a power in the post-industrial man which will very much resemble that of the pre-industrial man. We will eat better and have better hygene, but I think the NeoVictorian is the model.

To the extent that I don't believe the Vickies will be the model, Stephenson has me again. It will be the logistics of the swarm that rule the next generation (which is not necessarily an evolution) of organizational dynamics. IE Mongolian hordes. The Khan model of assymetrics will dominate, but (and the new Mongoliad is out this week) OMVI tactics cannot be far off. The individual tactitian organized in the small group of multi-thinkers will have advantages I think cannot be overcome by those driven to complete selfless devotion to battle. But it will be a good fight one way or the other.

So I am preparing myself and my family, armed with Peasant Theory, books and swords, and some Mongolian organization dynamics, amid the view of Dickensian London for that which might devolve here in the US, understanding that cities may seem 'unlivable' by today's yuppie standards, but the woods will be much, much worse. So how is a gentleman to survive? The model is already out there. Victorian manners are survival skills. So the future doesn't seem too bleak to me at all. 

Build a Town Already

I've been listening to people talk about how they will change the world for most of my life. Incidently today there is this piece by Eric Raymond, and this piece by Bill Benzon. I do not doubt for a moment that the world has changed and continues to change. In fact, it has been enlightening to run through KOA, The Reconing to help me understand two little tidbits. Let me riff off the tidbits.

In Kingdoms of Amalur, The Reconing, we are playing the role of a fateshifter. You see, we are in the land of elves, gnomes, fae, sprites, boggarts, brownies, jottun and various other creatures. Some of these, the fae, without going too deeply into their taxonomy, are immortal. As immortals they express a great disdain for mortals, because you see, the fae are inextricably bound to the Earth. They represent birth, growth, decay and death, all of which are eternal, and so they are fated in their immortality. This is rather like the fate of neutrinos to be massless and thus travel at the speed of light. As the fateless mortal character, we exist at the opposite end of the spectrum. We are massive and thus bend fate around us and can assume any form, it is a condition of our mortality. I suppose that means I must die at the end of the game, but who knows, I'm only at level 29 and have yet to enter the kingdom of Alabastra, home of the Winter Court of Fae.

The Fae resent change, but must adapt to it, and find uses for it, or exist forever in a state in conflict with their previously eternal fate. For example, the Fae of Sorrows administer the Midden where the dead are separated from their souls. Change has made the Midden to smell to the Fae as it does to humans. Now suddenly their exalted position stinks. 

So humans, as being mortals, must in the relatively short time allotted to them must find meaning amongst that which is eternal and transcendent and then force change. We must move swiftly and imbue ourselves with something permanent, or change something that seems permanent. This is what we do when we are confronted with the knowledge that we will die. For the vast majority of us, having children satisfies that condition. We smack up somebody else's life and produce one of the single most life changing changes that we can - creating life where there was none. And of course murder is the counterpart.  There it is.  End of riff.

In Raymond, the question of tribal prophets is answered rather matter of factly by the first commenter who serves rhetoric to the effect that all the titans of industry were prophets. Why not Ken Olsen, the CEO of DEC? And I have to agree with that point and take it to its proper conclusion which suggests that all such thinking about startup companies and tribes and such purposeful evasions of the public are a species of small-mindedness. This is, of course, the last thing that attendees of a TED seminar want to hear, but I cannot help but be reminded of the sort of eclexia implicit in these endless junkets. 

I do not doubt that there is boundless creativity to be found in these tribes. And I find it telling that the speaker to whom Raymond refers begins with a micro history of Superbowl Parties and all such manner of things likely to be captured by the incessant narcissism of social media. But nobody knows what Obama does, they just like the idea that the Presidency is up for grabs and your vote, like your code, and your glib intellectual obiter dicta can be connected into a clever narrative of empowerment. 

I am reminded of how many tons of rubber are produced in the world on an annual basis. We all take rubber for granted of course, and we imagine, we being those in the digiterati enthralled by the eclexia of TED, that there must be little of creative interest in the production of rubber and the management of a rubber empire. But I doubt quite seriously that we are correct in such assumptions, rather, we are determined to discount the qualities of such physical artifacts that don't flow over TCP/IP yeilding their secrets to those tools that we can appropriate freely in our open source worlds. 

And how are we to change the world? 

Well, we don't actually. What we do is we constantly change the way we see the world, and thus in a class of chatters, we frame and re-frame the fashionable intelligence, as has always been the wont and role of the Slice. We who work in close proximity to the Ruling Class. But TED and Google Plus and various streams of Twitter twaddle (and certainly some large unfathomable number of IRC channels) are the new channels that aggregate people into virtual neighborhoods. At long last however, the virtual remains virtual. So now we are witnessing what seem to be like sleepwalkers staring into the virtual multiverse as the stumble through actual streets and wreck their automobiles. Digital consciousness is now a 21st century virus unleashed in the 20th century world. Can it evolve?

I mean to do more than merely suggest but to state that this remote consciousness has devastating consequences for people who must of necessity put their bodies into alien spaces. And depending upon the quality of one's cybermind, every place is alien. There is no such thing as a company town, and this is the community that we are actually looking to build. The tribes fall short. And yet that is the new level of civic engagement, ever smaller, so that ever closer 'friends' feel autonomy in the societies we have built up over history. But these cities will not go away, nor will the distribution networks in place that put rubber on the wheels of all of the millions of automobiles that are also not going away. The virtual people have yet to build a town, and so the question ultimately becomes, at whose mercy are all these changes going to take place?

What is a labor union and what kind of city do they control? Now put them and their expertise in conflict with the TED crowd and what do you get? You get the election of Obama using the Leviathan power of the existing 20th century infrasturucture and physical world to force the labor union to provide the goods and services demanded by the Digerati and their tweeting children. 

Do you see the problem as I do?

Silicon Valley is not sustainable. It is not a real, livable place and its vision for living is not real. The changes it makes in the world are to make the common man susceptible to the fashionable intelligence of its Digiterati with no regard or respect for the actual physical networks and infrastructure that it takes for granted. The mega corporations its princelings seek to re-think and remove are the proven successes of the 20th century, and they do not know how to scale their vision of community. 

Obama's Breakout Foreign Policy

The President meets to discuss terms for withdrawal of US ships from the Gulf of Aden with the Somali Ambassador. 

So What If Christian Zombies Take Over?

The Apocalypse Codex by Charles Stross
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've already decided to like Bob Howard, and I get the cleverness of mocking up some evangelicals with a scarier God than any of them suspect, but this particular drama was a great deal more earthbound and yes, less mindbendingly frightening. I keep imagining Bob Howard being played in a movie by Simon Pegg and then the whole matter seems settled.

The book seemed to cover a lot of ground, background that is, with this or that describing what happened to Bob in the prior books. Too many times, I hear 'all Hell breaks loose' and not enough of 'gibbering horror'. There's just not enough crazy going on in this one. And I hate to say it, but the stakes haven't been raised high enough here. Bob is not getting his head bloodied quite enough, he's not frightened enough of the Laundry bureacracy, and the bad guys in this episode are basically little more than Christian zombies. Sorry but without the actual Sleeper possessing anyone, the Case Nightmare Green seems like just another WMD scenarios.

I just can't help but think that Stross is wanting Howard to live long and prosper like Harry Dresden kicking him upstairs at the Laundry, but something ugly is going to have to happen to people close to him or the next episode is not going to have the emotional weight. More creatures! More horrors! More debilitating pants-shitting mishaps! I mean, I'm sorry, I just can't listen to Howard telling me not to do black bag jobs and how much he loathes killing innocent civilians. He's got to be forced into it and let it wrack his consciousness later... It's too bad Harry Dresden already did the bit with touching the forbidden sigil and be partially possessed. That's exactly the kind of experience Bob Howard needs to go through, or else he's just Simon Pegg.

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The One True Religion

I would like to serve myself
And in all ways preserve my health
And in all things my conscience be
In all its force designed by Thee
The One True God of all there is
i.e. e.g. to wit and viz
The unity of pen and sword
Of mind and might
Of deed and word
Of Heaven's light in mankind's soul
And virtue's everlasting role. 

Harold Bloom has put forth one of the few genuinely new ideas I've heard. It is this, he centers our ideas about humanity in the Western Canon, in Shakespeare primarily. That is not too surprising. What is truly surprising and new is that he compares the authors of the Bible to Shakespeare. In other words, he implies without insistance that the Bible, as a canonical work of literature has its merits as any other work of literature. 

Absorbing this implies that everything about the best ideas human beings are able to absorb can be found expressed in the best literature. Therefore the Bible should be read as literature and that the ideas presented therein should be judged on their literary merit and in the ineffible way that critics like Bloom and all readers must deal with the text. Bloom warns not to read too much into the author by way of the text but to read everything the text says and implies about its subjects, especially how it makes us think as it directs our thoughts. I take this to mean that reading is a sort of possession, it is ours to consider the nature of the possession itself, not the nature of the spellcaster.

This aligns with my early polytheisms and the meme of religion as mankind's first education. It therefore transmutes in every way the roles of the religious and those institutions built around them. There is no difference between that moral instruction of any human author, and thus no lesser greatness in those who identify our spirit in their writing work. Writing literature, teaching literature is ministry. The secular professor of English, professes his faith in the literature he teaches to liberate the souls of the readers. 

I say this just having finished Charles Stross' fourth in the Laundry Series - the Apocalypse Codex. And so a new circle is complete for me (wow), linking literature, science fiction and religious texts all in the business of creating in humanity its own humanity. And in so doing, the framework for all of the humanities has become clear. I have Voltaire's realization confirmed again. There is one true religion. 

God,  it takes a lot of time to program a proper mind.

Honor Killing & The Innocence of Muslims

Steven Pinker's latest book posits a theory which makes some rather fantastic predictions about the social evolution of mankind, the overweening ambit of which makes me skeptical. But it is chock full of factual research whose historical interpretation while subjective, point to real and useful knowledge. Of all the tools Pinker uses to support his theory, the one that has stuck with me resides in mind as 'crappy government'.

In 'The Better Angels', Pinker describes that in societies whose governments have not yet reached a stable level of reliable provision of justice based on law and jurisprudence or in areas where such provision has broken down, there arises a pheonomenon of justice based on 'honor codes'. It very much does stand to reason that if I don't believe that the police are going to protect and serve, then I need to take the law into my own hands. And if my loyalties are to families rather than law, then the integrity of that family is more important than any sacrifice for the sake of the legal commons. In other words, the rules of dating my sister substitute for municipal law, and don't you dare talk about my mama. 

I take this as the single most useful observation of Pinker's book as it dovetails with Hobbes and is in synch with my critique of the overreach of organic politics - aka 'Who is Your Leviathan?' Nonviolent social protest and all such questions of 'social justice' are an attempt to move multicultural honor systems into national law here in the United States. They weren't in the case of the Civil Rights Movement, because King's SCLC was nationalist and his dream was firmly rooted in the American Dream. That was the Negro position. But the Black Nationalist movement that followed on the heels of Civil Rights successes required international links and Marxist connections. It sought to change the direction of justice coming from an honor established outside of the Pledge of Allegiance, as do its mulitcultural follow-on movements. 

-- this above paragraph is my first clearly articulated idea about what exactly people mean by 'social justice', which is to say that it seeks to elevate particular and provincial honor codes to national standing by privileging the victimhood of favored groups according to social definitions. I opposes this because it is anti-modern, and devolves common law towards interest-group law. --

It is clearly the case in every country that has recently found the pretense of what I percieve to be little more than an Onion-style parody video to be an excuse for violent attacks against US embassies their own governments are crappy. At this moment in history an ontological description of 'crappy government' is about all you can say about the Arab Spring. A bunch of largely Muslim folks living among rising food prices fell to the point of violent mistrust in their governments. Most of these populations have little or no experience in participation in responsive government & democratic politics of the sort that has marked the ascent of the black middle class in America in our post-Civil Rights era. They don't have the open and free sort of societies that give them the sort of critical tolerance of rude, ironic, offensive or provocative cultural productions we take for granted in the West. They have either failed to evolve or have lost the evolution of common law providing stable justice on a national basis. And so they have fallen, like anyone would fall, back to the matter of local, provincial and family honor, instead of the rule of law.

It is enough for me to indicate this without any mention of the particular role of Islam other than to speculate the following. I believe that any of the Muslim folk on the street, peasants all, would expect that a proper Islamist government or political faction would amplify their simple interpretations of honor without distortion, and that is especially the case since the provocation here is about the image of the Prophet himself. We have little real expectations that such things as applying to ourselves become national - 'Megan's Law' is the exception rather than the rule, and it's bad law anyway in my opinion. 

I should punctuate my observation with the criticism of those who find reasons to justify this violent spasm are likely to be among those who think Muslims are some special case of people whose sensitivities ought to be protected from the callous indifference of nature and the world at large. There's surely an Onion video for them as well. 

Left vs Right & Why Parties Lie

I have moved through a number of levels of political engagement over the past decade and I have come to know that without my own personal determination to get to the bottom of things, it would be very difficult to escape the useless drama. But I can offer some fundamental insights which I find to be useful in understanding why there is permanent irreconcilability in the mainstream. In other words I'd like to share some big picture basics, even though I don't really 'do politics' any longer. 

You cannot get close to understanding American politics unless you have about six large buckets for the general ideologies in play with the knowledge that these are in motion. Most folks merely consider their own foils rather than what actually exists. It took me a year merely to find my own place in the broad American Right. My categories work something like this. There is the Marxist Left, the Progressive Left, and the Social Liberal. The Social Liberal can be broken out into those casually vs seriously engaged. I think Obama's majority is the casual Social Liberal - those Clinton Democrats who simply could see no compelling reasons to consider a Republican candidate at the national level. Independents come in two flavors as far I can see and they are both generally skeptical, but I think they are mostly issue driven and largely disengaged from ideology. On the Right, there are Social Conservatives, Neocons, Right Libertarians and Paleocons. The main difference between neocons and paleocons comes down to foreign policy and matters of international law. 

All that said, I firmly believe there is fundamental and permanent difference between the Right and Left over the role and scope of government and I explain it in terms of the following two axioms.

The Right seeks to defend the rights of 'the family' from the dysfunctions of government. The Left seeks to use the power of government to protect from the dysfunctions of 'the family'.

By 'the family' I basically mean all non-government private associations, meaning business, religion, community and family. It boils down to a question of the legitimacy of agreements between people. In other words, which 'law' is best. This is all about a contest of governance. What should be the authority and what scope should that authority take? It is the relationship between people and this sort of question that determines the shape of their politics.

The second axiom is less binding but I find it quite illuminating. 

The typical person on the Left loves everyone in general and nobody in particular. The typical person on the Right dislikes everyone in general but loves particular individuals. 

This is a general observation that quickly demonstrates where ones tendencies fall on questions of rights and liberties. People on the Left will argue about broadly enforced standards from which nobody should be immune, and people on the Right will argue about what some particular people ought to be able to do, no matter what, and the rest of the world be damned.

 The American Congress goes to work every day as do the bureaucrats of every agency in every district, municipality, county and state. They all go to sleep at night. So whatever lies they live with -- well, human beings are very adaptable. In other words, it doesn't kill Ds or Rs to do their job, nor do they kill each other. There is an ideological scrim (and script) the floats above the business of government that the press samples and serves up hot. So what? 

The job of politics is to convince people who don't know what's going on that their interests are being served. Public relations is a lie. Every party line is a lie. The details of life simply cannot be represented in the space of what we Americans call political debate. Every press release is an abstraction. All there is, is the LAW and the POLICY. The law is the agree-upon rule, the policy is how much attention the law gets, and then there's REALITY. It is impossible for elected officials to represent reality, because reality doesn't fit within the scope of policy, and policy doesn't reflect the law. 

The ideological difference between my kind of folks on the Right and Progressives, is that we're not trying to get policy to cover every aspect of reality and thus lead the crafting of more and more law. Because the more you try to get policy in line with reality, the more you need some agency to police and reconcile policy with reality, the more you need to convince constituents that you are doing a good job, the more you need their ascent to justify your attempts to add more law and policy. It's a never ending circle that always contradicts itself in the end. Now remember what I said about the first Axiom. Who wants to expand government policy and law and who wants to reduce it? 

Democrats have to lie about what government is capable of doing because their intent and direction is to lay down standards from which nobody is immune, using government power to protect against the dysfunctions of private action. 

Republicans have to lie about what government is doing wrong because their intent and direction is to protect extraordinary individuals who really matter, leveraging private interest to protect against the abuses of government power.

Now let me talk about the Tea Party. Firstly by saying that they are American citizens who can say whatever the hell they like. All they're trying to do is elect people who think the way they do. But they are also not mainstream Republicans and are disorganized and spontaneous on purpose. That's right, on purpose. The Tea Party is less successful and will be less successful than Newt Gingrich's Contract With American candidates. There are a lot of reasons for this I won't go into. The Tea Party is a single issue movement whose basic gripe is against taxation. That's nothing really new. They simply want to defund government, it is a simple and simplistic distilled essence of what the broad American Right wants out of government. LESS. The GOP establishment cannot govern, nor win elections on such a narrow single issue platform. So it's their job to co-opt the message of the Tea Party, capitalize on its energy,etc, etc. 

The reason the Tea Party touches a nerve is because its principle contradicts a fundamental myth about the Republican Party - that it is the party of the rich businessman, and the TP crowd, which is mostly rabble, are neither rich, nor businessmen. They are populist, grass roots, with no central authority and 57 different flavors. And pesky. I guess. I live in luxuriant Southern California, we have Chai Spice and Oolong, but not much generic tea activity. 

I believe that the fundamental principle of the Tea Party is correct and proper, that our government is too large, too intrusive, and has too many laws and regulations that restrict my liberties and take too much money out of my pocket. Unlike the rabble, I understand that there are ways to reduce the size, scope and regulatory excess of government that have nothing to do with taxation. In other words, I don't live in a fantasy world in which I actually expect to defund government and thus lower my taxes. I know very well that tax breaks are leveraged through sophisticated and expensive lobbying.

Other than that, I pay no attention to the Tea Party and their antics, whatever they may be, have nothing to do with the way I view the six buckets. They're not a permanent bucket, and as I said, will be less successful than Newt's Contract. Like Ross Perot, nobody with think about them in 4 years. Why? Because they're street people, and street people don't change politics in the most powerful nation on the planet. Who are we kidding?

Here is what a 20 year veteran political operator told me. 17% of the electorate does their own research, is actually informed and votes accordingly. The other 83% can and will be swayed by campaigns. The business of politics is to get the 83%. Whatever works, works. It's not democracy, it's marketing. This is what the professionals who run the business of campaigns understand implicitly. I learned this about 5 years ago. As a business intelligence & IT professional, I understand what it takes to keep precise, accurate & timely data available for the use of organizations - so I have some good ideas as to how the energies of information provision are organized. In the general electorate, they are not organized - it would be too expensive, and after all, only 17% care.

After writing this morning, I considered the question of electronic voting. I want you to think of what Jeff Bezos has done in creating Amazon.com, what has been done to create Pay Pal (Elon Musk) and what has been done to create the iTunes Store. All created within the last decade or so. I've worked with credit card companies as well. So now it's my turn to ask a question. Why do you think that voting has not been done on the internet, even though banking has. The answer is because it would completely subvert the way government, press and the political parties operate their control of what the public is thinking relevant to elections and policy. The excuse made is about 'voter fraud'..

Again these are subjects that have to do with the mechanisms of voter registration, fundraising, and the contact points between party operations and the public at large. I have been inside of that process and neither party wants it changed. The information revolution has already bypassed the American electoral process, because that's the way the parties want it. 

The Democrats say what their bosses want them to say. The Republicans say what their bosses want them to say. That is how the sausage is made. There are only X number of issues in the news cycle, and it's a top down process. The opinion makers decide how to frame the issue according to POLICY and you consume their vetted responses and arguments.

Right now, today, you can't tell me jack about what's going on in the Horn of Africa, because that's not in play. That's not what's on the primetime political menu. Listen, I've been nationally broadcast on NPR in case you forgot. You talk about what the market wants to hear, and the parties are the market makers. Period. 

Eleven Years Down

The Leader of the Free World is busy piling up chips and betting it all on.. what?. Not that I'm listening, but you would think that there's a message the man has that would penetrate. For somebody who was supposed to be a brilliant articulator, he really hasn't come up with any truly memorable phrases we can be proud of. 

It just so happens that I was slaving away today without much attention paid to the news. But I did catch this video from Frank Gaffney. It's full of facts that are, quite frankly, boring in these pre-apocalyptic days. I for one have become resigned to a sort of defeatist and defensive strategy in the wake of the predictably pathetic foreign policy of the Obama Administration. I have put my wariness on the shelf and have gotten used to a future of 'whatever'. We are back to the Reagan Era, without even the balls to talk trash. You see Reagan talked a good game but he kept every the US Military on a tight leash with a bigger budget. A decent path to follow if you don't mind what happens in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. A dumb plan to follow if you really want to accomplish something in South and Central America. Obama talks no trash whatsoever and makes friends with enemies. On the other hand pursues an aggressive, if haphazard and deniable set of guerilla campaigns - all for the purpose of placating whom exactly?. Militarily undercover, like Reagan, but rhetorically dishonest and strategically backwards. In other words, the worst of both worlds. 

Obama seems to understand the realpolitik that the American Empire is always at war, but he's got no cred to admit it. And so he's letting all sorts of tactical advantages slip by because he has no grand strategy that can speak to justifying engagements we need to pursue. Therefore we witness what Gaffney sees. 

Anyway. Happy 9/11. And yeah we smacked down that mosque. That's the game as it stands. 

47 Spoonfuls

This afternoon I ate like a monk. An astronaut. A prisoner. 

I calmed myself down, slowed my breakthing, selected the pot. I opened up the can of tomato soup reminding myself of the sacrcity of this, in deep space. I marvelled at how effective the artificial gravity was, keeping the flame low as the pot warmed on the luxurious four burner stove. Gas. I remember when I could only find electric. I adjusted the flame down.

The one can of water I stirred in came from the two gallon canister on the counter, next to the rotating spice rack. I have it all. I selected a wooden spoon, no put that back. I selected a plastic ladle from the selection. I stirred gently, removed it and placed it on a paper towel.

I walked slowly to the living room and sat at the piano. I played with two hands remembering that I type so much that I have to force my fingers to work more than one at a time. I stretched them. I played a major scale in C, boring. I returned to the kitchen. The soup was ready.

I selected a bowl from the cabinet on the East wall. It was not Borky sized, but more appropriate to lunch - my midday half meal. I ladled out several until the bowl was 75% capacity and took it to the wooden table. It's quiet downstairs. 

I took my time with each spoonful, the temperature was perfect - I never had to blow. The scrim of red liquid contrast against the white porcelain as the level of soup went down. I counted. At 13, it seemed that I had an infinite amount and that the meal would last an eternity, and so it became my last meal. I would savor every moment and enjoy every bit of pleasure that can come from tomato soup. By this time, that amount seemed to be more than I deserved; I was going to die after the last spoon. I couldn't be more satisfied.

My eyes glanced aross the table to the folded bag of Doritos. I ignored them. I was eating my soup and there was nothing else in the world save me and this time with it. At 36 I started eating faster and forced myself to slow down. Don't lose count. Breathe. This is a perfect meal. I can do this for the rest of my life.

 

Blades & Books

I know why I didn't read Wuthering Heights when I was in the 7th grade. It's because it was the best book my teacher said she had ever read for her personally, and I didn't want to be like her, personally. The President of the United States was pretending not to be a crook and I didn't believe him. I wanted to be an astrogator, like Starman Jones. I had no need for the past or the present. Only the future. Only the future.

The future was unlimited to my fragile mind and seemed to be the only place I could be free.

Inverting the mantra
I spitefully said
Live for tomorrow, today we are dead

Today lingered on in the grip of the past
To hurry the future
Required the Blast

I looked all around and there was nothing there for me. Lady or Tiger was a game for those who politely asked for doors to be ope'd.

Enduring the grind and braving the narrows
I sharpened my mind amongst the straight arrows.
Scythwise I bent escaping my ghetto
Palms open, nose clean, secreted stilleto.

Every day out here on the nets I suffer the pangs and longings of those who want to inherit video codecs. They want a million luxuriant lines of code for free so they can be smart shoppers. They loathe the laws that bind them and hate the masters of the privy universe. Oh prithee demolish copyright so we might take videos of ourselves and our pain without tithing the lords. Do this for our hordes, please hordes. 

Blades & Books
There are guns and movies and movies about guns and movies, but swords and books are better. How are they going to ban them? There is a silent minority of self-improvement to exemplify all that is human and worthy. They don't require such institutions as do we. They would rather self-sustain than be a part of the movement. I don't know where they live, and that's not important - it's probably part of the plan. 

How is it that we in our lives do not have time to learn the bones of our own bodies? How do we become sensitive to the manipulations of councils who never send a man after us, but would only condescend to sell an inferior product at an inflated prices? Is this our oppression, the poverty of 3G in a 4G future? Today you are dead.

I am to become a man in the now. Appreciative of gifts of the past. I have realized my mortality and I am not friends with it.

I have exhausted my patience with the culture of resentment as they whine about the dimensions of their cultural and socio-political Gordian knots. I will have my swords, and my tomes. The rest is noise. 

You Couldn't Build That

Can you identify the object I photographed on my desk? It is a 30pin connector, more generally known as an Apple Dock connector. If you worked in the computer business, you will recognize it as one in line of many types of cables and wires that we need to know to allow various devices to talk to each other. If you're a kid in the local affluent highschool you know it's what you need to charge your iPod Touch. If you are a parent of said kid, you know it's that stupid expensive thing that always gets lost and so now you have to share yours. 

Fortunately, there's East China. Over in East China, they're making these things by the million because that's how many we need. And they have managed to squeeze some costs out of the manufacturing process, or there's maybe a price war going on between Northeast and Southeast China. The penultimate time I went to Amazon, they cost $15 from Apple and $5 from Hong Kong. Last week I could get them for a buck each. Sweet. 

I want you to think about several other dimensions of this object, besides its price, its function, what it looks like and how it makes you feel. I know this may be difficult but bear with me. I want you to think about what it's made of. Is that metal part aluminum or steel? Did you know that is a USB connector on one end? What does USB stand for? How many wires are in a USB connector? What is the standard electrical current that goes through a USB connector? If there are fewer wires than 30 in USB, then which wires are not connected on the 30 pin side? How thick do the wires have to be in order to carry the normal current? What material besided copper could do the job? 

What kind of machine is used to map the wires? How many different kinds of plastic are used to build the connector? How do you get that plastic in exactly that color? How long should this construction work before failing? What kinds of failures should you expect, after what period of time? 

There are certainly hundreds of other questions that could be asked and answered about this particular object, but the salient one in my mind is whether or not kids in public schools are able to ask the ones I mentioned above? And if they asked their teachers those questions could the teachers respond accurately? In other words, is this object, being one of the very basic staples of the information age, in which there remains low hanging economic fruit, a mystery? I'm confident that the answer is yes - that a majority fraction of highschool students would graduate without understanding amps, ohms and volts, or basic manufacturing. 

There is not much lament in this observation. The global market, the world, is what it is. And just like with any other enabling tool since the beginning of history, there will be those who have them and those who have not. Swords. Horses. Cameras. Catheters. 

BTW. Here is the pinout guide for the connector. 

It's the Stupid Economy

A thoughtful reader passed this on:

This working class boy is having a hard time understanding the American idea of the middle class. Where I come from, the middle class is comfortably off and a huge step up the social strata from Working Class. I always thought the US was a classless society. What happened? And if there is a Middle Class, what happened to the Working Class? It seems like if you are Working Class in the US, you are SOL.

Where you come from my friend, is the land of low hanging fruit. You know that it's true that in 1978, when I graduated from high school, you could be a drill press operator and make homeowner money. I know, because five years later when I finally made sophomore year, I attended the wedding of a guy who was that, had a car, a mortgage and enough financial security to get married & live in San Diego. I said, I want to program computers and he looked at me like I was a martian, which I was in 1983. Drill press operators? Draftsmen? Forget about it. What happened to the working class? Well here's the way I see it.

The consumer society is about 66% of GDP, down a few points from before '07 when the auto industry tanked. The auto industry is really key because Americans are socially into cars. Not because cars are useful or special, but that we completely understand them, we have conferred status on them, and we spend lots of money on them and the secondary markets that sustain the key number which is how many new automobiles are made & sold every year in the US.  Now if I remember correctly we went from about 19 million units down to around 11 million within a few short years. 

Think about it. Who really needs to buy a new car? How many new cars do you need to buy in your lifetime. How many cars have you owned? If the answer is more than two new cars, you are rich by any reasonable standard. Add up all the money you have spent on automobiles including financing. Is that the American Dream? It is so long as you and 100 million other suckers think so. But if you can't get a new car, do you suddenly feel impoverished?  But really do we need to sell 19 million new cars every year?

I bring up the demand side to illustrate the idea of low hanging fruit. There's huge money to be made when demand for new cars that cost an average of $20,000 are sold every year without fail. (thats 380 billion per year without a moment's consideration for spare parts, maintenance, gas, oil). Even if you cornered the windshield wiper blade market, you'd be a multimillionaire. How about 5% of the spark plug market? OK. Everybody gets it. But really how difficult is it to make and sell automobiles in America? It's so easy that lots of other countries have done so, and how difficult is it to build a 1965 Mustang from parts? Its so easy that most Americans with a 1965 high school education could do a fair job of it. BUT. Cars! Man they're simple. Any idiot with a drill press job could do it. And just having a nice one with a big back seat could get you laid. In 1965. Low hanging fruit.

Now every other country with a stable government and decent banks and can build and fix cars.  BTW, how satisfied would you be with a 1965 Mustang right about now? No airbags, 15 MPG, drum brakes, no shoulder harness, change the plugs and points every 3000 miles, and an AM radio with one speaker. That's the stupid product for stupid people in the economy of stupid. Fine if you're from West China. Matter of fact, they tend to prefer enduro motocycles, not even cars. Low hanging fruit are ripe for the picking in the economy of stupid. All you need to do is inflate expectations and slowly boil the consumer economy so that people who buy a 1965 Mustang are pretty sure they want a 1969 Mustang. You turn a low maintenance culture with a slow, stupid economy into a high maintenance culture with a faster economy. The economy doesn't get smarter by the way, it just keeps up with the Joneses, until it doesn't. OK done with cars.

How much brains would you say it takes to build a toothbrush? And how much would you pay for a toothbrush? I cannot remember the last time I paid less than a dollar for a toothbrush. I just went to CVS Online and this is what I found:

Surround design. Removes 2X more bacteria (clinical testing underway). For a healthier whole mouth clean (overall bacteria vs. brushing teeth alone with an ordinary manual toothbrush)! Surround bristles to simultaneously clean both sides of the teeth, down to the gumline. Wraparound cheek and tongue cleaner. Dentists & Hygienists Recommend: flossing daily; brushing at least twice a day; replacing your toothbrush every 3 months; cleaning your tongue to remove bacteria. Made in Switzerland.

That would be 9 dollars for a pair, in a 'value pack'. I warned you about the New Retail many years ago. Saw it coming.  Do you really need a clinically tested toothbrush? No, you don't. 

So these are two examples of cultural demand that has escalated the cost of stupid products made sophisticated into a high maintenance economy. It's not enough to write a five page letter written in longhand put a stamp on it and wait a week. You have to buy a computer, broadband and then tweet 140 characters. Is the 66% of our economy cost effective or is it just an inflated hyper-sophisticated version of the same thing we had 100 years ago?  This is the kind of question you must ask to determine if the skills and habits you have are really appropriate to your freedom.

Are the skill and habits you have appropriate to your freedom?

This is the question I began asking several years ago when what was supposed  to be originally a 400 billion dollar hit on the Dow turned out to be about 6 or 7 times that. Who knows how bad it is now. But I happened to also be around at Nissan when the CEO decided to go big and introduced the then brand new Armada. I was involved in building a new financial system that helped track what was called 'car flow' - basically the manufacturing inventory as it went from factory through distribution. Bottom line was that how people were living at Nissan depended on consumers buying the biggest SUVs ever. Remember SUVs? Remember when everybody decided that bigger was better? There wasn't an oil problem we couldn't handle. Bottom line was gas went to 3 and 4 bucks a gallon and people didn't buy the Armada. Nissan had to sell its HQ in California and move to Tennessee, which is where they are now. 

Why live in California when you can live in Tennessee?

I'll just leave that one and continue with the prior history of my evolution in thought. You see, there's no question about all this 'class' stuff because class is not tightly bound to education, work and culture. That's the mistake Americans make because we've had the benefits of low hanging fruit that made economic expansion readily available. So readily available that you could be an employee at Nissan and expect to get a promotion and a raise. But Nissan misjudged. What's America besides an economy? Don't answer that. But note the parallel. If the low hanging fruit of all American industry is used up and American industry misjudged, then your 'class status' is like the Nissan guy's 'employee status': tenuous. A whole big bag of 'that depends'. Class does not depend upon your position in the economy, it depends upon your position in society.  

So I eventually came up with the Peasant Theory which explains why millions of Americans who think they ought to be middle class actually are not. The middle class is illusory. It is just as illusory as 'middle management'. Or to put it bluntly, you're either an injun or a chief. Most of us are injuns. Well actually it's not that bad. There are three classes in America, just like there are three classes everywhere. There is the Ruling Class, there are the Peasants and between those two is what I call the Slice. The Slice are the people that the Ruling Class need to run things while they are out enjoying life. And guess what, the Slice is thinner than you think. Think Matrix Reloaded. There was the Merovingian and his bored wife. Rulers. Then there were all of the people at the party at the Merovingian Castle. Peasants. The Slice? Those were the guys you had to kill with the silver bullets and the ghost twins. You could probably count the guys battling in the marble room but really no more than 8. If you don't know at least a dozen millionaires personally, you're not in the American Slice. Or to be more proper about it if we were in England, the Slice would be the holders of Royal Warrants. 

But this is America, you say! We are a meritocracy, you say. Ha! Do you really want to live in a meritocracy? No you really don't. You don't want your refrigerator drawings in the Met. You don't want your face on an IMAX screen. You don't want to try and defend against Kobe Bryant. You don't want to race your boat against Team Oracle. You don't want to argue with K Street lawyers. What you want is to play with people around your level. The bad news is that your level is called Peasant.  The good news is that you have lots of company, not only now but throughout human history. Peasants persist. Nobody cares what happens to Peasants but the Peasants. What really matters is how well the Ruling Class earns the respect of the Slice, and in that regard I should refer you to Shakespeare's King Lear as the ripe example. Bottom line, you don't want to live in a meritocracy, you want to live in a neighborhood. Which is exactly how you would answer me if I asked you your exact salary, SAT score or weight. You would tell me it's in the neighborhood of X. You don't want judgment, you want acceptance. Peasants are good at acceptance. We call it manners. Which we need because at odd moments we recognize our harsh existential reality, plight and place in the System, and it ain't good. 

 So are we Peasants actually SOL? Not by a longshot. We just aren't going to knock the knights off of their horses or talk back to the King. We have the natural benefit of what I call the Logarithmic Shadow. The best way to understand it is this. You, being a Peasant, are generally not worth the effort required to find you and punish you because you pose no threat to the Slice or the Ruling Class. So that's the good news. The bad news of course is that there are plenty of bigger, badder, stronger peasants than you. All of them went to your high school in your neighborhood, remember? And the other bad news is that because you pose no threat to the Slice or the Ruling Class, they could step on your head out of spite or accidentally and not suffer for it. There is no cosmic justice in the cosmos, just the laws of physics. No matter what neighborhood you live in or symbols you manipulate, greater than is always greater than. Thus the prudent ambition for the Peasant is to learn by what means the Slice exercises control over the Peasantry, and either avoid it, or use similar tactics to your own advantage. 

Practically speaking what the hell does all that mean?

It means that right now in America the Slice is getting slimmer because it's harder than ever before to come up with a new set of ideas like the automobile economy that benefits so broad a section of Americans. It means you have to have a contract in Switzerland even if you want to enter the toothbrush market. 

But let's get a bit of focus on the original question. What material distinction exists between the 'working class' and the 'middle class' that matters? Nothing. It only matters to those two classes because they're both Peasants. All of them are minions for those who created the markets in which they are employed. It doesn't matter if you're a mechanic or a finance manager. When Nissan moves to Tennessee, you move to Tennessee. This is an example of the "Who's Your Leviathan?" question. Who is the most powerful person who guarantees your well-being, your livelihood? With which power are your interests most tightly bound? If someone comes to bang on your door in the middle of the night, can you stand up to that person and say "Do you know who I am? If something happens to me, some very powerful people are going to come down on your head. They will find you and they will stomp you into the dirt." Do you have a Leviathan? Probably not. So your class interests aren't all that interesting, because if you can't get somebody to defend your life, then who gives a rat's about your 'class status'? You do. That's all. You and the guy you owe money. 

Why is all this the case? Because your neighborhood depends upon some fraction of the economy functioning. And you have to understand that the whole of Motown can fall. And what do you have? Now we revisit the question- are the skills and habits you have appropriate to your freedom?

All of that depends upon how you are engaged with the economy. And I put that to you in the form of an axiom which is Cobb's Rule #31: If the poor and oppressed knew how to work the System, they wouldn't be poor and oppressed. The Ruling Class legitimates the System. It is their legitimacy which compels the Slice to build, operate and maintain the System. For everyone else, the System is the environment. 

Liberty in the Shadow & Boyd's Law
Now I'm going to take a rapid right turn. I've been talking about the economy, but I also said the economy doesn't determine your class, your relationship to society does. Since the Logarithmic Shadow is human nature, why live in California when you can live in Tennessee? In this society we have meritocratic disciplines for weeding out the Peasants from the Slice, but we also have liberty. Liberty basically says, here is where the Ruling Class has staked their claims, but if you're not around there, you're free to do whatever. You have the advantage of being rodent-sized, but if you only want new cars and expensive toothbrushes, you're not using that size to your advantage. You're rummaging around the luxury estates where the cats and terriers are vicious. 

Boyd's Law says: 

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

So if you figure out and accept once and for all that you a Peasant, then you can drop your pretentions and live within Peasant means. That is, unless like me you have permanent airs and are resigned to your contradictions. Nevertheless, I do try to reduce many of my needs to zero. I look for cheap toothbrushes and disposable razors with only two blades.  I have ceased to be impressed by certain cultural & class signifiers, probably most significant of which is everything associated with 'alma mater'. And I am in other ways deprogramming myself and defending that which reassumes its basic dignity. Reading excellent literature (royalty free) and listening to excellent music tend to make me immune to much of popular culture. 

Boyd says hoard your gold and go live in Tennessee. It made sense for Nissan. 

Arts and Letters

I say therefore my philosophy is complete
And if you might call this swagger
Do not confuse my dagger wit
With absolution left or right of it
The core I seek is the man, the soul
Its gravity's center, be that empty space
Between action's quarks and knowlege's bosons
Its motion compels my own
Though I unswayed drone on in prickly bursts
Ever more in passion even more in verse

I tire of the face of fame
And didactic attribution's curse 
The vulgar charge hypocrisy's the same
A game of goodnight nurse
I'd rather fake my way rebounding
In salons of dubious repute
Than knit my brown brow 
Over Mars' eye's commanding
Vaingloriously outstanding
Amid the mire and muck
Pretending that I give a fuck

To hell with nasty neighbors' blues
I won't watch the Six OClock News 
I have no lawn to shoo your brats away
No break of dawn to signal end of play
No rims nor Brims nor bling for you to covet
You'll never spy me out and God I love it
I'm just a wayfaring stranger
Head in book
With boots on. 

The Strategic Air Command Parent

I'm not a helicopter parent, I'm a Strategic Air Command Parent. I basically have five levels of engagment which are roughly equivalent to DEFCON. I have never had to go to DEFCON 1, and have only been once to DEFCON 2.

As a reminder, DEFCON stands for defense condition, and I think it is appropriate to consider parenting to be an exercise in defense readiness. We understand that as parents we are firstly successful and civilized adults. Our children are not. We defend our sanity in the same way we defend our civilization, by removing from our society those who defy it. In the case of our children this means restraining their free reign in our home and their free will in our lives. But it also implies that at some point they would need to be kicked out of the house in those situations in which their activity brings unpardonable shame or legal action upon it. That would represent a state of war between parents and children, in which the children must lose that thing they've only earned through love and trust, which is the dedicated protection of their parents. I will not protect a criminal or psychopath in my home.  

Defense condition	Exercise term	Description	Readiness	Color
DEFCON 5	RELAXED	Come and go as you please, but let us know what's up.	Normal readiness	Blue
DEFCON 4	EYEBALLED	Give us a plan and an outline of the day.	Above normal readiness	Green
DEFCON 3	RESTRAINED	Checking hourly on what you are required to be doing. Extensive questions and answers.	Medium readiness	Yellow
DEFCON 2	GROUNDED	You ask permission to do everything. You eat and poop on our schedule.	War readiness	Red
DEFCON 1	EXPELLED	Authorities are involved.	Maximum readiness	White

My kids are not the coolest people I know, but they are some of the best people I know. I tell them this on the occasions that it becomes obvious. They each have done rather well and have given me a great deal of pride, but my starting and basic underlying principle remains. You are uncivilized and you need to grow up. My job is to provide the right environment, to make myself available and to be the man that I am while giving them a special window into my opinions, thoughts and feelings. I do not run a democracy, I run a workshop. This is how we are civilized. These are our values, our ideas, our morality. This is what inspires us, this is what is fun, this is what we find offensive. Clean your room. Do your chores. Finish your homework. Do I have to tell you everything? The usual.

The Spousal Unit and I generally run on two different levels. This has evolved from our temperament and our schedule. I enjoy my solitude and in my career I have often been on the road. So I am rarely at Defcon 3. I stay at 5 and regularly weigh in at Defcon 4. When I go to Defcon 3, everybody notices. It is the kind of attention that makes them uncomfortable. I may have some outsized notions, but my scrutiny can be of the exasperatingly whithering sort. Don't disappoint Dad. My wife, on the other hand, starts and remains on 3, pretty much all of the time, or perhaps it seems that way to me. I am the one who looks at them in the eye and calls them a slob. My wife provides the verbose hectoring. Clean your room x 5. I'm not going to tell you again. Did you clean it? OK you're grounded. 

Everybody asks Mom if it's OK to go to place X or Y. She handles all of the logistics, details and trivia that I cannot be bothered with - like the names of the parents, the friends. I am the one who whispers in the ear of my daughter on the way to the prom. "Make memories you will always fondly remember, and none you will regret". In short, I am strategic and the wife is tactical. 

For about 80% of the things involving money, and all of the things in which several factors must be considered, the Unit comes up to the room, sits on the bed and waits for me to clear my head and swivel around in my desk chair. She gives me her look of exasperation or weariness and explains the situation. I am the calmly rational who consideres, weighs and voices all of the implications. Occasionally we need a spreadsheet and a calandar, sometimes a letter needs to be written. These are my strengths. They don't cheer her up, but she can move again. My wife is a shark of home economics. She is relentless. I am the great and powerful Oz. 

There is something about being SAC parents that we notice, which is that we don't have hostility. My daughter recently went with her scout troop to Orlando and did talk to us once that week. But she was the one who mentioned to us how odd it was that some other girls wanted to do anything *but* talk to their parents. They do actually like and admire us as we do them. We *do* provide strategic airlift, and our kids know that if they sound the alarm we are going on full alert to get them whatever it is they need. And ther are times when they will tell us that we spoil them. We are comfortable enough so that their contribution to the running of the house is only chores - they don't have to pitch in. The money they earn on odd jobs or from saving their allowance lets them buy those special shoes. What we've been trying to get them to do is exercise judgment. That said, some are better than others. But the point is that our aim is to establish the family relationship in such a way that they will realize how outside in life, nobody has necessarily got your back, or is necessarily interested that you are civilized. 

Of all the things we stress, these are the most important things, and we're confident that they know that they have souls and are working to protect them from the skullduggery and vulgarity of our society. We do not shelter them so much as express our revulsion at that which is revolting. We have enough evidence to suggest that their tastes are not naive nor pornographic. And so Netflix and Rdio are open without monitoring as is Facebook and everything else. I'm not sure we could have done that on an entirely secular basis. So we've insisted that they get their Christian education although without any restraints on picking a denomination. I think that choice was lucky although in retrospect it is precisely the course that I took in my youth - though a series of different Christian churches only one of which I found adequate. They've always had VBS and youth group friends. 

Now that Christopher is off at college, but just a long commute away, I've promised to have a monthly lunch with him. It has only been a week and the balance of things has already dramatically changed. I am spending more time with my daughters already, and nobody has vacuumed. We'll see how else my role will change. Three years from now, I'll have three kids in college. That's going to be.... wow. But even now, transititioning from being a parent to being an investor is how I'm looking at it. They're already promising to put me in a good home when the time comes. Hoo boy.