Cobb

The Last New Generation

I have been thinking a bit about the idea of the death of the American Dream for several years. I've been having these contemplations since before 9/11 but then the took a turn which was overshadowed by geopolitical neonconservatism. I think the big lesson I have learned, but is not quite finalized, is that America is not aimed towards developing the proper Empire, neither internal nor external. And now I am a bit more happy about that because I'm more libertarian than I was 12 years ago. I am thinking more about the probabilities of city states and global powers that could be associated with them.

You probably won't believe it but some of this thinking was influenced by my trip to see the latest Marvel movie, 'Wolverine', in which Logan fights an army of ninjas from a 700 year old clan and Yakuza gangsters on the top of a bullet train. The idea there is simple. 95% of what needs to get done at a human scale in this world can be accomplished with an army of 5000 killers. I might be wrong, but I'd need someone at West Point to tell me how wrong.

The major part of my rethinking of America came in the form of the Peasant Theory, in which I fundamentally assert that the collapse of certain democratic institutions (and they need only suffer distrust) pushes people back to more natural feudal arrangements. And it is interesting in this note to regard that suffering to come in Season Three of Downton Abbey, as new global arrangements have destroyed the investments of that feudal clan. One wonders, however, exactly what Lord Grantham needs to pay and to whom. Could it be merely taxes to the crown?

But the net of the Peasant Theory is that the broad American middle class is not as empowered as it thinks itself to be and much of it will be relegated to a state of relative peasantry, unable and ultimately unwilling to secure its own liberty against the privations of feudal powers now gnawing away at Constitutional protections, and the calamities awaiting plebian overreach.  Yes I'm reading Roman history and looking at celebrity politicians as the Tribunes of our time, soon to be struck down by the Next Republic. 

The Last New Genaration is that of our children who have already assessed the lack of low hanging fruit for their consumption. But what strikes me is their greater appreciation for our silliness as we have latently perceived the corruptions of the Baby Boom's easy money. I have decided that this is a good thing, and that only a few of our innovations will survive - that the consumer economy will shrink and that which will survive will be the local and the industrial and the grid of our civilization. But they will have to be distributed and redundant to survive which is why I am coming to think that the city state and its region will be the way forward. No powers of such magnitude as we have seen might long survive. 

There is the nuclear question. Does anyone possess the gall to destroy an entire nation? To destroy Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv would be to destroy Israel, and perhaps Shiva only comes in twins as the Fat Man follows the Little Boy. But it would take a great deal more to kill America, or Russia or the planet. So how much holocaust can we stand? How must we be reorganized so that we might be able to stand when the fanatics finally get their Bomb on? At some point we are going to have to recognize the ultimate fragility of super-duper-high-level organizations. How can anything function practically four management layers higher than the Mayor of Chicago, considering that nothing much exceeds the University of Chicago? How long can we stand people's artificial loyalties when their feet don't hit their natives lands? Somewhere around a city, is what I think the limit is. We all should be at least that superstitious. We all have to go to ground.

With that small comfort in mind, there needs be some new landed gentry. Or at least that is my aim. They must provide for the grid in some way that we might be comfortable with our civilization and that it be a civilization that favors the networked locality over the super aggregations of oversight and governance. 

The Last New Generation will take our dreams to their logical conclusions but they will not invent new ones. Rather they will mine what we and our parents of abandoned in our haste and sloth. And they will say 'because I said so' and they will be the same reasons as ours. But they will be more certain because they have a mess to clean up that we tolerated for too long. 

 

Rise of the Obsidian Interstellar

Simple

This is definitely an album worth getting. DP puts together the best aspects of Squarepusher trimmed down and Daft Punk funked up. It is signature work from the sountracker of Fez. If you liked Fez and wished it wasn't so dainty all the time, this album satisfies with space operatics and funk ovations. If Skrillex had a bit more composition chops and had worked longer at keyboard skills, this is what he'd sound like when writing for a small audience instead of a drunk crowd. Bam.

 

Deep

This is my second Disasterpeace, but I have been listening for 30 years. I'll tell you what's going on in this generation, because I have three kids about 16, 18, 19 years old. People in this generation are recognizing that not everything great is new, and not everything old has been perfected. And so they are a generation with the right attitude about retro. It's not about retro for kitsch sake, it's about making classic what was yesterday's new. This album, speaking with the Fez album in mind as well, creates what had yet to be created when the first synth pioneers blew our minds. If you can remember the work of Larry Fast and Walter Carlos and the synth playing in Queen, Mannheim Steamroller, Steve Miller and The Alan Parsons Project, you know that a revolution was afoot. But the more popular rockers who dabbled, especially during the New Wave, never quite achieved so much outside of the baselines. Disasterpeace composes that sweet choppy sequencer with melodic coherence and fury. When synthesizer licks were just licks approaching music we could groove on the break, but these are full songs. Songs to imagine space travel by. Songs to program computers by. Songs to turn off the sound and watch motorcycle racing by. They are engaging without being overwhelming. They are witty and sharp.

Roar

I just watched a stop motion video with plastic army men recreate some Omaha Beach action. I noticed a sound effect that I haven't heard in a very long time. Men. Battle Cry. 

Now it's true that I haven't been to a professional football game in a long time and I've never been to a championship game. I've only recently been to the Long Beach Grand Prix, and I tend to prefer, now that I think about it, European sports. But the Premier League is coming soon to the awesome NBCSN and I should get a broadcast dose. But I would have to do a lot of thinking to place myself in a scary screaming crowd of men. Hmm. And I keep promising my son that I'd take him to Dagohir - maybe, maybe not.

But think about scaling it up for a moment. If you've ever played football, I mean tackle football with or without pads. You know what it's like to face dudes you intend to run around or run over. And if you've ever been in a sweep, you know the adrenaline rush of having three or four blockers in front of you as you move the ball downfield. The roar of the crowd heightens the rush. 

Now multiply that times 1000. You're a part of not just 11 men, but 11,000 men running and shouting and screaming down the field. Do you know what that roar sounds like? No you probably don't. You probably will never hear anything more dangerous than the roar of the crowd at soccer match. And now that I think about it, I recall how upset a lot of people got listening to the vuvuzela horns at the last World Cup.

You just don't know. 

Recovery vs Willful Ignorance

More often than not I do what I call 'recovery', which is going back as an adult and trying to make sense of things I dissed as a kid - or knew would be meaningful in some way but bored me to death. 

Recovery works for me about 20% of the time. Like somewhere around 1995 I started listening to Grunge, which had been around for years by then. For me it was all about Stone Temple Pilots. Everything I liked about that flavor of rock could be expressed in Purple and No 4 + Prince's Chaos & Disorder album, one or two Soundgardern sogns some Fishbone and a couple albums by Rage Against the Machine. That was it. 

About 10 years later, I went back for Recovery. I listened to Pearl Jam, Veruca Salt, Nirvana, Hole, Bush, Smashing Pumpkins. Faith No More. Alice in Chains. Nothing. I got maybe three or four interesting songs out of the whole bunch. So I figure it was worth it for me to ignore Grunge. Still out of all that I got Foo Fighters and more importantly Radiohead. (Actually Radiohead is a different story),.

Most of the time however, I have the discipline to just ignore the whole thing. And I do always make mention of it. For example. I have probably watched no more than five episodes, combined, of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. I have never had a blonde girlfriend. I have never visited Jamaica. If I never have those experiences, I don't care. I won't miss them. There's a whole lot of pop culture and American culture and people in general that I just ignore because I'm convinced my way is better. I always do what *I* like. I always my my way of doing things. Interestingly enough it's not because I hate conforming, but simply because I have found enough purpose in the way I do something and don't need any more.

The way I do this is by reducing all the hype around something to non-existence. Like if somebody pays $65 for a designer shirt - to me it's just a shirt, I'm glad it makes you happy. Somebody gets a promotion, it's just a middle class job, I hope it makes you happy. If it's not in my interest, I think of it as a commodity. 

It's a fight though. A couple years ago, the KC Chiefs had a good early season, and I thought I actually might enjoy watching football again. Didn't happen. I used to watch NASCAR as a kid, my favorite racer was Buddy Baker (in the Daytona Charger). When I finally could afford a big screen, I thought that would happen. Nope. I know I pay a price by not having been to an NBA game since the era of Benoit Benjamin. But in the end, I'd rather fill my head with different stuff. 

I actually honestly believe that there's a superior way to get to learn everything that is useful and wise, but that most people waste their time. It's exactly the dilemma of whether you buy the next Soulja Boy album after that one hit. Or if you actually go to a restaurant instead of cooking your own meal at home. Do I want to be entertained, or do i want to learn? But also, am I too old for this shit? At some point in your life you start marking off large areas as just jungle not worth exploring. 

I pay a lot of attention to the amount of time I spend doing things. I love my time, I hate other people spending my time. And I really hate spending time getting to know something other people know that I really don't want to know, just so I can deal with people I'd rather not deal with. Especially when I am too old for that kind of shit - which is why I'm really annoyed by the Trayvon Martin thing because it interferes with the relationships I have with people I already know and like (or dislike) for other reasons. And the converse of that is that I find it annoying when I have found something awesome in an area that I know most people don't pay attention to and would have to spend a lot of time learning so they could deal with me on that thing. I finally made peace with this dissonance in the past year, and I realized that this is a gap that cannot be crossed. It only hurts when you try. So I don't really try any longer. It has lifted a great burden from me. 

Long answer I know, but this is rather central to the way I process what I have in common with most people = through literature, and I am very pleased to find that Game of Thrones is actually good literature.

Bastards of Westeros

I did no gaming the past week, and very little reading. I stayed indoors and consumed three seasons of The Game of Thrones. Now I know what it's all about. 

I had previously known it existed and that it was bloody and sexy, but I had actually seen less of it than of Boardwalk Empire, the show my wife had been following through its lifetime. All told, when walking through the den over the years I had stopped enough times to see three or four scenes, perhaps 15 minutes worth. As I watched the entire series, I still remembered each of those scenes - the murder of the tow-headed kid with Needle on the night road, the freeing of the witch by the Mother of Dragons and the subsequent duel that ended up killing Khal Drogo, and the setting free of the Unsullied who all desired to stay soldiers for Danearis. During E3, people were astonished that the voice of Peter Dinklage would be featured in the new game Destiny. I discovered his character in Game of Thrones was very popular and his voice unmistakable. On the whole however, I dismissed GoT and its audience with the same disdain I do for other oversexed and overviolent television. In particular, I find a number of HBO series particularly offensive as I've spoken before.

I shield myself from HBO as they move their dramatic series from corruption to corruption according to their tried and true formula - the challenged kingpin surrounded by crime and perversion. This time, Atlantic City during Prohibition. 

The characters of the HBO dramatic series are all shameless and innocent by our standards. We in the audience are to understand that they live in a distant and dangerous world in which survival depends on doing dirt. There are no options for their dignity. And so we can manage to ingest all of the 'adult' situations for which their TV-MA ratings are well deserved.  All the main characters suffer little from the misery of their predicaments except for the protagonist, who must be ruthless and sensitive at once. It is by drawing attention to the existential suffering of the protagonist that these shows manage to keep the attention in the more lurid offerings. For example, there is not only the haughty nude, but there is a brutal interrogation, a gruesome surgical procedure and a scene showing the results of a lynching. 

Game of Thrones is different. 

Recently, my friend The Ultimate Bohemian assured me that fact and even suggested that I watch the series before I read the book. The occasion was the show before the penultimate show of the third season, not very long ago this year. I was surprised by his recommendation and made a note. I have watched my own curiosity in reading move towards first person narratives and sword and sorcery on the fictional end. Something I never expected, but a video better than a book? This was something I had to see. It couldn't be worse than the girly 'Revolution'  and might be as good as the transparently multiculturally edge of 'Defiance'. I did not expect something on par with the brilliant but cancelled 'Last Resort' and certainly nothing worthy of 'Breaking Bad'. Instead I found something that has transcended all of those, which brings me aside on Breaking Bad. This next season Walter has to change a great deal or else. The show is falling into the old formula and I'm getting sick of watching him get in and out of the same criminal shit with the same cast of characters.

Game of Thrones transcends because Winter has been coming for years and it still hasn't arrived. The arc of this story is deep and long, tragic and heroic. It is the best story of our times because of the ways in which it is not of our narrative times at all. There isn't a single character in GoT who isn't imbued with purpose interlinked with the fate of their humanity and tested in a dramatically consistent basis. Each and every one of them is bound not only by their ambition but by their history and their fidelity to be about what they say they are about. They live and die, triumph and suffer, prosper or rot by these classic powers. 

Game of Thrones is not merely, as I had supposed, a story moved forward by spectacle and perversity where the extremes of dramatic presentation are ends of themselves. It is actual storytelling. It is the anti-'Lost'. Moreover it is the anti-Lost that still has unexplainable magic. Game of Thrones also manages to avoid the stereotypical strutting monologues of soap operatics. Even though the naked whores all have flawless skin and wonderful boobs, even through the princelings hair shines in the sunlight, there is very little show for naught. There is something excellent in the scene of the great funeral where the archer attempts to light the barge on fire while the royalty stands in full dress on the pier as it floats further down river out of range. He misses thrice and his elder has to snatch the bow from his cockeyed hands and finally make the shot. The story of Game of Thrones is vast and properly spread over multiple territories, multiple families, multiple generations. It is a universe, and I love a good universe. 

The Game of Thrones universe retains something of the old formula except that it is well distributed. But it also does not encourage the sort of badass posturing of our more contemporary dramas. The men and women of Westeros understand and feel exactly how they must sacrifice themselves for the exigencies of power. They live within a world where honor is real currency and debts are paid in gold or blood.  They face the tyrranies of indifference. And all of these ambitions and failures are not concentrated on a few superhumans, it is spread among a cast so vast, in a land so varied that it hardly seems proper to call it an ensemble. 

At long last yesterday I watched the wedding episode that had the followers of the show shocked and amazed several weeks ago. It was an exceedingly apt example of the sort of writing that deserves our attention. The deeper greatness of the Game is that men have long memories and short tempers and that for their principles they will try to get away with whatever it is they can afford. Moreover they must because it is a luxury to stand on ceremony and principle. Every day action is demanded, and men live to be old almost entirely based on wise or fortunate action. Luck is real, as is God. But everyone gets an equal amount of that. The rest of survival, at any level in any society depends on cunning. 

--

What I find most appealing about Game of Thrones aside from its own technical excellence is that it exemplifies something of what we humans face in the lack of a perfected civilization. I have, since the economic collapse of '07 and the election of Obama in '08, begun thinking about how to survive the downside. It has lead me from neoconservatism to Stoicism, and it may ultimately lead me back to the Catholic Church. My basic assumption is this. Man's nature is feudal, and we have only recently in our history invented such institutions capable of approximating Lordship. When these institutions fail, demos will fail, and hierarchies demanding fealty will rise. I think many people will be caught in the cold who don't recognize the failure of those institutions through which now they secure the blessings of liberty. Those who take their liberty for granted will lose it most swiftly and what is important today is understanding of who creates and who destroys liberty. Game of Thrones reminds us that freedom is given by both good-hearted and by evil men. It should remind us to look closer. 

We pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. 

What breaks? Can you feel it breaking? Is Winter coming? Is our courage at the ready, are our skills up to par, is our loyalty properly aligned? Everything breaks. Only the alert will see ahead. Winter always comes. 

--

They say in Westeros that there is power in the King's blood. The world of feudal sword and sorcery has no room for feminism of the modern sort. Sexual liberty does not generate power. Nor does knowledge in and of itself. Power is power and those who possess it can claim any liberty they please whether or not it is an example for the masses. Game of Thrones puts men and women where they are and not where some potentate might attempt to engineer an institution for them. It reminds us that our personal passions have consequences that either align with or dismiss the honors of feudal loyalty. One ignores those honors at ones own peril.

In my Peasant Theory, as I have developed it over these downside years, there are The Rulers, The Slice, and The Peasants, as corresponds to roughly, the highborn, free men and slaves in Westeros. The distinctions between those six classes ought to be paid specific attention, but I won't get into that now. I only wish to illustrate that which is parallel in our worlds. The Bastards of Westeros are those for whom high and low are mixed, whose fates most closely approximate that Jefferson's Aristocracy of Merit. 

As we watch the Game, our sympathies are with the victims of cruelty and the valiant who suffer as individuals whilst together with family they might be strong. These Second Sons, these Bastards are the wildcards. They are those who by cunning and art have managed to insinuate themselves into influence - they are those who might do for the good of the Realm. They are those whose future possibilities are not predestined - those who suffer daily for their predicaments and who must choose a course amid the chaos of change. But they fight within the context of a feudal destiny. They fight for the honor of their houses, and when the Throne rules all the only aristocracy of merit is that of merit in war.

But the Mother of Dragons is gathering an army herself, and represents the opportunty for a new order pregnant with possibilities. There is also a nameless brotherhood who carries the banner for none. That is what makes Westeros a universe and not merely a kingdom. There is magic on the horizon - the sort of magic that might herald the death of the institution of the current throne. It's a story well worth watching.

Act Your Old Age

When I turned 50, I wrote the following:

What I want is to live in truth, to never have to lie to myself or anyone else. I want to be wise and honorable. That means I have to figure out a way to be gracious in the presence of people who don't know what I know. It means letting other people say what they will say and do what they will do. It means avoiding their implosions and explosions. Maybe I live like an old farmer, because I'm not particularly addicted to power and I haven't schemed enough to get me some. 

When I had my first child, somehow I intuitively knew that I would have to stop being a bohemian social critic. I knew there was a class of books that I had to put down and a new set I needed to start reading. I now have a similar sense that I have to watch my health, prepare for disaster, and say words over the dead. I will work another 15 years, I figure. I will downsize my life. I will render myself into certain perfections of character and behavior.

It has been two years since then and I can say that I have become a much better person in those ways. I'm realizing the extent to which men in their 30s look up to me and expect a level of integrity and dignity that I need to be prepared to demonstrate. There is nothing lower than an older man who refuses to be wise or dignified, even if it is only the quiet dignity of modesty. I have found my purpose in life and it is finding that purpose and working to fulfill it that brings happiness. There is no other way.

A bucket list is not a good way to think of maturity. Adding adventure is for young men. For old men it's about subtracting the useless. It's about not being restless for action for it's own sake. It's about not letting desire to prove something get in the way of just doing something. For me, being this age is about your ability to know the truth of your life's experience and always tell that truth. But also being prepared if everybody else does that or if nobody else does that.

Overwhelmage

I just read something interesting from the Backblaze blog, which made me think about something I learned from spycraft. Call it the evidence of things unseen. 

The way the planet Uranus was found was not through direct observation, but rather through the perturbations it made in the orbits of known planets. If you wanted to know how much of your data the government might be able to store, you might try to figure out how much you can't store because of tight supply of hard drives. Or you might try to figure out the size of the hard drive market and pie chart it. These methods could only give some odd approximations because the NSA forces you to lie. As well, of course, there is no perfect information. But if the spy agencies are using a great deal of hardware, you can bet they're not building it themselves and the details are in the supply chain. There are money trails to be followed. 

When SGI bought super-computer maker Cray in 1996, our CTO who worked there at the time said the running joke was, “SGI sold no units this quarter, but made a healthy profit.” That wasn’t magic accounting. It was the NSA requiring purchases not be disclosed. The problem was, revenue still had to be reported.

Now I remember not long ago, because I have several terabytes at home, that the price and availability of external USB drives went pear shaped. Prices went up and availability went down. The story that was largely circulated was that some floods put some Asian factories out of commission. I never saw a picture of that flooded Asian hard drive factory and I never suspected the story until a couple weeks ago when I added three more terabytes to my little farm. The shelves at Fry's were practically empty. So how many years is this shortage supposed to last?

Being a TNPer I have followed a bit about 'Firearmageddon', the depletion of guns and ammo from American retail stores. We know that Homeland Security is buying historical levels of bullets. If we can forget 'why' for a moment, it becomes apparent when we add these two phenomena together that this is something of a zero-sum game. It's us vs the hungry government agencies when it comes to buying sophisticated hardware because neither of us can build it ourselves. 

If We The People could figure out what the government wanted next and buy it all first, we could limit it.

 

 

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Halo Moments

I've spent a lot of time in a number of virtual places but now I'm thinking about legendary (heh) moments in the Halo Universe. What are they?

I think the most memorable experiences in Halo had to do with the first time I saw a Scarab in New Mombasa. It was the largest, most unbeatable looking beast. The way the scene was setup so that the Marines around you were crapping their pants and it took several minutes to beat this monster was rather outsized for Halo. It was a boss battle that didn't seem like a boss battle. 

I thought it was very dramatic the first time I played 'Truth & Reconciliation' with the sniper rifle at night, crawling among the Covenant and trying to remain quiet all the while working my way actually up into the alien ship. 

In Halo3, coming out of the jungle to the enemy installation and watching Sgt Johnson fighting against a brute through the scope of my sniper rifle. Heart pumping.

One of the craziest co-op moments were in ODST when you played the guy with the rocket launcher and you hod to fight with vehicles to destroy Wraiths all over this mountainous terrain. Running around in the warthog and trying to beat the enemies on that map was a real hoot. 

Seeing UNSC ships in atmosphere is always super dramatic as are the large-scale invasions. So the cut-scene when the In Amber Clad drops the Master Cheif a Scorpion. Awesome. Also the first time I  ever got to pilot a Banshee had to be a stellar moment.

The rest is like trying to come up with the Top 10 maps, each of which had a special conflict or types of conflict that were designed into the gameplay. So let me remember maps - and I'm going to do this alongside this squeaker's video.

• Everybody desparately wanted to get the shotgun in the underground grotto of Snowbound. Crazy grenade battles in that room.
• For Tempest and Ridgeline, the best thing to be was an invisible sniper. 
• Sword battles on The Pit were awesome. Getting gunned down by the turrets was always a big frustration. This was a great place to have a needler and a pistol. 
• Countdown had epic CQ battles at the top of the big lift in back. I could almost always get first strike at the beginning if I got the needler first on the other side of the map.
• The Exile map from Halo4 is simply a masterpiece. Best map ever for Domination, and that includes similar gametypes across COD and Ghost Recon. 
• Last Resort: What can I say? Sniping from the sniper hole. Gunning from the turret. Ghost splatters and warthog domination. De in the top 5 most memorable maps.
• Settler is a great map, one of the first in Halo that makes you think about actual infantry tactics. The high ground is a bottleneck, so you have soldiers streaming in from all over the map just to get that one place. I think this map has seen more destroyed Warthogs than any other.
• On Guardian, everybody wants the hammer, or to snipe down the tunnel where the hammer is found. Plus, exploding walls! 
• Battle Creek would probably not fare well against more recent Halo maps, but the invisibility and the rocket launcher made for some crazy exchanges on this tiny map. It's Halo 101. Hang 'em High, I hated. 
• Vehicle battles abound on Sandtrap. Best vehicle map ever. If you don't have one, you won't last long.
• Lockout is a fan favorite. Blackout and other reproductions don't quite cut it, so it's greatness has been lost.

Interestingly enough, I do agree with the squeaker's top three choices, Valhalla/Ragnarok, High Ground and Blood Gulch. These are legendary maps in the Halo franchise. I cannot sing enough praises to High Ground for map design and weapon & vehicle placement. When I think of Halo's promise of 30 seconds of high energy fun and then you die and come back for another 30 seconds, High Ground is that map. It is the map that matches weapon finds with the territory - you basically *must* get to the lookout and grab the Spartan laser, or you *must* run for the dual weilding SMGs or get the bubble sheild and shoot the guy trying to get the SMGs. Or you *must* get inside the bunker and use the spikers, or get around to the backside and grab the energy drain, or get to the turret. It was a very deterministic map with guaranteed action. 

Valhalla and Blood Gulch on the other hand were wide open spaces that really leant themselves to being exploited by player skill and team coordination. If you couldn't call an audible and marshal your forces to one stronghold or another on these maps, you were doomed. I have to say in all fairness, One Bomb on Blood Gulch became a little tiresome in the way it was predictable, but for the Big Team Battles, these exemplify greatness in a way that no other maps have. I'm giving the nod to Valhalla/Ragnarok whose longevity into Halo4 makes it the best. 

Obligatory Seriousness on The Zimmerman Case

I probably have neglected to spell it out, primarily because I don't care much. But history is a bitch and people always want to know 'what were you thinking?'. So here's what I'm thinking.

1. The Media has a lot of nerve suggesting and keeping alive the suggestion that the outcome of this case is significant for black Americans. IE, this is another presumption about what 'does' happen and 'oughtn't' happen to the 'average black male youth'. 

2. What is the name of the town? In Florida? Some flyspec burg? So who cares?

3. No new law. 'Stand Your Ground' is not on trial. And that's Florida anyway. So who cares?

4. I hear that some racially representative factions will decide to riot depending on the outcome of this new 'Trial of the Century'. I recommend rubber bullets and teargas. OK maybe not rubber bullets. How about firehoses?

That's about all. One man dead. Happens all the time. I hear that they've been counting the dead in Chicago, Obama's home town. Something like a couple dozen over the Fourth of July Weekend. But who cares?

I do not have a more serious opinion and I refuse to be accept the notion that I should have one. 

The Santa Monica Samods AAU Diving Club

If I don't put this post here, then the web will have no record of what I was up to back in the late 70s. That might not be such a bad thing, but you know one day I'll be an old man and won't remember much of what I remember now. 

Our coach and fearless leader was Jim Wood. Jim was a great coach, dedicated, disciplined and wise. He had a soft side that he did not show during practice. During practice he was a hardass. After practice he would smile. Almost a different person. Jim was tall and craggy. He seemed a combination of Texan and Minnesotan. He had a sonorous but sharp voice and he sounded a little bit like Karl Malden. 

We practiced Wednesday nights at the new Santa Monica High School pool. It was a great facility. They had good boards and sprays. It was a long way for me to come by bus, but that's what I did. My brother Bryan and I.

Carl was our best diver. He was a great twister. I remember him working on his triple twisting forward 1 1/2. He also had a single twisting 2 1/2. Like all the best divers, Carl was fearless. Like all the mediocre divers, I hated double pikes and shied away from the 3 meter board. But I still did them. My best diving friend was Chris Monaghan from Culver City. I couldn't really understand him much at all. He was a good diver but had no force of personality. But he was a good kid. The captain of the Loyola diving team was Chris Horne. Much more personality, as in total geek. Chris lived in Palms, was a pale redhead with nerd glasses and zits and had a cool and quirky family.  In some ways he was a role model, in other ways not. He had a kind of lazy style as a diver, not quite snappy but elegant. I seem to recall that he had good entries but not very good tops. Still, he was way better than I was. The team sweetheart was Colleen MacNamee who lived over near the Santa Monica Airport. Her dad built her a diving pool in the backyard. She had every reason to be spoiled, but I can't remember if she was or not. I do rememeber she used to talk about how thoroughly green the chlorine turned her blonde hair. 

The Samod is a small fish I had not heard about before nor since, but that was what Jim named our club. We would participate in meets all over Southern California. Northridge Aquatics was a standard venue. There was another small pool with good boards over near the Budweiser Brewery in the Valley. Also the Jim Kramer Club in PV held meets. The first time I ever peeled was after a day at Madera, CA in the desert. Freaked me out that I got sunburned. They warned me, but I didn't think it was possible. Then I realized how many times I actually had been sunburned, the feeling was extreme that time, but familiar. 

My two best meets were the USA - Mexico dual meet at Santa Monica College, and the Chula Vista Invitational. In that meet I got my highest score ever, a 6 1/2 on a forward 1 1/2 pike. Sadly, Jim couldn't make that meet. I got third place - my favorite trophy. I got third at the dual meet too and received a medal. Good times.

I never hit the diving board but I did maybe one or two fail dives. I don't think I ever balked. I was a mediocre diver. I wasn't strong enough to be very good and of course I wore glasses. But I enjoyed the sport and did well enough to qualify for State championships. I used to think of myself as ranked 22nd in the State of California which, considering our champions, wasn't bad at all, but I certainly wasn't good enough to compete at the collegiate level. Chris Horne made the team at USC, I think but I recall that he quit after freshman year. 

33828662 was my AAU number. I did have an 11 dive list which was pretty decent considering that most kids who compete in High School have been diving for a while. Oddly, I never really wanted to be a diver, but a gymnast. Loyola didn't have a gymnastics team, nor a wrestling team the two things I could do well given my size. So I made lemonade.  I never quite got my forward 2 1/2 pike nor my single twisting 1 1/2. By the time I was junior I fell in love with soccer and the spirit went out of my diving. I couldn't switch sports and keep on track for four year varsity so I toughed it out. But senior year, my intramural soccer team won the school title. It was one of the things I was most proud of in high school. Odd that. 

The Fencing Problem

Back several years ago when I had my nascent media career - I think it was 2007 when I won the Aaron Hawkins Award, I invented a term called 'famousity'. I thought I could be considered a media person of interest but not quite a third rate celebrity, but I was on my way. I wondered aloud as I do from time to time whether in a dire situation it is better to be famous or not, concluding that it is. 

But now I had a startling thought, which is that depending upon who whispers what to whom, infamousity is much more likely to bogard all the safety credits one might amass. I am thinking, of course, about the chances that anybody with any clout in media bothers to read significant parts of a body of work found about any individual accused of misbehavior. I conclude briefly that one must enter a web of famousity and credibility if one is to avoid infamousity.

We are a nation of stooges, most of us, and there is a significantly gullible chatting class who can be relied on to hold any degree of ridiculous opinions. I know this because of the number of people who 'like' the Rosetta Stone Language Software on Facebook. (15,000) and where on Earth could I manage to get 15,000 'likes'? 

I thought about a very reasonable essay on the foolishness of Snowden with which I agree. My last writing on the man made too many points. But I do lean more forcibly towards certifying his insanity, and perhaps it is true that he lived in a world too solopsistic to give him the benefit of a doubt, which is the main argument of that essay. 

What is evident at this moment is that the poor boy is a man without a country, as is anyone who asserts the need for the defence of human rights. Nations don't step outside of their own laws of civil rights to extend such airy fairy human rights to strangers - not even to those bearing gifts. It's difficult enough in most places to have ones civil rights consistently defended. Snowden must clearly realize by now that he must choose sides because that's all there are. No third ways. For him to move forward, he must further expose the US to the specific benefit of some country that wishes to play enemy to the United States. And thus he must become more infamous than he already is.

This is all reminescent of the Fencing Problem. Snowden managed a great hack, a magnificent theft. Or maybe it wasn't so great and he just walked off with the keys he was given. But he ended up in possession of a great treasure that wasn't his. So he imagined, like all theives, that such treasure would enrich his life. But the treasure of state secrets can only be spent in a very few ways, and the people who sell them are spies by definition. You cannot sell or even give away such treasure and be repaid in any other way than as spies. That's the size of the market and the definition of the currency.