Cobb

Jerks and Twerks

When I was about 34 years old, I discovered strip clubs. That would be about 1995. No, then I'm wrong. It was closer to 1996 and I was 35. Mind you this was a few years after the debut of the film Jurassic Park and the debut of Janet Jackson's album 'Janet'. Janet Jackson was the last wholesome stripper, but that was way *before* her tit fell out which was in 2004, nine years later. At that moment, you remember, Justin Timberlake was becoming the new Michael Jackson, who was already long dead, artistically speaking. And it was at that moment that nominally white Americans were handed the baton, the way I see it. But titty bars were all the rage, along with Eddie Bauer Edition Ford Explorers back in 1996.

You see, I started hanging around new money and was rather excited by it back then, primarily because I was newly married and had a couple of babies, and I actually really cared about making as much money as possible. I had consigned myself to Plan B which was moving to the New South, when it was clear I wasn't going to do the Columbia MBA in International Finance with a trip through Wall Street as a hedge fund quant. I married the wrong kind of woman for New York City, and so we went to Atlanta, and I learned all about Sales. Sales guys are a fascinating breed of human being, and I wouldn't be half the man I am today if I hadn't gotten to understand the actual blood and guts of the sales process. Glengarry Glen Ross is the tip of the iceberg, people. This is the part of business that makes people throw themselves from skyscrapers. It's the crusher; the do or die, the dog eat dog and the kill or be killed. Most importantly, it's the winner takes all, a little bit of luck and the golden lottery ticket as well. So I got to see, up close and personal, what people do before and after the million dollar payday. There is an excitement that cannot be denied when you suddenly rise above all your previous limits. Suddenly, you are above society, above the law, for at least a party, right?

I don't want to speak out of school, because I genuinely learned a lot and made what you might call friends. But we people with massive egos understand that there are friends and their are friends. Nevertheless, when you have a closing party after the deal is done, much steak, lobster, cabernet and tobacco are consumed. Which is to say a lot more tasteful than hookers and blow. Then again there was Qualcomm. I do not digress to say that some people just have *that* kind of party just waiting to get out of them, and sometimes (clutch the pearls) it doesn't happen with 'experimentation in college' aka frat parties. Sometimes it happens with accountants, and purchasing agents in their mid 30s, who any other day of the week are on toddler lockdown. In short, there is a whole lot of America who are just six figures short of the kind of idiot party that Caligula might dream up, or Fellini. Does it really matter? People everywhere at some point in their lives want to get their freak on. So much so that it's a business. Strip clubs make lots of money, but at least some of them are discrete. 

So all across America when people really want to get wild and loose because they have become successful beyond their wildest dreams, well, there's Las Vegas. Just short of that there are titty bars and steakhouses. Happy Americans love to throw money around. This is actually half a problem. It is only half a problem because this is what new money success smells like. It smells like the Billionaire Boys Club. It smells like Less Than Zero. It smells like The Hangover, which is what Ferris Beuller was really thinking about doing on his day off. Except back in the Go Go 80s there wasn't quite as much new money as there was in the days of Irrational Exuberance. But it all smells the same. 

What's going on today is the same smell, except it's outdoors and broadcast and everybody wants a sniff. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that the big media executives of today have lost their ability to think like Michael Crichton or pay people like Michael Crichton. So instead of throwing money at entertainment like Jurassic Park, they throw money at Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Remember them? They are the millionaire geniuses behind South Park. Why should anyone be surprised that in such an environment as gives awards for being sexy, that being sexy is what such entertainers try their damndest to do. Wasn't it just a week ago that one of these morons told a bunch of teenagers that what's really sexy is being smart? I hear that some Senator cited him, and I kid you not.

So here's what I'm saying. There's nothing new about degeneracy. The content of hookers and blow are the same now as they have ever been, as is the utter and complete lack of imagination in transgressive excess in any of the seven deadly sins. For some people, it's a crazy party. For others it's a living, and with reality television we come closer to what we all really want which is pornography and snuff videos. YouTube treads the fine line with selfies and fail videos. But it's the same slapstick. It's the same dick jokes. It's the same night on the town in Las Vegas that Lenny Bruce was talking about. Except now every state has a lottery and every state has titty bars. Well, way more than before. But I probably shouldn't say 'we' so very broadly. It's not that highbrow culture has disappeared, it's just that people with money, ie big media producers, are not particularly interested in preserving it for the benefit of the mainstream. I'm thinking perhaps that CBS's exclusive coverage of The Masters Tournament is about all that's left. The rest is on PBS, but only because they rebroadcast BBC.

No doubt that the peasantry will be the peasantry, but we were once attempting something called public education, the ends of which were enabling self-rule. But you cannot raise a functional democracy in an atmosphere of continual shameless public degeneracy. You need episodic guilty private degeneracy for a democracy to work. In public, you should be public-minded and public-spirited. If your aim is the preservation of liberty you must more than balance your mindless debauchery with civil conduct. It requires an 80/20 rule at the very least. It's tragic that such cannot go without saying that prominent figures in society should be beyond any reasonable reproach. Of course you must understand that we are fighting a war against those who spend their lives chasing Pulitzer prizes for discovering 'hipocrisy'. Such gossips and destroyers of worlds refuse to distinguish between the personal and the political, the private and the public. Their parents were racist, so the world is racist, etc, etc. (c.f. Nouning Hatey). "What difference does it make?", these liars ask. We're all twerkers and jerks and smokers and drinkers and haters and murderers - it's all a part of American culture, they say. It's all a part of *some* culture, they'll say. Multiculturalists must accept that any human being can do what comes natural and it must be civilized because 'we all do it at some point' and 'who are we to judge', and other mawkish banalities.

What's going on is simple outrage. And since I spent an hour in a waiting room this afternoon forced to watch CNN and some doe-eyed parent wailing about the 20 year-old who apparently can't wait to get out of her Disney contract and her clothes, I had to think about it too. We, now speaking of myself in this, simply must take our moral obligations to the next level. One cannot assume that the public sphere is not immoral, because the airwaves and every other mass medium are run by moral idiots who have every incentive to cater to every degeneracy imaginable. Our media environment has all the appeal of a ghastly train wreck, with big tits, covered in bacon. It's not going to stop. You just have to stay away from it; guard your soul. 

It's not difficult to maintain distance. We all know where the titty bars are. As Nancy Reagan reminded us, Just Say No. All it takes is moral discipline, which for most of us is easily had. It's just rather pathetic that the media business has lost theirs. Which is why this 'story' is making headlines just before we punish Syria. 

Longitude: Counter-Example

Beth Comstock sez:

I had just left a decade-long run in media to hop to the corporate side of things at GE, working with Welch on communications strategy.

My life in media—especially network news—had been an adrenaline rush, racing from deadline to deadline. If you don't make it to air, there is nothingness. You're dead. And making it to air first brings an added sense of accomplishment. Not to mention bragging rights. For me, it was a constant whirl: making sense of the constant stream of information coming in, calling reporters covering us to tell them what was happening and why we were doing it best. I’d think sometimes, if only I could field phone calls with both hands and both feet, all would be good (we didn’t have email yet, but the newsroom did have an archaic forerunner of instant messaging that satisfied my need to multitask).

Moving fast and being organized were my strong suits. The more there was to do, the more I felt alive. Productive. Efficient. Every to-do list item was checked, with urgency as my soundtrack. I loved the thrill, and I was good at keeping up with it.

 

This is what's wrong with journalism as I discuss here.

Goodbye Darkness

William Manchester sounds to be the source of much of today's ambivalent confusion about war, and is writing a fact filled, yet soppy emotional memoir / history of compelling stuff. Writing in 1978 or thereabouts, he illustrates perfectly a Me Generation dream sequence which is absent the conviction of necessity. Manchester writes as if, and clearly you can hear it in his articulation, the war was a great revelation to him and thus to everyone. In this regard he displays a kind of shocked naiveté, as if the two World Wars were something just invented for his father and himself, custom-made to drive him to madness. So he deals with repressed memories, and the shock of being amidst the random chaos and violence, and the amazement of how empty such places were after the war. 

 Manchester plays the role of the callow youth experiencing war, trying to deal with cowardice and bravado, and how neither of these simple expressions of manhood seem to have much to do with who dies and who survives the brutalities of the Pacific theater. A sergeant trying to lead men, who develops through sheer luck, an ability to survive the horrors of jungle warfare on extremely remote inhospitable islands. 

The book serves as my first look into the complexities and the battles of the Pacific. Ask me yesterday and I might have said, Iwo Jima, Midway and Pearl, but now my understanding has been extended a great deal. Recognizing how close the Japanese came to Australia was a great revelation of the book, as well as the parallel drives northward of McArthur and Nimitz. The change in tactics by the Japanese and their all-consuming drive for victory as Dai Nippon has given me a new appreciation for why they were so hated by the Chinese. The devotion of many Pacific island natives to the Americans was something you never hear about, nor the primitive manner in which they lived and how Dai Nippon forced them into labor. The Solomons, the Marianas. 

It may be because he also wrote extensively about McArthur and Churchill that his own experience as recounted in this book seems to define so well many of the anti-war sentiments of the a man who clearly absorbed the import of the counterculture in American life. He ends the book describing the traditional values of the America he grew up in as if they were long gone and never to return. He so concludes that he fought for the equivalent of an instinct for his fellow soldiers, all of whom possessed a logic in defense of things that no longer exist in the modern world, which only goes to demonstrate how mashed up in the illusory narrative he became, all the while railing against its ignorance through the book. It is this tension between the personal in the context of 

 Manchester is nothing if not an intelligent and articulate master of languages and betrays the kind of respect for it that makes all of his descriptions of dialect and war era terminology quite a treasure. Terms erased by polite and cowardly conventions  spell truths that defy historical revisionism stand out everywhere in Manchester's writing. In reading this book you are submerged in a way of speaking American English that has all dried up into today's yuppy-speak. It's useful just to read the book aloud to experience something genuine. Manchester thus is at war with Hollywood and American ahistorical ignorance as well as with his former self. 

This book is an absolute necessity. 

About Those Redactions

I realize that some of you might be new to Cobb and find it puzzling that I have redacted my blog's subtitle. It is, in fact, Cobb: Curious, Skeptical, Analytical. I redacted the texts as a part of an internet-wide protest of some breach of civil liberty represented by something ugly we found out that the federal government was doing, or planning to do. There was some four letter acronym of some sort representing the thing that we serious liberty-minded folks were upset about. Of course I don't remember any of the details including the exact year in which this outrage took place.

The protest is thus meaningless as is my banner redaction. Because when I look at it, it doesn't serve to remind me of something I should do, or something that I did which is significant. It won't make me appear clever, as if I were sampling Kafka and calling my blog K, (or C, as the case may be). So I'll go hunting for the original banner and replace it. 

I still like the look of this, the main blog, and I retain enough trust in the folks at Typepad to continue hosting it and the seven or eight other blogs I have at cobb.typepad.com. I think I'll never combine them all into one blog as I thought I might. My weekends are too full of other interesting things to do - like helping my father organize his blogs.

I'm paranoid, but not to a level at which it causes me to lose sleep. NSA bastards don't really want to know what I'm up to, even though they can, easily. I have decided to stop arguing about it and trust them. So long as there are queer fuckups like Manning around, I'm faster than other bear hunters. Besides. It's not as if I could stop them. 

Suicides and Freaks

My brother committed suicide back around 1990. I have a very hard time remembering exactly the year and month, but it was in the summer of 90 or 91 or thereabouts. That's the only thing I have a hard time of is remembering the date. Look at the picture. He's dead. We're living. I did my crying. Time for crying is over. Time for living is now. Every day, whatever comes. This is a letter to someone I love, you know who you are.

You have to decide how crazy you want to be. The answer should be zero.

Because in a society as large and complex as this one, especially in the big cities, you can get all kinds of attention for your craziness. Don't expect much from me. You see I strongly believe that everyone has the right to make life and death decisions. Even about themselves. But people's decision making process is flawed. We all know that phrase 'Choose Life', but as crazy as it sounds, some people choose death. Why does it sound crazy? Because it is crazy. Period. 

I think it was really funny that somebody gave the following relationship advice. *You* be the crazy one.Why? Because nobody wants to deal with crazy.

Here's something else about crazy. It sticks to you. It's like a trip to a Mexican whorehouse. Once you go there, you can never ungo. You can never undo the experience. You chose to do it. All you can do is say, OK that was fucking stupid, I'll NEVER do that again. That's actually the best you can do. Then you have to move on and not dwell on it, and life goes on. You fill your life with everything else there is besides Mexican whorehouses. Simple.

Woody Allen is crazy. We always knew it. You can be a crazy genius, but then you'll be one of those stupid geniuses that can't even appreciate their own value because they keep entertaining their crazy thoughts. I mean there are a billion books in a million libraries full of interesting things to fill your head with, but entertaining crazy thoughts is a waste of time. Oh yeah, and there is music, and art, and everything that has yet to be discovered on this planet. I mean, you could learn a whole new language. Or you can just decide to focus on the crazy fucked up part of your life and implode. For a long time, we all thought Woody Allen was cute because he was all neurotic and seeing shrinks, and people thought being slightly neurotic was fascinating. He just wanted to bang his own daughter. Crazy. Because the whole world is not interesting enough, right?

Here's the thing about shrinks. You're either crippled or crazy. If you're crippled, they prescribe drugs for you and that fixes the broken pieces of your brain. You are mentally disabled, you have a hardware problem. Or in millenial-speak, you don't have an iPhone, you have a brick. It doesn't matter where you go with a brick, you're never going to get five bars. If you're crazy, then they talk you down. They talk you down by teaching you how to talk yourself down. You have an iPhone but you're just in a dead zone. You have to go out to where the signal of life is, then you get your bars. The shrink helps you recognize that you actually do have an iPhone and not a brick. I know. I've been there.

When I say I've been there I mean I have had.. ohh.. maybe 40 hours of shinkery over the past three years. I understand my limits and I know how it feels to not want to get out of bed. I know what being overwhelmed feels like. That's not crazy. Crazy is talking about the craziness and trying to get attention from it. I'm not going to do that, not for you or for anybody. That's how I know I'm not crazy, because when I actually started feeling that way I hated it and I don't want anybody to know except to get a cure and get away from that and back in control. That's the difference between wanting to be crazy and not. When you ask for attention and you get attention and you like the attention you get for entertaining crazy ideas, you become a reality show fail reel. Fascinating. Stupid. Short lived. 

People act like everything is curable. No. You can smear your face with shit this morning, wash your face today, and eat dinner with the head of the CIA tonight. Nobody will ever know. Not even the CIA.  But you will know. Everybody knows that you should never smear your face with shit. They knew that before the birth of Christ. Everybody knows what crazy is. 

All I'm saying is, you should decide to not be crazy. Crazy = Choose Death.

Now. What I've never done is write a 100 page bucket list. I've never thought of buying a trivia game at Toys R Us and taking all the cards and highlighting all the cool things on them with a yellow marker. I'm pretty comfortable with all the possibilities in my life and I don't have to make a list of 'gee I never thought of that before'. We stoics like to say, Handle survival and the upside will take care of itself. But if I were deep down in that dark alley where I hear you have been, I might start filling my mind with all kinds of new possibilities. 

Oh wait. I have to tell another story.

When I was 19, I got my girlfriend a job. It was with this company called AOMI and the boss had this huge office in Beverly Hills. He was basically a landlord for lawyers. If you were a lawyer and you wanted an office, you go to him and he rents you a nice office in a fancy building and provides you with a receptionist. I wanted to be an accountant clerk for that guy, but I flunked the test. Instead he hired my girlfriend as a receptionist. Did I mention that I was 19 and broke and now my cute girlfriend was working around rich attorneys? Yeah. So eventually she said the words. Like 'you're broke and I work around all these rich attorneys', and she started hanging out with this snotty Asian chick and not returning my phone calls. So I found myself at a freeway overpass looking down at the traffic. All those people have somewhere to go and I hate my life. And then I realized that if I jumped, I wouldn't get a chance to say all the hateful things on my mind, and people would make up stories about me that weren't true. I guarantee that it's better to get a chance to say all the hateful things, and I guarantee that all jumpers are crazy, and they never get the last word. 

We live in a society that acts like anything is possible and anything goes. It's not true, but people like to believe in infinite possibilities. Actually there are about 1000 ways to be completely happy, but those thouand ways are all like fruits on the same tree. If you cut the trunk, you never get to the 1000 fruits. You can't defy gravity and common sense and get the fruits. You have to climb the tree. I can't tell you what all the fruits taste like. I climbed up and stayed up. New fruits grow all the time on my branch. It's pretty comfy. 

OK that's 1200 words. What else? Listen to Dennis Prager. He's good, and he understands. Plus he's free. His message is be grateful. You can't be happy if you think the world owes you something. The world does not owe you squat. Um. Let's apply that to my metaphors. The tree doesn't owe you fruit, you have to climb up and pick it. 

Also, if you decide that you *do* want to be crazy, do it somewhere else. I don't have patience for crazy and I don't want it around. Seriously. I will disown you. Right. What I wanted to do on this side of the essay is talk about freaks and freak accidents. A freak accident can happen to anyone, but crazy people hang out where freaky things happen with frequncy. There's a whole freakonomics of that, but actually I don't even have the patience to talk about that side of the equation. I imagine there are 'reasons' to smear your face with shit... they say that the world is crazy and their craziness is the only real sanity. Yeah right, if you think you've outsmarted the whole planet, you are crazy. 

I'm pretty sure that's just about everything I have to say on the subject, except this. I love you and I will see you in the bright future. 

Then It Happens to You

So I heard some bad news today and I always love to hear bad news. This bad news involves a couple people I know. One of them tried to kill himself, the other found herself diagnosed with Lou Gerig's Disease. 

Part of being a Stoic, as I'm learning as I'm doing, is to recognize as the old saying goes, what you can change and what you cannot. But I think the most important part, or I suppose the part that appeals to me, is that it forces you to deal with bad news. I find it interesting that my father is getting on with the business of dying, and there's a kind of hectic aspect to it and simultaneously he is becoming liberated. But there's one thing I know about my father is that he does what he wants to do. He's in control of his time and he spends it for his own pleasure. Today, he let the dogs into the office. I think he shooed them off for my sake, but he did let them in, along with the innumerable flies that seem to occupy his neighborhood. 

I'm going to be writing more about my father in the coming months, primarily because if I wait until after he dies to start composing a eulogy, I will never finish before the funeral, and then if I do, I'll be pissed that I have to keep it to 750 words and a few minutes. That man deserves much more. But this is yet another tangent. 

As he gave me the bad news about these people I know, I remained stoic, and about the latter individual I made note that I think Steven Hawking has been living with the disease for practically as long as we can remember. I don't think he has even bothered getting an upgrade for that annoying voice. My father says that I make jokes now, but then it happens to you...

Peasants!

I just read the following quote from some dude named Terrence McKenna:

We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

 

This is the kind of quote you have to parcel out to peasants because if you don't tell them, they won't figure it out. And thus McKenna becomes a sort of guru for peasants, which binds him to them rather than to the source of the truth of this wisdom and its implications. It should be obvious because it was a person who quoted this quote as if it were the Sacrament of Confirmation. Or perhaps it is - I don't know how old that person is. 

My point is that I'm at war again with conventional wisdom which is the gobbledigook that goobers gobble and must regurgitate to get into fighting trim. And although it is necessary for their progress, all that vomit is still disgusting. How is it that people fail to learn that people go crazy or die of crazy diseases? It doesn't have to make sense, it just happens, and it happens all the time. Every day it happens. And when it happens to me, I'm not going to freak out and disavow or lose my sense of humor. I'll probably lose my patience when I get brain cancer (That's my prediction - I'll get brain cancer and slowly go insane and become one of those freaks as described by Oliver Sachs - I'll put peanut butter in my shoes to kill the space monkeys). I'll lose my patience like my father has lost his patience. 

My father actually has more patience and less. More patience for his family and pretty much none for the world. Since the first day that I ever heard him utter the word 'shit' and we recrowned him Mister B, at my brother's first wedding, he has been in the process of mellowing out. He is now completely mellowed out and the only traces of his monumental psychological cruelty that remains is the way in which he corrals us in front of his camera whenever two or three of us gather together. And sometimes when he says grace. But other than that, he is mellow and we are off the hook, but he still, with New England reserve, tends to spare us the bad news, because when it happens to you, you can't handle it.

But I can. I was raised to handle it. And then I asked for more. And then I taught myself to handle even more. And now I go looking for challenges. I go looking for trouble. I go out to fix things, and give people confidence when shit breaks. And it makes me a big scary man who would carry a gun if the permit process were more reasonable, not that I ever expect to need one because I'm a big scary man and people sense that, I think. 

Taleb has sworn off motorcycles and cigarettes. He's smart to play the odds. But even he knows how stupid it is to forsake life just to add a few years to your miserable life. I understand the attraction of an exquisite corpse, but I want to be all used up. But I'm internal, which is why I've been up since 4:30 this morning writing book reviews. 

I haven't written one of Cobb's Rules of love. But I've told men the following thing about marriage. Think about the worst thing you believe she's capable of, that thing you know will break your heart. Now visualize yourself married to her and she's doing that thing. Do you still want to marry her? If the answer is yes, then marry her, because it *is* going to happen to you. And then you die. But in the meantime, life is great and worth spending lots of time making jokes about awful things. 

Have purpose.

Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis

The more you listen to the lyrics, the more you wonder how he got a chorus to agree the world truly needed to hear these words.

On the other hand, perhaps he believed his music was being evaluated for secret messages to the black underground.

The Soul Markets

Ever since I first watched 'thirtysomething' back when I was twenty something, I knew that I wanted to work as a small independent consultant. I knew that my life wouldn't be as full of the sometimes silly drama that infected that crowd of actors, so I figured that running a small business couldn't be so tough. I didn't realize that nice houses were so expensive. 

Today in the news, Proctor and Gamble announced a voluntary recall, due to Salmonella, of Iams and Eukanuba pet food. I may be wrong but once upon a time I recall that these were small independent companies with devoted followers. Gourmet dog food. Gourmet cat food. Sold in a little shop like the one I used to walk by on Seventh Avenue in fashionable Park Slope, Brooklyn. I can't tell you which is larger and more soulless between MJB, Folger's or Maxwell House, but to me they represent 'big coffee'. How long have we suffered those ignominious commercials with the burbling tune, or the smiling Juan Valdez or the best part of waking up? Many droning years. It would be sacrelege to imagine Caribou or Peets or other gourmet brands to come out of Juan Valdez' shilling hands. Yet that is what's happened to Iams and Eukanuba. 

I don't rightly care about the purity of gourmet brands so much as I wonder exactly how much it takes to sell out a product business to the conglomerate. OK there probably wasn't anybody whose last name was Eukanuba, but it was definitely somebody's child. They bucked the trend of ordinary dog food, and people swore by them. And while it's hard for someone my age to imagine, given the dogs I've known and loved, that anything need be better than Purina, there must have been something a bit more special about those brands. Obviously from a market perspective, P&G thought so, so they bought Mr. Eukanuba & Ms. Iams out.

The obvious backside of the sword is monoculture. It seems unlikely that the common practice in selling into a larger congomerate company which engages economies of scale retains distributed manufacturing and management. These are the things that are generally folded into the infrastructure of the larger, purchasing entity. In 1994 when Mr. E's product got sick, Ms. I's, also independent at the time, remained healthy. Now these two share manufacturing facilities and the whole doggy-kitty kaboodle is wallowing slackjawed. 

At some point in the evolution of business and the business of providing for the billions, we will master the proper distribution of power. We will learn the limits of building too many Babel towers. but what about the market of souls?

No doubt Mr. E and Ms. I are relaxing at their Dosh Point, aka (F*ck You Money), and have gone beyond caring about the fate of their brands beyond the promises made on the fateful day of dealing. Good for them. Or is it? Where should such idle rich go, and do their selling out always contribute to clumsy gigantism of the sort P&G is slowly wrestling with? More importantly, is the end game of selling to the giants inevitable? Can these giants become so compelling and efficient at scale that their allure becomes irresistable?

That's very hard to say. I think it depends upon the industry. What do you think? What do you see as the consequence of creating a class of intelligent and capable venditas who rob the world of their skills when they sell out to bigger entities?

Well, it just occurred to me that the reason that the proposed ridiculous high speed rail in California costs so much is because of the accumulated venditas in the American railroad business. There aint many people who know how to do it - those that do form an oligopoly. Elon Musk reveals what real engineers can do.

Related articles

P&G recalls select Iams and Eukanuba dry dog and cat food due to salmonella risk

Racism Uber Alles

It is generally and falsely assumed that anything that makes black folks happy stands as evidence of a good America. Which is to say specifically that there is a miscalculation in the judgment that the suppression of racism surpasses all other moral concerns relating to black Americans. Since it is assumed (again falsely) that black cultural influence has always been suppressed because of racism, that any increase in black cultural influence is therefore evidence of the remission or defeat of racism. Since hiphop is everywhere it must be a good thing - and this goes without regard to the moral content of hiphop or the moral character of black hiphop artists, or black politicians, or black athletes, or black anything.

In this regard black success becomes an end in and of itself, the (false) presumption being that America's racism is so violent and evil that any success of any black American is worth any cost. And it is this fetish that the total value of any black American must necessarily be tied to the question of the elimination of racism that doubly binds the standing of any black American with race in our society.

This is an unquestioned assumption of both the group solipsism of the Talented Tenth and the white liberal Left.

--

I think this is a neat distillation. 

Vision Circle Summit

A while back, several folks and I started a group blog called Vision Circle. I think we did a pretty good job handling a number of issues we felt were of weight and moment for black politics and culture. We retired the blog after several years, but it still exists with all of its comments, here within the Cobb family of blogs hosted by our good friends at Typepad.com. 

A couple months ago, Spence contacted me to ask if I've heard anything from the legendary Prometheus6. I had not. Rumors were that he was in poor health. His blog was dark. Well we know he's alive and may very well be well. But he's not blogging any longer. Neither is LaShawn Barber. I haven't heard from George Kelly in a while.

So maybe we should have a Vision Circle Summit. And I'm thinking that for a couple weeks, until we are all bloviated out, we should talk about the past, present and future. Maybe make a few predictions, exchange ideas, give personal and professional updates, shoot the shit and basically make it into the black online Davos. Bet we could make some ducats and some impressions.

So here is a list of people I think would make for a healthy mix of some of the most notable black bloggers I've ever met. Who do you think should be on? What should we talk about? (And I'm not trying to load up the list with people I know, just the people who most impressed me... well I got to know most of them)

• Earl Dunovant - Prometheus Six
• George Kelly - Negrophile
• Lester K. Spence - Vision Circle, Blacksmythe
• Jimi Izrael - NPR
• Kevin Ross - The Kevin Ross Show
• Ed Brown - Vision Circle
• Del Gines - Adequate Defense
• Shay Riley - Booker Rising
• Oliver Willis - Oliver Willis
• Craig Nulan - Vision Circle, Subrealism
• EC Hopkins
• LaShawn Barber

I don't think you can say a whole lot about the black blogosphere without having consulted this group of individuals. I'm certainly out of date and I will amend this list to include people I forgot. So please don't get all wanky on me. Do you think it's a good idea as a media event? If you're on this list, please weigh in. If you're not on the list but have access to people on the list who may not drop by here on the regular, let 'em know. I'm going to try to pub this up myself and see what kind of traction I get. 

Downside Blog Update

The Downside Blog is going down. Everything there will be subsumed and reposted here under Security & Paranoia. As Col. Jessup might say, I don't have the time nor the inclination. It was nice to be instalaunched there once, but the blog defies my aim towards consolidation. 

Here is the full content of the blog.

Genki Desu

I just checked this place for the spelling. Actually, Maiko taught me in 1987, back when I was reading Otomo's Akira for the first time.

The Moto Project

Doc gave me a Honda for my birthday. My plan is to take this gift horse and restore and customize it, at some risk to my bones and dollars. Then again, what would you pay for a very cool motorcycle? Right, so I pay all of that into making it snappy after which I would be rather delicate in riding it. That's the theory anyway. 

I've been thinking a lot lately about replacing my future horse fantasies with motorcycle adventures. I have always wanted to retrace the path of the Lewis & Clark expedition by horse - or at least one week of it with my family. However that will probably have to wait until we can all afford to pay for our own rental, by which time I'll probably be too old and cranky to enjoy it much. But I've had a revolution of my outdoor expectations. Quite frankly, although Pops still likes to rough it up at Big Bear, I have rather tired of the fun of camping. I've seen the wilderness, and there's nothing there but discomfort, and the days are long passed since I sought to prove something through trials of endurance. But fresh air and solitude, remoteness and freedom from civilization with a big gear kit. I can appreciate that. Day trips. Yeah.

All that has to take place on a different breed of bike. This one you see here, the Honda 919 is a sport bike. And it's really just my style, interestingly enough. I used to ride a hot little Suzuki back in the day, shart bars, Yoshi pipe, tuned Mikunis. To scrape the pegs on that badboy took more balls than brains, and quite frankly I didn't have enough of either. So since I rode hard enough to scare myself, I guess you can say I rode hard. The 919 on the other hand is such a superior machine, it seems to make effortless what I half killed myself doing in 1980. And this one's 11 years old. It's everything anyone would want who is not determined to go to the track, and the tracks are (Willow Springs, Buttonwillow) way too far to ride out to on the kind of super sport crotch rockets with no personality that they crank out of the factories nowadays.

So in my future, perhaps, is an adventure bike. Doc should be getting his any day now. Some day we'll ride to Sturgis or one of the towns in the area. That should be the start of a new chapter. Meanwhile, I'll get the Black Hornet up to code, get my cert and do some sport cruising on the weekends. 

 

Living Like A Rich Man

I just contributed a few dollars to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund. As you may know, Lavabit was one of the last secure email services anywhere that the common man could use. As it turned out, Snowden used them and so they ended up on some national security shitlist. I quote the owner:

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on--the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

It turns out that I am among one of the hundreds of thousands of people who trusted Lavabit and its owner, and as flaky as any individual can be, it's within my ordinary powers of perception to tell if I can trust them or not. In other words, it's easier for me to trust a person than an institution - institutions are pretty good at camoflaging their failure. Humans who fail are easier to spot. And sometimes, they're completely honest about it, as we are fortunate to see in the case of Ladar Levison. 

Now, like a rich man, I recognize that through the greed and idiocy of others, I have a lot to lose. So I'm starting to overthink which people I should trust. I'm starting to tell those people about ways to get out of this deilemma. I starting to ask those people what they know. It's all getting chummy and clubby and less and less public - those people we can afford to have in our confidence. I am determined to have my way because I trust myself and my associates more than I trust those sworn to uphold ridiculous regulations. And if I have to hide away from the public in order to get my way, that's how it may have to be. That's what it's like to live when you recognize that entropy is a very big enemy. I'm feeling fragile.

So I think the safest place to be is in the woods, on my private property, with my closest friends, my guns and nothing electronic. Hmm.

Obama's Weakness Costs You Your Civil Liberties

It suddenly occured to me why the NSA and others in the security apparatus are getting away with murder. It's because they are doing what they do, unobstructed and unled. I didn't invent the phrase but I need to put it into Cobb's Rules: People don't have weaknesses, they just overuse their strengths. Well it's more appropriate to say that people have blindsides, and they tend to fight in one direction. It should be plain to see by anyone that Mr. Obama is blind when it comes to intelligence services and spycraft. 

What we know is that the President is obsessed with the international perception of America as a military bully, which is why he has been moving as quickly as humanly possible to drain the world's battlefields of American soldiers. But he also has to maintain his image as the leader of the Free World. Contrast that with someone who pursues an unabashed American geopolitical strategy and agenda. So Obama must *do something* and as his drone strikes and victories at Natanz and Abbotabad make clear, he'd rather do something covert. In this way Obama replicates the worst aspects of the Reagan and Carter years, having a large and capable military that fought the last war and now sits on their thumbs. In the meantime, spooks, spies, wiretappers and covert operators are in full force in an attempt to dox, blackmail and assassinate our way towards security. It's not going to work.

In fact, I believe I see the unintended consequences  of an image maintenance policy at the White House which supercedes a well-balanced national security policy. That is a set of intelligence agencies in the US government that are getting rubber stamps from a leader they don't respect. In other words, I believe there isn't a coherent direction coming from the top down, but that there is a patchy management of a million wishes coming from the agencies up. 

Who is the strong hand showing continuity from this cast of characters?

 

Kerry is clearly in place because of Clinton is gone. You can be certain that the history of the Obama administration is now undergoing a strategic rewrite in the minds of the Clintons - a deadly force to reckon with. The 3am phone call has happened. Rice, McDonough, Blinken and Holder are all a political choir to back up the President. Without him, they are non-entities. Hegel is a political creature, and none of these people impress me as those of the calibre of Richard Holbrooke. Leon Panetta bounced from DCI to SecDef after two years and then just got bounced out. Clapper is clearly the career man here, as in Brennan. These are the guys who are not political trapeze artists. A nod goes to Dempsey, but how does the Secretary of Defense end up in a Senator's pocket? This looks to be a National Security Council that serves the whim of the President and the wants of the Intelligence Community, none of whom any of us can figure to have much respect for the hands that feed them. So I think they have run amok as if they actually were the last line of defense America has. Not enough generals here, I think.

The more I think (these anti-fragile days) about the number of systems in place and the ability and willingness for this small crowd of actors to alter the pace and direction of their use the more clear it becomes that Snowden's leak is more substantive than the initiative of the President in determining the future of how this unleashed beast works. 

We already know that Obama comes from the kind of Chicago politics that can be deadly to American citizens, and that he's willing to execute them as terrorists without due process despite not having what I consider (without much review) a proper domestic terror court. More clearly i should say that when I proposed a domestic counter-terrorist court rather than the abuse of an open court, I expected more disclosure than what the FISA court is providing, and the movement of NSA and other agencies towards domestic suspicionless surveillance is a gross overstep which defies the public's confidence in what the FISA court might have been.

The bottom line is that the programs are already in place, and they are the way Obama likes them, secret. He is just the sort who would capitalize on secret advantages and powers which play to his strengths as a campaigny politician. And as we saw with his ACA, he will break arms to make Congress whistle his tune. Obama does not have the strength to roll back NSA's programs, just as he would continue to support TSA despite their security theater, buffonery and affront to American air travelers. This is just another pothole in Obama's second term. He'll try to make us get over it, because the alternative must come with some ugly admissions. He doesn't have enough people left to throw under the bus, and it's a long way to 2016.

And Walmart is still out of bullets.

Related articles

Obama Backs Reforms To FISA Court, NSA Programs

Gauss Gun

The New Transgressive Fungibles

About 18 years ago, Charles Isbell came up with a theory about why people who can't deal with black individuals ask about *your* opinion about the same list of black people. I wrote about it here:

http://www.mdcbowen.org/p2/rm/debunk/fungibles.htm

But over the past ten years or so, this stupidity has been replicated by a rear guard of black race men, and aped in the general population. What's different is that this time it's about criminals, reprobates, ne'er do wells and knuckleheads. The formula is the same. I give you a name, and you tell me if you respect or disrespect said person, and then I make a judgment about your blackness based upon your answer.

Here are, as best I can think up at the moment the new bad boys. And I might as well go back in time a bit, because some of those still creep up.

Trayvon Martin
Trayvon Martin is the new king of the NTFs because he 'represents' young 'at-risk' black males. Notice how 'males' has been used, like zoo specimens. Anyway, the politically correct answer is that you should believe that what happened to him could happen to anybody, because his situation is just like anybody's (appropriately young and black and male)

You know what? It gives me a headache just repeating the awful logic of these identity politics. I'll just settle for the names. You know who they are. And of course I know who they are because I probably had to write about this crap before.

• Shaquanda Cotton
• Michael Vick
• Sylvester Johnson
• Sean Bell
• Stanley Tookie Williams
• Mumia Abu Jamal
• The Jena Six
• Devin Brown
• Stanley Miller

So I carefully picked out these stories and all of them have their nuance, and in the past 90 minutes of doing that, I've calmed down a bit. There isn't much to say these days as I'm much more disengaged from the thrash of political news. But there remains that simple connection - some people have decided that it is there business to stay put, even when they know they're in a bad place. OK... this is another old argument, let me give it to you this way.

The Great Migration.

If you live in a state that was a slave state, a state that lost the Civil War and you complain about racism, then you are really embracing the culture of race and racism. The same thing goes for economics and the ghetto. Of course there are no jobs in the ghetto, that's why they call it the ghetto. Any man's first responsibility is to his family, and a man who knowingly lives in a poison environment who cannot remove his children from that environment is a failure as a man. It America, the threshold is fairly low for getting out of Dodge. So get out.

 

Suckered Away

Here at Cobb, I have discovered that I am at war with conventional wisdom. Why? Because conventional wisdom is so easy to come by. All you do is listen to NPR, read the Washington Post, watch Fox News and subscribe to a couple magazines. All the stories are connected and all the pundits read each other's work. Getting the conventional wisdom is a no-brainer. It's what we intelligent people do with our spare brain cells, because we have so many of them since we're all underemployed, right? Well, I'm less underemployed than ever so I have less time with my precious few brain cells. That is why I blog a whole lot less than I used to, I follow news less and less every year, and I become more and more comfortable reading old historical stuff that almost nobody reads any longer, like George Orwell's *other* books. Yeah, right now I'm in the middle of The Road to Wigan Pier. What an eye opener. More on that later. Right now, I'd like to rip up the cliche - "If it would help just one person, I'd.."

I'm not really against the American middle class. I happen to believe this axiom, and somehow it should become one of Cobb's Rules. But basically it goes like this syllogistically. What is the purpose of public education in a democracy? Moreover why should we have it at all, and how should we judge its effectiveness? It's actually rather simple. The common man should be educated to rule in a democracy. That is to say, a public education should be good enough to train the leaders of society. Or another way of saying it is that "If you go to public school, you can be President" should not sound ironic in any way. So we know that our system is broke. And it is that brokeness that makes me focus on the American middle class and its conventional wisdom. 

Now some people say that critical thinking means question everything. But it's funny how Orwell reminds me that the same thing is true today as was true in 1937 - the masses of people who are supposedly better off with a socialist program are not intellectual socialists at all - they completely ignore the principles of 'thesis, antithesis and synthesis'. So it's more about hating the other guys than putting together a solution. No surprise there. More conventional thinking.

So now I get to the title of this with the interesting note that the other day I got an Amber Alert on my iPhone. Did you? If you live in California, you probably did. Why? Because the government mandated that their new texting version of the Emergency Broadcast System was embedded into the technology (that you don't understand) in your iPhone. 

Cobb readers know I rail on about scientism, basically the religious belief in science. You know. The people who avoid cholesterol like the plague, but couldn't identify it with a microscope. The people who complain about Americans lagging in math scores but couldn't name one practical application of linear algebra. The people who say other people are anti-science but can't name one successful application of embryonic stem cells and haven't followed up on 'the science' since the election of The One. I could go on about this, but you understand, hopefully. 

This skepticism of mine is tightly tied to my undying support of the common man. Yes I am an elitist, or more properly a formalist (formalism only becomes elitism when there are relatively fewer and fewer people left who know how things actually work, knowleged gained by formal education) not that I have any problem whatsoever with tinkering, hacking and experimentation. And so I hate the fact that automobilies have become too complex for people to fix themselves. That computing devices are becoming more opaque. That shoes can no longer be repaired, nor clothing nor houses. We seem to be riding a technological wave of opaquely obsolescent product, and that not only accellerates a wasteful consumerism, but it poisons what's good about *any* consumerism. I want the common man to be able to buy a $550 suit in 1993 and have it still be useful and fashionable in 2003, and cooly retro this summer. I actually have some $200 wingtip shoes that fit that description except they're not even retro. A wingtip is a wingtip, and mine have been repaired three times. Same with watches, cars, refrigerators. These are all mature technologies. Make a repairable beast version that lasts 20 years. Sell it to the common man, so that he can learn in time to fix it himself. That's respect. Anything else is disrespect.

Disrespect is what we get all the time in the consuming mainstream. Why? Because we are suckers to fashion and that's what we deserve. 

So. Don't be surprised if someone takes you at your conventionally wise word and starts taking your conventional altruism for granted. If you could help just one little girl from being abducted, would you help? Why sure I would, you say. OK, so now we have implanted this chip in your cell phone that allows us to broadcast Amber alerts. If you could help us capture just one more terrorist, would you help? Why sure I ould, you say. OK, so now we have figured out how to read all the email in the world that allows us to find the bastards. If you could add just 3 more years to your own miserable life, would you help? Why sure I would, you say. OK blam. Sugar is illegal, because we have proved it's bad for you (on average), scientifically. 

Did I say a public education should be sufficient to train the leaders of society? If everyone actually gets such an education, then the leadership is more like a voluntary organization. But our governments are a bit far off that mark, neh? Our feel for society is slipping and millions are turning over their autonomy religiously, and the actual leaders are pimping fake science to justify their overlordship. Meanwhile the conventional wisdom is struggling to keep up, which is too bad, because conventional wisdom could be a very good thing, if it were wise enough. Instead, I'm stuck doing battle with the sort that doesn't perceive that which becomes obvious to me, that we are being suckered away from self-service. 

Yep. That's a phrase that should have legs. Suckered away from self-service. 

Chip Yates

Spite for the Baby Boom

For the longest time, I looked at America as a nation unfit for the glory, wealth and power bestowed upon it for its victory in WW2. I had this idea of America as a kind of Bonnie & Clyde era country, with flivvers and six guns, sharecroppers and buffoons in handlebar moustaches thrust upon the world stage before its time. If you've played the campaign of Red Dead Redemption, that's a good rendition of that view. There might have been a lot of sophistication in the world that built the Woolworth Building in New York City, but then again, what would anyone buy of substance from Woolworth's? Probably nothing worthy of a world power. And so that unsophisticated nation of the early 20th century tried to apply all of its formulaes for success to the world, and it always seemed to be a clunky affair.

When I think about Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong singing and playing into those newfangled springy microphones, I look forward a few years to their color pictures. And I see the romantic beginnings of Post War America. When I think of the Three Stooges and Hope & Crosby, I think of the millions of American men who would be drastically affected by WW2. Not very bright men, but men with patriotic courage and faith, with grit and determination over a narrow range of endeavors. Men who make for good soldiering, given the proper equipment. And those men came out victorious behind Monty, Ike and Bradley, despite never having to go to Russia. And we pulled it off, and the world breathed a sigh - Allies triumphant. And those men came home, created a Baby Boom and went to college on the GI bill, moved to brand new suburbs and started driving brand new Cadillacs. In the 1950s we invented a brand new American Way. 1953 was worlds apart from 1933. 

It's very hard to argue with the winners, but children always find a way. If Dad was silent and demanding, maybe he was trying to raise you in a way that didn't require him going back in his mind to the days of brandishing a bayonet in the Ardennes. 'Because I said so', makes sense in a world of military orders, but must have looked very strange to causeless rebels in the new suburbia. Maybe we should rename the Baby Boom to The Children of PTSD. 

I was born in 1961, on the cusp of something called Generation X. I belong to both worlds, the world of the Boom and the world of the X. My father was a Marine, but he never served in combat. So I knew how 'Because I said so' worked. But I also knew how people who lived through 1969 figured that the end of the world was near and how what transpired before their births was considered unacceptable. I watched the kids older than me reject it all, telling me there was nothing worth respecting in the polluted, racist, push-button, nuclear world we would inherit. I too felt the urge to get out of the American city and go hug a tree, or smoke one. 

Eventually, however, I came to love math, science, engineering and mutant superheroes. And there was something precious to me about the fact that my grandfather worked at Yale University and recited from Ovid. I found a world worth discovering, protecting, honoring which wasn't all about rejecting everything in America and in my parents generation. I became distinctly aware of the difference between my future and the future predicted by the Counterculture. I was, in that way, suspect of the Baby Boom.

It's important to note that I also recognized the duality of the Boomers who were pefectly capable of aping their parents' dignity and resolve, manners and standards. Richard Feynman may have been the only genuine man of those years. Everybody else dressed up in grey flannel suits at work and listened to Steppenwolf at home. It was an impenetrable two-faced world. When 1992 rolled around I looked at Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown and it looked as if it was inevitable that the Boomers would finally wrest power from their Cold War parents. But both of those men exemplified quite perfectly what made me queasy about the Boomers. They wore suits. They loved Rock & Roll. They were lawyers who smoked weed. They were longhairs who could 'act presidential'. They danced the dance required of them, and I think ultimately they didn't care about anything but the expedience that finally got them more power than their shell shocked parents.

But I understand.

Generation X remade America through the computer revolution. We didn't put the culture on hold to go smash fascism in Europe. We figured out ways to actually get new functional ideas into people's heads improving upon what they necessarily did. The revolution was actually an evolution of process. For me and my X colleagues, we had to rethink what existed, rationalize it and find a way to fit it into our new machines. We did not have to drop out of society and undo Western Civilization in our heads, spending seven years in Tibet, jail or Jonestown.  

I regret the loss of conformity to standards that has melted down over the years as the Boomers replaced the Cold Warriors. I regret the damage I see done to patriotic faith and courage for the sake of the Boomers' counterculture. I resent their attempts at rethinking what human beings are and their multicultural multisexual identity posturing. I am convinced that their struggle to undo and outdo their own parents has generated cynicism at an existential level of threat. I am also convinced that there are millions of parents like me, who have the potential to have undone that threat in one generation. I don't think they're evil, just stupid. And so I find it appropriate to cast them as they so often cast others, as victims of people who had to deal with the hardest reality of all - whom they rejected.  To all those 'guys' who say, "Don't call me Mr. Smith, call me Jack, Mr Smith is my father", I say hit the road Jack. 

I guess it's a little late for all this...but I'm ready to clear the decks. Now about that Medicare subscription benefit..

The last gasps of George Carlin exemplify how the Boomers, for whom he was a guiding countercultural light have failed to understand humanity. His contempt for pretty much everyone and everything outside of himself was palpable. I have more to say about Carlin, but that's for later. 

A Green River

I don't know how long it has been since I've been following the The Nutnfancy Project, but it's probably less than a year. Most likely in February of this year. I don't know. The long story goes something like this. About two or three years ago I was looking for a new aesthetic - some way to encapsulate what I knew that I was soon to be all about. I knew it before then, back when I got rid of the BMW thinking, but I was lost without a way of expressing this fully, and I didn't like the idea of making myself look beautiful. OK nevermind, the long story is boring. The bottom line is that my style is this kind of rugged utilitarian. A lot less on shirts and slacks, a lot more on shoes and jackets. All bling on the wrists reduced to fabrics and a concentration on the timepiece itself, and of course the aesthetic of the EDC. 

The king of EDC and of a number of other things is Nutnfancy. If you don't know him, look him up. He's in the T50 now. Not long ago, on his motorcycle trips, he stopped in a Utah town called Green River and met a man named Tim Vetere. Vetere is the sort of man that people forget exists, especially comfortable people who talk a lot about what's wrong with America, a game I really stopped playing a long time ago despite the fact that I still carry the scars. Vetere is a melon farmer. 

I'm not going to tell you why Tim Vetere is special. You'll have to see that for yourself. But I have to tell you that it kind of surprised me to see the follow-up that came back through the TNP because of Tim. It is full of the most egregious sentimental overflow you can imagine, the kind of mushy stuff I generally avoid like the plague. If you understand anything about my personality, then you know that I have worked to become something other than arrogant and yet there is some edge about me that must be maintained in order for me to go where I do, thoughtwise - if that means anything. And still, you also know that I do cry at proper movies. 

I'm not quite sure how to reconcile my reaction to Tim and the outpouring, because I value myself for the strategic and long view and my studied indifference to the up close and personal. If there is a utilitarian calculation in the value of ethics, then I might futher justify my distance. But I am not so sure of that these days, as I read more of John C. Wright's Apologetics and as I consider the simple deeds done by my own father. After all, I am aiming to perfect my soul, and I do that every day with people I meet every day. It is important to me that such work bears fruit. I don't know how it will work out. I'll study Cato and I'll study Seneca for reasons of humility. I wish to engage my world properly. 

Everything in my heart goes out to this demonstration of faith and courage, and I know it to be what sustains us all. And I suppose that if I'm having a breakthrough at this very moment, then it is because I am seeing in this small event precisely what I saw with regard to 'black leadership' after having read Gwaltney's Drylongso. There is no great need for leadership among the masses of people. There are sufficient righteous ones among them to survive. Motherwit is plentiful enough. Common sense doesn't need to be legislated. And so I need to configure that into the next of Cobb's Rules. As perfect is the enemy of good, legislation is the enemy of common sense & social responsibility. All we need to be is good, and social. No - ism required.

 

Society vs Cops & Courts from Michael David Cobb Bowen on Vimeo.

I think that if you put these two things together, you can begin to understand how I am skeptical of democracy, but in favor of democratic action. The appropriate response to the situation of the Veteres is accomplished through the private action of the Nutnfancy project. What is not needed is some bloviating politician, 'representing' the distress of people who lose their first born sons to motorcycle accidents regulating the motorcycle industry, or granting federal subsidies to the melon growers of America. Nor do you need to have a university study or market research done on which sorts of people respond positively to this kind of stress. You need, more than anything, the kind of messenger that Nutnfancy is himself.

What is not ironic in the least is that Nutn is the sort of person who would be ineffective in the bureaucracy that is the American Congress. He would be crushed. It is not a Parliament for the common man, but a Byzantine institution which lives in a thrash of self-amendment. I see this image of a man on the back of a motorcycle trying to balance a scale by adding something on each side every other moment. It never stops wobbling and it gets heavier and heavier.

Never doubt that America has the capacity to change the course of mighty rivers. It is often done in defiance of common sense. Most of the time, all we need is to get a drink, or to water our plants.

We can do for ourselves in society. We need politics less than we think.