Cobb

2013: A Year In Review

My brother asked me and my answer was that I don't think I know who I am writing for any longer. I mean it is satisfying that I get my 200 hits a day at Cobb, down from 600 a couple years ago down from 1200 a few years prior. If I suddenly got 2000 hits a day, maybe somebody in the comments would let me know something I don't. But I should be satisfied, and now I remember that I am, just writing the stuff that doesn't get written elsewhere - the stuff I wished someone would write for me. I'm doing what I think is proper writing and perhaps there are others out there like me.

But last night I got a bit of an itch. More on that later. For now, I'm writing about the year of a man. Me.

This is the year that I finally figured out what to do in my post-political world. The best revenge is living well, but ever since I got sick and tired of political debate I hadn't really found something more compelling. But I fell into the right groove this year with my martial education, which may come at the death of my writing career for the next decade. 

I have become a junior sheepdog and a Stoic. I no longer engage in much wishful thinking at all. I survive and let the upside take care of itself. And in that regard I am reinforcing what I know has been true about my rise to success which is that I have merely avoided as much foolishness as possible. I am not brilliant, but I do have a good memory and I always believe there is a better way. I live as much as possible with no regrets and make as few missteps in the maze as I can recall, recalling that I have a rather good recall. And when I cannot, at least I can read my own writing and blogging and most of my notes which report facts as well as I can parse them. My writing and reading have formed a cycle of virtue and decreased my appetite for reading a blatherous universe of things I've said better and with more detail than what I presume the average peasant consumes. Yet there is a bit of satisfaction I don't have given the enormous volume of bodewash presented to the credulous and superstitious minds of the millions. But there are still libraries and universities and university libraries. 

I'm folding my Men's Group. I like everyone I met, but I fear that I am just too odd for the lot. I don't understand why and am not really interested in determining why. It is part and parcel of my desire to be Stoic. How shall I put it? I am of no mind whatsoever to create an emergent need for myself, but I surely aim to be prepared for any emergency. And thus my value in society will be that whose company probably will not be sought outside of desparation, which while not delightful, is comforting. I don't know whose company I should seek, but I tried. Weird. I never quite know what to think about the fact that there is no Barney to my Fred and no Moose Lodge in sight. It's just a very strange predicament. Strange indeed. So. No more Men's Group. 

I did find a bar. I've been there about once a month. It was OK. It's still OK. I will return.

• New refrigerator
• New Couch
• New XBox
• Calesthenics - 1 each per day to 100 each situps, pushups, 4 count jumping jacks
• Tai Chi
• New Bike
• Integrate Cubegeek & Cobb
• Move static websites to Amazon
• Move Limbo to Evernote
• Mac Mini
• Start Men's Meetup in SouthBay
• Find a Bar
• 35 Year Reunion
• Finish First Draft of Borky's Beach
• Read Classics {Middlemarch, Don Quixote, Finnegan's Wake}

 

I got the refrigerator, and a motorcycle, and I did no calesthenics. I did a little Tai Chi and I will do some more. I don't care about digital integration so much no more. I got the Mac Mini and it was worth it. I bought a half dozen knives and my two favorites are missing. I spent a lot of time with people I used to know and I'm still very different. I never finished the first draft of Borky's Beach. Maybe I'll do some more writing this week while I'm still on vacation. Meh. No bike. That was more social. I'll do the solo gym.

Fatherhood has been a challenge this year. I'm in transition from Dad to Bank of Dad and also Dad & Dad Consulting LLP. I have had to break out the ledgers to keep track of what I'm spending on the fledglings who are growing up straight, but slo - o-o-w ly. I'm going to have to keep the castle a bit longer. Sheesh. I realize that if I had more money I would have spoiled them. Now I'm going to have to homeschool them - it's my own Finishing School, I guess. Because the world of young American adults is so chock full of insipid foolishness.. argh. Don't let me get started.

This has also been a good year financially.  My FICO is the best it has been in .. well since they invented FICO, and that's nice. I'm going to manage that even better next year. It gets easier. I did well in the market - my only regret is that I didn't buy four times as much Amazon as I did when I could have. 

I took care of my health, mostly. I'm better now than I was a year ago, not by a whole lot but, I feel good. 

What did I do in 2013 that was really different? I seriously thought about getting into motorcycling again. I read a lot of first person fiction. I finally got Cthulhu. I decided never again to buy cheap shoes. I got more belts because I lost an inch on my waist. I perfected my office. I read a lot more history. 

My coding is way better than a year ago. I have completely given up on Essbase and the Oracle stuff. I found the best text editor yet (Sublime Text). I overdosed on Amazon. I actually overdosed my brain and got used to working 10 hour days. I gave more consideration to Web stuff, eww. I decided not to leave the South Bay for meetups, because really there's nothing that great in Pasadena or Santa Monica. I decided to give in and just assume I'm hacked - although I am going to do more crypto this year coming. 

Basically life happened. Big deal. Sorry to bore you Future Self. 

On Guns: Every Adjective Except 'My'

I read something today about the collective protected state. 

If it is granted that the basis for any argument in favour of unrestricted possession of firearms has to depend on a discussion of the nature of the state, then it is problematical to hold that the right of individual citizens to possess firearms for the protection of the state in a state already duly protected is consistent. 

So who is protected and who is not?

I find it difficult to believe that any of your commenters so far have lived in a neighborhood in which gang members possess guns for periods of years. I often chuckle at the politics over Intifada crimes knowing there are fewer than 4000 deaths over a period of decades whereas here in Los Angeles County, there were about 16,000 murders between Crips and Bloods and Latino gangs during the 80s and early 90s. I can't tell you what it's like in the Third World, but I know people who were murdered by gang members and I know of murdering gang members, as does everyone in my neighborhood, 90016.

I live about 10 miles away now in a community that has had 2 murders in 17 years. Something very different goes on here with regard to the collective protected state. Let's just call that difference RaceWealth. There are those with it and those without it. Those without it can go unprotected for years, which is why some of my friends who happen to work for the law firm of the late Johnnie Cochran were very serious in their attempts to sue the government under equal protection clauses. It cannot be very difficult to see that there are communities in which personal defense is required because of a failure of equal protection by the state. You can deconstruct the Constitution all you like, as is your post-modern prerogative, but people who have had family and friends killed appeal to a different sort of logic - of the sort from which simple declarations stand the test of time, or sometimes rap songs that just happen to become national hits.

There is a simple principle, simple when it comes from a member of a denied community, that I would invoke. If there is a proper way for an individual to operate a gun, in defense of his own life, or the lives of his family in a forsaken community, why should that propriety be denied an individual of a forsaken community? Ultimately one's fortune and sacred honor is judged by third parties at some point in the future and the value of some lives is weighed against the value of others. In the gap between some mercenary or police service is the individual faced with the question of the value of his own life and that accorded to him by the collective authority. But it seems to me that if RaceWealth or some other cause can be such an ongoing disruption to a reasonable expectation of equal protection under the law, the individual is obligated to protect himself by any means necessary.

If there is a 'secular' argument, then it must transcend the context of the cult opposing the right of the individual to use deadly force. Let it be a universal argument so as not to confuse it with evangelical atheism. Ultimately we are talking about a martial education, something bourgeois Americans have foregone and thus lost any sense of. It is why those formally ordained in the ministries of the martial arts, ie Military personnel and Law Enforcement officers speak a different language than bloggers who use every adjective about guns except 'my'. And so it comes as no surprise that their third party proclamations come lacking that which would be common sense, ie the experience of living amongst and dealing with predatory humans.

Education about protecting one's own life is more important than education about the context of laws passed and theories about collective states and militias. I have no spiffy analogy to offer illustrating the foolishness - but look to your own martial education and re-evaluate your position.

Sign me, the dude in the bar whom you want on your side if and when a fight breaks out, long before you're out there explaining to the cops.

Games of Vigilance

In the metaphor of vigilance, there are three kinds of people in the world, sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. I am a sheepdog. I'm not a very good one, but I am a natural one. You see I was the oldest of five kids growing up in a roughneck neigbhorhood. We played vigilance games.

I've written about ghetto games before, and BB Britches, Open Chest and Rubber Donkey are the vigilance games.

BB Britches is a classic exercise in vigilance. It works simply like this. On any day at any time, somebody declares that BB Britches is On. Any word that starts with 'B', you have to say 'BB Britches' or else get fired on. The game would go on until whoever started it could get with a bunch of players and all mutually decided to quit. You can imagine what kind of confusion it causes when people didn't know the game was on, but generally it was only the stupid kids that didn't catch on.

Open Chest was simply more stupid and brutal. You walk around with your arms crossed across your chest. If you left your arms down, you get fired on. Simple, stupid, deadly.

Needless to say 'getting fired on' had it's own rules and regulations. But you would have to live in the hood to know that. Essentially, except during slapboxing (which we'll cover momentarily), 'getting fired on' meant specifically a punch to the chest. It had to be hard enough to make you go 'oof' but not hard enough to make you cry. Since none of us was older than 11 for these kinds of games, that was a broad enough range and we all understood our limits which were almost never breached. You don't hit someone in the stomach or in the ribs. You don't ever hit someone in the face. Hitting on the arm is for the b-players. When you get fired on well, it will make a deep resounding sound and 'cave in' your chest. You bend over, say 'Damn' or some such and rejoin playfully admitting your opponent's clean shot since all of these kids are your friends anyway.

Rubber Donkey was the game like BB Britches except that the letter 'D' was taboo. Now my best friend was a treacherous no-goodnik named Grant. Grant was a predator and was my best friend only *after* school. During school, I was not cool enough for Grant to acknowledge. Typical 10 year old stuff. So it was usually Grant who called the day to be a BB Britches day, and when he was feeling particularly feisty, he would combine Open Chest, BB Britches AND Rubber Donkey. Triple vigilance in your words and in your person. 

But that wasn't enough. Grant was not as good a reader as I, but he was as good in math. So we would also play Buzz. And we would also play Buzz Fizz. For you non-ghetto born / non-math geeks out there, Buzz is a counting game in which all multiples of 5 are replaced by the word Buzz. Similarly if you play Buzz Fizz, all multiples of five and seven are replaced by Fizz. 1 2 3 4 Buzz 6 Fizz 8 9 Buzz...

So we would, Grant and I, engage ourselves in all five vigilance games, and yes you did have to say 'Buzz BB Britches'. I could live in such meta for quite some time, even while enduring the blows waiting for my chances to strike back. But mostly I was vigilant.

--

To be a sheepdog in today's society requires an odd kind of vigilance, but I'm convinced it will be a useful discipline. Not because I am a grasshopper all about discipline as contrasted to a summer ant, but because I have known predators like Grant, who taught me how to play Poker, complete with the weekday rules. As in it's Wednesday and I have two pair, and two pair beats your full house on a Wednesday, bitch. 

Vigilance is difficult in today's society because we are so many millions and our social spheres are so varied. The zombie apocalypse is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. So my level of vigilance looks crazy -  I like knives and guns not only because they're beautiful tools, but because they are weapons. But the rules of society, somewhat distinct from the law of the land, but ever-shifting often dictates that sheepdoggery is perverse. I'll let those who came up with the term speak to that, but we dogs are cousins to the wolf and nip at the heels of sheep to get them in line. It can't be pleasant for those who don't know or care about the difference, knowing only what they feel in their absense of vigilance. 

I think the most important thing about sheepdoggery is the human quality I must bring to it. So many of us live in Idiot-Proof Cities that we tend to trust anonymous institutions rather than anonymous persons. People talk about the good of the common man and what's best for humanity yet don't see the contradiction in empowerment of institutions.

Captain Lewis, Captain Clark

I'm reading the old classic by Ambrose, Undaunted Courage. There are several striking aspects to the story.

One of the first things I did to day was play Time Machine with Capt. Merriweather Lewis. He materialized in the passenger seat of my Toyota as I was northbound on Inglewood Avenue headed to the 405 and so I had to explain to him what had taken place in the past 200 years. He kept pointing out things that I hadn't noticed, and had me trying to explain grafitti. Instead I told him about aircraft. He was impressed.

It's difficult for me to read Ambrose without hearing his revisionist critics take him to task for not talking enough about York, the African and Sacagewea and her baby, the Shoshones. But they don't represent. In fact, that's a good excuse for everything that Progressives hurl. They don't represent just because you say they do. Tangentially, I have in-laws in Monroe LA who actually did pick cotton. So nobody in media represents on that Duck Dynasty thing. 

Nevertheless, I am impressed with the extent to which national identity and the want for feeling of national identity is interposed into the relationships beween the Captains and the various tribes they encounter north and west of the Mandan Villages. The ability for Lewis to say that he speaks for the President without actually being responsible of actually speaking for the President and of the intentions of the US is rather remarkable. In one way, L&C understand very well, as did the ruler of France, that millions would come to America in search of cheap land and that there was no way to stop them. With that foreknowledge, what indeed could be promised with any certainty. It's very much like the promise of the Internet when people were still talking about the Information Superhighway and the Digital Divide a short 15 years ago. It's a whole new world and none of the specific promises matter, or can be remembered. What force do the pioneers have, ultimately? Not much.

The second thing that I find rather astonishing is how my understanding of economics makes it so easy to reconcile the trades made by the expidition and various tribes. $6 worth of manufactured goods like steel knives and pants and coats could hardly be called a fair trade for a good horse. But how else could you get manufactured goods way up the Missouri? 

So far the most astonishing thing is how poorly they understood disease and the human body, yet how far they pushed themselves in their journey. The thought of rowing every day all day for weeks and months on end in mindbending considering what diseases they had and what primitive treatments were doled out. Everybody had syphillus and took mercury for it! Amazing. 

The Missouri Breaks and other such remote areas still remain empty territory; territory that I find increasingly interesting. And yet these men went there when there were no roads, negotiating with what amounted to gangs along the way. While nothing done by L&C compares with the incredible trek of Shackleton, there is something quite clearly monumental about the effort the expidition made.

 

Obligatory Seriousness on.. Duck!

I'm on vacation today so I have too much time on my hands so I've been pulled into the hot mess that is the controversy over Phil Robertson. So here's the most enlightened thing I can say:

If you believe others to be inferior and you are an arrogant bastard, then what you need is a constant stream of ideologically pure rhetoric. You require a strict orthodox line of reasoning to keep you from engaging in predatory behavior. You so distrust your instinct, intuition and background that you must keep your mind free of the contradictions that reality presents. 

This can be by my reckoning the only rationale for preserving the principle which we understand to be behind the slapdash yet pervasive application of Political Correctness. People must honestly believe that being wrong is never worth it and so they slather themselves with righteousness. Maybe this is the result of the multiple-choice education so many people have received in our country. The shallow unsubtlety of it all is staggering. To have a view of humanity that is so frightful that it must tolerate the punishment of free speech is a condition of arrogance incompatible with sanity. 

I want not to be upset over this. And I don't doubt the spirit of the many, nor do I doubt that wisdom, while not prevailing, is still in healthy supply. But right now I am actually weeping for my country. And when I am finished weeping, I'll write another essay. 

In the meantime, I quote Camille Paglia via some other website.

Paglia, a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, explained that the country has become too politically correct.

“To express yourself in a magazine in an interview — this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades,” she said. “This is the whole legacy of free speech 1960s that have been lost by my own party.”

She also told Ingraham that while she's an atheist, she respects religion and has become frustrated by the intolerance shown by modern gay activists who seek to silence any opposition.

“I think that this intolerance by gay activists toward the full spectrum of human beliefs is a sign of immaturity, juvenility,” she said. “This is not the mark of a true intellectual life. This is why there is no cultural life now in the U.S. Why nothing is of interest coming from the major media in terms of cultural criticism. Why the graduates of the Ivy League with their A, A, A+ grades are complete cultural illiterates, etc. is because they are not being educated in any way to give respect to opposing view points.”

Paglia told Ingraham that feminism and the gay movement has been taken over by fanatics "who have displaced the religious beliefs of their parents into a political movement.”

(sigh). It's not as if I didn't know this. But they won't go away. In the meantime, I'm going to make sure my kids read Allen Bloom and E.D. Hirsch. 

Because Literacy

The last time I checked, the linguists were pretty certain that there's no such thing as 'patois'. I seem to recall a consensus that all the accents and dialects are valid. I'm not begging, I'm just differing.

I'm a champion of the concept of modernity which says that all men are created equal - that what we know, even down to our natural ability to speak, can determine who we are in society. What we know. Identity can be tricky of course; you can decide that who you are has nothing to do with what you know, but what you look like, or what you feel like or where you are or who you know or what you hope. All those are tangents off modernity, and we properly call them post-modern. The modern man is what he knows and he comports himself so.

The automobile is an example of an item created in the modern world for the modern man. It is transportation. What matters is that you know how to drive it. A post-modern automobile might be endowed with an artificial intelligence to ask who you know. If you cannot prove that you know the right people, the car won't start. The same is the case, more or less, with the pre-modern horse. Beggers were not allowed to ride, and could be challenged by nobles and knights. But a modern automobile made in Germany doesn't care that you are anything other than a driver. That is because the ideal of modernity rules the automobile industry in Germany and everywhere else. They want to sell as many automobiles as possible to modern person. If you live in a tribe in Borneo, there is not a car marketed to you or your values or suitable to your way of life. 

I go into this somewhat silly level of detail because I am reminded on the daily that many people don't quite respect the idea of modernity. There are obvious multicultural excesses, obsessions with gender definitions, sexual preferences, ethnic proclivities and religious affliations that dominate the humanities in America now. I am brought to mind, however, of the broader picture which was underscored to me the other day via a Gapminder 'ignorance' quiz.

It turns out that right now the global life expectancy is 70 years. The global literacy rate is 80%. Both of these phenomena are, according to the authors, unprecedented in human history. I believe them. I've finally answered for myself what to do for 20 years after the age of 60, but I suspect that most people have not. It's interesting that I intend, for many of those years, to continue writing books and software.

I choose to count myself amongst the worlds most literate. I cannot prove it at the moment, but my fluency in computer languages and in English counts for quite a lot in my estimation. There is no grammarian quite as strict as a compiler and chunking that sort of information for a living makes me quite the editor. Having read > 500 books is not inconsequential either. But the content and quality of those books and software and data are important too. 

What will .8 * 7.131 billion literate people going to want to read? If we hadn't invented the Internet that would have been a quite serious logistical problem, even for modern German automobiles. Right now, wags are telling us that it's porno, the most compelling subject of our contemporary media. I would believe that as well. But Aldous Huxley reminds us that an intellectual is someone who has discovered something more interesting than sex. This is one reason why I take a dim view of multiculturalism's epistemological blow jobs which literally inflate the value of gender and sexual preference. Race, ethnicity, regionalism and religion don't offer much sophistication over the prior qualities, but at least they are associated with more sophiticated and higher order discriminations and bigotry. The multiculturalists have, in more recent years, progressed towards more and more crippling features in their press for equalities. We shall soon entertain more reasons why autistics should follow the pioneering spirit of Temple Grandin. We shall soon forget Geroge Washington find more and more holidays for even more fractional minorities, until such time, one imgines, that Mercedes does indeed make a limited run special edition sedan for the gay autistic albino outcast from Irian Jaya. Between now and then, we've got to get the poor blighter some reading material.

One of the more interesting phenomenon I recognize is the number of times some small news outfit mistakes a story from The Onion, a parody news organization, for a real story. The decline of journalism and American media is old news, and it calculates well from my point of view that this kind of error takes place all the time all over the world in every language. Dissonance and Ignorance are the two great generators of errors of cognition and understanding. Both are cured by intellectuality, by study, by the independent reasoning and discovery that attends serious reading and writing. Pardon me for not saying 'education', a term that bears too much lightweight freight as of late. How can it be avoided if not by referencing intellectual authority? It cannot. Well, it cannot in a modern world. In a primative world, intellectual authority is always provincial, accented, particular, tribal. And of course the mulitculturalists would have most of us look no further than our pudenda for the authority of our agenda.

But even beyond that are the hopeless games and charades played for no good reason in the kindergartens of literacy. Not to mention sheer dishonesty and fraud. If I remember correctly, the most crucial reason for public education is to enable self-rule. But if that takes place in an environment that will not make qualitative discriminations, or will not assert modernity, then such projects are doomed to failure. When the laws of the land are written with an arcane artificial intelligence that asks who you know, the car of civilization won't start for the common man. Likewise of the common man speaks an impenetrable patois legitimized by cultural relativists, no subtantial populations can benefit (without the interventions of the Gay Autistic Albino Societies of Greater Borneo). Also disabling self-rule. The business of protecting liberty is not for the weak-minded or the lollygagging spirit. It is the central conflict of humanity.  

So since I have last looked, I would hope that there may have arisen some controversy about the absence of patois among linguists. When everyone has their own books, reprinted to match their own preferences - well there's the real filter bubble problem. There becomes no world and exchange becomes impossible. What allows computers to instantly communicate across the globe is the discipline of standards, which are so exacting that dumb machines perform them regularly without error. Literacy requires standards as well. There must be, I find myself having to assert to my own chagrin, better and worse.  Hope is not a strategy, so despite my intentions that linguists do the right thing, I must do some work of my own. Maybe an essay or two. Maybe publish it on the Internet. 

Overthinking Firearms Again

I've pretty much decided that I'd rather shoot than ride. As much as I love my birthday gift of the Honda 919, and I have to say it's probably my best birthday gift ever, I'm going to put it on ice for the time being. That is unless there's a windfall in the next 6-9 months, I probably won't restore it and instead concentrate on firearms instead.

Reason Number One: Risk Management. 
It probably doesn't make perfect sense to everyone, but Taleb has given up motorcycles, because his understanding of risk is that you shouldn't put yourself in the track of an oncoming train, no matter how fast your legs are. I already know somebody who died in a motorcycle wreck and I've wreck several times myself. Why bother?

Reason Number Two: Friends.
The fact of the matter is that I have 2 + 3 friends who ride. Two in the intimate circle and three in the close circle. But as for people who shoot, I have more. So as an activity to do with friends, I'll have more shooters than riders. 

Reason Number Three: Self
The bike is all about me and my fun. Outside of that, there is no practical use for the moto. The guns, on the other hand, are more practical. If you have to ask how or why, don't worry your sheepy little head about it. OK, there's the self-righteousness of my 2A exercise. But quite frankly, I already have a modicum of motorcycle skill and I have very little shooting skill. How am I going to live with myself if I don't expand?

And so with that, I am closing the chapter on the 919, which was spontaneous to begin with. 

Now that I've gotten a taste for mastering the fundamentals of pistolry, I have to make a choice of instruments. The more I shoot, the more informed I become about how and what I want to shoot. I find 22 to be brain-dead simple, and I'm actually very pleased with the 1911 conversion that I played with. But in all practicality, what I'm going to end up using in the clutch is what I want to be most experienced with on the range. Yeah I know ammo is expensive. So are golf balls. 

Everybody says that a Glock 21 is the most battle hardened bullet pusher for the 45 Auto. I'm going to take them at their word. Generally speaking, I like the idea of taking an odd angle, of not wallowing in with the crowd. But when it comes to reliability and capability with shooting, I'm going to think mainstream. That said, I have only slightly above zero felt *need* for home defense and that sort of reliability, and a lot of perceived need for a high quality machine I feel like I'll never need to replace. In this regard, I intend to be a prosumer from the gate. If the learning curve is steeper, then I'm just going to have to climb. That said, I have several other options that are appealing.

I really like the aesthetics of the HK USP, and I love the idea of the ruggedness of the HK Mark 23. So right now those two are at the top of my list. The Sig 1911 is the gun I've shot the most so far, and I like it, but Sig is no longer selling firearms in California due to legal restraints they don't like. It's a beautiful piece of machinery and I like the fat safety and the feel of the whole thing. 

I don't like the feel of the Glock. It's lightweight and yes that's probably a huge advantage for EDC, but I'm not going to carry every day until I move from California. Still, my prejudices aside, you cannot disregard the experience of so many Glock users. If I end up getting a compact, perhaps that will be the way to go. Then again, I think I'd much rather try a compact 9mm than a compact 45. 

Ogre

I met Bruce Sterling at UCLA somewhen about 1989. It was before I moved to New York and before the founding of the EFF. I had three distinct impressions. 

1. Dude was scary smart.

2. Dude was scary rebellious.

3. Dude looked way too young to know what he knew.

If I had finished up at USC as I planned, there was no question that I would have eventually fallen in with the dudes at the Swamp, the fairly well known geek hangout. I would have met a dungeonmaster. I would have been deeply into D&D. As it stood, I failed to make the connection. But since I had the audacity to write games in FORTRAN and found something fundamentally fascinating about bi-directional printing, then I would have been a lot more likely to trade the privilege of running USC's data centers for the sort of rebellious pose characterizing the name Bruce Sterling evokes. I liked him and I agreed with everything he said, but I think he had a lot of nerve to be poking his finger at those he did. Rich white boy. 

I didn't have time for that. I was working very hard for respectability in a society I didn't comprehend. I saw him as somebody throwing vases against the walls of his parents estate. Of course it didn't matter whether or not his parents had an estate, or how precise his aim. Destruction is destruction. I was a black man living every day life as a symbolic threat. He looked like Spritle Racer with acne. All he had to do was shut his mouth and he disappeared. I did not have that luxury in 1989.

Today I saw a picture of a box about the size of a carom table. Inside was a game called Ogre from a company named Steve Jackson Games. I read The Hacker Crackdown when I lived in Brooklyn two or three years after meeting Sterling. I thought of most cyber stuff about the way I thought of 'Lawnmower Man', severly lacking in aesthetic value with very little appeal outside of that which is given by a good crossword puzzle. I was one of those people who at once desired the distinction of belonging to Mensa or the Triple Nine and yet found the distinction worthless if not annoyingly alienating. I dug those like Feynman from a distance. I never had my own personal college professor. 

My friend Bryan Alexander digs ghosts and, well horror and scary stories. He's a college professor who lives in close proximity to nature and the understanding that what humans build, nature takes apart. He understands the moral dimension of destruction and failure and while he doesn't get all post-modern about it, he gets the deconstructional narrative of grand guinol. There's probably no better person on the planet to talk about the implications of the rise of Zombie Apocalypse stories in America. Bryan knows the literature, backwards and forwards.

I've begun to purposefully pay more attention to Bryan and he has been very kind in mentioning me by name over the past few weeks on Facebook. This is fortuitous because I have come around to the side of destruction, in the necessity of it. I've been knowing about Cthulhu for a long time, but I only recently decided to read what that fiction was all about. Somewhere between the fictional Mountains of Madness and the actual endurance of Shackleton is everything that human beings need to know at this moment in history. 

It was Bryan who took the picture of Ogre. As soon as I saw the logo of Steve Jackson Games, it took me back to the days in which the existential dilemma of being a young black urban sophisticate wrestling daily with call of cyber geekdom. I have been neither as both simultaneously, half-tracking through the woods of identity. Enough to be in it and called of it, distrusting both and unable to escape either. And in all that, no compelling need to *be* a rebel. Even now. Steve Jackson Games was persecuted by the US Secret Service. It said something profound about the imagination of the cyber and the warfare and secrets deeply implied in the strategic and tactical thinking of gamers, coders, warriors and spies. 

I am a console gamer. Skyrim is everything Dungeons and Dragons wanted to be, and in the imagination of those at the USC Swamp, I'm sure they inhabited the mind of the Dragonborn so many years ago. I can't say I feel jealous - I have had the ultimate dungeonmaster expressed as the world created by Bethesda for my XBox 360. And I stand in awesome anticipation of the next journey called Destiny, which is coming next September from the acknowledged master masters, the crafters of Master Chief, Bungie. There is the possibility that I will live in that world. There is the likelihood that in my dotage, I will remain in such worlds at nearly infinite stretches of imaginary time. I will experience all the destruction I might be able to handle and having it all realized, I will be ready to die.

I have raised a family. It's difficult for me to imagine Bruce Sterling married with children, but that may be so. Nevertheless, I don't entertain dreams of purpose dedicated to attacking the System, but of living in better worlds. Like Professor Farnsworth, I'm much more likely to become sick of the planet and go find a new one. I think of destruction as the thing that compels people to know reality, as the noose focuses the mind. But I am by nature a defender. I am the big brother without whose dependents I lack purpose. If nobody read Cobb, I wouldn't write it, much. I'd keep to myself, I imagine.

Adventure games are literature puzzles. Chess. Risk. D&D. I see these as things for people who don't actually know karate. Karate is stochastic and involves real risk. When you have to think about getting actually punched in the face, it's not so much fun to be a rebel. 

No conclusion. Just observations kicked off from a picture from a friend.

Obligatory Seriousness on Nelson Mandela

Nobody in America really knows or cares about South Africa. We all just have a sort of paternalistic affinity for a story we think ended well. And we have a dead symbol.

When I was a kid, my father used to tell me that one day, we black people would take over South Africa and get all of its gold and diamonds and we'd be so strong and powerful that white people all over the world would repsect and fear us. That idea stayed in my head, unaltered for so long that I found myself lying about it for no reason in high school. I told one of my prep schoolmates that I had been to Cape Town. I hadn't of course, but I had imagined myself there with a house overlooking the city. There's a lot of fantastic romance surrounding Nelson Mandela and South Africa. So all the foof around his death is familiar to me. 

I happen to be one of those oinks who had pictures on my bedroom wall of ANC propaganda. When I was in my late twenties and I read my first Noam Chomsky and Amnesty International, I decided to try to educate myself about something other than what went on here. I chose not only South Africa, continuing from collegiate shenanigans but Southern Africa, specifically Namibia. But that was oh so long ago. I tried to understand the world uranium trade and imagined myself living in Windhoek in that country, dominated by South Africa, as large as California on the other side of the planet. I remember paying specific attention to the Harare Accords and the UN Convention on Racism and actually spent a lot of time thinking about what foothold racism got in America because the Declaration of Independence, unlike the Harare Accords, didn't speak out explicitly on matters of racist offense. Before I wised up, my like of thought was this:

So how could we, in principle, create a document that exclaims loudly against racism, as the Declaration of Independence did against Monarchy. What goes into creating an Anti-Racist Manifesto? Incidentally, that is what brought me, the second time around to the Harare Accords. If I were a legal scholar, I might ask myself, comparatively speaking, which set of laws between that of the new South African Constitution, which includes significant language from the Harare Accords, and our own system and amendments is more completely anti-racist. I would actually include the new Germany as well as several other nations. I suspect that theoretically speaking, South Africa beats us, considering as I have, some of the work of Kimberle Crenshaw, Linn Washington, Patricia J. Williams and Judge Higgenbotham. Of course, I'm not a legal scholar and am unfamiliar with the details of the South African legal system. However I am aware of the UN Treaty on Racial Discrimination and I know that the U.S. did not become a signer until about 1996. I also recognize that you can go to jail in America for holding up a 7-ll for 50 dollars, but not for firing somebody because you think he's a nigger. We have no criminal law for racism. You can be a capital R racist and run for office in America's form of democracy, because America's form of democracy is compatible with racism. But notice you cannot run for King. You cannot run for president of the supreme Soviet. So I ask you, what is a bigger threat to democracy? Monarchy, Communism or Racism? We've lived with racism longer than with Communism or Monarchy?

I read both books by Mark Mathabene, Wood's biography of Stephen Biko and had a typical Western attraction to the work of Gordimer. Once upon a time, I followed the wars in Angola and could tell you where Cuban troops were fighting and on whose side. I think people forget the extraordinary mashup of international interests and mercenary actions in those days, but how about these words UNITA and Jonas Savimbi. Do you remember if we were for him or against him and why? I could recite the names of various South African leaders and movements, and on my own, I tried to send money to MK, the radical militant terrorist wing of the African National Congress. I discovered, fortunately not the hard way, that sending money to opposition parties in foreign countries is seriously frowned on by the State Department, and you really don't want to be on their list as someone supporting militant operators abroad. So I attempted to satisfy myself by attending solidarity rallys and seminars and such. 

None of those activities were satisfying. It was the same combination of liberal bourgeios condescention (poodle lady money), ignorant anger (x-hat illiterates), community organization (hold that sign a little higher for the cameras please), professorial woolgathering,  four or five attractive Peace Corps volunteers, Oxfam expatriates and diligence-doing grad students trolling for policy wonk creds, and of course the crowd. Nobody really knows anything for certain, the details are more complex than anybody wants to admit and there are about 30 agendas going on. As for me, half the time I was actually trying to find a good book recommendation, the other half I was just trying to spot the narc or a cute chick in dreads. I wish we had the internet back then. Now we do and the situation is no better. 

A lot of people talk about the squishiness of the term 'freedom fighter'. I've never met a Progressive American who likes to talk against GWBush's definition of terrorist vis a vis freedom fighters that are willing to acknowledge that Americans who want to buy guns in defense of their Constitutional rights are freedom fighters too. 

You can't really be familiar with Nelson Mandela if you're not aware of his rocky relationship with his wife, Winnie. And while its fairly common knowledge that she was arrested for her involvement with the beat down of some kid named Stompie and her advocacy for necklacing. I understood that vibe completely, I know how black activists get when they discover that black plainclothes cops have been attending their teach-ins. They want to kill the race-traitors. Winnie had that power and she used it, whom are we kidding?

I liked MK more than the mainstream ANC. I was rather all-in from my distance. When it came to the elections, I didn't necessarily want them to win. I was one of those who wanted the country to be renamed to Azania, because I was hip like that. Yes of course I was one of those geeks who could name more than five townships and could sing Xhosa lyrics to my favorite Miriam Mikeba songs and had all that Sarafina! jazz in my mixtapes and talked about how wimpy, yet beautify LBM were when they sang. After all, they were Christians, not true freedom fighters. When it came to the ANC, I preferred Thabo Mbeki over Joe Slovo. But because I had ingested so much of those politics and culture, it didn't come to me as any possible surprise that there were dirty doings in the details. So while a lot of Americans were priding themselves on know how to do the Toi Toi dance or sing Nkosi Sikelele Afrika, at some point the whole thing became like discussing American politics from the perspective of interpreting a Public Enemy record. Just more radical chic. 

When Mandela came to Los Angeles, I think I went to one of the events. I don't remember precisely. What I do remember was that I got my Pan=African red black and green flag from a vendor who made it in South Africa. Along with the posters in my bedroom, it was my outward sign for a long time. When I moved to Hermosa Beach and went to hang out on the and play volleyball, I would stick the little palm sized flag onto my beach chair so that I could easily be found. 

Have you ever gotten very sick or had somebody close to you die and noted the difference between the people who send you 'best wishes' and those who say 'you are in my prayers'? Sometimes of us want the best wishes, and some of us want the prayers. That's how I view the sentiments towards Mandela, a whole lot of best wishes and prayers waiting for a post-facto testimony to the power of positive thinking. I actually did want to see some blood, but I wanted to have some cool music as well, and I think I was about as connected as it's legally possible to be and not be a part of a university department or government liason office. 

Then of course there was trade. And I have gotten into debates about how Dick Cheney and George P. Schultz, two men I admire a great deal, went contrary to the popular best wishes and prayers for Mandela when it came to the Boycott movement. I went back and forth about Reagan's policy of Constructive Engagement, and finally decided not to care. And to this day I think it is the most compelling of the stories I have, at my silly distance to the power politics of nation building. 

You see while Mandela was still in jail, South Africans were drinking CocaCola. Now if you wanted to boycott the Nationalist Party, you would want to support a ban on all trade and starve the people of American goods, so that internal political pressure would be brought to bear. And similarly it would go for other American companies. But on the same list of American companies that, according to us anti-apartheid activists, should not be doing business with South Africa would be Boeing. So should South Africans be forced to ride on less safe aircraft while Boeing is restricted from selling parts or providing maintenance? Or should the policy make special loopholes? And what should we do about those companies like Coca Cola who, here in the US, have one of the best Affirmative Action programs in the world? Wouldn't they be more likely to hire blacks than the native companies? Some of the hardliners said whatever, the point is that evil Reagan is supporting American Businesses, and the Sullivan Principles really don't go to the heart of the matter and we're really just finding a way to split the difference because none of this is going to overcome the obstinance of DeKlerk. So they concluded the reverse. We should just keep doing business as usual with South Africa so that the blacks there can see that all of the White Power Strucutures in the world are doing business with the Nationalist Party, and that will bring the revolution even sooner.

The whole thing should have taught me earlier the limits of democracy and activism. Well, it kinda did, which is why I was hoping for some militant solutions. I had no doubt that Inkhata and those Zulus would have some cans of whoopass while those like Mbeki would be all diplomatic with the Europeans. 

Personally, I prefered Stephen Biko and I have come to unabashedly admire his style of leadership. We here in the US have that same idea in the form of the aphorism "There's no limit to what you accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit". Mandela today is getting all the credit. I can't honestly say what he did before he went to jail. It didn't seem to matter. After all, here in the US, lots of people could outthink MLK, but MLK was the one who could draw the crowds - the figurehead of a movement whose actions were well understood by 100 more on the ground and unknown around the world. Mandela in jail became Morgan Freeman before there was a Morgan Freeman. Grandaddy. Godfather. 

I don't know what's going on in South Africa and I don't much care. I like the South Africans I know, but they're all here and must be here for a reason. I've read a bit by Thomas Sowell and he gave a lot of interesting background on Jews and Indians in South Africa, people whose roles we Americans never pay attention to. Whatever happened if South Africa, I cannot imagine that Americans can take much credit or blame outside of our foreign policy of Contstructive Engagement, and I'm not sure at all on how to judge its worth or effect. As I said, even here, we were all over the place on it and its complications amounted to.. well I don't know. Were they wishes or prayers?  

Kant's Categorical Imperative says, if I remember it correctly, that you can judge a person based upon their moral sentiments which we intuitively and inherently know to be good or evil. So I suspect that's what a lot of the second guessing is all about. We were all morally right. We wanted to see blacks in South Africa achieve self-rule, and our sentiments and gesundheits for the late lamented Mandela are our outward signs to show that our hearts were in the right place. I think he was heroic, but I also think he was more ready to go to war than a lot of Americans like to remember. My guess is that South Africa is poorly run and that it took about three weeks for the newly elected people to realize how to redirect the grift - that the black masses have still not truly achieved self-rule. 

We're all good people and we say gesundheit as a matter of good manners. It takes more than good manners and recognition of good manners to achieve and sustain freedom.

The New Mustang: Last Chance

I was just trolling around some pictures of the LA Auto Show circa 2005. I can't remember what year it was, but it was the year of the Maybach. There was the prototype for the Honda Ridgeline and I think for the new Charger. At that moment in American cars, the biggest hottest new thing was the Chrysler 300. Why? Because it was gangsta and it had a big motor and it went fast.

This last year, the most exciting thing in American cars was, without a doubt, the new Corvette. It took forever for me to see one actually get driven by the guys on YouTube.

Now I live in Southern California and I know a thing or two about cars. Once upon a time, I used to drool over the Saleen. Whatever happened to Saleen is a mystery to me, but I do know this. The new Ford Raptor made everybody forget about what Saleen did to Ford Trucks. Ford owned that, and they still do. But if we look back at the real magic of Ford, it was the GT. Your realize of course that Jeremy Clarkson bought one and we still have to look to Europe (Gawd) and the BBC to get people who talk unashamed about car performance. I hate that Southern Cal is dripping with Priuses, so where do you go? Well, for years you go Japanese.

Except that Chevy has done something fairly racy with the Camaro. I never hated but never really liked Camaros. During my hot car years it was the same a Firebird and who could tell the difference? And what was the point of all that anyway. You got two nearly identical cars neither of which could whoop a Celica GT. Speaking of GTs, isn't it obvious that the Nissan GT-R owns all American cars? And anybody would have been a fool to pick a Mustang over an Infiniti G. Why? Because Nissan Skyline. It's what every kid wants but can't have. And kids have been tuning since Mazda RX3s.

The bottom line is that it don't mean a thing if your car ain't king. And Mustang is king of nothing, except maybe old Bruce Springsteen videos or something like that. Don't get me wrong, I bet Bruce Willis has got a really tricked out old something. But if there are two cars that have just completely lost their way, one of them is the Nissan Z and the other is the Mustang. I touched the dashboard in one of those Mustangs a few years ago and I thought I was in a Yugo. I would have said Hyundai but Hyundais are nice.

Now there is something to be said about a hyped up Ford Focus. But you can't drift in a FWD car unless you're a pro. Not saying everybody needs to drift a car to feel the sporty thing, but you have to hand it to Leo Parenti. He knows that unless you are the little brother of a real racing car, you're just a hot rodder. Well we can do all that hot rodding ourselves, but it would be nice if the factory had some balls.

Right now that factory is Chevy and that car is Corvette. Corvettes race. Porsches race. A sports car that's not a race car? Well, I guess that would be a Mini, a Boxster or a BMW convertible. And quite frankly, no Mustang is going to compete.

So to Parente's questions:

WHAT do you want Mustang to BE? WHAT do you want to SAY about Mustang? WHO do you want as your Mustang audience? HOW is the best way to reach them?  

1. Really I think it comes down to the convertable. If, when you think of this car as a convertible, you think, man I gotta have a roll bar or wow does that chick look hot in it. That tells me if it's a real sports car or just a sporty car.  The new Mustang should be *the* base car for the kid tuners of tomorrow. RWD, front engine, sports car, with all kinds of aftermarket kit for the car geek. People should look back 10 years from now and say Ford made a real, honest, no-compromises, affordable sports car. Not just a sporty looking car, a sports car.

2. Nevermind. That's all I have to say.

The Filter Bubble Problem

When it comes to security and privacy, we haven't been abused by the internet, we've just misused it.

Filter Bubble: Them say..

The term “filter bubble” entered the public domain back in 2011when the internet activist Eli Pariser coined it to refer to the way recommendation engines shield people from certain aspects of the real world.

Pariser used the example of two people who googled the term “BP”. One received links to investment news about BP while the other received links to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, presumably as a result of some recommendation algorithm.

This is an insidious problem. Much social research shows that people prefer to receive information that they agree with instead of information that challenges their beliefs. This problem is compounded when social networks recommend content based on what users already like and on what people similar to them also like.

This is the filter bubble—being surrounded only by people you like and content that you agree with.

This is an interesting area of my concern. Still I haven't decided which I like better between tribalism and globalism. You see, it makes no sense to even know an opposing tribe if yours is comfortable and unthreatened. There is a necessary amount of distance required for independent thought and self-reliance. This is called 'turning off the television'. It's not useful to have your mind colonized by global aggregators. So, no you shouldn't care about waxy buildup or Zulu mating rituals. Nobody pledges allegiance to the UN. You need people you can trust, right here, right now.

On the other global hand, you are paying too much for your colonoscopy and you need to comparison shop outside of your neighborhood monopoly. And by gum those Russian chicks do look better than the kind we grow here. And were would we be without alternative world beats, pray tell? I mean, who eats just meat and potatoes when there's panang curry? When the locals get crufty, you have to get smart. This is called 'getting out of Dodge'.

Therefore is it more useful to have global anonymous untrustable networks of information which is constantly trolled for long tail payoffs, or native blood and soil networks of brick and mortar communities? The answer is both, but the answer for the web is have it global, anonymous and untrustable. Our problem is that we've not decided to *be* anonymous on the global web, which - when we first started as pioneers, we naturally understood to be a good idea.

Speaking for myself, I was raised in the proto-internet age. When what we cared about was hypertext because we understood that libraries were primative. All was going well until My.Yahoo started personalizing the web and then those crazy cool kids with disposable minds and income started having sex with each other because of something called MySpace. All this My stuff. The web isn't yours. But when you started treating it like it was yours, you made the fatal error. Early pioneers in places like The Well and other private communities had long and serious debates about online presence. Were you 'cyberpresent' or not? What was the difference between your online identity and your 'real' identity. (Note that this moment in time it makes sense to put 'real' in quotes because most people are who they say they are online, which is why this privacy issue is an issue. Pioneers began by being scrupulous, but now the discipline has faded with all of Netiquette.

It was brain dead simple for me to understand this vis a vis my 'racial identity'. Back in 1993, although there were black Americans online, nobody was supposed to *be* black online. The sentiments of the early adopters were generally 'scientific' or 'techno' if you prefer or... there is a whole cornucopia of identity political ideas about the propriety of online identity. I don't think anybody had to fight too hard, but there's this.

It could be said that in my life online I have been through three phases. In the first phase, mostly as a cat named 'mellow mike', I was primarily interested in black cultural content creation. I had honestly believed that I could transform the realm of hiphop through some kind of online interactive artform. I was also all about the writing, and so I did a lot of lower case, and spoke with flair and flavor. It was all about the culture and the existentials. It was all about the Representation I spoke of.

Then I found out that people were so stuck on race that I couldn't carve out such a space without it being attacked. The internet was a hostile environment for black creativity. I recall as I write this, the hostility a friend of mine received for proposing a black cultural forum from the editor of Boardwatch Magazine, which was very influential at the time. It is exactly parallel to the stink over TCB, the same whack logic. Like any number of new domains, you'll often find self-appointed white male guardians who require it to be 'colorblind' and are thus hostile against women and minorities who claim a spot. As if white wasn't a color and male wasn't a gender. And so faced with this racial problem in the way of my cultural expression, I became 'boohab' and fought the race man's battle.

There was a break and a breather between boohab and 'Cobb', and I'm not sure how much longer Cobb will last, but in this phase I am clearly more focused on the political. As such I am being much more personable rather than abstracted and talking about Domestic Affairs, from an Old School perspective. I don't so often pick the subjects and preach as I comment on the subjects most bloggers are commenting on. That was easy during the beginning of the war and during the campaign season, but not so easy now. At any rate, The Conservative Brotherhood and Cobb are specifically about the black Right, what it is, what it thinks, what it wants, how it operates. Simple.

Or not.

I wasn't the first nor the last to entertain the idea and witness the reality that working through a cyber identity opens up interesting dynamics in human communication. It can blur what you want to blur and it can clarify what you want to clarify. As a written medium (originally), there were interesting semiotics you could invoke. And so I did, as did many others. We all rather take it for granted now, but a lot of thinking went behind online identity. 

Here in Cobb, I have wrestled with the notion of 'famousity' as I went briefly into the domains of broadcast media. I resolved to have an overabundance of caution as far as that goes. Once you become a celebrity you require handlers to keep your image and reputation intact, no matter what reputation you seek to hold. The ability for mass communications to shout down anything that comes out of your mouth about you is awesomly scary. Editors of media companies know this, broadcasters know this, attorneys know this, but the average Joe, be he plumber or no, jumps right into the most powerful mass communications medium ever built without hesitation or legal representation. And now we are surprised that all our laundry is being 'spied' upon by entities unknown?

Are you serious? 

So lets tangent off my example from 'Privacy & The Dead Hooker'. You are in the woods, alone, in a cabin. There is no cellphone coverage, no wifi, no television, no telephone, and the nearest mailbox is five miles down the mountain. You're quite private. But are you safe? It depends upon who else is in the woods with you and what their intentions are. Generally speaking, you don't get to a cabin by yourself. It belongs to your Church or your hunting buddies or your Uncle Jed. You're there to enjoy their company and solitude of a small group. Your friends, your family. Just you and them right on the lake by the fire. Those are the kinds of people you trust. Now I want you to meditate on what I just said. If you are here at the website, click on that picture. You'll see the whole big zoomed in beauty of what I'm describing and you know to be true. Don't worry, it's safe for work. Or maybe not. Maybe you'll start daydreaming and wondering why you are here in front of a computer connected to the world wide brain.

Bottom line. Your physical proximity to actors is what determines your safety and security. That is the kind of filter bubble you desire. In fact, it's the kind you really better have in the Zombie Apocalypse. The NSA may know all your online personnae, and they might even have an analyst tasked to you that's smart enough to figure out if you were joking about that BOMB you were going to DETONATE on the anniversary of SEPTEMBER 11 because now your pals at OCCUPY are paranoid about the new RQ-180. You might hope that analyst reads the context and not just the keywords. I don't care because I have lawyer friends and character references. 

This also refers, my over-intellecutal friends, to my old question 'Who's your leviathan?'. What matters is who exerts the energy and force. If you can be identified as a target, and who can't, then you are vulnerable. The internet you wade into without the proper attire will make you a target for the global aggregator of whom the NSA is probably number one. But Amazon aggergates your non-anonymous ass too, as does Google. So what are they going to do? They're going to seduce your money away from you in ways you cannot imagine. And this is the television you are loathe to turn off. But even the mighty Bing, or the great and powerful Yahoo, is not likely to send men in black to your cabin. AT&T has always known who you are calling, duh. 

One last thing. 

The political implications of the alarmism expressed by Pariser and the Filter Bubble people are in his next line. 

"And the danger is that it can polarise populations creating potentially harmful divisions in society."

Nothing with 300 million people in it is a society. That's more like a civilization. A society is the group of people you can socialize with, for better or for worse. I sense a kind of overbearing paternalistic need for something which isn't a society to be a society, or at least a polity. Since we're talking about America, why don't we acknowledge already that we are a fragmented society? You know where you don't want to be caught dead after dark. So do I. We all do. And we don't want to be around *those* people.  It always has been that way, and we're a good enough nation to have dealt with every social issue. Yes every social issue. Just not for 300 million people, that's freaking impossible - unless your Leviathan is really really big. 

So let us have our filter bubbles. Let us have our privacy. Let us have our cabins in the woods, enclaves in the city, cul de sacs in the suburbs and blocks in the 'hood. We all need our own space with our own people we trust, and we need you to respect that space and the dimensions of our bubbles. And when we go outside into the big old world, let us have our hoodies. 

 

Related articles

How to Burst the "Filter Bubble" that Protects Us from Opposing Views