Cobb

Ghosts

Call of Duty Ghosts is the most infantile game I've played in a long time. In the single player campaign, over and over I keep being reminded that I'm supposed to be a teenaged boy who loves his dad and his dog and will do anything to hear "I'm proud of you, son".  The most implausible set of episodes that include tanks that explode from one shot, guns that can be found anywhere in a jungle, and a dozen battleships in 50 feet of water off the coast of Santa Monica. Yike. 

Yeah. I hated the underwater combat, and I hated the space combat. What should have been an interesting challenge by changing the speed at which my character moved turned out to be just frustration.. There's not much else to say. I'm sending it back to Gamefly. 

Obligatory Seriousness on Black History Month 2014

I almost didn't notice that it's black history month this year, but I did notice that I've been hitting some racial topics over the past few weeks. Most of that I think had to do with my old angle on MLK subsequent to his birthday. I have long held that King mistook non-violence for a strategy when it really is a tactic. It certainly was the right tactic for the context of civil rights in America, but that was all about solving the Negro Problem, which was a smaller problem than the entire existentials of black identity in the world. It turned out, of course, that black identity in the world got only a marginally effective kick in the pants from the Pan-African idea, and Harriet Tubman was really more actively creating freedom than the Black Power dudes. But I digress..

I never did get the wording right in the context for putting King in the proper bucket. That essay stands unfinished. Since that time I've defaulted back to the rhetorical question of whether King would have been big enough on the world stage in the alternate universe of Nazis winning WW2. See how non-violent he would have been then. 

Pops is in the following video, and I think it's a good indication of perhaps where his grandchildren's generation puts all that context. All's well that ends well. They'll have other problems, and it's fairly certain that they do not feel the obligation of the race man, rather that there is some evidence of some multicultural accomodation in a country that can't get healthcare quite right but is trying...

I've only watched Pops and a few short seconds of the other interviewees, and I pass it on without comment on them. It's actually interesting that he mentions the white kids he grew up with in elementary school. He never actually talks about them, but has many fond memories of Hillhouse High School. The last time he went to a reunion, Ernest Borgnine was hanging out there, probably their most famous graduate. Funny how long ago and how different a time it was when somebody like Ernest Borgnine could be a star in America.

He did talk about the incident in Torrance at some length with the family, and I'm certainly in agreement with him on the conclusion. But in fact *we* were not intent on moving to Torrance, were we? I'll have to look that one up. As for the Obama celebration, I think this little vignette really exposes where he lives: in matters of the spirit. He definitely was inspired by the entire affair, although I cannot recall how much he got involved the second time around. His idea about the 'real' LA harkens back to the days when the Watts Summer Festival truly meant something special out here. There's that romantic black cultural nationalist in living color. You can catch him whenever the Watts Towers puts on a show.  

I'm likely a bad interview of Pops, but it's nice to get him on record. I'll work on it.

Two Stories

It's almost impossible to do justice to what I saw just a few minutes ago. These are back to back stories submitted by friends at Facebook. 

First this:

Sexual Assault at God's Harvard:
Patrick Henry College was supposed to be a safe place. For these young women, it wasn't.

“Basically, my issue was swept under the rug, and the assaulter received little else but a reprimand,” says a young woman who attended Patrick Henry between 2004 and 2008. The student fell asleep at an off-campus party where there had been drinking and was awoken by a male PHC student assaulting her. She says she reported the incident to Patrick Henry. “The administration encouraged me to not go to the police and said that, because alcohol was involved and I was violating the rules there, they hinted that I could be expelled if I brought light to the incident,” the student says. “The focus was the alcohol. I drank. I sinned. I deserved to be assaulted in the middle of the night.”

Another student, who asked to remain anonymous, says she was raped the summer before her freshman year. When she arrived at PHC in the fall of 2007, she was deeply depressed and cutting herself. She was summoned to Corbitt’s office. “I remember her smiling a lot in a forced, insincere way while she was telling me that ‘someone’ had relayed to her my ‘issues,’ and the ‘administration was concerned about my ability to successfully complete the semester,’ ” she wrote in an e-mail. The dean insisted that she take a psychological evaluation, then called her back to the Office of Student Life, got her parents on speakerphone, and made her tell them about the assault. When she choked up, the student says, Corbitt cut in to finish the job. Then the dean informed her parents that she was unfit for PHC and needed to be retrieved immediately. Her father flew out the following day and whisked her away, says the student."

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116623/sexual-assault-patrick-henry-college-gods-harvard?a&utm_campaign=tnr-daily-newsletter&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=11970655

 

And then this:

Thousands of Muslims Are Fleeing Killings in Central African Republic
International peacekeepers cannot prevent exodus of historic proportions

Almost a million people have fled their homes in Central African Republic. That’s 20 percent of the population, making the crisis in CAR comparable to the civil war in Syria.

With more and more mass graves being uncovered, the International Criminal Court in The Hague has opened preliminary investigations into atrocities that have taken place since the outbreak of the civil war in March 2013.
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/d09bf4ae47c3

 

I really wish those people could come here. It might give the New Republic something actually interesting to write about. I guess we have proven something about the New Media, huh?

First GLBT Christian Church

This church doesn't exist yet. Yet I am hopeful. 

The establishment of a GLBT church would send a powerful signal of self-determination, independence and strength to all concerned. I cannot imagine that the founder of this church would go down in history as a saint, at least within the denomination and certainly with the same moral inevitability such advocates point out is their due.

Let us stipulate that inevitability. What does it mean then if this course is not taken? What does it mean for the actual celebration of Christian faith if those whose interpretation of Christianity fail to establish their own denomination but depend upon the law and the coercive powers of the State? I should pause a while, perhaps a day or a week to truly reflect on the notion, but I already have my conclusion. This conclusion is based upon the parallel of my own African forebears in their role as the negro race in America. Our path, unique as it was may or may not serve as a proper example, but I cannot ignore the thought illustrated by Harold Cruse in his works on plurality. Cruse said that the failures of Reconstruction and the post-Reconstruction Era were due to the failing of legislation of the Blair Bill. The Blair Bill would have established a fund and precedent for 'separate but equal' educational facilities for the negro race in the South. Cruse argues convincingly that the establishment of black run, owned and operated schools would have not only educated but also provided the critical management skills necessary for independence within the negro race. That the failure of those ex-slaves to run their own schools established in them a permanent cultural dependency that wasn't eliminated for 100 years. Instead of black power consciousness expressed in the Ocean Hill Brownsville context, that kind of news would have been made a century earlier - so goes Cruse' argument with which I agree. So if the destruction of the Negro Problem could have happened in 1868 instead of 1968, we might have had our first black President in 1908 instead of 2008. Imagine that.

Instead, America chose, more or less, the path of integration rather than independence. There is something to be said for integration, in fact a great deal. But the problem with integration which I and many of my contemporaries touch upon from time to time, is that if the thing you integrate into has problems with integrity, there is no alternative but protest and reform. You cannot abolish that which you do not control. What's worse, is that you might have a generation grow up thinking that there is no acceptable independent alternative at all. The classic example of this is the use of the term "the master's tools" - such people actually believe that institutions such as banks or real-estate agencies and even capitalism itself is something that belongs to white folks and works for white folks because they are white. To them, there is no such thing as 'black capitalism', ie capitalism itself is a species of white supremacy. 

One percieves such twisted logic at the heart of that political movement which seeks in vain to destroy Chick Fil A and Westboro Community Church without commensurate effort to raise their own churches and fry their own chickens. The answer I suspect such politicos must embrace axiomatically is that Christianity itself is wholly and entirely incompatible with homosexuality and all forms of non-normative sexual expression. That's a very large presumption which I doubt, given my understanding that all have sinned and fallen short of the Kingdom of God which was what I was taught. Even with a less extreme version, parallel again to the destruction of the negro race, that no Christian church could abide sanctifying certain marriages on essentialist bases, the precedent for the establishment of a new denomination stands clear. Abyssinian Baptists were founded in 1908.  African Methodist Episcopalians made their break in 1787. 

It seems quite a stretch for me to assert that the practice of integration necessarily breaks the integrity of institutions that have heretofore discriminated. That can only be the case in which the matter of discrimination is more than mere taste or convention but principle. Such doctrines, such as the ordination of women in my own Episcopal Church were resolved through the slow deliberate process of reform and protest. And I am aware of one of the bitter beneficiaries of such affirmative actions. While her story may or may not be characteristic, the end result may be indicative of how unsatisfactory reform is, for those raring to go. Now.

At some point, any frustration and outrage that doesn't consider the alternative to reform cannot be taken seriously. If that alternative is the establishment of separate but equal, I see that as the most morally fit. The alternative that seeks allies in the destruction of that which will not reform, well that's a choice which holds more dangerous consequences. For the sake of gay marriage which claims to be an affirmation of love, one is hard pressed to find a more foolish choice. 

 

Dred Scott's Gun

It is interesting that the 9th Circuit, in its finding for Peruta v San Diego, has ruled that the pro-gun control side did not adequately research history. In that history of law with regard to the defense of Constitutional rights, one must of necessity pay attention to how certain matters were regarded wrongly, as with the Dred Scott Decision. Consider the following excerpt from Dred Scott with my emphasis in bold italics.

The legislation of the States therefore shows, in a manner not to be mistaken, the inferior and subject condition of that race at the time the Constitution was adopted, and long afterwards, throughout the thirteen States by which that instrument was framed; and it is hardly consistent with the respect due to these States, to suppose that they regarded at that time, as fellow-citizens and members of the sovereignty, a class of beings whom they had thus stigmatized; whom, as we are bound, out of respect to the State sovereignties, to assume they had deemed it just and necessary thus to stigmatize, and upon whom they had impressed such deep and enduring marks of inferiority and degradation; or, that when they met in convention to form the Constitution, they looked upon them as a portion of their constituents, or designed to include them in the provisions so carefully inserted for the security and protection of the liberties and rights of their citizens. It cannot be supposed that they intended to secure to them rights, and privileges, and rank, in the new political body throughout the Union, which every one of them denied within the limits of its own dominion. More especially, it cannot be believed that the large slaveholding States regarded them as included in the word citizens, or would have consented to a Constitution which might compel them to receive them in that character from another State. For if they were so received, and entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police [60 U.S. 393, 417]   regulations which they considered to be necessary for their own safety. It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State. 

Here the text of Dred Scott shows in very clear detail what was expected of citizens and illustrates those rights, privileges and rank throughout the Union, and what the slaveholding states determined to deny the negro race among which is the right to keep and carry arms wherever they went. 

It is therefore an interesting twist to recognize that the restrictions, heretofore applied in the State of California are explicitly those which would have been used against the negro race just prior to the Civil War. And while I've heard lots of stories about how California originally began its gun control law in reaction to the Black Panthers, I've never given much thought or credilibity to the meme of The Racist Roots of Gun Control'. In fact, I'm actually curious as to what I might have said specifically to this matter in the past. One thing I've always said is that all human beings have the right to make life or death decisions, including the decision to punt that responsibility to the state. But that was more on the harangues associated with abortion and capital punishment. But it is particularly interesting to read the following, discovered today from Adam Winkler:

After the war, Southern states adopted discriminatory laws like the Black Codes, which among other things barred the freedmen from having guns. Racist whites began to form posses that would go out at night to terrorize blacks—and take away those newly obtained firearms. The groups took different names: the “Men of Justice” in Alabama; the “Knights of the White Camellia” in Louisiana; the “Knights of the Rising Sun” in Texas. The group formed in Pulaski, Tenn., became the most well-known: the Ku Klux Klan. Whites believed that they had to confiscate black people’s guns in order to reestablish white supremacy and prevent blacks from fighting back. Blacks who refused to turn over their only means of self-defense were lynched.

Overly aggressive gun control often sparks a backlash, and that’s exactly what happened after the Civil War. Determined to protect the freedmen’s rights, Congress passed legislation like the Freedmen’s Bureau Act and the nation’s first Civil Rights Act. As the former law stated, blacks were entitled to “the full and equal benefit of all laws... concerning personal security... including the constitutional right to bear arms.” When these laws proved ineffective, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was added, guaranteeing all Americans the “privileges or immunities of citizenship”—by which the drafters meant the protections afforded in the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment.

 So this is interesting. Let's look at the text of the Freedman's Bureau Act.

Sec. 7.And be it further enacted, That whenever in any State or district in which the ordinary course of judicial proceedings has been interrupted by the rebellion, and wherein, in consequence of any State or local law, ordinance, police or other regulation, custom, or prejudice, any of the civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons, including the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and estate, including the constitutional right of bearing arms, are refused or denied to negroes, mulattoes, freedmen, refugees, or any other persons, on account of race, color, or any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, or wherein they or any of them are subjected to any other or different punishment, pains, or penalties, for the commission of any act or offence, than are prescribed for white persons committing like acts or offences, it shall be the duty of the President of the United States, through the Commissioner, to extend military protection and jurisdiction over all cases affecting such persons so discriminated against.

This is all news to me, to the extent by which the struggle for equality under the law for the negro race has been closely associated with this particular exercise. I am not likely to discuss the matter further without this particular aspect of the right. 

As an aside, the picture that comes with this essay is not that of Dred Scott, but of Harriet Tubman. Harriet is a well-used name in my family, by the way. But listening to Doc the other day, he reminded me of another little known fact about Harriet Tubman. It was that she happened to be fairly ill on the fateful day of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, and although she was personally invited, she couldn't make the trip. I add that to my knowledge of her that she did always carry firearms and vowed to shoot anyone who did not stick to the rules of the Underground Railroad. Obviously, everyone involved in the enterprise of freeing slaves put their lives at risk, and Tubman had no qualms about putting down any potential spy. 

Too Quiet

I occurs to me, as I listen to my son prepare himself a 2000 calorie dinner, that the idle mind is a playground for the Devil. And so my wife still loves psycho-sexual dramas, bless her heart. She introduced me to 'The Following' and I have watched seven episodes this past week. It's unbelievable but entertaining. 

I've noticed that the plot started thickening and moving too slowly as they decided to, watch yourself I'm about to spoil you, focus in on the dynamics of the three-way killers who are holding the child of their cult leader's ex-wife. I mean three way as in boy + boy + girl two of whom are in love with the same boy.

Is there anything we won't swallow?

Perhaps not. Perhaps in our evolutionary state, outstripped by the comfort of la vida loca here in Upper Middle Classville, maybe we are so short of actual dangerous stimulation that we need to focus on something ugly and terrible just so we don't get bored out of our gourds. 

But there's another way we deal with ennuis. We get obsessively petty. For example, somehow I managed to spend 175 bucks on Valentines dinner for two at the local upscale hotel. My wife and I do not watch our figures or the calorie counts much. So believe me when I tell you that short rib was short and we had to get our Jack In The Box on, on the way home. When the surf part of Surf & Turf is two shrimp, something's wrong. Aside from it being Valentine's Day with my wife, I was bored to shit, but a bit peeved that I didn't have my good knife with me. I watched the fluffy people watch the ice dancing in Sochi on the big screen, and even though the Asian kid in the white blouse fell down, there wasn't much action to be had. And so I was again double dipped in boredom, but I also envied the man sitting next to me his seersucker jacket and red Gucci shoes.

I searched my mind for another activity. I'm 52, I like drinking new kinds of bourbon and scotch. That's what I know. I didn't even think for a moment about joking about taking her to the shooting range, but my head was completely empty. I have everything I need at my two story, four bedroom, two bathroom home. I don't need to be out and about, and when I am, I'm sheepdoggish, looking for some shit to go down. It never does. We've had 2 murders in 17 years over in this town. Nothing's dangerous but the drunk drivers and the scatterbrain motorcyclists. I just wanted to go home and play Battlefield 4, where I must think quickly move around the video game level and kill or be killed. We went to the local poolhall instead. It was tacky, but still nothing intimidating.

I am not compelled, and that is my luxury. I have everything I need for everyday, so I have begun to prepare for the extraordinary. People about me say some kind of apocalypse is on the horizon but I don't actually believe it. I want to exercise my Second Amendment rights, and yes sometimes I go into dangerous neighborhoods at night, but I don't think the zombies are coming. In fact, I rather like the whole zombie angle of shooting. That's me, the zombie hunter, because only fantasy is noisier than the quiet we have around here.

The Spousal Unit jumps on my case because we have gone three or four months without healthcare. It's all getting sorted out, because we always sort things out. She handed me an envelope with disdain today. I was wearing my contacts and could not immediately tell that it wasn't something from the IRS. But it was a $38 parking ticket. Horrors. 

I'm not giving up my stoic demeanor. I remain prepared for the catastrophic failures, like Fernandez wrote about Venezuela and the Economist is writing about Argentina. But the catastrophes, like snow in Atlanta, seem a long ways off. So I fill my mind with dangerous fictions, and so do you.

My Twenties

I scanned my diary. Both literally and figuratively, I took about 12 binders of handwritten notes on canary quadrille and eyeballed passages and pushed them though my automatic document feeder at 600 DPI. I then sent them up to the Evernote Cloud where they will persist in PDF format forever, or perhaps as long as the electricity flows and people care and I pay my bill. I kept the originals, and they will go somewhere cool and dry for my grandchildren to stumble through a generation hence.

I was crazy.

I didn't know how to live, but I knew how to think my way through life. The amount of thinking I did on matters most people seem to improvise their way through is staggering. I hated the very idea of "bumbling my way through, somehow". For me, everything had to have a plan, a reason. I was here to make a difference, not to make friends. I was here to make an impact, not to merely survive. I remember telling my roomate, Spy, "I don't live to eat, I eat to live." That's why anything from the microwave that would settle my stomach's grumbling was fine. That's why I believed a pair cha shu bao for lunch three days in a row was fine, except for the fact that I was still a bit hungry. Learn to cook? Why?

I imagined myself dead and wrote the letter I wanted to be read at my funeral. Reading it today I see echoes of confusion and madness, and something of a total inability to see what I meant to other people and what they meant to me. I was probably the most aggravating person in the world, walking through it without an evolved sense of decorum and yet desperately searching for that very thing. I was full of annoying, piercing rude questions, swinging like Tarzan from clifftop to clifftop on the thinnest of conjectures, defying common sense at every turn. 

I read and I listened as if each indulgence from Coletrane to Coleridge would yeild up one more bite of civilization. Yet each shrunk me like Alice deeper into isolation in the rabbit hole that was my world. Literature became an elaborate tangle of bridges to nowhere. And I never found my contingent, except in contingent parts of people all around me. 

There was one person I got right. Well, there were two. There was myself and there was Cynthia. Everything I wrote about her was right on target. Everything she made me know then, I still know today. She is the only woman I ever wanted to live with, and she is the only woman I have. Tomorrow I'm taking her out to Donald Trump's country club for a romantic brunch. She reminded me of the date. I hadn't throught much about it last night as I was going through stuff. My standard valentine, by the way, was the 10 pound, $50, 2 foot wide heart shaped box of chocolates. Sorry, as fertile as my imagination was, I'd be three tangents from reality if I didn't do something typical to the extreme. 

My mother always told me that I go from one extreme to the other. It is my way of accomodating things that make no sense outside of my universe. What do you want from me!? OK here!. Plop. Subtlety is for the undecided. This should make you happy. It doesn't. But they acknowledge the thought that counts, only after the extreme act. 

At some point in my twenties I decided that I didn't want to be a Buppie. I wanted more than just a condo in a nice neighborhood and a job and invitations to beach parties. I wanted to explore culture and understand it all. The mere money and a good life of accumulation wasn't good enough. So I took off four years and moderated my technical cares for the possibilities of cultural production. I was a writer, after all. I had a lot to say. I had a world to make sense of. Ultimately I cannot say that it was a waste of time. I may be fatiqued by it all now in retrospect, which is why I know my crazy was satiated, but it needn't have been that way. If I cared more for my career, or more for domestic bliss, I could have taken all those distratctions more seriously. I would have demanded more from them. I probably wouldn't be writing so much now, rather in force of personality I would live more in the world outside of my head. But I like the world inside of my head and I am tremendously benefitted by the discipline I have mustered to handle the wisdom I now possess. But it did make me crazy.

I wrote to Swerdloff that I was a very very uptight young man, possessed by a set of ideas without which life appeared random and pointless. So I was guided by the implications of those ideas despite it all, it being the reality of the world I now inhabit. It was a safe place to keep my self, but it made the ordinary social intercourse quite difficult. I processed way too many symbols in my 20s and early 30s. I am time travelled to fractions of my past and I recognize myself, before the liberations of my children's smiles and my wife's cooking. I stand now, rescued and with simple purpose. Life is great.

The Harsh Truth About Truth

Bill Nye. He's the Science Guy. Which is about the appropriate thing to call him. As many of you know, he got all combobulated with a Creation Guy last week and it made a lot of people say 'Martha, this country is going to pot'. It's not. But there is a certain amount of faithlessness that's infecting people who are halfway committed to believing that Progress will benefit the Common Man. I say halfway because I can't determine if they believe that Progress is slowing down or that the Common Man doesn't deserve it. Either way they are in dire alarm and they shouldn't be.

Progress doesn't benefit the Common Man, charity does. 

Progress benefits the person who initiates it. When I take off the stock carburetor on my jalopy and put on the custom one, I turn it into a hot rod. My hot rod. When I buy a computer and learn to program it, I benefit, not the person staring at me in Starbucks. But enough with the analogies. When starving waifs were dying of the Pox in London and Charles Dickens wrote about it, he benefited not the waifs. When Tycho Brahe observed all the stars in the sky and started cataloguing them one by one, it wasn't the people around him in 16th Century Denmark who were benefitting. When you dedicate your life to improvement then you improve. The common man remains common, the layman lies, the ordinary Joe stays ordinary and all of the backwards, superstitious, ignorant people remain tied to their fate. Every advance in history has taken place amidst total ignorance of it. That doesn't change the truth of it, nor the force of that truth.

So when people mumble and grumble that McDonalds is screwing their minimum wage employees, it may be true, but if you don't work at McDonalds and you're not a minimum wage employee, have the decency to admit that it doesn't hurt you. When Chinese peasants starve, you don't. When African babies die of Dengue, you don't. If those everyday commonplace tragedies dissuade you from studying your maths, you are not contributing to Progress by doing so. When the survey reveals that some ungodly percentage of Americans think astrology is a science, then let them suffer their ignorance. Your job is to remember what Tycho taught you, not to worry that your light gets swallowed up by darkness. Darkness is only the absence of light, remember? Darkness cannot swallow.

I should say a word about empathy. Yes. This is something you may need to be reminded lest you think I have no room in my heart for it. Well, I believe in Christian Charity and goodwill towards others, which is about as moral as any man can be, and I'm not trying to be morally superior to that. Hubris and all, you see. What I oppose is the idea that the presence of foolishness invalidates the existence of wisdom, that the median of all our suffering circumscribes the extent of our joy, that the impoverished oblivion of our destitute invalidate the soaring triumph of our wealth. Most specifically that the jackhead idiocy of our superstition reverses the brilliance of our science. 

In a discussion about race I once had, I had to bring up the fact that the bodies at the bottom of the Atlantic are dead. They therefore cannot define the meaning of African American life. They're dead, and the dead are only what we make of them. We the living. We the survivors. We whom evolution favors by the existence of our very lives. We are those who count, not the dead. 

So if the foolish will set their own deaths in a matter of time, why should we lament? If the poxed get no love, if the cocksure have no offspring, if the solipsist navel-gazers get no likes, if the loud mouthed suggestion gets no traction, why should we who know better be concerned other than to direct our sympathy and empathy towards the misfortunate? 

Foolish people behave as if the truth only has the force of truth amongst those who live in it. Gravity and bacteria do not sleep. Ever. So hang on to life. 

Seven Banks

I don't quite understand why people have difficulty with the existence of the Federal Reserve. I suspect it's because they are navel gazing. After all, the Federal Reserve doesn't exist in the vaccuum of the USA, but as a powerful institution within the global economy. I suspect that they express a sense of powerlessness because they can't vote somebody else's money into a direction favorable to themselves or their perceived self-interest. I believe that a lot of Americans have been convinced that their voices are more important than they actually are. They are hearing the siren call of aggregation. 

In the meanwhile, it is surprising that they don't do local banking when they could. I am involved in some banking business myself, and I am discovering that many small banks have been held hostage to old technology. One of my customers is one such bank and I was surprised to learn last week that they still use RPG. All that aside, my book says think networked, act locally. 

Why doesn't America have a Savings & Loans industry? Well because it was mismanaged it into the ground. The history of the Resolution Trust Corporation is something I will get into. Banking has always been interesting to me since I was a teen, so it's rather fascinating to me that this corporation sold off a third of a trillion dollars of assets. That's rather amazing. 

OK So here's what makes sense to me.

1. Specialty Brokerage & Hedge Funds
Private banking and wheel of fortune for the Leisure Class, titans of industry & global capitalists. Step right up, get your tickets. No Limits. Minimal regulation. If the best minds on the planet can't keep the criminals out, tough boogers.

2. Investment Brokerage
401K, IRAs, and standard investments. I would look at firms like Edward Jones and bring back companies like Brown & Company. Conventional wisdom investment with some safeguards for the small businessman and net worth < 10 million. 

3. Global Banks
International finance. Want to build an island resort, an oil platform, an airport, a railroad, a coal mine? These are your guys. Keeps America competitive and use that dollar. Chase. Citi. Wells Fargo. 

4. Interstate & Business Banks
Think Washington Mutual, before it imploded, PNC, Wachovia, Bank of America 15 years ago. Good sized healthy business banks. 50 of these would serve us just fine. 

5. Savings & Loans
No more Countrywide. Local home loans, certificates of deposit, 529s, New Tax deferred savings instruments etc. This is the new nest-egg banking where risks are minimized and savings are encouraged. No interstate business. 

6. Utility Banking
Retail checking, savings, car loans, boat loans, credit cards, ATMs, collateralized loans. Insured. 

7. Credit Unions
As is with incentives to have more. 

I think there's no such thing as 'investment banking' but what do I know. It seems to simple minded me that people can invest one place and bank someplace else. Two aims, two businesses.  

Inequality and the Celebrity Ratchet

Once you get famous, you cannot get unfamous. 

If you can understand this phenomenon, then you can understand income inequality. You may not like income or wealth inequality, but you will begin to understand it. You also may not like the reason for it, that's because you are responsible for it. 

What is Kool Aid? What is a Band-Aid? What is a Xerox machine? What are Kleenex? These are all household names in America. They are marketed brands that have become so popular that their very name 'describes' what they are. Kool Aid is a flavored drink mix. A Band-Aid is a bandage. A Xerox machine is a photocopier and Kleenex are facial tissues. But even if you have none of these specific brands in your home, if you use Wylers, Curad, Canon or Puffs products, you still know the names. Even after their actual market share has declined, you still know them for their market victories. 

I want you to imagine that you are going shopping. Think of everything you put on your shopping list. As a matter of fact, the next time you go shopping try this experiment. Rank everything on your shopping list in price order from lowest to highest, and now imagine you are doing it for a whole month's worth of groceries. Make a big list, a list that includes just about everything in your refrigerator and cabinets right now. What brand of milk do you buy? Do you always buy the same brand? What about bacon? What about cereal? When you buy meat, do you buy the same cuts? What about beer?

Now lets go in another direction. How about clothes? Your underwear. What brand? Have you changed it recently? Laundry detergent? What about your washing machine? Who did you make rich when you bought that? Is it the same brand as your dryer? They don't have to be the same company, you know. Any washer will work with any dryer, but chances are you decided to make the same company richer than to spread the wealth around. 

OK your car. Do you buy gas at the same gas station? You can mix gasolines. Do you? What about tires? It would probably be inconvenient for you to have gone to a different college for each of your years, but you could have spread that wealth around. You could have gone to a college nobody ever heard of and learned exactly the same. Chances are that if you got a B in Calculus at Harvard, you would have gotten the same B at Oklahoma State. Calculus is calculus, right?

Why do you choose what you choose? Two reasons. Because you have a choice and because the results are satisfactory. It stands to reason that the less you care, the more likely you will just go with the flow and send your money to something familiar and popular. If you are not brand loyal, you are likely to buy what's popular. OK think potato chips. If you don't care, you'll probably by Lays. Most Americans do. Even if you've never eaten one, you are very likely to know they exist. And the smaller brands are not likely to get your notice. But a potato chip is a potato chip, right? 

These are well-known phenomena, market share and mind share. So how likely is it that you could invert market share? What about mind share? Well, think about what's funny. You laugh all the time, right? Videos about cats or babies can make you laugh. How about a video of a British baby biting his big brother's finger? Ah. That one is special. It can't get unfamous. Who is the funniest comedian? You can't undo their acts or their movies. Imagine how much work it would take for you to create a comedy phenomenon that would make people forget Charlie Chapman ever existed. What would it take to erase the memory of Marlboro in the world of cigarettes. Erase Shakespeare from English literature? It cannot be done. You'd need an alternative universe. 

Human beings are social animals, creatures of habit. We learn lessons and we have long memories. If we were goldfish, then our lives would not have these long tail phonemena. What if our memories were only 3 months long? What would be our favorite movie?  We wouldn't have loyalties and we wouldn't be drawn to anything popular. We wouldn't teach our children what we know. We would be random and more evenly distributed. No experience would be any more satisfying than any other. But we are not goldfish. The idea of us never kissing the same person twice until we have equally distributed our love is revolting to us.  You cannot rid human beings of their evolution. Evolution takes a long time. That is why evolution is sustainable. It builds on what already is, it makes what is most bulletproof, most popular. 

The inequality of wealth is a reflection of human nature. We stick to what works. We value loyalty. We cannot erase our memory. When something particular gets popular, it stays popular (market share) and if it get famous (mind share) beyond a tipping point, it become synonymous with what it typifies. Even when a Cadillac is no longer the 'Cadillac' of automobiles, we still know what that means, and it will go down in history that way. 

 

Question Time

It suddenly occurs to me that one of the certain consequences of the mass literacy and disposable income the planet is experiencing is the time for people to ask questions. Most of these questions are rude and useless. 

David Graeber, him say:

"There is no better way to ensure people are not politically active or aware than to have them working, commuting to work, or preparing for work every moment of the day. Sacrificing so many of one's waking hours to the gods of productivity ensures no one has access to outside perspectives that would enable them to notice - for instance - that organizing life this way ultimately decreases productivity." ~David Graeber

While I wouldn't call this a useless question, I sense that it is rude because it presumes that people ought to have nothing better to do than be politically active or aware. That is a question that begs aggregation of small minds for small purposes at best. At worse it is an open invitation to drop out of the work world and join the revolution. In either case it is an irksome proposition. 

I wouldn't be the first to question puritanical sensibilities when it comes to work. On the other hand, how exactly does this fetish for politics and away from work seek to deal with income inequality? Oh wait. 

Lenny Bruce

I wonder if it is at all possible for anyone to appreciate Lenny Bruce if they didn't hear him live. I have just listened to his two most famous concerts at the Curran and Carnegie, and I think Bruce would have told me 'it was another generation'. He understood that his context was specific. 

Lenny's voice, pacing and patter created a unique combination of artistic skills that make current day standup comedians seem artificial. He seemed to just go up there and improvise with a subtle kind of self-deprecation for his audience that was endearing. He felt like he felt and did so in sharp declarations, something that cut through to simple human emotions in a starkly honest way. Listening to him was like listening to an inner monologue that had no demons, you could say that Lenny Bruce had no filter, but what was going on at bottom was clear and sensible enough so that no filter was no problem. Lenny himself was not a weirdo haunted by memories. His stream of consciousness was reckoning with a changing society, in a context that lots of people understood, even though getting through his slang was at sometimes challenging to me. 

I have some nostalgia for the flavor of ethnic humor now gone. Tsouris. He even recognized it himself, 'Schmuck doesn't mean schmuck any more'. A dozen other Yiddish terms we don't hear. That level of indirection is missing from today's humor, and Bruce presaged the possibility without lament. He understood that context was the key to making everything funny - you had to share an understanding, you can't fake a laugh. 

The Matter of Authority

We have entered an era in which it is impossible to point to the person who epitomizes America. We have worked our way into a notion of equality that puts everything sideways - that someone who follows their passion into any excellence whatsoever is the best. If I am the best at BMX dirtbike sumersaults, that makes me as awesome as the best diplomat in the UN. I will get as much HD airtime and millions in sponsorships as they do, if not more. Even the President of the US - hey they're hip for 4 or 8 years, then they are as dead as MySpace. We are losing the concept of greatness in people, and instead are investing them in concepts. Therefore the master of science is just doing his passion and that's no better than the master of creationism. Everybody's just doing their thing, dude. It makes us all equal, yo. Who are you to judge, man? 

This disappearance of excellence and superiority from our social universe of judgment is the same thing that makes us perversely judge those who *do* believe in something beyond 'American equality'. And these are the extremists who threaten. The problem is that it doesn't matter what the philosophy is or the values inherent. What is despised is the temerity to say it's *better* than equal. This is the result of our Culture Wars. This is why it doesn't matter *who* the 'One Percent' are or *what* they do, but that they exist at all and are determined in their vectors. 

This becomes a problem in the way it is manifest in politics which ultimately become petty. If you can't go to war against China, or Iran, no matter what the reason because war is just too *extreme*, then you turn your politics into a sort of chronic, circular whining. You care enough always to be an activist, but never enough for an actual solution. Politics becomes the realm of desire and placation rather than that of accomplishment. That's the politics we have in America. Which is exactly why it picks up on the utterly meaningless 'battle' between science and creationism, and why someone like Bill Nye gets to represent.

Captain Phillips

There are two things President Barack Obama has done that I have given my unequivocal praise, and they were both martial. The second time, it was about unleashing the Stuxnet virus on Iran's Natanz nuke plant, the first time it was about deploying forces to the Gulf of Aden. This movie, Captain Phillips is about the first thing.

It's already an old cliche that the future is already hear it's just unevenly distributed. I know that to be a fact because I'm part of that future. I work from home in an economy that simply didn't exist when I was born. This is a good thing, that I expect more people will come to understand, appreciate, learn and live. That's how we think of the future in my generation - as the gradual deployment of good things invented to improve the quality of life. I think of that, even in my Peasant Theory; the premise of liberty is that peasants can eventually live like kings. There is always room for merit in this world, so one should undertake the opportunity to achieve something human nature rewards. Move to the head of the class and then graduate to the next class. But make no mistake, classes are unequal and they are unevenly distributed. Class is just as real as it ever was, its differences are stark, clear and present. So you can expect that there are dislocations of skill and culture that keep your future at bay, even though you can see it luxuriating in a sidewalk cafe across the street you are sweeping.

When I realized that I wanted to live like a king, I raised my children like little princes and princesses. I took the risk because I wanted to be a free man. I realized that when you are a king, you have nobody but God to turn to when you need to defend yourself from rebellious knights or revolting peasants. God helps those who help themselves. So fortunately in the land of the free, that means you have a Second Amendment right. You can call the cops but they're not going to get to you on time when you're facing Edward III. That's when you would have your kingdom teeter for the lack of a horse, or semi-automatic pistol.  

Watching Captain Phillips was an enjoyable experience for what it was. It was pleasing to see some good acting. Nobody seemed to be anything other than who they were portraying, and nobody was played for odious type. Yet the entire film hinged something which for me was an anachronism. You know like 80s movies whose whole plot drama could have been obviated by the use of a cell phone. Teenagers, don't go into that man with the chainsaw's house, but if you need help just get out your iPhone and call 911, OK? So you know what I'm talking about right? Captain Phillips, the lamer, should have had a sidearm. Dude has 2000 tons of freight and 27 souls on board and not one bullet to defend them. That's a very uneven distribution indeed. So I'm sitting in this movie wondering how many people live in the past and when the hell are they going to wake up.

I enjoyed reading Michael Crichton's 'Pirate Latitudes' for reminding me that the punishment for piracy was not just death but a fairly grisly execution and public display of your mangled corpse. The jolly roger flag was the appropriate symbol. Piracy was about death. Sure it was business, but everybody understood that it was a deadly business. Yet somehow in our time it has become a very complicated and expensive business as well. Lest I take back my praise of Obama can we acknowledge somehow that it shouldn't take much more than 25 men with guns to fight off four men with guns? In this case, the cops were an entire missile destroyer ship, the USS Bainbridge with a crew of 270 officers and enlisted men, choppers, radar... Well, people have learned their lesson, but the danger remains.

I should emphasize that the lesson remains, same as it ever was. To survive against pirates requires the will and the means to send their dead bodies down to Davy Jone's Locker. So how did our fair captain, lording over the coffe breaks of his unionized crew of merchant marines get so far afield of the lessons of history? Why did he need to put so much faith in the American Navy overkill? What combination of factors left him wheezing like a gordita in his own emergency lifeboat? Did he and his company forget about human nature? I will leave that speculation to you.

There is some part of me that finds the angle of big bad United States vs poverty stricken tiny African country interesting, but not compelling. Yet I suspect that in others, there is want to make points about the poor black man vs the rich white man. Who was a better captain is one aspect of that personal drama, whose bosses are more capable might be another. Let me not put stupid concepts in straw heads but consider what has really been alleged:

That’s the movie. Who green-lighted this? Why are we supposed to care about this story, again? And is it just me, or did Tom Hanks sound defensive when hetold the Wall Street Journal , “This underlying hopelessness because of the geopolitics of what a disaster Somalia has become … just adds to the fabric of the movie that makes it rise above the concept of ‘scary aliens have invaded us and we have to make it home.’ ”

Spare me. “Captain Phillips” is a crass money-maker based on Hollywood’s formula and America’s insatiable appetite for easily digested good guys versus bad guys, white versus black. And while we’re at it, here are a few potential questions for the gathered actors and filmmakers that would’ve been good for a panel discussion, were it a real movie event:

• Is there any part of you that feels exploited by the Hollywood system?

• Did you know that the real Richard Phillips is being sued by his entire crew over the incident and over statements he made in his book, “A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea,” upon which the film is based on?

• Did the pirates really call Captain Phillips “Irish,” or was that a convenient trumping-up of the good captain’s Caucasianness versus the dark-skinned devil boys of the Somali coast?

• Did the pirates really curse America and the USA (in English, no less) throughout the ordeal?

Ick. I'm almost sorry for making you read that. But if this film can be taken as a crass recruitment propaganda for the Navy, well the good captain wasn't the only person out of touch with reality. Nevertheless, you can't control how people interpret art, although that's rather the point when critics are in thrall to the narrative of white supremacy. 

'Hopeless geopolitics' is more passive-speak in the vein of peasants who wish to remain peasants and never pick up the swords and skills of knighthood. It doesn't seem out of place for a crew to sue their captain over what he says in a book in the world of unevenly distributed courage where men take broken bottles to a gunfight. More's the pity we have institutionalized courts that play venue to such petty vengeances. 

I can't deny my interest in shooting and sheepdogging kept my attention through watching the film. There is that part of me that felt that if I were there I could have made a difference even though the events in the film took place far in advance of my serious consideration of arming myself on the daily. But I cannot much imagine myself an adventurer on the high seas without any token of a sailor's dirk or cutlass. Who knows, perhaps container ships were 'gun free zones'. 

Justice is already here, but like the future, like common sense, like the wisdom of kings and the cowardice of crowds, it is unevenly distributed. Like films from Hollywood that hint at the dynamics of the wider world, you take what you can get and run with it. 

The Good Old Days

I need to write up a good old days summary, because every time I hear about how the American middle class is shrinking, it reminds me of how much the Russian middle class never grew. And if there's anything moral to be said about the decrease in wealth and earning power of Americans, then it stands to be moral universally. So what I'm thinking about are all the Russians and Indians I work with in my industry (computing) and how hard they work without whining.

I'm talking about what was middle class when I was a kid.

1 car (with manual transmission, windows and no air conditioning or air bags)
1 bathroom in the house
bunk beds - 2 or 3 kids per bedroom
no dishwasher
no air conditioning
no microwave
1 television
1 refrigerator
2 weeks vacation per year.

So let America shrink to that, and what do you have? America. But while I'm thinking about it, let me think back a little more about the inconveniences we had to put up with when we were in the small old days middle class. Trashcans were made of steel and after two years they rusted out at the bottom. Then you bought an aluminum one. After that came the plastic cans. If there were roaches in your neighborhood, you bought Black Flag, in a steel container that was separate from the sprayer. You refilled things like hurricane lamps to save electricity. We had a tub and a shower, but our shower broke and it became a closet. How many years could we not afford a plumber? All of high school for me. I took baths. 

We wanted luxuries like Dixie cup dispensers in the bathroom, and a Sparkletts water cooler in the kitchen. Every blue moon we would get Underwood Deviled Ham or Chicken of the Sea, brand name canned meats. Those were special. How long did we wear our shoes? Until they talked. How many times did we patch the knees on our Sears Toughskins? Not quite as many times as we patched the innertubes on our bicycles. We sewed new buttons on old shirts, and moved the ones on our jacket sleeves to our jacket fronts. 

Dad did his own tune-ups on the car and complained about the price of points and plugs. We begged him to put Champion spark plugs in, or buy a can of STP. We played ball and if we broke a neighbor's window, it was a big deal. So we had to replace it. That meant scraping from our allowance and going to the hardware store with the measurements for the pane of glass and getting that old putty to soften up a bit. 

We made rubber band guns and go-carts. If you were the kid with shopping cart wheels or clothespins, you were wealthy. We knew how to take apart the back rims of our Schwinn Stingray clones and beg the man at the mechanic's place for a handful of grease for the Bendix coaster brakes. The lady around the corner grew tomatos. The lady next door grew greens, and fruit trees were jealously protected from marauding kids. There were stray dogs all around the neighborhood.

We painted things, and when the walls got too ugly for paint, we glued paneling up. We had a washer and dryer but not until 1967. I know what a washboard looks like and how to use one. I know how to hang clothes on the line, and why our mothers especially hated rainy weather.

There are a thousand little things that told us we had not yet made it in America, a thousand things we paid attention to and grunted our way forward for. And gradually they came by the dozen. Hey, we got some Jello 1-2-3. Hey, I can afford studs for my jean jacket. Hey, we bought a second Monopoly game and now I can be the car again.  Hey look, powder blue wristbands and puka shells. Then it became ridiculous. I mean who would buy a Nerf football when you could buy a real one signed by Johnny Unitas? But we bought Nerf and Frisbee and Hula Hoop and Silly Putty and Easy Bake and Spirograph. And then a Daisy BB gun. And then an actual mini bike. And then a ten speed. By the time I was 19, I could afford two turntables, a microphone and a motorcycle. Things changed from the 70s to the 80s and soon we were singing Howard Jones.

Next we carom off this remarkable paragraph from Niall Ferguson.

In the post-war United States the consumer society became a phenomenon of the masses, significantly diminishing the sartorial differences between the social classes. This was part of a generalized levelling up that followed the war. In 1928 the top 1 per cent of the population had received nearly 20 per cent of income. From 1952 until 1982 it was consistently less than 9 per cent, below the equivalent share going to the top 1 per cent in France.85 Better educational opportunities for the returning soldiers coupled with a wave of house-building in the suburbs translated into a marked improvement in the quality of life. The parents of the baby boomers were the first generation to have significant access to consumer credit. They bought their homes on credit, their cars on credit and their household appliances – refrigerators, televisions and washing machines – on credit.86 In 1930, as the Depression struck, more than half of American households had electricity, an automobile and a refrigerator. By 1960 around 80 per cent of Americans not only had these amenities, they also had telephones. And the speed with which the new consumer durables spread just kept rising. The clothes-washing machine was a pre-Depression invention dating back to 1926. By 1965, thirty-nine years later, half of households had one. Air conditioning was invented in 1945. It passed the 50 per cent mark in 1974, twenty-nine years later. The clothes dryer came along in 1949; it passed the halfway mark in 1972, twenty-three years later. (The dishwasher, also invented in 1949, was slower to take off; it was not until 1997 that every second household owned one.) Colour television broke all records; invented in 1959, it was in half of all homes by 1973, just fourteen years later. By 1989, when the Cold War effectively ended, two-thirds or more of all Americans had all of these things, with the exception of the dishwasher. They had also acquired microwave ovens (invented in 1972) and video cassette recorders (1977). Fifteen per cent already had the personal computer (1978). A pioneering 2 per cent owned mobile telephones. By the end of the millennium these, too, were in half of all homes, as was the internet.87 To societies for whom this trajectory seemed attainable, the appeal of Soviet communism quickly

Ferguson, Niall (2011-11-01). Civilization: The West and the Rest (pp. 252-253). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition. 

How does the American Dream materialize? How can I be made to feel good about my life through these conveniences my family aggregated? On the other side of affluence these questions are easy to answer. I know which of these things had value and which did not. I have been satiated through the wonder of signifying wealth, those tokens and fetishes that, aside from their marginal quality, confer social status among the millions who too were short the thousand things. But even before affluence it wasn't as if we didn't have Christianity to remind us how material things could not satisfy our souls. There were millions of people singing Beatles lyrics about love and sunshine, and there was actual love and actual sunshine. We knew how to be happy no matter what Mr Monopoly was doing on the Upper West Side.

When things went pear shaped in 07 I was somewhere near the car industry. At some point I wrote down the impact. We lost 40% of the market for new cars. Down to 9 million from 16 million. Suddenly it occurred to me, that we could survive if we were forced to by circumstances.

This is from this year. This is how people boggle at American wealth, here in our recession. 

Treatment of dogs. At least until the 1980s in Guyana, dog food was not a thing that existed. Dogs got table scraps and mostly were outside. They are surprised by how in America, people actually avoid feeding their dog “people food”.
The amount of food Americans waste. My grandma to this day remembers a story about when she came to teach in California in the 1970s. The students used to get apples along with their lunch. Nobody ate them, so they’d just throw them away or leave them at the tables. My grandma was shocked at how they were able to just throw out good food like that, and that no other teachers cared.

Yes we have a dog food industry. 

This evening I took a tour of Khatmandu via video. It stays with me.