Cobb

Why Programmers Appear To Have Quiet Personalities

Back in the 80s when the world was new, I was a programmer. I would engage my professors and they would exhibit something I call programmer's dyslexia. This happens when you ask a good question that has many implications.

A good programmer will always think of the 0 case, the 1 case and the infinite case. Any calculation will fit into that and so we are always quantifying how much it takes to grind out an answer. But that also means we have to categorize our assumptions in order to come up with a reasonably proper answer. It was easier to ask such questions when the world was new, but now a lot of them have been asked and answered (I leave it to you as an exercise to qualify the query space of the Web itself).

You should ascertain by this that the quietude of good programmers is born of respect. You are either asking a question with a trivially easy answer and so we are redirecting insults to our internal dev/null, or you are asking a question that needs greater specificity or you are asking a well-qualified question that requires significant thought. The second type of question can yield great amounts of humor. For example, my wife has the habit of asking me questions like. "Honey would you like me to fix you a snack now or can you wait 45 minutes to dinner?" Now to me this is a simple yes or no question. But it requires a yes and a no. So I will say "No, yes", and then she will become confused. She wants me to say something inefficiently verbose, like "I'm kind of hungry right now but if you're fixing something really nice for dinner then I'll just grab myself a beer and wait." To a programmer, "No, yes" is the proper answer, to my wife and the rest of humanity, we are just being cryptic assholes. So sometimes we have to refrain from using our own unique sense of humor and send those responses down another path to the same mental bitbucket. That path often triggers a bit of emotional resentment.

Those of us who adapt well understand that and so we have developed fluffy verbose social skins over our lean, mean logical question parsers. But we often have to worldswap and figure out our contexts to check which skin to implement. Depending upon our environment, this takes a noticeable amount of time. Some of us even attempt to build human interpreters on the spot because the questions we get are so stochastic and meaningless that we simply don't have a map to the proper context. Sometimes it's easier to put on the 'asshole' skin (c. f. ehrlich@aviato).

Programmers are not quiet people. Our brains are always busy doing things, and we are always shouting at ourselves. What you are encountering is a very sophisticated set of filtering mechanisms that generate something approaching a simulation of civility, because most of the time your questions are not as interesting as the questions we ask ourselves, and you're interrupting us, dammit.

Be glad you don't know programmers without filters and social skins as we are wont to replace you with a very small bash script.

Why Ferguson Means More than it Should

I just finished browsing a piece by Adam Serwer, a race man of some repute. His title, "80 Years of Fergusons" sounds about the right kind of intriguing. I happen to think that Ferguson represents a good deal of retro - a kind of stunted growth for an American city. Throwback. 

To the extent that I used to spend a lot of my time being a race man, I find it hard to argue with the sort of well-written and thoughtful things someone like Serwer might write, although I seem to recall that he gets on my nerves. And yet I know my former amis de guerre find my dismissiveness a bit annoying. I don't like to be the guy who nods his head and then walks home bored and does nothing anyway, but that's my profile. Nobody would be far from wrong to say that I don't care enough. In fact when it came to Jena, LA and whatever towns in Florida and Texas got the nation upset about T. Martin and S. Cotton, I made something of a stink to tell people they couldn't *make* me care. 

There are two reasons I don't care enough, and perhaps neither should you, but they are related.

I don't care enough,

1) because my understanding of race is way too sophisticated to be communicated in the way Americans communicate about race. IE, if you might guess that the average American has read one or two books on race, I've read 50. Whereas most people tweet or thumbs up a Facebook post, I've been engaged for years writing essays about race. So basically nobody is saying anything I haven't heard before in one form or another.

2) I fundamentally don't believe that our relationships should be negotiated through any common understanding of race. In other words, even if I took all of the 50 books and boiled them down to a coherent, non-contradictory way of describing everything I know about race, I wouldn't want that to be the way you relate to me. 

So I think most people, even those who are not self-serving in describing their racial pain or cockamamie theories, who honestly say they want an extended national conversation on race, are barking up the wrong tree. 

And it is exactly in this juxtaposition where I lose most people, because it sounds like I want people to be colorblind in an ignorant way. I do want people to ignore race rather exactly the way people ignore blood type. I want no social weight to it and I want people to say "It really doesn't matter what blood type you are A, B, O, X Y or Z". But you and I know if somebody says "It really doesn't matter what race you are, black, white, red green or purple" that is considered disrespectful, ignorant and rude. When it comes to blood transfusions, I want a board certified doctor who has read the 50 books and has 20 years of experience handling my blood. I want him to be as accurate as it is possible to be. But I don't want him saying 'some of my best friends are O negative',  or "we should pay attention to what happens in Liberia with blood transfusions and Ebola because it could happen to anybody." Because it doesn't happen to anybody and we should stop pretending that it does.

when people actually want to talk about race, it is because they expect to be the beneficiary through some sophisticated or simple means. When people don't want to talk about race, its because they expect to take a hit through some sophisiticated or simple means. In otherwords, all race talk is some kind of zero-sum game. It has to be, because that's how racial theory works. I can't say to any race man "Hey I'm only 37% black so Ferguson only applies fractionally to me". You know they don't want to hear that. The Intellectual One Drop Rule applies, you are either arguing for racism or against racism. There is no neutrality. 

But there is if you really don't care, and that's the last thing many people want to hear, especially if you 'happen to be black'. But see I'm speaking as me, as I always do. I gave up my black privilege, to go out there and start my speeches "As a black man..."

Ferguson means more than it should because people want it to inform their racial consciousness, and people are struggling mightily to make it apply personally. People want the right racial t-shirt to wear that links them to Ferguson and to the right side of things now and backwards through history. Some people think their skin is that t-shirt and if you knew how to read it properly, you'd know they were on the right side all along. 

That is the entire problem. 

1973. Los Angeles. Democracy Works.

Posted without further comment. 

A Nation of Stooges

I'm attracted to spy stuff. So are you. We like James Bond 007 because he has a license to kill. He is intelligent, sophisticated, sexy, resourceful and dangerous. He lives outside of the law, and therefore is not protected by it. Everybody knows that when spies get caught, they get no trial. Spies are summarily executed, period. Still, it's cool right?

Like most Americans, I have spent a lot of time thinking about my privacy and security in the post 9/11 "connect the dots' era. And like most, I've been following stories about Edward Snowden with a bit of ambivalence. Is his an act of civil disobedience or treason? It's both, isn't it? I take the position, now, that without Snowden we would have been singularly unable to discover how much our government has been spying on us. Once upon a time, Congress warned us about the anti-democratic consequences of classified laws classifying what's classified. We yawned. The NSA did not, nor did Homeland Security, FEMA and the TSA. Now only conspiracy theorists talk about this stuff and only Snowden has proof. Maybe, just maybe we can elect a new Senator with the ball of Frank Church - after all, what can Snowden do that Congress can't? Hmm. A lot more than anybody should be comfortable with. So maybe Snowden's revelations were the only thing that captures our imagination: spycraft, double-agent stuff, secret loyalty, but most importantly, he got the goods.

Getting the goods on somebody, catching them red-handed, producing the smoking gun, cracking the code all of these are things we excpect a good spy to accomplish. It's the leading edge of Justice. You just shiver with anticipation that the bad guys are going to get their just desserts when they get busted. Americans really dig this, I know I do. And there is a sadness and righteous indignation when the bad guys were somebody we were supposed to be able to trust. In those cases, the anxiety is amped up because the consequences are so dire. Wait, you say, our spies are spying on us? The gloves come off, shit gets real, and it's on.

Of course these are human emotions more at work than human intelligence, and we are likely to make errors of judgment under such circumstances. We have laws and procedures and the presense of justice when calmer heads prevail, and after all, the 4th Amendment isn't a joke. But maybe it is, or maybe at this point in time when our faith in democratic institutional competence and integrity is at a low point, we are bound to make a joke of it. That's a profound error and it can have disasterous consequences.

I think of this because of the awesome power of the internet. It aggregates eyeballs. What one person sees, 10 million people can see the next day, practically the next instant. And what is it that we want to see? 

We want to see justice, but justice cannot be crowdsourced. 

These days, there is rioting going on in a town called Ferguson, MO. And the hackers at Anonymous have managed to get their hands on police audio dispatches, which have now been disclosed to the public. Our eyes and hungers have been satisfied for the moment. And while I have my beefs with Anonymous, their actions are the actions of spies. Well, that's part of the problem. The public cannot be anonymous because when you speak on behalf of the people, you need to be responsible, and you need to be inside the law.

That essentially means that if you expect the government to always respect the 4th Amendment, you should probably set a good example yourself. 

What we know, for example, is that police are responsible for somewhere north of 400 killings every year. If you took an internet plebscite today, Americans would unquestionably require police to have cameras worn on their persons and in their squad cars and film every encounter with the public. Imagine a system in which every shooting were monitored. We could tell the good ones from the bad ones and bring the bad guys to justice. You realize this is exactly the reason behind the NSAs dragnets. I've got news for you, there are something like 3.4 million arrests every year. Oh sure, crowdsource it you say.  We have the technology, we can make America safer, stronger, faster. Ahem, but who is going to edit the video and create the mashup, and how exactly is that going to be different than Cops? (And when is the last time you watched Cops?)

Think about it for a while. Is more surveillance really what you want? Because we already have reality TV and what a blessing that has been. More reality? The humanities are dying in America. We are becoming a people who actually believe we can negotiate our relationships and produce justice through electronic surveillance and spy tactics. 

The Other End of the End of Blackness

-- from the archives October 2012 --

This morning somebody wrote me about something I posted a decade ago on another website. It was a slanderous critique of Dinesh D'Souza describing his 'phoney half-breed superiority'. That's not an actual quote but is basically encapsulates all this character had to say about D'Souza. It got me thinking about what's up with him (some sex scandal I think has got him in the news) and what if anything people think about his 'End of Racism' now.

So it naturally made me think that there must have been somebody who thought that because a black man 'cannot get a cab' in NYC that we'd never have a black president. Considering that we've actually had a mediocrity as a black president, I wonder where all of the blackness and racism arguments have gone. So this little bit of stuff is what I pulled from the Archives. 

February 1, 2004
'The End of Blackness': American Skin
By GERALD EARLY
THE END OF BLACKNESS
Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners.
By Debra J. Dickerson.
306 pp. New York: Pantheon Books. $24.

With the publication of ''The End of Blackness,'' a book not only about white racism but about black people's response to it, Debra J. Dickerson joins a growing and varied class of black public intellectuals that includes people like John McWhorter, Bell Hooks, Michael Eric Dyson, Patricia Williams, Henry Louis Gates, Shelby Steele, Thulani Davis, Stanley Crouch, Greg Tate, Ellis Cose and Brent Staples. Their views are sufficiently different that they might be said to represent distinct factions among African-Americans and, no less relevant, speak to distinct factions of educated whites.

But ''The End of Blackness'' has another layer of significance. It is, in the end, despite its notes, index and historical consideration of its subject, largely an advice book. ''This book will both prove and promote the idea that the concept of 'blackness,' as it has come to be understood, is rapidly losing its ability to describe, let alone predict or manipulate, the political and social behavior of African Americans,'' Dickerson begins. '' 'Blackness' must be updated so that blacks can free themselves from the past and lead America into the future.'' The American reading public, black and white, loves advice books, whether from C.E.O.'s or retired athletic coaches offering bromides and thought-cliches about success, love gurus telling how to find a mate or psychologists and teachers offering tips on how to make your children smarter or better adjusted. One of the biggest business ventures in the United States, the diet industry, is nothing more than a huge advice mill. Americans, black and white, are suckers for advice because they are so inspired by the efficacy of self-improvement. Most black polemical writers of Dickerson's sort, from David Walker in his 1829 ''Appeal'' to W. E. B. Du Bois in his 1897 ''Conservation of the Races'' to Carter G. Woodson, E. Franklin Frazier, Amiri Baraka and Shelby Steele, whatever their politics, offer racial advice to blacks, because they have felt and continue to feel that black people, or some significant segment of them, need improvement for their own good, that black people need instruction in how to be black people of the kind the author thinks they should be. Although most black polemicists bristle at the suggestion that blacks are pathological, these books are driven by the view that the behavior and thinking that need correcting are so self-defeating as to require public censure. I find the prescriptive nature of this book and the others like it, including my own when they have been guilty of it, presumptuous and off-putting.

''The End of Blackness'' opens by criticizing blacks for saying that they don't feel American, for marginalizing themselves, for the imprisoning conformity of group racial consciousness. ''Only by daring to live as autonomous individuals with voluntary group identification, only by charting a course unconcerned with the existence of white people, only by taking responsibility for their comportment and decisions -- only then will blacks be able to achieve collective goals, assess collective penalties, award collective benefits and jockey for sociopolitical positions like fully entitled citizens.'' And the real enemy are middle-class blacks, bourgie blase blacks, as Dickerson calls them, because these are the blacks who feel ''least at home.'' These are the blacks who try to court the white attention they crave through cries of racism, who are the most afflicted by self-hatred and most deeply feel the inadequacy of being black when compared to whites, who are the norm.

The prologue gives a brief account of the origins of racism and the long history of white oppression that was finally broken by the civil rights movement. ''Thanks to the civil rights movement,'' Dickerson writes, ''black Americans are free and thriving.'' But, she continues, many blacks do not know how to live in this brave new world ''where you have no one to blame for your failures but you.'' The body of the book then proceeds as a series of head fakes. One chapter excoriates whites, their narcissism, their refusal to relinquish their privilege, their inability to see blacks as fully human: ''There is scarcely an area of American life in which blacks are not the worst off of all groups. More to the point, they are worse off for reasons that have nothing to do with either accident or simple black failure.'' Racism and structural inequity are the cause, although many blacks seem to revel in their low status because it gives them something with which to whip whites. This is followed by a chapter about blacks' inability to see themselves except as they are reflected in whites, the way they ''simply do not know who and how to be absent oppression.'' Blacks, by book's end, crave ''leadership that believes in the unlimited capacity of black talent, not the unlimited capacity of white evil. Blacks need leaders looking to the limitless future, not to the hunched-over past; leaders who are excited and hopeful, not bitter and defeated.'' The problems with this book are several and severe. It lacks nuance and balance. Politically, Dickerson wants to have her cake and eat it too, so she nods to conservatives in saying blacks need to ''do for self'' and quit worrying about what whites think of them, and nods to liberals in saying how horrible whites are and how persistent and unrelenting racism is. Her conclusion that ''blacks must look inside themselves'' is hardly novel, something that most black people hear all the time from a variety of sources within the race; it is an almost time-honored form of conservatism for blacks. The black middle class is harshly criticized as a neurotic, philistine bunch (a typical complaint of the educated, both black and white, about the middle class). But the middle class includes such a great range of people, from schoolteachers to accountants, from doctors to librarians to professional politicians. Since Dickerson shares Albert Murray's disdain for sociology and the sociological interpretation of black experience, why does she try to sound like a sociologist with sweeping, superficial generalizations about large numbers of people? About whites. About blacks. About the middle class.

How is it that whites can be so racist that whenever blacks appear on the covers of magazines the sales go down 40 to 60 percent, yet financially support and rabidly attend professional and college football and basketball, which are completely dominated by blacks? How can it be that ''many more Africanisms than blacks are aware of reside within them still, from language to comportment to musical forms,'' yet blacks ''lost their family structure, their histories, their knowledge, their religions, their customs, their cultures, their countries, their continent''? How can you be stripped, yet not stripped?

Superficialities abound. Though there is a rich history of black American travel writing about encounters with Africa, from Martin R. Delany in the 19th century to Richard Wright to Marita Golden to Eddy L. Harris in the 20th, Dickerson's section on blacks' discomfort with modern-day Africa is based on one book, Keith B. Richburg's ''Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,'' easy enough to condemn because the author's negative views of Africa are so unreflective and overwrought. Nor is the complexity of how blacks have seen and depicted Africa imaginatively in their literature weighed -- take Lorraine Hansberry's ''Raisin in the Sun'' or Langston Hughes's ''Big Sea'' -- or in their music, from Art Blakey to Sun Ra to John Coltrane. 

No blacks are depicted in Steven Spielberg's ''Saving Private Ryan,'' she notes, adding that no blacks were part of the D-Day invasion as infantry soldiers, then asking ''why no symbolism''? But blacks did participate, in the quartermaster corps or as the truck drivers who made up the Red Ball Express. (Spielberg hardly needed to be symbolic. Blacks were there.) Nearly 50 years before ''Saving Private Ryan'' Sidney Poitier starred in ''Red Ball Express.'' And the last dozen years have given us Spielberg's own ''Amistad'' and Edward Zwick's film about black soldiers in the Civil War, ''Glory.'' Why would Hollywood make a film about black soldiers and D-Day a half-century ago and not now is the question. Dickerson's discussion of Hollywood's depiction of the African-American soldier or blacks generally lacks context.

The problem is that the author does not know enough, has not researched enough, to write an incisive book on African-American life or American racism. If one listens to a lot of black talk radio or has some bull sessions with other blacks, nearly every gripe and observation in ''The End of Blackness'' will be familiar. One does not write a book like this. One gets over it. That is why good writers keep journals.

Gerald Early is the director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis and the author, most recently, of ''This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960's.''

 I'm a good writer and Cobb is my journal.

Citizenship & The Lost Report Card

It occurred to me this morning that when I was a kid in elementary school that we used to be graded on a lot more than what we knew, but how we behaved. 'Makes good use of time' was the one where I always needed to improve. That's because I was a smart-ass, finished my work early, got bored and started daydreaming. Well, that and I'm lazy. But I know this, because I was graded on it. And with all the ruckus going on over the complete breakdown in trust and authority over in Missouri this month it's rather interesting what solutions are being proposed. 

Now naturally since we're Americans and we like to congratulate ourselves in our ability to make something (rather than just nothing) out of race, there's a game afoot telling white people how they ought to think and behave and telling black people how they ought to think and behave. The ignorant assumption of course is that you add up all the diversity numbers and it will work out remainder zero. Except we're supposed to be indivisible with liberty and justice for all, but everybody keeps saying that diversity is the solution.

You can't have diversity without division.  The opposite of diversity is conformity. 

So that means you have to teach everybody the same thing and hold everybody to the same standard of behavior. Hey wait a minute - that's what public school is supposed to be about, right? That's why we had the Brown Decision to get us all in the same schools. But what if they didn't teach anybody how to behave? Hmm.

I specifically remember that as time went by in elementary school, the Citizenship & Work Habits side of the report card got smaller and smaller. The public middle schools basically reduced them to one line for each class you attended. What did you get in math? B, S, S? What exactly does an 'S' in Citizenship mean? Basically nothing. Hell, I wonder if they even use the word 'citizenship' here in Los Angeles for fear of insulting our Mexican national neighborhood residents. So I googled around to see if I could find any old school report cards. Not from LA Unified School District, but I did find some remarkable images.  

I find it almost impossible to believe that any public school in America would consider such a detailed and rigorous evaluation of the character of children. It seems almost unthinkable. I mean look at this. 'Treats members of the visiting team with hospitality". "Shares good times with others whenever possible". "Subordinates his own will to the larger purposes and ideals of life." These are things we all know to be essential to good character These are all virtues we acknowledge. So why on earth do we not teach them to children? What was the breaking point? When did GPA and test scores become more important than anything else?

Now I attended Catholic middle school and high school and measures of character, as well as discipline for lapses in character were all part and parcel of the spirit of belonging to the school. One sought to bring honor and respect to one's school by exemplifying virtue in all these ways. And I know all of my small 'a' atheist pals out there can't seem to find a way to understand how you can teach virtuous citizenship without summary intimidation and invocation of fire and brimstone from an 'imaginary' supreme being, but I guess they forget that nuns and priests are people too. And people have different ways of inspiring and teaching to standards. 

The point of course is to have standards and these are the kinds of standards I think too many Americans simply don't feel beholden to. They think perhaps that these are just optional - that you can function perfectly well in society and the worse thing that's going to happen to you is that somebody down the line is going to call you an 'asshole' or a 'douchebag'. Other than that, it's all whatever dude. 

I am inclined to believe that whenever we get into 'this conversation' things get so far carried away into the identity troughs of 'race, creed, color, ethnicity, physical ability, sexual preference, gender' that people simply don't have space in their brains for character. It must completely blow their minds to imagine that character might be measured in other terms than these fetishized diversity buckets. 

It's really hard to find in front of a paywall any sort of accounting for this set of measures. But I found a scanned copy from the Internet Archive. They are called the Upton-Chassell Scale and I have a copy for you. 

Now on first glance this is clearly a mix in importance. The author is quick to point out. 

It is interesting to note in Chart I, for example, that it is the consensus of opinion that a habit such as "Puts on or removes wraps quickly," listed on p. 22, is of trivial importance, since it is rated as i, and should, therefore, receive comparatively little attention from the teacher; while a habit like "Tells the truth without flinching or compromise, trying to give a correct im- pression," given on p. 24, which is rated 10, is of primary impor- tance and should be carefully considered when the teacher is making out the report card.

I often hear from people who begrudge conservatism its wisdom and other such folks whose motivations are opaque to me, that the benefit of all such things from the 'olden days' are negated owing to some inherent racist content or explicit racist implementation. So it would not surprise me in the least if at some point it were determined through some cockamamie finger-pointing posing as research, that white teachers were singularly unable to be consistent in their evaluations of non-white students when it came to these measures of character and citizenship. OK, let's stipulate that to be the case for 1919 but that somehow through the magic of the Civil Rights Movement, that white people have been sufficiently re-educated to give this idea a second-chance. Why not? What have we got to lose? Wouldn't you like to know this about public school students? Is there any situation in which these questions are inappropriate? I don't think so. I think these are things that anyone would notice in children and indeed ought to notice. 

I don't have the complete set of these report card images but there is an extensive list of citizenship metrics in the document. So have at it.

Now while I'm at this let's get an idea of whom exactly this Horace Mann character was, since there appears to be something to the fact that much of this reporting by Upton and Chassell was done at Horace Mann Elementary School. The great and powerful Wikipedia says this of Mann's Congressional career:

In the spring of 1848 he was elected to the United States Congress as a Whig, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of John Quincy Adams. His first speech in that body was in advocacy of its right and duty to exclude slavery from the territories, and in a letter in December of that year he said: “I think the country is to experience serious times. Interference with slavery will excite civil commotion in the South. But it is best to interfere. Now is the time to see whether the Union is a rope of sand or a band of steel.” Again he said: “I consider no evil as great as slavery, and I would pass the Wilmot Proviso whether the South rebel or not.” During the first session, he volunteered as counsel for Drayton and Sayres, who were indicted for stealing 76 slaves in the District of Columbia, and at the trial was engaged for 21 successive days in their defense. In 1850, he was engaged in a controversy with Daniel Webster in regard to the extension of slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law. Mann was defeated by a single vote at the ensuing nominating convention by Webster's supporters; but, on appealing to the people as an independent anti-slavery candidate, he was re-elected, serving from April 1848 until March 1853.

Well that ain't hay. But wait, look at that last measure of character. "Recognizes moral purpose in the universe, and reverences a Higher Power". Geez, I dunno. Could we even have such a question posed of our children here in America? Leaving that nit to be picked by such people as find it appealing let us review then, the top categories from the Upton-Chassell document.

• Takes Care of His Health.
• Keeps a Good posture.
• Is Orderly
• Execises Thrift.
• Is Prompt.
• Thinks Clearly and Purposefully
• Has a Sense of Humor
• Is Refined
• Is Characterized by Helpful Initiative
• Is Self-Reliant
• Exercises Self-Control
• Lives up to the Traditions of Sportsmanship
• Stands for Fair Play
• Is Courageous
• Is Honest and Truthful
• Is Trustworthy
• Has a Sense of Civic Responsibility
• Is Obedient
• Is Generous
• Is Courteous and Considerate
• Is Cooperative
• Is Broadminded
• Is Loyal
• Has a Fine Sense of Appreciation and Seeks to Express It.

Character counts. So why do we not count character?

 

Obligatory Seriousness on the Killing of Michael Brown

I've read about 50 headlines and nothing more, but I already know the narrative. Ferguson, Missouri, a town I never heard of, is now the last stop on the Protest Train. All Aboard!

It goes without saying, although people would try to blame me for not saying, so I'm saying it up front, that police brutality is a crime, and a wrongful death in police custody seriously retards faith in democratic institutions. But then I think it should be equally obvious that some of these small backwater towns are institutionally bankrupt and the people know it. That doesn't get 20 million tweets or any competent attorneys from our top law schools interested in improving the quality of municipalities in Missouri. Nor does the hopelessness of the locals impel them to load up the truck and move. You'll hear all over the interwebs what a crappy place Ferguson, Missouri is in perfect clarity as if this killing were the perfect storm everyone saw coming over the horizon. Yeah but you didn't evacuate. 

No man is an island and every man's death diminishes me. But rather like gravity it diminishes with the square of the distance. Socially, politically and physically that place is a long way away and no amount of echoes in the media is going to bring it closer to me. Aside from that, I'm supposed to be an independent thinker; well, I am. What strikes me this week, is how we really don't know what's boiling on the inside of people's heads. We don't know about cops, we don't know about robbers, we don't know about comedians or actresses. We just remark a lot when somebody dies.

It has been some time since I have thought about the Coalition of the Damned, and I misread something yesterday that gave me pause. Somebody said that folks 'showed up for a peaceful protest dressed like they were ready for combat'. At first I thought it was the crowd and I thought, what a wonderful idea. But it turned out, predictably, to be the police.

If the death of one man, by accident, or on purpose causes a neighborhood, community, suburb, town, ghetto or general residential district to break down civility, well I suppose you can call that person a hero by definition. His life is valued higher than law and order. Pinker has words to say on such honor codes. Essentially, they are tribal and inferior to the rule of law. But I've been saying this for years, tribal hierarchies are what people use when democratic institutions fail. Nothing at all surprising at that. What is surprising is the extent to which activists and political plotters and strategists try to co-opt the energy of tribalism and convert it back into democratic institutional power. It's really just swapping one alien committee for another. And of course the big problem is that it doesn't help the honor code or the tribe. 

A real pitchfork and torches tribe working the hierarchy is ready, and I mean defiantly, militantly ready, to stare down and shoot down the System. That's what 'by any means necessary' implies, but it always turns out in America that the means of choice is sublimation to the New Committee (which seems always ready to grant permanent seats to Jackson or Sharpton). It almost makes you miss Khalid Muhammad. But the bottom line is, misappropriation of James Baldwin's Fire Next Time notwithstanding, the tribe is going to lose.

Nobody in the tribe is willing to take a bullet for Michael Brown. Nobody in the tribe is willing to fire a bullet for Michael Brown. But the loudmouthing will follow for years. It's all just talk. 

The professionals will crank the gears in the Justice System, because the tribe unwilling as it is to be permanently anything but disgruntled will call for Justice. This reflects well upon them as Americans under the rule of law, but poorly upon them as a tribe. A tribe will call for Revenge. A tribe that gets stepped on grows remorseless terrorists.  Americans, as rude as they want to be, are still constitutionally too nice for remorselessness. At least the ones in Missouri appear to fit the standard. The will get their gruntle on in due time. But they will never forget. According to precedent, the Protest Train will land in a new town within a year or two. If I remember correctly, the prior major stop was some town in Florida and the dead man was Trayvon Martin. Nobody has forgotten that yet. His name is written in iron on the locomotive.

You can also count on hearing a lot of the conspiracy theorists shout out to get the crowd to say Ho! And I've already heard one against the NRA, as in Not Representing African Americans. It's not ironic that some folks are dead frightened of guns in the 'hood. It stands to reason that people who could consider 50 Cent an idol or stand in awe of the lifestyle of Biggie Smalls are not the sort to generally be trusted with firearms. That doesn't change the fact of the Second Amendment right. All the bureaucratic means testing of Orwellian nightmares is already in place. The NRA stands against that of course, and encourages its big fat lawyers to strike down every fetter to un-infringed civil rights. But you'll never hear them called a Civil Rights (tm - Jesse Jackson Enterprises) organization from predictable quarters. 

At some point, and it wouldn't surprise me under the Obama Administration (also not getting blamed for the DHS militarization of ordinary police departments) that some members of the Coalition actually decide to mix together some Molotovs and burn baby burn. Who knows, maybe even an active shooter might join the tribe and do things that only happen in gangsta movies and raps, truly fuck da police. But Michael Brown is probably not worth it, and Ferguson Missouri probably ain't the one. Maybe, in the long term we'll just say this one is worth a million dollars of looting and a couple hundred arrests. Nothing to call out the National Guard for. 

While I'm at it, just to stir up a little dirt, is there anybody who is thinking about a serious swapping of democratic deck chairs through the peaceful process of protest, even a little curious about what would happen if the Ferguson looters were shooters? Isn't there something deep down inside you that thinks maybe the Founders had something actually rational in mind when they reserved the right to keep and bear arms against government tyranny? I've been arguing with people like this and I wonder if they don't quietly think that maybe... just maybe. 

You may be reading this at several years distant from the event, but you should know that some sentimental segment of America are wondering in shock at the suicide of the universally loved Robin Williams, who apparently hung him self with a belt. A lot has been said about how certain things are diseases that tragically take lives. Williams had depression, but then again so do many many other people who cannot afford the best care on the planet like him. They survive. The lesson of course is that people choose suicide. They do so to kill the world and send a that world a message. I am not shocked by or sympathetic to suicides. We get 30,000 per year in this country. So likewise I am not shocked or sympathetic to those who have chosen and will choose to jump out of the civil box and commit social suicide at the hands of the local authorities in Missouri. But I would be respectful of a tribe committed to war in the streets. Not sympathetic mind you, and speaking for my class prerogatives, I would have the cops pacify such rebellion with all appropriate tactical response. But it seems to me that if Michael Brown was a real hero, he would deserve a hero's revenge. Who wants to avenge the hero? Who is prepared to get medieval? 

But I think Michael Brown is just a martyr of convenience to political masterminds whose intent is to fuel the legitimacy of their committees, narratives and agendas as they scan the country for poor people who fall to their deaths on the wrong side of the law or other unusual circumstances. Nobody else gives more than a few tweets, including me. Same as it ever was. As they prove nothing, the Protest Train will roll on belching smoke, steam and noise, in circles. All Aboard!

The Inebriation of Convenience

In the first third of my life, before I was 30 and married with children, I took great pains to become an Organic. I didn't like crowds nor the things that motivated crowds, nor did I have much truck in the things that crowds used to differntiate themselves. I was never big on t-shirts with writing, with the exception of 'Joe Cool', 'Pinball Wizard' and 'USC'. I have learned that such matters go under the heading of 'signal wealth'. 

What I did enjoy somewhat more symbolically than practically, was my attraction to BMW automobiles. I can still remember hours spent on freeway onramps meditating on the thoughts inspired by their marketing: 'The Ultimate Driving Machine' and 'Legendary BMW Performance'. Some large fraction of the time, however, I couldn't pass ordinary vehicles due to the lemony state of my particular BMW. Nevertheless, I still looked good. 

At some point I had to relinquish my organics and bohemianisms as I climbed into the upper reaches of the professional class. I ultimately recognized the power and necessity of markets and the confidence of the common man. No longer was I inclined to stay away from Walmart on the odd principles I had defined for myself. I liked that so many things were popular. At some point I recognized that 66% of the American economy was dedicated to the consumer, and somewhere around 2011 I read something I still find profound by Niall Ferguson. He talked with statistical precision about how the average American household became the 'house of the future' during the Cold War Era in contrast to how claustrophobic and skanky life became in the Soviet Union. I'm talking about very basic things, like ready-to-wear, which actually didn't exist before, as well as very luxurious things, like dishwashers, air conditioners and microwaves. 

Today, and since 2008 I have been making sense of how much economic shrinkage it is reasonable to accept and how the failure of public confidence in democratic institutions and civil society ought to affect people with the will and determination to survive and excel. It is from this POV that I wonder how much convenience is good for society and how much poisons the commons. 

I am willing to take on for myself the various burdens of preparedness. I am a 180 degree opposite kind of 'preppie' than I was in 1983 in my green Polo shirt, belt and shorts. These days coyote is the new black. But I am not so confident that everybody wants or needs to take on a stoic attitude. Nevertheless, there is that inebriation of convenience - that drain of skill and capacity that comes from not having to do your own homework. 

Do you sense this as well? Do you especially feel it in the Idiot Proof City? Something tells me that I will find a lot of answers in India. I gotta get over there. 

Civil Rights & The American Conservative Movement

Just found this via Jonah Goldberg - an essay written in 2008 by William Voegeli. Shrill, naive and or provocative people are always asking for proof that the GOP or Conservatives aren't racist, and they cannot wait to drop a Southern Strategy bomb on the Right. Even though I don't much care these days for defending the American Right, I did spend a lot of time in it and understood there was nothing particularly frightening about that experience, nor was there anything oxymoronic about my position in it. 

So here's Voegeli's scholarly piece stolen whole cloth for the sake of completeness and to debunk the drunken notion that nobody on the Right actually thinks seriously about Civil Rights. I expect you to read the whole thing.

And here is a juicy exerpt:

Viewed from 2008, the movement Buckley led was detached from the civil rights struggle because conservatives, despite frequent and apparently sincere expressions of hope for racial harmony, rarely viewed the fight against pervasive, entrenched, and episodically brutal racial discrimination as a question of great moral urgency. Conservatives were personally opposed to Jim Crow as liberals of a later generation insisted they were personally opposed to abortion. Making the opposition personal was a way to keep the states, in the case of abortion, or the nation, when it came to segregation, from making it governmental.

Buckley did not mention race in his famous publisher's statement in the inaugural issue of National Review. The magazine was going to stand athwart history and yell Stop. But it would be yelling at Communists, "jubilant" in the belief they had an "inside track to History," and at liberals "who run this country" and who, having embraced relativism, rejected "fixed postulates...clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic" in favor of "radical social experimentation."

It was within this framework that National Review conservatism addressed the issues raised by the civil rights movement. Integration and black progress were welcomed when they were the result of private actions like the boycotts of segregated buses or lunch counters, which Buckley judged "wholly defensible" and "wholly commendable." He also praised a forerunner to the socially responsible mutual fund, an investment venture started in 1965 to raise capital for racially integrated housing developments, calling it "a project divorced from government that is directed at doing something about a concrete situation," one that "depends for its success on the spontaneous support of individual people."

The corollary was that conservatism opposed the civil rights agenda when it called for or depended on Big Government. "We frown on any effort of the Negroes to attain social equality by bending the instrument of the state to their purposes," Buckley wrote in 1960.

But we applaud the efforts to define their rights by the lawful and non-violent use of social and economic sanctions which they choose freely to exert, and to which those against whom they are exerted are free to respond, or not, depending on what is in balance. That way is legitimate, organic progress.

This opposition to Big Government engendered conservative opposition to every milestone achievement of the civil rights movement. National Review denounced Brown v. Board of Education (1954), calling it "an act of judicial usurpation," one that ran "patently counter to the intent of the Constitution" and was "shoddy and illegal in analysis, and invalid as sociology." It opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act on similar grounds. A Buckley column dismissed the former as

a federal law, artificially deduced from the Commerce Clause of the Constitution or from the 14th Amendment, whose marginal effect will be to instruct small merchants in the Deep South on how they may conduct their business.

Senator Barry Goldwater used similar reasoning to justify voting against the bill on the eve of his general election contest with Lyndon Johnson. Saying he could find "no constitutional basis for the exercise of Federal regulatory authority" over private employment or public accommodations, Goldwater called the law "a grave threat" to a "constitutional republic in which fifty sovereign states have reserved to themselves and to the people those powers not specifically granted to the central or Federal government." Goldwater arrived at this conclusion, according to Rick Perlstein's book on the 1964 campaign, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), after receiving advice from two young legal advisors, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork.

Robin Williams: Dead

Robin Williams was a genius. And like most geniuses, you love him or hate him. The thing that strikes me about RW is that he stuck around long enough to have a body of work that has a lot of stuff in it that nobody else on the planet would do. That is for better and for worse - but there it is.

My first reactions:

• He wasn't that old, was he?
• No he wasn't: 63.
• Suicide, that figures.
• There was nobody around to tell this guy how he was wrong, and he finally figured it out. Whoops.
• Oh. Depression. Ugh. That's nasty. 
• That makes a lot more sense.
• I don't feel sorry for him, but at least he wasn't as bad as Carlin.
• Don't speak ill of the dead. Don't speak ill of the dead.
• I'm going to have to write this all down.
• Hmm. Dead Poets Society. One of my favorites.

I have no sympathy for suicides. You can read all about that here. Here's an excerpt that I think applies to Williams:

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

And that's why I thought bullet point #4. But since I have a good idea of how counselors deal with anxiety which is lightweight depression, I know that Williams probably found himself in the shoes of Pagliacci.  So I wonder exactly if he ever dealt with all that by playing against type. You see there is no question in my mind that Robin Williams' best roles as an actor came from his performances as an evil character. 

• One Hour Photo
• Insomnia

I never saw him in my wife's favorite film of him, The World According to Garp. It may turn out to be one of those avoided matters that turn out well. But I can tell you that a great deal of his mawkish sentimentalism got on my final nerve and he has singularly impressed me as being the star of one of the worst films of all time; What Dreams May Come. Awful. But when he could be balanced - when he was not in full farce mode, which only worked at a very superficial level, Williams could be good. That would be Dead Poets Society, Good Morning Vietnam, The Fisher King.

But I think it will be, in light of all this unpleasantness, Good Will Hunting that will mark him. It shows in film what he must have accomplished at some point in his life and career, the ability to live with dignity in light of an unspeakably tragic loss. Williams must have lost his own ability to lift his own spirits and could not do what our other great clowns (Steve Martin, Jim Carrey, Rowan Atkinson)  have done to be serious in life. 

I cannot say that Williams ever touched in me in a profound way, but it was good to have someone of his genius to be a lovable spoof. One thing Williams never did was sink into the vulgarian perversity characteristic of this age - and unlike Carlin, though Williams would do his share of moralizing, he never became shrill or pushy. You got the feeling that although he seemed to be one that could never stay serious for any length of time, that he was one of the good guys. All the more tragic for his failure. He was, still to the end, and sadly exactly Mork from Ork - a man blessed and cursed with an inability to keep still or settle his mind. 

He rests at long last.  

National Security Insurance & Tough Questions for the NSA

Last week an NSA spokesperson spoke to the Long Now. It was something of a friendly introduction to the NSA's culture of concern, but ultimately unsatisfying. When you come to your bosses, you generally offer a token of goodwill, NSA hasn't thrown us any bones. And so they will recieve rocks in return, but some measure of polite patience as well. The following is the list of questions provided by the audience:

But before I list them I'd like to put a question of cost-benefit analysis to everything. After all, the NSA's budget isn't and shouldn't be unlimited. So we really can't know if they are doing their job efficiently if some analysis of this sort isn't performed. Ultimately they want to reduce terror, and they might be effective if the intelligence they produce reduces the cost of war - after all, if you know exactly where and when the bad guy is, it takes less ammo to take off his head.

Most obviously the cost of domestic surveillance is the one I am concerned with and we would like to weigh that against the cost of domestic terror. So why not create a domestic terror insurance policy? If each American citizen were to pay $10 into a national terror insurance fund and every person who is killed by an actual act of domestic terror were compensated $5 million, then we could have a parallel strategy. After all, America can be very good with money and this is something we all could understand. What we don't understand is how much money the NSA spends on what and how many lives they have or have not saved. Insurance is transparent, the NSA is not. Let's try this alternate route. 

Note that the implications of this alternate route on domestic terror puts the NSA against a very concrete standard - one that doesn't exist now except in the minds of the convinced insiders...

 ---

I have a general (unfocused) question about transparency – which
hasn’t been mentioned thus far.  What is the NSA’s rationale around
hiding its activities from the American people?  What can you tell us
about the issue of transparency going forward?

What are the key questions NSA is discussing following the Snowden
releases?  And what is the NSA doing to address these issues?

Germany is very, very upset.  What could we have done, and what should
we do in the future, to fulfill our many responsibilities while also
respecting our most valuable international relationships?

How can we work toward a new social contract when the intelligence
agency directors repeatedly lie to the Congress and to the public?

Is it true you can still find one-star generals playing Magic the
Gathering in the NSA canteen during lunch hour?

The failures of 9-11 were not technical failures, but failures of
individuals and organizations to work together toward a common goal.

What  concrete steps can you describe in the intelligence community
that have been taken to remedy this?

What is the NSA doing to make the scope of its data collection efforts
as transparent as possible, while still achieving its goals w.r.t.
national security?

 

Is it an acceptable outcome that NSA fails at securing us in the
service of privacy considerations?

 

If the Snowden incident hadn’t happened, would the NSA have hired the
civil liberties expert?  What structural changes will make this role
actually effective?

 

Has the real tension been between the NSA needing to protect its own
systems while ensuring that everybody else’s are vulnerable?  Is this
inevitable?

 

Do you believe the mission of the NSA can be accomplished without
building a record of all worldwide communications and activities?
Why?

 

Is the NSA embedding backdoor or surveillance capability in any
commercial integrated circuits?

 

If you want to address the damage to public trust, and improve the
social contract, why not applaud the work Edward Snowden has done to
demonstrate how your agency has gone astray?

 

Do you consider the NSA’s role in weakening the RSA random number
generator to be a violation of the NSA’s existing social contract?
How do you think about its exploitability by criminal elements?

 

What do you tell American corporate tech leaders who are concerned
about lowered trust and security of their services and products?  Lack
of trust based on national security letters, for example, or
weaknesses introduced into RSA crypto by the NSA?

 

What is the best mechanism for an intelligence agency to prevent
themselves from using “national security secrecy” to cover up an
embarrassment?  Is there something better than whistleblowers?

 

Secure information and privacy need to be balanced – please give an
example of when you feel the NSA worked at its best in this balancing
act.  Please be specific :-)

 

How much is your presentation a reflection of NSA or your personal views?

 

Should the NSA play a role in devising the new rules for cyberwar?
(Since the old rules for war don’t work in the digital universe.)  How
do we citizens participate?

 

Do you personally feel that the leaks of the last year have revealed
serious overreach by your agency?  Or, do you feel as though the NSA
has simply been unfairly painted and that the leaks have been
damaging?

 

Privacy is, logically, implied (4th, and 5th and 10th Amendments).
Should it be an explicit right?  If so, how should it be architected?

 

Amnesty for Snowden?

 

When Russia invaded Ukraine, it seemed to take us by surprise.  Have
Snowden’s revelations damaged our ability to anticipate sudden moves
by rivals and adversaries?

 

How can the NSA build an effective social contract when it destroys
evidence in an active case and when its decisions are made in a secret
court without public scrutiny?

 

How can the public make informed decisions if NSA keeps secret what it
is doing from its public rulers viz the abuses exposed by Snowden?

 

Can you give an example of a credible “cyber threat” thwarted by the NSA?

 

Why did NSA dissolve its Chief Scientist Office?  So too FBI.  This
Office funded the disk drive and speech recognition.

 

How do you reconcile your stated goal of improving the security of
private sector products with NSA’s documented practice of
intentionally weakening encryption standards and adding backdoors to
exported network devices that facilitate billions of dollars of
e-commerce?

 

How does surveillance directed towards the United States’s closest
allies help deter terrorist threats, and how does the damage of our
relationship with Germany and other allies offset the benefits of
conducting such surveillance?

 

I am an American, legally, politically, culturally, economically.  I
was born in Pakistan and am a young male.  My demographics are the
prime target of the NSA.  I have no recourse if the NSA sees that I
have visited the “wrong” links.  I am afraid that the NSA deems me a
suspect.  Your response?

 

Balancing the needs of ‘security, society and business’ leaves most of
us with 1 vote in 3.  Given the shared interest in big data by
security agencies and business, how do the rest of us keep from
getting outvoted 2-to-1 every time?

 

Your fears seem to be based on a highly competitive scarcity-based
economy.  What is your role in a post-scarcity society?

 

In what ways do public, crowdsourced prediction markets help to
resolve the tension between public trust and the need for
sophisticated intel?

 

Does the government have either a duty or a need to be open and honest
in its communication with the public?

How does the NSA approach biological data?  Synthetic biology applications?

You never use the word law.

How many more leaks would it take to make your mission impossible?
Personally I look forward to this particular point in time.

 

Please share your thoughts on:  Re: ‘talent leverage’ impact on world
stage.  We are all one family on spaceship earth, and we have grave
system failures in the ship.  If the U.S. gov’t can shift from empire
to universal economic empowerment, based on natural carrying capacity
of each ecosystem.  Then, trust can be restored that this is not a
gov’t of and for the military-industrial complex, and the most
powerful corporations.

 

What are three basic reasons that make the NSA assume that it doesn’t
need to obey the law?

 

Surveillance and security are mutually contradictory goals.  Shouldn’t
these functions of the NSA be split into different agencies?

 

Was Snowden a hero or a damaging rogue?  Did he catalyze changes to
keep NSA from being the “KGB”?

 

Do we live in a democracy when there are no checks and balances in the
intelligence community? --> CIA/Senate, --> Snowden/NSA?

 

You described the importance of a social contract in determining the
appropriate balance between privacy and intelligence gathering.  But
contracts require all parties to be well-informed and to trust each
other.  How can the American public trust the intelligence community
when all of the reforms you mentioned only occurred because a
concerned patriot chose to blow the whistle (and now faces
prosecution)?

 
How are we to maintain the creative outliers and risk takers (things
that have been known to create growth and brilliance) if we are
keeping / tracking ‘norms’ as acceptable – or the things we accept.  –

How will we know if we are wrong?

 

Can or does the NSA influence or seek to influence immigration policy
so that the US could retain foreign workers here on expiring H1Bs?

 

What does the NSA see as some of the greatest emerging technologies
(quantum decryption for example) that can create the future
“Intelligent America”?

 

What are the factors that determines whether the NSA ‘quietly assists’
improving a company’s product security, or it weakens or promotes
weaker crypto standards / algorithms / tech?

 

Please talk about the recent large scale hacking from Russia.

 

Why frame this as “how can laws keep up with technology” instead of
“how do we keep the NSA from exceeding the law?”

 

1) Was NSA interdiction of a sovereign leader’s aircraft a violation
of international law?  2) Does NSA believe they can mill and drill a
database to find potential terrorists?

 

The NSA paid a private security form, RSA, to introduce a weakness
into its security software.  Spying is one matter. But making our
defenses weaker is another.  How do you defend this?

 

What is your biggest fear about NSA overreaching in its power [?]

 

How many real, proven terrorist threats to the U.S. have been
uncovered by NSA surveillance of email / cell phone activity of
private citizens in the last few years (4-8)?

 

Your list of tensions omitted any mention of corporate or otherwise
economic fallout that may result or have resulted from the Snowden
revelations.  What relief mechanism do you foresee maintaining
corporate trust in the American government?

 

You mentioned doing during slide 14 that the Director of the NSA is
declassifying more information to promote “tranparency”.  Can you
please elaborate on how we might find these recently declassified
documents?

 

Long ago we created a “privilege” for priests, doctors and lawyers,
fearing we could not use them without it.  Today, our computers know
us better than our priests, but they have no privilege and can betray
us to surveillance.  How do we fix that?

What systems are in place to prevent further leaks?

 

1) Is it ok for a foreigh entity to collect and intercept President
Obama’s communications without our knowledge?  2) Do you think William
Binney and Thomas Drake are heroes?

 

How do we build a world of transparency, while also enabling security
for our broader society?

 

As we grow more connected, the sense of distance embodied in national
patriotism and the otherness of the world shrinks.  How is a larger
NSA a reasonable response in terms of a social contract?

 

Describe the culture that says it’s ok to monitor and read US
citizens’ email (pre-revelation) [?]

 

How can the NSA enable more due process during the review of approvals
of modern “wire taps” (i.e. translating big data searches to
individuals)?

 

In the next 10 years there will be breakthroughs in math creating
radical changes in data mining.  What are the social risks of that
being dominated by NGO’s vs. government?

 

Has the NSA performed criminally illegal wiretapping?  If so, when
will those responsible be prosecuted?

 

Can you define what unlocking Big Data responsibly really means and
give examples?  Can NSA regulate Facebook in terms of privacy and
ownership of users’ data?

 

How do other governments deal with similar problems?

 

What prevents NSA from trusting “Intelligent America” revealing that
linking information but not the content was broadly collected could
have been understood and well presented. Funded [?] “Intelligent
Ingestion of Information” ...[?] DARPA 1991-1995.

 

Please address the spying upon and the filing of criminal charges
against US Senators and their staff by the USA, particularly in the
case of Senator Diane Feinstein of California.

 

Does the NSA’s legitmacy depend more on the safety of citizens or
ensuring the continuity of the Constitutional system?

 

Can you shed any light on why Pres. Obama has indicted more
whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined?

 

When will Snowden be recognized as a hero?  When will Clapper go to
jail for perjury?  Actions speak louder than buzz words.

 

Does NSA make available the algorithms for natural language processing
used by the data analysis systems?

 

In the long term view, it would seem freedom is a higher priority
value than safety so why is safety the highest value here? Why isn’t
the USA working primariy to ensure our continued freedom?

 

How do you protect sources and methods while forging the new social contract?

 

How can any company trust cybercommand when the same chief runs NSA
where the focus is attack?  How can we trust the Utah Data Center
after such blatant lies of “targeted surveillance?”

 

Now that the mass surveillance programs have to some extent been
revealed, can we see some verifiable examples of their worth?  If not,
will NSA turn back towards strengthening security instead of
undermining it?

 

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 encouraged our govt. leaders to adopt
aggressive surveillance laws and regulations and demands from the
intelligence communities.  How do we reverse these policies adopted
under duress?

 

Class In Session w/ Pops

Pops says:

What follows are hasty reflections on some of what you said via phone Tuesday night.  I wish there had been a way to “tap” the conversation with Dragon…and have your ideas spelled out in writing…ripe and ready.  But I think there is much value in what you shared…recording notwithstanding.

One of a number of interesting “threads” that you weave is what I pick up as your favoring a “group/cadre/collective” of folks who presumably have THE answers to that which ails the rest of us.  You make free and to some extent appropriate use of the word “class.”  In some ways that’s O.K.; but in other ways it has, for me anyway, hints of elitism…of the Eastern parts of this vibrant country at that.  I grew up hearing a whole lot about the elites who secured their educational exposure at the likes of “neighborly” (geographically anyway) places like Yale…or up the coast a tad to Cambridge and Harvard.  My guess is that much if not most of that “feeling” is gone around the country, but perhaps I am wrong.  As a side note, Stanford holds its Western own prestige-wise quite well.  So be it.

Before moving along, although the subject didn’t come up as we talked, I couldn’t help but think of some of the ideas I grasped years ago from my reading of Madame Ayn Rand…Atlas Shrugged in particular.  As you surely recall, Rand has her veritable geniuses taking leave -- with their demonstrated skills -- of a “gimme and ever- ungrateful society.”  With the implied addendum: “If y’all can do ‘it’ without us, have at it.”  There is something delightfully paternalistic about this mindset.

Something that pops out at me, and I don’t know if it is part of your thinking or not: Are there folks who are NOT members of this or these hotshot collectives who are “ordinary folks”?  If we dismiss money as an essential criteria, is there “room” – and I won’t add the phrase “at the top” for others?  Could an ordinary solid citizen take his or her place in those esteemed ranks?  You place a high premium on a social/moral order.  That being the case, I don’t see any built-in impediment precluding the admission of ordinary folks.  But you may have something different in mind.  So be it.

Now here’s my own admitted contradiction.  I remain unabashedly nuts about astronomy.  On the radio today I heard something about a space whatever named Rosetta that is fast approaching something “out there.”  I won’t even try to recall all the details.  What I was drawn to is the tight-knit team responsible for the at least 10 year mission.  This particular effort is a project of the European Space Program; and Americans have had many teams doing the same kind of thing.  My focus is on the skills, discipline and dedication of those who constitute such (elite) teams.  They seemingly are able to set aside “normal” hang-ups and pettiness that get in the way of regular folks.  And that’s exactly as it should be.  They even use a different system to tell time…either ahead of or behind what we take for (earthly) granted.  But as you well know, physical science and social science are radically different.

Jumping around, Donald sterling is a sad and yet real example of why money cannot or should not be salient criteria.  And the same can be said about the athlete who dragged his girl friend out of the elevator.  That’s just totally unacceptable asshole behavior.  And sterling’s comments – however “sincere” – keep him on the sidelines of what I think you have in mind.

Another point: I do think “education” is crucial; but I am not limiting the term to traditional college classroom offerings…although that may well play a significant part.  Exposure or experience is key.    

The military to some extent does present itself as a model of sorts.  The focus with the military is the CODE to which they swear allegiance…and to which military folks are expected to adhere…without exception.  The only problem here is that militaries have the historical role of making real the desires of the nation of which they are a part.  Yup I’m being evasive here: The harsh fact is that any given military exists primarily to kill people who “belong to” or swear allegiance to another nation/country.  No existing or prospect of future war removes the need for a military.  This is a collective that has perpetuity.  And that’s that.

Thoughts on the persistence and “relevance” of the seemingly bothersome atheist to follow.

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I try to make it clear that mine is a functional description of class. There is no 'ought' or 'should'. There simply are people who understand X, Y and Z and there are the rest of us who don't. Let us forget for the moment the instrumentality of getting a person with capability into a class, rather focus on the capability. We can make judgments about the efficacy of the class mobility process separately. What we do know is that in order to have lights on, we need electricity and although we all may be capable of consuming electricity we are not all capable of producing electricity. And among those who are capable of producing electricity, the means and motivation to do so are not always present. So there are those who have to present the means and motivation to those who Can Do. So the functional definitions can be expressed in another way, there are Enablers, there are Makers and there are Consumers. 

I think anybody's issue with elitism boils down to my previously stated antipathy towards crowdsourcing. But let me qualify that slightly and say that there can be a smart form of Consumerism - ie Consumers can be emergent Enablers. But even still, this requires some market making. There is nothing spontaneous about this. It may be that there are two articles of faith:

• "Ask and ye shall receive"
• "If you build it they will come"

There is no guarantee for either of these, and if they prove true there is always some agency, there is never any magic other than chance. Given enough time, anyone can call chance 'fate' , but we are assuming cause and effect here. You can call the market makers an election, or a business, or a church. But giving the people what they want is a job that somebody has to do. There are no genies. There are real people who are real Enablers and those folks get the Makers together to make something of value to the masses of the common man who can only then consume to their fill and satisfaction. So you may ask and receive but somebody who cares and is capable has to hear your petition. 

Now let's talk about the second article of faith. Note also that there are always makers who make things that they assume is necessary and useful for the masses, and sometimes this works. People can be persuaded that they need something that they don't have and can't make for themselves. The worst case of this? Think heroin dealer. There is also the person  that Taleb calls a charlatain, always selling something that either isn't as good as claimed or harmful in fact. But similarly you cannot simply blame the consumer, there is Enabling going on here. It might take two to tango, but somebody built the dance floor, played the music and facilitated the meeting of the dancers. 

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There is something delightfully paternalistic about Ayn Rand, which is probably why she appeals to college freshmen, the sorts of youth who have just successfully made the biggest decision in their lives - to study that which will elevate them from the common man. Unfortunately the sort of university education we see today is often far from universal, owing so much of that to its failure to pay appropriate mind to those things have have actually held sway over mankind's history. All this 'nasty brutish and short' history so casually dismissed by our contemporaries with their refrigerators and washing machines - which of course they are completely incapable of building or servicing when broken. Which I hope illustrates my point about what Makers do that Consumers cannot. So long as the shareholders and executive officers of Westinghouse decide to remain in the refrigerator and washing machine market, such consumers can live in relative ignorance and luxury, but maybe one day the Enablers decide it's more profitable to enter another sort of market. Then what? Well, so far that's been outsourced to the Koreans, and it's Samsung who are delivering the goods, but they may get bored of that too. 

There's a moral dimension of dignity to speak about here, but let me refresh you on why I brought all this up in the first place. I said that we have a class of Americans who say 'there ought to be a law' and so they agitate constantly for some government agency. Now I don't have so much of a problem with the intent as I do with the agency. Today on the radio I heard that there are, deep within the unread pages of the Obamacare law, some regulations about breastfeeding. Yes breastfeeding - a word I find rather Orwellian in its own existence. How else to mother's feed infants? Oh wait, we invented alternatives. And somebody built it, and millions of mothers came, and thus an industry of Nuk and Playtex and Gerber. But when the ratchets of law, and government procurement processes are set in place, they may as well be set in stone. But after all that is the point of regulating your population of commoners, neh? For their own good. What's not paternalistic about that? Well, let's look at the word paternalistic.

There is nothing wrong with being paternalistic, if you are responsible.

I want you to take me at my word when I say the best decisions are those made by a singular, paternalistic, responsible figure. And it is this paradigm I place on a pedestal of merit up against the alternatives, namely the crowdsourcers and aggregators. Which is to say quite frankly that the kids don't know what's good for them, because they are not parents, and the Consumers don't know what's good for them because they are not Makers, and the Makers don't know if what they make is any good because they are not Enablers. Each has its strengths and weaknesses but the paternalism stands. It's about expertise and experience, and we cannot afford to live in a world where expertise is dead. We cannot afford to live in a world where decisions are made by committees where the buck never stops. 

Now here's a major indictment, and where I think the Founders may not quite understand what they done wrought. As I have had as a refrain to unbridled wishful thinking and exploitation of the first article of faith in democracy 'Vote and ye shall receive' (c.f. Tytler): "Who is your Leviathan?" Well people have said and voted for health insurance for everyone (Yaaaay!) and who is their Leviathan? Obama, and so Obama hath wrought Obamacare, brought to you by the Executive Branch with a little armtwisting in Congress. But wait, those friggen Founders split the power so that the Judiciary could gum up the whole works, and Congress keeps changing. What is an imperious President to do? Maybe, just maybe health insurance for everyone is something that cannot be magicked into existence in one Presidency. We certainly accepted that as truth when Bill Clinton tried it. And so now that Obamacare is challenged and Obama's ratings are in the GWBush leagues, we have to ask if Obamacare's paternalism is actually responsible. Or in general is this something whose responsibility we can entrust to the sort of government we are supposed to have with Constitutional checks and balances. The solution is not to give more power to one branch of government so the people can have their Leviathan. 

The same, of course, could be said about our 'right' to live in a terror-free zone. Why should we keep stretching the Constitution in order to protect those Consumers from things they cannot protect themselves from (we say paternalistically)? Then again let's look to the classes. Who is going to Enable peace? Who is going to Make peace? Who is going to Consume peace? Maybe we don't need any Leviathans. That is my hope. And guess what? That equals power to the people. That means the Consumers enable themselves and make things for themselves through the agency of themselves. That means paternalism is little more than parents. Ick I know, it sounds like Conservative Christian Family Values .. but then again have you ever heard of any Leftists ever protest against Big Family? Hmmm. 

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I'll say this finally about Edumacation. Experience is the best teacher, the gallows focus the mind, necessity is the mother of invention, those who can't do teach. You've heard it all before. I am of the opinion that we are a nation of grade inflation and bullshit makework jobs, and we have come to the breaking point of where a college education actually makes Makers out of Consumers. In otherwords, somebody has Enabled a lot of Edumacation in a charlatan type fashion. How did the world possibly function without Title IX? As well as now? Truly? Can I even get an objectively scholarly expert opinion on the matter? 

I'll quote Ralph Waldo Emerson:

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian? 

And then Michael Heim on Martin Heidegger:

"According to Heidegger, we notice the eclipse of the truth of being occurring already in Plato's metaphysics. Once the truth of being becomes equated with the light of unchanging intelligibility, the nature of truth shifts to the ability of statements to reflect or refer reliably to entities. With the steadiness of propositional truth comes the tendency to relate to being as a type, a form, or an anticipated shape. With being as a steady form, entities gain their reality through their being typified. Already in Plato we see the seeds of the Western drive to standardize things, to find what is dependable and typical in them. Truth as the disclosure process, as the play of revealing/ concealing disappears behind the scene in which the conscious mind grasps bright objects apprehended as clear, unwavering, rational forms. As humans develop the ability to typify and apprehend formal realities, the loss of truth as emergent disclosure goes unnoticed. All is light and form. Nothing hides behind the truth of beings. But this "nothing" finally makes an appearance after the whole world has become a rigid grid of standardized forms and shapes conceived and engineered by humans. As the wasteland grows, we see the devastation of our fully explicit truths. We see that there is, must be, more. The hidden extra cannot be consciously produced. Only by seeing the limits of standardization can we begin to respond to it. We have to realize that each advance in typifying and standardizing things also implies a tradeoff. When we first reach forward and grasp things, we only see the benefits of our standardization, only the positive side of greater clarity and utility. it is difficult to accept the paradox that not matter how alluring, every gain in fixed intelligibility brings with it a corresponding loss of vivacity. Because we are finite, every gain we make also implies a lost possibility. The loss is especially devastating to those living in the technological world, for here they enjoy everything conveniently at their disposal -- everything that is, except the playful process of discovery itself."

 

So what I expect of class is that we recognize the truth of it. That the only way democratic institutions can work is based upon an aristocracy of merit. And this aristocracy must be aligned with the purposes, and make allowance for the limits of government, educational, religious and business agency. We need to eliminate the wishful thinking of the masses and pretending that there are no Enablers or Makers who know better. And of course it means that we must support the good Enablers and attack the bad ones, as with everyone and everything else.

Here's one more thing about class. Everybody hates a level playing field. Think about it, then read this.

French Dressing & Democracy

When I was 9 years old, the fine folks at Virginia Road Elementary School experimented on us kids. You see we had lost the brick building that housed our cafeteria to the big Sylmar Quake in February of 1971 and so we now got bag lunches instead of yummy cafeteria food. For some reason they decided to pack French dressing in those little plastic packets we are all now familiar with. Of course it was horrible. Nobody wanted to eat it. So some kids had a great idea, let's use it for fighting. 

We would collect the packets at lunch time and hide them in the cloak room until after school. Then, out on the sidewalk, we would place them on the ground and stomp them with flying orange results. The splatter was fantastic, and we transformed new clean clothes into wonderous patterns of stains of the sort all of the Tide commercials promised they could remove. Of course we were encouraged to stop by the administration, but their problem was twofold.

This kind of battle is absolutely irresistable to 9 and 10 year old boys. It is impossible to convince us that this was anything but the most hilarious fun that could be had. Nasty smelly orange French dressing that nobody liked could serve no better purpose than marking nons, hooks, punks and poohbutts in after-school wars. We kings of the school had our obligations. But not only that, they kept supplying us with the goop. What are we supposed to do, just throw away food? 

The experiment lasted a week, but I still remember.