Cobb

Three Sci-Fi Giants

I have returned to reading science fiction after overdosing as a precocious teen. I am startled to find how good it has become. I can say without question that the most imaginative and all-encompassing vision of space-faring sci-fi has come from Iain M. Banks. His Culture series of novels pose a galaxy that I find realistic and puts all other post-scarcity novels to shame. Start with Consider Phlebas. You won't be able to put it down, and you will be spoiled for all sci-fi yet to come. I won't tell you what Banks does, but once you read him every other sci-fi will sound lightweight and incomplete. Banks answers *all* the questions of humanity's relationship to the galaxy and once you've finished, you just wonder why nobody else has gotten so far. 

The most well-written, ethically thoughtful science fiction I have ever read is the work of Gene Wolfe's Tales of the New Sun. While I'm guessing you mean sword and sorcery as fantasy as opposed to spaceships and high tech, I'm going to say that this is science fiction. It is something else though, it is a deep rumination, told from the first person, about power, and it is told at a distance from a technical explanation about the science involved, much of which is alien and inexplicable. It is in the end a human fiction, a man's long journey into becoming legend through many travels and adventures in a strange land (that may be Earth) but billions of years into the future. It is about the conflicts on a planet of many races that live with a mix of tribal and medieval kingdoms - a planet whose sun has been dying and has lost its ability and knowledge of space travel, and a man whose story is wrapped up in growing conflicts as he gathers mysterious powers. Nothing shiny though. Way better than LoTR. 

Then this wouldn't be complete without Charles Stross, who is the single most brilliantly twisted mind in the world of sci-fi. The Laundry Series is great near future, spy-thriller involving a guy named Bob who is a computational demonologist on a hapless mission to save earth from gibbering horrors in other dimensions. But the other works of Stross are great because he envisions the universe as a can of hideous worms in which humans are amusing in their struggles. It really opens up your mind and pours sludge in.

My other favorites are:

Alastair Reynolds : Peter F. Hamilton : Paolo Bagigalupi

The Difference Between Horseshit and Bullshit

I am particularly fond of the term bodewash, for what it's worth. Yet I think that there are appropriate axes of shit that should be navigated with some care. 

The other night, as my clan-mates and I were engaged in the Iron Banner, a certain combination of unfortunate and somewhat unanticipated circumstances prompted one of them to roar, "You've got to be fucking kidding me!" And then on another occasion, "You've got to be fucking shitting me!"  I pause a moment to think about those outbursts as they indicate someone rationally making moves when suddenly gravity is reversed. 

Horseshit is a term which I think applies to a specific instance of falsity. And in that regard it would be less of an insult to 'call horseshit' on a particular matter. If I am saying that some situation is full of shit, it is generally horseshit to which I am referring. Likewise, I think my gaming friend had a moment of outrage, and the surprise of "You've got to be shitting me" must be inferred to indicate horseshit. 

If the same thing happened over and over, I'm sure he would have thrown down the controller and walked out of the room exclaiming "This is bullshit!" Bullshit thus in contrast requires that one recognize and implicate a continuous and purposeful production of shit. An average cow is double the weight of an average mare and the average cattle herd is generally much larger than the average herd of horses, although I cannot say my experience with these observations is expert. Nevertheless, it's useful to consider these facts with the understanding that the bulls will produce more shit. 

It is also useful to note that horses are much taller than cattle, run faster and range further. Thus their noses are not as likely to detect their own shit, whereas bullshit is generally found fairly closely to the bull. 

How Many Killers?

People have been asking about the proper means test for national gun registration. I've been thinking about panoptics a bit lately. It's part of the subject of my novel. So this is what strikes me today. First a couple headlines:

Phoenix

A woman’s decapitated body and two mutilated dogs were found by police Saturday morning at an apartment building in Phoenix, Arizona — along with the suspect who police say severed his own arm and took out one of his eyeballs.

Atlanta

The 30-year-old man found dead outside a Rockdale County apartment likely died playing Russian roulette, police said Friday. Robert Thomas pulled out a revolver, removed the rounds, reloaded one round, spun the chamber and told the three men he was with they were going to play the game, according to Capt. Jackie Dunn with Conyers police.

Seattle

Two men in their 20s were killed in a drive-by shooting early Saturday on Interstate 5 in Mount Vernon, according to the Washington State Patrol. Troopers were called to the area near the College Way, Exit 227, where they found the driver and front-seat passenger dead inside a black Mercedes just after 3 a.m.

That took all of five minutes to discover, but I already know that there are somewhere between 15-17,000 murders every year here in the US, as well as 30,000 odd suicides. So my question is, if you could have a standard set of quizzes and evaluations put on every American, how many of them would show up to be these kinds of sociopaths? Ultimately, that's the question. What do you do with the knowledge that your society has sociopaths and psychopaths? 

Now I stand against those with a zero tolerance attitude towards crime not because I have some special tolerance for crime or criminals, but because of the cost to ordinary Americans. The problem with American society, as I see it, is that we have abandoned a set of personal judgments between each other and looked away. Call it liberalization if you must. But our live and let live era has gone from the margins to the center and what was called crazy and worth of suppression 40 years ago has become manifest in the mainstream. Our natural inclination to persecute (yes), has now shifted to other weird things that don't deserve scrutiny because of our unwillingness to persecute what we instinctually and traditionally know to be hinky and wrong. The result is a mob social media following a set of narratives that don't make for common sense, but are accepted as the conventional wisdom. That and mindless aggregation as well as our democratic impulse trigger us to believe that there are new solutions to chronic problems and we need some kind of new shock to our system to right the wrongs. Does that make sense to you? Are you following me here?

Sin and crime are as old as humanity. We know them when we see them. But why should we institutionalize panoptics when everyone knows what crazy looks like? Because we are living in a society of cowardice, a nation of stooges, who prefer the institutionalization of common sense to direct action by individuals. 

Oddly enough, I've been listening to and falling back in love with the music of Billy Joel. The lyrics of his song Pressure, are the poetry missing in my post:

You used to call me paranoid
Pressure
But even you cannot avoid
Pressure
You turned the tap dance into your crusade
Now here you are with your faith
And your Peter Pan advice
You have no scars on your face
And you cannot handle
Pressure

All grown up and no place to go
Psych 1, Psych 2
What do you know?
All your life is channel 13
Sesame Street
What does it mean?

Those with no scars on their faces organize frightened mobs to vote for the police state institutionalization of society from living in fear of any tool that could become a weapon. Because Confederate Battle Flags. Everyone with a scar will be searched because they disobeyed the 11th Commandment: Don't try this at home. 

Keep America Safe from Stranger Danger! Register your psychological profile today! Vote for me and I'll set you free!

The Thai Civil Engineering Problem

On racial unity.

Let's say you're a Thai and you love civil engineering, but you live in California and there aren't many around you. You find the best engineering school and join the Thai Civil Engineers. Now you're surrounded by people and motivated and want to prove things to the Thai community and the Civil Engineering community, and you do both. And then you run for office to become president, and guess what. You have an opponent. And everything you stand for, she stands against. And you want to do X as a priority for the Thai Engineering Community and she says X will magnify the problem, and then you disagree on what the real problem is. 

You are at odds because you cannot stomach disagreement among Thais. You want unity and your organization can't produce it. You fail to appreciate the actual diversity of Thai interests and civil engineering interests. You want to build bridges, they want to build sewers. You want to talk about dikes and pumps in New Orleans, they say that's not a Thai problem. 

What you have to do is find a way to be yourself, by yourself. You can't design your own friends, you have to *make* friends. No matter how sophisticated and comprehensive you think your racial theories are, they're wrong. Because if they worked, you wouldn't have to ask the question. They don't work, and they never will. 

The best thing you can do is make babies. They will belong to you. And then they will become teenagers and rebel against everything you've taught them,just because they can. And you'll look back at the Thai Civil Engineers 20 years after you graduated and they're still dealing with the same problems. 

Look in the mirror, face yourself. Love yourself. Build yourself. Make yourself useful. The race ain't gonna follow you, because if there was a master plan, it would be a no-brainer for you to find the master Thai Civil Engineer and you would have already been on his friends list. But you're not. There is no such list.  So make peace with that. The racial unity you perceive in other people is a myth. Their unity organizations fail too. Don't believe me. Just watch.

ApplePay, Sxip and the LastID

Several years ago I read about something called limited liability identity. I thought it was one of the best ideas I'd heard in a very long time, so I wrote about it. I heard it from one of the partners at a company called Sxip. That company has died, but the idea lives on.

Recently I have restarted work on my sci-fi novel whose working title is 'Borky's Beach'. I would have liked to call it 'The Informationist' but that one's already taken. At any rate, it is about a panoptic, bioengineered utopian near future on the edge of collapse. I think it will be brilliant, but that's just me. One of the components of this future is LastID which is a combination of cyber-currency, panoptic marketing, federated identity and banking all based in part on the idea of limited liability identity. Well I talked to my co-worker at Full360, Rusty, over the weekend and he's telling me that a part of what this thing does is currently available.

So we're talking about two technologies that work to implement something that's actually very simple when you think about it. ApplePay and Vault are the two technologies. I'll describe it here with some language that I may repurpose for the book.

How it works is really simple. You have some fraction of your funds pre-allocated for impulse buying. So before you leave your house, because part of the security includes geolocation, you thumb your brick and tell it that you want to spend $100 over at the Panorama Mall. It generates some new 'credit card numbers' that are useful for about 6 hours, and then you just shop. After the time runs out, whatever is unspent goes back into your cash bucket. When you get to the mall you just pick up whatever you want in the stores. If you go over your impulse limit, your brick automatically checks to see if you can recategorize the purchase into your monthly budget. If you can, then it authorizes. If not, then you literally have to go back home and add cash. That's usually not a problem because you can put a hold on any merchandise in the whole supply chain for a small fee, and the sort of people who do this kind shopping without prepaid subscriptions are generally rich anyway. I mean why spend the time and money leaving your house to shop anyway?

So my new understanding is that Vault will work as an API that we can use to assign timed access and authorization to any resource under our management. If I want to authorize an ETL server to have access to a database server, I can provision it on demand. So this enables a new class of Lambda computing streams. Super cool. 

ApplePay looks like a cool and crisp implementation of limited liability identity, which basically means what I said above. You don't have permanent credit cards, you have pre-authorized, expiring certs.Nice. 

Three Phase Induction Motor

How to Beat the Trolls

Right now I'm sitting in my comfortable leather chair listening to the new Bad Plus + Joshua Redmond album on my Jambox. The music is good, really good. I know it's good because I have good taste in music, and I'm bored of music that doesn't have such melodic density and rhythmic sophistication. I don't need Reddit to tell me that it would be good, but I might have found out if I went there. I know enough Jazz to be a decent critic, and if there were 50000 ranked jazz critics in America I'd be in that number. If you wanted to get the consensus of the top 100 jazz critics on this particular album, you'll never find it on Reddit.

How do you rank a jazz critic? 

Well one thing you don't do is rank them by novelty or popularity. You have to read them and listen to the music they listen to and engage in a decent discussion with them. It's something that can be done on the internet, but it is not the kind of process that is supported by the lame, one-dimensional chat systems that are the majority of webchat systems that exist. 

If you've ever graded term papers, you have an idea of how that process works. Let's call it peer review. I don't consider myself an expert or formally familiar with academic peer review processes, but I do know something about decision making systems. I've been involved with building such systems for nearly 30 years now. I do know that you won't get the 100 top jazz critics on Reddit doing peer review because those rare jazz critics, experts as they would be, would not have the stomach for dealing with trolls. In short, trolls are not the peers of experts, and most every webchat forum on the internet assumes that we all are peers or that we want to be peers. 

This wasn't always the case. Once upon a time on the internet there was a phenomenon called blogging. You may have heard of it. The best blogs were group blogs and the best individual blogs had blogrolls or belonged to blog leagues. We called it the blogosphere and we had a great system called 'trackback' that allowed us, for moments of insight to attach our ideas and remarks to other blogs which might be outside of our designated blogrolls or blog leagues. The most important thing about how these blogs worked was that we allowed authors to choose their own peers. The second important thing about the blogosphere was that authors retained the right to ban commenters. These are controls that were vital to maintaining the willingness of people who knew what they were talking about to engage with the anonymous public.

If you were a commenter at Little Green Footballs, you would never bother to try to comment at Fire Dog Lake, and vice versa. There were Red and Blue blogospheres and each kept the other in mind, yet stayed out of each other's hair. As apart as they remained, they easily found a way to stick to the same range of topics. 

Now we know that blogs have failed to retain popularity in the wake of the signing of major bloggers to larger, more mainstream publications as well as the creation of megasites like Huffington Post. Surely Facebook has taken a lot of comment traffic away from traditional blog/salons like Cafe Utne. Surely Reddit has eaten away at Salon's readership. Slate gave up on comments altogether, so it seems. All of these places have their own character and temperament. Authors, editors and commenters all have their levels of patience with each other. So it comes as no surprise that megasites that have aggregated all of the previously more well-situated commenters and their eyeballs into their virtual streets are going to have more muggings in their virtual alleys. So long as the people who run these sites refuse to use their panoptic powers to block miscreants, they will suffer.

If you ask me, it takes a lot of nerve to suggest that a site with 50,000 members is stifling free speech by getting rid of 1000 trolls. It's not as if the internet is suddenly going to miss an argument about any subject when there are literally hundreds of online publications and hundreds of thousands of blogs out there. Yet today we hear that 'the trolls are winning'.

Now I know that some fraction of America wants to know, since I'm standing up on my hind legs and saying so, that I would probably still be on USENET's Soc.Culture.African.American if the blogosphere hadn't emerged and given me the control I need as an author to kill trolls dead. I say so as black American blogger who has won the award for best black blog, and as a host at Cafe Utne, a well known commenter at Slate and Salon, and as a member of the legendary online community the WELL. I've dealt with trolls from day one.

Here's how to get rid of them in one word: Discriminate.

One. Personna Non Grata.
If you give people the opportunity to boot people they don't like, then those people will be booted. Simple. A community is not a community if membership means nothing. Good fences make good neighbors, and since we're human beings, sometimes we have to call the cops. The best cops are the people themselves. Let commenters vote other commenters off the site. Make it a topic. Let people vote.  

Two. Charge money. 
I have yet to see any website that asks for everybody's two cents in the comment sections do so much as charge two cents. I can use a credit card or Apple Pay or PayPal  to buy an order of french fries at McDonalds, and McDonald's believe it or not gets billions of french fries sold. If I can troll people for free and lose no money for doing so, why not?

Three. Scribbling
Losing money is easy. Some people will actually find it worth it to pay a membership fee if they get to troll at will, get kicked off and troll again. So erase the content of the troll. Poof. Online graffiti should be erased.  

Four. Houses.
If your webchat is big enough to have a wide enough diversity of opinion such that people will get on each other's nerves. Let people self-select themselves into houses of like-minds and temperaments. If people want, therefore, to be in the Nazi house, then let them have that house which is read-write for members and read-only for non-members. Nozi comments stay in the Nazi house which can be ignored by anybody who chooses. The Nazi house can have it's own standards and can PNG anyone who isn't pure Arayan. 

You cannot wish for a better public. They're going to be who they are. Let people say what they will say and make a real community, not some unpoliced anarchic 'public square'. It's awfully presumptuous to think that discrimination against trolls results in the suppression of the free flow of ideas in an open society. All you have to ask yourself is one thing, is a troll your peer?

Judging Cosby

I was born and raised in the modern world. In the 20th Century, before the panopticon of the NSA and global social media, we used to not know a great deal about people we didn't actually talk to. We simply assumed that they might very well be 'decent God fearing people', meaning that they dealt with temptation to immorality and sin with some seriousness.

We judged people back then. Each of us. We didn't say 'who am I to judge' and then wait for some university study, or big data algorithm, or special session of Congress or Office for the Prevention of Discrimination and Harassment to do the judging for us. Back then, our own individual opinion mattered, so we worked on them and didn't just toss around accusations willy-nilly. That's because the accusations were our own, gotten by our own eyes and our own deductive skills. They were about people we knew, people who mattered to us, people whose actions directly affected our lives. 

Today, we listen intently, (I use the term 'we' quite loosely, because most of the time, I don't give a rat's) to what various media outlets have to say about people we've watched perform over various media outlets. And sometimes we take all of that a bit too seriously, but that's how the post-modern world works. 

I've had exactly two heroes in my life, my father and Batman. By the time I was 11 years old I understood good and well that neither of them were coming to my rescue. I didn't have a particularly rough childhood, but I did have one in which I came to grips early on with my own responsibility for my fate in all matters, even the disposition of my eternal soul. It was *me* that had to decide on whether or not to make Jesus my personal savior. It was *me* who decided whether or not I was going to punch Diana White in the face. It was *me* who had to decide how much of my allowance I was going to save or spend. I built my character from lessons presented to me in real life. 

After all that I decided to be some kind of scientist. I realized that you don't judge scientists by their ability to play football, just the same way you don't judge stock car racers by their ability to articulate emotions. The modern world I lived in worked because you let teachers teach children. You let gardeners tend gardens. You judged them by the quality of their work by what they decided to do for their living. 

Bill Cosby is not Batman. He never was. He never even came close to Bruce Lee. 

So how do we judge Cosby? I'm talking about Bill Cosby because my friend JCP found something of a hero in Cos, a man he knew personally. Listening to my friend's judgment affects me. While I found Cosby's book Fatherhood to be as amusing as the rest of the nation back in the 80s, I never had to look up to him as a father, nor as a professional. It's important that I consider the judgment of somebody who did. For me, Cosby was just another person out there who, like millions of other black Americans, defied the ghetto stereotype and exemplified a class of Americans relatively unknown at the time. He stepped into the shoes once placed at the feet of Sidney Poitier, although we knew then as we know now that Sidney was a classier dude. I've had various dogs in the fights over black class, specifically that about class identity over racial identity. In that regard, I've found reasons to agree with things I've heard that Cosby has said. But it's not like he's the only one with those ideas, he's just the only one major media pay attention to.   

Cosby's fall from grace is a middle class morality tale whose application is limited. It is impossible for me to believe that Cosby was not a rock star. From my perspective, the moral bandwidth of the ethics of Hollywood & entertainment stardom is rather narrow. To be specific, nobody wants to talk about how many other media stars are maintained in fictional relationships in order to sustain a window of social credibility. In other words, how many gay leading men kiss leading women in movies for box office reasons. In other words, how many drugs are financed by record labels for rock bands. In other words, how many pathological behaviors are overlooked and suppressed by sports teams. 

If more people were living in the modern world, rather than the post-modern world, such characters as Cosby would not become general purpose heroes. They would be actors. They would be musicians. They would be comics. And if some part of their lives were obtusely faulty, we could perhaps overlook their failures. That is, if they weren't crimes. But many of us are living in a post-modern world in which the symbolic greatness of individuals become industries in and of themselves. One's job is not just a job at a company, the company becomes 'family', the job becomes a 'mission', dedication becomes 'a passion'. In the post-modern world, you can buy shoes and it means you are 'relieving hunger in Africa'. You can buy a car and you are 'saving the planet'. For Cosby it meant you could write a book on fatherhood and become 'America's Dad'. 

This is where Cypher offers Neo a drink and says:

Jesus what a mind-job.
So you're here to save the world.

I think we live in an atmosphere where the post-modern eclipses the modern, and it will be to devastating effect. When crime becomes something other than what the law says, but what media can convince us that it is. In my modern world, if Cosby is accused of a crime, then he is tried in court. And if for any reason evidence is insufficient to support the charge, then the suspect walks. Suspects walk every day. We don't want the law to be as panoptic as society. We don't want children ratting out their parents' thoughtcrimes. We don't want to criminalize offense, especially these days in which post-modern thinkers find so much of life to be offensive, even their faulty interpretations of history effects the way they see people they are only dimly aware of because the internet says so. 

Cosby was not sent here to save the world, but to entertain. I judge him as an entertainer, and I hope that which doesn't stand legal muster will not have him judged an outlaw. What must be said in all of this is that those accusers who failed to judge him at the time suffer doubly for their faith in the post-modern world that made Cosby more than just an actor. He got away with being a rock star because people believed in heroes, and in the post-modern world, rock stars *are* heroes. Until they aren't. Not ironically for the same shallow reasons.

Benzon on Authentic Eulogies

(artlessly stolen whole cloth)

Dear Glenn and John, if I may,

I’ve been thinking about your most interesting conversation about Obama’s eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney and it led me to thinking about Duke Ellington who, in a sense, figured out how to perform blackness during a four-year gig at the Cotton Club. That, of course, is a very different kind of performance undertaken in very different circumstances and for a very different reason. But it was every bit a steeped in artifice as Obama’s eulogy/sermon and every bit as ‘authentic’ – an all but useless word.

 In thinking about this I watched Obama’s eulogy for Beau Biden, which of course, was quite different, though delivered within weeks of the Pinckney eulogy. The mood and content were different, as was the style. That funeral was essentially a private event that was in the public eye because of the people involved. That sermon did not draw on the traditions of black vernacular sermonizing that were so very prominent in the Pinckney eulogy.

 I also looked at bits and pieces of his 2004 keynote at the Democratic Convention. That was a very pubic kind of speech, in the way the Biden eulogy was not. It was also a real stem-winder. But was not in the black sermonizing tradition.

 Those were both superb performances. Performance at that level is necessarily artifice. You aren’t born to it. You learn it through deliberate practice. I have no idea whether or not Obama practiced either of those speeches. He might have. But if not, well, there was surely a time in the past when he did practice public speaking – perhaps he talks about in his autobiography, which I’ve not read.

 So, if it’s artifice and practice we’re talking about, how’s the Pinckney eulogy special? Well, as you discussed, he wasn’t born to that oratorical tradition. Not in the way that, say, MLK was. I’m sure he practiced as well, probably had some coaching in seminary. But he was practicing an art that he experienced in church from whenever in his life he started going to church.

 As you say, Obama didn’t have that background. He had to acquire that oratorical tradition as an adult. He certainly would have heard many sermons in Chicago and, I assume, elsewhere. So he had live examples to work from. But, as you’ve discussed, he also had to practice.

I have little sense of the range of his speechifying. If this was the first time he spoke that way in public, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Nor would I be particularly surprised to learn that he’d spoken this way on some other occasion. Either way, though, he would have had to practice the style in order to get the delivery down.

 Three things struck me about the eulogy. In the first place, it really was a sermon, complete with an opening bit of scripture from which to evolve the subsequent commentary. Second, as such, he had to talk of God. And third, he concluded by singing “Amazing Grace.”

 There was real risk in that last. It could have fallen flat. Not so much because Obama is only a good, but by no means a superb, singer. But rather, if people hadn’t joined in he’d have been hanging there – like the cartoon character who’s walked off a cliff and hasn’t yet looked down. But of course people did join it, because that’s how things work in church and Obama knew it. And the response he got during his preaching, including the organ punctuations here and there, told him he’d get a response at the end.

 As for the talk of God. Obviously you can’t preach a sermon without it. And that’s what was so extraordinary. I have no idea about Obama’s religious belief, but his political life has imposed at least the appearance of belief on him. But how many other recent (God-fearing) Presidents have referenced God so often in a speech as Obama did in that one? Any of them? I don’t think so. Well, maybe Jimmy Carter, but does anyone remember him?

 The country is founded on the separation of church and state, and that makes Presidential religion a tricky business. It’s one thing to receive Bill Graham in the Whitehouse. It’s quite something else entirely to preach a sermon.

 But there was a time not so long ago when rulers were regarded as divinely mandated. And it seems to me that Obama was stepping into that aura, if you will, for this occasion. That’s a very bold move to take. And, as you remarked on, Glenn, he did by assuming the mantle of a black preacher. But in a way it seems to me that that was something he could do as President that he could not do as a private individual. The Presidency has a ceremonial dimension to it that gives the occupant a certain license, and license that not much used (but think of the WH Correspondent’s dinner), but that is real. That’s what he was calling on. And that’s what gives his explicit adoption of black vernacular style real symbolic force.

 I bet any Martian anthropologists who were watching this had lots to report home about.

 And then there’s Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club. He was born to black middle-class parents in Washington DC. He started his band while still in DC but it wasn’t until he got the Cotton Club gig that he came into his style. The thing about the Cotton Club, though, is that the audience was exclusively white. This was a common arrangement in those days, black performers, white audience.

 So Ellington’s ‘authentic’ black style, his so-called ‘jungle style’, was created to please the tastes of wealthy white folks who had a taste for the sepia style. How could the music born of such a situation, one that had Ellington providing music for ridiculous jungle-bunny stage shows that appealed to the prurient tastes of the audience, possibly be ‘authentic’? Yet it was.

 Ellington was playing HIS music the way HE wanted to play it and rich white folks were paying for it.

 As for Ellington himself, he was smooth as glass. I only every heard his band once, and what I remember was a magnificent tenor solo by Paul Gonsalves. But I’ve seen plenty of clips of his band from way back and, of course, have listened to a lot of the music.

 More to my present purpose, I’ve read his autobiography. he wrote it and, stylistically, it’s slick slick slick. Not a peep at the private man anywhere. Very different from the self-penned autobiographies Louis Armstrong produced. There’s nothing particularly black about that prose. It’s more like advertising copy and autobiography.

 But the thing is, Ellington at the Cotton Club paved the way for Obama in the White House. I mean that in the sense that I do not regard African-American music as an epiphenomenal gloss on the social and political life of this country. It has had a causal force in events. What does it mean that at every juncture that music has moved upstanding white people to protest and oppose its existence? There have been record burnings in the past.

 And so for and so on. I could go on and on about this as it is of central interest to me. But I’ll stop here.

 Thanks for your attention. I’ve transcribed a bit of your discussion and I’ve appended that below my signature.

 Best,

 Bill Benzon

 

* * *

(from mcwhorter & loury) 

JM: You have to wonder how authentic the President’s rootedness in this kind of thing is.

 GL: Oooo! Oooo! You raised a deep question.

 JM: I mean this is a tough one. We’ll never know. We don’t know him. He wasn’t raised in this, at all. In terms of his history we know that even by the time he was in his early twenties, he was not that. He was kind of an interesting mutt. Even the black speech patterns, (as) I think about it, he didn’t grow up with those, he learned them later. And after the age when most people are good at learning new ways to talk. And the black church, he had to be told, he had to be told when he was being a black politician in Chicago that if you’re really gonna’ make you way in the black community, you have to belong to a church. He didn’t belong to one already; he didn’t join one as soon as he hit the city. He had to be told. And now here he is, and he seems to be a man in full as far as this goes.

 GL: Oh, John...

 JM: But it’s interesting, he’s a, he’s a very, I don’t wanna’ call him fake, but he’s a very . good . performer. I don’t know if I’ve ever known any body

 GL: Ah, John...

JM: who came into this sort of thing so late, and does it so convincingly.

 GL: That’s so, that’s so interesting, what you’re saying. I do know, I know what you’re saying. [Explains that McWhorter is a man who worries about his presentation and how some people will receive him as too ‘white’ and who thus] understands the problem that a Barack Obama, having been raised in Hawaii and Indonesia by white people, by white people, would face when he has to make a transition at a certain point in his life, he’s written about this in Dreams from My Father, but it’s artifice. We have to assume it’s all artifice. I don’t mean

JM: In the technical sense of the term

 GL: Exactly. I don’t mean insincerity. I’m not going to the heart of the man. I’m saying, exactly. A mask, a face has to be made. A way of being has to be fashioned. It’s gotta be practiced. You could see him standing in front of the mirror. John, we should write the novel John. […]

 48:34 It just resonates in my mind so deeply. Because what does it mean for a people, I speak now of black Americans 30-40 million, to have the embodiment of their generational hopes, personified by a person who must adopt artifice, and manufacture, in order to present himself as being of them. What does it say of such a people.

 No no no. I think this is historic profound. Excuse me if I, you know, I mean I’m just saying, here we are. Because think about it, think about it, OK, the stigma of race, slavery, OK, Orlando Patterson just brilliantly analyzes this, I think. Slavery has to be, you’re putting the slave down. The slave must be a dishonored person. OK so honor, honor becomes central to the whole quest for equality.

 And having the Chief Executive of State, be of you, or at the very least, be a person who when in a position of choice, chose to be of you, is countering the dishonor in a very deep way. But perhaps the only way that the state’s symbolic power could be married to your quest for honor is through the President of someone who wasn’t quite fully of you. Your stigma still resonates even in the workings of history, that are intended to elevate you.

  

Bill Benzon

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/

http://www.facebook.com/bill.benzon

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stc4blues/

Loathing

(miley cyrus channels ethel merman)

There's no loathing like self loathing like no loathing I know
Every day I take a hundred selfies, every day I throw them all away
I just always dream that I am wealthy but I am filthy in disarray

I so hate it when I'm rated by those people I know
They keep treating me like I'm a wet doormat 'cause my butt is fat and my chest is flat
Yesterday they said there's nothing wrong with that
But I already know
YOLO, yo but I blow.

 

These days I have raps, lyrics and poems in my head. 

Mr. Robot

Mr Robot presents us with a plausibly self-destructive young protagonist with a kind of concrete cast anti-social paranoia that most young people only wear as a mask. Still working out some very serious trust issues with his dysfunctional and dead parents, he is a wall of silence to his own therapist, unwilling to say anything he actually 'knows' from having hacked the accounts of everyone he actually knows. Thus with a full inversion, he accepts the reality of their cyber behavior merged with their cynicism and weakness in real life. He makes for a peevish sort of morality where it's easy to drop dimes on doxed kiddie pornogs and murderous drug dealers, but nearly impossible to be sociable with ordinary people whose secrets he has uncovered.

He gets in over his head by solving a DDOS attack for the biggest client (Evil Corp) of the computer security firm in which he works - a sophisticated and realistic version of Neo / Mr. Anderson. Yes he gets in way over his head, as he is seduced into working for a very Anonymous-like organization of renegade hackers called 'fsociety'. And then he dodges a bullet. For a moment he adopts the simulacrum of normality, dropping this sangfroid against Starbucks, only to get slammed back into his terrible reality by a cunning pseudo-father figure. 

The protagonist, Elliot, who looks like the halfway handsome grandson of Marty Feldman, skulks around the predator rich environment of New York City, surviving his pain through an injudicious yet highly disciplined morphine addiction navigating various distances from four women who see distinct parts him from various angles.

It's a cyber thriller that is demonstrably able and savvy. It is the Sopranos for the digital Millential age. You don't want to miss it. Maybe you heard it here first. It has the potential of being as good, ultimately, as Breaking Bad. All the parts are there. 

The Computer Snob

I'm turning the tide. I'm going back to what I used to say. I famously said to my father in 1993, "The internet is for me and for people like me. The rest of you can take the bus." 

The internet is now too much of a good thing. It is the Krell machine for the American subconscious. It kickstarts insipid ideas into 20 millisecond response time fruition. It is a garden of delights for a class of VC shotgunners who enable another class of mendacious graduate students intent on dominating worlds of limited imagination. It needs to be that for a while, and then it needs to be shaken down and deflated. That's what I want, a deflated internet. One that doesn't have time for foolishness. Of course, I'll be disappointed for the rest of my life.

In the meantime, I can remind people about Cliff Stoll's book, Silicon Snake Oil. I cannot recall it well enough to know how prophetic it was or not, but I cannot help but notice that there is a distinct disjoint between largeness and largesse. We are getting the former. Nobody seems to be building anything truly valuable out there in the net, or rather I should say that I am upset that the news is now what anybody is willing to say on social media. That is usurping the power of more considered minds and institutions, subverting the very practical matters of better and worse, for popular and lonely. I'm a lonely individual who has put mind over matter, but mind doesn't seems not to matter and most people don't mind. I don't really mean most people because I have been reminded that all people share great imagination. Unfortunate events must be the inevitable reminder of the necessity to employ imagination, yet we are enduring times in which necessity is a skinny bitch incapable of mothering jack.  

But here's what I'm really going to do. I'm going to tell people to use pencils and paper. I'm going to tell people, "Yeah maybe there's an app for that, but you're better off doing it by hand." I'm going to tell people that if you think you'll ever need technical support for that, don't bother. 

This is not a Luddite or Wrecker initiative. It is a desperate cry for quality. I want very much to keep the pikers out of the game, because pikers profit from the general ignorance and laziness of the mass markets. I want some of that market to collapse. I want people to recognize that AirBnB should not be more valuable than Marriott. I want a value reckoning. This is like the lawyer who is calling for the end of frivolous lawsuits. I want the end of frivolous software. 

I know. It's too much to ask. So I won't. I'll just wait for the bullshit to collapse under its own accumulated weight. How long? 

--

Somebody asked where does all the money go in a recession. It goes where all the love goes in a divorce. It goes where all the points go when a baseball game is called because of rain, where all the touchdowns go when the QB breaks his thumb. All the spam of the internet won't go until people stop checking their inboxes. The fire has to move to another domain, because as long as people have energy and attention spans, the economic activity will continue. 

Users need to become humans again. What are the chances of that?

--

I was explaining the other day that computer science is still truly a science. There's not much happening in the middle that hasn't already happened on the cutting edges. You are competing with everyone in the world and their legacy code. It's like writing books. You might be TC Boyle, but you are not Herman Melville and you never will be. But not even TC Boyle gets to write for FX or Cinemax or Netflix. The teeming millions are not interested or affected by true literature. Users of the world are not united under the auspices of Knuth. And yet truly great code persists out there. The most brilliant hackers are smacking whatever is crackable. The excellent and the useful and the outstanding persist. The future is already here, you've just been reading the funny pages. Who gets the last laugh? I think it's the aggregators.

I don't want to be nickeled and dimed to death. I don't want to follow the man who takes tiny steps. Where in the world am I going to go?