Cobb

The Alts of Berkeley

A couple years ago I was watching video of the EuroMaidan in the Kiev. What I was particularly interested in was reconciling my own relatively new mindset as a Sheepdog with the reality on the ground there. If there were paramilitary forces involved, irregulars and combat trained civilians in the mix of violent protest, where would I stand? How would I contribute? Would I be present? What manner of physical risk would I take to get a first hand look at such a struggle? As much as I appreciate a lot of the footage I have seen at Vice, I tend not to trust young journalists. Then again, I don't trust attorneys and a whole host of professionals to assay such situations, movements, protests, and conflicts. All I can do is look, and occasionally read, and speculate about how long it will be before I have to make such choices for real.

So I found myself doing that again this weekend. The subject was not Kiev, but Berkeley, a place that has its own special history in the minds of many people of my generation. Having been present at the Women's March in Los Angeles earlier this year, the contrast was stark. I also wrote quite a bit about clashes in Ferguson, MO when that went down. I haven't said much about this, the beginning of the Trump Era, but I do know what I don't like about globalization and what kind of nationalism I would prefer. All I can predict at the moment is that we don't have a particularly clear and easy path to my kind of nationalism, but the grounds are set. I think I will be thinking a lot about them in the near future. 

The first matter at hand is the rule of law and the social contract. What a significantly ample fraction of young boisterous Americans take with them is a sort of alienation from a respectable and satisfying mainstream. The blame must ultimately fall on the upper class whose duty it is to employ the right Americans in the right positions of power such that society is more or less coherent from the point of view of its productive members and those who wish to be. Let me have a shorthand stroke at this and blame a certain kind of capitalist. When I lived in Brooklyn in 1992, there was a rumor that South African racist was aiming to be the biggest hiphop producer in the world, and that he was going to singlehandedly turn hiphop into the big money business in a way that Public Enemy and Spike Lee could not. He was going to bring 'white boy wallet' to the hiphop game. Maybe it was nothing more than a rumor about Lyor Cohen, 'Elroy' who got the 'gas face' according to 3rd Bass. I don't know. But the point was that the very influence that so many rap artists desired might come from someone with no respect for themselves or for their craft, presuming they had souls in the first place. What I did know is that hiphop began to lose its artistic edge, and all of its female protagonists as the old school gave way to the commercially successful new. It was enough to alienate all aesthetes, connoisseurs and critics, those who would uphold standards for the maintenance of the soul of the craft. And that, my dear friends is what's happening all over this country in the professional ranks. We are getting accustomed to eating a lot more shit, and it makes us want a lot more bread. Life should not be a shit sandwich, but for too many it is. So those with the courage of their convictions go Alt. 

I have talked about the Alternative Slice before as well as the Anti-Slice. 

Consider a baseball analogy. Imagine you are going to attend a baseball game, and so as the owner of the stadium you need to hire chefs. In the world of cooking skills, and the world of baseball game attendees, all that is required and expected are hot-dog level skills. Despite the fact that fresh pizza, sushi, rock candy, pineapple lemonade and oyster po' boys would all make for superb ball-game fare, you can rely on the lowball tastes of the baseball fans to guarantee you only need to hire three master chefs instead of seven. The three you hire are 'The Slice', the four you do not are ''The Alternative-Slice''.

The greatness of this country can be seen in the surplus of Slice candidates. We have a built-in reduncancy and competitiveness. But the fragility of the country comes from that same fact. The Anti-Slice is underemployed or suffers from the fact that they are out of the mainstream. If they continue long enough, out of favor or the employ of the ruling class, they become contrary, and unless and until their desires are met, they harbor all possibilities and potential for subversion and revolt. They may become more than the alternative but in word and deed the Anti-Slice. 

I see the operation of Slice, Alternative-Slice and Anti-Slice in most political, technical and social discussions of the day, and I recognize that the national failure is the fault and responsibility of America's ruling class. I tend to see the Alternatives attempt to crowdsource their funding and popularity and the Antis work oppositional to the mainstream.

The Alts of the American politics have shown up in Berkeley to bring their bodies and anger to the streets. They are right at the point at which they are ready to throw punches. The ante has been upped since the days of Occupy and Ferguson. Americans are showing up with helmets, masks, sticks and stones. And although a lot of those sticks are selfie-sticks, there are people who are really prepared for violent confrontation. This is nowhere near the size, scope and import of the EuroMaidan, but this is the tip of the spear in American violent conflict. There are a lot of Americans who hate each other, and those few Americans who are part of an addled upper class are not in a position to mediate, or in any way bring calming, responsible arguments to these partisans. In any major American city there are a million voters whose solipsisms. identity politics and conspiracy theories are sufficient to derail considered deliberation in government and politics into shallow, irresponsible populist rule. It won't be long until such cities run off the rails. If we are fortunate, the rot will happen slowly, as it did in Detroit over the decades. If not, it will happen quickly as it did in Baltimore over a weekend. But when the haters come dressed to clash, the police will be outnumbered. 

It will be a callous perversion of democracy, each side electing corruptible agents whose aim will be to punish the other side, dumbing down government agencies in the process. But this is what the Alts want. They want to win the Culture War and take only the Government hostage. This is the amount of misplaced faith Americans have put in government which controls the prize of funding and ultimately of troops. That is the way of the rule of law, because the Alts believe that their extremism is a necessity. This is the law of the jungle which celebrates diversity for its own sake. Such a jungle has no well developed commons. It only has the lowest denominations of the commons, and so everything is done 'for the children' or for 'love, peace, Namaste and respect'. That's no Constitution, but it has a large griping constituency, many of whom are willing to defy the law until it ratifies a new narrowcast social contract. 

Whose streets? Our streets! Yes but who are we when only a minority of Americans actually pledge allegiance to anything other than their own playlists?

The more afraid the elites of America are of these rascally itinerant mobs, the less likely any subtlety and nuance will be given to their affairs. And like the spoiled millions who thought they were flying friendly skies, the disposal of the least significant scofflaw will light a reactionary fire that will further erode confidence in our society. Look about you. We are already talking in emoticons and propaganda, in sitcoms, puff pieces, reality TV and comic book films. I would like to think that something on the order of the blogosphere of a decade ago might make the difference. I'm not sure that Alternative Slice will get another chance. Will we get another Joe DiMaggio? Another Tip O'Neill? Another John Glenn? It's hard to imagine from where such a saint might emerge, considering what selfies we take with our cardboard cutout heroes. 

I expect that there remains a core of Americans who will have no difficulty doing what's right according to well-considered and most importantly, correct values and priorities. I simply wonder what mechanisms aside from crisis and abject failure of the status quo will bring them to responsible power. I have no desires to see American society descend into violent chaos, but I'm already thinking about what clothes I would wear into the Berkeley streets. 

On Intellectual Courage

And if you think it's easy that's only 'cause
You ain't me. And I ain't you.
-- Earnie Isley

I'm finally at a point in my life where I'm learning things that I should have learned a while ago. Surely it would have taken more faith and courage for me to have taken another road. So I hope that I am wise enough at this point to admit my failure of ambition. And still I'm a bit confused.

This weekend I have been thinking about how difficult it has been for me to be myself. It has gotten easier over the years, but when I was young it was very difficult. Something reminded me about how I used to look for friends when I was a child and find that all of the children I was introduced to had none of my intellectual interests. I've always had a problem because of my own natural curiosity and my intellectual powers, such as they were. I never quite believed that I was a nerd or a geek or anything anti-social but I was made to suffer because of those terms. I understand that people simply didn't understand me, but I didn't understand myself. I didn't feel like a weirdo. I simply felt like there were a lot of social things I didn't understand the value of. 

I often recall a summer vacation after my sophomore year in high school. I was bored at home and turned on daytime television. Regis Philbin was on his own talk show talking about a thousand things I had never heard of here in my own hometown of Los Angeles. I recognized that there were certain things I might not experience because of my not being rich, but I was shocked to find that I wasn't even aware of such things. So I endeavored to find out. 

So when I think about how I might be different from other 'nerds' in my profession, I know that I made a conscious decision to discover and understand the world of fashionable Los Angeles beginning in the mid 1970s. Several years later, when the term 'yuppie' was coming into fashion (I read it in the LA Weekly, while sitting on a bus stop at the corner of Santa Monica Blvd and Purdue Avenue after paying for a traffic ticket), I knew that's what I wanted to be. A young urban professional. 

Much of the life of the world was a mystery to me, and I did have a certain amount of arrogant ambition. I believed then, as now, that anything I wanted to know, I could learn. But I also understood, then as now, that I had no particular sponsors who were invested in my success. While I was at my private prep school, I was informed about every standardized test I should take that would help the school look good but I had no particular confidence in the advice of my guidance counselor. This is a very typical story I've heard from others and from things I've read and I don't mean to suggest my predicament was highly unusual. However I am particularly drawn to the subject of intellectual courage and courage in general.

What are we supposed to know, and how should we broker that knowledge? What kind of time should we give ourselves to pursue ultimate aims, and what confidence can we have in the edification of the journey? It is an especially difficult dilemma to consider for those like myself who were not only unsponsored, but who felt they had nothing to lose from falling short. And yet we must socialize. We have to sing the songs that everybody knows along the way, so we take time away from the pursuit to consume and understand the common understandings that get us through a day.

I always preferred to have my appearance, specifically my clothing, speak for me. I always felt and still do feel flummoxed in estimating what it is someone who might care to know me, might care to know about me. Self-introductions are very difficult. I probably overshare. I've heard one intimate friend tell me that I seemed insecure by telling so much. Perhaps she was right. But how else can one do it, especially if one is actually unafraid? What sort of personal information should one be proprietary about? One eventually learns, but in one's fragile youth it is very hard to say.  I like this band. I go to this church. I believe this about politics. If one seeks to think one's way into the future, many conversations are wagers. For me, it took a long time to break through. That was because, as I suspect it is for most young people, I was looking for someone to complete me. I ended up painting myself into a corner and that forced me to dismiss so many individuals for whom I made rash presumptions. Moving to NYC made it clear that my Los Angeles shoes were not communicating properly. 

It wasn't until my last grandmother died that I abandoned my race, class, political and religious conversations that, along with my career credentials and marital status, communicated what I thought were the proper clues which bore up my identity. I had been on my way to allow identity to flow like the loose robes of the desert through which ones nakedness might be shared. This was a difficult journey, especially as I moved and worked across the country. So I always had a contingent part of me, and now it was more evident. I was not that Ivy League graduate, or that Wall Street hustler. I was nowhere near the apex of the most reasonable peaks of ambition that I could imagine for myself, and nobody cared. 

It is now a great deal easier for me to say that I am an asshole. That is because I have found enough people to tell me that I am their kind of asshole. The inner beast that has been my ego, suffering under the clothing and skin and conversations that I have had to learn to be sociable is now able to express itself. What I find unusual is that it often expresses itself as a kind of resigned indifference. I have learned that the world of human beings stumbles along without ever clearly knowing how much weight to give to the wit and humor of Regis Philbin, the testimony of Robert Conquest or the intricacies of analytic geometry. We don't know what we are supposed to know, we just hope that we can manage our way through the gates for which we have no passports of confidence. 

Resigned indifference is not a comfortable position, and I am not particularly proud of this attitude. But I honestly have no idea how I should fit into a society that has failed to uphold, for me and others I presume to be like me, a reasonable set of values and expectations. What are they? Let us merely say that although Truth may not serve man, it should be prosperous for enough men to serve Truth.  The pursuit is not its own reward, and we must fight off the competition in any case. I don't actually pursue Truth but I believe the employment of reason and moral ethics to be enough. These too, are likely only to provide a sort of smug self-satisfaction of our own estimation of our energies. And then one gets old.

I suspect that there's someone who has already read the book or found the friend who let him in on this secret when he was 23 years old sitting on a bus stop in West Los Angeles. Instead, I was figuring out how to comport myself as a young urban professional. I've been there and done that to my own satisfaction, and that may be the only satisfaction there is to have. But I also have also taken very seriously those race, class, political and religious ethics I have grown in and out of. Some of that work has helped me to this point, which while not particularly high, does feel elevated. 

--

A friend posted a list of late 19th century occupations taken during the London census. One of them struck me as both poignant and hilarious. "Fatuous Pauper". It would be quite presumptuous to rename this blog or split it from now going forward, but that is how I feel. I feel on the one hand I might have dealt with my social dissonance in a more cold-hearted manner and isolated myself further into the narrow set of social constraints of a more disciplined and demanding profession. On the other hand, I actually do like myself, even if I should descend into penury. I think I'd be a very good wanderer, although I'd need to work on my harmonica skills. 

I'm going to beat myself up a little more about this for a week or so. I'll let you know how it turns out. 

59 Cruise Missiles

And this

59 from two ships sounds about right. Depending on the loadout, and the usual "Primary, Backup, Ready-Spare" that leaves us a few more to play around with if needed. 

We should at some point find out which ships fired the TLAM, but assume they were some of the Arleigh Burke DDG we have in the Med. 

FLT I have 90 VLS Cells and FLT II and IIA have 96. Not all those will have TLAM loaded but enough do.

The target:
- Ash Aha'irat (Al Shayrat) airbase is about 25 miles SE of Homs City.
- That is a photo of the base above. Just about a perfect place to attack with TLAM. The targeting is almost school-house training classic.
- It is well away from most Russian forces, and the approach to the target given the range gives you enough options to avoid even flying over their main units with a wide separation.
- It makes a point.
- It will not interfere with operations against ISIS - which is the primary effort.
- No USA lives are directly put in danger. Besides the odd advisor or training team - should not threaten Russian or Iranian forces either.
- Based on what has been said by the US government over the last 24-hrs, we had to do something.
- If we had to do something, this was the right call.
- For a point of scale for TLAM punitive expeditions; in Desert Fox against IRAQ in 1998, we shot over 330 TLAM over three days in addition to airstrikes.
- This is a focused strike. Proper COA selection, IMAO.

This should check a few boxes and hopefully this will be it for now.

Also this

Read Igor Markov's answer to Why didn't the Russians shoot down any Tomahawks, given their sophisticated AA equipment, in Syria? on Quora

Bogota and the Mystery of the Middle Class

I spent a week in Bogota, Colombia. It was easy. It was easy for me because I had friends, translation and money. I had places to go and things to do. As I could, I spent time in upscale and downscale locations very much in proportion to the way I do in my home town of Los Angeles. I conducted business with my colleagues. I ate in restaurants. I hired cars to get around. I slept in a comfortable queen sized bed with multiple pillows. I charged my phone. I connected to wifi. I put on short pants and brown shoes and walked through the neighborhood. I familiarized myself with the place, and in pursuing a somewhat ordinary set of routines, I was able to compare that place with other such foreign places I have visited. I have visited several dozen American cities and a few overseas including Zurich, Sydney, Milan, London and Paris. 

Bogota is different because it's middle class is nowhere near as affluent as the middle class of Los Angeles and those other cities. And with my understanding of my own position relative to the American middle class, (which is at the 'frequent flyer' level) I make certain observations and judgments about the others. I would call this perspective the 'walking economy', and from that point of view I can make a few reasonable determinations. 

The Mystery of the Middle Class is pervasive in my thoughts. I have concluded that what is most different about today's world is the number of people who live away from wealth and destitution. My uneducated guess is about 4-5 billion out of 7 billion, but that's because I am thinking about literacy. When it comes to actual income, I trust the numbers of Pew. Pew tells us that 13% of the world is middle income and that about 29% of the world is middle income or better. So the immediate thing about this mystery is that so many people can read and this affects how they can be governed. How do you lead billions of people who can read for themselves? You have to have ways of dazzling them or of compelling them. The interwebz provide the dazzle and compulsion is the same as it ever was. That means a lot more propaganda and story-telling, political narratives and bodewash are required for the peaceful transition of power. I sense this acutely in the US. We imbue far too many narratives with social and political significance. And within the context that more than half of us are high income on the global scale, more of us believe our narratives are economically justifiable and right. This is why we hate each other. We cannot stand when the other guys get to hold the flag and clap the erasers. 

What if there were only 20 million expertly skilled people who were actually capable of running the world? Would you be on that team? How much of the information that they used would you be capable of accurately understanding and interpreting? When the bankers banked, when the soldiers soldiered, when the engineers engineered, when the surgeons did surgery, how could you actually remain informed? What would be your responsibility to them? This interface is being renegotiated through computer mediated communications and it's generally pretty sloppy and subject to abuse. And so the faith of the general public, the common man, is being undermined, and that generates discontent which is self-fueling. So the mystery of the middle class is compounded by the natural forces of dissonance and the generated forces of disinformation as well as sloppiness.

What people need to know is different from what they feel they need to know in a situation of distrust and counter-narratives. This dynamic is accelerated to the point of 'eclexia', in which people become so broadminded as to become uselessly judgmental and broadly critical of that broad set of inputs they consume with vigor. At some point they fall to a level of studied cynicism. I think American citizens have fallen to that point after a period of snarky eclexia. This cynicism is useful to the point of independence, and I fall heavily on the side of that. For me, the fundamental value of individual liberty requires some of that studied cynicism. But hand in hand with that is the necessity for circles of trust. This is what I pursue and observe others similar pursuits. I watch how we at once pay lots of attention to information we must receive, process and somewhat distrust, while openly sharing that information with those people we very much trust. This is the new organization. This is the new neighborhood. These are the people we must trust to have our best interests at heart by sharing common values and purpose so that we can make communal sense of information in a world we distrust to organize and protect us from the top down. What therefore we need to know comes from our networked peers. We need to know trusted people. What we feel we need to know is everything that the ruling class says we need to know, which we must take small bites of until we have our own experts in our own networks. Why? Because we cannot trust the old order to provide enough security and knowledge in a world of billions of networked, literate actors like ourselves. They don't know us, and they don't trust us. They just tell us what they think is good for us, without actually sharing. When the message is "Please don't try this at home", we know they are forbidding our education, and ultimately our self-determination. We need to be able to experiment, take our own chances among ourselves with people we trust.

The entire first world is rather like a second world in this regard. Everybody understands cities, traffic signals, internal combustion engines, planes, trains, automobiles, electricity, clocks and maps. We understand shopping, money, budgets, costs and profits. We understand hospitals, courts, schools, police, food stands, fire departments, churches and parks. All of us have all of these things with more or less luxury signaling attached. The first class passengers get to the destination city at the same time as those in steerage. But what about the ruling class, the 1%? Are they even playing the same game? 

I think they are. But I also think that there are a new set of transgressors who through technique or technology are breaking the old guard's safeguards. Asymmetric war is forcing change. Digital currency is forcing change. GMO is forcing change. Soldiers have to soldier differently. Bankers have to bank differently. Politicians have to politick differently. Preachers have to preach differently. Scholars must re-evaluate their schools. So we watch to see what old comforts can survive.

This is the new middle class dilemma. Our children are not in such a hurry to learn how to drive. Maybe that's a job for a computer monkey. Our children are not in such a hurry to own a house. Maybe that's a job for a renting startup so they can live with their friends and trusted circles. We in the US have 20 flavors of motorcycle and 100 flavors of car. Maybe that's an over-investment whose significance is not as much as we think it is. Our banking relationship with that one giant mega-bank may not be what we really need.  

When I think about my retirement, I think about simple second world locations where I can easily understand the paradigms of the 20th Century because they are still clearly in place. Places where there are only 2 flavors of motorcycle. Where the entertainment takes place on stage in a theatre with live performers.  Where the food is grown locally and everybody knows how to cook it. Where gold jewelry works at the pawn shop. Where even if I can't literally read the language of the writing on the wall, I understand it because of its context.