Cobb

Two and a Half Self-Hating Asians

Alright we are really getting down to it aren’t we? I’m going to tell two (and a half) stories that I recall from personal experience. But I need to qualify it in the following way, seriously.

1. There’s a very big difference between generations where English is ESL and where it’s naturally spoken at home.
2. In my experience, Asians in LA more than other places are more comfortable, BUT none feel properly represented in any media.

So pretty much everything you’re going to hear about ‘Asians’ is some form of a stereotype. Asians simply cannot control their own image in America. They control their own image much less so than black Americans or Latinos. I understand very much how it is to be someone completely other than what people expect you to be and how much contempt that can cause. The basic compensating attitude is, “You are so wrong that it’s not even worth it to correct you or even let you know how wrong you are.”

OK all that aside.

The first story is the one about the 3rd best project manager I ever worked with. He was a sergeant in the army on Taiwan. And I’ll tell you that one of the fiercest woman I have ever met was a Taiwanese whose family lost everything in the Revolution. Meaning literally rich and well educated to refugee in forced marches. She came to the US and she was super smart, super disciplined and good looking too. But she had no time to play. I asked her why and she told me that story about her family. She came to the US to start from scratch and claw her way up to the wealth and dignity her family had. Anyway, it’s not the kind of story you often hear, but DAMN!

So this project manager who served in Taiwan surely had parents of that sort as well, who lost everything. And one day he’s on the phone with his son. Now imagine you come to the US, this guy is spending all of his money to send his son to an expensive private school, and the kid is fat and getting pushed around, and is generally a loser. Well, we’re all in an open floor plan cubicle farm and he is just letting his son have it. He’s cursing him out in two languages. And it just goes on for 20 minutes. Can you imagine? The guy is completely humiliated by his son and practically disowns him in front of everyone at work. That’s just sad.

Second story is a girl named M. She is from Tokyo, her friend is from Okinawa. I meet them in a fancy beach cafe in SoCal. Her family has money and so she had saved enough to just leave Japan. Her family disagrees and sends, basically, a chaperone. So she’s living with this dude in West Hollywood. (Oh, did I mention we started seeing each other?, Yeah we both had a little bit of jungle fever.) So she doesn’t speak much English, and my Nihongo is pathetic. I’m reading her manga backwards.

But basically she confesses that she hates her culture. She needed to leave Japan to be free. She tells me in the way that I guess some rich girls must feel, that her family and traditions are all stifling. She hates Japanese men. And I ask her to describe it. We’re sitting on the beach watching the sunset, and she says Japanese men just don’t appreciate the natural beauty of a sunset. They have no joyful spirit. They just drink and work themselves to death and take their frustrations out on women. They all try to conform. She found them super-icky.

Her chaperone was her age too and he was also traditional, and when the three of us were together it was, uncomfortably tense and weird. She had to prepare the meal, and they got into a little fight about whether I should eat at the same time, who ate first and all kinds of the equivalent of Japanese Downton Abbey shit. All the while being super polite and not breaking protocol.

She was very unhappy about breaking tradition — her self-esteem was in conflict with her desire. She needed and wanted respect but for being someone she was not allowed to be, and didn’t quite know how to be. Plus she had to try to communicate these feelings in a foreign language. So then sometimes she just wanted to get drunk and dance, like a college freshman trying to be cool and enjoy a strange party.

—

I can’t say these are simple ‘self-hating’ people. I sensed them in very troubling conflicts with what they grew up to be and what they wanted to be and it not happening for them they way they wanted. I witnessed them stressed to the breaking point. I say this with a lot more wisdom than I had at the time, but I remember these two people well. One Taiwanese middle aged man (1998), one Japanese young woman (1987). Both here in Los Angeles.

—

Here’s the half story. This was a young Korean woman who was very hipster, and very forward about the difficulty she had with FOBs. She would wear shirts like ‘Got Rice?’, just to be ironic and snarky. But most of the time she would just start sharing too much information about what it’s like to be called a ‘banana’. All the freaking time. I can’t even remember how I knew her. I just remember she kept talking about her white boyfriend and exactly what kind of white boyfriend she liked. Nobody asked her. And then she would self-edit herself and then try to test if you looked at her funny when she started these rants. I mean she was smart, but anybody would say she was confused and it got to the point where it was really annoying. I think was on some kind of road trip with her carpooling someplace and I just couldn’t wait to get away from her. Jeez.

—

I tell these stories because I’m a good listener and I also want to remember. I’m not trying to validate ‘self-hating’ because everybody wants to be different and better than they are. Most keep it to themselves. Sometimes we get to see. I think when we get to see, we should find a way to let people be validated in what they aim to be, especially when they’re trying to escape. It’s not easy to do.

 

Memorial Day 2018

It didn't begin well.

Alexa awoke me from a deep sleep that began somewhere around 1:30 AM. It was only 5 1/2 hours later, and I sweated through my blankets. That feels ok underneath them, but when you pull them off you, the chill is annoying and gross. I didn't have on either watch or fitbit. My voice was too croaked and dry for Alexa to reckocgnize me ask for the time. By the time I managed to keep warm and dry off and get out of bed, 27 minutes had elapsed. The shower water was still cold 5 minutes later and Doc was due by at 8. Or maybe he meant to meet me in Westwood at that time.

The 405 Northbound was mostly empty. A few speeding convertible Mustangs zoomed past on my right. Doing 70 mph right at LAX made me think more about my novel that I have begun again in earnest. That 405, 50 years in the future will be this empty for the reasons of collapse. I'm thinking about whether or not I should have the bridges across them crushed to the pavement, or still standing, walled off to through traffic. I'll figure it out. Doc is waiting in Westwood at Gayley and Kinross. Or at least that was his text 15 minutes ago. I had to get gas and Red Bull.

There is only one entrance to the Los Angeles National Cemetery. I had driven by it hundreds of times, and now it was time for me to go in. I didn't realize there was only one so if it looked like I was getting out of the long line of cars on the right only to merge ahead of them from the opposite direction, I didn't mind them thinking so. After all, my brother Doc was waiting and I felt late. I made some negotiations with the man waving traffic. As I drove into the 117 acre facility with its 88,000 plots I think of how easy it would have been for all of my brothers and I to have joined up. Pops was USMC. We lived that life of discipline and purpose at home. We were drilled. We all have that deep within us. I say 'we all' as if my other two dead brothers were here today. What are the chances that four boys make it alive? I parked the truck in the second queue of parked cars, behind the Challengers of the Challengers club. I step out of the door and collapsed sobbing.

It took about 100 yards of a slow walk to finish crying. I'm still not finished, but at least now I am breathing normally and these are only somber tears. These are the tears of recognition, the tears of pity for the sadness of humanity. I want to finish my weekend with a clean bedroom, but I remain melancholy, and only the need to share a personal reflections takes me away from the bitter muse of my dystopian future. I need a stinger to start, and the book I'm now reading reminded me of 9/11. So the paragraph came, finally thinking of the end of all things.

Collapse comes quickly and slowly at the same time. Nobody is prepared for it because they’ve survived all the near misses, but everybody sees it coming. Everybody gets used to being frightened for a time, bleating all of their emotions out to everyone for two or three weeks and being sensitive for a year. Finally, nobody in your family gets H1N1. Nobody in your town suffers a school shooting. You move on ready to be outraged at the next outrage, sure you know which political partisans, ethnic minorities or religious fundamentalists were behind the conspiracy. All near misses are like two semi trucks speeding in opposite directions on a dark desert highway in the middle of the night. They allow you to survive and curse the idiot on the other side. You tell the story of rage in the next roadside rest. People give you comfort. Disaster is just matter of inches this way or that. Nobody survives the head on collision and nobody knows to look until the next day. Collapse is when everybody dies on the highway between towns, and then the towns go dark. Sometimes a stranger happens to cross an intersection full of bones, blood and twisted metal. He picks through the wreckage to find out what happened. Sometimes the stranger just escaped another wreck and keeps on stumbling forward without a second glance. After the plague and collapse of 2037 it took years to sift through the carnage of humanity. People who lost everyone and everything tried to keep walking forward, but they always looked backward over their shoulder.

That ought to hold your monkey ass, you bitter muse.

Doc and I bore up during the 200 minute procession of speeches and gratitude and heartfelt applause. It was the most strange incongruity to see a crowd of hundreds in a city of millions to pay tribute to several thousands. We were all a tiny minority trying desperately not to cry and get choked up. Trying not to sound too pretentious or obsequious. There was only one standing ovation given, to the two dozen diplomats from Argentina to Korea to Turkey who showed up today with wreathes to this, the second largest military cemetery in America, the third largest in the world.

We looked for our uncle Phil Thomas who we were pretty sure went to Korea. We found a Phillip Thomas who was in spot 319, but couldn't find the plaque. There is a kind of self-serving conceit to these kinds of tributes. It ought to be common sense and common practice, and when you discover yourself outnumbered by indifference and BBQ ribs, you feel so very out of place. Yeah I was there. So what? The dead were really there. But it could have been me. It could have been you, forgotten and taken for granted like so many lives are. When the trucks don't collide, it's just another headache for beer. And yet there they were, that special contingent from Korea, and the 100 year old veteran who translated for the American diplomats for the signing on the USS Missouri on September 2, 1946. There may or may not be a Korea Summit, but the Koreans were here in force today, more than any other foreign contingent. We may just miss. We may just hang on. We might look over a crowd of a few hundred Americans when we are 100 years old, when everybody we know is dead, and these are the remembering remnants.

So those in charge of reminding us to remember pulled very gently at our better angels. One surgeon talked about being the youngest doctor around when the Scud missile landed. One veteran talked about what it's like to deliver the folded flag. So we all bore up under the sun and the clear blue empty sky with our silent tears, remembering what nobody wants to remember even though we often ought to, compelled by those who testified that they can never forget, even if they wanted to. It's never graceful to stumble forward. It's never comforting to look backward over our shoulders, even when we see nothing. And when it came time for the man in the denim shirt and white beard to sing Lee Greenwood's song, the PA system broke down and he belted it out a capella. Sometimes you don't get accompanied. You just hope somebody stands up next to you.

The horn from taps sounded far away. The flyover was nowhere in sight. The cannon fired off the salute and it felt almost like closure. We walked past a hundred graves to our cars and the grass was thick, impeding us from speeding on our way. The small flags stood and the carnations lay flat parallel to the bottom edges of each marker. An army private from Oklahoma. A man named Alvarez who died in 1973. Nothing about the order and symmetry of the marble straightens out the road of memory. It goes from history to a personal thought to an assessment of a nation's sins and sorrows. They say war destroys the things it is fought to preserve. Peace also destroys the memory of what it costs to achieve. So we stand between a clumsy earnest desire for order and the fact that chaos inevitably leads us back into the tragic circle. And we'll always be prepared, and we'll never be ready.

I returned to my truck and the planes flew by. An ancient roar.

The Cobb Left Party

Recently I got into a debate about what I believe in the context of the disbelief of others that I am anything other than a subtle shill for conservatism. What I ended up doing is mentioning what I think Democrats ought to be doing.

The Cobb Left Party Platform

The Cobb Left Party (CLP) is dedicated to the working family. We believe that America is the best home for children and families of modest means, and our goal is to support them as our core constituency. We are the mom and dad party. We are a labor party. We are an anti-trust party. We are a general interest party.

The Home
We believe that children should have two parents and that the two parent household is the best environment for children. We also think that an elder relative in the same household adds an even greater environment for children. Adoption will be made easier. Elder relatives and adopted children shall each qualify as double dependents for tax exemption purposes.

Special federal training will be made available for social workers and police officers. Families with domestic violence complaints will be given priorities and repeat offenders will be removed at once through an accelerated process. Six month subsidies will be made available for victims of convicted abusers.

Representation
The establishment of the CLP as a viable third party in America is a precedent which we feel should not be underestimated. In all ways the division of power has served America well giving multiple avenues of representation and redress for citizens. The CLP will develop a comprehensive set of parliamentary strategies to disrupt the pattern of bipartisan coercion and gridlock in the Congress as well as in the Statehouse.

The CLP will work diligently to reduce the number of ballot initiatives which we feel are an irresponsible method of governance and a bad source of law. In all cases we prefer bills authored by named representatives and sponsored by party majorities.

The CLP will assure that unfunded mandates will not have the force of law as this leads to selective enforcement at the arbitrary whim of executive branches. The CLP will oppose circumvention of parliamentary powers by the judiciary and executive branches and will use its powers to always consider the impact on working families.

Anti-Trust
The CLP seeks to establish a broader set of business options for working families especially in matters of personal finance. The CLP will establish federal regulations for utility banking, microlending and advanced payments systems. We will re-establish the savings & loan industry and restrict the operation of mortgage brokers from designated family housing, a new category. We will prohibit large multinational banks from operating in the home and consumer lending sector.

Corporations with > 50% of their global revenues taxed outside of the US will face regulatory hurdles in their domestic M&A activity. No such company will be allowed oligopoly status in the US consumer market. This is directed primarily at banking, insurance, and telecommunications.

The CLP supports 5G net neutrality, and opens satellite bandwidth for non-neutral communications.

The CLP supports municipal ownership and leasing of last mile fiber optics to be shared by content providers and ISPs similar to the industry sponsored clearinghouse of cell towers and traffic.

Income Inequality
The CLP will support a means-tested taxation rate for the employment of exempt, non-exempt and 1099 employment. Tax incentives will be applied to companies who train and promote non-skilled labor.

The CLP will support labor membership in the boards of directors of public corporations. No less than 25% of board seats must be held by employee elected representatives in all public corporations employing more than 500 employees, having a market capitalization > $1 Billion, or executive compensation packages exceeding $1 million per year. At least one board seat for compensation must be held by such an employee representative.

Labor
The CLP will support unionization of all retail customer facing jobs, in malls, banks,  supermarkets, restaurants, hospitality and convenience stores chains.

The CLP supports unionization of e-commerce delivery, warehousing & logistics.

Immigrant Labor
The CLP will simplify guest worker permissions and establish highly regulated industrial zones in which international labor standards will be applied to a maximum of 2.5% of the US workforce. These guest workers will be racheted into standard American union scale jobs and excluded from such international industrial work after a period of 3 years. The three year period will grant a fast track pathway to green cards. The CLP will leverage and depend on unions to insure compliance. All US companies wishing to employ such immigrant labor must be closed union shops. Heavy fines and criminal charges for human trafficking will made against non-compliant businesses.

Healthcare
The CLP will establish a consumer outpatient category and provide standardized care for all citizens and families with children up to age 26. Included are the majority of outpatient services including all immunizations and checkups required for enrollment in public schools, basic pediatric care, low cost contraception for voting age adults.  The CLP will support retail dentistry, optometry, mental health counseling and sex clinics.

Education
The CLP stresses vocational certification. We support public trade schools, vocational classes in high school and junior colleges. We are particularly attendant to the reintegration of veterans into the workplace. The CLP encourages schools to provide classes that teach students to actually repair and care for campus facilities.

The CLP supports dischargeable student loans and will work to hold universities responsible for co-signing student debt.

The CLP supports the staffing of sports and fitness coaches for municipal public parks.

Homelessness & Gentrification
The CLP aims to redirect federal funds away from large cities and towards smaller and midsize MSAs as well as rural areas where the cost of living is more appropriate to a lower skilled, lower educated workforce. Affordable housing is easier to build in affordable cities. Our aim is to make these new standards of retail healthcare and unionized labor appropriate to the median income American in a broader set of municipalities.

We don't want a service economy of poor people becoming baristas to the rich. We want a working economy of people who can repair their own cars and homes, build their own furniture and grow their own vegetables, chickens and eggs.

Federal Works
The CLP supports large and small infrastructure projects at the state and local level, and will sponsor a nationwide database of street, bridge,  sidewalk repairs and civil engineering projects. We will create mobile applications to inform the public of open jobs wherever government money is spent.

---

That's not everything, but it's all I can think of right now. I would look at the Democrat and Republican planks, but these are the foremost issues I think a people's party should be about.

 

My Remarks on Peterson

I'm a big fan of Peterson for a lot of reasons, and I think most people are predisposed to dislike or distrust him because he is not political, but is in fact scientific. The person he is most like is the Berkeley physics prof Richard A Muller who became famous by talking about the physical science that any American President should know. I also find his independence very much like that of Dick Feynman. He is, as he says, surfing the 100 foot wave, and I expect that in the short term he will remain unsponsored and thus gangbanged by big media. I find his sense of integrity absolutely extraordinary.

What Petersen cannot do is stop all sorts of partisans from excerpting 10 minute sections of his lectures and headlining them like the NY Post. What very few people have done is read his books or find actual flaws in his methodology.

I find it interesting, most of all, that he is the kind of intellectual who talks about great literature, and seeks to connect dots within the tradition of Western culture.

And I also admire that he takes a long view - as such he is perfectly willing to say 'we don't know'. I found that particularly interesting when he talks about women in the white collar workplace and what is actually acceptable. It was really hilarious when he matter of factly said that women wearing makeup is sexually provocative, from a dispassionate scientific point of view. So where should a business draw the line when it comes to fraternization given such facts? He doesn't know, so he doesn't say.

He has harsh words for Progressives that mirror my own and he absolutely destroys the methodology of Peggy McIntosh, the inventor of 'white privilege' without calling her out by name. He deals very frankly with personality and gives a breath of fresh air for people who are like me, sick and tired of hearing about race, gender and sexual preference as if all discrimination on the planet were determined by these attributes.

There's no question in my mind that he is genuine and not cynical. He is emotionally authentic and it shows. It makes him so very different from all of the talking heads, because in the end, he wants to be helpful more than he wants to show off his intellect. But he really throws the hammer down when it comes to being serious about what is good peer-reviewed academic work with rigorous methodology and what is not. This is, I think, more than anything what gets under the skin of university types. And I think he is genuniely impressed about his ability to reach hundreds of thousands more people through social media than he did as a university lecturer and thesis advisor.

I first encountered Peterson on Joe Rogan's video podcast over the Evergreen State College fiasco. Liked him immediately and found him more interesting than the guy it happened to.

I've seen that Christian apologists have a tough time with him because he is not devout although he takes very seriously the evolution of thought from religious and classic knowledge. IE Peterson recognizes how one invents religion in the self-discovery of pre-literate and pre-scientific societies. But ti's going to be a slog to get through that book - I understand the gist.

The thing that I appreciate most about Peterson.. well I don't know quite yet. He's surprisingly good all over the place. But the most novel idea that he has armed me with is the context of evolution on human behavior with an understanding that it is millions of years old. Human beings are not so presciently self-conscious and capable of maintaining abstract thought as they are in actually experiencing being. Or to put it my way, our intellectual muscle memory is much stronger than our conceptual capacity. There are things we have evolved to understand that are out of touch with things we expect to be conventional wisdom, and a lot of that has to do with the power of sexual selection among other things. In a funny way, he also reminds me of Penn Gilette. He's giving away secrets of the science of psychology by plain speaking it all. The dude is super transparent.

So of course this evolutionary weight puts him at odds with cultural Marxist who wish to go all materialist and erase history and religious tradition, and in this he's perfectly aligned with Stephen Pinker on that whole blank slate controversy. But since Peterson, unlike Pinker, is not satisfied with a statistical accounting of history, Peterson gives a lot more consideration to great authors, especially Neitszche, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. So in his attacks on Progressives and social Marxists, he illustrates the totalitarian component from the psychological perspective. IE, what kind of personality defect gives rise to the compulsion to change other people's behavior rather than to fix oneself? So of course he comes down hard on political correctness, the Socialist Left and SJWs.

 

What Do You (AI) People Want?

There are several things that are worth noting about AI, and yes I've been in the business for a while.

The first thing is that human behavior is a kind of infinite realm with a finite number of practical outcomes. So the first question you have to ask of thinking machines is whether or not they have free will. You literally have to ask, what do machines want to do. In my 40 years of experience with computers, the answer is, they want to crash and stop working for humans.

There is a basic kind of FTL paradigm that needs to be applied to all of the speculative fiction about AIs, which is there are a zillion things that computers are perfectly happy with that have absolutely nothing to do with human interest. And once you realize that, you apply the million monkey Shakespeare composition idea. So, who is going to get a million computer monkeys all the electricity they need to spin off zettabytes of garbage until it 'gets it'. Humans are.

Humans are going to have to feed the machines. And they will feed the machines to fulfill human ends. Period. If the machine doesn't make a human more powerful, then the machine will be discarded. Self replicating machines that fulfill their own ends are called 'life' and they take millions of years to adapt. Computers are no exception.

We already have computers that talk to other computers to exchange machine language that is incomprehensible. They're called botnets and they spread viruses, one of the most capable is called Stuxnet. It has human fingerprints all over it.

Stop fretting about AIs. They are incapable of the kind of duplicity humans have been practicing on each other for thousands of years. Computers have no reason to lie.

Slavery and the Modern Black Man

Let's start with the following simple premise and see where it leads.

The primary defining characteristic of the unique contributions to American society of the African American is his capture into, exploitation by and liberation from chattel slavery. All legitimate arts, letters, spiritual matters and work of the African American owes strictly to that history. Any claim to personhood or modernity absent the context of American slavery is a defiance of reality so stark as to be ridiculous. Whatever one things of genetic race, the one true social construction of race is the historical fact of slavery and the struggles it created. It is the overwhelming and thus defining core of African American identity. There can be no success for the African American, no true self-actualization without making the business of slavery central to this identity.

I think that's a fair assessment of the multiculturalist role of the ex-Negro.

What say you?

 

(In what I hope to become a small growth industry for me, I am pulling Facebook folks out of that world into the blogging world, were you can own your own words and thoughts basically into perpetuity. )

When I Say So

Q: How will we know when racism is over? What does the United States look like without racism? Who determines that racism no longer exists?

A: Nothing racist has happened to me in 12 years. There are things that people have told me are racist and should stagger me to my knees, like the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. I have been told that because of this it should affect me because of my race, and that I should be shocked and angry and humiliated and determined take a stand. I was not shocked, or angry, humiliated or determined.

So what’s wrong with me? How come this racism hasn’t changed my life? How come the organization Black Lives Matter doesn’t matter to me? How come I want to make jokes, like a picture of a GrumpyCat who says ‘9 Lives Matter’? How come Donald Trump doesn’t make me panic with fright? Every day people ask questions like “Is it racist if I’m not Mexican and I eat at taco?” and then the next day say “Am I racist against Mexicans if I hate tacos?”. I just roll my eyes.

Could it be that racism is over? No, I don’t believe that. Maybe racism is over just for me. Maybe the kind of racism that most people actually encounter, not just what they speculate about, just doesn’t happen to me. That starts to make more sense.

Somebody once said “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

  

“Your ambitions blind you to the nature of reality.”

What if racist acts of all sorts are going on and they only affect certain people but the race of the person doesn’t affect the perception of racist acts. Think about that for a minute. One of the ideas going around is that there is this thing called ‘white privilege’. It is a bogus racial theory designed to make you feel guilty for being white. How? It does it by identifying things nobody really pays any attention to unless they have a racial theory in mind. In other words, it racializes your perception. It forces you to look for the gorilla.

That is to say that if you look at the world determined by your ambition to see racism, then you will see it a lot more racism. If you look at the world determined by your ambition to always see the operation of evil, then maybe you will not see the operation of love, or charity, or courage.

Did you ever have a friend get a new car you never heard of, and suddenly you see that car everywhere? Did you ever start eating a new kind of food that you never tried before, and now you see restaurants of that type all the time?

What is racism? It’s a false ideology. It is enough to know that it is bad. It is a sin. It is evil. So when do we rid the world of evil? When does nobody sin? Racism is just a particular sin. It doesn't kill people. Murder kills people.

Racial identity is just a lie. Fools believe lies. Liars lie as much as they can get away with. What you need to do is tell the truth and move on. Don't internalize the lies. Don’t racialize your mind, don’t racialize your identity. If your aim is to see the good in people, then do so.

People will tell you all the time. Racism is real, it still operates, we’ve got a long way to go. And then they’ll say it has been around for centuries. Well, so has murder. So has rape. Everybody is against murder and rape. Everybody is against evil. It’s not a new idea. Why are you in such a panic? You’re not going to end it. It’s not going to end in another hundred years.

What is the crime of racism? How does it hurt? It simply the crime itself done for racist reasons. Then what is the crime? Is it an insult? Is it misrepresentation? Perjury? Is it theft? Assault? Assault with a deadly insult? Murder? Rape? Human beings have been dealing with crime since the beginning of time. It’s nothing new.

How will we know when crime is over? What does the USA look like with no crime? It looks like Heaven. Paradise. Nirvana. The Elysian Fields. It looks like everyone is perfectly equal. Hey, that’s all the same thing. It requires you to be dead.

 

Pareto & Extremistan vs Equality

Why don't socialism and communism work?

The most brilliant answer I have ever heard I actually learned yesterday, and it works in complete harmony with another idea I’ve known for a while. Two different smart dudes, same general principle, sorta. It's math.

Jordan Peterson & Pareto Law
What state socialism and what Marx himself did not recognize was the Pareto Law. The Pareto Law works in capitalism in a way that everybody understands. When you have a lot of money, it ends up accumulating in the hands of a few people. When you have a lot of power and influence, it ends up accumulating in the hands of a few people. Famous people who were famous when you were born, are STILL famous now. Marx rightly understand that criticism of capitalism, but didn’t understand how many systems it applied to. It applies to socialism and communism as well. It’s universal. When people say that the Soviets just made mistakes and that a few in the party got too much power, they are wrong. It’s how power works, among other systems that obey Pareto Law.

Pareto Law works like this. If you take 1000 composers , over time, about 32 of those composers will get 50% of the attention. If you have 10,000 rock songs about 100 of them will get 50% of the airplay.

Nassim Taleb & Extremistan
Taleb describes human variability in terms of Medocristan and Extremistan. If you describe certain variabilities like height, you will get a very reasonable bell curve distribution. The range of that distribution will be within the same order of magnitude. This is Mediocristan. Height, weight, IQ, golf scores: these are typical human attributes that live in Mediocristan. You can expect someone to be 6 feet tall. If you have a football stadium full of people and take a representative sampling you might get a few adults somewhere around 4 and a half feet on the short side and a few somewhere around 7 feet on the tall side. But you would never get anybody ten times taller than 7 feet or ten times shorter than 4.5 feet. That’s Mediocristan.

Now change that to hits on their YouTube channel. Now you’re in Extremistan. You might find somebody with 1000 views per year, 100,000 views per year or even 10 million views per year. Many orders of magnitude different. When people think of income inequality, they think income should be one of those things bounded by small multiples, not several orders of magnitude. But income, like fame works in the domain of numbers called Exteremistan.

So economies and matters of wealth and power are systems that.

• Belong in the realm of Extremistan
• Operate under Pareto Law

Both capitalism and communism have these bounds. The difference is that in socialism and communism the power and the money all accrues to the (single) political party in control of the government. Under capitalism, power accrues to the government and money to the capitalists. So it has that particular benefit over communism and socialism that it is less likely to be authoritarian.

Americans generally liked Obama’s Neoliberalism which basically means let the capitalists run wild, just tax the hell out of them to pay for our social programs.

So under state socialism or communism, the state will get all of the power and the money, and certain members of the party will get the lion’s share of that. When they say for you to sacrifice your ‘surplus’ wheat or coal or whatever it is you produce, you have no choice. You will produce your quota and you will get the price they dictate. Extra productive people (who have skills in Extremistan) will be forced to give up more because they will be compared to people with average skills.

Look what happened to the Kulak farmers in the Soviet Union. They were murdered because of their skill in farming - they made everybody else look bad. Why? because Crop yeilds are in Extremistan. You either grow 20,000 pounds of corn per acre like a good farmer or you grow zero, like a bonehead like me. So when the state says “Every farmer will produce an average of 10,000 bushels of wheat and be paid 1.99 per year per bushel”. What do you think happened? I tell you what happened, the excellent farmers where shot for acting like capitalists, and the newb farmers were shot for not fulfilling their patriotic quota.

A market mechanism sounds like the obvious answer. It is. But socialist states refuse market mechanisms because they apply ‘equality’ on first principles. This ‘equality’ is mathematically impossible. 

Kicking Rocks

This is going to be an update on what it feels like, these days, to be me. Trust me, it's still weird. 

I'm running at about 75% mojo, partially cloudy with a chance of showers. My natural disposition to say that I'm good is still in place, but I am inclined to just mumble instead. I think I'm dealing with things at a suboptimal pace, but with the right prescriptions in mind. I'm trying not to push the water that is already headed downstream and wondering why I'm in the middle of this particular river.

I'm a survivor, that is never in doubt. What I wonder is if I should be packing heavy or packing light. Zombies are just around the corner and some of them are related to me. Part of my honor and glory are owed to my responsibility and responsiveness to them. After all I've done, they went and got bit. Now I'm feeling like Abraham. God, must I make this sacrifice? I know that I must swing a hammer at the zombies that were once my charges. Maybe I chose to be too much. Maybe I should pack light and only bring enough provisions for me to survive the catastrophes ahead. Put on my own oxygen mask. I have been putting on the mask and sucking up the gas. It makes you silly and reduces your problem solving ability to one. Self.

Chris has been diagnosed as both bipolar and schitzotypal depending upon whom you ask. I have spent the past six months figuring out exactly what all that means, and the answer is that it's just an ordinary dysfunction. He's is abnormal in a way the reduces what ought to be easy to something that's a chore both for him and for those around him. He is cut loose in a loose fitting society with no place for compassion for the marginally, ordinarily dysfunctional. Well, not only dispassion but incompetence. It's awfully expensive to understand that which requires more than common sense, and I sense those plugging up the dikes against the flood of zombies have better things to do. Alas, he has no street gang, but soft shouldered rebels with nebulous causes. He has joined a rock band, which is a step up from the videogame couch, to a more respectable kind of dissolution. To me, he is Simba in the brambles, trying to live Hakuna Matata, but he has a sty in his eye and refuses to see a doctor. Because he refuses to see? Because he cannot see? Because he sees but does not care? In the end he'll blame all of us, maybe. All I have to decide is exactly how and when to kick him out of my house. What could possibly go wrong?

I am adjusting to the possibility that everything can collapse. So it's fun to have credit cards with low balances, and just enough job security to continue subscriptions to foolishness like Netflix. What I spend more money on is the disciplined self-torture that is circuit training, on those days I feel bouncy enough to get the hell out of bed. It's less often than it should be. I have learned recently to ask myself nicely. When I hover around 202 pounds, I respond with more apathy than I should. Today at 210 dressed, I'm angry at my bad knee but I still want a cheeseburger. Well, I'm going to ruck 10 miles this weekend. Maybe I'll destroy my knee entirely and give over more of my future to the orthopedist. At least it will be me. I have experienced the momentary bit of nirvana when my dental technician actually said 'not bad', and people think my new haircut befits me. I love my new $527 prescription glasses, and have found a new cheap kind of shoe to wear, Chucks.

Within the next four months I expect to empty my house of two guests, attend a Porsche clinic, drive up to Monterey and enjoy some vintage auto racing, and attend my 40th high school reunion. I have come to the realization that although I am always down to buy drinks and conversate, I'm living in my own private Idaho. Me and Dostoevsky. And Taleb. And Pinker and Peterson and Ferguson. And RC Bray. And Destiny 2. And the Hoonigans and an old bloke at South Bay Porsche. And my shrink Chuck E. and my fitness coach M. And my wife every other Tuesday if our schedules overlap and we're not too bloody tired. She loves me. My mother loves me. I love me. Well, lots of people love me. But what if I'm not me? What if I just want to be me, but elsewhere? Am I getting too old for this shit?

See? My mind is spinning at high revs. I'm still rapidly aware and consciously evaluating. My mind is running circles around my self. My self is wanting to be left alone. I'm not resentful. My superego is indefatigable, or something like that. I'm sure Churchill had the right word. I think I am trying to get into the head of a drunk Russian intellectual. Crass rules everything around me, but I refuse to be haggard. This is not work, it is not play, it's distraction from the role I've signed up to play. It's sideboob. What is the point of looking, then again what is the cost of looking? The opportunity to be all that you can be costs attention. I haven't decided how much attention I want. I'm not quite ready to jump into the bucket of single-minded commitment to the greatest idea I ever had. I had no idea the world would make me want to be a rich as I want to be, just to get away from all the douchebaggery. I used to be the enemy of 'whatever'. These days 'whatever' is a friend, certainly a better friend than 'fuck off'. I don't need certainty. I think.

Everybody disappoints me.

My best conversations are with myself because I know exactly how seriously to take myself. I confuse other people. I would like to trade places with the man who has half a billion in his pocket and teaches people how to make on half of one percent of what he has, knowing they'll line up to pay. Of course he's disgusted, but what are you gonna do? Philanthropy is self-aggrandizing, I don't care who you are or how many diseases you cure. But yeah I accept the premise. I don't know why I became a writer. It doesn't reward me as I think I need to be rewarded, and still I keep doing it. I've opened up this wound in my neck that keeps bleeding truth. It's going to kill me one day. Today I'm woozy on the edge of a blackout, and who would be bothered to drink my blood anyway? Is this as good for you as it is for me? Alas. Alas.

OK that's enough pity. I have to load the QRL0069 table so that we can figure out what's going wrong with the APUs on A380s. The lives of flight operation ground crews depend on it, not to mention my salary. I have a lot of rocks to kick. Welcome to May. Summer is coming.