Cobb

Thoughts on Income Inequality

The problem of income inequality is mostly a problem of crowding out working class and middle class people. In other words, it's a cultural idea with economic consequences. The primary problem with the cultural idea is that we have adopted the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" as the appropriate arc for the common man.

Look how everyone wants their phone to be smarter and AIs to deliver them from hard work. How they expect words to be as worthwhile as deeds. What America needs to do is to culturally reject the life of bling, and replace that with a work ethic that includes much respect.

Eating the rich is poking a hornet's nest. It cannot work without a revolution. I repeat. It cannot work without a revolution. Americans are going to have to accept that it's not just the Koch Brothers, but Beyonce, Tom Hanks, Bruno Mars, Drew Brees and LeBron James that they'd have to eat.

What people also need is the focus of attention for their basic needs. That means high quality items need to last. It means I should be able to buy a $400 refrigerator that lasts 10 years. Rugged dependable basic durable goods. It means that I should have no problem whatsoever finding a safe neighborhood if I can only afford $600/mo rent for a 1BR.

I grew up in an era where people regularly said "We were poor but we didn't know we were poor." That's cultural. It's because we had arcs of our lives that didn't depend on the ultra-rich. Those people did not control the things we needed and wanted in life. Then again we didn't expect ski trips to Colorado, or $300 wristwatches. But we also didn't have the monopolies that we have today.

I say the biggest problem is that Americans are oriented towards the blingiest and the blingiest is owned by monopolists. Look at something as simple as eyeglasses. It will scare the pants off you.

I think there is also an impoverishment of thought that gives us the idea that our problem is income inequality and the solution is wealth transfer. Look at what I select as priorities for the Cobb Left, and maybe you can catch my drift.

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It is reasonable for people to question curiosity, because curiosity is just another avenue for monetization. I think we need to look at the beast we created with the MBA, the concept that any single-minded hustler can take any idea whatsoever, from pet rock to college coed rating service and turn it into a million or a billion dollars. As long as we keep alive the idea that you can follow your passion and will be economically rewarded, we give license to the common man to abandon the discipline of the practical, and approval for Shark Tank overlords to dangle dollars just above our heads. These are not free markets, these are lottery mechanisms. And yes we have lotteries too.

Our culture has promulgated the illusion that wealth, in and of itself, is evidence of an immoral scam. That is because of an unwillingness to remove the idea of profit from the realm of vice. Too many people believe that profit is prima facie evidence of coercion, that wealth and the abuse of power always go hand in hand. This is what justifies the idea that tearing down all the wealthy to benefit the poor is always a good idea. But not only is it fighting fire with fire, it undermines the cause of structuring society's working classes to attain a moral profit. That is what gets dictatorial powers to those who will lynch capitalists, merely because they are capitalists, and destroys the ability to raise new moral capitalists in the mainstream.

Putting oneself in the shoes of the poor does not mean that suddenly I should hate the wealthy or the talented. We cannot ever afford to steal the profits of people who are not themselves thieves. There is but one morality and it has to do with fairness, in never doing to others what you would not have done to you.

When society believes that wealth and profit are always immoral, we make the talented who attain wealth through profit fear the revenge of society, even as society benefits from their productivity. This is evident in what we lament as income inequality. The rich want to live away from the rest. They are seen as a different kind of human. Whose responsibility is it to teach otherwise? It is everyone's responsibility. Because when a society decides to steal on behalf of the 'noble' desires of the poor to live like the rich, well I think Hayek best called it the road to serfdom.

There is one good life for all men. It is determined by liberty. Liberty cannot be bought with cash. It must be a common value in all of society. Liberty does not abide theft. So let us bring thieves to heel. The presence of wealth is not evidence of a crime.

The Return of Cosmopolitan EDC

I've started thinking about the old Cosmopolitan EDC again. Spontaneously I just threw together a couple amateurish videos. What's interesting when looking at these in retrospect is a couple things. Firstly I think from this point forward, I'm going to do a lot more self-publishing and see how that works out for me. It's something I actually do like to do, and I've spent a bit too much time thinking about such things to not put it out there.

Secondly, what I want to communicate here is something of value that is more knowledgeable about itself than just going for audience hits. I can't be the guy who does the top 10 most expensive watches, but I am particularly looking at a style which reflects the basic values of putting on a watch. That is to say, I've got the bases covered, and if I were rich, I would very most likely buy more expensive versions of the same things. What I want my style to reflect is a reasonable prosumer attitude. That is I don't disregard the notion of style and fashion, but I select something that reflects my personality. I want something of high quality, with form following function, but I don't want it to be idol worship. There is marginal utility in spending 800 bucks over 350 bucks for a chronograph style watch. I say you're getting 95% or relative perfection at $350. I think this a reasonable amount of moderation that still gets much love, and that's what this is all about.

Enjoy.

 

 

Advice to the Young Race Man

It’s a bad idea. Trust me, I’ve been there. For anything you don’t know now and haven’t experienced personally, ‘so what’ is the appropriate attitude. That simply assumes that you are a decent human being. The overwhelming majority of people are decent human beings. If somebody gets punched in the nose, you feel bad for them. Normal. If somebody experiences pain, you sympathize. Normal.

Now I’m going to give you a name. Michael Zinzun. Go read his profile . Understand this. He lost an eye fighting with cops. He was a dedicated enemy of the LAPD. His strategy was to spend all of his time and money to get more stories of things like that which happened to him, and to encourage lawsuits so that the City of LA would go broke defending the kind of cops who would blind a man in a scuffle.

You can’t make this up. You can’t just volunteer to live a life so dedicated unless you are willing to put yourself in the position to lose an eye.

Let me help you understand. Zinzun was an objectionable dude. You didn’t want to be around him. He carried, righteously, the kind of grudge you take to your grave. He wanted to be, in every way, the living breathing martyr and bane of the LAPD’s existence. And of course he surrounded himself with similar people.

Now I had to go looking for this person. He wasn’t famous. He wasn’t Rodney King. But if you started to look for such things and people, you would find them. Now there are a lot of complications that you cannot address unless you are qualified. Are you good enough to be the doctor and expert witness at the trial to say “Yes this person is legally blind”? Are you good enough to be the financial manager to deal with a 3.2 million dollar legal clawback? Are you good enough to be the manager of the ‘Fight LAPD Fund’ paid for by voluntary donations of winners of civil lawsuits against the LAPD? If you are, and you want this to be your life’s work, then you certainly don’t need any advice from Quora.

I didn’t want it to be my life’s work, and I was there. I met Zinzun and many of the political people who worked against City Hall. When my pals were having pool parties, I was attending rallies. That’s what I wanted to do back in 1990.

Are you catching my drift? If you want to find shit, don’t just look in the toilet, look at the place where all the toilet water goes. Soon enough you will be up to your neck in shit. The question is, are you serious enough to make finding shit and cleaning up shit, your life’s work? Because if you’re not, you may as well just retweet and call it a day. Everybody knows that shit stinks. It’s not a great revelation in human history. Everybody knows to clean their own toilet. It’s not a revolution in sanitation. You can make yourself more aware and sensitive to it, and you can write a 1500 word essay every week for the next 10 years. Is that what you want your life to be?

You are NOT going to save one more victim of police brutality from the cheap seats in the courtroom. You are NOT going to convince the leader of a 1 million dollar self-funded community activist organization that his leadership skills are crap. You are NOT going to raise awareness. You are just going to improve you own experience in finding shit.

I’m a writer. And I’ve spent a lot of time writing about race because that’s what I wanted to be back when I was in my late 20s and early 30s. And I put years into it. So I know about Michael Zinzun. But I left LA to go to New York for my real career and real life. About zero of what I learned about LA applied to NYC. So I got out of the part-time activist business and into the full time daddy business. Because my priorities changed.

What you will find, once you become an expert, is that you spend all of your time and effort trying to communicate the passion you feel for sniffing out shit to people like me who are in the full time daddy business and want to keep their noses clean. I don’t doubt your passion, OK here’s five bucks, have a nice day. No of course racism is bad. Everybody knows that. What do you expect me to do, give you $100? Oh you’re going to tell me a story? No let me tell you a story. Oh if I don’t listen, one day the LAPD is going to beat me down and blind me? Is that what happened to you?

This is what I want you to understand. If fighting sin is your life’s calling, then become a priest. If fighting racism is your life’s calling, then become a civil rights attorney. The law and the sentiment of tens of millions of Americans is already on your side. Just don’t become another half-assed ‘social justice warrior’ or self-congratulatory media activist. If you can’t do it for 35 years and risk your eyes, don’t do it.

Do real work. Everybody is already moral.

PS. You're not Dave Chappelle.

Borky's Beach: Future Police

Borky's Beach is my second novel. It is a near-future post-apocalyptic utopia set in Los Angeles 2060 or so. I've never described it that way before, but this new context gives me the reason. I hope to get it published before everything in it actually happens. I've been told that even people who can travel into future multiverses and back can't tell exactly what I'm going to say, so I don't mind not being proprietary for the excerpts.

The basic idea is that the police in Los Angeles have been essentially split into two types. The Intervention Squads and the Interdiction Squads. Since the city and the people are generally peaceful, there isn't much use for what the police used to be. You see, everybody has survived a calamity of the first order, and right now all people want is to go home to bed, with each other, and watch TV. A lot of the TV they are watching is about their neighbors, broadcast realtime over the Eyeball Network, which is essentially an artifact of the panoptic surveillance setup by the government and turned over to the people. The people now have the ability to call the cops on each other at will, more or less, and it goes up for a vote in the community in which the offense takes place. 911 operators have been disintermediated.

When a call is made to the Eyeball Network, you are alerted, shown the video and you slide left to intervene and slide right to interdict. Shortly thereafter, either girl cops come out to wag a finger and send someone off to counseling and re-education or the boy cops come out and deliver a first rate beatdown and haul someone off to the work camp. The people, via their smartphones are judge and jury. Ties go to the runner.

Sure there are special cases where traditional cops and courts work the old fashioned way, but those happen in other jurisdictions.

The Perennial Philosophy

The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a book that I think I will be referencing back to for the rest of my life. If you basically want to understand the entire perspective of a Western thinker on the commonalities of Eastern religion and mysticism as well as Christian mystic thought, this is the book. Think of it as the complete tutorial on what people *think* they're saying when they utter the cliche "I'm not religious but I'm spiritual." Now if a person were truly that, and very intelligent as well, then this book explains how they might think about God, self, universe, time, idolatry, salvation, truth, good, evil, immortality, mortification, charity, prayer... yeah, you name it everything you've stuffed in a closet in the back of your mind and called it 'religion' is presented here from the mystic point of view and collected wisdom of multiple 'religions'.

This might properly be called, at least I will, the set of ultimate goals for the self, or perhaps the self-less perfection of the realization of the divine in the individual and the purpose of all human consciousness. I'm not used to speaking this way, it will take me some time to get through all of the material in this course of study, but I can feel it working on me.

Several years ago I wrote that all I care about is wisdom. This is true. But one tends to think of wisdom as an attribute of the self. The Perennial Philosophy extends that challenge beyond the self (and yet within the self) towards the human infinite. So instead of the pursuit and capture of wisdom like a trophy to put on your mantle and show off, the Perennial Philosophy explains that this is an attainment of psychic, spiritual as well as intellectual dimensions.

There's some speculation in this which is especially clunky in the dated volume which contemporaries more well versed in psychology will easily spot. Also Huxley had been taken in by claims of faith healing and ESP that should not be taken seriously, but he seems to understand this. Also the book gets a bit murky in dealing with the concepts of time vis a vis Time and Eternity. And yet the book becomes quite persuasive in describing how nations and religions and philosophies that deal with reality in progressive time rather than in eternal timelessness, inevitably make bloody violent sacrifices to time (God the destroyer of all things, in time).

Huxley presents a convincing case for the unification of purposeful thought in this volume by taking contextualized quotes from a variety of wise ancients and mystics. It puts, for me, God back where God should belong in all thought, and the discipline of finding God central in human moral purpose.

I am convinced that this is the kind of material that is central to the human experience. It clears up a lot of things.



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The Mystic's Glance

The biggest difficulty of my life is knowing when, where and how I'm going to retire. Like most Americans, I've inherited the idea that the privilege is something I should expect. But like most of the haggard detectives in police dramas, there are days when I'm willing to risk it all for a last desperate act of brave integrity, knowing it will doom my security. Of course the decisions placed upon my head are not so dramatic. Nevertheless, the ducks and fish are calling out to me and I don't know how to hunt or fish. 

I began reading Maps of Meaning last night, and already I am tiring of Jordan Peterson's voice. He's not dispassionate enough for me to disambiguate his knowledge from his speculation from his personal experience, but I understand why he would read the book himself. Simultaneously, I am reading The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, and I'm beginning to think of him as a skinny man, and not a fat man, but certainly not an athletic man. He's Baldwin's white boy up in Harlem. How long has it been since thoughtful people gave up on ESP? Was Huxley duped by the Amazing Kreskin of his times? I want to understand what it is that thoughtful people do at the end of their cranial abilities. How quickly do they admit to the existence of magic? Or do they simply admit the mystery and tentatively accept a supernatural explanation? That's what C S Lewis did. I think he did so within reason, and so did Tolkein. The question is how readily do the masses accept their dramatic analogies teleologically? I think about it in response to my daughter's admiration for last night's theatre excursion to Jurassic World, that childish moral tale of human hubris and greed. Another movie with 1 and two halves men, in a cast of hundreds, among which are the beasts who always know which bad guy to chomp while letting good little children escape. The world of melioration is but philosophical cosplay. 

All this is to say that as I grow weary and age, at some point I face the probability that I will go all mystical and foggy. I will feign incapacity in the realm of the practical, because I will have begun to bathe in the soft salted baths of indifference instead of the bracing ice water of ambition. I don't have a reason why, and even the loss of my own soul doesn't seem worth the effort. I have lived for others too long. As much as I desire my distance from the incompetents and slothful, their plight still brings me to tears, and I don't feel sorry enough for myself. I don't hate the poor because of their poverty. I'm just not sure I can get used to the smell, nor can I encourage them through direct speech. Who am I? The tangent of my ambition is metaphysical. Worse than Hamlet is the student of Hamlet. Maybe that's what Huxley and Nietzsche discovered, and so packed up and went East. 

I'm going to go downstairs and fix up a batch of tea and microwave some frozen sausage. And I'll take a vitamin. This is all the profundity I'm worth today at 210 pounds. 

1982

'1982' is a barcade in DTLA.

I just assume that it's all about 1982, so I put on a white shirt, skinny black tie and my clubmans Falling Down style and headed to the bar EightyTwo in DTLA.

I got the high score on PacMan and three replays on Centaur. I had an Oban. I puffed a little vapor and I sorta dug the music which was and was not retro, but it was certainly loud. I met my brothers and Pops and for the time we weren't somewhat peeved that nobody in the joint cared a whit about putting the UConn game on, we had a ball at EightyTwo, the new 'barcade'.

What's strange at this moment is that although I feel like I could talk for hours about pinball and arcade videogames, I really don't feel like it. I mean basically the chick who owns the pinball machines kinda put me right in my place. I know I'm never going to step up and buy a pinball machine, even my favorite of all time, Bow & Arrow. And I know I'm never going to know more than 80% of what's worth knowing about what I kinda know. Like I eyeballed a machine that was built circa 1977 and I nailed that, but as she said, I was mostly right but wrong on the details. When I was 20 years old, I could have written a disertation of electromechanical pinball and arcade video games. I'm sure that I have spent something on the order of $2500 a year in quarters when I was in my Virtua Fighter championship form. But..

I'm out of joint and feeling somewhat weird about my relationships to the machines now that it has come around to this upscale hip joint that looks like it could have fallen off the back porch of the Standard Hotel. I popped at a million points on Centaur and turned to say, "At least machines have paid me more than I've paid them", which is true. Computers have been very very good to me. But I had several of those unbelievably low scoring balls and my typical movement of disgust was all there in muscle memory - never striking the glass, spinning around in place with my arms flailing in agony, but not wide enough to strike the next pinballer over, and never tilting in anger. It was the familiar frustration made unfamiliar by the whiskey. I never used to drink and game.

I'm all ready to drink and game if I can find the right friend to come with me. But I never have. I've always been, with very few exceptions, the lone gamer, the pickup gamer. It was never me and my crew, it was always me meeting the regulars at the arcade. Young men like myself known only by first name, if that, and their reputations as foosballers, or fighters. Whether it was Holiday Bowl on Crenshaw or Mr. Motos right across the street, or Sega Center at the Fox Hills Mall. Maybe it was Shatto Bowl or the legendary on Woody's on Figueroa. Midtown Bowl had a pretty good lineup but there was a great arcade across the street from LACC. Down on Broadway, I dropped a lot of quads, especially on Defender, yike.

My love affair with the arcades of the city is bittersweet of course. The social rules and rewards of arcade fighting games like Mortal Combat was a later phenomenon. I already was bathed in the solitude of pinball and of the digital cabinet games. It matters to get a high score on PacMan and there is that retro cinematic moment when you could stand back and have a few admirers, but as sad and lonely as it seemed in the movie Tron it was more desolate in life. We are the Tron generation and it is not entirely a happy thing to see the popularity of our old obsessions brought to life. It's a little bit shameful, at least for someone my age. There's no such baggage for the XBox generation, and I hope they enjoy and discover what joy we knew from those moments of finding treasure in Gauntlet, dodging sprites in Robotron or jumping that bridge correctly in Dragon's Lair. The social experience of an arcade has changed with the advent of Dave & Busters and now these new upscale hip joints. It's a lot less depressing than it used to be when arcades were on the outskirts of society.