Cobb

AI - A New Dimension

For me it started in 1982, four years after I graduated from highschool, I engineered my return to college. With that, I worked up my ability and willingness to read thick books. And so as a new 21 year old freshman at Cal State Northridge, my head was led by several fat books outside of the Computer Science curriculum. "Goedel, Escher, Bach" was the first. I didn't understand half of it, but I understood the Incompleteness Theorem. "Turing's Man" was the second book, who was that mysterious genius? Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" was book that excited me about work in the industry and its spirit of go big or go home was to set the pace for the insane startup work ethic of Silicon Valley years later. "Megatrends" validated that my obsession with computing had a future, but the book that made the largest impression on me was the legendary collection of essays "The Mind's I".

It was Dennett and Hofstadter who captured my imagination. What is thinking? What can think? The distinction between hardware and software became clear in my mind and I was all about the software. Even years after I was done with school, I still didn't understand hardware and so was captivated by the vision of 'Tron'. And still it was about the programs. In those days, hardware was the constriction. It was all slow and clunky and claustrophobic. Thinking the great thoughts had to take place in larger realms. That is why, I think, six years later my introduction to H.L. Mencken, the bigger world was that of the generation of political ideas, the analysis of history and the combat of philosophy. So I decided for myself to write for people in both essays and in programs. Both were realms of persuasion but the compute platform was more narrow and disciplined. It appealed to a smaller audience, and of course it was an expensive medium. In fact, the compute world was hostile to using too many text strings. Now this is no longer the case. Back in 1987 when my full time employment began at Xerox, my theme song was IGY by Donald Fagen. The lyric went - "Trust machines to make big decisions / Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision." I was that fellow.

The fellowship however was weird, and I probably shrunk my balls by straddling so many fences. I was told that I could be in business or computing but not both, not to mention my politics and philosophy. So it is very pleasant, if not entirely rewarding, to have more compute accepted as the medium for politics and philosophy. But the hybrid medium is not quite disciplined enough. That is the audience that I seek to satisfy, those who are entirely disappointed in what social media has become - a ribald public square that obeys no orthodox parliamentary procedure. When I first conceived of 'X Republic' years ago, parliamentary procedure was the first thing on my mind. 

Now politics is not so entirely important to me, so much as understanding the semantics of thought itself. But we're clearly going to have to crawl out of the semiotic swamp of populist politics and fake news to get beyond where we are today. And that's going to require some unmediated chaos to make itself popular in the public imagination. It needs the intent of millions to communicate in a new way, something that satisfies both the limbic and the cortical impulses of mankind.  

So I am in the process of attempting to get some support for what life has had me thinking. The compute universe is large enough. We can do in text, animation and live action what logic dictates. And ultimately we can do it interactively. The question now is how we use AI to provide the right gating that will help us overcome our evolutionary boundaries in the cortical and limbic schemas when their representations are chock full of overloaded types.  It is in that vein of thought that the following article sparked inclusion here:

Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet

I started with the raw list of the 175 biases and added them all to a spreadsheet, then took another pass removing duplicates, and grouping similar biases (like bizarreness effect and humor effect) or complementary biases (like optimism bias and pessimism bias). The list came down to about 20 unique biased mental strategies that we use for very specific reasons.

I made several different attempts to try to group these 20 or so at a higher level, and eventually landed on grouping them by the general mental problem that they were attempting to address. Every cognitive bias is there for a reason — primarily to save our brains time or energy. If you look at them by the problem they’re trying to solve, it becomes a lot easier to understand why they exist, how they’re useful, and the trade-offs (and resulting mental errors) that they introduce.

The Cognitive Bias Codex is one of the most exciting maps around. I haven't seen anything so delicious since the publication last year of the Memetic Tribes of Culture Wars 2.0. You can get that map Download Memetic Tribes - Memetic Tribes. 

AI's Ultimate Future - Today's Thinking

So firstly I started thinking about the future in around 2008 when I was finally done mastering the technology I'd been building with for a decade or so. I started reading science fiction again, and joined the Long Now. By 2010 I was mostly done with enterprise software and jumped into open source and cloud. Right now, I'd say that I get that - mastered it in a different way - not so much as a practitioner. So I'm starting to look past my immediate horizon again. 

I'm thinking that programmers are their own worst enemies, and that eventually their nasty habit of trying to make more money with tech they themselves understand will create some oligopolies, and black hats will accelerate that process. Looking forward, relevant software and hardware IT will become reduced to a smaller, more ubiquitous, more capable, more secure and more dominant set. So with AI coming along that is inevitable too. We all call this 'interoperability' and 'best practices'. Nobody wants to run afoul of these guiding principles except perhaps retro indy game designers.

All that said, there is a finite universe of applications that humans themselves will care about, as Musk says, in service of the human cortex and limbic systems. 

Right now, for me the most complete and perhaps most compelling vision is that of the late Iain M Banks' Culture. He has conceptualized and illustrated a post-scarcity galaxy in which humans and other alien species are governed and protected by massively powerful machine-based AIs with goofy names. That to me sounds like the endgame because it presents us with a compelling dramatic rendition of both planet sized catastrophes and the death by natural causes of entire civilizations. He calls the latter 'sublimation'. Essentially, nobody wants to live forever, and after you've been a hero and a villian, a man and a woman and a fish and a bird and a good angel and an evil demon and lived for 500 years and so has everyone in your species, you get bored with life. You sublimate and hang a sign on your planet that says gone fishin', do not disturb. You tell the master AIs to make you corner of the galaxy a no-fly zone and it's enforced. 

On the generative side of this, though unrelated is a series called the Bobiverse, which over several volumes tracks the person of Bob, a future computer scientist who becomes the first true cyborg, embedded in a space station, eventually clones himself and thus is the prototype for the Culture Ships, say 1000 years ahead of them. 

So I kick it off with Iain Banks and Dennis E Taylor. Where do your AI ideas go?

Myths of Nation Building

Q: What's behind what seems like a global turn to the political right?

Some recent examples to consider: India just reelected Modi. Australia elected a conservative national government (Liberal/National Coalition). Italy's Salvini is organizing with European rightists. 
That's not saying anything of right-wing politicians elected or reelected over the past few years, like Bolsonaro in Brazil. To say nothing of Viktor Orban in Hungary, Duterte in the Philippines, Poland’s Law and Justice party, or Trump in the US.

The way I see it, this is the inevitable result in the failure of cosmopolitain elites to recognize the limits of multiculturalism and the dictates of national culture. It's the flipside of the same coin of the failure of neoconservatism. It is that false belief that open free societies with global associations are reasonably equally valuable to all people, and that all people will inevitably assimilate those values. 

What they are now facing is the reality that force will be necessary to establish that 'open' standard. IE you have to be able to say something to the effect that "There will be no minority politics or sectarianism in my society." It's a false aim. Cornel West called this 'liberal structuralism', with the understanding being that there is this expectation that everyone will seek enlightened self-interest in similar ways throughout society.

This explains to me the appeal of socialism in the US, and the triumph of Obamacare. When you can say that there can only be one way for all Americans to get healthcare insurance and the Supreme Court says 'Yes you can tax those who opt out', then this is what you are doing. You are coercing not only idea of social equality but the mechanisms of social equality, the flavor of social equality and presumably the results. But the lie is that you can keep your own doctor, or your own accent, or your own church's moral authority, or your own sense of humor. You think these can all be resolved by market mechanisms, political discipline and government fiat. What you get, when you get tired of policing all that, is ISIS. The shock and awe of cosmopolite social justice creates Scud Studs all over the place. But in the end, they'll all flee the Green Zone. 

When the male transvestites start beating the shit out of women in sports, you start to realize that everybody can't be included in every way. When anti-vaxxers claim a right to infect themselves and others, you start to realize every interest group can't have a seat in the commons. When the Rawakening fails after the withdrawal of American troops, and Al-Sadr rises again, you realize every sect is not going to dissolve. 

Ultimately, you are going to have to have borders, and you're going to have to enforce standards. The US and Europe have falsely convinced themselves that you don't have to have either, unless you are very 'privileged'. And so they're trying to destroy the privilege of drawing lines, discriminating and allowing people to suffer for not holding up standards.

I think the likes of Viktor Orban, whom I have listened to most of them all, recognizes in short, sweet strokes what the historical center of his nation is, and what it costs when that nation voluntarily or under coercion cede their sovereignty. I perceive also that Greece has rejected various overtures of the EU with regard to austerity on a very nationalistic basis. My goto guy on that is Mark Blythe. 

We really need to examine the necessity of cultural and patriotic conformity or the concept of citizenship will die. If we don't in the US, we'll start to see more 'sovereign citizens'. 

The Mau Mau Factor

Q: Why do people fear black riots most of all?

A: Actually this is an answer to a lot of questions tangential to the one you asked, and it essentially goes like this. Black Americans, united by a leftist intellectual, cultural and political movement over the course of a decade turned America upside down. There was a moment in this country’s history that was catalyzed a number of disparate actions that amplified what had been going on in many people’s minds.

The short and sweet (and sour) story is that Black Power worked. Black Nationalism worked, Black Consciousness worked. And it worked on everybody in America and it made people change. It made institutions change. It was a bold and unstoppable power move on American society that made everybody stop and rethink what they thought they knew to be the nature of the Negro and his place in America and what that meant for American society and culture. And Americans realized that they had it all wrong, and the Black Power movement took every advantage of it.

I would basically say that the single most important thing it did was to make America rewrite its congressional districts to elect blacks into government NOW. There may have been nothing before or since that so drastically rewrote the political and cultural climate of the US, outside of war. The force of black power politics, riding on the success of civil rights politics established a new coalition of left blacks and whites that constituted first a powerful minority and then a majority in American politics.

This movement took what everybody assumed they knew to be true about America, and made every white American either silently in their own heads, or vocally in public stop and ask a black person “Is that true?”. Black Americans established, in religion, in sports, in schools, in general a separate and distinct take on America and they threatened to take America apart through violent revolution if that separateness and distinction was not reconciled. And while that rhetoric and that idea still works in the back of people’s minds when they think about black politics and culture, the difference was that back then, all of the most talented and powerful black Americans were united. There was a face-off and the Establishment blinked.

Black Americans got Affirmative Action, among other things, and this confrontation set the precedent for how Americans viewed power politics. To this day people think about mass movement politics using the tactics and history of what black America did. When 1 out of every 9 Americans was changing their very identity from Negro to Black, it was a force to be reckoned with. Cities burned.[1] It was revolution.

That kind of unique situation has not been replicated. America has changed. History will not repeat itself. But I think, in direct response to the question posed, is that Latinos in America are not racially and culturally unified enough to have a singular idea dominate their interactions with the rest of America. So if some Mexicans riot in California you won’t get the Cuban congressman from Florida or the Puerto Rican police chief in New York getting on television in support. All of the Latinos in the US are not going to change to Chicanos overnight, not in the way that Negros in America became Black. There is no national Aztlan movement. it simply does not exist.

I think there’s a second aspect to this as well, which is America was a great deal less accommodating in the 1960s. They had no idea how bad it could be, until there were riots every summer and talk about the living conditions of Negroes was regular news. The living conditions of Latinos in America is not an issue. It’s a fact that here in Southern California, campesinos from Mexico are not demanding equality as Americans. They may be as uneducated as Negroes were in the old South, but they have yet to migrate across America for more industrial jobs as Negroes did in the 1920s. We see Mexicans politically satisfied with the lowest paying jobs and without citizenship, and that compromise on immigration and citizenship undermines the legitimacy of any promise of equality in America. Mexicans in America can wave Mexican flags and put Michoacan stickers on their old trucks. So there is no pressure for a certain kind of equality, which would be more forthcoming anyway.

Which leads me to the third thing which is how ‘diversity’ and multiculturalism have diluted any sort of nationalism of the sort that brings real consequences to millions when there is violent conflict. Latinos have suffered and benefitted at the same time from this. For the most part, Latinos benefit because few people question their culture where they exist in large numbers. They are separate and unequal and everybody lives with that. When Villaraigosa was elected mayor of Los Angeles, people thought it might be the beginning of a Latino revolution., but no sustained activism took place.

Basically I believe that Latinos have never and probably will never achieve the level of uncomfortable isolation and alienation from America, combined with a passionate desire to be part of the mainstream of America that Blacks did in their destruction of the Negro. There is no new self that Latinos are trying to be en masse, and it will not redefine America.

So the news on black riots today is the same as the news on latino riots today. We take them as isolated and not reflective of some larger movement in America. The black Dallas sniper is your perfect example. Accommodating the political intent of rioters is not going to happen because ethnic minorities are already integrated into the mainstream of American society. We have already done the multicultural thing, and fact we have overdone it. The retro politics of street protests of the 1960s are not going to work.

America has dealt with massive terrorist attacks. Whose gripe is that big? Nobody’s. Go ahead and try it. Riot. America’s not going to buy it.

Footnotes

[1] 1967 NBC NEWS SPECIAL REPORT : "SUMMER OF 67"(Aftermath Of Detroit Race Riots Of 1967)

 

Obligatory Seriousness on Abortion in Alabama

The problem with being a Leftist is that you're supposed to be highly consistent on a wide variety of subjects you actually know nothing about. The consequence of this is that you tend to have contempt for people who don't make similar efforts to stay current with the state of the social art. It creates a class of intellectual consumers who pride themselves on their first class, continuing luxury educations. Lifelong learning for political effect is probably some kind of borderline personality disorder. I was lucky to grok that vibe in 1992 when I was in the throes of my public rants disguised as performance poetry. Yes, there was a moment at the Nuyorican when I dreamed of being published in the New Yorker. That moment was dashed within a few minutes after I learned that my worst poetry (It was a reverse poetry slam) was greeted with genuine appreciation for being pretty good, and make sure you come for a real poetry slam. There is nothing like the experience of being an engineer watching people fawn over and kiss up to assistant editors. Then again, you know Cobb goes there. 

When I decided to go there and the destination was the American Right, back in 2003, I was quite surprised by the actual diversity of the Right and the narrow way in which I, as a former Leftist, perceived them. Particularly as a 'black Republican' I so much expected to find that a majority of them were somewhere between Warren Buffett and Gordon Gecko, private enterprise, free market, supply siders of the sort that fixed the inflation problems of the late 70s with the election of Ronald Reagan. I had no idea. In particular, I certainly never expect to be confronted with black women who were fundamentalist Christians singly focused on the abomination of abortion. Yike. This is real? Yes it was, and it was something I learned within an hour of going to the Republican Club somewhere in Culver City that fateful evening. I expected people more like the late Joe Hicks, and although I never listened to his show, Larry Elder. No, this was not the black Right I was encountering. They were generally single issue folks. Small Government! Military Spending! Anti-Commie! But more than anything, what California conservatives wanted was money and votes. They had the walking dead's hunger for winning in one of the bluest of blue states - and lived in the shadow of winning ways of Mayor Richard Riordan and the strident domination of Governor Pete Wilson. Days long gone. They were, as I think of it now, destined to fragment into the unconsolidated Balkanized panoply of single-issue voters resentful of the Democrat's easy pickings.

Nothing quite tastes like the victory of Trump who might as easily decided he would be a Democrat as run at all. It has a greasy taste, like water out of a jerry can in an electoral desert. You swallow it, wondering which kind of death you'd rather have, that by dehydration or poisoning. As of today I see no oasis in sight for the Right. I only see the disjoint fanaticism of single-issue voters who are only partially satisfied by their party's victories. We live in the post-political-philosophy world of populist politics, in which hatred of the enemy far outstrips organization of the friendlies. But of all the friendlies, none are quite as motivated in such an energetic manner as the anti-abortionists. Say what you will about Republican claims to be unapologetic. This is obvious to the point of never necessary to mention when it comes to those opposed to abortion. And now it seems that in Alabama, the first domino has fallen.

I have only one philosophically consistent dog in that fight, which is my insistence that individuals have the right to make life and death decisions. It happens to align with my support of the death penalty and the use of deadly force in defense of one's life and property. But in all cases, none of these are decisions to be taken lightly either by an arbitrary individual or an arbitrary punt of that decision to the state by proxy. These are the most serious matters. Nothing speaks to me quite the way Eric S. Raymond's essay Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun on the use of firearms brings the weight of such moral considerations and individual responsibility and virtue into focus.  Consequently, for me, there is no sense of partisan alignment. As a mature individual who tends to overthink all matters, I remain curious to the logic and motivations of positions taken by all parties. It is the dynamic of the decision and the domain of evidence and aegis of thought that is the most interesting thing to me, and I have all but abandoned all hope that American political debate in the mainstream is capable of making such considered decisions. In other words, what is aggregated is compromise. I am brought to mind of the study that proved that a seven game series at the end of a season of baseball is actually statistically inconclusive. Yet we accept the winner as the champion. At least baseball coaches tend to be honorable in defeat. 

So what I see as the philosophical aegis of thought around abortion must take into consideration what has been described as 'reproductive rights'. My thinking about the matter began somewhere in the mid 80s when in vitro fertilization was meeting with success on a larger scale. Were test tube babies real babies? Was it the fact of sex between married men and women that made  babies real humans, or was it just the matter of DNA? Would an artificially inseminated ovum brought to term in an artificial womb be an artificial human being? What if the government collected the appropriate genetic material and raised these parentless humans to be soldiers? Would they have the same rights as the rest of us? Can the state be a parent? Can a university be a parent? Is love always attendant to 'authentic' human children? Is love therefore necessary? These are the kind of questions that arise in my mind after just a moment's reflection. As well, I imagine what defenders of either side of the abortion debate might say in response. But I only have the luxury of this blog to engage such matters, and I am long past the days when it is reasonable for me to expect more than 10 responses from a variety of people. The blogosphere is moribund, or at least arcane. But more interesting that these, perhaps practically unanswerable questions, are those questions surrounding legal matters of parental rights.

They say that women want equality everywhere but family court, where they want and expect greater standing and superiority. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, and of history, this makes perfect sense. And in the short history between the time of first wave feminism and today, this hasn't been challenged. So too, question of child support and welfare benefits in principle are not controversial. Men and women have different stakes and therefore different interests in the raising of children. Or put more basically, men do not squirt milk from their teats and therefore the pairing of mother and child in those first most crucial months of infant development are the responsibility and duty of the mother. The father must provide so that women are not dragging infants out to the farming fields, hunting grounds, factory floors, nurses stations or cubicle farms as the case may be. Or the attending wet nurses in the case of certain royal families. I'm sure those who support an artificial army would have them supplied, in addition to artificial wombs, artificial teats and artificial milk from the Playtex / Nestle military contractors.  Then the actual education could begin. Most of us, simply have mothers, fathers and love. Sisters and brothers too, if we're lucky. It is what we have evolved to be. But what if men were guaranteed equal say in matters of abortion? It seems to me that those in support of abortion rights would have a very difficult time in allowing any man who impregnates a woman to force abortion on demand. So the argument that avoids such a matter is that men's right in this matter extends only to the life of motile sperm, and once the ovum is inseminated, it becomes the woman's property to dispose as she sees fit. Which is not to imply disposal, but responsibility for its disposition.

All that said I can understand that by and large it is woman's choice to baby or not to baby the world, as by and large it has always been no matter what the particular instrumentality of men's defense of that decision. Clearly rape is illegal in all cultures and that matter has been consistent throughout history without any requirement for the effort of politicization. It is simply reasonable that women have that choice and obviously that men have agreed. I also understand that women spend a great deal of time in pursuit of the right kind of man, overlooking many others. We are not like chimps, dominated by seasons of heat, in which females don't care which male it is, so long as he bludgeons the competition. This mutual sexual attraction makes us different - we negotiate first and then let our basic instincts run. Despite our current proclivity to call all human choosing and negotiating 'politics' or 'markets' I think it should be obvious that the rules for one domain, particularly sexual selection, do not apply across all of them. Who would dare question the 'inequality' of Warren Beatty as compared to Harvey Weinstein. Hollywood does understand a few things among which is the art of sexual attractions and they can be masters. After all, Rock Hudson got millions of women to part with their entertainment dollars. Those were not shills screaming for the Beatles, and I find it difficult to believe that Mick Jagger had to pay for female attention and favor. The point is that millions of men who were not such stars got little benefit of doubt, and it is not reasonable to expect every man to be a good husband, father or provider of family. Despite the fact that women choose, it is not reasonable to expect that they will make good wives, mothers or makers of homes. 

One can make jokes about Alabama being a backwards place and I am not above that despite my respect for what engineering goes down in Huntsville and what shipping goes through Mobile. However when I think of the place, I think of it as a place from which thousands of African Americans voted with their feet. The Great Migration of the 20th Century is one of those massive historical events, like the Eastern Front of WW2, that Americans don't bother to keep top of mind, significant as they are. As well, Alabama being a Southern state, I am for Constitutional reasons reminded that despite interpretations to the contrary, States Rights are real. Our states are sovereign and as such cannot declare bankruptcy despite the fact that they very well may be in more ways than one. The empirical data on Alabama speaks for itself, socio-economically speaking. How long ago was it that their age of consent was 14 years old for females? It is 16 now, which compares to 20 in South Korea and 11 in Nigeria. Your mileage may vary. That being the case, I don't actually expect every jurisdiction to snap immediately into conformity with the latest findings of evolutionary psychology, as I don't necessarily agree, for example, that the Dodgers weren't the best baseball team last season. But in the long arc of history we do understand the dynamics of sexual attraction and selection, and so the laws have conformed to human behavior and desire. Rape is still rape, highly punished and also rare, online porn fantasies notwithstanding. But here is Alabama putting that Republican mantra into real legislation. Abortion is murder. They are deadly serious about it, and now making the 'abuse' of the human reproductive system as important as the abuse of guns. Obviously I disagree with the legislation, but on the other hand, you cannot deny that the intent is life and death serious. Alabama has radically ramped up the cost of the ethics of sex.

Is Alabama's new legal negotiation the first in a chain of dominos? Will women there find themselves in situations similar to those portrayed in The Color Purple? Will such a social shift be contagious? I don't think so. The viral talk about tipping points on the matters of rape and incest are not particularly persuasive to me. It's difficult for me to see how such women would not vote with their feet and find sanctuary in other states. Then again, if women have a right to choose, they are presumably wise enough, at the age of 16. Would any advocate for such choice deny an abortion to such a woman? Would they advocate for a higher age of consent? If the statutory age for rape were changed, who would complain? A woman who decides to baby or not to baby has that right to choose which man. That is natural because we are not like dogs or chimps. Alabama is going to be Alabama. I don't get to vote there. Alabama's body politic has the right to choose. I can only say that I wish they chose a wiser commensurate age of consent. One more consistent with the age of 19 at which one can legally buy and carry a firearm. And, by the way, I think it is much more reasonable to have all of those ages right about 20. Voting, military service, drinking, smoking, abortion, consent, marriage, CCW. Im comfortable with exceptions and I am comfortable with bumping it up a year to 21 in all those cases. Quite frankly Millennials are proving me right. Different subject.   

I expect that there are some people of all persuasions, coming from the jurisdictions from which they are comfortable, are going to be uncomfortable with the new regime of Alabama. It's a bigger deal than New Coke. It is a life and death decision, which I fervently believe is the right of every human being. It is not something to be taken lightly. It's 250 miles across Alabama from Columbus GA to Meridian MS. From Mobile, it's only 58 miles to Pensacola, FL. Now it might seem contradictory to some, but it is also true that in Alabama, you can carry a gun without a license. You have the right, with said gun, to defend your life and property.  So as rare as rape and incest may be, an abortion law with a 99 year penalty will chill the hell out of the medical practice, and predictably draw objections from the non-monolithic American Right. But as I see it, it all boils down to the individuals most affected and most responsible. They can walk, they can kill. No matter how many subjects we overthink to establish and maintain philosophical consistency, all we can do is watch. 

 

Decolonization Deconstructed

Q: What's all this I hear about 'colonization'?

When I used to employ this jargon, for me it was about a 'decolonized mind'. When you are *outside* of the 'system' as many people from enclaves are, you identify with your neighbors, some old traditions, archetypes, myths, religions, patterns of speech etc. So there is always a sense that *your* America is exceedingly different from 'The' America. And what 'The' America wants from you is to correct your English, get a haircut, stand up straight, wear a tie, learn X, Y and Z and all this is the necessary toll for access to that place where the success is.

So the paradigms of tribal vs cosmopolitan, pidgin vs King's English, civilized vs natives, educated vs ignorant, civil vs criminal, respected vs condemned all map very conveniently to white vs black, gay vs straight, inner city vs upscale suburb, bodega vs bistro. Again this harkens back to 1990 when Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider was blowing a certain subset of American minds.

So all of the things that weren't considered 'corporate' in the 80s, in the days of network television, were placed in this context. What did Gordon Gecko want you to say? 'Greed is good'. The Man was taking as his toll for your inclusion in 'The' America, the colonization of your mind. Anything and everything that made you different from the Kings of the World, was that which made you a native. So what is the American system of education? It is the colonization process of your mind. It turns you filthy, nasty Boyz in the Hood into respectable citizens. It bleaches your soul so that you can walk past the doormen, police, vice-principals and not give off that peasant stink.

For my case, the educational theory of Paolo Friere played into the mix. So if you want to know how it was that the Multiculturalists got up the nerve to bomb the Canon, it was from his cues. Friere essentially posited that all non-technical education is a barf-back method. Or what he called 'banking'. The student is an empty vault. He only gains value when he accepts, without alteration, that which the professor deposits in his mind. Friere wanted to change this and make education non-hierarchical and interactive. That the student should be responsible for changing the professor. This is the only path, sayeth Friere, towards the decolonization of the oppressed - resistance to the aristocracy of the professoriate.

So basically this is part of the theoretical framework of the disunification and tribalization of America. The taught idea, now prominent in post-modern universities, that a fundamental transformation of the soul is what the powers that be demand of anyone seeking a living wage - that you don't belong if you lie along any of the intersectional axes of oppression, and that you must be committed to lifelong struggle because Gordon Gecko and his ilk run this whole country. How do you know them? You know them by the way they swim in America, freely, without any consideration of the water itself, the water of America that drowns all of us outsiders. Decolonize your mind, stay filthy nasty Boyz, that is your only integrity.

Now you understand everything about the Culture Wars.

Now the thing to understand about these pictures is that the above picture with me in the tie was the 'before' and me in the bandanna is the 'after'. I had already spent my college years on track to be that which I wanted to be - a young urban professional. You see I had already been a union employee having dropped out of college after a semester at USC. That entry level job that I got 4 years too late did not captivate me completely. I wasn't giving it up of course, but I needed to understand what all this multiculturalism was about. The writer part of me was intrigued by guerilla poetry, the reader part of me was astonished by Toni Morrison and the yuppy part of me was bored with pool parties. Every part of me could not afford the down payment on a condo in Los Angeles, so I traded to the opposition. (They had better music too.) 

It took about 3 years to put down that rebel in me. But I firmly understood the theoretical ground upon which I stood. Ultimately I realized that I wanted to get married and have children and that fatherhood was totally incompatible with the mindset of a rebel. 

Great Inflated Expectations

My brother Doc told me something in a common sense way that I never quite understood so clearly before. This was some time ago, shortly after he joined the LAPD. He said people expect too much - like a divine reckoning - when they encounter police or expect things from government. He said, people need to remember society, but they don't. It sounded like an excuse until he explained something fundamental about policing that I never really contemplated.

I lived at the time in Redondo Beach, one of those fancy Southern California towns famous for, well, beach stuff. Every Fourth of July people from all over LA County would show up for the fireworks show at the Redondo Beach Pier. Subsequently another one off Palos Verdes, the wealthy enclave just south of Redondo would kick off. Two shows for the price of one, free. Some years back Torrance, the large city to the east of the coast had an all-day celebration at Wilson Park. But one night the fog rolled in and tens of thousands of people were disappointed. Maybe that was the reason, but they stopped having fireworks shows at night, and tribute bands all day on the Fourth. Consequently all of those folks came to the beaches too.

Redondo is one of those places that on that night, easily will accommodate a quarter million people on the sand. People literally park a mile away to get there at dusk. The Redondo Beach Police Department has about 100 uniformed officers. On the Fourth that means they are outnumbered 2,500 to one. But of course all of those officers are not on duty all day. Maybe there are 30 who manage the traffic and stay alert on patrol. So Doc tells me in these kinds of terms how much police depend on people to restrain themselves. If the peace is disturbed it will physically impossible for police to restrain the people. Yet a sworn officer's duty is to enforce the law at all times. That means the cop has to win. If the cops back down without controlling any such situation, the subsequent chaos is unstoppable. Nobody wants to see that, meaning everybody has an interest in not seeing cops lose control. That points one more time to the police depending on the public to police itself. 

This basic lesson extends to all parts of government in our republic. Yet somehow people work themselves into expecting that the kind of zero-tolerance oath sworn by uniformed officers of the law applies across politics. They expect that when politician says "Education is my first priority." That somehow his policy will effectively make all the children learn. Or when healthcare insurance is promised and even delivered, that life expectancy will go up. Remember the pregnant woman who campaigned for candidate Obama so that his administration would deliver her baby for free? Anyway, it's one of those things I remember, even if Google has purged all of the interwebz evidence. 

Anyway. I hope you get it. 

For the Record: Roland Fryer & Charter Schools