Cobb

Black Lives Denied

Some time ago I wrote My Black Life Doesn't Matter. As the machinations and shenanigans associated with BLM continue to disturb my peace, I think I have come to an appropriate way to describe it. Having come to this realization, I find it entirely consistent with my understanding of coming to grips with an identity one doesn't choose and how the Civil Rights movements of the past are so starkly and fundamentally different from what's going on today.

George Floyd has become a fungible. 

He has been press ganged into a parade of celebrity victims by a crowd of activists and their sympathizers. His actual black life has been hounded into a representational dead end. Or to use more commonly bandied about language, he has been culturally appropriated. George Floyd is not his life, he is only his death. What his life might have meant has succumbed to the public acceptance, almost unanimous, about what his death has symbolized. I too, like the family of Floyd, know what it is like to lose a family member suddenly and tragically. I know what that kind of grief and loss feels like. I have experienced this for myself, twice. What I do not know, is what it feels like to have a family member's entire life be overshadowed by a moment of infamy and then converted into an avalanche of political activism. I have not had a family member erased.

On the other hand, I familiar with the theme. Anyone who has attempted to write, as I have, as a black writer, knows how difficult it is to get your writing recognized as a legitimate and authentic representation of your lived experience. You can call this an economic injustice if that term suits you, because it is clear that the economic power of news organization and political organization and cultural production companies in any medium quite handily overwhelms the truth of any individual writer. Only the writer who is broadly published and becomes famous because of that, is relatively safe from misrepresentation. That safety is under a greater threat than ever in my memory, owing to the cowardice and volume of Cancel Culture and their blue meany alarm-clowns. As much as it is told that diverse voices are being empowered, these are only pigeonholes. They are as common and as generic as rainbow graphics and full [people of] color brochures for liberal arts colleges. Yet it is hard enough to have the actual details of life accurately portrayed in a world where racial stereotypes rule. When I moved from Los Angeles to Brooklyn around the corner from Crown Heights, it was assumed that black Americans all had the same negative connotations of Jews. So I was asked to join certain protests. I never had anything but normal relations with Jews my entire life. When I moved from NY to Atlanta's largely white Cobb County suburbs, it was assumed that I would inherit all of the black culture of Fulton County, largely black. Black diversity, that phrase you never hear, is real but it is always smothered for the premises of black cultural and political unity, and by the liberal confirmation bias that assumes it. That's why it's not part of today's narrative. That's why George Floyd's dead body means so much more than his life. It can't defy the narrative. It generated a perfect storm because it was racially predestined.

When I first got on the net in the early 90s, a close friend of mine said something fundamentally profound. It was that black Americans didn't need and weren't looking for a black leader, it was white people. White people needed a black leader to speak for the masses, someone they could accept or reject and then compare the ideas of the leaders to those black Americans with whom they wished to embrace or denounce. Where do you stand on Khalid Muhammad?, we were asked. Where do you stand on Mumia? What is your opinion on Cornel West? It was as if black America lived in an hermetic universe whose bubble could only be pierced by the Fungibles who communicated with the rest of us at the Wednesday Night Meeting. At the same time, we acknowledged it was true that black Americans were looking for symbols to back up their stories of "I told you so." to anyone who doubted the reality of racism. The dynamic remains. There is a hot market for tales from the hood. I cannot tell you how many breathless inquiries I have received in the vein of "What is the most devastating racist thing that ever happened to you?". 

In this inverted world of show and tell, only the bleakest, blackest tragedies are monetized and taken up by the American elites. The short attention span theater of the mainstream media does not have the inclination, time, patience or budget to put more substantive non-fiction into their agendas, certainly nothing that defies the new conventions of multicultural political correctness that floats up from the teaming millions. The common man must be left to his own devices and of consumption, but they are not interested in their reality. If the New York Times survey says X, then the public had better believe it for its own good. All the acceptable alternatives are to be consumed by the first class citizens in the magazines that matter, mostly brought to you by Conde Nast. Perhaps I'm being cynical and shrill. I simply hate drowning in the vanilla fluff of deepest darkest horrors of the 'black lives' that matter.  Once upon a time there were celebrated men like Vernon Jordan who got to represent what America could provide to its citizens. Now the examples are the mistreated, maimed, & murdered. 

In my writing, I have dealt with just about every one of them.  Sean Bell, The Jena Six, Latasha Harlins, Rodney King, Ron Settles, Michael Zinzun, Don Jackson, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin,  Mumia Abu Jamal, Shaquanda Cotton, and many more that I don't currently have the patience to link to an appropriate post in my archives. Nevertheless I have no problem simply listing them:

• Abner Louima
• Genarlow Wilson
• Dunbar Village
• Jonny Gammage
  Tyisha Miller
• Eric Garner
• Tamir Rice
• Freddy Gray
• Philando Castile

What did they do? How did they live? It doesn't matter. They were crushed, now all we have are their ghosts haunting every newsroom, every political mention of race. They have, in the hands of the priests of the death cult of the New Anti Racists, the only blacks that matter - the dead ones. Nobody is able to celebrate black life in this narrative. It's black death that pays the bills. It's black tragedy that keeps the newsrooms buzzing. It's black dysfunction that keeps people talking and editorializing and coming up with some of the most nonsensical political ideas outside of Lilliput. This game is old, tired and wrong. 

Sister Night: Forgotten

The other day I heard that Trump was planning to make a speech and rally in Tulsa OK, aimed at black Americans. People were aghast, as they tend to be whenever Trump does anything. His awfulness never gets dull. My response was, Let It Be. It's not as if nobody is capable of making a redeeming statement about the race riots of 1921. HBO's recent miniseries 'Watchmen' began with that very story, and Watchmen was in my estimation, the finest story ever about a black female superhero. If my kids were still into Trick or Treating, I'm sure one of them would have chosen Sister Night.

As my father would say, "But y'all forget." People are running around the streets pretending that the harshness of their lives is a cosmic injustice deserving of dramatic acts of outrage, chaos and destruction. Of course all of the smartphones are catching this symbolism. The grafitti, the flag burning, the toppling of statues, the rants, slogans and middle fingers of disrespect. Bret Weinstein called the most coherent of the madness the unbuilding of America, but his metaphor went even one better. He spoke of zombies fighting the boogieman. Nailed it. We are witnessing an anarchist skirmish, a leaderless revolt aimed at every possible symbol of institutional racism, income inequality, police misconduct, political corruption, amoral capitalism and media misrepresentation. For most, that level of detail, less than 50 words worth is best reduced to America. They don't want to be Americans. They want to be something else, here in America that is not America. Aside from the fact that it is an unwinnable war, it is the reheating up of the Culture War that was never resolved. 

On my end of things, I see this as an undoing that has been a long time coming. My associates in the IDW (Intellectual Dark Web, or Ineffectual Dork Web if you must) see it as a crisis of rationality in which the business of sense-making is limping along like a three legged dog in a race against time. For me, I saw the Closing of the American Mind as soon as I read that book. I also saw the appeal of Multicultural Literacy. I have also witnessed its perversion and the zero sum game that it has played against the Enlightenment and Western Civilization itself. It is perfectly understandable why people in the streets feel as if they cannot breathe in America. They've been living inside hermetic caves of identity and complaint. They've been stewing in their own juices of self-regard and projection and now that stew is boiling over. 

Sister Night wears a badge. She takes on the authority and responsibility required for justice. She fights on the side of the law and assumes those powers necessary to combat evil and chaos. That such action is heroic and courageous goes without saying, but it also requires deep contemplation of the world to come. The world that would be brought into being by the work of the righteous might exist only in imaginations, nevertheless the work of the righteous must continue. Fulfillment of such ethics must be their own reward. It requires more than mere obsession, dedication and dogged determination. It must reckon with what business of ordinary life is sacrificed to the duties of keeping the peace and taking the fight to the enemy. Nobody brings their babies to the front lines. 

In those caves, it is impossible to associate justice with the wearing of the badge of American law. They cannot believe that Bass Reeves could possibly exist. They cannot conceive of a black life that raises America to justice in any formal manner in large work or small. The black in such black lives must always be associated with loss, victimization, hopelessness and thus ultimately defiant justifiable rage. The black mind, according to this trope of complaint is psychologically incapable of dealing constructively or triumphing over all of the evil white minds have created. It's a tragedy all swept under white suburban rugs according to this theory, until it's too late. It's difficult to imagine, in this view of America that the legacy of slavery has ever been, or will ever be overcome. Forget the lyrics to that old Negro spiritual. What people really mean is "We are overcome", and this false premise justifies everything.

Injustice justifies a great deal, and remedies and solutions come with requirements, budgets, schedules and sponsorships. We might hope that our political parties, indeed our government and everyone in America would make that so, but we haven't. Part of the reason is sheer blunt stupidity. Part of the reason is droopy drunk indifference. Part of the reason is deliberate enemy action. Part of it is confusion and frustration. Right now that confused and frustrated part is running around hand-waving with its hair on fire. It is overwhelmed by the suddenness and the enormity of the crises we are facing, unable to determine cause and effect, trying to do something that will get a million likes, or at the very least a sober and determined Amen. Such things are not forthcoming primarily because the adults have left the room and let the kids run the streets. This used to be the thing we could turn to someone like Warren Christopher or Thurgood Marshall with questions and expect calm well-reasoned answers. Nobody has time for that except for the writers who time forgot. Such writers wrote books like 'Another Country'. Such writers wrote poems like 'Revolutionary Dreams'. Such writers wrote plays like "Dutchman". The closest I've seen to anything like that in a medium time has not forgotten is the HBO Dramatic Series of Watchmen. From that we have such women as Angela Abar the masked police officer Sister Night. From that we have such men as Will Reeves, the masked vigilante Hooded Justice. From that we have the intergenerational connection, the continuation of a call to action, to deliberate thought, to heroic sacrifice, to the complications in the weave of life. 

Everyone who thinks they have an answer that comes in the form of a protest march has had their say. All the marching is done, and all the doing a march can do is done. There's nothing left to do once the parade has left the avenue but clean up, or on the other hand, make more of a mess. Whose Streets? Our Streets. Yeah so long as the cameras are rolling and you have someone fetching you fresh water and trail mix. So long as law enforcement and crowd control are in abeyance. Then what? 

It's somewhat surprising to see how the lessons of my generation have been lost to the lost children out there, but not if you consider how many of us are on the bench, waiting for the arthritic grip of the Boomers to finally relent. It's going to take some doing to move the central institutions of our nation into the future, and it is quite a shame that we in my generation have had to bypass it through digital means. It wasn't what we intended. My father has always expected me to write books like Baldwin, Giovanni and Baraka, but here I am out on the internet having written thousands of essays for not one newspaper or publishing company. I am the independent outsider and possessed of a peace that appears to passeth all understanding. Why? Because all we seem to recall are the politicians and their promises. We forget those with the sound minds, competent skills, patriotic demeanor and worker's ethic capable of righteous work. We forget that there are millions of such Americans stuck in the traffic behind chaotic and stagnant self-serving leadership. We forget that people actually sit down and think, go out and test their thoughts and then recycle to refine their thoughts. We forget. Or maybe we never knew.

Juneteenth is the day when people try to remember that other people long ago didn't know. They say that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed. Yes it's always the case. Progress is always at hand, and so is devolution. There might be progress in Texas and devolution in Minnesota. There might be righteous work being done in California, and chaotic destruction being carried out in Washington. Those who dwell in caves who have concocted their racial theories are totalizers. Such totalizers have but one solution and seek to be of one mind, a mind that will not see what is not projected on their cave walls. A mind prepared to punish apostates. A mind prepared to create martyrs. A mind that demands compliance. Today we face the fact that such minds want nothing to do with what America was, what America is, but only what stands in the way of the America they demand. I have heard it said that there are no hardcore racists on the arbitrary left. I know their future is already here, and they are trying to distribute it by any means necessary. My job is to make sense of that and to remind you that politics is only a fraction of the story of America. It doesn't surprise me that these, the enemies of American ideals have no poetry, only slogans. They have no music, only chants. They have no art, only graffitti. Their desire is to tear down whatever isn't their own. No police is what they are demanding now. 

It's strange to sit on this side of Afrocentrism. 30 years ago, Molefi Asante's book convinced many young people that they could not be Americans. I watched my old organization, the National Society of Black Engineers stop inviting people like astronauts Mae Jemison and Guy Bluford to their campuses. Instead they invited afrocentrics like Legrand Clegg and Jawanza Kinjufu. I know such people still exist and I'm sure they would be happy to get Juneteenth to remind us of American slavery.  I know there are plenty of racial theories that require black lives to be totalized into categories under their control. Afrocentrism is never cited as a solution, although I do recall seeing Nancy Pelosi take a knee in a freshly ironed Kinte scarf just last week. Afrocentric thought took over Temple University and moved academia that much closer to a butchery of intellectuality and reason that we old engineers crave and practice. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on in the Humanities, and boy did I wake up when Claremont and Evergreen whacked out. We knew that future, and now more Americans are coming to see it in their towns. That future wants Whitey on the hook forever, and they have '400 years' of revised history to make their Jenga tower case. 

A lot of Americans want a reckoning. They want a racial reckoning. They're mad as hell and they're looking to hunt down The Man. A lot of these people are Americans in name only because they equate what America is with what its worst elements used to be. Have you ever seen it spelled Amerikkka? Of course you have. Similarly, they equate black Americans with the most pathetic and helpless people they ever were. That is the sum total of their moral ammunition. For them, there are only a dozen dots to connect it all, the latest one being a man named George. Last week there was a statue of a man named George that stood in Seattle. It is now toppled and covered in shit, if it is still in one piece. I'm doing the work, what work I can, if I might dare to call it righteous in the expectation that the American future I see will be distributed, even as others forget that any black hero ever existed to work toward that patriotic end. I can only write so much, but I do recommend that you take the time to watch the new Watchmen. Try not to forget. 

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This is my society. It is a society of mind, of philosophy, of science and engineering, of cuisine, of music and poetry. It is of criticism and sensemaking and it is about resolving the crisis of rationality we face. It is dedicated to the long term. It is observant of history and tradition. It is aimed at the management of risk, the decentralization of power and the establishment of global standards. It is open source and not coercive, and it's not particularly evangelical. It has no room for racial theories, in case you missed it. It aims to be responsive to the needs of the common man. You are welcome.

Insolubilous

"The problem is the racism of your people"

"Yes, the problem is the racism of my people"

The above statements, largely accepted without question in America today, are racial accusations requiring a racial solution. That solution will never come. The sooner people understand this, the sooner a true solution will appear. As long as these sentiments are expressed, it is a formula for constant drama and the occasional disaster. Try as I might, I was unable to turn my head away for the drama as it played out on my four screens and police radio yesterday afternoon. I watched and waited as the hour of curfew approached. 

Like the pandemic, there was nothing but moral panic being broadcast and tweeted yesterday wall to wall and station to station. For me, watching it was like watching a nature documentary where the cheetas and wildebeast, alligators and gazelles, lions, vultures, hyenas and zebra all interacted in their predictable ways. I was the giraffe casually munching and observing the circle of life and death. Like a giraffe, I wasn't making any noise. Today as a human, I suppose I'll stick my neck out. 

The announcer lamented, on channel five, in a typically unprofessional way. "What should be different this time, what have we not done in 25 years?" He was asking the mayor of West Hollywood who replied. "I would ask anybody who wasn't moved by that film of George Floyd's death, what is wrong with them?" I didn't watch it. I still haven't and I probably won't. As much as I like watching MMA fights, and even the fightporn subreddit, I don't watch snuff films. I don't watch Isis beheadings. I didn't read Cho's poetry. Such things are poisonous to the spirit. It might be funny to watch a child cursing and demanding the rent, but I do not like crime or true crime. The reason is because I understand violence and I understand justice, in fact I am compelled to respond. I know that law enforcement is inevitably violent. I know that people inevitably conflict. Like John Dunne, I feel myself a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Every man's death diminishes me. And yet I recognize my limits, my capacity to heal, my ability to defend, my willingness to go the distance, the limits of my mind, body and spirit. I too know my strengths, advantages and talents. I have tools. What can I fix? 

I think this is a question that few people ask of themselves. At least that's the impression one gets piling on images of sadness, defensiveness and pity , hour after Eyewitness News Live hour, and minute by GoPro minute. There were no scenes but three that were of the type I was encouraged by during my six hour vigil. The first took only 20 seconds as a man with a pistol, rifle and beard rapidly disarmed a man who had taken a rifle from a burning police car. The second was a multicultural set of a dozen suspects cuffed and seated on the curb, black suspects to the left, white suspects to the right. One obese black man in an orangeish getup was allowed to remain standing, hands ziptied behind his back. He stood over with the white suspects. The third was a discussion between several protesting citizens and two officers. A couple dozen onlookers stood behind the citizens. The discussion went on for several minutes, silent to me with my view from the circling helicopter camera. The citizens and the onlookers walked peaceably away. Something was resolved. The rest of the day was filled with salacious filming of young masked men, bounding as they do, in the delirious excitement of being naughty in the streets. They got shoes. They got tracksuits. They got backpacks. They rarely got busted. They got recorded. And their cars and their license plates got recorded. The panoptics were in play.

A couple of cars burned. But here in Los Angeles County nothing was particularly vicious. For every gleeful, looting fast mover, there were an equal number of uniformed shooters, but they were minding the larger, more static crowds and their signs, seated in Santa Monica just east of the pier. The peaceful protesters faced the peaceful cops in a boring standoff. When that got too boring, the TV station replayed conflicts and looting on a continuous loop, with the small qualification "Earlier" on the screen. Shortly, other contingents of troops were pushing Santa Monica crowds south out of the shopping district towards the park and pier and peaceful protest. They didn't seem to need more than a half dozen canisters of loud banging tear gas, and that bum's rush only lasted 10 minutes. None of the police even broke into a run. I watched a recording made in downtown Philadelphia. I recognized the shops on Chestnut Street. The view there was of casual disintegration. The Apple Store was desecrated, the Forever 21 demonstrated its vulnerability. There were turned over dumpsters that had clearly been on fire. You can hear the mumbling and the crunch of glass shards underfoot. It took me 3 minutes to realize there was not a policeman in sight. No squad cars, no sirens, no helmets. Only the occasional fireman amongst the shambling crowds. Everybody was on their own, wandering the streets in a kind of slack oblivion. This is what happens when shit gets real, I can imagine them thinking. No. It's hardly real. It's merely dramatic.

I do not believe in American exceptionalism, not in the people. Americans themselves are not exceptional, and they have the capability of destroying anything, including their inheritance. America has a handsome set of institutions and organizations that are world class, and many of them are capable of monetizing anything. Somebody said "Soon, the rioters will have corporate sponsors." They already do. Our economy has provided everything that anyone would ever want to loot for, or protest for including the masks, hoodies, smartphones and iconography of revolution. But that's exactly the distinction that people get wrong. They think the tools to fix what ails us are to be found in retail outlets, including retail media. No such transactions are for sale. So when people say "I can't believe this is happening in America." I always think them naive. They haven't been paying enough attention to human nature to understand what humans do. They don't quite understand cause and effect in the course of human events. They think that we all have these static roles in a stable nation that does not change. From that incorrect reasoning comes a broad number of platitudes like the first two in this essay. "It's subtle, pervasive white supremacy that is the cause of this." It has been 40 years since people have been talking about "400 years of oppression"; even that benchmark is static. White = White and Black = Black. Your people and my people are no more and no less than that, and America supports the White at the expense of the Black. Or perhaps your version is that the Democrats, Liberals, Commies and Socialists protect the Black at the expense of the White. All that static remains static in the settled minds of the unexceptional American. It is self-fulfilling foolishness. 

I am not Morpheus and I have not been searching for a messiah, but I do have a red pill to offer. It's the same one I've possessed for many years and although its flavor is difficult to describe, its effect remains potent. My red pill enables transcendence. People of conventional wisdom hate the idea of racial transcendence. They have been disabused of the notion of a post-racial America that was nurtured during the candidacy and Presidency of Barack Obama. Despite the fact that he personified everything they hoped for in a president, despite the fact that he handed out bucketfuls of hopeful rhetoric and delivered some actual change, Americans who suspended their disbelief in a hidebound crooked-ass racist America for eight years snapped back to their old fear and anger in 2016. I was there, witness to the happily offended parade at the Women's March here in Los Angeles. I recall the launching of the Trump baby balloon that heralded the return of the same derangement visited upon Obama, and Bush before him. Kanye West blamed the man as being The Man when Katrina hit. Obama claimed to be The Victim when Trayvon Martin's name was on everyone's lips. The duality remained static. Only a few of us have decided that our race does not, cannot and will not define us or 'our people'. Everybody has an archetype for which they intend to represent. The armed citizens pretending to be a Genuine Patriotic Militia did so recently at the statehouse in Michigan. Everyone with a BLM t-shirt pretends to be a moral crusader for the most righteous of causes of human dignity they imagine other Americans simply cannot see. So many have these ingrained dualities firmly planted, as well as the Hallmark Card exceptions that make everyone say 'Awww'. None of that is transcendent. 

So here's how it works. You recognize that everyone has a racial identity. In America it is impossible to escape that racial identity. You may not want it, but you have it. The question is, whether or not you take it seriously. How much of your life is defined and determined by your racial identity is entirely within your control. It is as much of your self as you decide it to be. Racial identity is sticky; it likes to eat other identities you possess. Racial identity is easy and popular; everybody in America knows what it's supposed to mean. We get a racial identity education and we understand it just like we understand Facebook, or watching TV, or eating at McDonalds. I tell people to think their way out of their racial world. It's the only thing that works. If they call you 'nigger' do you respond? Only if you think they have correctly identified you. Only if you admit to yourself that you are playing that role in their heads. Only if you are statically just that. Maybe it's just 30% of who you decide to be. And maybe it's just this kind of media panic that pushes you over the edge and suddenly you have to represent. You represent in solidarity. Well the lines are so clear and obvious that anybody can do that. "Yes, it's white supremacy and I am part of the problem, because I am white." That simple admission is all it takes. One sentence. Just like this sentence "I call upon Jesus into my heart to be my personal savior." It doesn't take much to claim your identity. You don't have to be an active 24/7 Christian, or an active black revolutionary. You merely have to recognize the moment, and answer the call in proper form. 

That's what I've been listening to for the past few days. I've been listening to people singing their symbols, joining the dissonant chorus and trying to keep everyone in harmony. They keep singing "We shall overcome, someday." as if nobody ever overcame before. As if someday can never come. And so the panto continues. Everybody plays roles of contrition, roles of anger, roles all dictated by the simple and seemingly all-encompassing definitions of race. The shoe fits, and nobody is going barefoot into the struggle. Well, except us giraffes. I'm happy to accept my vulnerability in this regard. I have had my glory road, I have been to the top of the mountain I was supposed to climb. I've played the role I was destined to play some 28 years ago. I led the marchers in NYC alongside William Kunstler. Still I was accustomed to not having my homeboy suit fit perfectly. I knew to put it on and to take it off. I've looked at clouds from both sides now, and found a third and fourth way. But I have grown old enough to have worked my way through it. Not around it, but through it. And so I know how to pray for the monsters Americans become when triggered. I know how to hear what they say - how they say the same things in a racially dissonant way - how they fall back to their archetypes and behave typically, think typically and expect typical things. When you transcend, you work your way through it. What is the black part of me? What is the white part of me? They were things I wrestled with when I was young, dumb and full of insecurities. I did my race man thing, and I learned that I was not destined to be that. Now you say it. "I am not destined to be that."

It's probably the hardest for those who have tatooed a progressive atheist mark on their mind. Tied to an ideology that has no god but progress puts one in a position to calculate your value and worth according to statistics from social science. You cannot leverage your identity with God's grace. You cannot say so much that you have felt the love of God for you and have been liberated from the troubles of the world. Sam Harris says he has meditated himself into such a graceful state, but I think he doth protest too much against those who have found another path. Reason has its limits, but the mystery of grace is infinite. I hear such men and women volunteer up their racial selves and take responsibility with a certain set of recognizable caveats. "It's not my purpose. I know those who do it. I know it might be me unconsciously." That is certainly not the exhaustive list but I know a White Liberal as instantly as I know a Black Conservative. Everyone volunteers to be called into account someway, someday. My country. My race. My problem. No exit. That is an eternally frustrating place to be, especially when one is so easily aroused by a dramatic murder.

A dramatic murder. Hmm. I have to say that in the game of "unarmed black man" vs "white racist cop" the scenario surrounding the drama surrounding the particular homicide of George Floyd couldn't have been staged better by George Lucas. The media coverage and meta-narrative have set up a powerfully irresistible magnetic field that have polarized the iron filings of racial identity into exactly the right patterns. Having been through my Iron Age, I have those memories.  Today I'm really not drawn in. I'm iron deficient according to some. I have some skin in the game, but not my bones. My bones are made of something else, nothing so brittle as iron. Something not easily melted and cast into an archetypical mold. So I can't ask for what the sides are asking for. I can't weep for this kind of dramatic tragedy. I'm on the margin, a minority of one today. Until somebody else reads this and becomes halfway convinced.  I'm telling you I ate the red pill a long time ago. You don't have to believe me. After all, if you really feel that bones are racial iron, then I can't convince you anyhow. Somebody needs to remind me, somebody with an excellent memory for those crazy old black movies of the 70s. This one had a scene in which the word 'insolubilous' was used. It meant to describe an unsolvable problem. I loved that scene. I named one of my jazz tapes after the word. A jazz tape with Mingus, Brubeck and Monk. People who have been marching in 4/4 time their entire lives can't see a solution in all of their rhythms. They need to take five. They need to accept not everything rhymes. They need some odd chords and phrasings, all this racial shit is tired. Who wants to say it's 400 years of the same old shit? 

I used to say, that if you dig around a toilet long enough, you are bound to find some shit. That metaphor, like all metaphors cracks under pressure, but people are looking up the ass of America and trying to predict its future. I happen to think that nationalism is appropriate and that America has outgrown its best form of nationalism. There's something inherently slippery and dynamic about the interaction of 350 million people that cannot fit into what we currently need nationalism to be. I think there are plenty enough people who are more certain than ever before that globalization has ruined a lot of things we ought to be able to take for granted. I'm one such person. My favorite company is American Giant. They understand the value of a domestic supply chain. So there are excellent models of American individuals who have grown their institutions out of an optimism that the bottom up view is not always a sky full of buttcrack and worse. Yet people want to be mad. People want retribution. That's human nature. Until we remaster more institutions and come up with something more coherent than populist identitarianism, we will easily regress to days when America actually wasn't so great. As I said before, it's never so static. The dynamism is always present; there is always discovery. 

I can't tell you who to be. It's something you have to discover on your own. You need to see that the static game of race is a broken record, and if race is in your bones, you may have to break them open and then heal up again. You need to respect most of all, the process of discovery. You have to step out on that limb. You have to get your hyena ass off that savanna, open the fourth wall and realize you are not destined to be that. You already know that the investment of millions of Americans in racial identity easily sets them up for a bunch of stupid games, some of which are very profitable. Believe me all that live coverage is being sponsored by some corporations. When is the last time you ever heard of a company refusing to advertise on a news channel that displays racial conflict? When is the last time you've heard a pundit not leap for the opportunity to lecture the masses on the significance of race relations? When is the last time people have avoided telling "you people" how to think about X Y and Z? As I like to say, nobody owns black people, including black people. Who dares to be something else? Who has bothered to discover a personal way out? I have, and the water is fine. From my perspective, I have the luxury of telling every American the exact same thing no matter what race they claim. It's just that simple. It hurts when you do that. Stop doing that. Stop identifying with the archetype, stereotype, typical type, all types of racial identity. Can't you discover something else to be? It this what your god requires of you? Is this what your philosophy demands? Obeisance to the totem of race? Are you satisfied with that? Truly?

If you want to be mad, go burn some shit down. I said as much when it came to Ferguson, MO. There are plenty of examples where American institutions fail. They fail their direct stakeholders and everybody flies journalists in from every major city to get the footage of how it fails the ideals of peace, justice and security. You don't get those things by being 'white' or being 'black' or being 'yellow'. You get those things by being busy working. Calling out racial slogans in the streets is some people's idea of working. What's the quote? "A riot is the voice of the oppressed." It actually doesn't take very long to burn down your neighbor's house, to loot the luxury store, to write 3000 words in an essay from your home office or a Birmingham jail. Half a day maybe. It takes longer to build and reform institutions and rid yourself of pre-determined reactionary patterns of behavior. Everything you feel ain't democracy. Everything you fight for isn't moral politics. That takes practice and work. Work you should be able to point to any day of the week. Work you try and correct along the way. Work and discovery, because nothing stays the same except a mind that refuses to grow. 

What tools do you have? What's your fix? I say start with yourself. Put your head above the savanna of drama. Shutup and take in the view. Eyeball the circle of life, the inevitability of death, the chaos of mindless emotional behavior. Don't be. Do. 

Passion Without Purpose

There is a certain mentality that is as old as history but often forgotten in modern times. It the mindset of the farmer, of the hunter, of the warrior. It has an appreciation and respect for nature and the purposes of plants and animals. It understands the life force and it pays it mind. There is ancient wisdom in that mindset. It values thrift. It values natural order. It values the oneness of structure and purpose.

In modern times, we have changed our minds more than anything else. Like in ancient times, we make tools for accomplishing work. But what we are able to call work today has very little to do with the work of history. So understand that my observation is not a critique of science, technology, tool making or building. It is a critique of mind, of priority, of direction. And so here is the greatest, and most obvious contradiction I know.

Modern women use modern medicine to stop themselves from getting pregnant in order to have carefree sex. Forget about the ethics of the matter and consider the biology of the matter. At their prime, when they would be the most fertile and the most capable of bearing a healthy child, they use tools to make themselves incapable, for the sake of pleasure and for the sake of economics. And a philosophy has emerged because of this change. There is a disconnect between structure and purpose. There is a re-purposing of the human body.

Modern men similarly re-purpose themselves, their minds, their bodies, their philosophies for the sake of pleasure and the sake of economics. And while I can accept the philosophical argument that there is no ‘natural order of things’, it is perfectly obvious that we have engineered ourselves away from that which nature provides. We are able to disrespect ancient wisdom because we have modern tools.

It is the fact that these tools obscure the thinking behind them that gives us problems. The farmer who finds that an ox pulls his plow better than a mule understands the purpose of that improved tool and makes him a better farmer. But the man who finds a better videogame, a bigger screen and a softer sofa, does that make him a better man? Even if it gives him more pleasure and more money and fame?

What do we know of gluttony? We know that if you eat nothing but pies, cakes, and massive amounts of carbs and sugars, your body will fail to produce enough insulin to regulate them. And so you can take pills - enough pills so that you can still eat pies and cakes whenever you please. So who is ever called a glutton? Nobody. We haven’t solved the problem, we have created a workaround.

With our modern tools and modern re-purposing, we understand very well that we sustain economies that fail to encourage our to discipline ourselves to the very simplest demands of ancient wisdom. Eat well. Our work takes us indoors, so I have to do this thing called ‘exercise’ in which I pretend to be be a farmer, a hunter or a warrior. Because I have an economy of likes and followers to fulfill. Is this work? Not really. For me this is pleasure.

Narcotics, recreational drugs, antibiotics, contraceptives, hormone therapies, dietary supplements, anti-inflammatories… there are every manner of cleverly invented molecules that repurpose our bodies temporarily. Why? What is the definition of good health? What does a healthy human body do? What is it supposed to do? Farm? Hunt? War?

These are deep questions we no longer ask. We simply use the tools without thinking. Our purposes are re-engineered by producers of consumer goods we don’t understand or question. We no longer look for purpose, and so we no longer know how to achieve our purpose. We are only encouraged to find our passions. This is the essence of the dysfunction of modern life. Passion without purpose.

Atomic Integrity

Q. Do you honestly feel that you have a genuine mission to help make the planet a better place to live, or one to just be a passive observer on it?

A. There is something called Gall’s Law which I paraphrase. All large complex things that work are comprised of smaller, simpler things that work. Imagine yourself as an atom. If your electrons fly away, if you tend to lose your neutrons, you’re radioactive. You need to be stable. You need to keep yourself together.

As one atom, you don’t have the ability to tell what the state everything else is around you. But when you bump into another atom are you stealing their electrons?

Similarly as one person, your job is to keep yourself together. The very presumption that you could be an accurate passive observer of the planet is ridiculous. How many languages do you comprehend? How many scientific fields have you mastered? Can you even scuba dive? How could you possibly be responsible for the planet? Your university, your employer and your family combined could disappear tomorrow and have no effect on the planet. You could be front page news for a week and have no effect on the planet.

Somebody external to you has convinced you that your every move can be directed as a combination of selfless actions in which you sacrifice for the planet. That sounds to me exactly like an evangelical minister whose god is named ‘Earth’. Is that why you exist? Is that the source of meaning in your life? What about you?

I have listened to people warble with joy that during the SARS2 pandemic, people’s misery, suffering, immobilization and unemployment have done wonders for lowering air pollution. There seems to be, very clearly, a preference for nature over humanity. Nature is full of creatures that kill, viruses and bacteria are among the most deadly. If you don’t believe me, get rid of your refrigerator. The math is very simple. Take away a chunk of humanity and chalk that up to a win for the planet.

I don’t worship Planet Earth.

I don’t pretend my weight is changing its orbit. I am on a mission to improve the lives of people around me directly. It starts with making sure the machine of me is working excellently. So that’s my electrical charge bumping into yours.

LA Riots: Myths & Stereotypes

l.a. riots myths and stereotypes
(from deep in the boohabian archives - spring 1997)
boohab - organic hiphop metaphysician

boohab - 07:42am Apr 28, 1997 PST (#6 of 185)
jesus christ. never have i seen such blatant revisionism. horowitz, you are seriously tripping! but you
know what? i forgive you because you are white and you didn't grow up in south central, so the only
access you have to the whole truth is through black folks like me who, on the whole don't care what you
think. you are so wrong it doesn't matter any longer if you ever get it right.

so despite all which has been said and truthful, people close to the facts understand that perhaps the
context will never stick. certainly after the fact of john woo's political descent, and riordan's ascent, the
political truth doesn't matter any more, so it is appropriate that your piece starts and ends with myths,
stereotypes and perceptions.

but just to give you the slightest clue, perhaps you should research back to those fateful days and ask
why people outside of los angeles rioted too.

further, as a matter of fact and record, kjlh 102.3 fm headquartered on crenshaw boulevard, right next
door to the angeles funeral home (an institution as distinctive as its name), played NO MUSIC. it was all
talk and call in for days. rap music indeed.

the only journalist closest to mainstream credibility i can give any credit for having any amount of context
on the subjects would be warren olney in his radio show 'which way la' in the aftermath.

boohab - 07:49am Apr 28, 1997 PST (#7 of 185)

the more i read that article the more i am amazed at how absolutely clueless the author is. i find it hard to
conceive what prompts him to flap around in the shallows of hearsay... i can't even find words which
describe how retarded his 'analysis' is. thank god he's on the web.

cause and effect. let us assume that this principle is universal, that it holds sway over all human beings
and begin from there...

---
boohab - 09:28pm May 1, 1997 PST (#41 of 185)

nobody is giving money to inner city schools. public high school education is being defunded, by what i
suspect are reactionary reasons. in california, the longstanding compromise has been to leave high schools
separate and unequal and attempt to take up the slack at the jr. college and state university level, where at
least there are state and federal funds available. that means, of course, affirmative action. now that
commitment is being dumped at the level it really matters because of all the rediculous hype over
berkeley. anyway...

horowitz, at least on charlie rose, doesn't appear to be a raving lunatic. at least now i understand what
stick he's shaking. and considering his enormous disenchantment with the black panthers, it is
understandable why his revulsion to the logic of violent insurgency infuses his rhetoric with such alarm.
still, i find his analysis flawed, and wonder who exactly he is talking to as regards the orientation of
african americans to the events of 5 years ago.

for example, as i talk about in the 'racial extermination' thread, there's no mention of the black church in
southern california, nor that of maldef, and left asian and black organizations in their response to the hype
about the uprising. what was clearly an outburst of rage has now been transformed into some grand
conspiracy in horowitz' description. i don't buy it.

i'm not entirely sure what anyone is supposed to learn about the events of 5 years ago. southern california
and the nation has failed to implement any serious policy related to the basic problem which was and
remains police abuse. there is no national watchdog and despite some efforts to implement community
policing, the public is not well prepared to act intelligently when such situations repeat, witness st.
petersberg.

if indeed the country is disintegrating into anti-government hysteria, there is no greater threat to civility
than distrust of police. anyone who recalls (or recalls reading about) events involving clashes of federal,
state and local authority regarding local police actions, should know what kind of mess this can lead to.
yet it is clear, in the wake of willie williams' dismissal that public confidence in the los angeles police
department is far from restored.

so what now?
---
boohab - 08:33pm May 3, 1997 PST (#44 of 185)

I was staring at that book just the other night in charlotte. well, that one and a dozen others. what i was
looking for specifically was something by john mcphee, but what section? over in the hype section was
cochran's book, radical son, the race card, fuhrman's book, and gates' book '13 ways to look at a black
man'. i read gates' dust cover and put it back. completely disgusted with everything surrounding oj, i can't
imagine what's left to say worth hearing besides chris rock's joke about if it were jerry seinfeld and the
only person who found the bloody glove just happened to be in the nation of islam... i ended up buying a
copy of the new yorker (with gates on black london - since i'll be over there this month) and gorbachev's
memoirs. i had picked up reginald lewis' 'why should white guys have all the fun' because it was
autographed by his widow and jett is in the news, but i decided to put it back.

at any rate, it would be interesting to hear angela davis dissected. as well it would be interesting to see
david horowitz deconstructed. now that i'm reviewing some history of actual marxism, it would be
interesting to see where these fellow travellers get off. as far as i've seen, all they do in black
communities is show up for king day parades and say "we're all the same". hmmm. let's try a thread shall
we?

---

boohab - 09:06am May 5, 1997 PST (#53 of 185)

whoa, slow down there pardner. my rage is my rage. i own it and i am responsible for it, it is not some
negotiable social anger to be farmed and framed.

what gives bell hooks, of all people, a special credibility is her unique ability to make clear the
distinctions. as soon as you got up to 'the killing rage of black women and men', bell steps in and lays
bare the differences in her critiques of 'she's gotta have it', for example. in that movie, men didn't see the
rape.

i'm going to crosspost some of my observations on black rage specifically, and i think that will illuminate
a bit more about the l.a. thing and the type of analysis bell hooks performs. overall, it is my belief that
'black rage' has become a commodity which too often substitutes for political action. that has a great deal
to do with the way non-blacks dismiss it (in the case of dh) and co-opt it (in the case of sa).

boohab - 09:51am May 5, 1997 PST (#54 of 185)

(boohab) Sat, 27 Jul 1996 13:49:31

black rage is not a theory.

i'm not sure that it makes so much sense to explain it in any other terms than malcolm x's. 'whatever you
will do to me, just know that i will do the same to you'. considering what happens to black americans
ever day *not it theory* but in reality, it's a mutha to face. most white folks who have looked closely at
the situations many blacks find themselves often recoiled in shock. to a person, in my experience, it
comes out like 'man if they did shit like that to me...'. in the end, there is a profound respect for the many
black strategies used to displace or redirect that rage.

coming from that perspective, i respect that many folks are likely to respect the words and deeds of mlk.
but that is rarely the case. there is often a sense of resignation americans feel in confronting the facts that
justice is so often an impossibility - that oj will be virtually barbecued forever, yet the korean shopkeeper
videotaped shooting a black teenaged girl in cold blood received a suspended sentence and is forgotten by
the nation. white folks and blacks alike come to agree that black rage, given american society, is
inevitable. that is why white people live in white neighborhoods, stay away from downtown at night,
understand the fear of bernard goetz, get the message of willie horton and respond in all sorts of ways in
every aspect of american society in a predictable fashion to the images of danger associated with black
rage.

black rage becomes not only a self-fullfiling prophesy but a necessary component of american politics.
white folks accept their guilt and fear, as they realize their collective historical incompetence as the
political majority in addressing the injustices faced by blacks. they bow out. they accept the destruction
of cities and the perpetuation of tragedy. black folks do the same thing in their relationships to each other.
we abandon our brothers at the first sign of trouble despite what we know, better than anyone, about the
content of their individual characters, and we use our own successes and absence of (external) rage, as a
justification of our own evasions of responsibility. thus the enraged black man or woman has become a
staple symbol in everyone's rhetoric. but few of us are serious or busy addressing the fundamental
injustice.

---

boohab - 09:52am May 5, 1997 PST (#55 of 185)

rage is not hate.

rage is visceral reaction to a severe victimization when all else seems hopeless. rage is the explosive last
lashing out of a man facing death with his back to the wall. it is not sustained or calculated like hate. one
speaks of acts of rage, not strategies of rage or ideologies of rage. you rage to get shit out of your system
and scare folks into not pushing you any more. it's a natural thang.

what's unnatural is that there is black rage. that a society is so predisposed to pushing black folks to the
limit that their rage is almost predictable.

although i never do, well - i haven't in memory - i know very well what this rage looks like and how to
use it. the expression of black rage as a dramatic device is (over)used by black and white artists alike. it's
part of the american lexicon. but that is very distinct from the real thing, as different as individual rap
artists are in rhyme character in a recording studio are from real killers behind bars. the expression is
romanticized in typical american fashion (i can think of no better example than the western movie, and in
particular the role of the writer in clint eastwood's 'unforgiven').

also, black folks front. that's not rage, that's frontin'. and i know one of you stupid punk ass white boys is
going to want me to please explain frontin'. don't even try it. you know what i'm sayin? just be glad i
didn't straight wax your sorry ass from the jump. cause you wouldn't be standing there with that stupid
look on your face gettin all huffy. you'd be pickin your ass up off the floor. oh oh oh now you know
what i'm saying. damn skippy. if your shit was correct i wouldn't have to go there. lame ass mu'fukas.

(i need to invent a new smiley to cap off that last paragraph. it is the following expression: i am tilting my
head to the side, rolling my eyes up and smacking my teeth and straight walking away - kind of like what
dennis johnson did to chris collingsworth last night)

boohab - 09:56am May 5, 1997 PST (#56 of 185)

articulation of rage is a valuable skill.

so often black folks feel it, but don't know exactly where it is coming from or what to do about it. they
equate that existential anger, confusion and the resulting frustration as an essential characteristic of being
black. but it is not. while it is certainly part of the black experience, the permanancy of which white
supremacy replicates generation after generation, it is not the defining core of who we are.

every generation (and ethnicity) of african americans finds different ways to articulate and diffuse or
redirect this rage.

boohab - 10:02am May 5, 1997 PST (#57 of 185)

(boohab) Sat, 03 Aug 1996

the articulation of black rage or any other black sentiment or thought serves as a critical discourse on
american society.

however, as many exemplify in their admittedly undernourished comprehension of articulate black voices,
most of america does not pay attention. there are certainly *reasons* behind white fear, defensiveness
and reactions to perceived threats posed by blacks. but they are not good reasons, and they must be
challenged. 'consistent patterns of thought' within black communities are either well articulated or they
are not. those which are well articulated have names as do those who represent them. if there are issues
to be discussed and contention about the validity of claims, then there are real ways to deal with them
which are not grounded in fear, defensiveness and reactionary rhetoric. to direct such discussions are the
reasons black thinkers of all types write histories, teach classes, create novels, compose music, sculpt,
rhyme, dance, preach, witness and otherwise work to expose their thoughts.

yet despite this fact, americans continue to beleive in or be unduly influenced by the racist hype, often
beleiving themselves to be as well-informed as anyone. because of this there is practically an industry
dedicated to knocking ignorant people upside the head. i take up the cudgel of the race man from time to
time, but this time i'll defer to farai: http://www.popandpolitics.com

certainly ms. chideya is not the first, nor will she be the last to bring clarity to issues of racial prejudice,
oppression and injustice. there are today and have been so many who have directly transformed rage into
productive lessons without pandering themselves as victims. they don't expect nor ask for pity; these are
teachers. and their lessons stand in defiance of fear. too often we extract soundbites out of these lessons
believing there are golden platitudes that stand for all time in any varitey of circumstances. but how many
times have americans consoled themselves with the pathetic plea of a brain damaged man beaten into
submission by brutal police officers? (if there was ever any question of whether or not rodney g. king
was willing to surrender, consider those words). there is no excuse for americans to pretend to
understand the lessons of the past without any consistent discipline and evaluation. racism invariably
leads to injustice.

like disease, racism needs to be fought with thoroughness and vigor every generation. yet unlike disease,
if you harbor racist ideas wittingly or not, it *is* your fault and your responsibility whether or not we live
in a democracy, everyone's attitude should bear scrutiny on the issues.

---

boohab - 10:07am May 5, 1997 PST (#58 of 185)

black rage is a self-perpetuating phenomenon.

there is a vested interest in american politics to use black rage. white political majorities are particularly
attuned to black rage, whether that is constructive or raw rage. in short, black rage is a legitimated form
of political protest. a lot of blacks recognize this and make use of it. if i sit here in this forum and
complain that black folks get harrassed unnecesarily by the same police that should be protecting them,
that does not carry the same weight in american society as the artist ice cube writing the rap 'fuck the
police' and having 17 year olds pump the beat in the car next to you with an evil stare on their face.

when black representation on the city council of los angeles is resisted for decades, and there is no forum
given for the tyrrany of the darryl gates administration, that doesn't get the same attention as video of
blacks burning police cars. often enough, there are no acceptable political compromises offered by a
polity which ignores the facts of black life. consider how it is that 'law and order' has become a 'white
man's burden' in our society.

such political intransigence is often enough reasonable provocation for black folks to take rage to the
streets. the spirit of compromise - cant we all just get along - is not proactive. it comes after the violent
fact. clinton has demonstrated this in his dismissal of sista souljah, for example.

boohab - 10:09am May 5, 1997 PST (#59 of 185)

(end of blasts from the past)
---

boohab - 05:54am May 6, 1997 PST (#70 of 185)

my rage is what i say it is. but that doesn't stop the patronizing bullshit. but i don't need to go there. like i
said before, you can be so wrong for so long as to be irrelevent.

america can survive the burning of its cities and not change its mind. that is the one lesson i have learned
above all. myths and stereotypes are what count.

the inevitable destination of dh and iv's condescention can be found here, as they demonstrate the snide,
callous, intransigent politics which creates police brutality in the first place and defends the misapplication
of justice as applied to black folks in particular. it is clear, that after an exhaustive and patient explanation
of the human element of rage in the context of los angeles 1992, both were content to reduce complexity
to the snappy reiterations of the most ignorant and prejudiced comments about the tragedy.

no doubt, they will recount to me 'the facts'.

"The tones of lies are vulgar facts but they are not noble sounds. But there is another truth and that
truth passes through time in the very same way that an irresistible force passes through an immovable
object. That's what I said: this truth is so irresistible that it passes through immovable objects. It is the
truth of a desire for a refined and impassioned portrait of the presence and the power and the
possibilities of the human spirit."

-- Stanley Crouch

---

boohab - 10:27am May 6, 1997 PST (#75 of 185)

you are being silly ilya. maxine waters *is* a duly elected leader of south central los angeles. is this her
call, or does it matter to you what she thinks?

take a look at these photos, (the essay is a bit obscure but it's what i was thinking at the time). who was
out for revenge?
---

boohab - 10:52am May 6, 1997 PST (#76 of 185)

I don't think it's beneficial to think about the accuracy of the aim of the looting, torching, shooting ragers.
those who riot best, riot. those who lobby best, lobby.

what is important is to recognize the disposition of political forces in the aftermath. to consign this matter
to the police as merely a crime wave is to foreclose the possibility of a transformative politics of the
ragers. yet this was the status quo of the racist stereotypes against south central and east los angeles, and
this is precisely what horowitz has done. such is the justification for the lapd being one of the most
advanced paramilitary police forces in the world. is there any reason to believe horowitz' dismissive
majoritarian position might be moderated by intelligent or (heaven forbid) compassionate consideration?
well, not if you are preoccupied with maoist history and the love affairs of opera singers.

so instead of engaging (which would probably have been very easy, considering salon's recent article on
maxine) on a level of political negotiation, we witness crude and egregious examples as par for the course.

this does not bode well for the future expansion of democratic politics in the united states. there are
generations and geographies for which adequate political representation has never been achieved. where
the practice of voting and speaking out is the experience of defeat after defeat. where human rights issues
become 'special interest' issues. where people don't expect suspects to be brought to trial - merely shot in
the street. where people are suspects for just being alive.

my experience tells me that the fire next time will be put out by next wednesday. american society and
politics absolutely crushes such political dissent even before it gets the opportunity to become political.
and as long as americans can distance themselves, with haughty indifference from the truths of these
matters, hiding behind the thin blue line of police force rather than engaging in constructive political
engagement, then as malcolm x said "as long as those ingredients, explosive ingredients exist, you are
going to have the potential for explosion on your hands".
---
boohab - 08:35pm May 6, 1997 PST (#84 of 185)

speaking of salvadorans, i forgot to mention that there was an improper degree of cooperation between
the lapd and the ins in the aftermath. having arrested a large number of latinos and holding them under
emergency rules, ins records were searched and individual suspects turned over to that agency for
deportation.

korean liquor stores were a particular target primarily because of the murder of latasha harlins. her killer,
the owner was caught on tape shooting harlins point blank for allegedly stealing a quart of orange juice.
she was given a suspended sentence and placed on probation. as i recall, no homes burned except one
apartment building adjacent to a strip mall. lots of pawn shops were burned.

I wrote "How will theory transform the monsters created in our nightmares by our abusive white
fathers?". i was thinking of several things, primarily the dualism gerald early calls the 'lure and loathing' of
american society. white cops protect white folks in white neighborhoods like beverly hills and like
hawthorne, meaning they keep you out, by any means necessary, but you are supposed to respect the
law - you hate the powerful society that you wish to be a part of because it is so eager to use violence
against you. so when you are successful, do you replicate that abuse? does the son kill the father and set
himself up to be killed, or does the son live forever in his father's shadow?
---

boohab - 07:23am May 9, 1997 PST (#125 of 185)

120 posts until slavery and the founding fathers. actually i thought nazis would be first. before we start
talking about the caucasian wars, the long march and the battle of hastings why don't we look a bit closer
at our own politics today?

the mike davis analysis is a very good piece. it clarifies for me some things that i knew but never looked
at very closely. (i studiously avoided all of the books coming out on the subject back then - the level of
ignorance was so astounding that i couldn't stomach it.) davis' ability to talk with gangbangers and his
understanding about their longstanding war with the lapd is unrivaled. although i didn't read leon bing's
bio on kody scott, i did read his own book, which i take to be more accurate.

I have some 30 or so photographs of the destruction which i'll scan in and add as a special addendum to
boohab's factotum.

Donna Dear - 07:47am May 9, 1997 PST (#126 of 185)
"A modest woman; with much to be modest about"

Boo....ya got a link to the Davis stuff?

boohab - 08:03am May 9, 1997 PST (#127 of 185)

http://www.exuberance.com/rut/miked/burning.html

david horowitz - 08:44am May 9, 1997 PST (#128 of 185)
Author, Radical Son

Sherman: Yes, the movie.

boohab: How come lefties like Davis always line up on the side of the criminals?

boohab - 09:19am May 9, 1997 PST (#129 of 185)

that depends on your definition of 'senseless death'.

if one is capable of compassion for the murdered, then one can measure ones tolerance for all murders
on the same scale. so justice denied to crips and bloods hurts just as much as justice denied anyone else.
davis lays bare the symbiotic relationships between local politicians, fear of crime, lapd funding and gang
warefare. what emerges is a picture of gang violence which is allowed to fester because it serves police
interests in obtaining paramilitary equipment, political interests in demonizing 'south central' as one big
sinkhole (which actually is one of america's largest and most ethnically diverse urban areas), and gang
interests in bloody revenge. despite the large number of gangs and gang members in los angeles, only a
small minority are involved in drug dealing and the murderous crime associated with that - but that
understanding is impossible to come by through conventional means. so there is essentially an ongoing
war between the lapd and gangs and it's the gangbangers who get shot on the street, not the cops.

the net result is that criminal suspects are systematically denied due process because of the agressive
tactics of the lapd. the courts try to compensate for the cops zealousness, then the cops try to
compensate for the courts.

on the other hand, davis illustrates clearly how operation hammer and gang sweeps affected everyone in
that geographic area. you recruit cops from all around the country, send them to the academy and then to
work an internship at the county lockup, then out into south central with orders to sweep, and you spend
millions of tax dollars with overtime for mass arrests with 2% criminal booking rates. nevertheless you
add thousands of names to a computerized arrest record system, available online to every patrol car -
which effects police thinking. they don't know, or care to know, the difference between criminals and
ordinary teenagers. to them, all youth of color in south central los angeles are potential gangbangers, thus
potential enemies.

also remember that the great myth of los angeles policing is that the area covered by the lapd is far too
great for community policing. the reason los angeles has helicopter patrols is an outgrowth of that old
idea. los angeles does not have community precincts - they have these large bunker buildings which spit
out squad cars. all the busses in the rtd have numbers painted on their tops, as do squad cars, and certain
public buildings so that la can be monitored from the air. cops don't get out of their cars unless they
*must*. they don't fight crime on the ground, they cruise around 'hostile territory'.

when pcp was (for a short time) the new hot drug on the streets, the lapd testified about its ability to give
superhuman strength to suspects. that's when they started with their more agressive baton techniques and
chokeholds. it was assumed that anyone resisting arrest was a potential pcp addict, and a great deal of
force was used. that whole technique we saw used on rodney king came from that period. the chokehold
got the lapd in more trouble than they could handle. so they got stun guns, then they got 9mm pistols,
shotguns and they even got tanks. well, they always had shotguns.

anyway, the lapd has been very successful in publicizing certain gang activity, bringing up the racial
spectre and in cooperation with local polticians, securing for themselves more and more paramilitary role.
the lapd's anti-terrorist and intelligence divisions are probably the most advanced in the world, and that's
no exaggeration.

the great irony is that citizens in los angeles, especially in south central, do not feel protected or served by
the police. everyone (these days) buys weapons for self-protection.
---
boohab - 03:13pm May 9, 1997 PST (#140 of 185)

So defending police officers somehow means that you are protecting
"the owning class"? Whatever that means. So many people seem to wish
to excuse criminal behavior due to the us vs. the cops mentality.
Does it suprise you that the cops will start to have the same
attitude? Americans today view our police as corrupt and violent
when the truth is that the vast majority are neither. You want to
see violent cops go to Germany. See what the Polizei constitute as
police brutality.

the vast majority of police departments in america don't have a credibility problem, and the vast majority
of police chiefs in california said darryl gates should have stepped down a long time before he did.

the vast majority of police officers in the foothill division which was that of koon, powell, wind and
brisneo also failed to cooperate with the fbi investigation of systemwide corruption. nor was there any
legal recourse for non-cooperation.

the vast majority of african-americans are unconcerned with police abuse and bruality in germany
because they know what it is like firsthand.

you seem to forget that african-americans specifically haved lived through an era when police exclusively
protected white people. so as much mouthing off as people do about 'defending criminal behaviour', this
country still writes off huge sections of its population as criminals, and not long ago that included any
black folks who asserted themselves in any dispute with whites. someday there will come a point in
american society when blacks, clearly and still america's most despised (except perhaps for gay blacks),
will be able to assert themselves in any situation without having to explain and carry their constitutional
and civil rights on their sleeves. but while we still do and are smarting from abuses, you'll hear a lot
whose rights are being stepped on, and that includes criminal suspects - because that's who we are.

---

johnny cochran is wealthy. why? because he has been successful in winning civil judgements against the
los angeles police department. the taxpayers as a political class, changed the law in order to limit the
liability of the lapd on several occasions.

the first example was after the successful prosecution of wrongful death and criminal negligence in the
case of (whatshisname) who was hung in the signal hill jail by police -(they claimed it was a suicide, and
were busted by a coroner's inquest). it limited the liability of police officers and jailers in civil and criminal
matters as regards the safety of suspects in custody. the second came on the heels of the successful jury
award of about 6 million dollars to activist michael zinzun, who lost an eye during his arrest and lockup. it
put a cieling on the amount juries could award.

it is perhaps not widely known that the legal defense fund for officer stacey koon amounted to about 13
million dollars. i beleive rodney king's award was about 4 million. these figures may be wrong, i am surer
about koon's defense fund, and i am certain he got more than rodney king.

so these are concrete examples of defenses of the police, specifically when they are at their worst. why?
because people like johnny cochran would bankrupt the city..

--

boohab - 09:17am May 10, 1997 PST (#146 of 185)

and even the abolition of slavery did not reject the presumed inferiority of africans... anyway.

neither the aclu or any other 'liberal' watchdog group has the political knowhow to work gang
intervention. the fact of the matter is that the few people IN the system which are successful at
reconstructing gang members get no respect or funds from either liberals or conservatives.

I think it is reasonable that juveniles of high school age convicted in the 'big four' violent crimes should be
tried as adults, but i don't think it is reasonable that special abridgements of due process are called for in
any case. just keep the police in their place.

but the fact is that before we can deal with violent crime, we have to undo the huge mistakes made in the
war on drugs and mandatory sentencing. i challenge anyone to convince me that prisons are not tough
enough, but they are wasted on the wrong people. the burden of prison overpopulation lies almost
exclusively with conservative neo puritanical prohibitions. violent criminals get out because crackheads go
in.

and yes it is a shame that the united states jails more people per capita than any other nation. the aclu is
right to fight against that. then again, the political majority seems to desire a police state.
--

 

Marxism vs American Socialism

The American Left has decided with the kind of casual rationality one expects of a show like 'The Bachelor' that it wants socialism. Various stripes of Stupid-Americans, hangdog skeptics of 'capitalism', aging Marxist academics and various political activists are all occupying various floes of ice floating leftward on a river of sentiment for what it considers to be socialism. I was alerted to this in a rather shocking way the other day as Rep. Crenshaw had a difficult time explaining to Joe Rogan the difference between socialism and public service. Joe's definition was simple - if the government pays for it, then it is socialist. I was struck by the utter simplicity of Joe's position and the Texas Republican's stuttering inability to argue him away from it.  

I've been knocking holes in the Left for years and in particular discovering from which pockets they pull their enormous moral confidence. The simple answer is that they believe that most human kindness is a result of humanism itself and that humanism is the basis of civilization. That humanism stands in opposition to capitalism, so they believe, and that business is ultimately mercantilist, in other words a zero-sum proposition. The state of this and other similar ideas has come to rest in what we have identified as Neo-Liberalism best exemplified during the Obama years. Let big business do what it must, generate evil profits, which our benevolent humanist government and taxation can readily convert into humanist foundations of a welfare state. It is a moral mission, a bit short of a crusade, but energized nonetheless.

I find fault with this left populism in that it's stupid and abandons what anyone who is not vapidly pro-business ought to be doing in good government, which in particular entails a labor agenda and an anti-trust agenda. But such things are not discussed rationally in American politics. Instead the populist Neo-Liberal agenda has been swamped by the Progressive agenda which is focused almost entirely on identity and making the personal political.  

What is Marxism? From my POV it is three things, none of which America needs.

1. Marxism requires a materialist view of the human being. It reduces a human being to a resource, an economic unit whose material needs, once satisfied, obviate the necessity for further concern. 
2. Marxism requires central economic planning, wage & price controls and the nationalization of the majority of and the eventual the totality of all means of economic production.
3. Marxism requires the conceptualization of 'natural' antagonism and struggle between large classes of people. 

That's all I have to say right now.

The Trump Diversion

I don't sufficiently hate Trump. 

That is because I don't believe nearly as much as opponents of Trump that he is running the country. It was 12 years ago that I concluded that populist politics ran the political establishment of the US and therefore deserved my scorn and abandonment. But perhaps it's fair to say that until Jonathan Haidt and the IDW correctly put all of the Culture Wars into fine relief that I may have been playing politics by other names. My hopes (and therefore my writing efforts) are for society to work, but I am convinced that the entire problem with politics and social media are that society has been dumbed down and escalated into conflict through very narrow channels. We have been turned from chimps to T-Rexs and have lost the ability to play piano. We are no longer dextrous. 

My association thus with the IDW and with Stoicism have resulted in me appearing not to give a rats about society. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am a staunch civil libertarian. It is completely consistent. But I think (as one example) the passage of the legalization of gay marriage has given its supporters the false confidence that political activism is the engine of positive social change. It is not. Politics is about government policy, not about social engineering. And yet that is what we've decided as a nation that politics is supposed to be, and for those of good intent on the Left it is the greatest failing of our age, because Trump doesn't give a shit. No, he doesn't. He is not a role model for the kind of decency we Americans want. He is a profound asshole, and a thin skinned bastard. He is caustic and inept. Transparently so. 

I have never thought that Trump's manipulations of those agencies he rules could be so clever and subtle that they couldn't be undone by a reasonable successor. So I have never panicked. And yet the merciless mercenaries that the Democrats have become has left wide open a stable rational response to Trump's haphazard governance, some of which is actually rational, if not diplomatic. At this moment, I can see two things he has done right. He has played hardball with Chinese trade and he has kept the immigration debate alive. Trump's nationalism has given nationalism a ridiculously purple paint job. But nationalism is what America needs. The leader of a national government should make that government work, but that is not the objective of the Progressive Left, which is to make Americans love Americans through political activism. To them, the personal is political. That is wrong. 

If you listen to Eric Weinstein's podcast 'The Portal' and if you listen to Sam Harris as I do, then you will quickly realize that there are very smart Americans who can see that there is a lot left to be desired in America. In the IDW, which both men belong, we are engaged in combatting a crisis of rationality. It is this crisis of rationality and its undermining of confidence in Western civilization that is our greatest problem. It is a problem that is not well defined or described in either the mainstream media, in academic publication, or in political messaging. Some people might call it income inequality. They are vaguely right. Some people might call it the patriarchy. They are vaguely right. Some people might call it godless degeneracy. They are vaguely right. As they politic in the diffuse miasma of social media only those select phrases come through. The simple common denominator is that America is being led poorly. 

Since I am a civil libertarian and champion of a better society, I often say it thusly. The ruling class has failed to fulfill its obligation to society. And to be more concrete about it I find it apt to point out that Donald Trump produced a reality TV show. I pointed this out before.

There was a great moment I saw from the Hoover Institution's You Tube channel when the host asked a reporter who has spent a lot of time with Trump and his team "I don't understand. How did millions of blue collar and poor working class people vote for this billionaire?" The first thing the reporter replied is "Have you watched 'The Apprentice'?" The host says, no I don't watch reality TV. To which the reporter replied, with a polite 'Duh'.

Trump is the billionaire that blue collar workers with no filter want to be. They communicate on the same level, and he has proven it. Everybody who looks down a these working class people and their reality shows is at a complete loss. But the answers are as plain as day. So really, how long are these clueless people going to keep the same media diet, if they truly want to understand the media language and political ambitions of that working class that stood up and elected this president?

So the problem I have with my Facebook friends is that they only know me as this ex-conservative who is not contributing enough to the dogfight whose job it is to shovel enough his own shit on Trump's head to bury him. But I know that's just partisan ammunition for political gain. That is because the Democrats who have failed miserably to produce grownup candidates, resurrect the Clinton gods or beat Bernie Sanders fair and square have been reduced to cataloging 'atrocities' of the President. What they haven't done is Labor. What they haven't done is Anti-Trust. What they have done is outsourced their brains to a mythical Scandinavia. Since I have to say this, because I'm often explaining to binary thinkers, the Republicans have done fuck all for America. They deflated the Tea Party who had every common cause with Occupy Wall Street and have defaulted spectacularly leading to the support of corporate welfare. There is no longer a such thing as a fiscal conservative in America, at least not one in a responsible position of power. They have completely crawled up the ass of big money, especially where political fundraising is concerned, and we are stuck with pretty much everyone who understands money and fiscal responsibility at the economic equivalent of a dog track run by gangsters and underwritten by the Fed. I pay over 17% on my best credit cards. Chase gets their money for 0.1% by the billion and has never paid more than 1% since 2008.

I know that nuclear power generation of electricity will not prevent global warming. But I also know it's at least 50 times better than wind, solar and all other renewables. Yet it is an article of faith that nuclear power is not politically acceptable in America. It's scientifically green but it's not Green. This is thus my situation. I have no patience with that which doesn't present honestly. I cannot afford to waste my breath contributing to a political dogfight that is not building ammunition to fight anyone but the opposition party and its constituents. So I'm out here stuck with the nuclear power engineers without a job. I'm stuck out here with the data engineers who traffic in flight schedules and aircraft maintenance, unlike Facebook who has all of the billions trafficking in the stolen personal data of consumers. I refuse to jump up and down and say with arrogant moral certitude that it's Trump's fault. It's the fault of American populist politics and its attendant media totems who refuse to surface the problems Americans are positioned, but not funded to solve. If one party cannot take sole credit at the expense of the other party, it will not be raised as a matter of concern to the Federal government. 

How foolish do we have to be to expect that a President elected from this environment can and will solve every other kind of problem Americans need solved? Perhaps we are being saved by the pandemic. Perhaps we will realize that there are more things between heaven and earth than are dreamt in our political philosophy.  

Yet I don't believe in political solutions to people's problems. When I explain this, people don't get it or don't believe me. Perhaps I should say that in the way that people who are atheist might understand. I have no faith in the god of Democrats. I have no faith in the god of Republicans. I can get to whatever people need without attending either church. Trump is, by all rights, the devil incarnate to those who believe in the god of Democrats. Indeed he may even be the devil incarnate to those who believe in the god of democracy itself. I have my doubts about democracy, and I certainly don't worship it. I didn't major in political science but computer science. I'm on the side of the engineers, and I don't believe in social engineering. In fact, I despise it.

So let me close with a couple other complaints around the matters of social engineering. As all Californians know, we are done with the drought. It has been around for a decade or more since El Nino drenched us and sent mudslides down our fancy slopes. And in those many years there have been no new reservoirs built. California political leaders have socially engineered a solution by jawboning us to conserve water. Don't care for your lawn, they said. Don't have a real shower, they said. Today, during the SARS-nCOV-2 aka COVID-19 pandemic, there was no strategic investment by either party in government policy involving our supply chain for medical equipment or funding for handling epidemics by pathogens that attack time and time again. No strategic investment, therefore no strategic reserve and obviously no strategy. Now that there is a crisis, the government is telling us to trust them and once again jawboning 'solutions'. They are socially engineering at the very limit of their capacity. And the people who know better, Americans who are actual experts are essentially left out in the cold. There are massive failures that are obvious to people who give it a day's thought can see. With everything that was debated and legislated about healthcare in the past 30 years, we simply find that we don't have enough hospital beds per capita. 

I don't sufficiently hate Trump. I don't see how doing so will get water or hospital beds to the people who need them. 

Obligatory Seriousness on the Chinese Disease

People are upset that the President of the United States has called COVID-19 'Chinese'. By the way, the novel coronavirus discovered in Wuhan is also known as SARS-CoV-2. Technically speaking, I understand that to be the name of the virus and COVID-19 the name of the illness. But does it matter what you call it when it is rather obvious we are talking about the same thing? People who are outraged at this use of the term find it racist and just another purposeful attempt of Trump to be xenophobic. I haven't looked, but I haven't heard anyone of that contingent suggest that the 1918 Spanish Flu was racist. My great grandparents died in that. I never thought to blame Spain for orphaning my grandfather and great uncles. The historical fact is that it was so named because Spain's government did not censor its existence. So while it was plentiful on the frontlines in WW1 combatants from France, Germany and England, those governments hushed up about it. 

Syphilis, an age-old scourge caused by the Treponema pallidum bacteria, is one of those ailments no group wanted to claim and all groups wanted to blame on some other. After an invasion by the French in the late 1400s, Neapolitans labeled it “the French disease.” The French, on the other hand, called it “the disease of Naples.” The Russians called it “the Polish disease,” while the Polish and Persians called it “the Turkish disease.” The Turks called it “the Christian disease,” the Tahitians called it “the British disease,” the Indians called it “the Portuguese disease,” the Japanese called it “the Chinese pox,” and so on and so on.

Osterholm, Michael T.. Deadliest Enemy (p. 74). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

Considering how many Americans think this thing is similar to the flu, what you call it has nothing to do with how you treat it. Some people actually believe that you can kill the virus by pointing a hair dryer up your nose. I swear to god, and I'm not linking there. So does it matter what you call it? No it matters how you deal with it, medically. Jumping on this particularly simple-minded partisan political bandwagon is to be expected. I'm glad my mind is not infected by such worthless jabber. You have read the disinfectant. Go in peace. 

Who Wants to Kill Some Camels?

Our collective ability, internationally, to deal with pandemics is negligible. All of this social engineering is not a solution, it's like squeezing Japanese commuters onto the subway and giving them discount tokens instead of building another subway line.

 

To deal with the inevitability of epidemics and pandemics of the more lethal pathogens that we already know exist will require way more strategic thought and invention. For what it's worth, if you'd like to spin it with your global warming fascinations, just think about what becomes tropical which is now merely temperate. That means mosquitoes - which means Dengue, Malaria, Zika, Chikengunya and yes, Ebola, all of which are mutating all of the time.

 

Everyone who has noticed that the administration has cut the budget of the NSC Office of National Health Security and Bioterrorism needs to understand that its budget was under $400 million in 2018, 1/3rd of which was lefteover from Ebola funding. That office would have made no material difference if Congress was not considering spending tens of billions for the kinds of strategic reserves and extensive wargaming required for dealing with pathogens *that we already know exist*.

 

Take MERS for example. We already know that it will inevitably spread from Saudi Arabia to the rest of the world. We also already know that it lives in the camel populations of the Arabian peninsula and East Africa. So what would it take for the Congress to compensate the Middle East for the destruction of its camel population in order to eradicate the MERS we already know? Who has been talking about that, my pedigree chums?

 

What does this mean for the future of MERS? Well, I fear that MERS is only beginning to show its ugly head. There are more than 1.2 million dromedary camels in the Arabian Peninsula, and 78 percent of them are found in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Bactrian camels, the two-humped variety, reside primarily in China and Mongolia. Africa has an estimated 24 million camels, most of which are in the countries in the Horn of Africa, including Somalia (7 million), Sudan (4.9 million), and Kenya (3.2 million).

Osterholm, Michael T.. Deadliest Enemy (p. 170). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

 

Camels are, in the Middle East, tantamount to what cows are in India. Their meat and their milk are consumed. Camels are bred for beauty contests and thoroughbred racing. You want to talk about science vs culture? Are you prepared to kill the sacred camel? Probably not. So please stop pretending you want anything more than your $1000 paycheck from the government, OK? 

 

The Death of Punk

Like I said, there are no generations. But there are memetic tribes, some of whom do battle. So it occurred to me, as many things often do, that the entire problem between guys like me and guys like SJWs is not generational so much as it is experiential. And of course I'm smarter and wiser, but let's not belabor that point. Let me put the blunt point on it. The problem with today's cutups and rebels are that they are not Punks. 

You see I can recall very well what was fascinating about the 1980s. In addition to the fact that we lost our fascination with Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Dianna Ross we were beginning to be fascinated by their opposites. This is as any antithesis should be. The result musically was the eventual synthesis as discovered by ATCQ and Soul II Soul, some of the greatest spanning of the period of the 90s to come. But what was the antithesis of the Motown R&B thesis? It was Sid & Nancy. It was Malcolm McLaren. It was Joey Ramone and Billy Idol. It was The Clash. It had something to do with abandoning romance. It had something to do with accepting exile. It had something to do with having absolutely no expectations of society and instead reveling in the satisfaction of the entire punk aesthetic. It was liberation from all convention. It was bad. Not bad meaning good, but bad meaning bad. Punk didn't care about the planet. Hell, punk didn't care about City Hall or even the college Administration Building. And there you have the difference between Punk rebellion and the cringe inducing politically correct temper tantrums we are experiencing today.

Some contingent out there wants Uncle Bernie and Cousin Yang to give us something that assures us that the world is going to be a better place. They are willing to do damage for the domination of their own neo-puritanical worldview. Banish coal. Banish meat. Banish hate speech. Banish patriarchy. Banish. Banish. Bash. It's all BS. They are the new Hollow Men, who accept their prefab imagination as the perfection of innocence in a world far too cruel. And yet what can they create that would stand the test of time like Punk? How can they even stand on their own two feet without arm-twisting some socialistic backsheesh from the polis? They are ready to sacrifice all mankind on a Malthusian alter to Gaia. All they need is their Leviathan. They clearly won't simply accept the Administration Building or City Hall. They want the totality. They want the tide to lift all the lightweight and anchorless above the height of all human skyscrapers. They seem completely incapable of self-improvement. 

That kind of attitude of self-denigration might be OK if they were Punks. Punks accepted the dark side of humanity. They lived below it and they were self-contained in their rage. They took their social isolation as a badge of honor and were ready to fight. Not for a cause, but for themselves. There was no ideal. Punks didn't even need to agree with each other. They were individuals to the extreme, even though within their aesthetic you could pick out a Punk from a mile away. They weren't trying to bring about the Apocalypse. They weren't trying to change your mind. They simply dared you to discover and explore the Punk in you. That was something I could respect. In fact, that was something I could mosh to. 

It would be a nicer world if today's contingent of unfunky ubervictims could make peace with their inner demons. But I respect enough of the true spirit of the Punk not to expect too much of the world. I just flip them off and go my own way. Speaking of which, would you agree that we have a Punk for President?

 

American Complexity

American life today is not harder, it’s more complex.

American life in the 50s and 60s was hard but simple.

So there were a few simple formulas for success and it all boiled down to hard work. You want a house, you need to put 10% down and make 3x your monthly mortgage payment. There were no credit scores, there were no fancy loans. You went and sat down face to face with a loan officer and you wore a suit and your best manners, period.

Cars had stickshifts, spark plugs and carburetors. There was a map in the glove compartment. You didn’t have power steering, power brakes, power windows, power seats or much power in the engine. That is unless you drove a Cadillac or a Lincoln. You could tune your own car. It was simple. Today’s cars are too complex, but they have power everything, and they cost 10x as much, and if your window breaks it will cost $400 to get it fixed. Or even your side view mirror, because now they have radars in them. You didn’t have cameras to help you park, you had curb feelers. Simple, but you had to learn how to park the hard way.

American life seems unfair because everything is so complex that hard work on simple things doesn’t make the difference. That’s because we’ve made everything easy and that requires complexity.

So in the 50s and 60s if you worked hard then you could learn how hard work rewarded you on any number of the simple things that our lives were based on. Today you can only specialize doing work on incredibly complicated things and you have to trade money instead of doing things yourself.

Look at houses. Same basics. If you got rid of your TV, smartphone and computers, houses would have the exact same things as 60 years ago. Except the appliances do a tiny bit more for a whole lot more money. Because who wants a simple refrigerator that requires you to open the door to get ice water? No that’s too hard. So let’s make a complex one that’s easy.

In the old days there were: No riding mowers. No power tools. No automatic sprinklers. No dimmer switches. No electric garage door openers. No doorbells with cameras. No alarm systems that call security. No automatic lights when you drive up. One radio. One TV. One phone. One bathroom. One refrigerator. No central air conditioning. No ten speed bikes. No $100 sunglasses. No self-powered speakers.

Anyway. I think you get the picture. People ought to be frustrated when common sense isn’t enough and are afraid not to pay attention to the cutting edge of everything.

America could be simple again if we were just willing to give up convenience as the default. As it is, this direction is unsustainable and that’s where we’re going to end up anyway. The question is how much of our infrastructure might collapse with the complex consumer economy. Hopefully very little.

Keep watching zombie movies. You know in the back of your head what’s coming.

The Paradox of Wanting AI To Run the World

Q: Can artificial intelligence run the world.

A: No.

I’ve looked at this many different ways, and today I am thinking of the classic film Metropolis . It is, to make it overly simple, the story of a beautiful city of the future run by advanced machines. In the upper classes of society there is utopia and the designer of the city is rightfully proud. In the lower classes of society there is drudgery in service to the machines that keep the city running. One day the machine breaks, killing workers, and the resulting chaos destroys the dream of Metropolis.

The second film I am thinking of is part of The Animatrix and it is an origin story of what we currently believe to be our deus ex machina, AI. This story, The Second Renaissance, tells of a future in which humankind refuses to accept machines as equals, banishing them to the Sahara Desert where they ultimately flourish, making better manufactured parts than any humans. Ultimately humans and the machines battle for world supremacy and to destroy the source of the machines’ power, the Sun, human destroy the sky. Thus is born the world we begin to watch as The Matrix.

I can’t tell you much science fiction literature and film has dealt with such questions. They are enormously complex. Nevertheless it really boils down to this. What is more important to you as a human being? Is it that which you can give and receive from other human beings, or that which you can give and receive from machines? The answer, for all of history has been that humans are much more important than machines - and that machines only exist to serve the needs of mankind.

I believe this is consistent even today. The consequence of that means underneath the question of machines running the world is a profound lack of trust in those who are running the world now. Logically then, one must ask the question, who is going to teach machines how to run the world better than humans? In otherwords, which humans will get the trillions of dollars necessary to design, build, and educate machines? Why would they do that for machines and not for humans? You see the paradox.

I say that AIs will not emerge with any intelligence that humans can trust for such matters as security guard duty within the next 40 years. I predict at that point in the future we will be lamenting all of the money wasted on self-driving cars when we could have just built self-driving subways for a lot less money, and having saved many more lives.

Venezuela Defied the Market

Venezuela promised and delivered the cheapest gasoline on the planet. You could get gas for literally something like 5 cents per gallon. Therefore to keep the refineries running, the government had to pay the difference. There is no refinery on the planet that can produce gasoline in significant quantities for mere pennies per gallon. Hell, some of the feedstock components cost way more than that. Lanthanum oxide[1] catalysts for one, and the price for that spiked in 2011. So obviously there where heavy government subsidies.

At some point all such freebies come to an end. The Venezuelan government had to raise the price of gasoline[2]. It’s no joke that when gas only costs a nickel, when you raise the price to a quarter it might not seem like much. But it’s still five times the cost. The Venezuelan’s predictably freaked out.

But you have to understand that Venezuela was not a true multiparty democracy. When Chavez took over in 1999, he literally rewrote the constitution of Venezuela. His socialists ran everything. So when he said to PDVSA that they will produce gasoline at whatever price he decreed, those who resisted were sacked. Not just executives. The entire board of directors. They were replaced by his cronies. The employees went on strike, and he fired them all.

The government continued to play games and so could survive by exporting oil when prices were high. It all collapsed with the price of oil, America’s fracking and shale oil ended up exported to VZ after their largest refinery suffered the biggest explosion[3] and fire in the world in a decade, killing 42 injuring hundreds and knocking production offline. 2015 marked the beginning of the end. Oil prices sank from 115/bbl to 53/bbl in six months. This was VZ’s single industry. Everything the corrupt government could do was predicated on the spread they could profit from during the ‘peak oil’ scare years. So instead of the oil industry collapsing, the entire economy failed.

Middle class people with skills knew, especially considering how Chavez summarily fired 20,000 striking oil workers, it was time to go. The brain drain accelerated.

---

So in summary. The single governing socialist party subsidized gasoline for the masses. They paid for it in an environment of rising market prices for oil that they refused to pass on to the consumer. They did this by cutting deals with other countries and undercutting market prices elsewhere. They, meaning the government, meaning the single party, meaning Chavez and his cronies pocketed the money by purposefully defying the market.

When the price of oil dropped, the party was over, the government raised the price of gasoline causing inflation throughout the economy. There was nothing the government could do but print more money. It was an economic disaster that the people of VZ are still paying for.

Footnotes

[1] Fluid catalytic cracking - Wikipedia

[2] Hugo Chávez challenges Venezuelan 'birthright' to cheap gas

[3] Venezuelan Refinery Under Scrutiny After Deadly Blaze

On Surveillance Capitalism

Surveillance implies law enforcement. Capitalism implies commerce. So surveillance capitalism is basically the business of creating tech that police and feds use to capture criminals. I suspect thus, that Motorola would be the biggest surveillance capitalists, and whatever hedge funds create ETFs for surveillance devices. What’s the controversy?

I don’t think the phrase means what you think it means. Zuboff has invented a phenomenon that is little more than common sense. Google and Facebook are not anything more than guidance counselors for the masses. They pay attention to the forgotten people who are the consuming public and they are the new Madison avenue with psychographics in addition to demographics.

In one way, people should be glad that narrow behavioral psychographics are being used rather than broad racial and ethnic stereotypes. One should prefer mathematically disciplined behavioral predictions rather than religious biases or bigotry.

If you watch the new comedy by Chinese comic Ronny Chieng[1], pay close attention to his bit about Amazon Prime, and you will see the essence of what is driving this market. It is the fanatical drive of consumers for instant gratification. Without that, no capital would be raised because revenue driving such matters would not exist.

I have had at least two Echo Dots in my house for at least three years and I have purchased absolutely zero from Amazon via that electronic pathway. All they do is tell me the weather and turn on my lights. Occasionally they will solve trivia questions and tell me what movies are playing. But they cannot shop for me because I don’t ask them to. It is entirely unprofitable for them to try and guess my shopping needs because I shop for myself.

So here’s the thing that I understand having been in the Business Intelligence field since before Zuboff wrote her first excellent book, The Age of the Smart Machine, and Rockarts The Rise of Managerial Computing. The gruff way to put it is that non-STEM academic disciplines have been selling a pig in a poke to generations. We have overproduced in IT and the reason why millions of people are staring at mobile computing devices is because of the failure of Humanities. You have created a programmable generation that behaves quite predictably enough for us to profit with digital understanding better than your philosophy. Maybe next we’ll start a religion. Pokemon Go manages peoples time better than most business managers. Who’s fault is that?

If you are a consumer, consuming the content of Hollywood writers and all of that can be delivered digitally rather than in person, perhaps you were mistaken to dismiss the human contact and physical environments provided by Starbucks.

Again I say it this way. For all of the millions of unheard people who want “our voices to be heard”, why shouldn’t we be pleased that Facebook is listening, every day?

---

The alternative is a protocol I am working on tentatively called the Circle Protocol. You can read about it here[2].

Footnotes

[1] ronny chieng netflix - Google Search

[2] Circles of Trust

On Automation Strategy

Q: What is automation strategy?

It is fast food.

Automation strategy means building stuff that is idiot-proof. Breaking down complex tasks into simple ones so that it takes less and less skill to do any single part of the entire task. It means turning a craftsman into an assembly line worker. It means turning a programmer into a program. It means making things easy for people and machines that don’t think.

It means you go up to the counter and ask for a Big Mac, because it’s easy and because the people behind the counter only know how to cook what’s on the menu.

It means that the moment something goes wrong, somebody has to call the supervisor because they are just a small cog in a big machine and they don’t get paid to think.

It means doctors don’t make house calls and know your name, but they work under the government regulations for universal healthcare and you can click on a website and get a healthcare provider, but not a doctor who knows you.

It means you get a car that you cannot fix. Or that you don’t even get your own car. You get public transportation and the bus automatically goes on the same path, and the bus driver will be replaced by a machine.

It means you don’t have to know arithmetic or carry cash, because instead of a cash register there is a little computer on your wrist that automatically debits your account for you. So you don’t have to trust a human being to give you the right change.

It means you don’t have to learn landmarks or compass directions or how to read a map, because there are GPS satellites flying overhead that know where you are and your phone tells you how to get where you want to go.

It means you become a smaller person because everything is automatically done for you. It means you are a child and that you have created a new verb called ‘adulting’.

It’s http://grammarly.com because you didn’t study grammar in school, so now you can have a service that helps you write.

It means you can have sex anytime you like because you can take a pill that automatically takes away the reproductive capability of your reproductive organs. It means you can got to a pickup bar, because it’s there and everybody automatically knows that. It means you can have a job where you don’t operate heavy machinery or physically intense jobs, so you can smoke weed if you like.

it means that you don’t have to search for culture because if you like one song a service will automatically find other songs like that. If you like one book, a service will automatically find you another. And when you buy it, it automatically lets people know that you want them to automatically find stuff for you. So they build systems to automatically track you and automatically influence your decisions.

---

It means you are afraid to take charge of your own life and work hard to learn things. It means you are afraid to fail, so you want the automated cheat codes. It means you think less of your fellow human beings because you think they are lazy and trifling like you. It means you have to depend on government to guarantee you a minimum wage. It means you are just one step above slavery because you are afraid of being a whole, free, responsible human being.

It’s fast food.

Or you could learn to cook instead.

 

Terms of Endearment

I don't say 'male' or 'female'. Not even for newborn infants.

What I mostly say is 'dude' when I am slowing down to describe something basic to a man who has temporarily lost his mind. For them 'Dude' is a preface to a basic fact. As in "Dude, the earth is round."

In passing I will describe chicks and dudes as people with no particular sophistication. Like, some chick ran her Prius into a telephone pole. Some dude slipped on a banana peel. This could be a dumb mistake because if I thought it was something the idiot could have been predicted to screw up, I will call them an idiot. I will almost never call an idiot female a knucklehead. A knucklehead is a generally transgressive dude who is goes beyond being a problem as to one who causes trouble.

I have described, on many an occasion, and perhaps out loud that a bastard is a man who has been abused and unloved in such a way as they have been convinced that this is the way of the world. Or at least it is the way they will treat others, with no respect except for those who adhere to rules while waiting like a buzzard for them to break one. A bastard usually has an absent or asshole father although occasionally bastards are orphans. The female equivalent of a bastard is a bitch. I don't often think that men behave as bastards, rather that they inherently are. A bitch on the other hand may just be acting like a bitch. A powerful bastard often has the temerity to be violent and may act decisively without remorse. A bitch will not be violent although a crazy bitch will. Bastards and bitches are vindictive and 90% of the time not soulless, but often have no tact and aren't interested in criticism of their methods. They have a right to be hostile, according to themselves. A 'bastard' who is merely acting out is dick and dick moves abound. Someone who is acting like a dick, as with a good plurality of bitches, may often be rescued from their evil ways given that there are sufficiently courageous individuals who will point out their social transgressions.

Ladies and gentlemen are self-aware women and men who strive to behave appropriately. However it is not altogether reasonable to expect such from the average Joe. Speaking of which, I make no claims for the average Jane. More often than not I will use the term 'average bear' to refer to someone of average intelligence with no bearing on their comportment. Nevertheless I am favorably disposed to the American peasantry. It is for this reason that while I may be dismissive of the comportment of yokels and bohunks, terms I prefer to 'bumpkins', I don't dismiss them entirely. I am not generally offended by yokels but I hold them in lower regards than rednecks. Rednecks are trying to uphold some kind of code. Similarly I am not as offended by people I regard as 'ghetto' and hold them in lower regards than homies who also are trying to be righteous in their own peculiar way. But while I'm in this particular domain, let me remind you of the three degrees of stupidity. 

Men and women who are not particularly interested in striving for the respectability of ladies and gentlemen, I refer to as guys and gals. However like the French and Spanish, any mixed group will be referred to as guys in passing. If I have no reason to make particular distinctions for their physical capabilities or emotional dimensions, they will be guys. As in "Are you sure you guys want to eat at this restaurant?" But I will, uniquely refer to gals collectively as women who compete in vigorous ways. I think this is unique. So definitely gals are superior to chicks. Also, I will occasionally think to myself about broads and dames. I don't happen to meet such women on a regular basis and don't often have an occasion to speak or write about them, but a certain hands on hips attitude of a female bartender who is smoking is reminiscent of a broad or dame. They won't necessarily be unattractive, merely rough hewn. The male equivalent of a broad or a dame I would generally refer to as a character. One worth mentioning would be a 'character straight out of Characterville' as used by Schatze Page from the film "How to Marry a Millionaire", a dame portrayed by Lauren Bacall. A female soldier is a gal. A female drill sergeant is a broad or a dame, but rarely will I leave 'broad' or 'dame' unadorned by the proper number of adjectives.

As I think on it, I would be rather embarrassed to refer to a gentleman as a dude, or a lady as a chick. Nevertheless there are various shades of knuckleheads who will be called out of name with some measure of opprobrium. My mind goes to the worst epithets I can think of, those I think of as lower than idiots. After all, idiots are problems, knuckleheads are trouble. Right now I am told that a 'cunt' is the lowest of the low, but the term has never had any great emotional resonance with me. Nevertheless I interpret some cunt as a particularly nasty, creepy or sheisty bastard. I might be able to wrangle some respect for a clever bastard or a cheeky bastard as they may be nothing much worse than an asshole on a bad day. By the way if you are not familiar with my use of the term 'sheisty' I mean purposefully deceitful. But I do appreciate that someone called a cunt is irretrievable as in "Eat shit and die, you miserable cunt." Excellent parting words, and not something you could ever be expected to be forgiven for or apologize for. So in this regard I am much more apt to be conventional with my ultimate insulting terms. 'Motherfucker' is a word that is fat and juicy in my mouth and I feel quite delicious in pronouncing it in the direction of the right human shitstain.  But there is, incidentally a certain kind of cretinous coward I find particularly odious and these times seem to be presenting me with more opportunities to mock them derisively. I think it must be repeated, however, that 'cunt' just doesn't register much more than a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10. Without further ado I present you with 'twunt', a combination twit, twat and cunt. That would be a stupid, cowardly bastard who makes too much noise and is incapable of anything beyond noxious bleating. A twunt will bear false witness against his or her neighbor in a heartbeat. Fucking twunt. Pussies I can understand. But a conniving twunt is like that little sickly twisted beak creature yammering in front of Jabba the Hutt. A cutthroat who can't even heft the knife. Hmm. Mayhaps the very existence of my invention of 'twunt' is capable of lifting 'cunt' out of its relative lightweight status. In thinking once more about cunts, I also don't see how calling any woman a cunt is so horrible although I wouldn't because I don't use the word, but it occurs to me that there is a connotation of uselessness in the common use of the term. So add to nasty, creepy, and sheisty, worthless. Worthless, no-count trifling motherfuckers. That would be someone who is not even capable of being likely to harm himself or others but remains a constant nagging pain in the ass.

It is much more likely that I will call out assholes. Now I happen to think of myself as an asshole. An asshole is someone who doesn't mind offending people he disagrees with. In fact, an asshole is someone who exhibits more than an average amount of disagreeableness. Not one who is not merely persistent or persnickety but who carries a bit of a grudge in their disputations. An asshole spends more than their share of oxygen in putting the competition down. And yet I respect that assholes are generally attempting to defend some principle or adhere to some code, much like rednecks and homeboys. So they might actually be a clever or cheeky bastard. Nevertheless, all bastards need to occasionally come to Jesus and confess whether or not they are respectful of ladies and gentlemen. If not, they are consigned to the bastard column. Here is my message to assholes.

Now somebody once said that they had the perfect moniker for 'racist, privileged, white male' in the generic politically correct argot. They thought better of the generic demonization and said that if people would use this term, they would instantly know it to be true and righteously appropriate. That term is 'douche' aka 'douchebag' with its attendant verbal form douchebaggery. I agree wholeheartedly. Everybody knows a douche. Everybody hates a douche. 

All of these people are socially acceptable. I would never seek to have any law to remove the most trifling twunt or the most insouciant douche from society. An anti-fragile society needs such people to push the envelope. Unfortunately, we are becoming a more fragile society. Lots of people say so but I will say that it's happening for a reason. That reason is that we are in an epistemological crisis. We are simply inundated with too much information that makes it appear as though certain aspects of our lives and our world cannot be understood. People don't know how to determine the truth in a universally accepted manner, and many doubt such a method exists. So people either retreat into STEM or throw their hands in the air and decide that they just can't care. That's why you hear a lot of people saying, or implying 'fuck that'. They're brittle. They can't go there. This too is all well and good so long as the law remains enforced. All this to say that criminals are still criminals. It's one thing to be difficult and quite something else to be vicious. 

My aim therefore in this short list of terms of endearment is to clarify elaborately on what you need to know about my generally precise use of terminology to describe my fellow humans, and understand that I am not necessarily being dismissive. I am judging. We all must. I will judge openly yet with some amount of reserve.

I imagine that there are some silly bastards who can't seem to get enough of the crumbs of identity they snatch from the floor of society. I have seen on more than a few profiles a kind of announcement of preferred pronouns, which to me sounds a bit too much like a personal ad. I like that people have the imagination required to overcome the vast suckitude of modern life made boring by the brilliant arts and crafts of convenience, but if it begins with pronouns assuming the role of titles, well it's hard not to laugh.

It occurs to me that some fragment of our society requires close inspection. That is the inspection of tattooed flesh. I don't know what to think about that, as I have never had the experience of having been invited to examine a warm naked body festooned with artificial colors. Quite frankly I care more about clothes and acrobatics, but I'm starting to grasp the narcissistic appeal of second party navel gazing. So while I haven't solidified my disdain for the parochial tribalism of the tattooed, it has been gelling for some time now. I think I'll let it thaw. After all, my truck has bumper stickers.

If this then is a short compendium of characters identified by their attitudes, I hope it helps bring into use the idea of a vocabulary of casual regard and mockery that we must use and tolerate of necessity. As much as we will dislike and disregard each other, we should not mistake small or great flaws of character to be confused with criminal intent. There's a lot more of us we need to work with without the coercion of law and the escalation towards a police state.

So stop being such a silly bastard and go find an asshole you can like. Find a twunt to pity. Dude, you can do this. It will improve our society.

 

The Myth of Trumpism

Q: Would you consider Donald Trump to be a visionary leader?

A: No.

Donald Trump is a boss. He yells people into submission. For a certain class of people over a certain class of problems, this is a very effective style of leadership. It is not visionary.

You want to get 300 tons of concrete moved to a construction site? You don’t ask Laura Dern to be your leader. You don’t ask Barack Obama to supervise the operations of a coal mine. You want to send troops into battle? You don’t put Nancy Pelosi on the comms.

There are all kinds of tasks for which Donald Trump is unsuitable. But there are many for which he is effective. People tend to forget that the presidency of the US calls for more skills than any one person can individually possess.

I think the President does a poor job of delegating authority which is how any leader extends his effectiveness beyond his individual capacity. I think this quality was evident during his campaign. However what his supporters wanted wasn’t a team player to get along in Washington DC, they wanted somebody with the hardheaded boldness to shake things up in no uncertain terms. They wanted an outsider. They wanted somebody to shake up the status quo. That’s what they got.

One more thing about ‘visionary’. When we talk about leadership, a visionary must articulate their vision and then execute. Anybody can have a ‘vision’. But they must be true to that vision, they must continually convince people that vision is attainable and they must deliver. When JFK said put a man on the moon, it was visionary. The point was that he delivered because he convinced enough people to accept that vision, be true to it and made it possible to achieve.

Achievement of a vision makes one effective as a leader. But the vision itself needn’t be attractive. The Nationalist government of South Africa had a vision for their society that they achieved. Their vision was inspired by the failure of American Reconstruction and the effectiveness of Jim Crow. They perfected that systematic vision in a theory called Apartheid. They delivered.

With that in mind, a lot of foolish people claim that Donald Trump, bigot that he may be, has a similar vision of White Nationalism for America. That is far from the truth. He simply yells people into submission and cannot effectively delegate. This is not an effective style of leadership for the legal subjugation of millions of people.

Donald Trump is not a visionary leader. There is no ‘Trumpism’.

----

Consider the following:

I don't think Trump has considered the merits or demerits of the geopolitical balance of power provided (or not) by NATO outside of the shallow question of how much the US pays for it.

Interestingly, I think this very thin logic is actually appropriate for the standing down of US military forces, because quite frankly Americans have no clear idea what our boys should be doing in the world - and that includes defending treaties. There is no domestic consensus, and he promised no vision. He received no mandate from his constituency other than the most simplistic 'support the troops'. The most dimwitted fool could see that America's enthusiasm for violent engagement, even against ISIS in Syria, was over. The US had been telegraphing rules of non-engagement even to the Russian military in Syria since its very beginning in 2013, when Syria's documented possession and use of chemical weapons - Obama's Red Line - was crossed. We backed down. It was a strategic withdrawal from the Middle East that Trump never questioned.

Who would call Trump's Space Force a strategic vision? Who would call his sending regular army to the southern border a strategic vision. Trump is bereft of strategic visions - he could simply listen to 40 hours of Rush Limbaugh and figure out what level of Republican talking points he needed to address and beat Ted Cruz into submission. He did just that.

Ted Cruz thought the American Right was a quiet majority that could be cultivated and respond to his values. Trump proved the American Right was disjointed, chock full of anger & frustration and vulnerable to a hostile takeover. That is precisely where the Republican Party is right now, an organization hollowed out by a hostile takeover running on oppositional fumes and innovating nowhere.

The Hubris of Globalism

I’m writing from California in English, but I hope people can see and recognize this wherever they are. It affects all of us.

In our consumer society, a host of goods and services that originate outside of the borders of our nation are made available at low cost. Capital can easily move across borders and take advantage of lower labor and commodity prices.

You can get tea. You can get sugar. These things are not produced locally. You can use GPS. You can send email anywhere on the planet. You can get green paint from a global market of chromium. You can get coffee, chocolate and bananas. You can get orange juice in the winter. You can share cultural references to superheroes that people in other countries will understand. You can benefit from international standards. You can play videogames or watch cartoons that originated in Japan. You can buy furniture made of hardwoods from South America. You can buy a t-shirt made from cotton grown in China and woven into fabric in Nigeria with a clever slogan on it invented by an American.

Globalization means that in your job you are not just competing with your fellow countrymen, but you are competing with people anywhere in the world who with the same skills. There is no ‘grading on a curve’. It means whereas your country might have had employment in every industry, that now the whole country may become specialized into a few industries. It means at some point, certain subjects will no longer be taught in school because your country doesn’t make that, it just buys that.

Globalization means that in your economy you are not just subject to the wealthiest people in your country who speak your language, but that your life is influenced by the wealthiest people in the world who may not care about your language, your culture, your religion, your education, your family or your neighborhood. They simply make deals with the wealthiest people in your country and that’s all they need to care about. It means when you buy their products and they fail, you can’t sue them or even bring them to court in your country. You’ll just be dealing with their agents in your country, but not the big boss who will never go to jail.

Globalization means that in your city, if it is a big enough city, or your college if it is a big enough college, that you will have to deal with gentrification. Not just affluent people from the nice part of town, but from the spoiled rich families across the globe. So in your neighborhood of nice houses, suddenly that one house on the corner now sells for a million dollars. And then Airbnb has people buying up houses to rent out to wealthy tourists, and soon there’s nothing your city council or mayor can do about it. Then their kids can afford to pay full tuition but you have to take out a loan, and there’s nothing the administrators at your school can do about it.

Globalization means you can buy bananas and coffee and chocolate, but you can’t afford college or home ownership. It means you can wear cheap clothing but you can’t get a job in manufacturing. I means you can play cool videogames on your iPhone, but if it breaks nobody in your country can fix it, so you have to get extended warranty insurance so they give you another one.

Globalization means the death of local control. And surprise surprise, the death of local politics. And if you vote to exit this regime, you are mocked as a stupid, regressive, racist, ass backward patriot, uncivilized barbarian to be ignored in the new world order. Becuz progress. Becuz the planet matters more than you. Becuz you can be cancelled.

Globalization is the Bitcoin where nobody anywhere knows who the inventor is, and nobody can be called into account because they can be anywhere in the world or even disappear from the world but the system keeps going. Globalization is the Black Mirror of the 21st Century.

The only thing that beats globalization is nationalism. Your laws, your language, your culture, your elected officials, your borders, your army, your flag, your cities and towns, your schools and neighborhoods.

Nationalism isn’t racist. Nationalism isn’t xenophobic. Nationalism means your sovereignty comes first, not the new world order. It means your democracy gets to decide exactly how much foreign exchange happens. It means international trade has to be negotiated, not just accepted blindly. It doesn’t mean we stop teaching foreign languages and literature in highschool. It means your citizenship and your civil rights don’t take a backseat to the rules of any other global cabal on the planet. It means anyone and everyone who does business in your country will be accountable to the laws and courts of your country. It means local people make choices and everybody else has to respect those choices. Nationalism is anti-colonialist. Nationalism is anti-imperialist. Nationalism means a limit on hubris. Nationalism means when some fanatic tries to organize the Xs of the world into a global revolution, he won’t be able to topple nations, because nations will be respected and nations will be strong.

Or not.

It’s up to you.

Men's Constructive Hazing

So I'm recently thinking about men and violence, and yes I just finished Jim Mattis' book on leadership. I shake my head in guessing the number of people who still think 'military intelligence' is an oxymoron. I don't recall where I read an excellent passage on how men in dangerous professions tend to haze newbs, but I immediately recognized the sense of it. It reminded me of my own fraternity initiation which included a significant amount of a black cultural angle. Which in as few words as possible can be summarized "If you can survive our terror, then you can survive what the white man has in store for you." We leave that for another day. Today I am answering the question:

Q: What are things men have to go through that women either do not understand or have empathy for?

A: I think women don’t generally understand violent hazing and competition in a non-abstract way. They are generally quick to assert that all violence is stupid and accept that they will not have to make use of it for any reason. They don’t have to live and compete in masculine hierarchies that establish rational violence that controls irrational violence, and generally expect to be protected from such environments.

It is my experience that there are particular ways that men fight and there are particular ways that women fight. I don’t want to get overly deep into that, but I think the following illustration is apt.

Boys playing soccer encounter a flagrant foul. The two involved immediately face off and blows are exchanged. After some period, other boys will break up the fight. Every one of them will know who won the fight. They are both ejected from the game. In the next game, the boys play fair and the incident is forgotten.

Girls playing soccer encounter a flagrant foul. The two involved face off but no blows are exchanged. Only the original offender is ejected from the game according to those rules. But the sting of the encounter remains. In the next game, the offended girl or one of her friends will foul the original offender for what happened in the prior game.

So what I’m saying is that in all conflict there is a direct application of social game rules and a higher meta application of unwritten rules. The higher meta application of unwritten rules includes unregulated violence and that is considered fair and the ultimate adjudication. It is male.

It’s not fair to say that women don’t understand or have empathy for this because they are very aware of its operation. They simply don’t participate in it in anywhere near the proportion that men do. But they expect men to and they will seek to reward heroes over bullies in the same way men do. I am saying they don’t necessarily understand how those lines of combat are drawn and evaluated the way that men do, from experience.

I think this comes to play in contemporary society often over questions of respect and conflict resolution or ‘anger management’. The simplest way for me to describe it is in terms of the lack of patience men will tend to have over endless negotiation and bickering back and forth in futile attempts to have nobody hurt or making everyone safe from conflict even when it is clear that there are irreconcilable differences in play.

In my personal experience I have observed how my daughters will debate questions endlessly and sometimes bring up old questions that should have been settled years ago. That ‘mean girls’ vibe of pulling back old scabs. I tell them, “Why don’t you just slap box?” They never do of course. It’s just the way they argue. Fathers and sons will resolve this at some point with a credible threat or actual use of violence. Women will argue and non-violently fight with their mothers for their entire lives.

I don’t have a theory as to why this is other than to say that it is evolutionary and that such behaviors are observable and recognizable in other mammals as well. Females nest and arrange for the conflict free home, and will pick over the details endlessly. Males hunt and having won a conflict to the death will plop down the meal anywhere, end of story.

In that context of nature vs nurture, I say it’s both, but evolution has a much deeper influence - millions of years vs a few years of graduate studies and social conditioning.

We could debate this endlessly, or you and I can take it outside.

What is the Role of Reason in Society?

Reason is a discipline of mind that allows people to generate knowledge. Knowledge is the stuff through which one may navigate cleverly to gain an advantage in life. The beasts don't have much knowledge. In our IDW discussion this past weekend, that got a little out of hand, our band of prickly interlocutors tried to get going on this subject. I don't think much was resolved, as a great deal of the talk got tangential to Jordan Peterson and to matters of faith. But what emerged to my surprise was a bit of bonding in the afterparty which came after the Fall.

Just after 7pm as a subgroup of the main decided on where to eat dinner the five of us headed down to the parking structure. Now at this point, to be fair, I suppose I need to start using pseuds, because basically none of these are public figures. I found them, they're my associates. Find your own. The first guy I'm going to mention is Brother. It's probably not fair that I call him Brother, but I do find myself in agreement with his empiricals and his description of the hard knock life. What many of you know about me is that I am the oldest of 4 boys and grew up in a roughneck neighborhood. I was somewhere along a third axis between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and as a young boy very much likely to get into the same kind of mischief and shenanigans, some of which involved cursing, smoking, fighting and wandering far from home. Brother understands a hierarchy of force escalation that I appreciate, as well as a respect for the eternal reasons to cool your own jets, without which one may become very quickly an agent of chaos. Brother and I agreed to carpool to the restaurant.

On our way down the single functioning escalator to the parking structure, our way was blocked by two way traffic and an 89 year old woman who faceplanted on the cold hard steel stairs. We observed momentarily a sea of frozen faces. If they hadn't been in close proximity to the poor old lady in age, I'm sure a dozen smartphones would have been in evidence. As two or three of us snapped to attention and pulled her to her feet and then to a 2/3s chair carry, the stairs were cleared. We sat her down on the large landing one level down. Her face was a bloody mess, but her hips and legs were intact and she was conscious. I immediately ran down the next flight to get my first aid kit from the truck. I had several triangle bandages, and no sterile wipes. I guess I never thought about injuries to the face so it made my ample saline wash useless. There were three lacerations on her forehead that were clearly from the familiar steel pattern of escalator stairs and blood saturated her auburn bangs. There was also blood in her ears, but I quickly assessed that it must have dripped down there. After we got her wiped up a bit and bandaged she was holding the left front of her mouth. She may have lost or chipped a tooth as well. The paramedics arrived about 20 minutes into our impromptu rescue, and we finally scurried off. We got beaming faces and kind words. My heart rate was up to 137, but my hands were steady.

Brother explained as we were washing our hands clear of blood, him much more than me, that we understand something about seeing people hurt. I have since gone through a short inventory of my own bloody scrapes, but from the point of view of whether or not I was fighting for myself or fighting for somebody else. It occurred to me that I have never lost a fight. I certainly lost what, if it were scored like a boxing match, was an ugly fight. But it wasn't a TKO. I guess that means I can take a beating and not quit. Sounds like stupid me. Funny as I write this I think of three other fights I got into, one of which I declined. That was John from Fedco whom I let ride my motorcycle which he promptly laid down within 20 minutes of begging me to let him ride. He said he'd understand if I wanted to punch him in the face (just once) but.. It was an effective enough apology. But I can't remember his last name. Brother reminded me of chivalry. I know he'd have my back in a fight.

At dinner, neither of us said much more about the Fall, but we both said that there is something we owe to bullies. I reiterated the gist of this 'On the Necessity of Knuckleheads'. (Wow, 2004 was a different era of my writing). And that trip down memory lane was abstracted a bit. While I was mostly interested in listening to my new associates, in the back of my head was something I recently said about the logic of violence, something I could not articulate well at all before my martial education but knew implicitly. I think the first time I talked about it was in the mid 80s during the gang wars of Southern California. I remember the movie 'Colors', and I remember saying "There is no such thing as senseless violence." People always have good reasons to squabble, because only psychopaths squabble spontaneously.

As many subjects as we covered through the course of the afternoon and evening, it is the matter of the rationality of conflict that touches closer to my current self. I think it is directly related to the reason each of us who did were comfortable dealing with the bloodied matron. We understand the logic and the rationality of violence. Brother paraphrased a meme which we probably both saw over the past week. "Those who are not capable of violence are not peaceful. Only those who are capable of violence can be peaceful, the others are harmless." And that's my paraphrasing. One must fight for a better peace. That too is rational. It is that rationality that tends to make me believe that Steven Pinker is rather smarmy in his predictions. Like many men who have not learned the hard way, long hair is an easily exploitable weakness. In male company (sometimes) I refer to man buns as a 'bitch handle'.

I struggle to come up with the appropriate handle for our fearless leader, but I am confident that he understands something about the rationality of the warrior spirit. Yet I wonder aloud whether or not such a spirit should be outsourced from society as it is today in our volunteer armies and our combat sports. When I'm in Texas I don't have such concerns, then again I haven't been outside of Las Colinas or Plano for some time now. We Americans are hung up and confused about gender, and many of us men are as well. It's a shame. We don't have very good arts to communicate the virtues of reason, courage, honor and toughness. We pretend to know what we need from our pop culture. Yet when we are faced with sudden violence, even the violence of gravity, most of us freeze. Some of us run towards the trouble. Learning how to survive trouble the hard way is not necessarily a blessing in disguise. Many a hard man has been laid low in our society by perfidious answers to "Or else what?". Beware the vengeance of politics and the force of lawsuits. It's getting easier to punk people via keyboard these days. But what kind of real man doxxes?

There is reason in violence because there are reasons for violence, most of which we don't bother to study or understand. And such ignorance is incapable of navigating cleverly through that knowledge. So it's no surprise that a great deal of mouthing off posing as intelligence is nothing more than propaganda which can often only be unlearned the hard way. Too many Americans are incapable of being peaceful. The have got a lot to learn. Especially those who claim to be innocent of aggression, but call for Leviathan forces in their attempts to turn the tides of history, remake the meaning of culture and manipulate the climate of the entire planet.

At length I am drawn to consider our common sense understanding of violence vis a vis liberty. It goes a little something like this: "Your freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose." Yet one of the reasons I have a category in this blog called 'A punch in the nose' is because I would much rather suffer a bloody nose than get hounded out of a job by cancel culture fanatics. What offends me a great deal is how a large contingent of wrong-thinkers, by Jonathan Haidt's definitions, are willing to stand 'in solidarity' with certain victims and support their violent acts.

Hardly any students say that they themselves would use violence to shut down a speech, but two surveys conducted in late 2017 found that substantial minorities of students (20% in one survey and 30% in the other) said it was sometimes “acceptable” for other students to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking on campus.

Is that the effective courage of one's convictions, or is that more like being a football fan? I think it's cheerleading for bullies, but only because most college campus speakers woudn't dare to ask a protester to take it outside. There's a time and a place for roughhousing. If you ask me, there is a very good reason 2019 is nothing like 1967 when there were over 150 violent race riots in America. Racial oppression is nowhere near so violently oppressive. I don't think there was anything so intellectually profound about those riots or of any at all. People who lose their livelihoods fight back. People who are roughed up on the streets of their own neighborhoods toughen up. Human beings are naturally territorial and always will be. There are foolish and wise ways to deal with this territoriality. But a hastag mob defies all territoriality and deals vindictive virtual vigilantism. Who wouldn't face such accusers if they could? The principle of Habeas Corpus demands the face to face conflict. There is reason in this.

I say that reason is no different in the court than outside, and our liberty is fundamentally tied to and inextricable from that reason. A government of the people is granted a proxy of violence not a monopoly. The judicial system holds that proxy and the judge pronounces the coercive violence of law enforcement with a bang. The system is not a substitute for our natural rights, it is an extension made regular. Due process insures the right about of violence is administered on a consistent basis. But our systematic liberty and rights are inalienable from ourselves. So when we are faced with sudden violence we should respond justly according to our reason. The judge is not ever present. The paramedic is not ever present. If we are to be a nation of individuals, then it is our responsibility to know. It is our responsibility to use reason, generate knowledge and navigate cleverly through that knowledge - not be mere unthinking harmless beasts in the ship of state, but free men possessed of reason, toughness, courage and honor.

Will China Adapt?

Q: What is the strategy of Americans to contain Chinese influence in the world markets?

A: I think the world markets are going to teach China lessons in capitalism. I have some suspicions that China, as a command culture, will have a great deal of adjusting to do in order to succeed in various markets. After all, they are going to have to compete with the rest of us, steeped as we are in market cultures and individual choice.

That said, I’m sure that China will engage in some neo-colonial practices in emerging markets. I probably should study up on the Belt and Road program, but my bias is to believe that a country with the nerve to tell its own poor people how many children to have will take a dim view of other poor countries’ liberties. The will pay to use China’s roads or face the belt.

It has been a long time since I thought of ‘spheres of influence’ but I do believe the US and LATAM will be a great deal more impervious to China’s ambitions than countries like Thailand and Vietnam as well integrated as they are into the current world economic order.

As the US finds itself paying more attention to its own resources and supply chains, I think it is more likely that we will ultimately look at China in the way we look at Saudi Arabia. Some few powerful American concerns will make several significant deals with China for strategic purposes, but the relationship will not go much further beyond that. Americans do not perceive China as an open and free society, and we have history, Taiwan and Hong Kong to remind us of that. I thoroughly believe that America’s openness will prove to be more adaptable.

It might be corny, but the exceptional life of Bruce Lee is instructive. He found the best of Chinese traditions in martial arts to be formalistic and non-adaptive, a top down idea of mastery that constrained creativity. He had to leave to expand these ideas and so developed a superior adaptive system. This became the foundation of American MMA. Similarly, as Brazilians opened up and adapted Japanese Judo to become BJJ, a superior system evolved. Today, after fewer than 50 years, Americans and the world have learned a combat format that beats 1000 years of traditional Chinese instruction. Perhaps China may learn an economic format that beats 300 years of free market capitalism in open societies, but I very much doubt it.

 

Some Thoughts about Space Colonization

Some perspective I have been missing in all of the fabulousity leading up to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing tossed me for a loop last week. In all of the things I have been ingesting on rocketry it had only been buried in the back of my mind that the space race was not merely ideological and patriotic but in fact funded by the research behind ICBMs. In other words, putting a man on the moon wasn't really much more than another way to scale up the capabilities of the military industrial complex. Whoosh!.

What is easy to forget in the hype is that we didn't merely put a man on the moon, we took 24 men to the moon and back. My favorite, Michael Collins, drove around it while Armstrong and Aldrin left footsteps, planted a flag and took pictures. But there were many others who sat on top of the most powerful machine every built, the Saturn 5. And each of those rockets had five monstrous F1 engines. While those didn't power any of our ballistic missiles, Aerojet, Rocketdyne and Aerospace Corp learned a lot from the lessons.

So when I hear people quoting Elon Musk, whose SpaceX has done some very impressive rocketry say we should go to Mars, I'm a bit more hesitant. Like millions of Mikes born in the 60s when that was the most popular American boy's name, I wanted to be an astronaut. I read science fiction and Starman Jones was probably the most influential book of my pre-teen life. But it is clear now that nothing about the manned space program was intended to scale to the dimensions of colonization. Considering the ribbing astronauts got from military pilots there's more than a little truth that they were just handsome window dressing distracting from a MAD economy. The oratory from President Kennedy takes on a sheen of irony and slight of hand now in retrospect. I didn't become an astronaut nor an astrogator. I don't think Earthlings will get the opportunity to flee this planet.

For all of the interest on global warming or climate change or the de-humanization of forests, you would think that before we start talking about space habs, we might try much of that here. It seems to me that even given the pretense of mass colonization, Earthers are going to have to learn to live indoors in the dead cold or boiling heat for a long time. Longer than the Biodome. Longer meaning for life. So why not try and build a city somewhere in the Namib or the Arctic circle. What mix of people would not drive each other mad? How do you make water in the Sahara for 75 people in a habitat. What is the appropriate sexual balance? How many children, handicapped and seniors are necessary for human sanity and compassion to survive in desolate isolation?

These are not things most people think about as the millionaires put down their payments for space tourist reservations. Maybe we ought to. Everything cannot be saved by rockets. It certainly was not why they came about.

Global Warming Isn't Dangerous

This is essentially what I've been saying. Read Dave Burton's answer to Did 30,000 scientists declare that climate change is a hoax? on Quora One of my favorite excerpts.

Sea-level rise is supposedly the worst of the negative effects of anthropogenic global warming, but the measurements prove that’s nonsense. Here’s a particularly high-quality, 110-year measurement record at Honolulu, showing a very typical sea-level trend. Sea-level is rising about 1½ mm/year (6 inches per century), with no acceleration in nine decades or more:

American Poverty

Read Chuck Coker's answer to If the economy of the United States is so great, why do so many people still seem to be struggling? on Quora

The Divisors

The primary social problem in our society is that we are too emotionally engaged with the productions of journalists and political activists. These two groups, more than any other media producers have captured the attention of many Americans and are compensated by those things that spark ‘debate’.

This is not a consequence of social media. Very few ordinary people as social media producers go viral with divisive material. The general public is satisfied with making fail videos, humorous memes, cat videos and porn. What is crowdsourced is generally useful and lighthearted. Consider Reddit. But those things that anger and frustrate us are the creation of a professional class of people who are competing in the realm of conviction. They want to argue and convince, instigate, provoke, trigger and foment. These American professionals are the best in the world at doing so. And because of their provocations, Americans are passing along their soundbites and clickbait against each other and against people they don’t even know.

The work of journalists and political activists is so pervasive that you unfriended your own friends based on things you didn’t think up yourself.

In the news today is the story of a boy who threw an egg at an Australian senator, who was making remarks about a mass murder in New Zealand. So today, emotionally involved Americans are yelling at each other as if we need, every day, to demonstrate that murder is bad. Who has convinced us that there is a spectrum of positions on murder which are worthy of public debate? Journalists and political activists.

There is absolutely no controversy in the heart of society that murder is bad, but journalists and political activists have made it their job to spin a controversy in such a clever way that we are encouraged to take a position in the court of public opinion.

Who runs that court, and why are you playing their game?

Americans can simply emotionally disengage from this codependent dysfunction by selecting their intake of information carefully, and not being ‘vegans’ about it. There is no value in bragging about your own ability to be [mis]informed. This will disempower the class of professionals for whom controversy pays their salary, and society will revert to its norm.

The Non-Civility Rant

Have people in your church started arguing about the nature of God? Probably not.

This is not about America per se, it is about the devolution of the domain of news and popular culture. We are reaping the seeds of the Counterculture. We have at once decided to be permissive of the perverse and needy for acceptance of standards at the same time. So this is about the loss of Walter Cronkite - of a kind of objective point of view that Americans are willing to conform to - and the rise of what we gamers call 'randoms', people we take on board our teams who conform to few of the rules of the game. This is an inherently contradictory position.

At the core of this is the hardened assumption demonstrated here, that 'minorities' are psychologically and inherently unwilling and unable to experience the American experience (as say narrated by Walter Cronkite) because America is fundamentally broken. I just have to say that this to me is a species of a suburban teenager who hates their parents and just knows everything about them and 'America' is both fraudulent and corrupt. This is fundamentally how I view the 'white liberal' social point of view - stuck in its own private Idaho and looking for the right party drug to drown everything out. When they come up sober it's all "Damn if I were a Negro I'd burn all this shit down." This is ossified to the point that it reinscribes racial reasoning even more deeply. All I can say to that is the Baby Boomers are fundamentally a broken record in that regard, and the rest of us have gone digital. That doesn't get rid of the power of the 60-70 year olds who run the country and still listen to the Rolling Stones.

But then that's it, isn't it? Rock and roll is a purloined rebellion lacking the redemptive quality of the Blues, ever on the edge of punk devolution. Rock abjures the transcendence of Gospel. Rock refuses the crossover of ethnics and rarely ever leaves its 4/4 signature, ever flattening all expression into a rebel yell. It is crassly commercial at the expense of the Folk and it is relentlessly omnipresent aiming to be the soundtrack of American life. At its heart it is James Dean, running away from home, looking for artificial danger to escape calm, negotiated civility. It's looking for a reason to shout because it cannot bear to sacrifice for duty. It has to make its own new rules of honor. It won't settle down until it drives off a cliff.

And now the saga continues as a new generation of randoms devours its old. The callow narcissism is astounding. Every declaration of identification attempting to force the planet to gaze at the same navel. Well, just America. Well, just white America. Well, just white America on my side of the aisle in my [inter]section. Yeah then we'll fix the whole thing. The chatting class has become the barking class, a pen of pent-up dogs who couldn't cross the street to save their own hollow souls.

Americans are in a psychological dumpster of their own creation. And that's what they get for trying to find salvation in the mall, on the radio, through broadcasts and broadsheets where everything is always up for debate and renegotiation. It desires disruption with the hope that the new pieces will fall in their favor. It is the refusal to work for common cause - a radical autonomy - that is sustained by a stereotyped partisan media and a stereotyped partisan politics. It is sustained rivalry that, with universal permissiveness, loses its ability to even conceptualize commonality. This is the hyper extension of multicultural counterculture into intersectional identity politics in which provocatuers lead the charge to politicize *everything* - and the major media trots along like Opie to our cynical Garfield. It is everything but Art.

Obligatory Seriousness on J. Smollett

Some soap opera actor faked a hate crime. The crowd went bananas. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris stood on her hind legs to make a statement about it. John McWhorter said:

So why in the world would he fake something like that attack—if he did indeed fake it? The reason might be that he has come of age in an era when nothing he could have done or said would have made him look more interesting than being attacked on the basis of his color and sexual orientation.

Racial politics today have become a kind of religion in which whites grapple with the original sin of privilege, converts tar questioners of the orthodoxy as “problematic” blasphemers, and everyone looks forward to a judgment day when America “comes to terms” with race. Smollett—if he really did stage the attack—would have been acting out the black-American component in this eschatological configuration, the role of victim as a form of status. We are, within this hierarchy, persecuted prophets, ever attesting to the harm that white racism does to us and pointing to a future context in which our persecutors will be redeemed of the sin of having leveled that harm upon us. We are noble in our suffering.

That's a lot of understanding of a lot of stupidity. A surplus of understanding.

I say this:

This is precisely the kind of story everybody needed to see, and that it is fake underscores the rabid obsession Americans have with exactly this kind of 'news'. I know the terms are overused, but could there possibly be a better example of confirmation bias and virtue signalling? Even commentary on the story falls into those buckets.

What is most telling, I think, is that it demonstrates public innumeracy and the press' willingness to cater to it. What actually happens in America is invisible to people who cannot or will not do the math. So all we have are dueling narratives in short attention span theater. Nobody is actually counting the dead because dead men tell no tales.

For me, it is simple. We have 15,000 murders per year 30,000 suicides and 70,000 fatal drug overdoses. People hate themselves more than they hate other people.

The symbol manipulation is at an all-time high. And this is what America gets for not using algebra every day.

Wherefore Art Thou Mr. Swift?

This week is the week of equating MAGA hats with Nazi armbands. Apparently I'm either misremembering my time at The Well or Godwin's Law has been sunsetted and replaced by a wacky doppelganger. These days mentioning Nazis does not end the reasonableness of the conversation, it legitimizes face punching. Well, I'm all for a good punch in the nose, but it seems to me that if we were dealing with Nazis more dangerous than Jay and Silent Bob then a punch in the nose would not be advisable. Everybody knows Nazis carry Luger pistols. One wouldn't expect today's typical American Chatty Cathy to know the difference between crypto-Nazis with their citronella torchlights and actual danger. This is why we have yelling teenagers and toothless wonders representing the 'dangerous divide' in American 'debate'. You see it all depends on your attire. If you're outfitted with a red MAGA hat, then you are evil, or at least deplorable. A nice ceremonial drum on the other hand, confers sainthood, or at least the halo of cultural authenticity.

It occurs to me that we have invented another N word. Except it's like 1947 and nobody minds calling people out of their name in public.  Nazi this. Nazi that. Once the Nazi has been identified then the argument is over. The existence of Nazis is the end of moral consideration. You know, like the existence of WMD.

It has been quite a few months since I decided that to be a wry stoic and combat epistemologist, that I would mock and deny a cast of raving fools. These days it makes me perversely attracted to the moronic inferno that is Facebook and social media. So I'm probably not one to talk about how much water is wasted dousing burning crosses. After all, I have no fear of the alt-right cuck callers and 4Chan doxxers. Perhaps I have too much faith in justice or my pistols, or the triumph of reason. I keep trying to tell people who are startled and alarmed seeking to inform me about the ills of Trumpist racism that I grew up around Crips who actually murdered people on the regular. Still I persist in my mockery, and I feel rather lonely about it. As much as I truly enjoy the podcasts of Joe Rogan who is just a brainy, raunchy delight, too often I feel like the rest of the smart, civilized guys out there are trying too hard to take the burden of civilization onto the shoulders of their 38 Slim herringbone jackets. There are no great comforts for free men it seems.

Are we doomed to become irascible assholes? I mean I claim it and I don't mind, but I'm a lot more fun than that. Fun seems to be off the table. That's no good. There's got to be a better way than Deadpool. Maybe I'll see what Gerard is up to. Perhaps he's found something more fun than poetry.

Men Haze

Men haze.

Hazing is a sophisticated socialization men do to determine if newbs deserve to stay. The more dangerous the profession, the more severe the hazing. Because if you are going to have someone in your squad who has responsibility for your life, you need to understand how they perform under pressure - the pressure of doing the right thing for the squad no matter how he feels. You don't have the luxury of deciding you don't *feel* like doing your job when your poor performance puts somebody's health or life in jeopardy. The more likely such a dangerous scenario is likely to occur, the more important that every individual passes hazing.

If you can't handle the hazing, you need to take your bitch ass home and cry. Everybody is better off without you, because you are a clutch failure just waiting to happen.

A Thought about Critical Theory

I think most critical theory generates praxis that cannot be organic, by definition. It can only work in an upscale bourgeios context, because it's essentially shopping research for ethical lifestyle choices. And still people don't know if red wine is good for you, waiting for the next round of PhD theses.

This is rather astounding given the (fake?) admiration for 'authentic' indigenous cultures who are operating on ancient wisdom and traditions of the sort rarely subjected to critical theory.

I think critical theory is an intellectual neutron bomb aimed at the modern metropolis. Then again, I'm sure some critical theorist might tell me I don't know what I'm talking about.

Curse of the Haole

This year I'm not going to use the term 'white' if I can help it. It turns out that there are any number of specific things to call so-called white people if I have reason to identify something stereotypical about one's character. So I will expand that vocabulary and imbue with more meaning the following labels.

Now the thing that led me to this matter is that at several memorable occasions over the past several years, certain friends and associates have made some persistently self-conscious remarks while eating spicy or unfamiliar ethnic food. I was embarrassed for them and for myself in their company.

So for the fellow who acts all meat and potatoes when confronted with and confounded by spicy Mexican food or chopsticks, the term is 'gringo'.

For the doofus who is perfectly uncool, has no rhythm and cannot dance to save his life, but is not an actual spaz, the term is 'honky', and I am thinking of Tom from the Jeffersons.

For the uptight, bookish, pale and censorious prig who refuses to hang loose, the term is 'haole'.

For the rude, indecorous, filter-less lout, who is not actually an asshole but would embarrass my grandmother, the term is 'gaijin'. c.f. Donald J.

Rednecks we know and the term is not necessarily pejorative and sometimes endearing. For the pejorative we use 'cracker'. Peckerwood is deprecated. Wasps are few but still often need to be stung. I will also continue to mock snowflakes who may not necessarily be Caucasian, but I think haole will be much more often used. The absurdly PC are all haoles.

I am probably going to desist using the term 'beardy boys' although I will think it. I'm actually preferring that men wear beards (not neckbeards) even if they're not real men. But hipsters and douchebags will still be identified as such.

Here in Facebook if I think you need to be confronted with the import of something that should be relatively obvious, I will preface my comment with 'Dude'. If I call you a dumbass, then it's my bad.

Why? Because it's not racial.

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.

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.

Bring Blogs Back

Everybody who thinks about it knows it to be true. Social media isn't working the way we thought it would. 

There are a lot of reasons. Some are simple and some are rather complex. But let's look at the simplest reason and to my mind, one of the most important. You don't own your own words. When you live on Facebook's property, you don't own your own words. They can be deleted by someone other than you. They can be banned by someone other than you. You can hardly even know what you said a year ago by searching for it. I don't mean to suggest that Facebook alone is capable of this, but it is the 900 pound gorilla. The same things are true of Twitter and the comments sections of hundreds of new media outlets. 

When it comes to participating in the debates that a free and open society require, these social media spaces do not facilitate. That is not why they exist. That is not their business model. They were not created to sustain collaborative thought, but to let everybody connect in social ways. They are not town halls so much as they are gas station bathrooms on the information superhighway. They serve everybody without much discrimination, but their facilities often stink. Sometimes you wonder who came in here to write what you see on the walls, and you cringe. No matter how many bots or attendants you apply to a roadside rest stop, it will never become a town hall. That's something you design from the ground up. Social media needs a redesign.

However, there was a moment of glory in the past in which the level of discourse broadly available to the internet public was better than it is now. That was the age of the blogosphere. As MySpace was dying and Google experimented with something called Orcut, which became very popular in Brazil, the American scene was beginning to get a taste of blogs and bloggers. It was a feast of alternative information written by individuals or edited contributions of blog leagues that set the American political world on fire. It was a place for writers, and it still is. 

As a veteran of early internet sites like The Well and Cafe Utne among others, I have been fortunate to have met some of the most exciting and informative writers anywhere. My history goes back to bitnet, Fido and Compuserv. Since there has been an online, I have been there. And so I have witnessed the temptations presented to bloggers to become more mainstream as previously paper only media publications moved online. Who would not, having become influential on their own, want to become even more influential as a syndicated columnist? And so many of the best bloggers moved on out of self-publication to sponsored work. I cannot say whether or not that affected the quality of their writing or if they have been edited into corners. But it did violate one of the key aspects of the blogosphere itself, which was full individual control. 

A blogger has many responsibilities aside from writing, one of which is to police their comment sections. One needs to decide whether or not to accept paid advertising. One has to decide which other blogs to link to using the novel idea of the trackback process. One has to periodically update the design, and of course one has to pay for their blog to be hosted. I've been paying 15 dollars a month for over 15 years. In 2007, there was a such thing as the Black Blogger of the Year Award dedicated to the late blogger Aaron Hawkins. I won that year owing to my extensive coverage of candidate Barack Obama and the insightful conversations I was able to host at my blog. These days I have about 900 friends on Facebook. Those days I had 1500 hits a day. The greatest responsibility to my mind was to foster the proper environment for conversations that would live on the blog. To welcome the right kind of interlocutors and to push trolls away, to steer debate towards productive an insightful conversation, to entertain tangents that are useful and yet keep the related ideas corralled. It was work. Creative, rewarding work. It required skin in the game, not some disingenuous promise to promote free speech contingent on the arbitrary goodwill of advertisers and marketing networks. 

Today I engage with many of the same writers I've known for 20 years online at Facebook. Many of us are getting tired and have enjoined a litany of complaint. Fake news, censorship, filter bubbles, defriending and the ever present trolling and flame wars are on our frustrated minds. But I think the most egregious problem in social media is its abbreviation.

I don't speak Emoji. And unlike the editors of The New York Post, I can't very often come up with a catchy headline to tweet out. I may be verbose even for an essayist, but the things I find of interest require more than two or three sentences to say. I think that is true of all of human affairs. People should not be forced into abbreviated descriptions of their ideas and their selves by the constraints of social media. I want to be responsible for the claims I make, so having them disappear after I post them serves no good purpose. Abbreviation of time is unacceptable. It's not as if the world doesn't have enough disk space in the cloud to handle all of our words, or even all of our digital video. So why should I have less than everything I want to say be referenceable in an opus of compositions over the years? Why should I not have every objection or agreement from everyone who wants to react to my compositions as well? I get that with my blog. I do not get that with Reddit or WhatsApp. The complexity of human affairs requires more space and time than social media adequately facilitates. It's no wonder that people are so frustrated.

When Google killed Google Reader, the use of RSS syndication of blogs and other online periodical publications fell to a variety of inferior tools. But now an outfit called Feedly handles it well. I still follow a selection of excellent writers in what remains of the blogosphere. Medium.com has also become a popular place for writers in all sorts of subjects. But the domination of social media over the average person's internet reading is beginning to grate on everyone's nerves. I hope to remind people that there are still cultured and informative places of respite from the oligopoly of the mainstream social media, and it is worthy and capable of supporting us all. 

I call on developers to revisit the innovations of the blogosphere and to move forward in their further development. I give props to Typepad and the other blog ecosystems for the steady platforms they have provided for years of reliable operation. I encourage writers new and old to get into blogging and recreate and renew what we know the medium of blogging can do to inform and delight. I call on devotees of the well crafted word and visual arts to put your best work forward. I call on editors in the mainstream to spend time outside of the world of compromise for wealthy producers and nurture and support organic writers in this decentralized medium. 

We must own our own words. We must resist censorship. We must facilitate real informative debate. We must not be policed by bots and algorithms. 

We have done better. We can do better again. Bring blogs back. 

 

 

Dodge City

Q: Has America already done the "What would it be like for everyone to be armed?" experiment? Wasn't that Dodge City in the late 1800's? What did we find out from that?

A:

Well, without going into the details of history of Dodge City there are a few things that are obvious.

1. It didn’t start a second civil war.
2. The nation survived and prospered.
3. Additional territories became states.
4. It didn’t terrorize people so badly that they couldn’t bear to watch a romanticized Hollywood version.
5. Even if you get the entire history of Dodge City wrong and misrepresent it today, it’s irrelevant to today’s politics.

So that’s my initial take. Let me give you an additional take based on my personal opinion and experience.

I have long been an advocate of a punch in the nose. I was a big brother in the neighborhood and I believed in a fair fight. So if two kids had exchanged fighting words, it was up to me and other big brothers to let a fair fight happen. This is generally known as chivalry, it is an etiquette between men that allows them to settle their differences with honorable combat.

Today in America, a business, or a school can be sued into bankruptcy over an insult. Here on Quora, thousands of people ask countless variations of the same ‘is this racist’ question seeking public affirmation of a principle that has nothing to do with them.

So I assert this. If men would fight with honor it would settle matters between them without the necessity for thousands of journalists and citizens get embroiled into a controversy. We have become a nation of busybodies thinking that we can insert our opinion and votes into every issue under the sun. None of it is our business. It is a complete and total waste. People cannot take a punch, shutup and say “I quit, you win.” Instead we try to march and get millions of other people invested in our business, with the hope that the ultimate government or social power will be on our side. So we are on the road to becoming dependent on everybody but ourselves to resolve our disputes. This is the way of children. I repeat, this is the way of children.

Would you lose a fistfight or lose a lawsuit? Think about the impact on society.

I’m not suggesting that every dispute can be solved on the field of honor, or that trial by combat is always appropriate. I’m saying that there is an entire class of disputes that could be, but are instead played out in the media and the ‘court of public opinion’ that weakens our society and absolves people of personal responsibility for their conduct so they can become celebrity victims. That cycle has nothing to do with courage, justice or any other virtue. We are a weaker society because of it.

Now swing back to guns.

Here in Quora, you have the good fortune to hear directly from a class of individuals who understand the honor of combat, whether in service to their communities or nation or in defense of their own personal dignity, property and life. You will find in them a comprehensive understanding of what is a fair fight under the rule of law and what rules of engagement are when the rule of law is lost. This is an education that our life experience has failed to teach many of us. I am fortunate to have learned this way of the world.

If you haven’t learned these levels of escalation, you most likely associate, like Hollywood films instruct, that the cleaning or racking the slide of a pistol is a sign of irrevocable deadly intent. All I can tell you is that it is nowhere near so simple. Just like cracking a book does not have the same impact on every individual, possessing a firearm does not either. A scholar can tell a scholar. A fighter can tell a fighter.

Whether or not people choose to acknowledge it, there is a sizeable fraction of this country that possesses the virtue of courage and the discipline to engage properly to insure justice and the wisdom to know how to escalate disputes under the rule of law. If these are all new phrases to you, then I suggest you find a way to educate yourself in such matters. Human disputes are inevitable. It’s not about the gun. It’s about the mind. Admit you’ve not thought about it.

 

A Rude Idea About Gun Control

So there are 90 odd million gun owners in the US with something on the order of 300 million firearms in their possession. It occurred to me that with all the symbols and empty gestures flying around, maybe one ought to be considered. What if, in protest against gun control, gun owners were to go to their local police departments or city hall and donate 5 bullets. Just go and volunteer and say, you want to be on record as making America five bullets safer. 

It would then be on the municipal staff to safely dispose of that ammo. They would be overwhelmed. 

Of course the NRA knows better and has a common sense set of alternatives. But in terms of sending a message I can't think of a better one. 

Dignity on the Cheap

 

"Ain't no man or woman, no beast alive that can beat me, cause I was born to fight" -- Tracy Chapman

There are few phrases that manage to connect with my synapse loop and cascade my eyeballs into a backwards roll like 'self-esteem'. When I grew up in the 1970s it was called 'ego' even though it was more like monsters from the id. We called it the 'bogard', but that's a long story. Actually, it's not. You see as young men we were raised to be good sports and to compete. Compete HARD. And if you weren't competing against your toughest rivals, then you weren't actually competing. We called that 'chickenshit'.

Sometimes I wonder, but only in the past couple of months when I have been compared to Morgan Freeman by several waiters and strangers, if I am in the first generation of African American men to reach maturity without possessing a sense of utter defeat. It's nowhere in me, I assure you. And I've always known what it looked like by looking to my parents and family elders. Although when the song 'Sister Rosa' became very popular, I didn't get excited about revisiting her heroism and myth. I already knew a grandmother who would not take guff from anyone, white or black, much less some cracker ass bus driver. In short, I have managed to keep my balls in place, and yes I take it for granted.

My dignity has come at a price, a price I was willing to pay and take pride in. I have often said that I have never been anybody's 'fair-haired boy', by which I mean in my life I've only gotten one or two scholarships. Never more than $10,000 worth. I've never had a financial sponsor. I worked for everything I got. How American is that? And I've paid more back taxes and legal fees than a little. But I've never had to wrestle for my self-esteem, and I certainly never came to expect that I would get it from movies or television. I always had books and my own imagination working with the power of ideas.

So this afternoon, I saw a headline saying 'Marvel's Black Panther Marks a Major Milestone', and it almost sounded like the ghost of T. Coates when I read:

Those of us who are not white have considerably more trouble not only finding representation of ourselves in mass media and other arenas of public life, but also finding representation that indicates that our humanity is multi­faceted. Relating to characters onscreen is necessary not merely for us to feel seen and understood, but also for others who need to see and understand us. When it doesn’t happen, we are all the poorer for it.

Aww. I used to think that it was a waste of money for any television producer to tell the stories of the Brady Bunch. You see I had black authors to choose from. All of them in fact. All of literature from Mark Twain to Arthur C Clarke to Richard Wright to Jean Toomer. I read The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew (a little) and Danny Dunn without shame. I knew the little world of my neighborhood. I was destined to compete with everyone in the whole world. I wasn't chickenshit. So I read everybody's playbooks. After all, they were free. I had my library card. I would go to the Baldwin Hills Public Library on La Brea and check out the books with the rockets and the cars of the future. I just knew I was going to get a Fierbird III when I grew up. And why wouldn't I? I was going to grow up.

Somewhere around 1990 just before I turned 30 I was painfully reminded that everybody wasn't ready to fight for things that made sense. There were people standing in 'a cipher' bobbing their heads to Public Enemy thinking that the story of an ex-con was the light at the end of a dark tunnel of black life underground in America that had yet to see the sun. And I pitied the man who didn't know his father or found nothing to respect in his own family or neighborhood. I felt sorry for the man who felt an obligation to kill for his block, but was afraid to look for a job where he might face rejection. I listened with hard eyes to the man who wept in sympathy for the debilitating anger of Chester Himes. Every time I think of Chester Himes, I think of a drunk man throwing empty gin bottles out of the window of his tenement window hoping to hit the policeman, but ducking behind the curtains in case he actually does. I was reminded that everybody doesn't know the sound of the righteous drum, and maybe they heard it but stood up against the wall anyway, afraid to dance. Never learned to swim. Can't catch the rhythm of the stroke.

I was unleashed. I did all the things. And I moved to the Big Apple and stood in the shadows of the Colossus, and I was humbled. New York humbles men. But then I realized the NYC didn't understand what was going on in LA. Not at all. The New York Times blasted this congressman named Bruce Hershensohn as if he were running the state of California. So I started reading the Observer. I went another way, unashamed of my path. And I watched all the kids wear their X hats backwards waiting for Spike Lee to once again Do the Only Thing, because the Jews couldn't do it, and a black man needed a black movie made by a black man to truly be a black man. But I was already there and I didn't need the movie. I already read the book seven years before.

And I realized that the man on the street needed those television producers to tell the stories of the Brady Bunch. Because if my name was Joe Smith and I looked like an ordinary whiteboy, who actually gave a shit about me? I'd have to prove myself against all the other whiteboys, because there is nothing that matters less to a whiteboy than another whiteboy. James Baldwin wrote that. Who made Holden Caufield into somebody? A bunch of anonymous chickenshit whiteboys and their sorry parents, that's who. And Bill Clinton got elected because he went on TV, like he was dancing at the Cotton Club. Looky looky who has got soul! And I realized I had to get out of the street. I raised a family in the suburbs. Some in the South. Most on the West Coast. And I've watched the generation watch me watch TV and I wasn't taking it seriously. But now the expectation is that everybody has to have their own blockbuster movie superhero.

There's something strange about needing superheros and watching superhero movies in peacetime. The President said that America should have a big ass military parade. I thought about it, and it occurred to me that it's about time we stopped looking at Russell Crowe and Bruce Willis and bushy faced actors portraying Navy SEALS getting shot. Could we actually face the faces that march for once? The actual soldiers? Could we stop producing Brady Bunch stories and stop merchandising snapback ballcaps for once? Could we just for a moment or a generation if it's not asking too much, stop depending on millionaire producers to tell the stories we so desperately need for our self-esteem? Or is it too late for that?

I used to get 1000 hits a day on this blog. A decade ago it was poppin' off. I don't need the hits. I'm happy to have self-published. All of this blog never cost more than $2,500 to produce, and it's all still here. Comments and every word. Free. But now people speak in emojis. It's never to late for people who were born to fight. So these words are for you. You're not alone. And I'll go watch Black Panther and be entertained, but I won't need the fulfillment, and I won't need to wait for the next superhero story.

So let this be my black history story. Look at all of the heroes in the Tracy Chapman video. They didn't need an injection of multicultural vitamin M administered to them in their safe spaces. They didn't need warning labels on their food. They didn't express themselves with cardboard and Sharpies. They didn't beg you to like them or say something comforting in the comment section. They weren't chickenshit. They didn't squabble over slights and insults. They had dignity because they grew it in themselves, and they proved it every day to everybody. They competed HARD. That's a history worth remembering and replicating. It takes character. It takes you understanding the price of dignity.

 

Protection From Words

Despite the fact that feebleminded nitwits are accorded one vote in this great nation, they have proven incapable of staging the kind of revolution among their fatuous fraternity required to overturn the First Amendment rights of the rest of us. While we are mindful that a number of dubious ‘institutions of higher learning’ as well as many dainty lily-livered website editors have been cowed by the shrill whinging of the moronic meddlers, these are but farts in the wind: offensive, boorish, putrid and largely imperceptible by those who dealt it, yet soon to be dispersed but not forgotten.

The greater threat are those duplicitous criminal facilitators who have been made wealthy through the aggregation of the nickels and dimes of idiot attention, the purveyors of ‘reality’ in the media and legal professions always looking to cash in on the lowest common denominator. In league with the humorless screechy drama queens who interrupt sensible society with their obsessions, there is a cadre of cads, ever present and primed to overturn the works of more thoughtful and reflective citizens of the republic. These creepy comrades have managed to twist legitimate universities into Mobius contortions of civility and discourse which only appear to be two-sided.

The grownups out here are vigilant as well, and so we will not be intimidated by these mental midgets and their sinister sidekicks. Their machinations will fail under the instability of their Jenga practice of hollowing out institutions by pulling planks of common sense. Oh they will claim to be building a better America by attacking its Founders and foundation, but they are only toppling their own Babels with their psychobabble, as those of us with sweet simple reason have moved out of the shadows of their Mordor. So when their dark towers fall, we will be at a safe distance, and ultimately help the poor suffering dolts pick up the pieces.

Snowflakes will not prevail.

America's Farcical Aquatic Ceremony

Several weeks ago I cracked a joke about Rick & Morty in mixed company. Now it used to mean, mixed company, men and women. Now the country is more colorstruck. In this case mixed company means baby boom me and my pals, and genx newlyweds. One of the newlyweds heaved a sigh of relief and said something to the effect that he only thought young white guys like him understood the weird jokes of Rick & Morty. He was genuinely having a moment, but I'm also convinced that he thinks I needed to hear it.

This week, the President in his progressing coherence (up 3 points from 'covfefe' ) uttered a couple syllables that threw the chatting classes into a tizzy. The two syllables were 'shithole' but in the newspeak of today, a kind of backwards-masked religious interpretation of the dribbles off the lips of the Stooge In Chief, it implies a world historically racist conspiracy to destroy the People of Color. Of course this is to be expected of a certain type of trendy American sophisticate. And suddenly I understand, having watch him riding in a Ferarri with Seinfeld, why these sophisticates love Trevor Noah. There is nothing worse for pet people than to languish in their respective shithole countries with no hope of reaching New York City. I mean that's what the Statue of Liberty is all about right?. Them huddled masses from shithole countries will never breathe free outside of America, the greatest white country that ever was. You know, because of us. The good white people as compared to them alt-white.

The problem with white people today is that they are compelled to turn over every rock to find every racist white person in America and destroy them. Otherwise non-white people will destroy all of America, and so, they think, rightfully so. This is the motivation of the good white collective, whose actions and utterings are as stereotypically borne by fear and civilizing burden as it ever was. And of course it maybe never was that much, but who can really tell what history actually was without the racial spin?  I didn't ask for the favor and I don't thank them for it. After all, I think I know my interests. TLDR, dude. It was just racist alt-white colonialists same as it ever was.

I say nobody is effectively racist in America. You can't find anyone who actually wants to stop interracial marriage or desegregated schooling. You can't find any group of substance that wants to actively suppress minorities with the force of law in defiance of the Constitution. Sure there may be as many of those as there are violent felons serving time in prison, but that minority is already spoken for. Here's the thing.  Only somebody brainwashed about the power of white privilege and white supremacy thinks such cretins could actually take control of the country and start a race war. It would have to be a race war because, you know, people like Obama and Colin Powell, Clifford Alexander and Togo West know too much. But then that's the problem isn't it. The good white people are that much brainwashed. They are convinced that they and their pet constituencies are the only civilized folks remaining in the nation, and that the rest are just biding their time, sharpening their knives and suppressing the n-word from their public speech. I mean why else would Google, Facebook and Twitter go to such lengths to protect us from Pepe and you, know, absolutely free speech?  OK maybe not a race war, the good whites must think because we should all be driving Priuses and eschewing that which is non-sustainable. But oh those deplorables!

So it is asserted by the burdened political good white suffragette minority that the Constitution still stinks of racism, sexism, homophobia and several other arcane diseases I have not yet learned to pronounce. Intersectionality is one of those concepts not explicitly made real by Title IX, "So we still have a long way to go." Because America is racist and otherwise incorrect enough to keep the struggle and purge of alt-white alive and tweeting.  These political good whites are not suggesting that they are genetically superior, even though everybody wants to sleep with George Clooney. They are merely culturally and intellectually superior according to their own interpretation of themselves. That's why their concerns for the plight of minorities must never be thwarted, why they must be granted powers. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony, farcical aquatic ceremonies mean any decisions made under auspices of non-politically correct speech. Of course if this minority of political good whites are outvoted by the aquatics, they don pink hats and make large parades. But perhaps I interpolate, project and protest too much.

If you must have some clearer understanding of my position, I take the side of King Arthur who actually existed and by most measures was considered a very good king indeed. The constitutional peasant did not actually exist. And yet his complaint resonates with the burdened political whiners ever out to drown racist witches among themselves, the winners of the 2016 election which surely could not have been an actual mandate from the masses, but some farcical aquatic ceremony.

It's the problem I have with these so-called 'white people'. They're trying to look good as white people. Which of course makes them white people. I only need people to be people. It doesn't give me a headache because when I see the same thing in Muslims trying to out Muslim other infidel Muslims I recognize the dysfunctional pattern. It's all about people desperate to represent. It's all moral posturing and some of it is fakery. But the biggest fault in the logic is that it assumes various presumptions about non-whites or non-Muslims. That basically without this 'proper' representation, non-whites would doom whites and infidel Muslims would doom Muslims. It demonstrates a profound a lack of faith in individual discernment, and the predestined priority of group affiliation. I imagine people who are desperately trying to be white or Muslim or gay or French have other problems as well, but I'm fundamentally talking about the rigidity of certain identities. Self-fulfilling bullshit.

There is a good side of the other side of the same coin of identity. It is the identity which rejects the use of race or sex. But it's actually not an identity but a set of ideas, and from these concepts one draws the power of moral consistency which needs not police speech with the assumption that some racial or sexuality based apocalypse lies just beneath the surface in everyone who uses the wrong fork. The warmth of these ideas are not strongly represented in the American public these days, there are holes in the edifice of our society and their heat has leaked out into the cold. I am thinking of Steven Pinker as a stoker and kindler of such ideas.

I want to take a little side tangent into Pinker for a moment, as I am reading his Blank Slate for the first time. Prior to my having started reading this book, I got into a debate with a friend who takes some pride in making intersectional identity a focus of politics and is generally quick to talk about what good whites must do. On his way to getting on one of my nerves he suggested that "Judeo-Christian" was just an anti-intellectual figleag and dog-whistle for Fundamentalist Christians to communicate their contempt and hatred for Muslims; that Jews had nothing to do with this neo-logism which has no historical use. If there is a proper term it is 'Abrahamic' and must include poor brown Muslims otherwise it is just another alt-white racist conspiracy. I probably did a poor job of showing how his interpretation would have Hillsdale College erased from existence as well as all intellectual Conservatives. But perhaps he and others need to hear something from Pinker. To wit:

For millennia, the major theories of human nature have come from religion.  The Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, offers explanations for much of the subject matter now studied by biology and psychology. Humans are made in the image of God and are unrelated to animals.  Women are derivative of men and destined to be ruled by them.  The mind is an immaterial substance: it has powers possessed by no purely physical structure, and can continue to exist when the body dies.  The mind is made up of several components, including a moral sense, an ability to love, a capacity for reason that recognizes whether an act conforms to ideals of goodness, and a decision faculty that chooses how to behave. Although the decision faculty is not bound by the laws of cause and effect, it has an innate tendency to choose sin. Our cognitive and perceptual faculties work accurately because God implanted ideals in them that correspond to reality and because he coordinates their functioning with the outside world. Mental health comes from recognizing God’s purpose, choosing good and repenting sin, and loving God and one’s fellow humans for God’s sake.

Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (pp. 1-2). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

That's hardly enough of Pinker to find the proper antidote for the social essentialism of the good whites whose own whiteness they only deconstruct into a racist and anti-racist dualism. But it would go a bit too far to show his understanding of Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes whose worldviews instruct those like myself who would defend Western Civilization and acknowledge its Judeo-Christian roots with proper respect, over the revisionist view good whites offer as an interminable struggle between various whites to overcome their evil alt-whiteness.

So the farcical aquatic ceremony today, let's call it philosophy. And I expect to add psychology to that over the next few years of study. It's obvious to me that 2016 was a referendum on the economic condition of blue collar working whites who worked a little too hard and didn't get enough money or attention from the good white party, which was busy protecting People of Color from the likes of Paula Deen and intersectionals from the ghost of Anita Bryant.  But economics are not democratic and subject to the dictates of good white political correctness, and therefore farcical and evil. Of course that means electing a man of few coherent diplomatic paragraphs will prove no better than electing a man who is not much more than coherent diplomatic paragraphs. QED. 

Diversity & Multiculturalism: The Semiotic Swamp Realized

They are basically good ideas that have been taken to extremes by well-meaning, foolish people. The result is a contingent of essentially nihilist non-conformists that undermine national unity, which is our best understood method of civilization.

A quick and dirty analogy is clothing. Diversity and multiculturalism are like different styles and colors of clothing. They can indicate interesting and important things about people but underneath people are all the same, and therefore the laws governing people should not take the clothes they are wearing into consideration. Society would be stifling and oppressive if everyone were forced to wear the same color and style of clothing. On the other hand if everybody wore completely different color and style combinations, fashion would be meaningless. Furthermore, how could you tell a policeman from a doctor?

Diversity and multiculturalism, like any political philosophy or cultural development in society must serve a higher purpose. I think proponents of these ideas have forgotten the purpose and become rigid defenders of their methods. I also think there is very little agreement or discipline within the ranks of those proponents about how as much as why. So in that regard ‘diversity and multiculturalism’ has become a minor, very young religion complete with its sacraments, holy writs, prophets and Philistines.

This development began in the late 80s, as I recall, with an answer book to E.D. Hirsch’s “Cultural Literacy” and Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind”. It was the Fifth Graywolf Annual entitled “Multicultural Literacy: Opening the American Mind”. Also notable in my education about this matter are Nathan Glazer’s “We Are All Multiculturalists Now” and Marshall Blonsky’s “American Mythologies”.

At this point, it is clear that the transformation of the American universities is rather complete, and I find myself in agreement with Blonsky and Bloom. The new ways of teaching have produced a generation of thinkers that don’t quite understand the origins of their values, and yet take their rote understanding of things very seriously. This applies to those in the subjective liberal arts, whereas those in the sciences are more immune. These days I am rather convinced that my interpretation of this recent history is correct by examining the relationship between people and information technology, including the shape and content of social media and its effect on cultural content production and political idea formation. The technology people won, and there is no art outside of electronic media that holds the attention of the masses of Americans. I find this tragic for the Humanities, but if you read the trajectories of those five books, you can see that the Humanities did it to itself by decoupling itself from the traditions of Western thought & history. And now finds itself adrift in what I call the Semiotic Swamp.

Immediately to my right on the bookshelf next to my desk is the Prentice Hall Guide to English Literature. I open to a random page. 518. The entry is ‘Feuilleton’. I was a computer science major, and I know what that word means. That makes me rather unusual in a nation whose blockbuster movies center around superheroes, childish animations and evil clowns and the most significant aspects of one’s importance as a citizen are considered to be their race and sexual preference.

I think a great deal of disappointment and suffering will ensue from the foolish ways in which diversity and multiculturalism have run off the rails of probity. We will be transformed, and we will survive, because those who possess the courage to deal with history honestly will reveal the folly. Those of us who defy wishful thinking will remain. And so it goes.

Obligatory Seriousness on Coates v West

Via Loury & McWhorter. (h/t Bill Benzon)

A couple points written in realtime.

1. Neoliberal doesn't mean conservative, it means pro-corporate in order to raise tax revenues to fund the welfare state. I expect very much that applies to Coates. So what.
2. I'll take West over Coates any day.
3. Yes Coates is more culturally impactful, but I'm not part of that conversation. I don't think much is being said.
4. "There's no politics in Coates, West". Yeah, I think academics over analyze politics.
5. McWhorter: Yes Coates fetishizes White Supremacy. I agree with West's criticism, but again, so what. If Coates is an 'artist' and yeah I generally think he's a creative, not a political figure. He's not refining a politics. West is an agent-provocateur but he's not leading a political party any longer. Coates, is a neo-liberal, just like Obama was.
6. [14:55] Racial essentialism: Loury stretches the size of the scope of the set of problems that can be legitimately synthesized by black intellectuals. Yes, if Coates is a bubble, then West is a bubble. Good comments on capitalism.
7. [19:40] What is the prescription? Biased narrative and development narrative. The issue is performance. Right. Uncontroversial simple facts. Interesting that he has to be so passionate about speaking the obvious. He must be speaking to a world of clueless newbs and willful fools. Afro-studies hustle. Heh. It's a shell game. It's a lie.
8. [25:30] Blackademia. Different planet. Yeah. I know that. I knew that.

 

So by minute 30 I am finding this tiresome. The satirical novel... blah blah. I would probably write it if it made me rich, but I have a better chance by doing something else. So at [31:14] I turned it off, because now they're getting hopeful. But thinking about the satirical novel reminds me that if Coates can be made a star, anybody can, and somebody will next. And then we'll have a new coterie of HNICs to maybe snipe at each other for nickels of publicity. It's all theatre, but it's not a black owned theatre. So what else is new? I feel like the Nigerian physicist program manager at JPL in all this. Who cares about African Americans? Africans don't. Perhaps it's time to close the door on the black intellectual promise. It's like Toqueville. Everybody goes back to Toqueville and everybody goes back to DuBois. There will never be another and there's really not much else to say, than a kind of black weather report in a warming economic climate. In that regard, if West is right, then Coates believes in White Supremacy's global cooling of race relations, and he's playing his role to try to keep that idea alive against all reality. Here's the black weather report for today. Coates can be the weatherman with a bow tie. It's all shtick.

The weird thing is that I'm not hungry for any of that participation. Occasionally it attracts my curiosity, and sometimes I hold out hope for a new take. But the most interesting thing I've heard about race in the past few years is that 'douchebag' is the perfect way to describe that kind of bad actor we all know and hate. It's not the Nazi. It's the douchebag, and everybody has the ethics to punish him. But I suppose this black intellectual is supposed to change the way we behave so no douchebag can ever make it past the first trimester? Again I say, black Americans are doing, every day, exactly what they want to and nobody is stopping them. Not even the other black Americans who try so desperately. Not my monkey. Not my circus.

The HashFlare Scenario

Somebody asked a question about HashFlare, which is a website that promises to mine Bitcoin for you, for a small fee. I took the time and worked out some of the economics of Bitcoin mining. I think it will be very instructive:

Q. How much money do I need to invest if I want to make 3 bitcoins a day by investing in a cloud mining platform like Hash Flare?

A. Uh. You can’t afford it.

In January 2016, 1TH/s would get you 0.004 BTC per day. 
If you wanted 3.0 BTC / day you would need 750 TH/s of compute power.

The Antminer S9 costs $2000 each and delivers 14 TH/s of performance. Therefore you would need a rack of 54 of them. Each Antminer S9 draws 1600W of power. So at 10cents per KWh, each Antminer S9 is going to cost $3.84 per day x 54 = $207.36 of electricity per day.

So if I’m HashFlare and I’m leasing the ability to mine 3.0 BTC/day my capital cost is 54 x 2000 = 108,000. But let’s say I get a discount and can get a bulk order of Antminers S9s at 10% off. (Fat chance, but let’s assume it.)

97,200 financed at 5% interest over 3 years works out to about 2915.00 per month. Plus electricity cost of about 6225.00 per month. That’s a 3 year cost of approximately 329,040. Let’s round that out to be $330,000 bucks.

So if I’m HashFlare, I’m going to mark that up a whole lot to cover my costs. Let’s see how much.

So let’s look at the SHA-256 Plan.

That plan says $1.50 per month gets you 10 GH/s. So $150 per month will get you 1 TH/s and therefore $2100 per month will get you one month of 1 Antminer S9 performance, and you don’t pay for electricity. Still, you need 54 of those to mine 3 BTC per day. Therefore you’d have to pay $113,400 per month to Hash Flare. That sounds about right.

Now 3 BTC/day at a steady $4000 per Bitcoin gets you $12,000 per day. In a month that’s $360,000. That would give you a net profit of almost a quarter million dollars per month. Here’s the problem. HashFlare is not going to give you that price unless you lock it in for a year. Which means you have to promise them a 1.36 million dollar contract per year.

See the problem here? If you can afford to spend $1.36 million per year to pay Hash Flare, why wouldn’t you just buy the hardware and electricity yourself for $330,000 over three years?

Well of course you wouldn’t. You’d be in the same business as HashFlare making 4.08 million over 3 years on costs of $330,000. And guess what? That’s a bigger profit than you’d make mining BTC. HashFlare would make 12x investment on you no matter what the price of BTC is. You would make 3x profit depending on the price of BTC. Meaning HashFlare only needs your business for 1 month to cover their investment. Oh but wait, you’ve signed up for a year. Quit early and I bet you pay a fee.

Now the big curve ball is that now you see it’s a much better business model to be in the HashFlare business than to mine BTC yourself. But then you’d have to compete with HashFlare. And the more people who get into the HashFlare business (and the pure mining business) the more the demand for Antiminer S9s goes, and the the more net hashing power there is in the world to mine BTC. So the cost of Antminer S9s goes up, and the net ability for 14 TH/s to actually mine 0.004BTC goes down.

 

The Day the Bandwidth Died

I do know how to camp, and even backpack. But I have never had to work out my survival skills. I bought my first SERE book when I was 22 in college. I grew up with the habit of shopping at Army Surplus stores for my gear, but I never read anything before that. It seemed impossibly difficult. I was living in the San Fernando Valley.

Two days ago my cable modem slipped in and out of consciousness. Since I work at home, it made a lot of my work very difficult, if not impossible. I had a series of frustrations beginning Thursday afternoon with my ability to do certain things on the network. So I spent a lot of time with the limited networking skills I have to try and isolate the problem. I finally nailed it to my cable modem, not the wiring, not the machine, not the hub. 

So I get on the phone with Frontier, who has inherited FIOS from Verizon in California much to my dismay. They have an automatic message that says they have 'detected a problem with your equipment' and puts me on a special hold. I sense this is bullshit, and I expect to hear it the next time I call. I go through a routine with the tech I get, she tells me the problem is fixed, but it is not. I can't VPN to my customer, with whom I've made a promise that now lies broken, over some simple stuff I could fix in literally 10 minutes. They of course are on the other side of the world, as is my boss with whom I could troubleshoot under ordinary circumstances. 

I get frustrated and try to get them to send me a new cable modem. That will take 3-5 business days. Meanwhile, my Apple TV doesn't work. My XBox doesn't work. Alexa doesn't work. The day is over, and my relaxation cannot take place. My daughter misses her daily yoga session from YouTube. Bossman tells me that I should just order a new cable modem from Amazon. That's done. It only costs $50 bucks. Really? I could have done this a long time ago. Amazon guarantees Friday delivery. Yeah what time Friday?

My Thursday becomes Friday with no solution in hand. My Friday is their Saturday so they can expect no resolution until next week. I try tethering. I don't have enough bars on my phone. It's Friday. I'm getting pissed. I head to Starbucks. I sit at the end of the long table amongst the chatter and noise. There are at least 20 people in here working on laptops. I get on the wifi. This confirms that it's not my machine. I can tether here too. But it's too loud for me to concentrate. I need space, more space than this. My company has a WeWork membership. I head to WeWork.

I figure I should reserve a room. I park close to the WeWork office. It's afternoon. I can't remember what I had for lunch. I have no bars. I try to download the app. It takes 10 minutes. I try to login, my password doesn't work. I reset my password. My new password doesn't work. I walk into the office towers in Manhattan Beach. There is no listing except 'Virtual Offices'. I jab the elevator button. It doesn't light. I jab it again. It's a talking elevator; I go to the third floor. "No this is not WeWork, they are in the other building". I go back down the elevator and across the plaza. I come to the security reception. Where is WeWork? "Right here, sir". I'm an idiot. It's right in front of me on the first floor. I come into the place and "Who are you visting?" No, my company has a membership, I'd like to reserve a desk. She cannot find my company or me in the system. "What is your home office?'" No, we just use the facility periodically. Their whole membership regime has changed. Damned startup companies. $50 to rent a desk for the day. No thank you. I leave and go back home.

I've got a cable modem coming sometime today. I'm supposed to meet my wife in the Valley for a weekend celebration at a vacation rental house. It's for my sister's 50th birthday. I ask if it has wifi. Yes, and a full sized office. I can maybe do some work there. But first I have to finish packing and maybe get my cable modem delivered. At home I pack. The cable modem arrives at 3, just as I was on my way out the door to avoid rush hour. I unpack it and try to install it. it doesn't work. I've had it. I grab my gear and go. I have to stop in Westwood to pick up something from the Amazon store. I ordered a laptop stand. It will show up tomorrow, Saturday. Today, Friday, there are two boxes of unknown goodies I have to ferry to the Valley.This day is over. I got no work done. I am tired. I have no bandwidth. It is 5pm and I am on the 405 northbound going 12 mph. 

I arrive in Westwood at 6:25, 20 minutes later than I expected. It's only 12 miles from my house and it took 90 minutes. Friday rush hour traffic. Every time I turn on the radio, they're talking about an Italian actress who was raped by Hollywood's douchebag of the hour. Some fathead named Weinstein. She's going to get a million dollars. Like I should care. I find a parking space 4 blocks from the store. There is semi-dried mud behind the tailgate of my truck which is filled with catering equipment for the party. I switch to walking instructions. Siri doesn't want to tell me where the Amazon store is. How convenient. Google doesn't care. I find the store. There are four sets of lockers. My wife doesn't know which locker the code applies to. It's locker #1, the first one I try. It is only the second thing I've done all day that worked the first time. I did have a good bowl of cereal this morning. I give thanks for the small things, but my teeth are still gritted. I enter the code, the locker pops open. I take out the first box, the second one won't be removed without help from the staffers behind the wall. I run with the boxes back to my truck thinking about a center of gravity problem for high school students. 

I ask my wife to send me her location. I don't have the address to the house. She sends me a pin through iMessage. It's 40 minutes away. I get back onto the 405. It's getting dark. The location she sent was someplace she was at when I called, not the address of the actual house. I'm in the Valley, it's dark. I've pulled over to a side street at a stop sign, making an aggravated phone call. Where am I supposed to go? A cop whoops up behind me. I move along. These are not the droids you are looking for.  25 minutes later, I still have no text in return with the proper address. It's 7:30 and I have to pee, and eat but most of all drink. I have officially told the world to fuck off. I find a bar on Ventura Boulevard.

It took a bowl of mussels and a shot of Angel's Envy to set my situation in perspective. This is my first world problem, combined with two other personal problems that are none of your business that made a dogs breakfast of my Friday. It is 9pm, I leave the parking structure. There is a brand new grey Porsche 911 Turbo parked next to my truck. I'm in Sherman Oaks. Another section of America doing way better than me. I could have been an entertainment lawyer. I drive northeast to the place. I am behind a Bentley in traffic. Traffic that never relents. I finally arrive and as I unpack, I realize that I have left my glasses and contact lenses back home. I have one extra contact lens in my dopp kit. I will have to wake up and drive home early in the morning with one good eye. 

My world. That small world under my control and discipline, failed to operate on Friday. I'm still angry about it. I'm still frustrated that such a combination of stupid small things stopped what I call progress. I want to take a hard left turn and run off road. I want to Survive, Evade, Resist and Escape. I want simplicity. I want the alternative. I know I am not held hostage by this, but it is what I have arranged my life around. The zombies are not going to rescue me from it. I'll have to change it all myself. Lord help me, I'll probably try.

They Said It Couldn't Be Done

I'm listening to the grinding sound of FUD over cryptocurrencies. It's annoying me to no end. I'd just like to review a few things I've heard in the past from the technically illiterate in consideration of the future of information technology. 

They said software would always and only be used by scientists for science, or by engineers for engineering but that business managers would never have computers on their desks. They said that only businesses would never use UNIX and that IBM would put all of those other guys out of business. They said that TCP/IP was never going to replace Banyan Vines in businesses. They said that AS/400 was an unbeatable operating system for business and that peer to peer networking wasn't necessary. They said that Token Ring was superior to Ethernet and would win in the marketplace.

They said that Triple DES was as secure as cryptography could get and that anything more secure than that could never be in the public domain. They said that MP3s and file sharing was only for piracy. They said the music industry would never go along with something like MP3s. They said that the taxes applied to the sales of blank CDs would satisfy the artists and labels to makeup for money lost to piracy. They said that the addition of digital music would shrink the entire market. They said podcasts wouldn't matter and could never compete with content on broadcast TV.

They said that AOL / TimeWarner would be the industry leader and determine the future of content delivery on the internet. They said the Steve Case was the most brilliant businessman who understood IT. They said that nobody would be able to solve the last mile problem of fiber to the home. They said broadcast TV would last forever. They said nobody in the mainstream would ever buy $2500 computers. They said nobody would sell personal computers to the public on credit. They said Scientific Atlanta was the only company that could win the settop box wars. They said there could be no possible business model that would satisfy the major studios and convince them to put their best properties online.

They said ecommerce was doomed because nobody would trust putting their credit card information online. They said that travel agents were here to stay because websites could never be sophisticated enough to handle airlines, hotels or car rental agencies. They said money lost in the dot com bubble proved bricks would always beat clicks. They said all of Silicon Valley was like Pets.com. 

They said that the digital divide was permanent and there was actually no good reason for black Americans to go online. They said that nobody would get news from online and that online advertising was not enough to sustain any real business model. They said bloggers could never influence real opinion. They said that Presidential campaigns didn't need to pay attention to 'netroots'. They said people who sat in front of terminals to write onto the internet couldn't be taken seriously, that it was all virtual and had no impact on real life. 

They said nobody would buy books online. Then they said nobody would buy shoes online. Then they said nobody would buy clothes online. Then they said nobody would buy groceries online. They said nobody would file their taxes online. They said nobody would pay bills online. They said nobody would buy cars online. They said nobody would rent apartments online. They said nobody would buy and sell securities online. They said nobody would contribute to charities online. 

They said Blockbuster was not threatened by online upstarts. They said Microsoft couldn't build a gaming console. They said the Blackberry was the business phone. They said Nokia could never be threatened by Apple. They said people would never watch video and movies on their phones. They said there was no use for wireless internet connectivity. They said wifi was only for the elite, not ordinary people. They said there would never be wifi on commercial airliners. They said a free operating system could not beat Microsoft Windows. They said separating the browser from Windows would kill Microsoft. They said applications run on browsers would never replace fat clients. 

They said open source software could not beat proprietary software. They said databases on mainframes would never be threatened by decentralized databases. They said no serious business could be run without a bricks address. They said ordinary people would not need or want 64bit computers. They said videogames could never make as much money as movies. They said tablets were ridiculous and nobody would have a tablet and a phone. They said Facebook was just for teens. They said Twitter was just for teens. They said online dating was just a fad. They said proprietary software was more secure than open source software. 

Today they are saying Bitcoin is worthless. 

So is a single bitcoin worth $500,000, $5,000, $500 or $0? I’m inclined to say $0, especially if bitcoin’s value depends on it being adopted as a global digital currency to replace dollars. There is no chance whatsoever that bitcoin can displace the dollar, for the simple reason that it is badly designed. Bitcoin can handle a pathetically small number of transactions, and uses an inordinate amount of electricity to do so, making it entirely unsuitable to replace ordinary money.

Even if bitcoin worked better, it is in a Catch-22 because of Gresham’s law, the nostrum that bad money drives out good. Given the choice of spending inflationary government-issued money or something which holds its value, everyone would spend the bad paper stuff and hoard the bitcoin. You wouldn’t want to be the person who spent 10,000 bitcoins on two pizzas in 2010, when a bitcoin was worth a fraction of a cent. Those bitcoins are now worth $40 million. But if no one spends bitcoin, it will never get established as a currency.

Bitcoin's value depends upon the genius of its invention and the conviction of those engineers and investors who understand that and their willingness to build upon its technology. Same as any other invention. The world will make room for it because it works better than the alternatives. The genie is out of the bottle. It will be adapted and perfected. It is inevitable. Why? Because the idea is entirely too massive to be ignored, just like open source software. Except digital currency is even bigger. It's bigger than junk bonds in the 80s. It's bigger than rural electrification in the 30s. It's about as big as double entry accounting. That's how deep this is going to go. I guarantee you. 

But there's basically one conspiracy, and that is to keep Coinbase as the only exchange in the US with access to a bank account. I can't imagine there will be no other bank to take on that challenge, but I can imagine people at the SEC being whispered to. 

A Straight Line

What has gotten me most upset over the past few days in the time I've spent chatting with my fellows in the Chatting Class is the temptation towards vigilantism by proxy. I am annoyed by their indications that they want to influence the progress of the law and law enforcement towards a specific sensitivity. They want the President to say something extra hostile to white supremacists, racists, Nazis, neo-confederates and other anti-semitic rabble who have infested the streets of Charlottesville. I don't need him to. I'm not sure that I want him to. So I wrote:

Some people are puzzled that I have no need for Trump to issue comforting platitudes, and that I was never impressed by those of the prior President. Perhaps this video will help you understand my perspective.

Today I have found too many people asking for things they should understand cannot be guaranteed, especially by the system which has put them in the embarrassing position of not being satisfied by political rhetoric, and yet demanding more political rhetoric. Politically correct rhetoric.

Somebody told me that Barack Obama got one million retweets today. Like that's going to help. 

I happen to drill into the simple statement by the President that there are bad actors on all sides. That is because I want the President to mete out appropriate punishment according to the law, without regard to the animus of any side against the perpetrators of civil unrest and criminal acts. In other words if anti-Nazi protesters are arrested and charged with assault and Nazis are arrested and charged with assault, they are equally wrong. My expression of this idea has been called 'moral equivalence' and I sense this objection as well as some political partisanship at work. But my rationale comes from a different place, a place relatively devoid of fear. 

When I saw the tapes of the violent rally at Berkeley earlier this year I was fascinated. There is something instinctual within me asking me exactly what I would do if I were in that situation. Because I know if that were my neighborhood, I would have to be there. I certainly would not go there from here, nor would I go to Ferguson or any other place on the map where I don't actually live. But if it came to me, how would I handle it? I ask because it is something of a foregone conclusion. I know myself. I know my instincts. I would fight. 

I don't want to. I want to talk myself out of it. I want to rationalize a kind of pacifism. But I know better. I can handle violence, I can dispense violence. I'm stronger than most and I'm better prepared than most. I know that I could make a difference and I feel a strong obligation to protect the innocent. I've done it before, and I'm likely to do it again. I would insert myself in between aggressors and innocents and I would be aggressive towards attackers. It's not my job. It's not my desire, but it is within my capacity. 

I don't have the fear that I would be helpless against aggressors. That is because I have studied what I have in the past four years. It has rearranged my sense of responsibility and civic duty. But here's one simple rule that makes even more sense than ever. Don't go to stupid places where stupid people are doing stupid things. That describes Charlottesville and Ferguson and anywhere that people have gone feral out in the streets wanting to clash and burn. I understand what it means to calculate the amount of force necessary to subdue. You don't enter into such decisions lightly. Ever. This is what it feels like to think like I think, as someone with guns and training. And even without fear, one understands that on any day at any moment a simple mistake or oversight in a confrontation can mean the end of your health, even the end of your life. As they say in college, you go big or you go home. That's easy. I'm going home. 

There's a great scene from a corny movie in which Dr. David Banner who is also The Incredible Hulk reveals his secret. In the comic book world, everyone knows that the good doctor is a mild mannered genius who, when angered, becomes a phenomenally indestructible beast. The angrier he gets, the more terrifyingly huge he becomes, and in his rage he is capable of leveling skyscrapers. As the monstrous enemy approaches Banner and his fellow Avengers, Captain America says that it's about time for Banner to get angry. He replies "That's my secret, I'm always angry". The transformation from Banner to Hulk is part of all of us. As Banner reveals that he is always angry we are shocked to know that his Hulk powers were always under his control, that he was never a madman, but that he possesses the explicit knowledge of self that channels his fury into a righteous direction. He's not passive aggressive. He's simply smarter and more powerful than anyone else and he allows the myth to remain. David Banner is heroic. 

The heroic is timeless, there is an arrow of dedication and effort in that direction. Some just look that way, some walk that way, some run. I'm a late jogger who quickly tires. But I am on the path. So I'm particularly vulnerable. I might make a stupid sacrifice. But I know why the existence of white supremacists, Nazis and other violators of the peace don't concern me to the point at which I am demanding that words from the bully pulpit calm my nerves. I recognize my brothers on that path. I know those employed in law enforcement and sworn to duty are ready to make the proper decision. They too are always angry at bad actors, and they too need no words of reassurance. 

But the most important thing about those who are sworn to protect and serve is that they understand on the daily how important it is to serve consistently. For them, a violation of the law is a violation of the law without regard to person. They are a key element in our justice system because they do not have the privilege of arresting people for evil thoughts. They don't have the need to hear specific denouncements of impassioned righteous citizens standing up for what they believe in. They don't need flags. They themselves are Banners. Now look at the picture. Here's my caption. "Whatever dude. Just don't cross the line."

I don't expect everybody to have the self-possession of peace officers, but I do expect them to hold off on thinking about changing the law. There is nothing in our system that is ill-prepared to handle the conflicts of the meatheads in Charlottesville. I question the sensibleness of those who set off to travel to that stupid place on that stupid day, and those who are calling for magic words. And I seek to confront, with this essay, the instinct to go tribal and ask for extraordinary law. Heroes aren't triggered.  

The problem with today's multiculturalism is that it is different than pluralism. Pluralism is the proper ethos for America, multiculturalism is not. The difference can be explained simply by assuming Americans can be divided into two tribes:

Ideological Tribe A
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained without regard to race, creed, color, sexual preference, etc..

Ideological Tribe B
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained with special regard to race, creed, color, sexual preference, etc.

Some might think that the presence of Nazis makes this a different kind of situation, that there is something that requires special regard for the violators of protected classes. That is the kind of distinction that is best resolved by the deliberations of judges and juries. In the streets, there is simply law and lawlessness. Cross the line and you are arrested. You might expect that the character of the counter demonstrations to matter. Let me say that it does, but let me also say, and this is important, that when I claim to be Sheepdog, that this is a tribal association. If I have any claim to the warrior mystique or the heroic path or the ways of the wise, all of that is tribal. So maybe I'm Ideological Tribe A, but I'm also in that Sheepdog tribe.

All of those tribal associations must remain subordinate to the rule of law.

The more we tinker with the rule of law from our tribal perspectives, the less applicable that rule of law becomes. When it becomes easy to defy the rule of law, when it becomes easy to mock police officer's dedication and service. So yes, when my Jewish friend says nothing is going to stop him from traveling to that stupid place to confront those stupid Nazis, I respect his tribe. I respect his motivation. But I don't respect his demand for the President to speak in defense of his tribe and specifically against another tribe. That's not how the rule of law is maintained. The rule of law does not have multicultural and tribal voodoo words sprinkled in with it. A moment's consideration reveals that is precisely what certain partisan Americans are screaming about now, the allegation that the President doesn't want to alienate white nationalists. 

That of course is a call to come up with a special policy in the law to presume the guilt of white nationalists and to jump the gun accordingly when they are found in stupid places doing stupid things. Pre-emption. Predisposition. Precrime. The existence of a Nazi, they say,  is like a man holding a sword above the head of another. Simply arrest him before he swings it. The existence of a swastika is hate speech which should be taken as incitement to a violent act. This is the blurring of the line that I cannot tolerate, not because Nazis don't deserve it, not because nobody deserves it, but because we cannot provide a system smart enough and consistent enough to have that standard as law. 

You are going to have to step out of your house and put on your suit of armor and be prepared to clash in the streets, representing your tribe in defiance of the rule of law if you want to punch Nazis. With contempt for police officers, sheepdogs, and the rule of law, you are going to have to descend to the level of Nazis who stand in contempt of American society. When America's disgust with Nazis is not sufficient for you, get out of line and go bust some heads. Do it. Cross the line. 

With regards to Ferguson I wrote:

Ferguson burning is a good thing. 

They say that good fences make good neighbors. I say that anger and frustration are just like farts in the wind. Nothing political really matters until people are ready to burn things down. It makes for good dividing lines. The Ferguson mob is a lynch mob, there's no question about that. If they could get their hands on The Man, they would stone him. That's good news. It has clarity. It shows that people actually have the courage of their convictions, they are putting their money where their mouths are. We, at long last, have a proper mob.

Go ahead and join a proper mob. If Antifa is your mob, represent. Just don't expect support from citizens who desire the rule of law. If Occupy is your mob, get out there son. Show 'em what you're made of. But understand with clarity that you have decided to abandon your faith in democratic processes and institutions. Of course they are not perfect. Of course they need maintenance and reform. Don't pretend that your chants and fists and flags are instruments of democracy and law.

Charlottesville has a bunch of tribes attempting to overthrow the authority of the courts now deliberating a lawsuit on the proper location of certain Civil War statues, a gift of artifacts of history. I hardly compare but, I consider my blog a gift of historical artifacts. Look at the picture again. My website now hosts a confederate flag, plain as day. Do I get scrubbed? I'm going to take a chance and see if Facebook can handle this kind of free speech. Maybe it can, maybe it cant. We'll see. 

In conclusion, I recognize all sorts of American tribes. Ideological tribes. All of which participate in our system of elections and are subordinate to the rule of law. That law should make no exceptions and be no respecter of persons or tribes. I oppose the idea that the Executive Branch make any exceptions or call out specific partisan enemies for any reason, that it treats all Americans equally with respect to their standing or what stupidity they profess or enact in public. They are either law upholders or law breakers. There is no social justice, there is society and all its tribes and the American justice system which stands in place for those who break the law. It's a simple and straight line. Know which side you're on and stop trying to bend it. Yeah yeah yeah I've heard your arguments before. Whatever dude. Just don't cross the line. 

Obligatory Seriousness on White Nationalists, Antifa & Charlottesville

So I figure that when we end the last term of Donald we will enter the seventh inning stretch of the Culture Wars. The game is not nearly over, shit hasn't gotten real enough yet. It will only come when there are enough burned buildings and dead bodies to stop the blathering in its tracks. 

I've been thinking about the hug. Men in Los Angeles, particularly straight black men (since such things have to be said) essentially starting grasping each other after the Riots. It was an evolution in dap that was created by the fact of the Riots over the beating of Rodney King, and the failure of a jury to crucify the four officers complicit in that beating. It was only after the buildings were burned to the ground, after Korean storekeepers hardened up their defenses to the level of lethality, after 64 people were dead, after similar riots in cities all over the country were over and people were picking up fragments of their lives from the ashes. It was only after all that when people responded with tenderness and a new kind of civility arose. It was only after the election of Riordan as mayor of Los Angeles that calmer heads prevailed. It was only after people lost fingers that they stopped pointing fingers and demanded healing. It was only then that these black men in Los Angeles started acknowledging their own humanity in a new and purposeful way. It was the peace that war demanded. And now American men hug that way on the regular. 

Our identity politics have been ratcheting up the stakes of the continuing Culture Wars but they haven't reached a crescendo. The failures of the multiple intersectional third wave theoretical tentacles on the appropriate pronouns for pet groups, while crumbling to its foundations, have not yet lost their grip on the popular imaginations of the Chatting Class. So 'racism', 'sexism', 'homophobia' and various other accusations have not lost their cachet despite actual progress against these very real sins. That a lone wackjob like Dylan Roof can kill nine in Charleston and not set off so much acrimony as the gang of neo-confederates in Charlottesville tells us something very important. We have political groups of Americans who wish to see the destruction of other politcal groups of Americans. As I say, there hasn't been enough violence to satiate that bloodlust.

In a way, we are fortunate to have Antifa and Alt-Right to enact these fantasies. Call it the boneheads vs the skinheads. So far we, we meaning Left and Right, remain willing to send them into ritual combat as non-official proxies for the never ending stream of invective that is our contemporary political dialog. We are in that same perverse way, fortunate to have a President whose oratorial vacuity allows all sides to interpret whatever they wish to project as emanating from his bully pulpit. Americans are not actually having to deal with leadership in anyway resembling a responsible republic. So the wars between ourselves against ourselves continues. And it shall continue as the Congress, the Executive and the Press continue to fail to lead and America stumbles into a triple witching hour when all three fail simultaneously. Charlottesville is just a test. Our good fortune will soon run out and real riots will begin, but we now benefit by watching all the ingredients. Time will provide us another OJ Simpson or another Timothy McVeigh or another James Damore or another Matthew Shepard. Somebody whose fate will align the political opposition like Alt-Right and Antifa into a perfect storm. America will rage. Then America will hug. But first we must suffer the fire next time.

What strikes me as particularly notable about this latest non-event in Charlottesville all due respect to mere three deaths in Virginia, a number that MS-13 would consider a weak showing, is the actual symbol at the heart of the matter; the fate of a statue. You see there's still a lawsuit. And while lawsuits are generally the respectable and civilized way to resolve disputes, nobody is really talking about that lawsuit. The focus of our finger-pointing is the animus of the non-official proxies and what pronouncements we in the Chatting Class are demanding of their putative leaders. The legal process and the legal solutions for violence and rioting and municipal statuary are not what we really care about. We demand that the right people make the right sounds. We demand rhetorical satisfaction, ultimately a pledge of fealty. We are demanding satisfaction for something with great historical import and mythological power to validate our claims of sovereignty.

The King used to be called democracy, due process and rule of law. But we don't really want that right now. We want the so-called King to bend the knee.

For myself, I didn't pay attention to the Taliban in Afghanistan until they started blowing up statues. When you decide to blow up statues, when you are offended by symbols, when you burn flags, books and buildings, you are expressing a desire to exterminate. That's what's going on here. A desire to rewrite history and to undo any claims that Others might make that stand in the way of your full dignity. It used to be that Americans, all of us, aspired to one national identity. But we've gone radically and multiculturally autonomous and self-serving. We've abused pluralism into a perversion of itself. The warm fires of the melting pot have gone damp and we have been served cold kale salad and told that's as integrated as we're going to get. Pick out the fruits and nuts you don't like. It's your salad, we are told. Common purpose is epistemologically impossible. Or at least faith in it has declined abysmally. That's what it means when you are compelled to rename, reclaim, resist, reinterpret. It's only one step from remove. 

What I hear in the back and forth is a call for others to imagine their ox being butchered. The interwebz are full of madlib scenarios of offense. "What if it were a statue of (insert inviolable icon here)?" We only offer sympathetic imagination of the Others when they are incited to rage beyond reason. Isn't what the screening of movies like 'Detroit' are all about? Of course it is. All of our dramas are about pushing people to the limits of tolerance. We are encouraged to all be inglourious bastards. Today is national punch a Nazi day. One step closer to the edge and we're about to break. 

American institutions of the humanities and mainstream mass communications are broken, but we people are not. The longer we pay attention to those broken institutions, the more we fail to see our own humanity both in ourselves and in the so-called  'Others'. I have lost my faith in the ability of these old mainstays of society to be repaired or reformed, although I am confident about our basic humanity and the evolution and growth of new institutions. A new kind of hug is coming, but it will take a while. It will come after the fire. We have already created our Alts and armed these outcasts with the imprimatur to fight for 'our' version of America. I'm telling you now that they have been dignified by our callous disregard for our common purpose and they will clash and that clash will not be contained. 

Psy Ops for Da Norks

After I finish writing this essay, I'm going to read the article that Niall Ferguson recommends on the matter of President Trump and North Korea. To Ferguson, this is his make or break moment. I think it's not but it should be. I really don't expect anything persuasive out of the White House. Americans did not vote in either Obama or Trump for their facility for understanding the world, as is evidenced by the current mawkish blather over punching Nazi's in Charlottesville. Then again, I'm sure PT Barnum had something to say about the moral perspective of the average American sucker too. I'll not dig up that nugget, and I'm not even tempted to find another clever insult against the current state of American political discourse. 

While I'm making loud pronouncements about foreign policy, I may as well say that if Carolyn Glick is to be believed, all of the Palestinian authorities are wheezing out their dying breaths over an even more balkanized set of inner tribes. Their last best hopes for nationhood are about go out with a whimper, but for random First World billions, wherever they trickle. So yeah. One state solution. I said as much a decade ago, and i didn't really care then either.

Speaking of one state solutions, that's my prescription for Korea. I wonder where the Seoul boys stand on that idea. Of all the ideas, there seems to be only one with a possible happy ending which is that the people who speak the same language and eat the same food give the Norks a taste of Gangnam Style. Actually, they should drown them. Here in California, lots of folks have gotten a taste of KPop and their daytime dramas. It's a contagious, and I think powerful way forward. Psy Ops. 

I am convinced that any military coup-like action by China would produce a huge refugee crisis that they seriously don't want to handle, presuming that the DMZ stays intact. Bodies floating down the Yalu is not a pretty sight, but it is preferable to bombed out cities to the south. So everybody ought to be urging the South to welcome the starving millions. Still, we know (don't we?) that the only way to keep a country from eating itself alive in the vacuum left by a deposed despot is to keep the powerful bureaucracies in power no matter how corrupt they might be. At least they know where all the secret accounts are that move money around with any semblance of order, something which would have to be very disciplined under a supreme leader. Nothing America does that doesn't encourage and empower the Seoul contingent to march towards pacific unity can be of any help. No matter how much of a beating Guam might take, the US is going to have to suck it up and work through Seoul, period. We have Hyundaied, Kiaed and Samsunged them onto the world stage, so let's give them more and more billions to become even more irresistible to their Northern cousins. Buffett is into POSCO, and for the sake of peace, I bet even Apple's CEO would shake more hands. 

Trump doesn't have a leg to stand on beating up the Norks, despite their Axis of Evil status. It's not what he was elected to do. A simple firm hand is all. Tit for tat. But if anybody takes it on the chin from a DPRK first strike, I wouldn't mind seeing one week of shock and awe. OK maybe two days of taking out air power and telecoms. The Norks would have about one week's sympathy for shelling the South or lobbing missiles at Japan even from the most diehard America haters. Essentially all America would have to do is provide one sure-footed kick in Pyongyang's balls, turn around and walk home. I presume that our best military minds know exactly where those balls are located and are stretching their hamstrings. IE, standard readiness, elephant walks and all that generic saber polishing. 

So that's my take. Seoul needs to get its reunification rhetoric engine tuned up and be prepared to make arrangements with the remnant DPRK state bureaucracy. America and the world need to see eye to eye on this and push the South as well. There is no other reasonable way. One Korea. 

Obligatory Seriousness on the Google Manifesto

I haven't read it. I'm probably not going to. That's because my interest in gender balance in the computer industry is low. I care about the software, not the people. Ironically (or perhaps not), this is what makes me a computer geek, and I can testify that for most of my life it has cost me socially. Everybody knows the stereotype of computer geeks. If you don't, then watch the video. The point I'm making is just that small and it should come as no surprise to anyone. Except for that fragment of the population who has extraordinary admiration and hopes for Google as a model of our society, which I happen to think is one weird fragment kissing another weird fragment's butt. 

In the news this morning, I read that Rockwell, which is now called Rockwell Collins (since when?), is the object of a takeover bid of around $20 billion. A lot of us keep forgetting about those big businesses that don't listen to our every word, and sell ourselves back to ourselves. In Google news, the GoogleManifesto, some essay written by a dude named James Damore, is all over the place. Evidently it went viral within the company and then I read about it first on Quillette and tweeted it out Monday. I'm generally attracted to articles that get actual scientists to comment, which is rare all over the net. Quillette is the bomb anyway and on my RSS. Right now Quillette is either getting DDOSed or slashdotted. Good for them. Fortunately, I have my own Evernote copy of the article in question.

So my basic and abiding interest is how computer systems add or detract from the ability of humans to make decisions. In fact, that's my career. So I find it rather disturbing that systems can be abused, then again, some people are just poor decision makers no matter what facts may lay at their feet. So my new favorite quote, from Game of Thrones, is "I trust an honest man's eyes more than I trust what everybody knows." And here, Damore is vindicated by Quillette's experts. 

This is the core of my support of Quillette's article:

Here, I just want to take a step back from the memo controversy, to highlight a paradox at the heart of the ‘equality and diversity’ dogma that dominates American corporate life. The memo didn’t address this paradox directly, but I think it’s implicit in the author’s critique of Google’s diversity programs. This dogma relies on two core assumptions:

• The human sexes and races have exactly the same minds, with precisely identical distributions of traits, aptitudes, interests, and motivations; therefore, any inequalities of outcome in hiring and promotion must be due to systemic sexism and racism;
• The human sexes and races have such radically different minds, backgrounds, perspectives, and insights, that companies must increase their demographic diversity in order to be competitive; any lack of demographic diversity must be due to short-sighted management that favors groupthink.

The obvious problem is that these two core assumptions are diametrically opposed.

Since I've tweeted out soundbites, I need to be here to catch flack downwind of the hot air spewing right now. Let's see what happens.

If this is an Affirmative Action discussion, then the simple fact is this: 18% of computer science degrees go to women. If Google wants 'parity', then 18% should be their target. If Google wants 'equality' then they're going to have to make some controversial discriminations. I am convinced that there is a demand within the non-bell curve of Silicon-Valley-Americans that far outstrips the supply of qualified women. So the mechanics of creating equality is bound to create a very bumpy playing field, despite all rhetoric to the contrary. Balanced workforce does not produce the kind of tokens people want. Well it very well may create outsized tokens, but that's not what I see as a proper pursuit. Either way, the office politics of such companies I find to be rather twisted. You and I both know that people would figuratively kill to land a job at Google. So I cannot imagine that they don't figuratively kill for promotions inside Google. 

I tend to believe that too many people have bullshit jobs, and that of the responsible industries, IT has done less than it should in insuring that productivity goes up. There has been and continues to be more bullshit, which is now often embedded in bullshit processes abetted by bullshit software. But I'm just a cranky old bastard who has been programming since 1974. What do I know? I know I very rarely work with female peers. But my cranky gripe has more to do with what millennials get away with in startups and the thrash that causes. On the whole and in the long run, more than half the industry is still running Windows. See? We're not all getting better software. The industry is generating masturbatory systems. But I'm sure that's not the tangent people embroiled in this controversy wish to discuss. Well, let them come here and discuss it. I can't guess.  

My point is that Google itself (not Alphabet) crowdsources all of its value. Google is valuable to the masses because it caters to the masses. When it comes to evolutionary biology, the masses don't get it. They don't care to get it, and they want what they want despite what the experts say. If Google is decidedly democratic (or wishes to present such an image) then it must pretend to aspire for a democratic definition of equality in its workforce, because that is what the masses will want to hear. Thus the dilemma. I think Damore will sue. I think Damore will win. I think there will be more pussy hat parades of disgust. 

Race Credits

I've stumbled upon a new way to confound and mock wishful thinkers. This in the dimension of race. It began with a stab at the definition of 'white privilege' which I consider to be presumptuous, ill-defined and mostly insignificant. 

In an attempt to monetize the benefits of inherited white privilege, someone suggested that the average income differential by race was indicative of the historical boon. An average white woman, by dint of this boon would therefore realize an annual salary of 22,000 whereas the average black woman would only receive an annual salary of 20,000. Therefor the white woman owes the black woman 1,000 if equality were to be achieved. 

However it is also part of this conventional wisdom that poor Muslim immigrants are now denied the opportunity to participate in the American economy by dint of a racist policy. Well, then let's let them in, goes the rationale. The effect however would be that these penniless people would be lumped in with the blacks and then reduce their annual salaries by another 1,000. Doesn't that increase white privilege? 

This mind teaser would force someone as bound to logic such as I am to investigate other conundrums of white privilege and racism as defined by those seeking a way out. Those seeking a way out? Don't I mean Whites? Well, I guess I do. Part of the engagement with the dilemma of white privilege involves some way of Whites weaseling their way out of it. Of course they do so by the basic presumption that they are indeed White and what they do as Whites matters. So they try to figure something out. Something that can finally allow the White race to sleep at night. Something must be found to purify the evil historical deeds of the Whites. What Whites need now, more than ever, is White purity.

Do you hear me chuckling?

Well, despite the fact that I have recently picked up a new commenter who believes it is his sacred black duty to make sure that I do not pollute myself with the agendas of the alt-right and various forces of white supremacy, I have decided to go ahead and speak up again on the tedious subject of race. I mean, it was a slam dunk. And to that end, I offer the following syllogism straight outta Facebook. The subject was two Asian stars of Hawaii-50, the rebooted TV show, quit for not getting paid. Predictably this is now a 'teachable moment' for the devotees of white privilege. 

What if Asians were actually such people who didn't need to watch TV? What if Whites were such a people who did need to watch TV? Then the presence of Asians on TV would be beneficial to Whites. The absence of Asians on TV would be detrimental to Whites.

Therefore it would be in the White interest to have Asians on TV.

The question therefore becomes whether or not Asians find it in their own interests to serve the White interests in consuming Asians on TV. And that depends upon whether the Asians on TV are portrayed as Asians serving the interests of Asians.

Thus if Asian and White interests are generally mutually exclusive, then the sole benefit of Asians on TV to Asians would be Asians serving Asian interests. Let's say that interest is teaching Asian language. Since that would be a mutually exclusive interest, it has to be measured against the White interest of having Asians on TV, meaning basically Asians on TV doing all things only a few of which actually serve Asian interests.

Thus an equilibrium is created in which the benefits to Whites is significant in that Whites can additionally claim to serve Asian interests (subservient to the White interest in TV). In other words, on the whole it's good TV which serves the White interest.

If on the other hand Whites and Asians both have the same interests in TV, then it doesn't matter how Whites are portrayed and it doesn't matter how Asians are portrayed. All that matters are the interests of TV, which means getting paid. In which case it doesn't matter the race of people who are getting rewards or those who are getting screwed.

Moral of the story. Don't fight the house.
__

However, if you choose to represent racial interests in any area of endeavor and choose to suggest that whatever happens to one member of a race is of significance to that race, then you have a great deal of accounting to do of interest by race.

I would suggest that this interest has been generated in Whites who desire to signify their morality as Whites to others who are not White. In other words, Whites are making themselves Whiter by investing in a new theory of race. Like carbon credits, this is a new economy of race credits. It has far less accountability than Jim Crow. And yet it is more pervasive. And it is generating a raft of strange new behaviors as Whites think up different methods to signal to each other that they are more racially sensitive than ever before in the history of mankind. Something they perceive to be actually simple, given the racial theory of historical White behavior.

It's all rather pathetic.

 

We're in a race bubble. Everybody seems to be an expert on what is and what is not racist. Which means of course that nobody really knows for sure, but they're trying. Well, you can't be mad at people for trying. But you'd think they'd be a little bit smarter about it. Actually more robust about it, or simply less fragile about it. Their accounting is completely random and nobody is really keeping an objective score, which is why so many charlatan claims are taken seriously. I'll keep my eyes on the math. As usual, when I bother to care.

But here's the serious question. What is at the end of white privilege? Is it a war that goes on forever? Does the white race get destroyed? When it drops below a measurable level do people continue being white? I ask this question as someone for whom the Civil Rights and Black Power movements were successful. All the major hurdles were beaten. If they weren't, then the fight for gays wouldn't have happened. Asian interests would not have been considered. It would still be 1968. There would still be no blacks on McDonald's commercials, stars in the mainstream or homeowners in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Black Americans would still be constrained to the same colleges and universities, still have their own sports leagues and barred from professional associations like the Bar or AMA. In other words, my generation had goalposts. For people I grew up with, it was the integration of Corporate America. For a lot of older folks I recall, it was the integration of the civil service. For others it was the integration of colleges and universities or suburban neighborhoods. Which is to say for most of us, it was some sort of integration. The elimination of white privilege, as it's defined, as something inherent to the white race, essentially means the elimination of the white race. But of course 'Whites' will decide how much white privilege is eliminated or purified. Everybody else who wants to speak up on behalf of a non-white race can complain forever. Then again that's the definition of race. You're either superior or sniveling.