Cobb

Now That We've Come to the End of the Road

Seventeen years of freedom. That's what I've put in here. I love you all, but I've got to go. Not going far though. Just to a platform that is going to get me some scratch. I calculate that I've put in about $3060 dollars of unreimbursed publication funds into this place and all I have to show for it is pride. I can't say that it has been that expensive a hobby, and I certainly didn't waste anyone's time. This is the blog that won me Black Blogger of the year so many years ago. So now I'm moving off. 

At the moment there are two platforms I'm working on. The first is Patreon and the second is Substack. If I can get sponsors in either or both places, I will figure out if it's worth it to stay. There are things I like about Patreon, and things I like about Substack. As I figure them out, I'll get it right sooner or later. In the meantime, I ask you to check me out at Patreon. That's where all of my sponsors live right now, and you can join for 5 bucks a month, which is close to nothing. But I believe Substack has more flexibility in all that, so when I'm ready to (if I do) make the transition I will let you know. 

If you've ever engaged with me in the comment section of this blog, you know what an exciting and sometimes dangerous thing it can be. A challenge to our wits and souls. What could be better? Don't answer that. Just get your narrow or fat ass to Patreon where I will be continuing my Stoic Observations. Or check out Substack which is a bit cleaner and more economically spartan. Also check out everything else. I will soon, this month, be rearranging a singular homepage at mdcbowen.org that will work at being a comprehensive portal to all of my writing.

Meanwhile, Cobb will be around at least a year, probably in perpetuity depending on how many subscribers I get. So thanks for the Socratics. Yall have been the best. Except for Thrasher, thordaddy and that other blockhead racialist who used to spam me. Bleah. Can't end on a negative. But considering there were only three trolls I couldn't handle in 17 years, I think that's a damn fine record. See you in the funny pages. 

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. 

My Father's Superpower

My father's superpower is his ability to illuminate the inner path. Illumination of the inner path means the ability to recognize that you have a mind, a mind that is something of a garden which needs tending. You could not grow up in his house without knowing that everything 'out there' in the world is not everything there is. There were not so many things 'out there' to get as a mission in life as there were 'in here' that were rewarding.

As a child, his favorite pastime was to take a book into the woods behind his house, make himself invisible and read. As an adult he became a writer, a man of letters and corresponded with fellows in the intellectual tumult of the 1960s. He was a photographer and would spend much of his spare time going 'out there' to capture something appealing on film, and then bringing it home to appreciate 'in here'. As an older man he has gone progressively deeper into faith, with his own interpretations of how God moves in the world. Yes well, anything not inside the mind is God's business. The foolishness of God's creatures, those described in Mark 12:24, was not his concern. 

He is not interested in the affairs of mankind. Not in business. Not in politics. Not in anything on television, or anything on the radio unless it is a particular style of jazz whose practitioners are mostly deceased. He lives on his inner path. The internet? He couldn't care less. The stock market? Whatever. He cares about his family, because all of them were his idea in the first place. And he reveres his own departed parents because he was their idea. He doesn't even invite people into his own inner path, but only demands they respect him. All of his books? The seeds he planted in his own garden? He sits among them as a reminder that he actually doesn't remember. But he will only give them to his own family, because we were his idea in the first place. University libraries? Art museums? These things out there are unworthy of his inner possessions. Their demands and needs are meaningless to him.

It would seem that his one stable passion over the past two decades would be the women's shelter he regularly visits and gives flowers from the alter of St. John's Church. Few remember that this long journey began as a literacy project. Yes, and even the last time his own dear father came out to stay in Los Angeles, Bob Bowen wanted only to have him write. To share his inner world. This, alas did not happen. Raymond C Bowen was a bon vivant and wanted to enjoy the delights of a Rob Roy cocktail. He was not interested in writing memoirs. But the homeless women of the downtown Women's Centers had stories to tell. He coaxed that creativity out of them, reminded them that their inner lives were gardens to be tended. And so he helped them by illuminating their inner paths.

There was never a moment when my father did not recognize the value of thoughts. He would never fail to ask what you were reading, what you were thinking, what did the world look like from your point of view. He was full of praise for the sacraments of talent and creative expression that showed an inward commitment to the life of the mind. It was how he revered the soul of anyone.

That is where he lives. He lives there inside of us and inside of himself. And yet he is there again trapped inside of his superpower's desire to make the external subject to the internal. He is ever unable to resist herding us all together for the picture he is about to take. He is ever unable to resist hushing us for the moment of prayer. He is ever unable to resist sharing of the most simple pun. He even talks to his dogs. He never physically sits with them or pets them or teaches them tricks. But he always talks to their doggy minds.

Someday in the future when we are all dead and gone, there will be someone among our descendants who will wonder how they discovered their own inner paths. How did that light and satisfaction in their lives persist despite their crumbling surroundings? When the world has gone to shit, how do they keep a sense of humor? What is that spark that keeps them holding on. Well once upon a time, people believed no such spark existed in certain men, and they were enslaved for that. But this man, my father, had a superpower. He used it well.

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. 

---

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. 

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.

The Second Set: Music That Remade Me

I seem to have lived more lives than I expected. These days I tell myself that in life there are two kinds of people, trees and monkeys. I'm a tree for my family, but out in the world I'm a monkey. A flying monkey. So when I looked back at the top 15 albums in my mind that I wrote 10 years ago, I was thinking back. Now a new set of music has ripened and matured in my monkey mind and I need to account for that.

I remember Puck in the first episodes of MTV's Real World. For some reason I associate it with a gig I had down in Jacksonville's Baymeadows district. I stayed at Homewood Suites and ran down to the package store past the gatorholes for a fifth of Jim Beam Rye. The riff from Interstate Love Song was in my head the whole time. Then one day I heard Vaseline and discovered that it was the same band. I had to know more. The album was a revelation, and it seemed that every song was an anthem for dark parts of me. It went in and inverted all of my rock sensibilities. As time went on, STP was for me everything that was right with the new rock, a soundtrack for sections of empty highways on my desolate consulting missions around the country. Lady Picture Show was Cobb Parkway in Atlanta. Meatplow was a two lane strip of black ice in the dead winter cold of Columbus, Ohio. Down was me sitting in a rental car in an alley in Boston. None of it mattered to be timely. I went back and forth in time with it. When I read the release dates of the albums it all seems wrong, like they've existed long before in my mind. They're that deep.

 

The second best apartment I ever had was on the top floor of a walkup brownstone in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Seventh Avenue & Flatbush. I bought my NAD amp and my Infinity Speakers for that place. That place with the hardwood floors. With the eat-in-kitchen where I never cooked. With the french doors on the two bedrooms. With the exposed brick. Where the first fat fly of summer buzzed against the windowpanes with the clear view of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower. It took me weeks to finally make the D Train go away. It rumbled by spooking me into thinking another earthquake was happening. Especially at night. I went to the brand new Virgin Superstore in Times Square and the pleasant young man told me that he knew everything about classical music. He was so happy that I asked him. "Hum anything", he challenged me. "I'll tell you what song it is." I was embarrassed. All I could think about were the clips in the old montage from 'Hooked on Classics'. I declined. But I did know one thing. I wanted the Appassionata. For years after I first discovered Bach, Liszt, and Debussy there seemed to be no solo pianists I could find to match their purity. Of course I didn't know where or how to look and the first person that asked to be a guide was declined. I thought too much of the encounter. I believed he was flirting with me and saw me too deeply because this was music I truly wanted to experience and I was only on the very edges of it. I was me. I wanted to do it myself. I bought Barenboim. His rendition of the Moonlight Sonata, which I didn't know at the time, has been the reference in my mind ever since. Every night in Brooklyn, I went to sleep with that album in the Sony CD player. It is peace.

 

I was bored on the plane and I had an aisle seat. I don't like the aisle because I have broad shoulders and enough bad experience with food carts and my funny bone to think there might be a conspiracy against me in the flight attendants union. At least it wasn't a bulkhead seat. So I actually plugged my headphones into the inflight station and browsed through the printed program guide in the seat back pocket in front of my knees. Hmm, what's this? A new album, a featured album no less, by Bobby McFerrin. Say what? If you know me, you know that I think there are two great injustices in the music world and they cycle around Fishbone and Bobby McFerrin. I know Bobby McFerrin to be a musical genius. I knew it back from his Spontaneous Inventions album back when people were just discovering Whoopi Goldberg's surfer girl routine. Of course the world has been fixated on that one song that paid for his mansion, but I knew better, primarily because of Medicine Music. I was entranced by Bang! Zoom, and in many ways it had been thematic for my early married life in Atlanta. Kids' Toys is still the ringtone for my youngest daughter, and Friends is to me one of the most perfect songs ever made. But nothing prepared me for what I was to hear on that flight. Beyond Words. This is one of the most inventive and transcendent albums ever recorded. As I listen even in this moment, the phrasing is sublime and the melodies seem crafted to soothe. It is a daddy album. It is a jazz album. It is both subtle and magnificent with the perfect interplay of Chick Corea's piano, Bobby's voice, excellent percussion and the most righteously mellow fretless bass playing I have ever heard. All with no lyrics. It is the landmark in McFerrin's career - he has invented something new in jazz vocals as it perhaps was inevitable that he would. OK. So I'm a fan. And yes he went even further several years later with Vocabularies.

 

There's a piano interlude between each of the cuts on this album that immediately takes me back to the days when my fiancee and I lived up near Grant's Tomb in the City. We had the tiniest of apartments sublet by one of the Urban Bush Women (thanks Christine) and it was a miserably hot summer. I had picked up the album back when I lived in Boston picking through the ruins of hiphop in the days of Jurassic Park. And there it was one complete with the Francophone edge of the Native Tongues, Lucien. And it got better from there. It was refreshing to hear the French approach to rap and I especially liked Democrat D's fricatives as well as the sad mellow of Moda et Dan. Of course MC Solaar was the standout. Some years later I found some comfort in Raggasonic, but this was the collection that kicked off my flirtation with Gallic hiphop. It lasted through a few singles later by Solaar, but Menelik and Lucien disappointed in the long run. This was the bright spot, and unforgettable.

 

 

There once was a videogame called Fez. It was a miracle of multiple dimensions. The game was highly anticipated and starred in a movie about indie game developers, unsurprisingly named Indie Game. The game was a smashing, although delayed success. I seem to recall it drove the lead programmer crazy. That was only the beginning. Its soundtrack was a simple marvel and introduced me to Disasterpeace who has gone on to relative fame. But there was a followup album named FZ: Side F that featured a collection of artists that rebirthed my love with electronic music. That included Solar Fields, Morusque, Monomer and my favorite Aaron Cherof. When I finally got around to Cherof, I was blown away, and so his album Anagnorisis has been in heavy rotation ever since 2013. It remains a standout among all of my new favorite electronic composers and DJs.

 

I got bored of jazz, you know. But I was overly into it for a long time. Obviously I loved the stuff that Miles was doing at the end of his life, and I have been a big fan of the Return to Forever crew, especially Stanley and Chick. Herbie has been a lifelong favorite and of course everybody lights a candle at the shrines of Coltrane, Monk, Basie & Mingus. There are several other dozens to choose from but everything new seemed to be a bit derivative of the best fusion and straight ahead. Truth be told I can put up with a lot of Bony James and contemporary smooth. But very little had gotten under my skin since the early 90s. Out of nowhere, really, came The Bad Plus. I was transfigured by the trio's coordination, by the drummer's prodigious fills and polyphony. It was frenetic and captivating. Their rock covers introduced me to songs I never knew - it had to be at least 5 years before I knew their rendition of Tom Sawyer was not original. (I have since put Rush in its appropriate place, I think). Flim, Velouria, too. All of their music had the energy and sophistication I forgot I was hungry for, and it was truly satisfying. I decided that Dirty Blonde would be my theme song - and I even wrote lyrics for it. The album that kicked it off still holds magic for me.

 

Jacques Loussier is one of the greatest jazz pianists ever. He did that French thing, take something old and make it new. They have said that Wynton Marsalis is one of those rare musical geniuses who is both a jazz and classical prodigy. It's true. But I think it is an even greater achievement to rearrange classical pieces that have been interpreted hundreds of ways for hundreds of years and make them jazzy in unpredictably clever ways that retain respect for the original. These are deeply inventive compositions he has put together with his trio, and it seems magical every time he performs. At least I am very convinced. It is almost impossible for me to decide which of his albums impresses me most, but I'm going to choose his interpretations of Satie. Because. I doubt even Satie could have envisioned his pieces so variantly played and I love the way he redoes them several times on this album. Taking nothing away from his performances of Bach and Debussy, this album is special because he renders them mulitple times, each with its own special flavor. For a long time, this has been my bedtime album.

Hiromi has saved jazz for me. Once again this is an amazing fusion of inventive style, prodigious skill, energy and sophistication that had me wondering why the Stanley Clarke Band's first album in 2010 was so extraordinary. I listened and listened but never read any liner notes. So I didn't really know it was her that made the difference. So I watched this video and knew that jazz was alive. What an outstanding trio. I can't say enough about this one, other than that the music is so excellent that talking about it is almost useless. You just want to listen to it over and over, and so I have. By far, I'd have to say my favorite song of hers is Labyrinth, although her play with Beethoven and Gershwin is fantastic. Watching her performances with Simon Phllips and Anthony Jackson is also a miracle to behold. I think only the Bad Plus synchronize in such fabulous ways, differently of course but spectacular. She's as much fun to watch as to listen - real passion on those keys.

 

I think one of the best things about being such a flathead as I am, so subject to the enjoyment of just about everything, is that you don't know what you don't know. That is to say, if there's a lot of things you can enjoy without getting bored, you will always have another opportunity to discover something wonderful you just haven't gotten around to yet. For me musically, that has meant Glenn Gould. As many times as I have ignored the award winning documentary about him, I should have guessed that he was phenomenal. And I have been in a lifelong quest for the perfect solo piano artist. I can remember first hearing in my college apartment bedroom Andre Watts playing live Listz Transendental Etude #10 so ballistically he popped two strings on the piano. I can still hear the KUSC announcer saying '..and survive it did.' Yes it stands as probably the greatest piano performance ever in my mind and experience. But actually the recorded album, which I eventually purchased, did not meet a very high standard of production. But this is about Glenn Gould. I can remember literally spending an afternoon holed up in a San Francisco hotel room watching the documentary of his second recording of the Goldberg Variations with commentary describing the difference between the newer 1981 recording and the original 1955 version. Astounding. As wondrous as all that is, it has been the French Suites that has captured my imagination. Am I heading down that corridor towards chamber music, after all that Prokofiev? It may be so. The French Suites stands out. It may be that his Scriabin gets me in the end, but for now it is the French Suites.

 

Steve Coleman and I have a very troublesome relationship. He represents the oversophistication of jazz that has made it fun for musicians and theoreticians, but not for listeners like me. A funny story is that my brother, who used to be a sound engineer, was a friend of Steve Coleman's original pianist Andy Milne. I knew about Milne because he ran clinics in Leimert Park at the World Stage, but I didn't know he had played for Steve Coleman. So I went to see him play at the Mondrian for the debut of his new album Forward to Get Back. My brother couldn't make the gig, but I spoke with Andy after the show. I said, I really like your music. I told him that it reminded me of Steve Coleman without the pretense. He cracked up. Ha ha very funny. Anyway, Steve Coleman did release what I say is one of the greatest rap albums of all time. Steve Coleman & Metric Tale of 3 Cities. Dude. I still don't know who the rappers are because I don't care. I expect that the golden age is over and my expectations and tastes have moved on, but damn when I was holding on the the last breaths there are two albums that stand head and shoulders above the rest. This is the first. Well I may as well mention the other which is Aphrocubist Improvisations from the Broun Fellinis, but that's going a little bit too far back dealing with a hiphop thread that is mostly dead. Nevertheless, more than even Buckshot LeFonque, A Tale of 3 Cities is the stand out, last stand standard of the most righteous genre of hiphop, serious lyrical force backed up with funky jazz. This is the last and greatest, right here. Get it if you can find it.

 

There is one last thing to say here and I'm not exactly sure how to say it because on one hand it is very conventional wisdom to say that Radiohead is one of the greatest rock bands ever. And it is also quite conventional to say that OK Computer & Kid A represent them at their most mindblowing and transformative. On the other hand, I like the reggae dub versions of these great songs, for the most part, better than the originals. This album, in addition to being a straight out genius arrangement, holds the distinction as one of the very last CDs I ever went out of my house to shop for. I recall the hybrid store out on the Santa Monica Promenade that let you pick and choose a dozen mp3s and they burned you a disc. But I had to have this entire record. It also bears mentioning that Vitamin String Quartet also Vitamin Dub has done a strikingly awesome cover of Just which is a favorite song of mine to play loud challenging the powers of my subwoofers. Radiodread's version of Airbag had been my daughter's favorite song ever, so it also has to be one of mine.

Nathaniel Rateleiff is, outside of Nancy Wilson, my favorite vocalist ever. I discovered him about 6 years ago. I looked around, bored, for critically acclaimed independent new music. The last time I did that, I found Coldplay. So I was batting 1000. The album cover caught my attention so I gave it a shot. OMG. To this day, I still haven't puzzled out the actual lyrics to half of his songs, but every time I have, it has been rewarding. His music is like nobody else's. It's like bluegrass, but not. Like country but more like western. But that voice. I've never thought I'd seriously consider the genre of 'singer songwriter', but his stuff gets to me. Like an abstract cryptogram of the heart, of suffering and of persistence. Like the souls of Modest Mouse with no need or desire to be stars, but the love of the music just comes through, haunting, vivid, like a bright red rash on the face of a hobo who just fell out of a moving boxcar. This is soul music. Soul music I say. Like Bill Frisell on a lonely day.

 

That's about it. To include more is to go beyond writing about the personal and into more generic music criticism, which I think I've indulged for the last time right here. So let's see. Here are the honorable mentions. Love Stories by Frank McComb, Treat Me Right by Eric Sardinas, Chant Down Babylon the Bob Marley covers by hiphop artists, Dub Chamber 3 by Bill Laswell. Real Enemies by D'Arcy James Argue. All kinds of stuff by Squarepusher, Tycho, Boards of Canada and Big Giant Circles, Lonesome Crowded West by Modest Mouse, Crystal Planet by Joe Satriani and various musics by Gorecki and Elgar.

A True Angeleno

A true Angeleno (from the archives April 2015)

1. You have at least two favorite Mexican beers.
   
Need I say more? Most people in the rest of the country only know Corona. You've been there, done that, gave it up, came back. You know your Tecate from your Negro Modelo, your Sol from your Pacifico. Rolling Rock? What's that?
   

2. You are some kind of burrito snob.

   Tacos are tacos, and from time to time you can accept something other than the usual, but when it comes to burritos, you are specific and exacting. If they put the wrong thing in it, you will take it back. You try to avoid conversations about the proper burrito like some people avoid religion and politics.
   

3. You have a beach.

   No a beach is not a beach. When you say you are going 'to the beach', you have a specific beach in mind. Venice Beach is nothing like Zuma. You try to explain to your friends from out of town that what they are seeing at Will Rogers is not volleyball. Volleyball is at the Manhattan Pier. You know loud pit parties at Dockweiller after dark, and the special quiet of MDR north of the channel. You know beach etiquette is local.
   
   
4. Deep down you miss the Raiders, kinda.
We don't lose a lot of sleep over football. I mean it's not like we don't have other things to do, like Ohio or Pittsburgh. But if we ever get another team, the bar is going to be rather high.

   
   
5. You have a love-hate relationship with local news personalities.
   
   
6. You recognize California in motion pictures.
Yeah that's supposed to be some exotic locale, but you recognize those hills. That's California scrub and you cannot be fooled. That cave? That's Bronson Cave, you've been there yourself. That distant mountain road? Griffith Park. That cliff by the beach? Zuma, dude
   

7. What's a tree? Yeah I recognize it, but if it's not a palm tree I don't know what it's called.
   

8. You have an innate earthquake sense.
Within 2 seconds, you know if that shake is going to cause annoyance or panic. You are wary of putting too many fragile objects on bookshelves. Glass coffee tables? No.

   
   
9. You recognize a sweet ride.
And you give props to somebody whose hooptie is tight. Not just your ordinary Porsche or S Class can turn your head, but a matte black BRZ with the sport exhaust, or a retro Baja Bug? That's a car.

Get Busy Dying

I have written 8000 essays. I have 50 followers. I haven't wasted my life, but I have spent a lot of time doing exactly what I want to do regardless of it's apparent value to the rest of the world. Although I've never thought I deserved a graduate student to make sense of all of this, it is a bit of a problem to leave it all here. But I'm ready to pack it in.

It's time to archive all this and start writing code. A lot more code. I understand the world and I don't care. I understand the world and I don't care. I understand. What is logical and coherent in my writing is pretty much everything even though I have managed to puff it all full of qualifications so people don't trip. I have been Cyclops behind mirrorshades, and as the New Wave poets said, "We're through being cool." I will build the code I want to build following my brother's advice. "Don't tell the world what you are going to do. Do something and then show the world what you've done."

I have had an excellent and unsatisfactory public life. I should have been a lot more selfish. I'm a better man for it, but better men die like every other dog. I am not dying, but I'm through living for other people. I have led you all gently and kindly, putting my best foot forward. And right now I'm thinking about the mathematics I didn't study. I'm thinking about the novels I didn't write although with less regret. I'm heading for an AND BOTH world for the two programming languages that are taking over the world. I will always be what I have been, but I am motivated to get off this highway and hike the elevations not previously blazed.

I'll be around. But not so much in the same places.

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. 

Sympathy for Suffering

Dostoevsky writes:

And an undoubtedly genuine grief can sometimes turn even a phenomenally light-minded man into somebody solid and resolute – at least for a while. More than that: real, genuine grief can sometimes make even fools seem more intelligent – also, of course, for a while. Grief can do this to people.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Devils: New Translation (Alma Classics) (p. 193). Alma Classics. Kindle Edition.

If you live a life that is mostly successful, you often wonder how it is that people let up their discipline and get sidetracked into dissolution. You exercise discipline over your life and you wonder how it is that people say ‘whatever’.  I was like that.

Then life threw me a series of curveballs. And I had to deal with them because they were my responsibility. I did. I John Wayned right through them. Then I became exhausted. I started to realize that the focus I could apply when I was on top of everything, I simply couldn’t muster after having dealt with tragedy.

For me it got to the point at which I was on call for events that could go sideways without notice - and nobody else could handle them. It got to the point where I purposefully refused to focus because breaking that focus would piss me off and these were situations in which being pissed off made things worse. So I had to live in a constant state of vigilance in preparation for fast, random work. Literally day to day.

At some point I joined a group of people coping with similar situations. What was weird about it was that some of these folks had long given up attempting to John Wayne anything. They knew all the kinds of things that could go wrong, but they didn’t say ‘whatever’. Some of them had the 1000 yard stare.

Then it kind of clicked for me.

If you’ve ever watched bag handlers, boxers, racquetball players or roofers. You’ll notice that the old pros have an economy of motion. They don’t move quickly and they don’t huff and puff, but they can do it all day. I realized that’s what happens when you have heavy lifting to do. You get used to the deliberate pace, you get to the right spot at the right time and you execute.

What you never do is say “If my daughter lost her legs in a car accident, I’d handle it without raising an eyebrow.” But if it happens to you, you eventually get to that point. You suffer through the pain, the burden, the work, the frustration and you get through it. You don’t get over it. You get through it.

That’s what happens when life breaks you and forces you to change. After a time you do get to the point at which you are committed to reacting well and adapting well instead of planning well. Then you recognize it in others, the people who have been through the pain and don't pretend they can John Wayne through it all and go back to business as usual. 

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? 

 

Surviving COVID19 - Episode 002 - LA County, Stoicism, EDC

My COVID Resource page is up. I hope you can find it useful. http://bit.ly/covid-mdcbowen

Suviving COVID19 - Episode 001 - The First Week Video

This week it's about Osterholm and his book, and my general attitude about it. 

The Cobbian Mental Universe

I've got to do at least one essay per week to continue my plodding journey to famousity. I've neglected this for some time in order to deal with a multiplicity of family problems. You don't want to know, moreover I don't want to tell. Nevertheless, I am quickly regaining my balance and it feels good. It has been some time since I've taken an assessment of where I'm going and what I'm doing in concert with you, my readers and fellow travelers on the road to continuous enlightenment and ultimately to wisdom and realization of 'thou art that'. 

Strategery

In the largest sense of my current intellectual pursuits I am moving sideways in my career. I think I have struggled through the last year in dealing with my difficulty in dealing with the fact that I am not coding on a day to day basis. There has been something of a hole in my soul missing the sense of accomplishment that comes with building elegant, logical spaces for my customers to work through their decisions. So I'm stepping back from that with the tacit acknowledgement that it's a two edged sword. I love to code just as I love to write compelling paragraphs in prose. But I need to do other things to make the enterprise of my business perform as it should. Others can code. I am uniquely situated to do those other things. So I will. 

Secondly, my journey through Stoicism continues. I feel very strongly about the gut sense I have developed over the past few years. And so I continue to be refreshed in this, not only by my own work but in concert with the LA Stoic Meetup group, led by DK. Beyond what it means to me in releasing myself from the tyranny of political gossip and blather, it is an important way to engage fellows and the public. I see it as part of my civic duty. In close proximity to the Stoic is the IDW participation that I have attached myself to. My aim in this is to establish and maintain a space for that part of me which is a combat epistemologist. I rigorously parse what people say and am determined to be honest in my feedback. I practice the Abstention Principle in politics, and yet I feel the need to be compellingly disconfirmatory in my political speech. In other words, I don't care who is right. I care what is right. I expect people to be logically consistent as they are capable of being and intend to bring that context right up front, doing so without any particular ambition or agenda other than letting people know there are dispassionate ways to be correct. The difficulty in all of this is that there will always be a temptation to follow too much of my curiosity. I can get bogged down. But I'm also not particularly trying to make friends or make nice. I'm trying to achieve a command of civility in truth telling and sense making. 

Thirdly, I'm aiming to expand the imaginative aspects of my life. Tangential to my desire to clean up my health (which is kind of a barbell effort, live on the border of injury while making myself harder and harder to kill) I'm learning yet another dimension of cooking, eating and drinking. My aim here is to both lose the remaining 22 pounds and to become a master of cooking fish. Check back with me after the summer. 

And finally I am changing my reading a bit. The same informative and entertaining habits are likely to stick, but I want to spend less time putting other people's ideas into my head. That means Blinkist. That means less Audible and more Kindle. It means less Science Fiction and more History. And I'm going to add poetry into the mix. I forgot how satisfying it is to write that way and I haven't in much too long.

---

Practicality

In the realm of the technical and professional I a convinced that the future is the Apache Beam framework and that the world of data will approach the realm of IoT. Everything is a data stream, and all applications are the tactical management of these data streams. Operationally this will all be some Kafkaesque future. Confluence are the masters. So we will be replacing databases with streams, and the world of data will be the fast sort and the slow sort. Hmm. I should map Kahneman over that. In the meantime, I'll keep my head above the code and try to start thinking in terms of service products that involve wrangling those streams and sending them where no man has gone before. Also this should be the guiding light for the LOGOS Project that will be my side gig, with a helping of Smart Cities. 

The Stoics and IDW are mostly driven by my primary podcaster Eric Weinstein. So I may very well continue what I've started in putting answer context here and elsewhere. It's coming naturally. The stuff of Weinstein gets my attention, and I think he's broad enough to keep it. So far it's not difficult to keep up, but it has certainly put others, particularly Peterson, on the back burner. I'm sticking to Sam Harris because he too gets my goat in a certain compelling way. But I'm definitely coming around to recognize his way of thinking about meditation. I think we'll have to come up, in toto, with a new religion. I will continue to write here and over at Quora, because Quora is the precursor to LOGOS. Also I expect to do a bit more American Wag. I just dont' have the rhythm yet.  While I'm at it and thinking about a new religion let me give you this aside with regards to my high level look at university. H/T Bryan Alexander:

Aside on the University

I think the university should be in charge of pedagogy and research. I think that scholarship should be exported. I primarily I think that the university is oversubscribed. There are too many of them and we don't need them to be entry level employee generators. The cost of training employees should be born by business. So the entire debt to society universities are costing should be shifted away from the current economy. Trim university systems and make them excellent at pedagogy, scholarship and research.

The matter of pedagogy has the common sense benefit of preserving the culture of academics who perform for academics. We can have a great deal of confidence that will work without much change - but it will only work if scholarship is exported. I want the province of fact checking of the entire realm of knowledge to be shifted from journalism to a kind of partnership of publication. In other words, academics should be paid not so much to train some selection of undergraduates but everyone, and especially global media networks through the same mechanisms they use. I don't want the editorial board of the NYT curating the truth about New York City. I want scholars at CUNY and Colombia doing that. It is therefore the priority of pedagogy to have more integrity than mere publication.

Scholars will do journalism better than journalists will do scholarship, so they must because the incentives for scholars is to be correct and comprehensive. The incentives for journalists is to be first and topical.

The university fails because it is not responsible for the ignorance and lies that are promulgated more rapidly than their pedagogy. It makes the university insular and only responsible for its own truth rather than a truth which should be accessible to the world. If the university cannot reach the world then it will exist in isolation and ultimately be reduced to monasticism.

I am pessimistic that universities can make this change before they are forced into the monastic position. Rather it will be visionary individuals who will do so. I think it will be a long time before the traditional philanthropists admit the necessity of endowing great podcasters. Although there is something to be said in defense of Mercatus. https://www.mercatus.org/

I will write more poetry, so expect more stuff from the Eruditorium. My flirtation with returning to Cobb the Comic is too near realtime and I can't keep all of those characters up to date on things worth remarking on. Twitter speed is what it is and I don't have the patience for it. I could have followed Gen. Q Soliemani into Heaven, but nobody really cares any longer. Comics need to be fast and I don't have a system that's fast enough. 

Exercise, diet blah blah. I'll take pictures and post them on Facebook. I won't mention it again until I lose another bowling ball. I will continue to post reviews on Goodreads, and reblog them here (which I haven't been doing). 

 

 

H1-B Is Not the Reason

Q: What role does immigration play on a country’s technological innovations?

A: It’s marginal. The only time it made a big difference for the US is after the defeat of the Nazis and after the Cold War. German and then Russian rocket & nuclear scientists found work here in the US in large numbers. Governments want their own technology and they will fund it for their own nations. It wasn’t like.. hey let’s build Sandia Labs but not until we can import some scientists.

At any rate, the top scientists in any domain are published internationally. Research and development are highly affected by government investments. IE it’s government grants that are going to our top universities. Once the R&D is done, engineers take over.

Engineers are employed by private companies for the most part. They have to innovate in the building of things and then sales and marketing take over. The design part is critical and requires lots of creativity and a strategic view of the market. It helps to have a large customer base (or lots of seed money in order to grow the market).

IT in the US and elsewhere is about 30% engineering, 25% implementation and the rest sales and marketing. But the open source R&D makes it different than, say, automobile manufacturing. On the other hand, the automobile aftermarket is like the open source. In any case the top engineering and design in IT and computer science is native to the US. It’s a combination of things that make the US the innovator, and a great deal of that has to do with our markets.

There is very little commercial software that comes from anywhere but the US. Nobody else innovates like we do. The fact that we have a large contingent of Indians in the US IT industry has little to do with a US need for R&D. It is very much about the phenomenon of outsourcing and the market for enterprise software.

The basic dynamic is this: The Fortune 500 is chock full of upper management who have, for the past 20 years, had almost zero MBAs with computer science undergraduate degrees. They. Do. Not. Know. How. To. Hire. Tech. Professionals. So they outsource. That is why companies like Deloitte and the former PWC (now owned by IBM) and the former Anderson Consulting (dismantled after Enron) and EDS (Ross Perot, remember him?) dominated in the 80s, 90s and basically all the way until the dot com boom. In the meanwhile, DEC went broke. Xerox computing went broke. Eventually Compaq went broke. Sun Micro went broke. Silicon Graphics went broke. A bunch of smaller computer and software companies consolidated and then went broke. Intel crushed a whole lot of companies. So all kinds of R&D was done in the US but the Fortune 500 did not hire smart people who have always been around in the US. So as soon as they found out they could outsource technical support, boom the bottom fell out of the markets and wages went down.

I saw this three ways, first as a call center rep and then as an IT consultant and finally as a VP of Services. In this last job it was made perfectly transparent to me that ‘business as usual’ meant essentially ‘sweatshopping’ foreign born IT staff and charging high rates for their services. That meant young people with hyped up degrees from schools nobody in the US ever heard of (and are not so very prestigious in their home countries either) can get over here on work visas and be paid $30/ hour while a company like Deloitte (for example) will bill them out at $150/ hour. This is the dirty secret of the IT industry.

For the past 10 years, roughly, I have been working and building stuff from AWS. (BTW a lot of the underlying tech of AWS was built by Twilio[1]. ) And nobody has needed any scientific research into anything AWS does. I can tell you without a moment’s hesitation that no PhDs are needed to build anything AWS has offered over the past decade. And yet still, most of the Fortune 500 has only adopted the cloud in the past 4 years or so.

But let’s put it starkly shall we?

If you’re going to make a real dent in the digital world where you need PhD level brains, then you would be making an operating system[2]. Clearly the biggest revolution of the past 3 decades is Linux and the Open Source movement. So first let me state the obvious. In cellphones the world is basically Apple’s iOS vs Google’s Android. The rest of the market splits up various ways. But in supercomputing and cloud servers Linux dominates these originated out of the efforts of Linus Torvalds of course, but was modeled after UNIX invented at Bell Labs, and BSD (Berkeley System D, obviously from UC Berkeley). Look at the heritage of Linux[3]. We didn’t need any imported labor to create the operating systems that at the core of the computing world, nor did we need it for the programming languages that dominate. Everything else is derivative. And stating more obviousness, TCP/IP, the network protocol of the Internet was developed by the US government, and Ethernet was developed at Xerox.

---

To understand this at a deeper level, get into this by Eric Weinstein[4].

That study was a key link in a chain of evidence leading to an entirely different view of the real origins of the Immigration Act of 1990s and the H1-B visa classification. In this alternative account, American industry and Big Science convinced official Washington to put in place a series of policies that had little to do with any demographic concerns. Their aims instead were to keep American scientific employers from having to pay the full US market price of high skilled labor. They hoped to keep the US research system staffed with employees classified as “trainees,” “students,” and “post-docs” for the benefit of employers. The result would be to render the US scientific workforce more docile and pliable to authority and senior researchers by attempting to ensure this labor market sector is always flooded largely by employer-friendly visa holders who lack full rights to respond to wage signals in the US labor market.

The creative genius in the digital world is American, and it started before Bill Gates.

Footnotes

[1] About the Cloud Communications Company

[2] Usage share of operating systems - Wikipedia

[3] GNU/Linux Distributions Timeline

[4] How & Why Government, Universities, & Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists & High-Tech Workers

How Propaganda Works

Q: How effective is propaganda, and where do we see the same tools and tactics that make propaganda effective in our daily lives?

A: Anybody who feels informed about complex subjects who hasn’t read at least two serious books, or passed an undergraduate course in the matter is subject to propaganda. All you really need to understand is that every nation on earth has its version of the CIA, and they are always spitting out propaganda. Right here. Right now.

It could be me. It could be Greta Thunberg. It could be Tucker Carlson. It could be a viral YouTuber, it could be anyone on Twitter.

What you really need to think about is who benefits if people think X about some subject. If it really matters and all of the media is talking about it, then some intelligence agency in some corner of the world is planting stories.

Clearly the current international event all are talking about is the execution of Quds leader Qasem Soleimani. It’s in some nations’ interest to make Americans feel guilty and blame America for anything and everything about that matter. Even though this incident hasn’t risen to any declaration in the UN - you can bet that every time something does rise to the level of a UN resolution, dozens of countries are going to be spreading propaganda to support their position and make opposing countries look bad.

The US is unique in that we have a lot of disposable income, free time, and political interests. Americans are always looking to argue about something. All I have to say is ‘comments section’ and you know what I mean. Believe me there are government departments dedicated to pushing information onto the American public.

If I say ‘Brexit’, you say what? And what is the book you read about the history of the EU? You cannot name any of the experts whose opinion helped form your opinion. You can’t name how many sources of information comprise the cloud of information in your head. You don’t have footnotes in your brain or in notes that you have taken and rechecked over time. But you might connect “nationalism” with … what? When is the last time you thought about the nature of nationalism on your own unprompted from media? Is nationalism good or bad? Why are you even thinking about it? It’s in somebody’s interest to make you question what you know, or make you think about what you never really thought about before. If you’re following the news, then you’re following an agenda for putting stuff in your head that you didn’t create.

One last thing, because people have been asking me about how much advertising and non-school ‘education’ affects what people know. If you can, find an Asian market in your town. Try a 99 Ranch Market or Mitsua Marketplace or H-Mart or Marukai. Oh yeah Patel Brothers or T&T. Easy for me in SoCal, maybe not easy for you. The point is that you go into a supermarket and you don’t know anything about the brands. You don’t know which bread to buy. Which is the premium soy sauce? There is a huge gap between your knowledge about American brands and other country’s brands. You will be lost until you get to the produce section, because there your own skill in picking fruits and vegetables takes over. You know a good avocado. You know a bad banana when you see one. When you are shopping, you don’t take any time to switch over from one way of knowing a good product to another way. Everything in a can or a package you know originally from marketing. That’s how propaganda works.

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.

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.

 

In Defense of Aquaman

Somebody asked me, because why I dunno, which superhero I would rather be. For some reason I have been thinking about them, and it occurred to me in a flash that I'd like to be Aquaman. There are several things that he has in his favor.

Firstly, Aquaman is genuine. He doesn't wear a mask. He doesn't have a secret identity. He doesn't pretend to be somebody he is not. He is genuine royalty.

Secondly, he's not some alien coming to Earth to save puny humans from themselves. He is genuinely from the Earth, from the legendary Atlantis - the most perfected Earth city ever.

Aquaman is not the first superhero you think about. That's good. He's got better things to do. He's not slumming around like Clark Kent or Peter Parker hanging out at some newspaper just looking for trouble. He doesn't believe in nation building or any ideology. He's just hanging out with his fish friends.

Aquaman doesn't have any arch-nemesis always threatening him. He's not burdened with the problem of killing somebody off so he can have peace. He's not psychologically co-dependent on some evil twin psyche. He doesn't have any rivals in his own domain.

Aquaman doesn't have ridiculous powers. He can't single-handedly destroy cities. His powers operate at the heroic level, not at the god level. So he can be trusted not to let his whim and failure wrack too much destruction.

All said, I like Aquaman, who is clearly an environmentalist, defending the seven seas.

The Stoic vs the Activist

Q: Can we reconcile Stoicism with Social Justice?

A: No.

Stoicism works against the premise of social justice, which is that there are populist movements that can and must re-engineer society on the outskirts of law.

I think the fairest assumptions that can be made about social justice is that there are permanent classes of people whose social status is set in stone and cannot be advanced without sustained social and political action in defiance of the established law and order. This is the difference between justice and social justice.

The difference between social justice and charity is that social justice is always secular. I think this is partially because of a naive construction on behalf of those in favor of social justice against organized religion. The Western understanding of the separation of church and state is prepared for organized religion with the supremacy of secular law over canon law with an understanding that there shouldn’t be much mutual overlap. We certainly should very well understand that a state that meddles as much as a church is oppressive and a church that rules as broadly as a state is oppressive. If we already have a free press, then what is the role of social justice activists? It seems to me that they are a fourth leg, superfluous to the three legged stool of the state, the free press, and the church, disruptively encroaching on the aegis of all three.

In any case the Stoic, aligning himself with the laws of nature, seeks to guide himself and his concerns to recognize his responsibilities to those laws of nature. This is something that works towards continuous incremental understanding and self-improvement, not towards outward activism that seeks to coerce others. A Stoic is a citizen whose deportment is disciplined and moral and works well within a libertarian context. You don’t need to coerce a Stoic, he will not defy nature. But the business of the state (law) and the church (canon law) is to coerce. The business of the press and free education is to persuade through rationality. The Stoic might be best employed there.

Since the Stoic ultimately achieves the serenity to accept the things he cannot change, the courage to change things he can change and the wisdom to know the difference, he is ultimately reconciled with the law and with canon law. He will defy injustice in either with courage or serenity. But this is manifest through the virtuous character of the individual, not through the sloganeering of activist groups. For whom does the social justice activist work? For those who cannot work for themselves. And what standards can the social justice activist stand by if neither law nor canon law suffice? So how can that ever be consistent over time in any society, much less in accord with the unchanging laws of nature?

The Stoic sees this as an individual journey which of course can make use of the study of principle, of rationality, of ethics. It is, after all, a search for the truth of the laws of nature. But the Stoic understands that any individual’s capacity to become righteous comes at an unpredictable pace and quality. It therefore cannot be demanded of the public at large by any activist group. The wisdom of Diogenes, for example, can only be approached by students of Diogenes - here we are many hundreds of years later and how many people have approached such ancient and timeless wisdom? It cannot be externally demanded.

One must ask of the social justice activist why they are not content to work to reform the law, or reform the canon law? The answer can only be that they are impatient. And why cannot they be satisfied with their own individual defiance of these? The answer can only be that they would be lonely and individually ineffective. They therefore must take the stage and dramatize their own struggles collectively speaking to the masses and take hope that the masses will similarly act up. But whatever principles they seek to defend are either in line or out of line with the laws of nature - and these will be known to the Stoic and anyone who seeks truth. So it must be concluded that they simply protest too much. Doesn’t the slave know he is denied liberty? Doesn’t the robbed know he has been deprived of his property? Doesn’t every victim of every crime know the injustice done to him? The law is sufficient to see all of this, either secular or canon, and if not, certainly the individual done harm. But this seeing and knowing is not sufficient to the activist. The activist wants to take part and take credit for seeing what anyone can see and then take issue with the laws for not being panoptic and expedient.

It is the distance between the law and the individual conscience that is liberty. If that gap is closed by any means, it is overreach. The individual must wait because he would have no license to act of his own accord - to right any wrong done him beyond the scope of the law, to use his immediate sight to correct any error. A law covering any gap that is not secular law or canon law would then be ‘social law’ and that would always be, like the other two, coercive. Where then would be individual freedom? Let the individual have space to act in his own defense. Let him have room to interpret the laws of nature and act accordingly. Keep the activist clear of this space every man must have to rationally consider his position and act accordingly. Without that space for individual agency, which is certainly presumed by the activist ‘in solidarity’ with the benighted masses, there is no freedom. There is no liberty. There is only waiting upon the machinations of social justice. That space space for action belongs to the individual, not the activist crowd. The individual is the atom of society, not the social justice partisan.

 

Joker

The first thing to know about 'Joker' is that I watched it all the way through, which is something I could not say about 'The Master'. I am tempted to call 'Joker' art, and 'The Master' pornography. Joker is intriguing and not entirely uncomfortable as brutal as it can be. It's a story we are familiar with; we know how it ends more or less. With this poor schlub transforming into a murderous maniac. In 'The Master' I had no idea how far off the rails the characters might go and that became entirely too uncomfortable for me.

The madness of the Arthur Fleck is accelerated by his desire to do for others. As much as he does, he can never do enough, and so naturally he feels that he doesn't exist. A comedian, a clown a showman, his ego only exists in the happiness he can extract from others. The laughter he possesses physically takes him over into uncontrollable spasms. They hurt as he wheezes up the last gasps of what could be laughing coughing and/or crying. He cannot control it. He laughs at the most inappropriate times, when the irony of life is cruel. But he resists his dark sense of humor. He is excused for what seems to be a disease. He has never been happy a moment in his life and yet from this self-pity he attempts to bring cheer. It only works for children. The adults in Gotham City are on edge and do not laugh at their own misfortune. There isn't a country song within a country mile. The blues don't exist here - it is all urban jungle, smoke, concrete and gritty bricks.

the rumors that I have heard but not listened to say something is wrong with the message this film sends to {incels, black women} but that's crazy talk. I won't even pick up the tangent. For all the social significance this film has and whatever that may be, I still say it is art, capable of sparking imaginations different ways. That is the exact opposite of commerce which is magic and technology, i.e. that which is calculated to bring a specific and perfectly predictable result from its consumer.

Hear hear for art.

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.

Just Fix The Planet

The ages have taught humanity, and we have learned well, how to deal with the consequences of our nature. And they are manifest in the stories and legends, in the fables and sacred texts, in the shared wisdom of our heritage. We know the virtues of heroism and we reward them. We know the vices of villainy and we punish them. When we pay respect to the wisdom of the ages we can expect justice and social amity, but this is not what we pay attention to in our contemporary American society.

 

What we pay attention to is the monetization of every possible aggregation of interest with nihilistic abandon. We say that infinite freedom exists and that we can be free of judgment. We say that anything goes because everything can be socialized into normalcy and we say that nothing outside of our experience need concern us because there is no standard against which we must conform.

 

So our self-discipline is narrowed to those few things we have decided to be in our individual interests. We pursue our passions. We champion our favorite pet charity or marginalized group. We sell propaganda for our favorite political provocateur or interest group. We consume our favorite flavors.

 

We ignore the commons. We ignore wisdom. We feel something is wrong. We blame others. We expect disaster. We watch zombie movies. We anticipate a great famine, a global holocaust, a Biblical reckoning. We panic and strive to get our last licks in, to cash in while there's still cash to cache. We are thoughtless, juvenile herds, like a swam of seagulls picking through a garbage heap with no higher self-regard than is absolutely necessary in our endless scrapping for scraps. The best thing we can hope to be is a sentimental favorite victim. Oh look at how I suffer. Squawk! Squawk! Where is my piece of this pile of garbage? Squawk!

 

Is it any wonder we kill ourselves? We have engineered our psyches into engines of self-destruction. We rightly hate what we have become, and yet we refuse to give up the game we have been convinced is the only game in town. Because everybody we know is playing, and so what about history? History is a story of oppression, and suffering we say. And so we have been convinced that our material affluence and comfort demand that we follow an arrow of behaviors that inevitably tell us to abandon the very idea of having many children. This is the way of prosperity, we tell ourselves. This is the way of maximizing individual freedom. This is the way of avoiding pain and suffering. And yet we still want to be rock stars, validated by the millions and under no obligations to something so pedestrian as a family, a religion, a nation. With no need to conform to any convention of chastity, of sobriety, or reserve our mantra instead is the direct opposite. Sex! Drugs! Rock & Roll!. We smash our guitars. We get smashed. We leap into the air and expect the adulation of the millions will bear us up. We sing our desperate songs of self to a million other selves who stare up at images of us in our lonely, adolescent cells. We feel stupid, and contagious, here we are now, entertain us. The game of life is hard to play, we're going to lose it anyway. Suicide is painless.

 

But it's not us. It's the guns. Just change that part of the planet and we can go on doing what we want. It's not us. It's the opioids. Just change that part of the planet and we can go on doing what we want. It's not us. It's the immigrants. Just change that part of the planet and we can go on doing what we want. It's not us. It's ChickFilA, it's the people who eat meat. It's the people who don't sex like we do. It's not us. JUST FIX THE PLANET.

 

Who is going to give us the power to fix the planet? Because it's not us.

Mike's Manly Man Checklist

Mike's Manly Man Checklist

1. Ride a horse
2. Ride a motorcycle
3. Shoot a gun
4. Rope a steer
5. Tune a car
6. Hang a door
7. Use a chainsaw
8. Quote the Three Stooges
9. Set a broken bone
10. Save a drowning person
11. Surf a wave
12. Ride a helo
13. Win at poker
14. Fly a plane
15. Climb a rock face
16. Retire that debt
17. Play harmonica
18. Garden
19. Wear a tux
20. Stop a thief
21. Run a marathon
22. Swim an ocean mile
23. Defend an innocent
24. Open that jar
25. Weld
26. Bench your weight
27. Stay loyal despite it all
28. Ace a hole in one
29. Gamble a day's wages
30. Break up a fight
31. Paint or photograph a nude
32. Paddle a canoe
33. Welcome a stranger
34. Back up a trailer
35. Take the L
36. Tell a dirty joke
37. Hit a curve ball
38. Get bounced
39. Pour a martini
40. Train a dog
41. Earn a nickname
42. Survive a humiliating job
43. Hustle pool
44. Teach
45. Score a touchdown
46. Perform the Heimlich
47. Calm an infant
48. Score a goal
49. Read Hemingway or Kipling
50. Tell a ghost story
51. Land a fish
52. Dress in drag
53. Finger whistle
54. Move a sofa
55. Drive a stick
56. Eat two steaks
57. No hands bicycle
58. Teabag a spawn camper
59. Nunchuck both hands
60. Wear leather jacket
61. Serve
62. Wear leather pants
63. Wear chaps
64. Explode something
65. Smoke a stogie
66. Survive an interrogation
67. Get a tattoo
68. Chop down a tree
69. Use your real name online
70. Wear the uniform
71. Lay cement
72. Build a fence
73. Grow a beard
74. Shave your head
75. Grill steaks
76. Quote Shakespeare or Bierce
77. Spit
78. Race a car
79. Make a huge fire
80. Approach that girl
81. Put out a huge fire
82. Backpack overnight
83. Face it
84. Play a guitar onstage
85. Wear a fedora
86. Lose a drinking contest
87. Arm wrestle
88. Curse out your (ex)boss
89. Mosh
90. Rescue an animal
91. Stop a bully
92. Paint a room
93. Initiate The Talk
94. Marry that girl
95. Dress an animal
96. Sweat lodge
97. Drive a tractor
98. Hunt for meat
99. Wear body paint
100. Bury treasure

 

American Wag 019 - White Supremacy

 

American Wag now has a bit of momentum. Here we are discussing current events, tribalism, cops busting minorities, identity and racial representation and a couple dozen other things related to the current buzz and fears about America falling off an ideological cliff.

As I begin to describe my efforts to understand the chatting class, liberal arts and humanities what I didn't explain is that my worldview has a very strong statistical bias. That is to say if 1000 people are murdered every year in my state, I'm going to calculate the chances that I'm going to get murdered and that is how I'm going to behave, by a precise risk assessment. Not by what some poet wrote about his dead homies.

The Uncle Bunny Scenario

I have white ancestors. I met them when I was a child. They were my Uncle Bunny and Aunt Mae. They lived in Connecticut in a small pristine house. I loved them immediately. Uncle Bunny had a head so bald that that it shone in the sunlight. Aunt Mae said he had a special formula that consisted of eggs that he used to polish his dome. Aunt Mae was just sweet, and you could tell that they loved each other. It was said that Uncle Bunny bought stocks in Ford when the company first went public. I am thinking about that today.

Someone I've known online casually mentioned in an interesting way that she inherited a bundle. And for some reason, I actually felt opportunistic. It's something I never felt before - not in the way I did for a few hours. I happen to know that the way she particularly came into this money was the cause of some embarrassment and discomfiture. You see she had lived her life without it purposefully not wanting the power it would give her over her material circumstances, but through some complications of the law she was forced to take possession of it or lose her wish to donate it all to charity upon her death. Seven figures is no joke, it might even be eight. Now it must be parked, for the moment, in a liquid state. She's going to buy an SUV.

We all have that wish for the genie to grant our wishes. I know that I have made a number of choices in my life that made me flirt with various probabilities of riches. I originally called it 'Fuck You Money' as did many people in my generation, especially those of us who worked in Silicon Valley. Although many of my wishes remained the same, I renamed it the 'Dosh Point'. And so I considered what I would do if I ever reached my Dosh Point. I must say that for a good majority of my professional life, the Dosh Point has never seemed that far away from me, and I have felt relatively confident that I would attain it. So I adopted such an attitude that I assumed it and so my tastes were never too far away. For me, it would be relatively easy to achieve the few material possessions I wanted and afterward settle into a kind of shabby gentility that always seemed appropriate to me. 

After some time, it became apparent to me that people much younger than I were cashing out of the casino capitalism having studied the game and counted the cards. Whatever it is they have done, I have recently considered that like Shaft, they must have planned for and achieved a Big Score. By my calculations of the thermodynamics of life, this effort must have had some opportunity costs. I've certainly known men who have sacrificed family for the glory of being the top dog. And while I often am thankful for what I have, I sometimes wonder in my solitude if I might have been happier with more money and less sagacity and more assholiness. I wrote about that earlier this year: 

A couple years ago I gave myself a bad haircut and went to see a long awaited popular military hero movie. In the men's room after the show, I met an irascible old man who grumbled that the actors in the movie didn't do shit compared to what he did in 'Nam. I took him out and bought him some drinks at the PF Chang's next door. He had come down the hill from Palos Verdes to condescend to the public. He informed me that when he was young he was a statewide track champion. He went to the war and became a helicopter door gunner. His bullets would spray but he didn't pray. "At least 100 kills" he said with a kind of practiced, gruff sangfroid. One day his chopper crashed and it broke his spine. He was told he'd never walk again. He walked like an old man for the rest of his life. He built a chemical company and lives in a multi-million dollar home with his wife. She let him out of the house, where he rarely goes. He still runs the company from home. He has beat everyone.

As I recall the story it reminds me of how Jordan Peterson says that disagreeable people make for good apex predators in the game of life. This man was certainly a case in point. He reminds me slightly of another man who was the one who loaned the computer that changed my life to the highschool I attended in the 70s. I called him to thank him one day, and he still grumbled about how OSHA set him up. He too ran a chemical company. The most successful men I know, with few exceptions, don't want to be happy. They want to win. They are only happy that they're not losers.  Life's a pile of shit that you must climb and stay rooted on top. These old climbers are kings of the hill and they'll tell you about it. They're not bragging to you, they're warning you.

I have some measure of this assholiness, but owing to the shape of my personality and life experience I have consciously bent myself into the service of others. Sometimes, though I am often disagreeable, I wish that I was more disagreeable in the way I was as a callow youth. But I have grown a social skin and it has become me. The engines of my single-mindedness have a lower redline than they used to. I could fearlessly go out and have that experiment with myself given double my Dosh Point, but I'm truly not motivated to do so. It gives me a sense of pleasure to know that I can and that I would, but I moderate my want for things I know I don't need, like that new Porsche and that house in Pasadena. 

So I think I understand (Sheila's) desire to resist the temptations at all costs. If you've made peace with the life you actually have, with person you have become, then why do that experiment? Perhaps it was in a moment of insight that you promised never to be that experimental asshole. Something like that commitment must be close to the heart of the reluctant heir. Isn't it the reformed alcoholic who knows better than anyone the power of the addition? Isn't it the beaten child who knows the terror of abuse? It's it the truly loved who know the horror of abandonment? I'm guessing there is something decidedly extra in my friend's experience that has made her swear off the fortune, or knowing her, she's just hardheaded enough to will that wall into existence, except for the SUV. Gotta have a good SUV.

I know in my heart that when I first read Fortune magazine and saw the profile of three rich families, I identified with the restaurant owners of Marina Del Rey. They pulled about 300,000 per year (in the 70s) from their businesses. They could have franchised and made way more money, but for them, they knew that would just translate to more expensive Christmas gifts to buy their friends.  That dovetails with the warning I had from a close friend of means who said if I made much more money I would only succeed in spoiling my children - a wreck of a sort I would never forgive myself. So yes, I am pretty much accommodated to my distance from the Dosh Point and consequently my bucket list is very very short. I am comfortable and I don't need much more comfort. It would be nice to have that Porsche and that house and that stereo system before I spend the rest of my life maintaining my health. It would be nice to have a month to waste in Paris with the Spousal Unit. There's not much more debauchery I'm interested in, not that I can think of any at the moment, but I do want to be exhaustive here.

All I can think of, seriously, is funding that business that builds that system that I think the world needs and only I have thought of, and time to write my books. It was that first opportunity that made me feel opportunistic when I heard the news. So it is in this I must face my lazy indifference and the possible disorder of my priorities. It is in this I deal with my own faults, a motivation I would lose if I suddenly had Uncle Bunny's money. 

I think I understand the point. That's why I no longer call it Fuck You Money. I'm not trying to be more of an asshole than I already am. I'm trying to reduce my asshole footprint. Personal riches are not going to help with that, they will get directly in the way. 

Leadership: The Hybrid Model

I am becoming more convinced that what is miraculous about AI should not seem miraculous to us any more than the miracle of the Triceratops. AI is a creation of the evolution of human thought pursuant to particular ends. If it reaches those ends, that doesn't make it generally useful or sustainable. As soon as people get bored with AI and the margins for AI development decreases, the industry and its products will suffer like flat screen TV repair. 

I read an excellent introduction to a new product called LF this morning and it has got my mind spinning and connecting a large number of dots. I will archive that original post here. In summary, it offers an interesting insight into sustainability by making the convincing observation that system developers fall in love with elegant models and tend to shy away from hybrids. I mean you teach theory, right? You cannot teach leadership. Leadership that works (as you see I'm skipping ahead to the lede) does so because it is agile. It keeps the goal in mind and it uses a variety of delivery methods for carrots and sticks contingent on its ability to see and sense. The operant phrase is in the quote:.

"Decentralize until it hurts, then centralize until it works."  

The next thing that happened was that I watch videos of Ronald Reagan and noticed how he stumbled over his answer about what leadership is. That's ok. A dictionary definition would not suffice. Reagan became clear when he reflected on his own values and his own stories. That's a very good way for a certain type of leader to operate - on the confidence with the methods that have personally worked before, yet with an understanding that whatever you do know or don't know, responsibility ends with you. If you are decided to not let theoretical impurity discourage you, ie if you are not afraid to be heretical for the purposes of a specific solution, then along with sharing the credit for success, there is nothing you can't accomplish. 

I like the idea of abandoning a slavish dedication to systemic elegance. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.

Stop Crying

So about a year ago I witnessed something that stuck with me. Over in Sunnyglen Park where I did my morning runs, I saw parents out with their young kids. One of the kids was riding on a scooter. He must have been about 3 1/2 or 4. I can't remember if he was wearing a helmet but he did an Arte Johnson. Fall down go boom. As he recognized that he was in pain, he started yelping and the parents rushed over. Of course they were young parents and so they didn't know how to deal with the situation, not as well as I do of course. They were reacting to the pain he was feeling, not the wreck. And when you're crying and people are reacting to your cries, you cry until they guess right or promise you ice cream. 

The proper thing to do when your kid is bawling his eyes out is to get him to start talking about what happened. You want to encourage him to talk and then he'll realize this and then he'll have to pipe down to explain the situation. So the first logical question is What happened? (sob sob, I fell down), Where? (sob. over there) Over here? (no) Show me where. (right here). OK. Where does it hurt? (sob. on my arm) Let me see. (see?) Oh. Yeah I see. 

If you are more perceptive than a 4 year old, then you'll see how the misdirection gets him to focus on the series of events that lead to the boom. Not the present pain. By the time you get through this exercise, the kid will have put together some cause and effect stuff in his head. You can even elaborate with some forensics. OH. Look at this bump. I bet you hit that bump and it made your scooter fall. (yeah. stupid bump!) Well you know to watch out for that bump. Now the kid is oriented to be smarter about his scooter riding and the consequences of bumps, rather than the quickness with which he can procure ice cream by crying loudly at all the mommies and daddies in Sunnyglen Park. 

Thus endeth today's non-fableized fable.

Turning Japanese

My relationship with the Japan in my mind started in college when I read Nathan’s biography of Mishima. I did read ‘Patriotism’ in high school and I understood its beauty. His idea of the ‘unity of pen and sword’ appealed greatly to me.

Like many Americans, I read James Clavell’s Shogun books during the 80s. Also the film Kagemusha was a big hit on the art house circuit. I wasn’t into it - I was kind of young, but I did remember. By the mid to late 80s, Americans like me were totally into Kurosawa films. Coming from Los Angeles as I did, I actually grew up with Japanese Nisei in the Crenshaw area. My friends and I were into Datsun mini trucks when they first came out. And the 510 was awesome.

The more I think about the subject, the more I remember. Part of the admiration came from the fact that in the 80s Japanese companies were buying American property. I seem to recall the Dai Ichi Kangyo was said to be the most powerful bank in the world. And of course everybody loved Nikon cameras more than American cameras.

Eating sushi was a big deal in LA. That too happened in the mid 80s for me. But it wasn’t until the late 80s when I finally realized how much I had been impressed with things Japanese. That is when I started studying Taoism, and also reading the Akira manga. Prior to that, a Japanese friend of mine was very much into the ‘cute’ and she introduced me to Han Gyodon. Ultimately I adopted Badtz Maru as my desk pet. But Otomo’s comic and the Tao kind of did it for me. When I read Shogun, I decided that I would run my house in such a way that my wife would make all of the financial decisions, so that I would be free of such concerns - money would not color my judgement. Unfortunately I turned out to be the one who was smarter with money.

At some for a short time I had a Japanese girlfriend. She came to the US because she liked the freedom and imagination of Americans. On the other hand I was attracted to Japan for its order, formality and traditional ways. I wanted to be able to think both ways, so it was important for me at the time.

I have never been to Japan, but I continued enjoying Kurosawa, with Ran being my favorite film for many years. But as I got older, I was not so fanatical about it. Today I am very comfortable with all things Japanese that make it over to the US.

I think most Americans simply enjoy Japanese food and consumer goods but don’t think very much about Japanese culture. Young people definitely enjoy Japanese videogames and heroic style.

 

How I Failed

Q: What is the hardest problem you ever faced as a student in highschool?

A: Motivation. And I failed.

I went to an exclusive prep school. I didn’t study, I was just smart. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I high passed all my standardized tests, but didn’t really care. Nothing was particularly interesting to me - until I started programming computers. I had no idea, seriously not a half of a shred of an idea how anybody on the planet could make money with computers. You just go work at IBM, right? In those days, most colleges didn’t even have Computer Science degree programs. It was all Electrical Engineering. Saying ‘software’ in those days was like saying ‘chip design’ today. Unless you know somebody who was actually doing that in one of the three or four giant corporations who do it, chances are.. no chance.

What we’re doing right now, was impossible. In fact, computer people absolutely hated programmers who used computers for text. Computer space was way way too expensive to waste on words, much less paragraphs and essays. Computer space was for numbers! And basically I hung around a bunch of Jesus freaks, hippies, stoners and political activists. I wanted to make some money, but I thought money was evil. Yeah. I was that stupid. I literally thought that the most wonderful thing I could do with a computer is put a million accountants out of work so that they could learn to write poetry and enjoy hiking in the woods. I was not alone. It was the 70s.

The inside of my head looked something like this:

Oh. Did I tell you, I had skipped a grade so I was 16 in my senior year. I got accepted to Electrical Engineering at USC on an early decision in January. So you couldn’t tell me shit. I basically daydreamed for my whole second semester (because I finished all my required classes) destroyed my GPA and chances for an academic scholarship. Not that I ever really tried after 10th grade.

So basically I had no motivation, and I didn’t care that I had no motivation. I was immature, arrogant and a little smart ass. I fit nowhere and didn’t really try that hard, and I didn’t really ask for any help, because I thought that I had already thought of everything. Which I probably did, but still wouldn’t listen to what other people told me. Like, “Maybe you should accept that 4 year scholarship, even though it’s not from USC.”

There’s a big long story in all that and maybe I’ll write a book about it. But the bottom line was, I could have had it all, but I didn’t really have faith in people, or the System or anything outside of my own existence. I should have just shutup and listen. The story has a happy ending. I rebuilt my life from scratch and finally made use of my talents. But I could have saved myself a lot of time and heartache if I had a bit more faith in my fellow man instead of so much in myself.

In that regard, I was just young and not as smart as I thought I was, and actually really afraid to fail or be embarrassed. I was fragile, and it made me a jerk. I couldn’t admit that I didn’t have all the answers. I just figured that I’d find out all the answers sooner or later. I did, but not the way I planned. You see by the next January I dropped out of college and ended up working at a store like Costco. So much for the power of genius.

—

So my advice is this:

• Don’t be brittle. Bounce back.
• You cannot cure yourself. Share your pain. Show your scars.
• Have faith in your fellow man.
• Shutup and listen.
• Make yourself useful. People will be grateful.
• Motivation is not about speeches, it’s about determination to grow.
• Let people tell you where you need to grow.
• Be generous with yourself.
• Be the friend that you wish you had.

So that’s the best advice I could give to arrogant little dramatic douches like I used to be. I’m not presuming that it’s your problem, but my biggest enemy was myself. And it wasn’t until I opened up as a person that I was able to overcome my shortcomings. A big part of that involves being open, honest with yourself and trusting others to help you when you are failing. It applies to every aspect of life. The sooner you learn that and experience it for yourself, the more fearless you will actually become.

I’m a much better person for all of that, and that’s really what makes life worthwhile, is being a better person. Success favors the emotionally prepared.

 

Myths of Nation Building

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mau Mau Factor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

 

Obligatory Seriousness on Abortion in Alabama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Decolonization Deconstructed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now you understand everything about the Culture Wars.

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

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

Great Inflated Expectations

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

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

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

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

Anyway. I hope you get it. 

How To Decide What To Do With Your Life (Via Negativa)

Get a pencil and three pieces of paper.

On the first piece of paper write NEVER.
On the second piece of paper write PROBLY NOT.
On the third piece of paper write. MAYBE.

Now plop down in front of the TV (or YouTube) and watch until you see enough stupid crap to fill up three pages.

What you do with your life is you figure out how to completely stay clear of the stuff you NEVER want to do, and away from people who are doing that same stuff.

Figure out what went wrong with the people who accidentally did a PROBLY NOT, and try not to make the same mistakes.

Don’t worry about the MAYBE. In fact, go do a MAYBE today. See how you like it. If you don’t, then put erase it and put it on the PROBLY NOT list. If you actually like it, well that’s one thing you can do in your life.

Keep the lists around. Memorize it if you can. Now ask other people about the things they would never do, or probably not do, or maybe do. Learn from their mistakes too. Pretty soon you will (probably) be making fewer mistakes, and respecting yourself more than you thought. You just never took the time to think about all of your standards. In otherwords, your whole life was full of MAYBE. But you’ll also learn if you’ve been sloppy and doing more PROBLY NOT than you should have. Adjust it the other way. Put those into MAYBE. Perhaps you didn’t know yourself as well as you thought.

The point is to keep recycling the list. You will make enough mistakes to really get to know what you do like and don’t like. Don’t expect that you will automatically get where you want just by putting things down on paper. But also don’t lie to yourself.

Success in life comes from discipline. When you discipline yourself, you gain control. If you lose control of yourself, others will discipline you against your will. Draw your own lines.

 

Eww, American Society!

Q: Why is America infatuated with reality TV shows, and is it effecting society?

A: I’m going to change what I say when I answer questions like this and remind people that their distaste with ‘American culture’ is actually distaste for the behavior of people they exposed to through media. There’s nothing wrong with that except that it goes against the ‘dont judge’ edict of many people.

The answer is that if I can see it, IE it’s done in public, then it is my business.

What we have today that we didn’t have before is the ability to observe any kind of human behavior. Before we used neighborhoods and distance and clubs and organizations to hide and defend ourselves from the kind of people we found distasteful. But now everything they do is on display for everyone to see, and everyone doesn’t like it.

The idea of trying to convince everyone to like everyone else is absurd. So is the idea that all of the perverse things we are able to see others do is normal. It is not.

Stereotypes, Prejudice and Bigotry

Stereotypes exist because human beings need to generalize. We are always guessing what might happen next according to our expectations which in turn are formed by experience.

A prejudice, is technically, any presumption. Or if we decide to let the word have a negative connotation, it is a sticky assumption that doesn’t relent in the face of actuality. That is defective thinking. Note also that stereotypes can be negative or positive.

Imagine for a moment, the characters of Gilligan’s Island. They are all stereotypes and they behave in character. There is no reason to believe, having watched a season, that Gilligan will not ruin an attempt to get rescued, that the Professor will suddenly get down on his knees and pray, that Mr. Howell will start building something useful or that Mary Ann will suddenly start cursing people out. Your prejudices are correct.

Now say something extraordinary happens. Say another boat is shipwrecked. Now Ginger has somebody else to flirt with. Mr Howell’s money means something. The Skipper doesn’t have to always be mad at Gilligan.

Your prejudices are now incorrect because something has changed. At some point, in the new season, you want Skipper to stop singing (you never knew he could sing). You want the Professor to stop wearing short pants and shave his new beard. Now you are being a bigot because you want people to revert to the stereotypes you are comfortable with. You conspire with Mrs. Howell to get Mary Ann to wash her clothes again - this is active bigotry. You want the social order to stay as it was and not respect change, and you use coercion and maybe even force to make things go your way.

But simply because there are stereotypes doesn’t mean you adopt them in a prejudiced way that denies reality. Nor does denial of reality make you active in bigotry.

The Problem with Empowerment

There is a significant difference between the defense of free speech, and the empowerment of random speech.

I was listening to the Joe Rogan podcast with Nicholas Christakis and they briefly discussed his problems with Yale's Halloween debacle. As soon as they started talking about the rights of free speech of 20 year olds, the conversation went right to the matter of them being old enough to serve in war, and I'm thinking there's something terribly wrong with this argument. It seems to me that the point of the rights in the context of free speech in academia in particular is to facilitate the expansion of knowledge. And while you never know where the next groundbreaking argument is coming from, the last place on earth one should encourage babble is in the university. 

I should start by pointing out my bias against the state of collegiate education. I am always fond of the aphorism that the British Navy conquered the world without the use of electronic calculators. There is much greatness to be found in the exploits of people who never attended college, but I am convinced that most of that greatness is of the sort not generally found in 20 year olds, or in undergrads. The American middle class is no easy place to survive given our economy and culture, but it also doesn't require a great amount of original thought. What it does require is some respectful attention and understanding of the theories under which America provides its structure that enables its citizens, and this study of Western Civilization has been neglected recently. I think much of that neglect comes at the behest of undergraduates who feel empowered by their very presence on campus. Of course they are empowered, universities empower them by accepting them and by heeding their complaints, mostly those about what their mere presence at university signifies. I tend to characterize this state of affairs as a matter of boorish bourgeois privilege and arrogance unworthy of any meritocracy, and have determined by my own brilliant insight that universities do not provide so much meritocracy, especially in the Humanities. It's rather sad to graduate such children into the harsh maw of market forces, and sad to watch the slow calamity of so many bean bag & ping pong businesses acquired industry by industry into oligopoly. As Pink Floyd said, 'Welcome to the Machine'. 

This is not about political left or right, it is about the proper authority of a university as a certifier of knowledge. If you, as an undergraduate, are capable of unseating the intellectual authority of a professor, then fine. But it seems to me that there is only one way of accomplishing that if the process of university education is correct - that is the process of becoming a professor. So are Humanities professors defending or abandoning the process that matriculated them? 

Let me use the following analogy. When you are a freshman, you are like a white belt in judo. You are instructed by black belts. If you think you can beat up a black belt, because the human body can assume an infinity of positions, then you are welcome to try and defeat your instructor. If you can defeat your instructor by smashing his head with a crowbar, you don't get a black belt - what you are doing is not judo and cannot be certified by the judo school. There should be absolutely no question about this.

The right of free speech is exactly like the right to challenge your instructor in a judo match. Use of a crowbar is random speech - it is not a credible position in the world of judo. You cannot win that way. And no white belt should be empowered to use such non-judo methods. The point of the right to challenge is so that even black belts can learn. The point of free speech and free inquiry is so that even professors can learn.

If a college professor is fired by the empowerment of undergraduates who in any other context is not considered professor material, then you undermine the very purpose of university. This is what's happening, and this is an abuse of the term 'free speech'.

Character Questions for the Rich and Famous

In a modern consumer society, I can think of two personal shortcomings of being rich. They have to do with one’s ability to answer these two questions which are somewhat related.

• how many mistakes is failure?
• how much pain is acceptable?

As I’ve mentioned before, whenever you make poor decisions that costs you money, when you’re rich you get to try again and again. This can be a tremendous advantage if you have reasonably good judgment and learn from your mistakes. But if you have poor judgment and make the same mistakes over and over, you can quickly fall into ruin because you think you can always afford to try again. This is what happens to a lot of rock stars, actors and pro athletes. For example, if you’re a drunk and you spend all of your money on booze.. well the poor man kills one bottle. The rich man kills three and invites others to do the same. Some party.

On the second matter, you know “No pain, no gain.” This is because for a lot of activities, humans are anti-fragile. Stress creates strength. But if you pamper yourself, well, it’s easy to get stressed out over trivial matters. And since it’s your limit of pain, you expect other people to respond appropriately. So here I’m going to give a personal example even though I’m not even rich. This morning I took my daughter out to a swanky breakfast on the marina. My wife orders Eggs Benedict with crab. Yeah it’s really good. But after the waitress left, she complained that she forgot to tell the waitress to poach her eggs a little extra. My wife hates runny eggs. Lots of people do. Now I paid over 150 for breakfast for five. You can imagine what kind of asshats we’d be considered if my wife’s stress over runny eggs translated into a demand for more service. She’d get the eggs and then send them back. So what if I have to pay more? I don’t have to put up with runny eggs! We’re rich!.

These two difficult questions go straight to the heart of character.

The more you think about it, the more you may come to question the position of motivational speakers. You don’t get to be one without having real success. Nobody off the street sells a book or fills an auditorium with people looking for advice. So if they tell you “No matter how much you fail, you can’t give up.” Well easy for you to say, rich dude. A rich motivational speaker will tell you to push past your pain, to endure more than you thought. Well, that’s a very broad spectrum but not so broad for those who easily spoil themselves. Eating runny eggs is not real pain.

 

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:

Gray Man Eight

Mission Critical by Mark Greaney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An excellent Gray Man book, one of the best. This one captures a sense of duplicity and partial knowledge with deft sensibilities. Superbly memorable characters in this one. Sometimes I wonder why I ever read any other spy books, Greaney has mastered the craft.

View all my reviews

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.

A Brief History of Cobb on the Black Hand Side

Steve Fair, semi-nemesis observes the following:

Cobb since I've known him has always tried to make the case that black people are these emotional sheep who have been indoctrinated to believe that conservatives were primarily greedy selfish racists when they really are saintly paragons of freedom, liberty and free market capitalism. No matter how many times we see conservatives serve the interests of the top 1% at the expense of the average American, or increase the size of government, or engage in nation building on the other side of the world, admit to voter suppression, or demonize people of color, that's his story and he's sticking to it.

 

If I ever did that, I regret it fully. I have absolutely no interest in saying black people are anything at all. If I ever did, it may be some artifact of my upbringing in the Talented Tenth and my history of 'black leadership'. In 1986, I made it fully clear that I believed that black unity was a myth and that I would no longer support that idea. As such I acknowledged black diversity in every dimension. It was my reading of Drylongso finally in 1993 that compelled me to give up the idea of 'black leadership' itself, at which point I vowed never to second-guess black people or say 'black people should'. I do not. Nobody should ever assume that I have a plan for black people - or consequently that I really truly care who black people are or what they choose to do. My standard byline and bottom line is "Some people find it very difficult to accept that they don't own black people, that includes black people."

 

So then from that point on, all I had was my own black past, which was (and remains) very ideosyncratic. I'm from a small town called Black, and I moved out a long time ago. Nevertheless, I had retained some interest, in black anti-racist politics. So somewhere around 1997, I made that the focus of my writing, very much in league with the Race Traitor movement. So between 1993 and roughly 2001, I made it a project to develop a singular anti-racist praxis which worked along multicultural lines. Adam Serwer is at that place now. It was during that time that I played Boohab and built Boohab's Factotum and The Race Man's Home Companion.

 

The last time I paid attention to Reparations, I did so following the Harvard Law professor whose name I do not remember right now. But then I asked the question in economic terms. What happens if Reparations don't happen? I called it 'The Cost of Not'. Then 9/11 happened and everybody everywhere completely stopped talking about Reparations.

 

Somewhere around 2003, having lived comfortable in the upper middle class nearly a decade, my class prerogatives took over. While I was still interested in anti-racism, it was clear to me that the random racism of American life was a footnote in mine. All of my anti-racism was academic. So I started to think about real political power and question why more black Americans did not seek political leverage on both sides of the aisle, like ordinary rich people do year in and year out. So I became intrigued about the fate of rich and powerful black people and the possibilities of integrating the Republican Party. I started my new blog Cobb. But before that, I got together with some of the sharpest black thinkers online and put together Vision Circle. All of these remain, unedited and in my control. So there's that.

 

With Cobb, I went on a simple journey into the American Right that turned out to be quite complex. It was deeply enlightening. But blogging as a 'black Republican' grew tiresome after about 3 years. So I quit blogging altogether, and then came back with a new angle. Since I had formed The Conservative Brotherhood, and did some media stuff on NPR and TV One, Cobb the blog became famous. But it was still a persona I created for a specific purpose. That purpose was over pretty much around -- I don't know 2006?. I changed Cobb's subtitle to "curious, skeptical and analytical". And then finally to its present form "stoic observations". The end of my actual political agitation was in 2007 owing to my disgust with identity politics but I had won black blogger of the year that year.

 

I'm still most famous as Cobb, and that is what it is. What persists from the conservative conversion is an organic defense of Western Civilization from its first principles, something I started around 2005 or 06 when I got into Dan Carlin and Larry Arnn as introduced by Hugh Hewitt. At that moment in my life, history became more interesting than the present. Still I sought to understand what was happening to the liberal left I grew up in and why it seemed so wacky. I finally came to understand the difference between liberals and progressives as well as the travesty of multiculturalism's dysfunctional fueling of identity politics. So I read Orwell to understand why the Left considers itself more moral than the Right.

 

These days, especially after the crash of 2008 and the re-election of Obama I can't say what my interest in blackness is. I'm agnostic. It isn't a compelling subject for me. I think everything that group identity could possibly be with political implications, I have a good understanding of and am immune to its charm and dysfunction. So it's just something I talk about from time to time with no agenda. I don't have dogs in those fights. So I guess you could write the end of my blackness was the beginning of the Obama era, because finally America had a bigger Negro it could use for its purposes. I still retain all I ever knew, and I don't have a problem recounting it or explaining anything I ever meant by what I wrote. But my interests and agenda lie elsewhere outside of identity and outside of politics. Around that time, my interest turned back to science fiction, The Long Now and ultimately my Peasant Theory and Martial Education. But it's probably best to read all that here at Cobb and see what you get out of it, if anything. I can't say what my interest in conservatism is either. I know both blackness and conservatism have very large problems in establishing their respective orthodoxies, but there are rabid folks desperately trying to establish some. Ahh those poor, damaged children.

 

I could go on and talk about my current interest in writing, but there's not much to easily explain. I'm interested in the universality of psychology, particularly evolutionary psychology and I'm interested in how computers might assist people in reconciling their personal philosophies with the history of philosophy and religion. I'm further interested in how religion became philosophy and how politics is not philosophy. Again this is about placing the zeitgeist into a developmental historical context. I'm also interested in Taleb's Incerto and the entire business of risk management, security and decision-making under imperfect conditions. So it likely shocks people that I mock or ignore their passions, for whatever reason it is that they do. Mostly I engage in public fora as a wry stoic and epistemological combatant. I think most people don't know why they think the way they do, and as someone who has 'trangsgressed' a bunch of religions, industries, and political philosophies I'm just the kind of stubborn intransigent to get on their nerves. I mock and defy. I'm an asshole and I know it. But I am polite enough to make people understand that I am challenging their premises. Most people get that. Enough don't that they think they've got me nailed. I doubt it.

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.

Huxley's Intellectual

It's funny that I still find it interesting to quote Aldous Huxley on the dichotomy between sexual and intellectual pursuit. Somebody nominated me to become, in the place of retiring Rabbi Findley, the moderator of the Stoics of Los Angeles. But right now there is so much chaotic shit in my life that I cannot bear the added responsibility, as minute as it would be. And yet it is a validation I cannot ignore.

The 'unregulated sex' argument went through the logical nets of people who haven't the fine mesh I have constructed over the decades, and so I let it be. I'm a bit tired of explaining. But if you asked me what exactly it is that I find more interesting than sex with people, it is testing to see how finely their logical nets have been crafted. I start with something pithy and provocative and see how many of the implications they get, and for the most part they don't. I am accustomed to this. I am alienated by this. I am adrift wondering why, at times, how it has become so difficult to be possessed of the kind of background I have. So I keep, with disdain, answering stupid questions. I can only laugh in the presence of old men who know. And all we do is know - because to know and to do is to draw a thick barrier around the human frailty of being an old man. Who would Mattis be without his Marines? He would be me, full of theory and vulnerable to not having all the troops. All the troops in your organization, all of the priests in your archdioceses, all of the agents in you station, all of your players on the field. I have all of 1000 friends on Facebook, but if I took pictures of my ass, I'd have more.

There is, in old men such as myself, the difficulty of the energy crisis. In America, you cannot outdo hustle. It is the hustler who learns all the angles. He cannot construct a thing of beauty from scratch, rather he polishes the ball to perfection by bouncing it everywhere and abrading it on every surface available to him. He is empirical, and so am I because I never got the sponsorship. Now I think I've learned that I've been oriented to achieving that sponsorship I never got, and introduced to the troops I would then lead. But there are no troops for sale. One must come from the ranks. I don't have the energy to ascend any more hierarchies. I need to win the lottery or move to Alabama. Or Texas. Or Louisiana. I'm not sure where there is such a place for me, but perhaps I am done with humanity and need most to commune with fish and trees. Everyone disappoints me. Everyone slogging through the mud of life having lost all care for the care of their feet. Oh but boy are they moving fast. Like baby goats. Can anyone out hustle kids?

It doesn't seem to require much precision to think one's way out of the various colored bags of America's intersectional, post-modern, post-industrial nook & cranny-verse. There are two to the 10th powers of elves for their culturally-appropriate shelves. The Wizards have figured out all of the market share trends and moments. There couldn't possibly be more 1024 options. If so, then the directors and producers will greenlight the project. There will be good and evil, black and white, rich and poor, foreign and domestic, left and right, straight and gay, rural and urban, hot or not, young and old, popular and obscure. But that's all, digital jaggies and a 8 bit world. Only a few pixels pay, only a few boxes sustain. That is humanity, according to the conventional and unconventional wisdom.

More later.