Cobb

It's a Battle for the Hearts and Minds

JK is one of the good looking dudes from my old neighborhood. We are fraternity brothers, and like most people from the old neighborhood he's exceptional. Almost nobody from my 'hood disappeared into mediocrity, we're all somewhat extreme. I met him among many of my frat at a smoker in Mid City this evening. Afterwards, since some brothers were from out of town, we made it a point to take in some seafood at Harold & Belle's. I forget how good and how reasonable they are. I'm going back again soon.

We talked about the world, because we've seen it. More of it than we expected to see, I'm sure for all of us. Character counts, and we all had a lion's share. In the end, JK, who knows how to turn a phrase had the most compelling tale to tell. His tale, about a chaplain's assistant who refused to be separated from his charge, going two levels up the chain of command was inspiring and instructive, but it was one phrase tangentially contextual that caught my mind. It was something I know I hadn't written directly on - something we'll cover here.

But first a bit of context. I'm a bit of a prodigal when it comes to hanging out with such excellent gentlemen as my fraternity has produced. You see, I'm an Alpha Phi Alpha brother but despite that I have given up my rights to be a member in good standing with the Talented Tenth. I grew up adjacent to but in close social intercourse with the communities of Ladera Heights, Baldwin Hills and View Park. I didn't want to be a doctor, lawyer or accountant. I wanted to be a scientist, but a scientist who drove a convertable Mercedes 450 SLC. My father was an old school Episcopalian (good) but also a black nationalist (bad) and a US Marine (what!?). My mother could pass any paperbag test (good) and was a Catholic from New Orleans (good) but converted to the Foursquare Church (bad). Yet both were civil servants (not bad) and conservative in that unique way the black middle class is. And yes we were totally white collar. Still, I was the prodigy and did my requisite hobnobbing at cotillions and partied with the cool kids at Palisades, Harvard, Westlake & Loyola. I wanted and expected the tudor gothic house. I just wondered how I was going to get it with my Engineer's degree. At some point, however, I became gradually outcast - perhaps more in my own mind - from the mainstream of those of us dedicated to Uplift, the Struggle, the Movement and Community Service. I made a series of radical breaks with traditions, but I still love those very specific peoples. There's no way I can explain it all. But I'm glad they know me. I'm glad to know them, but I've been out for a long walk on the Right side of the wall.

JK spoke about the absurdity, from his unique point of view, of the way America's foreign policy puts us into conflicts, especially in the Middle East. He described his understandable difficulty, as an army chaplain, in digesting the political objectives surrounding our engagements in that part of the world. In the end, duty prevailed, but the phrase 'hearts and minds' stuck in his craw. And why shouldn't it? As he went over that matter several things occurred to me, one of them rather unique. From my own grandmother's lips used to come the phrase "You just want to stay mad." in describing the refusal of any number of peoples to be pacified by American military action. 

You cannot presume to win hearts and minds simply by providing security.

We Americans tend to assume that people want what we have, simply because we do. There is a kind of tacit acknowledgement by all Americans that wealth and fame is what we all want. That subtext out of the way, we debate endlessly about the ethics of means. You cannot have a political discussion in America that doesn't boil down to a tug of war about the means, but everybody promises the same ends. Education. Health Care. Employment. Infrastructure. We know that a world of immigrants beat a path to our doors for those things, and all of us in the spoiled 5 figure middle class want incrementally more. We can get into full preacher mode verging on indignant hostility when we talk about the gap between black teenagers in urban Chicago and white collegians in suburban Virginia despite the fact that there are literally billions of humanity who would risk much to get into the South Side, even for the conditions at the end of the Great Migration generations ago. 

And yet when we attempt to go about the planet doing God's work in 'nation building' it seems to strike all the wrong chords. What sort of nerve do we have providing the Infrastructure for Education, Health Care, and Employment in Iraq? What kind of American exceptionalist arrogance is that? We are easily accosted as wrong for attempting to provide for others what we all clamor for here at home. The irony weighs a ton. And yet human nature provides the perfect answer (see above text).

Dare I raise the question of police forces in America? Of course I dare. Because nobody wants to live in thugland, especially those with infrastructure, education, health care and employment. Everybody in America agrees that public safety comes first, without which even our greatest cities fail in misery and shame, not to mention are more than a little bit backwards cities and towns. We all agree on the one hand, that nobody will succeed in business or society when there is appreciable violence in the streets. We are reluctant to agree that you can't jawbone violence into submission. Killers need way more than stern lectures. There must be fierce retribution and zero tolerance, right? This country's citizenship has rent its collective clothing for the past several months over a handful of deaths. We're dying to see peace and quiet, truth and reconciliation.

But people have decided to stay mad. 

It occurs to me, as one of my brothers intimated about the depth of culture and history in Israel, that we in America might decide to carry on grievances about slavery for 400 years beyond today. Maybe nobody in the large majority of African Americans wants to get over it. So let's just assume it. Let's assume that I, and the 3 or 4 million in the Talented Tenth are the only ones capable of 'just getting over it', even though only a third of those actually *want* to get over it. So let's say I'm in the minority of the minority prodigally engaged, but substantially divested of all racial baggage. Let's say that I will never be the one representing or represented the 'permanent interests' of the African American community (as that is generally interpreted to be vis a vis the Legacy of Slavery). Let's say there's only half a million of us so dedicated and so consecrated. We're happy. We are Thomas Sowell or Shelby Steele or whomever we are. We have our own reasons for our own patriotisms. We're satisfied in the mainstream. Our lives are secure.

But the rest of us, so the logic goes, are oppressed or suppressed or depressed or otherwise flattened and hard pressed in our communities. The rest of us want to stay mad, and we never worked our way out of our ghettoes. We live on 138th and Lenox and we have never been to the Central Park Great Lawn to play frisbee. We live in the 5th Ward of Houston and we've never gone on the tour of NASA. We don't know our way to your America. We are hypersegregated and we're always and forever going to need some extra efforts to rescue us out of our pressed situations. We're always going to be that Other America no matter how many sturdy hard-working immigrants arrive at our shores volunteering themselves into the melting pot.  We are always going to be the descendents of slaves and that will always be the determining factor. So what if we live in America? So what if we have security? So what if this is the richest country on the planet? All the more reason for us to stay mad. Or so the logic goes.

It bears repeating. Battles for hearts and minds end up just being painful battles, because some hearts and minds are closed. They may wear advertising about 'any means necessary'. They may say 'we want a national dialog'. They may claim that an equal opportunity requires an unequal push and so on and so forth, but every bus has a front and a back and in the end, some folks are just more comfortable at the back of the bus. 

No matter what you say, people have their pride, and that's what this is all about. Pride is not logical. Here's the thought experiment, which almost sounds ridiculous to bother explaining. What would you rather have, education, employment, health care and infrastructure or your community pride? Are you so proud of your ways in America, knowing that by sticking to them you lose education, employment, health care and infrastrucutre? How far back into the Legacy of Slavery or the conflict between Israelis and Arabs or the split between Sunni and Shia are you willing to dig in? How long will you refuse to conform? How long will you refuse to melt, to intermarry, to blend in, to get it where you fit in, to compromise, to let bygones be bygones, to bury the hatchet, to get over it? How many generations will you accept the burden of pride? Is it worth it? Yes? Because you just want to stay mad. You reserve the right to sit during the Pledge of Allegiance. You reserve the right to veto the settlement. You reserve the right to opt out, because you are not committed to integration. Segregation now and forever. Because Pride. 

More specifically, when it comes to violence, pacification does not provide acceptable justice. That's because  'The People' don't exist and so the Justice System does not satisfy the granfathered exceptions to the social contract granted to My Special Community. That's Israeli justice, not my justice. That's Shia justice, not proper Sharia. That's the white people's System, not mine. Hearts and minds aren't equal. They want to stay in their own little ghettoes. They want their own inviolate turfs. They don't accept the mainstream. They must have their own Pride Parade down Main Street, and City Hall better not deny the permit. So don't send your army in here to try and fix things. We like it the way it is, and who do you think you are anyway?

We know this ends badly. History is violent. People bear grudges. Forever. 

But the premise of progress is that lives can always be improved. So a Progressive agenda seeks to square the circle and reach out to the pressed peoples and make them over. It desires to do so with the assumption that what it has, the others do not, and their lack ought to make them submit to the program. When that fails, the opposition is blamed, but never 'blame the victim'. Really?

My Stoic Journey: The Sound of No Hands Clapping

Well this Christmas I celebrate the success of the project I had several years ago to get the hell out of the Enterprise software business and get into Open Source, DevOps and the Cloud. It's done. I'm there. I work at home and run several suites of stacks for several customers and that's all good. The Last Kid is a senior in highschool and we're in the middle of planning how to ditch the four bedroom house for cheaper, cozier digs. 

Along the way, some unexpected things happened, most significant of these were a dramatic increase in my credit rating and consequent quality of luxury furnishings. But seriously, it was the discovery of Stoicism and my martial education. These two things, which I didn't plan, came sideways out of the discovery, I suppose at long last, that I really don't like people in actuality as I do in theory. In theory I am an absolute modernist liberal. In practice, I feel most people don't deserve the benefit of the doubt. People meaning the people who practice democracy in America as a form of cultural identity and social complaint. I've concluded that things fall apart and at this rate my best efforts should be in divesting myself of the of the emotion so many have put into public debate. 

I was introduced to Stoicism, although I didn't know it at the time, by the following quote by John Boyd. 

“The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom — you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero.” 

My mind always drifts back to a series of afternoons in Southern California back in 2008 when I was working in Orange County. I was on the precipice of accepting the job before my current gig. At the moment I was making out quite well as an independent consultant. Although I was communting 100 miles a day and gas was approaching $4, I was happy and confident. A bit too much, I thought, in my BMW 750il. I considered my neighbor and friend who had recently purchased a large deisel Ford pickup truck. It was an anti-vanity. The issue of the day was immigration and I spoke for a moment about Jameil's Law on the local radio show with Warren Olney.  But my mind during lunches and commutes were focused on the larger role of long term thinking as I engaged the podcasts of the Long Now Foundation, of which I am now a member. In the long haul, I thought, I want to turn away from the politics of the sort that placate a loud public capble of rationalizing away the very meaning of 'illegal alien' and toward science. Scientific discipline has taken a back seat in our discourse and I don't want to be the guy in this society driving a luxury sedan. I'm about hard and excellent work at the top of my profession, or so I thought. And so in those days when nobody quite knew how bad the economy might get, I began a long march towards new sensibilities, anticipating no democratic solutions. 

So I was preparing myself for things to get worse. In fact, I wanted to purchase a Hummer, making a kind of outsized apocalyptic gesture. In the end, I wanted something that said smart survival. I wound up with a Toyota FJ Cruiser, and it has become my favorite vehicle ever. But deeper than this outward sign of an inward commitment, I was seeking a way to leave the chatter behind. I made a name for myself as a black Republican and founder of the Conservative Brotherhood, a move that was optimistic for values against a practical backdrop that was stunningly mechanical. For anyone who bothers to look closely, the GOP struggles mightily with reconciling the needs of electoral power, dedication to virtues and the resposibilities of governance. Pick one and a half. It was a boulder I'd rather not push. 

Fortunately I had dedicated my blog, the center of all my public thinking, to Socratic dialog, and people were still engaging me well enough to spark my own thoughts on every significant public matter. After some time however, once I got my final new job, working at home made me rather stir crazy. So I used Meetup groups to get from behind the keyboard and into real dialog. It turned out to be better in my own lab and library than in the agoras of Southern Cal. I met a few interesting people, but I would hesitate to call them friends. They too were single-minded or abstracted beyond much friendly use. Still, the philosophy meetup groups, the cloud computing meetup groups got me going. Raising my expectations and reducing my needs began to start coming more naturally. I decided not to be disappointed by disappointments in the field, and stick even tighter to long term thinking. 

Playing a major part in my transition was the entire zombie vibe that has infected our society. So I really began to think about what if democracy really did fail in America, not just in parts but the whole thing? I knew instinctively that we would revert to hierarchies and tribalisms, as many of us are doing in our solopsist idiot ghettos behind the barbwire interdictions of political correctness. But what if it weren't just Antioch University? So I began to develop my Peasant Theory, already making a very strong statement in my own sights that Obama's electorate was no place for my sort of long term thinking. 

Oddly enough, if these lessons in disappointment weren't quite enough, a couple video games helped push me the extra mile. Of course I read Seneca and Epictetus, but it was literally a boss battle in a game called Amalur that brought me to write:

As I approached the highest levels in Amalur, resolving the ultimate faction quest of the sages, I battled the Archsage's mental demons one of which was Ambition and the other Indifference. Having won, I got to choose and I chose Indifference as a power. Indifference is the power of equanimity. I know it contradicts Ayn Rand, but perhaps now is the time to consider disinterest. For years since my 40s I have been waiting for all the kids to eat first and being a river to my people with the pride of earning and giving away. But now it all starts to feel more and more like Indifference because it surely is not Ambition. Ambition is a tool to make one's river wide and deep. Indifference serves wisdom best. It makes one confident in judgment. The Judge is critical, but does not belong. 

I was becoming very judgmental. And it was finally Harold Bloom and Charles Dickens that helped me understand myself. People were behaving, according to me, at very low standards, and yet the chatting classes kept expecting to outsource a new generation of experts by public acclaimation and internet aggregation. We were and still are in the midst of a crap-populist revolution in America, both political parties harvesting shit tons of power by the buttload from the manufactured consent of a nation of asshats. And I knew that Wall Street was going to feed its own and the Exxon would still be Exxon. While the masses were tweeting out selfies, there was real long term thinking done by industry. Sure much of it was infantilizing the once formidable American middle-class, but once they decided to spend money through Verizon and AT&T texting adolescent spellings rather than essaying in paragraphs, well.. certain dislocations were inevitable. My job was not to outrun the bear, my job was to be in my castle not searching for mystical communications with nature in the first place. And so Bleak House has been my guide to what civilization can be without democracy. 

In the back of my mind is the Gangstarr soundtrack. 

Check it stupid 
While you're out there, on the main streets frontin 
Your game's week, so I'm huntin you down clown 
Cause you need to learn somethin 
All that bluffin, won't get you nothin but killed 
No mission fulfilled, because there's others who will 
get jealous, hell if they can take clout from you, they'll do it 
So that's what I'm about to do, I'll step to it 
and strip you of your pride (your pride) 
And then I'll stick and I'll rip you up from all sides 
or possibly I'll let you slide, slime 
Cause you'll set your own death in just a matter of time 
Yeah, and I'll be somewhere on the sidelines, y'know 

I won't disclaim all of that gangbanging harshness. What made us think we could be mellow in the first place? You cannot be mellow on credit. You're owned. Don't get me wrong. This is not pessimism. It's not even particularly skeptical or cynical. It's the mere acknowledgment that in the long term, to paraphrase Taleb, whatever can be, will be. In the long term, a black American president is inevitable. So is a limited nuclear exchange. The point is not to be shocked, but to be prepared. There are always backstreets. There are always sucker MCs, there are always men whose games are too tight to come apart at the seams. The trick, as Kipling would say, is to walk with kings nor lose the common touch. To observe judgmentally at the appropriate distance, and to have a home to return to at the end of what may or may not be an eventful day. The Chinese curse is not to live in interesting times, but that you would be become overly shitfaced by the whipsaw of the crap-populism of interesting times. I walked down the crapulous backstreets of Dickensian London. I get it. Buy better boots. 

One of the most intriguing ideas I have entertained in the past decade was an understanding of the best reasons for war, which have nothing do do with self-defense in the immediate sense, but the defense of reason itself.  The purpose of war is to destroy myths. The purpose of war is to restore human faith in cause and effect. The purpose of war is remind humankind of its limits. I didn't expect to be thinking such thoughts, but there it is all put together. It's only that thinking about my developing Stoicism that concerns me. Do I need war? Am I indifferent to that path to war? Do I accept it like the tank captain in Fury? "Ideals are peaceful, history is violent." 

The other day I read this excellent review of Mein Kampf by Orwell.

[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades…. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. -- George Orwell, 1940

I cannot be indifferent to that probability happening here in America, in the long term. If I were to mind the currents to a greater degree, I might be alarmed by those signs I could see. But I have decided to limit my field of vision to my own domestic tranquility, to my own probity, to my own property. I no longer am concerned about how I appear so much in the public sphere so long as I have a Western gentleman's comforts and privileges, because I aim in no uncertain terms for Western civilization to be sustained. Sinatra may be dead and Sammy may no longer dance the old soft shoe, but their pictures are still on the wall in my favorite restaurant where the bartender has read Kingsley Amis. I can survive another Blitz when Duke Ellington is triply redundant in the Amazon Cloud and I can still get packet radio. More importantly, I have friends with whom I can trust my life. I have tapped into some military tradition, and I will some more.  

Here is where things get a bit nebulous, because here is where I am. I don't have all of my answers, but I know where to look and whom to ask. I know that vodka makes good mouthwash, and I know I can drink vodka straight. I am a new organic all over again, and my loyalty remains to the city states of Los Angeles and New York, just in case things mostly don't work out. I can lose weight and run. I can shoot and cook and mend wounds. My martial education is advancing and I will have covered all bases by the time I reach 60. 

But. Hitler.

You see I understand and forgive the world its callow activities. I must. I have children I love, and I see the extent to which I have entrusted their education to the decrepit mediocrities of the American public. We don't know what class is any longer, because so little of what we have was forged by the harsh realities of war. We can lose the New Republic in a heartbeat because today's billion dollar fortune bears no resemblance to that of Carnegie's. Old money is dead, and hackers are trying Bitcoin. There's no gold standard, so you really have to get your own gold. We could lose the whole Republic in a heartbeat if the whole thing goes off standard. Which standards matter? (He said rhetorically as if to placate those post-modernists who actually wonder). I suppose Plato spoke about golden souls, did he not? I am ultimately in the business of aiding the survival of the Western, modern liberal ideal, in theory. But in practice, I leave my house in an urban assault vehicle. I don't survive on hope. I'm too heavy for that. I fall through hope's thin rafters so I'm all about concrete foundations, Fred Flintstone in Bedrock. Fred does not go to war. He is good natured, but very practical, and very defensive of his women.

Will that be what it takes? Will it be war that brings us out of the confusion that allows our politics to suffer in such reputable treachery?  If so, then let me be a war profiteer. Let me gain strength from the suffering of mankind, like a surgeon. Let me not profit from mankind's foolishness, like a rock star politian. I don't know. Will I be indifferent? I will work to be wise in my judgment, knowing judgment must come for each of us. We are men after all, and we do good and evil and must meet with our due rewards.

For the time being, I am an engineer among people who read tea leaves. I mock them. Yet I resist the impulse to slap the teapot over into their laps and rudely interrupt their mindless meditations. I sit in silent judgment, good natured and affably indifferent. I enjoy the tea. But I also don't complain about the price because I am part of the system that delivers it to the store where the common man shops. I am invested in keeping the ships afloat and the planes in the air. There remains infrastructure to be put to good use in the modern world, despite how many asshats vote for those who would deconstruct it mercilessly in search of an idiot-proofed utopia. Still, I'm not sure how much not to care the common man's ever more common mistakes when the health of the nation seems impaired by it. How many of us are just passengers on this ship?

The German comic Henning Wehn says something very deep about clapping along and enjoying yourself. I am Stoic. I am doing my work, and calculating, observing and judging with a studied indifference for the purposes of wisdom. I am reducing my needs to zero while focusing on my long term thinking, prepared for what can go wrong in my house made of bricks. I'm not just clapping along and enjoying myself in the public sphere. 

Ferguson Burning

Ferguson burning is a good thing. 

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

When this shitstorm began, I wrote the following:

If the death of one man, by accident, or on purpose causes a neighborhood, community, suburb, town, ghetto or general residential district to break down civility, well I suppose you can call that person a hero by definition. His life is valued higher than law and order. Pinker has words to say on such honor codes. Essentially, they are tribal and inferior to the rule of law. But I've been saying this for years, tribal hierarchies are what people use when democratic institutions fail. Nothing at all surprising at that. What is surprising is the extent to which activists and political plotters and strategists try to co-opt the energy of tribalism and convert it back into democratic institutional power. It's really just swapping one alien committee for another. And of course the big problem is that it doesn't help the honor code or the tribe. 

A real pitchfork and torches tribe working the hierarchy is ready, and I mean defiantly, militantly ready, to stare down and shoot down the System. That's what 'by any means necessary' implies, but it always turns out in America that the means of choice is sublimation to the New Committee (which seems always ready to grant permanent seats to Jackson or Sharpton). It almost makes you miss Khalid Muhammad. But the bottom line is, misappropriation of James Baldwin's Fire Next Time notwithstanding, the tribe is going to lose.

I went on to speculate about how the protest train would rumble on in infinite circles. I was wrong. It actually got militant, and so I am pleasantly surprised for the militants. We can look forward to seeing t-shirts that say "I rioted in Ferguson and all I got was this bullet in the shoulder." Non-trivial stuff. But that badge of courage will go to a precious few in the Ferguson tribe, while the complimentary abstracted blather of the rest of the Activist Nation continues. Some props have to go to those who dug into their pockets and made this their Million Man March, went to Ferguson, picked up a torch and burned something down. 

I haven't heard of any cops getting shot yet, but I did hear a story of somebody who, brandishing a pistol, got into a car wreck and shot herself in the head. Her video said of the gun 'We're ready for Ferguson'. She gets an E for effort, and a big fat fail for effectiveness. Then again, that can be said for most tribal mobs no matter how many strip malls and car dealerships they manage to burn to ashes. 

What we need, right about now, is somebody with a rifle and a can of gasoline to stand up and heroically say "Yeah I did it, and I'd do it again" But we are not yet to that moment. Right now it's all just Anonymous black mobs of rioters and looters and cockeyed shooters and their attending media circus of armchair wannabe vanguardians. I say it should have been Michael Brown's mother, but apparently she would rather be a media star than a soldier. Understandable, but not heroic. 

When buildings are burning is the moment for true heroes to be born. We have arrived at that moment. Will it become heroic or just more mindless destruction?

Now it also must be said that a lot of people are asking if the violence is worth it. The answer is yes. But it wasn't until buildings were burning that a sufficient amount of violence has been applied to the standard bullshit rhetoric of the Hate America First contingent. What makes the haters pathetic is their pacifism which undermines the legitimacy of their wordsmithing. What makes the Ferguson mob serious is its willingness to do damage. It doesn't matter that the owner of the bakery was a black woman. What's at stake here is not race so much as justice, and more particularly the failure of democracy to serve the very human ends of the Ferguson mob. 

This is what happens when democratic institutions fail. 

It happens all the time, all around the world. There is nothing special in that, but here in America it is especially necessary to pay attention when cities are set aflame. That's when the mob gets to play from a position of power. It is the human impulse, as revered and as sacred as the mastery of fire itself. It is a Second Amendment kind of fundamental right, and it is an order of magnitude more important than the talk. It establishes the serious skin in the game for all talk to come and it erases the nonsense of the talk already farted into the wind. Here is the dividing line; the acts that pledge and risk one's life to the cause.

I doubt there will be any hero to emerge from this who can stand on principle and unite the pen and sword. Many who weren't there will try to abstract this into #BlackLivesMatter or #HandsUpDontShoot. Anybody can play the Twitter game - Catching Fire like a holiday movie meme.  In the end, it matters mostly to Ferguson and those who live thereabouts. Democracy has failed that little part of the world and they've literally burned a tattoo there. We have a genuine scorched earth reminde. Any headstones will testify permanently. I am reminded, as should we all, that when men are sufficiently provoked, they will demand justice with fire. What will they get? What have they asked for? Who can provide?

The American Individual, Incorporated

America is an aggregated society. The American exists as an individual, but the nation has become rather indifferent to the individual and the common man. America may be too large for it to be any other way.

Earlier this week I wrote about why America works for stupid people. It may have been interpreted as Darwinist, but it is not. It identifies the inorganic, the incorporated nature of what we build in our consumer economy. We act as markets and our actions are interpreted by business enterprises which exert inordinate influence on our social lives. But our non-market actions, our political, moral and social actions, even those have been monetized and marketized.  This doesn't exactly dehumanize us, it actually distributes a great deal of arts and crafts through our society. But this marketization and corporatization of our social forces does do a bit of damage.

I view this situation primarily through the lens of what I call Aggregation. Aggregation is 'farming a greater portion of the long tail'. We are putting more people and things onto a market grid of understanding for the purposes of business. As the man in '12 Angry Men' said, we throw things up the flagpole and see who salutes. We throw things out onto the front porch to see if the cat licks it up. We build clickholes and honey pots. We bait the consumer with bright lights and big cities and convert the meaningless into markets going after disposable income. We feed him food in a box. This is an inflationary process whose key symptoms are 'bullshit jobs' and 'edutainment'. We pay people to do things that are optional in order that they might buy things that are optional, and in all that thrash we exacerbate the inequality of market-makers and market participants. 

At this point in our country's history, we have done so much of this that our private enterprise is no longer self-sustaining. The direction of private enterprise has gotten so far afield of providing the necessary ingredients for the common man into the realm of accoutrements and fashions that we collectively have become incompetent at the basics. These are outsourced industries. We graduate millions of high school kids who want to play video games and drive automobiles but have actually never seen computer source code or a drill press. The result is that the common sense of providing the basics has also fallen to the government which is compelled to tax private enterprise even more. 

The problem is the inflation which is inherent in the desire to provide a high standard of living and leisure for everyone. We cannot afford it. 

 But I see the greater damage in the rendering of the individual into a receiver of commodities, the quality and nature of which are dubious. Certainly it stands to reason that the woman who spends too much money on makeup only finds the lesser man. Surely the man who buys trophies is only fooling himself. But can we really stand to watch millions adopt such false identities as human beings? This is the dilemma of the Humanities and I'm beginning to blame them for not being up to the task of creating enough compelling materials and concepts to break through this identity crisis. 

We must find a way to rebel against the dehumanizing aspects of Aggregation firstly by leaving people be. We need to squelch crusading zealots for marginal causes while realizing champions are necessary. You cannot cure hunger in some developing nation by sending the profits of trendy shoe sales. You cannot cure debilitating diseases by solititing donations via viral videos. People have to do work. We must leverage the actual work of millions of the common man in order to accomplish that which benefits the common man. In other words, we must leave him to his own interests and not distract him with inflationary trinkets and make-work. 

The implications are that we will not have some lofty 'attainables' in society, but that which we do have will work reliably for the common man. He will benefit by being able to understand the overwhelming majority of issues that attend his own life, rather than being befuddled on an endless treadmill of university studies, or news videos about things of peripheral concern.  Americans may know how to 'change the channel', but there are literally 1000 channels of garbage. 

I am invested in survival. I expect things to crumble slowly then crash unexpectedly. My hedge is a skillset based not on paranoia or a SHTF scenario, but in the social graces required of chivalry; the human grace of noblesse amid the squallor of what befalls the common man in a system designed to fleece him. 

This covers a lot. It's where I am today. 

Because Winston Churchill

Not because Colonel Blimp. But as my father used to love to say "y'all forget".

I am in receipt of a missive from somejoint called 'CodeSwitch' which is a quite 1991 term, but y'all forget. It occurred to me that we have gone 20 years beyond the point at which there was actually something new to learn from the vanguard of multiculturalism in the Identity Wars which were really best exemplified in the very first movie I bought on DVD - Strange Days. In case you forget, which I know you do, Strange Days can be summarized like this...

A washed up ex- something or other white dude stumbles across a tape of the murder-by-cop of the world's greatest political rap star on the verge of Y2K. Except the tape is no ordinary tape, but a Vulcan mind-meld tape so that you can experience exactly what other people experience. It features pre-apocalyptic Los Angeles, complete with sleazy dangerous night club owners, plucky prostitutes, poker-face middle aged powerbroker suits, douchebag Japanese millionaires, a Gibsonian tech geek selling hot warez, a double crossing psychopathic murderer / best friend, the most fatal femme torch singer on the planet and her perky tits, and a strong black mother keeping shit real in the middle of the overflow of decadence who ultimately saves the day.

As you can imagine it was one of the greatest movies of all time. That's not the point, so much as the point is that it was done in 1995, and people are still trying to make all that vanguard identity narrative work its way like so many ear-boring beetles at the hands of Khan, into the psyche of the next generation. To wit: CodeSwitch:

NPR this mornin': 

"The straight white men of Straight White Men aren't what you might expect. Near the beginning of the new off-Broadway play, two adult brothers play a homemade, family board game, refashioned out of an old Monopoly set. Because the family is liberal and progressive, it's called "Privilege." It makes fun of their own straight-white-male privilege.

"Ah, 'excuses' card!" one of the brothers exclaims. The other reads it aloud. "What I just said wasn't racist/sexist/homophobic because I was joking," he deadpans. "Pay $50 to an LGBT organization."

The playwright, 40-year-old Young Jean Lee, is arguably one of the hottest playwrights in America right now. Her work revels in subverting stereotypes. With Straight White Men, Lee was interested in exploring a problem: What do you do when you've got privilege — and you don't want to abuse it? Lee, who is Korean-American, wanted to create straight white men on stage who think about these things.

"I know they're out there," she says. "I mean, I know them personally. Men are changing."

Lee writes about everybody. Straight white men. Native Americans. Asians. She even wrote a play actually called The Untitled Feminist Show. And in a play from 2008 called The Shipment, she did something that's hard for a nonblack writer to do. It's partly an absurdist sendup of African-American stereotypes seen over and over in movies and on TV. The first half of the play is an over-the-top compendium of cliches. Lee's process is to write plays using her cast to improvise scenes and ideas, and she developed this one with a group of five black actors.

There's also a twist in The Shipment that it would be unfair to reveal, and that captivatedNew Yorker theater critic Hilton Als.

"Black and white people were confused," he observes. "It was amazing. She was doing something very profound in terms of the ways in which we listen to 'ethnic speech' and 'regular speech.' "

Young Jean Lee writes by listening. When she started working on Straight White Men, she took advantage of being a playwright in residence at Brown University.

"I asked a roomful of women, queer people and minorities, 'What do you want straight men to do? And what do you want them to be like?' " she recalls.

Lee wrote down all of the answers. It boiled down to this: They wanted the straight white male character to sit down and shut up.

"When you hear that around the table, you just feel yourself sinking slowly into the chair," remembers James Stanley, who plays the character created from the list. The character, named Matt, is a sort of idealized straight white male. He works for a not-for-profit and is guided by a sense of trying not to — in his words — "make things worse." Lee and Stanley workshopped the character in front of the students. Who hated him.

"Hated him," Lee said, clearly still surprised. "And I realized that the reason why they hated him was — despite all their commitment to social justice — what they believed in most was not being a loser. [Matt] is exhibiting behavior that gets attributed to people of color: not being assertive, not standing up for himself, always being in a service position."

It's an existential dilemma, Lee says. She had one of her own while working on Straight White Men in the largely white-run world of American theater.

"I can always say, 'Oh, well I'm just pursuing my own ambition, but I'm making the world a better place,' " she says. "Because now there's this Asian female playwright who can be a role model for other artists of color, and I'm helping with diversity. And so I can do whatever I want and sort of get on the good-person list. And it occurred to me as I was doing the show, and listening to people talk about straight white men — straight white men don't really have that option."

Which is not to say that playwright Young Jean Lee thinks straight white men are categorically oppressed. But she likes using theater as a tool to reveal and dismantle our perceptions — of each other and of ourselves. For her, it's a place to check complacency at the door."

I know people keep having 'existential dilemmas', especially so-called 'white males'. It's rather sad that so many people think of themselves that way, but you know we black Americans made you into that. Didn't you know or did you forget? Here let me remind you as I did in Quora recently. 

America's most powerfully dangerous minority made it race and ethnicity because we said so. But it wasn't about race and ethnicity, it was about us and what we wanted. Because the NAACP is not about 'people of color' it's about black Americans. And we won. And we dictated the terms of how people talk about race and ethnicity in America. And it's going to continue to be that way until nobody (meaning black Americans) cares any longer, about halfway through the next black President's term. 

Now there happens to be a movie called 'Fury' that's around these days and you ought to watch it because ideals are peaceful but history is violent. A lot of people stuck in their identity crises remain there because they never face danger. They don't face the do or die moment which is the only real existential crisis there is. But we managed to redefine 'existential' somewhere along the way and so inflate the idiot problem explored within the semantic and semiotic swamp that is the stuff of CodeSwitch and that there ilk. 

What am I saying? I'm saying that dudes with Node.js and VC money don't make the world a better place, fighting men do. They make it a worse place too, but the point is that they make it and there are no big fat unanswered questions about that which require a seat in a theater on Broadway where some person with an interesting identity has done the thinking for you as you are entertained during your night on the town in fashionable shoes. 

Winston Churchill. Douglas MacArthur. 

We have a couple examples of the sort of men we could aspire to, who were not merely war makers, but impressive in multiple dimensions. They were none of the characters you might meet in a Broadway play or Hollywood film, and perhaps that's why young American men these days plop so easily into the 'white male' bucket. That's all they know. Too bad.

Why America is the World's Stupidest Country

It's because we make life easy and convenient. For stupid people. And we do a good job. And we have more people. So we get better at it.

Imagine a country where you don't get a chance to drive a car until you are 21 years old. And in that country there are no cars with automatic transmissions, air bags, seat belts or safety glass. There is also no collision insurance. So basically there are barriers to entry into the market for driving. Driving is a lot more risky, and failures of drivers are more catastrophic. In such a country of let's say 30 million there are only 5 million drivers. None of them are teenagers, and the fatality rate for drunk drivers is 30%

Now in America we have had automatic transmissions, airbags, seat belts and safety glass for 20 years. We license millions of teenagers. We have comprehensive auto insurance, and we crack down harder on drunk drivers. In other words, we make it easier to be a driver. You need to know less. The costs of failure are not so high. The need for skills are relatively low. It's built into the market and the culture of building cars. And the direction we are going in is to make cars even safer to the point at which they drive themselves. In doing so we drive the intelligence and skill base needed for driving even lower and lower. 

In driving, in working, in everything we have improved, we have made it easier for people to be whomever they want to be. Not conforming to high standards of skills, but towards smart consumption. That's why we have more stupid people than anywhere else - because we engineer our society's consumer economy to leverage smarter products, lower barriers to entry, greater amounts of insurance and risk mitigations. 

Now you get it. 

Do you want America to continue in this direction or not? If you do not, then you are arguing for inequality. 

Breaking Bad Men Black Style

Somewhere in my garage, I swear to God, is a part of an original manuscript written by Sanyika Shakur, aka Monster Kody. I got this from his wife some 20 years ago. It may or may not have been part of his jailhouse writing. Anyway, he has a very intensely held belief that the very lack of men on a straight path develops in young black men a special need to prove themselves. He cites his own experience in 'breaking' young men into gang life by giving them often their first opportunity to prove themselves to older black men. His theory, which I believe firmly, is that this is a universal constant and it is how armies have always been formed, and why gang loyalties transcend social boundaries. I cannot recall what he called this idea, but it got my attention because it was not specifically racial and he made the martial parallel.

In his context, Shakur was clear that neighborhoods became artificial constructs because no particular 'set' or gang often developed leadership long enough to establish dominion over more than several blocks. Nothing that would extend, for example, as far as the jurisdiction of a high school. Gang activity, while it might range far and wide in the city, only had loyalties of short turf distances, aggravated by the fact of civilians in the mix. That made a home set even more intensely loyal. Shakur of course attempted himself to establish his own fame to span kingdoms, but that was done through murder and intimidation rather than by diplomacy and extending loyalty. In the end, he couldn't navigate it. As I recall, the isolation of the Spanish language aided Mexican gangs in this longitude and latitude whereas black gang members only had one dimension, intense stunting criminality, to establish larger influence.

The result of the crime was, of course, an antipathy to authorities and a feeling of responsibility towards other gang members, but the community itself was split by matters of loyalty and it is this loyalty that defines what black communities become when there are gangs in it.

Anyway, I've thought about this a great deal and cannot separate my sources in my head. Much of this dynamic, I have applied to my thinking about black fraternities and football as well as my own family life (I am the oldest of four brothers and was a neighborhood 'king'). I've always carried a fair bit of skepticism about calls to black unity and matters of 'the black community' through a very clear understanding of my own family's geographical dispersion and loyalties vis a vis those sacrifices my father and uncles made specifically away from their families and towards Movement activism.

It has come as a great relief to me to be rid of my own feelings of dire responsibility for the fate of 'Black America' which has come from years of thinking my way in and out and around the sorts of relationships politics, education, culture and proximity collude among dark skinned folks in this country. Blackness is a kind of Facebook, a persistent and ubiquitous yet very weak link between millions. A Facebook community is just as real, and just as fake, as a black community. And yet it is not until one suffers greatly that the loyalty to it is established. 

I think of this actress who was recently in the news on a charge of public indecency and how her 'blackness' was deeply woven into her reaction to her detention / arrest. This particular moment had to be the most intensely felt part of her 'Struggle' experience but she had anticipated it all of her life through such weak links to 'the black community'. And it was clear that by her part in the critically acclaimed movie 'Django Unchained' that she felt politically and/or culturally aligned with black Americans is this mutual fog of 'The Struggle'. Yet it was obvious that in all of her life she never suffered any such 'breaking' as would be acceptable for the smallest black neighborhood gang. 

As I watch from a curious distance as the vacuum of the post-Civil Rights era, it becomes more transparent to me that calls for Black Unity are more desperate than ever. And yet nobody would go to the lengths that Monster Scott Kody did for the 'shorties' on his block. That basic ritual of violent 'breaking-in' and the establishment by transgressive deeds of a death-defying loyalty is missing. People in our society don't want that, and they don't need that. And yet they desire something more intimate and powerfully bonding than Facebook. That desire will go unfulfilled as will dreams of Black Nationalism. That a particular town in Missouri is not already burned to the ground shows the scope. Nobody black in America belongs that much. And after Barack Obama and his entourage leave the White House, this will become even more stunningly obvious. 

Citizenship & The Lost Report Card

It occurred to me this morning that when I was a kid in elementary school that we used to be graded on a lot more than what we knew, but how we behaved. 'Makes good use of time' was the one where I always needed to improve. That's because I was a smart-ass, finished my work early, got bored and started daydreaming. Well, that and I'm lazy. But I know this, because I was graded on it. And with all the ruckus going on over the complete breakdown in trust and authority over in Missouri this month it's rather interesting what solutions are being proposed. 

Now naturally since we're Americans and we like to congratulate ourselves in our ability to make something (rather than just nothing) out of race, there's a game afoot telling white people how they ought to think and behave and telling black people how they ought to think and behave. The ignorant assumption of course is that you add up all the diversity numbers and it will work out remainder zero. Except we're supposed to be indivisible with liberty and justice for all, but everybody keeps saying that diversity is the solution.

You can't have diversity without division.  The opposite of diversity is conformity. 

So that means you have to teach everybody the same thing and hold everybody to the same standard of behavior. Hey wait a minute - that's what public school is supposed to be about, right? That's why we had the Brown Decision to get us all in the same schools. But what if they didn't teach anybody how to behave? Hmm.

I specifically remember that as time went by in elementary school, the Citizenship & Work Habits side of the report card got smaller and smaller. The public middle schools basically reduced them to one line for each class you attended. What did you get in math? B, S, S? What exactly does an 'S' in Citizenship mean? Basically nothing. Hell, I wonder if they even use the word 'citizenship' here in Los Angeles for fear of insulting our Mexican national neighborhood residents. So I googled around to see if I could find any old school report cards. Not from LA Unified School District, but I did find some remarkable images.  

I find it almost impossible to believe that any public school in America would consider such a detailed and rigorous evaluation of the character of children. It seems almost unthinkable. I mean look at this. 'Treats members of the visiting team with hospitality". "Shares good times with others whenever possible". "Subordinates his own will to the larger purposes and ideals of life." These are things we all know to be essential to good character These are all virtues we acknowledge. So why on earth do we not teach them to children? What was the breaking point? When did GPA and test scores become more important than anything else?

Now I attended Catholic middle school and high school and measures of character, as well as discipline for lapses in character were all part and parcel of the spirit of belonging to the school. One sought to bring honor and respect to one's school by exemplifying virtue in all these ways. And I know all of my small 'a' atheist pals out there can't seem to find a way to understand how you can teach virtuous citizenship without summary intimidation and invocation of fire and brimstone from an 'imaginary' supreme being, but I guess they forget that nuns and priests are people too. And people have different ways of inspiring and teaching to standards. 

The point of course is to have standards and these are the kinds of standards I think too many Americans simply don't feel beholden to. They think perhaps that these are just optional - that you can function perfectly well in society and the worse thing that's going to happen to you is that somebody down the line is going to call you an 'asshole' or a 'douchebag'. Other than that, it's all whatever dude. 

I am inclined to believe that whenever we get into 'this conversation' things get so far carried away into the identity troughs of 'race, creed, color, ethnicity, physical ability, sexual preference, gender' that people simply don't have space in their brains for character. It must completely blow their minds to imagine that character might be measured in other terms than these fetishized diversity buckets. 

It's really hard to find in front of a paywall any sort of accounting for this set of measures. But I found a scanned copy from the Internet Archive. They are called the Upton-Chassell Scale and I have a copy for you. 

Now on first glance this is clearly a mix in importance. The author is quick to point out. 

It is interesting to note in Chart I, for example, that it is the consensus of opinion that a habit such as "Puts on or removes wraps quickly," listed on p. 22, is of trivial importance, since it is rated as i, and should, therefore, receive comparatively little attention from the teacher; while a habit like "Tells the truth without flinching or compromise, trying to give a correct im- pression," given on p. 24, which is rated 10, is of primary impor- tance and should be carefully considered when the teacher is making out the report card.

I often hear from people who begrudge conservatism its wisdom and other such folks whose motivations are opaque to me, that the benefit of all such things from the 'olden days' are negated owing to some inherent racist content or explicit racist implementation. So it would not surprise me in the least if at some point it were determined through some cockamamie finger-pointing posing as research, that white teachers were singularly unable to be consistent in their evaluations of non-white students when it came to these measures of character and citizenship. OK, let's stipulate that to be the case for 1919 but that somehow through the magic of the Civil Rights Movement, that white people have been sufficiently re-educated to give this idea a second-chance. Why not? What have we got to lose? Wouldn't you like to know this about public school students? Is there any situation in which these questions are inappropriate? I don't think so. I think these are things that anyone would notice in children and indeed ought to notice. 

I don't have the complete set of these report card images but there is an extensive list of citizenship metrics in the document. So have at it.

Now while I'm at this let's get an idea of whom exactly this Horace Mann character was, since there appears to be something to the fact that much of this reporting by Upton and Chassell was done at Horace Mann Elementary School. The great and powerful Wikipedia says this of Mann's Congressional career:

In the spring of 1848 he was elected to the United States Congress as a Whig, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of John Quincy Adams. His first speech in that body was in advocacy of its right and duty to exclude slavery from the territories, and in a letter in December of that year he said: “I think the country is to experience serious times. Interference with slavery will excite civil commotion in the South. But it is best to interfere. Now is the time to see whether the Union is a rope of sand or a band of steel.” Again he said: “I consider no evil as great as slavery, and I would pass the Wilmot Proviso whether the South rebel or not.” During the first session, he volunteered as counsel for Drayton and Sayres, who were indicted for stealing 76 slaves in the District of Columbia, and at the trial was engaged for 21 successive days in their defense. In 1850, he was engaged in a controversy with Daniel Webster in regard to the extension of slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law. Mann was defeated by a single vote at the ensuing nominating convention by Webster's supporters; but, on appealing to the people as an independent anti-slavery candidate, he was re-elected, serving from April 1848 until March 1853.

Well that ain't hay. But wait, look at that last measure of character. "Recognizes moral purpose in the universe, and reverences a Higher Power". Geez, I dunno. Could we even have such a question posed of our children here in America? Leaving that nit to be picked by such people as find it appealing let us review then, the top categories from the Upton-Chassell document.

• Takes Care of His Health.
• Keeps a Good posture.
• Is Orderly
• Execises Thrift.
• Is Prompt.
• Thinks Clearly and Purposefully
• Has a Sense of Humor
• Is Refined
• Is Characterized by Helpful Initiative
• Is Self-Reliant
• Exercises Self-Control
• Lives up to the Traditions of Sportsmanship
• Stands for Fair Play
• Is Courageous
• Is Honest and Truthful
• Is Trustworthy
• Has a Sense of Civic Responsibility
• Is Obedient
• Is Generous
• Is Courteous and Considerate
• Is Cooperative
• Is Broadminded
• Is Loyal
• Has a Fine Sense of Appreciation and Seeks to Express It.

Character counts. So why do we not count character?

 

The Inebriation of Convenience

In the first third of my life, before I was 30 and married with children, I took great pains to become an Organic. I didn't like crowds nor the things that motivated crowds, nor did I have much truck in the things that crowds used to differntiate themselves. I was never big on t-shirts with writing, with the exception of 'Joe Cool', 'Pinball Wizard' and 'USC'. I have learned that such matters go under the heading of 'signal wealth'. 

What I did enjoy somewhat more symbolically than practically, was my attraction to BMW automobiles. I can still remember hours spent on freeway onramps meditating on the thoughts inspired by their marketing: 'The Ultimate Driving Machine' and 'Legendary BMW Performance'. Some large fraction of the time, however, I couldn't pass ordinary vehicles due to the lemony state of my particular BMW. Nevertheless, I still looked good. 

At some point I had to relinquish my organics and bohemianisms as I climbed into the upper reaches of the professional class. I ultimately recognized the power and necessity of markets and the confidence of the common man. No longer was I inclined to stay away from Walmart on the odd principles I had defined for myself. I liked that so many things were popular. At some point I recognized that 66% of the American economy was dedicated to the consumer, and somewhere around 2011 I read something I still find profound by Niall Ferguson. He talked with statistical precision about how the average American household became the 'house of the future' during the Cold War Era in contrast to how claustrophobic and skanky life became in the Soviet Union. I'm talking about very basic things, like ready-to-wear, which actually didn't exist before, as well as very luxurious things, like dishwashers, air conditioners and microwaves. 

Today, and since 2008 I have been making sense of how much economic shrinkage it is reasonable to accept and how the failure of public confidence in democratic institutions and civil society ought to affect people with the will and determination to survive and excel. It is from this POV that I wonder how much convenience is good for society and how much poisons the commons. 

I am willing to take on for myself the various burdens of preparedness. I am a 180 degree opposite kind of 'preppie' than I was in 1983 in my green Polo shirt, belt and shorts. These days coyote is the new black. But I am not so confident that everybody wants or needs to take on a stoic attitude. Nevertheless, there is that inebriation of convenience - that drain of skill and capacity that comes from not having to do your own homework. 

Do you sense this as well? Do you especially feel it in the Idiot Proof City? Something tells me that I will find a lot of answers in India. I gotta get over there. 

Class In Session w/ Pops

Pops says:

What follows are hasty reflections on some of what you said via phone Tuesday night.  I wish there had been a way to “tap” the conversation with Dragon…and have your ideas spelled out in writing…ripe and ready.  But I think there is much value in what you shared…recording notwithstanding.

One of a number of interesting “threads” that you weave is what I pick up as your favoring a “group/cadre/collective” of folks who presumably have THE answers to that which ails the rest of us.  You make free and to some extent appropriate use of the word “class.”  In some ways that’s O.K.; but in other ways it has, for me anyway, hints of elitism…of the Eastern parts of this vibrant country at that.  I grew up hearing a whole lot about the elites who secured their educational exposure at the likes of “neighborly” (geographically anyway) places like Yale…or up the coast a tad to Cambridge and Harvard.  My guess is that much if not most of that “feeling” is gone around the country, but perhaps I am wrong.  As a side note, Stanford holds its Western own prestige-wise quite well.  So be it.

Before moving along, although the subject didn’t come up as we talked, I couldn’t help but think of some of the ideas I grasped years ago from my reading of Madame Ayn Rand…Atlas Shrugged in particular.  As you surely recall, Rand has her veritable geniuses taking leave -- with their demonstrated skills -- of a “gimme and ever- ungrateful society.”  With the implied addendum: “If y’all can do ‘it’ without us, have at it.”  There is something delightfully paternalistic about this mindset.

Something that pops out at me, and I don’t know if it is part of your thinking or not: Are there folks who are NOT members of this or these hotshot collectives who are “ordinary folks”?  If we dismiss money as an essential criteria, is there “room” – and I won’t add the phrase “at the top” for others?  Could an ordinary solid citizen take his or her place in those esteemed ranks?  You place a high premium on a social/moral order.  That being the case, I don’t see any built-in impediment precluding the admission of ordinary folks.  But you may have something different in mind.  So be it.

Now here’s my own admitted contradiction.  I remain unabashedly nuts about astronomy.  On the radio today I heard something about a space whatever named Rosetta that is fast approaching something “out there.”  I won’t even try to recall all the details.  What I was drawn to is the tight-knit team responsible for the at least 10 year mission.  This particular effort is a project of the European Space Program; and Americans have had many teams doing the same kind of thing.  My focus is on the skills, discipline and dedication of those who constitute such (elite) teams.  They seemingly are able to set aside “normal” hang-ups and pettiness that get in the way of regular folks.  And that’s exactly as it should be.  They even use a different system to tell time…either ahead of or behind what we take for (earthly) granted.  But as you well know, physical science and social science are radically different.

Jumping around, Donald sterling is a sad and yet real example of why money cannot or should not be salient criteria.  And the same can be said about the athlete who dragged his girl friend out of the elevator.  That’s just totally unacceptable asshole behavior.  And sterling’s comments – however “sincere” – keep him on the sidelines of what I think you have in mind.

Another point: I do think “education” is crucial; but I am not limiting the term to traditional college classroom offerings…although that may well play a significant part.  Exposure or experience is key.    

The military to some extent does present itself as a model of sorts.  The focus with the military is the CODE to which they swear allegiance…and to which military folks are expected to adhere…without exception.  The only problem here is that militaries have the historical role of making real the desires of the nation of which they are a part.  Yup I’m being evasive here: The harsh fact is that any given military exists primarily to kill people who “belong to” or swear allegiance to another nation/country.  No existing or prospect of future war removes the need for a military.  This is a collective that has perpetuity.  And that’s that.

Thoughts on the persistence and “relevance” of the seemingly bothersome atheist to follow.

--

I try to make it clear that mine is a functional description of class. There is no 'ought' or 'should'. There simply are people who understand X, Y and Z and there are the rest of us who don't. Let us forget for the moment the instrumentality of getting a person with capability into a class, rather focus on the capability. We can make judgments about the efficacy of the class mobility process separately. What we do know is that in order to have lights on, we need electricity and although we all may be capable of consuming electricity we are not all capable of producing electricity. And among those who are capable of producing electricity, the means and motivation to do so are not always present. So there are those who have to present the means and motivation to those who Can Do. So the functional definitions can be expressed in another way, there are Enablers, there are Makers and there are Consumers. 

I think anybody's issue with elitism boils down to my previously stated antipathy towards crowdsourcing. But let me qualify that slightly and say that there can be a smart form of Consumerism - ie Consumers can be emergent Enablers. But even still, this requires some market making. There is nothing spontaneous about this. It may be that there are two articles of faith:

• "Ask and ye shall receive"
• "If you build it they will come"

There is no guarantee for either of these, and if they prove true there is always some agency, there is never any magic other than chance. Given enough time, anyone can call chance 'fate' , but we are assuming cause and effect here. You can call the market makers an election, or a business, or a church. But giving the people what they want is a job that somebody has to do. There are no genies. There are real people who are real Enablers and those folks get the Makers together to make something of value to the masses of the common man who can only then consume to their fill and satisfaction. So you may ask and receive but somebody who cares and is capable has to hear your petition. 

Now let's talk about the second article of faith. Note also that there are always makers who make things that they assume is necessary and useful for the masses, and sometimes this works. People can be persuaded that they need something that they don't have and can't make for themselves. The worst case of this? Think heroin dealer. There is also the person  that Taleb calls a charlatain, always selling something that either isn't as good as claimed or harmful in fact. But similarly you cannot simply blame the consumer, there is Enabling going on here. It might take two to tango, but somebody built the dance floor, played the music and facilitated the meeting of the dancers. 

--

There is something delightfully paternalistic about Ayn Rand, which is probably why she appeals to college freshmen, the sorts of youth who have just successfully made the biggest decision in their lives - to study that which will elevate them from the common man. Unfortunately the sort of university education we see today is often far from universal, owing so much of that to its failure to pay appropriate mind to those things have have actually held sway over mankind's history. All this 'nasty brutish and short' history so casually dismissed by our contemporaries with their refrigerators and washing machines - which of course they are completely incapable of building or servicing when broken. Which I hope illustrates my point about what Makers do that Consumers cannot. So long as the shareholders and executive officers of Westinghouse decide to remain in the refrigerator and washing machine market, such consumers can live in relative ignorance and luxury, but maybe one day the Enablers decide it's more profitable to enter another sort of market. Then what? Well, so far that's been outsourced to the Koreans, and it's Samsung who are delivering the goods, but they may get bored of that too. 

There's a moral dimension of dignity to speak about here, but let me refresh you on why I brought all this up in the first place. I said that we have a class of Americans who say 'there ought to be a law' and so they agitate constantly for some government agency. Now I don't have so much of a problem with the intent as I do with the agency. Today on the radio I heard that there are, deep within the unread pages of the Obamacare law, some regulations about breastfeeding. Yes breastfeeding - a word I find rather Orwellian in its own existence. How else to mother's feed infants? Oh wait, we invented alternatives. And somebody built it, and millions of mothers came, and thus an industry of Nuk and Playtex and Gerber. But when the ratchets of law, and government procurement processes are set in place, they may as well be set in stone. But after all that is the point of regulating your population of commoners, neh? For their own good. What's not paternalistic about that? Well, let's look at the word paternalistic.

There is nothing wrong with being paternalistic, if you are responsible.

I want you to take me at my word when I say the best decisions are those made by a singular, paternalistic, responsible figure. And it is this paradigm I place on a pedestal of merit up against the alternatives, namely the crowdsourcers and aggregators. Which is to say quite frankly that the kids don't know what's good for them, because they are not parents, and the Consumers don't know what's good for them because they are not Makers, and the Makers don't know if what they make is any good because they are not Enablers. Each has its strengths and weaknesses but the paternalism stands. It's about expertise and experience, and we cannot afford to live in a world where expertise is dead. We cannot afford to live in a world where decisions are made by committees where the buck never stops. 

Now here's a major indictment, and where I think the Founders may not quite understand what they done wrought. As I have had as a refrain to unbridled wishful thinking and exploitation of the first article of faith in democracy 'Vote and ye shall receive' (c.f. Tytler): "Who is your Leviathan?" Well people have said and voted for health insurance for everyone (Yaaaay!) and who is their Leviathan? Obama, and so Obama hath wrought Obamacare, brought to you by the Executive Branch with a little armtwisting in Congress. But wait, those friggen Founders split the power so that the Judiciary could gum up the whole works, and Congress keeps changing. What is an imperious President to do? Maybe, just maybe health insurance for everyone is something that cannot be magicked into existence in one Presidency. We certainly accepted that as truth when Bill Clinton tried it. And so now that Obamacare is challenged and Obama's ratings are in the GWBush leagues, we have to ask if Obamacare's paternalism is actually responsible. Or in general is this something whose responsibility we can entrust to the sort of government we are supposed to have with Constitutional checks and balances. The solution is not to give more power to one branch of government so the people can have their Leviathan. 

The same, of course, could be said about our 'right' to live in a terror-free zone. Why should we keep stretching the Constitution in order to protect those Consumers from things they cannot protect themselves from (we say paternalistically)? Then again let's look to the classes. Who is going to Enable peace? Who is going to Make peace? Who is going to Consume peace? Maybe we don't need any Leviathans. That is my hope. And guess what? That equals power to the people. That means the Consumers enable themselves and make things for themselves through the agency of themselves. That means paternalism is little more than parents. Ick I know, it sounds like Conservative Christian Family Values .. but then again have you ever heard of any Leftists ever protest against Big Family? Hmmm. 

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I'll say this finally about Edumacation. Experience is the best teacher, the gallows focus the mind, necessity is the mother of invention, those who can't do teach. You've heard it all before. I am of the opinion that we are a nation of grade inflation and bullshit makework jobs, and we have come to the breaking point of where a college education actually makes Makers out of Consumers. In otherwords, somebody has Enabled a lot of Edumacation in a charlatan type fashion. How did the world possibly function without Title IX? As well as now? Truly? Can I even get an objectively scholarly expert opinion on the matter? 

I'll quote Ralph Waldo Emerson:

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian? 

And then Michael Heim on Martin Heidegger:

"According to Heidegger, we notice the eclipse of the truth of being occurring already in Plato's metaphysics. Once the truth of being becomes equated with the light of unchanging intelligibility, the nature of truth shifts to the ability of statements to reflect or refer reliably to entities. With the steadiness of propositional truth comes the tendency to relate to being as a type, a form, or an anticipated shape. With being as a steady form, entities gain their reality through their being typified. Already in Plato we see the seeds of the Western drive to standardize things, to find what is dependable and typical in them. Truth as the disclosure process, as the play of revealing/ concealing disappears behind the scene in which the conscious mind grasps bright objects apprehended as clear, unwavering, rational forms. As humans develop the ability to typify and apprehend formal realities, the loss of truth as emergent disclosure goes unnoticed. All is light and form. Nothing hides behind the truth of beings. But this "nothing" finally makes an appearance after the whole world has become a rigid grid of standardized forms and shapes conceived and engineered by humans. As the wasteland grows, we see the devastation of our fully explicit truths. We see that there is, must be, more. The hidden extra cannot be consciously produced. Only by seeing the limits of standardization can we begin to respond to it. We have to realize that each advance in typifying and standardizing things also implies a tradeoff. When we first reach forward and grasp things, we only see the benefits of our standardization, only the positive side of greater clarity and utility. it is difficult to accept the paradox that not matter how alluring, every gain in fixed intelligibility brings with it a corresponding loss of vivacity. Because we are finite, every gain we make also implies a lost possibility. The loss is especially devastating to those living in the technological world, for here they enjoy everything conveniently at their disposal -- everything that is, except the playful process of discovery itself."

 

So what I expect of class is that we recognize the truth of it. That the only way democratic institutions can work is based upon an aristocracy of merit. And this aristocracy must be aligned with the purposes, and make allowance for the limits of government, educational, religious and business agency. We need to eliminate the wishful thinking of the masses and pretending that there are no Enablers or Makers who know better. And of course it means that we must support the good Enablers and attack the bad ones, as with everyone and everything else.

Here's one more thing about class. Everybody hates a level playing field. Think about it, then read this.

African American, In Case You Forgot

I'm actually surprised that nobody remembers how the change originally occurred. In the late 80s when professors like Skip Gates was making a big splash at Harvard and Toni Morrison was the toast of the planet, a monumental book was published called the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. Anyone who was paying attention would know and recognize that a new generation of scholars were getting a foothold in the better class of universities around the country, and Black Studies Departments were in the intellectual conundrum of only having a couple decades of history to justify their existence. The newer, younger, smarter black scholars in English for example would be quick to point out to people who didn't get it, that authors like Frederick Douglass didn't call himself 'black' nor did Jean Toomer. The expanse of interest in the 'black experience' had to be put in a more appropriate context. So the academic world rightly adjusted its terminology. To talk about the corpus of literature, music, dance etc of blacks in America, you couldn't just overuse Black America - so the term African American was used as a blanket term which was more academically proper, demographically equivalent and politically neutral. Americans of African descent thus became this in the abstract for the purposes of more accuracy - you could then put slaves, ex-slaves, free persons of color, Coloreds, Negroes and Black Americans all in the larger category and use fewer asterisks, anachronisms and other such malaprops.

Around the same time, a charismatic dude named Molefi Asante wrote a 50 page book called 'Afrocentrism' which kicked off yet another chapter in the African American history of mobility in identity. (See? I used it correctly there.) This could be thought of as a second, or third if you want to count Garvey, attempt at a Pan-African unity in identity. For a short time, I myself identified with an international jet-set of 'New World Africans' while living in Brooklyn partying with Spike and dating cute Francophone chicks from Senegal. I almost got into the kinte cloth business. But that was then.

I would gather that there are still a number of folks who are fascinated by the cultural dynamism of that international jet-set including the likes of Zadie Smith and Cornel West and all those who did Bring the Noise/Funk in those glorious early 90s, but Janet Jackson blew up and bifurcated the dreads from the crinkles and as far as I know, the twain never rejoined. By the time John Legend and Common went back to short hair, I think the whole Afrocentric thing was over, but I can't say with any accuracy because I went into the suburban daddy business. Suffice it to say, the whole African angle lost currency, especially for those who don't even read 50 page books.

I think it came as some surprise to some that we went through a period of Bone Thugs & Harmony after all highbrow folks went through, which is part of the reason Lauren Hill was such an incredible surprise, but I digress with these cultural touchstones to point out that your basic 'black culture' goes through many shades and degrees within the spectrum of African American history. I have made my peace with the fact that it's under no direction or control but rather a manifestation of who's following whom, a very personal choice.

I can't account for why people focus on race, when culture is so much more nuanced and interesting, then again, the politics of race in America is pretty much the same stagnant story, and like I said, a lot of people can't be bothered to read.

On Foucault

My understanding and appreciation for Foucault comes from his idea of 'regimes of truth' in which he asserts that human understanding can a have reading of fact that is highly contingent upon social context. 

As a specialist in information technology, I find the implications of this concept very useful in my role in knowledge management and business intelligence. I thus think of a kind of 'thermodynamics of consensus' which is something that requires energy to maintain, rather than something that becomes established over time in positive incremental quanta. 

For example, the ideas that 'all men are created equal' or 'polio can be cured' or 'E=MC^2' are not plateaus of human knowledge per se. They are levels of understanding that must be pumped with energy to maintain. That's the energy of education and the energy to sustain an environment of education, and the energy to sustain the will to provide that environment. These become 'regimes of truth' and these regimes may rise to power or fall from grace. 

Foucault in this way rather undermines wishful thinking of 'progress' because he understands that knowledge can be created or destroyed because it must be sustained. The genie may be out of the bottle, but it has to be inside a house or the wind will blow it away. 

Foucault is misread, I think, by people who reside in very isolated bourgeois societies (houses) where the winds of discovery rarely blow. 'Regimes of truth' which maintain knowledge about the state of nature have no impact on nature itself. You cannot will yourself to levitate. Even if you spend billions of dollars to organize World Levitation Day. 

Similarly Foucault has motivated millions to think about 'deconstruction of narratives' towards a greater understanding. You might deconstruct the narrative of an automobile commercial and see that in fact that the roar of Ford Mustang does not make you sexy, but that doesn't change the fact of its engine does roar. People have taken Foucault (heh) a bit too literally in thinking every narrative should be suspect and the only relaible discovery of truth involves deconstructing someone else's version of the truth.

Lenny Bruce

I wonder if it is at all possible for anyone to appreciate Lenny Bruce if they didn't hear him live. I have just listened to his two most famous concerts at the Curran and Carnegie, and I think Bruce would have told me 'it was another generation'. He understood that his context was specific. 

Lenny's voice, pacing and patter created a unique combination of artistic skills that make current day standup comedians seem artificial. He seemed to just go up there and improvise with a subtle kind of self-deprecation for his audience that was endearing. He felt like he felt and did so in sharp declarations, something that cut through to simple human emotions in a starkly honest way. Listening to him was like listening to an inner monologue that had no demons, you could say that Lenny Bruce had no filter, but what was going on at bottom was clear and sensible enough so that no filter was no problem. Lenny himself was not a weirdo haunted by memories. His stream of consciousness was reckoning with a changing society, in a context that lots of people understood, even though getting through his slang was at sometimes challenging to me. 

I have some nostalgia for the flavor of ethnic humor now gone. Tsouris. He even recognized it himself, 'Schmuck doesn't mean schmuck any more'. A dozen other Yiddish terms we don't hear. That level of indirection is missing from today's humor, and Bruce presaged the possibility without lament. He understood that context was the key to making everything funny - you had to share an understanding, you can't fake a laugh. 

Because Literacy

The last time I checked, the linguists were pretty certain that there's no such thing as 'patois'. I seem to recall a consensus that all the accents and dialects are valid. I'm not begging, I'm just differing.

I'm a champion of the concept of modernity which says that all men are created equal - that what we know, even down to our natural ability to speak, can determine who we are in society. What we know. Identity can be tricky of course; you can decide that who you are has nothing to do with what you know, but what you look like, or what you feel like or where you are or who you know or what you hope. All those are tangents off modernity, and we properly call them post-modern. The modern man is what he knows and he comports himself so.

The automobile is an example of an item created in the modern world for the modern man. It is transportation. What matters is that you know how to drive it. A post-modern automobile might be endowed with an artificial intelligence to ask who you know. If you cannot prove that you know the right people, the car won't start. The same is the case, more or less, with the pre-modern horse. Beggers were not allowed to ride, and could be challenged by nobles and knights. But a modern automobile made in Germany doesn't care that you are anything other than a driver. That is because the ideal of modernity rules the automobile industry in Germany and everywhere else. They want to sell as many automobiles as possible to modern person. If you live in a tribe in Borneo, there is not a car marketed to you or your values or suitable to your way of life. 

I go into this somewhat silly level of detail because I am reminded on the daily that many people don't quite respect the idea of modernity. There are obvious multicultural excesses, obsessions with gender definitions, sexual preferences, ethnic proclivities and religious affliations that dominate the humanities in America now. I am brought to mind, however, of the broader picture which was underscored to me the other day via a Gapminder 'ignorance' quiz.

It turns out that right now the global life expectancy is 70 years. The global literacy rate is 80%. Both of these phenomena are, according to the authors, unprecedented in human history. I believe them. I've finally answered for myself what to do for 20 years after the age of 60, but I suspect that most people have not. It's interesting that I intend, for many of those years, to continue writing books and software.

I choose to count myself amongst the worlds most literate. I cannot prove it at the moment, but my fluency in computer languages and in English counts for quite a lot in my estimation. There is no grammarian quite as strict as a compiler and chunking that sort of information for a living makes me quite the editor. Having read > 500 books is not inconsequential either. But the content and quality of those books and software and data are important too. 

What will .8 * 7.131 billion literate people going to want to read? If we hadn't invented the Internet that would have been a quite serious logistical problem, even for modern German automobiles. Right now, wags are telling us that it's porno, the most compelling subject of our contemporary media. I would believe that as well. But Aldous Huxley reminds us that an intellectual is someone who has discovered something more interesting than sex. This is one reason why I take a dim view of multiculturalism's epistemological blow jobs which literally inflate the value of gender and sexual preference. Race, ethnicity, regionalism and religion don't offer much sophistication over the prior qualities, but at least they are associated with more sophiticated and higher order discriminations and bigotry. The multiculturalists have, in more recent years, progressed towards more and more crippling features in their press for equalities. We shall soon entertain more reasons why autistics should follow the pioneering spirit of Temple Grandin. We shall soon forget Geroge Washington find more and more holidays for even more fractional minorities, until such time, one imgines, that Mercedes does indeed make a limited run special edition sedan for the gay autistic albino outcast from Irian Jaya. Between now and then, we've got to get the poor blighter some reading material.

One of the more interesting phenomenon I recognize is the number of times some small news outfit mistakes a story from The Onion, a parody news organization, for a real story. The decline of journalism and American media is old news, and it calculates well from my point of view that this kind of error takes place all the time all over the world in every language. Dissonance and Ignorance are the two great generators of errors of cognition and understanding. Both are cured by intellectuality, by study, by the independent reasoning and discovery that attends serious reading and writing. Pardon me for not saying 'education', a term that bears too much lightweight freight as of late. How can it be avoided if not by referencing intellectual authority? It cannot. Well, it cannot in a modern world. In a primative world, intellectual authority is always provincial, accented, particular, tribal. And of course the mulitculturalists would have most of us look no further than our pudenda for the authority of our agenda.

But even beyond that are the hopeless games and charades played for no good reason in the kindergartens of literacy. Not to mention sheer dishonesty and fraud. If I remember correctly, the most crucial reason for public education is to enable self-rule. But if that takes place in an environment that will not make qualitative discriminations, or will not assert modernity, then such projects are doomed to failure. When the laws of the land are written with an arcane artificial intelligence that asks who you know, the car of civilization won't start for the common man. Likewise of the common man speaks an impenetrable patois legitimized by cultural relativists, no subtantial populations can benefit (without the interventions of the Gay Autistic Albino Societies of Greater Borneo). Also disabling self-rule. The business of protecting liberty is not for the weak-minded or the lollygagging spirit. It is the central conflict of humanity.  

So since I have last looked, I would hope that there may have arisen some controversy about the absence of patois among linguists. When everyone has their own books, reprinted to match their own preferences - well there's the real filter bubble problem. There becomes no world and exchange becomes impossible. What allows computers to instantly communicate across the globe is the discipline of standards, which are so exacting that dumb machines perform them regularly without error. Literacy requires standards as well. There must be, I find myself having to assert to my own chagrin, better and worse.  Hope is not a strategy, so despite my intentions that linguists do the right thing, I must do some work of my own. Maybe an essay or two. Maybe publish it on the Internet. 

Peacetime Sucks

War is Hell. Hell is well understood. Peacetime sucks. 

For the same reason that the noose focuses the mind, liberty allows for discovery of novelty in every sphere. I am reflecting for a moment on my discovery several years ago of the benefit of war. To reiterarte, the great value of war is that it becomes the excuse for everything, and it simplifies and accentuates the meaning of life. War is in every sense, reductive. 

Peacetime sucks because in peacetime, flirtations with the truth are sufficient. Nobody quite cares if you miscalculate because in general, nobody is going to lose an arm or a leg about it. Consequently, every mistruth becomes pretty much equal to every other mistruth, and the slippery slope ends up going down certainly. But not down to Hell. Because we are at peace with ourselves, our misdeeds, our mistruths and well isn't there delightful discovery in all that novelty? Yes there is. Peacetime breeds the corruptions of injustice, especially a peacetime with no death penalty.

Make no mistake. Peace is always preferable to war. Only during peacetime, with its attendent modes of discovery can we find value in the myriad permutations of human character and endeavor. Nobody loves humanity and all the diversions of society so much as during peacetime. In war, all we want is for war to end, by any means necessary - which generally means more war. In wartime, anything and everything goes to win, and blood debts give rise to greater commitments until the very end of human ability is tried. It exhausts the very soul. War makes zombies of humans, we become single-minded rabbits, astounding in our abject terror. Every face of every child reminds us that we are not our true selves in war, that we are reduced to following the orders of survival. And so we crave peace.

Peace is where a man can be a man, and a woman can be a woman, and a man can be a woman and so on. War does not allow us that luxury. So it is amusing as we contemplate our peacetime selves that women are wanting to be men and vice versa. The corruption is so vexing that it makes me entertain the clarity of Hell and the reduction of desire to survival. 

In between these extremes is Justice. I am sufficiently certain of this and don't feel compelled to backup this idea with my previous levels of investigation. I won't be looking up Adam Smith's version to compare it to somebody else's. I will simply rest on that certainty. More on Justice later.

The Jihad Next Door

As Cobb readers know, sometime around 7 years ago, I realized some awful things about the American electorate the fundamental nature of which can be described as lazy. I also recognized that when intelligent collaboration fails, human beings almost instantly and unconsciously revert to hierarchy. In this I predicted that Barack Obama because of the nature of his campaign and the character he displayed, would be subject to the great temptation of fascism. Which is to say more plainly that he is an opportunist who skillfully and with luck on his side managed to sell a shallow set of opportunities for intelligent collaboration as a candidate. The lazy American electorate purchased that dog food and soon after reverted to hierarchy. Obama has taken those opportunties as well. In this season, the press has come the constellation of his small treacheries. I saw its shape all along.

My most deeply held concern about the Obama Presidency has been and continues to be his naive, reactionary and rudderless foreign policy. I fully expect that his legacy will be that he was the American President who let Iran have nuclear weapons. Despite the bold and brave Stuxnet worm I'm sure his administration had a hand in, Obama's boldness is covert. He cannot hold his head high in front of troops and does not recognize the necessity and honor of the force of arms, the salutory effect of a national military force - the true meaning of uniformed boots on the ground. It is a projection of force with which he has fundamental quarrels - I believe it frightens him and so he responds to the irrational fears projected by like-minded individuals in foreign countries and peaceniks at home. 

In the news today is the sort of event which gets my attention because, in combination with the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombings it strikes me as evidence of a new sort of everyday savagery. After the professional terrorists have exhausted their most brilliant plans come the defiant ordinary butchers, all drinking from the same well of iniquity, the well of Islamist jihad the President dare not name, let alone poison. I am speaking, of course, about the machete attack on the British soldier in Woolwich. The broad daylight murder. The televised standoff in which red-handed killers were called 'suspects'. 

Someone wisely said that Europe has lost its mind. It fears its own militarization because of what it did to itself during the 20th century. And so the pendulum of its willingness to be cowed in public has defied the gravity of its Islamist defiance. Barack Obama carries that kind of fear in his heart as well, as do others who fail to navigate the reality of honor in military discipline. When all violent action is undifferentiable to someone, they are happy to speak of their disgust of hatchet men in the streets, and are equally happy to send them off through civilian due processes as if all violence were the same type of crminality.  In their simple-minded calculations, the random brutality of the one is only multiplied by the random brutality of the police, the national guard, the army. Better to suffer the indignity of Islamist wackjobs than the wackjobs in uniform - after all, real human beings just want to sleep and enjoy curious varieties of dress, meals and sex. So goes the thinking of the lazy many.

This makes life more difficult than it should be for the disciplined few for whom no pendulum operates our logic in support of the necessity of militant vigilance. But our efforts at intelligent collaboration have failed in the same democratic arena as the populist Obama's has succeeded, and so we fall too to hierarchy. It has taken me some time to see the measure of blind hero worship behind every teary salute, but that doesn't change the direction of my sentiment or of my thinking. It only makes me try, on occasions like today, to speak of the need for a leader capable of intelligent collaboration in support of boots on the ground.

I know such people exist who understand the limits of tolerance for that which seeks a barbaric undoing of our open society and civilized norms. That understanding comes from the simultaneous recognition of the value of liberty and the extremes to which it must often be defended. It comes not from fear, nor from dark vengeance, but for the necessity of protecting that which makes us civilized. It is not our unwillingness to employ violence which makes us civilized, but our unwillingness to be cowards. A nation so dedicated swears its citizens to oaths to this, and it is the dynamic life of that intelligent collaboration which keeps armies in uniform, in defense of liberty, in plain sight. A hierarchy of command that fears its own body will abuse itself in secret and send its dirty parts to do only dirty deeds. These are not the ways of proper leadership. These are the ways of fear and ignorance and such ways are always eventually revealed.

These are the events my friends. There is so little courage in our leadership that the tiny mobs are forming to fill the vacuum. The jihadi mobs are just the first. The now-quieted professionals whose masterminded schemes have been thwarted will again rise to direct them in due time. But by then they won't need masterful schemes..

Coates, Fight Club & The Uneducated Man

Coates. Him say:

I have all the repressed rage of a kid who was bullied — except now I have some size to match. At that moment, violent fantasies, wholly unmentionable, were dancing in my head. Contributing to those fantasies was a simple maxim inherited from childhood: “Thou shalt never be found a punk.”

My friends, being like me, and doubtlessly pumped up by the presence of other males, felt the same. There were four of us and two of them. But against all our instincts, we let it pass.

Afterward, we sat around stewing in our anger. Collectively we were a doctor, a filmmaker, an executive vice president at a health care company and a writer. All of us are in our late 30s. Our places in life no longer allowed for barroom brawls. We may well have had the numbers, but we also had our new and invented selves.

And then somebody responded:

How is this different than Italian American, Irish American, or Polish American kids who grow up in the rough and rugged inner city? Another example of Black "elites" pathologizing Blackness with vile racial essentialism. Do Black kids who grew up in Sag Harbor exhibit this behavior? Another example of how the Black "elite" do damage to the masses. This piece basically screams, "STOP AND FRISK IS JUSTIFIED."

 

My take on this, to put it at the street black level, is that for most of my life, I have identified positively with law enforcement on an abstract level. When I say abstract, it wasn't the local cop I idolized but the Navy Seal, or in the way that I identified with my own father's service in the Marine Corps. My father taught me how to jog, for miles. I knew I could outlast the street thugs, most of whom also could not swim. Aside from that, I knew that the thugs feared cops, and that more than one knucklehead in the 'hood, couldn't hang in the Army. So I always knew there were higher codes of honor that weren't punk codes.

Steven Pinker's latest book on violence reinforces this understanding of the tribalistic nature of non-legal honor codes of small towns and ghettos.

The problem with Coates, as always, is that he is so fraught with the socioeconomic significance of his experience without much (if any) props to people who learned what he's discovering many years ago, and throughout history. As a blogger, I get it. As an editor in a national magazine, it's a bit pathetic.

At some point, which he seems to be approaching, his connected experience with civilization is going to take precedence over his ghetto memories. He's going to have to choose, or become a caricature. I suppose, as a Leftist, he can explain away the contradiction - he certainly will have enough company in New York.

My evolving take on all of this at a higher level, and that I am applying to myself, is that the overwhelming majority of upper middle class America is absent a true martial education. Most of us cannot put two and two together with the understanding that our exercise and diet regimens would make us better fighters. We only think of evolutionary biology when it comes to sex, but not to fighting and war. We understand our attraction to representations of violence, but so few of us actually spar or hunt that we don't realized how much we have intellectualized all of it.

So for me, the solution is simple - a martial education which I will autodidactify on my own behalf.

The point of course is to become an order of magnitude more organic than people we can only judge by the policy implications of their intellectual blather. If Coates or any of his bourgeois buddies had a proper martial education, they would have known exactly where their rights and their abilities would be during 'fighting weather'. Instead, we have chatting class chock full of pussified men who can only show their honor and manhood through the backchannels of literary criticism and policy recommendations.

This is also highly correlated to the death of Trayvon Martin and his co-assailant. And that goes back to Bernie Goetz and the rest and so many other similar situations in the American public. Our problem is that America is full of men who learn, over their entire lives, less than what police officers - who need no college education - learn in a few short months in their respective academies. We have no proper martial education. We don't know our capacities, the law, our emotions and consequently how to handle violent conflict face to face as civilized men.

Of course this extraordinary helplessness and ignorance serves the political purpose of the ever-condescending protectionist liberal reactionaries who find their blather at all times superior to most everyone else's experience with violence. And in that regard, Coates' narrative, absent the possibility of martial education, makes for a useful (but meaningless) segue into ethnic essentialism as has been observed. 

The answer is that there is a proper way to deal with drunk belligerent men on the street, but most of us have not been educated.

Lure of the Guild

There is something retro deep inside me, and I think in all of us, when it comes to dealing with alienation of modern, global life. I think the proper thing to do is to work your way through modern, global life and supplant its alienation with a whiff of the tribal and a considered portion of the guild. You know the guild, the moose lodge, the order of buffalo, the brotherhood of the otter - something like Fred Flintstone had. You see, George Jetson had no running buddies. 

I am reading Gene Wolfe's tales in the Book of the New Sun.

What impresses me now the second time around literarily, since Stephenson's OMVI, is the concept of a small group of men who are self-sustaining in their ways. They could be monks in their monastary, perhaps a royal family in their castle, maybe a group of makers in their hackerspace. Organized around an arcane competence. Prepared to initiate noobs into apprenticeship and grow them into journeymen. Dedicated to sentence fragments with implicit subjects, but descriptive nonetheless. 

From Wolfe comes the Seekers of Truth and Penitence. Aah but maybe it's just little old me finally tasting a good portion of sword and sorcery. As I've read on, I can see how this story goes down the tunnel of a single quest and how different it is from more of what I'd call an 'open world / sandbox' adventure, of which Iain Banks is the master. And I've also gotten most of the way through Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber, and see some of the same interesting, but limiting first person-ality. 

This morning I heard the first whiff of the conspiracy theory behind some elaborate and scary intra-agency rivalries that verge on warfare. According to this particular Lt. Colonel, there are some sneaky agencies that run training operations in public and have patsies in place just in case something goes wrong. But I will deal with that at length on its own because that subject would overwhelm this, which is simply the following. 

Since 9/11, I sorta kinda predicted then end of the nation state. Of course I don't know what I'm talking about, because some time later, Colin Powell convinced me that state sovereignty is too powerful for anyone to let go. So state sponsored terrorism remains to me, an evil to be taken quite seriously, and more seriously than any other kind. But that doesn't change the fact that many states have many elements with many agendas, many of which come into and out of power. Today's African National Congress is in much better shape than yesterday's. Today's KKK is pathetic. Today's OWS gets no news. So the nation state continues, but watch for the movements below that level. 

Here in the US, we've gone diversity happy. I am convinced that just about anyone who flies diversity flags is eating their own dog food, much of which they didn't grow themselves. Which is to say that out of 1000 diversity programs, 990 are funded by non-diverse sources. In other words, we have a lot of cliques on the inside that aren't really on the inside. A lot of guilds have politicked their way into permanence, but a dependent permanence. Kind of like the class of people with driver's licenses and gas station credit cards as compared to auto mechanics and petroleum engineers. As long as there are auto mechanics and petroleum engineers willing to work for the public, driver's licenses and gast station credit cards are meanningful, but the guild of diversity is like the guild of driver's license holders. You can call it important. That doesn't make it important.

So all of this depends upon how well the rule of law and open society functions, leveraging the standing of the American general public. But at some point, I have decided to prepare myself for what might come next, which is the degredation of all that. How shall I say it? When it's time to cross the desert, the entire value of your cool low rider is nullified. Time to buy a Jeep.

So I'm interested in, as I said, my own martial education - but in the context of a reasonable guild. Not survivalists, but people whose value transcends the relative luxuries our open society provide today, but are not promised for tomorrow. That means that I need to make real tribal links. 

Everybody Hates A Level Playing Field

This is an argument for class and against equality. 

Imagine that you were introduced to basketball by Michael Jordan. He teaches you how to dribble, to shoot, to block, to assist. You get pretty good. And then he starts playing. Every day you are playing against Michael Jordan; every day you are losing. After a while, the sport would cease to be appealing to you, unless you were Clyde Drexler or Dominique Wilkins.

My observation of meritocracy is that it must be tyrannical. There are technical, political and aesthetic tyrannies at work at the core of any contest. Sometimes we made our decision about sport vs activity based upon whether the score was determined by judges. Ice dancing, springboard diving, skateboard vert ramp. All of these require judges rather than timers or other measuring devices. But a winner must be determined no matter what. If it's not, then a game isn't fair. Fairness seems rather odd in this respect - if everybody plays by the same rules, you always produce proper winners and proper losers. We seem to forget that this is what fairness demands. Fairness demands that you create losers. Somehow we've perverted sportsmanship. It's true that it's not whether you win or lose but how you play the game. Right. If you play fair and lose, then it's a good game. But if you play so that there are no winners and no losers then you have destroyed the rules, and thus the meaning of sportsmanship and the integrity of the idea of fairness. Meritocracy is hardball. Rules are tyrannical.  All of that is fair.  

We all used to play a game of 'sport vs activity' which generally focused on the courtly games vs the roughneck games. Is golfing a sport? What about skiing? Well, not like football or boxing. As it turns out, every sport, every competitive activity has its requirements most of which at the pro level are far beyond us. I don't know about you, but I'm never going to dunk on Akeem. I'm never going to hit a 90mph fastball. I'm never going to pass a stock car on the high side at 190mph. I'm never going to drive a golf ball 350 yards. I'm never going to surf Mavericks. And yet these are the things the best of us do every day. Nevertheless, I should be able to enjoy auto racing, baseball, surfing and basketball not only as a spectator, but as a participant. I don't want to play one on one against Jordan, but what about fairness? A level playing field is a killing field. That's why we have leagues.  

--

Here in America, we tend to be bastards. My definition of a bastard combines facts and observables. A bastard is always a heartless bastard and exerts his cruelty upon others because of the cruelty at the heart of his very existence. He was not loved by the man who made him. So bastards are unforgiving when it comes to the rules - they expect none and give no love or quarter. A gentleman may have his honor and with honor comes grace which is taken and given. Why should honor be sacrificed for a lack of excellence? A forgiving and gentlemanly father understands this, but such is the understanding only rarely received by bastards. So bastards stand as border guards, bayonets at the ready, following the only orders they get, surviving on the thin gruel of regulatory compliance.

I shouldn't say that we tend to be bastards, rather that our promise of meritocracy gives fine comfort to those who would be bastards. Here in the States, we don't go in for hereditary titles and the other trappings of royalty, peerage and primogeniture. We prefer SAT results, Body Mass Indices and FICO scores. We make sport scoreboards of our humanity, often to our detriment. But how can we avoid a discussion about who was the best rock guitarist of all time, or the top five romantic comedies or Mopar vs Ford vs GM? We cannot, because the bastards among us will not let us have history settled. America is the land that killed the gentleman's 'C'.

We may come to regret that, yeilding as we do all sorts of credits to all sorts of characters, ungentlemanly as they may be. You see in order to create the illusion that we are personally and institutionally in service to the ideal of equality, we must assert a 'level playing field'. It doesn't bother me much that I cannot hang with Michael Jordan, but I feel as though I am often surrounded by those who are bound and determined to level things out. To have he and I play by the same rules on the same court and call that equality is only something a heartless bastard would ask. It is quite enough for any sort of meritocracy I would respect that I can see and be inspired by Jordan, and play equitably amongst my peers, in my class, in my league, in my own neighborhood.

So who is really a bastard? The one who says we all must play on one playing field without any regard to our actual abilities. The one who won't let us group up into leagues. The one who, in service to the unreal ideal of a level playing field for everyone, makes the boys play against the girls, the rich play against the poor, the strong play against the weak, the young against the old, all without regard to their actual ability. The right way to do have fairness and meritocracy is to have a hierarchy of leagues and an open, unlimited class. 

Sports people knew I was coming to this. America loves sports because we get to participate. We get to watch Tiger Woods; we watched him climb the leagues. We have leagues and classes and invitationals and opens and tournaments and qualifiers so that the tyranny of rules can apply where we can apply ourselves among our peers. 

--

There's something I have called the Logarithmic Shadow. I have described it all kinds of ways. In one way I've described it in Cobb's Rule #7: Never trust a man whose shoes cost more than you're whole day's pay. The Logarithmic Shadow is how I describe how the poor survive at all given the power of the rich. Most of us don't know Michael Jordan. Most of us are even incompetent to be a high school basketball coach. So what keeps Jordan from messing all over our neighborhood basketball games? What keeps the CIA from bugging your PTA? What keeps Special Forces snipers from shooting schoolyard bullies? It's the same thing that keeps you standing outside of the club where Lady Gaga is hanging out tonight. It's the same thing that keeps you stuck in traffic on the freeway.  

The big dogs have bigger fish to fry, and you ain't one of them. Be grateful.

So I will describe the Logarithmic Shadow as the respect for leagues, boundaries and capabilities. It's NOT fair if we all play on the same turf. That's a class violation, and class violations are what makes the small tyrannies of rulesets into big tyrannies of societies. See you didn't like me saying meritocracy is tyrannical did you? OK. The proper American meritocracy implicitly means multiple levels and hierarchy. We mean climbing the social ladder. We mean, if we're serious, we mean superior and inferior. We mean winners and losers. We mean brackets and championships. We mean win, place, show and also ran.  We mean fair competition, not a free-for-all.

---

Now that we have that understanding, I'm going to point out some things I don't like which are consequential.

I don't like a President who doesn't act Presidential.
That means a President who hogs the spotlight and doesn't delegate authority is the man whose shoes cost more than your day's pay. When he's the big dog paying attention small fry that means three things. One. He's going to win with overwhelming force 95% of the time. Two. The bigger fish are getting away. Three. The 5% of the time he loses to the small fry, degrades the office. Stay in your lane.

I don't like all this rabble about 'income inequality'.
If you can walk all day barefoot, then that's your advantage over the man who can't. Ask the Viet Cong. If you can live without eating steak and lobster, without manicures and tummy tucks, without air conditioning and power windows, good! He who lives without luxury will not be a slave to fashion. But the girl who wears fake Prada sunglasses is both self-delusional and a fraud. The man who cannot save $100,000 cannot save the planet. Stay in your lane, people. 

 

Dorner the Individual

America does not have to take Christopher Jordan Dorner seriously. But we would all do better to understand something that applies to him and applies to all of us as well. In the terms I have used at this blog it is this: Human beings have the right to make life and death decisions.

Dorner is, by all appearances, not on a rampage, but on a vendetta. He aims to take revenge into his own hands. An organization has done him wrong and he plans to make them pay, in blood. 

There is a slight difficulty with this morality play. It is that nothing that comes of this drama, no matter which way it plays out, can be called justice. It will be vengeance. The difference is that justice is in the public interest and vengeance is something between squabblers that don't represent anything other than themselves. The more observers and critics attempt to draw large symbolic meaning from this drama, the more wrong they will be, unless they make that distinction. If the LAPD gets its way, then it will have avenged itself, that means nothing whatsoever to society. If Dorner manages to satisfy his bloodlust, it is not a triumph for the little guy, it's all about Dorner. So the problem we have is that everyone playing sides thinks they are cheering, in some way, for their own collective interests, and that is just wrong.

Our society is, for worse, collectivising itself. More and more people are getting involved in fewer and fewer issues with larger and larger battles. The 'significance' of more and more current events are in play for 'society'. America is less of a society of independent individuals than it could be, and I say, than it ought to be. And because of that, we have invested more (too much) of our time into defending groups and institutions that actually don't serve us well. I hope we all learn to be a bit more self-reliant in the future.

Dorner is guilty of expecting that his own personal sense of integrity would be served in his police and military work. And that is to be expected considering how people (on the Right) tend to glorify the deeds and character of first responders and military personnel. But a real trooper knows that subjugate themselves and swear oaths not to their own sense of right and wrong, but to the Corps, the Army, the Air Force. When you die in the course of duty, the flag they drape over your coffin does not have your name on it - you don't die for yourself, you die for your country, your city. And so that is how you are to live. If you can't go with the flow, then head for the door. The cost of being a professional is understanding exactly where your organization falls short. This is a psychic burden young Mr. Dorner could not bear. He couldn't stand a lie if it cost him his job. And he couldn't stand the cost of not having the glory he presumed from having that organization at his back. In other words, it was like discovering there is no Santa Claus. That is why Dorner is transparently sociopathic - his expectations of society, of the LAPD of the US Armed Forces were that they would always and everywhere support his personal convictions. That's not how it works.

As an individual, Dorner's course makes logical sense, to him.  No matter what you know, no matter how intelligent or foolish, no matter what your ability to gain support in your community or society at large, you will always have a point of view that diverges. An individual knows what he knows and sees what he sees and makes judgments according to his experience and learning. All colloboration is a compromise, even between identical twins. We cannot get inside of each others heads - we can only empathize with what we assume to be good enough rationalizations for actions. It always comes down to cases, and every individual's case is different.

Human beings have the right to make life and death decisions. Individuals can. In certain cases they must. But we are a large society and we recognize that we are better off on the whole if we can let some people specialize. The police exist, and we pay for their weapons, because we have decided to proxy off those life and death decisions to them, the professionals, the specialists. But in return we demand that they swear an oath and that they dedicate themselves to serving *us* not their own interests. The job of the police brass is to ride herd on policemen - make them wear that uniform - control their thinking, their behavior - make them stick to their duty. In the case of Dorner, they failed. Dorner's own experience caused him to make a break with the police, he put his own values above those of the the organization he swore an oath to. 

When the LAPD failed Dorner, they called him names - specifically a liar, and then gave him the boot. He was fired. When Dorner failed the LAPD he called them names, liars, racists; and now he has become a deadly enemy. I cannot justify either claim, and that's really not important. 

What is important is that as individuals we recognize what kind of power we give up when we pledge ourselves to organizations, groups and institutions. We need to understand that we submit to the rules, regulations, values and judgments of a collective and that means our opinion doesn't matter as much any longer. If we have a crisis of conscience, then it is our duty to abdicate. Leave. Scram. Hit the door. We have to have a Come to Jesus Moment with the leadership and get that my way or the highway decision. 

I think Americans have become so individually powerless that many of us are making Dorner's mistake. We think that our own personal ethics and values are actually served by those institutions we swear by. When that turns out not to be the case, we are blindsided by our blind loyalties. We cannot believe that promises were broken. And then we want revenge and have the nerve to call it justice. 

A King of Reason

I am reminded that there are quite useful bodies of knowledge out there that serve the exact purposes of we ships at sea. I have the good fortune that people are looking out for me, even in my doldrums of doubt and nary progress. One such rescue came in the form of a pointer to an award winning philosopher by the name of Alvin Plantinga. While you and I have been guessing, he has been proving. 

In my dreams of avarice, I am in possession of a great mansion. It is all I have ever truly desired. For in this house is a parlor populated by poets, priests and politicians and I let them have at it. Something like my blog in its heyday, I suppose. Yes, I want a salon. I rather guess I ought to go about designing it, neh? All this online scribbling is wonderful but there's no food in it. 

Anyway, for the T50 to ever get a chance to have a private audience, which would ultimately be publicized, this ought to be an interesting way to go about it. At any rate, here's this dude. Check him out. 

On The Proper Failure of America

At my reunion last night, at long last I got into a political discussion with Phil, Big Carl, Serious Mike and Cap'n Steve. Unfortunately, my feet hurt, I didn't let Big Carl get a word in edgewise, Big Mike blew in and out, and Phil and I already agree. But since this is an issue that is quite near to my moral universe, I needed to continue on. This is for Cap'n Steve and so many others like him.

The other day I remembered something about a class of problems called Rabbit Holes. 

A rabbit hole is a problem whose solution begets more problems. When you begin to address it and solve one part, you create new parts. These new problems may be puzzles, they may be new mysteries. There may even be rabbit holes within rabbit holes. Often the wisest course of action when faced with a rabbit hole is to avoid it altogether. Alternatively, the wisest course is bravado, overkill and simplification. Don't even pretend that you can solve the problem with any finesse, just jump in and get busy.

I have been making excuses not to involve myself with the business of politics while still being very concerned with the proper ends of politics. My problem is that I am impatient with the kinds of arguments and discussions that are not as informed as the ones I've been having here for the past ten years. I've got work to do. 

I was amazed when Jeff Bezos not long ago predicted the future with perfect accuracy. He said that in five years he will not expect that his customers will be asking him for lower quality service and higher prices. So the logical conclusion is that he must arrange his business to produce higher quality and lower prices. If you can't configure your business to do the same, then you have no future. So it occurs to me to apply this reasoning to the operation of cities, counties, states and federal bureacracies. But what I see ahead is failure. So before you get the idea that I want failure for failure's sake understand that I am taking Bezos' path. It is not coincidental that this mirrors the business strategy of my day job. To wit:

There are certain complications built into the way things are that allow people to drag their feet in dealing with obligations they ought not be caught up in. They wouldn't have such obligations if it were not for their faulty behavior and/or their failure to predict the future in the way Bezos has. There are a lot of American entities that are dancing on high cost, low quality platforms that are simply unsustainable. These are a class of rabbit hole problems. The federal deficit is a rabbit hole problem. Universal health care is a rabbit hole problem. And for the lot of these and many like them, the wisest course is not to try and patch them up, but let them fail.  

As some of you know, I am building the same kinds of systems I have been building for the past 20 years on the new cloud platform. The cloud is going to let me build higher quality products for lower cost. But my company doesn't have nearly the market share or revenues of the vastly more expensive home grown systems of the clients I used to serve. They are going to have to learn things the hard way. 

My negative attitude about politics means I am not going to waste my breath, time and energy trying to come up with a solution to today's rabbit hole politics. We all know they are broken and I am out of the patching business. I am no longer working with duct tape, chicken wire, bubble gum and spit. Nor am I working with bulldozers, wrecking balls, dynamite and dump trucks. I'm not even on the board for urban renewal. I'm just building the next generation of buildings which will be immune to the kinds of failures I predict in the future for the unsustainable status quo. You see? A new kind of city government, a new type of state legislature, a new sort of federal bureacracy needs to be evolved separate and distinct from what is doomed to fail. Lazy people will hobble to the new system if they survive the crash of the old, but thoughtful people will advance the new as the proper future.

Steve informed me that when the big Sequestration comes down, he expects that the Navy won't be participating in Fleet Week any longer. It came as a surprise and as no surprise. The US Navy will fail. 

I take Chesterton's advice very seriously. I am not going to destroy that thing whose purpose I don't understand merely for the sake of erecting something new. I'm working in a medium that will allow us to work alongside the ailing patient - it will clone the best DNA and put it in a more antifragile body.  We can work in parallel with the old and the new. I'm not engaged purposefully in a zero-sum game, just like Netflix co-existed with Blockbuster for a decade. But we're offering the old thing and the new thing too - for less. 

How do you build a better democracy? You start with fiscal transparency. Not just the kind of Woodward and Bernstien hit pieces that define our entire notion of '-gate' scandals. I am convinced that today's journalism lack that longitudinal view. Tomorrows news will include yesterday's and today's data. Not just "This just in" but "We draw your attention to the health and safety of the American embassy security situation that we have been monitoring for the past 7 years"  -- See? Here are the budget numbers, here are the votes for the appropriations, here are the directives, here are the projects that succeeded and these are the ones that failed. No mere 2000 word specials. A nation of millions of Americans can do 2000 word journalism specials every day for 10,000 bureacracies. This is how democracy will be changing as the old stuff dies. It's time for us to come up with a better way of putting policy together than Robert's Rules of Order. 

I will be involved in collaboration with people here in California, and my avocation will be to make systems of transparency and redundancy. Every lawyer I talk to says, oh yeah it's easy for me to get case law out of Lexis and Westlaw. As easy as Google? As easy as Facebook? As easy as YouTube? If it was easy, then any high school kid who has a viral video of somebody getting beat up at McDonalds would be attaching the case docket number to the video. They would be attaching the names of the attorneys in the case and having the testimony in PDF files on the sidebar. They would have the judgment or settlement figures in a spreadsheet right there. And this would be as impossible to fake as everything else, because the people will make it their business to get to the facts and stay on type of the facts far longer than the profit area of the 'media cycle'.

This requires several tools that don't currently exist and are not easily accessible to the internet public and experts at large. Today. 

This is not about being mad as hell about what doesn't work. I don't have time for that. I have new things to build while everything else fails. 

The False Majority

It's better to be the king of a small hill, than a prince at a higher elevation.
-- Cobb's Rule #9. 

The last book I just finished reading is Bruce Schneier's Liars and Outliers. It is a very interesting and good book which goes into some detail about security, trust, society and all things related to rule following and rule breaking. It's very thorough, not very technical and so truthful that it almost sounds obvious. What's extraordinary about it in retropsect is that Schneier told almost no stories from his personal experience. Good on that security.

Schneier is in my T50 - the list of thinkers that I am limiting myself to hearing out for the rest of my life. It's interesting how he sounds a little bit like a boring Gladwell. Gladwell is such a good writer that he makes everything sound exciting and profound. Schneier quotes almost as much as Gladwell, but not quite - still he mentions other folks in my T50, including Nassim Taleb and Clay Shirky, and even though he didn't mention John Boyd by name, I hear a lot of OODA thinking in his talk about the 'Red Queen Effect'.  

At any rate, there are bigger takeaways from this common sense sounding book that I now recongize in my own evolution. And so I remark about it here. 

F1 racing has been my metaphor for the kind of work I want to do and am now doing, 15 years later than when I first really wanted to. What it took me a long time to learn is the cost of largeness. What Schneier described very well in his closing chapters is how the cost of communication in large organizations rises with a factor of each incremental person added and there comes a point at which the technologies and processes are unable to sustain any single-minded agenda. This is precisely a characteristic of what I call information thermodynamics, but what I never quite envisioned was the negative aspect. I understood that within a large organization that it costs money to keep the brass informed about how the business is actually operating, and Schneier did make use of the Dunbar Number. But what I thought was the know-have-nots would simply be dragged along with the know-haves. I didn't think that there might be a point at which it drags down the ability of the organization to accomplish *anything*.

In other words, organizations don't get 'too big to fail', there is literally a point at which they get so big that they *must* fail. The nature of that failure is primarily in what I would call an 'open agenda', but not necessarily the failure of the entity. Xerox, for example, once owned American Express. Hard to believe, but true. While I was working there, ostensibly for the workstation business, Xerox' most profitable division was VanKampen Merritt Investments. They were playing money games on Wall Street but failing to be Xerox, the innovative product company. Soon, small companies like the PC printer division of HP and a company called Adobe kicked Xerox' in what used to be some of their core competencies. 

So, as certain people predicted several years ago, my disinterest in politics has left me to be a Libertarian. But I suppose as I have been called a RINO, then I may be a LINO as well. Except that there's no such thing as a LINO because libertarians seem to have the good sense to know they won't rule, and since they won't - the don't have pretenses to ideological fidelity - or at least they don't bother enforcing a party line. 

It occurred to me this week that you probably could run America with half a million people. That if we were really connected on Facebook Next, and you paid us 600 times our annual salaries, we could take care of 600 people each and we would all do just fine. 

Combine all this and what do you get? Well I get an idea that The System is permanently broken and that when it really comes down to it, there is no such thing as a nation of 300 million. Somewhere around whatever we were in the 1950s in breaks and there is the active nation and there is the passive nation. America keeps struggling to have all of us in the active nation with a real nationalism, but in the next 20 years that's going to break dramatically and we will split into the active nation and the passive nation. We will be more of a civilization than a society and the fakery of all patriotism will be exposed. Not that patriotism is false but patriotism that scales will break. Of course the great news is that we won't amend the Constitution, because that's too difficult. Put another way, democracy > 200 million is a Wicked Problem.

I expect that significant liberal and libertarian subgroups of the American population will have money enough to support the Elon Musks of the world and that they will come to build their cars for our markets. So long as personality and dynamism wants to be rich as in American rich, the active patriots will win the day. And we need fewer of them than we think, I think. I'm fairly confident of this rather in the same way that Vannavar Bush was confident that we wouldn't blow ourselves up with nukes. 

Conservatives aren't who they think they are, by the way. If they think the country is going to hell, it's simply because they think we're all in the same handbasket. As they discover that virtue will out, they will relax. This young generation has had its fair share of douchebags and they won't put up with it despite of all their other wimpy sensitivities. The free love to remain free and they will put down their celery sticks and fight when it comes down to it.

All of this is to say that the Fifty States are in for some real big fun and the Feds are going to have their asses handed to them. I am confident of this - because the states will fail and get right first. Experts will have their way again in the future and bullshit will walk. This is my optimism for the future of everything. We have too many cultural memories to forget how free we have been. That which is too big will fail, the small, smart and agile will perservere, there will be no Idiocracy, because the majority simply will not be clued in, and they will not be able to chain the minds of those who know. 

 

Unbelonging, Indifference and the Apocalypse

What I have dealt with, as a subconcious theme of most of my writing is whether or not we belong and how we should. You can see that this implies that I've always believed that we do belong and that we should in a particular way. Now I'm not so sure.

For most of my youth I took a generational imperative for granted. In a certain way, I was correct to do so. But since most of that has been accomplished, it leaves me with a sense of apartness, which is something different from alienation in that it is not a gap that can't be bridged, but one that bespeaks a non-trivial, respectful distance. Oh, I see you way over there. 

Perhaps I am mistaken to take the cue from Bloom, but the fact that he speaks of an absolute limit in getting to know others relieves me of a great insecurity in as much as I have always felt both a need to explain myself and a frustration with the overwhelming majority who still don't get it. In a way, it puts me back to what I rather obsessed over in my late 20s, the marvel that people understand each other at all. Now I accept that we don't, instead we mob up over common inside jokes. We sing the lyrics to a familiar song and we feel as though we are in communion, but we are not, we merely are similarly focused for the moment. And as I think of it, games are the same way, the point guard knows when to slow down on the fast break and knows when the forward will pass him and on what side, the no look pass is getting to know better but it is still connaitre not savoir. 

So we don't actually belong. We create the illusion of imagery. But in our dreams, we only dream of our true intimates. We only dream of our childhood homes. Every other dream is a kind of Fauvist wackyland of monsters and lovers you never actually meet. Well, for me anyway. 

I am taking it that Victorian manners and the excruciating tedium of the unambitious pace of a sclerotic aristocracy enforce the closest approximation of intimate society. Anti-liberty creates the bondage of intimacy. I feel that in Dickens as I felt it in Breaking Bad; this sense that literature creates the sort of symbiosis that I do not possess in life. Tangentially...

As I approached the highest levels in Amalur, resolving the ultimate faction quest of the sages, I battled the Archsage's mental demons one of which was Ambition and the other Indifference. Having won, I got to choose and I chose Indifference as a power. Indifference is the power of equanimity. I know it contradicts Ayn Rand, but perhaps now is the time to consider disinterest. For years since my 40s I have been waiting for all the kids to eat first and being a river to my people with the pride of earning and giving away. But now it all starts to feel more and more like Indifference because it surely is not Ambition. Ambition is a tool to make one's river wide and deep. Indifference serves wisdom best. It makes one confident in judgment. The Judge is critical, but does not belong. 

Indifference is the mark of the Logarithmic Shadow. It is the virtue of the broad minded. It is the acceptance of the alternate paths. It is the recognition that people adapt and little is predictable. It makes the honesty of the well-wisher that much more powerful. It is robust acceptance, and it allows that which is personal prejudice and bias to be transparent. 

The Judge will not belong. But the Judge approaches savoir. 

The Cabin in the Woods, is the bloody explication, by the way. The Book of Eli is the denoument. The Cabin in the Woods throws innocence in a calculated way into the lava pit of self-destruction for the purpose of satiating that which would destoy the world. The innocents, not knowing the world worth saving, have to go and just let it die. (awww Foo Fighters). That's a kind of naive indifference bordering on apathy. But it is righteous in whatever way youth is - the destruction of youth is as evil as any. 

The Book of Eli shows Indifference, truly, to the pain which must be born and dealt when liberation is at hand. The Walker is indifferent to individual suffering and does not belong because he bears the burden of lifting the survivalist intimate bondage. People have been reduced to animals and they know each other's stink all too well. There is no disinterest in the post-apocalyptic world, everything is too claustrophobic. 

Bleak

I'm reading and about 40% through Charles Dickens' Bleak House. What strikes me most is that there is in Dickens' mind such a minute and detailed accounting of character that it's rather frightening to consider how little we might do in comparison. Much of Bloom's criticism inflects my perception to trust the story more than the author but one cannot help but notice how perceptive one must be to manage all the recondite nuances without prejudice. I am comparing and contrasting with my almost recent going through of the Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes mysteries as examples of Victorian literature in pursuit of a more thorough going understanding of our mutal history, much of which was spurred on by my less recent review of Stephenson's Baroque Series. I expect that this interest will continue as I feel less and less bound by contemporary social and political imperatives - I'm ready to unbelong. 

What matters then is character somewhat limned by deportmant, but character over all. 

I am writing, and may finish today some reflections on Neal Stephenson and his Neo-Victorianism and implications of.. well let me do that because there's little sense in writing more about Bleak House until I complete it, which won't be for another week. 

Stephenson holds my attention because he is, like I am, invigorated by the lacuna of modern self-sufficiency and looks to history to reconstruct that bit of human knowledge which our contemporary conveniences have obviated for the sake of the masses. I am certain that he has seen, via Anathem, the value of a monastic discipline in education and what a social lack of that produces. He, better than most writers I have ever encountered understands the value of practical knowledge - what the Enlightenment has done and how a lack of disciplined education will undo. It will not undo humanity, but the Humanities. And so in that gap which arises from the failure to mass educate, he inserts his literature, and lately a corpus of tools that go beyond literacy. 

As a backgrounder, understand that I strongly believe that the masses and those who lead them for better or worse will fail to correct their failures until they are lying in its detritus. The wasteland must be upon us for our bearing to adjust - and that is born of the beeline for convenience which has been the impetus for the vast majority of our social change in the 19th and 20th centuries. We have educated without enabling and have left it to the Lords to oversee. But they too have been outstripped and do not, I assert, with any constancy maintain the integrity of their realms. And so we live on the brink of disease and disaster amongst a lot of men who have forgotten not only the recipe for survival, but indeed how to be men. We have gone beyond feral motorcycles to zombies. We know that the motors will not survive.

Like my old friend Charles Cameron, I'm paying attention to the millenarians and listening intently to those people who believe the world is about to end, or atleast collapse in parts of Europe and the United States. It might be a bit corny to say so, but I think that all such Westerners with a bit of motherwit are going to survive very much more like Guy Ritchie's version of Sherlock Holmes than any Mad Max. I say in fact that there will be a style and a virtue and a power in the post-industrial man which will very much resemble that of the pre-industrial man. We will eat better and have better hygene, but I think the NeoVictorian is the model.

To the extent that I don't believe the Vickies will be the model, Stephenson has me again. It will be the logistics of the swarm that rule the next generation (which is not necessarily an evolution) of organizational dynamics. IE Mongolian hordes. The Khan model of assymetrics will dominate, but (and the new Mongoliad is out this week) OMVI tactics cannot be far off. The individual tactitian organized in the small group of multi-thinkers will have advantages I think cannot be overcome by those driven to complete selfless devotion to battle. But it will be a good fight one way or the other.

So I am preparing myself and my family, armed with Peasant Theory, books and swords, and some Mongolian organization dynamics, amid the view of Dickensian London for that which might devolve here in the US, understanding that cities may seem 'unlivable' by today's yuppie standards, but the woods will be much, much worse. So how is a gentleman to survive? The model is already out there. Victorian manners are survival skills. So the future doesn't seem too bleak to me at all. 

The One True Religion

I would like to serve myself
And in all ways preserve my health
And in all things my conscience be
In all its force designed by Thee
The One True God of all there is
i.e. e.g. to wit and viz
The unity of pen and sword
Of mind and might
Of deed and word
Of Heaven's light in mankind's soul
And virtue's everlasting role. 

Harold Bloom has put forth one of the few genuinely new ideas I've heard. It is this, he centers our ideas about humanity in the Western Canon, in Shakespeare primarily. That is not too surprising. What is truly surprising and new is that he compares the authors of the Bible to Shakespeare. In other words, he implies without insistance that the Bible, as a canonical work of literature has its merits as any other work of literature. 

Absorbing this implies that everything about the best ideas human beings are able to absorb can be found expressed in the best literature. Therefore the Bible should be read as literature and that the ideas presented therein should be judged on their literary merit and in the ineffible way that critics like Bloom and all readers must deal with the text. Bloom warns not to read too much into the author by way of the text but to read everything the text says and implies about its subjects, especially how it makes us think as it directs our thoughts. I take this to mean that reading is a sort of possession, it is ours to consider the nature of the possession itself, not the nature of the spellcaster.

This aligns with my early polytheisms and the meme of religion as mankind's first education. It therefore transmutes in every way the roles of the religious and those institutions built around them. There is no difference between that moral instruction of any human author, and thus no lesser greatness in those who identify our spirit in their writing work. Writing literature, teaching literature is ministry. The secular professor of English, professes his faith in the literature he teaches to liberate the souls of the readers. 

I say this just having finished Charles Stross' fourth in the Laundry Series - the Apocalypse Codex. And so a new circle is complete for me (wow), linking literature, science fiction and religious texts all in the business of creating in humanity its own humanity. And in so doing, the framework for all of the humanities has become clear. I have Voltaire's realization confirmed again. There is one true religion. 

God,  it takes a lot of time to program a proper mind.

Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau?

	Hobbes	Locke	Rousseau
State of Nature	The state of nature is a state of war.  No morality exists.  Everyone lives in constant fear.  Because of this fear, no one is really free, but, since even the “weakest” could kill the “strongest” men ARE equal.	Men exist in the state of nature in perfect freedom to do what they want.  The state of nature is not necessarily good or bad.  It is chaotic.  So, men do give it up to secure the advantages of civilized society.	Men in a state of nature are free and equal. In a state of nature, men are “Noble Savages”.  Civilization is what corrupted him.
Purpose of Government	To impose law and order to prevent the state of war.	To secure natural rights, namely man’s property and liberty.	To bring people into harmony. To unite them under the “General Will”.
Representation	Governments are designed to control, not necessarily represent.	Representation ensures that governments are responsive to the people.  Representation is a safeguard against oppression.	Representation is not enough.  Citizens cannot delegate their civic duties.  They must be actively involved.  Rousseau favors a more direct democracy to enact the general will.
Impact on Founders	Governments must be designed to protect the people from themselves.	1. Governments must be designed to protect the people from the government.  2.Natural Rights must be secured.	1. Governments must be responsive and aligned with the general will.  2. People make a nation, not institutions. 3. Individual wills are subordinate to the general (collective) will.

I found this very interesting table somewhere on an academic website. Now that we've covered some bases about the possible overlap of secular law and canon law, let's examine the reasoning of these three dudes.

Ellis Cose: The End of Anger

Amazon: The Next General Motors

At some point, we must consider the basic needs of humanity and figure out how the economy is arranged to provide for it and what goods and services the markets can sustain beyond those of necessity. In America, we can predict beyond necessity because ours are so well spoken for. It is that interesting gap that I spend hours thinking when I try to distinguish our 9% unemployment rate from the poverty of the second and third worlds. 

Several years ago, the NYT published a survey about the most prestigious professions. I was mildly surprised to see that Database Administrators ranked third, behind doctors and lawyers out of 447 job titles. But what has not been surprising is how much of our economy has moved into what I must call industrial dependency on computing services. We are at a point in our history where taking away the computers would be like taking away the automobiles. Information technology and telecommunications are where what we know must live or else die. The efficiencies and effectiveness of this industry too compelling to put aside. In this world there are as many microchips as grains of rice, and the trend is irreversible.

Clay Shirky, among many inquisitors into the phenomena of this age has written a book entitled 'Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age'. In i, he shows how many ventures on the internet capture human efforts quite effectively - in ways heretofore impossible. Imagine the creation of a global encyclopedia in fifty languages written by nobody in particular in their spare time. That's Wikipedia. The ability for a literate population of billions to create products and services for the intellect is the world historical process that is emerging now. 

The Industrial Revolution as we know it come to be because it generated a great surplus in one basic human need, clothing. It turned out that once properly organized, ordinary people had the skill to produce in factories, a product everyone needed. By applying a process that scaled up the ordinary work of an individual tailor, people were able to earn more money, make more clothes and create for the population of ordinary people, choices in what clothing to wear. What started as clothing, once individually crafted, moved on to other sorts of manufacture with its ultimate expressions in the automobile and jet aircraft.  For an ordinary person to have choices in how to get to a destination, and have many destinations to choose from drastically changed the shape of the world. We don't talk much about the 'jet set' because now frequent flying is commonplace. It's hard to imagine rolling back to a time when an automobile was not an option or when jet transport did not exist. FedEx overnight delivery was created in our lifetimes. In America, 'allow six weeks for delivery' used to be the standard.

In these ways the future of IT are certain to create surpluses for the common man. What is necessary is for the high cost of craftsmanship to be surpassed by the low cost of mass production. For manufacturing, that required the factory. For computing it requires the cloud. What is a factory but a streamlined and standardized version of a craftsman's workshop scaled up for mass production? The cloud is certainly that as compared to the typical corporate IT shop.

In 1908, the head of Cadillac in England famously put on a remarkable demonstration. He had three Cadillac Model Ks race around a track and then disassembled. Then he scrambled the parts and even took out some and replaced them with off the shelf replacements. He then had the cars reassembled. All three of them worked perfectly. Today, most software is built in such a way that this would be impossible, but the cloud and the open source movement are rapidly changing that condition. 

Amazon is the leading cloud provider and I predict that the services, products, standards and practices that emerge from what it is learning about computing, networks, and security at massive scale will be every bit as influential in society as the paradigms that emerged over the 20th century for the automobile at Ford and General Motors. Moreover, the effect of these new ideas will provide similar surpluses. 

It was 1903 when the Wright Brothers first succeeded. It was a mere 14 years later when the Red Baron emerged as the combat 'ace' of WW1. That is how quickly people can adapt and master something that didn't even exist, on a world scale. Amazon and its rivals now host the software solutions of companies like Netflix. 14 years ago, in 1998, high definition video on demand to mass markets of mobile devices was considered impossible.

General Motors became the world's largest business and ushered in a new way of thinking about business. Even today we have a hard time not thinking about those businesses organized around the automobile when we say the word 'industry'. Glass, rubber, plastics and steel were all made that much more important owing to their place in the autombility manufacturing. Today oil is king because it is the consumable part of the worlds automotive needs. But it is *an* economy, not *the* economy. The next economic progression will come from the real fact that we will have more literate people on the planet than ever before in our history. Their cognitive needs and wants will fuel an even larger economy than that based on the clever assembly of glass, rubber, plastics, steel and oil. 

It begins with enabling a new class of database administrators, mathematicians, computer scientists, and all of the various kinds of creative, thoughtful knowledge and communications workers we can assemble and setting them loose in the cloud - the scaled up information factories of tomorrow. 

Today, we sit on the verge of enabling the common man a choice of thought previously only available in the same ways a choice of clothing was scarcely affordable in an age of hand sewn tailored garments. He will demand his choice and those who provide it will profit. The economy of intellect is at hand and it will be the Americans, once again, who light the way forward by providing the infrastructure necessary - the largest and most advanced software factories in the world. Considering what Microsoft and Oracle have been, I do not see how Amazon can lose. 

Nouning Hatey

Nouning is the application of a platonic label to a person who exhibits behavior in some form of the platonic ideal. It is an error of absolutism. Consider the essay Nouning Considered Harmful. Excerpt:

Here's the thing: Using adjectives as nouns obscures meaning, harms discourse, impairs communication, and ultimately reduces our ability to think in a careful and nuanced way about controversial issues, let alone effect social progress. Anyone who wants to see our society become less divided rather than more, and in particular anyone who wants to combat racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other forms of prejudice and modes of oppression, should try hard to avoid the practice, and refrain from calling a person a sexist, or a racist, or a homophobe, instead applying those descriptors to his or her actions.

Good catch, rather obvious from my perspective. It was one of the singular lessons from my highschool debate class. The only thing that doesn't change about you is your last name. So call people by their last name and describe their attraction to ideas they express. If you do this enough times, you make the distinction between the person and the ideas they hold. People as vessels of spirit, et al. Very basic and fundamental thinking. 

Who Is Your Leviathan?

The problem with libertarians and the problem with Anonymous and the problem with Facebookers is all the same sort of problem. They have no Leviathan under which their prerogatives are defended. 

This is a problem that I have no answer for, but here is the first way I think about it.  In the Old West, we think about whether or not law and order can succceed based on the character of the Sheriff. The Sheriff will or will not, based upon his gut and the resources available to him, defend your narrow ass from the various card sharks, snake oil salesmen, horse theives, claim jumpers, savages, lynch mobs, rapists, murderers, and outlaw gangs of the untamed wild West. But you should learn to carry your own Winchester.

When Doc first became LAPD one of the first things he noticed and communicated to me is the extent to which cops get on the scene five to ten minutes after the fact. It's almost never ever an intervention. It's a forensic reconstruction. What did you see? What was the order of events? What were you doing here? 

It has been a while since I've been blogging on the regular. One of the reasons is that I have very few loose ends and questions remaining on the Cobb project. But one of those has to do with the material floor of all jibber jabber. OK so we have this new internet thing and we can all have all the conversations we want and answer all of our questions, etc, etc. But who do you call when people start shooting? Who or what has got your back when all of you ideas and money are just marks on paper? When everybody loses faith in everything, what do you have? This is a question I began asking when it became clear to me that it wasn't 300 Billion or 600 Billion that was at risk when Lehman and Bear Stearns went under. Around 2007 when I first heard of Roubini, I decided that I wanted to stop driving a BMW and start driving a Hummer. I started preparing for bad case scenarios - not worse case, and no I did not develop a taste for zombie movies, but I noticed people that did.

Peasant Theory came out of that. What does anybody have a reasonable chance to expect? Just last night I finished a book by Paolo B. It was a light book (Ship Breaker) that took up an interesting angle that I fundamentally agree with. Humans are somehow hardwired for feudal hierarchies. Loyalty matters. In many ways, it may be the only thing that matters, especially given human ability to lie and adapt. We only need a certain amount of pleasure and a certain amount of pain to bind us to reality, everything else can be invented. I'm going to leave it at that and not try to qualify this out towards grand theory.

Some entity called The Rude Dog reminded me that the blog is more about my own questions and my own tracking answers through the collective minds in argumentation here than it is about any public service. I am writing what I don't see written anywhere else and thus like the man who invents for himself rather than for a market, I'm pleased with perfecting what I want. Your mileage may vary. But I think I should use this opportunity to ask that question of the various entities who have some investment in Cobb by virtue of their past participation.

So I will begin asking you. I'll come up with a series of questions, the ultimate of which will be who is your Leviathan?

For me, my Leviathan is in fact human curiosity. I never learned how to cook, but I did learn how to find things out and tell stories. So I will always be responsive to questions of what and how and sometimes why in a world that I think doesn't ask enough or bother to find out enough - primarily because as I said, most people need just enough pleasure and just enough pain to find their reality and the rest can be made up. The fact that I envision scenarios in which all of that gets inverted is just like me.

The problem with most literacy is that it doesn't need roots in reality. The problem with most education is that most people don't agree with it. So there's a whole lot of thinking in the world that isn't truly defended and is therefore ultimately inconsequential. I'm not sure if that's what Michel Foucault was on about, but I'd bet he understands this concept.

 

 

Drag Out the Dickens

This evening I watched Jean Reno in The Professional with my two daughters. It's movie night. I'm figuring out what I might do to deal with foul language. I'm unsure.

When he was about 12 I told my son that he shouldn't curse - not because cursing is bad, but because he doesn't have a real reason to curse. You shouldn't say that your life is fucked up unless your life is fucked up, and he doesn't know what fucked up is. And so while there is something to respect about Jay Z, I do puzzle about my daughters' choice in music. They do have the decency to listen to it out of my earshot, as do their addictions to the petty bullshit that runs through pop culture. I was listening to Fishbone's 1991 single "Bonin' in the Boneyard" and recall that their record corporation wouldn't even let them say 'funky ass bass'. Times have changed for the worse and people curse, but we really don't know what fucked up is.

His name was Charles John Huffam Dickens and he died during Reconstruction. I have yet to determine how much it might have been on his mind, and when time permits, I will. He was certainly one of the coldest eyes for detail in the detrius of civilization of the English speaking world; he could not have been immune to the charms of American slavery. That is, for what it's worth, our darkest chapter, and for all that - it's not so damned dark. The darkness of Russia's 20th century is so overwhelmingly ghastly that it's difficult for me to give us any credit for spine, though you must admire our nerve. 

So while I poke around for the equivalent of Conquest to plumb the depths of Chinese depravity, I do know what I want to get from Dickens - some flavor for the shit smell of London in the days when workhouses were the norm. I want to get the feel of what it's like a half to a full order of magnitude more socially polluted than what's going on here in the - Dont Tase Me Bro Generation. I know I ought to have a gun or two for my dumbbell strategy, but knowing when to shoot is more important than knowing how. 

You see, every day on Google Plus, middlebrow America is pissing and moaning and yes, cursing, about how depraved American society is. I ain't buying it. The ATM networks may charge you 3 damned dollars for an out of bank transaction, but they still count the money out right, and maybe we ought to pay that much for the convenience. In fact, maybe I'm going to join the ranks of those selling leeches for the boneheads seeking immortality. It only makes sense that for Charles Dickens, and Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Hopkins, and two dozen others - all of their works can be had for free or close to it. But if you want tickets to see Justin Beiber, well.. I'm not buying the expensive insanity or Linsanity of going Gaga over anything. That's for the young, bored and illiterate who, with any luck, will be out of a job and learn to live without all the disposable income competing in our economy for people with brains. What was it that Neal Stephenson said about the best minds of a generation writing spam filters?  Our society is not depraved, it's just lazy and uncomfortable. But that's an opinion as of yet uniformed by the details of the Dickensian.

Not for long. 

London, like the Holy Grail's Monty Pythonite who the Witch turned into a newt, got better. And all of the blather going on America's lightweight media, both old and self-righteously new, sounds to me like the illogic of the ensuing discussion about whether our society is actually a bitch of a witch. To much free fucking speech and no real thinking. 

How bad was London and how did it get better? I think maybe Dickens has the answer I'm looking for.

 

Against Impoverished Imagination

Why Are You Afraid of Socialism?

 

The difference between socialism and communism is not important. What is important is whether or not the ruling elite believe in the masses or not.

I am reading the book that I never learned in school which is Robert Conquest's The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Published in 1990, Conquest took materials previously unavailable for his original written in 1968 with a view to the provisional title 'I Told You So You Fucking Fools'. Conquest was Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitzen. Not prophetic, merely accurate in such a way as to be practically immune to wishful thinking. 

What emerges is a picture of a society at war with itself, which is always the case of revolution. But what I am taking awy from this read is not something merely awful because of the ways and means through which Stalin himself destroyed the nation and the people, but based on the inevitable injustice of the precepts of the revolution itself. This was new, a surprising revelation to me.

You see the vanguard, be they Menshevik or Bolshevik were ultimately the leaders and definers of the revolution. As it happened, the Bolsheviks 'won'. And so great was their need, it was a revolution after all, to destroy the basis of power of the enemies, that they were willing to jail and kill their countrymen along the lines defined by the revolutionary vanguard. Ulitmately, and principly, all was done for the liberation of the peasant from their capitalist overlords. And so (being very terse here with history) it was inevitable that 'land reform' was part of the process. Collectivization: take from the rich and give to the poor, all in the name of 'the people'. But which people? Which indeed would, by revolutionary defintion, become right and proper leaders of the new ruling class, ie those in charge of collectivization? It had to be organized. It had to be scientific. It had to be orderly and disciplined in order to fulfill the goals of the revolution - otherwise there would be no need for collective power or its exercise. If you left it to *all* of the people, they would become capitalists again. No. There was a need for organized force to insure the proper level of equality.

The problem was that there were different classes of peasants over which to rule. In particular there was the matter of the Kulaks. These were those peasants of the most capable strain - those who had managed to save money and manage what little business they had, oppressed as they were by the landed gentry. And so with the coming of the revolution in 1917, the Kulak welcomed the Bolsheviks as they delivered crushing blows to the landowners. But the Kulaks were not given requisite power in the vanguard who ordered them around more arbitrarily than those bourgeios nationalists they replaced. And where did the farm products of the Kulaks and the peasants go? Well to feed the revolutionary army, and the political vanguard of course. Within one year it became civil war, and the Kulaks thus became the enemy of the people. 

Peasants were starved to feed the revolutionary army on behalf of the peasants and the vanguard could not afford to let the revolution die - after all this was not merely a solution for Russia, but for the whole of mankind. It became clear to the leaders of this revolution that Kulaks and those poltically like them would have to be suppressed until the proper new peasant could take his place. Meanwhile the vanguard would suppress the opposition. The Bolshevik party line became all the truth the system could sustain, given the peasants willingness to make war against it. It was this fundamental inversion of democracy that foreclosed any possibility of the Soviet system to produce anything even vaguely resembling justice. The ensuing cruelty, show trials, purges and pogroms were but external and inevitable expressions of the fundamental cancer within. 

What is further shocking about Stalin's rule was the extent to which the Party destroyed its own fathers. Conquest details the arrest, detention, torture, confession, trial and execution of Bolshevik after Bolshevik by the Bolsheviks and their replacement, bureau after bureau, region after region. 

Imagine, if you could, the idea that Americans for Obama would have all the Clinton Administration shot, starting with Rahm Emmanuel and anyone who supported him. This is how it went in 1930 Russia. Old heads of the 1917 revolution were being put to death in 1937, no matter how high they had been. The only survivors would be the blindly obedient, and the executors. 

 --

What is there to fear from socialism? The answers are easy to determine. You merely need to discover who is arrogating it upon themselves to call the status quo unfair and how far they would go to revolutionize. The status quo is always defined by the people who are making the decisions that the people live with. In a free market, that's everyone who participates in it. To shunt aside the market for political reasons is to find fault with the people who sustain it, who must inevitably be suppressed. Those who would take power on behalf of 'the people' will inevitably have to form a sustained, organized, scientific, disciplined new order. A new ruling class, with new powers... for the new people. 

Anti-Fragility

An excellent podcast by Taleb. 

http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2012/Talebantifragility.mp3

JS Mill: Liberty in Discovery

Reading from the Catholic Education Center, a definition of liberalism & progress:

It would be impossible to give a definition that captures (at a proper level of detail and complexity) all of the different aspects and phases of liberalism. Rather than define it, I will read a single passage from J.S. Mill’s On Liberty (1859). If this text does not capture the soul of liberalism, then I suspect that nothing will. Mill wrote that:

There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices and set the example of more enlightened conduct and better taste and sense in human life. This cannot well be gainsaid by anybody who does not believe that the world has already attained perfection in all its ways and practices. It is true that this benefit is not capable of being rendered by everybody alike; there are but few persons, in comparison with the whole of mankind, whose experiments, if adopted by others, would be likely to be any improvement on established practice. But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist; it is they who keep the life in those which already exist....There is only too great a tendency in the best beliefs and practices to degenerate into the mechanical; and unless there were a succession of persons whose ever-recurring originality prevents the grounds of those beliefs and practices from becoming merely traditional...there would be no reason why civilization should not die out...[6]

This is something I understood a while back, but I never used the word 'progress'. The way in which I oppose Progressivism has nothing to do with questioning Mills premise here, but exactly to the extent which Progressives assume that the pace of government is adequate to the task - which is in my view oxymoronic. Government policy assumes, by definition, ossification of best practices into law, which we all know cannot be practically undone at any rate sufficient for the process of discovery to be sustained. Rather it makes for a sinecure for those corporate entities who, through their marketing, infantilize the population. 

Discovery is what the common man needs to exercise within the millieu of his class. His own experience is the best teacher as he discovers not only the enlightened selections of his superiors, but the alternatives to those which make his advancement a choice as opposed to a prescription. 

Notice additionally the way in which Mill shows his appreciation for the good things in life which already exist. This must be the place for conservation of classics, best done by those swift enough not to be overly impressed with novelty and change for its own sake. 

--

This is all in the context of writing skeptically of Dawson's rejection of technology, or more specifically technocracy. There too I am in agreement. But what I think neither Mill nor Dawson appreciated is the extent to which the democratization and decentralization of technology enables individual agency. That must be the gating criterion. And I then cede the conversation in principle to Richard Stallman's Four Freedoms. 

I think it is possible to generalize what Stallman is saying to all of the sorts of technology that Dawson might oppose, and that should be the test. That being the case, there is always the probability of discovery long after the inventors have died - so long as the spirit of invention and discovery is maintained. 

So today I just discovered and converged some very important concepts. It has made me an even greater proponent of Open Source, not only in software but in the context of the Force of Education. 

Loyalty vs Democracy

Pops and I had an interesting discussion last night. It was mostly me talking and I think I said enough to begin writing. I expect that this subject will arise several times in the future, but it is something that puzzles me.

Why do people have faith in democratic institutions?

What the USA does not have is a "people's army". I am hard pressed to determine, should various institutions in America go broke, what it is that our peasants will be loyal to that is not essentially feudal. This begs the question of the tipping points of social unrest. 

We have a nation that works quite well when there is essentially full employment. When we're at 95-97% employed everything is fine. When it drops below 93% we all start to worry. But let's keep in mind what unemployment statistics are. 

Labor force measures are based on the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years old and over. Excluded are persons under 16 years of age, all persons confined to institutions such as nursing homes and prisons, and persons on active duty in the Armed Forces. As mentioned previously, the labor force is made up of the employed and the unemployed. The remainder—those who have no job and are not looking for one—are counted as "not in the labor force." Many who are not in the labor force are going to school or are retired. Family responsibilities keep others out of the labor force.

Last month, about 87 million Americans were outside of the labor force vs 240 million in it. So right away you know that only 64% of us are even working, in general. And 8.6% of those are out of work - unemployed. Not good. But look at it another way, which is the way I started my discussion. What if only half of the jobs out there are good jobs by thinking, reasoning people. IE, what if only half the people who are working, actually have a grip on reality and can think their way out of a paper bag? (which is to say NOT Ron Paul supporters). Aside from his nutcase, what I'm getting at is people who are more than merely functionally literate, who live examined lives according to a reasonable philosophy / doctrine. Whose ethics make sense and who live accordingly. How many of us are actually tested?  When we screw up how often does it actually matter? I'm saying - not enough.

So basically a third of us are the working clueful. And yet within that clueful class, we have a sizeable fraction of intelligent people who might say that America could stand never to fight another war. Or they might say corporations must be gutted to save the environment. Or they might say all government entitlements ought to be abolished. Or they might say we should dismantle the FDA. In other words - out of the  intelligent, working third of America we have a surfeit of opinions that, whether right or wrong are never going to be tested. And if so, it won't be our doing if they fail even though it might be our undoing. The doing would belong to those elite technocrats, whomever they are - the Slice, the demiurges of the The Man, who will pull the levers and flip the switches.  This is not only political, but cultural and religious as well. Surely there are theists and atheists who have decided to be their ethical lives on a number of premises that have never been proven nor disproven - they are never called into account until after death. Surely there are monogamists who never travel more than 50 miles from their birthplace in their lives convinced they have found the perfect mate as well as profligates who span the globe hopping from one sediction to another both types pretending to be as happy as humanly possible. 

In short there are millions of us who get through life thinking, yes but thinking in error, never to be disproven or called into account. What my reading of Stephen Pinker adds to this concept is the idea that we may very well have a surfeit of brainpower. In other words we are evolutionarily fit enough to survive our current environment and none of us will never truly be called into account for our survival because we only need 20% of our mental capacity to survive. Most of our thinking lives are thus bullshit and never need to be more than bullshit. And thus as a consequence we come to realize that.. hey if I had Steve Jobs' money I coulda designed the iPhone as well. If I had as much time on my hands as Lady Gaga, I could be just as famously ridiculous. All of us secretly know this. We didn't need to go to school for 20 years to do this $65,000 job. And so we have plenty of extra brain capacity for memorizing Seinfeld episodes, playing rotisserie baseball, perfecting our flycasting, redecorating the bathroom and hunting down the perfect combination of bags and shoes.

This is the way it's supposed to be. We enjoy our comfort in society and we prolong it as long as possible, because when the shit hits the fan we know the answer to 'should I stay or should I go'? The gallows focuses the mind. We laugh at people who trip running away from the monster because we know that doesn't happen in real life.  We break ranks, get out of our comfort zones and then start really thinking about survival and we survive. We survive famine, pestilance and war.  Always have. Since prehistory. 

So now I'm going to repeat one of of the questions that was percolating behind all of this from last week: 

..the fundamental question is whether or not multicultural nationalism actually works. Maybe it doesn't and we've only passed through an era of economic prosperity in which there was enough peasant work to go around such that it could be marketed as something more solid than it was. It's easy enough to sustain 'sensitive' marketing to consumers of all stripes. Whoever buys buys. But on the employment side, diversity is new. I happen to believe that rising expectations of American consumers may be unrealistic given the murky reality of where the bulk of the American economy goes forward from here. Whatever restructuring needs to occur in employment with more global competition may not sustain the overhead of affirmative actions past. 

So broaden what you think about 'affirmative actions past' to include everybody in the New Deal Coalition. What if every American who is not an entrepreneur is the functional equivalent of a renter? What if everything you think you possess, you actually don't, including your sense of right and wrong? That's because, my Peasant friend, you are not actually called on your bullshit thinking. You don't extend yourself out to life and death responsibility enough to even know if you are capable of making life and death decisions. You probably have a list of things as long as your arm that fit in the blank of "I couldn't ------ if my life depended on it." That's right. There is very little you could actually do if your life depended on it, but you can do enough to survive 8.6% unemployment and the otherwise cushy American lifestyle you are renting.

But if you really thought about it, you might begin to question why you are loyal to democracy? You have never been defended by the ACLU, but you would probably defend them. And you probably are still paying your college loans, but you defend higher education in general without having any clue whether the education you got and others get is actually worth it. And there are a host of democratic, public institutions you defend without having gotten, in your entire life, anything but rhetorical benefit from them. None of us have ever seen what it's like on the other side of the democratic institutional breakdown. And yet we discuss and debate abortion, gay marriage, illegal immigration, some obscure medical coverage, some incremental taxation, some unbuilt pipeline, some arctic core samples, some diplomatic initiative to Yemen, some hunting habits of Alaskan women, some clauses in 250 year old documents as if our very survival depended on them. 

What has democracy ever really done for you that you couldn't do for yourself? And why the hell haven't you bothered to do it for yourself? What does democracy promise you and what does it deliver?

I know the answers to some of these questions. But I am of the opinion that we have more untested and unaccountable democracy than any large brained mammalian species needs. And we are starting to resemble creatures of that sort of artifice than our evolutionary path dictates. 

I'm Rich, Bitch! - A Peasant Theory Overview

According to the NYTimes version of popular opinion, most people would say that I'm rich. And considering what I used to think of somebody in my position, I would have been one of those people. But I don't believe it.

I'd like to think of myself as one of The Slice, the talented segment of society who, by their work, keep actual rich people rich. So let me elaborate a bit about my Peasant Theory while I'm keeping this stuff in mind.

The Origins of the Peasant Theory
I originated the Peasant Theory thinking about what Americans would do if the lights went out. It was also part and parcel of my observation as an emergent minority who has made the best of class mobility over the course of my life. What does the Average American expect? What does he have a right to expect? What would he get if America was not super wealthy, and how big is that gap? One enabling metaphor was that of the National Superhighway System.

It's well known that the Interstates were all built to a specification so that battle tanks could be deployed across the country, if it ever came to that. So our highways are strong and smooth - even though the tanks don't need them to be so smooth. Having a car and the ability to drive across country is a side benefit of the military strategic plan of the powers that be. In fact, an ordinary Joe can afford to buy a cheap motorcycle (as in Easy Rider) and get across country. But that is a privilege of him glomming on to something that wasn't built with him in mind and his ability to cross country owes nothing to his native ability to travel. In short, he's a peasant that doesn't have to think or work hard to cross the country, and were it not for the strategic infrastructure of America, the military superpower, he would be stuck in his hometown. Remember that battle tanks don't need highways at all, let alone superhighways. They'd get along fine with dirt roads or no roads, but Fonda's chopper would get nowhere.

So I started to think about this phenomenon in all parallels for emergent classes of Americans. What can we expect in America that we couldn't expect elsewhere and what politics is considered legitimate, what culture is considered legitimate, what education is considered legitimate that is not actually self-sustaining but a consequence of the fact of America's power? In other words what is the difference between a peasant and a free man? What must the free man know and do for himself that the peasant doesn't bother with?

This is a view of society and of mankind that exists independently of our traditional measures of socio-economic class. And it is in this way that I seek to understand people throughout history - with specific regard to their Foucaultian relationship to regimes of power and truth. Are we really free, or are we merely riding in the comfortable belly of the beast? For me, the best way to make the distinction is to consider how people make themselves useful to the powers that be. This is consistent with feudal hierarchies going back throughout history. And what I have concluded is that there is the Slice in every society, just as there are sovereign powers and peasants in every society. What may become absolutely fascinating is whether the Slice can become autonomous. But let's leave that discussion for another day.

Class in America
When I look at the standard definitions of class I have basically started with a compressed version for black Americans. These are from top to bottom {Hill, Burbs, Hood, Ghetto, Projects/Sticks} It was conveniently five, but there's probably enough reason to split Projects and Sticks into their own separate categories. My upbringing was in the Hood, in the shadow of the Hill, but with ample distance from the Ghetto.  I think I live in the Burbs, but perhaps I live on the Hill considering the priceyness of this particular Burb. By the way, I've always considered $300,000 to be rich. In my mind you make that kind of money not just being a doctor, lawyer or businessman, but a *good* doctor, lawywer or businessman. Be all that as it may (and not so crucially important) these follow a kind of 'geography / demographics as destiny' sort of thinking that was useful in my investigations of redlining (with the subheader 'American Apartheid' c.f. Massey & Denton) and my own national search for the right place to raise my family. It also played along the dialogs of 'mentality' for those interminable internecine discussions about proper blackness. 

The larger picture was not incedentally part of the rumnations of comedian Chris Rock who spoke about the difference between 'rich' and 'wealthy', and of course by Dave Chapelle from whose comic bit the title of this essay comes. So from that perspective, the top down view of all of America is {Wealthy, Rich, MiddleClass, Poor, Indigent}. What's most important about this selection is that I think of it directly in terms of the capacity of an individual of one class to assist a member of another, it is my rule of Each One Teach One. 

The rule works like this. If you are wealthy, you can move someone from the middle class into the rich class. But it is unlikely, without threatening your own position that you can make someone rich wealthy. Similarly and pointedly at liberal politics, if you are middle class, you can make someone who is indigent poor, but you can't make someone who is poor middle class without threating your own position. Similarly if you are rich you can make someone poor middle class. These are, in my mind, hard and fast economic laws - and like the speed of light, they are regularly abused in fantasy fiction but are never broken in reality.

Weath and Freedom
Let's start with rich - because it is the baseline of freedom looking at the high side of Boyd's Razor. (If you want to be free, there are two ways you can do so, you can be rich or you can reduce your needs to zero). I'll deal with the low side later. A rich man is free, and he will remain free so long as the powers that be respect his freedom. A rich man must defend his riches, he must have some skill in that regard no matter how he acquired them. But the most important aspect of riches are that they enable freedom in the civilized world. A rich man can employ others to assist him in accomplishing anything he desires - there are no basic things he cannot afford. Essentially, a rich man can fund his own destiny. I use such vague terms because I'm not trying to think in terms of affluence in the context of a consumer society, but in terms of the broad and general affairs of man. What can a man who is not oppressed do? What might he want to do with his freedom? Whether such things are wise or foolish, the free man is not constrained by his own lack of financial wherewithal.

Wealth and Work
The inspirational thought presaging this essay was the idea that if I am to be considered 'rich', which I don't think I am, there has got to be two kinds. Working rich and idle rich, and I am most definitely in the former category.  The same can be considered, to a lesser defining degree of the working and idle wealthy. But I suspect that the idle wealthy tend to use a bit less of the Slice than the working wealthy. The business of the world, it seems to me, is more dependent on the machinations of the wealthy whether they work or not. The Slice are the enablers, the demiurges of human affairs. I think much more depends upon their moral decisions - to the extent that they are to offer their services for the various masters they might have. 

So there it is, basically.

 

I Am OWS (Twenty Years Ago)

In 1992 I wanted Jerry Brown to be President.

I was a performance poetry artist who just moved to Brooklyn from Los Angeles. I hated Los Angeles, but when the riots broke out, I felt that I was somehow connected. I walked the streets of Brooklyn at midnight looking for somebody to celebrate with. But I had to wait until the next day. I had a very complicated and sophisticated message to bring to the people of New York City, but I was frustrated. 

I wound up joining the legendary William Kunstler on the stage at Times Square at a rally in solidarity with the activists in Los Angeles demonstrating against police brutality. It was a complicated matter, but what they really wanted me to do was to pump my fist and get the crowd rowdied up for a rambunctious, but peaceful, but noisy, but legal, but revolutionary, but non-violent, but angry march. 

My gripe at the time was that the subtleties of the problem in Los Angeles were not being addressed by the media. I was correct about that then as now, because I am a writer of some subtlety. My gripe against the mainstream media was in effect then, my understanding of the power of computer networks was just beginning, and complete one year later. 

The following rambling essay called White Flight Friday shows my state of mind. In fact, I just want to excerpt one little part. 

Thus I felt haughtily superior in my pity and disgust for the clutching yuppies self cornered behind the caged storefront cafes and restaurants along the parade route. Trashcans flew into windows normally employed as stages of vanity. Now the sybaritic know nothings seek the protection of proprietors. Maitres D' were suddenly stripped naked. Of all the things to do on the Friday evening after America suffered another painful plumbing of its uglier soul, dining in an upscale restaurant with big windows seemed the most foolish. But folks of this particular stripe seem to enjoy making victims of themselves. I consider it a complete waste of time, this useless simpering guilt of individuals coddled by the political majority. They all could have easily come outdoors with a raised fist, or an intelligent political statement of solidarity against the travesty of injustice and police brutality. But their fear outran their good sense and citizenship. This demarcates America's immediate political future - the privileged having the intellectual and political wherewithal to stand in the streets for noble reasons and instead remaining physically caged behind boutique security and politically bound by fluff/fear journalistic interpretations of those on the street. How many horror stories have you heard about the mob that almost got me? Political actors mere yards from each other in completely different dimensions. It makes me want to puke. I imagine their thought balloons; "Who's backyard? Not my backyard!"

I have sought out reporters this time trying as I might to inject a bit of fact and background into the stew. I was compelled to ask sista to give me a moment to speak back at Times Square because I felt nobody in this whole metropolis had any clue that white men in Volvos were looting computer retailers, ailing businessmen were allegedly torching their own inventories and college students were assiduously dismantling ATMs and burning the contents. Nobody realized that what happened in Los Angeles portends political chaos of Russian dimensions. But my spoken allusions to John Slaughter's words, Melanie Lomax's words and Mike Woo's words have been drowned out by soundbite editorials voiced over the infamous visual. I keep waiting to see amateur videoist Holliday responding languorously to "So, set up the clip." on some talk show. Someone other than the most critically affected will have the last words. I myself didn't help much were mooted by the mute response and a bad case of nerves. My speech to activist New York prompted by "Pump 'em up" petered out. Next time perhaps I'll conk my hair or come in a Kunstler mask. I keep trying to get to speak to people and Press and Police press and police.

Anyway, those from the print media all carried the same notepads and pens. They dressed down, some wearing 35mm cameras. All wore the ubiquitous badges that rendered them immune from police batons if not flying bottles. I plainly told them that they wanted to hear me out. I, after all, was a young black man from Los Angeles who from age 17 through 29 had been detained 17 times and cited only twice. But most of the print journalists didn't walk far past Madison Square Garden, where I chortled with glee at the Rangers fans watching us like a pack Midwestern zoo goers. I wanted to give the sportos violence for real, but guessed they'd love returning it. They alone were the only white folks not a direct part of the parade who didn't cower in fear. I told a woman reporter who paid the most attention to me that I didn't think the violence in Los Angeles would last very long. Mostly I was concerned that New York wasn't concerned.

You should know that there is a place in NY called Thompkins Square Park. And if you ask enough of the right people, you'll find out what went on there of symbolic import to connect police brutality in NYC with the police brutality in LA that people around the nation were rioting about. And so as I marched, I found out from fellow marchers that under no circumstances were the NYPD going to let us reach that place. The legal advisers to the march let us know that ahead of time and made it clear that if we weren't in the mood to break through police lines and get our heads busted and be arrested, (i.e. if you were just a Sunday driver kinda protester who didn't already have a legal fund with bail money ready) then you should not try to get into the Park. They were right. 

--

Not having engaged this thread of my own youthful anarchic / bohemian desires for what I once called the 'noble arena' over the past week, some of the juice in the overarching theme of this essay has escaped me. So I'll just jump to some bold declaritive statements.

1. OWS suffers a great delusion that it can counter the forces of global corporate oligopoly non-violently. The more they describe the great evil of bad corporations and corrupt pols in Washington and every other capitol, the more they must inevitably begin bombing. 

ows^pepper_spray < sqrt(rodney_king/2);

2.OWS must face the fact at the core that the American corporate oligopoly stands in service of the consumer economy. It must not fail if they are to deliver middle class goods. 

3. There are rarely national improvements made by local protests. OWS holds the admirable goal of ridding excess money from influence in national policy.  I wish it all the luck in the world in reforming democratic politics here in America. But nobody local can pull that off. OWS needs to be more organic and start where the rest of America has given up building from there. 

 

Infinite Universal Convergence

If the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory holds, then there are essentially infinite universes. In fact, there would a very huge sort of infinities of universes. If it's based upon the idea that every possibility of every quantum particle interaction instantiates itself in another universe, that's zillions created in every fraction of a second. It can only make sense that these universes overlap, otherwise I'm creating a universes outside of this universe, each a universe away just by typing. So if the universes overlap that means there is interference from every universe impinging on every other universe at once. 

Taking the example of the Moravec thought experiment. If it's a one in a million chance that you don't die from the electric chair, then in one universe you are alive but in a million others you are dead. (technically speaking 999,999 vs 1). So you're never really dead, you are mostly dead with the accumulated weight and energy of 999,999 universes keeping you dead. It is the momentum of the accumulated likely universes that keeps time flowing in one direction and preserves causality. And so it makes sense to say that the momentum of the zillions of likely universes converge reality into a single path objects in which can only escape that overwhelming force at the quantum level.

I think of it as what happens if the Washington Monument toppled over and fell flat on top of you. Well, it's a fact that there is a .50 bullethole in one face of it that was never repaired. When the monument falls, that part of you that fits in the bullethole is not dead, and was never touched.

Free Speech [Not] in Hollywood

The NYTimes has permission to flash me messages. So they flashed me a message informing me that Eddie Murphy will not be the host of the Oscars. My first reaction before reading the story was that perhaps he has come down with a heinous illness. That would be sad, because now that Heavy D is gone, Murphy remains one of the few icons I associate with my youth and the real culture I lived. That's an odd sentiment and somewhat multicultural, but I was just thinking this morning about how unfunny Gilda Radner was upon retrospect. In fact, I remember a whole lot of time I spent trying to laugh along with Coneheads consuming mass quantities of beer. It's not that I didn't get it, but how long can that be funny? it can't. So if you ask me, Saturday Night Live was where comedians went to grow tired and still have an audience, and in that regard stands well in the tradition of Cats and other perennial Broadway shows for the benefit of the sort of tourist who thinks Chevy Chase was awfully good looking. Don't get me started about Caddyshack.

Eddie Murphy, on the other hand, had the quality of genius comedy that was truly rare, discounting as we must his ability to exploit every stereotype known to black man. Still, he turned them on their heads enough times to keep me in stitches. Murphy stands with Billy Crystal, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison and Steven Wright as one of the best. I should do a top 20 list one of these days. But the point about Murphy is that he brought black American comedy up to date and into the mainstream. He changed what American comedy could do and say as profoundly as Bruce, Pryor and Carlin before him. It's sorry to see how many sad imitators came after him. Murphy knew he made profanity look easier and funnier that it was and that his gift was greater than vulgarity.

The reason Murphy quit the Oscars was because his business partner, Brett Ratner who was a co-producer of the Oscar show, got booted over a tempest over his language. The Daily Mail gives us some clues:

Ratner used a pejorative term to describe gay men in response to a question asked at a screening of his latest movie.

In his apology he said sorry 'for any offense my remarks caused,' adding that the slur was 'a dumb and outdated way of expressing myself.'

He said that 'as a storyteller I should have been much more thoughtful about the power of language and my choice of words.'

Initially Sherak said Ratner's remarks were 'inappropriate' - but said the academy had no plans to remove him from his Oscar-producing position.

On Monday, Ratner also recorded an expletive-laden interview with shock jock Howard Stern.

In the revealing interview, he discussed oral sex, masturbation and the size of his testicles.

He admitted he was stunned he had never impregnated anyone because of his virility: 'How lucky I am that I never got a girl pregnant. It's crazy.'

He boasted a doctor had told him he had 10 times the sperm count of an average man his age.

He also claimed he asked Lindsay Lohan to get an STD test when they allegedly slept together when she was 19.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2059531/Eddie-Murphy-quits-host-Academy-Awards-wake-Brett-Ratner-scandal.html#ixzz1dEsl6l8g

This is an action by what is popularly known as Hollywood's Gay Mafia. They have big toes and one is well-advised not to step on them. Note the carefully worded apologies, if you can stomach that sort of thing.

I only stop to mention this sort of fake high-mindedness to note how important things other than property have become amongst those who have it. Again, I am about halfway through Niall Ferguson's 'Civilization: The West and the Rest' and he is discussing the failed revolution of Simon Bolivar and the way in which the different attitude towards property and franchise were dealt with in North and South America. The key and important matter of civilization is that property owners not be dispossessed of their good for arbitrary reasons outside of the law. So is hosting an awards show about free speech? No. It's a private affair hosted by wealthy people and attended by wealthy people. So they can pick and choose. But neither the anonymous homosexuals nor were Ratner & Murphy's rights abridged. This is just a courtly bitchfight nothing of which has any standing in a real civilized court.

I look at the powers that be in Hollywood and the current mediasphere knowing with growing certainty that they will not be disintermediated so much as marginalized in the new greater economy of literacy that the internet is providing. Fewer people will care about the Oscars, and more people will see with transparency the hypocrisy of those who pretend to defend the honor and integrity of homosexuals. You will hear that the recusals will be about rights, but they are only about image.

Murphy will get the benefit of my doubt as someone who is fed up with the charade. I'm going to check out Dennis Miller's opinion on the matter as well.

The Bastards of Class Boundary Transgressions

I watched a lecture by Richard Stallman this morning and it was brilliant, and then I watched another by him and it was awful. The difference was that in the first one he was summarizing the lessons of his work and life and in the second one he set himself up as an example.

The problem with self-righteousness is related to another problem that I understand but have not yet given it a term. I'm usually pretty good at doing so, but this particular phenomenon escapes my ontology. It will take a minute to explain. 

We all know that hackers can own our computers. But they don't. Why? Because we're not worth it. And even if they steal 10 million credit cards, it's not really a profitable business. Why? because the average Joe doesn't have that much credit. We are beneath the radar. It's safe to be ignorant because ignorant people aren't particularly dangerous. That's the phenomenon. Let me describe it one more way. If you are the ordinary Joe and you wear jeans and a t-shirt it's not a scandal, but it would be if you were a UN diplomat. 

Let's call it, for the time being, the Class Boundary Scrutiny Problem. 

Stallman, in his odious lecture was explaining how Apple Computer was closed and proprietary and for that reason he would not even accept an iPad as a gift. He did a little browbeating of a person who brought up the question about a jailbroken iPhone, the questioner was being a little obsequious and Stallman was being a little self-righteous. 

When you are a tenured professor, you have the luxury of time to develop the skill of not using many cultural idioms. You can speak directly from knowledge without the necessity for idioms. But for most people in the world, we are trying to find ways and means to secure our lives. And the world is very complicated and doesn't readily yeild up sinecures like tenure. So we search. And in our searching we communicate with one another trying to make sense of our lifestyles, our religious, politics, diet, exercise, educations, job skills. There's a lot of information to process. But we'll alwyas be ignorant of something and until we reach the point at which we might be a tenured professor or acknowledged expert, there is always some detail or nuance that we do not know. We are in an inferior class of skill or knowledge. But that is acceptable because of the Class Boundary Scrutiny phenomenon which makes us good sports almost by default.  

Except Stallman didn't respect that. He said, you should be like me. He is the diplomat scandalizing the Joe for his denim.

This is not about Stallman per se. It is about whether or not people can be safe in their ignorance. I say they should, according to gerneralizable class boundaries. 

You see, I have a choice on a Saturday night to go out and watch a popular movie in theaters, or stay home and watch videos of Richard Stallman and write arcane essays about my insights. The former unites me with the masses, the latter alienates me. Well, let me qualify that. Knowledge alienates only when it is applied with discipline. But whether or not that discipline is applied, I at least have an additional layer of dissonance between myself and others who are not possessed of that same knowledge. That is because it takes me time to learn it and it takes me time to explain it to those who have not learned it. That's the minimal amount. If I apply the discipline as Stallman does, it seems like self-righteousness until I preach.

So today, the young man in the video and I both learned a lesson about the fact that certain chipsets, hidden within machines that might claim to be open, are not in fact open. Stallman bragged about his open source BIOS. The very idea of having an open source BIOS never crossed my mind, and I'm a programmer. Naturally, if I applied the discipline, then I alienate myself not only from Apple fanboys, but from the people who are completely satisfied with Apple products. 

You see, if you are of a certain class, you have complete freedom within that restraint. How then could you be equal to any other human at a higher level? You cannot, but you pay the price with the implied contempt of the superior class, and you reap the benefit of the neglect of the superior class. You are not important enough to merit attention, and thus escape the brutal scrutiny of a would-be peer. Unless, you find someone who, like Stallman in the second lecture, is unctious with his contempt. Those are harsh words to apply to that particular lecture, but since much worse has been said about Stallman, I only use it to make clear the social nature of such a class boundary transgression. 

BTW, when I think of the epithet 'bastard' this is exactly what I mean. A bastard, someone whose father doesn't recognize them, is the recipient of the worst kind of contempt. The bastard never gets the benefit of the doubt, is obsequeous and defensive at once. At some point they either transcend and find peace within themselves or they become a Bastard, which is someone who harries the newbs without mercy. A bastard is thus a person who possesses no grace and offers no quarter. 

So you see in this regard we do and should use class to protect our honor and our ignorance. We can merit this by not being salf-righteous bastards but still make efforts to reduce the dissonance between ourselves and those who are more or less informed. It works both ways you see. You cannot assume that simply because something complicated that you don't understand is not going the way you expect, that you should immediately whip out the torches and pitchforks. As Chris Rock said, that's when 'keeping it real goes wrong'.

A New Class of Stock

I just had a bit of genius idea. I'll share it.

(I keep writing stuff on Google+ which swallows up my comments and gives me no way to search for them). I've been considering the similarities and differences between the Tea Partiers and the 99ers. I have less sympathy for the 99ers because they don't know their enemies and are even more incoherent than the Tea Party rabble. But within their ridiculously large scope of concerns are some legitimate ones about public bailouts.

In one of those discussions on G+, somebody mentioned the pain problem of golden parachutes, with which I actually have no beef. No corporation dispenses with all that moolah if it needs it. In other words, no board of directors worth beans would allow for a CEO or other exec to take shareholder money out of the corporation. But then you have to ask questions about shares...

What if corporations, in order to receive a lower tax bracket, were required to issue a certain fraction of their shares as voting shares? And what if these voting shares could not be proxied? That would mean that such corporations, in putting significant questions before the shareholders would have to hold the sort of elections that probably have not been possible. But we can certainly do that with our new technologies.

This would bridge the gap between the foolishness of these populist movements and the recklessness of the boards of directors by empowering shareholders.

Action Bias

Taleb has the quote of the day:

There’s something called action bias. People think that doing something is necessary. Like in medicine and a lot of places. Like every time I have an MBA—except those from Wharton, because they know what’s going on!—they tell me, “Give me something actionable.” And when I was telling them, “Don’t sell out-of-the-money options,” when I give them negative advice, they don’t think it’s actionable. So they say, “Tell me what to do.” All these guys are bust. They don’t understand: you live long by not dying, you win in chess by not losing—by letting the other person lose. So negative investment is not a sissy strategy. It is an active one.

The Debt

The Debt, starring Helen Mirren, is the sort of film that explores the animal side of our human nature and it reminds us that when we are pressed up against our ability to handle the truth we are likely to be faced with life or death situations. And so how many of us are prepared for that?

The story is that of a trio of Israeli war heroes who face the prospect of their world collapsing as the possibility of an ugly truth coming to light thirty years after the fact. Of the three, only the woman can rectify the problem. It's a very intriguing concept, and brilliantly handled by the film but the greatness of this story comes out in the terse dialogs between the three, but especially the woman, and the Nazi war criminal who is at the center of their heroic mission. 

There is, in this tale, the story of how much we become defined not so much by our aims, but our ability to accept that which it makes us in the process, whether we succeed or fail. The heroes must struggle through the taunts of their captive as they decide whether he should be tortured, killed or brought to trial. As they stuggle with that ethical matter of the way in which they will embody the spirit of their new nation, as agents / soldiers of that nation, they must sublimate their own personal desires and lives. They become tools of their ambitions, and ambitions are always thwarted, and so it leaves them with what? Desparate confusion.

In The Debt's magnificent scene, the Nazi illustrates his contempt for Jews as he characterizes their behavior as sheeplike weakness. How is it, he asks, that the Jews were led to slaughter that so many were shephered into their deaths by so few? They were, he concludes, too weak and unpossessed of the pride and will to survive to do anything but submit to the superior force of will of the German soldiers. 

I found this to be a riveting scene because from my perspective it distills the very essence of human survival. We may thrive in an absence of conflict as we uniquely social creatures do. But we are so easily pressed into enforcing the courage of our convictions as a matter of principle and as a matter of survival, and all of our institutions fail and our social graces crumble away. We must do what we must do, and for the sake of keeping a promise or fufilling a mission, that predicament most always demands that someone must pay with their life.

We go through our lives planning to fill them with purpose and meaning. In the end, it may be all we have and our only purpose, is to cause the deaths of others and try to give that meaning. 

News & Notes for a Lazy Sunday

There is so much to talk about, now that I have come back from Germany. But I'm taking it light this weekend whilst I get back on a normal schedule and unjetlag myself.

My General Impression of Europeans
Their Slice is much smaller. Their infrastructure for that Slice is very cozy, but the members of that Slice are prepared for the worst. However, they have no illusions about their ability to hole up and survive and are thus grasshoppers wishing fervently that their winters of war never come. So far, the wishful thinking is working. I think they think that they are very civilized to the point of decadence, and having survived that before, are not peculiarly hesitant to admit that decadence. But they perhaps make some mistake in assuming that the immigrant impulse is to become civilized, a mistake anyone in the first world is likely to make - after all, our lives are so sumptuous. 

Everybody speaks English. But suggesting that's extraordinary is a mistake. After all, every contemporary operating system speaks FAT. 

Don't Call It Ground Zero
I wasn't really prepared to come up the PATH train at the WTC and have the emotional thing happen to me on the way to work. But there is something about the huge amount of air and light in the middle of Lower Manhattan, filled with the noise of construction that threw me a one-two punch Friday morning. I returned yesterday to take a few photos, and try to get closer, but half of that task was impossible. A stream of pilgrims will be making this journey for decades to come and there is no way to jump the lines. 

What's going up is much greater than what fell down, and the bulk of the new 1 WTC, now over 80 stories tall and still under construction, has begun to dominate the skyline. What surprised me more than anything is how clearly and singularly it will stand and be seen straight down the axis of Washington Square Park so many miles away. 

I see the new World Trade Center in my mind's future eye, and I don't think I can ever look at it backwards again.

Azn

I grew up in Crenshaw, which was everybody knew, a black and Japanese neighborhood.

Freddie and Keith were my first Asian buddies. Keith was Hawaiian and Freddie was Japanese. I knew Keith in the first grade and Freddie somewhat after. Keith was all smiles and full of energy and popular. Freddie was chubby, shy and laconic. Freddie and I lived on the same street, his was a single mom, and he rode a tricycle a little bit longer than anybody else our age. I never knew where Keith lived, and never saw him after school, but Freddie and I were closer friends. I don't know why and I don't know how long into our friendship, I hit Freddie. He ran home, told his mom, and I never saw him again after school. Well, maybe once or twice, but that was basically the end of it. 

There are probably more short stories like this I could tell end on end, but maybe they have that same theme. The friendship between blacks and Asians in LA is as varied as the number of different types of Asians, and yes everybody hates Koreans. At least, they used to. But on the whole the relationship is genuine and fragile. Whenever you try, you really can't make anything of it. 

I think there is a kind of social capital that black Americans have gained in a completely different way than whatever Asians have gained. When I think of Asian Americans, I almost never think of them as multicultural compatriots in a shared struggle for social capital. That has worked and can continue to work with Latinos, especially those who called themselves Chicano. But there has never been an Asian Chicano. Well, there's Margaret Cho, and that's about it. It's something I have variously found frustratingly disappointing and oddly attractive. But one thing I have long understood is that worse than blacks and worse than browns, Asians have never managed to be the authors of their own social acceptance. Asian culture was and remains all in the eye of the beholder, not in the aim of the creator. It all gets swallowed up in perception.

Here in SoCal, there are so many Asian groups that every place else seems freakily devoid. The idea that I might turn on a radio station and never hear Mandarin, Japanese or Korean on the AM dial seems uncivilized, as does any person who can't tell those languages apart. But let's face it. All us gringos care much more about the food than the people, that is except for the dudes with jungle fever, be they our dudes or their dudes. 

Almost all Asians I have known have attempted to compensate for a lack of social capital via ultra competence. I have never been able to determine, not that I care much, whether this is a personal matter, something that bespeaks a particular tradition, or was merely a reaction to racial stereotypes. It is not an intimation which I have been privy. I have known Keiths and Freddies. They either make it, or they don't, but either way, the intimacy has been lacking. 

I have known Asian men to get riled about banana chicks in their midst. I have known Asian women to find their roles stultifyingly austere. But I cannot know if I get that particular flavor of complaint straight, or through a black man filter.  And of course I have gotten my share of discussion about the 'model minority' role - whether real or imagined. What I haven't gotten much is a sense of Asian Americans to their native countries, if they have anything more than a passing familiarity with them. I notice this much more for the yellow Asians than for the brown Asians. Indians, are a completely different sort with which my experiences are more extensive. I know what Indians act like around Indians. So let me speak in broad general useless terms about that for a moment.

Once upon a time in Las Colinas, I was working for one of the most successful Indian companies in America. It was chock full of Indian nuts, and had some informal claim as the highest per capita PhD in Texas, if not the Fortune 500. So one day we were having a big meeting and one of the project managers was late, and we were sitting around waiting. Somebody asked who was he? And the answer was "oh. some white guy named Bob". It was funny, because that description suddenly made it easy, in this company, to identify him. But what was even more striking to me at this company was the extent to which the Indian social hierarchy, heretofore invisible to me, made itself visible. And since that day, although I have not given it more specific attention in a pattern-matching way, I have noticed how quickly such hierarchies are established stateside. It is my estimation that Indians here in America on work permits, are quite appreciative of the extent to which they are accepted into our creaky meritocracies. But really, I'm not talking about them here and I don't consider them Azn.

The Azn I wish I knew better are my associates from highschool, most of whom tread a fine line between conspicuous invisibility and innoffensiveness. Every once in a while I'll find an Asian dude my age driving a fabulous car, and I get this feeling that he's a cool, competent fellow I might knock back a few drinks with. But he's just on his way somewhere. These men have not become the sports announcer on TV, the over solicitous real estate agent, the friendly guy at the end of the bar. One of them, however is my General Practitioner, a Felix Unger type who wears his gloves and washes his hands a bit too often. But this fete manque doesn't bother me much - it's an empty spot like that trip to Berlin I never made. I was just going to be a tourist anyway, but it would have been nice to know I was welcome to learn the language and make friends. 

The problem with Asian Studies is the same problem as with using multiculturalism to solve the Race Problem - fighting fire with fire. There's always some esstialism involved. You always have to invoke some ancient Chinese secret to overcome the 'gaze'. There's always some black magic the Negro must use, some Judo for the Japanese. And for what? To get in the White door, as if it led someplace. There are always a hundred doors and a hundred keys. The problem is the fixation. Well, actually the problem is that the fixation is over-productive. You see Asian Studies, and American Studies and multiculturalism all work. They all work like that pill in the recent movie "Limitless". They work like Robert DiNiro playing a confident, powerful guy with the capacity to get in your face and make you suffer. They work like hammers and nails. 

One of the things you never hear about when these discussions come up is what to make of Asians who are Christian. I have never set foot inside a Korean or Philippino Christian church. But I know they are around. In Gardena, two towns west of where I live, I'm sure I could easily find a dozen Christian churches with Asian congregations. Where is the exchange? What does it mean to all of these racial and cultural signifiers we are trying to make sense of if and when there is that fundamental sameness? One of the favorite project managers I have worked with was a Taiwanese army seargant (boy you could tell) who sent his son to the same private Catholic highschool I attended. I remember so many times he would be shouting at the kid over the phone in Chinese. I felt sorry for the kid, rather the same way I feel sorry for any kid whose parents *and* teachers are Catholic. Where is the forgiveness? Where is the Christian fellowship? I suspect with some conviction that these might as well be different sects, as wholly other as Mennonties and Mormons. Yet I also suspect that there is a great story waiting to be told that will come from Thomas Sowell before it comes from Bill Moyers.

At bottom there will have to be a kind of studied indifference by the keepers of the culture that will inform our best sensibilities. I have found that kind of attitude works best when people get bent about American identity. Until then, we will have to stock our mental inventory with Dat Phans and Margaret Chos and Amy Chuas and a half dozen other riffs to satisfy the idiot level of stereotypes. We have to let all of the seminars take place, and try to reconcile Connie Chung and Tiger Woods. We'll have to have that conversation with the guy at the end of the bar, or commiserate/brag about our idiot/brilliant kids with the dad at the Friday night game.  It will become American, whatever that means, and then we'll talk about the bad old days when it was so difficult to watch the remake of the Green Hornet. And in the end it will all mean exactly what it's supposed to mean, nothing. Until we go to war with China. 

Speaking of which, I am reminded of the bottom line of Dr. Frayser, my dad's old friend. He is one of the kindest individuals I know, a real old school gentleman - the kind of man you expect to meet on a sunny day on Martha's Vineyard with his walking stick, straw hat and dog, knowing he as retired from fixing hundreds of human babies in his hospital. And because he was so absolutely gentle, his dictum was striking in its finality. He said, you know the reason why we respect Japanese and buy all of their products? Because we know they will fight us to the death. In the end, the only way to accept another human is to know that they can and will do anything you think you can and will do. The implications are simple and clear, and reiterate my indictment of Asian Studies. 

If the purpose of any study is to cultivate respect, admiration, acceptance and to break whatever is holding up that glass ceiling, then you enter a particular room with a particular shape and use particular tools to get a particular result. The problem is with the definition. You and I know what an Azn is. But that man is actually nobody in particular. 

 

 

 

 

Taking Science on Faith

All my life I have been fascinated with that thing I now call 'scientific animism'. It is, literally, taking the scientific process for granted and accepting that our 'betters' are doing things in our best interest without hesitation. The classic example I have been using is the matter of transferrance which is the process by which humans essentially judge a book by its cover. If the label on the cereal box says you are getting 100% of your Vitamin A, you believe that the cereal inside the box actually does contain Vitamin A, and that it's good for you even though you yourself cannot prove that such a thing as Vitamin A exists, and you don't know exactly what it does in the human body. 

There is no perfect knowledge, but the fragmented sets of knowledge we live with are surprisingly incomplete. 

My kids got pertussis shots last month. Pertussis is Whooping Cough. I've never even seen a video of somebody with it. We all know the first clue that somebody is off their nut when they start suggesting that government immunization is all part of a plot to enslave us. But to a certain degree, that degree by which we are truly ignorant of the workings of the things that make up our world, we are enslaved. So it has always been a difficult challenge for me to consider what degree I should know things I have proven for myself and trust things I take from others on faith. 

I do not use algebra in real life. I use logic. It happens to be one of my strengths - so much so that Aaron Hawkins used to call me Tuvak. Or was that Evil Tuvak. It was a while ago, admittedly. The miracle of our urban aggregations is that a person can use something like logic, with little else, and provide a comfortable living for themselves. Whereas logic on a desert island might just drive one mad. It doesn't have to be logic. Of course it could be personal intuition, or the ability to play guitar, or bake spectacular desserts. The point is that you can trade on that single skill and use your relative position in society to take some time out and figure out the natural order of things.

People talk as if getting away from a computer or the internet is, in and of itself, a healthy thing. You'll hear that fashionable statement become more taken for granted as truth. The great irony is if one actually understood more about what the internet is good for, you'd not take such fashionable statements as truth or 'science'. Figuring out the natural order of things is one of those things the internet is actually very good for - provided you have some discernment.  

All this is about leverage. You simply need to know how to turn your radio on and off. Then you can talk about what the talk radio talkers talk about without understanding the first thing about how radios work. It's fascinating and dreadful at the same time.

Here's my question. Does society advance when it delivers extraordinary goods to relatively stupid people? If so which society is best? Is that based upon the quality of the goods delivered or the relative ease with which people in that society can take advantage?

People of (Armed) Quality

My current understand of Seventeenth Century Europe is fundamentally complete thanks to Neal Stephenson. What strikes me most interestingly now is the extent to which their problems with matters of succession and civil society were much more intractable than ours. Obviously they had to wait until their monarch died, or in the case of Charles I, was executed. But in the meantimes, there were large segments of society that appeared to get on in their diehard partisanships without the benefit of an electoral, or fund raising process. 

I am always astonished by what I see as the credulity of middle class Westerners who expect corporate responsibility. I myself has been part of that large crowd who believed that large groups of literate people could affect change through the aggregation of will into integral institutional power. Accent on the word integral. Corporate institutions lack integrity by definition - it is because they are not truly capable of tyranny. At the same time corporate business is, in its neoliberal evolution, becoming a more group-thinky comfortable place for literate people, and a more wishy-washy gathering of marketmakers. How does this happen?

My short answer is that the nature of today's collaborative white-collar work specializes people into sublimation and takes away their ability to get the gestalt of their business. People are reduced to working within a narrow context of human experience and lose the ability to make judgments. We live in a society that increasingly says 'Dont try this at home' and among individuals who more often say 'That's above my pay grade'. I wouldn't go so far as to say we're being infantilized.. how about juvenalized?

So I am attracted to the idea of minimum rulesets and 'empowered' individuals. I use the term 'empowered' because I think a broad spectrum of people understand that it means giving people leeway to carry out decisions they heretofore were not allowed. I put it in quotes because I don't believe in 'empowerment'. 'Empowerment' is affirmative action, a staircase you are pointed to, a promotion within a fixed structure, and one can be empowered a thousand times without really gaining power. It is the removal of the rulesets and leaving people to their own devices and consequences that sets men free, not showing them how to polish their resume and get to the next level. 

It is this concept of People of Quality that intrigues me because there is an implied presumption that they were free to do as they pleased. An armed gentleman was expected to take his own life into his hands, and live by his word, not so much by his pledges of allegiance to abstract laws. People of quality conducted themselves as humble and obedient servants of the wills of people to whom they gave their word. Or at least that's the flavor I get. 

My atheist friends would remind me how clearly this feudal arrangement of lordship followed a hierarchy up to God, and that the sort of implicit hierarchy that people of quality maintained could not be broken - thus reducing the peasantry to immutable lowness. Tying all that to matters of birth and blood (as manipulated as that could get) put even greater restraint on those not well-born, favored or talented. Who indeed could defy those with the superior understanding of the Word of God? It is no wonder the Protestant Revolution was so bloody. 

At any rate I am taken by the prospect that people of armed quality retain the same relationship to peasants and to the law as ever, and that the fear and loathing men who would have their own weapons and their own Bibles making themselves accountable to only those they want, and not some altruistic common good of the masses - this fear and loathing is nothing more than peasants have always felt towards the gentry. Now dig that you NPR slurpers.

Socialists & Racism

If there is anything true about the epithet 'sell-out' it is that it doesn't take much financial renumeration to pull former comrades heads out of the collective ass of the collective. I prefer the term 'pinche vendida', which is most appropriate to the drama of the petit bourgiosie. 

There is a principle fallacy that I believe most Westerners adhere to and I am investigating it because of its many corruptions. Interestingly, it comes from a gut instinct I learned as a black nationalist in distrusting white liberals. The fallacy is that the middle class via political activism can make the poor into middle class. It ain't true, or at least it cannot be done without the sort of transfer of wealth on the pain of riots or similar legal fiat that I find reprehensible. At least some radicals have the honesty to say thier intent is to afflict the comfortable, another euphemism for "(fuc | soa)+k the rich". Understand that I find such honesty and aim to be an honorable calling, but make no mistake, I'm not on that side. 

With this in mind one must qualify any political program whose honest goal is 'upward mobility' for the masses (read 'deserving poor'). For the socialist program there is that interesting matter of race, and this is where the histogram above comes into play. Notice the particularly long tail of the households doing more than $75k. This is something I believe to be uniquely American, but I'm open to dispute about that. Still the real meat of this graph is the purple part with the 60% of American households doing less than 57K in 2005 dollars. I boldly assert (and here's where you can dispute me again if you care to) that this is where the Left is focused and sniffing up the ass of that Left, the mainstream anti-racists of America. The reason is because it is in this realm that racism has its greatest effect on the fortunes of Americans.

As anyone with a racial agenda will quote you, there is a well-known economic statistic about the fortunes of the white high school grad vs the black collegian with two years of undergraduate studies under their belt. I would be happy to remind you that people with such educational prospects, by and large don't often get past the 60%. I would think it amply fair to say that those people are about average. So when, on average, the white dude with highschool and the black dude with college are compared and this is given as proof of how racist America is, you are likely to get a shrug from me. Why? Because that level of achievement is not something I find particularly inspiring. But let us give the Leftists their due. In fact let us stipulate that this is the core of economic racism in the United States.

Those of you familiar with the film Brazil and Orwell in general should understand quite well how much energy has been spent spelling out the effect of dystopic authoritarianism on the fate of the common man. It is of course reasonable that the Left and Right focus on that meaty part of the histogram in the context of democratic politics. So how much social mobility does the entire program of the socialist program get to the meat of the American public? I'm going to be hugely generous, and say 25% And I'll tell you why I'll say 25% - because it's outrageous to think the American public wouldn't vote themselves a 25% raise if they could, or that socialists would smack down the capitalists among us to foot the bill if they could. While I'm at it, let's take a look at what credit the Left gives itself. If you pile those 150 things on top of each other do they add up to a 25% raise? Go ahead and add them up - it's really a great list. 

But I bet you that if you ask a black partisan how much of that benefit goes to their constituents they will still come back with a demand for the same half dozen things. Better education. Better jobs. Better healthcare. Better housing. Better policing. Better political representation. And they will tell you the bottom line is that right in the meat of that demographic a 25% raise would deliver all of that. Take a poll yourself. Ask a householder at 57K how much of that big list he'd give up for a $14,000 raise.

So what good does all the anti-racist agitation of the Left do their constituents? Very small marginal amounts that can only be measured in pyschic dimensions, which is about all the comfort I think they can give, because any marginal benefit to a middle aged householder in the meat(grinder) of the American economic demographic is good patronage. So if someone can be convinced that racism cost them a $2000 raise, well that's catastrophic economic structural racism - not really but you certainly have the attention of somebody in the the 57K demographic. 

How racist is the American Left? It doesn't matter because it's all relative. Like the hunter who doesn't have to outrun the bear, the American Left only has to be less racist than the American Right, by whatever measure because in the middle it's a game of inches. One notch over on the histogram is world historic for the man in the middle, and it is quite simple to show the operation of simple bigotry as monumental to the man of modest means. Black kids locked out of a country club swimming pool in suburban Philadelphia? Huge for the man in the middle. Monstrous for the poor. Asset forfeiture for stop & frisk in a single corrupt police force. Tragic for the man in the middle. Obscene for the poor.  

It doesn't matter whether the Left or socialists stop this bullcrap. It matters that they draw attention of their potential constituencies to these pint-sized atrocities. It matters that they will attempt to work on behalf of the poor who may not actually be beset by these problems, and that they will proclaim loudly that a $500 beef is RACIST!!! 

It has been a long time since I've been interested in anti-racist activism, and I have despaired of any hope. I recognize that the rhetorical patronage delivered by race hustlers is all that gets delivered. And I also understand what they fear the most, which is that by and large Americans in the middle won't give a damn about race. But it doesn't take much racism at all to keep them in the victimology business.

Kinda makes me yearn for the days of black power.