Cobb

Black Lives Denied

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

George Floyd has become a fungible. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sister Night: Forgotten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Insolubilous

"The problem is the racism of your people"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passion Without Purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living in Black Neighborhoods

"Your daddy's rich, and your ma is good looking. So hush little baby, don't you cry."

Q: What is it like living in a majority black neighborhood?

A: It’s kind of obvious to say they are all different, but I think it is useful to take note of the matter of class. You see since there are about 42 million in the US, that would make African-Americans the 35th largest nation on the planet. It’s also easy to remember that black median household income is about $42,000 per year. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to compare that with median household incomes of other nations.

At any rate, I have used class:

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.
And so I have lived like this in the following majority black neighborhoods.

Hood One - 90016
I grew up in what is now called Jefferson Park / West Adams in Los Angeles. It is in Southwest LA most notably known by its major thoroughfare, Crenshaw Blvd. I grew up in a 3 bedroom 1 bathroom house with my three brothers and my sister. My parents were civil servants. I would say that we were above the median income for the neighborhood. We moved in about 3 years before the white families started to move out. It was a very nice neighborhood with a good public school and lots of friendly neighbors from 1964 through about 1980. There were some street gangs on the periphery, but none in the neighborhood. Our neighbors all went to different churches and were quite diverse. So you could immediately tell that a lot of people lived there because it was a black neighborhood - meaning this was one where blackfolks could get mortgages, whereas others were off limits. The consequence was that it was not truly organic like an ordinary urban or suburban place. A lot of us had very little in common. After 1980 when I moved out, the drug wars began and the entire area started to run downhill. But that place was, to me, a very normal and often pleasant place to grow up. The place now looks a touch nicer than it did in the mid 60s. Values in the property have gone way up.

Hood Two - 90047
I then lived near the Circle Park in Inglewood with my father after my parents split up. This was a nicer neighborhood, but I was personally very broke. The middle class families were a lot more plentiful and similar to us. But the main boulevard, Manchester, was not as economically viable as Crenshaw was at the time. Shopping was not as nice. I didn't even think about crime, so much as I did worrying about how I could get my old car working again. I was there for two years then went off to college. The place looks pretty run down these days.

Hood Three - 90016
I didn't live in a black neighborhood again until five years later when I came back home to West Adams. Knuckleheads now populated the neighborhood. Ball scratching idiots nobody respected when we were kids. They didn't play sports. They had no mechanical or handy skills. They just smoked dope, acted tough, shoplifted, did B&Es and chased nasty girls. They evolved into gangsters. When young men like my friends and I left, everything went to shit. The little brothers and punks began to rule. ('hood trending towards ghetto, but still good houses). Looked ratty those days.

Hood Four - 90043
I got out as soon as I could, went to live with my ex-girlfriend on the edge of Inglewood in a duplex on a busy street. That didn't work out long. It was on the border of one of the worst blocks in the area called Hyde Park. Ick. Lots of Section 8 housing and crackheads roaming the streets, panhandling bums at the gas stations, steetwalkers and pimps at the McDonalds. But it was a very busy neighborhood at the intersection of Florence and Crenshaw. Lots of bus commuters, kids. Not quite a solid working class neighborhood but one on the verge of that. There was a big lumber yard nearby, a regional park, a little Jamaican grocer, a busy car wash. The McDonalds there, like two others on Crenshaw was owned by a black man who was pretty well known. (definitely ghetto adjacent)

Hood Five - 90016
I then moved in with my brother into another West Adams neighborhood. We lived in a very modest back house - which was basically a studio apartment. We got on each other's nerves sometimes, but I now had a good job, a new girlfriend and a serviceable sporty vehicle. We didn't interact much at all in the neighborhood. Our landlady was a quiet older Christian woman. The place felt quiet, definitely downscale, but not dirty. It was on the edge of what I call a burglar-bar neighborhood - where B&Es (breaking and entering) were so common that people put iron bars (ornamental as they might be) on their doors and windows. Unfortunately we didn't have those on the back house and the landlady's gardener(!) of all people had his 10 year old kid(!) crawl through our window. My brother busted them in the act and we we had to testify in court against him. ('hood accomodated to ghetto behavior)

All of this time, living in Los Angeles, most of my friends and associates were what we used to call 'buppies' - black urban professionals. Many of them came from the affluent neighborhoods of View Park and Baldwin Hills. So while most of us were not affluent, we enjoyed the same middle class culture, fashion, music and everything else. None of us were wannabe gangsters and music by Rick James was considered quite risque, but yeah we danced to it. I wrote about this social scene in People of the Dons.

I moved to the beach and in 1991 just before the Riots, I moved to Brooklyn. I wanted to live in the newly hype neighborhood of Fort Greene, where Spike Lee and other wealthy blacks were gaining a foothold, but I wound up in (still very nice) Prospect Heights. As I moved from Brooklyn to Boston and back to NYC., got married and moved to Atlanta, I didn't live in a majority black neighborhood until 1997 when I came back to California and lived in Altadena.

Burb One - 91001
Altadena is a super uniquely oddball neighborhood. The feel is like shabby gentility. 80 year old houses with old electric sockets, peeling paint, unkempt lawns and basketball hoops with no nets. The neighborhood grocer had old cash registers. It felt like a small town store somewhere in the middle of Texas. There were horses in the neighborhood and we'd see riders every week. The big public park had dirty foul mouth kids I liked to keep my kids away from, but a big hearted woman who ran the afterschool program. I befriended a young Nation of Islam man who would drop by occasionally. Jehovah's Witnesses were always trolling. But the police helicopter was trolling as well - around every Saturday night. Occasionally we heard gunshots. We had a swimming pool in the backyard - one day we found somebody's rooster had flown into the yard. The house next door was shrouded in tall bushes and was on a double lot behind an iron gate. It definitely looked like a haunted mansion. Fortunately the old man there would through the kid's balls back, eventually. This was the kind of neighborhood where the McDonalds runs out of french fries. Just crazy odball dysfunctions. When it was time we went to talk to the (young black) principal of the local elementary school, Edison. He told us that 40% of his students were foster children. We couldn't get over it. The private school was expensive and required parents to forbid their children from watching television (and probably eating meat). The parochial school had a total of about 25 students. We had to move.

Burb Two - 90745
From 2001 until last year, we have lived in upscale neighborhoods where rich people were not uncommon and black families were. Last year we moved to a majority black suburban community. I realized when we got here that I had not lived in a house with central air conditioning in 22 years. This place is a joy in pretty much every way. Even though we haven't gotten to know our neighbors very well everyone we do meet is cool. I never thought I would enjoy living in a gated community, although there was one at the top of the hill in Altadena I could not afford. Although this place isn't as upscale as View Park and Ladera Heights, it's easily nicer than Baldwin Hills. But that's Carson. It has always had a solidly black middle class suburban vibe. That means people drive a Lexus to the fish market. I didn't happen to watch 'Blacki-sh' on TV but that would describe this place, though there are almost equal numbers of Asians here. A lot of late model SUVs to be found here and retirees as well.

---

Sensemaking in the IDW

Q: Is it ok for a left leaning person to be here?

A: The point of the IDW for me and many others is that it truly has no use for those labels. In my view, we are mostly here because

1. We find that rationality is missing from public debate.

2. We find that civility is missing from public debate.

3. We find that non-politicized language is becoming rarer in public debate.

Aside from the obvious necessity of what Haidt calls 'disconfirmation' that keeps groupthink at bay, the IDW encourages individual independent thought that stands on its own without appeals to populist sentiment. That's a difficult proposition when this country has fallen prey to the seductions of popularity at every level of our democratic processes.

I would go further to say, as an engineer, sometimes the best thing for democracy is less democracy and more objective expertise. While everything can be up for debate doesn't mean it should be. We shouldn't disable sensemaking by combatting every conflicting assertion. I think a lot of people come here out of a sense of frustration that logic is dismissed in general.

A good principle that works for me is "I don't care who is right. I care what is right." That means I don't care what kind of person you call yourself if you speak the truth. And I see that most Americans have been conditioned to say who they are rather than what they do. Without offense, you can see the problem I have with accepting what kind of person you are. "Left leaning" is a who you are, not a what you do, because the what you do depends on your political fidelity to your identity and sense of belonging to a political tribe. In other words the very idea of tribal affiliation defies the purpose of intellectual freedom. That's not what saves us from this moment.

Some people can't help but to consider the IDW as a political tribe. That is not what it is. It is a refuge of rationality in a storm of idiocy. Or at least that's what it aims to be.

Pops on Corona

"CORONIC CHAOS"

The CoronaVirus Pandemic rules today as it did yesterday...a seemingly powerful phenomenon heading back too many taken for granted weeks,  Corona now even reeks havoc throughout the once restful night.  And doing this with what is hard to keep up with greed and measureless fury.  Sadly this and similar attitudes have become all too familiar.  We all weep, shake our ever-reeling heads, have over-taxed feelings and a general drooped and miserable outlook.  There is so much, too much to take...with no apparent sign of a break.  Whew.  When will it all end?  When will we get back to what was once lived and experienced as the good life...or if not, the normal pattern of living?

Well, what follows was put together during a couple of badly needed "breaks" from the sane, sensible and thoughtful therapeutics that already address what is noted above.  It is not intended to replace what folks already do and what already works.  Please know and understand that I did not and do not have the esteemed FACEBOOK in mind as a "recipient".  Whew.

So, here we go with some suggestions to remove ourselves from the Corona Virus Emotional Overload Speeding Roller Coaster:

# Being completely informed is a super-abundance of knowledge, but is likewise a replacement of wisdom.  A once an hour 3-5 minute update will suffice.  

# Listening to music always works.  From much calmer times we learned what specific styles of music and what specific composers/artists are at the top.  Now is their time for reconnecting with us. 

# Think about someone you are not now going to call or write but whose long time ago memory causes a smile, a laugh, a few tears or all 3.  Some time later, make the call.

# Take a slow walk through your house or apartment or wherever and look at something you never paid any serious attention to...and think what it might say.....if only it could talk.

# Hold in your hand a leaf from a branch in your garden or an indoor plant, close your eyes, smile and see what happens to you.

# Spell out your full name on a piece of paper...no spaces.  Then think of an adjective for each letter to describe yourself...actually or ideally.  Review the list in 24 hours.

# If you have a house pet, talk to that pet or pets whatever it/they might be.  This includes dogs, cats, hamsters, goldfish, turtles, frogs, caged birds, etc.

# Sit in the bathtub for no less than 20 minutes.  Hum softly with your eyes closed.....open.....closed......

# Make up a song and sing it in front of the mirror.  When finished tell the mirror image exactly how you felt while singing.  If you have a small portable recorder, use it.

# Go to your in-house library and, closing your eyes, select a book.  Flip through it, stopping at any page.  Read a few lines and in your mind draw a parallel with what the day has been like for you.    

# Take a shirt and cap out of your closet and put both items on backwards.  Craft a silly explanation you would give either of your living or deceased parents if either or both of them should suddenly appear.

# While safely riding on your bike, ride with one hand for a short distance.  With the other hand pat yourself on the head for being so skilled and confident and silly

# Take a swig of your favorite fruit juice, briefly gargle same before swallowing and then either smile or laugh outright.

# If you on your treadmill for any length of time, make a strange and original sound every few minutes.  The sound shouldn't make sense.

# Try tying a sneaker or shoe with one (either left or right) hand. Note: If you can do this without laughing at yourself, you are probably cheating!

# The next time you feel inclined to tell someone to "Have a nice day", say instead, "Have a rice day" and see if they catch it.

  ENUF!!

There is nothing wrong with the ever-unfolding protocols which are being advised to make and keep us safe and sane during the crisis.  I am pretty sure the harshness of the day can be eased by trying these or countless other innovative behaviors.  What is suggested above is not intended to replace whatever anyone is now doing to get through the day or night!  That which is serious is NOT compromised by our taking complementary steps to lighten the load.  Just crafting the above has given even me a badly needed and joyful break.

So...try any part of it.  You may like it and be inclined to come up with your own list of activities.  Or you might just laugh at the very thought of taking these suggestions seriously.  But just think about it. LAUGHING IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL!!

and...when you get tired of laughing...

WASH YOUR HANDS!!!!!!!!!!!

Feeling Good. Feeling Bad.

I had a bad dream last night. It was bad in many ways and as I was barely sleeping parts of it were based upon reality. I was waiting both in the dream and in life for something to happen and it didn't. In the dream I was made extremely angry by a dog. I was on the street of a residential neighborhood and a large dog kept rushing me barking loudly and then backing off. I had a switch and I swatted the dog on his nose each time. But he growled and took one less step back each time. A crowd gathered to watch this dramatic standoff between myself and the dog. I asked one family who knew the dog if they would please get the owner to pull his dog away. An old woman, obviously the matriarch of the family who owned the dog went through a list of children and grandchildren in her squeaky croaky voice. "Pooter, is this here your dog? Where's Jimbo? Dat Jimbo's dog? What about Cash? Ain't this Cash' dog?" I was two seconds from pulling out my pistol and blowing the dog into swiss cheese, but I kept asking politely. Will you please call your dog off? Nobody did. I kept swatting it on the nose. I couldn't take my eyes off of it for a moment.

I woke up, dead tired, angry. I told my wife that I had a horrible dream. I could hear the sleep in my voice mumble up my words. They conveyed nothing of the sheer awfulness of the dreamt experience. I was still boiling inside, still waiting for us to go watch the next episode of The Witcher together. Still staring at the back of her head as she patiently did her work from home. Still fiercely angry at everything that went on inside my head and of very little of consequence in the real world. I wanted to communicate how miserable I felt, how much I needed some tender and kind affection at this moment, wanting both to demand it in a scream and be quietly accepting that it wasn't going to happen. My mind went to the end. I'm going to die alone. We all are going to die alone. 

I haven't decided whether or not I'm going to pay my rent. I haven't decided whether or not I'm going to max out my credit cards. I haven't decided whether or not I even care. I'm not unhappy with my life with all of its shortcomings. And I thought about what would make me the most happy would be driving a convertible sports car up Pacific Coast Highway at 100 miles per hour. I can do that now because it's very Omega Man out there. I quit my gym. I can't remember the last time I went. But I do my morning walks alone. I did my 10,000 steps alone yesterday and I only took one picture and I don't really think it's worth sharing. I have worked from home for a decade and my solitude is second nature. I am socially distanced. When I post to communicate, I only get feedback on the stupid stuff I really don't care about. I am accustomed to dying alone. This blog has over 9000 posts. I have been writing it steadily since September of 2002. Even I don't read it any longer. In a way, I don't fear death. I am angry about not getting a chance to do what's next. Death is worse than derailment. It's the situation that you never get to address or correct. Death is the complete deterioration of the self; no matter how small your self may have been in life it is completely eradicated by the obliviousness of death.

I remember looking at my grey self in the mirror. I handed out my calling card at a meetup and somebody remarked, "That's not you." It's 4 years old when I was less grey. When I was in Bogota people kept mistaking me for Morgan Freeman. There's not much room even in my own imagination for whom that old black man in the mirror might actually be. I dress like a gardener, in Dickies tactical pants and nondescript black shoes. I'm putting on only the subtlest of shows, and I don't need to show off. My joie de vivre is what it is, but I've heard most of the jokes out there. 

So I sat on the edge of the bed waiting to watch The Witcher with my wife, because I want to do it together, but I might be dead next month.  She still has work to type into her laptop. I'm probably going to fall asleep while we watch. She probably will too. I have been playing the video game of The Witcher most of the afternoon. In the villages people starve and cough. They are surrounded by Imperial troops, wolves and monsters. I can kill them all, but sometimes I die. I have no savings. I spend all of my money on the best swords and armor because ultimately I am a monster slayer and that's what I'm needed for. It's a sword and sorcery classic and the narrative gets pushed along by me killing my way through the evil, solving the mysteries, negotiating with unsavory characters, resisting the temptation to treat the sorceresses as if they owe me affection as my deeds push the plot forward. I am a mortal enabler. A freak of nature. I am heartless and honorable and I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. Everyone dies alone except heroes and martyrs. I don't want to pick a hill to die on. I don't want to succumb to the forces of nature or destiny, but all I can do is live another day. It's obvious, but nobody seems to figure it out. We're caught up in the moment.

The dead live in the tales of the living. I only ever knew one song by Elvis Presley. "In the Ghetto". People got worked up about it, I recall. I sang it. It was a good song. I didn't care that it was Elvis. What a depressing song. But there it is. You don't even have to type 'Elvis' into Google, just 'in the ghetto'. People living in one room shacks. That's what they sang about. 

I once wrote that I figured out the reason for war. It was to remind mankind of their limits. War destroys memory and truth and it becomes the reason for everything. It has an irresistible gravitational pull on history and the Jungian collective consciousness. Now we are met on a new battlefield and I can't help thinking that these might be the last blogs I ever write. These videos may be the last time my face will be seen in its animated state. My voice, now clear, will be its last true self before the cytokine storm reduces me to rib-cracking coughs. Or I might just stay right where I am behind these two monitors and this keyboard and survive it all. Laying low. Risking nothing. Moving nowhere. 

I walked 10,000 steps yesterday. On my way back home I walked past a fire station. The men were playing paddle tennis in the side yard. You could hear the ball echoing across the empty streets and parking lots. I wanted to ask them questions about how I could use my old ICS training to help in an emergency. It was my instinct. But I didn't stop. I kept on walking past the sleeper on the sidewalk, past the old man digging in the trashcan. I held my breath each time. I didn't stop. The sleeper had a full canteen of water. The old man had a rough and ready coat on. Yeah. It's about that time. As I finished the steps, I finished the Sam Harris podcast with Nicholas Christakis. Now I'm informed. I should say that 'we' are the informed. Social isolation is all we've ever had, because we expect our knowledge to make a difference. We keep changing our behavior challenging common sense. We want uncommon insight.

We want uncommon insight because we're logical and disciplined. We want our minds to save us, and we get angry because everybody else doesn't work as hard to come to the same conclusions. They know whose dog it is, but they like the drama of not calling it off. Just because you want it.. you've already hitting it right on the nose, Mr Smarty Pants. But they don't see my gun. In my mind I'm justified. I could take the screaming action and everybody would get it. But maybe I'll just die a little bit today and hold my peace. it's not my war. It's not what I want to become known for. I'm just trying to be civilized, even if I have to do it on the DL. 

I have another meeting today. I need to confirm the time. I need to fill in the hours from last week. But my company could go broke and I could be dead next month. There's a book on the periphery of my list that I might move up in the queue. It's about 10% less democracy and why you should trust the elites more than you do. They're probably looking at us like, so why didn't you just do it? 50 Cent has a new show on TV, because he was ready to die trying to do that. I'm the writer. The writer writes. And here it all is.  This is what I wanted. This is what I got. I just need to keep it all going. I thought, in Episode 001 that I could just catch this and get it over with, because we'e all going to catch the bug, right? No. Delay death as long as possible. Keep everything going. Use your mind and take the extra edge. Minute by minute. Play the barbell curve. Be prepared for extreme negatives and extreme positives. My creditors could all be dead next month. My enemies, my doubters, all of the unknown unknowns could disappear. All of the decadent hubris could get the smackdown. Yes people are starting to scream. 

Maybe we should just be what we be. It's a bit weird to be a Stoic at this moment. There's so much to explain in that. It's a consequence of living a particular life of the particular mind. Being reconciled with triumph and disaster and treating those two imposters just the same is a kind of manhood for which few strive. It's not comfortable but it's necessary. That's why there is no panic here. There is also no resignation. You could call this a moment of dealing with emotions, of concretely wrestling with the logical implications of what I have already felt without making any hard decisions yet. I don't want to be singing depressing songs. I don't want to be angry in my dreams and then with my wife. I don't want to fear death or fear loneliness. I don't want to be overcome by the futility that often accompanies deep contemplation. This meditation thus is a public expression of my will. That's how Stoicism works for me. I don't mind being corrected. I don't care who is right, I care what is right. 

I didn't shoot the dog, but I did fall asleep during The Witcher. 

Surviving COVID - Episode 4 - Shopping While I Can

I was able to get about 90% of the items I wanted on my shopping. I was a bit surprised at what was available and not surprised at what was not available.

Obligatory Seriousness on the Chinese Disease

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

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

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

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

Who Wants to Kill Some Camels?

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

Suviving COVID19 - Episode 001 - The First Week Video

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

How To Survive Outside of the Box

“A situation becomes a crisis when it overwhelms the government’s ability to respond.”
-- Vinay Gupta

 

This is hard to explain, but should be impossible to ignore. So let me get into it a moment. One of the most important things I have learned in my 50s came from a dude named Nassim Taleb. This irascible character pisses off everyone like that kid who pointed out the emperor's transparency. He has reinvented the entire idea of risk management through complicated mathematics that I still cannot decipher. But he also wrote his logic syllogistically and put it in books accessible to me. You may know him as the author of The Black Swan. His magnum opus is The Incerto, and I would say that it is as fundamentally significant to the future as Knuth's Art of Computer Programming is to the digital world today. From him and from Dan Ariely and somewhat from Robin Hanson I have been instructed in ways that help me understand how deeply flawed and somewhat predictably flawed is the process of human decision making. I remind you that it has been my career to try to combine human thought with digital systems to think better together. So I have come to understand the strengths and weaknesses of both sides of that synergy.

 

One of the consequences of this education is my now somewhat advanced comprehension of the consequences of these flawed processes. Sometimes they crash and burn. Sometimes they limp along. Sometimes they create edifices of artifice that remain afloat buoyed by systems of blatant self-dealing, mass hysteria, pure stupidity, wishful thinking, co-dependence, petty vengeance, suspended disbelief or combinations of those plus damned statistics, lies, likes and retweets.

 

The most unnerving consequence is my logical decision to distrust democratic politics and institutions. That was somewhat easy given the absurdities of identity politics we suffer in these iterations of Culture War. But it has been difficult to reconcile with my civil libertarianism, Lockean views and dedication to public squawking. So, leaning back on my philosophical tendencies, I have engaged as a 'wry stoic & tactical epistemologist'. I mock what needs mocking from an historical perspective (though I'm no Churchill) and I spend a lot of time parsing arguments and providing disconfirmatory findings of fact, or at least of logic. The younger me would not like me, but he was living in the Infinite Library of Borges. (The truth is in there somewhere.)

 

Now that I'm unofficially a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, or like to consider myself that and two degrees of separation from Eric Weinstein, I have been a collector of arcane knowledge I feel is worth passing on. I feel this rather than think this because I truly cannot be held responsible for my inability to communicate it well. I can tell you it works (logically) for me, but so fucking what? We're still all going to watch Netflix as the apocalypse draws near. I want to chuckle as much as the next guy. But in the meantime, there's this bit of profundity from Vinay Gupta that I still have yet to fully decipher. But before I drop to the reveal, let me regale you with a piece of rap I wrote 28 years ago. 

 

the problem i have is this - food in a box
as an urban dweller, skill seller
im marketable, size 10 in my socks
i can find anywhere anyplace to sell and be sold to

clothes off the rack fit
i got enough snaps to pick it up if i so desire
i say wrap it up homes, flash the card
get certified
(the hangers are wood, not wire)

so i step to the pad
quite happy - having hunted and gathered
new duds for the hoe down
so i go downtown and across the bridge
to my flat with the empty fridge

 

It was about my patent inability to cook, but to make more than enough money to run a household. In recognition of my urban dilemma, I went through stanza after stanza of exemplifying all of the things I could buy but not make. Clothes, food, companionship, and for the purposes of this discussion, politics.

 

i guess the problem i have is this - food in a box
sometimes if im critical i get political
and all riled up about an issue as old has the hills
i wait for the next senate bill
and hope my choice with a pipsqueak voice
call in to oprah and wait on the line
like this is democracy, dont worry be happy
got no ability to sway the senate my way
'cept once every six for two out of a hundred
did my mission get funded?
no tell me what to do till they pass the ballot box again

And to reiterate for the n'th time. My moral position on politics is The Abstention Principle. To wit. 

 

A simple moral principle:
When a future change is framed as a problem which we might hope our political system to solve, then the only acceptable reason to talk about the consequences of failing to solve that problem is to scare folks into trying harder to solve it. If you instead assume that politics will fail to solve the problem, and analyze the consequences of that in more detail, not to scare people but to work out how to live in that scenario, you are seen as expressing disloyalty to the system and hostility toward those who will suffer from that failure.

 

----

This works us directly into the first square in Vinay's presentation which is the quote which begins this post. “A situation becomes a crisis when it overwhelms the government’s ability to respond”. I assume that politics will fail to solve the problem, therefore I must analyze the consequences of that in more detail. Since I am on a Stoic track, I would learn to live without the illusion that I can change the world through democratic politics. Not that I would shutup. 

 

What do you do, what happens to your citizenship if you find yourself facing a situation that overwhelms your government? That is the subject of Vinay's publication that I will link to here. So the quick answer is: The failure of the state to do risk management returns risk to us. What if we could use (X, Y, Z) instead of the state for managing our risk? There are 175 slides. One day I'll find the accompanying narrative. Stay tuned. 

The Death of Punk

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

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

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

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

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

 

H1-B Is Not the Reason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But let’s put it starkly shall we?

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

---

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

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

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

Footnotes

[1] About the Cloud Communications Company

[2] Usage share of operating systems - Wikipedia

[3] GNU/Linux Distributions Timeline

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

How Propaganda Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural Appropriation & The Beloved Community

This could generate some interesting discussions. I should say ahead of this that I've said 'cynical' more times than I should, whereas I mean skeptical. I don't mock people who have a notion towards the beloved community or a cultural nationalism. Obviously my parents generation actually made it. They made 'black' out of 'negro'. I simply don't see people of that calibre engaged in The Struggle. That is because, according to my reasoning, the Struggle was merely to be American Middle Class, a fait accompli. Even DuBois' Talented Tenth, well he was just talking about college education. Anyway, flavor can still be interesting if the underlying stuff is nutritious.

Terms of Endearment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Myth of Trumpism

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

A: No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

----

Consider the following:

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

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

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

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

You Missed The Sausage Party

Apropos the following:

1. https://letter.wiki/conversation/127
2. https://areomagazine.com/2019/09/24/a-wrong-against-boys-an-impossible-conversation-about-circumcision/

I wonder, given the depth and breath of this essay if some broadly implemented surgical reform is capable of establishing the issue in the forefront of thoughtful parents and all other interested parties. To be blunt, if our common cultural morals consider it taboo to subject anyone to involuntary touching of genitals are we likely to be more rational about our undoing of the custom, behind our backs as it were in a decision by the medical community?

I think we'd be much better off surfacing the information in the context of our social norms and expectations, and that admittedly is a great deal more difficult to do, than to get consensus among practitioners, researchers and ethicists. Who then will have the ultimate responsibility? Well, it must be the individual. That means from my point of view that the most important boat to be lifted is that of a specific male rite of passage. Consequently the same seriousness has to be taken in consideration of why we don't have one.

But where I'm afraid my logic really goes, given that I don't consider my own circumcision to be such an imposition, is to all manner of birth customs. In my family, all us children were assisted out with the use of forceps whose marks on our faces had to be explained. But even more horrid to my sensibilities is the rise in cesarean section for no apparent reason. I don't mean to throw dead cats on the table, but how are we ever to get a men's movement to reconcile this ethical gap given our social environment?

If we are missing, as men, a specific, even if physically minimal transition from the boy's penis to the man's penis because we have been deprived a piece of it, then the social implications go much further than an ethical loathing of heretofore primitive ideas about sexual acts themselves. The greater tragedy is the social lacuna of a male rite of passage similar to a woman's first menses, even as clumsily as that might be handled.

What is the Role of Reason in Society?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just Fix The Planet

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Free Speech, Coercion & the Business of the People

I had something of a difficult conversation the other day with one of my friends from the Breakfast Club. I introduced him, rather clumsily, to the Intellectual Dark Web, which he immediately conflated with the Dark Web, meaning probably 4chan or 8chan. I asked if he had ever heard of Jordan Peterson. He said no. I asked him if he had ever heard of Jonathan Haidt and he hadn't. Nor was he familiar with Quillette or the events at Evergreen State College. I was at something of a loss, halfway through my oatmeal, to describe the state of affairs. 

We talked about free speech and theatre fires, white supremacy and punching Nazis none of which was effective. I feared that he sensed something in me that was wrong, that fell afoul of his best hopes. I'm not sure that I could resolve that in the few minutes we had. The key about the IDW was the story I told about the No Whites Allowed Day at Evergreen State and how Bret Weinstein was run off campus. (I forgot that his wife was too). He was sure that this was an isolated incident signifying nothing. I asked if every client was able to use a similar tactic to get their attorneys disbarred what would become of our legal system. But he was clearly too clever to take the import of my meaning. It's a problem I have arguing with lawyers. They never take my intellectual gist, instead the deal squarely with the words I awkwardly utter, which they should. So perhaps this essay is my second chance. I must admit that without any context of the pitchforks aimed at Peterson and the alt-right, I couldn't expect him to get my gist, so I let it go.

In the end it's not the IDW that I care about so very much as it would be the effect of what they might do, and in that we agreed, finally. Reduce the money in politics. I would go a step further and say reduce the aegis of electoral politics. In my improved America, the Judiciary has a bit more authority, the Congress has a lot less to do, and the Executive Branch presides over a much smaller federal bureaucracy. Quite frankly, I like the idea of the separation between the CIA and the FBI, MI5 and MI6. Let one agency deal with the outside world, and one with the inside world. Let the Presidency deal more with the CIA and less with the FBI. I express it thus: 'Decentralize until it hurts, then centralize until it works'. He immediately understands that I want Utah to be Utah. Good. 

But what I really want is marginal legislation, and a marginal area in which populist politics can operate. I don't think there's a lot of new law we need. Not that I am gung ho for deregulation. I simply believe our ability to generate rules and bureaucracy exceeds our ability to deal constructively with actual change. In other words, the end effect of proper legislation and law enforcement in Congress makes our government more accountable to less reality. It's reductive. From the perspective of those who stand on their hind legs and squawk "There oughta be a law", the successful passing of a legalistic framework over an additional patch of human or organizational behavior is a win for the team. But this is generals fighting the last war. The playing field has shifted. What's really going on is that they have put signs, ropes and a dirt path into a new area of the jungle of human behavior, but the new legal map is not the territory. It just gives the illusion of control. People skip through those ropes all the time and quickly move into the unseen forest. And yet the legal fiction expands the definition of 'forest' to include half the planet of which only a fraction is navigable and policed. Practically speaking, Elizabeth Warren wants to decapitate Facebook and Google, but she understands nothing about the open source software she wants to disable. The law is not fast enough but the spirit of the law is too broad to ever be responsible. The law just captures the jungle path. 

I want society to manage society. I want a society permeated by reason in which the coercion of law is applied minimally and consistently at the margins. I don't want the ideas of culture warriors codified, because laws are hard to ratchet back. If the spirit of the law dominates the spirits of society, we become brittle. When the coercion of law replaces the persuasion of culture, we destroy our democratic experiment. No less than that is at stake. Law enforcement always entails violence. We will become more violent with each other if we try to empower politics over the rules of society. So the failures of the hierarchies of social reward and punishment are what get my attention. When the illogic of aggrieved freshmen can destroy the logic and careers of tenured professors, universities cease to be what they should be, and instead become political battlegrounds. I see more and more of America becoming political battlegrounds in the context where politicians say "Vote for me and I will change the climate." This is the Leviathan of our liberty's destruction.

The business of the people is simple. It is nothing more than the maintenance of a walled garden. We understand the difference between flowers and weeds, but we have let it run to ruin distracted as we are in our attempts to perfect 'equality' and 'save the planet'. The hubris of our political rhetoric has justified in many minds the purposes of flamethrowers and salt for our own front yard. That is the temperature of our screaming. The people don't seem to realize that society cannot be politically weaponized without grave consequences. I must again emphasize the Abstention Principle.

A simple moral principle: when a future change is framed as a problem which we might hope our political system to solve, then the only acceptable reason to talk about the consequences of failing to solve that problem is to scare folks into trying harder to solve it. If you instead assume that politics will fail to solve the problem, and analyze the consequences of that in more detail, not to scare people but to work out how to live in that scenario, you are seen as expressing disloyalty to the system and hostility toward those who will suffer from that failure.

Yet here I stand with modest, even minimal, political ambition. I write essays. I do not need a bully pulpit, and yet this is what people want to elect, a spiritual, cultural leader for America placed into the Oval Office, tweeting out the right words. I fear the man with the charismatic smile and silver tongue who captures this sick infatuation. So my interest in politics is about the business of the people. The Commons. Right now the Commons is 'the comments section' and that is a dumpster fire of illogic and emotion. I am not afraid of those who speak loudly, nor if they mumble. My concern is with what policed, flattened shortcuts through the jungle of life are promised by those who run the engines of our democracy. 

A Democratic Chaos Theory

My major take on the entire question of income inequality is that the only thing that's going to break it, income inequality being a bad measure of quality of life, is if everyone suffers. What establishes any meritocracy or any system that can be predictably exploited by the masses is consistency. You have to be able to understand a level playing field so that level playing fields and consequent fair rules can be propagated throughout society. This takes time and discipline.

But what if your desire was to disable the corruptions of the powerful? Given that what establishes much of monopoly is regulatory capture, what if democracy itself was used against level regulatory playing fields. In one sense this is what President Trump is doing to the trade relationship between the US and China. He is being unpredictably arbitrary with his use of tariffs. What nobody really knows is which tariff he might raise or lower in punitive fashion and exactly which domestic businesses it might effect. For those of my associates who couldn't wait to see Trump's brand of chaos upset the Beltway Establishment, this is punk music to their ears.

So while I think power should be distributed to the masses and Federal powers limited primarily because I am against the principle of monolithic scaling, I think it might be possible to establish a level of populist chaos that results in the creative destruction of regulatory capture. But short of this being done experimentally it is interesting to me to capture the marginal changes of policy in various industries and see what exactly the uninformed public is capable of doing. It seems to me that there are limits on the predictive abilities of lobbyists and in the implementations of hindsight as well and that those changes wrought by new regulations propagate in unexpected ways.

I come at this from the perspective of what the reasonable limits of populist, disruptive or revolutionary politics might be. How successful is reform? How timely? How consistently is energy expended? How many reconsiderations are necessary? How many police actions are required, expected, carried out?

The Race Man's Framework 2.0

A couple decades ago, I wrote the Race Man's Home Companion. Today, people are asking questions of the sort that should be answered with a bit more specificity. So I offer the following updated framework. Feel free to use it. 

Racial Theories:

All racists, and all racialists are attuned to Racial Theories.

A racial theory establishes the conventions around which races are defined. The aim of racial theories is to establish a well-accepted truth about race. These may be scientifically studied and many statistics, stories, myths and traditions may be cited. The point of the acceptance of racial theories is to establish by any means that race has meaning.

A racial theory doesn’t necessarily have to a genetic origin. It may have, according to its arguments, some cultural origins. So racialists will have difficulty accepting that an African could easily speak Mandarin or that a Pacific Islander could easily play European Classical music. This would be true according to the racial theory that each race has a ‘natural’ culture.

A racial theory seeks to be explanatory of behavior and at the very least establishes a baseline core property of any race. All racial theories seek credibility either through science, law, politics, ‘cultural construction’, myth, convention, tradition or any means at hand.

---

Racialism:

The Racial Realist

The belief that there are differences between human beings which are inherited such that they can be ordered into separate races in such a way that each race shares traits and tendencies which are not shared by members of any other race. Each race has an 'essence'.

All forms of racism build from the premise of racialism. Notice that racialism is not saying anything 'good' or 'bad' about races just that mutually exclusive races absolutely exist and divide the species. The racialist would argue that you could trace the bloodlines of blacks throughout history and that you can definitely determine the 'blackness' of any human being according to his racial 'essence'.

If you take a 23 & Me test and you are surprised or you feel that you have learned something more meaningful than what your horoscope says, this is racialism.

A racialist does not necessarily believe that the races, as we understand them in America are complete. He may say that there are, in actuality, 37 races. We just don't know what they are yet. The racialist's point however is that race, whatever it turns out to be, is deterministic of human behavior and that we need to know.

A racialist will discount psychology.

If you ask a racialist what is the essence of a race, they will have some answer or search for some answer, but they will not say that makes a race better or worse. A racialist searches for and finds meaning in racial theories and incorporates them into their worldview. The racial realist will not claim to be a racist, their explanation says "That's just the way it is."

Racism:

Type One: Extrinsic or Soft Racist

The extrinsic racist says that there is a moral component to the 'essence’ of a race which warrants differential treatment. These differences are, to the extrinsic racist, not particularly controversial. The extrinsic racist, while maintaining the belief for example that blacks are stupid, might not feel anything wrong with befriending a black. The extrinsic racist might very well applaud the black who proves himself not stupid and call him a credit to his race.

The extrinsic racist looks for the core meaning of a race as something that race owns, and must be convinced that they don’t know what race means. But they are content to let other people have their own ideas about race, and are always willing to grant exceptions to individuals of any race.

Type Two: Intrinsic or Hard Racist

The intrinsic racist says that the moral 'essence' of a race establishes an incontrovertible status for the race. No matter what an individual member of a race does he should be treated just like the rest of his race. The intrinsic racist would argue that the black is inevitably stupid so he finds clever ways to hide his stupidity (maybe through athletic prowess or spirituality) in order to gain other's confidence or that this intelligent person is simply not actually black, or what he demonstrates is not actually intelligence.

The intrinsic racist is willing to expend considerable amounts of energy in order to take extrinsic racism to the next level, which is to be politically, socially or religiously active and to evangelize for establishing the destiny of various races in the world.

Type Three: Racial Supremacist

The racial supremacist requires for his own peace of mind and the moral righteousness of the world, to be active in the establishment of racial law and racial order. The supremacist recasts the history and future of humanity through the lens of conflict between mutually incompatible pure races with mongrels and others caught in the middle.

The supremacist seeks to establish by any means, peaceful or otherwise, a social and legal hierarchy of superior races over their inferiors. From their point of view failing to do so risks permanent chaos and human dissolution. This hierarchy may be local, national, regional or global, but the supremacist needs the destiny of races to be established with immediacy. The supremacist operating in a non-supremacist society will accept any happenstance that leads to, or appears to lead to their desired outcomes.

Here is a framework that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about racism, racialism and racial theories.

A special note. 
There is a contingent with the political opinion that the absence of explicit and identifiable contemporary racial discrimination is irrelevant to the proper racial balance of any environment. I interpret this to be a fallacy owing more to a 'blank slate' hypothesis which suggests that all cultural and environmental factors can and should be adjusted to produce racially representative outcomes. I would like to call this a soft racism, but I think it is tortured thinking that fails to account for what is known in psychology and what can successfully be engineered in society. If you call it racist, that's ok with me, but I'd err on the side of befuddlement. 

Toni Morrison

I was 28 years old and at a summer pool party. It had been a year since I moved out to the beach and had been driving my BMW. I was coming to the end of my patience with yuppie indulgences, but I was still trying to find a consistent highbrow aesthetic in black culture. I had joined a couple memberships in theatre companies, I toured all the black bookstores in the city. I went to all the coolest clubs and bars. People knew me and I knew people. It's funny I was just talking about some of that period in my life when my friend Charles and I ran GDZ and were part of the Babeless Crew. Nothing like being affluent, single and somewhat attractive in Southern California during the Cosby Era. It struck me that I was about as connected as I could get when I had been invited to hang out with Robert Townsend's Partners in Crime. I watched Bobby Brown practice at the Wadsworth Theatre for his comeback. 'My Prerogative' was the song. I knew it would be a hit.

At the pool party I was reading Toni Morrison's new book "Beloved". It was rather the last straw. I had pretty much had my fill of what was explained to me as the best of black fiction. I found it shocking that 'The Women of Brewster Place' was considered the best. It left me rather flat and unimpressed. I knew that as a student of Computer Science that my background in the Liberal Arts needed work and I tried to ignore the conceit that we in what would eventually be called 'STEM' worked a bit harder and were a bit smarter. Yet I kept singing myself to sleep with that song from the film After Hours "Is this all there is?" Jeopardy and Thelonius Monk didn't quite cut it. What was an intelligent young man to do, just make money? And then about 20 pages into the novel, I realized that here was the writing skill and imagery I had been craving. Suddenly the world around me began to pale and the sounds got tinny and muted and I was in Toni's world. She owned me.

That summer marked a major change in my life. Eventually all of the dance clubs, in fact all of Los Angeles fell into the background. I had found, at long last, the powerful black literature that I wanted to experience. For all of the extraordinary complexities of Beloved, I found an even better lesson in Jazz and started to understand through her narrative grace and insight something that boiled down to a Michael Jackson lyric "You're just another part of me." It's often hard to communicate what differences I expected and experienced between race and culture as flattened as they have become in the popular imagination. But the very last lessons of race I learned from Jazz and the works of John Langston Gwaltney and Adrian Piper. From Jazz came the subtle yet profound consequences of the emotional rejection of family and what comes of the rejection of genuine love between individuals who owe loyalties to their racial identities. It doesn't have to be hate that brings one to ruin. Exclusion from family is sufficient because it is the ultimate betrayal.

Beloved's Sixo was for me, Morrison's best character. Of all the characters in all of the black literature I ever read there were ever four that marked me as something close to the self. They were Jean Toomer's Kabnis, Paul Beatty's protagonist in the 'White Boy Shuffle', as well as Darryl Pinckney's in 'High Cotton', and Sixo. That was for then. I don't often think of Sixo now - I found my Thirty Mile Woman and she bore my progeny. My time out of time is best described in the time and place I wrote that some 20 years ago if I did. Morrison, more than any other black literary figure I can recall stood in a unique place. There was something ineffably affecting in her writing, not only in its evocation but in its syntax. Morrison's sentences went on and on folding and unfolding like tesseracts of consciousness capable of delivering you into parallel universes. You live in the world, but your mind is captivated elsewhere. That's what I recall floating through the NYC undergrounds. It was an alien diet that made your aura transmit in the ultraviolet spectrum where Earthlings still see only black and white.

Like all great writers, Morrison had a psychological wisdom that allowed her to occupy the consciences of her characters. I can't tell if she was going inside herself or not as the book following Jazz took me into a gory corner I could not stomach. Was that Paradise? I don't recall - I only remember choking on blood. The last bit of Morrision I took was from Playing in the Dark, as she metastasized into America's black woman author. In that, she talked theory, perhaps it was critical theory of a sort. I think she overplayed the 'masters tools' hand while making an excellent point of the matter of the rescued.

'The problem of internalizing the master's tongue is the problem of the rescued. Unlike the problems of survivors who may be lucky, fated, etc. the rescued have the problem of debt. If the rescuer gives you back your life, he shares in that life. But if as in Friday's case, if the rescuer saves your life by taking you away from the dangers, the complications, the confusion of home, he may very well expect the debt to be paid in full.' -- Toni Morrision, 1992

Morrison brings up an interesting tangent. If America paid the Negro his Reparations, what do you think it would ask for in return? It doesn't matter the actual price, it's a psychic bargain, a deal with the Devil if you will, another form of shackles. Perhaps we ought to note and confess that the Negro is always with us.

This thinking remains with me, as does the echo of Sixo's self-liberation. I wonder if literature today, American literature, ever bothers to reach as deeply into the human psyche as Morrison's once did for me. I marveled at the empty profundity of so many somebody's daughter books, as if only the trials of women's souls were worth examining in literature. Unlike academics, I am not part of the industrial process of constant dealings with the intellectual and social maturity of our youth - these examinations of the dimensions of the soul are for me processed at the level of history and philosophy. Dostoevsky most recently. It is difficult to bear witness and learn at once. I am not growing tired or bitter, but I do sometimes wonder why so much is politics and so little is life. We are shocked at murder and want to blame somebody. We don't recognize the dimensions of our own souls, that is, I reckon an eternal human problem. We should wonder why we want to think we can program an AI to figure it out, or somebody else to tell the tales that Morrison has already told. Humanity lies in plain view in front of us, and maybe it is her death that can remind us of the transformative power of actual art. Can we bear our own imagination? Here lies Toni Morrison.

Some Thoughts about Space Colonization

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

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

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

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

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

When They Reminisce Over You, For Real

I only know the title of this piece sampled from some De La and I can't tell you what the joint was.That's odd for me who generally knows the OG, but not this time. So I listened and it comes sweetly in line with a friendly shout from Mark Anthony Neal, a man I knew back in the days of the blogosphere, the blackosphere and all places yonder, now more than a decade gone. There were others of course from back when I remember, first in line Jimi Izrael who got me on NPR with Michel Martin. There were my cadres from the black right, The Conservative Brotherhood, including the most effervescent and flavorful Avery Tooley and the stalwart crew including Baldilocks and the black conservative woman who set the world on fire, Miss LaShawn Barber. Long before there was Candace Owens, Shay Riley at Booker Rising ran down the facts. Prior to that I came with it on the Talented Tenth Progressive flavor at Vision Circle with the celebrated Good Doctor Lester Spence, my old boys Ed Brown, Craig Nulan and others I haven't spoken to or heard from in quite some time. Pshaw. Not long before that, I was all over various places in the pre-blog world including being the FAQ keeper at SCAA in the wild days of Usenet. That's where I met some of the men I call my existential partners - whose footsteps I could be or they could be me depending on how the wind tossed the butterfly. One of them has recently stepped up to legendary status, running the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. It's good to know good people. It reminds me to try to be good.

But I'm impatient, and I don't even suffer my own foolishness very well. As I have for the last 30 years at least, I've tried to live by the code that no concept you hold is valid unless it can be integrated without contradiction into the sum of your experience. Or as Cornel West would put it, your praxis has to have integrity. The code of your life has to compile with no errors, and you should not disregard the many warnings. You stand the risk of running in infinite circles. Somewhere around the end of 2007 when I was trying to help put Microsoft on the EPM map and a toxic green goo of mortgages started eating a hole in the floor of the American economy, I underwent a series of tough revisions that continued through the election of Barack Obama. I came to the slow realization that identity had tipped the scales away from reason, and I had to quit investing any effort in politics. Around the same time, continuing in my mad scramble for the dosh point, aka 'fuck you money' I assumed a bit too much about that realm called 'upper management' as well as that called the 'upper middle class'. I reset and went Stoic. I was fortunate to get a heads down job that I could work at home and enjoyed the blessings of focused technical work, let my face grow shaggy and began my martial education. I became friends with the local first responders, the local gunsmiths, the local FBI agents, the local dojo masters, the local gyms and the art of making brilliant salads. I had high and low points, and one notably on the same day having completed at the age of 57 a grueling ruck. It might be said that this was all part of becoming a military dad, but it was about my own health and getting away from political thrash and trash.

Nowadays, my Stoic journey is mostly complete but I've learned that an attitude of mockery can only get you so far in politics. I can't say that I am entirely done with writing. Even though there's nothing I want to tell and explain to the world, I still need to be a good example. So I think it is time to walk as a man in full, well in the moment, beholden to my own ethics, remaining anti-bullshit, but as open and social as possible. I don't have much more to do to protect my family, and I still have some great stories and good ideas in me. I've made some pretty excellent friends too.

So when I look at that black life, I'm left with very little but the sweet BBQ crust on the grill of my life. There's a flavor that will never disappear, but these days it's more than just pork ribs I'm grilling. It's bulgogi. It's not only Kingsford for the fire, I'm doing it just fine with propane and propane accessories. It's an odd feeling not to want to do anything particularly blackified, but I'm used to it. What I'm not used to is looking like an old black man and I hardly know what to expect of outward expectations. Still, I think like with every other experience down that disciplined road of non-contradictory integration, what I will continue to do is tell the straight story. They say that the human body replaces all but its brain cells every 7 years. It's curious looking back at what I was into 15 years ago. Well, I wrote what I needed to write.

These days, over in Quora where I spend most of my time online, I answer a good percentage of the questions they throw me. It gets me about 200k hits a month, which is better than I ever got on the blog. That's the preferred format for the moment, because I don't have to put stuff out there from my own imagination. People ask me. I like that, and it's a long format. I was surprised to get 6k karma points over a weekend just posting a picture of my parents wedding at Reddit. I mean we are pretty good looking but it's difficult swallowing that one post being the most popular thing I ever did in 20 years online. I continue to write my mostly serious and expository stuff here at Cobb, if only to keep track of where I'm thinking outside of work. And Facebook is for anyone who wants to be a lightweight friend. I have an odd mix of twitter followers @mdcbowen, and I really do hope to increase that and do some more vlogging on YouTube. I'll try to get some kind of hookup with the IDW which is for me right now the most righteous thing on the interwebz.

I'm a traveler, and some might even call me a pioneer. What I know for sure is that if I have a real curiosity, or something to prove, I'm not afraid to go there. I took the test and I'm very high on openness to experience. I did a tally and I have been to 96 of the 150 largest cities in the US. Sounds like me. Speaking of which, it's about time to hit the road. I'll let you know when I get my Porsche.

The Misery Gap, Kantian Good Intent and Non-Zero Sum Activism

Consider the misery gap.

Imagine that you are an American who feels out of touch with harsh reality. You can go watch superhero movies because they are violent and exciting but just really fantasy violence. You're safe. You're comfortable. You watch TV shows where young stupid awkward people are cute and have nice apartments and don't get into car wrecks that jacks up their insurance premiums. You're young and healthy enough to get totally wasted whenever you feel like partying and you don't even think about health consequences. I mean you'd eat cheeseburgers every day if you could live with the gut and hip consequences. I mean meat is more dangerous than alcohol, right? OK let's not get to serious here.

The bottom line is that you're a happy American and you've got it pretty good. You are, dare we say it, privileged. I mean not compared to your friends and co-workers but compared to all kinds of other miserable people. You think to yourself, I'm happy to talk about all kinds of ways that people could be less miserable. And I'm all for being supportive of that. I'm a good person and I will speak up, because that just makes sense to me. You think, I wouldn't want to live in a harsh reality like so many other people, and I want people to live like I do. More friends for everybody, right? In your world, there is practically limitless freedom. The only limits on freedom are the zero-sum kind. When I take advantage of you, directly that's wrong. Otherwise I can swing my fist anywhere, so long as it doesn't hit anybody's nose.  

OK That's the setup. 

What then is the zero-sum nature of activism? When you talk about all kinds of ways that people could be less miserable, is there a cost? Is positivity not always only positive? When everybody is working to make the world a better place so long as our intentions are good, then we are all good right?

Cobb doesn't think so. This is the theoretical context that occurred to me as I was thinking about a 'misery gap' in the following scenario. If Trump makes you miserable, if the very fact of Trump is making America miserable again, then why do people risk death to come here? Most certainly they know that they will face violence and dangers of the action movie type where commandos with black camo and automatic weapons will shout at them. Certainly they must know that they won't be able to get car insurance.

---

Anyway. That train of thought had a hard time climbing a hill to see the promised land. Meanwhile Fareed Z sees some facts and makes some speculations. The facts are the most interesting part.

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN: Given President Trump's mean spirited and often bigoted attitudes on immigration, it pains me to say this, but he is right, that the United States faces a crisis with its asylum system. Democrats might hope that the out-of-control situation at the southern border undermines Trump's image among his base as a tough guy who can tackle immigration. But they should be careful. It could actually work to the president's advantage.

Since 2014, the flow of asylum seekers into the United States has skyrocketed. Last year, immigration courts received 162,000 asylum claims. A 240 percent increase from 2014. The result is a staggering backlog with more than 300,000 asylum cases pending and the average immigration case has been pending for more than 700 days. It's also clear that the rules surrounding asylum are vague, lax and being gamed.

The initial step for many asylum seekers is to convince officers that they have a credible fear of persecution in their home countries. And about 75 percent meet that criteria. Some applicants for asylum have suspiciously similar stories using identical phrases. Many simply use the system to enter the U.S. and then melt into the shadows or gain a work permit while their application is pending.

Asylum is meant to be granted to a very small number of people in extreme circumstances. Not as a substitute for the process of immigration itself. Yet, the two have gotten mixed up. As the Atlantic's David Frum has pointed out, the idea of a right to asylum is a relatively recent one dating to the early years of the Cold War. Guilt ridden over the rejection of many Jewish refugees during World War II the U.N. created a right of asylum to protect those who are fleeing regimes where they would be killed our imprisoned because of their identity or beliefs. This standard has gotten broader and broader over the years.

And now includes threats of gang warfare and domestic violence. These looser criteria coupled with the reality that this is a safe way to enter the U.S. have made the asylum system easy to abuse. Applications from Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans have surged even though the murder rate in their countries has been cut in half.

More broadly, hundreds of millions of people around the world who live in poor, unstable regions where threats of violence abound could easily apply for asylum. Do they all have the legal right to enter the U.S. through a backdoor, bypassing the normal immigration process? The Trump administration's approach has been mostly to toughen up the criteria. Hire more judges, push Mexico to keep applicants from entering the U.S.

But a much larger fix is needed. The criteria for asylum need to be rewritten and substantially tightened. The number of courts and officials dealing with asylum must be massively expanded. People should not be able to use asylum claims as a way to work in America. There needs to be a much greater cooperation with the home countries of these applicants rather than insults, threats and aid freezes.

No one fix will do it, but we need the kind of sensible bipartisan legislation that has resolved past immigration crises. Democrats have spent most of their efforts on this topic, assailing the Trump administration for its heartlessness. Fine. But that does not address the roots of this genuine crisis. If things continue to spiral downward and America's southern border seems out of control, Trump's tough rhetoric and hard line stance will become increasingly attractive to the public.

Keep in mind, that the rise of populism in the Western world is almost everywhere tied to fears of growing out of control immigration.

(published now without further comment)

 

 

Penultimate Histories

This morning as I was sleeping through a conference call, I found some reason to check the stats on this blog. It turns out that some Chinese bot was keying on the word 'yellow' according to Google. Since the phrase I saw contained the phrase '500 tons of yellow' I quickly discerned that we were talking about the Valery Plame scandal and the matter of yellowcake in the evidentiary buckets of Iraqi causus belli. 

Just last week I asked over at Quora to some intelligency guys what they considered to be the amount and quality of disinformation assaulting our senses in the miasma of the interwebz. I got some fair answers, but nothing definitive. I'll go back later and ask another way. What I suspect is that the qualified experts on these matters pay attention to the qualified experts. The problem is than unless you are somehow hooked into their writing, it's hard to find out their syllabi. For me, on matters like Plame and Yellowcake, I would depend on Bellingcat. This reminds me that I am awaiting some factual resolution of the recent outrage over mined ships in the Persian Gulf, keywords 'limpet mines above the waterline'. 

What I would like to start now, is a new category called Penultimate Histories. It is the longitudinal stuff missing from the MSM that gives the appropriate context to the study of complex issues that are spun our way through various craptastic means. This is very much like the curated quality of a BoxTagged XRepublic except that I'm the sole dude. I have to start somewhere, and I can't get this crap out of my head. 

From Liberal To Conservative To Neither

Many people with whom I engage online have come to know me because of the work that I did as a black conservative. It is often difficult for them to see me in any other context. A question I answered on Quora may help those with genunie curiosity. 

Q. What turned you from liberal to conservative?

A. Seeds were planted all through my life. I noticed contradictions and lapses in Left politics. Having grown up with both my parents as cultural Marxists and social workers, I was right in the middle of the vanguard.

The first blow to that thinking came in the form of the work by Thomas Sowell whom I read in college. This was about the same time as the second Reagan presidency lead the country out of inflation. So by the mid 80s I was definitely pro-business and while not a supply-sider, definitely mindful of all economic aspects of political thinking. Having worked in a bank in the early 80s, I understood that people could not game the market and had no misgivings that capitalism was rigged against the people.

The second thing that happened was I came to understand the limits of Affirmative Action, having written the algorithms of the Balanced Workforce Model of Xerox Corporation that won awards from the Business Roundtable as the most progessive organization. From that I started to understand the actual supply and demand as well as the impact of political thought on meritocracy. Basically Affirmative Action is little more than a planned economy. In that way, it can never work and never not be controversial.

Thirdly, I came to recognize the ego-driven mendacity of the ‘activist’ world. I did so by participating in that smushy landscape of performance poetry and bohemian self-righteousness. It was fun, but it was not productive. Around that same time I began to sense that which was best described by David Graeber (the man who coined ‘we are the 99%’) as the ‘bullshit economy’. I ran from it and started taking money more seriously. Well because I got married and had kids, quickly. I moved to the South from NYC.

Then in quick succession several things happened to me that pushed me over the edge. Of course there was 9/11. Then I finally read some real history about the Soviet Union and learned (in my 40s!) how evil Stalin was. Enron collapsed and cost thousands of people their jobs, but Stalin murdered that many people every week. I had a fairly large payday and started to personally experience how it felt to be envied and hated for being rich. I found myself shopping at Walmart and immediately recognized the actual diversity of people that low prices and competitive capitalism serves. I completely lost all contempt for the working class. I found out that only about 3,000 people were ever lynched in the entire history of the post-civil war era.

So ultimately I saw where I came from as childish and self-serving and I was determined to grow up. I decided to understand the Right as well as I understood the Left. It was very surprising how much intellectual depth I found. It was right in front of me all the time but I never paid much attention or took it seriously. It took several years for all of this to gel, and ultimately I abandoned political conservatism but I came to respect a way of thinking that I had never participated in. I walked the miles in conservative shoes.

After I tired of political conservatism (it took about 8 years), I began engaging in what I call my ‘martial education’. At the same time as I recognized the divergence between Progressivism and standard Liberalism, I recognized how Identity Politics as well as a fanatic ideological puritanism struck Conservatism in the mainstream. So I see a wide variety of threads in these ideologies, few of which have clarity to their participants and partisans. I gradually adopted Stoicism which ultimately was fairly simple. These days I am fascinated (still) by history, and newly by psychology which as a computer science guy is fairly rare. Also behavioral economics and Taleb’s Incerto is fascinating to me and I really hope to square the circle by understanding the philosophy of religion. I expect big things from Aquinas, Nuemann, Jung, Spinoza and a few others.

I think the biggest matter of political philosophy that faces Western Civilization is that of relativism and shallow atheism. There is an essential lack of discipline of thought that only a certain element of ruin will adjust. Our ruling classes are currently not threatened by the nihilism they tolerate and are easily able to retain power in a lazy way. It seems to me that on certain conservatives perceive this threat, while the rest appear content to Let It Be. It’s not worth it to me to pledge any fidelity to any cadre of political philosophers. My way is to be Stoic and let things fall apart, but with a stubborn streak of public engagement of this sort in Quora. Now I really have to get back to work…

Myths of Nation Building

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mau Mau Factor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

 

Obligatory Seriousness on Abortion in Alabama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Great Inflated Expectations

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

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

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

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

Anyway. I hope you get it. 

For the Record: Roland Fryer & Charter Schools

A Note About the Black American Elites

(from the Quora Archives - Feb 2016)

Q: Do they mostly live in DC and ATL?

A: It's more or less true. Among my peers who generally have graduate degrees, there are a handful of cities that are considered when they want to start off their careers. I would say that there is a select subset of folks who, like me, got fairly deeply into black organizations, clubs or fraternal orgs in college. So we had a certain social credibility that we wanted to extend into our professional lives. So for that kind of glory, we would naturally ask, where are the smartest, coolest most well-connected black folks going to be found in America?

The DC area became one of those spots primarily because of the number of political connections that could be had. While the Congressional Black Caucus was in its heyday and one might be within whispering distance of power brokers like Ron Brown or Kweisi Mfume, there was no better place to be than inside the Beltway. So what generally happened was that the reputation and the actual demographics of Prince George's County went through the roof. 'PG' County was still pretty high up the list last time I checked.

It bears repeating that among the black elite, there are hangouts and vacation spots that are popular just as with all elites. Again I can only speak about what was hot back in the late 80s to mid 90s when I was one of those singles trying to maximize. All you have to look for, really, was the National Brotherhood of Skiiers Summits, or perhaps a Sinbad concert in Jamaica. Also the Essence Awards were a very cool place to make such connections. Talking to those folks, you could easily find out where the cool kids were living.

I lived for a short time adjacent to Fort Greene in Brooklyn where Spike Lee hung out. Soon after I got married, I headed down (by mutual agreement) to Atlanta. I still have fond memories of tooling through the suburbs just East of downtown out Cascade Road and admiring that particular set of upscale black residences. Oh. look that's where Evander Holyfield lives. Oh, Gladys Knight lives over in that neighborhood. In the end, I returned to Los Angeles, but for a time I was seriously flirting with that particular suburban lifestyle. It's all about the right neighborhood and the right church in the right city.

What's particularly appealing about these enclaves is that they come automatically with a Cosby-Show prestige. (No matter what Cosby does now, does not erase that glory which was the Huxtables). It's something that matters less these days, but back in the times before people even considered Colin Powell, this was about as prestigious as you could get.

Understand that this primarily applies to black Americans in the upper middle class, folks who can pick and choose more or less where they want to live. But rich black Americans require a little less of this prestige. I mean when you actually are Evander Holyfield or Prince, you can build your house where ever and *you* make the neighborhood, rather than the neighborhood making you.

Los Angeles still has some prestige. There are established neighborhoods like View Park, Ladera Heights and Baldwin Hills that still have drawing power. Also certain parts of Altadena and Pasadena have that old school appeal. But as I talk you young folks now coming out of grad programs with minds for money, they are not so concerned with such associations. They are buying real estate for market value in unfashionable neighborhoods, improving them and then selling them or renting them out. Similarly, my kids now in their 20s pay little attention to the old school prestige of these traditionally upscale black neighborhoods.

I think that there is nothing particularly unusual about this. Black America is simply a much larger ethnic group and every part of it does not mainstream or rise in society at once. I've known folks with five generations of college whose fortunes have risen and fallen and risen again, all with different relationships with these neighborhoods and their equivalents in foreign countries. But I think there will always be some upscale black folks around DC, ATL, NYC and LA. That's an American tradition. (Chicago, I don't know.)

 

The Problem with Empowerment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Global Warming Isn't Dangerous

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

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

American Poverty

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

One Little Two Little Three Little Indians

Did Amerindians get reparations for the attrocities committed on them by European Americans and African Americans(Buffalo Soldiers)?

 

No.

Each of these tribal groups can be thought of as something akin to small nations that ultimately made war with each other and with the US. The best short way to describe it is as bad diplomacy that ended in war with the US winning all of the wars.

Many of the battles of these wars could be considered atrocities, but they were on a relatively small scale. Granted most of these tribes were also very small so relatively speaking they could be called massacres. But the full scale and scope of these small, violent conflicts, were not great systematic exercises in force by the US. From my limited research, it cannot be said that the US ever used a fraction of its war making capacity against the various tribes as compared with its wars against itself (Civil War) or with Mexico[1] or Great Britain[2]. Instead, it is better characterized as a series of sporadic incursions.

Consider the largest and most famous of these Indian wars. The Great Sioux War of 1876 included the Battle of the Little Big Horn also known as Custer’s Last Stand. The entire war resulted in less than 600 killed and wounded, total for both sides[3]. The legendary forced removal of Indians from the South known as the Trail of Tears took place over a period of over 15 years. Large numbers are cited but the details[4] show a different picture.

In all of the conflicts with Indians here in North America, there were always political partisans on both sides of the issue, often with the wrong issues at hand. In retrospect it is only if you try to summarize the entire history into a short paragraph that it sounds like a systematic campaign of genocide.

When I look at this history I think it is most important to observe the specific actors and their intentions, capabilities and contexts in order to make proper judgements. Or as young people might say today “It is racist to bundle Chippewas, Seminoles, Creeks, Comanche, Sioux, Apache and hundreds of other ‘Indians’ as if they were all the same.” It’s just as wrong to say they had common interests today as it was during the time of the conflicts. So no single settlement can possibly be reached. Indeed this was certainly the case then, as now. No single chief could speak for all Indians as no President could speak for all Americans.

What each of these peoples got were the deals they negotiated and the wars they engaged. There are therefore hundreds of answers, none of which falls neatly into a bucket of ‘reparations for atrocities’.

Footnotes

[1] Mexican–American War - Wikipedia

[2] War of 1812 - Wikipedia

[3] Great Sioux War of 1876 - Wikipedia

[4] Trail of Tears - Wikipedia

The Divisors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Non-Civility Rant

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Simple Definition and Defense of Western Modernity

Q: Why are intellectuals judgmental and elitist?

A:Because that is the point of disciplined intellectual discovery, to know with certainty that X is right and Y is wrong and to know all the reasons for that to be the case.

We have dozens of ways of thinking about the advantages of disciplined intellectual discovery in Western culture. Here are a few examples:

• “If you had a time machine, would you go back and (kill Hitler, rule over primitives, play the stock market)?” The canonical book is by Mark Twain “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs’s Court”. Obviously the premise is that the modern contemporary person is a beneficiary of the collected wisdom of the past, that prior people did not know.
• “We can put a man on the moon but we can’t X. / It’s not rocket science.”
  We presume that the knowledge to do very complicated and impressive things is already demonstrated. If so, why is this particular problem so difficult to solve?
• “Been there, done that.”
  A very commonplace expression that says that once a lesson has been learned, or something experienced, we are supposed to progress from that point and are bored by repeating something we already know.

I like to repeat the expression “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” People who develop some expertise already know what new ideas, products and services are likely to roll out to the general public. Think of them as ‘makers’ and ‘early adopters’ as well as ‘hackers’. People seek to improve a situation whether or not the rest of the public understands what the innovation is, they commit to living in the new, changed way even if it makes them appear strange and unfamiliar to the average Joe.

To be against judgment and ‘elite’ knowledge is to undermine the premises of modern Western societies. Understand that modern is the opposite of tribal. And so to accept modernity is to accept certain things that are not so obvious today. So I’ll take a moment to remind you.

• In a modern society, you accept that expert information can be applied to all people, no matter who they are. You have a right to question based on reason.
• In a modern society, you accept secular meritocracy.
• In a modern society, you accept conformity to norms and standards of your own choosing. You can be an individual.
• In a modern society, you accept that you can give and receive, buy and sell and otherwise interact with people not known to you, not related to you and not like you.
• In a modern society, you accept that you can use money and therefore have a specialized skill whose value can be transferred anywhere.

The opposite is the case in a tribal society:

• In a tribal society, you accept that only certain people can possess certain knowledge. You cannot question certain members of the tribe no matter what the reason.
• In a tribal society, people only inherit status or are granted status by the rulers, but demonstrated skill means nothing without the blessing of a tribal leader.
• In a tribal society, you are what people say you are. You conform to your predetermined role. You have no choice in the matter.
• In a tribal society, you communicate only through pre-existing channels. Never above or below your level. Marriages are arranged, for example.
• In a tribal society, your prospects are set. No matter how skilled you are, your work is owned by the tribe. You cannot rise above your tribal affiliation.

If you look at ‘intellectuals’ as a tribe, then you will believe that everything they do is necessarily elitist and done for the benefit of themselves and their relatives and friends. But Western institutions that are setup to attract, fund and support intellectuals are precisely the opposite. They promote that the new ideas, products and services will outlast the individual lives of their creators and thus can be passed down through the generations. This is the case with Universities, which are open to the public, and with public Corporations whose stocks can be owned by the public. Democracies allocate political power to the government through the participation of the public. This is modern.

If you withdraw your understanding and support for modern institutions, then you can only be a marginal participant in modern society. This is happening in the US. Anti-vaxxers have withdrawn their understanding and support of public health institutions, for example. Anarchists withdraw their understanding and support of the rule of law. Many people are now withdrawing their support and understanding of democratic institutions. I think the most catastrophic failure of Western society would follow the abandonment of the study of the development of Western Civilization itself, and I find evidence of that in the decreasing popularity of Classics and History in the Humanities. In fact, I believe it is an ignorance of these particular subjects that would lead to the inevitability of the interpretation of all intellectual work as tribal.

There is nothing to guarantee that Western civilization continues except its continued understanding, use and defense. So to disregard its intellectual fruits is the first step. This has been the program of historical revisionism aiming to paint Western Civilization as something other than what it is, as in the famous quote attributed to Gandhi .

Currently, many Americans take for granted that their inheritance in the West is strictly a function of free capital markets and science and technology with some small hat tip to the American Constitution - but that the realm of values and morals stands apart from the history of the West. This is unfortunate, shallow and exploitable. I think this failure recognize the depth and importance of Western modernism can likely reach crisis proportions, but in the end Western modernism will win. It is simply the matter of what enables the modern masses over primitive tribes - the durability, capacity and power of modern institutions over the inherent limits of tribal thinking.

Obligatory Seriousness on J. Smollett

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

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

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

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

I say this:

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

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

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

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

Wherefore Art Thou Mr. Swift?

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

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

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

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

Some References by Allan Bloom

The civil rights movement provides a good example of this change in thought. In its early days almost all the significant leaders, in spite of tactical and temperamental differences, relied on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They could charge whites not only with the most monstrous injustices but also with contradicting their own most sacred principles. The blacks were the true Americans in demanding the equality that belongs to them as human beings by natural and political right. This stance implied a firm conviction of the truth of the principles of natural right and of their fundamental efficacy within the Constitutional tradition, which, although tarnished, tends in the long run toward fulfilling those principles. They therefore worked through Congress, the Presidency, and, above all, the Judiciary. By contrast, the Black Power movement that supplanted the older civil rights movement—leaving aside both its excesses and its very understandable emphasis on self-respect and refusal to beg for acceptance—had at its core the view that the Constitutional tradition was always corrupt and was constructed as a defense of slavery. Its demand was for black identity, not universal rights. Not rights but power counted. It insisted on respect for blacks as blacks, not as human beings simply.

Yet the Constitution does not promise respect for blacks, whites, yellows, Catholics, Protestants, or Jews. It guarantees the protection of the rights of individual human beings. This has not proved to be enough, however, to what is perhaps by now a majority of Americans.

The upshot of all this for the education of young Americans is that they know much less about American history and those who were held to be its heroes. This was one of the few things that they used to come to college with that had something to do with their lives. Nothing has taken its place except a smattering of facts learned about other nations or cultures and a few social science formulas. None of this means much, partly because little attention has been paid to what is required in order truly to convey the spirit of other places and other times to young people, or for that matter to anyone, partly because the students see no relevance in any of it to the lives they are going to lead or to their prevailing passions. It is the rarest of occurrences to find a youngster who has been infused by this education with a longing to know all about China or the Romans or the Jews.

All to the contrary. There is an indifference to such things, for relativism has extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life. Young Americans have less and less knowledge of and interest in foreign places. In the past there were many students who actually knew something about and loved England, France, Germany, or Italy, for they dreamed of living there or thought their lives would be made more interesting by assimilating their languages and literatures. Such students have almost disappeared, replaced at most by students who are interested in the political problems of Third World countries and in helping them to modernize, with due respect to their old cultures, of course. This is not learning from others but condescension and a disguised form of a new imperialism. It is the Peace Corps mentality, which is not a spur to learning but to a secularized version of doing good works.

Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind (pp. 33-34). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Actually openness results in American conformism—out there in the rest of the world is a drab diversity that teaches only that values are relative, whereas here we can create all the life-styles we want. Our openness means we do not need others. Thus what is advertised as a great opening is a great closing. No longer is there a hope that there are great wise men in other places and times who can reveal the truth about life—except for the few remaining young people who look for a quick fix from a guru. Gone is the real historical sense of a Machiavelli who wrested a few hours from each busy day in which “to don regal and courtly garments, enter the courts of the ancients and speak with them.”

None of this concerns those who promote the new curriculum. The point is to propagandize acceptance of different ways, and indifference to their real content is as good a means as any. It was not necessarily the best of times in America when Catholics and Protestants were suspicious of and hated one another; but at least they were taking their beliefs seriously, and the more or less satisfactory accommodations they worked out were not simply the result of apathy about the state of their souls. Practically all that young Americans have today is an insubstantial awareness that there are many cultures, accompanied by a saccharine moral drawn from that awareness: We should all get along. Why fight? In 1980, during the crisis with Iran, the mother of one of the hostages expressed our current educational principles very well. She went to Iran to beg for her son’s release, against the express wishes of the government of her country, the very week a rescue of the hostages was attempted. She justified her conduct by explaining that a mother has a right to try to save her son and also to learn a new culture. These are two basic rights, and her trip enabled her to kill two birds with one stone.

Actually the problem of cultural difference could have been faced more easily here in America forty years ago. When I was in college, a young Mississippian was lodged in my dormitory room for a few days during a visit of the University of Virginia debating team, of which he was a member. It was my first meeting with an intelligent, educated Southerner. He explained the inferiority of blacks to me, the reasons for Jim Crow, and how all that was a part of a unique way of life. He was an attractive, lively, amiable, healthy youngster. I, however, was horrified by him because I was still ethnocentric. I took my Northern beliefs to be universal. The “different strokes for different folks” philosophy had not yet taken full hold. Fortunately the homogenization of American culture that has occurred since that enables us to avoid such nasty confrontations. Only obviously pathological lower-class types now hold the racist views of my young visitor. Southerners helped to fashion our theoretical view of culture, but the Southern culture they intended to defend disappeared.

Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind (pp. 34-35). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

 

 

Obligatory Seriousness on Living in the Trump Era

For a number of reasons, I am finding my way to reading John Stuart Mill 'On Liberty' for the first time. It's lovely. I picked it up particularly to read its second chapter, the one on free speech. In those meaty and well-considered paragraphs, Mill does a fairly excellent job of considering the reason of wrong thinking in both the dimensions of truth and utility. It is truly a masterwork of thought that forces one to consider his premises at several levels and from a dialectic point of view. Of course, I was looking to receive such wisdom. It is consonant with my lifelong civil libertarianism. Just previous to this book was the Heterodox Academy's Jonathan Haight, whose 'Coddling of the American Mind' is a bit less precient and wise than Allan Bloom's presaging book 'The Closing of the American Mind' that I read back in the 80s. But now that everything Bloom has predicted is obvious, the closed minds need reminding that they are being coddled. What could be a better metaphor for the presidency of Donald Trump. A closed-minded man who has been coddled.

The helicopter parents of Trump are, of course, the power hungry and wandering tribe of Republicans who try desperately to be Conservatives but end up just being to the right of common sense. For all I can see, they do so in a retro kind of way which is quite odd considering that few could remember much of what the recently deceased George HW Bush did, besides be two orders of magnitude more dignified than the current Oval Occupant. Since I am into my 10th year of Stoicism, I can't say that I've pursued much satisfaction in political philosophy. I am truly happy with those sectors of American life that are about as good as it gets, as long as I am able to appreciate and afford them. I've ridden the tallest rollercoaster in the park. That's enough. I don't need to remain high. I don't need to chide the Republicans for their failure, I just occasionally need to hear better men than myself do so, and prepare for the end times when better men have abandoned the field that is America's ruling class. In the meantime, as I cultivate and tend to my own worldview, I think my observations on the state of sub-catastrophe might be of some use.

No there is no catastrophe. The Department of Justice has not been dismantled. Trump's own government (as if) is setting after him and his associates with a view to burning them in oil. The fate of that dastardly subset of government functionaries and flunkies will burn brightly enough to satisfy cynics and witch-hunters alike. But there seem to be few with the courage to pursue actual justice of the sort the country most desperately needs. I speak of the impending collapse of our bourgeois proletariat in the face of the coming inflation as the Fed inevitably raises interest rates after the ridiculous holiday of free money certain Americans have gotten. I'm not sure how to feel about that in consideration of my remaining hopes to climb higher in society. Another dumbell curve strategy, I suppose. Plan for great success and great failure at the same time. What we have been able to demonstrate and complain about over the past couple of years is astounding, and I still consider a great portion of that to be courtly theatre of the most sniping sort. Even Haight in his book makes the exact same mistake he blamed Trump for in citing foolishness 'on both sides' of the dustup in Hooterville. Or was that Charlottesville? Since we know Americans hate Americans for being Americans, it certainly doesn't help that the head political hack in charge of the Executive Branch has consigned all of his enemies and non-flunkies to the sharp end of his blunt force Twitter feed. That kind of divisiveness used to be understated. Now, as the young people say, it's fire. A dumpster fire. I know it's a cliche, but what is really happening that's so horrible in the long view of things?

China, Russia, Mexico, Britain, Syria and various shithole countries.
The American people do not understand China. They do not believe that Russia is dangerous or that Mexico creates refugees. They don't believe that Britain can possibly survive without an empire or at the very least a seat or two in Brussels and they don't believe that the USA did anything to actually destroy ISIS. I can't tell if my assessment of those beliefs are accurate, but I do get a sense that there aren't very many 5,000 word essays that are making the appropriate rounds to put things clearly.

What is think is most important to understand about China is their bloodless attitude towards the emerging world. To me, it seems like they cannot believe that any other country could possibly be as civilizingly industrious as they are and so they are obligated to lead the way. I suppose I believe some of the worst things about China that many other countries blather on about the US, with respect to 'imperialism'. China is more of a obsequious nanny who was whipped as a child. So it holds a rod over those in its expanding sphere of influence saying 'concrete is good for you'. As if nobody actually knew. The obnoxious Chinese are in that way, like the fearful parent who publicly scolds her child in the supermarket, not caring who hears them whimper. Trump's America is incapable of seducing away China's soon-to-be client states. He'd rather go toe to toe in a battle royale. Americans don't particularly care to be nationalists. It's fair to say we haven't been since Kennedy and the Space Age. So there is no gumption to correct Trump's tariff slap fest. Moe hits Curly. Curly hits Moe. China is indeed stealing intellectual property right and left, and is most certainly engaged in cyberwarfare against the US, as is Russia. There is a smart way to straighten all that out. Trump will not pursue the smart way. That might have been the job of Rex Tillerson, the only member aside from General Mattis, whom I found to be exceedingly admirable in the current White House. Tillerson is out. Tweeted out.

As for Mexico, it's a rehash of nationalists vs globalists. Not really interesting to me anyway. Mexico makes good car parts for some small minority of cars Americans care about. Mexicans themselves make for good Americans when the choice is made clear. There's no doubt they'll work for it, but half of America doesn't want them to. Because nobody is illegal. More tweet logic.

--

Once again I am exasperated in trying to make sense of some consistent political philosophy that American candidates and the electorate are disciplined to. I don't know why I bother. I am at peace with that part of the world fouled by its own nasty terms. I have better places to go.

 

 

First Man

What is wonderful about the film 'First Man' is that it is minimally romantic. A simple raw kind of action movie - the kind that, rather like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly has the camera linger on faces that don't say a lot - and it lets the dramatic situation flourish in your own mind. It's the direct opposite of a Quentin Tarantino movie. It doesn't talk its way forward.

I noticed that so many times when the protagonist had to deal with a mercilessly difficult time, I was cursing in his stead. But he didn't curse. He didn't complain. He overcame, and there were no words to describe his overcoming - just the evidence of triumph. It's the best kind of stoic victory, and yet I cannot come up with a film in long memory save that of Russell Crowe's Gladiator when I was so moved by an actor grieving over the death of a loved one. When Ryan Gosling's Neil Armstrong cries, it is crushingly honest.

While this isn't a talkative movie, it is not spare. The music and sound effects are rich, epic and vital. It makes you reconsider all prior films about spaceflight through the dimension of sound in the same way Saving Private Ryan rewrote the book on the sound effects of war. With something as simple and brilliant as the sound of rivets being torqued in steel you think might buckle any moment, the fragility of massive rockets becomes eerily immediate. I have a friend who was a test engineer for SeaLaunch and the violent vibrations depicted in this movie brought his testimony to mind. There was no jawboning about g-forces, you could just feel yourself gripping the seat.

The fascinating aspect of this film to me is how frankly and simply it dealt with the period. It did so in a way that appealed to my growing up memories of the time. I was the kid who wanted to go out and play only tangentially understanding how Mom and Dad were getting along - but definitely understanding what each of them wanted from me individually. I understood the difference between a handshake and a hug, and what it meant to have a responsibility and how little tolerance there was for excuse making in certain endeavors.

It's difficult to say with any specificity how clear everything was in the pre-multicultural America. I think it is fair to say that there was a lot more silence into which everybody let various dramatic interpretations flourish in their own minds. But those interpretations, in the mainstream, were no more complex then than they are now. Today, everything gets said, whether or not it is useful or polite to be said out loud. So I perceive that words keep speaking louder than actions and that our most outstanding achievements revolve around words. If only the inviolate rules of physics forced us to deal with the consequence of mistaken words.

And so there is no romance with spaceflight. Everyone wished that there was poetry in Neil Armstrong, but he even botched his line stepping off the LEM. We all know that it should have read, "One small step for a man. One giant leap for mankind." Even knowing that I know he missed the vowel is testimony to the stickiness of words, the phrases and memes that plaster our minds to static conceptual worlds in which we rarely put our physical selves. You can say 'Tranquility Base', but can you get there? Only in your romantic mind.