Cobb

Sister Night: Forgotten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

 

I Remember Cult of the Dead Cow

I can remember back in 92 or so when I discovered the Cult. They were definitely cool, and surely punk. I was just around that time getting more interested in the lo-fi of UNIX, but not deeply. (Damn you Xerox!)

 

Here's the odd thing. I was working in Cambridge and starting to do that kind of hacking thing, but I chose to go Mac and multimedia instead of building a minix box. I was already at panix.com and was also at the Well, so even though I appreciated the lo-fi, I never expected anything from the punks. Still, cDc had cool stuff.

 

So one night I'm surfing and some dude wants to talk to me. I give him my work phone number. He's asking me all kinds of questions about this underworld. Especially 'zines', but he pronounces it with a long i, like it rhymes with 'pines'. His story is that his son has started getting into punk zines and ran away from home and now he's desperately trying to figure out this BBS underworld. I generally assumed that he was FBI and trolling me to reveal something. I wasn't so into the scene that I could be of any help, but he could have been legit.

 

The coolest domain in the world at the time, next to panix.com and well.com was world.std.com. Software Tool and Die. cDc was right up there. Oh shit I almost forgot L0pht. L0pht Heavy Industries. I definitely wanted to join L0pht. It sparks joy as I think about it now. I can't tell you how close I got to moving over to that dark side. Wow.

 

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As much time as I spent in virtual worlds, for me it was always about the premises of augmentation as defined by the PARC dudes. I never really bought into the soul of the new machine, and I guess I was in the game far too soon, but that's a long story. I liked being in the streets as an arcade gamer. So yeah finding cheats online for Virtua Fighter was a coup, but doing stuff online - well I already had the Internet Hunt and the goings on at Well. The internet as a playground for punks wasn't appealing. See I can remember the UNIX wars and I wanted, more than anything else, to reap the whirlwind of the Xerox promise that Apple was maybe sorta just kind of approaching. Except of course that Apple didn't understand data at all. I was still thinking that I might get to be a rocket scientist on Wall Street.  I might have also, now that I think about it, ended up at Peoplesoft which was also over Cambridgeside, but meh. It felt a little granola crunchy for my tastes. So yeah, it was my material ambition that prevented me from doing the punk thing. Well, more my curation of self, and how I expected to live.

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.

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.

 

 

Racial Reasoning, Racist Buckets and Effective Racism

From a Facebook conversation

Here's the difference between 'racial' and 'racist'. Racial means you never ignore race. Race is always taken into consideration. If you are a racialist, like my dad, then you will always say "My friend Bill, a white guy, just called me on the phone today." With racial reasoning, you think race is always material, and that to talk about any kind of situation involving people, if you don't identify them by race, then you're leaving something important out.

Now then the question goes to how deep you think race goes. I think most Americans think race is skin deep and then some. This is more than it used to be 30 years ago. So without making a moral judgment, I say most Americans are 'colorstruck'. Anybody who uses the term 'people of color' are colorstruck. But I think this is mostly a social construction. In fact I say it is a social construction that is fake, but more deeply enforced because of multiculturalism. Most multiculturalism has become hard multiculturalism which is nothing more or less than racial essentialism. How do you know? Anybody who talks about what is 'authentically black' or 'authentically latino' is not talking about culture at all. They are talking about race. 'Cultural appropriation' is nothing more than 'you people have no business doing that'.

The logical inconsistency in this is very clear to me, but I think many Americans have been buffaloed. That is because of the use of the term 'diversity', which again presumes that there are different kinds of people who can and must be identified not by the way they think issue by issue, but by race, gender, sexual preference. And this is why every survey of every kind in the media focuses on these essentialisms. Not blood type. Not what sect of Christianity. Not height. So the difference between 'diversity' and 'variety' are exactly what the multiculturalists want, and they have made you think their way when you use the term. This is a Progressive political agenda that has succeeded. It is being pushed back now by the Heterodox Academy.

It is only a slightly deeper take, and I say mostly negligible if you argue that race is a hard-coded genetic divide of humanity. What you may see in the future but don't see now are people who take a 23-AndMe genetic test and say "I'm not white, I'm 47.3% northern Italian..." or "I'm not black, I'm 12.5% European..". So now we go to quadroons and octoroons? That's still transparently racial. But since we already have 'cultural appropriation' and 'Native American studies', the deeds have already been done. They are racial lines.

Where the rubber meets the road in however these lines are drawn, whether culturally or genetically, is how people expect members of any group to be perceived and judged (or ignored and not judged). If there is any difference whatsoever, then it’s racist. It’s racist because there is a value statement applied to race. It sounds kind of obvious when it is said this way but that’s the difference between racialism and racism. Racialism says you can absolutely divide people into relatively static mutually exclusive groups over which they have no control. You ARE black. Forever. Period. You ARE yellow. Forever. Period. We know all of the races and you are in one of them, period. So I can ALWAYS identify your race and you cannot escape, deny, ignore or hide your racial identity. You are part of this in your immutable history and future. That is racialism. This is what I think most Americans, now colorstruck by multiculturalism now believe. Why? Because American universities have made (starting with black history) it their job to colorize history and politics.

Finally what is racism? Racism is the belief that each of these buckets of humanity have particular destinies and paths to follow and that it is inefficient at best, and immoral at worst for them to deviate from these paths. That people should be judged according to how they fulfill their racial destiny. Every race has natural or social advantages that dictate how they should interact with others inside or outside of their race. SHOULD.

How racist is racist? It’s the difference between, ‘occasionally sorta kinda should’ and ‘always absolutely must under punishment of death’.

 So here’s the most interesting part, and that is Effective Racism. Which basically asks how well does the racist idea work? Now let’s revisit our example of the ‘unarmed black man’ and the white cop.

 If I absolutely believe that I am a black man in the racialist sense. That I am culturally and/or genetically black forever, then half the battle is won. I am racialist myself. If I also believe that I have a particular inescapable role and destiny as a black man and that I SHOULD be (perceived, ignored, judged, not judged) differently according to my racial identity, then I am racist myself. If on that second value I am a ‘occasionally sorta kinda should’ then I might not be an effective racist. But if I’m always subject to that SHOULD, then I am effectively racist. This is what DuBois called dual consciousness. I am an American, but I’m also not.

 So into any situation I go with my own effective racism. My acceptance of my own non-individuality, my own racial consciousness which also accepts that it is significantly different, if not completely opposed to other people’s racial consciousness. That’s pretty damned effective. If I am disciplined to a political ideology that enforces this consciousness upon me, I’m a racist.

It doesn't matter how much power one has if you are playing a racial role. If your racial role says that you should be dominant over your 'opponent' then you will assume an attitude of dominance whether or not you have any real power. If your racial role says that you should be submissive, that will be your attitude and you will find playing the role of a victim is more cherished. If you are to be subversive, then you will play that racial role in the assumption that the system is always corrupt. If you are to be a sacrificed martyr in asymmetrical warfare, then you can be effectively racist all by yourself without provocation. What is a 'trigger warning' other than something that amplifies the power of a college professor when it must be assumed that the role of a minority race is to be so powerless as to be traumatized by the mere utterance of a word? In all of these ways the effectiveness of racism can be determined. It's not about prejudice + power. It's about accepting a racial identity and playing the role.

So in a one on one situation, it matters whether I play the role that is determined by my racial consciousness and makes the situation effectively racist. There’s the dynamic. Is this a racial thing? Is this a racist thing? That’s entirely under the control of the way people decide to behave, effectively with regard to their racial identities.

Everybody, whether or not they accept racial identities imposed upon them, are always in control of how they act and behave in every situation. “I’m going to do the Christian thing.” “I’m going behave professionally.” “I’m going to represent Brooklyn.” “My grandfather told me that I should always do this.”

I should add that I think its critically important to understand that humans will form in-groups and out-groups of arbitrary boundaries. The psychological research is clear, even though I'm not good at citing it. I think the key researchers here are Milgram and Zimbardo, separately. But there is a more recent study that shows that any division of people, even completely arbitrary divisions, will lead to in-group thinking and behavior. We could make it hairy arms + dark colored shoes vs light colored shoes + drinks milk. People conform to any group. So what is the biggest problem with race? That we ever bother to think about it - it will inevitably make value of itself whether or not the lines are logical or consistent.

--

The most pernicious aspect of today's Progressive agenda is the way in which it convinces people to recast their own experiences into a racialized narrative. It does so against the other essentialisms as well, but the focus here is on race. In fact, personal individual experience is in my view, the most important tool that people have to divest themselves of imposed identities whether racial or otherwise. So I am convinced that the cure comes from the realm of psychology and mental health because it seems obvious to me now and in retrospect that only someone who has been psychologically weakened will accept outside identifications.

This is in consonance with my standard definitions of Left vs Right. The Left uses the power of the state to defend against dysfunctions of the family. The Right uses the power of family to defend against dysfunctions of the state. Therefore when challenged the Left will run to Congress and the Right will run home. The Right will more likely dysfunction into honor cultures of blood and soil. The Left will more likely dysfunction into Orwellian state cultures.

This is also in consonance with my particular definition of America's political split on identity and intersectionality; the two ideological tribes:

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

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

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

Conclusion: None. I just provide this for analysis.
PS. Most of us are familiar with this non-discrimination language but don't even know what a 'creed' is or what creeds were considered in drafting the language.

Obligatory Seriousness on the Potential Politicization of Black Panther

Politics has overstepped its bounds into the realms of society and culture, and Americans are caught up in social debates that they think can be politicized. Politicians, recognizing the opportunity and not being sufficiently qualified to actually write good policy, take advantage of this moment and attempt to ride herd on such social and cultural issues. This has gone on long enough to be mistaken for ordinary politics. It is not, and sooner or later people will tire of it.

In the meantime we are stuck with identity politics and errors of judgment, ie current affairs and personalities taking place of principled ideology. Somehow people believe that the person of Donald Trump actually represents Conservatism. Somehow people believe that the person of Hillary Clinton actually represents Liberalism. So while people march against a person believing they are attacking a wayward ideology and the idiots who support it, only a few people negotiate the difference. And so with the same masses of people who believed that the person of Barack Obama represented a particular ideology the noise will continue.

Apart from that on the purely social and cultural side, I have much to say about the role of superheros and such movies in American culture. In short, we’ve gotten cartoony. I think it says more than a little when our cinema is most predictably popular around Disney animations and Marvel comics. We can’t hope for Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, nor should we, but we should notice how much our role models in film have become two dimensional.

And so it stands to reason that many black Americans, although they might know better, want everything the mainstream gets. Therefore we have dark ‘skinned’ emojis and browsers that remember which ones we choose. Similarly, we have superheros painted into ‘inner-city’ tropes, like Luke Cage. I happened to think Luke Cage was not so super at all, nor were his contemporaries ‘The Defenders’. For me, Daredevil had potential, but in the end failed miserably. Only Gotham held my attention for more than one binge. To the extent Gotham had rich plots and characters, it was much more satisfying to watch Jada Pinkett Smith’s deliciously evil and devilishly charismatic portrayal of Fish Mooney. But her’s was the year of ‘Oscars Too White’ or some such hashtag noise and people want to racially represent. Some political mouthing off from certain quarters are inevitable.

Without having seen much more than an exciting trailer complete with stereotypical rap beats, and knowing Marvel Studios’ ability to deliver, I expect just what has been promised, an excellent action film that goes a bit deeper than the norm. That deeper bit, as demonstrated with Wonder Woman, is certainly enough to get the multiculturalists among us standing on their hind legs and yelping. Yes you too can learn from the example of someone who can bend steel with their bare hands! Heaven forbid Marvel has any superhero who eats laundry detergent like candy as well. And so it will be predictable that if Black Panther is as least as good as Wonder Woman then perhaps in the minds of such people who really really care, it might make up for the failure of Idris Elba’s Dark Tower. Then again, I don’t think even most political black Americans really cared. They wanted Elba to be James Bond, or so I’ve been told. Wasn’t he good enough in Pacific Rim?

Black Panther however, raises the whole black nationalist and pan-africanist notions above the level of academic debate. And though I don’t know how much the original comic dealt with some concept of Malcolm X with vibranium claws, its got an appeal that is at least as relevant as the Jewish origins of Superman and the reasons we Americans have superheroes in the first place. Which again, I must emphasize, is not inherently political as it is explicitly social and cultural as is any serious literature. Can superheroes be serious literature? It depends on the filmmaker. Western films can certainly include cowboys and indians and not be experssly about cowboys and indians. So too superhero action films can transcend the simplistic genre formulas. Witness this year’s extraordinary Hostiles and Tarantino’s Hateful Eight. Maybe Black Panther can do a better than average job, which won’t be so hard given what Marvel has (not) done before.

There is a contingent of political black Americans who play the race game which sometimes tries to be more politically significant than it can possibly be. We don’t know who BLM is, it has no one the caliber of even the second and third tiers of the Civil Rights Movement. But we live in a social mediasphere where that’s not important. And from that corner that represents itself as representing the stereotypical downtrodden oppressed black American, there will issue a call and expectation that Black Panther be an important lesson for all Americans, and as a bracing role-modeling experience. I daresay it cannot be taken so seriously as much of Spike Lee’s work. But that’s another generation. I can only tell you that my son and daughter, millenials who do cosplay, are hyped to the max. But they have no need for role modeling any more than I did. It was really something for me to have Richard Pryor and Muhammad Ali in the 1970s when I was in high school and in my early 20s it was a comfort and an honor to meet Guy Bluford. But those were real heroes not superheroes.

So I cannot possibly take seriously the idea, even if perfectly executed, that the politics of identity and all that could have Black Panther as its platform. It’s not a race film. Do The Right Thing was a race film. It’s a black cast film, and that’s plenty. As such, Black Panther may stand a chance to compete with Michael Jackson’s Remember the Time video as a showcase for beautiful people. God knows these baldheaded women in the preview are stunning. Black Panther may stand a chance to even approach Hall & Murphy’s Coming to America, although that’s a very high bar. I expect it to be at least as fun as Mo' Betta Blues and maybe as good as Boomerang which is saying a lot. And I am quite frankly relieved to see a new generation of actors and filmmakers take the stage. They didn't need Denzel. (and his Equalizer's nail gun (cringe)) Good on them.

If it comes to pass that some fragment of America wants to go there and make Black Panther into a vehicle for their political agenda, I won't be surprised or impressed. Such a move will indicate yet another example of post-modern symbolism eclipsing reality-based politics. So what. At this moment there are so many other more significant films dealing with reality. I could throw Remember The Titans at them and see if they can do that well. Antwone Fisher. Fences. Sometimes the hardest thing to explain is how nobody represents black Americans’ social, cultural and political diversity but themselves, but it’s just that simple.

 

Obligatory Seriousness on Coates v West

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

A couple points written in realtime.

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

 

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

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

Obligatory Seriousness on Hiphop & Black Culture

Hiphop has been a net positive. There’s no way I could say that any of our lives would be richer if hiphop never existed. There has been too much brilliant innovation. But also hiphop is folk music, and folk are not always enlightened. I would not venture to say that any kind of folk music is a cause so much as an effect. Your mind doesn’t play tricks on you just because you listen to Ghetto Boys. That’s their confession, their life, their reality.

I take a much broader view of black culture in America. Hiphop may have all the attention of somebody, but somebody ain’t everybody. Jazz, Gospel, R&B, Blues and Hiphop are all creations in this broad culture, and anybody that knows that kind of music (IE can create it) knows that there are many different styles in all that. So I object to the idea that Hiphop owns ‘black culture’. Because most everything I know about hiphop is the hiphop of another time.

As for what is negative and positive in ‘black culture’, I can only presume that one means what are good and bad results of the choices black individuals make, and how do they explain themselves. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I leaned on Marvin Gaye and Al Greene to get the attention of the woman I married, and I love renting convertible sports cars and blasting Bruno Mars. But my intent was there before those songs ever existed. So a lot of people get into a kind of chicken and egg loop here, but I try not to. I’ve heard people say that if it wasn’t for movies and restaurants, they would never know what to do on a date. If it weren’t for Prince, 1 million babies wouldn’t be born. And yet that’s not a machine. You can’t just play Nelly on a hot night and guarantee that women will take off all their clothes. And if you listen to DMX, he’s telling you straight up that you aint strong enough. That’s a self-conscious distance between even the studio gangsta and his audience. Hiphop, especially gangsta is always reminding its audience who is real and who is not. Hiphop is smart enough to recognize it’s not causality. So anybody who takes it that seriously is either fooling themselves or actually stupid.

So of course there are fools and idiots everywhere. And yes we live in a society that has industries that capitalize on the weaknesses of fools and idiots. I’m just not so sure we can actually call that culture. There is not so much one should expect from folk music, folk dress, folk dialect, folk cooking anywhere in the world, especially when it’s in a consumer society aimed at its fools and idiots.

Individuals will always find a need to express themselves. In the English speaking world, most all poetry has gone into remission except for the 4/4 time rhymed couplets of most hiphop. I think if you give American culture and the English language the respect it deserves, it will be easy to find hiphop and poetry capable of expressing virtue, elegance and intelligence. If hiphop never did that, we could all write it off. But it did. For the world, and it probably will again.

 

Obligatory Seriousness on White Nationalists, Antifa & Charlottesville

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the Anti-Climate-Deniers Deny

It has been just over 10 years since I learned supply and demand of energy at the global level. Some time later, I had the opportunity to spend several hours at a seminar held on the campus of
Caltech at a presentation by Koonin himself. I imagine that some things have changed since then, but I am convinced that they are marginal. So in light of some interest in the matter of Trump's dismissal of 'The Paris Agreement'. So from some Facebook provocation I have responded as follows:

Cobb: 

It's not campaign season, so 'Go Trump' is ridiculous. I'm a climate change skeptic in the way that I think 'March for Science' is foolishness. What will be will be and people will adjust to the new economic conditions. What I cannot stand is the posing and the presumption that (among other things) that ordinary people should 'go green'.

All of you are going to go as green as your overlords demand, and yet you will still suffer from the inevitable economic dislocations.

If any of the political divas had an ounce of economic wisdom, then they'd be worth hearing out. But there is no such thing as a Scientific Consensus ETF, that is guaranteed to make money. That's because all of these climatologists failed real world statistics, just as they failed to predict the election of Trump. Intellectual fools at best, charlatans by the dozen. Appeals to authority.

As well, I'm comfortable with the East Anglia scandal being as large and long-lived as 'Bush Lied'.

 

Responder:

So ocean acidification doesn't exist? Or isn't man made? Carbon particles are not at historically insane levels? What I don't get about the "climate change ain't all that" crowd is the blasé nature with which they can say "the consensus isn't strong enough to justify action". 99% of the deniers are tied to the fossil fuel industry. How is that lost on people? Who is putting out replicable stats that is independently funded? I have yet to see an answer to this question. No snark, no offense. Just legitimately haven't heard one independent institute/thinktank/researcher who isn't in some way tied to fossil fuel $$$. It blows my mind the degree to which they can leverage a few well positioned stool pigeons and stall so much more in the way of solid science. Serious question: Is NASA a liberal stool pigeon with a climate science denial axe to grind?

 

Cobb: 

You don't distinguish between the inevitability of climate change and the capability of those who analyze to lead. This is a categorical error. It's precisely like saying all 1.2 billion in the Catholic Church is are idiots, but completely incapable of getting .01 of that to join or contribute to their own cause. You keep saying Exxon is wrong, but you can't fuel 1% of Exxon's market. Plus, you can't predict one iota of what Exxon will do when the oil runs out.

I think that's the legacy of the environmental movement, who were all Malthusians in the first place. Swerd is right. Conference junkets make no economic change. The 'scientific consensus' has no market presence because they simply expect to have their vanguard established by political fiat. The Bolsheviks co-opted science too. They wanted the state to own all of the tractors where previously there were only oxen.

Responder:

The role us plebes have is to vote for people who would make climate change a centerpiece of their political agenda. Beyond that, those of us with the disposable income can shift their consumption patterns to something more responsible (which generally costs more money). For the rest of us, the only real role we have is to tamp down on the ill-informed idea that climate change science is ambiguous, thereby increasing the market for climate change-aware politicians to capture resources + media space + votes. Exxon will lead from behind until they figure out how to make money, and their stonewalling may cost them their place as significant providers of energy. And that is exactly as it should be - why is Panasonic and Tesla leading on batteries, and not Exxon? Because they chose to be blind to the future of energy demand. So, let them now be forced to pay licensing fees to companies who hold the patents, be they solar/storage/hydrogen etc. But all of this is a complete digression - why crap on the consensus science in favor of climate change? Anytime I quiz anyone on this, I get crickets. Again, can you point me to a source that isn't in the pockets of fossil fuel industry? If not, then why be a stool pigeon and carry the water of a dead/legacy industry? Just to be chic and contrarian? I sincerely want to know what motivates people to crap on the vast scientific consensus behind climate awareness. So far, I got nothing but trolling (or dogmatic repubs who also believe Trump had the largest inaugural crowd in history, etc etc etc). Hey, I like dem lulz as much as the next btard. But c'mon now. Let's call a spade a spade.

And so finally:

What you are doing is essentially calling for moderate (adj) Muslims to moderate (v) radical Muslims, because they're all Muslims.

 

It doesn't work. It's not a thing that is within the responsible power of middle class individuals even as a collective. I think there is a myth in the middle class understanding of democracy that the aggregation of will into corporate power, and I use that word purposefully, will create corporate responsibility. It's like saying "If every shareholder with voting shares would just... then we can overrule and control the operations of..."

 

The problem you should understand is that there is no recourse in democracy. Once a government has got X amount of power, then corresponding disinvestment in voting does not result in a corresponding diminution in government authority. It only took some small fraction of American voters to turn over the whole over the government apparatus to Trump, as it did with Obama. The ratchet does not slide back gracefully, and in that regard Trump is the best you can get, which is the radical at the top undermining the system he runs.

 

The problem is even worse for a global endeavor which attempts to get some global consensus of its middle class participants to aggregate their power under some entity superseding the power of nations. The more wishful thinking of 'changing the world' voters proxy onto supranational organizations the more dangerously and inevitably irresponsible those organizations become.

 

In short. Responsive democracy does not scale. Exxon and the collective oil industry is that supranational, and it will not be responsive no matter what democratic means are attempted.

 

Why you hear crickets is simple. You are asking people who don't understand how the planet actually uses energy. The planet cannot and will not survive on alternatives to oil. THAT is the denial of scientific research. And here are the findings. http://cobb.typepad.com/cobb/files/Koonin_UCSB_0307.pdf

 

The bottom line is that the second and third world want what the first world has. Emergent populations want cars, trucks, planes, trains, automobiles, air conditioners, dishwashers, radios, televisions, computers, networks, cell phones, nightlife. Low energy per capita = Rural. High energy per capita = Cities. If you want the planet to save energy, you have to force people to stay down on the farm. Force. Not market. Force. Not vote. Force.

 

That means force India. That means force China. That means force South Asia. That means force Brazil. All of those billions want more energy. Western environmentalist politics are entirely incapable of dealing with that reality. All they can do is whine about what their domestic political opponents do to ignore their agenda. Booo hoo, you're 'anti-science'. And what has this complaint availed them? Who among you would even bother to say as much to Putin?

 

So I conclude that all of the green political activism is trying to create a set of beasts through democratic means that would by some (never admitted) fiat, force compliance in governments to compel overburdensome taxation. They will fail. But they also will keep trying, and if on some measure they succeed, then the nature of those beasts will be no more responsive than the supranational beasts who now provide the supply for the growing energy demands of the planet.

 

The only thing big enough to change that is war.

 

59 Cruise Missiles

And this

59 from two ships sounds about right. Depending on the loadout, and the usual "Primary, Backup, Ready-Spare" that leaves us a few more to play around with if needed. 

We should at some point find out which ships fired the TLAM, but assume they were some of the Arleigh Burke DDG we have in the Med. 

FLT I have 90 VLS Cells and FLT II and IIA have 96. Not all those will have TLAM loaded but enough do.

The target:
- Ash Aha'irat (Al Shayrat) airbase is about 25 miles SE of Homs City.
- That is a photo of the base above. Just about a perfect place to attack with TLAM. The targeting is almost school-house training classic.
- It is well away from most Russian forces, and the approach to the target given the range gives you enough options to avoid even flying over their main units with a wide separation.
- It makes a point.
- It will not interfere with operations against ISIS - which is the primary effort.
- No USA lives are directly put in danger. Besides the odd advisor or training team - should not threaten Russian or Iranian forces either.
- Based on what has been said by the US government over the last 24-hrs, we had to do something.
- If we had to do something, this was the right call.
- For a point of scale for TLAM punitive expeditions; in Desert Fox against IRAQ in 1998, we shot over 330 TLAM over three days in addition to airstrikes.
- This is a focused strike. Proper COA selection, IMAO.

This should check a few boxes and hopefully this will be it for now.

Also this

Read Igor Markov's answer to Why didn't the Russians shoot down any Tomahawks, given their sophisticated AA equipment, in Syria? on Quora

Libsplaining Trump

I think it's going to take a while for people to get ready for the new normal, and that really nobody who voted against Trump wants to understand him or those who voted for him. I was really surprised, I guess, by editorials about his first hours in office. But yeah people are going to nitpick for weeks and months.

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

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

At some point somebody (presumably of the current coastal pundit class) is going to have to point out this obvious thing - that Trump's responsiveness to the Americans who elected him is not an actual catastrophe, but a slap in the face of those who didn't. The problem will be getting activist partisans to stop amping their predictions of catastrophe. (As if they predicted anything yet). Or to torture a soundbite 'libsplaining' Trump to Americans.

People understand that Obama destroyed his competition by using social media and outflanking traditional means of stumping. But for the longest time, the traditional media had to play along the historical significance of the fist black American President. Some would say it put them in the tank for Obama. I said it. But the greater point is that Obama didn't need them so much as they needed him. He reached who he wanted and needed to reach. So did Trump. 

Either of these sub-electorates is large and dynamic enough to defy categorization. I think that if I were in the campaign consulting business, I would be very quiet right about now. And so I think those people are. I haven't heard Carville or Matlin describe what went disastrously wrong with Clinton, not that I've been listening. But there is clearly no broad consensus among the 'experts' except the general assessment that half of America is curled into a ball rocking in the corner.  

At today's magnificent Women's March in Los Angeles, there was what can only be described as a very very divergent set of opinions about what to say. i could talk about the march at length and I may do so, but I am reminded of the old psychological adage that people don't have weaknesses so much as they overuse their strengths. There were at least a dozen identifiable interest groups if they could be identified by their slogans. But those who bothered to characterize Trump specifically as the object of their scorn did so in predictable ways. I'm not particularly moved or motivated by this type of ad hominem, but it reminded me of the vehemence reserved for Dick Cheney in another era. Whereas Cheney was seen as the evil eminence behind a vapid Bush, Trump is the embodiment himself. The orange target is clear. I expect the ire will continue and I hope it doesn't rub off on Trump's people, only three of which so far I find independently admirable (Mattis, Tillerson & Kushner). 

For me the only question worth considering at length is the extent to which Trump is or is not like Obama with regard to stepping aside for expertise. My impression and probably my greatest disappointment with Obama's White House was that given his weaknesses in foreign policy, he strove to reverse Bush in a relatively reactionary manner. And when he crossed the military part of that, he tended to throw expertise under the bus. I look at the Obama administration as a mediocre one with only Obama left standing intact. He hollowed out the Democrats and only the unsullied profile of Obama survived to his supporters, a subset of the American public that were completely T-boned by the phenomenon of Bernie Sanders. But my point is that non-partisan experts refused to work with Obama who determined he had to be the smartest guy in the room. So will Trump be that way? If so, then we will have another great mediocrity on top of the first, which will sink our capabilities even further below sea level. And of course whatever, outside of the control of the Federal government, goes wrong will probably get worse before the right people address it smartly. It is beyond my capacity to hope that citizens may take these burdens on at the state and local levels. So many seem dependent on the Feds. But the possibility exists. 

The electorate has nothing better to do but continue their griping in the shape of the rhetoric of the campaigns. The media may snap out of their daze and give some deeper context, or they may milk those duds.  I'll be on the lookout for references to FDR as a cue that reporting is still diseased. If the political shape of policy nuances between Obama's Interior and Trump's Interior must harken back two generations, for example, then we're getting nowhere fast. I expect media complacency, sadly, of the sort that requires reality show drama to break through. And this will serve the interests of Gramcian narrative. Ick. 

What's weird, now that I think of it, is I know very little about what Obama might do in his new spare time but play spoiler. Does he really like golf?

Obligatory Seriousness on Election 2016

I've been abusing history lately because I don't have the luxury of spending time with people who think like me. So I've been hunting among authors and books for stories that give me some feeling of what it's like to be a Russian. The reason is the same as the reason I read Dickens a few years back. I'm expecting the death of public optimism and a separation of classes, so I want to know how people keep their heads in such circumstances. I think I've learned something, and now I'd like to share it.

One of my life quotes is from Rabbi Hillel. "Where there is no hero, you be the hero." It means taking responsibility for keeping a level perspective when hope dies. Along with Hillel, I have over the past few years been reading Lovecraftian stories. I have this compelling need to understand what it means to fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run. In Japanese, there is a strange irony in the term 'domo arigato' which can be interpreted not only to mean 'thank you very much', but also 'thank you very much for the obligation to return the favor that you have now placed on me'. We may have lost some of that here when we reply to 'Thank you' with 'No, thank *you*.' The old response was 'You're welcome', which implies, feel free to ask again and I will respond again in kind. But that's a bit too much responsibility. Saying 'you're welcome' is tough. Civility is tough. The social contract is tough. In America, the social contract is under stress.

If you ask me what I feel about the election of Donald Trump, then I have to say this. Most clearly this is a rejection of what became the new normal under Obama, but also a reiteration with exclamation points of the same kind of reckless populism that elected Barack Obama the first time. The expression 'Yes we can' never escapes my mind without the implication 'because we are the majority and we have the votes'. Having the votes, is of course what democratic rule requires, and in the US, it requires money too. Whose votes and whose money are things we think we know but probably don't. But money and votes are aggregated by the infernal machines of party politics in America and dreams and wishes are pasted on top of that machine. The optimist in me looks forward only to a sort of glorious sacrifice. It's an unusual attitude for an American, but it gives me a great deal of comfort to know that I am not too comfortable. I do not let this discomfort poison my relationship to my fellows or to the common man. Instead, I look at history and world events and try to figure out what's keeping me out of war, and prison. The answer is 'plenty' and that plenty is what I look to. What keeps the buildings standing? Why does water keep flowing? Who keeps the electricity on? The Constitution and the infrastructure of this nation are simple enough to understand, as are our basic needs as people. It shouldn't be so hard to keep all that alive, so long as too many people don't take too much for granted.

All of us are subject to wishful thinking. No matter what actually happens in our lives, we project ourselves into other people's situations, or what we perceive them to be. Of course there are limits. There are certain people with whom we cannot identify at all. We say that we could not possibly be like that. I cannot identify with people who eat dogs, or practice female genital mutilation. They are the Other. All this is personal and psychological. I have come to recognize how much of our politics has abandoned the rational and calm and been hijacked by the personal and psychological, but I think this is to be expected under certain circumstances. I view this particular phenomenon largely as a consequence of the Culture Wars which has undermined that which we used to call 'E Pluribus Unum'. Whatever the reason we have moved from pluralism to populism, the consequence is the same. It's winner take all with no real sympathy for those perceived to be the Other. But we have even gone beyond that, to even project whom our political opponents cast as the Other. So people believe that somewhere they are hated and repudiated and all of those Others are voting for the Other Candidate. This is the characteristic of what we have just witnessed, and for those who were surprised at the victory of Trump, they simply presume that there were more Others out there in America than they ever suspected.

I should go on to say in particular that I find it so perverse and strange that people found it not only comfortable but compelling to argue that all of the racists and sexists were siding with Trump, and this was the defining element of his campaign. So it stands to reason that they were, in the spirit of a winner take all populist contest, dismissive of these opponents and considered them to be part of the great unwashed Other Americans. But that was the personal and psychological wishful thinking of people who were not interested in pluralism. How would they build a compromise on a zero-tolerance policy for dog-eaters and genital mutilators? But the actual terms and conditions of 'racism' and 'sexism' of America's Other voters was never defined, no more than anyone accurately measured into a moderated focus gun-grabbing, police-shooting, influence-peddling, weed-smoking, email-smuggling, muslim-hating, crotch-grabbing, or bible-thumping. It became an all or nothing wish to banish such Others into shameful oblivion. These were the terms of the American presidential election with the aim of destroying the opposition with aggregated majorities. What was surprising was how differently these majorities came together outside of the lines of both parties.

The energy and force of the Democrats was contained in the personna and campaign of Bernie Sanders. Whichever kind of socialist he was or is (I think grossly uninformed, narrow-minded but principled) his stripe of populist rhetoric carved out a new set of partisans from the Democrats. That which Bill Clinton, the most charismatic and clever politician of our era, had solidified, Sanders dislodged with aplomb. Neither Obama or Bill Clinton, even with the assistance of George H. W. Bush could elevate Hillary Clinton in the eyes of the general public. Sanders won the hearts and minds of the newly energized Left and the Democrat machine stabbed him in the back.

The career-long calculations and aspirations of Ted Cruz came to a rude and abrupt halt in Indiana. More than any of the hundreds of twists and turns of the election season, the crude disrespect of the crowd of Hoosiers telling Cruz to shutup and leave is the marker for me. Democrats must have been utterly confounded by Cruz' failure, as they have been focused on him as the apotheosis of social Christian Conservatism, that thing they believe to be the very heartbeat of the Republican soul. I think Cruz parading his Stepford family was too clever by half and that someone between him and Huckabee might have tapped that vein more properly. But I am a great deal more sensitive to the rudderless ramshackle that is the GOP as it struggles between its desire for power and its need for principle. Trump took all of its oxygen. Trump vacuumed all of the crumbs of the Tea Party and then moved them to orbital speeds, escaping the grip of gravitas of the Republican Party over the American Right. Trump is the ultimate RINO Conservatives have always feared, and now they will have to face the fact that Conservative principles will, from this moment forward, be a permanent minority of public opinion. Here is the clear failing record of three presidential elections they could not triangulate, and they've been trounced by a reality-show bounder.

All of that emotional investment has produced a litany of gut rumbles, weeping and wailing that I was able to ignore, with some patience. I have developed a strong stomach for the democracy of the masses, and it is not the mood of the people or even the subjects of their psychological obsessions that I measure. America is its traditions and its infrastructure, both of which are in jeopardy owing to its inability to transmit the energy and dynamism of its actual champions into the corridors of public service. The government we have cannot be hotrodded, its wheelbase is too long. People will have to get out and walk to freedom, come back and build a new chassis. Trump is not that builder. He is the madman who will chop the top and do donuts, orange hair blowing in the wind. America will not move forward, it will spin in place and knock over a lot of cones and maybe a bollard or two. At the end of four years, we will choose a sober mechanic, and perhaps we won't be so afraid of the blowtorching we need.

In that long walk to freedom, America will discover its legs. That is my expectation. There are no free rides. There is no comfortable backseat.

Obligatory Seriousness on Dallas Snipers

I sense that many Americans are really looking for a revolution, that they cannot find society worth investing in and protecting. We can only hope their homes spontaneously combust before their neighbors come with torches, it seems they can only be taught by accidental tragedy. They are not prepared for purposeful militancy. It all comes apart quicker than they think.

I wrote this yesterday in response to some messages I overheard about civil war in response to the failure to arrest Hilary Clinton. Yes Virginia, Twitter has made billionaires from gossip. And so we are a nation of gossip some of which is structured and bankrolled sufficiently enough to be called politics. The future is here, but the neanderthals are quite evenly distributed. Can you hear the howling? Of course you can. 

I don't know the names of the last 20 men to be shot dead in America's streets. I can wait to find out the decision of the juries. I have that much patience. It's not just because I'm on vacation in Solvang, California. It's because I understand that the rule of law requires patient deliberation, much more patience than various aggravated tribes are currently willing to expend. The mobs are out. Those invested in chaos are making their point, and the revolutionaries will pick up the ball tomorrow. If I may indulge my ribald sense of humor, the noise sounds a little like Yosemite Sam.

But this is no cartoon. This is political violence. This is putting real revolutionary skin in the game. Shooting cops is the ultimate civil disobedience. It is unmistakeable. This is the turning point for BlackLivesMatter, if they're willing to claim any responsibility. I find it difficult to believe that the shooters had no connection, although there is an interesting possibility that this might be a very clever false flag operation or two entirely random nutjobs found their way into this obscene opportunity. Either way, BLM is the reason and the bearer of the concept that pitchforks and torches are carried to the street. After all, who is it that cannot tweet non-violently? BLM, like ISIS have staked out dubious territory and have captivated millions with their blunted ideas. And while many millions will claim moderation and decry the violent extremism, they nonetheless work from principles that call for radical reform as if the police in America have a serious deadly obsession.

I was speculating today while thinking about the topic of police lethality about how advocates of police disarmament might consider the fallback to billy clubs and chokeholds. There's not much lethal about a broken jaw and unconscious choked out suspects offer very little resistance. Would today's advocates trade a few more broken bones for a few less deaths? Or is this the kind of bloody calculus to be avoided in protest policy? I don't think it much matters to a crowd whose mind is made up. After all, Rodney King didn't die at the hands of police, but 50 people did in the ensuing riots.  

I expect many Americans will accept a rewritten history according to the narrative that serves a President who is not saying 'cool it baby'. They will accept that all the racists in America decided to rise up during his administration and cause this kind of inevitable uprising in this long hot summer. After all, who could not be against racism, and who cannot see how these poor black victims are psychologically unable to contain their justifiable rage? This is predictable in the society we put up with today, and so will be the mindless backlash of yet another 'silent majority' who says a little rough street justice is in order. 

This is simply another coordinated terrorist attack on American soil. It's another set of people impatient to show their dedication to America's destruction, another cohort who cannot abide our status quo. One more set of fanatics with no patience whatsoever with our free society. I think I recognize the reception they're going to get, depending on their Mumia factor. So let's all watch out for that. Michael Eric Dyson is quick to explain that black people see things differently when watching videos. No they don't. It's elementary to suss out what people think police are doing and thus what should be done to police. Then again, why should anyone be surprised at Dyson's angle?

But let's remind ourselves of a bit of recent history, shall we? In January of 2015, a small device blew up on the outside wall of an NAACP office in Colorado. It made national headlines and invoked a litany of pontifications from John Lewis and Julian Bond, like this:

“Obviously, this is a terrorist attack,” says Julian Bond, a University of Virginia history professor and a long-time chairman of the NAACP.

As head of the NAACP from 1998 to 2010, Bond says there were zero violent incidents like what occurred Tuesday in Colorado Springs. And in recent decades, acts of violence aimed at the NAACP have tapered off. But the organization has dealt with direct threats virtually since it began in 1909, with one of the worst occurring in 1951 when Harry Moore, who founded an NAACP branch in Brevard County, Florida, was killed on Christmas Day after a bomb was placed underneath his bed. No one was arrested, but several Ku Klux Klan members were suspected in the incident.

25 KEY EVIDENCE PHOTOS FROM THE FERGUSON GRAND JURY

 

A little over a decade later, Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader and field secretary for the NAACP, was shot and killed in his own driveway after meeting with the group’s lawyers. Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist, was later convicted in the killing.

 Notice how they throw in some Ferguson stuff. Read the whole article. A month later the truth was revealed that the would-be hate crime racist was trying to scare his tax attorney. 

We are prepared, too many of us, to jump off the deep end with crazy speculation and trumped up victimization. So it's going to be a very tedious but interesting time to see who tries to make hay with this actual terrorist disaster and try to parlay it into the kind of racial complaint BLM has been begging for all these months. 

I do not accept much that will pass for conventional wisdom over the next month, so I will attempt to ignore that which I expect to only add to my contempt for tribal impatience in today's identity soaked electorate. 

Obligatory Seriousness on Islamic Terrorism in America

It's awfully strange how difficult it must be for a genuine Islamicist to defend acts of terror on American citizens. They're either straight crazy or are playing a longer game than anyone considers possible. But let us presume that both are true. That means that the violence has both short term and long term meanings and they are both the same, that only Islamisicsts have the courage of their convictions, against all odds, to prevail against the infidels. 

The structure that supports the short term goal is the death cult of indoctrinated militants. The structure that supports the long term goal is one particularly strategic version (or perversion if you must) of jihad. The reward for both is the establishment of Islamic Court standard of justice in the world. I think we have seen enough to know that these cults can be maintained here in the US as we add Orlando to San Bernardino in the lexicon or our recent tragic experiences. But what has to come apart in the US for Islamic justice to become preferable to the system we have in place? Perhaps not as much as we think, precisely because we don't often think about America's justice system. Isn't it interesting how certain American politics takes the shape of jihad in defending nominal Islam against the American system of justice?

I think there is very little understanding in our country about any process of judicial review. As far as the populous is concerned, we vote for President in order for them to appoint ideological justices to the Supreme Court. Other than that, nada. I would suggest to my fellow defenders of the first few amendments to the Constitution, that we spend a bit more time tracking this process down and writing about it. We can't wait for every gross miscarriage of sexual assault cases to get us ready to remove and disbar, but that's what it seems to take considering Duke and now Stanford Universities. 

I cannot help but chuckle with sadness at the level of frustration people who are completely invested in the post-industrial sections of our economy. For them, the inevitably hypocrisy inherent in the inflation of narratives must be horribly taxing on their sense of fairness. When you actually believe that free speech is everything, and in fact the only thing, diversity presents a mind-blowing challenge. At some point one must admit that hate speech must be allowed because no arbitration of speech can really allowed. Everybody's history must be revealed, and you cannot weasel out of cultural appropriation and you cannot deny history. These contradictions of political correctness are now more clearly manifest than ever, so what to do? Well, their simplistic evasion of logic abuses logic by using half logic. If the modern world is capable of making manifest the actions inherent in the conflict of narratives, and yet every narrative must have free reign, how do we keep from violent conflict? Their answer is to destroy that capability in the modern world. Let the Muslims hate the West, and although we stand against it, let the West hate the Muslims. Now all we need is to destroy both of their capacities to act on those hatreds. I think these post-modernists will attempt that until it comes to war, only during war finally recognizing their (some other word than fascist) requirement for monopolization of the use of force. 

I am reminded of the three tools of coercion. Seduction, negotiation and force. The matrix works something like this. Seduction means you can convince someone to work in your interests against their own interests. I like the word fraud equally well, but fraud is a false negotiation revealed after the fact which might be overturned. With seduction it is always too late. Negotiation has both parties aware of what they stand to gain and what they stand to lose in an honest brokerage of interests. They come to a mutually agreeable settlement. Force is what it is. In both force and seduction, the dominant party wins and the losing party is humiliated. So they are zero-sum and we pay the most attention to them. But a negotiated contract, that's a hard bargain and it requires mutual coercion whether it entails the best of two bad worlds, or the worst of two good worlds. 

Coercion is necessary for the co-existence of all narratives. PC represents something between the two extremes of bad and good negotiated worlds. The problem is that the settlement is not holding and the stakes are too high. So we are moving into the realms of seduction and force. This is what happens when speech defines. If we lived in an industrial economy where nobody cares about the words spoken in the factory where the car was made, the stakes would not be so high. If the value were most found in the structural integrity of a bridge, instead of the famous photographs and words spoken in protest on one particular day in the life of that bridge, the stakes would not be so high. If the post-industrialists actually believed that actions spoke louder than words, we could be a lot more free with our words, but we can't. We are cowards and not men of actions. We are men of emotions and emotional outbursts. We must be this way in a post-industrial world. 

I think I can best exemplify this requirement for coercion in the idea that for whatever human problem exists, "there is an app for that". The process of developing software is to put our best abstractions of a human activity, and/or all knowledge associated with that activity, into a computer simulation. This requires extraordinary brains, cooperation, discipline and a whole other boatload of virtuous qualities. It is a making of an interactive map, through which we might navigate the world of problems while looking at our cellphones, sitting at our armchair computers. If you didn't take a moment to think about it before, let me assure you that it's a programmer's world and you just live in it. All of the roads, alleys, walls and doors of software mazes are planned before you rats move through it. That includes the drama of the narrative. You are totally constrained. Or as Golding says, language fits experience like a strait jacket. What chance do the larger markets of miseducated have to second guess the virtual world frameworks of post-modern debate and politics? I think only blood and pain crash the apps like cellphones dashed to the pavement. In the meantime, the ceiling of disbelief remains suspended. In the PC world the false pillars of racism, capitalism and patriarchy are said to hold that ceiling up, and so the peasantry content themselves to live among the grass roots, never to climb. 

--

What the post-industrialists understand is that their leadership depends upon masses paying attention. So in order to maintain their power, they must sustain those systems of belief that are the talking points of their narrative. Most importantly, they must keep talking and they must be consistent in their talk such that they can project backwards and forwards, constantly revising their seductions about the past and about the future as well. Whereas the man who makes a horseshoe or a pair of pliers can prove the physics of the universe serve his purposeful work without uttering a word or sharing a selfie. 

This Islamists bring the pain. As sure as there are avenues for every conceivable narrative and contradictory fantasy in the post-modern West, there are but a few allowed for the devout Islamist. The alternative is death. And when death and dismemberment cannot be brought directly to the American infidel, then it is brought streaming into his interwebz. Even this content defies the PC narratives and thus challenges the self-righteous ingenues of our Hollywood frameworks. So this is the new soft terrorism. The narrative Producers must amp up their portrayals of blood and death in order to bring 'realism' to the screens. They abuse the myths of superheroes, ennobling them only as proxies of central committees. All superheroes will become Hulk over time. Mark my words. The thoughtful individual heroes will be crushed by disillusion as they approach the Enemy. Because it is an axiom of PC faith that the Western man suffers a complex of irredeemable original sins. He is white. He is male. His fortunes come from free markets. He applies individual logic and justice against the poor Muslim from a Western point of view. The pain brought by the jihadi is our just dessert, for an uncountable number of reasons which can be recalled on demand from any liberal American university study.

-- 

In America there are men who wrench their own automobiles, who know the fields from which came the cotton in their shirts. There are those who understand that their shoes are leather and are not swayed by narratives against the use of animals or the consumption of wheat. There are men who wear single function devices on their off hands, recognizing that time is precious and not to be divided amongst the multiple distractions of multitasking apps. Such men keep precious thoughts born by hard won experience in their heads. They will never compete with the cacophony of the Cathedral. The knowledge and force of such men cannot be integrated into the power structures of democracy. It requires, as does all decentralized authority, its own rites of initiation and channels of communication. The farmer must mind his own hedgerows. So let him be a hedgehog. Let him know what he knows best and let his heart and his family and his virtues stand on their own with his select interdependencies. He will turn off the broadcasts of his own accord. He has better things to do with his time. And when the Islamicist comes to these islands in America, he will be met with unblinking eyes, but only if our Judiciary has not abdicated its responsibility to Constitutional justice. 

All depends upon us understanding and experiencing the relevance of our jurisprudence in our lives and culture. No post-modern creations can bring us there, neither of economic or humanitarian design. We must align ourselves to our extraordinarily slow pace of evolution and trust our human instincts armed with the insights of our own founding history, even as we use the tools of modernity. We must settle ourselves within a world where water is precious, where physical labor reminds us of our duty to our born bodies, where courage requires that experience against the firebombing of propaganda razing our cities into markets of fantasy and cant. If AI can replace you, you are already surplus. Your mind is not to be led by the Marauder's Map. Your experience is something to be initiated by your courageous virtue, not purchased from the app store. I understand what C.S. Lewis said about magic; ignore that too, because post-modern wizards struggle every day to advance their technology to be indistinguishable from it, and they will never reveal where the minds are that make it. Focus instead on justice. We have had it in our lives, and we should never forget its blindness, especially as the screaming media and interwebz attempt to coerce what we see. 

 

Obligatory Seriousness on the Tubman Twenty

Well, here's one that I cared a little about and hoped it would go a particular way. Hey it did!

I'm not a particular hater of Andrew Jackson, but I am a particular lover of Alexander Hamilton, and that's going back more than 20 years before the musical. In fact, it was about 1992 when I used to hang out at Hamilton Terrace in NYC on weekends teaching kids in a Church School. I came to learn about Hamilton and found him an admirable character. But even before that, I was partial to the ten dollar denomination when it came to spending cash. That's from when I used to work in a bank back in the 80s and could get any kind of cash that I wanted. I held a lot of silver dollars and a lot of Hamiltons in my pockets back then. Do you remember when ATMs used to give out 10s?

As far as symbols go, I've learned that you cannot trust or train the American public. They're a rowdy crowd and accustomed to being undisciplined. They call this 'freedom' and think that's what this place is all about, so long as they interpret that my freedom is appropriately balanced with their freedom. Which is to say they think that I do what I want and they are suspicious of me. But that's just some extra thought I've been doing about the American public, having recently taken a short midwestern holiday. The likeness of Harriet Tubman makes for a fine set of symbols, but she will always represent to me what she does now, a gun-toting spy with balls of steel. Generally, my kind of badass. Add Teddy Roosevelt to the 500 and we'd really have something to crow about. 

Given the choice of having a woman or a non-woman on the specie is just about meaningless to me. After all, look what happened to the Sacagawea Dollar coin. Its complete disappearance has not affected the status of women in American society. But you would think, listening to the many numbskulls, such a causal relationship exists. 

That reminds me. I'm off to take MIT OCW 18.05

Obligatory Seriousness on #BlackLivesMatter

Yes of course. And some matter more than others. Your choice of which lives to call black or representative of black says a great deal about you. In fact, I'll say it says way more about you than it does about black Americans of which there are umpty millions. Your mileage may vary, but lots of people get pretty far with their racial theories. Me, I'm not into any of that, I call them as I see them with no respect for being politically correct. Why? Because my dealings with 'black America' isn't political. No agenda serves it, especially no special agenda. That doesn't stop people from trying and yet I digress.

Some time ago when the focus of Cobb was black political partisanship, I established the category 'Keeping it Right'. That had in mind the old cliche about 'Keeping it Real' and recalls the last hiphop group that mattered, De La Soul, on the best album they ever put out 'Stakes Is High' in The Bizness. I now repurpose that thread as my contribution to that unique American discussion which remains permanent and like memories of high school and formative cartoons like Johnny Quest, hits me square in the funny bone on occassion. So there it is with less emotion and yet more detail than the hashtag can evoke. Keeping it Right is my take on which black lives matter to me. 

That said, I suppose I owe a top ten now that I think of it. It shouldn't be hard, but it's also not so deep. (So I say before I write it - but let's see what I come up with.) OK. The first one is not in the top ten, but it is the reason why I have revitalized this thread.

Omar Hakim.

When I was living in Brooklyn, back in the early 90s, before Jurassic Park and Janet's massive album, I purchased Omar Hakim's solo album. And as the classy young man I was, I thought it was appropriate to my style. I therefore spent a lot of time being angry in a particular way that aesthetes get angry, that dudes like Onyx were making money. Nowadays that's called being a hater. I didn't hate Onyx, but I had minimal respect for them. Like Criss Cross. I happened across Omar's album in my collection today and paused for a moment of sadness in that Omar didn't become the star I thought he deserved to be, especially considering the huge sensation he made in Sting's world massive Bring on the Night concert. So who matters to me? Well, both Onyx and Omar Hakim made me think about music and culture, but Hakim matters more. 

Top Ten Black folks... alright this is silly but .. nevermind. It's too silly to even contemplate. I will re-awaken the topic Keeping It Right. That is all. 

Still. Onyx. Extra double dumb. 

 

 

Obligatory Seriousness on.. Duck!

I'm on vacation today so I have too much time on my hands so I've been pulled into the hot mess that is the controversy over Phil Robertson. So here's the most enlightened thing I can say:

If you believe others to be inferior and you are an arrogant bastard, then what you need is a constant stream of ideologically pure rhetoric. You require a strict orthodox line of reasoning to keep you from engaging in predatory behavior. You so distrust your instinct, intuition and background that you must keep your mind free of the contradictions that reality presents. 

This can be by my reckoning the only rationale for preserving the principle which we understand to be behind the slapdash yet pervasive application of Political Correctness. People must honestly believe that being wrong is never worth it and so they slather themselves with righteousness. Maybe this is the result of the multiple-choice education so many people have received in our country. The shallow unsubtlety of it all is staggering. To have a view of humanity that is so frightful that it must tolerate the punishment of free speech is a condition of arrogance incompatible with sanity. 

I want not to be upset over this. And I don't doubt the spirit of the many, nor do I doubt that wisdom, while not prevailing, is still in healthy supply. But right now I am actually weeping for my country. And when I am finished weeping, I'll write another essay. 

In the meantime, I quote Camille Paglia via some other website.

Paglia, a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, explained that the country has become too politically correct.

“To express yourself in a magazine in an interview — this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades,” she said. “This is the whole legacy of free speech 1960s that have been lost by my own party.”

She also told Ingraham that while she's an atheist, she respects religion and has become frustrated by the intolerance shown by modern gay activists who seek to silence any opposition.

“I think that this intolerance by gay activists toward the full spectrum of human beliefs is a sign of immaturity, juvenility,” she said. “This is not the mark of a true intellectual life. This is why there is no cultural life now in the U.S. Why nothing is of interest coming from the major media in terms of cultural criticism. Why the graduates of the Ivy League with their A, A, A+ grades are complete cultural illiterates, etc. is because they are not being educated in any way to give respect to opposing view points.”

Paglia told Ingraham that feminism and the gay movement has been taken over by fanatics "who have displaced the religious beliefs of their parents into a political movement.”

(sigh). It's not as if I didn't know this. But they won't go away. In the meantime, I'm going to make sure my kids read Allen Bloom and E.D. Hirsch. 

Obligatory Seriousness on Nelson Mandela

Nobody in America really knows or cares about South Africa. We all just have a sort of paternalistic affinity for a story we think ended well. And we have a dead symbol.

When I was a kid, my father used to tell me that one day, we black people would take over South Africa and get all of its gold and diamonds and we'd be so strong and powerful that white people all over the world would repsect and fear us. That idea stayed in my head, unaltered for so long that I found myself lying about it for no reason in high school. I told one of my prep schoolmates that I had been to Cape Town. I hadn't of course, but I had imagined myself there with a house overlooking the city. There's a lot of fantastic romance surrounding Nelson Mandela and South Africa. So all the foof around his death is familiar to me. 

I happen to be one of those oinks who had pictures on my bedroom wall of ANC propaganda. When I was in my late twenties and I read my first Noam Chomsky and Amnesty International, I decided to try to educate myself about something other than what went on here. I chose not only South Africa, continuing from collegiate shenanigans but Southern Africa, specifically Namibia. But that was oh so long ago. I tried to understand the world uranium trade and imagined myself living in Windhoek in that country, dominated by South Africa, as large as California on the other side of the planet. I remember paying specific attention to the Harare Accords and the UN Convention on Racism and actually spent a lot of time thinking about what foothold racism got in America because the Declaration of Independence, unlike the Harare Accords, didn't speak out explicitly on matters of racist offense. Before I wised up, my like of thought was this:

So how could we, in principle, create a document that exclaims loudly against racism, as the Declaration of Independence did against Monarchy. What goes into creating an Anti-Racist Manifesto? Incidentally, that is what brought me, the second time around to the Harare Accords. If I were a legal scholar, I might ask myself, comparatively speaking, which set of laws between that of the new South African Constitution, which includes significant language from the Harare Accords, and our own system and amendments is more completely anti-racist. I would actually include the new Germany as well as several other nations. I suspect that theoretically speaking, South Africa beats us, considering as I have, some of the work of Kimberle Crenshaw, Linn Washington, Patricia J. Williams and Judge Higgenbotham. Of course, I'm not a legal scholar and am unfamiliar with the details of the South African legal system. However I am aware of the UN Treaty on Racial Discrimination and I know that the U.S. did not become a signer until about 1996. I also recognize that you can go to jail in America for holding up a 7-ll for 50 dollars, but not for firing somebody because you think he's a nigger. We have no criminal law for racism. You can be a capital R racist and run for office in America's form of democracy, because America's form of democracy is compatible with racism. But notice you cannot run for King. You cannot run for president of the supreme Soviet. So I ask you, what is a bigger threat to democracy? Monarchy, Communism or Racism? We've lived with racism longer than with Communism or Monarchy?

I read both books by Mark Mathabene, Wood's biography of Stephen Biko and had a typical Western attraction to the work of Gordimer. Once upon a time, I followed the wars in Angola and could tell you where Cuban troops were fighting and on whose side. I think people forget the extraordinary mashup of international interests and mercenary actions in those days, but how about these words UNITA and Jonas Savimbi. Do you remember if we were for him or against him and why? I could recite the names of various South African leaders and movements, and on my own, I tried to send money to MK, the radical militant terrorist wing of the African National Congress. I discovered, fortunately not the hard way, that sending money to opposition parties in foreign countries is seriously frowned on by the State Department, and you really don't want to be on their list as someone supporting militant operators abroad. So I attempted to satisfy myself by attending solidarity rallys and seminars and such. 

None of those activities were satisfying. It was the same combination of liberal bourgeios condescention (poodle lady money), ignorant anger (x-hat illiterates), community organization (hold that sign a little higher for the cameras please), professorial woolgathering,  four or five attractive Peace Corps volunteers, Oxfam expatriates and diligence-doing grad students trolling for policy wonk creds, and of course the crowd. Nobody really knows anything for certain, the details are more complex than anybody wants to admit and there are about 30 agendas going on. As for me, half the time I was actually trying to find a good book recommendation, the other half I was just trying to spot the narc or a cute chick in dreads. I wish we had the internet back then. Now we do and the situation is no better. 

A lot of people talk about the squishiness of the term 'freedom fighter'. I've never met a Progressive American who likes to talk against GWBush's definition of terrorist vis a vis freedom fighters that are willing to acknowledge that Americans who want to buy guns in defense of their Constitutional rights are freedom fighters too. 

You can't really be familiar with Nelson Mandela if you're not aware of his rocky relationship with his wife, Winnie. And while its fairly common knowledge that she was arrested for her involvement with the beat down of some kid named Stompie and her advocacy for necklacing. I understood that vibe completely, I know how black activists get when they discover that black plainclothes cops have been attending their teach-ins. They want to kill the race-traitors. Winnie had that power and she used it, whom are we kidding?

I liked MK more than the mainstream ANC. I was rather all-in from my distance. When it came to the elections, I didn't necessarily want them to win. I was one of those who wanted the country to be renamed to Azania, because I was hip like that. Yes of course I was one of those geeks who could name more than five townships and could sing Xhosa lyrics to my favorite Miriam Mikeba songs and had all that Sarafina! jazz in my mixtapes and talked about how wimpy, yet beautify LBM were when they sang. After all, they were Christians, not true freedom fighters. When it came to the ANC, I preferred Thabo Mbeki over Joe Slovo. But because I had ingested so much of those politics and culture, it didn't come to me as any possible surprise that there were dirty doings in the details. So while a lot of Americans were priding themselves on know how to do the Toi Toi dance or sing Nkosi Sikelele Afrika, at some point the whole thing became like discussing American politics from the perspective of interpreting a Public Enemy record. Just more radical chic. 

When Mandela came to Los Angeles, I think I went to one of the events. I don't remember precisely. What I do remember was that I got my Pan=African red black and green flag from a vendor who made it in South Africa. Along with the posters in my bedroom, it was my outward sign for a long time. When I moved to Hermosa Beach and went to hang out on the and play volleyball, I would stick the little palm sized flag onto my beach chair so that I could easily be found. 

Have you ever gotten very sick or had somebody close to you die and noted the difference between the people who send you 'best wishes' and those who say 'you are in my prayers'? Sometimes of us want the best wishes, and some of us want the prayers. That's how I view the sentiments towards Mandela, a whole lot of best wishes and prayers waiting for a post-facto testimony to the power of positive thinking. I actually did want to see some blood, but I wanted to have some cool music as well, and I think I was about as connected as it's legally possible to be and not be a part of a university department or government liason office. 

Then of course there was trade. And I have gotten into debates about how Dick Cheney and George P. Schultz, two men I admire a great deal, went contrary to the popular best wishes and prayers for Mandela when it came to the Boycott movement. I went back and forth about Reagan's policy of Constructive Engagement, and finally decided not to care. And to this day I think it is the most compelling of the stories I have, at my silly distance to the power politics of nation building. 

You see while Mandela was still in jail, South Africans were drinking CocaCola. Now if you wanted to boycott the Nationalist Party, you would want to support a ban on all trade and starve the people of American goods, so that internal political pressure would be brought to bear. And similarly it would go for other American companies. But on the same list of American companies that, according to us anti-apartheid activists, should not be doing business with South Africa would be Boeing. So should South Africans be forced to ride on less safe aircraft while Boeing is restricted from selling parts or providing maintenance? Or should the policy make special loopholes? And what should we do about those companies like Coca Cola who, here in the US, have one of the best Affirmative Action programs in the world? Wouldn't they be more likely to hire blacks than the native companies? Some of the hardliners said whatever, the point is that evil Reagan is supporting American Businesses, and the Sullivan Principles really don't go to the heart of the matter and we're really just finding a way to split the difference because none of this is going to overcome the obstinance of DeKlerk. So they concluded the reverse. We should just keep doing business as usual with South Africa so that the blacks there can see that all of the White Power Strucutures in the world are doing business with the Nationalist Party, and that will bring the revolution even sooner.

The whole thing should have taught me earlier the limits of democracy and activism. Well, it kinda did, which is why I was hoping for some militant solutions. I had no doubt that Inkhata and those Zulus would have some cans of whoopass while those like Mbeki would be all diplomatic with the Europeans. 

Personally, I prefered Stephen Biko and I have come to unabashedly admire his style of leadership. We here in the US have that same idea in the form of the aphorism "There's no limit to what you accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit". Mandela today is getting all the credit. I can't honestly say what he did before he went to jail. It didn't seem to matter. After all, here in the US, lots of people could outthink MLK, but MLK was the one who could draw the crowds - the figurehead of a movement whose actions were well understood by 100 more on the ground and unknown around the world. Mandela in jail became Morgan Freeman before there was a Morgan Freeman. Grandaddy. Godfather. 

I don't know what's going on in South Africa and I don't much care. I like the South Africans I know, but they're all here and must be here for a reason. I've read a bit by Thomas Sowell and he gave a lot of interesting background on Jews and Indians in South Africa, people whose roles we Americans never pay attention to. Whatever happened if South Africa, I cannot imagine that Americans can take much credit or blame outside of our foreign policy of Contstructive Engagement, and I'm not sure at all on how to judge its worth or effect. As I said, even here, we were all over the place on it and its complications amounted to.. well I don't know. Were they wishes or prayers?  

Kant's Categorical Imperative says, if I remember it correctly, that you can judge a person based upon their moral sentiments which we intuitively and inherently know to be good or evil. So I suspect that's what a lot of the second guessing is all about. We were all morally right. We wanted to see blacks in South Africa achieve self-rule, and our sentiments and gesundheits for the late lamented Mandela are our outward signs to show that our hearts were in the right place. I think he was heroic, but I also think he was more ready to go to war than a lot of Americans like to remember. My guess is that South Africa is poorly run and that it took about three weeks for the newly elected people to realize how to redirect the grift - that the black masses have still not truly achieved self-rule. 

We're all good people and we say gesundheit as a matter of good manners. It takes more than good manners and recognition of good manners to achieve and sustain freedom.

On Bombing Syria

(Written 9/5)

Active Containment
I think that the least warlike sort of military aggression we should consider as a matter of course is a no fly zone, which is the 21st century equivalent of a naval blockade. But we should also consider naval blockades, which implies that we should have some kind of blockade on the ground. This is what I would call active containment. As part and parcel of active containment we should have a a flying command center swiping up all sorts of military communications and task a satellite to basically spy the hell out of the bad guy regime. We then share this information with enemies of the regime and essentially jail the country.

Liberty Exodus
The next thing we should do is import about 50,000 exportable middle class, rich and poor folks and put them up in a new suburb we build for them somewhere in New Mexico. Why New Mexico? Why not? We are really good at building Walmarts and McDonalds and parking lots and houses. Why not put a lot of people to work just building a new city? Make sure that we get them on the news every damned day, as soon as they learn how to speak English and say the Pledge of Allegiance. 

These are not acts of war. These are acts of empire, and we need to get back into that business, but more specifically into the second aspect of that business, which is to import some fresh foreigners and let them volunteer to join the US Army so that they can be military advisors.

But more seriously, I predicted that Obama would be a retarded foreign policy president. I don't think he can bomb his way out of his predicaments. If the United States had anything close to a standard playbook when it comes to countering the outrages of tyrannical regimes around the world, we wouldn't have to go through the sort of monkey business that the current administration finds itself pandering. Just like 'the US does not negotiate with terrorists' there ought to be some standard offensive and defensive maneuvers the US ought to have on contingency. 

Assad has been a disaster waiting to happen for as long as he's been in office. We all knew it. Neocons like me were saying we should have given license to Israel to smash him up way back in the.. hmm let's see:

• Kafranbel (ok that's a little cheesy - but an excellent reminder of the Right intent)
• Hitchens poked Bush for not doing enough back in 06.

See, a lot of muttonheads keep forgetting that Syria's madness has kept Lebanon on edge for years. And now Beirut is seeing people tried for rocket attacks. Rocket attacks? That ain't normal. So the suggestion that this is all about Syrians killing Syrians and what do we care, is just more ostrich feathers. 

American foreign policy in the Middle East ought to be simple and consistent. But Obama made the dramatic break when he promised to meet, as head of state, and talk with Assad and Castro back in 07. So now, having been handed this not-so-stunning development the revelation that he's done nothing shows his indifference to any reality that conflicts with his vision of negotiated settlements with such parties. 

At any rate, the basic premise is that lousy governments are the bane of liberty, and lousy governments who use chemical weapons need to be squashed. Period. America remains the superpower lurking in its own shadow, the improper empire and weak under this President who really doesn't seem to understand a great number of things a president should understand. I'm saddened that he isn't the moderate he pretended to be, he just moderated his radicalism. If he was a true moderate, he would be strong in moderation, but in fact he is weak in moderation, and his flippidy floppity tap dancing is only amusing to his emboldened enemies.

(Published 9/10, and he still hasn't decided)

When Iran drops the bomb. You'll know who to blame. These are the wasted days. 

Jerks and Twerks

When I was about 34 years old, I discovered strip clubs. That would be about 1995. No, then I'm wrong. It was closer to 1996 and I was 35. Mind you this was a few years after the debut of the film Jurassic Park and the debut of Janet Jackson's album 'Janet'. Janet Jackson was the last wholesome stripper, but that was way *before* her tit fell out which was in 2004, nine years later. At that moment, you remember, Justin Timberlake was becoming the new Michael Jackson, who was already long dead, artistically speaking. And it was at that moment that nominally white Americans were handed the baton, the way I see it. But titty bars were all the rage, along with Eddie Bauer Edition Ford Explorers back in 1996.

You see, I started hanging around new money and was rather excited by it back then, primarily because I was newly married and had a couple of babies, and I actually really cared about making as much money as possible. I had consigned myself to Plan B which was moving to the New South, when it was clear I wasn't going to do the Columbia MBA in International Finance with a trip through Wall Street as a hedge fund quant. I married the wrong kind of woman for New York City, and so we went to Atlanta, and I learned all about Sales. Sales guys are a fascinating breed of human being, and I wouldn't be half the man I am today if I hadn't gotten to understand the actual blood and guts of the sales process. Glengarry Glen Ross is the tip of the iceberg, people. This is the part of business that makes people throw themselves from skyscrapers. It's the crusher; the do or die, the dog eat dog and the kill or be killed. Most importantly, it's the winner takes all, a little bit of luck and the golden lottery ticket as well. So I got to see, up close and personal, what people do before and after the million dollar payday. There is an excitement that cannot be denied when you suddenly rise above all your previous limits. Suddenly, you are above society, above the law, for at least a party, right?

I don't want to speak out of school, because I genuinely learned a lot and made what you might call friends. But we people with massive egos understand that there are friends and their are friends. Nevertheless, when you have a closing party after the deal is done, much steak, lobster, cabernet and tobacco are consumed. Which is to say a lot more tasteful than hookers and blow. Then again there was Qualcomm. I do not digress to say that some people just have *that* kind of party just waiting to get out of them, and sometimes (clutch the pearls) it doesn't happen with 'experimentation in college' aka frat parties. Sometimes it happens with accountants, and purchasing agents in their mid 30s, who any other day of the week are on toddler lockdown. In short, there is a whole lot of America who are just six figures short of the kind of idiot party that Caligula might dream up, or Fellini. Does it really matter? People everywhere at some point in their lives want to get their freak on. So much so that it's a business. Strip clubs make lots of money, but at least some of them are discrete. 

So all across America when people really want to get wild and loose because they have become successful beyond their wildest dreams, well, there's Las Vegas. Just short of that there are titty bars and steakhouses. Happy Americans love to throw money around. This is actually half a problem. It is only half a problem because this is what new money success smells like. It smells like the Billionaire Boys Club. It smells like Less Than Zero. It smells like The Hangover, which is what Ferris Beuller was really thinking about doing on his day off. Except back in the Go Go 80s there wasn't quite as much new money as there was in the days of Irrational Exuberance. But it all smells the same. 

What's going on today is the same smell, except it's outdoors and broadcast and everybody wants a sniff. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that the big media executives of today have lost their ability to think like Michael Crichton or pay people like Michael Crichton. So instead of throwing money at entertainment like Jurassic Park, they throw money at Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Remember them? They are the millionaire geniuses behind South Park. Why should anyone be surprised that in such an environment as gives awards for being sexy, that being sexy is what such entertainers try their damndest to do. Wasn't it just a week ago that one of these morons told a bunch of teenagers that what's really sexy is being smart? I hear that some Senator cited him, and I kid you not.

So here's what I'm saying. There's nothing new about degeneracy. The content of hookers and blow are the same now as they have ever been, as is the utter and complete lack of imagination in transgressive excess in any of the seven deadly sins. For some people, it's a crazy party. For others it's a living, and with reality television we come closer to what we all really want which is pornography and snuff videos. YouTube treads the fine line with selfies and fail videos. But it's the same slapstick. It's the same dick jokes. It's the same night on the town in Las Vegas that Lenny Bruce was talking about. Except now every state has a lottery and every state has titty bars. Well, way more than before. But I probably shouldn't say 'we' so very broadly. It's not that highbrow culture has disappeared, it's just that people with money, ie big media producers, are not particularly interested in preserving it for the benefit of the mainstream. I'm thinking perhaps that CBS's exclusive coverage of The Masters Tournament is about all that's left. The rest is on PBS, but only because they rebroadcast BBC.

No doubt that the peasantry will be the peasantry, but we were once attempting something called public education, the ends of which were enabling self-rule. But you cannot raise a functional democracy in an atmosphere of continual shameless public degeneracy. You need episodic guilty private degeneracy for a democracy to work. In public, you should be public-minded and public-spirited. If your aim is the preservation of liberty you must more than balance your mindless debauchery with civil conduct. It requires an 80/20 rule at the very least. It's tragic that such cannot go without saying that prominent figures in society should be beyond any reasonable reproach. Of course you must understand that we are fighting a war against those who spend their lives chasing Pulitzer prizes for discovering 'hipocrisy'. Such gossips and destroyers of worlds refuse to distinguish between the personal and the political, the private and the public. Their parents were racist, so the world is racist, etc, etc. (c.f. Nouning Hatey). "What difference does it make?", these liars ask. We're all twerkers and jerks and smokers and drinkers and haters and murderers - it's all a part of American culture, they say. It's all a part of *some* culture, they'll say. Multiculturalists must accept that any human being can do what comes natural and it must be civilized because 'we all do it at some point' and 'who are we to judge', and other mawkish banalities.

What's going on is simple outrage. And since I spent an hour in a waiting room this afternoon forced to watch CNN and some doe-eyed parent wailing about the 20 year-old who apparently can't wait to get out of her Disney contract and her clothes, I had to think about it too. We, now speaking of myself in this, simply must take our moral obligations to the next level. One cannot assume that the public sphere is not immoral, because the airwaves and every other mass medium are run by moral idiots who have every incentive to cater to every degeneracy imaginable. Our media environment has all the appeal of a ghastly train wreck, with big tits, covered in bacon. It's not going to stop. You just have to stay away from it; guard your soul. 

It's not difficult to maintain distance. We all know where the titty bars are. As Nancy Reagan reminded us, Just Say No. All it takes is moral discipline, which for most of us is easily had. It's just rather pathetic that the media business has lost theirs. Which is why this 'story' is making headlines just before we punish Syria. 

Obligatory Seriousness on The Zimmerman Case

I probably have neglected to spell it out, primarily because I don't care much. But history is a bitch and people always want to know 'what were you thinking?'. So here's what I'm thinking.

1. The Media has a lot of nerve suggesting and keeping alive the suggestion that the outcome of this case is significant for black Americans. IE, this is another presumption about what 'does' happen and 'oughtn't' happen to the 'average black male youth'. 

2. What is the name of the town? In Florida? Some flyspec burg? So who cares?

3. No new law. 'Stand Your Ground' is not on trial. And that's Florida anyway. So who cares?

4. I hear that some racially representative factions will decide to riot depending on the outcome of this new 'Trial of the Century'. I recommend rubber bullets and teargas. OK maybe not rubber bullets. How about firehoses?

That's about all. One man dead. Happens all the time. I hear that they've been counting the dead in Chicago, Obama's home town. Something like a couple dozen over the Fourth of July Weekend. But who cares?

I do not have a more serious opinion and I refuse to be accept the notion that I should have one. 

On Charles Ramsey

The thing I like about Charles Ramsey is that finally, he's the guy who knew what he was talking about. Most of the time when I used to pay attention to such stuff, I got the impression that reporters would deliberately seek out the loudest black man on the street with the most hair and the fewest teeth and have him represent the neighborhood. At long last, they didn't pick a bystander.

Of course he's still from Cleveland.  

Obligatory Seriousness on Christopher Jordan Dorner

We woke up this morning with a police helicopter hovering over our neighborhood. Two women delivering newspapers early this morning were shot about 4 blocks from my house. I sleep like a rock, but once I was up the annoyance was persistent. It turns out that a couple or three counties in Southern California are on alert on the lookout for a manifesto writing ex-cop and Iraq reservist whose name will now live in infamy whether or not they shoot him dead. 

You see Dorner has promised to wage asymmetrical warfare on the LAPD, and he sounds like he knows how to do it. So obviously they'll be bringing in any number of hotdog specialists to track down this man who doesn't seem to have any pathological pictures available for the press to make him look crazier than he is. Now that I think about it, I hope they don't bring drones - but I have a feeling this could be the beginning of something ugly for a number of reasons.

Manifesto Destiny
Whenever somebody writes a Manifesto, it basically means - "Hey I know I dont' have a legal case but I'm about to go off the deep end - here's why..." In Dorner's life story we learn that he's been fired for not getting some other cops fired, and essentially being zero-tolerance for called 'nigger'. It's rather sad when even Snoop Dogg has more self-esteem. I mean nobody likes being called ugly names, and anybody ought to take offense, but usually a slap in the face followed by throwing breakables across the room generally gets that point across. This nutcase is talking about whipping out the .50 cal and sniping the freeway. 

How Many Is Many?
Right now, although it's unclear, Dorner is a suspect in a double murder. A basketball coach and his fiance were the first targets, tangential to some ugly part of his career. Since that happened yesterday, I think he has either shot or killed two or three police officers. So obviously they've got eight or nine law enforcement agencies on a big old manhunt. Last I heard, he hightailed it up to the mountains. So the irony of course is if he's actually up there, then they'll be chasing him through the woods with dogs. So he's some sort of mass murderer, I'm just not sure what the tipping point is. Either way, a lot of us will feel a lot better to see him hogtied. 

The Devil You Don't Know
Whatever the manifesto says, whatever the locals report, whatever the amount of dirt you might find in the LAPD, there will be a campaign of shame against Dorner. It's not really necessary though. A double homicide is all the bad you have to know.  So that's why this is obligatory seriousness.

Under the Jail
Dude is planning jihad and he's not afraid to die. Blaze of glory? Naw. I say get the gas and the tranquilizer darts. This dude needs to be humiliated. Too bad we don't pillory.

Related articles

Christopher Jordan Dorner, Disgraced LAPD Cop, Suspected In Irvine Murders

Manhunt for Former Cop After 3 Officers Shot

Obligatory Seriousness on The Adverbs of Shooting

In America, we have shootings. We have serial killers and people who go ballistic. We have lots of things that nobody seems to want to count. 

This morning and today I will hear people offer peoms, politics and prayers. I am as skeptical as Sting of poets, priests and politicians but De Doo Doo Doo is not all I want to say to you. I want you to be mindful of the numbers. Because today is another crisis for which a certain small but influential group of people would like to exploit as what they call a 'teachable moment'. 

How this works is that they don't use numbers. They will say 'far too many'. They will say 'all too often'. They will say 'never quite enough'. They will say 'gone too far'. They will say 'beyond the limit'. They will do everything possible to make what's happening right now seem to be the biggest, the most important, the most extreme, or as Judy Jetson once put it, "the most ut". What is the most ut? Well, that's obvious, it is the utmost. And that is exactly what the poets, priests and politicians will seek from you, and they will make you feel selfish if you don't participate in their teachable moment.

These will be 'pro-actions' which will be done by pronouns, and it will all sound good until somebody says how much it will cost, you know, in actual accountable figures. As soon as the anti-gun lobby says exactly how much money they have raised, the game is up. Fortunately most of us can still be snapped into reason when the poetic rationale becomes translated into dollars. Of course the poets know this, which is why they tell you how much money the gun lobby spends - so you focus your analysis on Them and keep your hearts with Us. 

People will offer prayers. It sounds nice until you try to quantify it. How much prayer should I offer when it's 27 dead? Is that a linear function? Should 'a moment' of silence do? If five minutes of silence was appropriate for 9/11, how many seconds for 27? Nobody will do the math. 

Nobody will count the number of flags at half staff. Nobody will count the tears. Nobody will count the blessings of this not being Syria. Nobody will count the hours of airtime spent which paper over the other 17,000 murder victims who will have died this year, or the 30,000 suicides in this country alone. Nobody will count the refugees in Namibia or the number of ships in the Sea of Aden or the price of touchscreens in China. That kind of science is not popular because it starts clarify what is outside the Agenda. That kind of science is outside of the scope of the Narrative. Until it isn't - you know - until all the leaders of the Chatting Class cite another Harvard Study that tells us if red wine is good or bad for us as compared to the French, and that is the talking point of the day.

But the talking point of this day will be to unify the sense of outrage that none of us good people should have to endure in a country as wealthy and powerful and good as America the Beautiful. 

But here's what I'm saying. Today of all days, be on the lookout for adjectives and adverbs. The people who find them to be their most powerful tools will be using them instead of numbers to get your attention. My bet says that we can expect 'senseless' and perhap a 'heinous' or two. 'Gawdawful' is rather popular. I guarantee that 'tragic' will be in the top three adverbs. And I gather that some people will even see this text as 'disrespectful'. Ahh but it is not. I challenge people to be a nation full of adults who are not led by men who weep at the obvious. 

And now to my personal story.

Just the other night, there was an armed robbery somewhere in Moreno Valley which is a good 90 minute drive from where I live. But it was a short high speed chase for the cops and robbers to where my son attends university. One of the robbers decided he would hide out at CSUF among the students - maybe blend in and fool the cops. I discovered this crime in progress when I was somewhere in New Hampshire about 3024 miles away by car and 3 hours different in time zones. My news source told me that the school had been on lockdown for several hours meaning that all students should 'shelter in place'. I figure the drill is much like we see in movies, men in tactical garb going room by room and then shouting 'clear!' After four hours of looking for an armed robber, I'd be wanting a donut break if I was a SWAT officer. I know the students waiting for the drama to end were wanting one - I read the twitter feeds.  It took about 3 hours to get a text from my son, who was OK. But he might have been shot. This is the third time my kids have been blanketed by scores of cops over such violent matters.

I should note with irony one of the tweets that was often repeated portrayed 'The militarization of our college campus' with a shot of these officers, along with complaints about the helicopters. All which come with the territory of politics - and disappar quickly when the first victim is shot dead (by someone other than the cops). 

It's very difficult to get good information about when and where precisely people are, what their skill levels are and who is safe and who is in danger. All the texting and Instagramming of the masses lacks the precision of the kind of radio traffic we remember hearing between Eagle and Houston during the Space Age. Most people don't know the difference between Roger and Wilco, and we should not expect that to change. The point is, even when you want precision and science and facts, (like is my son dead or alive right this minute?) you can't hardly get what you want. So it's frustrating to hear the standard litany of adverbs and adjectives from the local standup newscaster. Just as often you don't get what you need. Until your son shows up - or not. 

When it comes to the facts, you're on your own.

I know enough about personal tragedy to understand that sympathy is due and small gestures matter. I also know that all the sympathetic language from the anonymous public does not. But what I'm thinking about today is the extent to which people are seduced into making their sentiments into law without looking at the hard, cold facts, and how much they are coming to expect that this is how democracy should work.

 

Obligatory Seriousness on Citizens United, Corporations & Free Speech

Every once in a while I hear a bunch of noise about Citizens United being a singular perversion about the ideas of liberty and free speech blah blah. I never paid so much attention to that controversy assessing in a reactionary way that the opponents will spend as much money as they like to defend whatever it is they want to defend. Just because they don't call it a corporation doesn't change matters. I roll this in with my growing skepticism about democratic aggregation in the Peasant Theory. More on DA later.

Apparently Justice Alito has saved me some trouble with his own snappy answer. Or was it Roberts? 

But basically the snappy answer is this. Does the New York Times have a First Amendement right to free speech? Is the New York Times a corporation?  Case closed.

Obligatory Seriousness on Boy Scouts & Pedophilia

The worst thing about the Boy Scouts is that they're awfully serious about their programs. And if you are a traveling consultant like I am, there is no amount of assuaging you can do which is up the level of guilt you must bear by half-doing it. You can't just let your kid be a Scout. They pull you in. Nevertheless, I wanted to participate a bit, got certified in Youth Protection, and helped out with my local troop. 

Boy Scout Youth Protection certification is onerous. I will say that without question it is more difficult than traffic school which I've done twice. About 40% of the matters and situations you study are somewhat reasonable common sense.  The rest gives you an indication of how little, in our everyday lives, we think about the implications of being around child molesters. I can tell you that's what the Scouts are today and have been since I've been involved for about 7 years as a parent.

Clay Shirky snarked a remark today that rubbed me all backwards. But who am I to take tweets seriously? But the upshot of his remark was that one can expect that pedophiles can get away with more in organizations that are homophobic. My retort was that it is amazing how much slander you can get into one tweet. So obviously I take issue with the charge of homophobia. I also disagree with the counter-intuitive argument. But most of all I resent the attitude.

There's not much I can do about my resentment towards anyone's attitude. It unnerves me when intelligent people who are otherwise deserving of respectful consideration have their mental and ethical transmissions pop into neutral and drift into oncoming traffic. So I'm unnerved; I'll get over it.

What to think about the Scouts? Well, an accusation of homophobia is like an accusation of racism. How much is six pounds of homophobia? That's a matter for you and your neighbors to discuss. Despite the fact that we are chockablock with meddlesome people whose mental wellbeing seems to cry out for their every social desire to be legislated, we still haven't turned over the country to such fashion police. I can't say that I'm sanguine about the longer term prospects, but at least we know political correctness when we hear it. Is New Hampshire more homophobic than South Dakota? If you had to scratch your head more than you might about Michigan vs Mississippi then there might be hope for your objectivity yet. That doesn't change the fact that we're already aware of the stereotypes which affect our judgment. My point here is that people generally live in communities where their social expectations are in the median. So if six pounds is enough to cause you outrage, chances are that your neighbors are outraged too. But what does your outrage matter on the national stage?

That should be a matter of objective measurement. 

So I would like to know, as a matter of objective measurement, what can be inferred by the number of pedophiles in the general population and their rate of apprehension, vs that in Scouting. I quite clearly recall that when the matter was dealt with in the Catholic Church that the numbers told the tale that the organization fared better in identifying the perpetrators. After which all of the noise became moot, despite the controversy. 

I must say in this and in many matters that I have the advantage of indifference which is quite apart from disinterest. I have a Randian distaste for disinterest.  I never say it doesn't matter one way or another. It does. But from my point of view, I'd much prefer that we seek an objective standard. Let it be six pounds without question, how you react is your business.

I've twice taken the USADA to task (up to a point of indifference) for what I percieve to be a radical standard of evidence in its dogged persuit of Lance Armstrong. Considering the amount of power they seem to hold over such matters of the fate of cyclists who break the rules of that sport - to me they seem as much as a civil court - they certainly don't operate in ways that would be acceptable in an actual court of law. The same can be said about the Boy Scouts. The amount of scrutiny we give adults around Scouts at our events is Orwellian. OK let's say six pounds of Big Brother. The fact of the matter is, that it is a clear violation of Scout policy for there to be less than two adults present at any pickup or dropoff point, for example. If an event is over and a parent is late, and there's just one kid left, there had better be two adults present. Think about your kids and how you pick them up and drop them off for school or over a friend's house. I'm sure most families are not up to the Scouting standard, one that is necessary in light of what we know about child predators. I've seen the grated nerves of Scout leaders, personally.

What little I've heard about the news on NPR this evening which might be behind Shirky's reasoning is that the Scouting standard has been responsible for booting suspected gay leaders and suspected pedophiles with a ridiculously tendentious evidentiary standard. Yes, well that's the problem with zero tolerance. We all have that same problem. It is the same problem as zero tolerance of homophobia.  The good news is that the Boy Scouts recognize the ambit of their influence and don't go trawling for other people's misdeeds under some inflammatory non-standard. The bad news is others do and so we get unnerved. We'll get over it. The Boy Scouts have defined their six pound weight limits, and you don't get to be a Boy Scout in any way unless you are certified against that standard.

Of course that wasn't always the case. To get fired from the Boy Scouts of America as a suspect of pedophilia is a rather serious indictment and the process is well understood in the here and now. I don't know which other organizations might have publicly disclosed their history, rules and actions to a similar degree aside from the Catholic diocese of various major cities in the US.  The stories in the news that I read today gave their egregious examples from the 70s - you remember the 70s don't you? Some standards of those days wouldn't fly today, for that there's no doubt or controversy. But today's Boy Scouts are a strong and proud organization which I defend against flippant charges. 

Yes, they are ahead of the law, and when it comes to pedophilia, I think that's a good thing, and so do the people in my neighborhood.

Associated Stuff:

• Rude Questions About the Catholic Priesthood
• The Depravity Scale 

On Racialized SciFi

From a conversation I began and forgot two weeks ago...

..This is somewhat interesting. I'm actually on my way into deeper realms of this dimension. In particular I'm considering all of the NeoVictorian everything as a useful countercultual metaphor / narrative/ critique of the failures of globalism. I suspect that there's more than a bit of white boy worry going on here, which for people like myself amounts to little more than 'hey are you sure your sensitive oppressed little soul can handle this?'. That's especially the case when such white boy worry anticipates rather than reacts. I mean you just can't win as a white boy, which is why criticism is always better than prior restraint. (In general anyway). Of course I understand that some folks are doomed to only think of themselves as white boys, more's the pity.

All that said, I agree that the entire culture vulture argument is wrong and always has been wrong. And the presumption that cultural artifacts can serve political purposes is faulty as well. Either it's racist terrorism & propaganda or it's not. Everybody's mileage varies, but not by race. I just went over this matter in my head a couple weeks ago viz Resident Evil 5, and it was bad, but it was the kind of bad that was clearly artistically bad. Any attempt to read a political intent into that is foolish.

I'm also going to qualify myself via the 'six pounds of racism' excuse because although I've not read all of Kipling, I've yet to find something in him that makes me all queasy. Again, I don't put a lot of stock in post-colonial narratives of oppression. There might be enough racism in all that to give some folks the vapors, but that's hardly criminal facilitation.

Korman, I presume you are referring to Pynchon's Against the Day re: female airship pilots etc. If it's whitewashing history, then it's only another form of revisionism. I mean have you actually read Molefi Asante? I think any historical fiction is just as fair game as science fiction and the more any writer tries to make of the races of their characters in any contemporary political context, the more they are writing themselves out of the ultimate humanities.

I haven't been influenced by any racialist reading of Tolkein but I can't give that bit any more cred than I would of a literal interpretation of the meaning of putting sentient animals into any story. I mean who of us are actually hares and who of us are tortoises?

I have encountered a rather stilted Barbie system in EVE Online, which I have on trial at the moment. And I've played enough RPGs to judge how strict their racialisms are. But I have never encountered one that warrants prior restraint that wasn't transparently racist propaganda. The only thing that comes immediately to mind is Ghetto-opoly, which crashed and burned in a matter of weeks. 

I am ultimately convinced that any writer sufficiently in touch with the actual nature of humanity should have no problem writing out any length of work strictly within their 'own' ethnic realm. I was even relatively certain of this back in 1989 when I was writing the Great American Black Novel...

Obligatory Seriousness on Aurora

Senseless violence. As perpetrated by human beings, there is no such thing as senseless violence. The only senseless violence is that done by nature. A hurricane is senseless. A volcano is senseless. A tornado creates random and senseless violence leaving human devastation with no reason whatsoever. Human beings are never senseless - they do things with purpose. Murder is purposeful, never senseless. Every man who aims a gun has a purpose, and a reason.  I would hope that anyone who wants to debate the fate of shooters in America never makes this mistake of using the term 'senseless violence'. 

I cannot address this unique murder except through the context of two ideas, one which is certain and the other which is not so certain.

The uncertainty stems from the probable lack of any good data on the incidence of mass murder in other countries. Here in America, we have 17,000 murders (or so) per year, the overwhelming majority are done one at a time to people known by the assailant. So ordinary murder is not such a big deal as far as press stories with political legs, but this sort has gotten up and walked around the block a couple times. How many mass murders are there in the world? Or is America exceptional? 

The United States experienced 645 mass-murder events — killings with at least four victims — between 1976 and 2010, according to Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox. When graphed, these incidents show no obvious trend. The numbers go up and down and up again. The total body count: 2,949.

For the sake of reference, Los Angeles in 2008 showed 384 homicides.  

I always begin and end with the premise that all men are created equal. This means I have a very difficult time with criticisms of American society that don't have some baseline outside of American society. And I look at the political activism of reasonable people with history in mind. What are the possibilities that the ideas tossed around among the American chatting class this month can actually hold water against everything that has gone before? Or are people just convinced?  

I write this essay in the context of obligatory seriousness because it is something that in light of the first idea, I cannot be certain how ultimately serious it should be taken. Is it more important than any other sort of mass murder in the world? I have heard many people express outrage directed against what they percieve to be an unusual defect unique to America. My bias is not to believe the defect is so unusual. Perhaps it is self-evident that Americans have access to a higher quality of manufactured goods than any other population - our guns kill better, but I don't think that's really the problem. Is there something about America that produces more psychopathic killers? Or do our psychopaths merely have access to better technology? Does America have more psychopaths per capita, or are they just more free to move about unimpeded in society? These questions have not been answered to my satisfaction. 

--

The certain idea is actually the more disturbing one, because what is certain is that the end game of gun control is disarmament. Disarmament is never universal, it is always directed at a certain party. Disarmament is selective and compelled. The effect of gun control is to disarm certain Americans. Well, which? The answer, more often than not, begins and ends with political bias. Try 'gun-nuts'. Try 'NRA supporters'.

I suppose that I am as guilty as Jason Alexander in ranting over this story. Consider the difference between the reactions of the Left and Right in response to the matter of of the Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan. Or of Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner. Or of Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho. Jason Alexander and others are quick to explain out that the Aurora shooting should prove that there is no defensible logic for the support of publicly available assault rifles. That claim invokes rather complicated proofs, not the least of which is an explanation of how Cho killed more than twice as many people with a couple of pistols. 

At any rate, I find myself at a particular loss to get excited over this except to guage the energy and logic of those motivated to hang their disarmament hats on this particular peg. Or as I expressed it more passionately: 

It's not a gun-nut problem, it is a matter of law applied to the public because of the acts of one. What I'm more interested here is how your political lot can agitate to remove +Eric Raymond 's freedom because of one lunatic. Suddenly in your eyes, we all become 'gun-nuts'. How can you not see that prejudicial bias working against the principles of liberty?

How indeed?

Gil-Scott Heron: Dead

There is a poem by Nikki Giovanni that sums up in about 25 lines everything I think about black consciousness. I could write about it for years, but the essential thing to say doesn't take more than 30 seconds. There are lyrics in a song by Lionel Ritchie that sums up my confidence that I would grow to be the man I expected to be despite all the odds. There's a song by the Isley Brothers that puts me immediately at peace every time I hear it. If I didn't know better I might say that everything I needed to know about black culture could be summed up that way. 

Once upon a time I didn't know better, and in those days it was important for me to find a way to express every emotion and cultural concept in my shared black language. I called it, as I finished my last experiments in it The Well-Wrapped Universe. I would never have to use any metaphors besides those invented in the 'hood to communicate my humanity to all of humanity - and as Earth Wind & Fire said, "If you don't understand me, it's your fault."

I knew I was being selfish even as I over-exaggerated self-referentially in post-modern blackness as a 'Boohabian persistent black object'. But it was still charming and fun in the 90s. I felt the beginning of the end when I found myself, a bit to my surprise, across in Europe trying to make myself understood. I knew I couldn't be so persistent when I found things I was looking for in Borges' poetry and in the lamentations of Chinua Achebe and spiral tales of Carlos Fuentes. Yeah, I was that multicultural. 

The problem with Gil Scott Heron is the same problem as with John Cheever. It's the same problem as with Issac Hayes and with Jesus Christ Superstar. He's too damned specific. It's like saying New Orleans and then humming When the Saints Go Marching In. You can't get away from the fact that Gil-Scott Heron wrote 'Angel Dust', 'Whitey on the Moon' and 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised'. You might want to think of Curtis Mayfield in some broader context than the Superfly Soundtrack. You might want to try to extend the cultural significance of The Wizard of Oz, but it's still always "I'll get you my pretty, and your little dog too". And Vince Geraldi will always be Linus and Lucy and Mikey will always be Life Cereal and Wil Wheaton will always be Ensign Crusher. Forever.

Issac Hayes is the big bald black man who made the ungh sounds of the 70s like a natural man was supposed to. And Jesus Christ Superstar made all pop culture Jesus freaks and hippies approachable for a moment. But what I didn't know when I was 13 years old was that those symbols wouldn't last forever and explain more about the world than just that moment. It was hard for me to accept that Kwai Chang Caine's grasshopper lessons wouldn't serve me long after the show was canceled - especially when I learned that role was supposed to be for Bruce Lee. 

And I began to become resentful of all the things I knew to be true but only for my Well Wrapped Universe. I began to hate the fact that the world couldn't catch the flavor and it didn't want to study. That there is what Gerald Early calls lure and loathing. But I played in all sections of the orchestra, and mastered all the languages and idioms. 

Still. I was prepared to hear that Marvin Gaye's 'Whats Going On' was not the greatest album ever recorded. I was prepared to hear that Alex Haley's Roots was not the greatest American story ever told. But it was hard to give up the arcane gems. It was hard to have to explain The Last Poets. It was difficult to remind people that LA had KDAY, KGFJ, KJLH and KACE, each a different flavor of black radio. And as time went by, it was disappointing to explain Yellow Back Radio, you know, and break it down. It was painful to read High Cotton alone. It was ridiculously hard to give up on explaining George C. Wolfe and so now I explain the real killer. 

The real killer is when, above and beyond the Well Wrapped Universe you find superior examples. It's like dissing Michael Jackson in 1982 when John Landis was just discovering him.

So I look back on Gil Scott Heron and what can I say? He was deep to me as a teenager when I sat in the back of the bus and recited him and Richard Pryor like the perverse psuedo badass I was, or pretended to be. When the world was ruled by The Funk, and when Issac Hayes said ungh, you said ungh back. When you looked with admiration at the matron in the white uniform and 14 inch arms who stood in the back of the church and swung a mean tambourine; when the hardest working man in show business dropped to one knee and the sweat on his forehead let you know he was The Godfather; when all you had to do was say Aretha and everybody shutup. That was the day for Gil Scott Heron and all the ghetto poets of America. When Flip Wilson was preaching in The Church of What's Happenin' Now. When the New York Times used slang words to let the reader know that a Negro was speaking. That's when Gil Scott Heron's message to the masses was a thing to hold in reverence. When everybody had the expectation that some wino had more humanity in him than the President, when hippy dippy weathermen were funny, when you were excited to see Goldie Hawn  pop out of a little door and say 'sock it to me'. That was then. 

It's all so specific that unless you're over 40 years old, you probably have no idea of half the things I'm talking about. Just like I didn't get Bugs Bunny jokes about A ration cards or victory gardens or the aphrodesiac powers of nylon stockings until I went and studied. 

You can go and study Gil-Scott Heron, but his world is over. It's just taking up space in a part of my brain I don't use much any longer. His voice is coming out over the transistors of my old leather covered Federal radio on 1230 AM, hot times soulin' on the weekend, KGFJ.

A rat done bit my sister Nell
and Whitey's on the moon.
Her arms and legs began to swell
And Whitey's on the moon.  

There's some things you remember for which you'll never need Google. I'm prepared to accept those things only mean something to me, and only because it used to mean something to the me I used to be. That's what it means not to be televised. 

Obligatory Seriousness on the End of Birther Madness

I hear that there's an official request from the President of the Uniteed States to the appropriate bureaucracy in Hawaii providing a birth certificate, putting to rest all rumors to the contrary. There's really only three things to say about this.

1. It illustrates that if the President wanted it done, it would be done. End of story. Therefore, he clearly didn't want it done.

2. Birthers need to STFU.

3. Birthers will not STFU. They will go find another conspiracy theory. 

There are always parallels made between Birthers and Truthers. Some odd bunch of peasants who don't deserve franchise have managed, in our brain dead mediasphere to make headlines. That's nothing new. I think the better comparison is made between Birthers and the people who assumed that Dick Cheney was trying to make money from Haliburton and had secret meetings with energy people in his office. In both of these situations there is a level of contempt in the Oval Office that spits contemptuously at the presumption of irate citizens. 

Clearly Obama was working on a principle. 

 

Obligatory Seriousness on Terry Jones

Terry Jones is the evangelical whose grandstanding and staged burning of the Koran has got him in a lot of hot water. He should drown in it, no less than other clerics who think that America should take political cues from their faith. But some people, especially atheists, have suggested that he be tried for incitement, reckless endangerment and even murder. Why? Because some nutcases on the other side of the globe used his provocation to set them off on innocents, namely UN staffers in Afghanistan. That logic, to charge Jones, is absurd, but there's nothing particularly defensible about Jones.

I am impressed witht he fact that Jones prepared his act for maximum effect. He could be considered a symbolic terrorist, manipulating media to outrage, insult and injure a particular class of people. But that's only a moral and ethical definition - we are fortunate that it is not a legal definition. Where would it stop? As shrill as this act is, it is very little more than a staged act by one individual. It is not a political movement by many people over a long period of time. If one were to bend the rules of causality to accuse Terry Jones of murder, how many executives of Planned Parenthood should be next? 

In the end, Jones made people of a certain mindset do what they were aiming to do, none of which is justifyable. I am stuck with an analogy of Malcolm X whispering in Emmett Till's ear - "Hey, go whistle at that white girl."  You can see how vile that would be of Malcolm to send Till to some dangerous fate, but you still couldn't accuse him of murder. Murderers are murderers, period. But those who send innocents off to murderous environments are far from being guilt free.

Obligatory Seriousness on Assange

Some zealot named Assange is responsible for leaking the names of dozens of Afghan informants through WikiLeaks as part of a greater effort to fight the Pentagon. Over the past week many comments have been made to suggest that in light of this, perhaps unintended consequence of Assange's mission to disclose the ugly truth about war, that he doesn't have problems sleeping with the knowledge that these informants will be hunted down by the Taliban.

Aside from the matter of Assange's apparent moral fecklessness, there is the matter of his entry into the intelligence business. The fact that the release of such names has been disclosed in this instance does not mean such leaks have never taken place before - if so, how would we know? Clearly, Assange has decided to work at cross-purposes to the Administration's war effort. He is apparently not up to it. That he comes to us in large print, compromised in the same vector he wanted to be sainted.

Coincidence? I think not.

Obligatory Seriousness on LeBron & The World Cup

I have five things to say on LeBron.

1. If I was LeBron, I would have left Cleveland too. It makes little sense to be the world's best and live in a second rate city.

2. Shaq made no difference. It obviously takes more than two to make a winning NBA team.

3. The new Heat will encounter new defense, a la 'hack a shaq' that will shut down whatever the new trio is called in the first season. I like 'The Amazing Three' from the cartoon. I'm surprised that I haven't heard more.

4. Dan Gilbert doesn't need to be any classier than any other loudmouth NBA owner (Mark Cuban).

5. Jesse Jackson should mind his own business, and if I were LeBron James, I would find a way to quietly tell him so. 

--

I have five things to say on the World Cup

1. Suarez of Uruguay got the booing he deserved, but he was not as bad as Zidane.

2. Forlan of Uruguay got the Golden Ball he deserved. He made the most beautiful goal of the entire series.

3. I'm disappointed in NED. They depended too much on Robben against Spain.

4. If Muller hadn't got put out of the semis, I still think Germany would have won.

5. Yay USA. Expect a lot more attention from American sports fans. Still, Altidore pooped out and should have done more.

That Flotilla

Every once in a while, a phrase creeps up into the news cycle that carries its context with it, obliterating all prior use of the phrase. Wordsmithing is to be expected. That's the genius of modern media, meme creation. It doesn't need to be either grounded in reality or respecting of traditional usage. I would wager that we have a relative spike in the use of new idioms of this sort.

As I listen to No Agenda, I am reminded of the power of PR firms. They know things we don't know about how to create things we are expected to know. A world of bourgeois info consumers, that's what we are - those of us with disposable income and disposable brain cycles. It's why the iPad is popular. Because we have time to read all that brain spew. I'm a brain spewer myself. I've got time to think and no particular village to run. I'm no Hill & Knowlton or Fleishman Hillard and neither are you. So try to remember that your opinion is brilliant, but nobody knows about it because you don't have those guys working for you.

But what a lot of people already suspect can be amped into virtual media certitude with the assistance of an intelligence service, a PR giant, a sufficient editorial dollop of yellow journalism or a government agency or two. And what we tend to forget is that when, oh say Saudi Arabia and Syria have an interest in spreading their spin on events, the right words will ring in the right ears. So if you suspect that Israel is up to no good, it doesn't take a million dollar PR budget to buy yourself the proper global media meme.

And so today we are living with the word 'flotilla' pretty much at the top of the search trends, although I've waited a few days to publish this or say anything, so who knows what's transpired since I wrote it. I refuse to dignify 'peace flotilla'. Well I guess I just did by putting the two words together. It's PR, and it's fake and it's deceptive and it's all over the English, Hebrew and Arabic speaking world. 

I don't generally care to comment on Israel or the Palestinians other than to note from time to time how lame our policy has been since Shalit was abducted. I have generally abandoned care and snidely suggest an international protectorate for Jerusalem, but David Goldman recently let me know that has been tried before. I am satisfied with all of my investigations that the Israelis are doing a commendable job, all things considered.

So let be be one more to jump on Caroline Glick's bandwagon.Oh and by the way, I will use the terms 'military blockade' and 'human sheild' in reference to the matter of the Marvi Marmara.

GTMO Again

I remember when GTMO was a big deal on everybody's lips. I learned a lot from Stashiu over at Patterico's Pontifications. The subject came up again this morning elsewhere and so I had to look some things up. So I'm putting up this post to remind me of the keywords.

In retrospect, what I'm thinking about GTMO is rather simple. Number one, here is the declassified Operating Manual. I haven't read it but I do have it. Download Gitmosop

Number Two: Most of interrogation is not dangerous or inhumane. You'd have to read Stashiu to know that - he was there. I'm not going to do your homework for you.

Number Three: Only Hamdan had a case. The rest was mostly baseless, or caseless as the case may be. Yes I'm being flip. Then again, where are the lawsuits? If you have more information on the lawsuits, by all means, share it.

I Remember Lena

She was old when I was young, but she was beautiful. She was extraordinarily beautiful - as if she were another species of human. She came to my neighborhood to speak when I was a child. She took her time. I don't remember much of what she said, but that she believed in us. Don't quit. Work hard. Common sense things coming from a legend makes them seem more real.

She was right there. I saw her. It was unreal.

She had a kind of accent, a kind of unusual power in her voice. She had eyes that swallowed you whole. Her teeth were brilliant white pickets. Her skin was perfect in every way. She was regal. I didn't want to get too close. She didn't get tired, she didn't want to say hi and then jump quickly back into the limo. She lingered. She waited until everyone asked what they wanted to ask.

I got the feeling she outlasted all of her opposition and that she was free. She never let anything corrupt her out of frustration. Time was on her side.

Scott Brown Looks Good

Scott Brown. From nowhere. 

I haven't heard a word he's said, but like most folks on my side of the curtain, I think his billboard is brilliant. 

From his website:

State Senator Scott Brown has led the fight in Massachusetts against wasteful government spending and higher taxes. He is a free-market advocate who believes our strength as a nation flows from its people. He believes in a culture of family, patriotism and freedom. At his September 12 announcement of candidacy for the U.S. Senate, Senator Brown articulated a core set of beliefs that guide his thinking.

• Government is too big and that the federal stimulus bill made government bigger instead of creating jobs
• Taxes are too high and are going higher if Congress continues with its out-of-control spending
• The historic amount of debt we are passing on to our children and grandchildren is immoral
• Power concentrated in the hands of one political party, as it is here in Massachusetts, leads to bad government and poor decisions
• A strong military and vigorous homeland defense will protect our interests and security around the world and at home
• All Americans deserve health care, but we shouldn't have to create a new government insurance program to provide it

Senator Brown is a proud member of the Massachusetts National Guard, where he has served for nearly three decades and currently holds the rank of Lt. Colonel in the Judge Advocate Generals (JAG) Corps. Brown was awarded the Army Commendation Medal for meritorious service in homeland security following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. His career in public service began as selectman in Wrentham. He then went on to serve three terms as a State Representative and won his current State Senate seat in a special election in 2004. He is currently in his third Senate term.

Sounds like a winner to me. Today he is four points ahead in the polls.

Gnicrowe Dyelecght

It has been a while since I've updated my list of books I've been reading, but as I trod through the snow this evening back to my hotel room, Banks' Transition was on my mind. I could only see through my glasses in the thin strip of light between the scarf pulled high over my mouth and nose and the brim of the hat pulled low over my forehead. I followed some anonymous persons footsteps on the snowy sidewalk in the dimming light and it seemed to me to be a completely alien experience.

In Transition, certain persons are transported into the bodies and minds of others. Having done so they go through a mental checklist of their mental abilities. Languages come first. Most of the target humans have four or more languages, but nobody gets transmuted into a single languaged black American like myself. I have enough French to get on a bus, and enough Spanish to order a taco, but who doesn't? What I do have is just about every American English dialect, from Georgia Drawl to Texas Twang to East LA Spanglish to Brooklyn Eytalian-English, to suburban Upspeak. And though I don't have it as much as I used to, I surely have that which would make me absolutely indistinguishable from Ice Cube if you were to hear me on the phone. With all of these, including a light Scandihoovian, all it takes is two weeks dipped into the element, and I'm in full brogue. And so it occurred to me what a conceit it is that Europeans think themselves so damnably sophisticated in their polyglottish when there's less distance between London and Venice than there is between Phoenix and Seattle. 

I don't mean to be dismissive of European history or culture. Well, actually I do for the same reasons the Euro Zone was created. Italy ain't got much on Texas and 58 million Italians know it. Especially in the wake of this global recession, the PIGS aren't faring very well. (Portugal, Italy, Greece & Spain), whereas plenty of hope and vitality lies with the BRICs or so it's said. Tangentially, as I'm on a rip with my atheist pals, I wonder how readily they would dismiss San Marco Square given all of its religious totemry. Why not defend an atheist suicide bomber in Il Duomo? Obviously Mr. Kurt Westergaard doesn't seem to be worth anybody's time of day, neh? The Continentals are committing cultural suicide in some crazy perversion of Descartes, they think, therefore they shouldn't impose their being. Well, to a certain extent, especially that which gives rise and courage to the likes of our Social Democrats, good riddance to the knot of you.

There is nothing special about any dialect or language. Sapir-Whorf has been disproven and Turing was he who did it. And if you don't believe me, you should recall that you are reading from a digital device. There are simply better and worser communicators, and so when I think about it I wonder how long it will remain that we are transfixed by the skill of language translation. Surely you realize that thing which is Google is making all of this a job for dumb computers. Like chess. I give Kurzweill full marks on that score; how long do you think it's going to be before your iPhone will translate your voice into any language - sounding like you? Not long.

This brings us around to the ignorant mutterings of the day and the hearts bleeding over Harry Reid's obiter dicta. Harry Reid, fer chrissake! Him say Obama no have Negro Dialect. Him speak-um with forked tongue. White Eyes big-um race hater. Me take-um political scalp.

Deus ex machina will not solve petty human freakouts, insecurities, neuroses and emotionalisms. But it sure is fun to mock them from this corner of.. where am I again? Oh yeah. Cleveland.

An Offhanded Dismissal of Today's Black Nationalists

A thoughtful reader asks questions in italics:

1.      As much as black people talk about black pride, why is the Black Nationalist Movement relegated to nothing more than a fringe movement.

Because there are three flavors of black nationalism right about now. The first and basically the only flavor that matters is black cultural nationalism. This is a soft kind of position that basically adheres to the idea that black culture is all that and Elvis was a vulture. You could think of the leader of the black cultural nationalists as Spike Lee. Cult-Nat types are basically interested in investing as much value, time and treasure into blackness, primarily out of love for blackness. It's all about the flavor and being immersed in it. All the cult nationalists range from your basic India Irie to the edge of hard afrocentrists. Any black dude who wears dreads is one of them unless he does it strictly for the chicks, including white chicks.

The second flavor of black nationalist is the separatist. Your Nation of Islam, New Black Panther types. The survivalists. The ones who rents Rosewood more than once. These types don't last long in the daylight, but you'll find them in most every black neighborhood. They'd never live anywhere but black neighborhoods. Sometimes they masquerade as Muslims, got to give the black power handshake, calls blackfolks Kings and Queens, thinks that Neely Fuller and Cress-Welsing are deep thinkers. Rarely do they keep their 'slave' names. Separatists aren't always militant, but they're almost always racist. As soon as you hear one say, "black people can't be racist", you know you've got a live one. Ask them about Tawana Brawley or Nat Turner... and bring a lunch.

The third flavor is a kind of black nationalist is the kind of neo-nationalist. They will simply say they are 'merely' pro-black, but they are exclusively pro-black, specifically about recycling black dollars. What they want most is black power for black people with black money, because by and large they are convinced that the world works in an ethnic mercantilist way. These are a class of bounders beholden to no tradition who will call themselves 'nouveau niggers' because they really have no other idea of what a black man with some power and money is like. They think that they are more reality based than the others, but they're playing an ahistorical game too.

All black nationalists think that racial integration is an iffy proposition. They will always prefer Malcolm X to MLK, and with some exceptions on the neo- side, always prefer Karl Marx to Adam Smith. They will sing the praises of black unity and are generally pissed that 'we cant get our thing together like the Jews' or whomever. What binds all black nationalists together is a sense of shame they feel for the race for which something MUST be done. And then you listen to their plan..


2.      To your knowledge, has their philosophy ever been tested (i.e. its followers win government office and successfully implemented any of its tenants)

Yes. It's a smashing success in black history departments all over America, and nowhere in Africa or anywhere else. Every black nationalist with any organizational dollars can be traced to one degree of separation from a black bookstore, black studies curriculum, or black media outlet. They all have to stay plugged into the continual intemolectual spew otherwise reality would knock some sense into their collectivist theories.  But outside of that same old mau-mau game, nobody is making any money being a black nationalist outside of the Nation of Islam, and the chitlin circuit that collects speaker fees from gullible undergrads.


3.      If not, would not cities such as Detroit and New Orleans provide a platform for their philosophy? Why haven’t they taken the lead on rebuilding these cities?

Because the political end of black nationalism is a dead end. Whether black political activists with a nationalist bent like it or not, white liberal Democrats have no patience for all that bullshit. Not that white liberal Democrats are not full of it themselves, but they know how to run political campaigns and control votes and dollars, and without them black nationalists have no organization, no infrastructure, no say. Hell, black nationalists don't even have a list of names of black nationalists.

That doesn't mean that black nationalist sentiments of the cultural, separatist and neo- strain don't matter in political contests and rhetoric. They do. Black nationalist words speak much louder than black nationalist actions, and those words count, and they appeal to African Americans on the fence - like memes of Obama getting shot. Or in defense of Mumia and Tookie. Or hateration against Obama as 'half-black'. But none of that influence is permanent. In the end, there is NO black nationalist organization of substance in America, meaning with money in the bank. (as compared to say... Ebony and Jet,  or Sucka Free Sunday) http://www.mtv.com/shows/sucker_free/series.jhtml

The most important thing to understand about Black Nationalism is that it has always battled with Christianity in general and the Black Church in particular. And it has always lost. That's really all you need to know.

4.      It is my theory that the Black Nationalist Movement is best left to those who live in their momma’s basement and quote Prof. George James to hide the fact that they just don’t want to work.

Oh plenty of them work, and they work hard. It's just that the work that they work doesn't work.

Happy Holidays from the Woods Family

Guess who will be hanging out with Kobe Bryant for a while?

Is UCLA Too Big to Fail?

I wrote to the LA Times:

There is almost nothing, I repeat nothing, you can spend $100,000 on 18-22 year olds and get something of vital importance to society. UCLA will fail as will the business model of this sort of university. It will fail just as surely as the newspaper industry has failed, and the reason is simple. You can get the same or better information online from people who will share it for free.

Look at MIT OCW. That's free. And a well motivated student can learn what he or she needs to know without the imprimatur of this bankrupt public system.

I attended Cal State in the 80s and wondered what it was I was missing for not having attended UCLA as an undergrad. So I did the common sense thing, which was to go to the UCLA bookstore and buy the books that UCLA students were required to buy. What I learned was that physics was physics and astronomy was astronomy and what I was able to learn had everything to do with my desire and discipline and nothing to do with .. well the patience of smart-assed 22 year old teachers aides.

Everyone who is protesting is gambling on their ability to leverage a dysfunctional political system for funding something a truly smart person would be able to provide for themselves. This for the privilege of having a credential that speaks louder than one's own skills. It's marketing. It's failing. And so are the institutions that hire such dubious individuals, because obviously the endowment is not helping.

Surely the Left commenters here should stop romanticizing simply because UC is a public institution and rather recognize what a UCLA education has become... a bourgeois luxury. If you don't believe that, consider the quality of those opinions written here by students in the fray.

There is a culture of foolishness in America that could do well to fail in this failing economy. And at some point Americans will stop watching television shows like 'Entourage' and spending $2.50 for 8 ounces of energy drinks, or beer for that matter. But until that happens, one cannot take seriously these sorts of complaints.

This is basically when I put on my Dirty Jobs hat. Perhaps our problem as a society is that we have too many 'educated' opinions.

Obligatory Seriousness on Derrion Albert

Every man's death diminishes me, so here it is plain as day. Murder.

I used Google Street View to get a flavor of the neighborhood in which Derrion Albert was beat to death by a gang of teenaged thugs. I read a couple stories about the fact that he was a good kid and didn't deserve to die. And so I think, just like with Jamiel Shaw, Albert's is another chapter in the long history of communities without men. That's what I said. Communities with men don't let boys run the street.

But this neighborhood had a community center. Obviously the 34th Ward Centre and the Agape Center if that is or is not the same place, didn't provide enough cover. Community activism that doesn't put public safety as the number one priority is part of the problem. Which goes to the heart of a problem in a lot of ghetto politics which is ambiguity over police protection. You may recall similar trouble in Philly and NYC.

There's this:

Now the Obama administration is taking a stand and sending Holder to the area where the incident took place. The Attorney General will meet with school officials, residents and students to talk about school violence. Holder arrives in Chicago Wednesday.

Kinda makes you wonder what exactly if anything Obama is doing with the office of Homeland Security. Why would you send the Attorney General to talk about 'school violence'? Smells like a photo op to me. I didn't pay much attention to whatever it was the President said a couple weeks ago in his national address to school children. I'm fairly sure it didn't include words to the effect that if you get killed walking to or from school, we'll investigate.

The solution to the problem of deadly crime in impoverished neighborhoods is the same all over the world. Police. I don't know what we are to make of this death by linking it to ghetto politics or not. Either there is something categorically wrong or this is another isolated, stupid human tragedy. If it's the latter, there's nothing to do but say, gee that's too bad and shrug. After all, there is a big typhoon killing hundreds in the Phillipines and a huge earthquake that killed many more hundreds in Indonesia. No doubt there are still thousands of refugees getting no attention from us Americans in Darfur. Ever notice how Darfur kind of disappeared after Obama got elected? And, hey what about Iraq? Don't we still have troops over there? Oh yeah...

And so if Americans have the nerve to have opinions about what can and should be done in the life and death situation that is war, and we still are in two of them at last count, then the problems of the South Side of Chicago should be an open and shut case. Guess what? It is. And the answer is. Police. Crackdown. With. Community. Support. Against. Gangs. Period.

With 'school violence' as an accepted area of political debate and attorneys in suits pontificating behind podiums with three or more microphones, you get nowhere. Instead, what you need are men in those community streets who are not afraid of roving bands of criminal youth. And if the community itself cannot provide such men, then they should be imported from places with a surplus. Call it occupation if you like. If you don't like, then laissez faire. Let the denizens of Sherwood Forest kill themselves and whoever can escape... escapes.

So now that I think about it. It seems to me that life insurance is more important than health insurance. And if you really want to make a statement about a domestic political agenda, you've got to put a higher priority on murder than on illness. So where's the police czar? Or maybe Obama can talk the street gangs of Chicago into a peaceful settlement. Maybe that's what Holder was sent to do.

I'm going to leave you with one last provocative thought. If you ever want to have an unending discussion about black communities online, talk with black women about finding a good black man. I guarantee you that the conversation goes on and on. Now is that a conspiracy, or is it just a real fact that real men are nowhere to be found in close proximity to where Derrion Albert was beat to death by wild boys?

Obligatory Seriousness on Van Jones

OK, so maybe Dvorak was halfway wrong about the President's CTO, but I've seen about 7 minutes of Van Jones video, some of which is Congressional testimony and I'm thinking that Obama must really believe that older people are incorrigible and unforgivably stupid.

But maybe I'm thinking the wrong way about how czarist political sausage is made. Maybe you hire smart young people who haven't built anything to be the mouthpieces of the office of the President. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around, that you got the most experienced people you can to advice the White House on how things really work and then reality-based policy moves from there. Nope. That's not the Obama way. He gets young Turks.

Well, this turkey is out on his can. Let him fast talk someplace else.

Obligatory Seriousness on Michael Vick

The man has paid his debt to society, and then some.

Not long ago, I put up this public apology as an example of the sort of language we are likely to hear in our pandering society. I did it as a parody because I find that as the mass communications of the mainstream media disintegrates, so too is the public faith in our institutions. People have no automatic reason to trust them implicitly and certain individuals can profit by tearing them down rhetorically. I think that this is generally corrosive to society, and I'm not sure what's going to keep the public faith. That so many have fallen for Obama's bunkum is disturbing.

So I listen carefully for the sort of extra-institutional judgments that the media moderate with an ear towards what they are actually second guessing. So people who feel that they must speak up against Michael Vick at this point, I consider enemies of the justice system.

Anyone who believes that an appearance on 60 Minutes is required, so that the people can make up their own minds, is taking away power from the judge, the jury, and the courts.

Birthers

Sometimes it helps to know that you are part of a tradition. I am part of the African American conservative political tradition, for what it's worth. And as such, I recognize those issues that are close to my interests as part of that tradition and those which just happen to be interesting at the time. There is always political dissonance, and a lot of noise about the meaning of that tradition, and today's noise is about Birthers.

Birthers are to Obama what Truthers were to Bush, a loud idiot minority stuck on stupid, or in Churchill's famous definition, fanatics: persons who can't change their mind and won't change the subject. Birthers believe that Obama should not be President because they claim he was not born in America. There are a lot of crazy and unbelievable things that can and do happen in this country that a little dilligence could clean up, but the provenance of the President is not one of them.

Intelligent opponents of Obama's policies have figured out ways to be provoked to defend the intransigence of Birther's hatred. That only goes to show a general lack of confidence in reason and the echo chamber that even our dispersed media generates. I say it's a waste of time and credibility.

So my point is to have this moment of obligatory seriousness to dismiss the Birthers and their defenders. You're all gone mental.

Sotomayor

I don't know how to judge a judge and neither do you. But just because I have no objective standard to help I am not going to get all exercised about who she *is* or where she comes from or what she looks like or the fact that she's a she.

Dennis Miller said something this year that has had a profound effect on me, and it's just common sense, but I'm going to have to name it. I'm calling it ducking down Miller's Alley. Miller's Alley is a one way street home. He basically said don't spend a lot of time worrying about something that is completely beyond your ability to change. I'm the kind of person who needs to be whacked upside the head with this message, because I'm out there on the boulevard like a motherless child. I need to turn down Miller's Alley and head home where I make a difference. So do a lot of people.

What happens in American politics is that we get annoyed with what we think other people believe. And most of us don't really know what we believe because we cannot sustain a productive conversation about things worth knowing. We argue because it solidifies something in us that we don't want mushy, giving us a false sense of security. But solidified arguments are not so very useful as understanding the process of discovery. That's not what we are doing - we are not discovering anything of value, instead we are uncovering a new class of clowns who look like us but are clearly wrong. Every political development in our national life gives us a new class of freaks to avoid like the plague. 'They' are ruining 'our' America.

So today is the day of California's ruling on Proposition 8. Today is also the day that the first handlers out of the block will start Sotomayor on her path through a guantlet of pundits, pollsters and political parasites, in anticipation of the greatest show on earth, the Senate Confirmation Hearing. The screech of tires has already begun and its just a matter of weeks before the ultimate crunch of steel and broken glass. But in the meantime the squeal will get louder and more incessant.

I know it's irresponsible of me as a public citizen to head down Miller's Alley, but it's really not my job. I think I might do a better job if I were employed as a pundit, pollster or partisan, but I'm not. And so I'm going to reserve judgment on the judge. I will watch without worry.

Cramer vs Stewart

I was in the middle of other things when people all over the web went cuckoo over Jon Stewarts alleged fisking of Jim Cramer. I have one thing to say about the entire affair and in the end I believe that it is the only thing that matters.

What Jim Cramer was that Jon Stewart never will be is someone who made money for people. Cramer was responsible for running a business whose job it was to make money for his clients - and he made it to the top of that field and had the responsibility for many people's jobs in the financial industry. No matter what Stewart says, in the end he is just an entertainer and he is responsible for what? To make people laugh. What Stewart is doing is taking the cheap shot to an art form with maybe a dozen 'researchers' who scour YouTube for something he can play for laughs. In the process, he has been mistaken for and misrepresented as an 'investigative journalist' or someone whose 'standards' of 'tough questions' have put the news media to shame.

And yet he still cannot hold a candle to The Onion.

Be that as it may, in the grand scheme of things Cramer was the boss of adults who worked in a very important industry that is currently in crisis - a crisis that means something to the livlihoods of millions of people around the world. Jon Stewart, on the other hand, is a comedian. If everyone of his equal talent and standing in his industry were to declare bankruptcy and never come back whose livelihoods would be affected? Perhaps bored college students with snarky attitudes might be found throwing their lattes against the walls, but little else would change. 

When Stewart writes a book that compares favorably to PJ O'Rourke, give us grownups a jingle.