Cobb

Black Film: A Thumbnail Review

So a week ago, Amazon Prime started their "Black Lives Matter" advertising and put up a couple dozen black oriented films, offering a title called "Just Mercy" for free. (Discounted from 2.99). I cast it as a simple-minded commercial ploy but also defended it to a knucklehead who said that anyone or any institution that says "Black Lives Matter" is racist.

Last night we finally got around to watching Harriet, with my favorite young black pop star Janelle Monae, but not after running through the offerings of Prime, Netflix and Apple TV. Prior to going to Apple TV, the only standout films I noticed were Glory and A Soldier's Story.

During this time, my eldest daughter the most conservative and blackified of us, raised up something of a continuing issue for her as not having been raised in the same cultural milieu as some her other black friends. So she began checking off a list of films one of these friends explicitly gave her as representative. The included:

• The Wood
• Higher Learning
• Boyz n the Hood
• Set It Off
• Waiting to Exhale
• Rosewood
• Love & Basketball
• Juice
• Poetic Justice
• Friday
• New Jack City

With the exception of New Jack, I didn't see any of these films as worth the time and started to grumble about her friend's taste in film. But I didn't say anything. You see, the second context of this reading off of film titles was that I was trying to explain to them what a big deal Tyrese Gibson (who? they said) had been back in his day. He recently squared off against Jamie Foxx in some controversy or other on Instagram. I remember taking Gibson's side. But I was trying to explain that he was all the hotness back in the day along with Morris Chestnut, Taye Diggs and the older Denzel Washington. But I couldn't remember what the popular movie was with Chestnut. (It was The Best Man)

With that concession, I recalled a few more that I started to see on a YouTube search. That was a short list of films which is something of a unique category of black film: rom-dram. Romantic Drama, which is what I think best describes Jason's Lyric and Eve's Bayou which were two smoking hot romances I recall.

Finally we got around to checking out the collection on Apple TV. Damn, it was impressive. They had about 10 different categories of black film and there had to be at least a dozen in each category. So now just this moment I'm going to give 50, 4 and 5 star films that I think are worth anybody's time and a couple others worth seeing as canonical pop, like Coming to America and Sprung.

Fine	Black	Films
Glory	Daughters of the Dust	To Sleep With Anger
She's Gotta Have It	Malcolm X	A Soldier's Story
Killer of Sheep	Carmen Jones	Bird
Training Day	Man on Fire	Cry Freedom
Sankofa	Hustle & Flow	Akeelah & the Bee
Hoop Dreams	The Color Purple	Paris is Burning
Do The Right Thing	The Green Book	Amistad
Us	Get Out	Thelonius Monk

 

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Fun	Black	Films
Friday	Strictly Business	Drumline
Boomerang	Coming to America	A Rage in Harlem
Django Unchained	Purple Rain	Stand By Me
School Daze	Set It Off	Tales from the Hood
New Jack City	Sorry to Bother You	Crooklyn
Just Another Girl on the IRT	The Defiant Ones	Jackie Brown

While I'm at it, here are some ripe old stinkers.

• Three Brothers
• Dead Presidents
• Rosewood

I have no opinion on the following, either because I haven't seen them or I basically have no judgment

• Love & Basketball
• Love Jones
• Precious
• 12 Years a Slave
• Claudine
• Hidden Figures
• The Best Man
• The Wood
• 1 Angry Black Man
• Moonlight
• I Am Not Your Negro
• Mahogany

It also goes without saying that there are a lot of standout films starring Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Sam Jackson and Sidney Poitier that ought to be considered, but you already know that. Also I would also say that my favorite younger contemporary black film dudes are Harold Perrineau & Jeffrey Wright. Either of them could do my biopic. 

My Father's Superpower

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sister Night: Forgotten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

Fame Inversion Theory

A while back, after some controversy involving the rap artist 50Cent, ideas of accountability shot through my head. His album was 'Get Rich or Die Trying' and somehow, despite his huge success with that album, he had somehow disappointed millions of fans with his next album. Well, he already got rich. It reminded me about my own preferences. The theory started like this. I would rather make 1million dollars each from 17 people, than make 1 dollar each from 17 million people. At the time, a CD cost about $17 and an artist could be fairly sure to get at least a buck from every one sold. 

So if you piss off a million people, you've got to be some colossal-sized arse, but in the end you can ignore them. They're only out $17 bucks most of which you didn't even collect. But if you piss off a million dollar investor, you're in trouble. These are relative extremes of responsibility. When you're chilling in you mansion, and some sobbing waif shows up at the gates begging for an autograph, you don't interrupt your Cheerios breakfast. When Mr. Shadow calls, you sweat blood. Having watched Julie Taymor's film 'Titus', I reckoned that making a deal with a king is a very, very dangerous thing to do. One should hope never to owe their life to anyone, the cost of abandoning those responsibilities might very well be fatal. 

So maybe I don't want 17 million dollar investors in me after all, and certainly not one 17 million dollar investor. Which is better? The irresponsibility of having cadged the masses, or the enormous debt incurred by the sponsorship of a few powerful benefactors? In the former case, you are famous forever. You are ultimately accountable to the masses who must ultimately be disappointed in you by the millions. When you owe allegiance to a cabal, your fame is inverted. They will say as did the man in the Godfather: "A man in my position cannot afford to be made to look ridiculous!" It's a deadly game when at some point you are made an offer you cannot refuse, but everybody saves face and the accountability is brutal.

This morning I was stunned by what I'm calling the Secular Northstar. More about that later, but part of its brilliance, this manifesto of world historic dimensions, is that it seems to understand perfectly how it is that the web of obligations can corrupt our most important institutions. And those corruptions are manifest in their inability to be responsible to the public. It is because of Mr. Shadow. He has dirt on you. You have dirt on him. You must be sharks. 

It suddenly occurs to me why motivational speakers and con artists prey on the public. "I'm a successful real-estate developer who has made millions. I can show you how, just buy my book!" Maybe he's the guy who just realized that to make tens of millions, he gets in over his head with people he never wants to piss off. Better to just stay in the 7 digit category trying to sell books, than in the 8 digit category looking over your shoulder.

Integrity dies in the confidential, accountable service of masters you cannot escape. Of course you were just following orders. You were protected. Only make sure that when you die, the secret letter gets published. Then you may smile at gunpoint, like Aaron the Moor. Then you may be a martyr. 

On The Edge of the 60s

Today is my birthday. I was born in 1961, on the edge of the 60s that dramatic moment in American history. They say that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Can you hear it? 

When I remember being a kid and my father told me that they shot black people I told him that we should go to the white people and show them who we are and then they wouldn't have to be afraid. "Speeches, Poetry" was my collection of child talk recorded on my dad's old Webcor in 1965. I've been doing a bit of recording myself. The other day I decided to write about the riots but I went back to restating what to me is obvious, that people want not to transcend but to transform, not themselves but others. This morning one of the heads I follow said that although some people want to end oppression, others seek to reverse oppression. He said in the Middle East it is well understood that in order to make peace you have to have blood on your hands. I believe that the Culture Wars are not over and they underly what goes on. So there will be blood. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but underneath all of this tumult is a high degree of conviction that will not relent until it has blood on its hands. Or as the little hoodrat in my head says, 'some motherfuckers need to be pacified'. Right now most Americans have a very good idea who those motherfuckers are. As for me, I can't remember ever using the word on this blog. I think most people are lazy and foolish. They're much more likely to shoot themselves in the foot. That, my friend, is a religious profundity. 

Yesterday, after the third declaration of curfew, I decided to dust off my pistols. My shooting buddies and I used to joke that Barbara Boxer, our wealthy California Senator was behind the purchase of our favorite shooting range at which our club sublet. The lessee could no longer afford the hiked rent and so the club closed forcing us into more ghetto accommodations, or the waitlist for more ritzy accommodations. Our reasonable gun club became the excluded middle the result being I'm pretty rusty from two years of not shooting twice a month. It took me 20 minutes to recall my muscle memory, but not before having loaded a magazine with the rounds in backwards to my horror and dismay. Mario Puzo laughs in his grave. Everything is unevenly distributed. Everything is unevenly distributed.

So my health is better than it has been in probably 17 years. I can still put my socks on standing up. I saw a set of stunning before and after pictures of Mike Tyson last week. He coming back. The before was from 2009. In 2009 I looked pretty good, so I couldn't make a similar comparison. I only know that in 2003 when I was so broke I literally couldn't afford a Big Mac, that I did some cardio-kickboxing and got down to 185. This past Christmas I was at 217 and now I'm at a very stable 195 or thereabouts. My driver's license from '08 says 210. I never consistently weighed myself so I was really just guessing back then. I always assumed that I could get my breath back, but it has proven fairly difficult. My VO2 max is pegged at 29.6, down from 34 a year ago February. On the other hand, my bloodwork is improving steadily. Specifically, my blood pressure is good, my cholesterol is better but still not good. My A1C is down 2 points so I am almost not diabetic something I had no clue about before January of this year. Once again, I had not been measuring. All of us are pretty sure we're OK, but OK is not a number. When it comes down to it, if you like your face in the mirror, that's quite enough. That has got to be the easiest 'like' given on the planet. I think most people are lazy and foolish. I'm working against that in myself.  

In my company, the oldest startup in the world, we remain something of a Porsche garage. We are full of very smart people trying very advanced competence on very expensive hardware. Trying to be known for service by word of mouth is a marketing nightmare. So we have finally built a product we will be branding and shouting about. Other than that, we are limping and stumbling forward, massively crippled by the destruction of the airline business and trying to pivot over to healthcare data integration. The family and the extended family is all squared and sorted. I could use a few more cans of soup in the larder, but we're all surviving these various apocalypses on a better than average basis. We are in constant pain, but not suffering. It's a tough workout. 

I have been thinking in a way I haven't for quite some time what it is like to look like I do. When I don't bother to affect any persona, more and more on these inside-only days, I look like an old black man. I'm stepping into a few paradigms that are different. While I'm comfortable on the inside, part of me is a bit conflicted, during this crisis of rationality, on 'the optics'. I am not Morgan Freeman and I'm worried about the reason that Denzel Washington hasn't stopped making action films. Nobody in America has a good idea what an old black man is supposed to be other than a 'respected civil rights leader'. I'm the same age as Obama and he remains his own unicorn, all the rest have big fat round pumpkin heads like Colin Powell, John Lewis and James Earl Jones. I'm definitely getting rid of my t-shirt collection I have acquired over these 10 years of working the home office, and I'm finally comfortable with Orvis. But on any weekday afternoon run to Home Depot, I look like just another gardener - so long as you don't look at my hands. Oh well, this could have its advantages. Esse quam videri. 

I always used to wonder, since I've always expected to live quite some time, what the hell to do for 20 years after you are 60. My parents remain stubbornly clear and present and sometimes dangerous halfway through their 80s. My grandparents, except for the polio survivor with the 2 pack a day smoking habit, all outdid the statistics. Outside of the optics, I'm very confident about what I expect to be doing. There will be plenty to keep me busy. Two of my greatest time sucks have been gaming and reading. A good 1100 books and probably ten times that many hours in virtual worlds. I'm giving all that a sharp haircut and am going back to school in software engineering. I will be taking all of my accumulated skill and wisdom in the digital arts, for what that is worth, and reinventing it from top to bottom in the language of Go. Having written thousands of essays here over the past 17 years, I will do the same in code over the next 17. I expect it all to hold together. Outside of that, I'll probably get my knee fixed and do a half marathon, get some sort of Porsche or another, preferably the kind I can beat on, and do some interesting driving, and if retirement is in the cards, I think I'll be pretty good at studio mechanics if not some more advanced bass guitar and keyboard proficiency. I have already cut 5 albums of my own material. I can easily see getting back into mixing tracks again. If I ever decide to go for it, I'll also purchase a serious 750 mm telephoto lens for my Nikon and get cranking out more digital photography. 

As you can see by my t-shirt in the photo above, I retain my humblest admiration for both religion and science, the two greatest open source inventions of mankind. While both have failed spectacularly in their organizational hierarchies and relationship to power, they are the primary avenues of disciplined discovery of the self and of the universe. They form the perfect circle of human endeavor whose programming language is philosophy but whose operating system remains mysterious. I am happiest when exploring their realms and their history. Well, that and enjoying my wife's cooking. That woman is a treasure. Oh yeah I have kids too. Well, at least I'm not paying for them any longer. Speaking briefly of money, I am also rekindling my interest in cryptocurrency and all distributed, secured methodologies that will survive the current world destruction. So much to do, so much to do. 

Anyway, I've got to go get in some steps this morning. I expect to be eating a bunch of cake and excellent home cooking today. Cheers. 

The Books That Made Me

What I discovered as soon as I thought about this subject was that these are not the best books I've ever read. They are also not the most enjoyable books. They are simply the books that changed the way I look at myself and the way I look at books. They changed me in ways that last to this day. So let us begin.

The Juvenile Years

The first important book that I read, like many on this list, was something I didn't want to read at all but ended up very glad that I did. And I specifically remember that to be true of Tom Sawyer because, not only had I not heard of it before, I read the first page several times and was bored by it. As a youngster, I was very wary of books that involved outcasts, the impoverished, or broken people. I had no room in my head for tales of woe and I refused to listen to them or read about them. That Tom Sawyer didn't live with his parents was my first clue that I wouldn't like it. I pressed on beside myself and came to very much enjoy the first book I realized could not be judged by its first pages. As I recall the book, images of Injun Joe and Becky Thatcher are fresh, though I get mixup all of my graveyard memories with those of Frankenstein. What was and what wasn't in Huckleberry Finn also is dim in my memory, but I certainly felt more ambivalence over reading White Fang than I did about Nigger Jim. Though it did come back as I learned to speak Progressive. I made something of a squawk about it in the abstract during my 1990s Boohabian Period. As a kid, I loved the book because it was such a big surprise.

I cannot remember which was the first book of Mssrs Williams and Abrashkin I read, but my favorites were Danny Dunn on the Ocean Floor and Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine. Into this series of books I have to throw in a couple more. That would be The Secret Language by Usrsula Nordstrom and Call It Courage by Armstrong Sperry. The last in that category of kids books before middle school would be The Lemonade Trick by Scott Corbett. These rounded out my juvenile period.

 

First Sci-Fi
After those, and especially after reading practically all of the Danny Dunn, I read 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke and The Martian Chronicles. And while my brother and I digested every one of the Hardy Boys mysteries, I went on to read as much science-fiction as I could get my grubbies on, specifically that of Heinlein. Of all of his, the one that convinced me that I was destined for space was Starman Jones. Although I and other people made a bigger deal out of the fact that I read Clarke when I was 10 years old, it was Heinlein that got to me. The Martian Chronicles were depressing and if I had known that it was permissible not to finish a book, I would have left it alone. But it was a big book, and I was proving that I was a big boy. Before I was a teen, there was nothing that got so deeply under my skin as the pathos and drive of Max Jones. He was me. My imagination was captured the moment I began reading and I saw the crashing train missing the loop in the early part of the book. The wistfulness of wanting to be elsewhere is what I recalled. It defined my youth. I understood the inevitable fact that my mind and my courage would take me far from home and the homeboys of my pre-teen neighborhood. I strove to understand nuclear energy. And suddenly, I did.

Growing Up Fast
In middle school, there were eight or so books that stuck fast in my head. Four because I read them and four because I refused to. The first I refused but read anyway was The Contender by Robert Lipsyte. Anybody who wants to know my biography and state of mind as an adolescent living in Crenshaw ought to read Stop Time by Frank Conroy. As I think about it and my desire to grow up and out, it probably ought to be paired with the song Zoom by The Commodores. So there was never any part of me that felt trapped by circumstances and place, and any suggestion that I had to adjust my way out of that with the kind of YA fiction that existed then, notably The Cross and the Switchblade was simply anathema to me. So while the Contender was good enough on its own, the other titles by Lipsyte left me cold. So too were fantastic and escapist stories, which I took to be the likes of A Tale of Two Cities, Wuthering Heights, and Two Years Before the Mast. Finally they pointed me to Steinbeck. I read Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. I was sick of all that depressing shit. I must have been something of a piece of work to deal with. Fortunately for all concerned, I read Jaws by Peter Benchley. Suddenly all was right with the world. Here was an excellent, real life portrayal of life in America. Ahh but that was just the beginning. For there was Fail Safe, the book that made me. As I ponder this moment, science and courage were the two signal themes in my life at this point. I might have read Silent Spring, but I was set. I read Red Alert instead. Nuclear was everything. The Cold War was everything. I was in it. And so I read the classic Hiroshima by John Hersey.

 

High School
My English classes put me in touch with some rather standard fare. Billy Budd. Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. Red Badge of Courage. The Man Who Lived Underground. Taming of the Shrew. But the entire period seemed devoid with the exception of one monumental book, again something bigger than I was expected to read: Roots by Alex Haley. And while I found that I favored the work of Flannery O'Conner (not Harper Lee) and was stunned by Kate Chopin's The Storm, Ellison's Battle Royale and Yukio Mishima's Patriotism, in the end it was Roots that absorbed me completely. I must have also gone through my father's substantial library but found nothing more interesting than M and J's Sensuous Man and Sensuous Woman, both quite practical in theory if not practice. In the end, there was no place in books worthy of disappearing into as with my prior younger life. Filling this period during my lonely moments were music, pinball, Star Wars and chess openings.

A Marginal Need
I had worked and earned money, got girlfriends and vehicles. It wasn't until my new job at a bank and the attempted assassination of President Reagan that I thought that perhaps I wasn't as intelligent as I should be. So with only that slim motivation I started reading. I picked three authors who seemed appropriate to the time. When I think about it, I reflected then as I often have since about the lesson I was taught in my private prep school that literature was spoken in the important world. This was the answer to the inevitable question, why Shakespeare? The answer was that someday in a job interview the boss might begin "There is a tide in the affairs of men.." to which we are obliged to reply "Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." and thereby demonstrate our worthiness. Now 40 years later I have yet to hear it, but the bell hath tolled for me. But at the beginning of the 80s it had to be about Woody Allen, Stephen King and Robert Ludlum. I also read the plays of Neil Simon and began some fantastic daydreams about New York City. But Los Angeles nourished no greater literary desires beyond the banter of Regis Philbin and Kathy Lee Gifford. So I figured I was up to speed, so long as I watched art films.

Science!
After 4 gap years, I returned to collegiate life. As an old frosh I jumped in with both feet. Metamagical Themas, Goedel Escher Bach, and The Soul of a New Machine were stuffed into my brain like buns in a hotdog eating contest. They were poorly digested, especially the second one, of which I only recall the Incompleteness Theorem. Maybe I should read it again one day. But the most significant books I read and appreciated were The Mind's I and Turing's Man. These were my blueprint. I also later read the biography of Mishima and long considered his phrase 'the unity of pen and sword'. By my fourth year, I was disenchanted with the dearth of higher though in my environment. So I struggled for a clue among my contemporaries and professors I didn't respect, especially my drama teacher who idolized Terri Garr. I found a toehold of solace in music, and the bold strokes of Ayn Rand, Henry Miller and Malcolm X. That was pretty much it. On the whole it left me nothing but the desire to remake the world digitally. Of course I still have some of my textbooks, still remember the boredom of Abcarian & Klotz. still repsect Springer-Verlag and still look wistfully at the old volume of Salas & Hille on my shelf. But outside of academics I learned a great deal by reading Thomas Sowell. While his bigger books were very informative, it was Ethnic America that I took as my personal blueprint.

Shock and Awe
So there is no black unity, the world needs to be taken over digitally and The Rise of Managerial Computing is inevitable. Shoshanna Zuboff kicked off my career with here informative book which reminded me of the terrors of Taylorism. My bets were that machines like the Xerox Workstation, distributed, graphic, object-oriented would change the world and I could ride that wave. By the time I got my American Express card and people from Dean Witter and Amnesty International were calling me at work asking for money, I guessed that I had the whole thing figured out. But something in me was disturbed. So I felt that I could take a ride on the wild side. So I started listening to Pacifica Radio and reading Ishmael Reed. As I got deeper into jazz and reggae and soca and finally dub, I recognized that I was not as cookie cutter buppie as I might have been. There was yet that conversation I could never find. But I tried seriously to see what the deal was in black literature. I kept swinging and missing. Gloria Naylor didn't nail it for me. I was highly disappointed. Terry McMillan was operatic, but soap operatic. I was highly insulted. Ah but then I found Jean Toomer's Cane and Kabnis became my alter ego. But it wasn't until I read Toni Morrison's Beloved was I swept away. During the time that I entered my professional career and began reading not to learn so much as to not insult my intelligence with the blather of conventional wisdom, I discovered many interesting books to read. Along with Beloved were the roots of the Afrocentric and multicultural era. You see, given my education, I was prone to believing that there weren't so many civilized Americans as I once believed. So my shock and discovery of a certain amount of critical work was in order. One of the first was Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life by Cornel West and bell hooks. West's The American Evasion of Philosophy was a great milestone. For while I took a shine to H.L. Menken in his Fifty Years of the New Republic, and was somewhat radicalized by Theodore Cross' Black Power Immerative, it was West's description of Ralph Waldo Emerson, C. Wright Mills and Reinhold Neibhur, that convinced me once and for all that everything I ever wanted in life was philosophically consistent with American thought. No need to go to Europe or Asia or Africa or South America for that.

The Mythopoetic.
But I did go. First stop Jose Luis Borges. I can't remember how it was that I got caught up in Borges, but I'd have to guess that it came from the direction of reading Ishmael Reed. There has been a streak of attraction in me for the cryptic and complex meaning that I believe cannot be expressed through pedestrian language, at least not efficiently. The first time I saw rambling classified ads in the back pages of the LA Reader. There was a bizarre set of conversations going on that were deliciously weird, rambling and sometimes poetic. It was like nothing I'd seen before. So I might have been thinking about that when somebody suggested Mumbo Jumbo.  I blazed through a half dozen of Reed's books, but all of that changed when I finally read Japanese By Spring, as far as I'm concerned, his best work. Yet of course I'm hanging out with nobody particularly interested in such literature. It's a wonder I found Borges at all. I did. And so Dreamtigers. Somewhere deep in my psyche are the echoes and implications of the Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

During this time I was floating and flying through different worlds of mind. The sense of play was elaborate. I read Moliere, and especially loved Tartuffe. I listened to Thelonius Monk. I finally read Candide by Voltaire. This thread of reading foreign authors took me to Carlos Fuentes, to Paolo Friere's seminal work The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and then around to Sun Tzu. But also I found myself deeply attracted to the work of  T. Coraghessan Boyle. Little did I know that I was heading towards an interesting sort of intellectual dead-end. But in the moment, I declared myself a champion of reason and of logic, abandoning faith and filling myself with the kind of eclecticism that is at once edifying, exotic and self-congratulatory. Like everyone my age, I knew exactly what was wrong with America, and I was finding all of the proper expressions of my own humanity in the retinue of art films and the like. So I found my way to Tarkovsky's austere visions. I dug the quirky sensibilities of Eating Raoul and Repo Man. I was drawn to the films of Henry Jaglom (and Woody Allen) and the wordy narratives of Joe Frank and especially Spaulding Gray's' Swimming to Cambodia. I was digging the discovery of Kurasawa in his latest works. 

At some point I've got to stop this post. I suppose this point is just about right. I'm almost up to my late twenties when I started really taking my journaling seriously, and evolving myself to stand up and speak in public from my own poetry and thoughts. Here I was in the depths of trying to get international in my head. Sun Tsu's Art of War and the Otomo's Akira were two of the gateways. 

Insolubilous

"The problem is the racism of your people"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passion Without Purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stand and Deliver

When I was a skinny kid, I learned one day at Susan Miller Dorsey Pool, how to do a 1 and a half. As soon as I write this, I am brought to mind of a girl who came there one day and did a 'half gainer'. I had never seen anything like that in my life. A bunch of us kids would do a couple bounces on the board (which was pretty high quality) and manage our 1 and a halfs, but she did what I later learned was called a hurdle, which is the standard way a springboard diver gets the board to flex in a continuous motion to the edge with one final bounce. And she got height, which in our own way of judgment was as important as it is in the real world of competitive springboard diving.

Like most kids my age, I hated being shown up, but I also didn't hesitate with my props. After all, it's about being the best, and she kicked all of our asses that day as well as showing us something new. One of my friends said it was a gainer, but she told me there are five categories of dives. Forward, reverse, inward, back and twist. I knew about inwards, but was never really impressed with them. We did 'backs' off the board lots of times. I couldn't get my head around the physics of a twisting dive, although I could do a back 1 and a half with a half twist. That was my best dive. In the flip-flop world of street tumbling we called that an 'arabian' which started backward and ended with a full front. I did it often enough when I wasn't confident about the doing backs, or I was just lazy. The idea of doing a reverse dive was just frightening beyond belief. How does someone move forwards and rotate backwards at the same time?

For me, the value of diving was adjunct to tumbling. While a few of us had a number of dives, the number of tricks we could do on the grass was much bigger and so were our audiences. I was one of the best divers I knew, but to climb the hierarchy of tumbling at the local parks delivered a great deal more glory. As I went around various area parks, it was good to be king or close to king. My brother Bryan and I were constantly on the lookout for good 'FFG', flip flop grass. I still have vivid memories of impromptu pickup battles at Sportsman's Park, at Centinela Park, at Dorsey and in front of the Olympic Swim Stadium at Exposition Park. Speaking of which, I did dive off the 5 meter platform back in the days when the City of Los Angeles was not so pussified to have them around. I never bothered with the 7.5 and 10 meter platforms. I did wear glasses after all.

I never became the great tumbler I dreamed of becoming. There were a couple of insurmountable barriers. The first came in the form of money and the second in terms of opportunity. The City of Inglewood had a summer program for tumbling over at Rogers Park just around the corner from their City Hall. And like their pool at Centinela, there was one fee for Inglewood residents and another for outsiders. Dorsey pool cost a quarter no matter where you were from. Centinela charged a whole dollar, and you couldn't leave the pool and come back. Similarly, Rogers Park charged an unthinkable $100 for their summer gymnastics program. It boggled my mind. Later, when I attended high school, they simply had no gymnastics team. Also, no wrestling team. Also, no band. All of the things I was decently competitive in, were not an option. My first semester, I hated the place. But there was a diving team.

I joined the AAU diving club in Santa Monica. I can't even remember if I paid much for it. But I finally picked up on all of the techniques I vaguely recalled from the good old days at Dorsey Pool. One or two nights a week, my brother and I would take the bus from Crenshaw to Pico, take the Pico bus to Sears, and then take the Big Blue Santa Monica Bus all the way to Santa Monica High School to practice under the watchful eye of Jim Wood. Jim was probably one of the best influences I had as a teen. He demanded as close to perfection as you were capable of. He always threatened to put my toes in a pencil sharpener. Sometimes it's hard to focus on pointing your toes when you're half scared to death of the stuff you're doing in midair. Carl was our best diver. Chris Horne and Chris Monaghan were my friends. Coleen McNamee was the belle of the ball. Her blonde hair would turn the brightest shade of green of anyone. I, like a flying Q-Tip left my afro at full length. I first borrowed a pair of diving shorts from Chris Monaghan and finally got a pair of my own. Most people don't know, but when you do dives to your feet, like a double front, it is not kosher to hold your balls. But if you are ballsy enough to dive in Speedos, you won't be for long. It stings like the balls of your feet when you land from jumping off a roof. These things I knew at the age of 14.

I lettered varsity in my freshman year according to the points I earned that first season. I peaked in my junior year, making the quals to go to State which was held at Beverly Hills High School. I was good enough for highschool and AAU. I won gold once or twice and I had a decent 11 dive list by that time. My best AAU meet was the Chula Vista Invitational. My first, and worst was at the Jack Kramer Club in fancy Palos Verdes. It was at that meet where I made my first fail dive. I can't even remember what went wrong. There are three horrible things you can do as a springboard diver. The worst is just what you think. You can slam some part of your body on the diving board. That never happened to me at practice or in competition, but some time after highschool I did so doing an inward dive at the pool at Val Verde Park north of Magic Mountain. It wasn't so bad that it drew blood, if I remember correctly and it got me a good dressing down from the lifeguard. I'm sure if I impressed any girls with that stunt, they were the wrong ones. The second horror is called a balk. Just like with a baseball pitcher if you start your hurdle and then stop in the middle and then start over, it will cost you half the points on your dive. I also never balked in competition. I did land a ridiculously laughable and grotesquely embarrassing fail dive at this, my very first meet. Of all things, it was a 1 and a half. This wasn't a serious meet and unlike in more serious competitions you only needed a five dive list. But to get a zero on any dive.. well that sucked.

Somewhere else on this blog, I've thought back about my diving career. The fear of diving with a boner. The days the team called my Kunta Kinte. The win at Leuzinger that made me a role model. My mentoring of Adrian Hernandez and Tremelle Jenkins as captain of the team. My first merciless sunburn at Madera. My win at the Mexico USA dual meet at SMCC. The first year banquet at the Hennebery's in Toluca Lake. The medals and trophies. My rival who smoked me at East LA College. The non-kosher slide at Camp Stevens. The day Chris Horne hit the wooden lane lines at Northridge Aquatics. The black dude with the burn on his left ankle who was an incredibly fast spinner, and of course the mutual contempt held between every diver in California and Greg Louganis. Chris Horne healed up and made the team at USC, but didn't make varsity. California has produced the world's finest divers- the competition is fierce. But I did once get a 7, at Chula Vista.

This past weekend I got up on a diving board for the first time in at least three decades. It was a crappy little joke of a board, typical of the sort you find at home pools, not the glorious and expensive Duraflex sort you find at a high quality pool or at Colleen McNamee's house in West LA. I wouldn't be surprised if more people hurt themselves on these stiff little boards than on public high dives. My inward dive suffered horribly. But I did manage a decent forward half twist and forward pike. My daughter's Instagram of my crumpled back layout got the most likes. Fortunately, or not as the case may be, she published it in a one time fashion with no remaining record. I have yet to get the original video.

There's something dramatic about approaching a diving board. All eyes are on your mostly naked body, your teammates, your coach, everybody in the stands, your parents, other divers and of course the judges. You prepare the acrobatics in your mind, clear the water from your ears and eyeball the sprayers that mark the surface of the water. You get on the board and move the wheel forwards or backwards to your ideal spot. I liked mine a touch firmer than medium for my earlier career. As I gained weight and skill that place was still good. I changed from a three step to a four step hurdle in my sophomre year. Your hurdle needs to be smooth, you have to line up your spot so that you're not staring at your feet as you land them as close to the front edge as possible to gain the maximum momentum of the board which pushes you up and out. It takes a while to feel and trust how the board pushes you forward. You should aim straight up, not out, to get the height you need. Sometimes if you have a lot of rotations, say a forward 2 1/2, you want to grab your knees too soon or throw your arms down before you reach a good top.  The score depends upon three parts of your dive, your approach and hurdle, the 'top' of your dive which includes your form in the air, and your entry which as everyone knows, should make as little splash as possible.

It's during the approach where you have to rid yourself of distractions. They call your name and the dive. On more than a few occasions, they call a dive out of the order you remember submitting on your list. You have little choice once you place your foot on the board. Balking costs. As the crowd hushes and your coach gestures his last signal to remind you not to do that weak part of your dive (Jim makes a cranking a pencil sharpener gesture), you are under maximum pressure. Breathe in. Stand and deliver. Focus and perform. Once the thing is in motion, it's all practiced mechanics and then finding the right split second to reach for the bottom of the pool. Push your arms forward, left hand grasping the right wrist, palms forward, locking your elbows and punching a hole in the water for the whole of your body to pass through. Are you under rotating and short? Are you long with your legs going past your head on entry? Did you finish your twist square with the board? Did you screw up the top and let your legs and feet go limp with frustration? It doesn't matter. The dive is over, you swim over to the side of the pool, adjust your trunks and pull yourself out of the water, triumphant or otherwise. You listen you the judges but you knew what score you deserved the moment you hit the water.  Shake out your hair, grab your towel and prepare for the next dive.

I was pleased to learn that Jason Statham was a springboard diver. You have to have style as well as discipline. You have to be comfortable with your body and abuse it. You need to be fearless of both pain and embarrassment. You get to show off. You get to learn the intricacies of something that takes place in seconds. And other than during the Olympic Games, you don't get to show off how well you can anticipate what a judge will score any particular dive. It's a dying art, I think. The Chinese have taken over the aesthetics of diving. They are slim and smooth and elegant. During my era, the era of Phil Boggs, Klaus Dibiasi and Greg Louganis, a combination of grace and power was what the judges liked. Then when Mark Lenzi came forward, his muscular hairy chested diving was acrobatically amazing. He could finish a forward 3 1/2 pike above the three meter board which is astounding to watch. It changed the sport. Now there were many dives that were included in official competitions with greater than a 3.0 degree of difficulty. Not so graceful but exciting in a new way. The Chinese and all divers, due to the new higher DD dives tend to be a lot shorter than those in the old school. Louganis was 5' 9" and by memory I recall Boggs and Dibiasi to be taller. But the sport moves forward, alas with fewer American world champions and contenders.

I am pleased to have recalled all of this and recognize the impact it had on my life. Getting into the yearbook sports page thanks to the drawing of Gary Suard, was one of my proudest moments as a teen. And doing well in a sport that wasn't my first choice or my second I guess taught me some valuable lessons. But I think the most important was to stand and deliver under the pressure of failure and against all odds. I think I did OK.

How to Hide 1Kg of Diamonds

So let’s start with giving an evaluation. A parcel of stones at VVG1 to VVG2 at an average size of .35 carats with F-G color will net out to about $3250 per carat. 1kg of such stones will be about 14,285 stones worth about 46.5 million dollars US. So really the question is how would you hide about 15,000 little things worth 45 million bucks. Your ability to hide them depends largely upon one thing, which is your ability to sell them.

If you have no ability to sell any of the stones, then you can only use conventional means, IE something anybody could think up on a middle class salary. In which case you might as well just throw them in the ocean because you’re going to get yourself killed or jailed the moment one person finds out. So there’s a Clean Approach and a Dirty Approach.

Clean Approach
So the first thing a smart guy will do is to approach someone with moolah and someone you can trust with your life. So for me, I happen to know a couple such people as I am fortunate in that regard. One of them is a Wall Street broker. He would know someone who deals with that level of investment with whom I would partner. I convert a fraction of my diamonds to cash, essentially 2 million worth, and give the other people the impression that this is the extent of my cache. I then set up an entity through which I can employ my own skills and improve them. This would include a cursory understanding of the diamond trade and a couple of trips to such traders and producers. The aim of these trips is to determine how far I can get away with selling diamonds legitimately without being a known quantity in the business. In other words, I’m setting up a diamond laundering business, but I can remain overground and live fairly large.

Dirty Approach
The other way to go is go underground, which means I live low rather like a card sharp. I produce the occasional rock in card games, to used car dealers, to pawn shops all at a level that people will immediately be able to handle and not talk about. In this case I have to do a lot of low rent stashing and have a 5 year plan to raise about 200k per year.

OK so either approach gets me to the point at which I can use sophisticated means to hide my stash. It costs money to hide money.

The Stashes

One - The Big Pentagram
I’m thinking undeveloped land in New Zealand would be the best thing for buried treasure. It’s not hard to get there. It’s not a dodgy place. I’d keep the biggest fraction there, roughly half, in five plots underground in a pattern. How about a pentagram 100 meters across? Uncleared woods. GPS tracked. Iron rebar markers with RFID tags. On a hill. (25 million)

Two - Obvious
I’m going to make a mistake. So it might as well be a stupid mistake. So I’m going to seed the stupid mistake ahead of time so the over-confident detective gets to talk shit. Which means I’m going to put the stash under my mother’s grave, or in a mausoleum niche having bribed a groundskeeper at a cemetery in my town. I will be observed making regular trips. (2 million)

Three - Attorney Client Privilege
This is the first technically challenging one to place. I troll around to find an attorney like Go Call Saul from Breaking Bad. Living in LA with its drug trade, I’m sure I can find a gang attorney relatively easily. I will put it into this attorney’s hands. I don’t know or don’t care where the attorney puts it, but he only gets his cut as trustee based on his ability to sell the diamonds himself. This is the one I plan to live from. (7 million)

Four - Charity
I use geocaching to place a handful of random stones into that game. Once a year I travel out of the state and place a rock into a geocache. I drop a rock off into the coffers of various churches in my travels. (<1 million)

Five - Rich Bitches
I develop a rapport with douchebags of all sorts who can fence this kind of stuff on their own. I develop a reputation and then flame out quickly. It will cost me getting my ass kicked but among that crowd I will clearly appear broke and flamed out. Kills suspicion. (1 million)

Six - Other Hidey Holes
Smaller versions of the pentagram. All self-service all visited during peak tourist season.

1. Black River National Forest: Michigan
2. Mount Washington: New Hampshire
3. Hot Springs: Arkansas
4. Sturgis: South Dakota
5. Gifford Woods State Park: Vermont

And I periodically check Quora, detective novels and CIA spycraft legends just to make sure I’m up on the best ideas. After all, I’ve got nothing else to do.

Atomic Integrity

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t worship Planet Earth.

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

The Second Set: Music That Remade Me

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

Living in Black Neighborhoods

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

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

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

At any rate, I have used class:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

LA Riots: Myths & Stereotypes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

black rage is not a theory.

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

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

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

---

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

rage is not hate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

articulation of rage is a valuable skill.

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

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

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

(boohab) Sat, 03 Aug 1996

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

black rage is a self-perpetuating phenomenon.

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

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

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

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

(end of blasts from the past)
---

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Stanley Crouch

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sherman: Yes, the movie.

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

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

that depends on your definition of 'senseless death'.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A True Angeleno

A true Angeleno (from the archives April 2015)

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

2. You are some kind of burrito snob.

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

3. You have a beach.

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

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

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

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

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

Sensemaking in the IDW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Busy Dying

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

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

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

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

Marxism vs American Socialism

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

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

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

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

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

That's all I have to say right now.

The Trump Diversion

I don't sufficiently hate Trump. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pops on Corona

"CORONIC CHAOS"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ENUF!!

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

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

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

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

Sympathy for Suffering

Dostoevsky writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then it kind of clicked for me.

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

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

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

Feeling Good. Feeling Bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surviving COVID - Episode 4 - Shopping While I Can

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

Obligatory Seriousness on the Chinese Disease

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

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

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

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

Who Wants to Kill Some Camels?

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

Surviving COVID-19 - Episode 003 - Lockdown & Mythbusting

• Pandemic Czar
• Skid Row
• 231 & 2
• State of local neighborhood
• Florida beaches
• Sauna Rumor
• Food stocks
• Zika SARS MERS
• Global Health Security Bioterror budget
• Stoics & IDW

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

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

Suviving COVID19 - Episode 001 - The First Week Video

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

How To Survive Outside of the Box

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

----

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

 

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

How To Hide 1Kg of Diamonds

So let’s start with giving an evaluation. A parcel of stones at VVG1 to VVG2 at an average size of .35 carats with F-G color will net out to about $3250 per carat. 1kg of such stones will be about 14,285 stones worth about 46.5 million dollars US. So really the question is how would you hide about 15,000 little things worth 45 million bucks. Your ability to hide them depends largely upon one thing, which is your ability to sell them.

If you have no ability to sell any of the stones, then you can only use conventional means, IE something anybody could think up on a middle class salary. In which case you might as well just throw them in the ocean because you’re going to get yourself killed or jailed the moment one person finds out. So there’s a Clean Approach and a Dirty Approach.

Clean Approach
So the first thing a smart guy will do is to approach someone with moolah and someone you can trust with your life. So for me, I happen to know a couple such people as I am fortunate in that regard. One of them is a Wall Street broker. He would know someone who deals with that level of investment with whom I would partner. I convert a fraction of my diamonds to cash, essentially 2 million worth, and give the other people the impression that this is the extent of my cache. I then set up an entity through which I can employ my own skills and improve them. This would include a cursory understanding of the diamond trade and a couple of trips to such traders and producers. The aim of these trips is to determine how far I can get away with selling diamonds legitimately without being a known quantity in the business. In other words, I’m setting up a diamond laundering business, but I can remain overground and live fairly large.

Dirty Approach
The other way to go is go underground, which means I live low rather like a card sharp. I produce the occasional rock in card games, to used car dealers, to pawn shops all at a level that people will immediately be able to handle and not talk about. In this case I have to do a lot of low rent stashing and have a 5 year plan to raise about 200k per year.

OK so either approach gets me to the point at which I can use sophisticated means to hide my stash. It costs money to hide money.

The Stashes

One - The Big Pentagram
I’m thinking undeveloped land in New Zealand would be the best thing for buried treasure. It’s not hard to get there. It’s not a dodgy place. I’d keep the biggest fraction there, roughly half, in five plots underground in a pattern. How about a pentagram 100 meters across? Uncleared woods. GPS tracked. Iron rebar markers with RFID tags. On a hill. (25 million)

Two - Obvious
I’m going to make a mistake. So it might as well be a stupid mistake. So I’m going to seed the stupid mistake ahead of time so the over-confident detective gets to talk shit. Which means I’m going to put the stash under my mother’s grave, or in a mausoleum niche having bribed a groundskeeper at a cemetery in my town. I will be observed making regular trips. (2 million)

Three - Attorney Client Privilege
This is the first technically challenging one to place. I troll around to find an attorney like Go Call Saul from Breaking Bad. Living in LA with its drug trade, I’m sure I can find a gang attorney relatively easily. I will put it into this attorney’s hands. I don’t know or don’t care where the attorney puts it, but he only gets his cut as trustee based on his ability to sell the diamonds himself. This is the one I plan to live from. (7 million)

Four - Charity
I use geocaching to place a handful of random stones into that game. Once a year I travel out of the state and place a rock into a geocache. I drop a rock off into the coffers of various churches in my travels. (<1 million)

Five - Rich Bitches
I develop a rapport with douchebags of all sorts who can fence this kind of stuff on their own. I develop a reputation and then flame out quickly. It will cost me getting my ass kicked but among that crowd I will clearly appear broke and flamed out. Kills suspicion. (1 million)

Six - Other Hidey Holes
Smaller versions of the pentagram. All self-service all visited during peak tourist season.

1. Black River National Forest: Michigan
2. Mount Washington: New Hampshire
3. Hot Springs: Arkansas
4. Sturgis: South Dakota
5. Gifford Woods State Park: Vermont

And I periodically check Quora, detective novels and CIA spycraft legends just to make sure I’m up on the best ideas. After all, I’ve got nothing else to do.

The New Pandemic Normal

"The sun warms a graveyard in December."

So mentally, I'm prepared for this. Financially, I will probably be ruined. Emotionally, I'm certain to get through it. Healthwise, I say I'm in better shape than most people my age, but you never know. I'm not the Omega Man. What's 3 or 4 Greek letters backwards from Omega? Upsilon? I'd rather be the Tau Man, so I can associate it with the Tao.

The aim here is to make use of some basic skills I have and do my part sitting at home and rapidly parsing through a mental landscape of data / information / knowledge / wisdom and present it with some common language commentary. I don't have many more than a couple thousand followers all told, but I do what I can. I hope I can keep my head when about me are losing theirs. I know I can't just data dump. So I'll do some fraction of a daily thing and interpret what it means to me, giving a sense of what I believe to be actionable and that which is just good to know. I kind of do this for a living - which is to boil down desires, aims and goals into systems that use data / information  to help people turn it into knowledge. I can't get paid for assisting people with the wisdom part. 

Background:
I'm going to start with helping you understand my perspective. So last year I suffered through what seemed my worst year in about the last 20. I'm 58 years old, and can write both essays and software. I took a salary cut and burned through 75% of my savings. I got kicked out of my apartment and started renting in a newer more expensive place. My son was hospitalized twice for mental illness. My mother suffered blood clots that could have killed her. I was diagnosed with depression, and I basically blew my top at a big family gathering. I gained about 17 pounds and I'm sure there were other things I can't think of at the moment that made it a miserable year. 

On the other hand, about four years ago, my younger brother dropped dead (of a blood clot) and then my mother suffered a stroke. I then went through the agonizing processes of dealing with my son's mental illness, and the shaky financial position of my employer. So I had a couple years of tragedy and sorrow to prepare me for 2019. So things haven't been normal for me since 2016 or so. But even prior to that I was prompted to approach Stoicism. You shouldn't call Stoicism the hero of my story, but it is a nominee for best supporting actor. So if you wonder how it is that I've managed to John Wayne through a lot of this, part of it is my personality, part of it is Stoicism and part of it is that I've had a lifetime of ups and downs. Back in 1989 I studied the Tao. It helped me to understand how to live in the present. That's a part too. It's not about me. This just helps you know who I think I am not being a medical expert trying to be helpful. 

Now:
I have a wife and two adult children who live with me and I suspect my wife will be the hardest hit if it comes to us getting infected and sick. So I am concerned for her. My father is 83 years old and has survived cancer, but is starting to be frail and forgetful. His wife has also had some serious medical issues over the past few years. I worry that they may not make it. I have an uncle who is the oldest of our family, and a couple aunts for whom I am concerned. I also have a cousin who lives abroad where things might not be so tightly wrapped. So a number of my family members are at risk, as are all of my friends who are around my age. I have watched my father see all of his dearest friends die (and one of his sons) over the past several years. I see what it's like to look backwards and not forwards in life.  

----

This week:
I have Evernote and I started using it to keep track of this and that for years. This week I started taking notes about COVID-19 and now I have enough to make some kind of presentation. It started with the big reveal on Joe Rogan's podcast with Michael Osterholm. This is some of the best straight talk I've heard and it is my ground zero. Last Friday I purchased 200 nitrile gloves and sent an email to my local CERT alumni coordinator. That was the moment I started dealing with the fact that I'm going to have to deal with this. But the interview really kicked it off for me and straightened things out. I expect now that washing my hands will give me a 5% better chance of resisting infection, and adding gloves to that will add another percent or two. It's really about breathing. 

 

Here is the tweet that got me a few bits of rec.

@mtosterholm @CIDRAP And see his interview here.bit.ly/3aNVOMI and his book is here: amzn.to/2TQpxNW 

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So I'm going to close this first post by making a parallel between Osterholm and the man who tried to warn us about 9/11. So if we know nothing at all, we know that there are people who know what they are talking about, who are working on the problem and have mastered the details enough to be able to see the big picture. I'm all about the big picture. All of everything I've written here in this blog over the past 17-odd years may add up to nothing during my life, but I took no money to say what I had to say. This is an unexpected turn, but I can do it. More people are going to die from this than from that terror attack. And we survived. We survive a lot. So much that most of us don't have to think about survival. I do, because I've had to deal with death, something I'm now mature enough to reckon with - even my own. So I'm keeping my head up and my eyes open. You can too. 

More later. I want to expose more of my thinking, but this is enough for now. (It's about thinking through it, not just knowing stuff.)

Kafka on the Shore

Well, this book deserves a longer review than I'm going to give it. Perhaps I'll make the effort in the Dreamtime and so it will be done, if not written.

Murakami gives us a world of mystery, ultimately the mystery of the self and of the many interactions we make with the world based on our interpretations of what it may want from us and what we want to give it all while figuring ourselves out (or not) day by day. He creates a platter of characters some of whom have purpose none of whom quite understand it and it becomes a delicious marvel.

For me to have been gorged with the plot driven and the diet of the autodidact, this was something of an adjustment. But the characters were so lovely that the entire snack expanded in my stomach filling me up and causing me to belch up flavors that are surprisingly fragrant. In all the time reading it, jumping in and jumping out as I have over the past month, there was no telling where the lightning storms, missing persons, talking cats and animated American mascots were going to end up. There were so many lovely references to music and literature and language - so much plain talk and simple actions swooping gracefully through a web of curious reflection and occasional profundity and confusion - so much to taste and consider. It has a quiet and subtle majesty. I found myself thinking so many times how this clearly Japanese author had such a facility with the English tongue. I can read about him now, but I just wanted to read more of the story.

Murakami's book has a gentle absurdity that never becomes hateful. Even the bloody murders seem to evoke the lightest kind of obligation, the kind that is never questioned from characters who are incapable of stepping outside of themselves and offering special opprobrium. What is taken must be replaced. What is opened must be closed. Over generations if it must be. Time is not so important here, but what is unspoken remains inevitably true. All theory is followed lightly, logically and we live in the margins of certainty until we don't.

Ah Nakata. You are our simple selves. We knew you when we saw you, but never before, only knowing someone was out there to know. Now we know.

 

 

The Death of Punk

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

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

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

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

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

 

Valkyrie: Joe & Skippy Adventure #9

Valkyrie by Craig Alanson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ahh yeah. This is the one we've been waiting for. And the conclusion is absolutely devastating, and that's about all I can tell you. All of the thrills chills, antics, close calls, near misses and odd historical moments dredged up into a soup whose recipe we have all come to know and love.

There's some ass-kicking. There's some name taking. New friends, old enemies and a lot of, shall I say, wrapping up of loose ends? Yeah that's kind of what's going on. Well, now that I think of it, I might as well spoil the whole thing. Ready?

Nah. I'm not going to do it. I can't. You just have to read to the end because it's a great mind-blowing kind of thing you deserve to experience, you filthy monkey.

View all my reviews

The Cobbian Mental Universe

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

Strategery

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

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

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

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

---

Practicality

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

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

Aside on the University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

The Soundtrack

My anniversary date at little sister comes to mind
i heard it was the bomb so as i hit rewind
and bring to mind the first time i sat down for some duck
a tribe called quest was playing loud, what the fuck?
did they change the channel cause i just walked in?
i could barely hear myself think over the din.
I think it was wrong on a fundamental level,
like the restauranteur had made a deal with the devil.
I couldn't understand why the beats were so loud,
NFL on the tube for the upscale crowd.
Eating forty dollar plates, not forty ounce brews
I was kind of expecting to be hearing the blues
or some jazz in the joint in an elegant style
with the edison lights and the antique profile
but this was not to be an intimate retreat
so i put it out my grumpy mind and started to eat.
what a treat, the meal was for real. true perfection
i had to congratulate myself for the selection
my election wasn't luck so fuck my disaffection
i steered my mind clear of the subtle imperfection

the next time i dropped by it was fly
i ordered up a rye for my throat was dry
once again old school was the flavor of the day
black sheep, janet jackson, ll cool j
i didn't mind, in fact it was right on the money
as i think about it now, it seems kinda funny
that my expectations were clearly out of whack
its not like america doesn't own black
culture, ha i gotcha but nobody does see
from your mouth to my ear on the air means free
free black souls and free black arts
it flows through time as it flows through hearts
if your mind can't hush the political distraction
you can't expect enlightenment from dissatisfaction
so an action of racializing music like this
like any crab rap it ends up as a diss
but i dismiss as james baldwin said i have to mention
such a journey's an invention to avoid the clash and tension
of an inward adventure on a face that doesn't show
a poor benighted soul seeking solace below
running wild like a street child it figures
sixty years later it's still about the niggers.

niggers that you run with, niggers in your mind
mythical niggers, human beings you never find
convinced they are the real niggers so they wear the mask
the mask of a skintone so you never ask
who's the actual nigger who's the actual slave
to the racialized artifice from cradle to grave
who cannot escape the matrix of these tricks of race
pray to god your soul to keep
and hope for god's grace

on tape, on wax, on color dvd
the call and its response, well it wasn't for me
it wasn't for the woman, it wasn't for the man
it wasn't for the righteous, it made a jillion and
all the niggers in the house say ho
all the bitches in the house say ho
all the niggers in the house say ho
all the bitches in the house say ho

 

American Complexity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

H1-B Is Not the Reason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But let’s put it starkly shall we?

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

---

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

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

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

Footnotes

[1] About the Cloud Communications Company

[2] Usage share of operating systems - Wikipedia

[3] GNU/Linux Distributions Timeline

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

How Propaganda Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Thoughts on Game B

I just listened to the Intellectual Explorers Podcast on Game B. Pretty interesting.

I liked BJ better than Hall. He's an engineer. Anyway, the important thing that I see that he's doing is that he is avoiding Pinkering. He understands the fundamental framework of religious meme propagation, to use one of the dozen or so new terms that I'm going to have to deal with. 

First Idea. - Faster Better OODA
How do you inject OODA into OODA in order to have the fastest OODA? Well it's about making each particular aspect faster and/or better. If you make it better then you incorporate more information into each loop. If you make it faster, then you may get to fail forward more often. 

Second Idea. - Context of the MetaGame
All of this has to evolve, and while it's evolving there are going to be schisms and heretics among the priesthood as well as billions of the great unwashed. So I am thinking about some of the practical problems that are going to arise once this magical manifesto appears. And when it gets into those weeds I'm pretty interested to figure out if it's going to stay coherent. The first observation is that there pretty much hasn't been anything like the Well since the Well. And when the OGs were putting together Mondo 2000 and whatever that corporation was up in San Francisco the whole gang of us didn't profit. In other words, once upon a time was Ed Krol. His book, the Whole Internet Catalog was everyone's bible. All of his rules and all of those protocols have been superseded, and there is really no new book. So there are going to be some meantimes and in-between times. And yeah there will probably be GameC, unless Hall's regime is actually the Trilateral Commission. But we can start.

Money
I'm going to try and just ignore my grass roots (ha) anger against Hall's 40 people who have been working on it for 5 years. It just sounds so Silicon Valley that it makes me ill. I understand that everybody has to make money. Really I do. I just don't like the track record of IP. 

Nationalism & Law
I agree 100% that we have too many 'thou shalts' in our law. I think nobody in search of liberty objects to the rule of law but we are overdetermined by the million rules of law. I'm not certain that is determined by nationalism, but in any case, there should be a small, ethical superset of laws against which no surviving human culture rejects. 

Antlike Apes vs Blue Apes
I do agree with Hall that there is a bandwidth problem with the Ant Game and that human society has a massive advantage. I am very confident that the lot of us can keep abstracting denser packets of information between ourselves. As he hinted at human / compute interfaces perhaps extending what we can learn, yeah maybe. What I'm trying to figure out is how long did it take for alligators or sharks to evolve as animals appropriate to their environments? Maybe it only took 5000 years and that happened X million years ago and then they stopped evolving. If human beings are in fact still evolving and it will take us 5000 more years before we stop, what is Game C that we are not appreciating? Or what if the whole idea of Game B is actually a Game A tactic? 

A couple things pop into my mind. The first is that we haven't quite learned how to live underground. What if that is what we're supposed to do? What if The Matrix is prophetic in that regard and the Machine Morlocks simply have not yet arrived to take over the surface in a flipside of Time Machine? I mean that party in Zion was pretty banging. This lives along side of the idea that we have not yet evolved into the Eloi. That maybe all the toxic masculinity and toxic femininity has not been bred out of us yet and Beta Males will become the new Alphas. After all, none of us culturally resemble Angles, Saxons or Jutes. 

Sex
Nobody talked about sex. So here's what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about during the in-between times we're going to have to deal with questions of personal sovereignty. Specifically, I'm thinking about the idea that people have a right to life and death decisions. So I'm talking about the spectrum between abortion and infanticide. The spectrum between wealthy people with few children (oh boy the advantages of disembodied heirs, no drama between actual siblings for the Trust) and poor people with many. I'm highly doubtful that we apes are going to be able to wrangle any ruleset with the force of religion on matters of sexual ethics. Why are men protective of women? Why do women talk in terms of 'my man'? We have to think about our possessiveness and territoriality around sex and reproduction. Maybe we are at a point in the social pendulum where nobody really cares enough for their sexual partners to defend their humanity with deadly force - maybe rape will always be less heinous than murder. But it might swing back. I'm trying to imagine if there are natural limits to human aggression over matters of sex. It's not a history I am familiar with aside from Helen of Troy. Maybe we'll never go to war over the rights of women because by definition they are not worth fighting for, but do we really know that for sure?

Ritualized Violence
I have a hinky feeling in anticipation of watching the Tinfoil Hat podcast with BJ Campbell. I will leave speculation out of this, but I think he'd do a lot better than those weirdos by talking to Jocko Willink. With a backwards glance at the depopulation of Japan and the sexual attraction women have towards aggressive men, what is wrong with football? After all, we're talking about memetic tribes here, and on the off-chance that they do not totalize, that there's not a binary choice between the SJWs and the Alt-Right, there is the church of sport. That includes the honor of personal combat. If we do not completely kill war, maybe we regress it to the point at which we accept something rather less which nevertheless satisfies our bloodlust. It's got to be something a bit more consequential than a dunk tank for Nancy Pelosi or a pieface pillory for Donald Trump. 

Altered States
I really love the distinction made between wise ethics and authoritarian morality. I put them in the context of Heidegger. Those who accept morality eventually lose the understanding of the process of discovery (of ethics). That is the privilege of those who noodle over the New World Order. But as part of that process of propagation, the entire blueprint has to be open sourced, including all of the heresy. Because people get hit by buses. BJ rightly sees that people will not be wise, and they will refuse to be wise. In fact they may choose, in a world without war, to be contrarian in all sorts of ways, not the least of which will be the alteration of consciousness. Are people at liberty to be drunks, fools or louts? Will there be classes of people who are determined to not obtain or destroy their ability to obtain any modicum of wisdom? Will they have the right? Therefore must we police them? Jail them? Exile them? What do we do with the apes who drop out, and who will protect them?

Creeping Malthusianism
I am going to say that I seriously doubt that the Hall Group will come up with something that appeals to China. So at some point in the in-between times we are going to have a half-assed solution. Just like we do with oh say university education in America. I wonder if the players of Game B are thinking about their victory over Game A in Leviathan terms or if they're more like Locke. If the former, then maybe we'll all have to accept our new overlords, be they the B Commission or the CCP. But if we go Locke's way, which I hope, is there some lurking assumption that scalability is simply impossible? I guess that depends upon how soon we expect Game A to implode or if it only takes out the EU. 

 

OK That's enough for one day. 

The Paradox of Wanting AI To Run the World

Q: Can artificial intelligence run the world.

A: No.

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

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

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

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

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

The Epistemological Nightmare Continues

The epistemological nightmare continues. https://t.co/3s2WVCRrMU

— Michael DC Bowen (@mdcbowen) January 5, 2020

On The North Face

Depending on whose fung you shui, facing north is good if you're a house with a blue door. Facing south is good if you are in the Northern Hemisphere and you want sun in your windows. I don't want sun in my eyes because it makes me squint. I don't want the sun at my back because, well I'm too pretty to be backlit. I've been thinking about my portrait reflections over the past few years and they all involve rocks. So at the moment I feel as though I have suddenly found myself free climbing. So the north face of something describes me. I have a face here that is definitely north of 40. This time I've put in a lot of filters. I'm wearing my skateboard injury. I'm in my new home office. I'm contemplative. Again. Out of a discipline, but not necessarily of necessity. 

This is my 9th month of seasonal affective disorder, or mild clinical depression or whatever you call it when you're on a very mild upper and you pay $50 a month to see a psychiatrist. On the whole I have come to understand that the thing that concerns me most is money. Weird how a small pile of money can change my mood. I understand why. I have the kind of self-confidence people usually associate with arrogance and for this reason all I ever thought I needed was money. I was wrong either to believe this too much, or not believe it enough. So I didn't ditch every relationship to make some killing on Wall Street, blind as I am to the confidence I would have made one, nor did that fantasy ever lose currency with me. Today I watched George Carlin's routine about 'stuff'. I am still surrounded by my stuff, and my family's stuff. It feels like the kind of material comfort that preachers rail against. I don't love my stuff, but I always feel entitled to it. But when I can't make enough money to keep my castle manned, it makes me edgy and uncomfortable. 

I did a calculation several weeks ago to determine exactly what it would cost me to draw level to my financial situation as of 12 months ago. That I had an answer gave me some comfort. It was really that simple. You see, I've been talking to people who have some vague idea of my intelligence and capability and I see in their eyes that I'm worth something north of what I'm getting. That too gives me some comfort. None of this comfort, however, changes the elevation of the perch where I find myself on this cold January morning. One step at a time. One fingerhold at a time. Facing the rock. I could fall to my death. This is not a moment to play. 

I have faced down three crises in the last 8 weeks. Blood clots in my mother's legs. A mental hospital commission for my son. Kidney stones sending vomit level pain through my wife. I put on my ten-gallon hat and John Wayned it again. All the way through the crises, I took the reins. I think I drove the right people to the right places. I bent over finally to take a deep breath, hands on my thighs calming myself. I stood up wobbly to find bloody hands. Suffering in the wake of this and other fine piles of shit, I conclude 2019 as the crappiest year of my life. With great disappointments comes great what? Capacity to survive disappointment. I have lurked in the shadows of my capacities for what seems like 3 years. I have grown so accustomed to not feeling my self-confident self that I have given up trying to stay in the lane I thought was mine. In 2003 I was so broke that I considered driving a cement mixer truck. It was that strange. Call me Deacon Blues. This year hurt more but I have more cushion. I can take a more brutal beating, it seems. I watched a video of an armed robbery in which everyone cowered from the gunman holding up the bar except for one patron who continued smoking his cigarette and drinking his cup. I don't know if it's healthy to stare death in the face, but I think he knew the odds. He wasn't being a hero, he was just eating popcorn. I'm drinking lemonade and eating popcorn watching the movie of my own life. 

I remember my 23rd birthday. I realized in the back of my mind that I would not be anyone's fair-haired boy. I would not be tapped by the secret society. I wouldn't have the money to survive the pranks filling my imagination. I determined that I could only experiment with myself; my personality from time to time was my only playground. And yet I never designed to make a spectacle of myself that I couldn't reverse. So I have been halfway to everywhere exciting, developing just enough skill so that I don't have to take anything so seriously that I anchor my life to it. I participate. In the wrack of these crises it all becomes apparent where I have been participating and where I am truly committed. The answer is frightening. I have been engaged in a finely honed diplomacy with everyone in my life. I am only fully open with myself and with my writing; my writing to an audience who is merely participating with me from time to time. It occurs to me in this very moment that only the completion of publishable materials may give me the satisfaction of a pure act of creation. Everything else has been a responsibility to others. Everything else is a disappointment. Offerings to inconsistent deities of our own choosing for the occasional intimacy that delivers necessary social oxygen. 

Three months ago I ventured back to my old neighborhood in several trips. The first was to an intimate concert where an old college friend would be performing with his Erykah Badu style band. He mis-introduced me as a crazy black Republican to the most likely to succeed man I ever knew in college. I picked up a conversation we had 25 years ago when he informed me of the cultural dissonance of China. We spoke abstractedly for a few minutes. I found a table with another member of my friend's entourage but we were informed that it was reserved. We cruised the bar for drinks but it was too crowded. I left, frustrated. I had been promising myself to go to a local bar I had never been, next door to the old hardware store I fetched to and from whenever my baseballs broke a window. It was halfway full when I buzzed through the security gate, full of men and women 20 years older and 30 years younger than I. All looked forlorn with their tall drinks as two football games and a reggae song played. The bartender looked like the kind of large Arab who, in cartoons, stood at attention beside a door in curly toed shoes with arms folded attending a 3 foot scimitar. His smile was gentle behind his large black beard, and he poured me a tall drink. Here, in this place I've never been, I am welcome. One of our newly empowered fat young women in exquisite makeup over flawless dark skin in a flush of florid fushia returned from the bathroom to her pink drink. I don't belong here yet. I left to go to the other restaurant in West Adams where the music is more Marvin Gaye and the red beans and fired chicken bring back good memories. Yet at the very beginning of Friday night it was closed. My heart sank as I floored it through the dirt back alley on my way somewhere else. I arrived to Jefferson where a new brightly lit healthy food cafe announced the gentrification of 'East Culver City' just two train stops past the new gigantic residential skyscraper rising above La Cienega. It too was closed. I grabbed a desktop printed menu of forgettable dishes and settled into the mood of fête manqué. I returned to the original venue but I missed the entire set. My college friend's singer didn't show up, we had little more to say. He too was disappointed. I might have thanked him again for the time he spared me by letting me paint some of his house to the sound of Tupac. Instead, I promised to come by the next time. I didn't, but that was last year. 

When I look at my face in the mirror, I see a man on the verge of looking that dismissible age. We assume in all our casual associations that anyone who looks like the old reporter Bernard Shaw, or Morgan Freeman is a man defeated, unless he's wearing an impeccable suit. Maybe he's somebody's strange uncle at a BBQ, or a retired football coach, or gardener or principal of a middle school. You never really know what to expect of old men unless they look powerful in that ridiculously manicured way. In my current affluent environs, they wear dark shades and drive expensive sports cars. It's the only casual that works. I have my breakfast club and I am as full a member as might participate. But all of the men my age that I've known tend to bunch up into a single decade or other. My relationships are abbreviated. I talk about the deep past or a shallow present. No one has more continuity than my family, and there my role is fixed. Second to that are my inveterate readers, of whom I've only met 3 or 4. Where is Kikka? 

I have been thinking about the next decade. It will be a troublesome time for all of us. Nothing will be quite right. My children will live in the Millennial sphere. I will continue to work like some old Dickensian shuffling through sooty snow in a troubling winter cold I can barely survive mumbling past the poorhouse and street beggars in frozen street sewage. My mind is ever sharp. My experience is ever deep. I go everywhere in my mind and yet it transports me not. I have to decide once again how much I want whatever riches I can manage. For this season a lifetime of average luck has brought me to handle a fistful of tragedies that make me dizzy, lazy and half crazy. Yet I can see the hell of it clearly, the hell of all of this is in stark relief. 

Mark Twain. I think I'd rather be Mark Twain than Frederick Douglass. I had better read that Twain biography. I don't want to need a war for my own satisfaction and liberation. Maybe I can turn more towards the wry aspect of my stoicism. 

Cultural Appropriation & The Beloved Community

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

The Decade That Was

This decade I left the enterprise software game and entered the open source software part of the industry. I left on-premise and moved to cloud. I went from strictly database design to that plus API level programming. I moved from ksh + Perl to bash + Ruby and played with Go and Python. I went from mostly doing data marts and outsourcing data warehouse to mostly doing data warehouse backends and data management. I went from mostly batch to mostly continuous near-realtime feeds. I completely dropped Wintel and went over to Mac + Linux. Although I always had Ubuntu, I picked up Alpine, Kali, Centos. I didn't do Hadoop at all. I went from being a traveling consultant to working at home. I became much more of a Los Angeles person than in the previous two decades. 

I engaged in a lot more business running responsibilities and a great deal more sales and marketing. I learned to do a lot more marketing which had been intimidating and mysterious. I shifted my writing attitude to be more wry and less provocative. 

I stopped following politics in the prior decade, but weighed in on a lot. I switched from Republican to Independent. I made sense of the difference between Liberals, Leftists and Progressives and evaluated them from a moral point of view. I moved from blogging more to Facebook. I attended a large number of professional meetups. I moved more off of Facebook and more to Quora. I joined Instagram, Twitter and Reddit. I wrote fan fiction. I built a computer rack and began puttering at home with that. 

I put one kid into the military and two kids through college. I moved from a large beach community to a smaller downscale suburb. I got rid of by BMW and bought a Toyota SUV. I played with a motorcycle then got rid of it. I stopped playing beach volleyball. I became more of a patriarch in the family as my brother died and my son, mother and father suffered serious illnesses. I decided that I definitely want a Porsche. I participated in more activities that are affiliated with military service as a Blue Star dad. I bought a lot of knives. I did a GoRuck light, and an all day ruck walk. Oh yeah and tea. I have given up Red Bull for loose leaf Earl Grey tea. 

I started circuit training and lost 15 pounds and put on muscle. I had a lot of dental work finally done. I earned a yellow belt in TKD. I learned to prepare marvelous salads. I cut down my fast food intake. I started wearing boots, tac pants and T-shirts with slogans. I put bumperstickers on my truck. I continued to wear my hair, and moved to keeping the beard short and clean. I started reading a great deal more science fiction as well has historical fiction. I built up my bar and learned to make some new cocktails. I settled on my favorite spirits. I tried and failed to find a local bar where everybody knows my name and ended up at a breakfast joint. I made new friends and solidified old friendships. I changed my attitude about money and adopted a barbell strategy. I massively increased my creditworthiness, and rang up a bunch of debt. I made a pile of money on Bitcoin and Amazon stock. I paid off my tax debts and then cranked them up again. 

I developed my peasant theory and made a lot of progress on my novel. I began and mostly completed my martial education. I purchased two pistols and learned how to shoot them in a combat style. I attended CERT training and a citizens police academy. I attended the FBI citizens academy. I attended a NAMI program. Each of these were at least 12 weeks long. I attended a variety of church services and cleared up my position on Christianity. I studied Stoic philosophy and that continues. I started the American Wag podcast with my best friend Marc. I volunteered and organized for Rights International. 

I marginally increased my Spanish. I visited Germany, Switzerland, Australia and Colombia. I learned to love Las Vegas, New Orleans and Bogota. I cranked up my cigar habit but drank a lot less. I began a love affair with ramen. I got used to taking pills. I went through anxiety and depression and spent a lot of time in therapy. I improved my cardio, flexibility, strength and endurance. I have made peace with yoga. I began taking a great deal more video diary and slowed down my still photography. I have increased the size of 'The Terabyte' by 20 fold and now run Southwall. I admitted my love affair with cars and followed Formula 1 and IMSA racing. 

---

The next decade. 

My intention is to dramatically reduce my consumption and learn to live simpler and cleaner. I aim to produce rather than to interact. I intend to cap my martial education by practicing BJJ and learning to hunt with a rifle. I want to start my own company with venture capital. I want to buy and build a Porsche. I want to marry off my daughters, and bury my parents with the least amount of fuss possible. I want to produce a more coherent set of writings and video. I am aiming for completion. I expect to retire never. I want to visit southeast Asia and Tokyo. I'd like to get to London again and see if I really want to live in Texas. I want to begin composing and performing music again. I will try guitar and piano. I would like to correspond with my intellectual heroes and gain some academic associations. I would like to build my final audiophile system. I'd like to improve my horsemanship and go on a horseback vacation. 

 

 

Venezuela Defied the Market

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

Footnotes

[1] Fluid catalytic cracking - Wikipedia

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

[3] Venezuelan Refinery Under Scrutiny After Deadly Blaze

On Surveillance Capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Footnotes

[1] ronny chieng netflix - Google Search

[2] Circles of Trust

On Automation Strategy

Q: What is automation strategy?

It is fast food.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

It’s fast food.

Or you could learn to cook instead.

 

Terms of Endearment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Supernova Era

Supernova Era by Liu Cixin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very imaginative book best approached with no preconceived notions. It certainly isn't as dark as Liu's previous trilogy, nor is it as complex. It is a fascinating look at human nature and the inertia of geopolitics and social organization. I think it is both realistic and optimistic and it's certainly unique. It is nothing at all like Lord of the Flies, so please dispense with that notion.

It moves in its storytelling at a rather predictable pace. You can easily imagine the scenarios presented at the beginning and middle of the book. But as the children take over and their ultimate values make themselves evident things evolve in a fashion nobody could predict. Because we're adults, that's why.

The case is very clear that children and adults think very differently and I think Liu has nailed it. In some way this book is conceptually reminiscent of Dennis Taylor's Outland. The very fact that the protagonists are young heightens the sense of danger and drama.

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