Cobb

The Myth of Trumpism

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

A: No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

----

Consider the following:

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

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

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

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

In Defense of Aquaman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith vs Reason: Will Atheists Eat a Christian Meal?

 

Q: Despite being a sinner, could a Christian still be honest and objective enough to examine the moral attitudes of atheist progressives and leftists, and form conclusions accordingly?

A: It’s almost impossible.

Look up my questions to atheists. You’ll find that I get opprobrium because ‘small a’ atheists tend to suggest that there is nothing more to their atheism than a denial of God and that for someone who practices faith essentially has insufficient moral standing to investigate their morality. This implies, basically, the Hitchens argument which is as follows. The presumption that the faithful can be forgiven their sins (by a non-existent entity) undermines every moral system the faithful can have. Because assertion of a falsehood as true implies anything is true. So anything clerics dream up as ‘the will of God’ can be justified regardless of its inherent good or evil.

The Hitchens argument is reasonable and absolutely nails hypocrites. But it doesn’t address the moral or psychological origins of the disciplines of faith. There are a lot of other implications here as well that it’s difficult to get atheists to discuss, but we can in the comments.

Progressives and Leftists. Well let’s start with Leftists.

‘The Left’ is essentially the Marxists or the Frankfort School devotees. I think they are overly materialist and tend to be authoritarian. Even ‘authoritarian’ in the way that German intellectuals can be, which is in that way of mastering a technical scrum and expecting that the less capable will fall in line. There is a certain lack of libertarian sentiment in that line of thinking as I see it. That is the difference between a Leftist and a ‘classic liberal’. So I tend to think of such people as incompatible with religious freedom in that they are not likely to accept more than one moral master, nor would they borrow or share. Again, this is a kind of totalizing sentiment.

Of course Enlightenment liberalism (and natural philosophy) are under a broadside attack from the Progressives. I see them as unilaterally shallow and completely dismissive of any idea that true freedom has ever existed prior to the years of their births. This would be ok if they had a decent track record of institutional reform. But I perceive that Progressives are more likely to be ahistorical in their attacks against Christianity and more than a little susceptible to anti-Semitic tropes.

What I would like to discuss with atheists is the usefulness of art which is wholly created out of someone’s mind as a symbol of moral teaching. Consider the moral universe of Star Trek. Can any science fiction be morally instructive even if it asserts the falsehood of faster than light travel? Can any fiction be morally instructive if its characters never existed in actual history? Doesn’t that make authors of fiction atheist prophets? I think some atheists fail to distinguish between facts and truth in that the search for truth doesn’t begin and end with findings of fact. To do so is to be shallow, moreover it is an admission to the trust of human instinct in all decisions that are unproveable. What is that other than faith? I try to draw the equivalence between cosmology and/or the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and the search for God. I set these equivalent. The will of God = the laws of nature = the inherent structure of the universe.

Given that equivalence there is no core principle of the existence or non-existence of ‘god’ that is relevant. What is relevant is the ethical and moral discipline of the schools and adherents. And I think a careful study of history will show the syncretism between Christian ethics and natural philosophy in the development of the West. To me, a proper vision into this shows no conflict between faith and reason. Just as there are fallacies of logic, there are heresies of faith. The existence of these don’t negate the ability of these systems to reveal truth.

I am interested in evolutionary psychology. I’m getting a clearer picture of what we don’t know about the ways in which we think. And I am convinced that a refreshing study of the history of philosophy and the history of religion can clear things up as we advance our understanding of what thinking actually is, what believing actually is, what conviction actually is. This being the core idea in pressing back the unknown, I tend to be dismissive of Progressives and Leftists who seem to have no positive use for any history before the 20th century or respect for the development of the humanism they claim.

I have been instructed in many forms of Christianity and I respect the historical idea of Christendom as well as the aims of Catholicism which means ‘universalism’ as well as the general idea of monotheism over polytheism. I am particularly fond of the fact that the Catholic church is not fundamentally evangelical, and the same holds true for Judaism. I am a student of the Tao, and I have essentially made peace with the universally understood mystery “Thou art that.” My contention is simple. Moral truth is like an excellent complex meal. It takes much skill to prepare it and generosity to serve it, but everyone will enjoy it and be nourished by it. We have all evolved in the same way, if we are not defective, it’s impossible for us not to.

I say it's almost impossible. What I really ask is will atheists eat a Christian meal?

The Stoic vs the Activist

Q: Can we reconcile Stoicism with Social Justice?

A: No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Modesty Point

If you interview someone. If you talk to someone about themselves. You will get one of two variations of confidence. The modest confidence and the bold confidence. It's difficult to know which one to trust.

What strikes me at the moment is that the person who is modest is probably either, unclear of where they might stand or quite aware of people who are superior to them in the context of the subject being discussed. The person who is bold is probably either, unclear of where they might stand or completely unaware of people who are superior to them. Which to trust? There is also the matter of the interlocutor. The modest person may consider that the interviewer is smart and is asking questions they already know the answer to. The bold person may consider that the interviewer needs instruction and context. On the other hand, the modest person may assume that the interviewer may know nothing and be embarrassed by a frank discussion of facts. The bold person may assume an interactive Socratic confirmation or disconfirmation.

I tend to be bold and make no assumptions about the interlocutor. I expect both theoretical and experiential disconfirmation. My interest is 'Chinese'. What can the two of us do with what we have?

Joker

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

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

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

Hear hear for art.

A Memory of Banking Before Computer Networks

I’ll talk about retail banking in 1980 when I was a teller.

First of all, banks opened at 10am and closed at 3pm, and they were never open on the weekend. If you needed cash only a very few banks had ATMs and there were no ATM networks to speak of. The protocols for Cirrus and the others had yet to be invented and adopted. Also, if you traveled, there would be no banks in say Las Vegas that were the same as your banks in California. No banks were licensed to do business across state lines. So you really needed a credit card, and they were hard to come by. Most people used travelers checks.

So banking was slower and geographically limited and it meant a great deal if you had a credit card or American Express card. There was no Discover. There were no debit cards that were acceptable outside of your bank’s ATM network, and bank ATM networks went bank by bank (until around 1986 or so). So the idea of using a bank card at a supermarket was ridiculous. To get a credit card for a gas station or a department store was a huge privilege. There weren’t many general purpose credit cards.

Nobody had automatic overdraft protection. If you bounced a check, the branch manager at your bank would get a greenbar report of all of the overdraft checks and he would approve or deny an overdraft according to his familiarity with your account and business.

Ordinary checks written say to your supermarket could take several days to clear. This was called float. It was relatively easy to float a check - so you’d write a check on Monday and you could be reasonably certain it wouldn’t hit your bank until Thursday or Friday. And of course there was no banking on the weekend, so you could easily float a check over the weekend. There was no bank by phone, so if you didn’t know how to balance your checkbook you couldn’t just go to a phone booth and dial your bank. You had to find a branch office near where you were and wait in line for a teller, and a teller would tell you your balance. If you were lucky, they could tell you which of your checks cleared and were paid.

You wouldn’t know how your stocks were doing unless you read the paper (the WSJ of course) on a daily basis. Interday trading was unheard of. You had to call your broker and hope he would take your call. But I digress.

Deposits also took a long time to clear, so you could deposit a check on Monday and it wouldn’t clear until Wednesday or Thursday. If it was drawn on a bank from out of state, they might even put a 2 day hold on it or give you partial credit.

Very few tellers had cash counting machines and they were unreliable. So cash deposits were counted by hand, twice.

There was a world of bookkeepers, clerks, typists, stenographers, secretaries and receptionists who handled the bureaucracy of every business. So if you had sloppy handwriting, you couldn’t get an entry level white collar job, period. I ended up at the bank because I got one question wrong on an accounting test for the Beverly Hills equivalent of WeWork in 1980. My girlfriend got a job as a receptionist (lowest on the totem pole, you had to be cute and have a good telephone voice). BTW, there was no voicemail, no email, no fax. You had messengers, couriers and other schleping bagboys delivering telegrams and such. There was no encryption. People had to be trusted.

In other words, altogether things were slower and people had to be trusted more.

 

The Hubris of Globalism

I’m writing from California in English, but I hope people can see and recognize this wherever they are. It affects all of us.

In our consumer society, a host of goods and services that originate outside of the borders of our nation are made available at low cost. Capital can easily move across borders and take advantage of lower labor and commodity prices.

You can get tea. You can get sugar. These things are not produced locally. You can use GPS. You can send email anywhere on the planet. You can get green paint from a global market of chromium. You can get coffee, chocolate and bananas. You can get orange juice in the winter. You can share cultural references to superheroes that people in other countries will understand. You can benefit from international standards. You can play videogames or watch cartoons that originated in Japan. You can buy furniture made of hardwoods from South America. You can buy a t-shirt made from cotton grown in China and woven into fabric in Nigeria with a clever slogan on it invented by an American.

Globalization means that in your job you are not just competing with your fellow countrymen, but you are competing with people anywhere in the world who with the same skills. There is no ‘grading on a curve’. It means whereas your country might have had employment in every industry, that now the whole country may become specialized into a few industries. It means at some point, certain subjects will no longer be taught in school because your country doesn’t make that, it just buys that.

Globalization means that in your economy you are not just subject to the wealthiest people in your country who speak your language, but that your life is influenced by the wealthiest people in the world who may not care about your language, your culture, your religion, your education, your family or your neighborhood. They simply make deals with the wealthiest people in your country and that’s all they need to care about. It means when you buy their products and they fail, you can’t sue them or even bring them to court in your country. You’ll just be dealing with their agents in your country, but not the big boss who will never go to jail.

Globalization means that in your city, if it is a big enough city, or your college if it is a big enough college, that you will have to deal with gentrification. Not just affluent people from the nice part of town, but from the spoiled rich families across the globe. So in your neighborhood of nice houses, suddenly that one house on the corner now sells for a million dollars. And then Airbnb has people buying up houses to rent out to wealthy tourists, and soon there’s nothing your city council or mayor can do about it. Then their kids can afford to pay full tuition but you have to take out a loan, and there’s nothing the administrators at your school can do about it.

Globalization means you can buy bananas and coffee and chocolate, but you can’t afford college or home ownership. It means you can wear cheap clothing but you can’t get a job in manufacturing. I means you can play cool videogames on your iPhone, but if it breaks nobody in your country can fix it, so you have to get extended warranty insurance so they give you another one.

Globalization means the death of local control. And surprise surprise, the death of local politics. And if you vote to exit this regime, you are mocked as a stupid, regressive, racist, ass backward patriot, uncivilized barbarian to be ignored in the new world order. Becuz progress. Becuz the planet matters more than you. Becuz you can be cancelled.

Globalization is the Bitcoin where nobody anywhere knows who the inventor is, and nobody can be called into account because they can be anywhere in the world or even disappear from the world but the system keeps going. Globalization is the Black Mirror of the 21st Century.

The only thing that beats globalization is nationalism. Your laws, your language, your culture, your elected officials, your borders, your army, your flag, your cities and towns, your schools and neighborhoods.

Nationalism isn’t racist. Nationalism isn’t xenophobic. Nationalism means your sovereignty comes first, not the new world order. It means your democracy gets to decide exactly how much foreign exchange happens. It means international trade has to be negotiated, not just accepted blindly. It doesn’t mean we stop teaching foreign languages and literature in highschool. It means your citizenship and your civil rights don’t take a backseat to the rules of any other global cabal on the planet. It means anyone and everyone who does business in your country will be accountable to the laws and courts of your country. It means local people make choices and everybody else has to respect those choices. Nationalism is anti-colonialist. Nationalism is anti-imperialist. Nationalism means a limit on hubris. Nationalism means when some fanatic tries to organize the Xs of the world into a global revolution, he won’t be able to topple nations, because nations will be respected and nations will be strong.

Or not.

It’s up to you.

You Missed The Sausage Party

Apropos the following:

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

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

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

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

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

Men's Constructive Hazing

So I'm recently thinking about men and violence, and yes I just finished Jim Mattis' book on leadership. I shake my head in guessing the number of people who still think 'military intelligence' is an oxymoron. I don't recall where I read an excellent passage on how men in dangerous professions tend to haze newbs, but I immediately recognized the sense of it. It reminded me of my own fraternity initiation which included a significant amount of a black cultural angle. Which in as few words as possible can be summarized "If you can survive our terror, then you can survive what the white man has in store for you." We leave that for another day. Today I am answering the question:

Q: What are things men have to go through that women either do not understand or have empathy for?

A: I think women don’t generally understand violent hazing and competition in a non-abstract way. They are generally quick to assert that all violence is stupid and accept that they will not have to make use of it for any reason. They don’t have to live and compete in masculine hierarchies that establish rational violence that controls irrational violence, and generally expect to be protected from such environments.

It is my experience that there are particular ways that men fight and there are particular ways that women fight. I don’t want to get overly deep into that, but I think the following illustration is apt.

Boys playing soccer encounter a flagrant foul. The two involved immediately face off and blows are exchanged. After some period, other boys will break up the fight. Every one of them will know who won the fight. They are both ejected from the game. In the next game, the boys play fair and the incident is forgotten.

Girls playing soccer encounter a flagrant foul. The two involved face off but no blows are exchanged. Only the original offender is ejected from the game according to those rules. But the sting of the encounter remains. In the next game, the offended girl or one of her friends will foul the original offender for what happened in the prior game.

So what I’m saying is that in all conflict there is a direct application of social game rules and a higher meta application of unwritten rules. The higher meta application of unwritten rules includes unregulated violence and that is considered fair and the ultimate adjudication. It is male.

It’s not fair to say that women don’t understand or have empathy for this because they are very aware of its operation. They simply don’t participate in it in anywhere near the proportion that men do. But they expect men to and they will seek to reward heroes over bullies in the same way men do. I am saying they don’t necessarily understand how those lines of combat are drawn and evaluated the way that men do, from experience.

I think this comes to play in contemporary society often over questions of respect and conflict resolution or ‘anger management’. The simplest way for me to describe it is in terms of the lack of patience men will tend to have over endless negotiation and bickering back and forth in futile attempts to have nobody hurt or making everyone safe from conflict even when it is clear that there are irreconcilable differences in play.

In my personal experience I have observed how my daughters will debate questions endlessly and sometimes bring up old questions that should have been settled years ago. That ‘mean girls’ vibe of pulling back old scabs. I tell them, “Why don’t you just slap box?” They never do of course. It’s just the way they argue. Fathers and sons will resolve this at some point with a credible threat or actual use of violence. Women will argue and non-violently fight with their mothers for their entire lives.

I don’t have a theory as to why this is other than to say that it is evolutionary and that such behaviors are observable and recognizable in other mammals as well. Females nest and arrange for the conflict free home, and will pick over the details endlessly. Males hunt and having won a conflict to the death will plop down the meal anywhere, end of story.

In that context of nature vs nurture, I say it’s both, but evolution has a much deeper influence - millions of years vs a few years of graduate studies and social conditioning.

We could debate this endlessly, or you and I can take it outside.

What is the Role of Reason in Society?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will China Adapt?

Q: What is the strategy of Americans to contain Chinese influence in the world markets?

A: I think the world markets are going to teach China lessons in capitalism. I have some suspicions that China, as a command culture, will have a great deal of adjusting to do in order to succeed in various markets. After all, they are going to have to compete with the rest of us, steeped as we are in market cultures and individual choice.

That said, I’m sure that China will engage in some neo-colonial practices in emerging markets. I probably should study up on the Belt and Road program, but my bias is to believe that a country with the nerve to tell its own poor people how many children to have will take a dim view of other poor countries’ liberties. The will pay to use China’s roads or face the belt.

It has been a long time since I thought of ‘spheres of influence’ but I do believe the US and LATAM will be a great deal more impervious to China’s ambitions than countries like Thailand and Vietnam as well integrated as they are into the current world economic order.

As the US finds itself paying more attention to its own resources and supply chains, I think it is more likely that we will ultimately look at China in the way we look at Saudi Arabia. Some few powerful American concerns will make several significant deals with China for strategic purposes, but the relationship will not go much further beyond that. Americans do not perceive China as an open and free society, and we have history, Taiwan and Hong Kong to remind us of that. I thoroughly believe that America’s openness will prove to be more adaptable.

It might be corny, but the exceptional life of Bruce Lee is instructive. He found the best of Chinese traditions in martial arts to be formalistic and non-adaptive, a top down idea of mastery that constrained creativity. He had to leave to expand these ideas and so developed a superior adaptive system. This became the foundation of American MMA. Similarly, as Brazilians opened up and adapted Japanese Judo to become BJJ, a superior system evolved. Today, after fewer than 50 years, Americans and the world have learned a combat format that beats 1000 years of traditional Chinese instruction. Perhaps China may learn an economic format that beats 300 years of free market capitalism in open societies, but I very much doubt it.

 

The Bomb Drops

I put together a survey partly because it's fun and I haven't done it in a long time, and partly because I'm really not interested in people taking tangents outside of my own concerns. When it closes I will paste a link here or in the comments. The survey is all about the recent attacks on Saudi Arabian oil refineries, the extent to which is ballparked at 5% of the world's petroleum supply. That's a chunk significant enough for the President to release the taps on the US Strategic Oil Reserve. I noticed the coincidence that 4 days ago the President was shaking his fists at something related to ANWR, but I wouldn't go so far as to mumble that in front of the students. Nevertheless a small percentage of the respondents thought the US was involved in a false flag attack.

It does change my view of the Middle East. I think the Saudis have turned the corner on their vulnerability certainly with the American willingness to tell them to take a long walk off a short pier. It will be interesting to see how destabilizing this matter will be, and FWIW I might pay attention to the Yemeni war. I sense that the Iranians are getting more and more ballsy these days. I'm not sure if I care, but I'm noticing.

Just Fix The Planet

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Obligatory Seriousness on the Return of Dave Chappelle

Somebody told me that Chappelle is like Pryor. I disagree that Chappelle is like Pryor. I think he's more like Carlin. He's focused on observing the contradictory stuff that people do. DC is very precise with his words, but he does it with subtlety. In a way, he's like Lewis Black. Kind of like, you know where I'm coming from audience. But Chappelle messes with his audience too, because you can't escape his observations. He's like an inner conscience that we have but don't listen to, but most importantly, DC is unleashed.

He's rich. He ended his career. He didn't need the work. He's like the resurrected Christ. Dude, I already died. I'm still funny. I'm still telling the truth. Sorry not sorry. He's not pretending. He goes there. He has got nothing to prove. He can just be Dave. I think he will survive it. And I think like nobody else alive except for Seinfeld, he will have his full, undamaged confident self years from now. I don't think he can be hurt because he's living in truth. All he has to do is walk his straight line and the world will provide the funny. He's just the dude to say it out loud.

Now that Eddie Murphy is coming back, I'm really curious to see what Eddie will do. I can see that he is much more serious. Also Dave Attell and Jeff Ross are the bomb.

I don't know. I think right now Dave Chappelle is the Doctor Manhattan of comedy. He's just out there completely naked and still you look him in the eyes, and you are in awe of his power and you desperately hope he cares about humanity.

Watching Sticks & Stones was brilliant but now more than ever it makes sense to watch his other new releases, which I just did, especially the one recorded in LA where he's super intimate smoking a cigarette on stage. Which, when you think about it, is against the stupid law. So I have to tell my Dave Cheppelle story.

About 25 years ago I was hanging out in midtown Manhattan at the Houlihan's at 42nd and Lex. It was happy hour aka time for Dancing in Suits. It was that night that I hung out in the foyer with a man I am convinced was Dave Chappelle. It was one of the funniest times in my life, and I regret never going to hang out with him and see his show. This was the same time when Ray Romano was just getting started. So I did, within the short time frame, go to that comedy club in the Village. Romano's best joke was a bit about his prediction about people getting implants from their cell phones in which the punchline involved somebody getting a fax out of their ass. But I missed Chappelle's show. Nevertheless, we sat there in the foyer of Houlihan's for about an hour just ragging on people who came through the front door. We were cracking each other up. It was that memorable. 

I often think about that evening. Now I think about how it was that I almost became the class clown, how my insult humor was devastating back in middle school and how I was almost ready to fight to become class clown. I touch of that came out when I watched Dave do a bit of ragging on the dude from Brooklyn in the tracksuit. How hard you can be and not really mean anything by it. And I see how comfortable he is doing just that. Sitting down smoking a cigarette and busting on people. "I say a lot of mean things." He said. Because everything's funny until it happens to you. 

At the same time DC does something that I've only seen in Eddie and in Michael Jackson which is to be so bloody talented that they appear to be approachable. But I'm watching and thinking, damn it would be fun to hang out with Dave again, knowing I'm never going to get that chance. I'd done so with Reynaldo Rey. We hung out and had a hilarious time. I've done so with Paul Mooney, who is a friend of one of my NY cousins. I even met Dave's brother once. And it's weird because I also want to hang out with Neal Brennan. There's almost no other entertainer of any sort that I think it would be cool to hang with - although I haven't thought about it in a very long time. You see, I'm loving what comedians are saying today. They are the necessary jesters in a mad mad world. 

If I had to do it. And desperation might get me there. I would do a little clown makeup and perform a sit down comedy act. It would be like a combination of Spaulding Grey, Joe Frank .. but let me shutup. 

Free Speech, Coercion & the Business of the People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Logos Project

For about 20 years I have been saying that I have 2 or 3 original ideas. Today I'm going to share them in one giant tarball. I'm going to call it the Logos Project. The reason I'm calling it the Logos Project is because of Jordan Peterson's big book Maps of Meaning. It was a very rambly book but it was one that lay behind all of my most profound interests. In one way you could say it represented a reconciliation between faith and reason, which is ultimately the combination of religion and science. What could be more fundamental to the prospects of Western civilization? The one Bible piece I've been able to quote was the beginning of the Book of John. In the beginning was the word. And it seems that many of us have abandoned the word, and that needs to be addressed. Social media falls short. We need to build logical media. We need to transform our computer mediated communications into something that serves the purpose of social maintenance of the commons. This is a management problem which is poorly served by the faint number of actions that social media spaces allow us to perform. We are trapped in Twitter because of what Twitter is, and because we have given it over to the builders of Twitter to be the masters of Twitter, Twitter doesn't belong to the people. Anyway, there are a lot of problems like this and the aim of the Logos Project is to solve each and every one of them.

 

This is something I'm ready to contribute to for the rest of my career. And at this moment I am particularly excited about the Intellectual Dark Web, in that they are finally doing what I've been hoping would be done. Of course I've been creating all kinds of content but I couldn't quit my day job. Now is about that time to see if I can integrate all I've been building and thinking into something both concrete and sticky. I'm sure I'll need others to help me pour the concrete, and this teaser is the sticky part. So please do check it out and put in your comments and criticism. 

The Axis of Magic

There is something which unites magic and applied science [=technology] while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men; the solution is a technique. --C. S. Lewis

This week I happened on a conversation by @swardley, one of my favorite tweeters. He was describing magic in the realm of corporate desire. The thread is here: 

X : Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Me : Magic eats culture for lunch
X : What?
Me : I asked 20 tech executives - “Do you think your workplace is magical compared to others” and 40% said yes. Magic is real.
X : This is bullshit
Me : You started it with culture.

— Simon Wardley #EEA (@swardley) August 27, 2019

And the idea of magic occurs to me in two contexts. The first is the series Magic 2.0 by Scott Meyer. My review of the first book is here.

What a fun book, and what an exceptionally diabolical villain. Scott Meyer's protag is an ordinary bumbling, self-deprecated cornball of a 'Greatest American Hero'. All good intentions and smarmy sentimentality of a Millenial Charlie Brown, Martin Banks can't figure out a purpose for his life and becomes a marvelous fish out of water in the series. And having read the audiobook, one of the greatest voice actors in the business does a pitch perfect mentor in Phillip, the wise and conscientious mentor to Martin the Magnificent. But the true genius of this book is found in the character of Jimmy, social engineer par excellence. I cannot think of a villain who exemplifies so much of what is wrong in this world than this ruthless manipulator. He is the kind of glib evil that permeates so much of American society that recognizing the lengths he goes to is a revelation. 

The book is an excellent meditation on ethics and power, wrapped up in fantasy and fun, a brilliant and entertaining combination. Trekkies will immediately recognize the centrality of the Prime Directive in this work. 

But Lewis' is deeper. I remembered what he said about the expertise of technologists. He said that they cannot explain what it is they do, because they're all wrapped up in technique and their specialization has a necessary measure of opacity and obfuscation. I think I'm feeling this right now in my profession, and mustn't we all eventually? I mean if we really become proficient, we learn the underside of our business. Lewis said however, any child can understand magic. If you want to explain why all rockets don't explode on the launch pad, someone who understands all of the 735 components of the the rocket assembly couldn't explain it in a year. But if you say "it's magic", everybody gets it.

There's another tangent to this which is the explanation of the infinitely contingent nature of human decision making. Jordan Peterson made a remarkable impression on me in describing how humans handle tools. A car, for example, is just a tool to get you from point A to point B. It's only when the damned thing breaks that you bother to look under the hood. You will spend as little effort in using this tool as possible so you can accomplish your goals. When the tool begins to fail you, it becomes a problem and so you get into its innards, yet only up to a point. You then decide that all of its complexities are a waste of your time & money and you discard the entire thing. It is no longer relevant to your purposes. You find an alternative tool.  In that respect, it doesn't matter if your car runs on electricity, squirrel farts or vampire blood. It's technology you're never going to learn unless that is your purpose.

Philosopher Peter Kreeft writes in clarification of Lewis:

Science and religion both aim at conforming the mind to objective truth, objective reality (science conforms our mind to the nature of the universe, and religion conforms our mind to the mind of God and our will to the will of God).

Magic and technology, on the other hand, try to conform objective reality to the human will. That is why they both arose at the same time—not the Middle Ages but the Renaissance, not the Age of God but the Age of Man. Both are Faustian, Promethean. The difference is, of course, that technology works while magic doesn’t (usually). But their end, their goal, the purpose behind them, the human values and desires and state of soul that set them in motion, are the same.

What I need to think about is - oh never mind I just figured it out. Wow!

The abuse of religion always is involved in the establishment of the illusion of supernatural magic. The charlatan seeks the authority granted by inverting the idea of approaching God, the sacred divine by objectifying God as the ultimate authority to which the charlatan naturally appeals. The abuse of science always is involved in the established of the illusion of supernatural technology. The charlatan seeks the authority granted by inverting the idea of practicing the scientific method by objectifying Science as the ultimate authority to which the charlatan naturally appeals. 

Mike's Manly Man Checklist

Mike's Manly Man Checklist

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

 

American Wag 019 - White Supremacy

 

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

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

The Dutzburger Tribute

This is my family. Dutz is my sister.

A Democratic Chaos Theory

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

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

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

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

The Race Man's Framework 2.0

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

Racial Theories:

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

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

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

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

---

Racialism:

The Racial Realist

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

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

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

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

A racialist will discount psychology.

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

Racism:

Type One: Extrinsic or Soft Racist

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

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

Type Two: Intrinsic or Hard Racist

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

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

Type Three: Racial Supremacist

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

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

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

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

The Uncle Bunny Scenario

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Metal

Once upon a time I remember believing that Robert Ludlum was on the government payroll and that his fiction was partly paid for by our intelligence services just to scare the enemy into thinking about how we might be thinking. Then I started reading Tom Clancy, so I thought no it's not Ludlum, it's Clancy. Then, if you can believe it, for a short time I thought it might be Dick Marcinko. Now who knows? I mean there are writers like Littel and LeCarre and my new favorites Jason Matthews and Ben Macintyre all who know quite enough history to have their work reviewed for approval. 

None of that approaches the verisimilitude of Greaney's new book with Rip Rawlings. These two in combination have done to the genre what Speilberg did to the war movie with Saving Private Ryan. Suddenly everything prior seems fake, staged and artificial and 'tacticool'. 

This collaboration is stellar. It puts together a complex timeline, memorable characters, geographic settings, strategic consideration, battle details in a compelling narrative. It works on multiple levels with remarkable precision that doesn't sound stilted and it doesn't force you to suspend disbelief while delivering just the right amount of drama. It is not romantic, nor pessimistic and it is far from far-fetched. The duo have set a new high water mark for the military thriller. 

The way this turns out I even wonder if there is much of a market for this kind of fiction written in Russia. I feel sorry for Russian authors. 

This one gets tanks, militias, choppers, close air, infantry, submarines and artillery operations down with stunning precision (as far as I could possibly tell) and by doing so takes a great combined joint strike at the genre of the special forces that do it all. What a refreshing take. The story itself is certainly plausible and it gives the reader a new take on how quickly things can go from bad to worse. No book I have read has ever done a better job of dealing with the fog of war in the manner this one does. 

A stellar effort. 

Toni Morrison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Thoughts about Space Colonization

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

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

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

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

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

Ecosystem Engineering

So if you can CRISPR an infertile mosquito and half of the worlds mosquitoes literally screw themselves into extinction you will have eliminated a lot of malaria. You will also have eliminated a lot of bird food. How many humans will live? How many birds will die? If you knew the answer to that question and network searched all of the ecospherically related questions, you might end up with something that ends up counting all sorts of animals of particular interest. The trick of course is to simulate an entire ecosystem, and having done so with a complex enough model, reduce the number of unintended consequences, or at least recognize some of them in realtime for the next iteration of the model.

The biggest problem with this will be scaling moments. What happens with the death of 20 billion mosquitoes may be a completely different phenomenon than what happens with the death of a mere 2 million. This is a field of endeavor that I imagine. Look how primitive putting a wristband on the leg of a condor is compared to this.

I cannot see that the ethics of this are any more significant than the ethics of farming. Farming is certainly exactly that same thing - ecosystem engineering, in which the DNA and destiny of any number of organic species is manipulated and subordinated in a controlled manner to yield benefits specifically for the dietary requirements of humans. You control the territory. Map off a piece of the earth and subject it to human science, technology and other fiddling.

I recall some research done a long time about about wolf populations somewhere in the colder bits of Canada. At the time people could not believe that these arctic wolves could survive without eating livestock, and so farmers were shooting them. Only one researcher was brave enough to hang out at those latitudes away from supermarkets for months to study these wolves. As he came close to starving, he found himself regularly dining on roasted rats, and suddenly it became clear that large mammals could survive indefinitely on such a diet - which nobody believed before his documentation. Since then this has always been a part of my thinking and threw a great number of monster movies under the relentless logical bus in my mind. How can anything so huge survive to be strong enough to knock down buildings if all they are going to eat is a tiny human or two?

These are the matters of caloric thermodynamics to be considered. It takes energy, and these paths of energy are what should be measurable to enable such tracking of ecosystem dynamics. I don't know what shortcuts are taken in the supercomputing simulation of nuclear detonations, but there is a clue in there somewhere.

The Fact Chain

Imagine that you were an actual smart college professor who cared about the state of human knowledge. You cared so much that in your spare time, you would collaborate with other such professors to determine the truth value of what every comment section said about your specialty.

You could use a blockchain tech to sign facts in collaboration with others in your field, and those facts would be made accessible to everyone else on the planet for free.

By the way, Quora is a good feedstock for exactly this problem, but Quora is centralized and under the control of Quora.

At some point in the future, the best answers at Quora could be annotated and curated by such professors who will do public peer review, and thereby insure the integrity of the distributed ‘factchain’.In other words, instead of Google telling you what is popular, the factchain will tell you what is right.

AmCoEx

(from the archives - June 1998 )

The AmCoEx Index of Used Computer Prices (long version of index)
The following average prices are for the most actively traded
models for June 22, 1998.

Average Average
Buyer's Seller's
Machine Bid Ask Close Change($)

IBM PS/1 486/66 420MB $100 $250 $125 0
IBM ThinkPad 350C 300 500 400 -50
IBM ThinkPad 500 250 475 325 0
IBM ThinkPad 755CX 350 650 500 -25
AST 486DX/66 420MB 125 275 125 0
Fujitsu Lifebook P133 800 1150 875 -25
Dell 486DX/33 270MB 100 250 125 0
Dell Dimension P166 2.1GB 300 650 625 25
Gateway 486/100 540MB 150 375 225 0
Gateway 486/75 Notebook 320MB 350 600 525 -25
Clone 486/66 420MB 150 250 175 0
Clone 586/133 500MB 200 400 250 -25
Clone P100 1.2GB 275 450 375 0
Clone P200 2.1GB 400 650 600 -25
Clone P166 1.2GB 350 575 475 25
Compaq Contura 4/25 120MB 200 475 500 -25
Compaq Prosignia 486/33 500 MB 175 375 175 0
Compaq Presario P200 2.5GB 400 600 525 -25
HP Pavillion P166MMX 2.1GB 400 600 500 0
Mac Quadra 700 230MB 200 350 300 -25
Mac Quadra 840AV 500MB 300 600 350 -25
Mac Performa 6116 700MB 300 500 475 0
PowerBook 160 160MB 250 500 300 25
PowerBook 180 160MB 350 600 375 -25
PowerBook 520c 250MB 400 750 600 0
PowerBook 540c 320MB 600 1000 750 -50
PowerBook 5300 500MB 500 750 550 0
PowerBook 5300cs 500MB 650 950 825 -25
PowerMac 7100/80 700MB 300 675 525 50
PowerMac 7200/75 500MB 400 675 650 0
PowerMac 7500/100 1GB 800 1400 875 -25
PowerMac 8500/150 1.2GB 800 1500 1150 0
PowerMac 9500/120 1.2GB 900 1600 1175 -25
Mac 8100/80AV 1GB 500 900 550 0
NEC Versa 486 200MB 450 625 525 -50
Toshiba 486/75 500MB 400 650 575 -25
Toshiba P75 Notebook 500 850 800 -50
Toshiba 4800CT Notebook 550 825 800 -25
HP LaserJet IVL 200 400 250 0

Since 1988, the American Computer Exchange has matched
buyers and sellers of used microcomputer equipment. The index is a
sample of the most actively traded models in the used market. Many
other models are actively traded each day. For more information
contact the American Computer Exchange at (800) 786-0717 or download
the AmCoEx Used Computer Pricing software at http://www.amcoex.com.

When They Reminisce Over You, For Real

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

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

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

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

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

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

Service Aussie Style

So I was in Sydney and found my perfect pub, the Dove & Olive. I was a bit surprised to learn that it was an insult to tip the waitstaff. So I learned how it worked.

You go up to the bar and order what you want. You pay ahead of time. You find your own table. They give you a number. They send somebody over to your table with your food. If you want more food or drink, you go and repeat the process. If you want bbq sauce or mustard, it's sitting on a side table somewhere in the joint. Get it yourself. When you're done, they bus your table and that's it. Here in the states, the closest thing to it is how Carl's Jr works. I like it.  

The most important thing about a sit down restaurant is that you get to sit down. So we have some difficulty because we have a lot of restaurants like Denny's and Tony Romas where the food isn't all that great and the service isn't all that great, but we're stuck in the formal restaurant rut in terms of the service style. There's nothing about these kinds of joints that is the elegant thing where the waitstaff ought to make a difference. They're watering holes. 

I got in the habit of tipping because I was on business and expensing my meals. But even the business meal joints have become rather run of the mill to me. Basically, if you don't have live music, but you do have some music, it's not a fancy tipping kind of joint. So I would say there is a class of overpriced chain restaurants like PF Chang's, Houstons, Mortons and McCormick & Schmick that are in my sights. I'm going to tip there out of force of habit, but I really don't want to. I can get food that good at an Aussie style joint, but right now the Frequent Flyer, Happy Birthday and First Date crowd are keeping these places alive. Those people tip. 

Leadership: The Hybrid Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider the misery gap.

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

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

OK That's the setup. 

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(published now without further comment)

 

 

Richard Kadrey and the Morality of Dark Degenerates

I have been enjoying the Sandman Slim series of novels by Richard Kadrey for years. This week I just finished his latest novel, The Grand Dark. It is a revelation. I will place it, in my ultimate library right next to Gene Wolfe's 'The Land Across'. The new book, The Grand Dark, takes place in what could be described as an alternate Mitteleurope postwar near future. It's at once both futuristic and retro, a brilliant creation in which serves as a kind of gothic background for a tale of youth and innocence lost, repression, rebellion and decadence. In describing it thus, having read it, I find myself getting excited about something I'm sure I wouldn't have been excited about had I read an overview. It's Kadrey, a writer of wondrously dark imagination. There's not much of any other way to describe him now as the caretaker of the morality of dark degenerates. 

So start with the phrase 'entartete kunst', and imagine an American 1980s romantic punk sensibility in a Reagan era where the CIA was not turned against Soviet Russia, but against Americans whose common folks had turned to a minimally employed louche cokeheads and heroin addicts. Imagine thin wastelings like the Pet Shop Boys, East end punks in tattered jackets looking after scores with West End girls, dragging on Shermans all black lipsticked in sheer gauzy blouses. Imagine a precisely speaking man in small hornrimmed glasses dressed formally with a preternatural intelligence lording over a bicycle delivery service with a ratpack of couriers looking just out of the workhouses of Oliver Twist. Imagine a grimy industrial city barely hanging on to civility patrolled by automatons, robot taxi drivers, spiderlike police bots. Imagine disfigured war veterans who wear steel masks covering their deformities grumbling to themselves on public transit everywhere you go. 

The Grand Dark is the pseudonym of the theatre of the absurd in which the most crumbly of human dramas are shot through with sexual drama and political innuendo that caters to the most ribald and degenerate sensibilities of a bounding youth and a slumming aristocracy - where poets and students and grand dames & dukes meet at opioid cocktail parties signifying about the potential of transgressive creativity, each production aiming to rise the level of shock and awe to that of civilizational neutron bombs. And around every corner are the brutal police and the even more vicious secret police. 

The novel is the story of a naif and his lover, an actress, two against the whole demonic world. Like Forrest Gump stranded in Milan Kundera's Prague, Kadrey's protagonist Largo struggles against the news of the world as he manages to escape its crushing jaws by inches every day. He is animated by his passionate love for Remy whose love and life are romantically reckless in the way only an energetic and beautiful youth animates to the stunned jealousies of the jaded who surround her at work. Their love is true and it surpasses all until things with gravity and grit get their grubby ways. Remy disappears. Largo struggles to find Remy. Has she abandoned him? Is she lost? Kidnapped? Dying of the miasmic vapors of this cruel industrial wasteland?

In all ways subtle and clever, Kadrey's world pulls you into its twisted orbit, drowning you in gothic mystery and the horror of war, the heat and hate of the beat down humans and the intrigues of revolution and counter-revolution. It is a world of creeping cold claustrophobia, like Terry Gilliam's Brazil set in Eastern Europe. Kadrey's writing simply and occasionally brings you directly into the head-pounding despair of a sweet young man fighting for his very survival in a world intent on destroying all that gives him hope. 

In all this, Kadrey has brought me face to face with something I would not have known how to approach - which is how one who is weak and powerless with no cause to hope and no ethos beyond survival lives at the mercy of sophisticates who see in him only a means to crafty ends. Largo's degeneracy is genuine. He is a son of the underbelly of society, and no he doesn't know how to tie a tie. He doesn't jog for his health, he grabs on to the parcel of peace that can be purchase by a couple of drops of opioid under the tongue, by the hot breath of his lady love, by the thrill of outrunning the gangsters out to bash his brains. And so we are left breathless trailing a youth with none of the degraded common sense of a degraded time, yet whose honesty is the only sort that can reflect the humanity of those who struggle on the daily. He is dirty and unsubtle. He is weak and frightened. He is used by inches in ways he cannot comprehend and all he can do is try to stand up straight and stand up for his friends. He who suspected no one finds himself pinioned, as was my heart. 

Penultimate Histories

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

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

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

Recursion

Blake Crouch is the most emotional sci-fi writer I read. In that regard, what he writes may be a great deal more accurate for his characters and NPCs. Danger, confusion, loss and suffering are more vividly illustrated in this book than in others, but quite resonant with his prior 'Dark Matter'. Oddly, I preferred Dark Matter's protagonist who was a bit more bumbly and challenged. 

However the scale of Recursion is a great deal broader. The entire planet is entangled in a quantum dilemma. At its best, this book gets us close to Michael Crichton level drama. Its take on 'time travel' is a very clever working on the order of Primer and Inception. 

There is a kind of blind naivete driving the ambition of the characters here that didn't ruin the book for me, but annoyed me for a time. And since this is a book about people's lives rather than the situational drama created by technological disruption I think it's something Crichton would have handled much better. The way the ordinary Joe protagonists in this cinematic drama handle their dilemma puts a locus on character that requires me to suspend disbelief more than I should. In other words, if you give somebody the talent, financial and technical wherewithal to change the world, and their ambition is actually to change the world, how do they end up so squeamish when they actually do change the world and people die? That said, I find the protagonists' reactions to the tragedies that ensue quite realistic in an oddly informative way.

What Recursion reveals, emotionally and psychologically is the extent to which people whose lives spin out of control tend to seek comfort and solace from an ever-shrinking circle of intimates. In Crouch's world, the keys to all survival are the hugs and kisses that only one person in the world can give and losing that person drains all meaning from life. Recursion is the illustration of what could happen when that person is erased or altered by memory. The world comes apart.

Stop Crying

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

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

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

Thus endeth today's non-fableized fable.

From Liberal To Conservative To Neither

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

Q. What turned you from liberal to conservative?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning Japanese

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Fall; or Dodge in Hell

Fall is a massive book that runs across multiple generations in two different planes of reality. In the world we are familiar with, characters we know from previous books by Stephenson appear, and we are pleased to be reunited with them, even though we don't remember much about them. In the alternative world we are entertained by an entirely coherent mythical universe that contains some of the same characters as they play into an epic struggle. The barrier between the two planes of existence is opaque but events in one affects the reality of the other.

What makes this book particularly brilliant is how well Stephenson's mythical universe dovetails with archetypes we all know. In that it is part sword and sorcery, part game of thrones, part creation story, part clash of the titans.

Allegorically, as is expected, Stephenson proposes answers to some eternal questions that vex us in contemporary American society. How bad can a post-reality internet get? What might be the consequences to an America subject to powerful schismatic cults? How far could a War of the Worlds level hoax be perpetrated on social media? But even more curious to fans of his fiction, what is really going on with Enoch Root? How can we live in virtual reality? What about the Singularity? And even, Why does God allow suffering in the world?

Where REAMDE was a giant action movie in book form and Seveneves was a hard science fiction, this is an extended study and romp into virtual reality. Moreover it proposes some questions about the nature of the human mind and what are the inevitable effects of is disembodiment? Nothing is so revealing as Stephenson's understanding that the limits of our imaginations are essentially nothing more or less than the human drama of dreams. More importantly that our dreams are of little value to us if they are not shared with other people. So whatever humans can be, they must dream it first, and guess what - practically all dreams are familiar, but being social creatures nothing quite defines humanity as 'make my dream come true and share it with you'. Well, the other side of the coin, which is 'I am your worst nightmare'.

There is something altogether familiar in science fiction that I think C. S. Lewis came to understand, Arthur C. Clarke explained famously and now that Stephenson understands. That is that science fiction and ultimately science is best understood as magic. Magic is nothing more than the wish fulfillments that defy the constraints of our knowledge of cause and effect in the physical universe. What humans will always want from science is predicted by science fiction which is nothing more or less than magic. Once you connect magic to science fiction, you inevitably connect it to fantasy, and human fantasy is, in that way, predictable. Fantasy tastes like mythology - in the end these are the stories we use to teach ourselves, and religion is how we discipline our mythologies and engrave it in memory and dreams. It's all connected.

So in that way, Stephenson knows that he is writing books that come full circle in mythology, in fantasy, in science fiction. In all of these, miraculous things happen. The only difference is the selection of machina, type of deus and the direction of ex. In Fall, they are executed in parallel between the two planes of existence, each an opaque reflection of the other.

It comes as no surprise, and is a usefully instructive matter that Stephenson does not create a post-scarcity universe in either plane of reality. In fact, his illustration of the relativity of time and its relationship to energy and matter is spot on. I'll let you read that. His words do it best. That is best when you are wanting to please readers of science fiction. But in a cryptic ending, Stephenson gives us a surprise we have to leave as a mystery. It is either a massively hokey joke or the test condition of a recursive story. In the case of the former, it can be forgiven considering the scope of the tale. The very idea of history stopping is a hokey joke and Stephenson's best books are historical fictions. But there is a playground out there for alternate planes of reality that are not only turtles all the way down, but perhaps turtles all the way around. After all, which way is down?

Fall, does not induce dizzying nausea. It delivers some stunning moments that are exciting and dramatic in the way the best fantasy can be. Stephenson's characters are less well defined as a matter of course if you read the book as I did, which is to give equal weight to both analogues in both planes of reality, but it is easy to be enchanted by those on either side. Nevertheless Stephenson weighs more deeply on the fantasy side - as some fraction of the book plays interestingly with rather hackneyed stereotypes of extreme Americans. The heroes and villains are not so clear in our world.

My overall take is that this book is an ambitious attempt at something only a few writers are bold enough to try. I don't know any who have come close. I would like to say that Stephenson has been reading Gene Wolfe who is, to my reckoning, the absolute master of sword and sorcery fantasy writing. He remains intrigued by the probabilities of magical science and remains upbeat on the whole. Although Fall might have been made profoundly darker - all the elements were there - there is a happy ending. And in the end one must confess that in this rendering, Hell is a relative term. Where there might have been some Kafkaesque absurdity throughout, Stephenson's characters never lose their minds or abandon their purposes in confounding frustration. Where there might have been some great experimentation with the element of chaos, a fundamental building block of the fantastic plane of existence, it is only marginally mysterious and stochastic.

Since I cannot believe that Stephenson is finished with his characters or the fecund prospects of co-dependent universes, I must conclude that Dodge and his entourage must have more adventures in our future. Please.

How I Failed

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

A: Motivation. And I failed.

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

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

The inside of my head looked something like this:

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

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

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

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

—

So my advice is this:

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

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

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

 

In This Moment

For the first time a couple weeks ago, I happened to grab some skin on my thigh and I was able to pinch more than ever. More than I've ever noticed before. It was kind of a shock, because I don't feel frail. But perhaps it's time to admit that I'm looking down one of the last tunnels. I think for the first time I'm beginning to think of looking to lower the river instead of building a mightier bridge. It's a weird notion, and almost foreign to me.

The first time I ever got laid off was in 2001. It was a landmark year for everyone. I was to turn 40 that year and was dealing with tax and custody problems. It was the first time in my life where I considered the possibility that my best days might be behind me. They weren't, but it took about three years of risk to get all the rewards. I began to recognize the kind of desperate ferocity that I saw in others as they pursued their careers. I looked towards my feet and saw the space below like the gaps in the floors of a fire escape to the hard pavement 10 floors down. I was at something of a dizzy height, not in absolute terms, but relative to where I had been before. Of course people say 40 is when you are 'over the hill', and that kind of joke has its currency for a while. But it was a fact that I had achieved technical mastery of the tools I had used to fuel my career, and now people were just building newer ones and calling them next generation. It's a different perspective when the leading edge moves away from you and you're not really impressed.

So many things have happened in the intervening 18 years. I feel greatly expanded. I feel capable of handling so much more bad news and so much more triumph. I have gone from a small balloon to a large one, where before I needed helium to rise, now I only need hot air. Where before, I could be popped by one prick (and I've met my share of pricks) now it takes a determined axe to take me down. Of course I'm a bigger target with large bright colors. Some might even say graceful and majestic. Some might say full of gas with no particular direction.

I think what I recognize this year that makes the most sense is that there is always a great deal more reality to face than we might like. It's always out there, and when you keep your head down with the assumption that your feet are headed in the right direction, there's always the chance that change has overtaken your attention. Yet you can always raise your head and adjust course. There are always landmarks you can identify. There are always distances you can measure. So long as you keep your boots on, you can get on a profitable trail.

I have the advantage of watching men and women who are senior to me, as well as those younger. It is pleasant to watch the young become bold as the old make accommodations for their shrinking ambitions. I have discovered how much I feel that I have lived a gratifying life and how that gratification leaves me disposed to be honest and reassuring. Several years ago I assumed the position of asshole who was not anti-social but anti-bullshit. I know how that can be inspiring. I know how that can be dangerous. The truth serves no one, except perhaps those whose appreciation is done at a distance. So often we end up rewarding courage posthumously. Who wants to take the time to raise their heads and try to be objective when the strategy, money, glory and patience is headed away from the truth? I suppose only the honest man who knows the value of honest work and is so dedicated. That is what I have been doing, with consistency. I am conscientious. But I am also open to new experience.

It is new experience that has added volume to my ballooning skin. Over the past three years I have dealt with chaos and frailty in my job and my family and finally in myself. Right now I am in the middle of a pace that doesn't feel like courage so much as it feels like facing that which I refused to deal with as I might have. A couple years ago I took pictures of myself after dental surgery, and didn't mind so much that I looked ridiculous. I few years ago I realized that 'good genes' were not enough to keep me going - when I found myself panting going up two flights of stairs. It was and remains difficult for me to distinguish between what I do to make myself useful and make myself happy. I realize those are both my responsibility and that I shouldn't abandon either as one reinforces the other even when I cannot prioritize either. That confusion has landed me in bed with anxiety and depression; two sides of the same black dog. Yet purpose remains. So in this moment, I have a kind of joyless purpose. It is joyless partly because of the medications I am taking and partly because I acknowledge that my purpose cannot end. I will die trying something. I will die trying something. And so I feel capacious. I can handle more pain without yelling. I can answer more questions without yelling. I can do a lot more without passion. It is good to be king, but it doesn't feel good. It feels like you must always say we, because you encompass more than just your own life. You must move forward and pull everyone forward with you, or at least shout out the direction. That right now is the meaning of my life.

My youngest is now in Spain, finishing off the last credits of her university education. My children are neither brilliant or impressively ambitious, but they are all good people. They're the kind of people you want to be around. They are the kind of people who appreciate life. Despite my inadvertent spoiling of them all, they get it. They are grateful and they are excellent company. I am impressed by their willpower. They are hardheaded bulldogs. So I have been giving myself credit for having done the father thing well, and it is, such as it is, that accomplishment for which I am completely satisfied to call my greatest. I know now that I am exactly human whereas I thought I might never be ordinary. I finally saw that dramatic presentation that convinced me that I would not abstract any good from denial of my earthly loves. Any terrorist brute could compromise any secret I know if my family were threatened. I'm OK with that, because I might survive to take revenge. I only pledge so much allegiance to any flag.

Today, having studied more psychology than I ever expected, I am accepting of the fact that I don't know myself as accurately as I expected to. That is because I am open to experiences I never expected to be. It has not been sufficient for me to remain true to one course in life. I have turned left and right; I have turned it up and calmed it down. I have gone full force. I have shutdown completely. I've always said that a little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing. I realize it is Buddha's Nothing, it is everything and nothing at once. So now I am almost ambivalently large. I am yet so satisfied to have the integrity of the moment and to string those moments together. That is how I remain myself, as contradictory as it seems. To allow myself to be open to the new and the different. It's not, as David Bowman said, "full of stars". It's full of humans. I'm sure that I know humans better than I know stars. So I'm well disposed to know all the humans I might become, depending upon what circumstances the planet and stars may throw my way.

What's changing about me is my willingness, yet again, to presume I have so much to tell people. I'm not carrying a message. I'm carrying, if anything, a habit of being perceptive and articulate. So I am carrying the context of myself, sloughing off my own skin as I am dragged through life. Perhaps not only should I stop writing 'objectively' but stop reading. After all, what is it that I really want to know? I want to do that which I think needs doing in my own field of endeavor, and I only need to know how. I am not challenged by the rest of life to name the passage in the Bible, or the stanza of Shakespeare, or the canto of Dante. I only have my worrisome curiosity and my expository habits. The arena is not noble or arcane. It is merely the stomping grounds of Fat Tony. I am not Maxiumus enslaved and I don't care if you are entertained. I'm just that pain in the ass who keeps parsing speech, making wry jokes, telling stories and analyzing. I can always stand a change of subject, but for now I don't seem to want to shut up. I'm still in the habit of free and mind-altering speech.

I watch violent fights. I read histories of battle. I immerse myself in the study of tragedy. I think I realize the bell tolls for me. Perhaps the random bomb will fall on my Bleak House, no matter how well I have fluffed the pillows and kindly tucked my charges into bed. I am stoic, perhaps properly Stoic, but I don't have or take every opportunity to show how. I merely live and leave this trail. I'm not sure if words are enough. So there will be video. Things I will be embarrassed to watch at some time in the future, perhaps. See me? That's my picture. Unlike the past two times, I am not in the dark. Life is a challenge at every level at all times for all days. I'm still standing. I suppose I may as well be poetic.

AI - A New Dimension

For me it started in 1982, four years after I graduated from highschool, I engineered my return to college. With that, I worked up my ability and willingness to read thick books. And so as a new 21 year old freshman at Cal State Northridge, my head was led by several fat books outside of the Computer Science curriculum. "Goedel, Escher, Bach" was the first. I didn't understand half of it, but I understood the Incompleteness Theorem. "Turing's Man" was the second book, who was that mysterious genius? Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" was book that excited me about work in the industry and its spirit of go big or go home was to set the pace for the insane startup work ethic of Silicon Valley years later. "Megatrends" validated that my obsession with computing had a future, but the book that made the largest impression on me was the legendary collection of essays "The Mind's I".

It was Dennett and Hofstadter who captured my imagination. What is thinking? What can think? The distinction between hardware and software became clear in my mind and I was all about the software. Even years after I was done with school, I still didn't understand hardware and so was captivated by the vision of 'Tron'. And still it was about the programs. In those days, hardware was the constriction. It was all slow and clunky and claustrophobic. Thinking the great thoughts had to take place in larger realms. That is why, I think, six years later my introduction to H.L. Mencken, the bigger world was that of the generation of political ideas, the analysis of history and the combat of philosophy. So I decided for myself to write for people in both essays and in programs. Both were realms of persuasion but the compute platform was more narrow and disciplined. It appealed to a smaller audience, and of course it was an expensive medium. In fact, the compute world was hostile to using too many text strings. Now this is no longer the case. Back in 1987 when my full time employment began at Xerox, my theme song was IGY by Donald Fagen. The lyric went - "Trust machines to make big decisions / Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision." I was that fellow.

The fellowship however was weird, and I probably shrunk my balls by straddling so many fences. I was told that I could be in business or computing but not both, not to mention my politics and philosophy. So it is very pleasant, if not entirely rewarding, to have more compute accepted as the medium for politics and philosophy. But the hybrid medium is not quite disciplined enough. That is the audience that I seek to satisfy, those who are entirely disappointed in what social media has become - a ribald public square that obeys no orthodox parliamentary procedure. When I first conceived of 'X Republic' years ago, parliamentary procedure was the first thing on my mind. 

Now politics is not so entirely important to me, so much as understanding the semantics of thought itself. But we're clearly going to have to crawl out of the semiotic swamp of populist politics and fake news to get beyond where we are today. And that's going to require some unmediated chaos to make itself popular in the public imagination. It needs the intent of millions to communicate in a new way, something that satisfies both the limbic and the cortical impulses of mankind.  

So I am in the process of attempting to get some support for what life has had me thinking. The compute universe is large enough. We can do in text, animation and live action what logic dictates. And ultimately we can do it interactively. The question now is how we use AI to provide the right gating that will help us overcome our evolutionary boundaries in the cortical and limbic schemas when their representations are chock full of overloaded types.  It is in that vein of thought that the following article sparked inclusion here:

Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet

I started with the raw list of the 175 biases and added them all to a spreadsheet, then took another pass removing duplicates, and grouping similar biases (like bizarreness effect and humor effect) or complementary biases (like optimism bias and pessimism bias). The list came down to about 20 unique biased mental strategies that we use for very specific reasons.

I made several different attempts to try to group these 20 or so at a higher level, and eventually landed on grouping them by the general mental problem that they were attempting to address. Every cognitive bias is there for a reason — primarily to save our brains time or energy. If you look at them by the problem they’re trying to solve, it becomes a lot easier to understand why they exist, how they’re useful, and the trade-offs (and resulting mental errors) that they introduce.

The Cognitive Bias Codex is one of the most exciting maps around. I haven't seen anything so delicious since the publication last year of the Memetic Tribes of Culture Wars 2.0. You can get that map Download Memetic Tribes - Memetic Tribes. 

AI's Ultimate Future - Today's Thinking

So firstly I started thinking about the future in around 2008 when I was finally done mastering the technology I'd been building with for a decade or so. I started reading science fiction again, and joined the Long Now. By 2010 I was mostly done with enterprise software and jumped into open source and cloud. Right now, I'd say that I get that - mastered it in a different way - not so much as a practitioner. So I'm starting to look past my immediate horizon again. 

I'm thinking that programmers are their own worst enemies, and that eventually their nasty habit of trying to make more money with tech they themselves understand will create some oligopolies, and black hats will accelerate that process. Looking forward, relevant software and hardware IT will become reduced to a smaller, more ubiquitous, more capable, more secure and more dominant set. So with AI coming along that is inevitable too. We all call this 'interoperability' and 'best practices'. Nobody wants to run afoul of these guiding principles except perhaps retro indy game designers.

All that said, there is a finite universe of applications that humans themselves will care about, as Musk says, in service of the human cortex and limbic systems. 

Right now, for me the most complete and perhaps most compelling vision is that of the late Iain M Banks' Culture. He has conceptualized and illustrated a post-scarcity galaxy in which humans and other alien species are governed and protected by massively powerful machine-based AIs with goofy names. That to me sounds like the endgame because it presents us with a compelling dramatic rendition of both planet sized catastrophes and the death by natural causes of entire civilizations. He calls the latter 'sublimation'. Essentially, nobody wants to live forever, and after you've been a hero and a villian, a man and a woman and a fish and a bird and a good angel and an evil demon and lived for 500 years and so has everyone in your species, you get bored with life. You sublimate and hang a sign on your planet that says gone fishin', do not disturb. You tell the master AIs to make you corner of the galaxy a no-fly zone and it's enforced. 

On the generative side of this, though unrelated is a series called the Bobiverse, which over several volumes tracks the person of Bob, a future computer scientist who becomes the first true cyborg, embedded in a space station, eventually clones himself and thus is the prototype for the Culture Ships, say 1000 years ahead of them. 

So I kick it off with Iain Banks and Dennis E Taylor. Where do your AI ideas go?

Myths of Nation Building

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mau Mau Factor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

 

Obligatory Seriousness on Abortion in Alabama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Decolonization Deconstructed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now you understand everything about the Culture Wars.

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

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

Great Inflated Expectations

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

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

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

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

Anyway. I hope you get it.