Cobb

Fame Inversion Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trump Diversion

I don't sufficiently hate Trump. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

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. 

How To Decide What To Do With Your Life (Via Negativa)

Get a pencil and three pieces of paper.

On the first piece of paper write NEVER.
On the second piece of paper write PROBLY NOT.
On the third piece of paper write. MAYBE.

Now plop down in front of the TV (or YouTube) and watch until you see enough stupid crap to fill up three pages.

What you do with your life is you figure out how to completely stay clear of the stuff you NEVER want to do, and away from people who are doing that same stuff.

Figure out what went wrong with the people who accidentally did a PROBLY NOT, and try not to make the same mistakes.

Don’t worry about the MAYBE. In fact, go do a MAYBE today. See how you like it. If you don’t, then put erase it and put it on the PROBLY NOT list. If you actually like it, well that’s one thing you can do in your life.

Keep the lists around. Memorize it if you can. Now ask other people about the things they would never do, or probably not do, or maybe do. Learn from their mistakes too. Pretty soon you will (probably) be making fewer mistakes, and respecting yourself more than you thought. You just never took the time to think about all of your standards. In otherwords, your whole life was full of MAYBE. But you’ll also learn if you’ve been sloppy and doing more PROBLY NOT than you should have. Adjust it the other way. Put those into MAYBE. Perhaps you didn’t know yourself as well as you thought.

The point is to keep recycling the list. You will make enough mistakes to really get to know what you do like and don’t like. Don’t expect that you will automatically get where you want just by putting things down on paper. But also don’t lie to yourself.

Success in life comes from discipline. When you discipline yourself, you gain control. If you lose control of yourself, others will discipline you against your will. Draw your own lines.

 

Character Questions for the Rich and Famous

In a modern consumer society, I can think of two personal shortcomings of being rich. They have to do with one’s ability to answer these two questions which are somewhat related.

• how many mistakes is failure?
• how much pain is acceptable?

As I’ve mentioned before, whenever you make poor decisions that costs you money, when you’re rich you get to try again and again. This can be a tremendous advantage if you have reasonably good judgment and learn from your mistakes. But if you have poor judgment and make the same mistakes over and over, you can quickly fall into ruin because you think you can always afford to try again. This is what happens to a lot of rock stars, actors and pro athletes. For example, if you’re a drunk and you spend all of your money on booze.. well the poor man kills one bottle. The rich man kills three and invites others to do the same. Some party.

On the second matter, you know “No pain, no gain.” This is because for a lot of activities, humans are anti-fragile. Stress creates strength. But if you pamper yourself, well, it’s easy to get stressed out over trivial matters. And since it’s your limit of pain, you expect other people to respond appropriately. So here I’m going to give a personal example even though I’m not even rich. This morning I took my daughter out to a swanky breakfast on the marina. My wife orders Eggs Benedict with crab. Yeah it’s really good. But after the waitress left, she complained that she forgot to tell the waitress to poach her eggs a little extra. My wife hates runny eggs. Lots of people do. Now I paid over 150 for breakfast for five. You can imagine what kind of asshats we’d be considered if my wife’s stress over runny eggs translated into a demand for more service. She’d get the eggs and then send them back. So what if I have to pay more? I don’t have to put up with runny eggs! We’re rich!.

These two difficult questions go straight to the heart of character.

The more you think about it, the more you may come to question the position of motivational speakers. You don’t get to be one without having real success. Nobody off the street sells a book or fills an auditorium with people looking for advice. So if they tell you “No matter how much you fail, you can’t give up.” Well easy for you to say, rich dude. A rich motivational speaker will tell you to push past your pain, to endure more than you thought. Well, that’s a very broad spectrum but not so broad for those who easily spoil themselves. Eating runny eggs is not real pain.

 

A Simple Definition and Defense of Western Modernity

Q: Why are intellectuals judgmental and elitist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The opposite is the case in a tribal society:

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

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

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

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

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

Obligatory Seriousness on Living in the Trump Era

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Racial Reasoning, Racist Buckets and Effective Racism

From a Facebook conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Streaming Creek is Drying Up

I have a big enough music library to recognize some dimensions of the market. The recent change in policy by Amazon Music has killed off some of my more interesting selections. I was warned.

My reaction is to spend a bit more money and time on vinyl, and to never again sell a CD. It's tricky to maintain several terabytes of digital music, but the convenience of streaming music is seductive and risky.

For example. I once had but no longer have an album of the Dave Rose Orchestra. This guy recorded 'The Stripper', a classic. You may immediately recognize the music, although not the girl, from this video.

I would be provocative to suggest some censorship is going on. I wouldn't doubt it but I cannot prove it. It makes little difference in a renter's market whose tastes are crowded out. But I suspect that the renter's market is only marginally larger than the buyer's market when it comes to digital goods online, and what's going on is the shrinkage of the renter's market to the minimum. Some understanding of the economics of 'ultimates' and 'superdistribution' is in order here.

The bottom line is that the major cloud providers are out of ideas and can no longer provide cheap or free storage for the long tail of digital goods and streaming services. The internet is no longer and infinite library.

I'm looking forward to TBL's SOLID, and forming some online collectives. Books, movies, and music are disappearing.

The Tale of the Counterparts

Q: As a minority, what is life like in the United States compared to your white counterparts?

A: It is fortunate that you speak of counterparts because that is a rather useful term.

I have never been, since my highschool days, one to consider white Americans to be a block, and it has always been my experience even as a black nationalist, to understand the difficult work involved in creating an ideological racial unity. Let us take religion for example. My mother grew up Catholic and my father grew up Episcopalian. Neighbors in our all black neighborhood went to different churches, and of course there were heathens as well. Neither of my parents had any religious devotion until the end of their radical politics somewhere around 1968 for my mother and 1972 for my father.. Much as people desired to create and sustain black unity all manner of simple differences among black Americans kept that from happening on a consistent basis.

Nevertheless, you could always find counterparts. When I went to church with my father, I had one set of friends. When I went with my mother, a different set. When I went to Catholic school, I had another set of friends different from those in the neighborhood’s public school. I did not attend school with any white kids until I was 12, for summer school. That was one set. The following fall, I attended a different school with white students. The following summer, I went to a day camp with another set of white kids. Within a year of my 12th birthday I found three different counterparts of white kids my age. I cannot say how common such an experience is, but it was out of the ordinary at the time, and yet I found a great deal in common with other black students with similar experiences. Over my highschool days I was somewhat uncomfortable with my own lack of general popularity like any teen, and yet I got on well enough with the various cliques, swim team, soccer team, computer club, monogram club, national merit kids.

As a big brain but a lousy student, I was well rounded but didn’t understand much at all about American society or what was expected of prep students in any deep way. I had no extended contacts of any sort into the upper middle class or upper class other than the shallow associations of alma mater. I could wear boat shoes but didn’t know anyone with a boat. Soon enough, I was sidelined from college because no money, and I found myself with a union job. New counterparts altogether. Eventually I worked my way through college and got a serious good job and moved into the upscale community that is where I live now, but then I moved at the age of 30 to New York City from LA where I grew up.

By the time I was 30 I perfectly comfortable and used to dealing with people from pretty much all walks of life, but I did so as a particular stripe of black American and spent a lot of time perfecting that image. In doing so, I didn’t really expect any parallels. The best way I could explain it was this: if all Americans were surprised and shocked at the very existence of Denzel Washington and The Cosby Show, and eventually and ultimately Barack Obama, I was the smug one who was living that life all along. To the extent I took any pride in that you could call me a Black American Prince. I don’t think I was such a douchebag, but there are I’m sure plenty folks who might disagree. Like most people with relatively good looks, relatively high IQ and relatively affluent employment, I played the role. This is something akin to what is now called ‘white privilege’, which basically means you act like gangsta rappers and diss everyone else as a sucka, except you do it with precise diction while wearing a tie and boat shoes. In this attitude as well, I had counterparts.

As I matured in my career, got married, had babies and moved to the suburbs, I found various counterparts as well, but finding them became less and less important over time. During my 30s, my ambitions had to do with finding the proper teams and markets to advance my wealth - this outside of pretty much every world generally associated with ‘minorities’.

But I should say something about being black in America which any successful black person will tell you. It’s very much like being Rocky Balboa. Sylvester Stallone is 5′ 9″. It would be ridiculous to try to deal with him as if he were short and every kind of lack in confidence you would think short men have. It’s like trying to punk Henry Kissinger because he wears glasses, or Jay Leno because he has a big chin. You’re just an idiot to assume people think of it as a handicap the way you assume. And that is precisely the idiot position that prejudiced people put themselves into. Do you actually think you’re doing me a favor by not calling me nigger? Do you actually believe I’m psychologically handicapped by something so brain dead obvious? I would literally be shocked if something like that would get to me, not by the racism itself, but the the fact that I’m facing someone so stupid and provincial that they think it would work.

At any rate, I don’t see how anyone who is reasonably successful in America doesn’t figure out a way to identify with their peers and counterparts in all different areas of their lives. It is why I think ‘race relations’ is stupid, rather like I think collective bargaining is stupid. But, having been a union employee back when I was still a teenager, I understand and recognize that there are some people who cannot negotiate with the boss on their own behalf. There are people who would seriously screw themselves over trying to get a raise or air complaints about their job, and they need some agency to work things out for them. Understood and respected, but not for me at all. So I understand that millions of Americans need to feel some confidence that they are being properly represented to The Man. I wish them the best of luck, honestly, but I know that can only get them so far.

These days I endeavor to make deeper connections to my tribes. I belong to many. As well, I make connections to history - to people who are no longer alive, to ideas and traditions deep in Western and non-Western cultures. I have lived long enough to get bored drinking KoolAid, so I’m down with scotch, (and soju and cachaça.)

About a decade ago, a lot of Americans liked to think they were living at the beginning of a ‘post-racial’ era, which makes about as much sense as saying that once you’ve been accepted to Stanford you are living in ‘post-stupid’ era or once you make six figures you are living in a ‘post-poverty’ era. No. You’re just working with a different set of counterparts, for the time being.

I suppose I should add as a final note that as the Jedi said, “There’s always a bigger fish.” I don’t waste time or energy worrying myself about the existence of people who are not actually my counterparts but are clearly my superiors, wherever they may be in life or in history. My own ambition is quite enough work for me, thanks.

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There was a young man whose name I cannot remember, a colleague of mine. We were out drinking in the late 90s somewhere in Federal Way, WA. We were working together trying to land a deal with Boeing. He was talking about his background and a particular difficulty he had. As the conversation went on, I suddenly realized as he described his family background that I was very much like his father. Perhaps that was the reason we got along. Economically speaking, he had certain advantages that I never had being the son of social workers. He understood money and business in a way that seemed natural to me, whereas I would have to consciously discipline myself to be as financially scrupulous as he. He had good money habits and I did not.

Some years after that, I began to think about generational capabilities of economic development. It wasn't the first time, but this time (around 2003?) I did so outside of the context of demand but in supply. People often say that minorities do not succeed in various areas because of prejudices against them on the demand side. "Nobody wants to watch movies with black stars outside of America" or "There's a glass ceiling and nobody wants black CEOs". But starting after the LA Riots, I thought, nobody black I know studying business wants to run a grocery store like Koreans do. Nobody black wants to be a craft brewer. What is the shape of black ambition to begin with, and what legacies do they create to make that easy? Well that's an interesting economic study, but it is often ignored when people like to make broad comparisons between 'black' and 'white' income and wealth. Next time you hear such a discussion, ask a black person if they would like to be a cotton farmer. If you manage not to be rudely accosted, the honest answer will likely be that the thought never occurred. Black Americans may have had at one point in time, every skill but no opportunity to master the cotton industry. When the color bar was lifted, ambitions pointed in another direction. The Great Migration depleted the South of its sharecroppers.

The Return of Cosmopolitan EDC

I've started thinking about the old Cosmopolitan EDC again. Spontaneously I just threw together a couple amateurish videos. What's interesting when looking at these in retrospect is a couple things. Firstly I think from this point forward, I'm going to do a lot more self-publishing and see how that works out for me. It's something I actually do like to do, and I've spent a bit too much time thinking about such things to not put it out there.

Secondly, what I want to communicate here is something of value that is more knowledgeable about itself than just going for audience hits. I can't be the guy who does the top 10 most expensive watches, but I am particularly looking at a style which reflects the basic values of putting on a watch. That is to say, I've got the bases covered, and if I were rich, I would very most likely buy more expensive versions of the same things. What I want my style to reflect is a reasonable prosumer attitude. That is I don't disregard the notion of style and fashion, but I select something that reflects my personality. I want something of high quality, with form following function, but I don't want it to be idol worship. There is marginal utility in spending 800 bucks over 350 bucks for a chronograph style watch. I say you're getting 95% or relative perfection at $350. I think this a reasonable amount of moderation that still gets much love, and that's what this is all about.

Enjoy.

 

 

The Psychology of WEIRDos

This particularly struck me today:

This is one of the most important topics, right?  Well, here is a new and quite thorough paper by Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich.  Here is the abstract:

Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD). We propose that much of this variation arose as people psychologically adapted to differing kin-based institutions—the set of social norms governing descent, marriage, residence and related domains. We further propose that part of the variation in these institutions arose historically from the Catholic Church’s marriage and family policies, which contributed to the dissolution of Europe’s traditional kin-based institutions, leading eventually to the predominance of nuclear families and impersonal institutions. By combining data on 20 psychological outcomes with historical measures of both kinship and Church exposure, we find support for these ideas in a comprehensive array of analyses across countries, among European regions and between individuals with different cultural backgrounds.

So I was talking to my daughter about, now that I think about it, the 8th End of My Blackness. In this telling, she was relating, her sense of friction she gets for speaking proper English and a host of other upper-middle-class markers that, to her critics, mark her has 'white'. I repeated my normal 'haters gonna hate', but also added that all she needs to do is actually visit Africa in order to shut most of them up. It's an expensive trip for a stupid reasons, but is one that ultimately such haters must acknowledge. The reason I have observed has primarily to do with what those poor souls lack in cranking up the significance of 'their culture', which is an actually researched family tree. The less coherent family you have the more likely you are to adhere to cultural institutions, ethnic myths and racial unity. That's what I see.

When I was talking to Richard Peete the other night - there's no way we could catch up on 7 years in one evening - we did brush across the same subject. I told him about the time when some Hoteps at City College, back in my school days, reduced some freshman girls to tears. They were some of the first in their families to attend college and were informed in no uncertain terms that they had no idea what their real roots were, and would not be complete or authentic black women unless and until they went back to visit the slave castles and the pyramids. Guess who was organizing such trips, for a not so small fee?

While I am ready to accept the premise of WEIRD psychology, and it certainly makes sense to me, I wonder if the gap between the rule of law and of honor codes, viz Pinker, is so deeply broad. What I mean to ask is how long into a Catholic marriage does it take for kinship circles to fade into obscurity? How many generations out of the 'hood with all your play cousins does it take for one to psychologically adapt to Corporate America's bowling leagues and pizza overtime? I'll be keeping this in mind, as it relates directly to Peasant Theory and the applicability of personality to political narratives.

Oh. Have I not talked about that? Probably not. Here's the gist. If and when America comes apart and delivers government of the quality of Ferguson, MO, then people will abandon democratic institutions and adopt tribal and kinship associations. This is likely in most rank and file cases, to result in honor culture lawlessness and radical autonomy of the sort we love to watch in zombie and other post-apocalyptic dramas. Only in this village scenario with the individual start to matter again, as the individual is being squeezed by a bipolar political conformity that grows more shrill by the year. Hard to say what will correct it. But I am very curious as to how personality works when it comes to the fundamentals of civilized community outside of kinship and tribe.

The thing is, ironically, that most American tribes are voluntary 'civic organizations'. Like the skateboarders, the volunteer firemen, the book of the month club, and the stoners at the liquor store.

Peasant Theory and the American Meritocracy

Meritocracy does exist. You’re just not in that league. It is a non-trivial matter to get there.

First of all, as any parent should understand, you don’t have to have a perfect house and a perfect kid to have an excellent family life. So meritocracy is not something everybody needs. In fact, I would argue that meritocracy is only needed for overachievers. But let’s leave that aside for a moment.

I have something called the Peasant Theory. It works like this. There are only three classes of Americans. Rulers, Peasants and the Slice. 90% of all Americans are Peasants. The only thing they control is their own family, maybe.

The Rulers are those people in society who have the power and prestige to give you power and prestige. They are few. You do something for a Ruler because only they can give you something you cannot give yourself. They are the motivation of America. They are not all good, nor are they a club. Some of them are men like Steve Jobs. Some of them are women like Mylie Cyrus. The bottom line is people will run to be associated with them. These are the 1% (which means there are about 3 million of them)

The Slice are those people in society who make things work so that the Rulers can actually rule. In other words, they keep the electricity on. They build and arrange the lights and microphones so that you can actually see and hear Mylie. They design and build the batteries so that your iPhone actually works. These are the 9% who actually know WTF they are doing, all the time.

Now there’s an interesting dynamic between the the top edge of the Peasants and the bottom edge of the Slice. In that realm is the meritocracy. It’s not for everybody.

There is a highly competent realm in the American Peasantry. You know that brilliant computer programmer who refuses to work for Apple. You know that master mechanic whose hot rods can beat any supercar. You know that guy who grinds his own coffee and absolutely hates Starbucks. These people do not care about meritocracy. They’re not trying to sell out. They are not trying to appease or work for the ruling class. They therefore have not power nor prestige. They are amateurs. They are not professionals. Some of them are rebels. Some of them want revolutionary change and know they can never get it given the current ruling class. I call these people the ‘Alternative Slice’.

So let’s slice up the Slice for a moment. Right now, the man in the Oval Office, definitely part of the Rulers, has some broad choice (perhaps getting narrower by the moment) of highly competent members of the Slice to push the buttons, and pull the levers, for the power and prestige of working for the President of the United States of America. That means other members of the Slice are sitting on the bench right now. And the second stringers have a third string too., and the Alternative Slice knows just as much as all the rest.

So what is incredibly important about the US is that our Slice is so large, and manifestly competent. We have a deep bench. One guy gets fired, there’s somebody else ready to go. Always. Why? Because we have a meritocracy. What did I just say?

We have a meritocracy.

If you are not a board certified gynecologist, the ladies of the ruling class in NYC’s upper west side are not going to give you a second look. They talk to each other. America has a Top Ten for every friking thing under the sun. And the Rulers are always spending time and money to put those best things to use. Goods, Services, People. So when you get to be the private pilot for the CEO of Goldman Sachs, you know WTF you are doing, all the time. When you get to be the host of the Tonite Show, you’re at the top of a very large pyramid. Meritocracy.

Now of course, it is absolutely true that there are Rulers who don’t care about your competency, they just want your absolute loyalty. That’s the difference between a Leader and a Boss. It doesn’t matter. They still enable the Slice. So if I’m the scumbag lawyer for the Hollywood producer or the weed carrier for the decrepit aging rock star, dude, I’m still getting paid and on tour with the stars. Slice.

The overwhelming majority of Americans drink beers they don’t know how to brew, wear clothes they don’t know how to sew, eat vegetables they don’t know how to grow, watch crap movies that still look better than anything they could ever film themselves and consume news that literally makes them crazy, yet they are incapable of writing a rebuttal worthy of an editorial column. Most Americans live in the Comments Section. But. Who cares? It’s still a good life.

Here is what we do in America, and it is the right thing to do. We have leagues. We are all amateurs and Peasants, and none of us, EVER want to compete in basketball against LeBron. None of us want to get on stage in front of 20,000 people and have a dance off vs Mylie Cyrus. EVER. Few of us can even stand the humiliation that an average math teacher at an average high school can deal. Who among you would debate your minister? Most of us are mostly specialized in our little jobs and wish. But we get along fine, because we are not subject to capital M Meritocracy. We have leagues. We want to compete at our level.

When you win in a fair competition, at your level, you can be completely satisfied.

If you’re not satisfied, then you become an overachiever, and then you start asking yourself tough questions. Then you get aggressive because you want to dominate. You want not just competence, you want mastery. You want to know as much about that thing as anybody has ever known in the history of mankind, and you don’t give a crap what anybody thinks about it. To hell with them, I’m friken doing this. Or die trying.

These are the people who make the meritocracy. They always have been and they always will be. And the reason they play fair is because they want to KNOW, and the want to DO. Understand that this is completely different from the motivations of the people who want to RULE. Because when you want to be the Boss of Everyone, the ends justify the means. You don’t need to play fair. Playing fair is for little games like basketball and dance contests and college calculus. Rules are for followers. Rulers will break rules to become Ruler and make new rules. And life isn’t fair, and they want to rule in life. The unfair game of life.

Most people are not psychologically prepared to be Rulers, and they are not competent to be in the Slice. But there are many Peasants who take care of their own business, and a few whose desire to become ultra-competent puts them in contact with America’s deep bench.

---

What is the cost of corruption, and all other kinds of evils? What is the cost of racism. First of all, if you cannot whip the competition and make them like it, then you’re not trying hard enough to be in the Slice. Do you want to be Ice Cube and be a superstar entertainer ultimately worth $150 million? Then you don’t walk around with picket signs or sign petitions against racism in Hollywood. You fight and risk everything to be Ice Cube. You want to complain about the deprivation of civil rights? Well, sister, you have to get that law degree, clerkship and become the best civil rights attorney in your state. Slice. Working for the Rulers in the capitol.

You want to fight against class? Then you have to become more appealing in every way than the Ruling class. That means you have to steal the Slice away from them and get them to work for you. You want revolution? Are you ready to die? No of course you’re not. You don’t even want guns in your neighborhood. You just want things to be nice, maybe 20% nicer than they are. That’s a good Peasant ambition. Move up to Cadillac from Chevy. (Cadillacs designed by the Slice).

At some point in everyone’s life, they have to figure out what it is that they expect the world to deliver to them and ask why they’re not getting it. Ultimately and for most of us, it is because we haven’t found anything worth fighting and dying for. The overwhelming majority of us are satisfied with a 20% raise, and we are not willing to break a lot of rules to get more.

So will a meritocracy be better for you? Are you really ready to overachieve and become ultracompetent? Well, guess what, there is a Meritocracy out there in America. It’s just not easy to get into it. Be happy in your league. Your league is for you. Play fair. Have fun. Enjoy life. But if you can’t have fun and enjoy life because you know you deserve better, you know which way to go. Right up the side of that mountain. We sincerely wish you the best of luck.

The Barclay Prime Factor

Thrillist has gotten my email and has seduced me into clicking. It's not my worst habit, but I shouldn't give them so much of my attention. They make me forget that there is poetry in the world. Nevertheless they can be instructive on finding new foodie spots I have not yet discovered, overpopulated as they may be with younger, more energetic humans than me. (grumble).

This morning's seduction began with the thirty one best steakhouses in America. Interestingly enough, I've been to two of the first three. I haven't thought of Barclay Prime in a long time. It has been at least seven years since I was there. I remember that it was when paddle shifting dual clutch supercars were a new thing, and so I particularly noticed the new convertible Lambo out front. Come to think of it, there is nothing quite as sad as a three or four year old Lamborghini. They have to be sparkling as well as loud to maintain their appeal.  But I'll spare you these and other stoic observations to make my short and sweet point, aside from the seduction of the adjective 'best'.

The kobe beef wasn't worth it. 

I'm pretty sure that I saw on the menu, a listing for a kobe beef hotdog or hamburger for $100. I thought about it a long time, but I decided against it. I had an ordinary ribeye steak and found it to be unremarkable as ribeye steaks go. In fact, I have had three coming to Jesus level steak experiences in my life. One at Jockos, one at The Double Eagle and one at The Hitching Post. Aside from that, I think I have reached the age where the subtleties of everything non-intellectual generally fail to impress me. The difference between a first class steak and a world class steak is marginal after your 500th steak. And yet this distinction without a difference must be said with some deep appreciation for the privilege it is to eat so many steaks in one's life. I have such a deep appreciation for a good hunk of beef, but I can also spot a bargain, and there's something ever appealing about a bargain.

An old boss of mine used to tell me that we should go eat a cow, and in some high rise building in Bellevue, I had one of the largest steaks I ever ate in one sitting. I was physically in pain getting out of my chair afterwards. But what I remember was the elevator ride up. We were in the same car with game developers, one of whom looked to be in his mid 50s wearing a braided grey beard as long as your arm. They were totally casual in this hot shit restaurant, and I was like... trying to ignore that reality. It wasn't about the steak. It was about the Dosh Point, aka 'fuck you money'. I was wedded to my monkey suit. The steak wasn't quite as satisfying as it should have been. We overdid it. I really didn't need 24 ounces. But it was on my old boss. I was being seduced, or something. In the end, that business failed. 

What I have learned in the intervening years is the extent to which we must work with consistency and within the aegis of our ambition. I have always expected to be first rate but not world class. I cut myself out of that arena when I recognized that my French had lapsed and I didn't attain my Master's degree. I thought I was out of it, and I still haven't bought the Rolex, although I could afford one if I made a point of it. But that $100 kobe beef hamburger and that Lambo. I have come to realize that they are on a logarithmic scale. The quality is on the X axis but the price is on the Y. It seems way above my head because it costs so much, but it is not far from the quality I have already experienced. If I'm the poorest guy in Barclay Prime, it's OK. There's a McCormick & Schmick up the street that is not in the location location location, but its steaks are first rate. 

It turns out, of course, that no American restaurant ever really had authentic, official Kobe beef. The Japanese never exported it. It was all fake. And yes it's true now that you can buy a Camaro that outruns Ferraris, Porsches and Lamborghinis. What's important is your attention to the difference. When I sold stereo, I used to tell my customers that if you can't hear the difference, don't pay for the difference. But like wine snobs, we generally associate quality with price, even when we can't tell the difference ourselves. It's about the signaling, of course; it's about drawing other people's attention to the distinctions. 

I enjoy my life. I need to remember not to show off. I need to remember that my indulgences in those things for which I pay particular attention to the distinctions are for myself. I need to simply be happy and not brag about what stuff makes me happy. My enjoyment of that which makes me happy is its own reward. I'll share it with some modesty. 

At the same time I need to be aware of the extent to which people are enslaved to their own Dosh Points as I have been, which we may never reach. We need to pursue our barbell strategy. Prepare for both extremes, enrichment and impoverishment. Live without regret, as a warrior all your days. Dig for treasure but love the shovel. Only be a fanboy of the dead. 

The Best Racial Joke Ever

I've been thinking about what kind of people know enough about America to be worth listening to if you're just an average American. I'm saying it's Louis CK. He's our best comedian. He travels the road all year, and he speaks to every audience in America face to face. He knows how much he can assume about what Americans know, and where their moral limits are. You can't be funny if you don't know where the line is or how to push it. So right now, I'm saying that our sharpest comedians are truly the poets of American society. I think musicians and other recording artists are too isolated in their craft from their audiences and that the interaction of laughter is much more useful feedback than flashes of cigarette lighters or people saying 'ho'.

Louis CK is also wise to the ways of the interwebz and has captured many of his routines on YouTube. Here is one I've recently found very interesting. 

Louis CK's Connecticut friend is having a very tough time explaining his discomfort with the use of the term 'nigger' to describe anyone, and as we laugh our way through the story we get to the end. It's not about the name calling, it's about falling asleep at a forklift. But if we used the term 'bastard', the whole joke would not be funny because Americans don't really care about who is a literal bastard or not. It's not about John Snow or the King in the North. The fact that Game of Throne's John Snow is a bastard is a very big deal - it is a fundamental essentialism that cannot be ignored in the mythical kingdom of Westeros. In the mythical kingdom of America, primogenitor and other birthrights are not at issue, but we are colorstruck.

Then again who do we mean 'we'? 

The more I think about this routine, the more I appreciate Louis CK's powers of perception. It is perhaps the smartest way anyone could identify the discomfort of whitefolks around whitefolks in dealing with race. I say 'dealing with race' rather than 'dealing with racism' because while most folks would easily agree that it is racist to call someone a nigger, it's hardly actually racist. It would be more clearly racist to fire the sleeping forklift driver if white sleepers were not, but the black sleeper was not fired as the story is told. It's about the aggravation of the white Connecticut friend not being able to convey his sense of outrage at this act of 'racism', yet time after time, everybody else in the story only reacts to the act of sleeping, not the epithet. 

This is instructional to the degree that it illustrates where we are. I say so because I also understand how Louis CK deals with other taboos. In another bit, he talks about how he is annoyed by people literally saying 'N-word' as it makes him think 'nigger' because the person saying 'N-word' is actually too much of a 'faggot' to say 'nigger'. That's brilliant too. 

I came across thinking about Louis CK this morning as I was reading some autogenerated blurbs from a Twitter account I newly followed. The blurb started off.."Thanks for following me! Having witnessed the downward spiral of the USA for too many years, it is my hope that.." Then he goes on to talk about a 50 word solution. Such are the pains of trying to grow your Twitter following. But then I asked myself what exactly is spiraling downward in America and what kind of person has the proper perspective on all that? The answer that came forefront in  my mind was the matter of self-regard that shortcuts the ambition of Americans from believing that they can participate in any noble aspect of society. It's a kind of navel-gazing that accepts the self as shit and the world as shit and the danger of giving a shit. In that, Louis CK's comedy, the stuff that really launched his popularity, embraces that shitty self-regard. Doing so with the contrast of what he must do to be a good father is what gives his comedy the biting tension. He's got something excellent there, an extraordinary balance of semi-porn mixed with a kind of brutal self-deprecation that informs his observations. He's a sinner. He makes no bones about the fact that he's a sinner and it allows him to tell stories that remind us of our own sins. And much of that is the whole slavish self-regard. In this routine's beginning he mocks with blistering accuracy the person who gives the non-apology for being in trouble. "Whoops", he says. Lies are perfectly magical. How can we liars tell children not to lie? 

Bullseye. 

I have something of a theory about how America has changed for the better as a society relatively free of repression while at the same time embracing universally low expectations with heedless ferocity. We are the nation that has capitulated to the culture of weed smokers. That's why niggers are falling asleep on the forklifts. We're all niggers now. Who among us sleepers needs to be any better than that? Damn good question. 

 

Ignoring the Present & PARC

Ignoring the present is best accomplished by filling one’s day with fulfilling work building something that does not yet exist largely in the public consciousness. Then simply tune out the news. It is a habit of mind that is best sustained when one has colleagues with similar orientations.

The nature of that work can be of any creative sort, and if one is particularly imaginative and self-confident, tuning out the present is not so difficult.

I cannot stress how important taking in long periods of study and reading and writing are crucial to the process, but also play. In my time at Xerox I was always two degrees from PARC, through the decentralized and office systems business units. So I was continually hearing stories and occasionally getting my hands on hacks. What was true then is true now. Get some idea about the technology’s ability and then imagine a future where everybody can do it.

For example, back in the mid 80s the CD format was just emerging. But scientists at PARC and engineers in the business units were already thinking about how storage density and transfer speeds in such portable media could be extended. This was in a world where there were probably only 10 CD pressing factories on the planet. So my friends and I were into bartering, buying , selling and trading them. That was the first business model - back in the days when (dig this), video stores only had VHS tapes AND their databases were not networked across stores. But it was easy for us to imagine what is basically the current video on demand business a good two decades before Netflix went online.

I also particularly remember a story about PARC staffers having ‘smart badges’. These were ID tags that announced personal ring tones that let a person know who was entering their office without looking up from their work. We were certainly able to to write musical (but not MIDI) code that personalized our email inbox alerts. So yeah basically we were thinking about ringtones in ‘86.

It’s not so difficult to live in your own imaginative private Idaho. The incredibly difficult part is to get what is obvious to forward thinking geeks, to get financed and organized into a successful enterprise. I think that has always been the case.

I believe PARC was the last ‘PARC’ because the age of monolithic top down government and corporate funding really receded in the era of Venture Capital. With the research and development that is going on now with blockchain accounting and token economies, I think financial thinkers are going to make the biggest changes in the world in the next 20 years.

There’s a dude named Clay Shirky[1] whom I haven’t read in a while, but has a very good handle on economies of attention and the monetization of surplus human ‘time’. Think about it this way. Cellphones have monetized human talk. That’s massive. So the world economy has expanded because you think you’re only working 8 hours a day, but actually you are working for attention aggregators almost every moment you are awake. So the trick is to figure out what interesting and compelling things people do take place outside of work and what kind of devices and economies could spring from that.

Oh by the way, also check out the Long Now Foundation[2]. And for what it’s worth, I’ve been thinking[3] about how people might avoid the plague of ‘fake news’. It’s the same as it ever was. Cloister yourself and read only the most advanced thinking you can understand.

You know what’s funny? When I was a freshman in computer science, I thought I’d never be able to write essays with footnotes. Now this software generates them for me. Thanks Ted Nelson[4].

Footnotes

[1] Clay Shirky's Internet Writings

[2] The Long Now Foundation

[3] Scrums of the Interwebz

[4] Ted Nelson Home Page

 

Social Justice, Hope and the Welfare State

Q. Do you feel that welfare has made an overall positive or negative impact on poor people in the United States?

A. Absolutely negative economically, absolutely positive in terms of hope.

I’ll focus on the negative because I think people will ultimately decide for themselves if it is appropriate in the long term to get hope from government cheese.

The strength and consequent weakness of our consumer economy is that somebody somewhere is always always always thinking of something new and exciting. They sell this idea to capitalists, who decide, Shark Tank style, whether or not the masses should get a taste. The thing to understand is that the business community in the US is coming up with new business models faster than any other entity in society. I don’t think even music.. well I guess the perfect example IS music. New musicians make money all the time. There is no way anybody can predict what kind of musician it is most profitable to be. By the time you learn to sing, somebody has come up with autotune and singing is so 2010…

The net effect is that you can only hope to educate yourself quick enough to be employed by the newest industries and business models if you go to the hottest schools. People who go to ordinary schools pick a major where they figure they will be able to get a job at a good company that has been doing X for a longer time. If you can’t get a college education you have to pick a business that’s been around for maybe 50–100 years. If you get no education and pick welfare, well then you’re in the same category as peasants from 400 years ago. Even illiterates can pick grapes for a living, and there’s competition of those jobs too.

So income inequality continues as long as new ideas and new markets emerge, and the lower you are on the educational chain, the lower standard of living you have to accept.

But at least there’s hope.

You don’t get thrown in jail just for defaulting on a loan. We don’t have debtors prisons in America. There’s disability insurance which is part of the welfare state. So if you mess up your back, you can collect on that. But I’m thinking you’re asking more about stuff like WIC and EBT cards. I know very little about that, personally.

I believe that it’s fundamentally wrong to let people fail, but it is also fundamentally necessary. You cannot force people to succeed. If I believe you are going to get a worthless job, I have an obligation to tell you about a better one. If I believe you are going to be on welfare, I have an obligation to try to persuade you away from that dependence. If I believe your weed smoking is a crutch, then I have an obligation to sober you up. But but BUT BUT all of these are just *social* obligations, not *moral* obligations.

Being poor is not a crime. I have no moral obligation to prevent you from being poor, like I have a moral obligation to stop a violent attack in progress.

If you learn anything from this, understand that this is the difference between justice and ‘social justice’. ‘Social justice’ is not actually a moral obligation, it’s just something you do to improve your social status. Justice itself is a moral obligation. That is why we craft laws and establish institutions to execute those laws. That’s why certain offenses are merely socially unacceptable and other offenses are crimes.

Since it is not a crime to be poor, you can even help people stay poor. That’s what dependence does, and in some ways that’s what the welfare state does. It creates dependence on a set of exchanges that are some of the slowest moving business models ever. Milk money for babies. That’s as basic as it gets, and rather sad because after all, a well-fed woman could nurse her child for free.

I cannot tell you the value of hope in the various forms of the welfare state, but I’m pretty sure that’s the best thing that comes out of it. It would never be enough for me.

 

Bogota and the Mystery of the Middle Class

I spent a week in Bogota, Colombia. It was easy. It was easy for me because I had friends, translation and money. I had places to go and things to do. As I could, I spent time in upscale and downscale locations very much in proportion to the way I do in my home town of Los Angeles. I conducted business with my colleagues. I ate in restaurants. I hired cars to get around. I slept in a comfortable queen sized bed with multiple pillows. I charged my phone. I connected to wifi. I put on short pants and brown shoes and walked through the neighborhood. I familiarized myself with the place, and in pursuing a somewhat ordinary set of routines, I was able to compare that place with other such foreign places I have visited. I have visited several dozen American cities and a few overseas including Zurich, Sydney, Milan, London and Paris. 

Bogota is different because it's middle class is nowhere near as affluent as the middle class of Los Angeles and those other cities. And with my understanding of my own position relative to the American middle class, (which is at the 'frequent flyer' level) I make certain observations and judgments about the others. I would call this perspective the 'walking economy', and from that point of view I can make a few reasonable determinations. 

The Mystery of the Middle Class is pervasive in my thoughts. I have concluded that what is most different about today's world is the number of people who live away from wealth and destitution. My uneducated guess is about 4-5 billion out of 7 billion, but that's because I am thinking about literacy. When it comes to actual income, I trust the numbers of Pew. Pew tells us that 13% of the world is middle income and that about 29% of the world is middle income or better. So the immediate thing about this mystery is that so many people can read and this affects how they can be governed. How do you lead billions of people who can read for themselves? You have to have ways of dazzling them or of compelling them. The interwebz provide the dazzle and compulsion is the same as it ever was. That means a lot more propaganda and story-telling, political narratives and bodewash are required for the peaceful transition of power. I sense this acutely in the US. We imbue far too many narratives with social and political significance. And within the context that more than half of us are high income on the global scale, more of us believe our narratives are economically justifiable and right. This is why we hate each other. We cannot stand when the other guys get to hold the flag and clap the erasers. 

What if there were only 20 million expertly skilled people who were actually capable of running the world? Would you be on that team? How much of the information that they used would you be capable of accurately understanding and interpreting? When the bankers banked, when the soldiers soldiered, when the engineers engineered, when the surgeons did surgery, how could you actually remain informed? What would be your responsibility to them? This interface is being renegotiated through computer mediated communications and it's generally pretty sloppy and subject to abuse. And so the faith of the general public, the common man, is being undermined, and that generates discontent which is self-fueling. So the mystery of the middle class is compounded by the natural forces of dissonance and the generated forces of disinformation as well as sloppiness.

What people need to know is different from what they feel they need to know in a situation of distrust and counter-narratives. This dynamic is accelerated to the point of 'eclexia', in which people become so broadminded as to become uselessly judgmental and broadly critical of that broad set of inputs they consume with vigor. At some point they fall to a level of studied cynicism. I think American citizens have fallen to that point after a period of snarky eclexia. This cynicism is useful to the point of independence, and I fall heavily on the side of that. For me, the fundamental value of individual liberty requires some of that studied cynicism. But hand in hand with that is the necessity for circles of trust. This is what I pursue and observe others similar pursuits. I watch how we at once pay lots of attention to information we must receive, process and somewhat distrust, while openly sharing that information with those people we very much trust. This is the new organization. This is the new neighborhood. These are the people we must trust to have our best interests at heart by sharing common values and purpose so that we can make communal sense of information in a world we distrust to organize and protect us from the top down. What therefore we need to know comes from our networked peers. We need to know trusted people. What we feel we need to know is everything that the ruling class says we need to know, which we must take small bites of until we have our own experts in our own networks. Why? Because we cannot trust the old order to provide enough security and knowledge in a world of billions of networked, literate actors like ourselves. They don't know us, and they don't trust us. They just tell us what they think is good for us, without actually sharing. When the message is "Please don't try this at home", we know they are forbidding our education, and ultimately our self-determination. We need to be able to experiment, take our own chances among ourselves with people we trust.

The entire first world is rather like a second world in this regard. Everybody understands cities, traffic signals, internal combustion engines, planes, trains, automobiles, electricity, clocks and maps. We understand shopping, money, budgets, costs and profits. We understand hospitals, courts, schools, police, food stands, fire departments, churches and parks. All of us have all of these things with more or less luxury signaling attached. The first class passengers get to the destination city at the same time as those in steerage. But what about the ruling class, the 1%? Are they even playing the same game? 

I think they are. But I also think that there are a new set of transgressors who through technique or technology are breaking the old guard's safeguards. Asymmetric war is forcing change. Digital currency is forcing change. GMO is forcing change. Soldiers have to soldier differently. Bankers have to bank differently. Politicians have to politick differently. Preachers have to preach differently. Scholars must re-evaluate their schools. So we watch to see what old comforts can survive.

This is the new middle class dilemma. Our children are not in such a hurry to learn how to drive. Maybe that's a job for a computer monkey. Our children are not in such a hurry to own a house. Maybe that's a job for a renting startup so they can live with their friends and trusted circles. We in the US have 20 flavors of motorcycle and 100 flavors of car. Maybe that's an over-investment whose significance is not as much as we think it is. Our banking relationship with that one giant mega-bank may not be what we really need.  

When I think about my retirement, I think about simple second world locations where I can easily understand the paradigms of the 20th Century because they are still clearly in place. Places where there are only 2 flavors of motorcycle. Where the entertainment takes place on stage in a theatre with live performers.  Where the food is grown locally and everybody knows how to cook it. Where gold jewelry works at the pawn shop. Where even if I can't literally read the language of the writing on the wall, I understand it because of its context. 

 

 

The Unsustainability of Dainty Sensibilities & Strong Arms

"We're just bugs on God's windshield." -- Richard Kadrey

I have this notion that I call the Logarithmic Shadow. It's one of those aspects of human nature I should probably consult Adam Smith on. In my version, this shadow is what keeps the common man alive. Why? Because we have a low profile, and since we do, the Powers that Be aren't particularly out to get us. It's why billionaires don't buy on eBay. It's why Michael Jordan doesn't play basketball against high schoolers. It's why you'll never get to speak to, or be margin called by a group vice president at Citibank. We're not worth the effort. We provide no challenge. 

Lots of people think I'm something of a spokesmouth for the American Right. I'm not, but I also am not into the hopey changey. But what my evolving sense of things is telling me is that the overwhelming majority of people, including intelligent people, are not really qualified to say what's best for the commons. I suspect that the law, bearing a high resemblance to the world of code, is far too contradictory and convoluted to be understood by any but the finest minds. Rather like the best algorithms for TLS, people only believe they understand how it works, but not having authored at that level, have no idea how it might be subverted. 

So I'm puzzling in public with my buddy, whose codename is Ladera. He understands appellate law. And within 30 minutes of spirited grumbling I hear something quite nuanced that makes a significant dent in my argument, and I realize that I am completely out of metaphors. Like many other of my arguments, I am getting very close to actually needing an understanding of the law and its evolution. My gripe is and has been that Americans have voted themselves into comforts and luxurious standards of living that are as unsustainable as an underwater blowtorch. My overextended metaphor is that we have voted in such a way that all cars must be expensive because they must all have airbags. And I'm trying to get Americans, who consider themselves to be anything but rich despite the fact that most of them will own several automobiles in their lives, to see how risk averse that pile of laws has made us. We have grown out of the virtue of physical courage because our entire paved, plastic, medicated and insulated environment shields us from the rigors of... childbirth, street fights... you know all of that stuff that we find so fascinating in the 'culture' of the Third World. American women and men do not have large families. That is the vector of the West. We don't face the life and death decisions of having six children who might have to face life and death decision. We have engineered an economy and lifestyle that we know is unsustainable, and yet...

It seems to me that the whole birdsnest is held together with bubblegum and spit, but also the titanium chickenwire of let's say 2,000 attorneys, judges, legislators and law professors who genuinely want us to be pampered pets.They will fight to make the law that says it is insufficiently civil for people to die of cancer before their 80th birthday. They will therefore unleash the beasts of healthcare and healthcare insurance to make it so we have every legal avenue to live forever. In other words, they take the daintiest of sensibilities and work a bulwark of rights from that. It's rather like Little Red Riding Hood's mother has actually contracted 50 woodsmen to follow her journey to grandmother's house. 

The implication is, that there is no actual logarithmic shadow. Sure our instincts remain. We naturally protect children and innocents. But we're actually not playing fair with the bad guys. We are reserving the nuclear option. 

This puts us in bed, all of us common Joes, with the most dangerous abstracted corporate powers that ever were. So when United Airlines tells us to fly their friendly skies, we had better believe their marketing. When we look at the smile of that Gerber baby, we had better trust the Nestle Corporation because all of those 2,000 legal eagles and their regulatory capture of the baby food industry are our only salvation. You know because none of us know how to actually grow food we trust to feed infants, and American breasts are not for suckling. 

We have a culture that absolutely demands that of us. We have internalized it. The likes of Trump scare us to death because he doesn't talk like the Nestle corporation. He tells us that the skies may not be friendly. This is not about Trump of course, it's about physical courage and danger. You know I'm talking to you because of your squeamish reaction to the video here. 

I have a difficulty in maintaining optimism for the First World. I'm not certain that I approve of the Shadow. Are all men actually created equal? There are a lot of scary implications. I need to see decentralized power, and I'm not certain we can get there. Worrisome. Very Worrisome. 

The Palm Springs Phenomenon

The malls are the soon to be ghost towns
So long, farewell, good-bye. --Modest Mouse

There are two ideas that come to mind when I think of Palm Springs. It's nice to be my age, because I have two ideas and three stories. One of the stories involves dirtbikes and golf bunkers, but that's another story. This is about one of the two ideas, that I am naming the Palm Springs Phenomenon. It is prompted by a headline I read off Facebook. The whole story is here. 

The song 'Teeth Like God's Shoeshine' asks the question "Do you have a lot of what you need to survive?" We do, for the time being. We also have a lot of stuff we don't need. It's rather odd to think that there are people on the planet who will never have a garage, much less enough junk to have a garage sale. But when you're rich in America, you have an estate sale when you get low on cash and you don't want to sell the vacation house. Or maybe the vacation house itself is part of the estate sale. When I had money to burn and a house less than chock full of requisites, the Spousal Unit and I would go hunting for garage sales and estate sales. I'm not ashamed to say that it took over 30 years of working in my career before I had enough credit to afford the furniture that all the marketing in the world made me lust after. Now I have the big leather sofa and love seat. Thanks Synchrony Bank! 

But isn't this a nice virtuous circle? As soon as I could afford that cowboy comfort, I put the old sofa out on the curb and it was gone in a couple days. And so it makes me think of Palm Springs with its strip of art shops. Now I've met and talked to a few antiquarians and art & crafts dealers and I know that they do what I did, which is troll estate sales for great buys. So it suddenly occurred to me that the Palm Springs strip was very much like other such quaint little expensive business districts. They are right on a main drag which is the first major boulevard that runs parallel to some hills. Hills are where the rich people live, and it's convenient for the ladies of leisure to drive down the hill to the shopping place, indulge their peculiar senses of taste and buy expensive crap to tote back up the hill and show off in their living rooms, parlors and salons. That is until such time as they, die, go broke, or run out of space and donate such queer objets d'art to some charity. Or have an estate sale. Then it's right back into the hands of the not so rich lady who runs the antique shop.

Now surely there are some other virtuous loops of free markets I have left unmentioned. We don't want to give them short shrift, but this particular idea gains significantly in resonance to the affairs of the common man when whole retail chains find themselves on the auction block. On my last trip to Chicago, I learned that Mr. Aaron Montgomery Ward was quite a heroic figure. At least the plaque in that park I read gave me the decided impression. I would like to have as nice an epitaph as he. But what if the luxury of shopping disappears altogether for the common man? What if some large portion of us who think we are economically significant are just working bullshit jobs on Palm Canyon Drive? What if some large fraction of America are just wannabe antiquarians thinking we add value? Well, that would be frightening. 

I suppose we all get displaced sooner or later. Enjoy the bright lights while they're still shining. 

 

Dissatisfaction of the Peasantry

It has been a while since I've had a reason to consider my own Peasant Theory, but some of my best ideas come when washing dishes. I am thinking about how it is that the quality of our economy, as brilliant and robust as it is, affects the conduct and opinion-making of the masses. Why indeed do Americans need to follow the news at all? Because we are not under any obligation to inform our opinions. We feel good if our guy wins. We feel bad if our guy loses. And there is this sense of entitlements, call it 'middle class morality' that allows us a fair amount of leeway and signalling in our lives. A better word for this falls into the framework of 'lifestyle', because we can all afford lifestyles and talk about all the subtle social clues we have in our lives for our lifestyles. That is how, after about 70 years, an entire nation can pull opinions out of the idiot box. 

If I were a dishwasher for a living, I would not bother to chit chat with the chatting class in the main dining room. Not because I'm less intelligent, but because I know as a dishwasher, it doesn't much matter if my opinion is charming, brilliant, quaint of buffoonish. Such labels don't stick to us in the manual labor departments. So I don't seek them. Small talk is not on my resume. A dishwasher is one of those people who knows his job. We assume, we in the chatting classes, that he also knows his place. But in our expansive economy of bullshit work and opinions informed by television, and the interwebz, there are lots of places for everyone. So knowing one's place is not so constricting as it once was when only 20 million of us had careers of the sort where 'charming, brilliant, quaint or buffoonish' might mark us permanently. In the land of shallow economic opportunity and social mobility, one sticks to one's knitting; there isn't room in a tighter economy to put on airs, whether you are up high or down low. 

That is not our case. We have freedom to be impossibly wrong and never get called on it. We can generate not only shallow opinions but we can change them at will according to the fashion. We have no skin in the game, because the game never ends. There is no margin call. In the sprawling economy you can afford to be wrong all year long. In fact, we play that game in our electoral politics, and for the supporters of Trump, orange is the new black. See you in 2020.

The video serves to remind us that we are all very aware about the appeal of having something attractive in our lifestyle. We all know what a burnout is. It's a cool thing you do with a sports car. The appeal is universal, and the failures are predictable.  What we all know is that there is car insurance. And so in fact, these failures are not only predictable but profitable. You might even be one of those who cluck disapprovingly at people who are drawn to the lifestyle of fast, flashy cars. Among your friends are no such fools. One man's flash is another man's folly, and who's to judge, eh? We're all humans. 

We're all humans in an economy that is so rich that we can buy and sell and trade opinions in an open market. A fair candidacy is what the electorate will bear. A fair cause is what the crowd will chant for. This is the market society and it has a pricing problem. 

The American middle class has a great deal of disposable income and disposable time to absorb disposable information. Today it is dissatisfied with the political shopping habits of its next door neighbors. And of course there are knots of us whose social bubbles don't even include people with the nerve to value other notions. We clearly don't shop the same aisles. But I daresay very few of us know who is right, and it's getting more difficult than ever to find them out. There are still those same 20 million whose opinions matter, and perhaps they are getting bubbled away too. 

When I look at the car wrecks, I'm sad. Sports cars are such beautiful and magnificent engineering achievements. I'm so very glad that there are those dedicated to continue building them and maintaining them and restoring them. Human beings will always deserve the best, and will always chose the exciting over the dull. But they will always wreck. The trick is to know, if you're going to be a spectator, which side of the road to stand on when they do. 

I am drawn, as ever, to those activities which define our lives with purpose. I know that there are disciplines that are ever rewarding. These lead to lives of satisfaction, not lifestyles filled with schadenfruede and complaint. 

Advice for the Aspiring Buppie

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes. —James Baldwin

Ground Rules:
You have to know with absolute confidence that there are whitefolks who would fight and die for you, more than anybody you ever met in your life. You just haven’t met them yet. If you believe otherwise, then you will fall victim to the one thing that kills all success, which is fear. If there is some part of you that honestly feels that all, most, or plenty of whitefolks are just smiling faces with ulterior plans to betray you, then looking over your shoulder will deter you from any goal. Bury that fear, and prove it every day.

So there’s a bit of paranoia in the following: “Anyone who doesn’t care if you fail is, by definition, an enemy.” This is a general rule in corporations and business. Everything is not dog eat dog, but trust in business is hard won and super valuable. You must have people who trust you, and whom you trust, with your career. It may not happen for 10 years. Work on that too. This is a two way street. You need to show people that you are invested in their success, and people need to show you that they are invested in your success.

Here’s my primary advice:
1. Don’t make work the focal point of your experiments in social relations. That’s too risky; it puts all your eggs in one basket. Make work the focal point of being excellent. Period. You can be as cold-blooded as you like at work. It’s not a good strategy but there is nothing wrong with being “all business”. In fact, if somebody tells you that, take it as both a compliment, and as an invitation to be friendly. But the point here is to learn, share, and all that offline. Then bring that game to work, when and if you are comfortable. Just because you lose your job doesn’t mean whitefolks hate you. Just because you have a white girlfriend doesn’t mean you get promoted on the job. Two different monkeys, two different circuses. But it’s more important that *in your life* you have real friends and associates of all stripes.

2. The world is never going to fully understand your black world. That includes me. The most comfortable way to communicate a particular or potential conflict of values is to phrase things like this. “Where I come from, respect was very important. So I hope you don’t mind if I hesitate to call you Bob, Mr. Fisher.” Sure, call him Bob, or Bob Fisher if you must. But don’t make it a sticking point.

But as a corollary, Americans will understand black culture, because it’s American culture. I can tell you that in 1992, if you said “What’s up with that?” in any business conversation, you might as well have had a bone in your nose. Today, pierced noses are no big deal. Well, they are with my customers, but I deal with finance and aerospace. Which leads to:

3. Every business culture is different. The only way you get to know American business, really, is to be in a consulting company. So say what you want about ‘white’, what works in New Hampshire does not work in Colorado does not work in Florida, and Texas and California have three different worlds each. Oil Services is not Health Care is not Finance is not Online Advertising. The only thing that works across the boards at all of those companies in the ‘consulting standard’, which is the nephew of the WASP standard. You know how that works, it’s just another mask.

And finally,
4. Be prepared to deal with the end of your blackness. As long as you have a dog in the fight of ‘race relations’, then you have to feed that dog. You may feel you have to be a role model. You may feel you have to take a stand ‘in solidarity’ with some political or social stand that is race related. But guess what, ‘blackness’ is not in your control. All you can control is the amount of emotional investment you put into showing and proving. How much you pick up that burden is entirely on you. The bottom line is that if you are being *yourself* somebody ‘white’ is going to tell you “You don’t seem black.” And somebody ‘black’ is going to tell you “You don’t seem black.” If you make that your problem, well then it is your problem. It sure the hell ain’t mine, because my name isn’t ‘Black Mike Bowen’. So I don’t have to answer to that name. Unless I want to, until I don’t want to any more, unless I do again.

The longer answer is here in my essay called My Black Life Doesn’t Matter [1]. I am in a very very comfortable place. You’ll get here. I’ll pour you a bourbon.

Footnotes

[1] My Black Life Doesn't Matter

A Libertarian Stoic Principle Explained

Once again, I have ingested a nugget of wisdom that somehow has failed to get published on my blog. Let me do so now. Robin Hanson drops this excellent pearl.

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.

I assume that American politics will fail to solve a whole host of social problems. I have been assuming this since somewhere around the time I recognized people were taking Candidate Obama seriously. But there was ample precedent in my prior understanding of the position of an economist named Zingales and his position on mortgages.  What I ended up doing is formulating my Peasant Theory, which is another large story. The bottom line is that I have disappeared into history and have taken it upon myself to pursue the barbell theory of using my cleverness, privilege and social capital to the maximum and expecting only hostility and other minimums from the bulk of society. At the same time, I retain what I think is the necessary principle of respect of common law for the common man. And so I exist in the realm of extreme practicality with expectations of leverage. It's a different take on organicism, but has a bit in common. It games organicism and eschews the moral halo of civic virtue. 

The reason I expect American politics to fail in solving social problems is because there is an interventionist bias in Progressive politics and a rabid desire for power in Conservative politics. Liberals don't know where to go and are choking on their own multiculturalist hypocrisies. The whole thing stinks, so I'm shorting democracy and am long on decentralized yet globally capable guilds and their networked supply chains. The smart money. I'm hiding behind money and ultra-competency right now, and I'm hoping for protection from the right clubs. It means I have to go outside of the normal boxes of the upper middle class; class prerogatives are insufficient insurance, and I suspect that there is no 'hookup' to be found in civic signaling. In other words, I think the millionaires are afraid of the billionaires. That's a lot of paranoid shit rolling downhill. 

So if I can call myself a Libertarian Stoic, it is because I believe in a minimum set of civilizing rules based on Constitutional principles and the need to be left alone. The problem is that we live in a society in which the Tytler Tautology has come true, we are aiming to vote ourselves riches. Regulatory capture and too big to fail and all that crony cruft. Yes I'm encouraged by Brexit, but I expect some bitchy negotiations. Billionaires have unusual longevity. I actually believe everything can possibly go to shit, so I keep my powder dry and a handful of silver handy. Did I tell you that The Book of Eli is one of my favorite films?

What I expect for the future of America is something like the present of India in its big cities. America will adjust its middle class down and will sustain an internal third world. It will take 3 or 4 generations if the current trends prevail, but between now and then the frog boils and the Slice will lose its redundancy. 

Caught Up In The Struggle

Not long ago I reconnected with a childhood friend whose formative years were rugged, but TC transformed and survived. Better than that he thrived.When he left my neighborhood, he got  'caught up' with Crips in Compton. The turning point came, as he tells the story, when an older kid about to do an armed robbery put a gun to TC's head and told him to go home. The person who did it was a killer gangbanger who didn't see himself replicated in young TC. Or perhaps he did, and decided to break the cycle in a moment of clarity. 

This past Independence Day weekend, I found myself in Gardena at a party that reminded me of my old neighborhood, which sheltered myself and TC from the worse parts of the ghetto, but still retained elements of influence. We knew Crips by sight and by name; they recruited us. We resisted. Yet these were people who listened to Marvin Gaye and Cameo like the rest of us. They chased the same girls, played (cheating) ball on the same courts and ate the same BBQ ribs. They whistled at the same cars, and with the exception of an identifying bandana or hat, wore the same clothes. But we were miles apart in character. 

Last fall, I learned a lot about how the Los Angeles office of the FBI deals with gang members in cooperation with Homeboy Industries and Father Greg Boyle. It came as something of a surprise to understand how the FBI's was a social initiative rather than a crime fighting mission. But there was no mistaking the psychological dynamics of gang attachment, the necessary alienation from civility that is central to the identity of the youth who attaches to badness. 

People like to pretend that character doesn't count and that in interactions with the larger society, nobody can tell the difference between those of us on the outside of gangs and those of us on the inside because of the Venn of 'hood life and gang life. It's not the shoes and it's not the slang. I do understand that there is a definition of 'black man' that has very little to do with what it meant 30 years ago, but is an extension of a radicalized political hostility embodied in the lyrics of the rap group "Public Enemy". We really don't have to go far to understand the basic meaning of 'Public Enemy' and "Niggas With Attitude". Is it so subtle? Can we tell the difference between Richard Pryor and the highschool kid who quotes Richard Pryor? In kids, it's generally a matter of our faith in their character. Sometimes it takes a gun to the head for the consequences to me made clear and for a permanent choice to be made. Sometimes the gun isn't friendly.

Doc takes advantage of his badge and lets his perpetrators know. He makes it clear to them that you have about seven strikes before you are consigned to the wastebin of prison culture. "You fucked up today son, I hope I don't see you again, but you chose to be here. Choose better. Live better." The attitude alone will not get you there, but cops will be around if you keep showing up on the wrong side of civility. Is it enough that attitude puts one on the wrong side of civility? To be sure, the matters of character will degrade in ways no political class is truly interested in discerning, but processing through the System takes time, energy and persistence, just as does the discipline attached to the conventions of success. Recovering Christian backsliders, alcoholics, gangbangers, gamblers and whores all have long roads. Every day there are choices to be made. Every day there is positive purpose to be fulfilled or abandoned. A lot of that gets buried in the loose bonds of colloquial black identity. A lot of people get caught up.

The political consensus is lazy and prefers not to split up that black identity. It suits certain political agendas that a convenient racial aggregation can be assumed. I saw this over a decade ago and determined to poke a hole in that circus' big top. Black Republican! The very existence forced people to consider values, to consider the character of citizenship, to consider economics and religion and lots of other distinctions that disrupt the diet of racial and cultural conformity.  

It doesn't surprise me that today's Americans suffer from the calculations of hegemonic identity politics. The game is populism and the game is not being gamed. It exploits logical lacunas that might even make Orwell retch. Everybody is supposed to be in favor of 'diversity' which requires a stultifying conformity of opinion. To agitate against a particular nation is 'racist'. I needn't belabor the point to those who read and think. Those who read and think, well their company is not sufficient, and like police, their skill and authority cannot resist an onslaught of incivility in a nation of millions. The attitude of the masses keeps landing them on the wrong side of civility, and the hegemonic players keep thinking they can sustain their powers through it all. We are not only cruising for a bruising we are dashing towards a smashing bashing. 

I want my cosmopolitain life but I'm not sanguine. I tend to feel very much like Bruce Wayne in Gotham City, or the Omega Man in zombified Los Angeles. Not that I am any such hero, but at least I know what heroism requires. We play chess in our own living rooms, but outside is the antagonist who only sees purification by fire. Chess is a fair fight and life is not chess. I stay on the lookout for men who would pledge their lives, fortunes and sacred honor, amongst crowds who believe such things cannot be respected. We are failing to respect the common law for the common man, and we stand on the margins of parades of power as they design uncommon laws for those who sweep the streets before them. I say it all started in the Counterculture, and now we stand on the brink of delivering the Presidency to one such Boomer, again. I am hoping that I can distinguish myself. Not that anyone in particular asks me. A capable man must watch his back. 

I don't want to get caught up in the struggle for survival. I know what a decent life, even a good life requires, and I aim to pursue happiness with vigor. Sometimes a wise coward is better than a brave fool. I explain more than people want to listen. I make distinctions more than people care to discriminate. Yet I know I am splitting the proper differences, but we are all contorted away from speaking the simple truth, avoiding the streetsweepers as we must. I've never read Anne Frank yet. 

Dear Occupant

Once upon a time, I asked if you were a Jew, why would you ever drive a German car? Then I thought about blackfolks. If you are the descendant of American slaves, why would you ever wear cotton? Moreover, why would you EVER live in a slave state that lost the civil war? Every time the Confederate Flag controversy comes up, I ask this same question. I never get a satisfactory response.

Not for nothing, I put a statute of moral outrage limitations starting with the Great Depression, when my grandparents got married and everybody in America was broke. The case is simple. You don't get a choice about what American history you inherit. Either you're an American citizen or you're just a person living here. If you're just an occupant then you get no claim on anything. Go ahead and put a NOTW sticker on your car. But if you're an American, then you get to claim everything, and everything gets to claim you - not selectively.

YOU and YOUR PEOPLE didn't write the Constitution, so how do you get to claim civil rights? YOU and YOUR PEOPLE didn't conquer the natives but you live on conquered land you ain't giving up. Neither the Germans, Koreans, Viet Cong, Taliban or AQ said, oh wait those are African Americans, let's not shoot. You're an American and you don't get to choose. You inherit all America. When you renounce it all, like Assata Shakur, then all of your rebellion can get taken seriously. Otherwise, get over yourself and your ethnic consumer boycotts. Shoot a cop or shut up. 

I'm not saying injustice hasn't happened or not to notice. I'm saying there's no cosmic justice. There is the justice system and all of its strengths and weaknesses, but that's the only path of recourse. If you didn't get your settlement from the law, it's not going to change just because you can surface a hashtag to a million people. In other words, there is no Social Justice, and that's really why I bother to write all this over booze. Like I need to care about some moral supply chain in my consumer products.

I have been entirely too close to the sort of folks who literally made an assessment about the entire visible spectrum of justice possible under the American system of government, and made a GO / NO GO decision. This vestigial radicalism gets on my nerves. I don't have it in for people who find themselves incapable of patriotism, but I don't see them as anything more or less than self-serving political opportunists.

Obligatory Seriousness on Islamic Terrorism in America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

-- 

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

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

 

The Orlando Blip vs The Civil Right

Where in the name of common-sense, are our fears to end if we may not trust our sons, our brothers, our neighbors, our fellow-citizens? What shadow of danger can there be from men who are daily mingling with the rest of their countrymen and who participate with them in the same feelings, sentiments, habits and interests? -- Alexander Hamilton - Federalist 29

I consider the Orlando shooting to be a blip. I'll salute the flag at half mast, but I'm not particularly outraged by the state of murderous violence in the US. It's a consequence of my belief in equality. So the Syrian Civil War looms much larger in terms of moral outrage. The burning alive of Yazidi women by ISIS, the kidnapping into slavery of women by Boko Haram. Those are headlines that get my attention. I'm not even particularly worried about Donald Trump, scumbag that he is, because I have come to appreciate what outstanding individuals and institutions we have in the US that have and will survive idiocy and even hostile intent. That confidence comes from the understanding I have gotten from hanging out with men of a certain character: men with whom I share the same feelings, sentiments, habits and interests. All of us to a man have found some reprise from the madness in this address by Netanyahu. He said all that needed to be said, in under three minutes.

It would have been nice if one of those men were Obama. I would have liked to like him. In the end however, Obama cost me $400 a month with his heathcare shenanigans, and as I predicted, screwed several foreign policy and geopolitical pooches. His irresponsibility and withdrawal from the world stage has let some particular nasties bubble up. He was a doofus but at least he was an ethical and personable doofus, a standup-guy with a good sense of humor, but as smarmy and self-righteous as they come. I think he may have done better than President Pierce when it all comes down to it, but perhaps I only think so now because what comes next will not be so civilized. He has cleared my head about the consequence of identity politics and leaves the country not so much principally divided as actually hating itself. He was congenitally unable to address that problem seriously, not only because it elected him, but because identity was not a box he could think outside of. And as he mouths off about so-called reasons for not using the term 'radical Islamic terrorism' he only digs himself a deeper hole. Today and all week, Americans have been bickering with each other because our leaders have decided to close their eyes to the world, and say that America's problems begin and end at home. 

So the leader of the Democrats' vision of the free world has cosigned more rhetoric to make this shooting about gun control and gay rights I am predictably saddened. So I have come to I think there is absolutely nothing special about his government's approval, because it's not so much my government. I mean the 1% always get it, don't they? It's just a matter of certification and legal arrangements. The more lawyers you have... So where we're speaking in specific regard to the topic of gun control, the 1% and the lawyered up will do whatever bureaucratic madness eventually becomes necessary to shutup those opposed to the free franchise of gun ownership. That's not a moral standard is my point. It's a bureaucratic requirement, which in the end depending on your perspective is called either an entitlement or a loophole. Basically that's pretty much our relationship with the nanny state. One man's entitlement is another man's loophole. But does that matter morally? Not actually. I guess the analogy some 'liberal' might understand is how many fucks are given by rebels at Stonewall for the privilege of a government stamp of approval on their same sex relationship. Determined men are going to do what they will. So for myself and those like me, who have FFLs and friends with FFLs, we will get whatever guns we find necessary. And because we are resourceful, we will work within the law just like people with the highest paid attorneys work within the law. We will find the loopholes, because we're Americans, we're entitled to them.

But here's the thing about government entitlements. They never quite protect you the way you think they should. I mean how can it be now that Gay Marriage is a reality that all of the activists and social justice workers and the very law of the land could not protect a gay club in Florida? Could it be that all of them picked the wrong policy issue? After all the time and money and effort spent. After all the years pressing the issue and boycotts of Chick-fil-A and selfish cake-makers and wedding planners, could it be that they picked the wrong enemy? Don't we now have gay rights? If so how could this massacre happen? Clearly Obama didn't go far enough. He didn't get to ban all of the guns. That's what we really needed right? 

So the focus changes to guns, and somebody is going to come up with a new gun policy. What I resent is the idea that ignorant self-righteousness under the figleaf of 'intelligence' or 'moral sanity' or however it is that those who think their outrage is so bloody brilliant is what guides discussions of security and public safety. Please. The ultimate effect will be to disarm the common man, period. Not clever bastards like me, or clever bastards like the insane murderous Orlando fuck, just the ordinary Joes. Because the ordinary Joes don't get loopholes. Today it seems that even their rights don't get the benefit of the doubt. Indeed now is the silly season of questioning the Second Amendment. To impugn the Constitutional right, is to sign the warrant that says the ordinary Joe's life is not worth defending with deadly force unless somebody certifies his life. Unless Congress writes him an entitlement, all he gets is wall to wall CNN coverage of his grieving on camera with a creche in the background. That and maybe a moment of silence. There are always people who hold themselves superior in judgment of what is or is not 'senseless violence', but not Joe. 

Now this is the moment when I might hope for you to reflect on the point of the poor Yazidis and ask yourself if America is so retarded and regressive, then what exactly is there to stop all the evil people believe Donald Trump to be from subjecting us to more domestic terror? Is America impervious to tyranny? Are we so exceptional? Or are people generally all just evil bastards without the rule of law? Well, today America is exceptional because today the majority of us, even the ordinary common Joes, say that their lives are worth defending with deadly force, and worth it whether or not there is some government stamp on that defense. We take it as a right, and that the legitimacy of our government is based on the fact that it cannot abridge that right. We are met in an Orlando suburb testing whether that right or any right can long endure. We are testing if our faith in ourselves to defend these rights can survive what has become of our politics and our faithlessness in the leaders we have chosen. 

I feel today that I have to read and study and apply the lessons of the Constitution independent of whoever is running Washington DC. It's a depressing feeling. I have to fight for all of my civil rights. So listen to and have personal friends that have possessed Federal Firearms Licenses. So I'm kinda well-informed. I studied for a year before I bought my first pistol. There was nothing I ever liked or cared for about guns in the first 50 years of my life. I was completely ignorant and subject to exactly the same illogical emotional appeals I recognize on this every day. I understand and accept that people will never give me credence. I don't expect that they will have the discipline, the patience or the motivation to know what I know. But I'm an expert here, relatively speaking. I have already discounted the willingness of people, voting citizens in America, to step out of their emotional reactions and listen to reason on this and many other issues. I'm not really upset except for one thing:

That is the willingness for people to take it on advice of authority to restrict the rights of the common man, in the assumption held by so many, that the common man cannot be trusted. As civil rights are eroded for each and every 'teachable moment', the American experiment dies. And like me and my FFL friends, and those of us with fancy lawyers, we will get what we want, but the presumptions of US government will be that the common man is on his own.

Go lookup your best hate crime statistics and see who has the most to lose. Should they have the right to defend their own lives with deadly force? I know some people might be persuaded that there are special cases to be made for LGBT or Sunnis in Dearborn, or migrant Mexicans in Texas, but none of that demographic detail means anything to me. I say there is one standard, universal with liberty and deadly defense for all free men. I have a right to defend my life with deadly force. I am perfectly happy to share that right with everyone else, in fact I insist on it. If and when we lose that right to the narrowly focused distrustful of American society anti-gun activism, I will use my privilege and power to defend my life with deadly force. 

So if you're working for the new anti-gun regime, please go ahead and make your list of means-tests of the kind of certifications you in your infinite kindness and mercy deem necessary for government certification of possession of deadly force. That will be your definition of a free man. The rest, will be less than that suffered to your protection and guidance, for our own good. Many, many Americans will not be disarmed 'for their own good'. Be glad that some of us say so for consistent, universal, ethical reasons. I'd hate to have to join a well-disciplined militia. But I will. 

A Provocation on Gentrification

What is a community? I think this is a (New York) city dynamic that resonates far less elsewhere. I remember when I moved to Prospect Heights from LA, I was supposed to have an opinion about Crown Heights and that kind of crap means something only to people who live near Crown Heights. So I'm looking at apartments strictly in terms of price and amenities, and people keep telling me, what side of Vanderbilt I should live on or the chances of me fitting in in Boerum Hill vs Cobble Hill. So I basically call tribal bullshit on 'gentrification'. This tribal bullshit is real, for me, in LA. In LA different neighborhoods *mean* something. I "could never live out there in" Corona or West Covina. And I'm sure that means absolutely zip to a New Yorker.

 

I think Americans have this fixation with the social power of real-estate agents, a class of people I generally find quite distasteful in just about every way. But their necessity comes with urban territory. It is always the argot of these negotiators that set up the expectations of people moving from place to place. We have become accustomed to living in the urban matrix, and these are the agents who inform our vocabulary of locality. There is nothing at all organic about the city or about the urban neighborhood. It's always a market. It's always a commodity. This is a consequence of our desire to have no restrictive covenants. Freedom of association is a corporate, communitarian value. Residents are fungible.  I think relatively few people these days consider at length that context of urban alienation which was discussed a lot more in the 50s and 60s when 'The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit' was a metaphor for the collectivist conformist demands of corporate employment and city life vs individual needs of family and home.

The film, like the novel on which it was based, became hugely popular. Historian Robert Schultz argues that the film and the novel are cultural representations of what Adlai Stevenson had described in 1955 as a "crisis in the western world", "collectivism colliding with individualism," the collective demands of corporate organizations against traditional roles of spouse and parent.^[4] That increased corporate organization of society, Schultz notes, reduced white-collar workers' (represented by Tom Rath and the other gray-suited "yes men") control over what they did and how they did it as they adapted to the "organized system" described and critiqued by contemporary social critics such as Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, and William H. Whyte, Jr.^[5] 

Thus 'gentrification' is unsolvable. It is part and parcel of the larger problem of living on property you don't own (and owning a brownstone on the Upper East Side gives you about zero latitude with respect to what it means to be living on the Upper East Side) and society you don't control. You fit in. You must. You have no choice. If you really wanted that choice you wouldn't live in the city. So I think there's a false sense of freedom that invites people to justify their feelings of violation. But when you live in the city, you should expect to be violated. In fact you should welcome it. That's the skill of being cosmopolitan. You go to the city spots expecting to be invigorated by the random encounter with something slightly alien to your ordinary experience. You wear clothes in an outdoor cafe that will attract a certain attention to you as you observe others observing you. But it is this hope of finding something comfortably strange, an amusement, a diversion, that is part of the risky joy of city life. 

 

I perceive this through the lens of those structures, architectures of thought, if you will, that sustain certain ideas and starve others out. What is it about the 'social geography' or 'cultural geography' of a place that makes it more or less friendly to certain expectations? I think Foucault went batshit in this direction. But I believe that concept that we have no idea of whom we might be sexually compatible with because we only hunt for partners in a very small geographical area. So we actually sexualize neighborhoods and they take on more personal meaning to us than they deserve.

 

Which is why I used to tell my girlfriend "Pretend we're in Cancun" whenever she made side-eyes at my apartment's relative sloth. Me. I'm immune to Cancun. It's just another place.

Liberty Vs Legal Hegemony

At some point I may end up making the practical project of figuring out how to map the laws. That is to say let’s call this project ‘Law Map’. Law Map would be a system of identifying every law on every book and having an accounting of every case and conviction in every jurisdiction of the US. 

What I learned in the FBI school was that the problem with the legal thicket in the US is that there are three levels of law. One is the basic law as we understand it. ‘Thou shalt not steal’. Then there is a second level that lays out all of the authorities and agencies responsible to enforce that law and whose jurisdiction is what. Then you get into the third level which are the regulations about how these authorities and agencies are allowed to operate. The first level of laws is 100 pages thick. The second is 1000. The third is 1 million. It is the tension of oversight between level two and level three that makes it possible for people to get away with breaking level one. For example, a regulatory level three law requires that in order to *legally* be an air traffic controller, you have to pass 6 certifications per year, every year. This costs more money than new radars, so planes get lost. Too much law. 

The Constitution is fine. They figured it out over 200 years ago. It’s the crap they’ve built on top of it that makes prosecution of the law so complicated that it can effectively nullify its sharp intent. It is only when you cite wisdom entirely outside of the aegis of law that you can determine whether or not that system of law is actually good. But that goes beyond what the average Joe is capable of, in America or anywhere else on the planet. Nevertheless, there are plenty of Americans who do just that.

The enemy is the politics that navigate between level two and level three in order to pursue their power and agenda with the understanding that the common man who doesn’t have a squad of attorneys behind him will be eternally frustrated. But even the common man has the intuition that sees *something is wrong with the system* when despite the clarity of ‘Thou shalt not steal’, people get away with grand larceny. Call it legalistic corruption. It’s corrupt, but it’s legal as long as that level of regulation exists and the long arm of the law gets tangled up in fancy clothing. It is when the law loses its moral clarity that the people rightfully lose respect for it. But our civil religion does not allow enough space for us to escape the long arm of the law. We are not a liberty to do so precisely because the reaction to distrust has been *more law*. This has become an unvirtuous cycle. 

If we were to allow tradition and logic to rule us, then we would not need laws of the third order impinging on personal freedom. How many generations have smoked tobacco? And how much brains does it take to see that it makes you cough? And how many lungs do you have to cut open to see the effects? So why do we need a law to tell us where and when we can smoke? Because we have interposed systems of law and regulation to be superior to social forces of tradition and logic. That doesn’t mean we don’t need law, and it certainly doesn’t obviate the Constitution. It means that if we cannot use tradition and logic because we allow the reach of law so far into our lives that it becomes hegemonic. And thus we disable the social forces of tradition and logic. 

The Proof Machine

Back in 1980, when the world was turning to morning in America, and I first began to understand what inflation was and why I couldn't afford an apartment in Los Angeles, there was a small
miracle called MICR. 

MICR (magnetic ink character recognition) is a technology used to verify the legitimacy or originality of paper documents, especially checks. Special ink, which is sensitive to magnetic fields, is used in the printing of certain characters on the original documents.

What I learned in the anti-fraud part of my teller training was that banks used to leave MICR machines out in the lobby for their customers' use. If you forgot your deposit slip, you could take a blank one from the kiosk and use the MICR machine to put your account number on it. The teller would take your deposit and all would be sunny. Except for the time when some clever cad pre-stamped all of the blank deposit slips with his own account number and left a pile of them at the kiosk. No more MICR machines in the lobby. 

Nevertheless, checks still have your account number on them. What they don't have is the amount of the check you write. So it was somebody's job at the bank to eyeball every check amount and MICR that bad boy so it could be processed. It was an interesting period in our time, when paperwork of a certain type ultimately ended up in a computer database that did tallying. Tally is a word you don't hear much any longer. This was the job of the Proofer. In my rounds of bank operations between 80 and 82, I excelled most at TCDs. It got me a desk. But I also had to do customer service and proof. If I were to be an operations manager, I had to know all aspects including teller, vault teller, and wire transfer. I never got to do wire transfer and when it came to proof, I stank. Even though I had my ten key skills, (by touch), I could not compete with that thin Eastern European girl who was the regular. 

While I'm reminiscing, I might as well name names. The branch was Pershing Square and the branch manager was Tom Caballero. The operations manager was Tom Hamilton and the assistant manager was a lively Mexican girl with wavy mid-length hair. I want to say that her name was Gonzales, but it doesn't seem quite right. She was the backup for the proof girl. The vault teller was a severe and gorgeous black girl and her best friend was head teller. She was slim and had a nasally voice. The senior teller was Anna Mena who later moved out to a branch in Van Nuys. The kid I hated was an emancipated minor whose Beverly Hills parents couldn't get rid of him fast enough. He actually knew the French lyrics to Blondie's Rapture song. I had something of a crush on Sarah Farren, but she was already married to Bob. The wire transfer girl was Marnita Jackson. She had her own apartment in Hollywood and didn't trust me for jack. There were a couple of loan officers down on the first floor including Piccolini who drove a Mercedes 280 but didn't get a lot of respect in the bank. The SVP, Ken Allen, offered me a spot in the management trainee program so I could learn credit. I told him I really wanted to do computers. The macher of the joint was Marvin Schwartz who looked like an evil Dr. Katz. His word was law. Every Christmas all of the businessmen who owed him money brought large cans of gourmet popcorn. 

--

People say that they are afraid of AI. Some people probably should be, but they are the same people who don't get the respect of the big bosses of the world anyway. If I decide to replace you with a machine, what exactly am I doing? Well, in the case of City National Bank, you are saving me the headache of being a modern day Bartleby. Me working proof would have been a nightmare for all parties concerned. We want labor saving devices. Some of that, obviously, is a consequence of us being peasants living in the fictional, idiot proof city. We have bullshit jobs because we actually don't know how to live any other way, and necessity isn't quite the mother it needs to be to reduce our body fat ratios. It's rather sad how far our society has gone to sexualize our relationships one to the other, but if there's any comfort in that perversion, at least AIs won't be sexual. Except in the movies where they are. 

I expect and hold out eternal hope that people, being people, will ultimately desire to be around and work honestly with people. That is the satisfaction core to our being as social animals and we won't evolve out of that necessity. But technology will march on while there is money to be made in it, and so every once in a while slim East European women's' daughters will invent something better than proof machines in memory of their mothers' toil. MICR be damned, we now have ATMs that read checks, but debit cards first existed around 1995. That didn't take very long. 

I think there is something magical about cooking with friends. I've never had the job, but I've done enough barbecues and enough banking piecework to meld the two together in my mind. So what Wendy's is proposing, kiosks instead of cashiers, might work out well. After all, how hard is it to order up a supersized #4 with Sprite? I tell you this, it's a no brainer to build a fast food ordering app. It's already done. I say it's just a matter of time until all fast food restaurants take on a new profile where it's all about the kitchen. And the security staff in the dining part. But the esprit de corps of the fast food joint is something I don't quite have my finger on. A diner, on the other hand, is something we all remember.

 

Hasn't it always been about saving money?

The Problem With Multiculturalism

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

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

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

I could go on at length to describe the nefarious notions that are sustained in the American Culture Wars, begun in the late 50s taking shape in the 60s and blossoming  in the 90s, but the distinction above nails it. What's important is that multiculturalism is now clearly showing its philosophical weakness and that ordinary people are recognizing it.

The weakness of multiculturalism is that its advocates simultaneously emphasize the politics of difference as well as notions of equality, and they try to do so without being judgmental. It is a direct consequence of trying to nail down the precise weight of 'special regard'.

Multiculturalists will assert that Americans must pay attention to the history of X in order to properly understand and respect X-Americans. In this they will assert then, that the same is true of Y-Americans. And of course they consequently assert that we make America better, because the general history of America was neglectful and disrespectful of all of the Xs and Ys and now only today with the new multicultural perspective can true equality become reality (but we still have a long way to go), so they say. So multiculturalists will emphasize all these histories and develop a new 'special regard' which can be communicated through the convoluted narrative of respectful terms, aka politically correct language. Along with this pervasive demand of the general public, multiculturalists also demand special programs of 'inclusion' and 'empowerment' of institutions.

Of course X-Americans don't have to do this diligence or sponsor such regimes because they already know, right? Well, not exactly. Multiculturalism requires that its subjects toe the ideological line in expressing the particular history of the narrative of multiculturalism. This is where the whole ball of yarn unravels, because this requirement of 'authenticity' becomes untenable as soon as you get to a particular level of detail and especially if you happen to be some as of yet unclassified hybrid of X & Y. This particular knot is sending shockwaves through the efforts of the ever more stultifying alphabet soup of the LGBT... 'community' as various identity factions attempt to micromanage the weight of special regard for their distinctions.

Multiculturalists are the enemies of conformity and anonymity. They require that people represent their differences, except of course when they are not supposed to. Confusing? Of course it is. Multiculturalists will highlight the great benefits of 'diversity' but then assert that people just 'happen to be X' and contribute equally with everybody else. The only way this can happen is if all parties in the 'diverse' group accept with precision the special regard for the X person. Multiculturalists would be profoundly disappointed were people of X distinction refuse to apply for X scholarships, or if people of Y distinctions did not predictably support multicultural rhetoric 'in solidarity' with Y. They would haughtily say such people were working against their own interests. (Because multiculturalism defines those interests! Just read the history!)

Where the friction of this regime expresses the pain of its logical error is at border conditions. IE, hiring, firing, promoting, demoting, and all other sorts of transactions that move individuals from in-group to out-group status. All rationales for discriminations of any sort must now include politically correct rationales, each appropriate to their 'own' groups.

It goes without saying that the aim of multiculturalists is to sustain this politics of difference and to denormalize the normal to which they have attached the prefix of 'cis-'. The mainstream of America of multicultural dreams has a complete and total ontology of race, gender, creed, color, country of origin, sexual preference and religion, each which contributes to the de-emphasis of America's 'majority'. They have succeeded massively in enabling this narrow and particular set of demographic tags to drive analysis of Americans over all other sets. Things like 'years of education' pale in significance to 'race', for example, when looking at socioeconomic indicators. This is true across all media.

The impact is clear. Multiculturalists seek to maintain their success by enabling 'victims' of every stripe (with a meticulously maintained database of stripes) to raise suspicions about the motives and capabilities of every group they are not a part of, and a general assumptions about cultural and political 'authenticity' that maps properly to their regime of special regard. This makes a trainwreck of evenhandedness, undermines common cause for anything outside of the multiculturalist agenda and establishes a never ending crusade against the true spirit of competition, meritocracy and fair play.

Before multiculturalism collapses under the weight of its accumulated deceptions and Orwellian contradiction, it will drown the ambitions of millions and set up millions more for failure in the world where multiculturalism's narratives and machinations does not exist.

No Judgment: The Three Legged Stool of Opinion Equality

Opinions are all of equal value when you have:

• No understanding of the game.
• No skin in the game.
• No agency in the game.

Only when you have a rational investment in the outcome and understand something about the process and reason to believe it works for you, does the value of the opinions you hold and your take on the opinions of others take shape and become firm.

Scenario A. Understanding
Imagine that I know nothing at all about professional sports in America. I'm sitting in a bar and the person at my right might say that the Dallas Cowboys are the best football team this season. The person to my left might say that the Atlanata Hawks are the best football team this season. I'd have to say both opinions are about equal even though the Hawks are a basketball team. The Hawks fan could go on and tell me that the Hawks won each of their games by an average of 12 points, whereas Dallas only won by 3 points. I'm in a totally ridiculous conversation and I don't even know why. I may even come to support the person on the left after the person on the right says "You're an idiot!" and walks away.

Now I'm supporting an opinion I have no idea about, while forming another opinion. "Dallas Cowboy fans are assholes." based on this one particular encounter.

The more you know about something, the less tolerance you tend to have for people who don't. But lots of people who never develop any expertise, or skin in the game, adopt opinions on specious premises. We live in a consumer society in which information and opinions are marketed and people adopt them based upon context rather than content. This is a well-understood psychological phenomenon called (something I can't remember) in which the consumer falsely assumes what's inside the box is well-represented by the illustrations on the outside of the box, or the conditions under which the box was presented. The other standard logical fallacies apply.

Scenario B: Investment
My personal opinion is that all gambling in Vegas is the same and is for losers. Now I actually know that one has a better chance at winning at Blackjack or Texas Hold 'Em and that there are professionals who can legitimately beat the odds. But I don't care because I never waste my money gambling in Vegas or anywhere. I've already divided the world into two kinds of people, those who don't gamble at all and idiots.

Imagine that I was an atheist. I have reasons to believe that Islam and Christianity are equally dubious. Since I have no reason to invest any hope or trust in their various institutional manifestations, I'm likely to come to regard the defensive of Islam and of Christianity about the same. Basically, both have no value to me. I don't need to care because, as Childish Gambino might say "I ain't lovin' those fake hoes." So while I have some understanding, I can still be dismissive of informed opinions and not bother to weigh the differences between them. 

Scenario C: Agency
This one is especially interesting. It is the tragedy against knowledge and interest which is resignation. Imagine that I were a voter in a democracy and I understood the process. Not only do I understand the process, but I have a particular stake in the process. I want my party to win. But I live in a jurisdiction where the other party dominates. Say I live in Los Angeles and I want a Republican mayor. Or I live in Texas and I want gun control. Or I live in the ghetto and I want them to build a Nordstrom's. I know that pretty much no matter how much time and energy, knowledge I possess, what one guy like me can do against the system amounts to butkis. So I judge that everybody's opinion, not just mine, basically doesn't matter. What's gonna happen is gonna happen so yes I'll agree, I'll play along, but I really don't see the point in giving one opinion any more credibility than another.

--

When I was a kid at camp, we were organized into Adventure Groups. One boys cabin, one girls cabin, our two respective counselors and one staff member. These groups would get together on a daily basis and do our craft projects as a team. My group called itself The Mighty Flaming Armadillos. Already we were into Monty Python. We adopted purple as one of our banner colors, I do remember that. There was one group whose name I remember like it was yesterday. They were IIWI, pronounced Double I Double U I. It stood for "I don't know. I don't care. What's the difference? Incorporated". No matter what the project, half of them didn't show up and the other half did half-ass work. They refused to take anything seriously but they must assuredly said that their group was as good as any other group. Their banner was the four letters in plain black magic marker on a white cardboard picket sign, sans serif. 

There is logic to apathy and non-judgment. It's not hopeful or energetic, but there's logic to it. 

 

Dumbing Down Racism

The deliberate attempt to redefine racism is done in order to sustain the fiction that there is more that can be done politically, beyond a reasonable guarantee of civil equality, to alleviate racism.

 

The direction in the US is to make even more and more insults, slights, harassments and petty outrages to be included in 'racism'. This has taken the form of 'triggers' and 'microaggressions' whose remedies are politically correct speech and 'safe spaces'. The aim is to sensitize individuals to this and then come up with 'solutions'. These solutions will deliver attention, influence, money and votes to their originators who are the Multiculturalists. The redefinition of racism to ever more sensitive levels and calls for a 'national discussion' satisfies the fetishes of 'experts' who would rescue victims of this 'abuse'.

 

The effect of the acceptance of this sensitization is the induced crippling of the protected class. It sustains what Toni Morrison called the 'dilemma of the rescued'. Ultimately it goes against self-determination, this is why it is subversive and wrong.

 

Right now and I suspect for the foreseeable future this is just more nonsense and a waste of dignified people's time. It will ultimately become worrisome if and when some tipping point is reached at which time pluralities of Americans believe it is time to criminalize more racism. Currently, the commission of felonies may be considered a hate crime if it is determined that racial animus is proximate cause for the act and/or it is done as a terrorist act of intimidation to the public. If America decides in some future time to add racial scrutiny for misdemeanors, then we will have reached an Orwellian level of dystopia in many ways. Primarily because it will have infantilized the protected class so completely that it will be generally accepted that they need a police state to survive.

 

The first clue to this kind of thinking has already emerged. It is already widely accepted in the popular wisdom that black Americans calling themselves 'nigger' is neutral, but that a white American calling a black American 'nigger' is an amount of provocation that a black American is psychologically incapable of handling or ignoring. These kind of simple minded double standards are part of the politics of victimology and will always be around, and will continue to take root in weaker minds and flower into vines that strangle self-determination.

 

It's always in somebody's interest to suggest that 'minorities' are incapable of self-determination without paternalistic political intervention. And of course, it is in those interests to attempt to be racially deterministic. Just listen to them say how African history is inescapable for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Listen to them say how race and racism are an inescapable world altering system.

 

Law or Honor

Author Stephen Pinker makes the most sense to me. He says that most people in the world are socially functioning as societies of law or as societies of honor. Where you have legal codes, people are systemically equal as the law tends to treat all individuals the same, and prosecution of the law is more or less even. Where you have honor codes, people literally take the law into their own hands. This has always been the case in all of humanity throughout history and the trend of course in modern countries is towards a society of law.

 

However there are parts of the world where democratic institutions are defective, or simply not trusted. So what do people do? They take the law into their own hands. Mafia. Drug Cartels. Gangs. Religions. Cults. Charismatics. Secret Societies. Alternative Lifestyles. All kinds of people in small groups for all kinds of reasons decide that The Law doesn't apply to them and they will deliver the kind of justice they feel is most appropriate.

 

You talk about my mama? I'm going to kick your ass! You rape my sister? I don't care what the law says, I'm exacting revenge. You blaspheme my god? I don't care what the law says, I'm going to cut off your head. You insult my people? I don't care what the law says, I'm going to do what I'm going to do. You disrespect El Jefe? You will pay in blood. Honor codes are not random, but they are inconsistent and irregularly applied as compared to systems of law.

 

Now obviously  there are various mixes of these regimes. You can go into any neighborhood and ask the people what fraction of the democratic system of law they trust, and what do they think they need to take into their own hands. You'll get some combination. In the US, there are a significant fraction of people who have, for their own various reasons, decided against the legal system. For them, there is no justice in the justice system, so they opt out. They redefine justice as something to be delivered by 'the people' aka their honor codes. Unless and until they subject their codes to legal review and democratic vote, they can claim whatever moral high ground they wish, but honor codes can never and will never be democratic or embrace civil equality, and they will never be the law of the land.

 

Once you understand this phenomenon, all becomes clear. It is the central question facing American society today.

 

Markets Matter More

What do you think of when you think of diversity? Go ahead. Try and think of diversity. I bet you can't do it. How many kinds of diversity do you think there are? And when did 'variety' become 'diversity'? Are you upset that I'm talking about race? No you should be upset that you're *thinking* about race. But that's what 'diversity' was invented to do, add racial consciousness to your thinking about variety. 

So if you think about a demographic survey, you probably would put some 'diversity' questions on there, and you wouldn't end up with much that works in the real world of markets. You would just place yourself into the shallow but powerful world of identity politics, and naturally you would be angry. Now do you understand? So let's think a minute about markets and proper marketing.

When I started looking at demographics and psychographics in the 80s, I was supremely impressed by the work of Claritas, which has since been acquired by Nielsen. Claritas clustered demographic information, primarily by observing buying patterns by zipcode, into 54 clusters. They have extended the original PRIZM into two new clustering systems called P$YCLE and ConneXions.

The guy behind this Michael Weiss has probably made a couple fortunes. Here's a review of a book he wrote in 2000:

"Primary age group: 35-64... Median household income: $80,600... Median home value: $247,000... Predominant ideology: moderate Republican... Preferences: car phones, domestic wine, Land Rovers."

If this sounds like you, then you're a part of what's known as the "Winner's Circle" cluster. If not, then you probably fall into one of 61 other lifestyle clusters with names such as "Urban Gold Coast," "Pools & Patios," "God's Country," "Golden Ponds," and "Shotguns & Pickups." In The Clustered World, demographic detective Michael Weiss draws on the work of market research firm Claritas and its PRIZM cluster system to render a richly detailed view of the many neighborhoods and demographic segments that make up the United States. According to Weiss, the image of America as a melting pot is simply inaccurate--think salad bar, instead. He writes, "For a nation that's always valued community, this breakup of the mass market into balkanized population segments is as momentous as the collapse of Communism.... Today, the country's new motto should be 'E pluribus pluriba': 'Out of many, many.'"

In addition to explaining the cluster concept, Weiss shows how marketers can put clusters to work to understand consumers better and sell everything from college educations to Dodge Caravans. Weiss also looks beyond the U.S. population to lifestyle clusters in Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, South Africa, and Spain. Marketers and social observers will find this pointillist view incredibly useful and perhaps a little disturbing. The overriding truth behind The Clustered World is that, like it or not, "You are like your neighbors." And in case you're wondering what cluster you belong to, Weiss includes the URL for the Claritas Web site (yawyl.claritas.com), where you can enter your ZIP code to find out more about you and your neighbors. --Harry C. Edwards

So whereas far too many Americans have only learned to relate to each other in terms of race and gender and politics, things that really don't describe the actual choices we make in our lives, Weiss and others see how looking at what you actually purchase (thousands of times in you life) when you shop, are more accurate measures of your behavior.

This is why people who always try to identify others by these old static terms are poor beggars, but retailers get all the money. Retailers are really too smart to let race and gender be determining factors.

Here's my cluster:

Stoic Thought of the Day

It's actually very useful for the Stoic to think of how power is abused. Thinking about the promise of American liberty and the usefulness of a Constitution such as ours would be severely tested in the populist era of an Obama presidency followed by a Trump presidency. So I've come to the following conclusion:

Our hegemonic subjugations must be exceedingly sophisticated such that the most intelligent and capable among us interpret their most excellent achievements as liberating. Thus we sustain the moral propriety of liberty as meritocratic. So we will be fortunate if the most powerful men are not self-loathing or that when they are, that they will destroy with purpose. For to know that the most powerful men are not free would doom us all to chaos and the ambition of ruination.

So the other side of the coin is accepting the possibility that liberty is simply not sustainable in a meritocracy. That's what I'm imagining. 

The Downside Again

A couple years ago, when I was absorbing the wit and wisdom of Nutnfancy and developing my Peasant Theory (now mostly complete), I started The Downside Blog. The Downside Blog was kind of a prepperish journal of observing things that fail and processes that might fail in order for its readers to be cognizant of such things ahead of time. It turned out that a couple years ago was not a good time to start a new blog, and quite frankly I didn't have the patience for it. This morning I thought about that subject again. This time I'm considering it in the context of psychology.

Psychology is my daughter's major. I'd like her to consider cognitive science and so I gifted her the most recent book by Dan Ariely, Irrationally Yours. When she decided on that major, I found that I had a lot more to say about psychology than I thought.

What has always intrigued me about cognitive science has to do with the practical aspects of the acceptability of facts embedded in compute systems. If you are seeking an answer to a question and the answer is to be found in a computer, do you accept it? If you are seeking a solution to a problem and that solution lives in a process or institution that is unfamiliar to you, do you accept the agency of that process or institution? Generally, what are the factors that keep people from actually doing what they say they want to do, given the opportunity. You may be familiar with this cartoon which was a favorite amongst the software sales teams I used to hang out with in the late 90s. 

As I've mentioned, the reasons for my Peasant Theory were manifold. Chief among them was the idea that when people don't have trust for institutions, democratic and business institutions specifically, they tend towards tribalism. Organizationally, when flat, egalitarian organizations fail, people tend to fall back to hierarchical, authoritarian organizations. While I haven't been very specific about it, I tend to consider global trade and free markets as very flat and egalitarian, given the relative absence of regulatory capture and oligopoly. Also I should say that I have a great deal of confidence that hierarchical organizations don't scale. Towers of Babel fall, while suburbs do not. 

In considering the downside of things as I mused this morning, I thought about my friend whose job it is to run companies that have been criminally mismanaged. There's money in that business. As there is money in police and fire work, in soldiering and in disaster relief. There is an upside to the downside and this has been fascinating to me, but not for any perverse reason. In fact, I am rather wary of that tipping point, wondering if in various parts of our society that tipping point has been past, in which it is more profitable to destroy that which is weak than to reform it. 

Perhaps it is because I have been outside of the corporate loop in my small business that I sympathize with those who say there's something morally bereft in our leadership class. I wonder if the nation is being financialized when I think about AirBnB more capitalized than Marriott. 

I don't have much to recommend for what is becoming of my stoicism this morning. l have plucked my mind from the Matrix and living in truth without wishful thinking has filled me with a kind of sadness in regarding humanity that I cannot describe. I think perhaps that I have turned a melancholy corner that can only be remedied by fun and beauty, both to be found in ritual and discipline. But I think that will only be personal, or intimate at best. I am considering that looking over the horizon that I don't want to remain long in the solutions business. I don't want to profit as Cassandra, no matter how correct I might be. It is only too sad to understand the downside. 

Psychologically, I am curious as to how I will deal with this, precisely whether I will let go of the discipline of avoiding wishful thinking and creative solutions in order to be happy. I do not wish to retreat from society. Perhaps there is a spot of zen in my mind I will find in rituals of the body. 

Girl Scouts Aint Beanbag

A friend alerts me to this:

 

1. I’ve read on the Girl Scouts website that the current pension deficit issue will cause councils to see a 40% increase in pension expenses starting the day girl scout cookies go on sale, and a 62% increase over the next three years. According to the girl scout.org site “For many Girl Scout councils, this means that the pension expense will suck up money that would normally go toward operating expenses such as staff salaries and benefits, camp maintenance, outreach programs for at-risk girls, scholarship support for low-income girls, and general programming.“

I know you’re currently trying to get congress to grant legislation to help you but I haven’t heard of any progress on that so I’m under the impression that as it stands, cookie sales that previously went to scholarships and camp maintenance will now be used to pay pensions.  I’m reading of many historic camps that are being closed or sold.  It’s a concern for many reasons, but particularly because the girls in our troop were always able to say that cookie sales help at-risk girls and support community camps. We haven’t been able to get any verbiage to respond to people who will ask why girl scout camps are being sold and whether the councils will be able to support scholarships as they have in the past.

 

Girl Scouts is probably not a middle class organization any longer. It probably suffers in the same ways most formerly strong organizations have failed the formerly strong American middle class. We live in an upper middle class neighborhood and the Scout Leader of our girls troop is an aerospace project manager at Northrom Grumman. So this last year when the Last Kid sold her cookies, she made enough money for the troop to sponsor her and her mother on a three day Pacific cruise along with the other top sellers. Both of my daughters have had trips from LA to Disneyworld in Florida with most costs covered by their fundraising activities. In other words, we have a kickass troop, that is not only solvent but profitable. But I know that it kicks ass because we live in close proximity to the kinds of neighborhoods where fundraising is part of the culture and sponsorships are abundant, and because our leader is smart as a whip when it comes to managing time and money.

 

I think our story is very much like the story of America, where things taken for granted by a middle class simply are not economical any longer, and the things that work economically, like Priuses, are overpriced, over complicated and oversold. Nobody has the old drill press job that affords the family of four a new Chevy, because now gas mileage and crash protection are higher priorities than ever in our 'dont try this at home' society. And if that sounds like a crazy stretch of logic, it's because I've been thinking for a long time why America doesn't work the way it used to. The short answer is that we've all adopted what used to be upper class standards and are petrified at what we used to do in the unsupervised, unsafe good old days. How did your grandparents survive without ATM networks and a pocket full of credit cards? They just did. Today a cheeseburger cost 6 dollars. You practically need to finance it. How did your grandparents survive waiting 6 to 8 weeks for mail order delivery? They just did. Today you can't mail anything physical without activating multi-billion dollar logistics networks.

 

Our troop of Girl Scouts is run by somebody who understand those logistics networks, professionally. And I have no doubt we have at least one accountant looking over the books and figuring out how to finance our young ladies' activities. it aint beanbag. That's too bad. We need more beanbag. But can we accept that it's just beanbag and not a set of best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma business case to synergize a consistent set of community activities supporting our mission statement through cultural diversity for STEM awareness, retention and graduation?

My Stoic Journey: The Sound of No Hands Clapping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the back of my mind is the Gangstarr soundtrack. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But. Hitler.

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

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

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

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

Ferguson Burning

Ferguson burning is a good thing. 

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

When this shitstorm began, I wrote the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what happens when democratic institutions fail. 

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

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

Core America

As an adjunct to my Peasant Theory, I need to flesh out a couple things that are brought to mind by the phrases 'It's a big country' & 'It's a free country'. These items mostly arise was I get rather disspirited by clumsy comparisons between the US and various socialist Scandinavian nations. They also arise when, as is popular now in Quora, people talk about the experiences of recent immigrants dealing with the reality of America as contrasted with all of the myths they've heard all of their lives prior to coming here. 

On the first note, it immediately comes to mind that the examples of Denmark or Sweden make very little sense because Sweden is Sweden and its history is not arbitrarily swappable with that of the US. You can't hope to evolve one nation on the basis of an abstraction of another country's history. Sweden will never have it's George Washington, just as America will never have its Cromwell, nor will Canada have its Idi Amin. I'm not suggesting much in favor of a Great Man Theory, but this is a quick way to illustrate that political developments are not fungible commodities. Everyone in hindsight sees that al-Maliki in Iraq provided no Jacksonian Democracy for that nation. My point is, that which is possible (absent tyranny) is only possible due to the particular and transient confluences of political power. You cannot cut and paste policy from state to state. 

I've made this point differently before. In Little Old Scandinavia I said:

 Scandinavian countries are not good benchmarks for America. I'm not sure that they are for Europe either, but they always lie at the up end of some hockey stick of arbitrary predictors of the good life. In their socialist way, I suppose such things are predictable like cost of living increases mandated by the state, but they are also relatively small countries. Their isn't a lot of dynamism at work in those places. I tend to think of them as partial demographics. That is to say, anything you can say about Finland, you can say about any particular American suburb or university. It's small and isolated enough to be artificial.

It's that last item, small enough to be artificial, that keeps this in mind. There is a kind of social inertia which grows in correlation to the number of people involved in a single system. The US has many systems because we're more deeply embedded with independence and individualism as values. Small states can't afford that - for them it would be far too chaotic. And I see that this has implications in immigration policy - a smaller state would have a more difficult time without assimilationist policy, but 15 million new Americans is not going to turn this country on its head. Perhaps if they all went to South Dakota, but that's not what happens. 

Americans disperse and they go to their own ground. If you want to live in Watts, CA, you know what to expect. If you want to live in Billings Montana, you expect something different, and it will be different in Indianapolis and Miami. It's a free country. Find your place. 

I think it is the second note that is illuminating to everyone. People have found their place in America, lots of people in lots of places. And while there can be said to be some regular pattern to the waves and generations of ethnic majorities in various Brooklyn neighborhoods over the years, the Irish will have done it differently than the Jews. The American mainstream becomes less meaningful culturally, but the core of American values becomes more important as the proliferation of laws becomes more insidious. We have a Constitution and that core is critical, even as we absorb more and more diversity. It must be a core of law, you see. 

It is this core, the Constitution, serving as a benchmark of Western Civilization, that must resonate. I am confident that it does, because within the broad inertial society of the Peasants, the Slice and the Ruling Class, that which is Constitutional is very well established and very well funded. Few people expect that which most needs doing to keep America strong is in fact, unconstitutional. We are interestingly diverse and divided and even awkwardly and stupidly divisive at times. But we Americans are not fundamentally perverse. We go with the Constitutional flow. 

That flow is not going Progressive or Socialist or Fascist or any more than 10 points from the center. Within that core is an iron center, a hardcore America. And whether or not we admit it or take it for granted, that's not moving. It will be there and remain attractive because it is aligned with our best understanding of ourselves - an understanding that is sufficiently profound to withstand the ambitions of the world's wealthiest and most powerful institutions which seek out and defend the shelter that the American Constitution affords. 

In the coming inflation, this will be tested. And even in decline and remission, the core of America will remain. 

The Peasant Epicurean Diet

One day two weeks ago I threw out my back. Nothing serious but I'm so stupid that I put heat on it instead of ice and ended up having to go back the the chiropractor twice more than it usually takes. You see, once a year I do this, but this is the first time I've done it during summer beach volleyball season. At 53, I'm the oldest dude on our regular court (but still have the highest vertical), and this might be my final season. I've got a lot of work done in my home office this year and I think all the sitting is catching up to me.

My chiro and I had some good conversations. He's about the same age and he reminds me of the Chinese kid from Oceans Eleven. The 'Grease Man'. He's one of those lightweight small guys that are all sinew and muscle and flexibility. Yeah he does ultra-triatholons. I used to have a very strong 'core' before pilates and big rubber balls came into fashion. That's because my primary sport in highschool was springboard diving. I retain my good posture and I never destroyed anything in particular except my gut.  

He recommended I do 'movement', meaning exercise, and it worked. Simple stuff like squats and bends that made me hurt and pant for a week. Now I can do it without much problem, especially since my back pain is done. He also recommended The Paleo Diet. I whipped out my iPhone and took a picuture of the ISBN number on his copy, told the Spousal Unit and she said just figure it out, you don't need to buy the book. Besides, I already know what I eat that I could do better at. 

For the past six months or so, I've been making a concerted effort to eat better lunches. And so I have moved through the deli section and bought a set of cutting boards. I've developed a taste for soprassetta and pepper jack cheese which are two new additions to my lifelong love of deli. I've also been consuming a lot of gourmet potato chips. I cannot resist Kettle Maple Bacon. Who could? But I turned a corner this summer when I realized that I could make a better ceasar salad.

Just this past weekend, I found myself at a joint called DTLA Cheese in the Grand Central Market. There, with Paleo fundamentals on my mind, I thought it would be cool to eat as I imagined most working class men in the 1920s ate, with some meat, fruit and cheese wrapped up in a handkerchief. So I got myself a chunk of hard sheep cheese called Fiore Sardo and a fat square of fennel salami called Finocchiona. The guy at the counter wrapped it up in special paper and put it in a brown bag for me. 10 bucks, and it lasted longer than lunch. 

Now I'm not a cook. Not at all. My mother's kitchen was strictly a place for me to wash dishes and fix peanut butter and jelly and Nestle's Quik. I never touched the stove except for giant Saturday morning breakfast. So I know my eggs and sausages, but that's about it. Now I am having emerging behaviors about kitchen propriety that may very well stress my marriage. This combination of disciplines around food and movement I am integrating into my life, I thought you might like to come along.

So the first thing you need to know are the broad outlines of what I am calling the Peasant Epicurean Diet. It is designed for an upper middle class snot such as myself with rather paleo attitudes about grooming and housework and all that. I'm a man's man who works at a damnable keyboard all day long. Let my role model be a cross between Rudyard Kipling and a player to be named later. In short, I am going to use expensive ingredients because I dig flavor - that's the epicurean part. But I'm also going to use very simple raw ingredients that need a minimum of preparation, that's the peasant part.

Let me put one more image into your head. Back when I was 19, I worked at a retail store. Teamster Union shop. There was this pale skinny kid from Czechoslovakia who worked there. My friend Clave Marks could speak fractional Russian and Czech, but not much enough to have a conversation. The kid, every day, came up to the lunch room and ate out of a grocery bag. Groceries! Like an onion, an apple, a head of lettuce. Dude could fill up for a dollar. 

--

The first staple of this diet is deli meat. The second staple is cheese. The third is romaine lettuce. The fourth is water. 

Instrumentally, I have a big kitchen knife (Henkels I think - I've had it for 22 years) and a stack of pie tins. That's right. You see the signature meal I've been eating is a Man Lunch. That means I can throw this thing together in about 5 minutes. I don't know about you but when I had no cooking skills and I jump off the keyboard to eat, I want to eat now. I'm thinking the wait at the drive through is a good deal compared to figuring out something in my wife's kitchen. The most frightful apspect of this involves digging through a refrigerator that is (dis)organized according to principles that make no sense whatsoever to me. So I needed my own section of the refrigerator. Meats. Cheeses. Bottled water.

Now since I'm going to continue in this thread for a while as I develop the food and movement discipline, I realize I ought to just use today as a benchmark and sample day. How about that?

Today, my after morning poop weight is 210.6. Today's man lunch was, I think, pure Peasant Epicurean - let's call it PE - as follows.

1 dozen slices of Gallo sliced salami.
2 slices of pepper jack
1 half dozen strawberries
2 dozen or so green seedless grapes.
12 oz bottle of Pelligrino

All except the water goes into a pie tin. I use a hand towel, not napkins. 

--

This morning I had no breakfast, but it's going to go something like this as time goes on.

Tea. Always tea. Simple, pure. Use Dasani bottled water and English Breafast grind Earl Gray loose tea. I get mine from the local Japanese supermarket.  

2 Boiled eggs. 2 Microwave sausage. 

That's it. Boom. 

The Environment of Sacrifice

I have a difficult time with atheists and Progressives. Not because I 'am a Conservative' but because I'm a student of history and I have a serious appreciation for thinking which has already been done, with skepticism against that which is yet to come. Most atheists and Progressives I come in contact with always seem at the ready to crowdsource their latest meme against the history of mankind that has brought us the status quo. 

The other day, somebody in one of the streams I read argued briefly that people who care not for nuclear energy or fracking logically care not for the prevention of AGW. I don't care one way or another about those particulars because I already know that the rich and powerful will still live better than those who are not, and my plan is to court the rich and powerful. You know, in the same way that doctors who 'cure cancer' do, within the institutional boundaries of well-capitalized wishful thinking. IE Big Technology on the verge of being appreciated as Magic by them who don't know. Poor blighters.

But as always, I am drawn to pointing out the unexpected consistencies as well as the studied hypocrisies of wishful thinking and belief in magic. So it occurred to me that atheists and Progressives, appropriately qualified, are pragmatic utilitarians, and also predictably humanist. As such they are likely to eschew human sacrifice of virgins in order to order good karma from the Gods, nevertheless they are quite willing that we all suffer a bit in particular to progress a step in general. So if you ask an atheist whether we should all pray for peace, they'll huff dismissively at you and tell you to go through the pain of researching the conflict (say in Gaza) and to then agitate appropriately to the proper authorities, especially by not buying Sodastream or giving any credibility to laws originating in the Torah. Similarly if you asked Progressives if a dude like me ought to by an economically inefficient Prius to make my symbolic obeisance to the current balance of atmospheric gasses, they will assert so in a hurry. But what other kinds of sacrifices are popular with these sorts which make about as much sense as burning sheep guts in effigy to the Great Spirit? 

I think this will be my new course of wry stoic study. 

In order to do so, I will assert some of what I assert might have been Seneca's Rules.

#1. If it works for the rich and powerful, it will work for you given that you are sufficiently rich and powerful. 

The obvious corollary to this is that since people still want to be rich and powerful, all the miracle cures peddled to the poor and weak don't actually work. If they did, nobody would have a need or reason to become rich and powerful. Doesn't that make perfect sense to you? It does to me. Which is why I keep wondering what motivates Progressives in particular to endlessly come up with shortcuts toward humanistic utopias in their bleatings. You see in all of this I'm also thinking very seriously that I may very well be rich already and just don't know it - and therefore am paying too much attention to things beneath my consideration as a Progressive knee-jerk reaction. (Yes I still possess such impulses, masked as they are as moral sentiments). (Or should I call them sentiments masked as moral impulses? )) It's probably more accurate to say that we are all merely middle-class dreaming up ways for the poor to become middle-class and have no idea what really works in this world - but are merely rearranging furniture in a rented house for the benefit of our poor cousins, and restraining our tongues civilly at the Thanksgiving table. Either way..

What if the horrors of fracking are what is required for the diesel fuel that moves all the freight across the country so that poor people can shop at the supermarket instead of grow, shuck, and bake their own cornbread? What if we could sacrifice the environement of North Dakota so that everybody else in the Lower 48 can continue taking public transportation to the free health clinics? Now I haven't connected those particular dots, but you're getting the picture. No matter what you think about gluten free bread, it comes in paper or plastic bags. Trees or oil. Obviously there are third ways that work out nicely and it might actually be more economical for the local supermarket to give away free hemp shopping bags than all those previous disposable recyclables. But also maybe not - maybe it's just as uneconomical as the gas mileage you supposedly get on a hybrid Toyota Prius over a gasoline engine Honda Civic. 

This circles back to my Peasant Theory, which is something of an elaborate critique on the American post-war economy and consumer lifestyle that is at once making our cities both comfortable and idiot-proof. 

 

Voluntary Negrosis & the Treachery of Black Images

Any testiment that begins with the words 'As a black man, I..' is one that should raise eyebrows of skepticism. That is not because there is something wrong with the tribes invoked, but because what follows is inevitably trying to represent something that may or may not exist. I'm not saying that blackness doesn't exist, rather I'm saying that perhaps it only exists in the confession. In other words, the only thing that is universally true about blackness is that it begins with voluntary negrosis, the conscious act of making oneself darker than they are - an action of conformity, of taking a particular fork in the road of identity, a racial construction in progress.

I understand that there is no black American cultural orthodoxy because that racial construction is always in process, often at the Peasant level. (c.f. 'ratchet'). There are recognizable forms. In music, there is R&B, Gospel, Blues, Jazz and Hiphop. Within those forms there are better and worse examples, and of course the influence of these cultural inventions is wide and deep. A lot of people get wrapped around various axels of authenticity but no one dares say "Miles Davis IS Jazz". What Mahalia Jackson sung may be the best example of Gospel, but nobody gets to say that all gospel singers since her are lesser shades of black. 

This all comes to mind in the context of the complaints of a number of black American college students managing the microaggressions that have come to give rise to their profiles in recent weeks. Today, the Kwaku network produced "I Too Am Harvard", with its hard bitten confessions. Not long before that, UCLA Law students pleaded their discomforts and receive this kind of response from the sympathetic.

There is, of course, some intellectual tradition in all of this that is not vapid or silly. That's because the tradition is written as literature. It would have been nice to see some mugshots with a bit more creativity, though I certainly wonder if the dude in the Alpha jersey isn't mocking himself all hoodified. Be that as it may, one hopes that the literary tradition can indeed survive Tumbler and YouTube as it takes its hits today by kids who think they represent. 

Technology, Diverse Empowerment & Slavish Dependency

I went to a store. I can’t remember the name of the store or what I was buying there, but what I remembered was that there was music. There shouldn’t have been music in this store, there should have been Muzak. But today’s Muzak is all the same kind of confused soft rock & roll. Stuff like Goyte.  

Technology allows Stuff Like Goyte, something catchy, simple, overexposed and annoying to be called entertainment because of what? A lack of discrimination. When you allow technology to ‘empower’ the ordinary Joe, then you have to understand that the ordinary Joe will exploit the opportunity at every turn. That’s how we know technology has value, because people use it to their advantage. And because they do it will be all in your face until you force it away or turn away yourself. If you want to immerse yourself in the creativity of the common man, this is your era. You have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Vines and dozens of other social media services.  You will have a diverse experience. You will see everybody's point of view, and you'll never have to decide. You'll never have to sacrifice. You'll never have to discriminate. Social media presents perfect empathy for everyone. All you do is open your ears and eyes and every possible point of view is represented. It is a cornucopia of the common. 

If you want quality, then work is required. More work than ever before. 

It's hard to imagine that Beethoven's deafness was a horrible defect. He could certainly hear the music in his head with no distractions whatsoever. The distractions of common knowledge and conventional wisdom are pervasive today. Even colleges are pervasive. You can get a lot of intelligent opinion through computer mediated communications. But once you step above the common, it becomes awfully difficult to determine if what you are finding is actual. Once again, there is technology which aids and abets the intelligent, chatting class. If you choose to find out the series of events surrounding the burning of the Amerian Embassy in Libya and the murders of its officers, you will hear every theory possible. What actually happened would be a state secret, but you'll have all the smart theories, plus there will be some counterintelligence planted in that swirl of narrative as well. 

We are entering a post-industrial twilight in which the ability to see clearly, while everyone's goal, becomes increasingly difficult as we peer through kaliedescopes of computed media. But this shouldn't come as a surprise. When everyone has a cell phone, making long distance calls is no longer an elite activity. When everyone gets to learn to read and write at public school for free, it's harder to write the Great American Novel. When everybody tries to run like Jesse Owens, it's harder to actually win gold at the Olympic Games. Technology has raised the bar for everyone. Citius. Altius. Fortius.

Our freedoms are all relative. What we can do is limited by the context in which we do it.

When I was younger, there was an expression of contempt in the phrase 'cotton-picking' as in "get your cotton-picking hands off me". It's something you don't hear much these days. A machine picks cotton and so that which was menial labor at great cost to the suppleness of the human hand, is now obviated. Nobody has cotton-picking hands any longer. Those people are out of work. So they had to do something more sophisticated that a machine can't do. We didn't think a computer could beat a grand master in chess, but we were wrong, and today, technology can't come close to performing ballet. What elevates us as humans becomes more and more important as technology replaces human work, but also as it empowers the least of us.  We have to discriminate more about what is worth knowing when anybody with a Google device can ask questions and get reasonable answers in seconds. We have to discriminate more about what is worth doing when labor can be mechanized and automated. These are the new lines of class.

In 1964 if you had a car with 200 horsepower and a two-way radio smaller than a shoe, you could have been James Bond. Today if you have that, you're more like Maxwell Smart. There is nothing quite so marking of class these days as the man who walks around in public with a bluetooth earpiece affixed. Ten years ago it was awesome, now it's only awesome in Bulgaria. I have been on the cutting edge of information technology for my entire career; it is my career. I am acutely aware of how to discriminate when it comes to accepting the answers given to any question by a computer. Decision support is my job. And I know when money is aptly spent to support decisions by making the best use of compute power and when it is a waste of time and expense. I know when a computer aided decision augments human intelligence and when it replaces it. I can tell the difference between collaboration with compute resources and slavish dependence. Sometimes the cotton-picker goes free to study ballet, sometimes he gets demoted in pay to someone who merely tends to the machine that replaced him. Sometimes the common man uses his iPad to make the music in his head, sometimes he becomes a prisoner of the iTunes store and can only use the technology to feed a consuming habit. 

Here at Cobb, I have made use of the terms gearhead, hacker and maker. This is the hierarchy in the post-industrial world. Because more of what our contemporary economies produce can be accomplished by smaller groups of people aided by compute power, the goods and services of our economies can be appreciated, modified and created more by individuals. No small group of men could build a railroad, but a small group of programmers could build a Facebook. But even the gearhead is advanced beyond the mere consumer or someone outside of the market altogether. Those who consume or aim to consume cannot afford to discriminate, figuratively or literally. They are as captive as ever before and cannot escape the attractions of Stuff Like Goyte. They are in the mass market, a growing global middle class in the billions. We have uplifted many more than ever before in human history. This *is* a global proletariate being born. But they will be united only by their discriminations because the very diversity of their undisciplined consumption will leave them behind. Why learn English, the language of computer programming and air traffic control, if Wikipedia comes automatically translated into your native idiom? Why learn Math if Siri will add numbers for you? Why learn Piano when Goyte is played wherever you walk? What is the point of being an extraordinarily talented human when you can be an ordinary Joe with extraordinary gifts provided to you by technology? Why pick cotton?

I keep in mind, ever since 9/11/2001, that all systems fail, that is all except pain receptors in the human body. All technology, all systems are designed to operate within certain environmental tolerances for a specified period of time. Stress those tolerances and snap, crackle, pop: system down. Makers are stressing those tolerances every day because they want what they build to exceed one or more of them. Hackers are stressing them to find the limits and gearheads make it their business to know the factors. Consumers and those wishing to consume are just trying to get a ride in the boat, trusting souls. For a maker and hacker and gearhead, (I am all three depending on the target), I want to experience the balance. I create for my consumers to the level of their expertise to enable them to do what I do with my 20 year headstart. That's a product; that's the enablement, the empowerment, the new economy. I could make them slavishly dependent but I choose not to. I want the product to educate as well. I want its guts to be transparent, so that when it fails, all can see how to fix it. This is a principle of integrity that can easily be ignored. It is disrespectful at best, and coercively entrapping and enslaving at bottom. It is the Muzak that cannot be switched off. It is ultimately the company town, the slave plantation whose master rejects the liberating cotton gin. And yet in human skill and nurtured talent is the ability to remain free of such all encompassing systems. When they fail, it is what humans must fall back on anyway. So we should always be mindful of what skills and talents and abilities we give up for the convenience and empowerment of technology.

Closing, I present once again, the irony inherent in our drive to empower through machines. I think it is driven primarily from our fundamental unwillingness to discriminate against people. We are able to empower through devices because of a basic failure to empower through human character. We punt responsibility to machines because we are unwilling to give the appropriate training and responsibility to human labor. In some cases, for picking cotton, that is the proper way to go. In many more cases than we care to examine in these days of social media, we are forgoing human judgment for the sake of empowerment of the indiscriminate masses. We create mass media with mass entertainment and generate Stuff Like Goyte. We pollute investigations with counterintelligence and cults of personality in order to sheild failures of judgment of the elites. We build obfuscating products and interminable co-dependent service contracts. We make things that function against standards.

I think the solution to this problem is found in the drive to embue ourselves with organic skills, to face life off the grid and make ourselves antifragile to the failures of systems. I think socially we should aim for Victorian relationships - to understand with clarity the necessities of life and to judge and discriminate people based upon their ability and willingness to provide them for themselves in all ways. I think we will find that as we reach for the gold medal achievements in life, we will find ourself more dependent on securing products and services from people who live at the silver level. That in order to avoid the catastrophe of humans dependent on systems whose failure is opaque to them in scope and time, that humans must depend on other humans whose capabilities are quite simply transparent to humans. Where only gearheads, hackers and makers can identify the stresses on systems, all of us know what tears mean.

I should like to go to a store where a woman plays a piano. Wouldn't you?

 

No Country for Young Chickens

Over the past year or so, having been freed of the necessity of care of a certain sort, I have endeavored to find the moral focus on the American Left to see whether or not it is true. My first stop was the investigation of the moral precepts of Socialism itself. What I discovered is that the American Left isn't truly socialist in any way that would be considered respectable by the likes of George Orwell. And I pretty much left it at that. 

These days I find that the worst bricks thrown at capitalism are that it is .. well I can't find a consistent set of descriptions outside of the adjective 'evil'. But it is clear to me that American capitalism has been socialized quite enough. Says me, the guy with the ACA healthcare. But if there is any consistency to be expected, then the bricks shold be thrown at the BRICs. I mean it's not as if Russia and India haven't been industrialized for quite enough time. Then why has their capitalism made a middle class as large and prosperous as our capitalism has made our middle class? Same thing goes for China and Brazil.So while discussing the 'undemocracy' of capitalism. I got the following: 

Third off we are already facing more dire straits than just a loss of democracy. Capitalism as we know it today is, quite literally, killing the biosphere and once that happens we are all fucked beyond words. It is kill or be killed and quite frankly I'd rather NOT be cursed by my ancestors & descendants for coming up with fancy sophistry to justify cowardly inaction and apathy.

My riposte went as follows:

Urban living is cowardly inaction and apathy. Dependence upon the government creation of services funded by usurious taxation of megacorporations that build polluting convenience is the essential neoliberal modus operandi. Neoliberals as well as most of the American Left are too nearsighted and morally ambiguous to sustain a real socialist revolution. Aside from that, their masses are only marginally skilled to handle urban living (thus their agenda), and have no real political pull from traditional self-sustaining rural peasants. 

In other words neoliberals ask Whole Foods to 'do no evil' and eschew learning how to raise their own damned chickens, because no liberal wants chickens in their backyard. They'd rather so sitins at the FDA over salmonella scares. (Not that they could identify it with a microscope). 

It is not 'capitalism' that is polluting the biosphere, it is the incompetency of the masses to be self-sustaining that generates the demand for mass-production of staples in the urban metropolitan model. If GM wasn't privately held but publicly held, that wouldn't make their automobiles less polluting. So long as the left requires a 'living wage' instead of 'life skills', then it accelerates dependence on mass production. 

The Neoliberal and Progressive agenda stops far short of socialist revolution to the transfer of wealth (not the means of production) into jury-rigged urban survival schemes. For them, the purpose of government is to provide a means of regulating and suing the drug companies they need for the free health care they need because their constituencies know nothing of midwifery or home remedies. For them, the purpose of government is to provide a means of building schools that teach how to socialize into urban environments because their constituencies know nothing of growing vegetables, repairing clothing, home repair or electricity. For them the purpose of government is to provide a greased slide from any sort of crippling handicap directly into First World living standards and life expectancy in one generation with all the affirmative actions necessary. Because science. There's your fancy sophistry. Destroy independent living, regulate everything, charge taxes.

I'll leave it as I wrote it. But as I excrept in the future I will bring up the idea of 'equality' in that bit about affirmative actions which also has tangents to The American Price. And I also like the idea of using the term 'independent living' rather than 'liberty' because that's what I mean by liberty. I mean yeoman-farmer, country squire, family compound, shabby gentility and organic self-sustained hunting, fishing, hiking, carpentry & small town values. I mean all the things I can do, unregulated, unhamstrung by government interventions. Me and my 700 Facebook friends living somewhere in one town in Texas. I mean a jurisdiction that never needs more law than the Constitution provided as of its latest Amendment, and laws that can be effectively abstracted in 1000 words or less. 

But the problem is urban living isn't it?

I've worked in all the major US cities, and I know that Seattle and San Francisco like their homeless more than the rest of us. They give way to them rather like the attitude towards cows in Madras. But the citadel of the city is no place for people with no skills. Such people will never be independent begging for scraps, no matter how well laid out and tax deductable those charitable donations may be. The point of the city is to aggregate the most complex and cosmopolitan of us in our arcane specialties abetted by a matrix of specialty services. Pizza by the slice, as Clay Shirky explains, is only a profitable enterprise with a certain urban density. (As is begging). But you cannot put affordable housing in the CBD - it is a contradiction in terms. The yuppies will always win in their gentrifications. That's the point of it being a city; it's where money and sophistication go. The attempt to make cities idiot proof simply undermines them. 

The American Left place little faith in corporations and yet they need them to fund their projects. The extent to which they feel morally compelled determines how much they are willing to tax, but it doesn't address the fundamental question of sustainability. It is not cost effective to have low skilled people in high density areas. It does not make sense to mass produce and ship goods to cities in the way we distribute retail goods. It does not make sense to morally justify wealth transfers to establish national standards for the short term, if you are interested in the biosphere. It does not make sense to create demand for mass produced goods that contribute to pollution when people can be trained to provide for themselves.  

That White Backpack

Many years ago there was a set of questions or observations put together by a researcher by the name of Peggy McIntosh. You can look her up, but the gist of McIntosh is that her 'invisible knapsack' meme made her a star in the days before people figured out how to monetize meme-creation. She ended up resenting the popularity of her meme and withdrew support from the ideas percolating around them. But she still gets a lot of credit for the phrase 'white privilege' and of course 'white male privilege'.

I just dipped into some doo surrounding one of the derivative scoldings authored by a dude named John Scalzi, a scifi writer who can be easily described as an Ohio State fan. If you don't understand anything about Ohio State fans let me try to explain. There are several things that can be said about folks from Ohio, and in my experience the best three adjectives are, 'friendly', 'provincial' and 'self-conscious'. I really don't want to get into all that. Take my word, if you can understand that Ohio State fans believe themselves at once to be the greatest and most unpretentious people in America then you have an idea of where I'm ultimately going.

Scalzi wrote a lovely set of sci-fi war stories in a set known as the Old Man's War series. I read the first and found it enjoyable but not particularly deep. Scalzi's protagonist is existentially simple - like a second string lineman for the Buckeyes. You know exactly what to expect in the wholesome department. But over at his blog he decided to block for Peggy McIntosh by writing an essay with a videogame analogy called 'Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is'. I once knew a guy who used to play the role of a white boy. This meant that he spent a bit of extra energy convincing people he thought needed convincing that even though he was a white boy, he could X. I leave defining the full set of X to you so you can explore your own ideas by offering one member of the set: eat spicy foreign food. 

Currently, I am under the influence of this bit of studied wit about post-literacy. I find it brilliant as it underscores what I have noticed about failures of modernity in the West and the increasingly serious farce of multicultural education. Additionally, I sense that this ties in with the higher level debate about modernity itself, perhaps expressed best as Lyotard vs Giddens, but I really don't have time for all that. Still I cannot deny the influence as I continue to find Dickens fascinating and occasionally refine my Peasant Theory. 

So I respond to Scalzi: Imagine a game called 'White Male Battle Royale' in which white males were thrown into a ring and forced to compete for a panel of judges. Scalzi emerges as champion with his essay (which tells you something about the judges) and raises his fists in triumph, but not too high. There I sit watching this channel on television and I change it, wondering why I watched it in the first place.

Scalzi did address who the hell he was supposed to be writing that essay for in a subsequent follow up, but that didn't seem particularly compelling. On the whole all of this white privilege backpacking, repacking and unpacking seems to be as pointless and significant, boring and compelling as Ohio State football.  Or football. Or sports. Or entertainment. 

It's difficult for me to assess what the point of making Scalzi's point is, or actually the point of my critique. Perhaps both of us have too much time on our hands.

Nah. That's too easy an exit. What I mean to say is that Scalzi is wasting time on a morally self-congratulatory mission which involves foolish white guilt of the sort that actually undermines modern society by advancing arguments about identity which have nothing whatsoever to do with the presence or absence of justice. 

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The Blue Zone

When I was a kid, there were no blue zones and all of the curbs at the curb were curbs, not wheelchair ramps. One day when I was 19 years old making 3.25 an hour at the local department store, I remember a lady driving a brand spanking new Mercedes-Benz through the parking lot at about 3 mph. She had a blue piece of plastic hanging from her rear view mirror that said she could park in the blue zone. So she did, and walked into the store. Right about that time, I was driving a 1968 Karmann Ghia with no insurance and no brake pads. The irony stuck.

Obviously rich people get Mercedes, but rich decrepit people with no driving skills who get Mercedes and privileged parking spots grated on my nerves. Why? Because when I was 19 years old living in what we used to call a 'redlined' neighborhood, I knew that I was being punished for being young and she was being rewarded for being old. I hated the insurance industry with a passion that only young ignorant boys can sustain. All these old farts from rich neighborhoods get discounts on their premiums because they never drive fast. Me and my cohort have to suffer the racial calculations of the good hands people. Yeah me and my cohort not my cohort and I, not subjects, objects.

I still think there is something wrong with America specifically engineered by the Baby Boom, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Actually, I recognize all kinds of blue zones, I just don't know what to think about them. Consider this story about artisan toast. I'm not mad that people are making money off hipster crap, and I'm not mad that there are mentally ill people who manage to be functional in society. I'm mad that life keeps getting easier for all classes of marginally competent people. I cannot help but observing the conclusion that society gets softer, and the profit incentive for making people dependent on blue zone after blue zone starts to dominate. Today, you and I both know that for an extra ten grand, that Mercedes has the ability to parallel park itself.

I deal with this dilemma in concert with another I'll call 'Crowding Out Quality' but I'll deal with that in another post. It's just another unresolved aspect of the tradeoffs between modernism and self-sufficiency. I think I'll always give the nod to self-sufficiency.

The conversation came up with my daughter. She saw one of those new three-wheeled motorcycles and she thought it was really cool. But I disagreed and thought it was a poor development. She argued that it is good that they made a new kind of motorcycle that would allow more people to ride. I argued that the roads would be less safe because the people riding them would have less skill than old school motorcyclists. But perhaps the new trikes would be more safe and would indeed require less skill. Wouldn't that be an improvement? I don't know. That's why this is a dilemma for me.

I've got to find some kind of simple test that helps me determine whether it's better or worse when new processes or inventions allow lower skilled people to function in a normal capacity. What do you think? How many blue zones should we create?

The Human Bits

The other day I was deeply engaged in a 2A argument and the question of the virtue of police officers came into focus. Someone suggested that he shouldn't have to require officers to be personally virtuous, that the proper police department would generate the appropriate results.

I immediately thought that doesn't make sense - a police department that produces Robocop or Mark Fuhrman or stop & frisk or broken windows policies undermines the trust of the communities they are supposed to serve. Upon further reflection I could concede the point, and yet an even more stark defense of my position arose.

In the first place, I myself find it useless to extend general virtues onto the victors of certain contests simply because they win. This comes to mind generally for sports. Last year's Tour de France raised the question of why there isn't a women's equivalent. The origins of the Tour were to inspire manly virtues in the French population in the wake of WW1. And yet today's cyclists, despite their perserverance, endurance and sportsmanship hardly evoke much of the warrior mystique. And even against the scandal of Lance Armstrong and others, I am rather hard pressed to see the winner of the Tour de France as much else other than the winner of the Tour de France. Thus according to the policy of the police department all appropriate benchmarks are applied to determine that best officer. The best policeman may very well simply be the one who makes the most arrests or solves the most murders. The best banker the one who makes the most money for the bank - the ideal institutional member, fulfills the mission of the institutional charter. 

So doesn't the Progressive or liberal structuralist inculcate human values into the organizations and institutions of society? I think they do - I think they expect that fidelity to institutional rules imbue the follower with the values of the organization, which are some fraction of the idealized values for humanity itself. When you value the mores of the Red Cross, then your participation under its structure rubs off positively on you.  When I was a Progressive, I would stress the institutional because only the institution transcends the slipshoddities of the individual and the meanderings of the masses. If you wanted peace, for example, it wasn't sufficient in my mind to have peaceful individuals. The only real peace was a peace permanently moderated by an institution. Let people do what they will, but slam them against the walls of the virutous institution and you will have the values of the institution expressed. 

However, my current thinking about the dynamism of individuals and societies mitigates against my hopes for institutions, as well as my aversion to the idea that men are mostly empty and mostly need to be (ful)filled via their loyalty to institutions, be they churches, businesses or governments. And my friend correctly argued that it is a conservative principle for people to possess virtue, and that the virtue of the people that make any institution worthy of respect and loyalty. Although there is some balancing required, I think Kafka would agree with me.  

As I look at this dynamic I see a conflict between the aims of civilization and the aims of society.

Civilization, according to Socrates is the organized specialization of labor. It is the specialization of labor that creates the interdependence of the farmer to the distributor to the marketer to the consumer. Each participates in such a way that the individual's privacy is maintained and scrutiny is not required. IE I do what I do in my specialization and I get enough renumeration from that. As a stevedore I do not have to be as articulate as a teacher. As a teacher I do not have to be as physically fit as a stevedore. They they can fulfill their role in civilization and 'be all that they can be' within the context of that civic duty. But they do not fulfill their human potential, they suffer the alienation that ultimately comes from their very specialization. The system does not recognize what else that individual is outside of their job, or as the cliche goes "I don't pay you to think".

In society on the other hand, we look to our commonalities and make calls on matters of character and deportment. Society is more about fitting in. We want the stevedore to wash his hands before coming to the table. We want the teacher to accept that everyone is not her student. We look through society's lens at more of the person in the context of their living life, rather than their civic participation that helps the world go 'round. When these people sit down at my dinner table, it is not enough that they tell me that their school is top ranked or that the harbor pulled in more freight this year. 

So how do I reconcile the idea that some people's virtues matter and others do not? In fact, this is what I do according to my Peasant Theory. I do not expect that the overwhelming majority of people, the Peasantry, exhibit any particular decorum. I merely expect that they are provincial and spend most of their energy taking care of themselves and their families and property. It doesn't surprise me that they are vulgar and not diplomatic. I do not insist that they adopt 'policitical correctness'. That is because whatever damage they do, they do locally. As leaders of their own families and property, their misbehavior brings retribution upon their own heads and no more. It is for the professional class, The Slice, the Managerials to have the decorum apporpriate to the institutions they operate. In my view, only 30% of the population requires higher education - as they are the Slice, the Alternative Slice, the Anti-Slice and all such heirs apparent. The Ruling Class must have the wisdom of the ages and all such virtues required for understanding the conduct of human business, and they, outnumbered by their knighthood must command the respect of that powerful Slice class. The corruption of the Ruling Class spells doom for civilization. 

In short, the more responsibility you have for society, the more you should possess virtue. This is essential to humanism as I see it. But let us consider the prospects for liberty.

Let us presume that the distribution of the talents virtues of the leadership are unpredictably random in the human population. I use the metaphor of slavery in this regard. The slave will ultimately recognize that he is a slave, whether or not he is ever educated in the nature and history of slavery.  If it is possible for any slave or peasant to be virtuous and to accomplish the understanding of The Slice or even of the Rulers, then they should absolutely have the right to opt out of compliance with organziations put in place to institutionalize the values of the Ruling Class and to leverage civilization. This is, to me the essence of liberty, to limit the panoptics and influence of the institutions of the ruling class in order that every man might fulfill his human potential outside of those institutions. Imagine you are as strong as a stevedore and smart as a teacher and diplomatic to boot. You should be free to opt out of Slice or Ruling Class obligations Consequently, the benefits of institutional membership should be in your Logarithmic Shadow, ie ignored as beneath you. You should be queer or bohemian or hermetic or organic. You should not take up a seat in public school, and you shouldn't have bagboys take your groceries out to your car for you. You should be a man of independent means and your house it's own institution. You should be neither agent nor subject, you should be free.

It is this sort of free man who takes it upon himself to serve dutifully in the Slice or lead dutifully in the Ruling Class. We presuppose that there will be enough volunteers to take up the Mantle. So I conclude that higher standards of virtue must be applied to individuals commensurate with their responsibility over others in their social and functional roles. However the size and scope of institutions must be limited against monopoly and oligopoly. Thus the leverage of the institution and the necessity of its function should not outstrip its ability to be reformed. No institution should be too big to fail, and the failure of any institution should not cripple society but directionally straighten it.  

The risk against tolitarianism is the presumption that powerful institutions which compel obediance to their members is that legitimate human values and virtues of the organization are in conflict with those of smaller human groups. The more powerful the institution the more it creates a chicken-egg situation of which values should predominate. Crossing the organization can cause irreperable harm ot a community which depends on the organizational function. These smaller human groups, these minorities, these communities should not be sacrificed. Certainly free men have the right to assembly, to create their own small institutions independent of those larger more powerful ones. 

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Trust and the Hacker
James Baldwin wrote that the downside of being a professional is understanding the underside of one's profession. The displeasure of The Slice is more consequential because they understand how the organization they run can be undermined - how their weaknesses can be exploited, or indeed how the organaization's strengths can be abused.  So it comes as no surprise that we expect professionals to swear oaths of loyalty to be virtuous themselves. 

It is therefore, and once again, the virtue of those capable of subverting that keeps the Slice, the profession moral. This is especially notable in the matter of computer security as more of our human institutions attempt to improve their efficicencies and effectiveness via information technology. We pay strict attention to 'black hat' vs 'white hat' hackers. The integrity of all of these institutions are at some risk no matter what, but the very knowledge that enables the professional to create, can equally be used to destroy, and this is the critical point I wish to illustrate. It is the virtue of the human bits that secures the value of the institution to society.