Well in my book we've got retard law enforcement and retard soldiers because half the country when counter-cultural instead of integrationist.

Actually you're wrong, but that's OK. There's a lot I don't like about Ohio, but it's not because of the people, but because of the economy. As someone who has spent a lot of time there, I can say it's complicated. That doesn't change the fact that I was there while the city was eating its guts out over LeBron, and how its downtown empties out if there's not a game on, and how much it hates other cities whose teams come and beat their teams - and basically how insecure the joint is over its fall from industrial might and grace. Cleveland is two steps ahead of Detroit, sorta. But Ohio is f'd because it doesn't have a regional air carrier. A state with that many good sized cities should have air service between all of them - and it doesn't. In that way Ohio is like the South. Isolated. My experiences with people from Ohio in particular is good, so long as it's Ohio. Just like Georgia, they grow elaborate tall tales about people from other places that have little bearing with reality, and because of that, it's not very often that the people are as honest as they otherwise would be. They don't want to talk about East side Cleveland vs West side Cleveland. They obsess over things that happened in their city generations ago, and can't seem to get over it. So here's where I blow your mind. I learned to swim, in 1971 at the Cumberland Pool. I spent the summer with my uncle who lived in Cleveland Heights. If there were seven black kids at that pool back in the day, half of them came in our car. Since I was only 10 years old, I knew it was a big deal, then again, I was doing it and I was just 10 years old. I went to go look up that old neighborhood and it still has charm, but there are nicer areas that would be more comfortable. Times change, tastes change. I spent some time in Columbus working at Abbot Labs. Three things shocked me. 1. I met lots and lots of people who grew up in Columbus and never went to Cleveland, or Dayton, or Cinci, or Toledo. Like never, and asked me why that would be important. (!) 2. The football stadium is massive. It was like a holy shrine. I could see where an Ohio State football game was like a combination of gladiators in Rome + Stonehenge. 3. Men own women. Men with duallies. Columbus was the last place I remember where male managers treated female managers like they were all secretaries. I like Cincinnati most of all. I dig the Ohio River, I dig the vibe in the place. It acts like it has a future and people seemed to be more confident about themselves and their town. So I know that I dont have much to say about the black thang in Cleveland. I'll leave all that alone because frankly I don't care. All of the black officials in Cleveland can't get Mittal to hire more steelworkers. I talked to men who used to work coke ovens and now drive cabs. And people just brag about the Hospital - instead of producing materials that build new things, the money in Cleveland is taking care of the sick and dying. That's what makes me sad about Cleveland - all the empty buildings downtown and no new nothing to fill them up. Oh yeah a new light rail or bus lane or whatever that thing was. That's all economic despair and until that can get turned around people will squabble over stupid shit like race. And you do, just like in the South. I get a room at the whatever hotel downtown and see all the black folks taking one bus one way and white folks taking another bus another way. It's sad, but - when you have no economic opportunities to give a new generation new mobility, they fall into the same old patterns as yesteryear. Sadly, that's what Cleveland represents to me - from personal experience. A city that tries to change but .. I wouldn't give up hope on Cleveland, but quite frankly if I was black and not living large there, I'd get the hell out. Then again that counts for just about all the Northeast, with the exception of New York City. New York City is *alive* always, and black folks have social clout in themselves, not just through political mojo. Here's the bottom line. Cleveland is not an international city. It's a local city. People who are trying to get above treading water need to get where international money (and food) flows - where ethic and religious and economic diversity is real, not just a slogan. Cleveland will change slowly. So if blackfolks are impatient, then they can go with the slow flow, or they can get the hell out of Dodge. LeBron did. He's happy. On the other hand, it's probably a Cleveland thang that so-called intellectuals will never understand unless we live there for years and years... That's the problem. Global reality doesn't work in Cleveland.

I think Americans are predisposed to salute heros, and Cleveland is especially hungry for some. So I'm calling this one an aberration. There isn't enough positive media for cops. Here in LA, it's such a habit for people to sue to police department that one of the dudes who helped find Dorner is suing because he's challenging the criteria for the reward money. You really have to consider a city's cottage industries around villifying and worshipping police. You get nowhere without dealing with those profound shapers of public opinion.

People trust media more than they trust police. That's because they watch more media and judge more media and know more media than they watch, judge and know police. So when the media and the police are in harmony, such people behave respectively. I think if local media would tag team with police in ghettos and celebrate the good, it would change the politics of every city. But you know every journalist wants to be Bob Woodward. Stop and Frisk is ridiculous. New Yorkers have lost their minds.

OK so I was misguided. What I did not appreciate fully at the time was: 1. The amount of inertia an armed civilian population creates, whether or not those arms are 'assault weapons'. 2. The slippery slope of 'marginal' gun control regulation. Any impetus that can continually revisit legislation will create rediculous loopholes. 3. The actual language of the Constitution. 4. The amount of willful ignorance of the anti-gun constituency.

Well, here's a way I put it when I was first onto that organic intellectual thing. At some point, all of the cops who put their lives on the line fighting for the comfort of the ignorant upper classes are going to rebel. Only the stupid cops will be left. Now my original angle would be to express concern about the quality of the democratic process that allows that sort of ignorance to rule. So reform efforts would be directed at bringing some objective competence into the mediasphere - meritocratic wise. But now I am convinced that reform is not impossible, just too slow to stop any fill in the blank 'War On...'. So long as it's always a proxy war, there will be deceptive reporting. The reality of the Master Cheifs out there do not survive translation. It doesn't matter how good a reporter anybody is. The only way to be an armchair general is to have been an actual general. In other words, there is a certain amount of integrity a democracy simply cannot have, and for me, I'm not willing to wait for the reporters back from the front - not that they go any longer. As I read up on the Napoleonic Wars and the Articles of War of the British Royal Navy, I am finding some interesting worldviews that have disappeared from America's best and brightest. America's best and brightest substitute rock climbing, triathalons, and scuba diving for martial education. Even thought there is no doubt it's extreme, I am saying that it is foolishness. Especially as the so-called honor of the regular Army, who ain't rocket scientists, goes unchallenged. So my martial education introduces a solution. Not that I ever gave more than a passing turd for the unscrubbed millions, it could do them good. Well, obviously it would do anyone good.

GW's war was logical. GW's war is over. Obama has turned off the engine, let go of the steering wheel and is gliding that behemoth inertia. The top cat is away and now all the bureaucratic mice are fighting over the cheese. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of government cheese. Deficit spending cheese. I can't properly expect that when Republicans take two branches that they'll sunset those cheesy provisions - but I do know that they would be the only party that contains and nurtures the idea of self-defense as a rational alternative. The absolute undeniable fact of the matter is that even the knuckle-dragging redneck Tea Partiers you fear and loathe have no record of or proclivity for shooting up the homeboys. Every 19 year old Jihadi knows that. Aside from all that, I'm hardly worried about the scragglies from Sherwood Forest. If I need to shoot, then I'll shoot. That doesn't take much discipline or education at all. Again, I'm really not thinking about them - what I do is directed against the failure of all generalist ideas about citizenship and shape of the economic buckets it creates for the individual, family and village.

Sorry, I haven't gotten the memo of why the cool kids dismiss Ted Cruz. I'm subject only to the context of his 30 minute address to some conservative group about defense of the constitution and pro-business growth. it doesn't change the fact that those agencies are out of control and seem to be arresting people for no actual national security reasons.

Murphy's observation reminds me of what's wrong with everybody who loves 'The Wire'. Of course you are correct about higher-ed and the 'black humanities' but that sort of pussification did not happen in a vacuum - they are all consequences of the closing of the American mind and the rise of identity politics centered around gender and race and other such postmodern bullshit. The clarity of the martial education idea for me is not something I think about as a palliative or a cure to whatever internal wars may be against powerless blackfolk. Rather I think of it in terms of liberty and the necessary tonic that makes all Americans deserving of the 2nd Amendment. The answer to 'Who's your Leviathan' for protectionist busy-bodies defaults to *all LEO and first responders* and if that's not enough, we have proven over the past decade, quite capable of launching massive federal police bureacracies. We know FEMA doesn't work. We know TSA doesn't work. Nobody knows what the hell DHS does. Immigration has become ICE. BATF is mired in scandal, and the Border Patrol doesn't do its job. Yet they all are out there, sworn to the beck and call of ambitious political assholes operating in short attention span theater. It is no wonder at all, no wonder at all that the Attorney General cannot answer a straightforward question about the domestic use of killer drones. Nobody is in control of these agencies, and I think they are starting to hate each other. So I think the individual citizen cannot afford to be out of touch with the discipline and legal presence of mind all of these operators have grown into.

I finally got my trainer's appointment. He was grinning the whole time when I was telling him how fit I used to be. Then he proceded to put me on the machines and destroyed me in less than 45 minutes. The circuit constituted about 6 machines - treadmill, something whose name I can't remember, the elliptical, the hand crank thing, the stairclimber and then the rowing machine. He expected me to row 500 yards in two minutes. Or was it three? Either way it killed me. There are all kinds of muscles that are waking up on my body - and whatever I've been doing for the past couple weeks is meaningless. This is boot camp. I hope I can keep it up.

Well the interesting thing is that now that I'm in the third quarter of my life, I'm trying to get a martial education. I don't know how to hunt, fish, or get up every day and do situps. I don't know how to dress a chicken or build a duck blind. So that's all in the future. I'm not going to stop studying. But I'm fairly certain that there are only about 100 more books I feel any need to read. So that's maybe 7 years at the most. I'm basically looking at learning how to live outside of the Western volksgarten that's already built up and figure out how to build my own.

Well that's why they call Him Jesus, which is my point. You can be Christlike and you can be Jordan-like, but you're not in the same league.