Project Cascadia

As Cascadians we're used Cascadia to being the name of a bioregion more than a country, even though we have our own flag and sport a form of nationalism. That's because nationalism is a well-known trope. We also have Rogue Nation, with its own networks. Python Nation is another virtual nation I'm a part of.

Recognizing the reality of Cascadia doesn't keep us from seeing these other political data layers, such as that of the US and Russian federations. Oregon is like an oblast, a stan, a state.

If the situation were more dire, one might imagine the Oregon oblast trying to get on the other side of some border, outside the jurisdiction of the Feds, who might send Border Patrol to help the process along (maybe they want to kick us out of the Union once and for all).

As it stands, Cascadia has no problem being within more than one jurisdiction, with Canada the administrator of our northern areas, and the United States claiming much of our south. We also host several indigenous (n8v) nations, making our geography quite complex.

In this same sense, the oblast of Donetsk might be in Ukraine, but in this sense we're talking like in Cascadia, whereas the administrative line, by Russian constitution, is such and such, and maybe there's another constitution in the works for the oblasts out west, closer to Poland and Romania. 

I'm not aware that the western oblasts have gotten to work on such a document, but one surmises it must exist in draft form at least.

Does Cascadia have a president? No. Does it have a government at all? That's what I'm saying. No. Or rather, it has the various governments currently operating within the bioregion, none of which self identify as the government of Cascadia per se.

Cascadia is a PR project, and featured prominently during Occupy Portland as a beacon for an alternative reality, wherein we're not as fixated on the current post Napoleonic narrative, wherein the Louisiana Territories were purchased. That was obviously a European fantasy, indulged in by the lawmakers of their time. 

In retrospect, we don't have to accept the Doctrine of Discovery (the rumored Papal Bull) or any of that early lawmaking. We're free to reprogram.

Whether we do (reprogram), or not, is another question. Some generations prefer to take the work of the ancestors for granted and just perpetuate it. Why fix what ain't broken? I'm in that camp with respect to a lot of cultural and ethnic practices. I don't find them flawed. 

But when it comes to how we conduct ourselves with respect to national borders, let's just say I've become disillusioned and well understand if Gen Alpha and so forth decide to reject a lot of the presumptions and declarations we currently never think to question. 

Now that social engineers have made it possible to impose oppressive surveillance regimes on the rest of us, to an unprecedented degree, we have to think about which of these engineering cabals is promulgating the better designs. 

There's no point granting in advance that any one of them has an inherent right to tell the rest of us how it has to be.  The debates have not all been settled.  Most of them have yet to begin.

From the Framework

Martian Math Storyboard (School of Tomorrow)

I mention not working directly with the Russian schools on this Storyboard, but why the disclaimer? Who would even think that I would be, and why? Because I talk about Siberia (in Russia) and the hydroelectric dam we imagine building, and hooking up, to the global grid.

When I say Martian Math includes dharmas about hydropower, complete with dynamos and AC / DC current flows, am I saying we'll be featuring Maxwell's Equations? Why not, right? But initially I'm just focused on Energy as a quantity, and as something that drains away, even as it's replenished. I picture a "tank of joules" (like a tank of calories) and picture all the work one might get out of it, were said joules to be provided in the form of fuel.

So what about small nuke plants, of the kind OSU is reputed to have been working on. That's not an entirely different topic, especially when one considers the fusion reaction driving the condensation cycle, whereby evaporating lakes and oceans lead to rains, refilling rivers at their origins (higher up). The gravity of water flowing downhill, its inertia, is what's behind a hydrodam, and therefore nuke energy, the holy grail kind (i.e. fusion).

I'd be happy to sit in as a student auditor on some of these. We're not waiting for Kirby to get his PhD in electrostatics & electrodynamics (E&E). Phasing in his Martian vs Earthling "war of the worlds" memes isn't that difficult, given all the accomplished trailblazing. The Russians could do it sooner, is what I was suggesting in my concluding remarks. Given the open source, not secret, nature of these projects, the usual community dynamics are in play.

Boosting bus numbers around Quadrays is a priority in any case. If you're not familiar with "bus numbers" as a term, it has to do with how many people would need to get hit by a bus before torch-passing a specific knowledge and/or practice became untenable. A computer project with "low bus numbers" is in danger of fizzling, but why succumb to this fate if the content has intrinsic interest.  Sometimes you just need the right recruiter, advertiser, promoter, to boost the bus number. To that end, I've been actively filing posts to Synergeo, an online public archive, detailing how the system all works.

Sacred Geometry and Synergetics

I don't see it as "selling out" to work with the Sacred Geometry crowd on upgrading their computer graphics and animations to incorporate more themes from our Cascadian Synergetics ala the posters by Casey House of Syn-U. 

The SG community already has an abiding interest in geometry, both 2D and 3D, and occasionally nD (n = "any"), as if there's one place where the standard normie paradigm is open to spirituality, it's in the realm of "higher dimensional beings" ala Abbott's Flatland. Indeed, expectant waiting for AGI to emerge from AI deep learning (some say it has) is arguably a spiritist cult if not a full-fledged religion.

Yet despite my letting myself off the hook in allowing myself to dive in to SG, I'm more fishing for SG veterans who want to avail of concentric hierarchy themes, primarily these alternative models of combining dimensions and making height-width-depth a tetrahedral affair, with two "snakes" making complementary zig-zags, or call them "cobras".

Once snakes start intertwining we're in Caduceus country, the realm of Hermes, and from there it's easy to access mercurial texts and symbolic meanings, going back to Toth and before. We start sounding more like Theosophists in reaching back to ancient Polynesia for an alternative creation story, tracing humanity to idyllic beginnings. From Eden to Zion, could be the arc, with Zion the planetary system, including satellites, both natural (the moon) and artificial (Hubble space telescope).

I've been going back to Marshall McLuhan a lot lately. The way he got dropped from the syllabus suddenly had to do with his having to peers to carry the torch forward. I'd argue Synergetics is McLuhanesque and Fuller's fascination with Phoenician finds its echo in McLuhan. The Phoenician helped readers develop a mind's eye TV per Marshall, which Fuller associates with Euler in his more psychological passages. Gibbs is more gut-level for Fuller, visceral, tactile. The two combine, synergize, to make our sense.

Marshall manages to squeeze more meaning from Finnegans Wake then most I'd say, in how he sees it alluding to the movement from movies (films, cinema) to a yet more immersive television. Television leaves more to the imagination in some ways, drawing viewers in as a participating partners than leaving them to speculate more objectively and independently. At the same time, TV was distilling us into a Global Village, by which McLuhan did not mean some smoothly operational form of global governance. He meant something messier and more claustrophobic. I doubt he'd be surprise by our term "doom scrolling".

I've also been revisiting Synergetics against the backdrop of William Blake, thanks to Daniel, and the latter's "marriage of Heaven and Hell." Blake counterposes Energy, desire in action, with a countervailing Reason that keeps Energy in harness, systematized. Imbalances either way lead to pathologies, harmful disequilibria. With Fuller, it's Radiation versus Gravity, always complementary, and therefore a unity of opposites in the SG sense (more Jungian).

:: two cobra zigzag ::

Easter Eggs

I'm joining the small throng today who like to play up the geek meaning of "Easter Egg", namely a buried or hidden treasure, accessed via some secret key combination most likely, in a computer game. That might be the most literal rendering of the geek meaning, but by ripple effect, it can mean a lot more.

In Python World, we have two Easter Eggs that play off the keyword import, what in C they call use. If you enter import this at a Python prompt, you'll get the famous Zen of Python poem by Tim Peters. Just about every Pythonista knows this. I'd say a tad more obscure is import antigravity, which will get your browser to pop up with a famous XKCD comic (about Python of course).

I'll identify as Christian through my Quaker heritage, even though my wife, Dawn Wicca, got special clearance from her membership committee to stay non-Xtian in her identity, meaning being Quaker yet not Christian is not an oxymoron in the eyes of our Meeting. Identity is like clay: yours to shape. Different ages or eras manifest different types (back to Python, sorta). Dawn was raised Catholic and was escaping Patriarchy, yet she loved to read about Jesus and admired how good the Patriarchy was at ritual, around Easter especially.

I'll plan to join our Meeting today, on Easter Sunday, or First Day as old timey Quakers called it, wanting to decouple day names from celestial phenomena and the pagan overtones in planet-based nomenclature. Most Friends don't share those hangups today, or even think about the Moon as having anything to do with Monday. We have other Pythonistas besides me in our Meeting. I make jokes about the Snake Church sometimes and have pictures of Glenn Stockton, the late shaman, holding rubber snakes. I also promote beer drinking among Friends, and the concept of Quaker breweries, even though I've dialed way back on drinking alcohol myself. I've had my share.

Spring has sprung, big time in Portland, Garden City. Flower petals cover the sidewalks. Every couple weeks its a new bloom, with tulips and cherry blossoms withering, only to be replaced by lavender and apple blossoms, and a lot of stuff I don't know the names for. I'm weak on nomenclature when it comes to flora, a little better with fauna. Like I know what a faun is, thanks to Narnia (C.S. Lewis). I'm just another big dummy in a lotta ways, a sinner with limited access to Easter Eggs, and yet grateful for what I get.

Back in the Saddle

I was "away from my desk" as they say, over the weekend, celebrating my Uncle Bill's 100th birthday. We filled a big room with friends and relatives, and all sang sea shanties, with a group hired to lead us in doing that. Bill sang along, knowing many of them by heart.

Bill lived a life at sea in the merchant marine and later returned to matters maritime after retiring as a mining engineer. He morphed into an historian, as I've recounted elsewhere, researching submarine R&D and production in the Pacific Northwest in the pre WW1 chapter.

I took Sydney the dog on this trip. Elise arranged for her to have an annual vet appointment with her original vet. Syd used to live with Elise and family. Her husband Les and his brother Stafford were there, working on their boat, out of the water and on its trailer on the farm. We're talking a pretty big boat here.

I came home via the Edmonds-Kingston ferry, Hwy 104 to Center Road, to the unincorporated township of Quilcene, where I got to visit with old friends. The ferry is always a blast. I could have taken Sydney to an upper deck but she's usually a happy napper in the back seat. Maybe next time.

XREF:

Go By Train
TG 2016
Lost in Oregon
Lightfoots Visit
Touring the Silicon Forest
Remembering a Person

Global U vs Planet of the Apes

What the present does is leave records for the future, called the future's past. The present creates the future's past, by making recordings, curating, remembering, memorializing.

These days, humans are engaged in making the collective movie of how they brutalized one another in subhuman fashion, in ways we hope future humans transcend. This was Planet of the Apes. We see it everywhere.

The planet is a mental hospital of sorts, an asylum, and a healing one insofar as we're able to invoke our humanity and create humane conditions. Bucky Fuller's futurism wasn't saying this was our inevitable fate, to act humanely, but that we might choose oblivion instead. Oblivion = Farce. We chose farce.

Closing Time by Norman O. Brown is somewhat required reading for those wanting to trace the transition to the Aquarian Age, as it's all about the coming farce we're now within. We act out, play our roles, dress up, go before the cameras. Politics = Theater.

Fuller's futurism was about how in principle we have the props, the inventory, to stage a "success for humanity" play, and a big part of the challenge is convincing people that was true. China's rise as an economic power, OBOR et cetera, has been encouraging on that front, likewise the growing prosperity of Asia's other little tigers. Portland, a hub city in Cascadia, is a gateway to Asia on the Pacific Rim.

A lot of folks with obsolete educations want to star as heroes but they don't get that it's a farce, because myopic hand wringing about our plight as humans is empty juvenile whining at this point. We have arrived at the point where we see ourselves in the mirror and that it's our choice to keep making this a Planet of the Apes. Our tragic circumstances are self-inflicted at this point, which is what makes them farcical.

The idea behind New Palestine University is the Global University, the university being an older institution than the nation-state. Enrolling refugees into a global system that takes care of them as students and faculty is the name of the game.  A benign global company in support of the GU would be Global Data, likewise science fiction (or investment banking once real enough) going back to the 1980s in this author's schemes and dreams.

The refugees of this world should be free to explore the whole planet, without trespassing, because they'll be within their rights on campus facilities, interconnected by airlines. This is really more a model of the status quo than an aspiration, with the caveat that the curriculum is low quality at the moment, by definition. When we see it's Planet of the Apes out there, we look to faculty and ask what they plan to do about it, curriculum-wise.

What I do about it is join with other faculty in finding new shared memes we can build on, such as Global University, Global Data, OBOR, Trucker Exchange, BizMos, Chinese Peace Corps and so on. A big part of what I do is geometric animations, simple GIFs, based in Synergetics, one of our GU disciplines.

Prophetic Words

I fished this set of paragraphs out of Critical Path, digitized, before heading into downtown Portland for the big protest.

These do seem like prophetic words, given how they were written close to a half-century ago (2030 - 1980 = 50).

From Critical Path (1981):

The plotted curve of the rate of gain for increasing proportions of all humanity being thus swiftly advantaged by the doing more for more people with less and less matter and energy per function all accomplished with computers, satellites, alloys, etc.indicates that 100 percent of all humanity will be thus advantaged before 2000 A.D. In less than twenty years (less than one generation) all humanity is scheduled by evolution (not by any world planning body) to become physically more successful and metaphysically more interestingly occupied than have any humans ever been in all known history-provided that humanity does not commit ignorance-, fear-, and panic-induced total-species suicide. 

Why might they panic? All the present bureaucracies of political governments, great religious organizations, and all big businesses find that physical success for all humanity would be devastating to the perpetuation of their ongoing activities. This is because all of them are founded on the premise of ameliorating individual cases while generally exploiting on behalf of their respective political, religious, or business organizations the condition of nowhere- nearly-enough-life-support-for-all and its resultant great human suffering and discontent.

Reason number two for fear-wrought panic is because all of the 150 nations of our planet are about to be desovereignized by evolution; that is, they are about to become operatively obsolete about to be given up altogether. There are millions in the U.S.A., for instance, who on discovery that their government was about to become bankrupt and defunct would become activist “patriots,” and might get out their guns and start a Nazi movement, seeking dictatorially to reinstate the “good old days.” If people in many of the 150 nations succeeded in re-establishing their sovereignties and all the customs-barrier, balance-of-trade shacklings, it would soon be discovered that the 150 nations represent 150 “blood clots” imperiling the free interflowing of the evolution-producing metals and products recirculation as well as of the popular technical know-how disseminating.

We have today, in fact, 150 supreme admirals and only one ship Spaceship Earth. We have the 150 admirals in their 150 staterooms each trying to run their respective stateroom as if it were a separate ship. We have the starboard side admirals’ league trying to sink the port side admirals’ league. If either is successful in careening the ship to drown the “enemy” side, the whole ship will be lost.

I don't think Fuller was under any illusions that his simply forecasting the demise of nationalism would magically occur right when he penned the lines about its so doing. He was anticipating trends and looking at moving targets, like the rest of us are. What he was saying here is, to look for signs. A last surge, a final hurrah, for nationalism, might involve activists rising up to re-establish their balance-of-trade shacklings.

I know "globalists" are the enemy at the moment, for nationalists everywhere, where "globalist" is predefined as this or that. In my day, "think globally, act locally" was one of those Bucky-inspired boomer slogans. 

But then skeptics such as Wendell Berry wondered if "thinking globally" was actually possible, or, more likely, a dangerous chimera. I think of him, along with Charles Olson, as someone with little patience for the techno-laced lingo of the Fuller-inspired futurist crowd, into which I have blended.

Where does Wendell Berry cast aspersions on "thinking globally"? 

I've been cultivating the habit of letting Perplexity do some of the heavy lifting, in terms of searching the corpus and graphing a path through it, connecting whatever dots I throw at it, or maybe telling me some dots don't connect.

Prompt:  Did Wendell Berry express skepticism regarding the boomer slogan "Think globally, act locally". Did he find something disingenuous about thinking globally? More generally, did Wendell Berry ever comment on Buckminster Fuller's brand of futurism, expressing distaste for it. We know Charles Olson, the famous poet, did not hold Fuller in high regard. Are we able to document Olson's views. He and Fuller were both associated with Black Mountain College.

Here's the essay Perplexity wrote, in a few seconds, minus the footnotes and citations for brevity. 

Here's a link to the full session online. 

Good job Perplexity.

More Media Analysis

Speaking of media analysis, I've been recently reminiscing about all the silos I've been going down. 

I say "going down" even though, originally, a silo, the agricultural construction, pointed up, like a grain elevator, like a Butler grain bin, right? 

But then "silo" was co-opted by the ballistics industry and now our image of them is more that of "shaft into the earth". We now "go down" a silo, or at least that's what I do.

Then "silo" became further co-opted by the business metaphysicians, the ones who diagram on whiteboards how our organization is overly siloed. And don't get me started on academia, right?

Among those silos: the Snow White remake, and all the controversy. I track that because of DefunctLand in large degree, my favorite YouTube channel or right up there. 

Kevin Perjurer makes brilliantly entertaining documentaries about the Disney saga, a saga I've studied since I came across Donald In Mathmagic Land (1959)  as a 2nd grader (early 1960s).

I don't hate Rachel Zegler, a talented actress and good singer, in Hunger Games also (lotsa snakes!). I think it's fair to attack the content as that's what we do with films; they're fair game to diss.

Probably a lot more is going on though, in terms of the expectations EPCOT brought, the World's Fairs also, and the dystopian tunnel we seem to have entered. There's a blame game going on. Why aren't we having the positive future some prophets told us we might enjoy?

Disney always seemed so optimistic, and a lot of kids wished on a star to two, and now wonder if they were just never heard. "Didn't Santa get my letter?" Quivering lip.

Hey, to change topics (and silos): I finally saw Little Miss Sunshine in a home theater environment (not my home). Now there's a "dark" comedy for ya. Thumbs up. Quite compelling.

A couple years ago my silo was girl punk bands like Sleater-Kinney, an I-5 exit I sometimes drive by. Listen to the music, tune in the gossip, make some "knowledge graphs"... lots of dots to connect, right? Portlandia being a more obvious one.

Media Analysis

I'm been binging on Marshall McLuhan YouTubes, as all the knowledge graphs show he's going to continue popping up within the networks we care about. There's the University of Toronto connection for starters. We're already focusing on Coxeter and Hinton. Canadians play a big role in our story.

Going over the disembodied interviews, I see his avatar clarifying many matters. A primary driver in his case is irritation. He finds what the next or downline generations are doing, with the new media, is frequently jarring and unpleasant, and not just because "too loud" although that's certainly part of it. So in some interviews he explains why he maybe comes off as somewhat cranky.

Also, let's talk about his Global Village meme, not far at all from Spaceship Earth. He and Bucky were co-conspirators, that's already established. Wasn't McLuhan all pollyanna Small World After All, the way Bucky was, or was rumored to be? "Global Village" sounds so quaint, so pat, as if we're all supposed to get along with obnoxious neighbors. By what Show White magic? 

On the contrary, explains McLuhan, a Global Village may be claustrophobic, like a Winesburg, Ohio which a read a long time ago. Tiny towns can get oppressive, as everybody knows everybody else's business. Secrets become hard to keep. Privacy is lacking. Gossip is rampant. That's a global village for you.

Reading McLuhan tends to revector (re-aim) what I consider to be the meaning of "tactile" in the sense of "visceral" in Synergetics, what Fuller hands over to "the Gibbisian" those vectorial degrees of freedom (visceral energy flows), those deltas around phase changes, around going between frozen, liquid, and gaseous states of being. One the other hand: "the Eulerian" which is the visio-conceptual.

McLuhan somewhat scrambles my senses such that TV becomes the aural-tribal-tactile side of the senses, the Gibbsian, whereas the reader of phonetic alphabets, with an imagination, is the visualizer, able to conjure mental imagery in a private theater driven by text. That imagery went to film, and then was taken in by all the channels and programming and network talk of the broadcast and cable stations, by way of radio in between.

McLuhan didn't live to see the internet take-off, but would have used that development to underline the same lesson: the next medium uses the previous as its raw material. Theater uses literature, which uses real life. Television uses the movies, which came from theater, and the internet uses television, as streams. The golden age of television is feeding into the power of point to point and a PWS that's fully personalizable. PWS = Personal Workspace in the GST namespace.

Television is "cool" but by that McLuhan didn't mean "non-hormonal". On the contrary, the 3rd parent reaches into our skulls and squeezes the endocrine system, gooses glands. The electronic media manage to scare up and harness veritable blobs of groupthink emotions. The "EST people" may have a better immune system (better antibodies) according the the Handbook.