Revisiting Dallas

I've actually not yet been to Dallas, nor toured the museum (obviously).  Is that buckyball still there, looking down on Dealy Plaza?

However, I did budget myself permission to dive in to three conspiracy theories at a time, bouncing around between them, and not all three slots had to be occupied.  I picked two of the most obvious:  JFK and 911.

Regarding the JFK one, we may be coming to the end of the road, as the truth that Oswald was deep in the deep state, an operative, is now finally becoming mainstream.  The as-yet-unborn (when it happened) have wanted their due by law:  "we don't care, just tell us, OK we thought so" is kind of how it's going.

Of course they do care on some level, just as they care about a government that has back door (behind the scenes) access to Twitter.  It'd be better to have a more even playing field, with law enforcement being more public and obvious about its objections, going after Tweeters that broke some real law, not some ad hoc "community standard" cobbled together by corporate dweebs, and without taking unfair advantage.  

We know a lot of them would like to shell us, out here in the American Donbass, where we freely play by our own rules.  They already dispatched Border Patrol under the last crook.  They seem to hate Portlandia for some reason.

I've come at the story through Kerry Thornley, a Discordian and friend of Oswald's, although not an associate or co-conspirator.  According to Jim Garrison and others, he typified the Oswald type in some degree:  unafraid of the establishment because able to navigate it.  Only to a point though.  We see what happened to Oswald.

Kerry gets me thinking of the Laurel Canyon generation, circa The Doors and Frank Zappa.  A lot of these kids were refugees from military-industrial nuclear families back east, and as such were unafraid of authority, having sprung from the same matrix.  I'd put Tucker Carlson in the same boat:  a privileged dog, never beaten.

These parents were not that tyrannical, I report from experience.  Curtis Yarvin had a similar upbringing I think, another egg hatched in the church incubator.  It's more an "elitist" than a "working class" mentality.

In interviews with Kerry as an old man with nothing to hide, he revealed what today sounds like shocking anti-Kennedy rhetoric.  That hatred for the Irish Mafia (a term of endearment) was deep seated, and tour guides such as Colonel Fletcher Prouty (Oliver Stone's "Man X") tried hard to tell us why.  It's a psychological tale, and those aren't always the easiest to communicate.

Scholars have traced Lee's final attempt to make a phone call, from prison, we think to someone familiar with his long career as an intelligence community asset.  He had not "defected" to Russia so much as he was transplanted, with authorization.  More, he had proved his immunity to either side's propaganda, which made him seem dangerous.  

I see no evidence he was the shooter though, or even one of them.  He and Jack Ruby came from the same underworld, a world scrubbed from the narrative by the Warren Commission, mostly because the American public was not sophisticated enough to appreciate the criminal element.  They hadn't yet seen Breaking Bad and like that.

My view is not fringe or marginal in light of recent declassifications and pundit banter.  I'm hiding out in the crowd with these views, as a blogger, not "in the closet" nor with any need to be.  I'm not suddenly "a subversive" because I've been caught promoting mainstream views.

Synergetics: An Onboarding for Russians

"Onboarding or organizational socialization is the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors in order to become effective organizational members and insiders." -- Wikipedia

What I bring up in the video above, is the power that Computer World has manifested, in terms of coming up with viable subcultures that bring people together on the basis of shared artifacts, such as numpy in my case.

Where I'm likely to cross paths with Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and other eastern states, is in the context of an OSCON, here in Portland, perhaps at an Nginx booth.  OK, so Nginx was bought out by a Silicon Forest company.  Not every Russian knows that.

Ergo, with these channels already open, and with a vital home grown philosophy already frequenting these channels, a basis for opening communications seems in the cards.  From my point of view, it's about content.  Do we want to debate as if we were neocons?  I don't.  I'm not interested in defending NATO or whatever.  Our family worked with Libya after all.

Given the internet is still working, giving me a working group (M4W) in Lithuania (hello Vilnius), I'm confidant we'll be making more headway in the months ahead.  We don't have to wait for a next in-person OSCON or Pycon, to get more balls rolling.  I envision a coding school co-venture, with Silicon Forest participation.

Crypto

The world seems pretty confused about the crypto currency craze.  The impulse to create currency is not new.  People do not always want to scrape and save to build reserves of someone else's unit of value.  A big part of a token's worth is its exchangeability, meaning merchants accept it for their own reserves.

In Critical Path, the Bucky Fuller opus, we have coinage backed not by gold, but by cattle.  This crescent shaped coin was likely wearable, like a bracelet.  Every bracelet might represent so many head.   If I'm able to redeem my bracelets for cattle, then I might exchange them for something else, worth as much as that cattle.

I've been looking at crypto in connection with arcade games, the winning of which relates to control over allocation.  The hero has a profile, of championing causes.  Win a game, donate the tokens.  How do these tokens translate to "real" currency?  How does "real" currency translate into milk, butter and burritos?

If I'm able to exchange token X for a burrito, and if a burrito is worth $10, then by the transitive law, a token is worth about $10.

Do food truck merchants have a way to accept crypto?  I'll gladly pay $12 to get a fresh new crypto wallet on my phone, and then use $10 of that to buy a burrito with it, using transaction infrastructure.

Over on FSI, I pointed out to our resident tetrahelix expert, that a so-called blockchain, such as what Bitcoin uses, could easily be graphically represented as a growing tetrahelix.  

Each block in the blockchain is a regular tetrahedron.  Successive blocks, each containing records of transactions, bond face-wise to continue the blockchain spiral.  

That image might be a part of some wicked cool marketing, for some "beyond the cube" blockchainers.  We're watching the space.

Blue House News

The big news, of course, is the dog:  Sydney.  Our extended family up north dropped her off on extended loan, a Christmas present for Carol, who has been asking for a canine companion.  She joined us yesterday and has been adorable ever since. 

Just now, I "he manned" it through the briar patch, the side yard, to prove I could win against brambles and reach the gate, and close it.  We don't want Sydney wandering off.  I have a driveway gate also, to guard visitors from the vicious dogs.

In other news, I've jumped back into curriculum development and testing.  By testing I mean practicing, as when doctors and lawyers "practice".  One may become "practiced" (experienced) but these professions stay in practicum mode, not claiming higher seniority than "practitioner".  

Come to think of it, "practitioner" is akin to "professor".  The former practices something, say an art, or over the road trucking (OTR type, meaning in contrast to in-city delivery and so on).  The latter "professes" about something, i.e. lectures.  We've all seen the "chalk and talk" genre, unlikely to disappear, but getting more competition.  Sir Roger Penrose likes using transparencies, with an overhead projector.

The testing materials are not by me, primarily, but are secondarily.  I'm getting the synthesis and branding from a track curator closer to Istanbul (Byzantium), with a local version on Github I'm free to modify and expand.  

For example, I added a sudoku.py module this morning, which is supposed to brute force recurse a solution to a 9x9 sudoku, meaning generate a solved one from a pseudo-random seed.  If it won't solve, try a new seeds.  It'll take thousands of attempts and take up to 25 seconds to get one.  All in Python, using numpy, which is the main point (to show numpy in action).

I'm still coming up to speed on sudoku though.  For example, how do I know a given puzzle has only one solution?  Do a simply try to solve it several times and see if all answers are equivalent.  That's mean putting more randomization into the algorithm I'm using now.

Zoom World is alive with memorial services and memory sessions regarding CJ, quite a few years my junior.  A comprehensivist scholar, consciously pioneering what that even means (and doing a good job of it).

I could update about other family members, but I'm not posing as some exhaustive chronofiler, trying to capture every detail of my life.  My blogs provide only glimpses.

We held our Winter Solstice potluck at the Linus Pauling House, as we've been doing, with a Zoom-only interval.