Debate Teams

Per Facebook, I’m collaborating on with other schools regarding how we might ramp up the debate team scene. If you’re not on Facebook, maybe Medium?

Excerpt:

Remember the rules of debate: as a team, you’ll be expected to be prepared to argue either side of the resolution. The US team could well get the job of trashing the resolution, vs upholding it.

So if you’re on the US team, my advice is you learn to think like a Russian and vice versa. People who only know how to think on one side are just morons when it comes to Lincoln-Douglas face-offs of this type.

Micro Economics

The workhorse Mac Pro likely bit it last weekend, halting mid-sentence, as I was crafting some nuclear energy policy (just kidding: I was yakking with an informed lobbyist on Facebook). Had to hard reboot, but she never came back.

Fortunately, I was surrounded by acres of wildflowers and getting tractor skills, plus had an iPad for telecoms, so no time for a self pity party. My plan is to take my time casting about for solutions, without feeling overly pressured. Laptops die. I have backups. Maybe I should write a grant proposal, and or try to get by on a Pi.

Regarding social media (telecoms), I’ve picked up the pace on X a bit, looking back on 2024 and imagining a DreamTeam. I parodied the Russiagate genre by having free tier AI to a wonderful Bernie and Tulsi meme, as Superman and Wonder Woman. As hackneyed as it gets, and also so nostalgic, as neither is even running for president this year.

I also mocked State dot gov for trying to make RT sound more sinister than it is. Unable to compete on a level playing field, Cowardly Capitalism (scan blogs) is trying to re-enact the Hua Wei model and simply ban the competition. Pretty wimpy, but that’s President Blinken for ya, now out of favor in Poland they tell me (the list keeps growing).

I cleaned out some of my old FSI posts, which I can always refresh when the time comes. FSI is one of the Mighty Networks (that’s the hosting platform — very iPhone compatible). Then I use Synergeo a lot, for promotional materials. Example 1. Example 2.

I alerted the FSI via forum posting (vs in a group) that the most up to date summary of my thinkings and doings, with respect to the Bucky stuff at least, was archived at TTBC. This is where I overlap with BFI members a lot (I was made a lifelong member with the Synergetics Explorer Award, amidst ceremony).

If you’re not familiar with all these acronyms, I suggest a blog search, from the box upper left. Use the right margin navigation widget to jump to my other blogs.  Field Structure Institute and TrimTab Book Club are both entangled with BFI, for which I was webmaster in the 1990s, in cahoots with Kiyoshi.

Having archived my thoughts on working with Disney / Pixar, and summarized the Lithuania chapter, I retired from TTBC as the protocol there is to keep it apolitical, and in this particular season that’s not in the cards for me. I’m called to grapple with various political powers that be, were, or are still in the pipeline. That means I’m back to small group comms. I use Telegram a lot.

Some might wonder if I stay in contact with Princeton alums and is there anything to the idea that Ivy Leaguers have a rule the world complex? Yes, I stay in touch with some classmates, including at a recent picnic in the park (local Princeton Club chapter). But I wouldn’t say there’s any world domination tone to it. We’re all over the map.

Where you might still encounter “world domination” talk is in the world of free and open source engineering, where copyleft commies still reign supreme. If you go back in time quite a ways you’ll find a bemused mass media discovering geekdom’s memes, “global dom” being one of them. 

The full meme comes with a lot of penguin pictures (March of the Penguins had been big) i.e. Linux iconography. That was the David and Goliath myth of the day: Linux and open source were gonna rule the world, displacing the slower, dumber giants, not agile enough to keep up.

So how did that go?

Well, it’s a long story. The short version is the giants swallowed a lot of the open source philosophy (PayPal: “InnerSource”), not to mention source code, making Big Tech more dot commie. But the language of capitalism is still what’s macho among tech bros. They see the business sense in copyleft, which is padding the bottom line. Imagine paying IBM prices for all that stuff.

The equilibrium we’ve achieved might be imagined as a skyscraper or any tall office tower. As you rise or descend in the elevator, you find some floors are public and open, whereas others are authorized personnel only, with not all personnel authorized on closed off floors. Developers tend to get authorized access to a smattering of proprietary floors, work there and in the public spaces, contributing to both.

Most economists speak of “the commons” thinking of an old fashioned grazing area near a town, where anyone could park their sheep or whatever. Not closed off, not like BLM land, not proprietary. In geekdom, the gold has a different character in being infinitely copiable so long as electricity and storage is made available. My School of Tomorrow repo goes out over the wire to any point on earth, firewalls notwithstanding.

That being said, my curriculum writing is needle in a haystack stuff, spread by word of mouth vs by high pressure advertising. Pressurizing the content is more a job for downline repackagers and resellers of our open source content, MIT license a lot of it. We use Python a lot and you know how liberal that license is. I’m a copyleft king in my kingdom, practicing Potlatch Economics (tagline: “there’s more where that came from”).

The copyleft movement is more an outgrowth of academic protocols than any flavor of Marxism. We already had those concepts of “fair use” and “public domain” whereby scholars are allowed to excerpt and cite X, without financially supporting X. Why would I want to pay a school to which I’m philosophically opposed? If they’re pumping out memes, affecting change in the public spaces, then as a member of the public, I have a right to investigate. Greg Palast is one of my heroes.

Thursday Think Tank

I was testing some of my comedy lines last night at the Think Tank (what we’re calling it now, after Thirsters). Better to have jokes bomb in a small group, then fine tune or abandon the ones that don’t work. A lot of the feedback is high bandwidth. Mostly it’s others talking anyway. I fired off some one liners.

We had a former IDF tank driver from Israel at the table, but he was hardly pro what’s going on there. I was somewhat the odd man out in not being Jewish, with Barbara the odd woman. Actually, no, that education expert (3rd grade reading scores are the key indicator — but just in the one language) seemed to be, like me, on a different spectrum. I’ll study Judaism but wouldn’t claim to be Jewish.

Mostly we talked about the upcoming citywide elections, which will mark the debut of a new voting protocol Portland has never tried, involving ranked choice and four districts, newly drawn. We’ll get a new mayor, as distinct from a city manager. 

The new plan addresses perceived weaknesses with the old system, but some of our group saw an overcorrection and still no clear pathway to getting competence into government.

My jokes had to do with my snobbish elitism. It’s easier to fall into that vs fight it, given the oddball trajectory through Chicago, Portland, Italy, Florida, Philippines, Princeton, Jersey City, DC, New York, back to Portland. 

Such programming turned me into a globalist also, but not of the Soros kind (whatever that means). There’s gotta be room for a vast variety of globalist, just as nationalists come in all flavors (more than 31 at last count).

For one thing, although a globalist, I encourage talk of virtual nations, network nations, diaspora nations. Contiguous borders are for the birds. Citizenship is about creating your public service resume and turning your life support benefits into more life support. Coffee Shops Network has lots of ideas for channeling funds that would flood the starving motherboard with alternative power (yes, crypto might be involved).

I didn’t bring up NPU or any of my writing on an evacuation plan, one of many I hope others are storyboarding too. Am I the only one looking for ways to rescue the Gazans from this onslaught? The nationalists seem to think Gaza is more of a prison than anything else. I’d have had a lot of them out by now, transitioning through way stations, and many of them eager to return someday, when the real estate has some value. At the moment, no one should be forced to live in such conditions.

So would my NPU blueprints result in another diaspora nation? Palestine is already a diaspora nation, that’s my point. To the extent the conventional UN system of nations fails to offer a conventional solution, our backup idea gets more energy. Picture city skyscrapers with a Palestinian logo and mixed use dorms, classrooms, gyms, shopping centers, not exclusively for a specific citizenry. These assets could pop up anywhere, and the neon outdoor logo might be subtle, which isn’t to preclude blanket sized flags in many of the apartments.

Regarding the mayoral position, I said I was open to the Portland mayor flying around the world a lot as our civic ambassador, with a small entourage of course, of rotating “minions” (Mayor Gru?). I haven’t been following closely meaning I hadn’t heard much about the candidates. Now I know one of them is a professional stripper. Should she be our ambassador abroad, and to other cities in North America? Maybe. We like keeping it weird here in Portland. Good for business.

Movie Shoot?

I’m back on the farm serving in my apprentice role. The last two days have been all about the reel line, and how the Italians went the opposite way with clockwise and counter-clockwise, when it comes to jacking up this rig. 

Once firmly stationary, the hose is pulled out across the field, in this case in a lane mowed between wild flowers. But are they wild, if grown as a crop?  The more hose off the reel, the heavier, and we’re talking too heavy for humans from every angle. 

Just moving the rig requires motorized towing. Getting the towing pin to insert into the gator’s towing hole is especially tedious in the current setup. Extending the hose takes a bonafied tractor. The gator runs out of oomph after so many hundred feet. Hose is heavy, especially when full of water.

Is that a tremor I’m feeling? The destination trailer is wobbling slightly. That might be wind catching the awning, but I mostly retracted that. Time: 5:20 pm PDF. The Pacific Northwest is on the Ring of Fire and, like Japan, is prone to seismic events.

Sam discussed his evolving landscaping dreams, which include a raised and leveled dirt platform for a dome, which he’d design. Adding structures requires permitting. The place has come a long way already, what with all the new irrigation piping and the informal Flextegrity Museum, which only a tiny elite get to see.

The Flextegrity Museum inherits from Lattice Gallery in downtown Portland, a popup Sam financed in 2019. I was one of the several volunteers on tap to give tours. I’m up for playing that same role today, and in the meantime serve as location scout, looking for places to make our movies.

I talked about a movie shoot where we’d show off a high tech yurt, advertising our Global U tech of tomorrow. We’d have all the shots in the can within days and the director and crew could either stay in this trailer, and / or in town (Springfield and Eugene are but minutes away).

The high tech yurt idea goes way back and I know some folks live in them already. By high tech I mean they’re wired for internet and the people inside are able to tune in the whole world. Yet it’s a remote rural setting with no real need for yellow school buses. Teachers appear online. The occasional van might swing by to take kids to their martial arts training or other team sport.

I don’t have this movie funded yet. Old Man River City either (they’re related). The Refugee Biz is big, maybe the biggest, but for now is back burner as armed thugs storm our precious agricultural lands and play Risk or My Kingdom with live ammo. We hope this wasteful form of cosplay will be ended shortly. These Global U resources, human especially, are needed for more adult purposes.

Political Propaganda

Refugee Channel

My Refugee Channel (I call it "my" as one who proposed it awhile back) is still gelling, and has to overcome objections from Survivor genre "reality TV" producers, who fear overshadowing by true survivors (bad for ratings).

We know many refugees will be endearing and achieve stardom, plus they're doing the technologically speaking "sexy" work of prototyping, like test pilots, but of entire "campus" (from "camp") solutions, including experiments with crypto-currencies. Kids watching will wonder how to break in to the refugee business. Good news: the floodgates are open.

The issue of "open versus closed borders" is a general one. We might go back to Prouty and Iran-Contra and talk more about the small planes. Drug traffickers are not trying to climb over Trump Wall. They fly in to Mena, Arkansas, or used to, per old books in Dollar Store bins. If we're talking about substance control, let's say so. Human trafficking is something else.

In this blog, we take a strong interest in the difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing. Both sound wrong and objectionable, but there's a difference between murdering and pushing out. Many apartheid-oriented neighborhood associations have been successful in keeping various neighborhoods ethnically cleansed, i.e. free of some fill-in-the-blank ethnicity, but without resorting to lynchings.

I mention all that because a Refugee Channel needs to not be too sloppily scripted, such that the storytelling anchors slip up all the time, the way we allow on ordinary civilian TV. The Refugee Channel has to interview lots of military and paramilitary about what's going on on the ground, to manage an evacuation after an earthquake for example. A lot of refugees are fleeing natural disasters. The personnel need a lot of training and self-discipline and may have prior military and/or paramilitary experience themselves.

But what about the high technology part I always write about? Isn't it the case that electric ATVs, yurts with RV-like hookups, shared sound stages and festivals (yes, like Burning Man) all belong to science fiction? Where in the world does the United Nations actually have its act together? We'd already have a Refugee Channel if the curriculum were even a little bit better. The UN acts within severe constraints, obviously, and has historically become a target.

That's where the scripting comes in. Storyboard artists need to plan out where the next Asylum City will be, and how it will connect within the existing network. Managing a circulation system for relocating humans, sometimes at the whole family or whole village level, or even regional level, takes a lot of logistical support from existing campus facilities.

The Asylum City matrix is designed with a living standard floor in mind, namely that of a college campus. Each freestanding yurt, tent, bizmo, or apartment dorm may not have a full kitchen, of the kind used in mess tents and company cafeterias, but they'll have enough to nuke ramen, brew coffees and teas, and refrigerate leftover desserts brought back from the "snack-topias" (picture food pods). 

We call them campuses because that's a lot of what goes on: learning, experimenting, making tomorrow happen. Some tribes use a different, yet intelligible, namespace and that's fine.

Active Inference

"Active inference" is not far distant from "activist inference" in that to "actively infer" is to adopt the posture and mode of an experimentalist. 

We don't sit around waiting for the environment to hand us faits accompli, from which we're to abstract a worldview. Rather, we know what our worldview entails, in terms of actionable testing routines, and therefore have ways to provoke model failure faster than if we'd waited for it to fail anyway, of its own accord.

In other words, to actively infer is to stress test your model at every opportunity, which needn't mean you yourself feel lots of stress. When you strongly and justifiably believe your model to be correct, and it appears to fail, you get to find your mistake and debug it, one of the most valuable exercises when it comes to keeping in shape and doing activism. Mostly, if it's a good model, it will appear to succeed.

The more one debugs oneself in training, in the staging area, the less one is likely to be forced into doing live re-coding on the fly, in production. Not that rewriting on the fly is forbidden (on the contrary), but it gets to be a hassle sometimes -- why not work out the most obvious kinks ahead of time? That's called being prepared, a first motto of scouting.

"Do I know how to set up a tent and hunt for food?" The couch potato read-all-about-it type might infer an affirmative answer, having followed the hero this far. 

But what if we wish a life beyond that of a couch potato? In that case, practice setting up that tent yourself, in your backyard, and see if you're able to scrounge any provisions from your environment, without resorting to shoplifting or other types of theft.

In the Active Inference namespace, we have Free Energy in proportion to our need for it, in terms of reconciling discrepancies, between our simulated, imaginary worlds, and the real one. 

When the simulation matches the reality seamlessly, there's zero friction, no chaos, all is smooth, with no energy unaccounted for. 

Free Energy is like noise, error in the signal, or at minimum unused, still-available bandwidth. 

The "activist inferer" is not going to sit around waiting for what's too big to fail, to fail. Better to stress test and prompt failure in controlled anticipatory circumstances, when it's not all about reacting in ways unplanned.

So is our activist in this sense an accelerationist? 

Sometimes the billionaires especially get accused of wanting to put events on fast forward to make houses of cards topple, and ponzi schemes explode, not in years, but in hours. That's a stereotype, and has the connotation of "irresponsible change agent" given the implied more haphazard approach.

To that I'd say I'm more humble than that, thinking the wheels of evolution have a more inexorable pace, not subject to my own druthers. 

The most I might do is catalyze, which is where experimentation comes in. 

I'm using that term loosely by the way, but with emphasis on "replicable" as I'm thinking "by imitation" is the most serious form of propagation. Check for yourself whether what I say works, actually does work. YMMV.