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.
