Comments On News

I was OK with the Russians' dissent over using "genocide" and underlining that.  For one thing "ethnic cleansing" was the term of art at the time, and no one seems willing to say 7000 as a percentage of how many?  How many of population N must one kill to qualify for "genocidal" and how would this definition apply to August 6 and 9 of 1945?  How about to weapons testing in Micronesia accounting for cumulative collateral damage, ongoing thanks to fallout?

The Russian approach is to see politics more as soothing psychotherapy, a potentially healing process, but for the USA the goal is always to "win" in some "us versus them" final triumph ("war by other means").  Such thinking traces to Protestant Apocalyptic memes (which many Catholics share) wherein God comes in (again) from back stage and condemns the Baddies to hell, while exalting the Goodies in rapturous exaltation in some winner-take-all orgy of damnation such as only God (by Cecil B. DeMille, Ayn Rand a fan) could get away with.

Because of this "winner take all" mentality, which is childish at best, psychopathic more normally, the USAers need to be undermined occasionally, i.e. "outed" for their "two track" i.e. "hypocritical" as in "forked tongue" approach.  They'll smile at you over the table, holding out a hand of peace, while hiring a hit man to get you when you're not looking.  They like to lord it over the vanquished, to gloat.  Treating Russians like the vanquished in using the U2 to penetrate Soviet airspace post WW2, was problematic.  Dulles needed to be exposed, much to Eisenhower's resulting embarrassment.  People of some intelligence could see all this, and make it happen.

That's how the n8vs came to see the Anglo-Euros, and their Eagle Shield says as much:  arrows in one claw, olive branch in the other.  A schizophrenic in other words, a personality split right down the middle, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  In the national debates, we've broken it down by bird, dove versus hawk, such that only Boy Scouts have to be Eagles (vigilance is their chief quality -- not much escapes the Eagle Eye).  Why not the Jekylls versus the Hydes?  How about Doctor Who versus the Pentagoners?

How much time will the BBC spend on the anniversary of Clinton's bombing the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade?  They used some cluster bombs then too, didn't they, the helpful Beltway Goons of Pentagon City.  Always happy to help, like in Syria, which the USAers gave themselves permission to "save" much as they used to "save" witches.  Thank you for Saving Syria, the banners should say, over each refugee boat arriving in Greece.  Mission Accomplished.

When Clinton aka NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, was that when John Denver decided to check out?  That was never ruled a suicide actually.  He was hosting the Olympics before that on TV, in the Balkans, so happy that finally, in the 1980s, something good was happening in this desolate land of warring factions.  But noooo.... that was not to last.  Fast forward and we were back to crazy wars in the Balkans again.  I don't blame those nostalgic for Yugoslavia, which I'd visited.

The problem facing the supranationals is "EuroZone" is already not "Europe", i.e. no one said anything about a Zone in the 1980s.  If Greeks had known it was to be a Zone, they might have asked for "grexit" sooner?  Anyway, the Balkans are hard to believe in, with the Baltics not much more believable i.e. so many sovereignties are so fragile, so much the creations of empire, that their caving to supranational pressure is merely stripping aside a layer of melodrama no one believes in anymore anyway.  The supranationals are somewhat leery of having their masks (the pseudo-sovereignties) stripped away.

Don't get me wrong.  I love Athens, and Vilnius and Split and Dubrovnik and all those places.  I haven't been to Belgrade yet but I'm expecting to love it too.  I just don't buy much of the narrative the Hydes are pushing.  I don't really care what they say.  The Jekylls just make more sense, being medical doctors without borders and all.  I'm a proponent of psycho-health.  Food Not Bombs.

Animusic 2 (movie review)

The Animusic music videos are among my favorite.  These surreal instrument-robots would be too hard to make work flawlessly.  These animations are almost a parody in that they show physical objects of great complexity working way better than anything real of that complexity ever would for very long.  This is especially true of the bouncing balls segment.  Balls would never be that well behaved, and yet the paradox is everything seems completely determined by the recognized laws of physics.

Also unrealistic (hence surreal) is the mistake-free execution of the music.  Of course we're used to that from machine music and studio recordings.  People do things until they're perfect, and with cartoon animation, the computer is in charge from the beginning.  Nothing can go wrong.  Again, almost a parody.

The music is more than decent and the coupling of the animations to the synth is perfectly done.

My liking this music video hearkens back to my general fascination with anthropomorphic art i.e. human-like yet inhuman creatures.  The musicians in Animusic are all robotic.  But then music has historically been a prime area for innovation, of automation, of player-pianos, drum machines... so although surreal, it's familiar territory, and the machinery is highly believable in its visual construction.

If these musical vistas are unrealistic it's because these machine world operations are simply too quiet and too smooth.  The machinery itself does not squeak; only the most friction-free and precisely built watches run that silently.  We have to surrender to belief in a higher civilization, more capable than ours, until we remember:  this is "just" animation, and we're really able to pull off some magic when it comes to keeping it unreal.

July 4, 2015

from July 4, 2007

Our family has traditionally made a pilgrimage to Lake Samammish around this time, to meet up with my dad's side of the family, descended from Swedes who pioneered and developed infrastructure around Mercer Island in Lake Union.

Sisters Elsie and Esther were my great aunt and grandmother respectively, with Esther having John (aka Jack) Urner who married Carol Reilley.  My parents were in Chicago, attending 57th Street Meeting (Quaker) by the time they had me, dad already having his MA from Johns Hopkins (International Studies) and looking at getting his PhD in Planning under adviser Dr. Dick Meier (a teacher for Alan Potkin as well).  Julie, my three-years-younger sister, her birthday July 5, joined us in Portland.

This year Carol and I stayed in Portland, though we still have a long car trip ahead of us.  We drove to the Burgerville on Hawthorne and 12th, kitty corner from the Food Pod (bizmo court) so as to be closer to fireworks.  I ended up parking next to Dependable Pattern Works (pause to recall Razz) and following the crowds to the place where the pedestrian spiral takes bicycle and foot traffic off the Hawthorne bridge on the east side.

The same marching band that helped us say good bye to Blue Butterfly showed up, all in white with trombones and stuff and somehow managed to march through the crowd and make music as anticipation grew.  On the opposite shore:  the Blues Festival was in full swing.  I'd gone the previous night but on the fourth just kicked back reading the new JKF book (2008) and other things, tuning in the blues track over KBOO.

At Burgerville, Carol talked about some of her demilitarizing work.  The Ban Treaty which aims to criminalize nuke WMDs has been a dark horse but is gathering steam, enjoying strong support from Austria, Norway and others (a majority of nations have signed it already).

Those working for a Nuclear Convention have worried the Ban Treaty will steal bandwidth from a process already suffering from neglect and inattention, given many Boomer engineers see making WMDs as a pet profit-making business and are pretty rutted in their ways.  Media attention on Countdown to Zero projects (a World Game initiative) is jammed and/or dissipated by competing interests.

Carol got a turkey burger and salmon salad.  She has mostly abstained from eating mammals in her adult life, but at 86 she's committed to longevity and good health and allows herself fish and foul (Jurassic World still at Bagdad).  I had Walla Walla onion rings, which I shared, and a regular sized raspberry milkshake, one of my favorites (we also have a commercial raspberry pie in the refrigerator, and two flavors of ice cream in the freezer).

The professional Portland fireworks display was splendid, from a barge over water (pretty safe).  I recommend this form of entertainment.  First Person Physics.  Air is a tense medium and sudden sharp disturbances, known as explosions, do have the power to exhilarate, without the intense sadness and horror of outward warfare, which uses incendiary devices mainly to disappoint (shock and awe are secondary).  People in the WMD business are all about disappointing people, most especially their own mothers.

Carol managed the 9 block walk each way very well.  We had to go over train tracks and make pedestrian lights that were not timed with old ladies using walkers in mind.  Given the crowds and alert drivers, our progress remained safe.  Coming back, right after the show, with thousands flowing inland, a lengthy freight train came right across, as they do, a moving barrier.  That added context and color and a chance to gather energy for the rest of the uphill.

Clearly I have nothing to complain about in terms of living standards.  I've enjoyed marriage and family life as a father / husband, thanks to Dawn Wicca (1953 - 2007).  I've enjoyed world travel, interesting work, many teachers and friends.  So "problem solved" in my case.  Per my natural freedoms, I pursued happiness and secured a bunch.

But we have many in need, many still unhappy (some don't want houses, preferring camping) and stateless, including right here in Portland, so many puzzles to work on.  It's not like when one's own case is solved, that there aren't others to work on.

Late Night TV

I don't know what exactly disagreed with my GI-tract yesterday, as I'd done my favorite things with beer and pizza, no big deviations.  Random unexplained event (RUE).

As a consequence, I bagged my plan to see the documentary at Clinton Street Theater, a retrospective showing PR / propaganda films against Weed, on the day it became legal in Oregon (Prohibition was slow in lifting, given oppressive religious imams who think this might be their Iran to own and control, most of them claiming to be friends of Jesus in some way).

Not that Oregon east of here, in West Idaho (as some call it) necessarily agrees with cosmopolitan Portland.  They don't get Willamette Week out in Dufur.  Or maybe they do?  Actually I think Terrabonne, Bend, Madras, those places, aren't going to turn tail and defect to Potato Head State.  We shall see.

As another consequence, I had to interrupt watching Endgame (so how fictional?) to more fully experience my indigestion.  Nor did I get through as much of my queues as I'd wanted, meaning more work today (but I'm better now).

Nor did I get much sleep, but that was the good part.

A long documentary on Johnny Carson was aired on PBS, and that was important for me to see, very glad I did.  Then I had BBC on (radio through OPB-3 digital broadcast).  Lots of news and views seeping in, almost replacing dreams it sometimes seems.

The Johnny documentary was important on many levels, one being it openly discusses television as a medium, the dynamics.  They take the "cool" of McLuhan and connect it to the "coolness" of Johnny, and that works to hit a note with the TV-savvy, comedians, and connoisseurs of talk shows in general.

What made Johnny so interesting was not just his erudition but his friends, male and female, his relationships.  They portray him as stand-offish but he somewhat had to be given the culture itself is still working on on-camera-versus-off personae and how these connect.  He innovated.

On the topic of innovation and media:  we could do a lot more with political cartoons in the sense of anime, not manga.  Lets use these to teach seriously even though the point of view will be challenged (serious != unchallenged).

Show the plight of Greece (too big to fail?) as an animated cartoon in other words (for example).  Of course different groups will spin it differently depending on how vested.  So have a film festival (could be virtual) and share them all?  Let audiences access the many points of view.

Am I saying that nations themselves should be turned into cartoon characters?   Doing that is certainly within the ballpark, i.e. I'm not dictating the formula (who'd care?) just recommending more didactic content in that animated cartoon form (take on history).

South Park is doing it, as is Taiwanese Animators, but these are projected as satiric and comedic.  So what would "more serious" look like then?  Think how pharmaceutical companies use cartoons to show us our own innards (ah, great tie-in!).  That's serious stuff, no?

Cartoons can take the edge off, or add edginess, sugar-coat or expose.  They have great powers.  They may be tagged, certified or rated in various ways, just as all movies are, from Youtube to Netflix to whatever equivalents.

Almost forgot:  the Dawn mission to Ceres has my attention.  They just found those bright spots.

Quakers 2015.6.28

mosque in Alabama, by Temcor

Carol and I both caught colds.  We blamed Lindsey, but then I was outside sweating through my clothes at a crowded launch site for World Naked Bike Ride, so maybe it got worse then.

My phone ran out of power from the pictures I was taking, so I got to walk home, given I do bus tickets on the phone.

I suppose I could have gotten some cash back somewhere, but I didn't mind hobbling on my bad ankle.

Today mom and I breakfasted at Tom's before coming to the meetinghouse to see the Barkers, Isolated Friends who've had a lot of experience "overseas".  I'll chronicle more of their talk as the day progresses.  Next stop after here:  Salem.

I bussed over to Enterprise this morning to rent a brand new red Toyota with under 1000 miles on it.  The Nissan is still in the shop (fine by me -- this one has air conditioning, woo hoo (though given our colds, Carol wants it turned down)).

We're having fruit salad during social hour.  We missed Meeting for Worship, given that would have meant being ready by 9:45 AM.  I was back with the car by then, but Carol needed time to three hole punch and sort papers at breakfast.

Iran (going by current borders, as some World Game people draw them), is currently surrounded by US military bases (Paul showed a slide about that), the latter emulating the UK which had a global empire that included India.

India's troops fought alongside the British against the Ottoman Empire, looking forward to spreading their own administration to Baghdad (Iraq).

Political conservatives of the American Century persuasion miss-associate "imperialism" with "greatness" whereas exporting soldiers is really just the Iron Mountain's way of housing and feeding the more socially unproductive (prisoners, like base populations, are similarly seriously curtailed, in terms of what their contribution to civil society might be).

Persians practiced "sky burial" under Zoroastrianism much as the Tibetans do.  Lots of dynasties so far.

Democratically elected president Mossadegh was victim of Dulles Brothers PR, who convinced Eisenhower he was Communist.  Nixon-Kissinger played their brain dead version of "realpolitik" to disastrous effect.  

DC's bankrupt pro-Shah policies fed Khomeini's rise to power, with student activist support, leading to the so-called "hostage crisis".  

Although Iran was sympathetic towards the US over the events of 911, by 2002 the "Axis of Evil" label had signaled the US was entering a period of prolonged political immaturity complete with idiotic baby talk, farcical clowning, and extreme violence.  We remain in this chapter.

Iran has set aside seats in its parliament based on religious orientation, e.g. two seats for Christians, one seat for Jews.  Such codifications do not impress me as good design.  As a software engineer, I detect cruft just about anytime politicians use their creaky / contrived / obsolete codes to try to run things.

Many young Iranians feel the same way about old fossil politicians as North Americans do.  They flagrantly flaunt the stupid "rules" that the know-nothings wish to impose.  Young people around the world have a lot in common in not wanting to leave global affairs to old fossils.

The Persians got their first research reactor as a gift of the Eisenhower administration.  The current line is nuclear WMDs are anti-Islamic, i.e. against Islamic principles.  DC insists this is hypocrisy, and postures as keeping Iran's WMD ambitions in check.  

However, if Iran is serious, then perhaps Christianity has become the true champion of nuke weapons, given US conservatives like to pose as such and embrace nuclear WMDs wholeheartedly as God-given (Jesus loves nuclear weapons apparently).

Visa Commercial

I found myself doing a "Visa commercial" recently, not for pay, not officially, just I was saying in some email that I'd take Visa over a visa any day, a dig at the game of nation-states, which isn't working for so many.

We went to MercyCorps on International Refugee Day, Glenn and I, to learn more about those ejected from "the system" (so-called) and what engineers have been coming up with to compensate.

Yes, we blame the non-nations, the corporations, for not letting nations have their way, but then the corporations do not require those huge contiguous tracts of land, so problematic on the maps.

True, a soy bean farm in Brazil may run to many acres but it's still not exactly a state, not that private property is any friendlier.  Is it a hospital, a hotel, a university?  Expectations vary depending on the namespace and of course one's role in whatever scripts (processes, scenarios, time tubes).

We have a lot of players that are non-nations, NGOs in particular.

So are church groups NGOs?  Temples?  Do we worship in NGOs on Sundays and Saturdays?

The nomenclature is not clear.

Many a Friends Meeting is indeed a 501(c)(3) on paper, shorthand for a kind of institution that does the same kind of work as the USG i.e. serves a public ("the people") and as such is tax exempt.

One may even donate to such tax-exempt corporations, known as charities, and claim those donations off the top is if those were taxes already paid.  Not every penny need be rendered unto Caesar.

Like, why sponsor a corrupt government, overrun by plutocrats and their minions, when you might earmark for the sleeker charities of your choice?  Many a donor billionaire has just such thoughts.

What I like about Visa is it's somewhat freed of the taint of nations and suggests that more of the real wealth, the real work, is not performed by humans at all.  The latter weave a final set of products and services and network amongst themselves, but the heavy lifting is done by water and wind, cosmic forces (gravity etc.).

Visa plugs into all that, in my imagination (PR), whereas old money still bears the face of a "sovereign" to whom credit for great works was assigned.

I have nothing against great works mind you, I'm just not one to encourage humans arrogating all credit to themselves for much of anything.

We humans didn't design our own human bodies and have yet to figure out how they work in many important respects.  We have our myths in which humans are made to be boss, but they're called myths for a reason.

Anyway, don't mistake this for some religious argument about deities.  I'm just sharing my realistic assessment of value added through Work (i.e. expending Energy in physics terms), saying I'm not about to give humans all the credit, as if humans were the only source of anti-entropy in this world.

We'd get absurd forms of bookkeeping from such an anthropic premise.  Our narratives would fail to hold water after awhile.  So lets keep it real if we want to keep our currency hard.  That's really not a new concept.

Yes Men are Revolting (movie review)

Carol (mom) and I saw this at Living Room Theaters, the same venue where I saw Citizen Four.  She asked afterward how much of the back story was really real, and that got me thinking.

Having checked the web in a few places, I see Adam (not his real name) really is a professor at some New York college or university.  I was imagining he might have rented a classroom and pulled the same stunt, of having us believe that was his job.

Could it be that other guy (Mike) had never set foot in Scotland?  You can see where my mind was going with all that:  even the back story was paper thin, constructed for our edification (Adam promised in Uganda he'd do something GLTBQish, and on that promise he made good).

The spoof technique the Yes Men use is pretty interesting:

(A) show people in authority doing what we subconsciously think would be the "right thing" (US Department of Energy, Chamber of Commerce)

or...

(B) show people in authority being flagrant and crass about their true intentions (Shell and Gazprom).

Both work, although I'm not always clear on the criteria for success.  Their parody of the Gazprom / Shell collaboration in Amsterdam was deemed a failure.  How so?  Too complicated to understand?

Watching Canada lose its sovereignty has not been pretty.  Another cast of politicians has lost credibility, a needed attribute for government, but what else is new?

All this activism can get exhausting and the oceans continue to rise.  Occupy was a shot in the arm.

Stay tuned.

Wanderers 2015.6.16

I met up with Elise at Sokongdong BBQ, part of the Fubonn Shopping Center, catering to Asian cultures.

I bought a bag of black rice afterward, then high tailed it to Wanderers, stopping home to share a red bean ice cream ball with mom.  Carol is not a huge sweets fan but enjoys the occasional sticky dough sphere.

Don was setting up the projector when I arrived, eager to share the above video.  That's a level of physical coordination you don't see everyday, worth filming.  Tap dancing in roller skates, sheesh.

Discussion turned to the TMT in Hawaii, the newest telescope.  The synergies between astronomy and local culture -- lots to investigate, we barely scratched the surface (excuse choice of words).

Earlier today, on a break from teaching (in the teacher's lounge as we say), I studied the physics of dam disasters, with help from Youtube.

I researched the failure of the St. Francis dam, serving LA, with much interest.  That was a disaster some people saw coming apparently.

Before then, the dam feeding the Pennsylvania canal system, or intended to, before trains took over in the transportation business, ended up re-purposed, only to end in disaster.  Talking about Johnstown.

Recent News and Readings

DC is moving tanks around (the kind that shoot shells) in a political game with the Kremlin to play Cold War in Ukraine.  By DC of course I mean the Pentagon, in turn a euphemism of sorts, for a Beltway mentality that works closely with Iron Mountain partners (e.g. Geiko) around the world, many in Germany and Japan.

DC's moves are predictable.  When all you have is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.  One dimensional chess is what tanks are all about, although when caught up in symbolism, as here, they're not so much tanks as pieces on a game board, so some dimensions are restored.

I've been reading The Cryptographic Imagination by Shawn James Rosenheim (Johns Hopkins Press, 1997), literary criticism focusing on Poe.  That's an important literary vector (Gothic) in my writing given Laffoley, Applewhite and Fuller as influences.  The notion of "cracking a code" as both the act of reading and a path to deeper insights, resonates through these works, from Gold Bug through Da Vinci Code.

An "encoding" (such as UTF-8) need not be about concealment so much as preservation and recording.  How else but in a dense code, some set of hieroglyphics, perhaps a language invented for this express purpose (e.g. Synergetics, less about neologisms than spinning known words in a new way)?  Mnemonics, memory palaces, are "encodings" less about "concealing" then "memory management" (data processing, IT work).

The last time I saw Ed Applewhite was at the Fuller Symposium in DC.  This was after he and June had visited us in Portland.  June, his wife, had since died, whereas my wife was just about to receive her terminal diagnosis, the reason I flew home early (missing Pycon and a dinner with Ed).  Ed was talking about the overlap twixt Synergetics (his collaboration with Fuller) and Poe's Eureka, anticipating the same convergence, in the rear view mirror, that I'm looking at a decade later.

The World's Fair in Kabul, the dome (like the Climatron), Khrushchev's admiration for it -- these themes and events will return with a renewed Cold War.  Mom was telling me that higher ups in the new Ukraine government have dual citizenship in the US or other places in some cases.  They're friends of Kagan's wife Victoria Nuland or something?

The long term credibility of the "nation state" in contrast with some "Tomorrowland" (ala Disney's EPCOT) is a theme the news dances around a lot.  I guess we need to keep believing in these "nations" so that NATO has some meaning?  How can you have treaties without nations?  Ask the n8vs.  They have nations too, and alliances.

Tweeting Synergetics

:: tweeting synergetics ::

Trusting Mathematics

If you saw Imitation Game, which title is suggestive of the Turing Machine's mission, you know lives depend on keeping secrets and/or finding them out, and once mathematics became something "engines" could do on an industrial scale, the art of cryptography really took off.

Above you'll hear me babbling away, fairly coherently, about the difference between private key and public key cryptography, and the difference it made.

Buzz Hill is tracking Bitcoin and the whole idea of cryptographic systems built to enable secure transactions.  He just sent me a PDF of Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, by Satoshi Nakamoto.  I'm looking forward to studying it more.

Cryptography came up recently around Python.org as well, where we went into the topic of tie-breaking algorithms on elections-wg, a new working group.  I summarized some of what I took away from that thread on edu-sig, also a Python community listserv.

Thirsters 2015.6.4

I'd been looking forward to more serious discussion of the Peace Corps, and that's what occurred.  The conversation was reflective and far from self congratulatory.

Many of the participants talked about how suspicious people had been.

Clearly the US was exporting its homeless and prostitutes, dumping them in 3rd world countries.  That was how Peace Corps was sometimes perceived by some of the rural students in Ethiopia.

And when the US was up to no good, as in Vietnam, Peace Corps volunteers got a lot of push back.  They paid a price for horrific stupidity in the Pentagon a lot.

Art Kohn came right out and said that, as a Fulbright Scholar, he was unambiguously an agent of the USG, State Department in particular.  Not a secret.

I wish I'd been more able to engage but Python work is at high tide.  Not that I was ever in the Peace Corps myself.  Some friends of mine were.  The topic interests me.

Thirsters is the natural place to bring it up as founder Bob Textor was one of its several architects.

I stayed in a corner with my head in my laptop most of the time, thinking about code and context managers and such.

Carol (mom) came with me and she wishes she could hear better.

We had a good time anyway.

I've been eying the Thirsters for their importance in Peace Work.  Now that AFSC is quitting the Portland Peace Program (we carry on without much Quaker support), I'm casting about for other ways to configure our Portland matrix.

Of course a lot of people are interested in so-called peace work.  Or call it citizen diplomacy or whatever.  I'm just looking for new ways to participate, given AFSC's decision to give up its role.

I talked at length with a woman who knows the Humanists of Greater Portland is also looking for new angles.  She was asking about interns and PSU.  I had no direct answer about how to find one.

Making room for the emptiness i.e. allowing the vacuum to take shape, is probably better than fighting it.

I'll wait for a way to open.  We're in a state of "casting about" (sounds like I Ching).

On the way over, mom talked about Mexico and how one of their low level officials made a ridiculous ass of himself by disrespecting the Sioux.

The Mexican government appears to be in some kind of unstable mess again, with native peoples saying enough is enough already.  But then they've been saying that for awhile right?

The Internet's Own Boy (movie review)

Aaron's story has some elements in common with Alien Boy's in that both ran up against bullies who have the system (inertia) on their side.

Also, The U.S. Versus John Lennon is another documentary that resonates, with lots of big name talking heads, and lesser-knowns, adding their tribute and perspective to a hero's short life.

Aaron Schwartz was infused with a lot of the same ideals that drove geeks to create a free Internet based on free software, with free as in Liberal Arts (libre).

That MIT and JSTOR were not active prosecutors in the case against Schwartz saves them some reputation, though both were diminished by this chapter.

The Obama Administration comes away scarred, but I think we know it's really just Washington DC and its cult of lawyers under the surface, smug in its being the heavy and having the right to strip search and humiliate whomsoever it pleaseth.  Roman heritage.  Fascist (literally).

Admittedly, things have been moving quickly lately and politicians used to using a finger-in-the-air approach to sensing political winds have been confused a lot, about which way said political winds are blowing.

This film was shown at OMSI recently.

Although I've fought many of the same battles for open access, I was not specifically aware of Schwartz at the time and most of this information about his battle with SOAPA was news to me.  I remember fighting Clipper (so ancient)...  he was far more engaged than I with domestic politics.

I was glad to see Tim O'Reilly in the lineup of those appreciative of what Schwartz was hoping to accomplish, in terms of liberating hard won human knowledge from those asserting control by entitlement.  A lot of scientists and engineers resent what amounts to slavery as well.

Aaron's contribution to the Creative Commons movement lives on and continues gathering momentum.

Bucky Fuller was always pointing out what he called "LAWCAP" was up to (the post World War Two US legal establishment):  creating scarcity artificially, deliberately handicapping technology.

This film shines a light through the dying LAWCAP somewhat transparently.  We see its last gasps protesting moral supremacy before an increasingly skeptical audience that keeps wondering when a more intelligent form of life might arise from these ruins.

 Idiocracy and LAWCAP have much in common no?

Blue House News

I've been a clearinghouse for incoming data regarding the IT person using my address, with permission, and now in Nepal, enduring many tremors amidst outright earthquakes.  She misses cold beer.  She just donated a Sony camera to a team, recalling her time with Jordan, neighbor, whom I recently saw at May Day in South Campus.

Jordan and Lindsey interviewed Right to Survive and Right to Sleep activists quite a bit, including their testimony in City Hall.  She got good at video editing, helping splice things together.  She'd been doing that anyway, with audio, and her drum machine, R2D2 coincidentally, like the Village (North Campus).

So now that she's in Kathmandu she realizes the predicament:  earthquakes happen quickly but their ripple effects and consequences are more enduring and the challenge is to sustain attention in a species with ADD (Gore Vidal called it amnesia but in any case a dementia of sorts).  People will forget all about "the big earthquake" or "the big storm" and yet people in and around New Orleans know that Hurricane Rita is still blowing, in a manner of speaking.  More work to be done.

Melody knows a lot about New Orleans first hand whereas I'm still relatively green when it comes to great North and South American cities (not forgetting Central).  There're a lot of cities out there and unless you're campaigning for some big office or on a team that's doing that, or work for TSA or one of those, you probably don't see many of them.  Maybe if you work for Taco Bell at some level, or similar franchise.  Just saying:  my geographic information awareness is somewhat limited and I'm aware of that.

The incoming data were about upgrading from tourist status so as to continue the relationship.  Visits to the US Embassy were also involved.  Nepal wisely wants criminal background checks and more if taking in a student, we often do the same.  Visiting other countries is not a one way street and we all have to go through various obstacle courses.  Some celebrity recently was caught smuggling his dog into an aggressively self policing country and took a lot of flak for it.  One is not supposed to flaunt the law.  That being said, a private jet may still cut some hours off processing time.

Actually, when Urners traveled to Tashkent from Kabul, Afghanistan, via Aeroflot, the idea of simple tourists was new enough that Intourist wanted to be there.  They met our plane and showed us around, in Moscow later as well, but not in any heavy handed way.  Yes, Russians get paranoid, but I don't want to exaggerate for melodramatic effect the way some do.  Urners wandered alone and unsupervised in Russia, just as they did in many places.  Big Brother was not watching.

Directory Services

As the NPYM Tech Clerk (IT Committee), I've been looking at the issue of name badges across the full spectrum of Unicode character sets.  Given our regional personnel are schooled in the Anglo alphabet, I'm using Last, First for collation, using the A-Z phonetic alphabet, but then allowing any glyphs in Full Name.

For example if your name is Лэрри Фэргуссон (fake Russian pseudonym) then you can have that on your name badge, but the Friend fishing it out for you is going by phonetics.  Л is an El sound (L) and Ф we all recognize from Phi, as an F sound.  So in finding the nametag, a Last = "F", First = "L" search algorithm is used.

My original vision was of R2DToo / Dignity Village as field-testing campuses for such as Institute for Integral Design's lean-to prototypes, made of a pan deck material and solar paneled, better than simply corrugated metal, already a staple in refugee world.

Other refugee camp / disaster relief shelter solutions would likewise get a dress rehearsal in these pre-deployment testing zones, with MVPs flying in to PDX to get the tour.

R2DToo aka Right to Survive, is already a refugee camp, in downtown Portland (W Burnside).  Dignity Village is close to PDX (Portland Airport) and to a prison.

These are not new ideas, as far as these blogs are concerned, i.e. I've been suggesting prototyping disaster relief solutions in disaster relief villages for quite awhile.

R2DToo is "North Campus" vs. PSU as "South Campus" in terms of Portlandia geography.  Most people refer to North and South Park Blocks as parallel concepts.

Speaking of PSU, Linsdsey is eagerly awaiting her transcript from FSU (Florida State University, where Dawn also went) which should come by snail-mail to Blue House.  I'll scan it and send it to Nepal as PDF or JPG, and she can share those documents with her language-teaching university.

With enough bona fides demonstrating her intention to be a full time student, she'll get that student visa, less restrictive than the tourist one.  She's been pursing getting such an upgrade all through the many earthquakes and resulting devastation.

Institute for Integral Design is Glenn's idea.  Last time AFSC was planning to move, from E Burnside to somewhere else, he nursed the hope of NGOs banding together for a building on Hawthorne, by now a furniture outlet.

I knew it was a long shot, and AFSC ended up moving to ElderPlace / Providence, an admin building on Belmont across from Horse Brass.

Just as Philadelphia was choosing to pull the plug on its Portland Peace Program sponsorship, I suggested the Pauling House campus for a gift shop ala Laughing Horse Books, replacing the vacating Anthology Books.

That was a long shot again.  A high end tattoo and piercing studio moved to fill the void.  ElderPlace stays landlord for the AFSC office, home to an industrial strength photocopier, though that's clearly a back office.

E Burnside had a receptionist and was friendly to walk-ins in the old days, before AFSC became a ghost of its former self.

However, Stark Street Meeting (SSM) has a PSCC (Peace Committee) so the idea of needing non-Latin-1 nametags for some Portland AFSC meetup (co-hosting) is not as far fetched as one may imagine.

They've co-hosted / co-sponsored events before, and could again.

If NPYM, in the meantime, has helped make the nametag situation more cosmopolitan, then kudos to Quakers for being catholic (open minded) in that regard.

Mad Max: Fury Road (movie review)

A Mad Max movie is like one of those human subject experiments one may never run, not just for ethical reasons but think of the expense.  Science fiction screen play takes over and we do anthropology in a simulator.  The players throw out their hypotheses, as to how humans would cope, and we in the audience, the spectators, engage and endorse somewhat to the extent we empathize with the characters and their motivations.  Do we understand this reality?  Does it ring true in some way?

In a Mad Max, the virtual reality is horrific in that most technology has been removed except the gas guzzlers.  You get an oil refinery, a bullet factory, lots of vehicles driving around shooting each other, lots of road rage, and that's about it, a very simple simulation.

The humans form into pyramid hierarchies that apex in some "strongman" archetype (like a Saddam or Qaddafi).  The leader clique controls the water supply and the rabble get all religious about what this means.  Unionization, forming into agribusiness co-ops, let alone revolution and wealth redistribution, is not in the cards, as peoples religious tendencies are turned against them.  That part rings true enough.

Furiosa, the protagonist (Max might be her alter ego), is tired of how women are treated in this domain and remembers a better place.  She has made her way up in the ranks in this almost entirely male hierarchy, as one of them, but she was a kidnap victim from the start and these are not her people.

She's always felt alienated and decides its time to right the balance.  She's going to seize the day and get the women to that greener place, a place in her memory from before the kidnapping.

Max reins her in at a critical juncture, talking practicality and reality and saying we need to face our original fears and not forever run from our deeper selves.  Not that it's quite so psychological in that way.  All the metaphors are geographic in this invisible landscape, this teenage wasteland.

The drones or fan-boys who love the strongman at the top, don't have much use for children or women except as tools of their pyramid.  Harvesting milk and feeding infants has been outsourced.  There are no "fathers" per se.  However, in the emerging relationship between one of the breeders that Furiosa is rescuing, and a fan-boy, we see that human nature still retains a latent ability to form male-female bonds.

I caught this movie on my birthday thanks to Melody, a good friend and experienced world traveler.  We talked about Belize and the Mennonites there.  I was going on about Amish Mafia on the Discovery channel (I've only watched previews so far) and wondering what a Quaker Mafia would look like.  We went to Yard House on 5th both before and after the film, at the Regal in Fox Tower, which had devoted a majority of its cinemas to Mad Max viewings, including a 3D option.

Melody, who reads a lot, wished the narrative had veered off the action track and explored this virtual world a little more, giving us a richer context, perhaps with back stories and flashbacks (ka-ching!).  The twelve hour version probably has that (smile).  I agreed.  This was like a whirlwind tour through Narnia wherein we only have time for one battle and a quick interview with Aslan, then its back home, tour over, so many questions still unanswered.  Melody thought the funniest touch was the fan-boy rock star, with drummer backup (all very portable), a fitting signature of this psycho-wasteland.

Be Unusual. It's OK.

I'd not worry about some fixed universal true meaning of "game" in Plato's World of Ideas.

Being of "language game" (LW) and "World Game" (RBF) heritage, I'll obviously come with my own spin, but so does everyone "mean" (i.e. "spin") in some way.

Are maths "really" but language games? But what is "language" here? "Forms of life" said LW. So it just keeps on going. One spin after a next.

Follow what beaten tracks you will, or go off beat. Many games to play that way too. Be unusual. It's OK.

Kirby


From this Reply-Tree at math-teach

Avengers: Age of Ultron (movie review)

I'm very far from being a deep Marvel or DC comics scholar.  MAD was more my beat.  These X-Men, Fantastic Four and Avengers were familiar to me, Hulk especially, but that hardly counts when it comes to fandom.

We all find our angle if willing though, and I'm in love with the Natasha character (I love Lucy, one could say, or call her Her) and find her being "Hulk whisperer" appealing.  Captain America is a brooding philosopher, so ironic given his outfit.  "Maybe he's right and we are monsters" he mulls aloud, in the midst of a pitched battle with their eternal foe.

Ultron is brilliant, as is the spawn of Ultron and Jarvis, but let me not give away the whole plot.  You'll wanna see it.

I love the way comic book writers can just suddenly supply details.  The classic rural farm, so like the one in Interstellar in some ways, shades of Furious 7...  Superman was here.  A family from nowhere.  The Avengers express surprise, just as do our avid readers, the fans...

Anyway, our family has been Joss Whedon buffs for awhile now.  If only Nietzsche had had Whedon instead of Wagner to look up to, we might not have had Hitler.  We wouldn't have needed the big falling out and misunderstanding and we could all have been happy Egoists together -- or at least that's how it's seeming now.

Really funny and quirky is how Thor, son of Odin, is on stage from another mythology, pre Marvel, yet accepted as one more Avenger, one of the Elders thereof.  Such a tip of the hat to mythologists, one writing crew to another, to welcome Thor aboard, among the immortals.

We're more suspicious of Tony Stark and his defense contractor reflexes.  Ultron is prepared to use that to split the Avengers and therefore win.

But lets remember the Avengers themselves have a supporting cast.  After the CIA blew it in the last episode, under the milk-drinking evildoer Robert Redford, the aircraft carrying quad-copter is back, ready to evacuate the Eastern Europeans from their Dracula, ur Ultronic Lord.  Good to see us being friendly with those folks instead of using them for target practice.

The Hulk is becoming more brooding and Natasha is ready to admit there might not be a viable child of such outliers, but the relationship is real nonetheless, already complete in the immortal chrono-log of another might-have-been Universe (aren't they all a tad fiction?).

Axing Staff in West Region

After repeated assurances that a move would not mean a downsize, thereby garnering our support as a Committee, the West Region management team:  (A)  downsized our Office and (B) dissolved our committee.  After we worked our butts off to move out of the old office, friendly to walk-ins.

The staffer that worked hardest to accomplish the move is the one for the chopping block, most ironically.  And walk-ins?  No one knows where the new place even is (hint:  near Red Square and Movie Madness).  We've gentrified ourselves out of the picture.

So why do Quakers allow such evil in their name?  Well, for one thing, they don't know what's going on.  Regional Executive Committee is devoid of Oregonians so it was easy for the unrepresented state to have its Office axed, despite promises and lies.

These people hardly ever meet and most Quakers don't know what a listserv is and therefore expect the world to plod along as slowly as they do, with Business Meetings only monthly (guffaw), or less.  Organizational memory leaks away in conference calls, nothing recorded.  What a mess.

Nothing really gets done at this pace and our numbers are understandably dwindling.

Also, Quakers are losing their enthusiasm for Peace Work and prefer the blanket comfort of being against Climate Change, as if the Biosphere had ever not been changing, and yes, thanks to humans in large degree.

Such a nice safe discourse, the suburbs compared to inner city struggles with Racism and other cancers of the soul, such as Affluenza and "nuclear superiority" (oxymoronic in the extreme).

So sweet and antiseptic, to be against "oil trains" while gassing up at the nearest pump (oil is cheap this summer and USAers are guzzling like mad).  Who in the Pacific Northwest wants to ruin nature?  Talk about playing it safe!

Given a combination of ignorance and apathy, it's no wonder the back office blood suckers are able to ax the talented while keeping jobs for themselves.  Capitalism gets away with so much profitable crime, is right up there with organized religion on that score.

The relocated Office is in a building prominently marked for sale by the way.  Did our earlier landlord kick us out?  No.  Were our co-tenants begging us to stay?  Yes.  Glowing promises of a better tomorrow are what suckered our Committee into stepping off a cliff, score one for the West Region management team.

Even when the bottom line was starting to look good, they pick on Portland, as if we had nothing to do with things getting better.  I say we did, and we will continue the Peace Program in Portland, with or without Quaker support.  The Unitarians have proved reliable.

Things look pretty bleak for the AFSC though, just as it was turning one hundred years old.  Rufus Jones was a cool dude but couldn't predict everything, not even Hari Seldon could.

Will we recover by 2017?  Not necessarily.  They're pretty stuck in their ways in Philadelphia, I'm able to report, having been to quite a few meetings there.  Actual people want to talk Doctrine of Discovery and show up prepared to do so.  But these privileged Corporation folk just want to preach to the choir and pretend our West Region will just go away.  That's the east coasters for ya.

Don't expect too many miracles from people who know nothing much beyond Windows (we have some stellar staff, but are way top heavy in admin, judging from experience on the ground, not from abstract financials).

Quakers: What Do We Offer?

A Quaker Meeting is less a "church" than a "business" as the original Friends had greater trust in the honesty of bookkeeping and plain speech when the "hireling priests" were not in the picture.  Church was a corrupt institution in the eyes of these early Children of the Light.

The purpose of Quaker business is socially responsible, i.e. if Corporations are People, then a Meeting has to live up to some high standards, unlike a Corporation of the purely money-making variety (these latter tend to have many pathologies and short half-lives in any case).

Through participation in the business of Quakers, members of the public reconnect with a way to get work done as equals and by consensus.

Equality does not mean we're all clones of one another, or are striving to be.  Rather, we respect one another as athletes in a Metaphysical Olympics of sorts, with some high achievers outrunning or outgunning the rest of us.

I say "outgunning" in a tongue-in-cheek fashion as Quakers pride themselves on keeping their weapons "inward" i.e. the invisible / ephemeral world of warring memes is where Quakerism builds its open bastion and takes up its mission.

Our mission is not to convert the world to Quakerism or Christianity.  Diversity is welcomed and treasured.  Religions come and go.  The best religions are likely still to come.

Our mission is to provide those already convinced of Quakerism's effectiveness and its value in their lives with opportunities for structured practice, meaning Meetings for Worship for Business and work on Committees at the very least.

The Peace and Social Concerns Committee is one of the most important, as that committee is about putting Quaker values and teachings into practice, bringing healing justice into the world.  PSCC is where Friends practice their skills with the Sword of Compassion (another meaning of "jihad" in fact).

As a non-profit Corporation, your Meeting has officers in the eyes of the state, but it also has roles, likewise public facing.  Quakerism is a role playing "game" though to say "game" does not imply we're not serious.

The good order of Friends promotes transparency, not just carrying private fantasies around in our heads about who has what role.  The clerks, rewarded not by coins but by a deeper experience of their Faith & Practice, facilitate and record, as the Committees go about their business.  We know who they are and what job descriptions they follow.

Indeed, the slate is one of the Meeting's most important public-facing documents, as it puts in writing what Business Meeting has approved, of Nominating's recommendations.  Any Monthly Meeting wishing to be taken seriously has an up to date slate, easily available as a matter of public record.

Sometimes people ask about Membership as in "do I need to become a member to participate in Quakerism?"

The short answer is "no" and indeed one is encouraged to work on committees in a "try before you buy" mode.  "Convincement" comes through practice, not through "leap before you look" mindless / reflexive behavior.   Skeptics are most welcome.

The long answer is: membership provides a way to be public and out of the closet about one's Quakerism.  Some cannot afford this luxury and need to keep their affiliation hidden, but for those willing to brand themselves Members, that institution is alive and well.

Contact your Oversight Committee for more details on how to apply.