Postmortem

I haven't actually lived in WDC (that's Washington, DC for nonlocals) for a long time, and even then, my chapters there were sporadic and short-lived. 

I lived in a finished attic, cram-packed with spy and detective books, that time I worked for Americans for Civic Participation (a nonprofit voter registration outfit). Another time, my parents were housesitting a place near DuPont circle, below ground-level as I recall. 

Speaking of which, Ed Applewhite introduced me to the Cosmos Club, on said circle, on a different visit. A bigger and older version of Wanderers in a lot of ways.

All of which is to say, I wasn't there when the decision was made to provoke Russia into actions egregious and punishable enough to justify the sudden imposition of sanctions up to and including an internet cut-off. So it's speculation on my part, mixed with some remote sensing (based on open sources), when I say the WDC political cast was taken by surprise when no switch got flipped such that all the lights went out in their foe economy. Russia Today (RT) remained accessible to those not dependent on cable.

Russia experienced disruption and inconvenience yet continues to have internet.

The missing puzzle piece, I'll offer, is: 

• the free open source Linux revolution, starting in the 1980s, 
• bringing us the graphical web by the 1990s (with memex vibes from earlier science fiction), 
• and leading to e-commerce changing social dynamics big time (shopping, dating) in the early 2000s. 

Software engineers learned that copyleft collaboration left "every company for itself" strategies in the dust, in terms of advancing the state of the art. Competitors could add some secret sauce and hide proprietary layers inside cloud containers, but the value added was atop publicly scrutable designs.

Making the fundamentals of tcp/ip secret, as in classified, would have defeated the whole purpose: to make a decentralized system that could withstand enemy attacks. That was arpanet (sticking to lowercase unix style).

As a consequence, those with less than a high school education, by today's standards, with respect to cyberspace, continued to think of "the internet" as some uniquely American (as in US) technology that could suddenly be withheld from others with the flip of a switch.  

Let's imagine a TV show wherein a West Winger shouts "do it" through a bat phone to some anonymous corps of engineers in the Pentagon, but then nothing much happens, because there's nothing much to do really, in response to such orders. 

Of course the banks have older games and could just repossess bank accounts. The lawlessness of the "rules based order" would feed a growing counterweight, a bulking up BRICS.

I'm not saying the internet couldn't be physically hampered. However the vote-winning hand was supposed to be a domineering control of cyberspace without the powers of explosives, not an edge in conventional force or special operations savvy. 

Just throw that imaginary switch. Do that thing with the routers. 

Once the sanctions proved ineffective, much to West Winger surprise, the game became more conventionally military -- but not really, and "because internet" again. 

Eyeballs could gain access to the frontlines over coffee from any office. What used to be hard-to-obtain humint, moving sluggishly through the system, was now "open pipe plentiful" both as raw intel and cogent analysis. Propaganda met with counterintelligence at every turn.

So-called secrets would come out immediately, meaning they really had no chance to become hidden in the first place. The engineering cult of open source had transformed the vista, even when it came to waging a more conventional, less asymmetric war.

If my analysis is correct, then perhaps we're on the right track on YouTube, in providing higher education to those most in need, such as those WDC congresspeople and agency staffs.

Seeing how the global economy has swiftly integrated, and proved resilient, it's time to build in more anti-fragility. Fragile egos, suffering from imposter syndrome, need to stay away from hard hat construction sites in the energy department. Whoever blew up Nord Stream is too juvenile to have a place at the grownups' table.

Science is not about pandering to nationalism at every turn. The idea that the sciences have to wall themselves in and compartmentalize "because nations" has always seemed semi-ludicrous, given how the science cults (e.g. the Pythagoreans) long predate the United Nations. 

The melodramas and game shows staged by the political cast constitute so much fluffy daytime TV for the least informed, from the standpoint of more snobby genres.

At another level (intertwined), you have a US military that was willing to go along with a "communism bad, capitalism good" ideology, but was unwilling to shift gears to an "our mafia versus their mafia" ideology once communism caved. 

If it was just "our conglomerates versus their conglomerates" then it's more like a mercenary Europe, with gangs of thugs selling their services to some highest bidder, some Machiavellian.

Putting a lot of weight on rotting trestle timbers is a great way to lose a train. 

Many in high leadership never lost that sense of detente and rapprochement that followed the reunification of the two Germanys. The Americans and Russians had been allies, with Russia taking the brunt, and the reason both felt safe to let the Germanys fuse was a sense of overcoming their own differences. 

But not everyone got the memo, and out of sheer reflex and unthinking momentum, Russophobia persisted even when so-called communism had become harmless.

We have the old Smedley Butler screed War is a Racket, his shot across the bow of a business class thinking to heist (hijack) the US government (see Business Plot). 

Humans need high ideals to die for, and if it's gonna be like Coke versus Pepsi, then the heroics ain't really there anymore. Interest in serving will wane, and civilians will forget why it's OK for a world military cast to prey upon them, forcing servitude (enslavement), compliance at gunpoint. 

How are we "defending democracy" by allowing bought politicians to sell us out to highest bidders?

The American people are getting narratives from respected military figures with no special animosity towards Russians. Various ethnic groups continue grinding their axes, but their specific beefs have a way of sounding parochial, especially outside of Old Europe. 

It's probably not fair to say that Ukrainians have burrowed more deeply into the molehill than Russians. Russian settlers date way back, including here in Cascadia for example. 

Our ethnic Russians and Ukrainians get along with Estonians and Lithuanians (they share news and stores), just as our Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and Laotians are not at each others' throats. 

AFSC's Portland branch was involved in diffusing Hispanic-Asian tensions. A melting pot can get hot, but it's not likely to boil over if democratically managed.

In sum... 

The WDCers who masterminded the war on Russia didn't understand the global internet. Once it was no longer about communists under every bed, in every closet, many career military minds disengaged. Dot commie engineers weren't the same species, and their warez clearly underpinned the workings of today's capitalism. So why war against them? Pythonistas were not the enemy.

Virtual Nationhood

A sense of how to start a Diaspora State online comes from business law with its supranational (globally dispersed) corporation, not that other structures, say nonprofits, aren't also supranational. 

Say on leaving Gaza (uninhabitable at this time) a guest (a Global U person) receives a choice of nationalities, including Palestinian, but with a separate set of choices regarding where to go next.  We know Egypt and Jordan have said they're not offering vacancies, however let's expect some vacancies elsewhere.

Per this journal, a science fiction story got rolling wherein Cubans, friends of Palestinians, likewise embargoed (BDS hits everybody it seems), are offering some Cuban slots and the documentation is done digitally. Head shot in a booth, printable record, memory stick, database, and you're on a plane from Gaza to Cuba (via Malta? I don't know). 

This would be a tiny pilot study, and no, this isn't a torture taxi to Gitmo. There's no need for any overt US involvement. Cuba does have some olive groves. That some Palestinians were showing up around Cuba would not be kept secret. This would be positive PR, a story of helping families escape a hell hole.

The process of documenting with a Palestinian flag icon, for those choosing it, is not a United Nations thing, but a datum in a database thing. We have all the national flags, or do we? Who gets a flag in Unicode? How about flags gone by? How about flags in the future? Unicode is not "full" we all know i.e. there's plenty of room for new glyphs. OK, here it is, one of the emoji. That's sufficient for Postgres or SQLite or what have you.

I believe Florida's governor declined to offer any slots or vacancies. I don't know what the other states are saying. I'm guessing they feel semi-paralyzed because any innovations around getting people evacuated from the Gaza killing fields will be labeled "human trafficking" by critics. 

When it comes to exporting human beings around the planet, there's lots of paperwork. That's what your university is endeavoring to help with, with a student visa, but there's that sensitive "town-gown" relationship to consider. What if your home country wants to draft you, what rights do you have to stay away?

The main point here is these pilot projects need not and should not be huge at first, as we have bugs to work out. The EU has gained more experience with processing and documenting those coming in illegally, although Florida has been dealing with Cubans for decades. Ever since Texas became a state, we've had tensions with the state of Mexico in the human trafficking department, along with Drug Wars.

The question is what are the next steps, once an evacuation system is established, for besieged refugees everywhere (with Gaza the showroom exhibit)? We're talking about a global underground railroad. As a Quaker, I'm just "talking the walk" meaning you'd expect stuff like this from a "human libber" i.e. someone wanting more, or wanting to better secure, liberty for humans -- and so, like a Humanist in that regard.

I've been dreaming of Asylum Cities, which are not all the same and which learn from the mistakes of others. A first objection here is: don't we already have asylum cities?  Am I dreaming of anything we don't already have? Just look at history right?

Refugees from all over the place gravitate to these various urban centers, where they often find congenial groups engaged in the same or similar struggles, sometimes in Diaspora Nation mode. New York City is a haven for many such virtual nation global subcultures. France has been a refuge for Iranians in exile. The US is home to a Chinese Diaspora as well as a Cuban Diaspora. Given the relatively open switchboard nature of domestic media, the psychological battlegrounds move to where Americans get a front row seat.

Once some small elite, enrolled in this "Escape from Gaza" program (thinking of the movie Escape from New York) -- perhaps to return there when sanity again prevails someday -- starts getting documented as Palestinian (i.e. database fields, allowing multiple citizenships and affiliations), pressure will likely build to let more people register, which could lead overnight to a Global Registry and all the paranoias that would entail.

Short of such a system, the possibility of international travel with a Diaspora Nation document (somewhat ceremonial in function) would help plug the holes in the current UN system, which seems unable to register the world's peoples for any humane form of nationality whatsoever. Too many fall through the cracks, like Tom Hanks in The Terminal -- which is why alternatives might well be arising (the Zeitgeist is creative). Too many are deprived of their human rights per the UN's own declaration of what those might be.

A Diaspora Nation might also be a Nostalgia Nation e.g. one puts an icon for Persia or Prussia on one's travel van. There's no campaign to make passports or citizen ID cards for these places. More and more students are getting a standard university World Pass by default (by 2050?), and relying on university infrastructure to maintain a basic standard, in terms of providing orientation classes and onramps to lifestyle options. 

Someday national citizenship may be an unnecessary frill for some, yet still an essential component of one's identity for others, or somewhere in between. 

One's ability to move about the planet need not depend on having a declared nationality. You have your resume, transcript, health record. Your social media help convey your ethnicity. You have joined some cradle to grave work-study program perhaps. You're a nuclear materials scientist with a specialty in medicine. 

Perhaps the nation you most identify with no longer exists within in the UN system (or never existed), but that doesn't force you to pick a different one. Databases support these additional fields.

That's the big picture of where we're maybe heading in Global U terms (its own namespace).  Global U == Spaceship Earth in this cosmography.

What we're against is forced confinement of innocent people using the ruse that they have the right to remain in place, and that no one is allowed to "force" these prisoners to freedom. That's a pretty cynical rhetoric a lot of us see through. Whatever happened to freedom of choice?

If you're all for human liberties not being interfered with, then that includes the liberty to move yourself and your loved ones out of harm's way. 

Contriving to pen the Gazans inside Gaza requires collaboration among nation states well beyond those in Mesopotamia or Eurasia. But then the nation states violate one another's sovereignty routinely, to where they're clearly only notionally sovereign. It's not a system still in need of undermining. That system sank a while back (Grunch of Giants, St. Martin's Press, 1983). We're already floating in its wake, trying to make sense of a chaotic world.

In sum, not everyone is OK with forced confinement policies and some may take it into their own hands to catalyze the emergence of a virtual Palestine with or without UN representation. The parallels with Zionism are obvious, but then "let my people go" is an age old protest. Jews are especially well positioned to understand Diaspora Nationhood, whereas Christians and Muslims have felt more secure in respective empires.

Go where though? In search of a homeland, a promised land, a place on the planet, the planet as a whole, as a last resort, although not exclusively. We co-exist. We enjoy our time as guests and explore our campus freely.

More Stories

In recent journal entries, we created a beachhead surrounding Napoleon, remarking on his playing The Turk, ostensibly a chess playing machine (count Babbage a skeptic). Omni-triangulating from there, you might move laterally around the earth, as we have been doing, from Eurasia to the Americas, and/or forwards and backwards through time. 

Rolling forward, we come to Margaret Fuller, who, like Ada (student of the Babbage engine), was another polymath, though perhaps with less interest in math per se. Ada liked Bernoulli numbers. 

Fuller was surrounded by the Romantics (mostly men), who felt mostly repulsed by industrialization and its psychological costs. A free thinking woman, on the other hand, might anticipate better times ahead, once they were finally made equals to men, in terms of privileges and power. 

Industrialization could liberate them from onerous tasks, even if men were making a mess of it all with their unchecked egos and susceptibility to alcohol.

Margaret was educated by her father, but had that built-in love of learning that, once accelerated, kept its inertia, such that she could make it her economic lifeline and not marry early. She kept to scholarship and entered male academic society as a fellow bachelor, as literary magazine editor and proverbial single woman in a big city newspaper columnist, head for fame as an international correspondent, for the New York Herald Tribune (run by Greeley).

The overseas chapter was catalyzed by a Quaker couple, who wanted her to serve as au pair for their kid. Some of the highbrow learning might rub off. They would travel Europe together, including Italy, and Italy is where she decided to resign her au pair job and fall in love with Ossoli. 

By this time she was already a fan the Revolution going on, for an integrated place called Italy, versus a patchwork of vassal states (of Spain, of Austria) with Papal Lands around Rome. Germanic states were in a similar mood: to unify as Germany, which they (the nationalists) wanted to include Prussia (and yet the King of Prussia refused their offered "gutter crown" in one scene). 

What was at most at stake in these times, from a Transcendentalist viewpoint, was:

1. the present and future role of slavery; the USA was expanding and the anti-slavery activists wanted to make sure slavery, as an institution, did not continue to grow as the USA did (they wanted the practice contained and preferably abolished).
   
   
2. the present and future role of women; all this talk of freeing the underclasses and expanding voting rights to the masses was reminding women they were an underclass too, deserving voting rights as much as anyone
   
   
3. the present and future role of nobility; shorthand for the role of class (a focus of Marxism), with a landed aristocracy distinct from capitalizing industrialists, with organizing (unionizing) workers, and peasants resisting (as in ending) feudalism while contemplating various kinds of land reform
   
   
4. developing egalitarian relationships with Native Americans, anti-imperialist values

To quote Terry Bristol, a promulgator and champion of engineeringly based thinking, the key question, then and now, as always, is "how shall we live?".

My tendency as a Quaker is to remember John Cadbury (1801 - 1889) and also Robert Owen (1771 - 1858), not a Quaker, for their company town utopianism, a hybrid of capitalism and socialism featuring ownership by workers and shared institutional wealth. My university ideal likewise has that company town aspect, with work-study trajectories and student-faculty (4D brand?) housing around the world.

Margaret Fuller and her Transcendentalists proved that a middle class or "bourgeois intelligentsia" could be both radical and instrumental. "Middle" means "in the midst of" i.e. where memes mingle from other social classes, above and below (or we might talk about subcultures, or cults), including religious and military hierarchies.  

Studies of any middle class might start with their social organizations, be that synagogue, mosque, temple, church or what have you. Girl Scouts? Rotary Club? Therapy sessions? White collar work and organized crime have a long history together too. We use a lot of fictionalized TV shows to show ourselves these partially overlapping scenarios (e.g. Breaking Bad), with screenwriters tasked with keeping it at once both real, and entertaining.

Transcendentalists were into self empowerment. Once God was "within" as a Unity (versus "out there" as some Trinity), why not explore and introspect as a way of discovering divinity, meaning one's own potential as a human.  No More Secondhand God, by Margaret's grand nephew, would propagate this doctrine or attitude forward. The idea of self betterment, of working on oneself, would echo forward through the Work of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (and Maurice Nicoll).

Bucky delved into his great aunt's corpus once at Harvard and picked up on her "better times ahead" attitude. She, like Emerson, anticipated a post-Romantic more purely American mindset that embraced technology in a way that didn't at the same time deny nature, as these would become one and the same in the new American philosophy. Was this Pragmatism? Are we talking philosophy or architecture?

That's how her grand nephew saw himself, as fulfilling her prophetic hopes, living up to her expectations as a poet of the industrial era. He did not see his own work as entirely derivative of anything European, e.g. the Bauhaus school.

Alt Left?

Probably "alt left" is taken, by someone quick, given how "alt right" flew off the shelves, making new space, opening possibilities for self branding. I'll avert mine eyes and not go searching for spoilers, and carve the alt left niche as I choose, knowing I'll be ignored by some of my imitators.

Alt Left will include Occupy and Dr. David Graeber, the Yale anthropologist, who died early of Covid. I've got a take on Occupy starting from the Elk Statue (now hidden away) in Portland, Oregon. Occupy Portland (OPDX) disbanded peacefully, although not everyone got the memo (we did, and relayed it). 

For the record, OPDX (2011) did not fight with police all that much. We were all part of the 99% per the shoptalk of the day. I tracked the Joker Riots (2020) too, through social media and in these blogs, but didn't wade into them personally (no, not even here in Portlandia), as a caretaker for a 90+ year old in the middle of a pandemic. I got vaxxed and stayed semi-isolated (doable in my line of work), but I wasn't vexed by the unvaxxed, who included scientists. 

Like Dr. Bucky Fuller, Graeber is good at scrambling what people take for granted, as when writing his history of debt. Bucky helps us revector "socialism" as what we've been implementing through our prime contractor irrigation system and cost plus defense contracts, base housing, base schooling, hospitals for veterans, cradle to grave. One way to frustrate capitalism in its more cowardly forms is to not buy its ridiculous presuppositions.

Rorty's Achieving Our Country, figuratively circled in the above YouTube, traces leftism to anti-imperialism, non-interventionism. When Jefferson suggested the USA support Napoleon in spreading the French Revolution, Washington and Hamilton pushed back. I'd throw in the reluctance, on the part of many Friends (Quakers) to engage in proselytizing, i.e. arm twisting others to imitate one's ways.

The "alts" have to be interesting to libertarians to survive (do we need to survive?), which I link to "libretarians" i.e. those who believe in (fight for, exercise) the freedom to read anything and everything (libre for books, and for freedom). I reveled in Princeton's open stack libraries (Firestone, Jadwin...).

Going with the freedom to browse comes the freedom to explore, the planet for starters. My declaration of human rights admits that bars or other establishments might ban access to specific customers over time, that relationships should be voluntary (where "serving strangers" is also relationship e.g. "I'll voluntarily treat new people, given my doctor codes" is a kind of business professionalism).

Which brings us to the libre software movement and the leverage that transparency and code sharing brings to the picture. At some point, "reading" became "running" i.e. "to read" meant "to execute", to carry out orders, to tackle tasks. Writing came to include programming, i.e. filing such executable scripts. 

The alt left is bold about not championing closed box architectures, even if it has to use some. By "it" I might just mean "me" as I'm using black boxes routinely, but to run open source pretty often.

I'll extend the "energy slave" and "no race, no class" concepts, as revolutionary in the lefty sense, of creating more civil rights for people.  The "nature is technology" school recognizes a universe "slaving away" in the sense of orbiting planets, exploding stars, transforming energy, and reckons in those terms. 

In contrast, the moral abomination we call "slavery" wherein people are coerced to perform labor against their wills with no powers of negotiation or opting out, may be offset by automation, such that our machines (our energy slaves) do the dreary stuff. That was a big part of the vision: freeing the scholar to return to his [sic] studies.

Keeping those machines running can actually be interesting work, for someone in the mood to pay attention to such things. For example, I get mental benefits from coding, including debugging, even when I'm not being paid. 

Left to their own devices, many humans enjoy playing with model trains.  Those who get to drive the trains for real should have opportunities for job enjoyment.  Job satisfaction among railroad workers is a critical diagnostic. Likewise healthcare workers need ample access to their own "dogfood" including mental health care. Too many ER doctors get the stress without the benefits (just money doesn't cut it).

Religions should be recognized for contributing to professionalism and selflessness in performing necessary jobs with a sense of volunteerism, in celebration of a cosmic order.  Religious orders may have widely differing beliefs and practices and yet work in symbiosis. Diversity is desirable. 

The ability to collaborate and cooperate are marks of Darwinian superiority (ironically). The individuating individualist need not be a simpleton, singularity or soliton. "Self made" does not imply "hermit" or it might, for a spell.  I'm not suggesting leftists have to be extroverts and gregarious. Many a leftist  intellectual is more of a hub and server, in the W3 sense, multitasking.

Teaching Martian Math

Driverless Vehicles?

The thesis here, let's say unproved, still taking evidence, is that USA PR has become too thin a gruel, as in insufficiently nutritious, when it comes to fueling a world's imagination with hopeful visions about the future. In the past, a one word synopsis for the American Dream was "promising", especially if one subtracted the Affluenza and bipolar (pathological) "USA versus USSR" dimensions (both ongoing themes (memetic streams) to this day).

A symptom of this paucity: embracing driverless cars over a world without death by starvation, as a Silicon Valley priority. AI in general has a cruel side, which may be shaped and tempered, especially when left in the hands of Malthusians. 

Of course the banks will retort that SV is not an epicenter of bioengineering i.e. other centers have taken on the data science (GIS / GPS intensive) of feeding humanity (is that Bayer's job? Cargill's?). I still think SV failed to think globally enough in creating its profile / reputation. There's room for a makeover.

The problem with the driverless car (vs a people mover) is over duplication of relevant technologies. The waste-filled suburban living template, wherein everyone has the same well-appointed kitchen, gadgets, garage full of toys, means zero cooperation is necessary. Neighborly relations stay undeveloped in bedroom communities, commuter villages, because everyone has and does the same things. There's no pooled funding for shared meals until you get to senior living facilities and through a few churches serving the most needy.

If the individual carriers (cars) have a common brain, and run on perhaps invisible tracks (radio guided), and are sufficiently shielded from pedestrian walkways (we call them road beds), then each car needn't have such fancy sensing equipment when going into driverless mode. Automated guided vehicles (AGV).

We've seen such systems in the big warehouses and fulfillment centers. But to achieve integration at that level, we would want a large campus, base or megastructure, with all cars under the same AI (plus some I) management.

USA PR is not entirely dependent on Big Tech, nor is Big Tech synonymous with dreams of autonomous driverlessness (an oxymoron?). But then DC has been as glitchy as SV, falling into too many pitfalls, getting caught up in too many outward wars since its own Civil War, meaning insufficient healing. 

The darker dirtier covert operator class started asserting behind-the-scenes dominance over Congress etc. during the war against Nicaraguan insurgents, the ones who won (Sandinistas etc.). Citizens learned of a secret government or deep state, populated with Ollie North / Admiral Poindexter type characters seeking "total information awareness" (not such a terrible goal) atop of special privileges to play by a different rulebook than any published, for those with access to public funds.

I've made the claim that the Silicon Forest is distinct from both SV and DC and has its own blend of PR that could be working in the USA's favor at this time. Some curious bystanders have been looking into it, as to whether my claim has any substance. What are my sources and who are my influencers and why should anyone care? That's the kind of thing I talk about in my blogs, among other topics.

Teachers' Strike

FaceBook chatter...

Kirby Urner:  They're going to announce at 7 pm tonight (Halloween) whether the Portland Public Schools strike is on or off starting tomorrow. I got an email from a former employer about these new online sessions for affected students.

Julie Urner:  Maybe you will get a few gigs, but my guess is that the strike won't last long. What to Know

Hayden Dunn: going to cross the picket line?

Kirby Urner:  I'm not with Coding with Kids anymore. I could go back, but they want you to sign a non-compete, and I'd prefer to compete. 

My angle during the strike is to encourage high school math teachers to keep occupied and up on their game by studying the curriculum I wrote when teaching 8th grade, for Sunshine Elite Education (SEE), a private school for techie families in the Silicon Forest.

That's all free and cloneable, as well as forkable, presuming said teachers are Git savvy. If said teachers want to meet me in person and set up a workshop, that's not strike breaking activity. That's like striking actors trying to stay in shape by hiring some kind of coach. Maybe the union itself wants to contract with me. I'd rather work with teachers than directly with their students.

Hayden Dunn: I was wondering. I didn’t really see you as a scab.

Kirby Urner: even if I stayed with CwK, it was an after school program that depended on cooperation from faculty. In moving to an online format, per Covid, they’re probably not seen as scabs as their program does not count towards a degree within the system. They don’t do the same job in other words.

A Foggy War?

A cliche around here, regarding the war for military dominance over Ukrainian territory, is "no war before this one, has been quite this foggy" i.e. more impossible to know less about, more opaque. 

I'd beg (or at least propose) to differ: never before has a war been so micro-covered. I'm not just talking about the Pentagon's view, fat pipe shared with Ukes and Russkies, but the view of householders subscribing to open source channels. 

If you want a fairly fat pipe, with updates almost in real time, with geolocated video, it's all out there, and sourced from points near the action.

None of which is to say you're unfree to immerse yourself in propaganda. Go for it, pig out if that's your genre. If you don't know how to distinguish propaganda in its many flavors, high school is your friend.

In pointing to high school, I'm not being condescending. Remember teenagers. They pop up in the adult world and many of them find that the adult world is a mess, a wasteland as much as theirs. This discovery is somewhat exhilarating and begets an egalitarian willingness to step up to the plate among some, but it also engenders disillusionment and cynicism.

A great way to feed disillusionment and cynicism, and to develop one's immune system, is to study old programming, meaning persuasive media designed to inculcate a way of looking that is currently not in vogue. Visit museums of propaganda, something I did as a kid growing up in post-WW2 Europe.

Tour all the ways humans have persuaded themselves to believe any amount of goofy garbage. Then look more deeply into what "persuasion" is all about, as it borders on "coercive" so much of the time. People internalize bullies as often as they encounter them in the wild, it sometimes seems. An authoritarian is often some voice in your head, too sure about everything.

The German language philosopher Peter Sloterdijk writes a lot about immune systems and how these hyper-dimensional membranes between bubbles (as in media bubbles, echo chambers, subcultures) become more or less permeable and/or subject to entropic memes.  

Marcuse, a critic of capitalism, always marveled at the capitalist system's ability to transform apparently undermining materials into cute knickknacks, subversive lyrics into commercial jingles. I'd argue this ability to trivialize and de-dimensionalize (to recontextualize and render harmless) is intrinsic to any effective counterintelligence program.

Accelerating Acceleration

I’ve reached the fat farm, I mean XRL prototyping area. We’re close to universities. Full disclosure: a Wanderer couple was here just before me, also with dog. We’re still in the Silicon Forest, as a namespace and geographical area (these go together, as often as not).

Of course the proposed Cuban proposal for a New Gaza in Guantanamo, is unlikely to gain much traction right away, given the media forces hogging the limelight at the moment. Some gurus in State realize this is just the off and on ramp needed, wherein the Pentagon voluntarily and with understanding starts the process of launching a new mission, this time one the Cubans have no issues with, as it involves collaboration.

Here’s the ideal opportunity to accept the legacy of the Spanish American war without becoming its puppet in perpetuity. Remember the Philippines. Remember War is a Racket. That’s a military reading, a dharma talk by someone who knows men.

A military base quickly becomes a white elephant, if all its good for is forcing unnecessary war planning, as we see from the case of China.  If you already have an established base, you’re motivated to justify keeping it open if that’s in question, meaning war plans pour forth, in which your base is strategic.

The DCers would not have to spin it as some kind of Afghanistan. On the contrary, building a substantial Asylum City will involve with talents of many Cubans and the lifting of sanctions, giving a boost to the local and global economy. Taking care of business instead of persecuting civilians, treating them as guinea pigs for weapons testing, is going to inspire people with thoughts of prosperity, which in general is a prerequisite for a growing economy.

When I say “growing” I probably should be saying “morphing” or “transforming”. The economy needs to keep changing shape just to run in place, meaning there’s no static solution now that all these balls are in motion. If we learned any thing at all from Toffler (Future Shock) it’s that dynamism and volatility are what’s normal. He called it accelerating acceleration.

Obviously I’m not expecting any sudden turning on a dime as they say. Momentum implies a current direction, not easily changed, which is why we have TrimTabers (not unlike Wanderers — there’s some overlap) i.e. people in precessional positions who have ways of nudging the storyline. At least more people are talking about getting those who wish it permanently out of Gaza, but without tearing apart the community.  Your whole school, parents and extended families included, want to move, to some new South Park.

The spectator world tends to go into observer mode, offering commentary, hand-wringing, faux passivity. That’s the role of the chorus. The idea that we’re actually authorized to participate is foreign to many, who eschew activism and prefer cheering from the bleachers for whatever side in some conflict. When you become a player on the field (an action figure) it’s easier to define the game itself, given the rules might be fluid (as they tend to be in World Game).

Looking back, I want the Palestinians to know that some people such as Center for Defense Information types (a former WDC NGO), not unfriendly to Cubans, would not have a problem using Guantanamo for a worthy cause that requires military level logistics, and helps repair many global relationships. Even if saying so out loud is politically problematic, you can think it. When Americans think of Gaza, they’re not all equally knee-jerk about it.

Extremely Rural (XRL)

I didn't blast off and down the freeway to the "fat farm" as planned. Maybe I'd do better by shifting the narrative to reveal my gaining access to some XRL (XRL = "extreme remote livingry" but how about also "extremely rural"?). 

Extremely Rural means on the wilderness fringe yet likely in touch with satellite services, cell towers, even roads, even paved. Like a parking lot at some public beach. Criteria are not strict as we come inward, towards the more urban pole. Camp grounds maybe.

The reason for this change in plans: a likely minor electrical glitch best dealt with on a business day versus some sabbath. I'd planned to drive. Still do.

So instead I went to a Quaker meeting I've frequented a lot in the past, doing my time on various committees, lighting the tunnel for the family's passage within a Friendly community. That was fun. I recommend Quakers. Dawn joined me in our tunnel.

Today, however, the meeting was grim, with people feeling bleak and trapped in familiar patterns regarding well known cultural narratives, resonating with stuff in the holy books and seasonal programming down through the ages.

Quakers tend to be horrified by orgies of violence, which doesn't single them out all that much (many share these compunctions), but they do want to stay worldly and help process whatever is happening. They're participants more than hermits by training. I say "they're" to capture my "just visiting" status. 

The last time I visited, was to show Andrius, the visiting math guy from Lithuania, what a Quaker meeting was like. Before that, I found them in Laurelhurst Park (sometimes this group shifts its worship outside).

One lady wound up the meeting by urging we read up on what FCNL had to say. We were encouraged to write to our representatives and to write letters to the editor. I'd call it necessary boilerplate.

I heard no serious talk of an actual evacuation, granting Gazans actual refugee status and the right to never return, along with the right to return maybe. One's status, as a refugee, seeking refuge, does not, as a matter of grammar predetermine, any final destination. One is escaping from, not converging upon.

The meeting had a possible new family to my left, just moving from Atlanta (we learned that during introductions), and a newcomers' gathering coming up (this came with the announcements), and maybe the wheels really do turn that smoothly. When things really work exactly as designed, there's this sense of self parody why is that?

The gathering did feel well oiled. They run microphones now, and include the Zoomers upstairs (in person only downstairs, and maybe no mic runners, I'll need to sample that).

These were unprogrammed Friends (Stark Street). Pretty much anyone might deliver a sermon, or folksy talk, or self analysis, lecture whatever (or call them rants). If you hang around Quakers a lot, you'll note the tropes, the signature rhythms, of vocal ministry.

Greetings all. Sorry to have skipped out on social hour. And sorry about my cell phone going off, I thought I'd taken care of that.

Evacuation?

My major focus during the Serbia-Kosovo crisis, to which NATO contributed its signature aerial bombing service, was evacuating those wishing to leave. I don't care whether we call them civilians or not. People should have the right to vacate a dead end combat zone.  Indeed some buses showed up. Some got away.

Likewise, I was glad how the war in Ukraine started with a prolonged evacuation period, in which literally millions of Ukrainians could opt to leave the theater. Some escaped to EU countries, some went to Russia. I don't know where all of them went, but at least they had a chance to leave, some of them.

When it comes to Gaza, I always storyboard the same vision of a steady belt of ships, a circle line, undertaking a massive evacuation. 

Where would the Gazans go? They deserve a homeland, a Zion. They need liberation as much as the Jews of Egypt ever did, under Pharaoh Bibi or whomever.

Of course many Gazans would choose not to leave, given their attachment to a godforsaken semi-desert (just kidding, that's a beautiful and fertile area, been there myself (not to Gaza but places nearby (dad did some scuba diving in Sinai, when Urners lived in Cairo all those years, during and after president Sadat (I helped Palestinians build a swimming pool in Ramallah)))).

I understand Gaza is valuable real estate and once we sweep religion aside (Promised Land = Planet Earth, duh (I think a lot of Jews know that by now, as do the rest of us especially gifted (chosen))) we see it’s a battle between land developers, who want resort hotels and retirement communities in Gaza, ala Florida. 

They want the "lowlife" out of the way, as unable to afford the Miami of the Mediterranean level rents they have planned. Not only Israel-based lenders want to invest in the luxury version of Gaza (think Hawaii). International land developers would love to participate in the makeover. Again, it's not really a religion thing.

I'm thinking Palestinians are a resourceful and intelligent ethnicity and letting Gazans move en masse, versus enforcing some diaspora, would be a welcome development to many. 

But where could they go? Who is willing to develop a refugee paradise from scratch?

Naturally there'd be a lot of scheming and dreaming, on the part of the emigres, as to how they'd gain access to their old stomping grounds by means of moneymaking. A Gazan family might buy its way back into the community after the dust has settled.  

Many Ukrainians are thinking the same way. They want to return, but maybe some American real estate conglomerate owns their family farm?

Many Jews, in Germany's concentration camps, dreamed of being rescued and having their lands returned.  

Many Americans, forced into camps by other Americans, who thought Japanese Americans were a lesser breed of American, were lucky enough to get their farms back. Many were not.

Obviously I'm fumbling around, short on details, imaging my flotilla of cruise ships introducing Gazans to a Carnival and/or a Disney line level living standard, at least for the voyage over.

They certainly deserve a vacation. Somewhere in Africa maybe?  A mega-project, like an OMR? I know it sounds like an admission of defeat, but then the Jewish diaspora didn't really win either.  When we look at history, we see it's about humans streaming around the planet, often in evacuation / refugee mode.

Of course what's important is Gazans get options, not commands. Even if there's some promised Shangri-La, at the end of the cruise, that doesn't justify coercion. We want to build community on the basis of "people want to be there" not "people have to be there".

The Creator (movie review)

:: atmospherics ::

Mazur (Melody, Mel -- visiting faculty) and I thought we might have the Bagdad to ourselves, not a comment on the popularity of the movie, but on the feasibility of making a multi-hour commitment starting at 3:15 in the middle of the day. We could, and some others joined us.

I'm not dissing the film, but rather showing off my budding film savvy, in saying this was viewable as a mashup of other famous flicks in the same genre. That's not really saying anything as what makes science fiction a genre in the first place is its a namespace of shared tropes (motifs, plot elements), often drawing heavily from military experience. This film is about a geopolitical scenario, one I found pretty fun and original.

The collective west was at first in love with the AI layer, a source of compliant labor, to the level of trusted caretaker, only to see itself betrayed, with AI turning on humanity and proving itself soulless, to be dealt with accordingly. The west sees AI machines as literally that: machines. However, New Asia has taken a different track and still sees AGI robots as sentient, to the point of being equals.  Asians are still blending with AI whereas the Americans are in an existential war to the death with AI.

As viewers, we're challenged to figure out where we come down. We're in the same space as the movie Artificial Intelligence by Steven Spielberg, taking over for Stanley Kubrick. That's the first movie I'd finger as an influence (the circus scene especially), but then also Ex Machina and all the films arguing for AGI achieving humanity, in the sense of sentience and self awareness. WestWorld. Usually it's "the West" that's head over heels for its electronic monsters, wanting to bestow the breath of life into them. In this movie, the West is disillusioned. AI says it wasn't responsible for nuking LA (spoiler alert but you find out how the Americans see it in the opening credits, so not much of one).

Another trope (Melody picked up on this one): the sacred messiah child, perhaps with (or definitely with) superpowers. We get the demon child on the flip side, which is how the Americans would see her (the hybrid).

Most of what struck me were the atmospherics, as the two table top scifi books I've been gazing at the most (pictured above), emanate precisely this aura of fluorescent lit giant cities in the fog, technology blended with nature, at the same scales. 

The flavor of Avatar and Avatar 2 was likewise present, both in the atmospherics and in casting Americans as the insensitives, the invasive monoculture, coming to seem more bot-like in contrast to our protagonist, at one time undercover against AI, but becoming instead a bridge figure (another trope).

Tellingly, it took me, a viewer, a little time to determine what side this NOMAD might be on. Was that an AI asset or "one of ours"? The movie answers this question, but I felt drawn in by a sense of ambiguity. Who was fighting whom and why? That tends to gel, not be readily apparent at first glance, even in real life.

Science fiction is known for its open-minded acceptance of permutations. Lesser minds will decry this film in anti-American and yet it is quintessentially American in its continuity with the morphing culture, part Asian from the get go. 

What "American" means is a function of context, which some will call "climate". Getting locked into just one way of thinking (imprisonment within the dream) is a way of losing one's freedoms. 

Sometimes we need to snap out of it (whatever the dream) and films such as this one, already conversant with the collective unconscious, may prove catalyzing in that regard. I gratefully accept it into the canon and recommend seeing it.

Spiralling Forward

NATO's Inevitable Decline | Andrei Martyanov

The Alphabet algorithm suggested I might be curious regarding the above YouTube, which I watched over coffee. I'd check in with Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, later. He's another coffee fiend. To watch X does not mean to agree with X at every turn, we all know that right?

In my echo chamber, we don't lavish love on NATO, that spearhead of Russophobia. NATO was way too bloodthirsty / bomb happy, in the Balkans, in Libya, in Afghanistan... 

However what's salient in Andrei's rant is how much he despises an Ivy League education, granting some  exceptions. His thesis is NATO would never have trespassed so egregiously and out of its depth had the children in charge of it (now "grownups" of a sort) been better informed about their world.

As an Ivy Leaguer myself (Princeton, Class of 1980), I should note the US Army General Mark Milley, recently retired, 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is of that same class from that same university. 

Obviously we went forward on different tracks. 

I became more the contrarian, and the closest I've gotten to the US military (not counting times on base in the Philippines, as an expat civilian teen) was my occasional visit to the Center for Defense Information (CDI), which was likewise contrarian vs-a-vs many of the long term trajectories that landed us in the current iteration of World Game.

chatting with a Princeton peer, 2009

My own rhetoric has taken up Future Shock type memes to insist that a high school education in the 21st Century cannot afford to simply replicate that of the 20th, and that our curricula have evolved way too slowly. 

That led me to the position that "high school" and by extension "higher education", should be perpetually reoccurring phases in a single lifespan. We'll need to go through high school more than once in other words, just to keep up. 

That doesn't mean squeezing back into old facilities and reliving the same teenage years. We have to invent what it looks like to keep our learning going. Obviously the internet will have something to do with it.

In studying futuristic literature, including science fiction, I've come to what I'd consider not so much a new Future Studies but a future Basic Studies. From my point of view, we have an adult population, say the Boomers, that never got to go to high school again, in order to retrain for new careers. 

Or rather, many of them did, but under what felt to them like forced circumstances. The Boomers' expectation was still: go to school, learn, and then work, rising through the ranks, until retirement. Those reading the futurist literature knew even then this expectation was somewhat unrealistic.

What I'm wondering is whether we're entering a period akin to the one I was born into.  As a 1958 baby, I popped up in the middle of the so-called Cold War, but during a period when the USSR was pulling ahead in aerospace, in the form of Sputnik. 

Educators realized they could now justify their reforms as a national security priority, by suggesting the curriculum was out of date and we risked coming under the thumb of the technologically superior. Have we come full circle?

April, 1999

Game Pods

I keep mentioning Game Pods as a feature of my Schools of Tomorrow, in ways I'm sure other teachers find too cavalier. What evidence based research drives my eagerness to experiment with this technology? Aren't computer games the ultimate distraction and therefore the antithesis of what we'd call a "school supply"?

The game pod comes in many shapes and sizes, but is primarily designed to be immersive. Immersive needn't mean "isolated" though. A learning program might include one-on-one and group calls. One is often immersed with peers, many of whom are geographically distant.  These pods were designed with computers in mind. There's no reason a cubicle worker might not find a pod a big step up, remembering it's not an either / or proposition.

Sometimes I'm in a "booth" (i.e. pod), scanning documents, or mastering specific games designed to teach chemistry. Other times I'm at a desk, or in a meeting room.  I visit the gym. I shop. All these activities may occur in one building. That doesn't mean I'm stuck here. I cycle through a long list of such buildings, in the course of designing these schools in the Global U context.

You'll remember from Math Forum my emphasis on simulations. We make models to help us conceptualize the many inter-gearing workflows, in an airport, in a shopping center, in a hospital, in a mine.  A dollhouse is a simulation.  Childhood features simulations.  I'm not breaking engrained patterns so much as reinforcing them.

Wanderers Fall Equinox Celebration 2023

Over the years, I've come to connect "wanderer" with "flaneur" i.e. someone with a sketchbook drawing time going by in ways many don't notice, in getting on with their lives, but chronicling differences that really add up. 

Some people had enough time on their hands to step back and observe, getting into the headspace of geological time, understanding "this will someday be seen as an industrial revolution, if it isn't already".

Wanderers come from many walks of life, however this particular group is heavy on the science and engineering side, given origins in ISEPP (isepp.org) which includes those with practical experience working with machinery, engines, boats, motor vehicles. We include artists and musicians.

Having a degree in something specific was never a requirement. We never had much in the way of requirements. Our only bookkeeping was the coffee fund, which Jon Bunce took care of.  We haven't been brewing much coffee lately, now that (since the pandemic) we're down to four meetups a year.

What happened this time is people started gathering on the porch of the Linus Pauling House, on Hawthorne, only to realize no one was inside the building, so getting someone to answer the doorbell was not an option. 

We had come to rely on Glenn to know the combination, as he was connected to the building on many levels.  We lost Glenn in October of last year. He made it to the Fall Equinox gathering of 2022.  

Don called Terry but his phone was turned off (direct to voicemail) so... we moved the event to my place, and taped a sign to the door redirecting anyone else who might come by.

Dissing Unity

The algorithm snagged my attention, as it often does, on this Unity / Disunity story. Unity is the name of a big bucks on paper stock market (virtual bulls) venture made valuable by game developers, and to some extent academic modelers. They make an engine, which in this case means a software framework, which developers use as a basis virtual reality.

I’m prone to see intellectual history as a roiling melting pot with schools of thought (invisible colleges) adding ingredients, hoping to make something yummy, but we all know the “too many cooks” adage. I’ve seen the legalese speakers feeling triumphant over their mastery of the reality principle, but then engineers can be that same way, as their disciplines boil down to the reality principle as well.

The lawyers are ascendent in many dimensions, as they’re the ones who see themselves applying a living corpus, their law talk, to the unfolding of history, in terms of who are the real criminals. Which presidents were likewise gangsters, in the technical sense? That’s the game show on TV now, as infrastructure is more neglected, with engineering considered “sexy” only if it’s about launching phalluses towards space, ala Apollo. The oceans are still mostly militarized such that thinking about submarine infrastructure is largely discouraged in the tabloid opinion papers.

However I’m not seeing LAWCAP as farsighted enough to plan the phasing in of more science, with its independent grasp on reality. Competition from the engineering minded is fended off more than welcomed, leading to the disconnect foreseen and satirized by H.G. Wells in his Time Machine. We get the Eloi (pudgy) and the Morlocks (chthonic), a Martian Math theme I keep coming back to.

Fall Term Begins

:: readings ::

:: homework ::

Low IQ Valley

Speaking of rebuilding, and low IQ periods resulting in gross destruction, I woke up to a guy on YouTube in England, bemoaning some aviation shutdown owing to some miss-entered record, and how it took a long time to debug the problem, resulting in chaos and cancelations system-wide. His worry is less capable people are filling the shoes of their progenitors, and leaking away organizational knowledge and skills. He’s seeing a brain drain, in other words.

I’m in my own IQ valley, having misdiagnosed a basement plumbing situation and only awakened to the reality this morning. I had been blaming outside rain, versus a kitchen drain. 

On top of that, I may have fumbled a transaction yesterday, and left a Visa card in limbo. I’ve got it locked and have a place to check when it opens, before I declare the card lost.  One could say such valleys represent everyday mundane challenges and when one is looking ahead towards a task, there’s always that self assessment that goes on. Am I up to it?

I have optimistic stories too, about the world’s IQ. Our level of self awareness “as humanity” has improved, thank you National Geographic and other architects of global consciousness. The airlines for sure. 

Aerospace did end up integrating our intellect in a major way, though marred by psychological complexes associated with Ken World militarism. Perhaps my readers have a different diagnosis. “Conditioned reflexes” is an umbrella term, for those mental habits that serve one well, until some no longer do. 

There’s an ongoing process of self rehabilitation (self healing), best undertaken oneself and voluntarily, in one’s capacity as an autodidact. I need to keep doing my homework, along my work-study track in the Global U.

The Rebuilding Channel

From a zoomed out perspective, a Rebuilding Channel might seem pretty awesome, including as a recruiting tool. People with relevant skills like to get involved in rebuilding.

But why "rebuilding" in particular instead of simply "building"?  Some of the deeper lessons come from learning how a particular rebuilding was needed. What happened? A natural disaster? An industrial accident? A war? Exploring these questions requires entire episodes, as we jump around the planet.

Another reason we theme it "rebuilding" is to remind ourselves how much running it takes to stay in place. We have to completely repopulate the planet, with new people, within every one hundred years or so. The epigenetic logistics involved is mind-boggling and yet we've been succeeding in getting it done.

When I say "channel" I might mean "genre" as we'll see imitators. "So what happened after those great floods of 2023?" Our genre provides more continuity and followup than your average newspaper or even magazine. Or call it a magazine channel, which is what many of them are (magazine-like in format, yet streamed).

Clearly I'm back to the themes of My Bizmo Diaries, as MBD forecasts these scouting and reconnaissance fleets, vans and minibuses (some full-size buses) that scope out and monitor, provide admin and coordination in some cases, with regard to Global U projects. A lot of these projects connect into the Coffee Shops Network (CSN) back end when it comes to fundraising.

What happened after that big earthquake in Syria-Turkey? Or after that war that destroyed Aleppo?

Study Habits

online puzzle, solved by Dr. D.

I was talking about "frame of mind" over on Coffee Shops Network (CSN), suggesting "detective mindset" as a good one, not too judgemental or prejudicial, open to findings. Omnitriangulating.

Somewhat continuing, in the vein of "disciplines", I've been keen to marry personal scheduling and prioritizing, with insights into the generic importance of scheduling more generally, an excuse to foray into operations research, which, through computer science, has become systems science or something like that (design science in some cliques).

Here's an exercise: roam through your current habitat noticing tasks you might realistically undertake, tasks you're even tempted to do right now (while you're thinking about them), but the point here is to enqueue. 

Make a list and report back. No side tracking. Let the candidate tasks pile up as you take inventory of your domicile or PWS (personal workspace, GST jargon (general systems theory)) but don't engage in doing any of them during this exercise.

An advantage of the above exercise is you may engage in it as a meta exercise i.e. instead of physically roaming through your home, you imagine doing so, and even so, come up with some thoughts about tasks, such as doing dishes, vacuuming, baking a cake, walking the dog... (fade into a cloud of memes colored by some ethnicity fusion). It's that much easier not to engage in imagined housework, when you're kicked back on a jet plane to Hawaii or somewhere.

A payoff is not to get you slaving away on a bunch of tasks (although you might be in the mood to tackle a few, or you had them enqueued anyway, with or without some stupid exercise), but rather to engage the conceptual machinery, the contextualizing grammar, around data structures, such as bag, queue, stack, tree, network.

Bag: just throw the things into it, with unique handles or addresses (hash table)
Queue: line up, first come first serve, FIFO
Stack: stack up, last in first out (LIFO)
Tree: store in cul de sacs addressed by forks in the road (binary or more)
Network: a directed graph, polyvertex ball, wireframe, may contain cycles

We don't need all the details or implementations right at this juncture (e.g. a bag may be implemented as a tree), but rather an appreciation of context: that of simultaneously developing computer and logistical literacy, in association with mundane thoughts about cleaning house or whatever. 

Connect the day dreamy world of up close logistics with some abstract topic you might encounter in some cryptic notation, in this case parallel programming, multi-tasking. But then we're just talking about taking out the garbage.