Post-Apocalyptic Technology: Managing Apocalypses

When I say "After the fall of government" I am just using an easier phrase for the ear. I really mean "After the extreme decline of governance and services provided by the government". The US federal government is still in existence in Washington DC. Most of the operational offices and war-rooms are in the former DC subway system. They are now referred to as .gov TLD. Their role outside the subway caves is improvised, shaped by the power ratios of clans and fiefdoms and their own expendable resources at the moment. .gov TLD keeps most of its far flung operations focused on resource stealing or revenge. This was a theme established during the Bush II years, and seems to work for them. ( the "stealing and revenge" economy is an alternative to our intentional community's "warring and trading" viking-informational economy. I believe the viking methodology is more sustainable. Revenge is often a resource hog. )

In 2008-2010 .gov TLD was led in its last great arc of respectable glory, with Barak Obama at the helm. His legacy was a soft and cultural one -he gave Americans a new style of honest reasoning, with the candor of his speeches. This meme was a building block of resilient communities that emerged as .gov TLD shrank. Then in April 2010 his old opponent Hillary led a coup. Obama fled to Alaska, now invested with permanent tenured status and propagates effectively within the .google TLD. Hillary has since directed .gov TLD in what she calls a V Monologue style.

Through these same years a threat developed in our region. The NeoRajneeshees. Led by Ma Anand Sheela ( real name Sheela Birnstiel ). She perpetrated the first bioterror attack in US history, planting salmonella in restaurants to incapacitate locals in order to skew election results. All this in support of her guru Indian mystic Bhagwan Rajneesh. During the early 2000's she operated upscale senior homes in Switzerland. In 2009 Sheela saw the policing vacuums in US governance and returned to Antelope Oregon. Her red frocked followers from Little Rock Arkansas ( I actually knew several of them in the mid 1980's, even seeing a personal letter alerting that Sheela had fled the compound with millions of dollars. It was a first life lesson that New Age combined with female leadership leads to a horribly abusive society and a terroristic threat to outsiders. Years later seeing the intellectually stunted Lesbians with Small Offices at Yellow Springs Antioch University was another horrific example).

The NeoRajneeshees were now 40-60's somethings, not the more youthful profile of their first attempt at local domination. They also had an estimated 4000 seniors from Switzerland. All were medically enhanced, using bioengineering tricks first popularized by Seattle's Lake Union biotech companies. The seniors were strong enough to clear passages in old mines, and these mines became the living quarters for The NeoRajneeshees.

Trouble for our intentional community came on October 12, 2012. The NeoRajneeshees sent 12 seniors to our commune with a message -that they wanted our land. The seniors then dumped a dead person on the ground, poisoned by genetic intervention/alteration. They explained that this is what they will do with us, if we stay one more month. They then swallowed a vial, passed out, and their bodies morphed into the same outwardly visible characteristics as the dead victim.

We were full of dread.

An amazingly timed, but totally bizarre and unanticipated thing happened before our month deadline was up. We got this information by watching surveillance video nanopiped from The NeoRajneeshees compound. They had continued digging in the mine shafts, I guess to expand their living quarters. Jump back for a backstory: A Christian Youth Ministry had bought the old The Rajneeshee Ranch in the 1990's. Around 2009 they just vaporized, no one knew where they went. In our surveillance video we believe we saw them. The NeoRajneeshees suddenly started running back out of the cave. Maybe a 1000 people, if you can call them that, came behind them. They were all wearing Mormon style underwear only, and had no legs past their knees. But wow were they fast in those caves!

The Christian Youth Ministry Cave Monsters ate all the NeoRajneeshees. At least that's what others told me, I couldn't watch all of the footage.

In January 2013 we got a "revenge stipend" from .gov TLD for the death of Sheela Birnstiel, a nice petroleum credit and also limited search access of .gov TLD. We are tunneling this access to the Google cloud, to expand the cloud.

Post-Apocalyptic Technology: Black Power

Our intentional community has for the last four years bought all petroleum from specialists living further east of along the Oregon Trail. The drivers and support community that move the oil are all African-Americans originally from Queens New York. They call themselves The Walkers. Their story is an interesting perspective on black communities since the collapse of government.

They no longer live on the East Coast, preferring a nomadic trucking existence between the upper Mississippi River and Pacific Coast. Upon arriving west of the Mississippi, the distance from urban black culture was not a shock. While in New York they had begun to forge an outlier culture all their own. Their cultural transformation began in 2008.

In overnight stays at our "commune" ( one might call it that ), a few of the drivers have related the chain of events in New York 2008-2010. It goes basically like this (excuse the bullet list style, use of the word "thugs" and lack of details, its all I remember them saying):

1. Undercover cops were at the drug and prostitute haven Club Kalua when a group of known drug dealers with former weapons violations started acting aggressively and then one tried to attack the undercover agents using his car to run them down.

2. The undercover agents shot over 50 bullets into the car, killing the drug dealer and also successfully stopping the car.

3. The drug dealer in the car was Sean Bell, a black man. All the men shot at were black, two of the police were black.

4. Career agitator Al Sharpton called for protests that would shut-down the city. In those protests were signs such as "Kill the Cops" and black women were screaming at black policemen to leave the force.

5. The protests did cripple the city economically, and the police ceased to patrol or enforce laws in most of Harlem, some of Brooklyn and Queens.

6. The black communities were in meltdown. The very factions expressing rage over the killing of a thug turned out to be the thugs and activists of the black community, and not any of the black business owners or professional classes. Crime was unmitigated.

7. The Walkers were already unique, and uniquely empowered, getting all their income from Chinese needing local orienteering in business investments.

8. They were sponsored by the Chinese to clean up the anarchy, rid the black neighborhoods of people and institutions Mao Tse-Tung would have considered scum. They were issued a little black and gold book written by Mao with descriptions of the scum and recommended means of eradication.

9. The first target was the Club Kalua. The Walkers waited until a wedding party for a notorious Harlem crack dealer was being held there. They burned the place down with everyone still inside. This was the first of many similar measures.

10. Black business owners were thrilled, and gave The Walkers praise in the local neighborhood newspapers. Many credit them with forging the now dominant role blacks have as proactive anti-crime agents at the community level.

11. The Walkers had massive income and credibility, but knew organized black crime would be targeting them soon. They purchased a fleet of oil tanker trucks from Russians ( see photos in this post ) which they use to live in and transport energy and chemical supplies for a living.

12. This year The Walkers began special support of our commune in an effort to enable the one-global-Google-planet-brain, and are helping end the schismatic BlackGoogle.com

Post-Apocalyptic Technology: An Intentional Community

Our Intentional Community on the outskirts of The Dalles, Oregon.

Seven years ago, in 2008, twelve of us were hired as data center technicians at the world's largest and most important server farm, the Google Data Center in The Dalles Oregon. (see the original job posting we answered here). We decided to create an intentional community to help share child care, operate a fish catching boat, and share the cost of home based server and telecom equipment.

Recently higher fuel and food prices have been a challenge. Alongside economic hardships the nation-state has collapsed in its ability to provide services, and anarchy is on the rise. Our commune has grown to 37 people total, and we decided to put more intentional in our community.

With some under the table money from one of the town's larger data centers, we began to outfit our intentional community designed for warring and trading (Viking means "warring and trading"). We decided warring and trading is fundamentally an informational economy, so our protection of the Google Data Center and running our home telecom fit perfectly well with 21st century viking.

Our vehicular arsenal includes an old bio-diesel Unimog, seen in the photo transporting one of our 10 cargobikes, and an assortment of diesel motorbikes. We have a varying amount of junk off-road four-wheelers we recast as drones with self-detonation or fire-spreading as their main mission. We finished off the dorms ( full of anti-technology students destined be powerful bureaucrats working for peaceful homeostasis ) at Reed and Evergreen State driving these drones with mouse/keyboard from this desk.

While we harvest protein from the Columbia River, we need vegetables and other food stuffs. The Northwest abounds in pacifist, luddite, vegan intentional communities, and we have little resistance taking food from these people. We abide by the rule of any good tribute system, and allow them enough sustenance to live on to grow us more food. These communities are off-grid anyway, so essentially no longer equals or constituents in the informational economy. We occasionally get representatives of European human rights organizations staying in town and asking about our activities. There are no pure humans working in town, only bio-robot hybrids strongly allied with our ethics. The Old World humans are easily contained.

In our early years, before the collapse of the nation-state, we read this and this for inspiration. Of course the ultimate inspiration is always the Google cloud infrastructure.

Thanks to Antioch University in Seattle for inspiring this meme.

Meme Spreading: Perpetual Disequilibrium

Society for the Perpetual Disequilibrium
of Society and Nature

Proponents and agent provocateurs of hardened utopias and resilient dystopias.

Rules for engagement with reality

1. Never allow one rule to rule absolutely in your mind or out on the corporeal plane.

2. Acknowledge higher powers for corporeal profit.

3. Never allow a species to gain security from extinction.

4. Transport the minerals on every planet possible.

5. Joy in destruction is perverse,
   joy in stasis is perverse,
   joy in adaptation is a virtue.

6. Your thoughts have boundaries.
   The corporeal plane has boundaries.
   Boundaries are good,
   for some things.

7. Hats can be worn indoors.

Post-Apocalyptic Technology:Transportation

^{(goto my source at www.dieselbike.net)}
While its easy for many to concoct imagery of a post-apocalypse world, few are creating actual industrial objects that would be at home in that world of Mad-Maxian ruin.

Pictured here is Haydn Franklin and his motorbike. The frame is made of old water-pipes, fashioned with the aid of a pipe bender. The motor is a 1 liter diesel, formerly the stock motor of a Daihatsu Charade. Most of the parts for this bike came from the dumpster. Haydn claims it can do 100 mph, and gets 85 miles per gallon. It has won 20 trophies, including Best in Show at the Rat and Survival 2007.

This diesel motorbike is an emblematic specimen of possibilities after the fall -after the fall of nation-states, or industrialization as we know it, or corporations, or whatever. Imagine a land of hand crafted post-dumpster machinery, riders bringing back spoils from a raid on pacifist farmer cultures in the delta. Living in houses converted from old huge metal structures such as battleships, oil storage tanks, and  rail cars (just as done in Russia in 1990's). 

Hopefully amongst all that metal-ness we can keep the core luxury of contemporary life up and running: mesh-networked computers using no moving parts, a solid-state hard drive, and Linux operating system.  More ambitious and certainly worth the trouble would be keeping the Google Proj2 in The Dalles Oregon operational. Just as the Vatican and the Forbidden City kept humans higher than animals in an earlier age, the Google connectionist brain living on that server farm provides us with higher parameters for living than we would otherwise have . After a collapse of Google services, I cannot imagine what primitive depravity humans would reduce to.

 

A friend responded that he loves the diesel motorbike, but also would want an Earthship in the post-apocalypse.

Not-Microsoft.com

After many years of allegedly enhancing the workplace with productivity, Microsoft has found disfavor in the eyes of once loyal fans. Vista was their Waterloo. To commemorate this historic loss, the public is being offered a domain name that reflects their preferences for operating systems.

http://www.not-microsoft.com

This domain name is for sale.Contact: lancemiller777@gmail.com. The domain name is currently owned within Network Solutions, which provides a safe means for domain name purchasing. Through your own user account with Network Solutions, you can initiate a bid for this domain.

Minimum bid is $3000, enough for me to buy a tricked out iMac.

Dear Hillary Clinton Supporters

It is the day after the Pennsylvania State primaries, April 23 2008. Here is a plea to the group of old, failed pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-progressives that are littering the contemporary political landscape with votes for Hillary Clinton. Please go away, and take the pundits who over-value your political dominance with you.

The Socially Conservative but Unionized ( read socialistic ) Factory Worker, Catholic, Democrat. God, you're a loser class. I am progressive, and would never in a million years buy your crappy manufactured goods. Americans prefer the goods produced by non-unionized evangelicals working at Honda or Mercedes plants in the midwest or south. No one likes you or your ugly stinktowns except your local preacher/priests and politicians, who are just your parasites anyway. Progress is everywhere else except in your dead-30-years-ago rustbelt reality. We should take note of who you vote for just as we take note of what you buy and what you believe in, and then throw away that note.

Old lady feminists, cutting edge back in the 1970's, now fat, single, lonely, and trying to make your last stand of social or historical relevance by voting for Hillary. History is full of evidence that women are a match to men on everything from mathematician to politician, but your not one of those equals. Women were always and forever equal, without your pathetic last stand for equality. You are a punitive group on a last gasp and encouraged by getting some time on the news, just like your stupid candidate of choice. I hope for real women to hold their own with men, and also take you old failed feminists out in the process.

Starting Worker Cooperatives Through Dialogue

Starting Worker Cooperatives Through Dialogue
by Benjamin F. Galbraith
Masters of Science in Management
Graduate Management Program
The Center for Creative Change
Antioch University Seattle
Year 2006
Abstract

“Worker cooperatives” are businesses that are controlled and owned by their workers. Dialogue is conversation in which we suspend judgment, be honest, and build new ideas with others. I used dialogue to help create a worker cooperative as part of this thesis project. Little has been written on how to start worker cooperatives in the USA. The literature available on dialogue hints that dialogue could help make workplaces more worker controlled. Dialogue does not have to be perfect: conversations can involve varying degrees of dialogue. Dialogue like conversation helps groups trying to become worker cooperatives succeed by allowing them to have an accurate view of themselves.

Full Thesis Document Here

World View-ism

reposted from http://seattle.craigslist.org/forums/philosophy

Quantum Theory for philosophy < theworks345 > 04/13 20:47:46

Nothing exists until it is measured by an observer.

Ie. You create your own reality. How? By habit. Are you aware of your habits? Yes. Can we collectively create a better reality by ending our habits? It would appear so.

---

Reply:

---

All of your statements are wrong.

The best proof that world view does not create the next instance in our reality is the age of exploration and colonialism. European cultures had the gun, boats, and a new economic construct called the corporation. The Europeans often wanted to take land from native peoples, or use the natives as slaves.

In the very earliest stages of this drama the native cultures had not been indoctrinated by the invading European culture. The native "world view" was all native. The native view had their own sense of order and power of the universe much different from the European world view that respected the use of guns and economics.

The natives world views had a chance to defeat the competing world view of the invaders. In every instance the native culture was defeated by Europeans.

World view did not shape the outcome. I would add that the Europeans were full of as much idea garbage as the natives (e.g. Catholicism). They did not "win" because of a better world view. All that mattered was guns, global navies, and global economic constructs.

The most peaceful and positive world view does not command the next iteration of reality, the strategic world view that utilizes technology and allows for the dynamics of exploitation, does.

There has never been an exception to this. Progressives do not try to undo this historical record, fundamentalist and monotonic Humanists do.

Human Intelligence Tasks

I love the concept of the Human Intelligence Task [ HIT ]. HIT is part of the Amazon Web Services. Amazon provides data storage, application serving, cloud computing, and now with HIT they are providing humans within the computers.

---

Example snippet from the website:

---

HITs - Human Intelligence Tasks - are individual tasks that you work on. Find HITs now. As a Mechanical Turk Worker you: Can work from home Choose your own work hours Get paid for doing good work or learn more about being a Worker

---

This is progress, showing an exact line of demarcation of where the human and machine differ, and with that demarcation create a cooperative economic function involving both human and machine. The humans that design a HIT task, and the humans that accomplish a HIT task, are emblematic of a truly progressive cultural evolution.

Would you (vested within a legal capacity) kill Uighur terrorists?

Google ID is needed to participate in this poll. Participate by posting a comment. The purpose of this poll is to query moral boundaries, complexity of those boundaries (such as absolute non-violence versus conditional law and order) , accepted norms of statecraft (e.g. supporting a State's right to defensive posture versus a borderless world ethos), mystical/religious culture versus secular/scientific/industrial culture, and many more levels.

Question 1 Would you (vested within a legal capacity) kill Uighur terrorists?

Question 2 Do you believe China has a prerogative to kill Uighur terrorists?

Question 3 Do you consider the migration of Chinese Han people into Central Asia as a positive or negative trend?

Links to news articles and snippets on the Uighur issue are below. Note that as a generalization, Han Chinese represent the more industrial and Marxist group, and Uighur represent a Sunni Islamic group.

China says 35 arrested in Olympics bomb plot

---

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang#Demographics

---

Chinese Population According to the 1990 census:

Nationality	Population	Percentage
Uighurs	7,200,000	45%
Han	6,885,000	43%
Tajiks	33,000	.2%
Salar	3,000	.02%
Kazakhs	1,100,000	6.8%
Uzbeks	15,000	.09%
Russians	3,000	.02%
Hui	600,000	3.8%
Yellow Uighurs	11,000	.07%
Boan	300	.001%
Kyrgyz	150,000	.1%
Tibetans	5,000	.03%
Other non-Chinese	9,000	.06%
Ethnic Manchus	90,000	5.6%
Tartars	5,000	.3%
Dongxiang	40,000	.25%
Dawani	5,000	.3%

Moral Populist Movements Can Only Harass, Not Help

Antiwar movements cannot stop wars ( the duration and illegitimacy of the Iraqi war shows the antiwar movement as no meaningful effect in the specific domain they are trying to effect. )

Human rights campaigns cannot save people. (Africans killing Africans, and the populist reaction in the West is fight the Chinese by fighting torch bearers. Synopsis: the genocide perpetrators are African, but white moralists find it hard to call an African evil.)

The decline of the classical Nation is much discussed by postmodernists, but there is little discussion on the bankruptcy of power in large moral populist enterprises. I think the two declines are part of the same dynamic. An alternative would be the world is too complex for something as simple as a moral precept to disperse without a lot of channel noise undoing the message and the intent.

Progress is in the Language

(If Python is in the Language)

This posting is short and about capital P Progress. Mixed into the equation of progress is always the issue of technology. For technology to mix well within the larger discussion of Progress, it needs to follow these meta properties:

1. Ubiquitous, or becoming ubiquitous. This prevalence should be built on a populist distribution model. Profit is not a sin, but reliance on continuation of a single company or entity for support thoroughly disqualifies from "Progress".
2. As genetically ambivalent as possible. Can be used by many types of people.
3. Technologies exist by support from other technologies. The technology hierarchy needs to hold the "Progressive" properties already listed.
4. Where the technology hierarchy has gaps of inclusion, the newer technology has effects on society or the tech hierarchy that reduces those gaps.

With this list I've shown myself in league with the millions of open source software proponents that dominate the blogosphere. I'm a stereotype. To commit myself to the stereotype even more, I'll let you in on what this post was supposed to be about: The Python Programming Language. But that in itself shows how open source proponents think, when they see a freely available C compiler or powerful free scripting language they see something like the "Progress" hierarchy previously listed.

Anyway, in the last month I've started learning Python. It is the coolest and prettiest language I've seen. If it runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux with roughly similar power then it denies most of the operating system battlespace. Still, Linux is free so it is the de facto winner in the "Progress" qualification. But my Number 4 in the list is a complex, non-linear process. The route to Progress, the progress of Progress, is not a route of perfect righteousness. By empowering Windows with a program that runs equally well on Linux or Apple, dependence on Microsoft diminishes. Microsoft is not evil; rather, absolute dependence on Microsoft, or any single entity, is.

Geeky examples ^{(copied from here)}

There are a number of modules for accessing the internet and processing internet protocols. Two of the simplest are urllib2 for retrieving data from urls and smtplib for sending mail:

>>> import urllib2
>>> for line in urllib2.urlopen('http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl'):
...     if 'EST' in line or 'EDT' in line:  # look for Eastern Time
...         print line
    
<BR>Nov. 25, 09:43:32 PM EST

>>> import smtplib
>>> server = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
>>> server.sendmail('soothsayer@example.org', 'jcaesar@example.org',
"""To: jcaesar@example.org
From: soothsayer@example.org

Beware the Ides of March.
""")
>>> server.quit()

Open Decision Making

Over at John Robb's "Global Guerrillas he is discussing theories in flat hierarchies. There is a lot of good discussion in the thread, and I posted my own comment.

1. Go to "OPEN DECISION MAKING"

2. Go straight to my comment.

Transportation Transformation: The Great Pragmatic

Let me be explicit: I prefer getting around in this order:

1. Walking
2. Busing
3. Train
4. Plane
5. SUV or AWD stationwagon

I walk to work, own no car, and live in the inner-city where all the services I need (and also my workplace) are within one mile.

But for America, the great transportation solutions are not going to resemble my lifestyle choices. My transportation profile is so politically over-correct because I live in a city. For a majority of Americans, especially the poor and struggling end of the middle class, suburbs and rural areas are the only place they can afford housing.

These places the poor reside are often dangerous, also. Keep in mind I am not referring to the urban street in movies, but the wide and fast suburban streets of today. I can think of no more dangerous place than walking along some of the suburban or rural highways of the midwest or southeast. One must be enclosed in a car, with doors locked, and preferably moving; in order to be safe in the modern American (lower to middle class) suburb.

And what about all those commuters in Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah? They need to travel 20 - 60 miles by mostly Interstate, across a mountain pass, to work. In snow.

For transportation solutions that get away from a gas-guzzling scenario, we need to fulfill these market needs. People in cities already have enough options: scooters, buses, walking, and mini-cars. Green alternatives need to offer something that gets a person across a snowy mountain pass, fast, twice a day. Stop designing for the places that already have the solution, and design for where very little exists.

I know many will say the adaptation will come in migration, all those remotely flung people will move back to the town center. What a beautiful thought, that will not happen. A lot of people have lost the social ability to exist in a collectivist, neighborly, resource sharing culture. They will resort to reducing other things, even food for their children, or selling drugs, rather than try to master an alien lifestyle.

An Easy Target to Enable Republican Re-Domination

President Bill Clinton was a great President at all the things that matter, but the Republican/Christian Coalition machine managed to distract the world by pointing at Clinton's sexual life. It was an easy snipe, everyone in the political business knew of Clinton's rockstar sexual activities long before he got in the White House. I was amongst the movers and shakers in 1986 (working with John Gorman in North Little Rock Arkansas ) that decided not to back his run for the White House till a lot of people were silenced with payoffs.

Now the Republican machine has to be salivating at the chance to make a fun and easy crushing of another Democratic tenure, using the same achilles heel of semi-secret sexual life as the focus point. Then the Repubs can cash that in with sweep of Congress, and we'll be on our way to another single party domination of all three branches of government. Plus Rush Limbaugh will have loads of fun.

Its sick and sad. "MoveOn.org" was created as a political networking tool to encourage "moving on" past the preoccupation with the President's sex life as end-all metric of job performance. I wish both Clintons had not triangulated in this one topic. They could have done like Bloomberg ( pot smoking: " Yeah I did, and I liked it") and Schwarzenegger (sex with millions, and always honest about it) . Such a stance crushes the offense, and moves the job performance evaluation of politicians back to whether they keep streets safe, paved, and pleasurable places.

For Democrats, my advice is to have a Obama/Bloomberg ticket. With this highly pragmatic and centrist team, the Republican machine will not have such an easy leverage point for regaining power.

Wired 15th Anniversary Reflection

Just posted a comment over at Wired.com, on their 15th Anniversary reflection: 15th Anniversary: Why the Future Still Needs Us a While Longer. Reprinted here:

The Singularity, a political landscape where technology imposes some of the decision, all of this I am for. The failures and misery within the contemporary world are caused by 2500-1000 year old religious frameworks. Technology making decisions about our social sphere will surely help humanity get past our moral frameworks. The old moral frameworks oscillate between a silly and dumbed down pacifism and a genetically charged militarism.

Technology will be too intelligent to follow the purely pacifist path, and too distant from genetics to care to make that kind of war.