An interesting read: Advanced Automation for Space Missions

I am just posting this here without much comment just because it is so cool.

• http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:NASA_Advanced_Automation_for_Space_Missions_images

Resilient Community: Online Crime Watch and Alerts

Seattle 911 Police Blog has an interesting example of community information sharing here: PDFs: Other crime alerts sent this month to UW students.

In that example the UW is sending crime incident alerts to students. Here are my examples of extending that communication style:

1. Police precincts offer an email alert system to local residents, with info duplicated on a website.
2. A cooperative second tier is created for citizens to share information, sometimes augmenting the police alerts and other times referring to incidents or suspicious conduct unknown to police.
3. Seattle has neighborhood association offices, one in each neighborhood. It would be nice to keep the physical/real offices open, and augment with an online version. The physical office could even serve the online version by providing a place to sign up as a member of the online community, as a way to keep random people outside the true community from participating in the forum.
4. These community information systems need a true residents only layer of activity, and a wall-less layer where information is available to the whole world, both the specific incident information and the community's communication style. This keeps trolls out of my neighborhood discussion space, but makes the whole operation open source for the world.

I just wrote an entry on civic wrangling, and John Robb just wrote about community security here. The UW email alert example and my extensions are a more concrete, incremental treading through the topic space.

This part of the blog entry goes to another level related to the crime watch/resilient community topic. I can anticipate one hurdle to open sourcing a community's problems, big property owners might see this as negative PR and potential for lowering their property values. This would be the opposition point between absentee investors versus people truly in the community. For the investor, the problem space is all abstract, with marketing spin the main means of improving the property. For those truly living in the residence, the problem space is not abstract, with personal safety, transportation, access to grocery supplies, and a million other pragmatisms making or breaking the situation.

A resilient community will not PR itself out of problems.

Christian Science Monitor -Neighbors on Patrol

The New Input Output : Civic Wrangling

Take a look at the photo below, and think about any and every .gov, placing /developers at the end of the URL.

police.gov/developers fcc.gov/developers utah.us/developers fema.gov/developers

Beyond "developers", imagine /wiki, /blog, or Youtube channels ( which allow comments and video response, which makes it as much an input as an output).

Over at whitehouse.gov/blog/ Macon Philips, Director of New Media, writes : "One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it."

Listen up: Government for the people, by the people has lept from a well wishing aspiration to something we can truly wrangle with. By wrangle I mean Bruce Sterling's vision:

"Wranglers are the class of people willing to hassle with Spimes. And it is a hassle. An enormous hassle. But its a fruitful hassle. It is the work of progress. Handled correctly, it can undo the harm of the past and enhance what is to come."

--When Blobjects Rule the Earth/SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, August 2004

I know a kind of people that dislike "fruitful hassle" -they are the people who shy away from learning something new, understanding the complex, working, and delayed gratification. But these kinds of people are rare. More prevalent is the little bits of this in everyone, or simply life circumstances that make civic wrangling difficult. Time to grow up. All good things, all real things, have a learning curve and require a commitment of time.

I would like to note the passing of a certain social thesis to the dustbin of history. In Better Together -Restoring American Community one chapter focused on Craigslist and asked if online community enhanced/enabled social capital. The authors disqualified online civic activity as a positive.

Bye Bye "Better Together", and every academic or NGO activist invested in opposing online civic activism. Bye, wave bye now, c-ya, bye, bye bye.

While mentioning those being left as the train of progress, power and glory leaves the station, I must mention the significant number of anti-computer/anti-internet students I attended college with at Evergreen State College. I especially remember one guy at my last house party in Olympia. He was extremely proud he did not know a single thing about using a computer. A girl in the room was charged with pride of association while say "yeah, he doesn't know how to type in one, what to do at all with one". These kids were usually from higher end middle-class families, raised on the values of 60's counterculture, and were taking the values to a Luddite extreme. I was one of the hot-dog computer science students on campus, often considered uncool or undermining the political revolution by my use of technology.

My government just abandoned those kids. My government just adopted the way I communicate. The Luddite end of the Left lost, and I won. We won.

Coming to terms with a New Era

Email from a friend:

I'm still coming to terms with the idea that we are living in an "Obama era"

The Bush (II) era was so distinctive, covering a quarter of my life and distinguished by several profound changes, including the sudden and terrifying reawakening of the sleeping Left, a profound reduction in American clout overseas (not always directly connected with our former president), emergence of surprising self-sufficiency in Latin America and selected asian and african countries, and a cartoonishly orwellian and predictable evolution of Bill Clinton's "War on Terror" run largely by the Bush/Saud/Bin Laden clan.

And now it's over.

Nobody is calling Iraq "Bush's war" any more, though if anybody ever had the right to claim ownership of a war, this is surely one of those cases. I think the whole period will be remembered as an abberation, like "The McCarthy Era". The decade in which Irony died will be remembered as the decade of Irony.

Now we are really looking at a period of post Irony, facing serious questions about science, technology, the planet, how people work and live, politics, race and religion. I optimistically believe that these questions will naturally answer themselves as we see them with fresh eyes.

However, I also see us walking into some big traps: the aging babyboomers are not going to go back to work when the banks start lending money again. Our efforts to reduce carbon emmisions will have huge costs and no tangible short term benefits, and I anticipate an economic carbon bubble which will dwarf the recent construction and credit crisis. College education has become paradoxially indispensable and too expensive for many households. These are traps: they they may require faster and bolder action than we can manage.

-Seth Galbraith

Technology Uses Us: Humans as an Ecological Niche

An excellent description of modern humans and technology by Maureen McHugh. Original copy of this article here.

More and more we use biological metaphors for our technology. Cars break and are fixed, but computers get infected. Technology evolves, competes, exploits our emotions. We are the ecological niche for technology. And its uses of us may be no more benevolent than our uses of our own ecological niches. Just as we sometimes turn grasslands into deserts, technology can alter us. Our bodies and brains become the ecology affected by technology.

Inuit asked to draw maps could draw amazing accurate maps of the areas they roamed and lived, transferring three dimensional knowledge easily to a two dimensional representation. But they drew the lands they hunted larger, out of scale, because these were the areas that loomed large in their umwelt, or self-world. We are defining our world through not literal representations—maps, chat sights. We have a cyberspace landscape. The result is some comforting illusions about space and distance. California is, in some ways, closer to Austin, Texas, than Burton, Texas, a tiny town full of boarded up buildings less than 100 miles away. I telecommute to California daily. I certainly ‘draw it larger’ in my umwelt. These are people I don’t see, or touch. We are all familiar with the experience of meeting someone we know only from the internet and discovering that they are nothing like what we had expected.

Already, cities and reading and writing are altering our bodies. First generation Arctic Native Americans had myopia rates of over 50%. Their parents, 2%. 70% of mainland Chinese are myopic, 90% of Taiwanese Chinese are myopic. Studies in rhesus monkeys show that it’s not central vision that’s associated with myopia, but peripheral vision—which leads to the question, are cities making us nearsighted? What else is changing us? We have talked since William Gibson’s book Neuromancer about augmenting our brains. We are holding those augmentation devices in our hands—what abilities will we transfer to our tools and stop being able to do ourselves? And if we lose and ability and become more dependent upon say, GPS, doesn’t that ‘benefit’ the technology, insuring it’s continued existence? Reading and writing altered the way people remembered things. People from oral cultures can do amazing feats of recall. But I wouldn’t give up being able to write for the ability to remember my grocery list. What happens as we become dependent on more things outside our brains to do the work of our brains? Is that to our benefit or technology’s benefit, or both?

The industrial revolution produced environmental changes we are still learning to deal with. It is reasonable to assume that technology is changing us—our neural and physical ‘landscape’—in ways that will become clearer over time. The benefits of smart phones, search engines, and ubiquitous memory assists from online tools are way too cool to give up. But rather than wait for a Rachel Carson Silent Spring of technology, we can be mindful that we are causing changes and be alert for them.

-Maureen McHugh

Maureen McHugh is a Hugo Award winning science fiction writer. In the past few years she’s also written for the Webby Award winning ARGs I Love Bees and The Dark Knight. She lives in Austin Texas.

First I want to praise the writer's treatment of umwelt. This is a good counter to the currently hip preoccupation with bioregions and also drawing maps that more accurately depict the Earth's landmass. We need personalized Earth maps that omit the local town or creek that holds less survival relevance to us than, say, the route our internet data packets go through, or the cities we do more commerce with. Bioregional perspective is relevant for biologically bound humans. Humans, at least all humans practicing lifestyles that enable their likely survival, are not bound by biology.

Another area I like in this writer's perspective is allowing technology to disable our biological ability in order to more efficiently perform the task, and also ensuring the technology is protected and kept in existence. Oral tradition culture is mentioned and noted for superior mental abilities, then the writer deftly devalues that superiority, saying she chooses the technology of storing information in print over the biological ability to store it in her memory.

Social Justice

Where I want to go next is social justice. Social justice in the West, since World War II, has increasingly become a supporter of the very ways of human existence which we should be proactively replacing. Up until the 1960's the West unrepentantly embraced the human replacement of a biological bounded existence with a technologically enhanced existence. I am not referring solely to metal and electricity here. Included is literacy. Where there were indigenous people, the Westerner placed an unilateral valuation before them: that a literary culture is both superior and the only route to power as an equal human being on this planet. Being PROGRESSIVE was taking the stance that the less powerful human should be allowed to learn the technologies that would make them more equal and able to survive.

Then along came the postmodern progressive, practicing a social critique methodology that upended the previous progressive march. To the postmodern; the oral tradition is better than the literate, and beyond that every culture with less tech, more biological boundaries, is better. The postmodern progressive perfected a powerful rhetorical maneuver: their social critique is the only social critique, all others are retrogressive or impaired by cultural blinders.

But outside of academic or political games of my-critique-is-better the reality stands: a biologically bound, illiterate, non-technological human is always powerless and the first to die. How will they die? Not by the genocide campaigns of colonialism or Darfur type warfare, but by ignoring. This "ignoring" is not an un-Christian abandonment. It is the intrinsic behavior of networks as an UMWELT.

Time for a neo-progressivism, armed with the reflection that we are altering ourselves with technology, and reengaged as social justice activists who offer a unilateral stance to all: to say no to technology is to explicitly choose extinction, please choose technology, I will help. But for me to help, or even keep talking to you, you must see your biological existence without technology as both undesirable and a less enriched life.

My winter on a crab boat in the Bering Sea

Ten years ago at this time I was working on the F/V Bountiful as a seafood processor. The Bountiful is a rare type of boat, it catches crab and processes/packages the catch. The boat is owned by Trident Seafoods, which is majority owned by Chuck Bundrant. Chuck invented the crab catcher/processor type boat with the F/V Billikin [link], with the Bountiful being the second of this type. I had already worked for Trident in Alaska since 1997 (my 1997 akutan alaska story here), and the Bountiful crew had a reputation as an elite tough guy club. I took a demotion from bookkeeping and quality control for the experience.

It almost killed me. 18 hours a day, an unheated bedroom, the hardest work I've ever seen, and waves that didn't look real. In March the Lin-J capsized due to a sudden ice storm [link], the same ice coated our boat and I was with everyone else fighting to break the stuff before we went down like the Lin-J. I can be all romantic and posture with a tough tone right now, but shit, that kind of adventure is no fun when you're in it.

Everyone on the boat was tough. Except for one guy. From Florida, got sea sick all the time. Then he made a mistake beyond not being tough. He stole money out of his roommate's bag. The captain gathered us all in the wheelhouse, and said he wanted the guy found and he'd be fine with whatever frontier justice happened. The guy was beat up, and fired. Years later I was talking to a deckhand working the boat that received this fired worker. Our boat swung in fast, lifted the guy up with a crane and swung him onto the receiving boat almost at full speed and in rough seas. Petty theft meant this guy's life was in peril till he reached dry land.

There was this seven foot tall Bosnian who never complained, and showed up 15 minutes before start time to kill more crab. Hacksaw, a jovial guy to me but threatened the guys he didn't like. Everybody liked me except this one deckhand from Hawaii. He pushed me once. Others told me was looking for a fight, and would claim I started the fight, hoping to get me fired and lose my end of contract bonus.

I made a plan to defeat the guy. I would do it by being crazy. On my raingear I used magic markers to draw and write. I drew lots of little flowers and "I WILL KILL YOU" all over myself. Across my rubber work gloves I wrote "I hate indigenous hawaiians". The little flowers all had smiley faces with swastikas for eyes.

The propaganda campaign worked perfectly, most got a bang out of it and the jerk deckhand walked a wide circle around me.

The gig on the Bountiful was a bit too intense to call fun, but my other experiences in Akutan, Ketchikan, and aboard the Neptune, Sea Alaska and Independence were awesome.

One message I want to creep out of this indulgent remembrance is how meaningful and valued people were in those notoriously anti-union Trident factories. There were more than a few ex-cons, and a lot of the American guys seemed to be current or ex street druggies. There were more green card workers from the Philippines and Central America than Americans. Everybody that worked was an equal, and most worked much harder than they really had to. ( e.g. Hacksaw the big muscled up street druggie stacked all 5000 boxes of crab perfectly in the freezer under no supervision ) Down here in the lala-land of the lower 48, especially amongst the do-gooder set who've never seen hardship, we think of the most bizarre schemes to enrich the impoverished. Up in Alaska I saw a lot of people from bitter backstories be reasonably satisfied, and laugh if the joke was good enough -they did it by working their ass off and getting a few thousand dollars to take home. That's what the down and out need.

Fascist watch: Seattle: The Tunnel Debate

News Article: Guest Columnists: Climate the loser in tunnel choice.

My comment posted on the news site:

From a Seattle citizen: Greenhouse emissions are not part of my criteria. Economic and cultural viability are.

Stop ramming your global-environment-first agenda down other people's throats.

I'm pro environment to the degree that accommodates a modern industrial city , and tired of imposing fascist extremes like the writers of this article.

Move to Portland, jerks.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors

Matthew 6:12 (King James Version):

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

Continuing my preoccupation with describing or understanding Resilient Communities in the last two blog entries, I'm thinking about Matthew 6:12 as an economic behavior of a society. The "forgiving of debts" would certainly help endure shocks to the economic system, such as the one America is experiencing since the last days of 2008.

Going back a few months to a conversation my wife and I were having, she sort of condemned a valuation of humans on an economic rationale. I was promoting some sort of race, creed, and color blind meritocracy; assuming I was taking a progressive high road when she said such schemes have failed in the form of heartless States who used citizens like firewood.

I crept away from that conversation with my secular technical meritocracy ideology seriously countered by her politically liberal theology.

But now I'm back, co-opting some of the ideas in poverty/welfare focused theology. Now I see it as a no-brainer for an economic system to have special modalities to save those who fall through the cracks of prosperity. Think of this non-merit welfare focus as a dimension in the meritocracy.

The key is for pro-meritocracy players to guide the welfare program. Please kill that word "welfare", I am not talking about welfare as previously done in the USA. Replace with the word "resilience" , not to merely sneak in an old idea via stealth, but to show the true goal of the mode -resilience.

I'm not saying anything very bright here. Just pointing out that for a system to absorb shocks of loss, or endure a period of starvation, some sort of extra and exceptional modality has to be carried out. I am not advocating a tragedy of the commons, I'm advocating a resilient technical meritocracy.

It's Alive

In my last blog entry I committed blogocide, saying I was going to cease blogging.

The reasoning was that a negative aspect of blogging is its continuum of the last several decades of culture war, and its tendency to gather together affinity groups who believe in the most preposterous or pathological ideologies. While that is obvious Networks and Netwars 101, what adds a more urgent condemnation is my anticipation of social shift towards empiricism, pragmatism, and industrialism in the home or immediate neighborhood..

This new paradigm will hopefully end the endless symbolic culture war Americans have waged since the 1960's. Advocates on the right and left have waged a battle to preserve, entitle, defend or enrich some class or creed, with the prize being Federal dole or favorable laws that direct some of America's centralized economic resources ( tax revenue and free market ) to that class or creed. Alongside siphoning dollars the objective is to get a mythical "official" American culture to declare the group equal ( e.g. homeless, gays, spanish speaking immigrants, white protestants, blacks, "big beautiful" obese whale women ), and we are to scream their "equality" from the rooftops everyday, include them in every popular movie ( Spike Jones idiotically wanting more blacks in a movie meant to be a sensitive treatment of Japanese viewpoint ). The American cultural sensitivity machine has gotten as pathological as any Soviet agenda.

Now we are seeing centralized culture, especially industrial production and money flows, rife with some sort of contagion. The oil tankers hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia without a reprisal carpet bombing campaign, and Madoff hijacking the most wealthy while authorities knew and did nothing, are emblematic of our time -the giant stuff is the weak stuff. I don't say this with any pleasure at all, I like the stuff centralized production makes. No revolutionary desire for collapse on my part. But as a pragmatist I see vulnerability and pathological underperformance in our old way of doing business.

John Robb's Resilient Community thesis is the bright spot on this paradigm horizon. On the exact day I declared an end to aiding and abetting the symbolic culture war, JR posted a blog entry that extended his resilient community thesis: Viral Resilience (please read). Add to that what he says in the next blog entry:

Greed is firmly entrenched among elites on a global scale and unlikely to dissipate (for example, there isn't even a hint of the scandals/public excoriation of excess that occurred during the early years of the 20th Century's Depression). That means that a counter strategy to greed will emerge, as the people not driven solely by greed seek protection against its revealed excesses.

What will this strategy be? We can already see the emergence of it with the shift away from consumerism towards the economic independence of thrift, investment, resilience. Dependence on the larger global economy is being curtailed, firewalls between systemic instability and the local are being set up, and new sources of local and virtual income are replacing older forms. It's possible that we will find the competition between greed at the global level and cooperative resilience at the local will be an evolutionarily stable strategy that will persist for decades to come.

-link to blog entry here.

Cities, and individuals who are early adopters of this paradigm stand to gain pronounced leverage. My next move is not so much cessation of blogging as it is doing more to get Seattle further along with this distributed production, thrift, and viral resilience economy. My mission is to move way from exposing the evils of postmodernism, left-wing social justice and back-to-nature agendas, and on to enabling a local distributed industrialized culture. This will mean countering green luddites prominent in Seattle's civic culture, with the best counter filling the land with modalities the luddites and old style lefties do not understand nor survive in.

I will begin by contacting a number of locals with odd points of leverage, e.g. a prominent journalist and a technologist. My Seattle resilient community progress reporting will probably wind up on another blog, under a different Google username identity.

Wish me luck, if my criticisms of the current paradigm are true, and the next paradigm is as I describe, then my family's living standard hangs in the balance.

To blog or not to blog: a raison d'etre

In 2003 while enrolled in a cutting edge college course called "Community Information Systems", we were very excited with the then emerging Web 2.0 and the phrase "Second Superpower" being assigned to describe what Web 2.0 was quickly becoming. ( Since then "blogosphere" has been used for the same large phenomenon. )

By late 2007 I'm a grad school dropout a month from having our baby being born. I decide to start this blog. I started writing, and the long, odd hours up with a baby actually helped me write more. So here I am, and millions of others -hyperactively serving in the Second Superpower army. Surely we are changing the world.

No doubt we have. One-to-Many media is perceptively less informative these days. The media outlets with user contributed content are where we get the most current news video footage. Many-to-One-to-Many (e.g. CNN's iReport.com) is amazing in getting new info to the masses. To speak in specifics: Web 2.0 radically changed civic critique of power by allowing whistleblowers a free, easy, ubiquitous channel to get their message to the public.

Then Obama was elected. Web 2.0 won. We may still want the countercultural Second Superpower, but we should also want to be a part of the new monoculture. We have a President who is addicted to his Blackberry, and who understood the Second Superpower well enough to get his unknown self elected. He will be in the Halls of Power. It would be foolish for the rest of the Second Superpower not to follow him there.

Counterculture may be over.

On a personal growth perspective, I've had an epiphany. It happened by me looking at my own blogging words. My last blog entry, Mandate to end Postmodernism, ended with a summation:

A survey of what is hot and what is not: 1960-2008 Making-shit-up in your head and finding others who agree was the new cool. 2009-? Engineering and empiricism are in, making things and finding other to help make it better is the new cool.

"Making things up and finding other who agree" sounds an awful lot like blogging. If it is, then I'm done. If it is an infinite free fall of complaining or positing bizarre social critiques....then I'm getting off that train. I like the way "Engineering and empiricism are in, making things and finding other to help make it better is the new cool" sounds. Time to take my own advice.

In the last month my programming skills have been getting better. I would drop out of blogging for several days, and obsessively program. At the end of a project in which my skills made great progress, I took a break from programming and wrote Mandate to end Postmodernism. I'm glad I did. It gave me an orientation for the next few years. I'm still deeply embedded in the Web 2.0 world, but it will be as programmer, making web applications that tangibly help our culture, not counter it.

Addendum

Of all the things I've written in this blog so far, there is one entry I am not only proud of, but will try promoting as a social critique and shaper of all public policy. It is The Acid test of Legitimacy.

Mandate to end Postmodernism

Referenced documents:

A President Forgotten but Not Gone
By FRANK RICH
Published: January 4, 2009

Highlights of Accomplishments and Results (15MB PDF)
- The Administration of George W. Bush

Frank Rich's NYT column A President Forgotten but Not Gone is an analysis of the last marketing campaign of the Bush Administration. Rich focuses on the GWB regime's exit interviews, a greater number of interviews than any previous President. In all the interviews, Bush/Cheney/Rove have ( with a straight face ) put forth a glowing review of their tenure. Add to these interviews the regime made headlines as the most environmental president ever with the Jan 5 announcement of the largest marine sanctuary in the world (Grist).

Contrast this with the rhetoric of Obama. He is an engineer, a social and cultural engineer. Our tribal subjectivisms are duly noted in his speeches, and he asks us to transcend past them to make a more robust, wealthier, healthier, and inventive society. In his world view their is work to do, criteria, and success or failure upon reflection. In his world view, we can't just make shit up.

The GWB Regime, by contrast, is entirely contained in its tribal subjectivisms -serving its base, ignoring or gunning for the rest. The GWB Regime was the greatest achievement of postmodern tactics. This week, with the view provided by Frank Rich, we are seeing Postmodernism with one foot in the grave, touting itself as forever relevant, so oblivious to empirical data that it will not know its lights are about to go out forever till its lights are out forever.

Within the Postmodern semiotic, tribes echo chamber their values within, and attack the tribes that are opponents. Since sometime around the George Wallace presidential campaign, and Nixon's swooping up of those voters with his southern strategy, Republicans have not been a coherent policy in the least, choosing rather to attract tribal subjectivists who do not measure real world goods but rather make symbolic gestures to express their hatred for all things urban. While the Republicans made this unreal world of incoherence, the countercultural left was fast maturing past 60's recreational subjectivism and by the early 70's were creating a big economy via publishing and academia. Subjectivism ceased to be recreational, old hippies got professional about their psycho-somatic methodologies.

Republicans ruled Washington (East Coast), and Dems/counter-cultural left ruled the storytelling worlds of Hollywood (West Coast) and books.

Then on Sept 11 World War III broke out. Washington responded with the largest , longest barrage of subjective making-shit-up the world has ever known. More powerful than 1000,000 of the original atomic bomb. Through 70's and 80's Repubs and Dems had toyed with casual Postmodernism, with the most adventurous being on the left side in academia or popular books. But on Sept 12th, the Bush Administration pulled a Postmodernism out of a research hanger at the Heritage Foundation that simply made history and science melt away.

This Postmodernism kicked ass, mowed down opponents like they were grass. Except for real opponents. Oh yeah, that thing the hippies and the new Repubs forgot about -objectivism, realism, empiricism. You can make history and science melt away, but reality does not melt so easily. You, the subjective, will melt first.

A survey of what is hot and what is not: 1960-2008 Making-shit-up in your head and finding others who agree was the new cool. 2009-? Engineering and empiricism are in, making things and finding other to help make it better is the new cool. Rest in Peace Postmodernism, the head trip was fun till it became an addiction.

Climate challenge and objective centrism

Climate change. I was in McMurdo 95-96, right after I left my friend Don Brogan emailed me to say the road to the airfield had melted. Unprecedented melting on the permanent ice shelf had occurred.

Climate change was a buzz topic amongst my crowd of Sierra Club political ops and progressive politicians back in Arkansas, then in Antarctica it was beyond buzz.

Now it is strange to see every other paragraph of PR from the biggest companies saying the phrase "this is easier on the environment" or "green". I am slightly like the Fox News and Repubs who question/mock this green religious conversion. I think its the right religion, its just that a superficial (ahem) affection for the religion undermines both legitimacy and effectiveness. e.g. Every high school kid that is "freaked out" by the plight of polar bears, then a news feature shows a grand hopeful story of the "freaked out" having a bake sale in which they heavy hand their fascism in the face of anyone that will listen.

[ side note: the link between the superficial and fascism is almost a one to one correspondence. ]

I want a cold-hearted technical fix mentally, and if no fix is possible at least technical approach. Engineers only. For this technical approach, their are two goals that are very different from each other: 1) mitigation of undesirable climate change if possible 2) adaptation ( e.g: Air conditioning, build houses underground in tornado belt, or on stilts in flood areas. Migrate from areas emerging as dangerous.)

The superficial religiosity form of being green has silenced #2, and for that I want to gun for these superficial mamby-pamby's. I return to my mantra that most students at Evergreen and faculty at Antioch need to disappear in the night, last seen boarding train cars to an unknown town in Poland.

Bringing this back to objective centrism, there should be a way for all of us who are not crazy or superficial to agree on some data and a baseline of assumptions, move on and build adaptations for greater incidence of inclement weather, water either rising in oceans or ceasing in mountain snowmelt tributaries, and other changes that are facts of our times.