Sunday, March 29, 2009

Legal Marijuana Whisky

The legalize pot crowd could make some gains in acceptance by promoting some stigmatization in the agenda. Social conservatives get a strawman argument by saying things like "we don't want people coming to work, or school, or driving while on the effects of pot". Why don't the pro-pot people take that rhetorical device away?

The norm of today's political advocacy is for the proponent group to never mention boundaries for their own cause. I think it would throw off the typical outcomes of debates if the proponent side did some self-critique, laying out some limitations on their own agenda.

So with Marijuana, the pro-pot people should be trotting out the word "Whisky". A catch phrase such as "Marijuana should have the same degree of legality, and acceptance, as Whisky". Pot people should stress that we don't have a society in which someone comes to work after drinking whiskey, they do not drive while drinking it, and we do not say "your boyfriend is always drinking whisky, a perfect guy to marry". We have all these social and legal stigmas on whisky, yet it is perfectly legal to sit in one's living room and imbibe in the hard stuff if one so chooses. It is even legal to drink the stuff till you pass out. Simply, it is with some stigma, and yet legal to consume by an adult while on private property.

Where we stigmatize whisky, lets do the same for pot, and where we allow whisky, lets allow pot.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Adaptation to New Economy

If the world is switching to more austerity, I believe we will still have consumerism -a much more sensible consumerism.

In the photo is my form of sensible consumerism, and I'm darn proud of it. I just purchased this vintage (1980's) Schwinn road bike. I found it on Craigslist. The guy who sold it to me refurbishes the old bikes and then resells them. He has a shop for his bike work at ActiveSpace. The guy lives a few blocks from his ActiveSpace shop, and a few blocks from me. I bought the Trek trailer to take my son to the beach this summer, and for towing loads of groceries home from Fred Meyer. The beach, and Fred Meyer, are all on a bike trail that runs in front of my apartment.

The bike was $160, the trailer $75. The bike works perfectly and is high performance enough for my needs. It is our family's only transportation vehicle besides riding the city bus or rarely renting a Flexcar.

I am not trying to save the planet, rather I am successfully adapting to a changing planet. This transportation choice isn't answering a moral imperative, it is providing a technical solution.

I'm going to have fun in this Depression.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Freeman Dyson: Heterodox Humanist

MAGAZINE PREVIEW
The Civil Heretic
By NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF
Published: March 29, 2009
How did Freeman Dyson, the world-renowned scientist and public intellectual, wind up opposing those who care most about global warming?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.htm

Beyond the specific points of factual dispute, Dyson has said that it all boils down to “a deeper disagreement about values” between those who think “nature knows best” and that “any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil,” and “humanists,” like himself, who contend that protecting the existing biosphere is not as important as fighting more repugnant evils like war, poverty and unemployment.

Winchester is a medieval town in which, Dyson writes, he felt that everyone was looking backward, mourning all the young men lost to one world war while silently anticipating his own generation’s impending demise. He renounced the nostalgia, the servants, the hard-line social castes. But what he liked about growing up in England was the landscape. The country’s successful alteration of wilderness and swamp had created a completely new green ecology, allowing plants, animals and humans to thrive in “a community of species.” Dyson has always been strongly opposed to the idea that there is any such thing as an optimal ecosystem — “life is always changing” — and he abhors the notion that men and women are something apart from nature, that “we must apologize for being human.” Humans, he says, have a duty to restructure nature for their survival.

“There’s a lot of truth to the statement Greens are people who never had to worry about their grocery bills,” he says.

He and Imme have spent 51 happy years together in the same house, a white clapboard just over the garden fence from the stucco affair once inhabited by their former neighbors, the Oppenheimers. On some Sundays the Dysons pile into a car still decorated with an Obama bumper sticker and drive to running races, at which Dyson can be found at the finish line loudly cheering for the 72-year-old Imme, a master’s marathon champion.

All six of Dyson’s children describe him as a loving, intensely devoted father and yet also suggest that this is a parent with, in the words of his son, George, core parts of him that have always seemed “remote.” William Press said he finds Dyson to be both a “deep” and “magnificently laudable person” and also mysterious and inscrutable, a man with contrarian opinions that Press suspects may be motivated by “a darker side he’s determined the world isn’t going to see.” When I asked Sacks what he thought about all this, he said that “a favorite word of Freeman’s about doing science and being creative is the word ‘subversive.’ He feels it’s rather important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive, and he’s done that all his life.”

Dyson says he can “remember so vividly lying in bed at age 15, absolutely enjoying hearing the bombs go off with a wonderful crunching noise. I said, ‘That’s the sound of the British Empire crumbling.’ I had a sense that the British Empire was evil. The fact that I might get hit didn’t register at all. I think that’s a natural state of mind for a 15-year-old. I somehow got over it.” At Cambridge, Dyson attended all the advanced mathematics lectures and climbed roofs at night during blackouts. By the end of the school year in 1943, which Dyson celebrated by pushing his wheelchairbound classmate, Oscar Hahn, the 55 miles home to London in one 17-hour day, Dyson was fully formed as a person of strong, frequently rebellious beliefs, someone who would always go his own way.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Being a Kulak. Malcom McLean is our example.

Truck driver stops flow of resources to dock worker's homes

Malcom McLean is my Jesus. Forbes Magazine called McLean "one of the few men who changed the world. He created Sealand, and launched containerized shipping (pictured above).

Visualize the day that he saw the opportunity. He was dropping off a payload at an Eastern seaboard dock, and the dock workers were offloading the goods and transferring to warehouses or ships. Mclean saw the inefficiency. The multiple times a good was handled. He also saw, or at least heard about, the dock workers steady stream of stolen goods while on the job.

Mclean was a common man, close to the class of dock workers. He did something heroic. He stopped the flow of stolen goods into those dock workers homes. This is where Mclean becomes my hero, stopping the flow of goods to families.

History Lesson: Communists hated Kulaks

Lenin would have called Mclean a Kulak. I remember one of my earliest uses of the internet involved a "virtual exhibit" presented by the Library of Congress, this was in 1992, a year before Mosaic web browser came out. The exhibit showed personal correspondence by Lenin, and the documents had just been smuggled out of Russia months before I saw them. Of particular note were the several times Lenin mentioned his highest contempt was reserved for Kulaks.

According to Marxism-Leninism, the kulaks were a class enemy of the poorer peasants. From this theory's point of view, poor peasants and farm laborers had to be liberated by the revolution alongside the proletariat (the urban workers). According to the Soviet terminology, the peasantry was divided into three broad categories: bednyaks, or poor peasants, seredniaks, or mid-income peasants, and kulaks, the higher-income farmers who were presumably more successful and efficient farmers. In May 1929 the Sovnarkom issued a decree that formalised the notion of "kulak household" (кулацкое хозяйство). Any of the following characteristics defined a kulak:

  • use of hired labour;
  • ownership of a mill, a creamery , other processing equipment, or a complex machine with mechanical motor;
  • systematic renting out of agricultural equipment or facilities;
  • involvement in trade, money-lending, commercial brokerage, or "other sources of non-labour income".

By the last item, any peasant who sold his surplus on the market could be automatically classified as kulak. In 1930 this list was extended by including those who were renting industrial plants, e.g., sawmills, and who rented land to other farmers

How to describe the Enemy

By cross tabulating the specific example of Mclean's shutting down the dock worker's paradise, and the Russian definition of Kulak, we can come up with rough caricatures of people I call the enemy. They are a class of poor or common people that have none of the creative/inventive abilities to produce resources which they feel they have a right to. They want to take value added manufactured goods home and distribute along class or genetic (familial) lines. The mode of acquisition varies -stealing, legislation (Soviets), seagoing piracy (Somalia), and maybe even unionization. They are the dumb but opportunistic layer of the industrialized world. They tend to derive from any religious sect except Protestant.

Extending the Enemy

The archetypical Protestant tradition places automatic virtue on those who succeed. I like that, but problems arise as a class emerges who have not succeeded as much as been born in a family that succeeded long ago. These too are a dumb but opportunistic layer of the industrialized world.

These are NOT the doers, inventors, or intellectual capital of the industrial world. They are just parasites with refined tastes for consumption. These are just as reprehensible as the Catholic, unionized dock workers. The parasitic wealthy do not pilfer through bins on the dock to steal and take home. Rather, they lurk in the corners of international trade and finance, funneling resources to themselves while adding no value to the industrial object.

An example of this is the sorry state of internet service in the United States. In 2001 American consumers could brag that their internet connections were larger and easier to get than in Japan or Korea. As of 2009, this most vital resource is grossly unimproved for Americans, and Asians consumers have 100 times better connection speeds. This is a case of investors arbitrarily ceasing to improve service while continuing to increase the cost. This is where the industrialists cross a line from earning wealth by merit to earning wealth by leaching off the Kulak class of common man.

Representation in Ideology

The Kulak class of common man goes undefended in political discourse. Whether it is your local newspaper, or historical analysis by college professor; the semi-successful common man is never poor enough to rally support. The poorer get screams for social justice, reparations, or sympathy and understanding for their crimes.

The Republican Party has tried being the voice for Kulaks, along with media ally Fox News. All it takes is looking where your not encouraged to look, and you see these are just the parasitic wealthy class manipulating Kulaks. "Joe the Plumber" was emblematic, appealing more to the media's faint and distant knowledge of a real working man, just an angry Aryan Nation looking cartoon posing as a Kulak. Like attracts like, in this case a stupid man attracting stupid men. Kulaks (semi-successful doers in the industrial economy) have better things to do than follow a political party and media outlet that offers this kind of crap.

Economic Operations 1.0

In the 1996 I had never heard of Malcolm Mclean, but I did decide to starve the parasitic peasant class. One agenda I adopted was being very pro-Amazon.com. I even worked there as a temp in late 1996. My desire was to replace the multitudes of construction workers who build brick and mortar stores ( especially the illegal aliens and anti-literate construction workers) with programmers and other cool people that live in Seattle. I wasn't a programmer at the time, and was a mere working class man myself. We were generating a better kind of human -the internet using human, and I wanted to take proactive steps towards feeding that family, and not feeding its antithesis families.

From 1996 I was encouraged by society's use of Amazon.com, Newegg.com, and other online retailers to buy everything except groceries. This killed off so much of what I wanted to go away, and made what I think is the better aspects of humanity flourish.

Economic Operations 2.0

The Depression has hit, and consumer behavior may have changed forever. Shopping as a form of entertainment, relying on suspiciously easy credit, is over. The core meaning of Kulak was "tight-fisted". The new consumer behavior sounds more like a Kulak.

Maybe we are entering a new era in which the Kulak is the norm, or acknowledged for being a wise/successful way of being. Hopefully the poorer skill-less peasant classes start to see a climb to semi-successful working class as an honorable goal, rather than continuing class/racial solidarity and expecting academic/legislative sympathies to divert resources to them.

The next iteration of industrialism is supposed to be a distributed sourcing of manufacturing or energy production. This is Kulak with an exponent beside it, Super Kulakism. As these resources are made in our homes, we need to keep the Malcolm Mclean and the Sealand container in mind. We will sell our excess energy, welded metal, guns and electronic devices. We want that distribution channel to be efficient, no siphoning off by wealthy or poor parasites.

Maybe a distribution channel such as Amazon or Google, completely automated by computers, would be the answer.

John Robb blog: The Resilient Community: Malcom's Platform

Friday, March 13, 2009

Cheaper Web 2.0 Crimefighting

Greg Whisenant, CEO of CrimeReports.com, said that given the state of the economy, those in public safety need to take advantage of every opportunity available to help citizens become more informed.

"Budgets are getting cut and we need to find new and innovative ways to use tools to our advantage to engage the public," said Whisenant, whose site aids law enforcement agencies in communicating crime data to the public.

-Police departments keeping public informed on Twitter -CNN

After looking at CrimeReports.com, and SPD's own SPDblotter, I'm thinking this is only 40% of the solution. These examples get official police documentation of crime quickly to the public, applaudable but too narrow if not augmented.

The remaining 59% of the solution ( 59 + 40 = 99, there is no 100% solution to social constructs ) is with citizen reporting. And I don't just mean human citizens, I mean an endless army of citizen created surveillance cameras. This grid of cameras then needs to be available for monitoring by anyone with web access, with a trickle up construct in which people who can take action against the crime are triggered.

We are in a global depression, everything we've been used to in the last 50 years in terms of "services" may evaporate. We will likely see more and more unsolved murders and home invasions if citizens assume police departments have the resources to solve crime. Citizens need to make crime more easily solved, more cheaply solved.

Production versus Plunder

Production versus Plunder. The Ancient War That Is Destroying The West. by Paul Rosenberg.

This blog entry is allowing reviews and commentary on the book.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

The One Way Propagation

I got 45 hours of graduate level credit studying in a program which adhered to a central tenet that a small group could change the world by the propagation of its values and practices. The gist was revolution from small to global.

I never took a survey, but it seemed certain that most in the program were pacifists. Pro local economy was another norm in the school population. Beyond my grad program, the people I encounter while discussing politics in Seattle are often pacifists, and for local economics as opposed to global. At Evergreen State College, 60 miles south of Seattle, the students are over the top on these issues -the goal is some sort of pacifist anarchist crop raising utopia. Between my grad school's teachings ( and hopes for the world ) and the Evergreen agenda, I can say that a lot of Pacific Northwest people think a pacifist self-sufficient food growing society is the goal.

I have one of many goals, it is too eliminate such a pacifist crop raising society if it ever occurs.

I won't be a lone maniacal hippie hater, though. I will have the rush of all social network behavior behind me. Humanity will do my work for me, eliminating the autonomous pacifist groups.

Absolute pacifism is almost never absolute. The societal node that practices no violence often has a larger power which does have tanks, guns, and power of subpoena to protect them. But beyond these quant little petting zoos of pleasant peasants and monks, lets imagine a pacifist truly autonomous, with no protector.

This is very likely if the big meltdown happens. What we are currently calling "the Depression", what if it gets worse than that? Such as collapse of states, or at least drying up of their resources to the point they no longer send a soldier or police officer out to investigate crimes or craziness.

The radical left, Naomi Klein and Adbusters et al, have for a long time lusted after the big meltdown; the collapse of McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Nike, and Hollywood. With that vacuum of none of the later 20th century stuff they imagine we can all get back to being good natured farmers.

Pacifism doesn't spread. Pacifism, by its very fragility when in transit, does not travel out in the world. It stays at the commune, or in the monastery. Yes, some buddhist monks have travelled, but the swords of a sympathetic warlord or Emperor were an essential ally.

Localism has a giant enemy -information. Information in the form of novel music, jewelry, cooking pots, and pretty women from the villages of that other ethnic group over the mountain pass. Two years into localism, and I promise the stuff from afar will have an unavoidable appeal. And for good reason, the closed system of ingenuity is no ingenuity at all. And without ingenuity humans are an empty husk, worthless to themselves or others.

But what about the waves of meth enhanced murderers and rapists that love burning crops and villages? Oh, sorry to interrupt your bong hit with such a downer, but thats going to be some of the fun being had in rural areas if the big meltdown happens. We got a lot of people in America like this who will have plenty of freedom to roam and collect into bands of marauders if the economy collapses to barter and localism.

Autonomous pacifists will be rare or non-existent, but I do believe their will be a kind of localism if the collapse happens. Cool theorists call them Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ), but we've got an old term that works just as well: a Fiefdom.

Regardless of race, religion, or technological level, Fiefdoms have these qualities: an upper class that doesn't know how to do anything other than hang onto power. This class cannot work with their hands, and command "thinkers" who know math or literature. This upper class have unlimited use of the lower class for screwing. Whether homosexual or heterosexual, the constant is a daily disposal of several bodies to hump. The people who pull food from the dirt, they are less valuable than the animals owned by the upper class. There is a class of military capable men, and they provide dangerous encounters to every other class.

This is the localism that actually happens, nothing really to do with the humanistic and healthy vision of today's left. Today's left has an orthodoxy of hope nothing to do with what humans do, or how things will ever play out. It is totally ironic, the pacifist-localist luddite agenda I mingled with is not going to spreading their way after a collapse of globalism, they are going to be the mostly likely way of life to become extinct.

I say all the above critiquing a certain extreme (but prevalent) agenda, but should make clear no one should have a problem with adaptation and change in the form of, say, more urban farming, or anything DIY. It is just the strong moral imperative that embellishes a lot of "green" and "local" pursuits that needs pummeling.

LEAKED: Antioch University Bold Future Initiative

Chancellor Toni Murdock has commissioned the Antioch University Bold Future Initiative to develop a comprehensive brand that will establish a compelling and distinctive position for the University that will benefit not only the University but each of its campuses and programs. Funded by the Pierson-Lovelace Foundation, as part of its generous and continuing investment in the future of the university, the Initiative will incorporate input from all university constituencies into its deliberative and decision making processes.

Neal King, President Antioch University Los Angeles Lynda Sirk, Director University Communications

Below are snippets I've gleaned from email exchanges and discussions dealing with the re-branding of Antioch for the future.

"America's new President is a welcome reprieve from the Bush regime, but frankly, Obama's embrace of science and technology is useless and alienating for the Antioch agenda. Antioch must aggressively posit an anti-Obama stance, demonstrating our commitment to the inner human that wants to blossom in a world without cell phones or timekeeping devices.
....
Obama wants scholastic and industrial achievement by all. That agenda runs counter to Antioch's anti-cognitivist strengths. Antioch will gain prestige during Obama's tenure by contrasting with Obama's work (slave) ethic by being a light attracting the country's most sensitive, mystically expansive students."


"Feminism will continue to make the unstoppable gains it has in the last 30 years. Antioch has been the breeding ground for this most beautiful inner core from which the feminine divine overtakes patriarchal privilege. Antioch will continue the unstoppable femme centered world by a new scholarship available to any female student. The qualifications are simple -the female student needs only to write papers giving first nations a revered, higher place when compared to other cultures. The student's papers need to explicitly state that industrial societies are male and ugly, and any non-metallurgical primitive culture is feminine and beautiful. Antioch regretfully recognizes that most brown people in the world are quickly mastering the arts of industrialism, we ask that students discuss brown people as if they are primitive....and feminine, and beautifully divine. We feel this Antioch initiative will attract the niche market of lesbians who worship Native Americans. "

The President of Texas

Many place the rise of American suburbs in the 1950's, sort of coinciding with middle class consumers of convenience appliances and longing for a Jetson's-like nuclear family.

Bullshit. As a young boy in the 1960's I remember the town's main stores, and our house, being downtown. It was the same most everywhere. On the outskirts of town were cows, crops, and the people that tended them. Or wilderness.

In the late 60's people (white people that is) started moving to any outskirt that didn't have sidewalks that led downtown. Why? Because black people lived downtown, and US laws and law enforcement officers were now going to treat everyone downtown equally. The Left Anti-suburbia set ( of which I am sort of a member since I live downtown and don't like suburbs ) think they are expressing an epiphany when they claim "the suburbs don't have any community". No shit, thats what whites intended -to abandon community, because the US had mandated a desegregated community. The whites who didn't want to live a desegregated life wanted no sidewalks.

Let's move onto the newest secession craze. America has elected a black man, possibly the most brilliant and technologically advanced man to occupy the White House. Conservatives that are more brawn than brain ( exclude the good guys David Brooks and Arnold Schwarzenegger ) are talking about militia, tribal, postmodern temporary autonomous zone types of secession.

I give a list of links to track the wackiness. The last link is the Lawrence Massacre, just to throw a dose of sobriety into the mix.

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/glenn-beck-plots-out-our-dystopian-

http://www.bobcesca.com/blog-archives/2009/03/colbert_is_a_ge_1.htm

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/03/12/chuck-norris-for-president

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Massacre

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Talking Point Rhetoric Meme Bombs

First off, let me say that there are Republicans I can respect. Ron Paul is at the head of that class. He has a set of principles which he has consistently stood by. In 2008, when most Republican politicians where whores sending every tax dollar possible to military contractors, Republican Ron Paul and his followers where saying no to this.

Now it is 2009, and the whore class of Republicans are pretending they were stern watchers of taxpayer dollars all along. Now that a non-Republican is in the White House. For the last few years those same Republicans exclaimed "you are not a patriot" if you questioned any spending of taxpayer dollars in Iraq.

Here is meme bomb idea that recycles an old effective meme bomb - the "Bridge to Nowhere". Lets recycle the old phrase and reuse it when talking about US taxpayer infrastructural investment in places in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.

Here is how the protest sign should read:
NO MORE "BRIDGES TO NOWHERE" ON FOREIGN SOIL USING USA TAX DOLLARS.

When you say the above, you take whore-class Republican feigned values to task, and shut down the money pipeline to their accounts.

Economy Reset: Industrial Reset, and the Pentagon Budget

President Obama has made it clear the Bush practice of funneling taxpayer dollars straight into military spending is over. I applaud the end of handing out dollars by the train load to military contractors making bridges and buildings to nowhere in the Middle East, while the US infrastructure rots or gets evermore behind Europe and Asia's innovations. ( The insincere, fat boys and girls of the Republican Party love deficit spending when its to make America over into an infrastructure-less agrarian South, and dump taxpayer money into state building on foreign soil, but hate deficit spending when its to maintain the fundamentals of an industrial society here at home.)

But the Obama team shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water. The White House ought to stop Bridge to Nowhere projects on foreign soil, but keep Pentagon programs that have a multiplier effect for the US public. Specifically, the next gen micro-device programs at Darpa (see here).

I'm saying this if these technologies do at least the following: 1) Defend America for less money than previous generation technology and tactics 2) Defend America more effectively 3) Has trickle down effect of more powerful consumer goods 4) Invigorates American competitiveness in the global tech market place (with the caveat that those dollars do not go to American stockholders that opt for offshore production scenarios, leaving the average American unemployed once again).

Friday, March 6, 2009

The State of the Far Left Revolution as of March 2 2009

This is a good synopsis of the far revolutionary left, the big names and current intentions: Resistance to the War on the Wild.

Note the stature of Derrick Jensen. I had personal email correspondence with him, in 2004, when his ideas in "Culture of Make Believe" were attractive to me. I've moved on to being pretty much an arch enemy of EarthFirst crapology.

Man-Machine argument on Craigslist/Philosophy

I have a presence on Craigslist philosophy forums as the username ObamaEraCyborg. I started the username on President Obama's inauguration day. I do not "troll" on the forum, I "meme bomb" the forum with a political/social agenda.

Lately I've noticed two fairly long discussion threads in which the original poster mentions my name and my philosophy stance. It seems my pro-technology memes are ruminating in peoples heads, which means my meme propagation project is working.

Ironically, I learned the value of meme warfare from my philosophical enemy: postmodernists, most specifically during my tenure as grad student in Whole Systems Design at Antioch University. That school taught me the phrase "do you want to be right, or be effective?". Postmodernists taught me that it is not by being objectively correct that I will spread an agenda, it is by pure and amoral propaganda. Propagation, with an emphasis on lodging my ideas inside subjects who oppose its propagation. By their mentioning of my ideas/values in a hostile way, they carry my ideas further. A step further up the meta, I recognize that by employing postmodern tactics I am propagated by my so called enemy, and one could say that I am losing the war by being like my opponent. I can obliterate this by reference to the moral sphere, specifically moral consistency. A good warrior does not employ moral consistency. I worship in the church of objectivity and rationalism, but on the battlefield have no problem disregarding the manners and civility I would practice while at church. Whatever it takes to kill off the Luddite, the zero-growth Nature lover, and the anarcho-primitivist. The 19th century was the wholesale destruction of the primitive( no metal use humans), the 20th century exterminated the peasant ( local economy humans ), and the 21st will be something similar for another retrogressive class. My guess the class slated for demotion will be those who think without using technology. My education, and tens of thousands of dollars spent, at Antioch U will help me help the 21st century with its network hygiene goal.

Here is the best thread so far:http://seattle.craigslist.org/forums/?ID=118078118