Progressive Positive

Juche and a antidote to Juche

2011-12-26T07:17:00.000-08:00

Juche is a political thesis created and implemented by Kim Il-sung. "Juche" has sometimes been translated in North Korean sources as "independent stand" or "spirit of self-reliance", and has also been interpreted as "always putting Korean things first." According to Kim Il-sung, the Juche Idea is based on the belief that "man is the master of everything and decides everything." Kim Il-sung outlined the three fundamental principles of Juche in his April 14, 1965, speech "On Socialist Construction and the South Korean Revolution in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea":

Political independence [chaju]
Economic self-sustenance [charip]
Self-reliance in defense [chawi]

In the early 21st century it is seen as progressive (to leftist Westerners) to embrace departures and annulments of the following societal blocks:

Global trade blocks such as WTO and NAFTA.
Nation states.
Porous borders for the transmission of material manufactured goods.

Basically, Leftists want to bomb the ports and revert to a localized economy, society, and body politic. North Korea is practicing an extremely pure instance of localized independence.

Human ideas are wonderful and dysfunctional till they become purely implemented -then they become hideous and hyper-functional; locked into a death trap of stasis.

My concept of Goliath Machine God is a counter to pure Juche, and to Kim Il-sung's belief that "man is the master of everything and decides everything". Machines need to be part of the master class, and big decisions need some of the process done on machines.

The awful Truth of Ecosystems, the Lie called Ideology by Seth Galbraith

2011-12-25T07:40:00.000-08:00

From the Havel essay The Power of the Powerless:

As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual. In societies where there is public competition for power and therefore public control of that power, there also exists quite naturally public control of the way that power legitimates itself ideologically. Consequently, in such conditions there are always certain correctives that effectively prevent ideology from abandoning reality altogether. Under totalitarianism, however, these correctives disappear, and thus there is nothing to prevent ideology from becoming more and more removed from reality, gradually turning into what it has already become in the post-totalitarian system: a world of appearances, a mere ritual, a formalized language deprived of semantic contact with reality and transformed into a system of ritual signs that replace reality with pseudo-reality.

Phrases we should perhaps use more often: "post-totalitarian" (persistent repressive ideological government) "public competition for power" (the popularity contest that we commonly call democracy) and "dictatorship of the ritual" (when the internal reality of an ideology seems to guide the power structure of a post-totalitarian system.)

Humanity has so far got two great competitors for dominance of this planet. (A) ecosystems - networks of interdependent species which are capable of rendering the planet less inhabitable through thoughtless but complex changes to resource cycles and which could arbitrarily "decide" to favor bacteria over humans and kill almost all of us. (B) ideologies - systems of ritual and interpretation of reality that reconcile the ugly power structures in our lives with our ugly selfish desires into a beautiful narrative that we can identify ourselves with.

(Note that presently in North Korea, humanity is being squeezed out by both ideologies and ecosystems, as they seemed to have returned to the famine and malnutrition of the 1990's.)

In essence, ecosystems are the awful truth and ideologies are the big lies that excuse us from facing the truth. But it's not that simple. Ecosystems are immensely complex, possibly unpredictable, and we have very limited influence over them. This defies our conventional notion of "truth" as facts that allow us to improve our prospects by adjusting our behavior. Truth that doesn't give us an opportunity to improve ourselves is simply fate.

Ideologies on the other hand defy the conventional notion of a "lie" as a contradiction of truth that allows us to improve our prospects by rejecting the lie and adjusting our behavior accordingly. Rejecting ideology is difficult for the individual and seemingly impossible for an entire society. The best system we seem to have come up with is a public competition for power, which encourages ideologies to track reality, but that doesn't make the lies true.

Human self-interest is really a simple problem: we need first the necessities of life, second the security of social connections (family, friends, community, etc.) and finally we need to be engaged in some satisfying activity, which really doesn't have to be a lot more useful or complex than playing World of Warcraft.

We are supremely adapted as a species to pursuing this interest. The primary reason that we lived as hunter-gatherers for 100s of millenia before developing agriculture is that we were really good at it. Paleolithic bands were efficient, close-knit, busy and more fun than we usually give them credit for.

By the middle ages we had gotten so good at agriculture that it was actually better than living as a hunter gatherer (for the most part - we don't have much hard data, and conditions varied from place to place.) Medieval communities were efficient, close-knit, busy and more fun than we usually give them credit for.

By the 1950's some parts of the world had gotten so good at industry that it was actually better than living as a farmer (but again we don't have much hard data on pre-industrial societies.) Death of a Salesman notwithstanding, Industrial America is associated with creating great surpluses of the necessities of life (food, energy, housing) having extensive social networks (clubs, associations, family reunions) finding fulfilling work (entrepreneurship, skilled labor) and a near monopoly on defining good times for future generations (http://xkcd.com/988/)

So on the one hand we have human beings continually improving their lives by developing and perfecting our way of life. And on the other hand (A) our lives also depend on unreliable ecosystems dominated by selfish bacteria, and (B) we sell our souls to ideologies that also ultimately only care about preserving themselves.

It seems to me that this is a situation we can never really escape, but it is one that we can manage, as we have managed to live with bacteria (and they with us) for the entire history of our species. The rise of post-totalitarian communism in the 20th century was an example of poor management, but the situation has now improved for some communist and post-communist (post-post-totalitarian?) countries.

But this perspective raises some disturbing questions. For example what about persistent post-totalitarian states with starving populations and nuclear weapons? What if global warming eventually stirs up a global bacterial bloom that wipes out most life on Earth? If we find at some point that ecosystems and ideologies are ready to kill us all, how far would we go to prevent it?

Visual Literacy : Final Reflection : Summer 2005

2011-12-24T16:05:00.001-08:00

Final Reflection Essay by Lance Miller for Visual Literacy, a course taught as part of the Whole Systems Design Masters Program at Antioch University in Seattle.

This summer our group in Visual Literacy explored visual phenomenon and visual thinking. I make this distinction between phenomenon and thinking to point to phenomenon external to the receiver and thinking with neural activity that emulates visualization.

An interesting entry point for discussion was the assertion that language paralyzes thought. Thinking in a visual modality, rather than in a linguistic modality, was offered as a way to avoid the stated paralysis.

In my exploration of visual modalities in thinking, I think I’ve understood the sentence “language paralyzes thought, and visual creativity can go beyond language to discover new creativity or thoughts” as an instance of English language. It states that there is something outside the bounds of linguistics that is neurological activity that utilizes visual parameters. The meaning, use and even the possibility of cogent discussion on this neural activity are important clarifications I need.

Book on Logical Philosophy

My need to understand such a meta level assertion led me back to a dependable source of inspiration – Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tracticus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP). When I discovered Wittgenstein, in 1994, I was involved in a religion my family had been in for four generations. This religion forbade the use of icons and imagery to convey religion. Text and hermeneutic extrapolation using historical records was the method of religious experience. Wittgenstein’s Tracticus Logico-Philosophicus freed me from the crude self-referencing affirmation of revealed truth and validity that had empowered this religion’s hold on my thinking.

TLP opened up the stuff of life, the non-deterministic unfolding of the present, and a more rigorous thinking for me. After discovering Wittgenstein, I hitchhiked for twenty-five hundred miles, and drove ten thousand miles on a summer long vision quest that delivered me into opportunities to go to Antarctica and Alaska. Along the way I read Umberto Eco, Gregory Bateson, and all of Wittgenstein’s published works.

The Freedom of Rationality

A key feature of this new adventurism was the ability to explore reality with language and rationality. I mention the encounter with Wittgenstein’s works not just for indulgent autobiography, but to demarcate my life by a line on which I became far more rational, and creative. Previous to this time all things creative –music and writing especially, were elusive crafts that escaped my serious attempts at mastery. After reading Umberto Eco’s “A Theory of Semiotics” I started developing an understanding of repetition and change as relational in creating music. I saw the use of the two in creating signals that communicate. Other relative opposites are words like unique and banal, and music can mix these as a means to communicate. Ad hoc frameworks like these came easily after stumbling into a rational analytic philosophy with language as the prime thought process.

Irrational is __________

When I step out of a rational language space, I mentally experience______. The exception is when I play music. In the case of music, when I step out of rational language space, I mentally experience…music. But the music is has a relational management system built into it via harmonic rhythm, overtone scales, and spatial corporeality expressed in reverb. Music is a rational language space in its own right.

Universe of Ratios, Universe of Relations

When I speak of rational, I imply its root, synonym, and derivative terms. I especially imply ratio. For me, all things add up to one universe by a gathering of things into relative ratios. A few caveats I should mention on rationalism: I know that my senses only see a tiny fraction of these things, and my ratio summation of the universe is always incomplete. Our choice in things to see, the lines of demarcation to see separate things, and even the ratios we choose as metrics are ad hoc socially constructed artifacts. For me, the discovery of systemic thinking and a love for it is simply an extension of my vision quest into the rational.

A Ratio of Perspectives, Participation, and Collective Experience

One of the biggest lessons I learned while in Visual Literacy Studio was the variance in perceptions and avenues of articulation. From classroom discussions and online dialogue I saw that people experience art, color, brightness, and combinations of sensory input very differently. In the last residency we had an excellent discussion on imagination, which is the mental creation of a new thing that is doable, as opposed to fantasy, which is the mental creation of the impossible. I believe we need, and will always need, more imagination to guide society away from pathologies. People need inspiration and varying degrees of stimulation to encourage imagination. I have learned that what I need to free my mind and create new and great things is not the same as what others need. I want to respect these needs unlike mine, I want to encourage the needs unlike mine. We are creating tomorrow today, and a greater pleasantness for that tomorrow will require an inspired and imaginative humanity.

Creative use of visual stimulation, painting, and visual thinking may be just what many will need for that process.

References

Wittgenstein L. (1922). Tracticus Logico-Philosophicus. Great Britain: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.

Human migration and settlement of comets via genetically engineered trees.

2011-12-22T03:22:00.000-08:00

This blog posting is a recycling of ideas in an essay by Freeman Dyson published as Chapter 24 in Scientist as Rebel. I feel the bullet point style in this blog posting promotes Dyson's ideas to a wider audience.

Except for Earth, planets are not important for human habitation. Mars is waterless, and the rest are inhospitable for humans.
Comets are rich in water, carbon and nirogen -the essentials to support life.
Approximately one comet per year has a perturbation of its orbit such that it is captured into a region near enough to the Sun where it eventually evaporates and disintergrates. If one comet per year has been falling towards the Sun throughout the existence of the solar system, then the population of comets loosely surrounding the Sun likely numbers in the billions.
Billions of comets, a few miles in diameter, would amount to habitable space ten to one hundred times the size of Earth.
Comets are a plentiful platform for long-term space colonialization.
Two essentials comets lack -air and warmth- could be added to the comet environment with introduction of biologically engineered trees.

Components and Features of a Space Tree
1. Leaf Skin
  Requirements of leaf skin designed for space:
  - Opaque to far-ultraviolet radiation in order to protect vital tissues from radiation damage.
  - Impervious to water.
  - Transmit visible light to the organs of photosynthesis.
  - Extremely low emission of far-infrared radiation, to limit the loss of heat and keep itself from freezing.
  - For the colder environment beyond Saturn additional features are needed for warmth: a compound leave that has photosynthesis and warmth in one part, and a cold mirror component that focused sunlight on the photosynthesis area. The mirror component could have genetic instructions to orient correctly towards sunlight.
2. Branches -must be insulated to retain heat, a less complex challenge than insulating the leaves.
3. Roots -will penetrate the comet, transferring heat to the roots system to melt ice into water (to service humans and the tree), and carry building block substances to the rest of the tree.
4. Trunk -the trunk area would provide oxygen for humans, with the tree leaves genetically instructed not to release oxygen, but to carry the oxygen to the trunk area where it is released for human use.
5. Size -ordinary wood has the ability to support its own weight, which if combined with the weak gravity of a comet ten miles or less in diameter should produce trees hundreds of kilometers in height. This size feature will greatly increase the ice melting and oxygen output for human use.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil by J.D. Bernal (1929)

2011-12-18T17:17:00.000-08:00

‎

"Normal man is an evolutionary dead end; mechanical man, apparently a break in organic evolution, is more in the true tradition of a further evolution." -page 42

"Instead of the present [human] body structure have a whole framework of some sort of very rigid material...in shape it might well be rather a short cylinder...the brain and nerve cells are kept circulating over it at a uniform temperature. The brain...is connected in the anterior of the case with its immediate sense organs, the eye and the ear. The eyes will look into a kind of optical box which will enable them to alternatively to look into periscopes projecting from the case, telescopes, microscopes and a whole range of televisual apparatus. The ear would have the corresponding microphone attachments and would still be the chief organ for wireless communications...attached to the brain cylinder would be immediate motor organs, corresponding to but much more complex than, our mouth, tongue and hands." -page 38

"The complex minds could, with their lease of life, extend their perceptions and understanding and their actions for beyond those of the [normal organic] individual. Time senses could be altered: the events that moved with the slowness of geological ages would be apprehended as movement...As we have seen, sense organs would tend to be less and less attached to bodies, and the host of subsidiary, purely mechanical agents and perceptors would be capable of penetrating those regions where organic bodies cannot enter of hope to survive." -page 45

The brain itself would become more and more separated into different groups of cells or individual cells with complicated connections, and probably occupying considerable space. The would be loss of motility which would not be a disadvantage owing to extension of sense faculties. Every part would be accessible for replacing or repairing." -page 46

The new life would be more plastic, more directly controllable and at the same time more variable and more permanent than that produced by the triumphant opportunism of nature. Bit by bit the heritage in the direct line of mankind -the heritage of the original life emerging on the face of the world -would dwindle, and in the end disappear effectively, being preserved as some curious relic, while the new life which conserves none of the substance and all of the spirit of the old would take its place...Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherialized, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving into pure light." -page 47

"The cardinal tendency of progress is the replacement of an indifferent chance environment by a deliberately created one. As time goes on, the acceptance, the appreciation, even the understanding of nature, will be less and less needed. In its place will come the need to determine the desirable form of the humanly-controlled universe which is nothing more or less than art." -page 66

Space Vikings -Why People Will Go Into Space- by Seth Galbraith

2011-12-13T05:26:00.000-08:00

http://www.shareable.net/blog/to-the-stars-a-diy-open-source-manned-spacecraft

This article has two videos you should watch. The first is just a short recording of a test launch. The second is a TEDxCopenhagen presentation from before the test launch.

Key points:

Any blacksmith with the right plans could make a spacecraft.
Save money by finding people who don't know how to do the job but are willing to learn.
You can do this with one ten-thousandth of the budget of NASAs space race programs.
Regulatory hurdles actually favor bold adventures over gradually building infrastructure.
In other words, rockets are just metal tubes and professionalism is a barrier innovation.

Three nations are capable or nearly-capable of supporting long-term outposts in space. All of them are driven by a myth of resistance to occupation. For the Russians the iconic occupier is the mongol horde. For the Americans the iconic occupier is the British. Between the 1840s and 1940's China was occupied to some degree by almost every colonial power from Portugal and Britain to Germany and Japan. Even the runners-up, like India, Israel and Iran also have similar post-colonial resistance narratives that shaped their identities.

France, Japan and the UK also launched orbital rockets, but they have had this capability for decades without developing their own independent human spaceflight program.

Of course a post-colonial national identity is not unusual in the modern world. Half of the world's population lives in countries that have had orbital launch capability at some point. But pushing frontiers and showing that you can drop a nuke anywhere you want matters most to a country that sees itself as the product of armed resistance to external exploitation.

I believe the post-colonial narrative is fading as it has become the new normal and the world is getting flatter. Maybe we will see one last new batch of national space programs emerge from Kennedy's "New Frontier" of equatorial countries that emerged from colonialism in the 70's and 80's, but eventually we will probably end up with one big international space station program. Maybe we'll have a few space stations, but they'll all pretty much be built from the same cloth as the current ISS: low earth orbit monuments to cooperation between countries-that-aren't-colonies-anymore.

When I say the world is getting flatter, I don't mean that exploitation is going away, but that exploitation within nations is increasing while exploitation between countries is decreasing. The post-colonial narrative was largely about how countries that benefited most from colonialism (like the UK and USA) should recognized the debt they owed to the countries that benefited least - or at least respect the independence of those peripheral countries. "We" westerners should realize that "our" prosperity was the produced at "their" expense.

The global movement that has emerged around Occupy Wall Street has a new post-post-colonial framing. "We" aren't the rich west and "they" aren't the third world. "We" are the 99%, whether we sleep in a wheelbarrow in Lagos or a McMansion outside of Las Vegas, and "they" are the 1% of people managing the system so poorly that the banks are foreclosing on our wheelbarrows and McMansions in spite of us keeping our end of the deal we made with them.

This is what will drive space colonization: general disenchantment with management. Schemes for libertarian barge-cities notwithstanding, you can't live in the modern world and escape completely from the stagnating influence of management hierarchies, stifling professionalism, and meddling regulations. And the savage, primitive, brutal environment of outer space is about as far as you can get from the modern world.

When there is nowhere left to run, people will sit on top of a homemade tank of explosive fuel and light it off.

For now this is only a temporary escape. Suborbital launches only provide a glimpse of space, but each launch that takes people further, higher and faster will show the boring old world below as a smaller and smaller circle until they have figured out how to get into orbit for thousands rather than millions of dollars. Then they will start learning how to survive in space for weeks, then months, then years. And finally small groups of people will just fly away into the solar system, not for science, not for profit, but just to live by their wits in a place where people can screw things up for themselves instead of being torn between regulation and exploitation.

-Seth Galbraith

Class Warfare, The Rise of Anti-Visionary, Detail-Oriented Leadership by Seth Galbraith

2011-10-05T05:21:00.001-07:00

One of the parallel processes at work in modern times is the shift away from the abstract, mystical and visionary and toward the detailed structure of things. Computers and animals are becoming more important, even more loved and respected, while human beings, governments and corporations have lost value. Artificial intelligence has literally become a joke. Making intelligences that reason at a higher level makes no sense if the future belongs to beings that reason on a lower level.

"Corporations are people, friend."

"I think it's dangerous ... this class warfare."

That's what Mitt Romney said, and he's right.

In 1833, Parliament abolished slavery throughout the British Empire and paid slaveowners 20 million pounds for the lost property. The United States failed to reach a similar compromise and instead - after a generation of threats and negotiations - slaveowners got to eat lead balls. The 14th amendment allowed the freed slaves to become citizens, but it also became the basis for corporate personhood.

Class warfare is dangerous. It's dangerous to the class on top. And when you are on top and you don't see the winds of change coming and take action to preserve yourself, history will not judge you kindly. It doesn't matter whether you are a role model and a job creator and a success story. It doesn't matter whether you are just trying to hold onto your just reward for a lifetime of hard work and good decisions. It really doesn't matter, because future generations will just see that you stood there and ate a lead ball instead of getting out while the getting was good.

In the final years of the second millenium, the first fully self-regulating banking system was created and put in charge of Wall Street. This was a system built from machines, not people, and it made bankers just as obsolete as slaves, skilled craftsmen and actors in an age of trucks, automated factories, and digital clones. Human labor now has no more value than the oscillations of a sewing machine - not even "mental labor" in the sense that we say a banker or manager does mental work.

So this is class warfare between classes of people who have no value to one another as commodities. A war of utterly alienated cyphers. Zero vs. zero.

It is not a slave revolt because the slaves are already as free as their minds will let them be. It is in fact the masters who are on strike. They are on strike against regulations, against social programs that only benefit people who work for a living, against taxes, against tax CUTS when those tax cuts require them to exercise the little gray cells (like payroll tax cuts.) The masters have gone on strike against all of the bogeymen that oppress them in their own deluded imaginations, harrying them as they drive in circles around their gated communities.

Occupy _____ is not a strike. It's the strike breakers. They don't know and they don't really care about the issues that the oligarchs are upset about. Plutonomy? free markets? sounds like some hippie BS to me. Up against the wall!

Corporations are ...

... collectives with a shared consciousness
... people entitled to equal protection under the law
... discriminated against by oppressive governments
... citizens of the world with no loyalty to any one nation
... conscientious objectors who reject all state coercion
... rising up in revolt against the Establishment

... and totally on the wrong side of history.

Let's take Temple Grandin's hierarchy:

big picture normal humans
detail oriented autistic people
animals

And add a few other types of intelligence to the great chain of being:

mystical visions
corporations, collectives, governments
normal humans
bureaucrats and engineers
autistic people
animals
computers, ecosystems
appliances, vehicles, plants, germs
genes, ideologies
chemicals, simple machines
physical structure of the universe

One of the parallel processes at work in modern times is the shift away from the abstract, mystical and visionary and toward the detailed structure of things. Computers and animals are becoming more important, even more loved and respected, while human beings, governments and corporations have lost value. Artificial intelligence has literally become a joke. I'm not a robot, I'm a unicorn. Making intelligences that reason at a higher level makes no sense if the future belongs to beings that reason on a lower level.

If Peter Ward is right, we are living in the middle of the age of complex, multicellular life, which began 600 million years ago, and will end some time in the next 600 million years. For billions of years before this age began, the microbes ruled. And after complex, multicellular life eventually self-destructs, the microbes will rule again for billions of years.

Perhaps we are also living in the middle of the age of complex, social intelligence. Perhaps culture and civilization are working against themselves, destined to self-destruct and return us (or return without us) to a world ruled over by animal-like intelligences. Even if that is not our destiny, the current trend is not toward a more transcendent and humanized future, but a more animalistic, mechanized, and ideological one.

Advocacy of Total War

2011-08-09T05:44:00.001-07:00

IF the US did these things:

Only became militant against entities (or their support network) that had committed an atrocity within the territory of the US.
Became equally militant, no preferential treatment, e.g. the US's perverse distinction between Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and others.
Only nullified all life in a zone, and then leave. No conquest, religious or ethical proselytizing, taking of resources, signing of lucrative exclusionary trade deals, orphanage building, or state building.

THEN

the world, especially the Muslim world, would have a very sincere respect of the US.

I would support a war on jihad extremism much like the US's war on the Japanese -the US obliterated every city above 50,000 in population. That nullifies the production of almost anything: hardware, memes, religion. In the war on jihadism, the US should have, at the very least, obliterated Islamabad, and then moved to an opposite of Japanese urban-bombing and used some form of nuclear war or other complete area death methodology to wipe the mountain terrain of both Afghanistan and Pakistan clear of all human and animal life.

Below is a copy from an email from a friend on the subject of Total War, his synopsis compliments my statements.

Saying that total war is all good or all bad is like saying that government is all good or all bad, or that bacteria is all good or all bad. Total war is a horrifying idea, and a powerful strategy that may do more good than harm in some cases. At the core of the idea is the concept of the "system" - the coordinated nation-state, the body politic, the public and private, military and civilian appendages working together under a political head.

To make any distinction between Sherman's march to the sea and Hitler's rape of Europe, we need to think objectively about systems. We need to understand that the good of the system is not necessarily the greatest good, and that the system does not self-regulate, it is not inherently justifying, it is not necessarily rational, and it has no destiny written in the stars. But we also need to understand that the system can do enough good to justify itself, that the system can be efficiently regulated, that it can be mostly fair and moral, and it can be improved over time.

Any system that can prevent Total War is a subtle form of Total War in itself, since preventing Total War means preventing the whole system of one nation from organizing itself against the whole system of another nation, and preventing a nation from organizing itself in that way is a military intervention against that nation.

-Seth Galbraith

Anders Breivik and Knights Templars are Perfectly Postmodern

2011-07-27T08:39:00.000-07:00

The New Left abandoned the previous Progressive Left's love affair of science and rationalism. The New Left allowed for and encouraged the world view of all the dark people's religions. They weren't really into carte blanche diversity, because if the culture had industrialized or evolved away from being a poster child of poverty and death, then the New Left didn't really want to talk about those more successful non-Western cultures. Only backward shamans please.

This might be summarized as a love affair with mysticism. That is what the New Left pushed into the pop culture end of Progressive identity. It has stuck to this day.

Postmodernism promoted an end to one central global dialog: science. In its place local language and customs are revered.

Both New Left and Postmodernism thought white Protestants would remain forever static -in that late 1950's American form of decently behaved, law-abiding, slightly-prejudiced, highly-functional middle class people.

But white culture smoked the crack of Postmodernism themselves, and fractured into the million group identities we have today.

In the movie "Serenity" there is a scene near the end when the Reaver fleet come out of the asteroid cloud thing chasing the ship Serenity and the Empire ships see all this coming at them, and Mal says "looks like the chickens have come home..." or something to that effect. Well, Breivik is a prime member of that Reaver fleet. And he maybe killed the entire next generation of ruling liberals in his country. Him and the Reavers, they sure are crazy but sure are effective.

Oh, hey, my Postmodernist grad school (Antioch University: Seattle) had this phrase plastered everywhere: do you want to be right or do you want to effective? When Breivik blew the face off that 16 year old girl, he was being effective but not right.

Postmodernism wanted an end to the big and universal, especially science, and a return to local culture and mysticism. Here is what local culture and mysticism are across 99.9% of all human history: beliefs that crudely use all resources, devalue humans (especially women and children), and call for the killing or extreme abuse of any human that exists outside the clan.

I am putting a hard iron law declaration down here, I am saying abandon science and international bourgeois industrialism and one MUST embrace a way that lynches all people (especially the children) of the other colors, creeds or religions.

Tibetan and Salish non-violent tribes being the exception to the above historical practices of violence to outsiders, but who cares what they did anyway.

So Knights Templars, Al Qaeda, Black Hebrews, and anyone else really down with killing those outside their clan have the bulk of human history on their side.

Me and what do I really stand for? Science and bourgeois industrialism, racial intermarriage, safe streets fghts or everyone. But if the world around me abandons science and international bourgeois industrialism, then it has no choice, no where else to go, other than to evolve to Knights Templars, Al Qaeda, Black Hebrews, and other precision forms of mystical killing machines.

Mechanized Marijuana

2011-03-22T05:39:00.000-07:00

Marijuana should be legal to consume, but needs some tweaking to its image before this should happen.

The USA has been on a path to bourgeois-industrialism in all facets of life for the last 100 years. This is awesome, and what makes America a success. Removing nature, and replacing with the mass manufactured object is something I want and would fight and kill in wars to make sure happens.

Enter marijuana. At the consumer experience level it is too leafy and simple. This just won't work. Whiskey and beer show in no way the plants they come from, and come in a glass, metal or plastic container. Marijuana needs to adopt the same.

Marijuana needs to be consumed in a form something like a can of Red Bull.

And marijuana sounds too foreign and sensuous, it needs to be called what redneck, white Lynyrd Skynyrd fans called it in the 1970's: Pot.

Pot. Let's make it industrial looking, legal, and persecute anyone wanting the organic kind.

What we want -written by Seth Galbraith

2010-12-23T11:54:00.000-08:00

Environment

What we want: maintain natural resources that allow us to live and live well.
What it becomes when we use it as an excuse for mediocrity: eco-guilt
What it can become when we use it as an excuse for evil: eco-terrorism

Economy

What we want: to promote commerce that produces prosperity and comfort
What it is called when we use it as an excuse for mediocrity: wall street
What it can be when we use it as an excuse for evil: shock therapy, SAPs and exploitation.

Social Equity

What we want: fairness and meritocracy without cruelty
What it is called when we use it as an excuse for mediocrity: social justice
What it can become when we use it as an excuse for evil: social engineering or armed robbery

Live simple movement dies of starvation and loneliness

2010-12-18T06:02:00.000-08:00

This painting Office Diety is hanging in a government office, an office in which many have been terminated due to budget shortfalls. The painting's message conveys an anti-commodity/anti-consumerist/anti-bourgeois critique of society. It is a painful irony that that man -a middle aged man, a black man- is going to get his big opportunity to loose all those nasty materialist manifestions such as cellphone, cigar, and golf putter. The post-2009 US economy is laying waste to that age group and class, their employability may be gone forever. They may never work again.

The standardized social critique of 1960-2010, in which the materialist or bourgeois are cast as a mockable pariah, should now crow with a truimphant "Mission Accomplished" as many move from a home filled with Best Buy flat-screen TV's to the fun-filled world of car-camping...and never employed again.

As for me, I was never anti materialist or bourgeois. I applauded minorities or any of the formerly marginalized becoming bourgeois. But now the Postmodern Left and Right have accomplished their goals; and honestly, I don't feel up to undoing the harm they've enabled. I purchase less, and what I do purchase is either food/clothing (and I will only pay the cheapest prices, never the living wage rate) or technology such as a smartphone designed and made in Taiwan, and mostly consume software. My family's spending follows this basic formula:

Shopping for the lowest price possible on food and neccessities, fully conscious there is almost no way the workers in that supply chain could be earning a living wage.
Paying high figures for such things as a bicycle made in the Netherlands, a smartphone made in Taiwan, and software. The recipients of these dollars we spend are either young and technically over-proficient Americans who solely manipulate symbols; or workers in Europe, China, Korea, Taiwan, or Japan.
Expending almost zero dollars on Facebook, Twitter and Google software technologies.

I doubt if even .001 per cent of our family's expenditures enable an older black man to puff cigar's, enjoy golf, and be complacently bourgeois. That is sad, I never wished that to happen on the scale it is today.

But the painter of Office Diety did.

Be like the USA in 1790 -A Horrific and Stupid Contemplation

2010-09-22T15:54:00.000-07:00

I went to college with a bunch of ape-like scum who believed in an anarcho-primitivist utopia. The experience led me to hate this wing of extreme leftism. But in the last year a large segment of the right wing in the USA have been making ignorant claims for their own utopia.

The archetypes and tropes popular amongst right-wingers hail from the earliest years of the republic, with the brand name "Tea Party" as example number one.

Here is what I have to say about the lifestyles and modalities of the USA 1776 - 1860 : Useless, dumb and (thankfully) irrelevant to any way anyone is going to live today.

A major public policy mantra of these Retro-publicans is "small government, and no regulations". Like America once was. Back when disputes, crimes and other social issues were handled at the local level by the immediate community. The nation was largely Jeffersonian: yeoman farmers in the north and corporate farms in the south. People reprimanded an evil doer, and the church in middle of town normalized everyone's ethics.

Here's a situation in 2015 that shows Retro-publicanism for what it uselessly is:

I buy an old gas station "AS IS" from a bank that has had little contact with the original owners. The building is full of old car batteries and drums of petroleum mixed with rust. The Retro-Publicans have gotten their way -their are few to no regulations I have to comply with. The Tea Party President has spoken several times on being guided by faith and doing what Jesus would do when one is presented with situations like mine with old gas station.

But unlike America in 1820, I am not tethered to the values of the church or the sentiments of the congregation down the road. I can either silently dump stuff in the nearby river, or spend money having it safely shipped away.

I say dump it. Where there is no law, the people (can) perish.

Atlas Sure Did Shrug

2010-08-31T07:24:00.000-07:00

I know the set-up for contemporary political discourse:

If you are conservative, libertarian, Tea Party, or pro-business you look up to Ayn Rand and the ideals presented in Atlas Shrugged.
If you are urbane, liberal, socialist, progressive, gay, non-white, Catholic, or progressive you are supposed to see Ayn Rand and the ideas promoted in Atlas Shrugged as a kind of cancer that attacks the delicate social contract that makes cooperative civilization run smoothly.

Both of the above are the dominant but wrong interpretation of Atlas Shrugged. I have a non-standard, but more correct, view of Atlas Shrugged. I'm an urbane, progressive, Obama-supporting Scandanavian-style socialist....that truly admires Ayn Rand and her Atlas Shrugged.

If the book's fictional scenario was a reality I lived in, then yes I would absolutely support the heroes in her story. She presents a dystopian USA filled with a new wave of political agenda in which wealth, status, and respect are taken from the hardest working, smartest, and most proficient and redistributed to the feeble, mediocre, idiotic, and low-functional. Rand's heroes, e.g. Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, are great heroes. They are not just wealthy leaders of corporations, they are engineers who work long hours into the night doing what it takes to make a better product. They are high functional, hard workers, smart, and deliver something (in the book: train service and better steel tracks that make trains run faster and safer) the public can use. To take from these high functional individuals, and to undo their offering of a superior "product" to consumers, is a wrongheaded and foolish political paradigm.

But real America has at its top of its corporate and economic pyramid characters who are anything but Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden. Think of the antebellum plantation house, with owners who never touched the crops, did not pursue modernization of the equipment nor infrastructure. A lazy and un-technological class with power locked into place by the accident of birth. Plantation aristocracy did not stay up late working on the math that would produce better train service or better steel.

America has a cancer of plantation aristocracy running throughout its economic leadership, a lazy and inept people who keep themselves in their beautiful comfortable lives by keeping others broken, addicted, ignorant and immobile. One person I know calls this elite "takers", as opposed to industrial society's "makers".

Today's conservatives, from Alan Greenspan to Rand Paul to FoxNews, have misappropriated the ideals and heroes of Atlas Shrugged. Republicans/Conservatives/TeaParty agendas more times than not promote a no-leash law for plantation aristocrats, and a leash law for workers, makers and innovators.

Today's conservative movement in the USA work to undo the efforts of real world Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden. In the early to mid 20th century maybe the enemies of innovation and wealth were Soviet type ideals. News flash: the Soviet Union collapsed, and the threat to Ayn Rand's ideals and heroes are coming from South Carolina, not Moscow.

they want us to do well

2010-08-03T04:49:00.000-07:00

Accepting the postmodern tenet that the world is full of tribes now -clusters of people politically aligned due to blood kin, social class, agenda, etc; then we are stuck in a perpetual state of conflict if we think the other tribes besides our own are out to get us. This is the root of liberal-hate by red states, white hate by blacks, Israel hate by Arabs, etc.

The radical leap for anyone in this age of tribal membership -a radical leap that could end the cycle of obstructionism and war- would be viewing your traditional opponent tribe as wanting you and your tribe to do well, to prosper.

...to think "they want us to do well".

Obama's machines defeat Arizona, sanctuary cities and Mexican criminals

2010-07-30T04:03:00.000-07:00

Arizona's immigration law allowed police officers to use their own human judgement on choosing whether to demand papers proving someone's right to be in the United States. This provision of the law was struck down by a federal judge.

The Obama administration isn't soft on illegal immigrants, actually Obama is more effective at catching people who here illegally than any President before him. He uses machines.

The machines are computers that compare fingerprints compiled in a federal database. The machines are part of the Secure Communities program, arrested people's fingerprints are required to be submitted for matches in the federal database. This is fast, race-neutral, even immigrant-issues neutral, and results in accurate information and identification.

To agendas fueled by silly human sentiment were utterly crushed by Obama's Skynet:

WASP-first nationalism.
Sanctuary cities and other agendas that aid illegal immigrants.

Long live Obama's Skynet.

While Economy in Trouble -More dollars go to propagandize ourselves

2010-07-20T16:41:00.000-07:00

Email from a friend:

I am now getting absolutely hounded by left wing organizations for money (by e-mail.) They don't have much choice, because the corporate dam has been broken when it comes to funding Tax-break politicians, mostly right wingers who wish Reaganomics worked.

POINT: My initial reaction to this is "OK our society/economy is not designed to have this massive amount of cash disappear into the political system, we need to cap how much can be spent on this stuff."

COUNTER-POINT: The only counter argument I have to capping the money going into the political system is this: "We are a democracy, and for a democracy to work, the populace needs to be educated on political issues, which Americans traditionally are NOT. This new wave of political money is going into buying media to educate the general public on political issues, which is a much needed change in American society."

Q: Does my counter-point really justify the massive waves of cash being sucked up by both parties right now?

(My)Answer: Political commercials, no matter which candidate or agenda, are not education. Even if supporting a sane and valid course of action, a political commercial is still at its fundamental core propaganda.

My friend's email brings up a good point, but I've got a slight tweak on his terms. Money is being pumped into the political system for sure, but the industry that eventually receives this windfall of cash is the media industry -television and radio commercials, graphics artist who make flashy pamphlets, whoever creates robo-calls, and the stage hands who build the stage on which the candidate performs their "live show" while in tour.

All of the above (a diverse lot of graphics artists, writers, actors, film crews, and blue collar stage hands) are the recipients of the giant torrents of cash going into "the political system". My tweak on the common phrase is to say "the giant torrents of cash going into the advertising and entertainment industries -the propaganda system".

A few blocks from me is a large state highway bridge. It needs to be maintained, otherwise it will become unusable, or at worst collapse into the water below. The same goes for our entire transportation infrastructure, on which our way of life depends. In these lean times, when there is less money to go around, we are choosing to donate our money to create a TV commercial starring a politician talking about that bridge, rather than paying engineers and construction crews to actually repair it.

Don't want a politician working on cash raising more than working on legislative solutions? Then you want a politician like Bob Burr. He's running for Senator in Washington State. He promises to not run for a second term, which entirely nullifies his need or care for raising campaign funds while in office. Over and above that promise, he will not accept donations at all. Never, not now, not any.

Bob Burr is not just a model candidate, he is a model citizen. Burr is not accepting the current normal way things are done, and taking real and immediate steps to do it differently and honorably.

We should all be such a model citizen. Here's some good news: it's easy. We just get off the crazy train of money-fueled propaganda. Don't send your $15 to help fund an ad campaign, even for the issues you care for, and don't let your opinion be swayed by a slick right wing or left wing ad campaign.

Instead, read books, read the fine documentation online at government websites that show the actual legislation, and then talk intelligently and sincerely with those around you. That's a campaign style that is both higher quality than any media blitz, and cheaper than any media blitz.

Maybe, if we all do more of that, our money can start going to repair that bridge you cross everyday.

http://www.bobburr4senate.com/

Email from a white man married to a Chinese woman, with children

2010-07-06T19:11:00.000-07:00

I moved out of the Rainier Valley in Seattle largely because of the racial tension there. The whites were trying to keep the Mexicans out, the Blacks were pissed about the Asian businesses, and various types of Chinese did not like other various types of Chinese. My Human Services training tells me that when you run into a group that is hard to get into, it is because the communication inside the group is not healthy. I ran into particular issues whenever I tried to socialize with any of my african american male neighbors on the bus, if they were older than me there was no problem, but if they were younger than me there was hell to pay.

Well, it turns out that around the time I moved out, there was a significant struggle going on for the hearts and minds of BET:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlKL_EpnSp8
and much more importantly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ4tTOeVp_g

It turns out this conversation is continued now in the Obama era, though you can see it is evolving:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRVqVwGWocM

Technological empowerment is the key

2010-07-06T05:28:00.000-07:00

"Much of this disparity is down to globalisation. When the world is changing fast, those qualified to deal with the technology du jour (be it the steam engine or the internet) will earn more than their peers. But the fact remains that not only is inequality at the highest level since the Thirties, the pension and welfare systems set up then for the express purpose of levelling this divide are in an exponential decline, threatening to widen the gulf further."

(British) Middle class families face triple whammy -Telegraph.co.uk

Last night my wife and I had a great conversation about our family budget, especially focused on the idea of my getting a cutting edge smartphone. One thing I brought up is that our employability or entrepreneurial capacity relies on our technological abilities. We must stay current with the innovation edge or we may never be employed again.

"Never be employed again" sounds over the top, but I've seen that very sentence fragment in many economic news articles in the last few months, and the other fragment that accompanies it is "millions in the US".

Here is a surprise: I've been embracing this emerging age for almost two decades. I knew Americans couldn't just keep purchasing Chinese goods with their credit cards forever, and I also knew pollution and crime were on an ascending spiral in some areas and not in others. I prepared -by moving and by learning technology skills.

Others will whine, via blog or newspaper op-ed, about this age of massive die off or enslavement of formerly middle class citizens. Whining doesn't get anything useful when there is a true scramble for dwindling resources (including safe places to live). Legitimacy through innocence may make points with the social justice crowd, but who cares when that crowd's (middle class) rank and file are being pummeled by the same economic decline?

It is a mean age I've anticipated for a long time, and I don't plan on losing. Others will pray to a God or patron saint who cares for the down-trodden, or rant about the gangsters and the corrupt in our halls of power. I will stick to the innovative edge and not expend energy for social justice (at least the type of social justice that mistakes losing and poverty with moral legitimacy).

I, along with my family, will win.

Don't Tread on Me....because I'm crazy.

2010-03-27T04:07:00.000-07:00

At the Tea Party, it's every man for himself -Washington Post Blog

Let's extinct the unionized public school teacher

2010-03-15T18:25:00.000-07:00

"The industrial education system in the US continues to collapse. Soon, in order to get any semblance of an education, you will need to home school online." -John Robb

A high school diploma means you successfully were babysitted for twelve years. We are coming into not just a hacker era, but a uber-hacker era. The 17 year old drop out that mastered some relevant skill, and is also an aggressive entrepreneur, will be able own the meaningless pieces of meat that simply complied with norms of teenage rite of passage.

http://tfninsider.org/2010/03/13/the-list-of-shame-in-texas/#more-6030

My plan:

To starve every mediocre teacher and curriculum designer grinding a political agenda axe.
To educate my son North in a way that makes him more capable, wealthy and adaptive.

Rules of play: Tolerance of Tolerance. Intolerance of intolerance

2010-03-06T16:19:00.000-08:00

Tolerant society is the goal.
Tolerance of intolerance is the boundary of tolerance. There can be no tolerance of intolerance.
- If a subculture does not reciprocate "tolerance", it's members do not receive it, and is not allowed full rights in the system.

David Brooks on New Left and Tea Party similarities

2010-03-06T05:57:00.000-08:00

The Wal-Mart Hippies
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 4, 2010
New York Times

David Brooks has an op-ed, The Wal-Mart Hippies, in which he links the 2010 Tea Party movement to the 1960's New Left; saying the Tea Party is studying some of the classic books and thinkers of the 60's New Left. Below are two paragraphs from The Wal-Mart Hippies.

"To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. Dick Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left.

These days the same people who are buying Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals” on Amazon.com are, according to the company’s software, also buying books like “Liberal Fascism,” “Rules for Conservative Radicals,” “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left,” and “The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party.” Those last two books were written by David Horowitz, who was a leading New Left polemicist in the 1960s and is now a leading polemicist on the right."

-David Brooks

For me , it was surprising to see Brooks studying the Amazon.com buying patterns for Rules for Radicals, etc. I've been studying the Amazon.com buying patterns for those exact same books for the last two weeks. Why? Those same books are being purchased when people are buying my book: Manual for Redneck-Technologist Power and Empire: Enslaving and Exterminating Anarcho-Primitivist Pacifist Vegetarian Communities After the Apocalypse (look at the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" section of page).

The Wal-Mart Hippies are buying my book.

The irony of all this New Left / New Right kinship is my Manual for Redneck-Technologist... explores "rednecks" in the dream world of 60's radicalism: a world where The Establishment has fallen. But in that day of anarchism, my book points out the opportunity for rednecks to enslave hippies. Brooks says Tea Partiers, like their leftist counterparts of the 60's, don't really have a plan for if their revolution succeeded. Well, my book satirically envisions such a plan, and Tea Party people are buying it, and praising it. And in Manual for Redneck-Technologist... the hippies are not studied or respected, they are the object of exploitation.

Fox News, Tea Party, and the Joe Stack Suicide Bombing

2010-02-20T04:32:00.000-08:00

( I posted a comment in reply to John Robb's blog entry: Rage Against the Machine -The Joe Stack Suicide Bombing, and reprint it below )

I agree people like Stack are the canaries in the coal mine. We can go down an infinity hole trying to parse if he was right wing, left wing, but it does seem that lack of economic success was the central component of this story and event.

Here is my folksy psych test: amongst my wife's network of friends, who are not fringe, radicals nor fans of a forum such as GG, one of them read Stack's letter and posted to Facebook how lucid and rational the letter was.

With a smirk I watch Fox News try to spin this suicide bombing as a crazy and a coward. Whateverz, dudez. You all (Fox) put a sheen of legitimacy and funding into some of the the key moments in the Tea Party phenomenon, and now the movement is your scariest nightmare: distributed, open source, and its least stable and most unhappy folks have small planes. I've lurked on some Tea Party forums, and was amazed at the intelligence (keep in mind I'm a hostile witness, I'm not conservative), and ability of its members to dissent from the top hierarchical players. This dissent only appeared in the comment threads, never in the main content of the webpage. The Tea Party, as it is described from the top, is nothing I'd respect, but down in its basement, there are independent thinkers who are not hemmed in by identity politics (e.g. they say progressive things, they don't endorse carte blanche funding for the Pentagon).

Someone needs to notify Rupert Murdoch, and tell him: "autopoiesis, its what's for dinner." While I'm cracking jokes, I'll add "Independence Day, oh wait, who needs an official day, oh wait, who needs an official."

Whole Earth Discipline: Summary by the author

2010-02-12T17:27:00.000-08:00

Ecological balance is too important for sentiment. It requires science.

The health of natural infrastructure is too compromised for passivity. It requires engineering.

What we call natural and what we call human are inseparable. We live one life.

-page 302. Summary of book's message.

Mutating Humans Mutating Earth

2010-01-13T03:55:00.000-08:00

(click here to see email response to graphic )

Email response to graphic:

Today our Sustainable Urban Development Policies professor basically presented us with a symposium of her doctoral thesis, then apologized for geeking out and promised a real class discussion on Thursday. The subject of her research is basically http://folar.org/

She pointed out how the website of this artsy fartsy enviromental activist organization (which started out as a tongue-in-cheek mystical conceptual art project by poet Lewis MacAdams) shows a love for artificial, man-made environments.

She said that "engineers are not the enemy" and "there is no going back to nature." She used the terms "geotechnical engineering" and "bioremediation" to describe the methods for "reconstructing" of nature (not restoring old nature but creating a new nature informed by both the present and past state of the world.)

Whole Earth Discipline: Cities and Shantytowns

2010-01-06T05:37:00.000-08:00

My Favorite Quotes from Whole Earth Discipline

(quotes are in light colored background, my commentary is in black background and white letters)

City air makes you free, and preference for urban slums over subsistence farming:

Many of my contemporaries in the developed world regard subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.

Civilization is what happens in cities, and the return of great Asian cities:

The trend is pretty clear. The "rise of the West" is over. The world looks the way it did a thousand years ago, when the ten largest cities were Cordoba, in Spain; Kaifeng, in China; Constantinople; Angkor, in Cambodia; Kyoto; Cairo; Baghdad; Nishapur, in Iran; Al-Hasa, in Saudi Arabia; and Patan, in India. As Swedish statistician Hans Rosling says, "The world will be normal again; it will be an Asian world, as it always was except for the last thousand years. They are working like hell to make that happen, whereas we are consuming like hell."

The Challenge of the Slums, 2003 UN-HABITAT report:

"Cities are much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city."

Unleashing the potential for Urban Growth, UN Populations Fund 2007 report:

"Cities concentrate poverty, but they also represent the best hope of escaping it. ... the half of the world's population living in cities occupies only 2.8 percent of the world's land area. ... In cities, concentration and density make it easier to provide social services. Education, health, sanitation, water, electrical power -everything is so much easier and cheaper on a per capita basis. "

Kebler's Law -organism's become more metabolically efficient as they scale up :

" ...not only do cities increase their creativity with increasing size, but the relation is superlinear: when a city doubles in size, it more than doubles its rate of innovation. ... City growth creates problems, and then innovation speeds up to solve them. ... We have shown that growth driven by innovation implies, in principle, no limit to the size of a city, providing a quantitative argument against classical ideas in urban economics. ... Cities can go on growing forever. Look at the invention of the steam engine, the car, the digital revolution. What these advances all have in common is that they allowed cities to continue growing. ... the secret to creating a more environmentally sustainable society is making our cities bigger. We need more metropolises."

William Blake - "Without contraries there is no progression", Multitude of contrasts begets progress:

"...it could be surmised that the city is simply made up of contrasts; it is the sum of its differences. What drives a cities innovation engine, then-and thus its wealth engine-is its multitude of contrasts. The more and greater the contrasts, and the more they are marbled together, the better. The most productive city is one with many cultures, many languages, many neighborhoods, and and more kinds of urban experience available than any citizen can keep track of. In this formulation, it is the throwing together of great wealth and great poverty in the urban stew that is part of the cure for poverty. "

Rome:

"Rural economies, including agricultural work are directly built upon city economies and city work. Most farming innovations, for example, are city-based. When Rome collapsed, European agriculture collapsed. "

Slums are innovation:

" Peasants who leave the land take rural skills and values to the city slums with them. Building their own shelter is what they've always done, at a miniscule fraction of the cost of city-provided housing. Collaborating with extended family and neighbors in close proximity is nothing new to them, and neither is doing without elaborate infrastructure. Those are all the abilities they need to build the most creative urban phenomenon of our time, the squatter cities-the teeming slums of the uninvited that house a billion people now, two billion soon.
...
squatter cities are vibrant/ Their narrow lanes are bustling markets, with food stalls, bars, cafes, hair salons, dentists, churches, schools, health clubs, and mini-shops trading in cellphones, tools, trinkets, clothes, electronic gadgets, and bootleg videos and music. This is urban life at its most intense. It is social capital at its richest...What you see up close is not a despondent populace crushed by poverty but a lot of people busy getting out of poverty as fast as they can. "

"The sad fact is that when governments and idealistic architects try to help by providing public housing, those buildings invariably turn into the worst part of the slum. The people who build the shanties take pride in them and are always working to improve them. The issues for the squatters, Neuwirth found, are location -they want to be close to work -and what the UN calls security of tenure: They need to know that their homes and community won't be suddenly bulldozed out of existence. "

" Over time, the walls get solider and higher, the materials more durable. The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually, increment by increment, by the people living there. Each home is built that way, and so is the whole community. To a planner's eye, squatter cities look chaotic. To my biologist's eye, they look organic. "

" According to urban researchers, squatters are now the predominant builders of cities in the world."

" [Field researchers for 2003 UN report found: ] All slums households in Bangkok have a colour television. The average number of TV's per household is 1.6... Almost all of them have a CD player, a washing machine, and 1.5 cellphones. Half of them have a home telephone, a video player, and a motorcycle. "

" [ favelados, slum residents of Rio ] have the aspirations of the bourgeoisie, the perseverance of pioneers, and the values of patriots. "

The massive trend of migration to slums is defusing the population bomb:

" In the [subsistence farming] village, every additional child is an asset, but in the slum, every additional child is a liability, so the newly liberated women in town focus on education and opportunity -on fewer, higher quality children. That's how urbanization defused the population bomb. "

" Massive numbers of people are making massive changes. Having just experienced the first doubling of world population within a single lifetime (3.3 billion in 1962, 6.6 billion in 2007), we are discovering that it was the last doubling. Birthrates worldwide are dropping not only faster than expected, but much further. "

" The takeoff of cities is the dominant economic event of the first half of this century ... People in vast numbers are climbing the energy ladder from smoky firewood and dung cooking fires to diesel-driven generators for charging batteries, then 24/7 grid electricity. They are also climbing the food ladder -from subsistence farms to cash crops of staples like rice, corn, wheat, and soy to the high protein of meat -and doing so in a global marketplace. Environmentalists who try to talk people out of such aspirations will find the effort works about as well as trying to convince people to stay in their villages did.

Peasant life is over unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it. "

Resilient Community Viral Self-Sufficiency : Alternative currency energy security

2010-01-02T06:17:00.000-08:00

This is blue sky thinking about a futuristic resilient community. It is currently feasible, but the pressures to adopt it are not high enough, so if this was implemented now it would be by a idealistic group operating on an esoteric imperative such ethical agenda or wanting the hipness of early adopter of technology.

Pressures and Adaptations

>> Pressure: states fail and currencies can devalue.
>> Adaptation: Monetary independence. Must be a non-falsifiable commodity.

>> Pressure: Travel is risky and expensive, more so in a post-state tribal allegiance world, and more so if motors have no fuel.
>> Adaptation: Travel irrelevance. The WWW provides cheap labor (outsourcing call center, data entry), education certification, and information such as Wikipedia.

>> Pressure: Must keep connected to WWW grid.
>> Adaptation: Cellphone towers powered by electric feeds from users needing the cellphone towers. The energy media (electricity) is the monetary media.

>> Pressure: Power grids for a cellphone tower would need a baseload.
>> Adaptation: Community of cellphone users, who are also distributed energy grid producers, are forced to coordinate to keep baseload adequate. This coordination, while serving an industrial/technical imperative, would simultaneously encourage a peaceful and socially engaged community. [ don't cooperate or care, and the baseload sinks to the point your WWW and phone doesn't work, which disrupts your personal life. In this rare case, I bet on peace and cooperation. ]

Intel officer: CIA officers' deaths will be avenged

2010-01-01T06:40:00.000-08:00

The CIA's normal mode is as an organ of the State, employed to serve abstract national ideals and the whole republic. The recent attack on their group has elicited a call to action that is tribal -someone hurt their group and now they vow a focus of effort and resources for their internal sense of justice. I'm not saying this is wrong. It may be interesting to see if they ___ck up the Taliban more effectively when acting upon a group allegiance imperative. I've opined in the last few months that maybe the West's War on Terror tap into our own crazy, violent tribes (e.g. militia groups, corporations that want to field test technology that kills, etc). You know...mix it up a little.

(CNN) Intel officer: CIA officers' deaths will be avenged

Excerpt: Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out by Neal Stephenson

2009-12-28T16:18:00.000-08:00

Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out
By NEAL STEPHENSON
Published: June 17, 2005

"Concentrate on the moment. Feel, don't think. Trust your instincts," says a Jedi to the young Anakin in Episode I, immediately before a pod race in which Anakin is likely to get killed. It is distinctly odd counsel coming from a member of the Jedi order, the geekiest people in the universe: they have beards and ponytails, they dress in army blankets, they are expert fighter pilots, they build their own laser swords from scratch.

And (as is made clear in the "Clone Wars" novels) the masses and the elites both claim to admire them, but actually fear and loathe them because they hate being dependent upon their powers.

Anakin wins that race by repairing his crippled racer in an ecstasy of switch-flipping that looks about as intuitive as starting up a nuclear submarine. Clearly the boy is destined to be adopted into the Jedi order, where he will develop his geek talents - not by studying calculus but by meditating a lot and learning to trust his feelings. I lap this stuff up along with millions, maybe billions, of others. Why? Because every single one of us is as dependent on science and technology - and, by extension, on the geeks who make it work - as a patient in intensive care. Yet we much prefer to think otherwise.

Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.

If the "Star Wars" movies are remembered a century from now, it'll be because they are such exact parables for this state of affairs. Young people in other countries will watch them in classrooms as an answer to the question: Whatever became of that big rich country that used to buy the stuff we make? The answer: It went the way of the old Republic.

Avatar = Avatard

2009-12-27T19:55:00.001-08:00

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/forums/?ID=146317430

Industrial Evolution

2009-12-27T06:27:00.000-08:00

I've found a by-product of writing a lot is the accidental coining of a new (for me) useful phrase that captures a large concept.

In zillions of dialogues I've tried to place myself on some ideological map, and having half-on half-off resonance with capitalism, anarchism, conservativism, liberalism and consumerism.

Maybe what I depend on, enable, and can heartily endorse 100 per cent is Industrial Evolution.

This means no hard coded allegiance to Wall Street capitalism or our current energy infrastructure, it allows me to have no long term allegiance to any current political/economic regime (e.g. a specific corporation, political party) or technological configuration (the oil market).

It does create a permanent blockage to my being anti-industrial, or placing capital N Nature (everything not produced by humans) as a higher or equal priority. It also places religion, mysticism, and subjectivism in boundaries.

This Industrial Evolution concept may supplant my Athena, Goddess of War and Technology religious aspiration.

Reply ( or extension of thesis ) from Seth Galbraith:

The cult of Athena followed the sun with exponential acceleration until the period between 1900 and 1950 when the light of progress finally shone on every nation, day and night, the humanistic phase of Industrial Evolution became saturated, the concept of human rights encoded in the law of the United Nations, and history came to an end, with the marginal exception of sorting out the widespread hypocrisy of dictatorship disguised as democratic, republican, socialist government.

Then the posthuman phase of Industrial Evolution began, leading to much confusion. Those who measured the success of Industrial Evolution in terms of employment (the size of the Industrial Working Class, sometimes combined with "service sector" jobs) pronounced the end of the progress.

Those who measured the success of Industrial Evolution in terms of consumption (profits, growth, productivity, GNP, GDP, trade deficits, etc.) faced the horrible stagnation of saturated demand and the looming spectre of finite resource depletion.

This left only two measures of progress that provided people with any optimistic predictions:

(A) Measuring progress by how completely we have returned to Nature: dismantling civilization, reducing of the human population to a utopian society devoted to the pursuit of one superstition or another. Various parties are advocating such societies based on the dogmas of islam, nature worship, racial supremacy, christianity, existentialism and other religions.

(B) Measuring progress by adaptability: not the sweat we put into the machine, or the tonnage of manufactured outputs, but the increasing variety and utility of the machines themselves. Technodiversity of economies modeled after the biodiversity of ecologies. This then becomes the antithesis of the return to Nature, which insists upon the reduction of economic technodiversity.

The Nature metric requires that we sacrifice all of the benefits of civilization, including our freedom and our lives, for a higher moral purpose. (Our bodies are - after all - merely dust given form via the stored energy of buried Carboniferous forests.) The Adaptability metric allows us to count the continuation of civilization as progress without requiring either expansion or contraction of the built world or human population.

The Revolutionary Viral Darknet Software Driven Resilient Community

2009-12-26T03:55:00.000-08:00

John Robb, the guy who introduced 4GW to me, is getting all worked up over a new substrata of his Resilient Communities, 4GW, DIY Security/Governance/Economy/Energy-Production. The new muse of his is a virus-like software darknet global badass thingy.

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/new-book-freedom.html
( I just ordered the book Freedom. Already read Daemon. Most important fiction I've read outside Stephenson.)
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/journal-resources-for-small-group-superempowerment.html
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/a-darknet.html
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/journal-a-quantitative-examination-of-open-source-warfare.html
"What makes this very interesting to me is not the scientific support it provides to open source warfare, but rather that it provides me with additional clarity on how open source warfare could be instantiated in Darknet software."
Finally: He is actually trying to realize this software:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/thanks-and-onto-the-next-year.html

Half-thoughts I have to add:

Daemon offers a new means of revolution. Basically, a virus takes up the classical class warfare ( especially crushing rich oligarchs ). This is quite different compared to Marxist ideas of workers owning the means of production. Also, in John Robb's vision of post-centralized governance and economy, it is the Makers (aka "Creative Class") (urban farmers, fabricators, hackers, home micro-energy production, and any industrial artisans) combined with the community providing more of their own services (security, local legal regimen for drug use and taxation, etc). Would their be a clash between this Creative Class and a Badass Distributed Deamon?

I don't think so, but hope to see some words and vision statements from someone -maybe in new book Freedom, or John Robb, or someone on this thread.

Digression to Marxism and Zizek

I'm reading First As Tragedy, Then As Farce by Slavoj Zizek. He is openly and proudly a capital L Leftist and capital C Communist. I am reading him because I kept picking up his book at the bookstore, reading a passage, and seeing so much wit and intelligence. Now I'm ten or so pages into the book, still think he'd be fun to hang out with in a beer hall if at least for a vigorous argument, but sensing a giant dustbin of history for the capital C Commies. I can sum up my contempt with this: Seize the means of production and I will point out this is only 20 % of the solution. The rest is more important: Seize the means of innovation. Oh wait, more irony is embedded in this deconstruction! It is not seize, but rather Free up the means of innovation. Without innovation, production becomes that process of making things...poorly. Like the dogshit Soviet Russian factories were famous for.

Back to Zizek, I'm getting a hint he is going to deliver a solution to social justice, but leave off with what humans need more than a symbolic social catharsis in which undeserving elites are beheaded -technological innovation. I do not mean in the form of better high definition televisions or a faster SUV. I mean technological innovation manifest in food production, energy production and use, shelter, and health care. For starters. I'm referring to anything urgent and necessary.

I'm all for a revolution, but believe social justice addicts miss the forest because of the trees. Social justice, if it happens, will be as a side effect while humans innovate in realms more technical and mechanical.

The Dubliner Dialogue: A List of Issues and Ideas

2009-12-25T16:48:00.001-08:00

On Friday December 4, 2009 a few of my friends and I gathered at the Dubliner(Seattle) to celebrate my birthday and talk politics, culture and art. Below is a condensed remainder of the questions we opened up in our meandering conversation. Note the topic headings for giving a hint of the section topic.

Radical New Individual Types

Choices humans make in who they mate is one of the great shapers of society and the bounds of what human is. Certain behaviors result in a person not being chosen for producing offspring. I know we could site an over-conservatism America was prone to in the 1950's -such as taboos in inter-racial marriage, or a "good" girls who don't date geeks or guys who smoke weed. I certainly believe we've had a cultural renaissance and technological explosion, beginning in the 1960's, due in part to society's boundaries as to what is acceptable.

I contend that the unbounding of boundaries has gotten so mature that we are no longer loosening the strictures so as to have more/better art and technology, we have entered into a phase of unboundedness that is producing, ehem...reproducing, pathologically insane scumbags, often of the needless murdering persuasion. Exhibit A (almost harmless non-murdering type): http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/19/father-and-son-sport.html.

This thread of thought might provide ammo for Right Wing Christian Culture Warriors, I'm not endorsing that. I'm just saying at this point we need to prepare for more crazies in the world -the sick needless murdering kind, mainly because they are finding mates and producing offspring. Previous political/religious agendas for healing and emancipation have sited our economic excesses as points of change (e.g. Marxism, Catholicism). The addition of a needless-murdering class of humans should make for some new ideologies offering solutions. Or maybe this is a post-ideology domain of inquiry, one in which personal choice has more power than great social movements.

Islam. My honest question: Is there a good and bad kind?

First I want to promote how I think of religions. Specifically, the names and boundaries of religions. To me, if a people claim they are of a religion, they are. If a socialist agenda Catholic org says that are Christian, they are. If a group believes donating to Isreal's military and killing Catholics will be the first thing Jesus does if he returns to Earth, then they to are Christians. Same wide girth of inclusion goes for Islam, Buddhists, and Communists.

So, yeah, I assume their are cosmopolitan and tolerant Moslems. I also assume their are racist, intolerant, and country hick Moslems also. The historical record is full of examples of cosmopolitan Moslem nations -in the Kiev, in Irag, in lots of places.

I've said all the above to set-up for a specific question to my friend Brian [http://www.eye-ontheworld.blogspot.com/] , who just taught a college course on Islam and is writing a book on it. I've just heard of a division in Islam: Inclusion versus Exclusion. I need to know more about this.

My own personal stance is a support for the tolerant and cosmopolitan versions of every political/religious construct. For a globally interconnected world, exclusion seems like a poorly equipped construct.

Racism

I've pursued a narrative that has focused on black on white crime. (See this detailed entry, with personal accounts.). I want to reiterate something I said at the bar, what I see as the positive and negative directions we can go. Positive: mixed income and race neighborhoods, interracial marriage, and education/employment scenarios in which merit performance is the holy grail for respect and rewards; these are sure routes away from racism. Negative: oppressed classes sticking together and viewing all others as contemptible and worthy targets of violence, wealthy classes moving to remote or gated communities, whites fleeing to sidewalk-less suburbs -these are progenitors of misery and re-enactment of the worst scripts humans read from.

The Homeless Technologist

2009-12-10T20:30:00.000-08:00

We are in the midst of D2, The Second Great Depression. For the struggling people who have the means to prepare before they become homeless, here is a battle plan: put aside enough money to have an iPhone, Droid or Blackberry phone with connection fees covered for at least a year.

The Creative/Technological Class, which will own the 21st Century, can be virtual nation inhabiting every monetary strata and racial group on Earth, including being homeless.

The slum (thinking more of the types in India and South America) will be the engine room and R&D department for what works in this century. Large and wealthy institutions will be hampered by hindbound vision or communication rules ( such as polite-speak ) that limit lateral adaptation. The slum resident will be have two pressures that ignite positive change -concentrated population and poverty.

I am not pining that homelessness and poverty are cool, and something to be sought after, I'm saying slums are a place where dynamic forces are at play that push people upward. In the US we often cast being homeless, or living in the poorest neighborhoods with an eternal status -a place of absolute zero, I'm countering that with a sense of optimism and opportunity within the context of dire straits, properly equipped with the right technology and knowledge, there is reasonable hope.

And now for my out-there idea. I know this may never happen, but I think we should have a slum-to-astronaut program. Most or all astronauts must be from slums. This would break the current assumptions of class and access to privileged, hypermodern opportunities.

Philosophers and the Equality of Barbarians

2009-12-10T20:18:00.000-08:00

Ancient philosophers designated some as barbarians, opposed equal rights of barbarians, and religious zealots ( often barbarians themselves ) fought for the equality of barbarians.

Modern or progressive philosophers support the ubiquitous spread of technology, an egalitarian enterprise, as the great equalizer. But this agenda of equality is often opposed by barbarians in privileged positions of power, who want their slaves or adorers to stay in a relative servile position. The opponent of progressive philosophy wages a war on mass consumption technology -the supply line that aids the barbarian in becoming ( often a peaceful ) equal.

Fortress or Resilient City?

2009-12-06T20:17:00.000-08:00

In economic or social collapse, which will fair bette, or will both fair well but in different ways(?) :

I think certain cities will have the advantage of talented people, trade of diverse goods (e.g. computers and potatoes). Their downside may be criminal/terrorist class predators. For the fortress, all the opposites are in play: a shallow talent pool due to small group.

One vision of the future might tip the advantage to an underground fortress: A world where inventions and knowledge are open sourced and shared efficiently across the internet, and travel of any kind become an anomaly because of extreme expense. In this case a fortress able to secure its own food, water and electricity would have access to the "world mind".

The Insurgents and the Vigilantes

2009-12-02T12:52:00.000-08:00

Maurice Clemmons and those who aided him were insurgents -nihilistic murderers believing in a narrative in which they are legitimate, and police (and the society police are protecting) are not. Their aggression against police come less than a month after a cop killer waged a war on the police with bullets and bombs (Guns, Bombs Found In Shooting Suspect's Apartment).

All the people above are African-American. Seattle is a liberal city, where the dialogue that emerges after a crime committed by a black man usually tends towards a critique of the society more than the perpetrator, with a usual wish list of better schools, community services and other government interventions, for the statistically disadvantaged. Something new has happened in public sentiment after Maurice Clemmons. No one in mainstream dialogue is crying out in regards to a history of social injustice as a contributor to the murders. It seems most are glad Clemmons is dead.

For a city of the political profile Seattle has, this unanimity is significant. I believe we've entered a new age, one that can see some as simply wrong and evil, and we proceed to eliminate them without the infinite regress of self-critique.

Then there is the woman who shot man at bus stop, and won't be charged. We may be moving into a golden age of Charles Bronson style public safety in Seattle thanks to Maurice Clemmons. The Seattle PI wrote this story (State cuts to criminal supervision 'are a tragedy waiting to happen') focused on an assumed pacifism and defenselessness on the part of daytime commuters, but what if these criminals face honest folk that put a bullet in them?

Returning to the infinite chasm of self-critique liberal dialogue has tended towards since the 1960's, where America's previous social injustice sins are referenced in the labeling of mainstream society and economy as inherently immoral, and in an eternal debt to those who might have suffered. This ethical framework manifested itself in huge government initiatives designed to right past wrongs. These government programs cost money.

2009: NOW WE ARE BROKE.

A shrinking economy will mean less jobs, locally and globally. If insurgents and criminals are mostly caused by unemployment and poverty, we can expect more waves of angry murderous criminals and insurgents than ever before.

Paradigm over: Hopefully, the era of the wealthy compassionate liberal who directs all guilt to their own economic heritage is over. The wealth is gone, and maybe there have been enough nihilistic murders that the stupider portions of the compassion is gone also.

Maurice Clemmons manhunt: Facebook thread

2009-11-30T20:31:00.000-08:00

Microsoft, Bing and Murdoch

2009-11-23T13:25:00.000-08:00

Microsoft tries to buy the news.

All I see is a sick, dying, out-of-touch dinosaur declaring he's going to open up a can of whoop ass. I'll wait an hour, the dinosaur will have cockroaches eating its brain. The network was the computer decades ago, and Gates and Co somehow convinced the mentally weak all the power was at the desktop. Please die now.

While on the subject of Murdoch, I might as well promote my book, which specifically mentions the Rupert Murdoch archetype as a class to be eliminated in a future fictional scenario: TechnologyTexting KIDS: Subvert Primitive Ways, Invent Writing and Metal, and Delete Financiers like T Boone Pickens .

Tea Party Patriots, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin Explained

2009-11-03T04:07:00.000-08:00

Chapter 1: Rock and Roll Music Culture

There is an era we can call rock 'n roll, countercultural, hippy, or even liberal. It spanned from the middle-late 1950's to the middle-late 1990's. It had a form and function that integrated American black music (all of the subgroups: gospel, blues, and jazz) into a world music, illicit drug use, sexual relations beyond one partner, and a reverence for anything simultaneously visceral and non-violent ( e.g. sex, danceable music).

The main conduit/media for this era was music. For sure there was literature and academics, qualitatively equal to the giants of any other era, but music types and personalities were the means of spreading all other memes in the era. If an academic had a radical, countercultural thesis, there had better be at least one song that resonated with the academic's message. If no one in the rock/punk/alternative echoed the thesis, then the thesis wasn't even remotely relevant.

Then something happened in the mid 1990's. Disney Corporation started training up and churning out talent (e.g. Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake) and the popular music press didn't make a fuss over the distinction between this as opposed to the previous 40 year history of self-taught, populist route to music stardom (e.g. Elvis, James Brown, John Lennon, George Clinton, Sting, U2, Kurt Cobain).

The delivery system for the countercultural system of ideas -music; up and died. Or at least shapeshifted silently from its essential self to an antithetical self, rendering it a killer of memes it once was the nurturer of.

Chapter 2: Internet Culture(s)

In the mid 1990's the Internet sprang into popular culture. At first it was college students, government employees, and early adopter tech hipsters on the bandwagon. By the year 2000 grandma was on it, and later with blogspot and Facebook she had her own content on the web also.

With easy self-publishing of Web 2.0 a wall of water rushed over the Earth -a torrent of micro-universes within which held endless threads of dialogue. To say there were mutations of classical ideologies, and they flourished and thrived, is an understatement. The aggregate size of these mutations quickly eclipsed the size of our own Sun.

Chapter 3: The Rise of a Counterculture, via Internet

While the Rock and Roll Music Counterculture died years ago, a new counterculture has emerged, sent to kill it. This new counterculture rallies around Guns, God, and Hating Gays. They are better at serving the violent edicts of the Old Testament rather than living like the non-violent Jesus of the New Testament. The gun toting bandit life of pre-1880's rural America, Bible in one hand, gun or whiskey in the other; that is the capstone of American greatness. A white man, drunk on whiskey, having referenced the Bible earlier in the day, shoots someone else, preferably an American Indian or black. And, basically, this new counterculture is saying that white man is a heroic icon, they want to or will do that lifestyle again.

But what are they really after? Well, its not actually running the country, they lack the attention to unemotional detail to attain or hold onto that. They want to gun down something. Ask them who they'd like to shoot/lynch, and I bet you get hundreds of answers. But the answers will all add up to one mythic entity: The Rock and Roll Music Culture circa 1955-1995.

The dead Bandits of the rural Wild West want to kill the dead Rock Stars of London, NYC, and LA .

Where did I develop a sense of this new counterculture? By happening upon it, appropriately, on the internet. Reading textual content, and then finding these photos. The craziness of the costumes indicates departure from our mainstream business or academic world. It is the new counterculture. I will cease with my wordy description and invite the reader to the photos on these sites.

Starhawk's Pantheon of Organizational Archetypes

2009-10-30T11:59:00.000-07:00

Dragon - keeps the boundaries defined for the group.
Crows - are exploratory, finding new directions and establishing "the vision" for the group.
Spider - are the networkers that keep everyone communicating with each other.
Snakes - are the group psyhologists that look at underlying emotional processes.
Grace - are the people who keep tabs on the group's over all energy level, deciding when the group should expand etc.
Killdozers -are those who intervene when all the others fail. Killdozers never fail.

Two models of globalization by Seth Galbraith

2009-10-20T05:23:00.000-07:00

from Seth Galbraith
to Lance Miller
date Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 8:13 AM
subject Re: Crops for food or cash

1. "The Law of Comparative Advantage" - move products from where they can be produced most efficiently to where they are most needed. This approach insists that all nations should be governed the same way - same taxes, tariffs, subsidies, copyright, trademark and patent laws etc - but only works if nations are developed differently - different levels and types of industry and agriculture, different patterns of education, social structure and wealth, different technology. This model is most darkly epitomized by the US military-industrial complex sharing steel technology only with selected allies, and the modern push for international software and gene patents.

2. Allow ideas (and people and media carrying those ideas) to move freely through your borders so that you can accumulated the best technology, and in the hope that it will be useful to other countries. This approach works even if other countries have different laws, but it allows other countries to develop similar technology and a similar pattern of living if they choose to do so. Japan after WWII was infamous for this development strategy and and modern China has a similar movement. (Notice that neither example required a high degree of political freedom or socially liberal attitudes.)

Pekka Himanen's Hacker Ethic has three principles: passion, creativity and sharing.
Commons-based Peer-production & Virtue cites four virtues: autonomy, creativity, benevolence, cooperation.
Richard Florida's Creative Class has three values: meritocracy, diversity and individuality.

Notice the high degree of coherence:

individuality/autonomy/passion
meritocracy/creativity
diversity/sharing/benevolence/cooperation

The coherence is even stronger than the intuitive connection between each cluster of words. Hacker passion is very individualistic - it's the guy working on a model railroad in his basement, not the social passion of participating in a group. The hacker creativity is very meritocratic (not self-expressive) and hacker sharing is very much about cooperating benevolently with diverse strangers.

Hackers have captured the heart of this movement and pulled it forward, but it is not limited to that group. Twitter, Wikipedia and other social networking projects are bringing a lot of people into the movement through Commons-based Peer-production. But if Richard Florida is right, the Creative Class is 26% of the US population, plus a large fraction of the Service Class whose creative contribution is not always apparent in their wages.

In other words individuality, meritocracy and sharing may be fundamental values of the majority in post-industrial America, Europe and some other places. But only a small fraction of that majority is active in the movement, because the majority aren't aware of their own existence as a class, and because the interests of this class have not been articulated as a project for our society.

The same was true of the industrial working class when Marx and Engels started writing The Communist Manifesto.

But the project of the industrial working class has been completed, and that class is steadily shrinking as manufacturing becomes automated and distributed. The 21st century is Our Time if you count yourself in the Creative Class, and unlike all previous social classes, the Creative Class is the only class with the potential to include everyone who wants to participate (with the Service Class as an important complimentary pole for people with less interest or opportunity for creative work.)

Food for locals or cash crop for global market

2009-10-19T03:53:00.000-07:00

Cotton was in high demand throughout Europe and most settlers wanted to raise cotton for big profits. But Mexico demanded that the settlers produce corn, grain and beef, dictating which crops each settler would plant and harvest.

[ Santa Anna ] also imprisoned some cotton plantation owners who refused to raise their assigned crops, which were intended to be redistributed within Mexico instead of being exported. These actions triggered outrage throughout Mexico.

-Texas Revolution.Background [wikipedia]

Records show Irish lands exported food even during the worst years of the Famine. When Ireland had experienced a famine in 1782–83, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government in the 1780s overrode their protests. No such export ban happened in the 1840s.

-Great Irish Famine.Food exports to England [wikipedia]

I've posted these historical records to highlight how there is nothing new in the friction of "local food supply economy" versus "lassiez-faire capitalism cash crop economy". I've left out any research on Southeastern US cash crop economics, but can speak from life experience: the traditional southern diet is so unhealthily slanted towards starches and meats cooked in grease, and simple sugary dishes because while the region was almost totally agrarian before the end of WW II, not all agrarian societies are the same. In New England the yeoman farmer could direct some or all of his production towards foodstuffs good for his family. In the south, we know the cliche, "Cotton is King". Ever try to eat cotton?

Leaping to the present and projections for an economic depression or collapse, its good to keep in mind these frictions of local food supply versus the landowner's choice to utilize the land for a distant market. Just because the USA experiences an economic collapse, other places may stay wealthy. e. g. What if a land owner near Seattle chooses to grow X crop for wealthy people in Beijing? With the threat of post peak oil, the potential for an "Ethanol is King" scenario of fuel for wealthy foreigner's cars is entirely plausible.

Things will get interesting.

Points of Superiority

2009-10-18T06:48:00.000-07:00

For every race or culture in the world, using the point in which they integrated the innovations of Hellenistic science/philosophy and/or British Industrialism, they were a higher people after that point.

It is not that Greeks or British are great, it is that they discovered things that make any people better, and any people can integrate.

The planet would have been an evolutionary failure without something like the innovations the Greeks and British introduced.

Beyond humans, the planet has also become a higher form of evolution by mining and moving of massive amounts of minerals all over the globe. This mass alteration shows the Gaia evolved to a more complex object in the universe.

Humans would be lower without math, sciences and industry, and the planet itself would be a lower rank of planet if no species had developed to alter it at such extreme pace.

Re: criteria

Whether planet with life or culture, neither have the luxury of existing in a pleasant stasis. There is always an outside invader, predator or competitor.

It is not romantic or aesthetic goals that we can hold up as positive examples, rather it is whatever contends with assaults from the outside and survives or mutates is the higher and more positive example/specimen.

Re: slavery invalidates superiority or claim of innovation

Innovations are never invalidated by slavery or atrocities committed in war. Moralists do not have a leverage from which to invalidate innovation. In our era of sentimental moralizing this may come as a surprise, since sentimentalists thought they had a rhetorical innovation in the form of "if it was accomplished by arbitrary force it is evil" . Ironically, it is the Technologist that has a leverage for invalidating innovation. It is not the mass enslaving or genocide of humans that invalidates, it is whether the innovation is open source. An innovation is a sin and blight on this earth if it's means of production or use are kept secret, and especially, if the secret is allowed to die when its group of users die.

Millions of the world's poor and most common people reuse innovations that originated in some horrible context of slavery or mass killing. There is no regret for this. The advice of moralist luddites, to abstain from these innovations, is the course that is regrettable and evil. In sex and technology: abstinence is the greatest perversion.

Seth Galbraith email response to me

Extend an olive branch by admitting that history's winners were not inherently more moral or clever than the losers - in fact the winners were often foolish and arrogant - they were just ahead of the curve adopting the best tools available.

You must justify your asserted hierarchy of higher/lower culture and higher/lower world. This is the uphill battle you can't lose if you want people to take your thesis seriously. Specifically you must show the reader that (A) s/he is materially and emotionally safer in your world and (B) this happy condition does not require great suffering in distant lands or future generations.

Distributed energy production questions answered by Seattle City Light

2009-10-13T16:04:00.000-07:00

Hello,

I am a Fremont resident inquiring out of curiosity about Seattle City Light policy towards residents or businesses connecting their power generation to, and selling to, the Seattle City Light grid. To get a quick context of what I am exploring, please read the following:

"The reason that all these other countries are building solar-panel industries today is because most of their governments have put in place the three prerequisites for growing a renewable energy industry: 1) any business or homeowner can generate solar energy; 2) if they decide to do so, the power utility has to connect them to the grid; and 3) the utility has to buy the power for a predictable period at a price that is a no-brainer good deal for the family or business putting the solar panels on their rooftop."

- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/opinion/16friedman.html

Any information would be helpful,

-Lance Miller

Hi Lance,

Thanks for your email. City Light is proud to have about 200 solar electric systems installed in our service territory. The majority of these are residential systems, though there are about 20 systems installed on businesses, plus 24 demonstration systems on schools, parks, libraries and other public buildings.

All of these systems are eligible for net metering, which is where if your system is producing more power than you can use at any moment, you can send that energy back onto the electric grid and spin you meter backwards in the process, earning a credit for the electricity. System owners are also eligible for the WA State Renewable Energy Production Incentive which pays up to $5,000 per year for the energy produced (at $0.15 to $0.54 per kilowatt-hour generated).

We just put the finishing touches on a guide to installing solar electric systems and I've attached that here. More info can be found at www.seattle.gov/light/solar. Please let me know if you have more questions I can help answer.

Cheers,
Meg

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Meg Gluckman
Solar America City Coordinator

Seattle City Light
Conservation Division
206-684-4827

I'm an urban liberal who just can't seem to fit in with urban liberals

2009-10-02T06:05:00.000-07:00

I'm currently a supporter of Mike McGinn for mayor of Seattle. I follow his campaign on Facebook [facebook.com/McGinnforMayor].

Lately I've had some intellectual friction with postings from McGinn. Let's start with this entry from McGinn: "Cary Moon of the People's Waterfront Coalition has written an excellent article on HAC detailing the many reasons why the deep-bore tunnel should not be constructed." >http://hugeasscity.com/2009/09/30/special-guest-post-tunnel-digest/.

I posted this response in the Facebook thread:

Read the posted article. Phrases like "vibrant urban street" and "incentives to not use cars" shouldn't be part of the discussion. This is a state highway, for throughput of relatively fast traffic in route from one point in the state to another, e.g. West Seattle to Shoreline.

A few days ago I weighed in another issue, McGinn agrees with the Mayor Nickels effort to ban guns from public property such as parks.

I don't encourage the carrying of firearms as a solution to anything, so I'm not pro-gun. But I think this ban is going to fail at the legal level, and end up costing money for the effort. I'm voting for McGinn regardless of this one issue, but feel it is playing the identity politics card for votes. McGinn doesn't need to do that, he's got many fine points.

Back to the Anti-Deep-Bore-Tunnel article. My family should be held up as the most model citizens when it comes to progressive transportation lifestyle. We walk or bike everywhere. Especially to work and for grocery shopping. We've located our residence so as to not need a car. But even as we are committed car-less, I see a certain kind of anti-car stance as a bad thing. I want to call it punitive identity politics. The Alaska Way Viaduct replacement as example, we have so-called progressives who want to sabotage the effort. They want to make something that isn't a state highway. To get to a final point of reference: I don't want to live in a city that isn't a city. A city absolutely must have some conduits of high speed intercourse with the globe. I agree that into the future we should have less or no cars, and "high speed intercourse" may all be online. I embrace that. But today, and in the next several years, we have a large constituency who need to drive, in a timely manner, from West Seattle to North Seattle, at hours when buses do not run. We have a democracy, those people should be served by city and state services. It is slightly fascist for a portion of our constituency to dictate a car-less agenda to those who rely on cars for employment and their paycheck.

ttylr

2009-10-01T05:16:00.000-07:00

I did not begin to use computers till the early 1990's. My first experiences where at UALR [wikipedia], using a VAX unix system and text only internet. In 1995-6, the World Wide Web exploded into wide use, and I was in a place with 24/7 access to a computer lab. My life, and the world, were changed forever.

From 1996 on, I began using a Unix command prompt for access to email, web pages, and a shell prompt [wikipedia]. I felt immediately at home on the command line. And let me add a qualifier: on an inter-networked command prompt. In the early 90's I had used DOS, and the concepts and ease of use did not flow so well. Once I got on Unix, and the shell prompt had an ubiquitous internet connected to it, then the operating system made sense. On the other hand, DOS, especially if one cannot get to the internet from the command prompt, was too useless to make sense.

I've attributed my ease of "grokking" Unix and the Internet to a very odd and rare experience as a child. In 1972 I was in fourth grade, enrolled at Wakefield Elementary School in Little Rock Arkansas [map]. I was very much into reading, I spent many summer days riding the bus downtown and hanging out at the main library. Our little elementary school library was a favorite place also. One day I noticed a book in the math section: Networked Computers. I had just seen 2001: A Space Odyssey [wikipedia] in the theater, and knew computers could control a whole spaceship, talk with humans, plot to kill, et cetera, so I checked this cool looking book out to find out how they did that. The book turned out to be WAY over my head. It was not a simple howto book for children nor even an average college student. It was an honest to goodness technical science book on the inter-networking of computers.

What was bizarre about this book's existence is the date and location. By date I mean the internet was not invented till 1967, beginning as a DARPA project at five colleges in the western USA. By 1972 networking was certainly still only for government and business. So, what was a technical book on one of the most advanced technologies in the world doing at a children's library in the working class side of an Arkansas town?

I finally made a pretty good guess a few days ago, 36 years later, on that question. My answer (which is still just a guess) is the book was donated by someone who worked at the Teletype plant, which was about one mile away. I believe some eccentric engineer wanted to blow a young person's mind by the Gestalt method of teaching -basically by overwhelming the person with an intense exposure of a concept.

...and it worked, to this day I can remember one diagram in the book of computer terminals, a line depicting networking cable connection, and their numerical addresses printed underneath. Text on the page explained the routing. Below is my own re-creation of the graphic from memory:

The Teletype plant was not solely about technology to me, I played on the construction site on the weekends when no work was being done, and us kids called the woods between the plant and 65th Street the Teletype Woods.

Website for the Little Rock Teletype Plant.

The Decline of the English Department -the American Scholar.org

2009-09-23T18:39:00.000-07:00

"The study of literature will then take on the profile now held, with moderate dignity, by the study of the classics, Greek and Latin."

The Decline of the English Department -the American Scholar.org

I see more good in this than bad. Of late I've realized that the superiority of Greek and Latin culture to the other cultures around them, during their Hellenistic and Pagan Empire historic phases, is not muted by American academia or pop culture. The wealth, through study of these languages and histories, is there, and those who choose to say the uncivilized of the same era were equal or superior; impoverish themselves primarily.

Let's take the basis of postmodernity as a weapon against all who adore inferiority -we are all free to pursue what we want. With that, the intellectually superior can leave others to their own pathetic devices.

Bakfiet Cargobike

2009-08-26T06:40:00.000-07:00

Long list of articles and videos: http://bakfietscargo.blogspot.com/

Really long review by owner after 1 year of use

"The spokes and fenders are stainless steel. That coupled with the anti-rust primer under the paint makes this thing completely weather proof. Got mud on it? No problem – spray the thing down. Left it outside during a downpour? No worries, it’s weather proof. And the internal Shimano 8-speed hub along with drum brakes and a fully encased chain means no mucky transmission. No maintenance whatsoever really."

Dutch Bikes: Seattle

Good adaptations: Americans moving to China

2009-08-11T05:59:00.000-07:00

I anticipate Americans who do well versus those that sink to poverty, misery or powerlessness will fall into those two groups by one criteria: those who migrate and adapt and those who stay where they are. Those who stay in their hometown or home region thinking its just about minor change such as training for a new career are possibly missing the point: the place around them is going down the tubes. Those that succeed will be those who changed on ALL levels -career, location, culture.

"Mr. Perkowski, who spent almost 20 years on Wall Street before heading to China, says many Chinese companies are looking to hire native English speakers to help them navigate the American market."
-American Graduates Finding Jobs in China

Kant's Robotic Army

2009-08-02T04:53:00.000-07:00

"I think there are varying degrees of moral agency, ranging from amoral agents to fully autonomous moral agents. Our current robots are between these extremes, though they definitely have the potential to improve.

I think we are now starting to see robots that are capable of taking morally significant actions, and we're beginning to see the design of systems that choose these actions based on moral reasoning. In this sense, they are moral, but not really autonomous because they are not coming up with the morality themselves... or for themselves.

They are a long way from being Kantian moral agents –- like some humans –- who are asserting and engaging their moral autonomy through their moral deliberations and choices. [Philosopher Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative" is the standard of rationality from which moral requirements are derived.]

We might be able to design robotic soldiers that could be more ethical than human soldiers. "

- Can "Terminators" Actually be our Salvation?
A Conversation with Peter Asaro.

Categorical Imperative(s) @ Wikipedia:

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end."
"Therefore, every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends."

Criteria for Good/Bad Software

2009-07-16T05:37:00.000-07:00

Evangelism and advocacy by techies for what is good software has been ill defined over the years. I believe I have the criteria statement:

The network is the computer, and software is bad if it gets in the way of user access to the network-as-computer, and good if it enables, and only augments with unquestionable enhancement, user access to network-as-computer.

"The network is the computer" has been a reality for a long time. Microsoft has been the main block to that reality. Our language for advocacy was to tout "open source". I think "open source" misses the point just as asking if someone is a monk to determine if they are religious. Yes, Irish monks once saved western civilization just as GNU software saved computers, but the good guys list is much longer and inclusive than that.

Cisco, IBM, Sun, Linux, Apache, Mozilla, Apple and Google have all been operating in ways that allowed the torrent of functionality coming from a global-network-computer. There is a mixed bag of proprietary, capitalism, and non-profit open source in that good guy list. The important distinction is just like all the stuff in a functional mechanic's toolbox: the tools are not designed by their manufacturer to undermine one another. The Sears screwdriver is not designed to f*ck up the functionality of the Snap-on wrench. We do not ask Sears to give away their tools, and Sears wants to make as much money as possible, but their tools do not destroy other tools and ultimately the mechanic's effectiveness.

Microsoft does disable other tools, and suppresses the torrent of functionality coming in from the network-as-computer. If the legend is true that Bill Gates was slow to realize the relevance of the internet while at the same time setting an agenda for his software products, that in of itself indicates my contention. The network was the computer at the moment Bill Gates had no appreciation of it, which means Microsoft wasn't working on the only computer that mattered -the global computer. They continued to curse customers with a lone Personal Computer.

Having Fun Through Post-Apocalyptic Collapse

2009-07-14T04:55:00.000-07:00

Resilience is the ability to have fun in interesting times without getting killed.

Use it or lose it:

Exploiting a property is more important than a theoretical right to it. Resilient communities are full of people who can do things: plant flowers, teach karate, bake cookies, fix cars, shoot guns.

Don't be a tool:

Exploitation grows out of control during unstable times. Criminal exploitation becomes violent atrocity, Even profit or interest collected in a way that seems initially fair can become criminal exploitation. A resilient economy does not simply trade people's lives for money.

A hero ain't nothin' but a sandwich:

A resilient community is linked by people with common interests. It has it's cliques and elites like any other human community. However we intentionally associate with people who are different from us. Different physically. Different socially. Most importantly: we asscociate with people who disagree with us. Utopian communities established by ideologically pure vanguards are not resilient.

-excerpt from email thread written by Seth Galbraith

Make the Makers Make Better Things

2009-07-07T19:20:00.000-07:00

While a lot of left leaning progressives focus on carte blanche equality of distribution and replacing any square foot of industrialism with nature -I'm a leftist progressive who believes an ever optimized ubiquitous technology is the only thing making the universe a better place.

The point of technology is not to make as much money for a group of stockholders as possible ( 1980's to present Republicans ), make it meaningful and free to the poorest poor ( 3rd world fetishists ), or make big explosives to defend the regime ( Iran, N. Korea, Soviets, etc ). What should be the criteria?

Technology should make humans as functional as possible.

The above is philosophical. Now I'm moving on to an odd case study, and hope my friends/readers can come up with better supporting stories.

The US military Jeep was developed in a strange way. See this Wikipedia account. One thing the Wikipedia account leaves out is Bantam submitted the design and prototype that won the first round of qualification, but the Army knew it lacked in some respects. Get this: THE US GOV SHARED THE DESIGN DOCUMENTS WITH THE COMPETITORS, NOT SECRETIVELY BUT OPENLY.

I contend that intellectual property rights over-protect the investor, rather than technological advancement. In the case of the Jeep, government pressured private companies to produce the vehicle the soldiers wanted, not what the vendor marketing and lobbyists force-fed soldiers. Ironically, Jeep went on to become a marketing dream, an international survey determined it was the most widely known vehicle type in the world. This case points to the plausibility of corporate protection of critique and improvement of its inventions as counter-productive, that we would have better and more popular products if there was stronger pressure to get the technology right or improved, rather than sit passively and hope a company gets it right.

What is Anarcho-Primitivism?

2009-07-06T04:34:00.001-07:00

Anarcho-Primitivism

I. Introduction

Anarcho-primitivists comprise a subculture and political movement that, generally, advocates hunting and gathering as the ideal human subsistence method (from the point of view of sustainable resource use) and the band as the ideal human social structure (for its features of egalitarianism). While the goal may seem improbable, a primitivist would contend that more modest goals are either undesirable or unachievable within the system. The past 10,000 years have after all been largely a history of “solutions” to the problems of an agricultural society. This critique of “civilization” inherently rejects less radical ideals and claims to go uniquely to the heart of all social discontent. It is multi-faceted, drawing on several traditions of thought. These include the nineteenth century social speculators, anthropology of hunter-gatherers, situationism, anarchism, radical (deep) ecology, and anti-technological philosophy. The potential problem of implementation is largely solved by a growing consensus that an end to “economic growth” is fast approaching, making revolutionary change inevitable. The direction of that change is the focus of anarcho-primitivist interest.
Anarcho-primitivism is subtly influencing society in several ways. The Unabomber’s “manifesto” enunciated many of the central tenets of anarcho-primitivism (e.g. rejection of liberalism and industrialism). Primitivists were among the protesters participating in window-smashing, spray-painting, and other vandalism at the Seattle WTO protests in December 1999. They are probably among those elusive “eco-terrorists” who carry out property destruction in the name of the Earth Liberation Front. The popular novel Fight Club (1996), which became a feature film, portrayed a group of alienated young men who reject consumerist culture and attempt to bring it to an end through massive sabotage. While anarcho-primitivism may not seem worthy of much thought or attention because it falls far outside the mainstream of political discourse, it ought not to be dismissed. It merits substantial attention solely on the basis of its harmonious integration of several historically disparate lines of thought.

II. Aims

The prefix “anarcho” signifies the anarchist rejection of the state in favor of small-scale political structures. Additionally, as primitivist icon John Zerzan (2002:67-68) explains, “I would say Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate all forms of domination.” So a key distinction must be made between anarcho-primitivists and anarchists generally because, “[f]or example, some Anarchists don't see the technological imperative as a category of domination.”
In the most general terms, they reject “civilization” in favor of “wildness.” More specifically, they call for the abandonment or destruction of industrial (and possibly agricultural) technology in favor of subsistence that is not based on the industrial “forces of production”—hence, the adoption of the “primitive” label. This means that primitivists reject even forms of production based on collective management and ownership because any production exceeding immediate subsistence needs is seen as incompatible with long-term sustainability. Derrick Jensen (2000:143) explains:
Make no mistake, our economic system can do no other than destroy everything it encounters. That’s what happens when you convert living beings to cash. That conversion, from living trees to lumber, schools of cod to fish sticks, and onward to numbers on a ledger, is the central process of our economic system.

III. Influences and Precedents

a. Anarcho-primitivism’s internal coherence lies in its complementary and self-reinforcing synthesis of several previous modes of thought. The oldest and most pervasive of these is the romantic idea of the noble savage. This idea, popularized in the eighteenth century by Rousseau (2001), has persisted ever since (recall the Iron Eyes Cody anti-litter advertising campaign). This romanticism was adopted by the nineteenth century transcendentalists like Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller (Pearce 146-150). However, these early radical thinkers, while admiring of the “primitives” and favoring social change, did not seek to emulate their societies: “The fact is,” Thoreau wrote, “the history of the white man is a history of improvement, that of the red man a history of fixed habits of stagnation.” (Pearce 1965:149). The white man’s “history of improvement” was the focus of another group of speculators, including Comte, Tylor, Powell, Morgan, and Spencer, who advocated unilineal cultural evolution (Bettinger 1991:1-29). The most prominent of these was Morgan who outlined the progression from savagery to barbarism to civilization. These stages were defined by increasing technological progress (originating with stone-age hunter-gatherers) resulting in a corresponding decrease in reliance on nature and the increasing opportunity for managerial and artistic pursuits (Bettinger 1991:4), but only for an elite class. Although Morgan’s categories of society roughly correspond to some of those still in use today, the idea of unilineal evolution is of no more than historical interest to anthropologists today, who no longer endorse sweeping generalizations without significant supporting evidence.

b. It was not until the 1960s that the negative stereotype of “savagery” was challenged. In 1966, the first international conference on hunting and gathering societies (entitled “Man the Hunter”) was held in Chicago (Bettinger 1991:48). The significance of this conference was to overturn the longstanding assumption that hunter-gatherers’ lives were “nasty, brutish and short,” in the enduring words of Thomas Hobbes. Marshall Sahlins famously made the case in his paper, "Notes on the Original Affluent Society," which consolidated brand new ethnographic research from Africa and Australia. He concluded that hunter-gatherers (of the most mobile sort) could be characterized as affluent on the basis that their few and simple wants were easily met. He called this economy the “Zen way” (1972:29). Although significant problems with his source data are recognized now, his essay is still commonly assigned in introductory anthropology courses because of a lingering sense that he “had a point” (Bird-David 1992:26). Since Man the Hunter, there has been no shift in the scholarly literature back toward the negative stereotypes of hunter-gatherers. (A shift away from stereotypes in general is an obvious trend, however.) Richard Lee, a co-organizer of the 1966 conference, still publishes work propounding the study of the “primitive communism” phenomenon (Lee 1995). Participants in this revolution of hunter-gatherer studies certainly were and are aware of the romantic stereotype of the noble savage, and, if only unconsciously, they had brought it up-to-date with modern scholarship, giving it significant credibility. This primitivist trend attracted many to the study of hunter gatherers, and certainly formed a foundation for the appearance of anarcho-primitivism in the ensuing decades.

c. In a novel critique of modern society that we would now recognize as postmodernism, Guy Debord expressed in The Society of the Spectacle (1995) the vacuity of life within industrial society in terms of “the spectacle”—his term for symbolic representation run amok. In Thesis 1 he says, “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” (1995:12). Debord was part of a revolutionary French art movement of the 1960s, Situationism, which rejected the substitution of representation for direct experience. Like previous art movements had done, Situationsists sought to bridge the divide between art and everyday life. Primitivist Kevin Tucker (2003) makes clear that, in the decades since Debord presented his critique, the dominance of his “spectacle” has grown exponentially with the development of audio-video recording technology and the internet as mediums of communication (“medium” is a key word here, suggesting “mediate”) that replaces the direct interaction of individuals. As in the early primitivism of the Transcendentalists, Debord’s situationism implied a desire for social change, a desire that he makes explicit in a preface to a recent edition (1995:10). The above quotation of Thesis 1 also illustrates Debord’s primitivism. In lamenting the loss of a perceived past in which direct experience was universal, he paved the way for anarcho-primitivism, which would paint a clearer picture of that implicit alternative. Debord and his contemporaries were aware of political movements that had historically exhibited similar critical attitudes to social and political norms (“Situationism” 2002). Among these was anarchism.

d. Anarchism, also called libertarian socialism, has a long and complicated history beginning in Europe approximately 200 years ago “in the climate of reason” that simultaneously gave rise to libertarian and authoritarian socialism (Bose 1967:77,379). At the end of the nineteenth century, it was taking hold in the US and Europe among organized laborers. It was at this time that the stereotype of the bomb-throwing anarchist was born, fueled by events such as the Haymarket Affair (Bose 1967:253,392). However this stereotype does injustice to the idealistic motives of anarchists as explicated by its numerous philosophical proponents. The chaos they are so frequently accused of desiring is arguably the antithesis of their true motives: the widespread (socially accepted and internalized) disorder of war, oppression, greed, hunger, depression that stalks hierarchical societies is the object of anarchists’ assault. As Howard Zinn (1997:644) explains,
It is these conditions that anarchists have wanted to end: to bring a kind of order to the world for the first time. We have never listened to them carefully, except through the hearing aids supplied by the guardians of disorder—the national government leaders, whether capitalist or socialist.
The ultimate aim of anarchists is hardly different than that of other idealists throughout history. But anarchists’ optimism—their faith in the ability of human beings to voluntarily cooperate with each other—sets them clearly apart from all the others, who unfailingly require some authoritarian class for the maintenance of “order.”
It was perhaps a lapse in this long-standing faith, stemming from the lost optimism of the 1960s, that led some anarchists in search of a historical basis for their convictions—a search that led back to the origins of the first states—that is, to the beginning of “civilization” itself. These primitivist themes began to appear in anarchist publications in the 1980s, and they explicitly referenced the 1960s anthropology of hunter-gatherers (e.g. Sahlins 1972); the egalitarian band structure seemed to exemplify the anarchist solution to social disorder. The environmental movement also flourished into the 1970s, and this is reflected in the anarchist-leaning fiction of Edward Abbey.

e. Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1976), centered on a small group of radical, mostly young individuals dedicated to sabotaging the infrastructure that allowed for the taming of the “wilderness” of the American west. They are sympathetically portrayed as the underdogs in a country where political power is held by no-good despoilers of nature. The uncompromising sentiment for “eco-defense” (a novel concept itself) expressed by Abbey reflected a radical environmental ethic that was totally new and would become known as “deep ecology.” This ethic is summed-up well by its recognized founder, Arne Næss: “The flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth has intrinsic value. The value of non-human life forms is independent of the usefulness these may have for narrow human purposes.” (1999) It was in this context of Abbey’s advocacy of “monkey wrenching” and Næss’s eco-philosophy that the name “Earth First!” was given in 1989 to a new movement dedicated to defending the natural world by any means necessary (“About Earth First!” n.d.; “Earth First” 2005).
Derrick Jensen (2000:188) expresses “the central question” that environmental activists face: “What are sane and appropriate responses to insanely destructive behavior?” He continues, “So often environmentalists…are capable of plainly describing the problems…, yet when faced with the emotionally daunting task of fashioning a response…, we generally suffer a failure of nerve and imagination.” Earth First! reflected the first attempt to overcome this failure of nerve, but the challenge drove others to take more extreme measures. The large-scale property destruction (glorified in Edward Abbey’s novels) of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) was one response to the ineffective “reformist” measures taken by many activists. The first actions claimed by the ELF occurred during the 1990s in the UK and US. Examples include the 1998 arson of the Vail Mountain ski resort, the 2003 arson of a San Diego condominium construction site, and multiple examples of vandalism at car dealerships, particularly of sport utility vehicles (“Earth Liberation Front” 2005).
The radical environmental movement was compatible with primitivist ideas, as the popular portrayal of Indians as ecologists demonstrates. “Primitive” people, especially mobile hunter-gatherers, are directly dependent on the land for their subsistence and, presumably, have a more “ecocentric” worldview than is possible in modern industrial society. There has been some dispute over this point in recent years from scholars who seem “intent on demonstrating that it is ‘human nature’ to be environmentally destructive” (Hunn 2002). Eugene Hunn attempts to put the debate into perspective concluding, “by the excellent condition of the continent when the first Europeans arrived,” that Native Americans had done something right. He continues,
That the continent was not ‘pristine wilderness’ is undeniable, since it had long been home to millions of Indian peoples. That Indian peoples had cared well for this land, had conserved its biodiversity, is also undeniable. To dispute the reality of ‘The Ecological Indian’…is to blind us to the damage done since, in the name of progress and of profit.
Thus, environmental problems came to be seen as a symptom of the far larger problem of “civilization,” which has demonstrated unconcern for any limits to “growth” to the detriment of the natural world. One individual responding to some of the same concerns with a more anti-technological focus was Theodore Kaczynski, widely known as “the Unabomber.”

f. A 34,000-word paper entitled “Industrial Society and Its Future” was published in September 1995 by the Washington Post. The Post was complying with an anonymous offer from the “Unabomber” to stop his 17-year bombing campaign in exchange for the publication of his revolutionary treatise. Sixteen mailed bombs were sent by Kaczynski, resulting in the deaths of three and injuring 23 more (Goldberg 1996). The “manifesto,” as the media called it, decries the ever-increasing dominance of technology within modern society. It calls for a revolution, not against political structures, but against “the economic and technological basis of the present society” (Kaczynski 2003:3). This tendency to aggressively challenge technological innovation can be traced back to early eighteenth-century England when advances in textile manufacturing technology threatened to make obsolete centuries of tradition. These detractors of technology, popularly called Luddites, from 1811 to 1812 sabotaged this new machinery creating an uproar in English society (Sale 1995a). Their name derives from the mythological figure, Ned Ludd, whose name served as a pseudonym in their letters of threat of and explanation for their vandalism (Sale 1995a:77-78).
Modern philosophers including Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and Chellis Glendinning—so-called neo-Luddites (Sale 1995a:237-240)—continue to promote the skepticism toward “progress” that has surely existed as long as technological innovation itself. The difference between neo-Luddites and their predecessors is that, in the nineteenth century, new technologies were only a social threat, whereas today technology threatens the biological systems that form the basis of human existence (Sale 1995a:266-267). Kaczynski’s text is very clearly informed by neo-Luddite thought, although he does not cite the influence of any previous thinkers within it (Sale 1995b:305). Elsewhere he has said, “Technology, above all else, is responsible for the current condition of the world and will control its future development.” The ideology of the Luddites and their modern counterparts provides a crucial pillar of anarcho-primitivism.

g. A final pillar supporting the primitivist ethos demonstrates the unsustainability of industrial society. This body of work refutes those arguments that claim science will provide the solutions necessary to sustain current First World living standards in the face of massive resource degradation and depletion. It also provides anarcho-primitivists a safe, simple answer to the challenge, “How are you going to get there?” The 1972 book, Limits to Growth (LTG), was the first systematic assessment of the sustainability of modern society. More than a decade of environmentalism still had not popularly integrated ubiquitous environmental problems into a coherent message for public consumption. Earlier works like Erlich’s The Population Bomb and Carson’s Silent Spring had focused on specific bite-sized issues. LTG offered a satisfying, yet disturbing complete picture. It was the product of a research project commissioned by the Club of Rome, an international, informal group of “businessmen, statesmen, and scientists” (Meadows, et. al. 2004:ix) who wanted an assessment of the sustainability of the overall course of human society. The final report predicted that unless widespread measures were taken to reduce consumption and pollution sufficiently early, human society would overshoot global carrying capacity and ultimately face a collapse, defined as “an uncontrolled decline in both population and human welfare” (Meadows, et. al. 2004:xi). The research group reached this conclusion through the use of a computer model which was able to factor in multiple variables and the interaction between them. LTG was the first attempt to present the environmental crisis as a whole and show that it required a systematic response (Kassiola 1990:17).
Resource shortages have become a serious concern in recent years among limits-to-growth theorists. By far, the most popular and far-reaching of the theories of resource depletion concerns petroleum. “Peak oil” refers to the point at which total oil extraction (in a particular oil-field, a region, or the planet) reaches its highest point along the slope of a bell curve. From that moment on, supply begins to drop while demand persists. This phenomenon has been observed for decades, but the global economy has been able to sufficiently redistribute oil to regions where the supply has long been exhausted (e.g. Texas). The consequences of the global peak of oil extraction are only recently being considered: when global supply is unable to meet global demand, oil’s market value will begin rising ever-faster. Anything and everything that depends on oil (try imagining some aspect of out society that does not) will become increasingly expensive, and eventually industrial society will grind to a halt. It must be added, few if any of the scholars who promote limits-to-growth critiques are excited about the end of “civilization” they foresee (most hope to avert it), but, for an anarcho-primitivist, their scenarios provide a near-panacea.
The seven influences outlined above are by no means universally recognized among all anarcho-primitivists, but they are clearly visible throughout the available “anti-civilization” literature. The key writers, including John Zerzan, Derrick Jensen, and Daniel Quinn, all come from different backgrounds—the labor movement, the environmental movement, or entirely non-political—but they each synthesize elements of the above influences and add their own unique contributions.

IV. Synthesis

John Zerzan (1994,2002) adds the most academic voice to the chorus. While his writing style is the least accessible, his critique is by far the deepest. He seeks the root of all domination, and this path leads him deeper into prehistory than even the origins of agriculture. Art, language, number, time, and even symbolic thought have been subjects of Zerzan’s interrogation. For him, each of those serves to mediate humans from the direct experience of the world that Guy Debord elegized. Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (1995), is undoubtedly the most widely read book questioning the basis of civilization. It is a novel that revolves around a Socratic-style dialogue in which the reader learns how civilization came to be and what humanity has forgotten as a result. Derrick Jensen provides a uniquely psychological analysis of modern civilization, drawing on the work of R. D. Laing and Erich Fromm. He uses his own experience of child abuse to show how the same types of relationships are manifested on a larger scale throughout society (2000). He also assesses the psychology of hate groups in terms of its relationship the dominant culture (2002).
All of these individuals agree that civilization was a mistake that has had disastrous consequences for human and non-human life, and it will continue to wreak havoc until people decide to stop it or until it collapses under it own weight. After one of these events occurs, the planet will finally be able to begin recovering from 10,000 years of human domestication.
Picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course. You'll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle. We'll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what's left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against the bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night....
[Y]ou'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower.... [T]he air will be so clean you'll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles. (Palaniuk 1996:124-125)
The above quotation from the popular novel Fight Club is a vivid description (some might say caricature) of a world in which industrial civilization has been survived by the kinds of small-scale societies to which anarcho-primitivists aspire. There are two modes of thought on how people can affect this outcome. The first, advocated by Daniel Quinn (2000), is that it can only be accomplished through the dissemination of a new “vision” through society, which will inevitably result in the radical transformation of civilization necessary to end the destruction of the natural world. Quinn feels that without first “changing minds” all other efforts will be fruitless. However, this strategy has been criticized for a lack of urgency. Derrick Jensen (2000:182) conveys this urgency well:
Many perceive the pain of denuded forests and extirpated salmon directly in their bodies: part of their personal identities includes their habitat—their human and nonhuman surroundings. Thus they are not working to save something out there, but responding in defense of their own lives. This is not dissimilar to the protection of one’s family: why does a mother grizzly bear charge a train to protect her cubs, and why does a mother human fiercely fight to defend her own?”
The more common response among primitivists reflects this urgency and calls for direct action that will bring an end to the destruction wrought by industrial technology as quickly as possible.
A legitimate objection to destruction of the infrastructure of industrial society is that it would inevitably lead to the deaths of millions. Aside from the high probability that such a scenario will eventually occur, if current trends continue, without any help from saboteurs (Meadows, et. al. 2004) and that the sooner that catastrophe occurs the less “disastrous the results…will be” (Kaczynski 2003:3), an anarcho-primitivist would argue that such objections exhibit naïveté about the reality of technological progress.
You can't get rid of the "bad" parts of technology and retain only the "good" parts. Take modern medicine, for example. Progress in medical science depends on progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer science and other fields. Advanced medical treatments require expensive, high-tech equipment that can be made available only by a technologically progressive, economically rich society. Clearly you can't have much progress in medicine without the whole technological system and everything that goes with it. (Kaczynski 2003:121)
The increasing incidence of cancer is probably the most ironic consequence of this “progress.” In terms of the human health that modern medicine ostensibly improves, the cancer epidemic provides a striking wake-up call to advocates of medical technology. It generally agreed that cancer is a disease caused primarily by the lifestyle of Western Civilization (Moss n.d.; Ransom 2002). All the same, life expectancy has increased in the last 100 years (“Life Expectancy” n.d.; Stobbe 2005). This begs the question of which is more important, quantity or quality of life.
The consequences of modern technology are certainly far greater for nonhumans, as they are not its intended beneficiaries. The present global rate of extinction is estimated between 100 and 1000 times the (normal) background rate (Levin and Levin 2002). As a result of large-scale logging, less than two percent of U.S. forests were more than 200 years old in 1997 (“U.S. Forestland” n.d.). Every introductory environmental science textbook describes in detail the seemingly endless atrocities perpetrated against the natural world. Fisheries are being harvested at rates far in excess of the maxim sustainable yield. The same chemicals responsible for the human cancer epidemic transform diverse productive land and water habitats into barren waste dumps.
Anarcho-primitivism seeks a return to a wild life free from the culture that seems to be doing its best to destroy the planet, a life that humanity successfully realized for nearly all of our time on this planet (Rosman and Rubel 2004:181). What this entails in the modern context is a small scale society that is independent from the global industrial economy, but said society would also not be restricted by the modern constraints of property and imaginary borders. It would be self-sufficient, subsisting successfully on the local land as well as any scraps which civilization (or what is left of it) provides. It would lack the desire to control or subdue the life forms upon which it depended. But most importantly, such a community would have a visceral sense of and relationship to a physical place.

V. Prospects

Much of the anarcho-primitivist community is restricted to the pages of anarchist magazines and websites. This is community in a very loose, virtual sense, but in the modern context this form of “community” is almost surely a prerequisite of any new zeitgeist. These are real individuals writing, reading, and thinking about anarcho-primitivism across the world, and their common interest connects them. This “community” is only significant insofar as it has the potential to lead to face-to-face interaction, however.
There are some signs of actual emerging communities which advocate and apply (to an extent) the principles of an anarcho-primitivist philosophy. The first large-scale secular movement that exhibited some “primitivist” themes was the outbreak of communes during the late 1960s (Houriet 1971). The hippie subculture idolized the Native American cultures of the southwest like the Pueblo, Hopi, and Zuni (1971:198). Synonymously called the “back to the land” movement, these intentional communities emphasized that the land was true basis for the economy (1971:153, 181). The hippies advanced few of the philosophical and none of the empirical arguments that have become available in the last 35 years as justification for a non-civilized life, and their communities have all but disintegrated. In the early 1980s, the various threads of primitivism began to cohere into the independent worldview outlined above.
Today there are a few groups of people who actively seek out community that approximates (as closely as is feasible) an anarcho-primitivist alternative. Most loosely connected to anarcho-primitivism are so-called primitive skills gatherings, at which attendees camp in an undeveloped area and learn a few skills of self-sufficient survival including bow and arrow making, friction fire-starting, edible wild plant identification, animal tracking, and shelter construction (“Primitive Skills” n.d.). For some, the interest in these meetings may be more hobby-oriented than ideological, but the skills they teach would be of definite use where the necessities of life are not provided by a global industrial economy.
Wildroots is the name of a self-described “radical homestead” in North Carolina. One resident participated in a brief interview (Anon. 2005) providing the following information. It began with only two individuals and the population has since doubled. Two are from the “upper middle class,” one from the “middle class, and the other from the “working class.” Visitors are welcome and typically stay for a few weeks in the spring and summer. “There aren't really rules, except that if anyone new wanted to live there long-term and build a dwelling, the four of us would all have to agree on that.” There are also no “economic limits to ‘membership’.” The group lives on 30-acres of lush land which is owned outright. All of the members have spent time at larger intentional communities, and one member has lived at one.
“We are pretty heavily influenced by many of the same ideas even if we haven’t all read the same books. Many of us are into Chellis Glendinning and Derrick Jensen.” Clearly, Wildroots is philosophically rooted in anarcho-primitivism. The resident said that Wildroots was not the only attempt at a primitive community and cited two examples in Washington state (“the Institute for Applied Piracy and the Feral Farm”).
It should be clear, by now, that there is a reasonably solid canon of anarcho-primitivist philosophy available, which provides the seeds for what could potentially blossom into a movement. Several periodicals (Green Anarchy, Species Traitor, Green Anarchist, Fifth Estate, Live Wild or Die, The Final Days, Green Journal, Disorderly Conduct, Cracks in the Empire, Do or Die, and Quick!) are dedicated to anarcho-primitivist theory, and the most widely circulated American anarchist magazine, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, frequently features primitivist viewpoints (Zerzan 2002:3). The Federal Bureau of Investigation apparently sees the potential of a radical environmental movement, since it has deemed eco-terrorism the number one domestic terrorist threat. The small communities currently in existence may represent the budding of this movement or they may not. In either case, the arguments in favor of anarcho-primitivism should be evaluated openly by mainstream society because, if its claims are valid, their implications are immediate and uncommonly far-reaching.

Works Cited

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Bettinger, Robert L. (1991). Hunter-Gatherers: Archaeological and Evolutionary Theory. New York: Plenum.
Bose, Atindranath. (1967). A History of Anarchism. Calcutta: World.
Debord, Guy. (1995). The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone. (Original 1967)
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Eco-terrorists versus Into-the-Wild-ers versus Me

2009-07-02T18:17:00.000-07:00

I'm reviewing and researching anarcho-primitivism for my new book, going over anarcho-primitivist material looking for things to frame my side of the debate.

Derrick Jensen's Terrorist Army

Derrick Jensen is one of the most powerful voices in American eco-terrorism. These videos show the relationship engine. First is this one which shows how charismatic Jensen is: Youtube: Derrick Jensen on Identification. Consequent to his charismatic and sloppy reasoning are the legions of sympathizers who operate as sleeper cells reconfiguring the Jensen memes into their own art and life mission: Youtube: Quote from Derrick Jensen's Endgame Vol II, page 662.

What is an Anarcho-Primitivist?

I found, copied and archived a definition of Anarcho-Primitivism here [Warning: Long Read]. The only new information in this for me was Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (click to specific citation). So this is why so many at Evergreen were anti-internet -according to this meme all things done through mediation are illegitimate or at least of lesser value. Makes me angry just thinking about the masses at Evergreen who proudly stated they didn't know how to use a computer or refused to rely in internet communication. They even fought successfully to keep cell phone towers from being built so cell signals could work at the campus. Oh well, the anger is good, my hater-style book needs more of my brain cycles in that mode.

Living in Collapse

My big surprise today was finding the first anti-civilization piece I've ever respected. Living in Collapse by Jason Godesky [Warning: Long Read]. I lived amongst hundreds or plausibly thousands of eco-terrorist resonators while going to Evergreen State College, and I promise none I ever met were this academic. But I should stress this piece is not eco-terrorist. I did find it by a link from an eco-terrorist blog, but the gist of Living in Collapse involves no active violence to bring down civilization.

My questions and counters to Living in Collapse

Like Living in Collapse, I do believe the world is some sort of state of collapse. I am more in the John Robb school of Collapse. I diverge strongly from Living in Collapse by believing industrialized and informational civilization will become stronger, rather die like in the Living in Collapse vision. Still, the Living in Collapse gives me pause, and ultimately the only disagreements may be a simply a clash of what lifestyle Jason Godesky wants ( to live in nature without civilization ) as opposed to my sentimental preference for an electrical and computer-enhanced, literate human race dominating at least this solar system.

I find one assertion by Godesky hard to believe, that the great empires succeeded one another due to depleted soils, and that civilization is about to completely end due to all soil being depleted. Key paragraph from Living in Collapse:

There are distinct differences between our situation and that of the Roman Empire, however. While the Romans did face some problems of soil depletion and erosion, these were not acute crises that brought down the empire. Rather, the Roman Empire largely choked on its own complexity. More importantly, the Roman Empire, and all previous civilizations, were part of a general trend of escalating complexity. Each civilization in the past left fertile soils, mineral deposits, and other resources that future civilizations would need. The trend of Western civilization was a constant move west, to find soils not yet destroyed by agriculture—Persia and its attempts to conquer Greece; the Greek city-states and their Italian colonies; the Roman Empire stretching into Germany, France, Britain and Spain; the medieval kingdoms of Germany, France, Britain and Spain, and their eventual colonies in the New World; the United States after its revolution and the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny” pushing into the west; and finally, the Green Revolution once we ran out of new frontiers to coqnuer and to cultivate. Each one left less for the successive civilization, but while Rome fell, Teotihuacan, China, and even Byzantium could continue on uninterrupted, while soils and mineral resources untouched by past civilizations remained on the frontier. With the exploitation of fossil fuels and the emergence of a globalized peer polity, that trend has reached its inevitable conclusion. There are no more fertile soils that have not been exhausted; there are no more fossil fuel or mineral resources in economic quantities and close enough to the surface to mine without an industrial infrastructure; there is no corner of the globe where complexity can continue uninterrupted when global complexity collapses. From the long view, it is clear that civilization is a momentary blip in human history, an anomoly born from a very specific constellation of geographic and climatological factors.

With all due respect to the writer Jason Godesky, I doubt his fundamental assertion: I do not believe the soils are depleted. But hey, if I'm wrong, and the bedrock of all our problems is in this depleted minerals issue, then here is goal number one for civilization: mine the solar system. Divert money and effort that would have been spent on sustainability and equitable distribution of depleting resources, and put it into a race to colonize outer space.

Nature and Social Justice: 0
Space Travel and Mining: 1
Go Team!

There is a concluding vision in Living in Collapse -their are emerging gaps of opportunity in civilization, places such as the Appalachians, where people can drop out of civilization. Early adopters of the total civ collapse, you might say. The author seems hopeful that humans will start seizing this way of life as cracks open up in the great slow collapse.

I offer two subtext tangents from this Into-the-Wild ism. One is the author is pointing at The Big Complexity of human achievement, and saying it is eroding and their are cracks in it that provide opportunity. What if its not the whole Big Complexity that is collapsing, but merely parts of it. What the means of production, wealth, etc are being adjusted radically but The Big Complexity comes out stronger. My contention: what if The Big Complexity is going through much needed network hygiene (killing off under-performing nodes, making new connections, making new/better protocols)?

My second subtext tangent is to return to eco-terrorists. The writer of Living in Collapse offers something I disagree with, but god bless him, at least he offers a peaceful solution -where opportunity emerges, march yourself out of civilization and make your way in the wild. For this to work there needs to be a slow, several generation collapse. The eco-terrorist want overnight carnage type of collapse. In that scenario few to almost none will be prepared to make it a go in the wild. The eco-terrorist are actually pursuing the end of humans as much as they are pursuing the end of civilization. What a sick people.

Successful Immigrants

2009-06-27T07:22:00.001-07:00

This is what I wish leftist social justice was for: Small U.S. businesses thrive with Ethiopian woman's help -CNN.com

Instead, The New Left, circa late 1960's to now, would want these immigrants to NOT assimilate into a capitalist society, and try convince the immigrants that their pre-colonial era cultural heritage is the more valuable and to hold onto it.

Of course a rational approach, and the one the people in this story could very likely be doing, is to assimilate into and master capitalism while retaining a sense of unique cultural heritage.

It is the New Left that draws a disabling line in the sand, in which cultural and personal evolution and adaptation are a dirty sin much like St Augustine saw women.

Disruptive Tech

2009-06-17T09:09:00.001-07:00

I wished I had articulated this while enrolled in the Whole Systems Design Program at Antioch. It would have made clear I was not on board with their social-justice-first orthodoxy.

"I believe in innovation that makes both liberals and conservatives uncomfortable and forced to alter lifestyles and vocations, to get their food in new ways or starve."

Neo-Austerity-Consumerism

2009-06-04T15:17:00.000-07:00

I was inspired by this blog entry from John Robb and created this graphic:

Antithesis on inherent goodness

2009-05-31T04:22:00.000-07:00

From the Postmodern Left we should believe all bad things begin from within the machinations of corporations and governments. That from below, especially an extremely disenfranchised group like the homeless, is the origin point of all that is good.

What about these homeless people who killed the person who befriended them?

How to get higher quality? End class warfare on the production floor

2009-05-29T16:15:00.000-07:00

They can build them, why can't we?

from the article:

In the current crisis, the union has been making big concessions, but it's too late. The transplant workers are new, young and country-style. Suddenly, they had real jobs and futures--instead of pumping gas or growing old working at burger joints. The Big Three workers are older, tired and often from urban environments. Doing less was always the goal, and they bragged about it, too, which is why auto workers may not be particularly popular, even in their own towns. Foreign manufacturers, with American plant managers, won over their factory workers with a new culture: uniforms for everyone, democracy in the parking lot and no executive dining rooms.

The foreign culture was about more than parking spaces. Its real focus was on eliminating class warfare from the factory floor. The Japanese and the Germans, too, put particular emphasis on teamwork and quality. Detroit talked a lot about quality but did not always deliver on its promises. Quality means everything from poor fit and finish, gaps between exterior and interior parts, hard plastic that looks cheap and transmissions that break down at 50,000 miles. My favorite Detroit expression was "perceived quality." That meant if you paid $30,000 for a car and found a scratch in the door, it wasn't a quality issue. Why? The car still ran, so it was "perceived quality."

NIMBYism, Rationalism as opposed to Moral Religious Fascism

2009-05-23T10:03:00.000-07:00

Rationalism is a prerequisite for being considered a human with the full rights of an adult.
NIMBYism is the only honest and valid civic discourse.
Any claim to a universal unchanging valuation ( e.g. people should not be suffering in poverty, or all should be fed ) is not NIMBYism, and is not a political public policy stance, but rather a religious conviction. One cannot claim to be secular or offering an administrative objective when positing such valuations. When these religious convictions are domestic or foreign policy, they are fascist and imperialist.
The religion of Christianity is not the one correct religion, but does mark the evolutionary higher mark when spirituality become a literate and rational pursuit. The horrors and abuses of the Holy Roman and Greek Orthodoxy empires were more attributed to abandoning the higher mark of literacy and rationalism for the short sighted gain of converting illiterate peasants. Protestants resurrected the correct way ( literacy and rationalism ), which led to their dominance of other cultures. The "other cultures" practiced irrational and illiterate means to power ( whether spiritual, political, or military ), which is intrinsically lower and thus a means to less power when confronting a literate and rational entity.
A subtext, sublimated, and unspoken goal of the Political/Philosophical Left is a cessation of all coercion and violence as means to offense and defense of territory ( in layman's terms that means closing down all police and military operations ). The Right Wing reactionaries often think the Left is just plain stupid on this. But that misses the unspoken assumption of the Left: that the world works on a karma/righteousness basis, that if we cease all the mean stuff called police/military activity we will be more "innocent" and will reap some sort of karmic benefits. I offer this secular stance: there is no karma at work, no eye in the sky jotting down the absolute pacifist as a good person to be rewarded. The person that operates with no sense of strategy, banking totally on the exchange rates of a mystical construct is a fool. The person who would impose this foolishness on public policy is a liability to society.

The Short Synthesis Manifesto Thread

2009-05-15T19:20:00.000-07:00

Goal: Keep it short, cover the big brush strokes.

Generalized infrastructure ( Roads, Ports, etc).
These are as essential as air, food, and water to be an industrialized country. We do not leave these to the gambits of the market place.
Religion.
Ability to do it and ability to pay rent, work, bath, serve in the military and walk down the sidewalk without doing it. The default space is secular and loaded with NO ETHICS except economic norms, efficiency, and expediency. The NO ETHICS means such statements as "I value every human and want them fed and happy" to be a nice hobby and religion, but not imposed on the default space.
Technology.
We are a hairless fangless species. For any member of our species to abstain from technology, we need to help them along by killing them, because a human absolutely without technology is dead anyway.
Competition.
It is good. Every instance it did not succeed and make a better place, it was because it wasn't absolute enough, some people got to be stupid or fat or slow and still got a prize.
Misery.
Life is hard. But it is not retarded. There is a kind of hardship that does happen. But no reason to MAKE it miserable. The goal is the pursuit of happiness. Being a hardass is ok. Being just freaking mean and cruel is not part of the game. Being mean and cruel gets a public endorsed wrath of ass paddling in front of your friends, or prison time, or execution.
One generation (or more) ago.
One generation ago we are not responsible for. No reparations, no righting of wrongs, no tipping the balance score, no historical justice. If my father killed everyone in Russia or Africa, you give me five minutes of attitude about it, see the ass paddling or prison time in above statement. Counterpositive with this, generations of innocence do not make a good people. The past does not make one righteous or unrighteous. We look at now, and overtly judge everyone.
Freedom.
You are free to drink whiskey and play blues guitar all the time. Enjoy. You are free to overwork, save, and then send yourself to Stanford. Enjoy. You are free to live on the street, score some good pot every day, and practice tai-chi in the park. Enjoy. Don't be rude to other people and stay out of the way of anyone not a friend of yours.
Ambivalence.
Ambivalence is the root of all tolerance. Demand that we love, and we will hate. Without ambivalence the economic relations degrade and we revert to war.

Computer Visionary

2009-05-15T19:00:00.000-07:00

"If the hard-disk is removed from the computer, the smart-phone becomes useful as much as the computer and the network is involved in our lives more than ever, the web environment will have a huge impact not only on general users, but also for developers and UIzard will be a good tool for the developers to practice and make their ideas real anywhere the internet is available."

-Ryu Sunt-tae link

Cryptonomicon: My Experience

2009-05-15T04:59:00.000-07:00

I just read Cryptonomicon for the first time. I'm ten years late in reading it. I should have read it when it was published. The year it was published, 1999, was also the year Stephenson published In the Beginning was the Command Line. I must have read In the Beginning minutes after it was published. It was amazingly important to me.

1999 was the year I settled down from years of adventure travel in places like Antarctica and Alaska. I was a newbie at computers, and had a custom tower built and installed Red Hat 5.2. Barely even knowing how to type, I spent two months hacking the X11 monitor configuration on the command line to get startx (the desktop) to work, and also hacked the network config to get a cutting edge wireless service called Ricochet to work. Once I was online I found In the Beginning, and it affirmed my pursuit of Unix as the one true way.

But I didn't read Cryptonomicon. I wished I had. Cryptonomicon would have made me smarter and better prepared to contend with idiot anti-technology Luddites who dominate the Pacific Northwest alterna education environment.

Fast forward to now, 2009, and I've spent that last ten years learning to write code and honestly spend more time looking up some coding arcana rather than reading history or philosophy books like in my pre-computer life. So reading Cryptonomicon was divergent with my latest life patterns.

Cryptonomicon has a lot of In the Beginning running through it. A paragraph here and a full page there tells how, for example, 1) video compression 2) Van Eck phreaking, and 3) various crypto systems work. A lot of the time, you need to understand these tech tangents to appreciate plot twists and scenes.

A surprise was Cryptonomicon's immersion of the reader into World War II, and war in general.

For you Hollywood war movie fans, this book may be a real let down. It has its heroes for sure, but along the way it wears the reader out with the tastes and smells of war. I'm not saying its poorly written, I'm saying it is the best. When Japanese sailor Goto Dengo has an entire battleship crumble under him and is thrust into a sea covered in the ship's former fuel supply, then all those in the water scream as they inhale nothing but gas fumes, then picked off by sharks in the night, then the castaways eaten by New Guinea cannibals, then a Japanese rescue party rapes and cuts to pieces the natives, then random animals poison or tear to pieces the Japanese while on march,

...you get the idea. And that is just one phase of one subplot in the novel. Be prepared to read about 14 year old girls raped and then thrown out 10th floor windows. The book will make couch potato neocon war mongers tired of war, it will any reader tired of war, and in that way it does us a service.

There are amazingly entertaining and funny subplots and scenes also. The book accomplishes a strange mix of creating respect for both mental/math/genius types and action/ass-kicker/patriotic types. That mix of heroes with opposite skill sets (extreme in either the brainiac or patriotic way) is done with depth and sincerity.

Fast forward to the present, 2009, and I've purchased and started reading the hardback version of Anathem. The reasoning for reading it is a personal hunch that Stephenson writes with a view to urgent contemporary issues, within an enduring sort of construct. I loved Cryptonomicon, but as I said earlier, it may have served me better if I'd read it in 1999. I don't want to make the same mistake of procrastination with Anathem.

(characters in the book) Lawrence Waterhouse and Robert Shaftoe are now some sort of respected personages to me. Stephenson, you've won in your Metis Chapter contention: those archetypes are alive and embodied somewhere. At least I hope. But hey. maybe thats extramuros bullshytt.

post-apocalyptic adaptations: monastery prisons

2009-05-05T11:09:00.000-07:00

In an economy of declining or totally imploded cash flows, prisons are underfunded or totally inoperable, what do we do with violent criminals?

The Axis Powers of WWII give us the cautionary tale of simply eliminating undesirables. While I personally would like to see a lot of violent criminals eliminated, mine is just a particular framework of ethics and sense of priorities, and the civic space is one that shouldn't just pander to my framework. I can say that about everyone else's framework also. In a place like the U.S., we have a patchwork of mismatched societies all with different fews to the worth of a violent criminal's life.

The only objective thing we can say is the criminal committed the act, after which we plunge into each schism's hatred, care, or even veneration of the criminal.

Then lets use this divisiveness.

Those who have some sort of care or love of the criminal provide sanctuary, for life. The contract with the larger society is the criminal never exits the sanctuary again. If there is ever a problem, there is an abrupt eviction and execution, or if the monastery prison is found extremely negligent of responsible for the "problem", then monastery receives some sort of harsh Killdozer-esque response from the wider society.

This Monastery Prison model provides for varying degrees of tolerance and care, but does not subject the general civic polity to the burdens of the most tolerant sect's worldview.

KKK = Gangbangers

2009-05-02T06:22:00.000-07:00

There is a news story on teen thugs shooting at each other at Alki Beach: News story here. There is a comment thread below the article, and I posted something there which is reproduced below.

Reply To Semaj23,

The posts have been harsh on thugs/gangbangers. But your post almost demanding counseling, forgiveness and the like for troubled youth is a step in the wrong direction also.

Societies worldwide have an endless assortment of poor or historically marginalized youth. The world owes them a fair shot at a respectable life, but does not owe them a free lunch of any kind . More close to home here in Seattle. With a Depression taking funds out of city programs, you can expect a lot less help for troubled youth. If the stance of sympathetics like yourself is that we owe gangbangers some sort of help, otherwise we can expect them to ruin our streets with their violence. Sorry, your style of sympathy is not going to fly. Society does not have to ask kindly, plead with, or counsel people to not be violent criminals. The gangbanger attitude of hate and violence is unforgivable. They are the new KKK, a type rallying around the volatile combo of stupidity and aggressiveness. Society wants them gone.

Post-Apocalyptic Technology: Wikipedia on a Stick

2009-05-02T05:26:00.000-07:00

Scenario: Due to a large or small catastrophe you are cut off from the world wide web. The time of your cut off from the web may be a day, or a year.

It would be nice to have ONE FILE that is all the information you need, that you usually easily get from the WWW, wikipedia and Google. The info may be How To Create a Wireless Intranet, How To Create a Web Page, useful land topography or tide table info for your area, a set of specialized calculators, How To Create a Internet Relay Chat on a Wide Area Network.

ONE FILE that contains all the info, so that it is easily portable on a USB stick. ( Maybe be a little more prepared by having Firefox software for Windows, Linux and OS X on the same USB. )

Amazingly, a group has already produced a fairly mature answer to this design spec: http://www.tiddlywiki.com. There is even a project trying to make a Desktop/OS version at http://tiddlyhome.bidix.info/desk/. There is another TiddlyWiki project for saving confidential info at http://tiddlyfolio.tiddlyspot.com/.

Gov cannot shrink and survive, it needs to provide more value

2009-04-28T05:18:00.000-07:00

"To convert to new software would be a very time consuming and expensive undertaking – technical staff would have to learn how to manage the new software and make sure there weren’t incompatibilities with existing applications and services, and agency staff would have to learn all new software for word processing, spreadsheets, and the rest of the desktop and server based productivity software they use. Then we would have to make sure that we were reasonably compatible with the rest of the state and our constituents."

Unlike the writer of the FUD scare tactic rhetoric in quotes, I have a more precise counter: Switching to a free software that performs almost exactly like Microsoft Office Suite should not wreck the communications norms of state government. I worked for Microsoft as a contract engineer, using OpenOffice to open my Microsoft boss's spreadsheets, I would add data to the spreadsheets, and email back to them. The documents were then sent on to other tech teams. There was never a moment of incompatibility in the two pieces of software.

As our economy shifts to a less consumerist paradigm, and tax income for the state shifts to a smaller footprint, managers within gov achieving more on less is not an option. It is, rather, a fitness test of our time. This fitness test is nothing like the Reagan Era attempt to simply diminish gov, for in the current fitness test voters like myself want gov and its services to remain strong. Strong while living on a smaller tax income.

If managers misperceive the current fitness test as a mandate to shrink services for citizens, while maintaining their internal organizational norms, their whole edifice faces extinction.

original post as comment

Context:

ZDnet.com: Washington state rejects open source.

The Sudden Snap of Network Hygiene

2009-04-27T06:03:00.000-07:00

Collapsitarian-ism is a new pass time and thing to blog about. Economics and terrorist systems disruptors are working together to end the world as we knew it. Like most, I worry and fret over this. Unlike many, I want the industrial to survive, and many institutions and ways of living to be purged from the world.

There are two such candidates for purging in New York Times articles. Here they are:

The university article muses about what's to be done, offering a paradigm busting restructuring as a solution. I attended undergraduate and graduate schools that were unconventional and created as antidotes to the op-ed author's critique. These schools still managed to cultivate a kind of irrelevance in a large swath of graduates. Social justice had taken on such a powerful a priori that lucid, creative, and innovative inquiry suffered. I am speaking of course about the Janus faced object called Postmodernism and also the New Left. They both are cognitive systems that first reference a history of Anglo-American success in subjugating or simply out-competing other cultures, then the same cognitive systems move on to color every hue of their epistemology and language game to symbolically aid anyone who died as a victim of Anglo-American abuse. Social justice is not served, and resulting epistemologies of the graduates (crap such as time being radial, mysticism superior to empiricism) deem them useless at anything other than psychological shell games. I will say the science programs at my undergraduate school, similar to what the op-ed described in the article, turned out a fine crop of graduates.

A sudden snap is probably needed for this, seeing how even alternative types of schools show a predominant tendency towards little value in their output.

The Worthless Class of the Upper Class is another thing entirely. I am not being a Marxist here, in a meritocracy an uneven living standard amongst citizens is not always social injustice, inequity of outcome is desired. It is a social injustice of the most extreme kind if, in a meritocracy, a Worthless Class is also an Upper Class. Which is exactly what Krugman is pointing out.

So what we need is more social justice within a meritocracy. The surest way for that to be accomplished is more turbulence and wild swings of scale in which zones become autonomous then global again in irregular punctuation. I am not hoping for violent chaos that hurts good people, I am hoping for long overdue network hygiene to remove the useless who sit at the dinner table of our economy.

Anti-empiricists doomed to defeat?

2009-04-25T16:21:00.000-07:00

So our faculty in Antioch C3, a lot of New Agers, and a lot the New Age Left, believe we can change ANYTHING through feedforward, to hell with empiricism since thats just derivative of Western civilization.

So I came across this:

"Grand strategy, according to John Boyd (arguably America's best military strategist), is a quest to isolate your enemy's (a nation-state or a global terrorist network) thinking processes from connections to the external/reference environment. This process of isolation is essentially the imposition of insanity on a group. To wit: any organism that operates without reference to external stimuli (the real world), falls into a destructive cycle of false internal dialogues. These corrupt internal dialogues eventually cause dissolution and defeat. " (context link)

Does this mean the Mystical Morons are doomed due to a deterioration of meaningful dialogue?

Connections are Poverty?

2009-04-20T20:20:00.000-07:00

The buzz coming through a circuit of cool and informed people is a SXSW talk by Bruce Sterling declaring that only the desperate ( middle class to poor) need social connections -especially Twitter and Facebook. See: Let Them Eat Tweets - “Connectivity is poverty”. I love Bruce Sterling, see his point on this one, think its valid, but would like to turn the thesis on its head and say "Connection is poverty, and the wealthy may need it".

There is this Depression going on. If things slide just right -with combinations of less buying, a terrorist act here and there, failed governments, etc etc; we could see social/economic collapse in places named Florida, San Diego, or maybe the whole industrialized world.

The NYT article posits an old vision of Wealth as the privilege to not have to learn, communicate or do things.

Good work if you can get it. If the world slides just right, and a lot of things we take for granted are suddenly ad hoc, Wealth as the Village Idiot that Needs No Friends Nor Skills will be an unenviable and undesirable archetype to emulate.

Josh Dressel's Open Source story on ZDNet

2009-04-17T20:17:00.000-07:00

Friend from my days in Olympia, a fellow Evergreen student into open source software. He is now with the WA Department of Natural Resources ( DNR ) as IT support. He responded to a dept request for cost cutting ideas with a switch to open source software that would save the state 1.8 million dollars. He has since encountered resistance for his efforts from dept management. ZDNet has done this story: Washington state rejects open source.

Black leader gives order to kill black men who are desperate for work

2009-04-13T06:31:00.000-07:00

President Obama gave orders to use force ( orders to kill ) if Somalian pirates posed imminent danger to a U.S. hostage [ see story].

We can capsulize this narrative with "Black leader gives order to kill black men, who are desperately making a living, and who are holding a white man hostage ".

All I can say is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. The militant and caustic radical narrative that promotes a black solidarity imbued with hostility and violence against Anglo-American whites, justified by black instances of poverty or desperate employment choices -that narrative just got dissed by America's first black President.

With each bullet the President sent into those pirates, legitimate civil rights and social justice was cleansed a little more from the parasites of radical militancy.

Black President: 3
Black Thugs: 0

Republicans for what they are against

2009-04-13T05:36:00.000-07:00

Just a short post here to highlight the latest Republican crack whore in the mens restroom sort of morality. Most Senate and all House Republicans in Congress have just voted NO for stimulus legislation. This is fine for those who've been consistent Ron Paul style politicos. But of course few to none are. Secretary of Defense Gates just submitted a proposed budget that breaks with the last several decades of military pork projects that do little to serve strategic advantage. Let me be explicit: every American that has participated in a Teabag event, or was against the stimulus bill on grounds of too much government spending, AND is making an uproar of discontent over the zeitgeist of Gate's austere defense spending....THAT American is either a traitor or an imbecile.

Network Communication of Bacteria

2009-04-09T06:46:00.000-07:00

Legal Marijuana Whisky

2009-03-29T18:32:00.000-07:00

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.

Adaptation to New Economy

2009-03-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

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.

Freeman Dyson: Heterodox Humanist

2009-03-26T04:32:00.000-07:00

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.

Being a Kulak. Malcom McLean is our example.

2009-03-16T05:20:00.000-07:00

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

Cheaper Web 2.0 Crimefighting

2009-03-13T18:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-13T16:37:00.000-07:00

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.

The One Way Propagation

2009-03-12T14:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-12T06:13:00.000-07:00

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

Talking Point Rhetoric Meme Bombs

2009-03-07T07:28:00.000-08:00

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

2009-03-07T06:55:00.000-08:00

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).

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

2009-03-06T05:59:00.000-08:00

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

2009-03-06T03:44:00.000-08:00

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

Watching the WORDS go by

2009-02-26T05:52:00.000-08:00

This post is a mental mash-up of the content of two URL's.

So machines, especially the page ranking system of Google, are parsing our URL text based on statistical relationships. Humans, such as me, enjoy statistical non-narrative representation of URL text as seen on S.I.P. on GAE.

Why doesn't Google create Matrix-like vertical scroll ( MLVS ) of the stream of searches coming through? Or someone write an app that pipes Ettercap packet capturing into a MLVS? Or any other source that would make for an interesting scrolling screen?

I know some of the answers might be "well why don't you write it?". Yes, the Ettercap example is doable by a lone wolf hacker such as myself. But Ettercap is not going to have as rich content as a global Google stream of activity. This is more a business decision than technical. Someone with access to a critical mass of text stream needs to do this.

We stopped being wise

2009-02-25T15:48:00.001-08:00

My Crime and War Posting

2009-02-22T06:04:00.000-08:00

Prelude

I've been saving up a lot of ideas on crime, war, justice, pragmatism and valuation of life; and in this blog posting will try to display all of them as coherently as possible. This blog posting will jump around from abstract theory, all the way over to technological or legal specifics. I will have lots of links that are sometimes a fundamental read to understand what I am saying.

Also note that all crime I am concerned with relates to murder, theft, assault, intimidation, and harassment. I do not care what someone does in the privacy of their own home as long as it is not harming another person.

The poor and female are at the greatest risk

A common perception of pro-Law & Order types are as Republican/Conservative, are above the poverty line, own property, and support Law & Order to protect their private interests. I think the stereotype is largely true. I also think the Republican/wealthy demographic should not be the only ones pro-Law & Order. I believe many on the political Left, especially including the inner-city poor and independent single females, should be pro-Law & Order. Why?

Because the easiest targets for violent crime are the poor and the independent, single female.

Compare the lives of the wealthier and the poor or more frugal in inner-cities. Those with more means can buy a car, pay for parking at their condo and at their job, while the poorer, or more frugal, must travel in less of a bubble on the sidewalk and by bus. The point of greatest threat in the inner-city is on the sidewalk, the most basic and austere of all transportation choices. Sure, all can potentially be on that sidewalk. But citing the Washington DC underground walking corridors exclusively for government workers as an archetypical example, plebians walk the most unsafe routes.

And we do not have to stay in the city, focused on dangers faced by plebians going to work or shopping for groceries. For the single female, life has gotten wrought with danger in the wealthiest suburbs. In the Seattle metro area, the "Eastside" is a synonym for wealth, suburbia, and a life removed from the troubles of the city. Arpana Jinaga, 24, was a young woman with great promise in the software industry, living her dream working at an Eastside company and living near Microsoft headquarters. Someone broke through her apartment door (shattered the door jam), and strangled her to death. The case is unsolved. See more info here. Look up the cases of Eve Carson, and Anne Pressly to see more of the same trend.

This is properly a feminist issue. Why aren't feminists inflamed and vocal about such an immediate, quantifiable and objective threat? Because capital F Feminism as an institution is configured to go after systemic abuses of power such as the professional "glass ceiling", dominance of white men in the pantheon of great thinkers, and too many phallic symbols on billboards. When it comes to immediate measurable violence against women, Feminism tends to only prosecute if the perpetrator is a white male, or white cultural unit.

Women are dying in part because of this cultural dialogue paralysis. We need Feminism, we need more independent females, and we need them in the war against their truest threats.

Great Depression/Transition of the 21st century

We may all become poor as the economic trends of late 2008 spin us away from a hyper consumer/production world economy to something still industrial but with a new austere overall lifestyle. This means less money for everything, including pay for cops to come and rescue you, or investigate the murder next door.

Americans have a lot of disinformation thrown at them via TV and movies. On TV, the detectives work what seems to be thousands of man hours on any and every murder case. On TV, viewers are conditioned into thinking the police are capable of infinite labor. Recently I was watching Jericho, and was disappointed the writers promoted the idea of infinite resource in saving people, especially in a series about the collapse of all basic services in our economy due to a terrorist nuclear attack. This was not a crime solving issue, but still my point is about the continued "principled" myth of infinite labor and resource even in a plot about the upheaval of all our basic needs.

The solved case and bad guys sent away forever, if it happens at all, will have to be done with less money. If we don't start planning now for how to do law enforcement with far less funds, we may not have law enforcement.

There are several theorists pointing out with details a near future social collapse due to a total end of global consumerist economics. John Robb and Dmitry Orlov have the most detailed view of this future, and I recommend reading their blogs and books. Robb predicts an America that is like swiss cheese -pockets of crime/anarchy/chaos/miserable poverty called Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ). He predicts a future in which some regions/cities figure out how to do the new lower wage economy well, and others that simply rot into misery.

My crime and war ideas are corollary with this swiss cheese America in which some places are safe to live in and others are some form of dangerous. I believe we are already well along this path, and the extremes are becoming more pronounced. Examples: Phoenix Arizona is the 2nd highest rate for kidnapping in the world as of 2008, with over 370 for the year. Across America their are formerly nice suburbs now ghost towns due to foreclosure evictions. Drug users and sellers are filling the vacant houses, and creating an unsafe environment for the few remaining homeowners. My own mother and father were held at gunpoint in their suburban home, threatened out of their neighborhood by blacks wanting no white homeowners.

Jurisprudence, Justice and Public Safety

Read a news article about a court case involving a murderer. Most I've seen weave a story around justice and rights. In this story the inner motivations of the killer are weighed, or we muse about the value of the killer's life and take its value into account while meting out justice. For the more vengeful, reasoning is presented about the killer's life needing to be spent behind bars or terminated altogether for justice to prevail, basically an eye for an eye religion/ideology. The story may weigh the killer's change in personal values, and ask if the killer regrets the act ( repentant ).

In a war, or in a place in which murder is so prevalent it might as well be war, communities may not have the resources to hold court and slowly, cautiously parse the incident in question. Equal valuation of life without regard to economics is ultimately religious, with Secular Humanism and Catholicism being the main religion examples ( I see the apparent error in categorizing something secular as religious. Most Secular Humanists I know have a mystical, non-empirical, non-pragmatic approach to their ideology) . One has to believe in an unquantifiable framework of psychology, spiritual motivations, and the like for a discussion of justice, repentance, and equal valuation of the killer's life to make sense. In a tough austere world in which murderers are prevalent, and the means to stop them rely on depleted funds/resources of the community, we will likely switch off the long nuanced story of justice or repentance. We may turn to a short dialogue of pragmatism and empiricism with immediate public safety as the only goal. We may turn to whatever is the quickest, cheapest means of eradicating the problem.

An overarching theme emerges, that I am going to tag as a meta quality of the Depression/Transition era: everything is tactical.

We can still have ideals, and aspire, but these will need to address needs and vulnerabilities in the now, in the corporeal world.

Paradigmic Blur

In the Post 9/11 world, especially with the advent of swarm terrorism and system disruption, acts of war no longer look like two official armies going at it. Acts of war look like crime.

The "actors" in war and crime are beginning to blur also. Al-Qaeda and Mexican Drug Cartels, are they both simply organized crime, with the trafficking of Allah ( with opium a complimentary export ) and cocaine as the main differences? Still, my main point is the open source nature of contemporary threats -in the national army paradigm the nation's military regulated who could become an actor of war, whereas religious fanaticism or drug trading are open to anyone to join the movement by merely copying the lifestyle and tactics, which are easily accessed in songs, media and internet sites.

"We are seeing Mexican hit men coming into the US doing hits for the drug gangs. One hit team took out three people at one time in (a middle American city). My team took out two small groups in (a middle American city), but they are here to stay. Very dangerous group. They cross over into the US then using Greyhound buses to travel up north. They are good at counter surveillance. They have been hiring private eyes to find cops, and informers to deal out death." -Undercover cop in middle American city. (source)

Solutions: Cheap and Technical

CPTED(wikipedia entry) is a direct, intelligent way to approach the problem of crime, by designing the manmade environment to naturally thwart crime. It usually requires lots of eyes and lots of social participation, the eyes and participation of the intended users of the environment (example: mall shoppers). CPTED is a viable component of crime prevention even in an era of austerity, but is a weakness for remote stretches of land, remote facilities such as oil or electrical lines, and single females living alone.

In Better Together the authors believe in non-technical, offline social solutions. I believe the physical, non-technical, offline lifestyle will be more prevalent in an austere era, but anticipate it will be the source of weakness in some and the source of strength in others.

Absolute anti-technical communities will be candidates for the worst kind of TAZ, a vulnerable off-grid community with little means to import good open source solutions (example: capturing rainwater on rooftops) posted on the internet, and little means to combat crime other than the way of the Old West. The criminals or terrorists, if organized, will likely have electronic communications of some sort, giving them crucial tactical advantage.

The point I'm trying to make is a subtle one. This Depression/Transition era will be a shift to more austere living, and less consumerist culture. But it will not mean an absolute negation of industrial/technological culture. Luddite anti-industrialist, all-localism types may see the Depression/Transition as a carte blanche affirmation of their desired world coming into existence. I think something more dialectical will emerge, best described as an end to easy money and rampant consumerism, but with industrialism moved to a distributed in-home topology. Less trips to Best Buy, and more welding/fabrication at home. Also, recall the industrial age existed long before the Consumerist Age born after WW2. To turn off the Consumerist Age does not turn on a primitive hunter-gatherer society.

Solutions: Surveillance and Citizen Involvement

In the here and now of the early Depression/Transition era, we have the tools to combat crime more effectively. At the top of the list is an Open Democratic Surveillance System (ODSS). Recently a discussion on Slashdot generated what I consider a fairly robust and near complete description of an ODSS. I saved the salient points in another blog entry, here: slashdot discussion: open democratic surveillance system, it is recommended reading.

I have been obsessed with the ODSS concept, and began writing a web app for citizen reporting of crime here ( tip: does not work with Internet Explorer, use Firefox). Since beginning this programming project I've found somewhat better examples already on the web.

Changing focus now to sociology more than specific technical, to examine why ODSS may be better than CPTED and offline "get-out-in-the-community" crime prevention. Walking around a neighborhood, hoping to view and subsequently report a crime is tactically dangerous. Viewing it on a surveillance camera and clicking on a submit button ( see Texas Border Patrol example) to report an incident in progress is much more tactically sound, by being both safer and quicker in getting the info to the right people faster. Once the reporting of the incident is sent to the most appropriate actors ( police, US Army, citizen vigilantes, etc) the information can still remain in public view at something like this. Of course information that would be an extreme tactical advantage for the criminals may need shielding, the answer might be an email list to confirmed residents/stakeholders rather than general WWW publishing. But the surveillance footage should always be fully public.

An ODSS and online reporting tools have another tactical advantage that is sociological, not technical. Racial and class solidarity is often a support system for crime, and the anonymity of web based civic action could help break this kind of solidarity. As an example of the no-snitch code within some communities, I give the example of the murder of Tyrone Love and the silence maintained in that community. The best people in that community, people like Tyrone, need a means of defense that does not put them at risk for doing so. Online channels of reporting help with that.

Solutions: The old American melting pot

Panning to a much broader view of fighting crime, with Tyrone Love in mind, I want to close with message that may sound odd, and may not fit well with typical Conservative nor Liberal talking points. Fighting crime in the Depression/Transition era will work better with the most honest and intelligent dialogue we can muster. For liberals, it is time to admit that certain neighborhoods or regions have crime coming mostly from blacks or Mexican immigrants. These fail my Acid Test of Legitimacy. It is an automated Liberal reaction to claim such racial statements as heinous, and that is unfortunate hypocrisy. The same people who play the language/rhetorical game of never stating the danger of a neighborhood, but make absolutely sure never to place themselves in that neighborhood. This Liberal game helps kill black men like Tyrone Love. This Liberal game prevents society from the natural hygiene critical dialogue provides. It is the most complete and utter fool who thinks by stating "these particular blacks or Mexicans are a threat" we will denigrate all in that race or class. We are able to effectively point to the meth dealing Aryan Nation membership whites living in trailer parks from Florida to Oregon as people deserving prison or worse, without confusing ourselves into thinking all whites fit that profile.

For Conservatives, to win the war on crime, do like the US military -try to recruit all the good people. Remember, everything is tactical. Creating an all-white, all-Protestant, all-heterosexual club would be fine, except you create more criminals, and you tell them to target your club. An all-white, all-Protestant, all-heterosexual club is tactically weak. Recruit every homosexual that wants to own a home, be a professional, and contribute to the community. Recruit every black that doesn't identify with gang culture or solely with black culture. Recruit every Chinese immigrant that wants to run their business in peace. Recruit every Mexican immigrant that is afraid of, or opposes, the Mexican Drug Cartels.

That is a community army that could kick crime right in its head.

Open democratic surveillance system

2009-02-22T05:15:00.000-08:00

See:Border Patrol example of concepts posted below.

Open democratic surveillance system
thread on Slashdot:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/21/0425218

by macraig (621737) mark.a.craig@gmail.xxx on Saturday February 21, @07:46AM (#26941049)

The correct use of those cameras is to wire them up to the Internet, and make it so that ANY concerned citizen can monitor the cameras in a Web browser, or perhaps a dedicated app. Leave it up to concerned citizens watching a camera to call the police and report what they have observed. Best of all, give them a tool - Firefox extension? - that lets them record what they're viewing, so they have some form of evidence to give police, not just hearsay.

In the United States we have Neighborhood Watch groups, many of which would no doubt find cameras on every street invaluable: they could sit home warm in their jammies and still help keep their neighborhood safe, instead of being out roaming the streets in the harsh cold with the crooks, risking being shot-at.

That approach would incur no additional municipal cost for monitoring, and any misuse of the cameras would be the responsibility of individual citizens, not Big Brother. Would citizens actually do it? I think they would, in high-crime areas or areas where crime is rising. That approach would be democratic, rather than autocratic.

by RyoShin (610051) tukaro@gmail.xxx on Saturday February 21, @09:33AM (#26941873)

"so they have some form of evidence to give police, not just hearsay."

So the police set up a system, the people record the system, then give the police their own feed? Instead, set the system up so that it records the previous five minutes. If someone is watching and sees a crime, they can hit a button on the website (which would use either AJAX or Java) that would start extra recording for that particular camera. After it's all gone down, they hit the stop button (or it stops after X minutes automatically) and they are given a video ID and a little form to fill out to explain what they just saw.

When they submit the form, the information is sent to a rookie/veteran stuck in the office whose job it is to watch the feeds and read/respond to citizen alerts. (If it doesn't work out to have the same person behind the desk 24/7, just make it a rotating shift where each cop takes 6 hours a week at it.) If a lot of citizens suddenly flag a camera, an alert is sent to both the cop on duty, the police chief, and an SMS is sent to any cop in the immediate area of that camera. Cops hopefully have access in their vehicles to the cameras, so they have to check the feed before speeding off (to stop /b/-style raids or some gang using social engineering to move cops from another area).

But getting the citizens interested might be a bit hard... so, instead of Neighborhood Watch, make it Neighborhood Survivor, or Neighborhood Real World, or Neighborhood Big Brother. Glitz the page up, and let people create accounts that can be tied to their successful report rate. (Make sure it has the ability to automatically downgrade reports from an abusive account or IP.) Have a weekly show on local cable about various incidents and those who reported them, along with the ability for people to "vote" on which camera area should get a make-over (regular city stuff, like re-paving a road, fixing fences/house sides, etc.) which will help to boost morale in an area.

If "Information is Power" is filtering/banning information for your soldiers a case of friendly fire?

2009-02-19T06:37:00.000-08:00

It's one thing to unplug the networks because of an active and known threat. It's another when the network is disconnected from a failure to comply with computer policies created by folks who don't have the slightest understanding of information or computer security (pilots).

The AF is bass-ackward when it comes to all things network. As pointed out in the article, much of the internet is blocked for arbitrary reasons based on words in the website such as blogs, forums, flash sites, social networking. I have even been blocked from accessing websites with the word "weapon" and "flight simulation". I wonder how many websites Al Qaeda blocks from their people? ...obviously not flight sims.

An average terrorist with a internet connection is better wired than an Air Force officer. The word to our enemies is, "Don't try to bomb our communications, we will gladly disable them for you the first time you email an Air Force Base a .zip file."

Posted by: Sauce | Feb 18, 2009 9:54:23 PM

See what happens when you standardize your network on the most insecure operating system on the planet - then implement half-ass DoD 8570 measures. Maybe those boys should get some real training for a change. Perhaps buy one less F-22 and you could actually fund that.

Posted by: Solaris10 | Feb 18, 2009 8:52:58 PM

WIRED:DANGER ROOM: Air Force Unplugs Bases' Internet Connections

How to make NASCAR rednecks accept Obama

2009-02-18T13:38:00.000-08:00

I'm on several Conservative email lists. No wait, I am on one, but its so busy and diverse its like being on a thousand. It is Human Events magazine. Through it Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, Ted Nugent, Sarah Palin, Pat Buchanan and Chuck Norris weave their unique style of right wing ism. I read it so I know what true right wingers are talking about. Not being all snob here; Coulter has a stinging wit that is great and Pat Buchanan comes off as very principled and intelligent.

Since January almost every writing is a call to jihad against President Obama. The President's economic rescue plans are simply seen as ruination via all out socialism.

Here is my recommendation to the Obama administration to counter this growing tide of discontent.

Make sure the stimulus money employs men that drive concrete trucks and work laying down concrete. Make sure this concrete is being laid down far from the big liberal cities. Out in suburban Ohio, Nebraska, California's redneck valley region, Wyoming, and Moses Lake Washington. Whether the projects are repairing our aging Interstates, or building something for the next paradigm - such as wind farms; get lots of Republican men and women out there doing real shovel work and bringing home $800 a week.

Do not direct stimulus money to the standard old friends-of-Democrats such as inner-city lesbians working towards rewilding the landscape and revering native peoples. Hire hard drinking lesbian truck-drivers instead. Hyperbole aside: do not divert tax money to pet projects of the far left social justice set. Not one dollar of the stimulus money.

So back to the prejudiced white Nascar fans bringing home $800 a week (who's neighbors are unemployed due to the closed Home Depot store). They will become deaf to the Republican scream-machine, and become not so much believers in socialism, but at least vocal advocates of the type of government Obama promised in his inauguration speech. One that works.

The most IMPORTANT reading material for an American in 2009

2009-02-16T19:17:00.000-08:00

Social Collapse Best Practices by Dmitry Orlov. He is predicting the full collapse of the USA economy. I quote him in the remaining paragraphs of this post.

So that’s what we have now. The ship is on the rocks, water is rising, and the captain is shouting “Full steam ahead! We are sailing to Afghanistan!” Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge, or do you desert your post in the engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats? If you thought that the previous episode of uncontrolled debt expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes, and economic hollowing-out was silly, then I predict that you will find this next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomic straws even sillier. Except that it won’t be funny: what is crashing now is our life support system: all the systems and institutions that are keeping us alive. And so I don’t recommend passively standing around and watching the show – unless you happen to have a death wish.

Right now the Washington economic stimulus team is putting on their Scuba gear and diving down to the engine room to try to invent a way to get a diesel engine to run on seawater. They spoke of change, but in reality they are terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status quo. But this game will soon be over, and they don’t have any idea what to do next.

So, what is there for them to do? Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” What should their realistic new objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.

Micro/local/residential industrialism: home power management

2009-02-14T19:58:00.000-08:00

I spotted on a friend's Facebook Wall discussion about emerging power management for the home with desktop software. Here are the two "products" they were discussing:

Anti-crime technology: Device knows when it is stolen

2009-02-14T08:42:00.000-08:00

Sun Microsystems is promoting a world in which devices are networked. Add to that RFID, and we have a world of objects managed digitally.

Here is an idea I would love see implemented: objects know when they are stolen, and do the right thing ( such as contact owner and proper authorities ) to get back to their proper owner. Bruce Sterling has described a world of these types of things, and calls them Spimes.

For all who would opt out of this, fine. In a depression era economy, I also offer as an idea for police departments: Provide little or no assistance for those who make law enforcement and investigations expensive. By "make law enforcement expensive" I mean people and their objects are not on the grid, not watched, not trackable, and anonymous.

Math formula to discover bad faith Republicans

2009-02-14T08:12:00.000-08:00

( Republicans against drain on treasury for market intervention since Obama is in office)
MINUS
(Republicans against drain on treasury for market intervention while GW Bush was in office[ Ron Paul type platform ])
EQUALS
Amount of insincere, unprincipled Republicans

Progressive Positive

Juche and a antidote to Juche

The awful Truth of Ecosystems, the Lie called Ideology by Seth Galbraith

Visual Literacy : Final Reflection : Summer 2005

Human migration and settlement of comets via genetically engineered trees.

Components and Features of a Space Tree

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil by J.D. Bernal (1929)

Space Vikings -Why People Will Go Into Space- by Seth Galbraith

Class Warfare, The Rise of Anti-Visionary, Detail-Oriented Leadership by Seth Galbraith

Advocacy of Total War

Anders Breivik and Knights Templars are Perfectly Postmodern

Mechanized Marijuana

What we want -written by Seth Galbraith

Live simple movement dies of starvation and loneliness

Be like the USA in 1790 -A Horrific and Stupid Contemplation

Atlas Sure Did Shrug

they want us to do well

Obama's machines defeat Arizona, sanctuary cities and Mexican criminals

While Economy in Trouble -More dollars go to propagandize ourselves

Email from a friend:

Email from a white man married to a Chinese woman, with children

Technological empowerment is the key

Don't Tread on Me....because I'm crazy.

Let's extinct the unionized public school teacher

Rules of play: Tolerance of Tolerance. Intolerance of intolerance

David Brooks on New Left and Tea Party similarities

Fox News, Tea Party, and the Joe Stack Suicide Bombing

Whole Earth Discipline: Summary by the author

Mutating Humans Mutating Earth

Whole Earth Discipline: Cities and Shantytowns

My Favorite Quotes from Whole Earth Discipline

City air makes you free, and preference for urban slums over subsistence farming:

Civilization is what happens in cities, and the return of great Asian cities:

The Challenge of the Slums, 2003 UN-HABITAT report:

Unleashing the potential for Urban Growth, UN Populations Fund 2007 report:

Kebler's Law -organism's become more metabolically efficient as they scale up :

William Blake - "Without contraries there is no progression", Multitude of contrasts begets progress:

Rome:

Slums are innovation:

The massive trend of migration to slums is defusing the population bomb:

Resilient Community Viral Self-Sufficiency : Alternative currency energy security

Pressures and Adaptations

Intel officer: CIA officers' deaths will be avenged

Excerpt: Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out by Neal Stephenson

Avatar = Avatard

Industrial Evolution

The Revolutionary Viral Darknet Software Driven Resilient Community

Half-thoughts I have to add:

Digression to Marxism and Zizek

The Dubliner Dialogue: A List of Issues and Ideas

Radical New Individual Types

Islam. My honest question: Is there a good and bad kind?

Racism

The Homeless Technologist

Philosophers and the Equality of Barbarians

Fortress or Resilient City?

The Insurgents and the Vigilantes

Maurice Clemmons manhunt: Facebook thread

Microsoft, Bing and Murdoch

Tea Party Patriots, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin Explained

Chapter 1: Rock and Roll Music Culture

Chapter 2: Internet Culture(s)

Chapter 3: The Rise of a Counterculture, via Internet

Starhawk's Pantheon of Organizational Archetypes

Two models of globalization by Seth Galbraith

Food for locals or cash crop for global market

Points of Superiority

Distributed energy production questions answered by Seattle City Light

I'm an urban liberal who just can't seem to fit in with urban liberals

ttylr

The Decline of the English Department -the American Scholar.org

Bakfiet Cargobike

Good adaptations: Americans moving to China

Kant's Robotic Army

Categorical Imperative(s) @ Wikipedia:

Criteria for Good/Bad Software

Having Fun Through Post-Apocalyptic Collapse

Make the Makers Make Better Things

What is Anarcho-Primitivism?

Eco-terrorists versus Into-the-Wild-ers versus Me