Freeman Dyson: Heterodox Humanist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being a Kulak. Malcom McLean is our example.

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

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

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

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

History Lesson: Communists hated Kulaks

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

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

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

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

How to describe the Enemy

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

Extending the Enemy

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

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

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

Representation in Ideology

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

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

Economic Operations 1.0

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

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

Economic Operations 2.0

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

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

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

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

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

Cheaper Web 2.0 Crimefighting

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

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

-Police departments keeping public informed on Twitter -CNN

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

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

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

Production versus Plunder

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

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

The One Way Propagation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEAKED: Antioch University Bold Future Initiative

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

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

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

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

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

The President of Texas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talking Point Rhetoric Meme Bombs

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

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

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

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

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

Economy Reset: Industrial Reset, and the Pentagon Budget

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man-Machine argument on Craigslist/Philosophy

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

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

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

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

Watching the WORDS go by

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

1. The Technium: Two Strands of Connectionism
2. S.I.P. on GAE

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

My Crime and War Posting

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.

1. Texas Border Patrol (live cams with citizen monitoring enlisted)
2. YouNews (archived footage)
3. Anchorage Crime Map

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

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?

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

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

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

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:

1. Google PowerMeter
2. Edison by Verdiem

Anti-crime technology: Device knows when it is stolen

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

( 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

An interesting read: Advanced Automation for Space Missions

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

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

Resilient Community: Online Crime Watch and Alerts

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

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

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

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

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

A resilient community will not PR itself out of problems.

Christian Science Monitor -Neighbors on Patrol

The New Input Output : Civic Wrangling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming to terms with a New Era

Email from a friend:

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

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

And now it's over.

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

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

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

-Seth Galbraith

Technology Uses Us: Humans as an Ecological Niche

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

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

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

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

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

-Maureen McHugh

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

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

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

Social Justice

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

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

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

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

My winter on a crab boat in the Bering Sea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fascist watch: Seattle: The Tunnel Debate

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

My comment posted on the news site:

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

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

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

Move to Portland, jerks.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors

Matthew 6:12 (King James Version):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Alive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-link to blog entry here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Counterculture may be over.

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

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

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

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

Addendum

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

Mandate to end Postmodernism

Referenced documents:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate challenge and objective centrism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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