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

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

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

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

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

Antithesis on inherent goodness

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?

• Good samaritan beheaded by homeless man he helped.
• Drifter kills college honors student.

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

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

• 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

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

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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

"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

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

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

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

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

"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

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:

1. End the University as We Know It
2. Money for Nothing

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

Legal Marijuana Whisky

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

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

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

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

Adaptation to New Economy

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

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

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

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

I'm going to have fun in this Depression.

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