Unqualified is the Qualified in Postmodernism

A little backstory: I'm from Arkansas. Live in Seattle. Will vote for Obama. Do not like George Bush as President. I am liberal by most right winger perspectives. What I say in this blog posting is analysis, not my preferences. And the analysis is aided by my extensive experience in the backwaters of the Southeast, combined with undergrad and graduate studies in postmodernism in uberleftist schools in the Northwest.

The Left and (good) established media are getting it wrong on Sarah Palin. She is qualified because she is a hockey mom. Her answers in interviews that have sent pundits into a tailspin of derision are the articulations of your standard hockey mom, or a mom that owns a successful diner in Memphis Tennessee, or a mom that is in a bureaucratic position at the local police station. I'm met 100's of those types of women, kin to a few, and can tell you for sure that all they need to know is the leader of Iran hates Israel and the next thing out of their mouth is "then we need to kill that man".

America will vote for a woman like that.

Postmodernism has taught the legitimacy of the less than aristocratic, the less than educated, the less than expert. Republicans operate on that; are strengthened by that. While the nuanced and smart that proliferate the campuses and more urbane metro areas of the USA tout academic capital P Postmodernism, they don't know game as it is being played on the streets. Postmodernism is certainly a threat to old orders of doing things, but it is not a tool that only fits into the hands of former slaves, the downtrodden, and indigenous. Actually it is a tool that only works for those who know how to manipulate it. I contend that to manipulate it, one is better served by acting unqualified and ignorant rather than articulating a thesis such as historical slavery.

George Bush II was the only person in his family we could call "stupid", and his family has been amazed at his success eclipsing his more brilliant brother. GWB should thank god for postmodernism, because he got through 2 Presidential elections riding on the mandatory qualification of "ignorant" as part of the Cult of Personality in a postmodern state. Adding to this, in the smaller towns away from metropolitan suburbs across the South is a type of man who is successful by local standards but an ignorant oaf by New York City or Stanford standards. I've met a lot of those kinds of middle aged men -they talk and act just like George Bush II.

America voted for that kind of man.

With every New York Times Op-Ed piece that correctly points to Palin's lack of expertise, they have added to the power of her in Cult of Personality in the postmodern state.

Supporting resources Dump Palin?

"Eastern US Useless Moneychangers Culture" - you so die now, die die die die

Below is, too me, a scary description of what may happen in the US if the tax payer bailout goes forward. It is all a quote from MSNBC MCCAIN VS. OBAMA: BAILOUT POLITICS:

The New York Times’ David Brooks sees an ideological shift for the country coming, and it starts with the enactment of this plan: "The Paulson rescue plan is one chapter. But there will be others. Over the next few years, the U.S. will have to climb out from under mountainous piles of debt. Many predict a long, gray recession. The country will not turn to free-market supply-siders. Nor will it turn to left-wing populists. It will turn to the safe heads from the investment banks. For Republicans, people like Paulson. For Democrats, the guiding lights will be those establishment figures who advised Barack Obama last week — including Volcker, Robert Rubin and Warren Buffett." Brooks continues, "If you wanted to devise a name for this approach, you might pick the phrase economist Arnold Kling has used: Progressive Corporatism. We’re not entering a phase in which government stands back and lets the chips fall. We’re not entering an era when the government pounds the powerful on behalf of the people. We’re entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable — and often oligarchic — framework for capitalist endeavor.” -MCCAIN VS. OBAMA: BAILOUT POLITICS with Brooks comments at bottom

David Brooks is brilliant, hip and honest. The only brilliant, hip and honest voice from the conservative side of American politics, in my opinion. So my vehemence is not aimed at him, but at those who would carry out the assessment Brooks has prophesized.

With more sadness than vehemence I read on the Barack Obama official campaign website that Obama is supporting the bailout, with conditionals that are a little more disciplined than the initial White House offering. I may not be voting for Obama now.

I think the red-blue state cultural divide may take a back seat to another cultural divide that is as yet unnamed. I cite this article to give some of its tectonic shape: CNN: Fed's bailout plan met with skepticism out West. I will call the Pro-Bailout side the Eastern US Useless Moneychangers Culture. I brushed up against this class when I lived in Arkansas. There was a class of wealth who looked down on anyone 1) with a skill 2) that had to show up at a job. Even CEO's, bank presidents, and the state governor were of the lower class to these people. All these people knew how to do was invest, to hedge massive amounts of abstract wealth in ways that insured their continued aristocratic lifestyle. Doubly emphasize one aspect: this hedge investing class viewed any skill or technical knowledge class of humans as expendable slaves. Now that you have this Eastern US Useless Moneychangers Culture in mind, look at another cultural tectonic landmass that is forming in the form of I.T. intelligentsia: Door Number Three -Bob X. Cringely. I quote from the Cringley op-ed below to give a quick glance of this emerging cultural force, but emphasize my own schema first: the old redneck suburbanite or southerner versus urbane social justice redstate/bluestate may be slipping in relevance. The Giant Data Warehouses with Web Access Culture is on the West Coast ( Amazon and Google). This culture has a new kind of person in their workers and their more adept users/customers. I think this new kind of person has the potential to subvert and take over, and the first and most appropriate target for destruction should be the Eastern US Useless Moneychangers Culture

We're in an important transition period not just for IT, but also for business in general. Everything seems to be in flux. And that means the old ways of doing things are changing and ought to. And in this way IT is leading -- or ought to lead -- the way. Later this week I'll be making a dramatic shift and proposing the Cringely Energy/Economic Policy, but first I need to drive home the point that, however different it is from the rest of the company, IT is generally the vanguard for a new corporate culture and whole new ways of doing business for the world. We're in a mess. The world is screwed up and some of that can be traced to the improper use of IT as a financial weapon. But the people of IT actually present many of the answers we need, because they are living much deeper in technology than other parts of the company or of our society. Think about it. There has nearly always been a class of eggheads showing us a path toward new business models, whether it was Edison and Firestone, Hewlett and Packard, Noyce and Moore, Gates and Allen, or Brin and Page. It takes in each case a generation to happen, but ultimately we all (and I mean ALL -- everyone in the total organization) come to look like the geeks of the generation before. So let's lean into that, get on with the transition, and get past this place we're in right now where nobody wants to be. Let's consciously embrace the next model that's generally running fitfully right now inside every company, down in the more functional parts of the IT department. What I mean by this is that times have changed and the world can no longer afford even John Reed's world view with its needs analysis, design, debug, test, rollout strategy -- whether we're talking about a new app or a new marketing campaign. By the time the app (or the campaign) is rolled out, the world changed from HTML to Javascript/SOAP/Ajax (or from financial regulation is bad to financial regulation will save us). At the heart of this is a concept completely foreign to traditional business -- Open Source. What the open source community has demonstrated is the superiority of a strategy that emphasizes early proof of concept, early release, and frequent releases with features added as needed -- probably totaling 20 percent of the features identified in a needs assessment. This is the new IT strategy we live with every day -- 80 percent solutions because they are fast, increasingly reliable, and keep the end users in the loop from almost the beginning. All made possible because of an open Internet (at least until Comcast succeeds and enslaves us), easily grasped standards and impressive demonstrations by companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and a ton of start-ups. Wall Street back offices figured this out long ago, they just never got their boss's bosses to understand. Last week's column was a utopian vision that simply requires all the old managers to be reprogrammed or accept a bullet in the head. But it is not at all utopian if applied solely (or initially) to IT, where this stuff actually works pretty well. IT people are most of the time building fortresses or feeling unappreciated -- often both at the same time. Yet to our discredit, we've done a very poor job of explaining or demonstrating or outright selling our utility to the broader organization. Where are our Geek Appreciation Days? Take a Geek to Lunch? Bring Your Geek to School? Taciturn, we disparage our co-workers for not appreciating us while giving them little obvious reason why they should appreciate us. That has to change. Door Number Three isn't just an escape hatch for nerds, it is the way business and culture and civic life will be for most of us a generation further into this information age. We're just leading the way. And if we're leading the way let's embrace that role and become leaders. If, like me, you are likely to be fired, anyway, there's no real downside to this strategy. Let's give it a try. Door Number Three -Bob X. Cringely

Giant Data Warehouses with Web Access Culture.....march forward and don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes!

I should add that those strongly invested in the redneck Protestant suburbanite or urbane Catholic social justice cultures are like the peasants and indigenous peoples during WW2 -spectators, soldiers or victims in a battle they do not guide. This won't be about valuing all humans equally and giving them equal access to food and housing, and it won't be about giving white rednecks a default safe haven. Both those agendas will only live on in the minds of the old or irrelevant.

Eastern US Useless Moneychangers Culture in the news with their views:

• Note how Picken's only qualification of the bailout is that it needs to happen soon
• Note how Welch exalts Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner without any real qualification for such praise and trust

Email to Barack Obama

Senator Obama

I am one of the millions who find your candidacy for President exhilarating. Across the board on issues and nuanced perceptions of America's needs, I feel you have potential no other politician has offered us in my 46 years of life. I support you way beyond the context of this one Presidential election. I hope to be seeing the effects of your vision long into the future.

Unfortunately, I have some precise business to write you about. The issue of taxpayer bailouts of private investment banking firms. I am absolutely against these bailouts. In the November 2008 election I will not vote for any one running for a national office who voted for the bailouts. With your historic run for the Presidency, I have had an ill feeling about standing absolutely on one issue and voting, or not voting, for you based solely on your Senate voting record with the bailout. In final summation I cannot cheapen our relationship -I must vote or not vote for you based on our agreement on issues.

I heartily encourage you to coordinate with Congressional ( especially GOP ) leaders who are standing up against White House pressure, and articulate a resounding no to this amazing attempt to swindle tax dollars to reward failed market risks in the private sector.

Good Luck
-Lance Miller

The New Characteristics of the Tao

I read the Tao Te Ting alot in my year on the ice in Antarctica. The clincher for me is the last poem. It basically acknowledges the big problem trends cannot be avoided unless we 1) avoid symbolic analysis 2) avoid travel/mobility.

So in 1996, at the end of my 13 months in Antarctica, I committed TO mobility and symbolic analysis, which has further mushroomed into my full embrace of digital technology as the cure for social ills. The essence is I saw the Tao as stating an untenable path. Plus I was in the first years of extreme mobility after a lifetime spent bound by localism fetish in Arkansas. I associated localism with a lack of intellect and ability, only those lacking talent tended to stay in Arkansas.

Mobility and symbolic intellectualism are my Tao.

Project Gutenberg Tao

Republican scum promoting MORE socialism

"Drill Here, Drill Now"

I'm an odd liberal progressive that has no problem with lifting moratoriums on domestic drilling. But the vagaries of meaning the Republicans are embedding the phrase with is such a sham. First, the oil that would come from any drilling in the US would be sold on the "spot market", which simply means to the highest bidder -e.g. If China outbids on the barrel of oil, China gets the oil. The spin we get from Republicans is as if the oil resources are nationalized, like in communist countries, and oil pulled from US soil automatically goes to American consumers. Ask a Republican if they want the US government to seize all oil produced on US soil, if they say "no", then tell them its the Drill Here Drill Now may mean no oil for the US consumer if the US consumers are too poor to pay for it.

Republican scum kill the free market

Reference article for this blog post: McCain’s Radical Agenda

1. Good: Republicans are for a free market ( this does NOT have to mean pro-corporations, it DOES have to mean the market will kill off bad ideas, bad people, and bad products, and it DOES have to mean if a product is successfully being sold or method of trade is occurring, including barter or living solely on goats milk -is legit by its simply existing. )

2. Bad: The REPUBLICAN government is bailing out failed financial services giants.

1. Good: Republicans are for personal responsibility, innovation and initiative as the means of bettering one's living standard, and not the role of HIGH TAXES paying for bums, idiots, and worse to have things they don't deserve. Key here is the GOP almost always run on a LESS TAXES mantra.

2. Bad: The McCain-Palin Health Plan is to do an entirely new tax in the form of TAXING HEALTH BENEFITS AS IF IT IS INCOME, with the intention of poisoning the current employer-based health insurance scheme with negative social engineering.

The negative social engineering, combined with higher taxes, would make the McCain-Palin Health Plan a double crime from a purist free market perspective.

Its worth noting that Obama is the only voice of free market principles since these bailouts started happening. He is saying, too nicely for my taste, that these bailouts are the wrong signal to the economic system. He puts it in moralistic language sympathetic for the middle-class, which I think obscures the absolutely right stance he is taking. In a free market, one can make billions, or one can lose all of one's billions -the socialistic crime is government preventing either one.

The Republicans circa 2000-present are the worst failures in American history. Security from terrorism -failed; War- failed; Economy -failed. We'd do better electing a crack whore with a history of recurring head lice. At least we could run the country while she was passed out.

Post-Apocalyptic Technology: Multimachine

"The MultiMachine is all-purpose open source machine tool that can be built inexpensively by a semi-skilled mechanic with common hand tools, from discarded car and truck parts, using only commonly available hand tools and no electricity. Its size can range from being small enough to fit in a closet to one a hundred times that size. The MultiMachine can accurately perform all the functions of an entire machine shop by itself." -wikipedia

The best documentation of the machine I have seen is at openfarmtech.org. My desire would be Multimachine aiding in the construction or maintenance of this kind of ride:

Engine blocks with correct bore:

1. AMC/Jeep 242 cubic inch "242 or 4.0 L or 4.0" straight-6. 1987-2006. Discontinued in USA, still produced in People's Republic of China for Chinese Jeep models.
2. Ford 240 (3.9 L) 300 (4.9 L) straight-6 1964-1996. Used in F-150 model, UPS trucks, and as power for ski lifts, power generators, wood chippers and tractors.
3. Cummins 6BT 5.9 L B5.9 4.01". Optional engine in Dodge Ram.

Palin Feminism is the Better Model

Good points in this article: Was Feminism Necessary?

See my initial take on Palin in this earlier post: Here.

Is Life as meaningful as a bag of stones?

http://seattle.craigslist.org/forums/?ID=101192408

Does life have a meaning? < - > 09/08 13:35:51

is life any more valuable than its equivalent in a bag of stones? Metaphysically what is the real difference?

life is < linux_lance > 09/08 13:52:29

animate, recursive, extropic. A bag of stones is not.

This line of inquiry, pretending to flatten the valuation of higher and lower things, is a pathology that began in the 20th century. Hopefully in the 21st century academia labels this as an attempt to overvalue the lower, and undermine the higher.

Post-Apocalyptic Technology: £270 Trike handmade in 48 hours

[jump to trike pics]

Previously I've posted a handmade, dumpster parts diesel motorcycle that's won many awards here. Now I have found another handmade rat bike, and have to admit it is my all time favorite example of post apocalyptic technology.

Here are quotes from Brit Chopper that form the basis of my admiration:

The entire bike was built in my front garden on a sloping driveway. I made a point of using basic hand tools ( apart from the welder ) just to show it can be done. I didn't plan any of it, just made it up as I went along. The 2CV engine cost less than £100, and the rest cost less than £70.

Time taken to get from a pile of bits to MOT( no MSVA ) ready trike: 46 and a half hours.

The frame was built from scratch by me, in thick ERW tubing. The exhaust guards are made from 10mm mild steel bar, which I bent into shape around a tree.

It's a bit of a wheelie-monster in first, being so short and light, but handles really well with no wobbles or shaking in the steering and despite only having 35 odd BHP it flies along.

[See whole magazine article here]

I should stress this trike builder is famous for extremely polished and beautiful handmade machines that have won many awards. The trike I'm featuring here is a personal project the guy did for himself, and not representative of his custom orders such as this.

Why do I like this trike so much? Here are the reasons:

1. A trike can drive in the snow. To me transportation that cannot go in snow, ice and rain is not really transportation.
2. The quickness of the project being completed. If people are building needed items, they do not have the luxury of a year long project. Remember, my criteria is post-apocalyptic adaptation.
3. The parts are ubiquitous, cheap and the work was done without expensive manufacturing machinery.
4. Previously my favorite tough snow capable motorcycle has been the Ural Patrol. But they are over $10,000 and the engines are still not as bullet proof and easy running as European and Japanese motors. If I had a choice between a new Ural, or a handmade rat trike like this Exmoor, I'd certainly choose the Exmoor.

[back to top]

Post-Apocalyptic Technology: No Welding Needed

Sections of exhaust pipe joined, not by welding, but by the use of exhaust jointing paste, beer cans and jubilee clips. The result may look unconventional, but it doesn't leak or fall apart, and did not involve the spending of money or the use of heavy equipment.

This is important for austere times such as an apocalyptic anarchic phase in which one would want to keep the machines going.

( learned this researching rat bike culture on wikipedia )

Ayn Rand is perfectly great in this interview

Rightfully Dead Rescued by Lying Scum

The US government has just made the largest economic intervention in decades -acquiring control and fiscal ownership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The governments stated motives were the prevention of greater chaos in global financial markets, and lower mortgage burdens for US home loan debtors.

So the Bush Regime and Republicans, and for that matter Evangelicals, stand for the free market? Free Market 101, Tenet #1, is that the systems decides what survives, dies, weakens, or gets stronger. To help a dying system node is to undermine the system's own means of hygiene.

Everyone on board for this government economic intervention are not for free markets. Period.

These are looter scum that just raided my pocketbook. I am taking every word of anti-socialism and anti-big government that has spewed forth from the Reagan Echo Chamber and hurling it straight at every business person and Republican administration official who was for this or benefited from it. You are scum.

My family is currently DOING WELL in this economy. We 1) do not own a house 2) do not own a car, walk to work and to the store 3) have over $25,000 in the bank 4) We work in a small firm that makes computers for broadcast news, and as the world goes to hell and people want to watch on the TV, our company gains in that very scenario.

I am living out a dream as master of disaster economics, enjoying watching the stupid plummet into a cesspool of economic and social ruin, all while I live a beautiful, safe, and austere life.

Now the Republicans have taken some of my tax money and rescued people more foolish than me. I'm sorry, weren't Repubs supposed to be the party that believes in a meritocracy? That failures, the stupid, and the underperforming get their just deserts of poverty? And now you dare prop up that very type?

I am speaking of the inner-self and personal value of all on board this hypocritical government action -you are scum inside, and I will here on out practice politics and economics designed to f*ck you in half.

Woe,The End of Days...for the foolish

Today I'm writing with a religious motif and maybe even religious hyperbole. I am playing a fool's game of "divining" meaning from ancient pasts and prophesying the future. Here I go...

I can't really "know" what happened in extremely remote history, but I do know the narratives that survived to my time, and can preach on their relative value -which old stories are worth less by virtue of whoever draws semantic sustenance and guidance from them will become manipulated lower-humans we (those drawing from better information) work to death. Or, more likely, they just die off by living in the spatial-temporal poorest choice, killed by the fitness question imposed from an evolutionary god who has no malevolence.

The first narrative structure of the Bible is the story of the Garden of Eden. My favorite deconstruction of this tale is to look at its regional origin, the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia. In that birthplace of military conscription and urbanity, the Garden story stands as primordial antecedent. The Garden has a corporeal relevance in those old river valley civilizations, the Garden is simply a over-the-top idealization of oasis autonomous culture. An oasis culture would have had fruit dropping off the trees, water, intimate family, no government, and naked people mating with no need for a sense of taboo. To further cinch my tying the Garden to oasis cultures, think of the one Big Threat that would chase everyone from an oasis paradise. A large snake.

Imagine what a tale of simple living the Garden was to both the urban Mesopotamian/Egyptian and ever-warring, ever-wondering pastoralist.

The warcraft and scalable, specialized economy of Sumeria spread to almost all of the Eurasian continent long before the European conquests of the New World. To me, the heritage that goes back to Sumerian warcraft and economy is the basis of difference between the colonialists and the natives who were easily overwhelmed. Mesopotamia's story of primordial simplicity of the Garden was still alive across the New World.

It is fine when a nude Adam and Eve, with no taboos and no need to work, live on pages of a book. But when they occupy real land, and they are discovered by Eurasia, with its heritage of warcraft and scaled economy, its time to kill off Adam and Eve or put them to work.

An oasis dweller has no rights, because a platonic utopia has no legitimacy for space on Earth.

So we are through with the easy genocide of Adam and Eve, and note how the story, if lived and literal, is an undesirable lot.

Moving on to today, and something analogous.

Movies of the 20th century have this structure: peaceful setting of family/village/company offices/farm/automobile plant; an obligatory scene or scenes in which all are in a normalized routine that is mundane, some petty bickering that is more for fun than being mean, flirting, children running, someone singing while walking or working. Then something that is a surprise and ominous (such as Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter) comes into the screenplay, or something hugely evil such as a Death Star, Decepticon, Cujo, Illyria, asteroid, or the Event Horizon.

The first thing wrong with this narrative form is the feeling of entitlement to peace we assume for the first scene people. Nothing wrong with Hollywood scriptwriters using this emotion if the audience has it to be exploited, Hollywood's just trying to make every buck they can. What is wrong is us having this emotion of entitled peace.

The second thing wrong is also the second thing on the storyboard. The impetus for change and adaptation is a bad guy, or a whole bad Empire with a guy named Darth as Project Leader. Its, like, always some Nazi, messin up our bong hit, man.

Entitlement, to peace with no contingencies attached ( or shown in the story ). And adaptation. It is rarely the antidote after evil upsets the peace, but rather a Thor-Messiah reaches out and touches someone bad with the hammer. The villagers get to go back to their entitled carefree existence, such as the last scene of boy-on-boy-ass-slapping in the bed in the Lord of the Rings movie.

All entitlement and no adaptation makes Jack a dead body.

Ok, enough beating us all up over our dominant pleasure narrative of the last century. What is the answer to making this better?

Hollywood has willingly blown up this convenience store nutrition-narrative a few times. Clint Eastwood did it a little. Some zombie movies did. But this was just nihilistic shock, not a lot of useful info on what the right system of thought would be.

The right system of thought would be eternal pragmatism, eternal sense of contingency, eternal vigilance. Not a mean spirited leaving behind of emotional attachment, not in love with "change" to the point of infatuation, but a knowing that the world is full of wrong places to live and best places to live. And making a move now if you live in the wrong place. By place I might mean anything from house, job, whole town, region, nation, or religion.

In the 80's or 90's Yuppies were made fun of in the press. Wow, kinda got that wrong. Lets go visit the pathetic dumbasses in the cancer ward of a Louisiana hospital. They stayed in their little petrol-chemical town, a press featuring stories that made them proud of their lack of mobility, and watched the smart nerd move on to less polluted regions. Wrong move, or non-move as the case might be.

Move. Not necessarily to the most wealthy position, its not that simple. Move to where its safe. Down is a watchword for me. The bad things are likely to be thrown down-wind ( pollution), down-stream( pollution and water overuse from upstream), and certainly on low lying land near water is a bad idea. Move to where, if law and social order break down, you don't have windows easily gotten into ( never live on the first floor ), and good guys with guns will be more prevalent than bad guys with guns. Or places with lots of ice or ocean that keep poor bad people far away.

Adapt. Safety will be technological, the "good life" much more so.

Give others a break, and a chance, and some margin for error, but do not corrupt this rational level of compassion with unlimited sense of connection with those who will die in the jaws of civilization disruption.

In the new kind of narrative for survival in the 21st century, we should easily give bad press for some places, dishonor traditions that produce hideously deformed people, and mock those who died holding on to the welcome sign of Shitville. On the positive, we should be screaming from rooftops about the best life practices, about the most enabling skills, about the points on Earth where intelligence finds expression and crime is abnormal. We should want to share information on what works.

In America, the Old Left and the Old Right are doing little to enable the above narratives and dialogues. But then, their constituents are those who won't move or won't adapt. Rich and poor alike in their more passive followers, they are energized by media that reveres their lifestyle as a civil right, when civil rights were intended to protect equal access to adaptation and change more than economic equality of statically defined lifestyles. Those who believe their lifestyle sacred and protected miss the point that their lifestyle is protected from harassment but not from becoming the walking dead adhering to a static, deterministic biography.

The smart walk away.

Google Chrome

I want to see the OS become the system bus device manager, with the only thing sexy it does is CPU intensive audio visual programs, or some crazy math thing, that read write locally ( and that of course is for professionals or hobbyists ). Beyond that, all the processes anyone gives a **** about are hybrids that have half of a life on the web and half on the local bus. If one was to say "I'm not using the internet today", will effectively be saying "I am just going to be checking if my OS sees all the devices connected on the system bus, and I'll check the memory access speed. Thats all I'm doing today with my computer".

Its time the OS became your plumber, not your mayor.

Numerati: Better area of focus than the lowly Turing Test

Book Excerpt: The Numerati by Stephen Baker

An Alaskan woman is too good for the East Coast

Gov. Palin is running for VP on the John McCain GOP ticket.

What is good:

• Alaska is essentially another nation, superior to the United States by being everything and more that the United States claims. This means she is a more progressive politician than anyone on the East Coast, by default.
• Palin is so much more modern progressive than Hillary, the fate of having a woman nominated and it being Palin and not Hillary is a case of the right thing happening.
• For Obama, this is a good thing because, in Lakoff terms, Obama has now framed the debate and imposed the talking points. Change, maverick rookie and youth are those points, and the GOP choice for VP is the GOP following Obama's lead.

What is bad:

• Alaska is a more progressive nation, but that works as a disadvantage to an Alaskan that comes into the heart and pinnacle of power of Washington D.C. To an Alaskan, the White House is a foreign dystopia with a hall of mirrors Palin would likely not master in a million years.
• If Palin was President, the very worst behind-the-scenes K Street Republicans would likely control things. I think Palin would hold values that would be as good for the country as Obama, but she would be a puppet led by evil handlers.

I wish it was an Obama/Palin ticket, as I bet many Americans do.

Manual for the 21st Century

Whole book online in HTML and PDF format here.

As the author of this book, I offer this grid of what the book is, and is not:

• is a terse short manual
• is for readers who can understand systems science
• is about extropic systems
• is about epistemic technology
• is about the Anthropocene geological era
• is for the bourgeoisie-technologist
• is supportive of industrialization
• is written in a style inspired by the Tao Te Ting
• is progressive ideals of cultural inclusiveness and diversity
• is compatible with the perspectives of Ayn Rand
• is supportive of evolution and change as a demand on all things
• is supportive of mobility and adaptation as a demand for all humans
• is supportive of violence in defence of society's continued dynamism
• is supportive of treating intentional pacifist localized economies as powerless tributaries
• is appropriate for all brilliant children as a source of inspiration and guidance
  
  
• not a manual with detailed implementation
• not supportive of a return to more primitive ways of living
• not for absolute local economies
• not for absolute pacifism
• not for religious morals imposed on wider society
• not for a totalitarian society engineered not to evolve
• not for legislation designed to prevent individual and community death by failure

A Model for Humanity: Shipping Containers

• Peter Lorenzi review of The Box
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcom_McLean
• The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
• John Robb blog: The Resilient Community: Malcom's Platform

Over at John Robb's blog he is musing on what a "Resilient Community", existing in a chaotic 21st century world, would look like. He brings up the abstracted platform of containerized shipping as a design inspiration for such communities.

Yes, yes, yes! Robb has hit upon something great.

I see the containerized shipping platform as a way to explicitly state the friction points in society. By friction points I mean any point where objects/people/information must pass through a "checkpoint". A checkpoint is any point of observation labor and judgement -e.g. "is this package legal or safe?", "is this person a terrorist?", "is it safe to invite this person in my house?", "should I marry him?", "are these pesticides safe? ", "is this email a virus ","is this email for joe_user@example.org","is that child tall enough to ride this rollercoaster?","are these tomatoes ripe?". Humans, as well as all animals, need these friction points. Why am I calling it a "friction point"? Because the flow of objects slow or stop at that threshold. The threshold is sometimes all physical, sometimes all semantic.

Shipping containers created a revolution by tidying up the transport and trade of goods. Before containers, goods were handled by dock workers at several transition points. This took time, the workers stole some of the goods, and the dock workers were a part of the union, socialist, mafia, and often Catholic culture. A southern trucker, with typical contempt for such working class northerner culture, saw these dock workers performing their trade on a dock and dreamed up how box the cargo up so the producers and consumers of goods could save money, and the vermin culture wouldn't have their livelihood. It worked, and now that vermin culture is long gone.

Switching gears a little here, there has emerged an orthodoxy in the countercultural schemes for a platform. These orthodoxies tend to want no friction points, or simply place all friction in the semantic distinction between their alternative society and mainstream society (Mainstream is always judged bad, alternative is a frictionless zone of no judgement). It is interesting to note the Burning Man culture as maturing through this, from wide open to needing security.

Back to John Robb's "Resilient Community" musings, and a platform. Humans need civilization, and it is time we containerized it for safe passage through time, by maturing to a point where all are conscious of the flow, and where/when the free flow points and friction points should appropriately exist. Not a police state with police judging people's validity of movement, but a people state policing with a precision, decisiveness, violent intervention, wealth and innovation protection that makes police states of the past look like what they really were: weak, pathetically poor and stupid.

A little about the non-philosophical. Sealand rocks! I was once the bookkeeper that did all the bill of ladings for cargo loaded on Sealand ships in Akutan, Alaska. The captains were really smart and cool. It was also something I liked about coastal Alaska . I remember watching a steady stream of cargo ships passing by while moored in Southeast Alaska, and thinking how densely commercial and modern in a truly contemporary sense the shipping corridor of Alaska is. Its the perfect mix of wilderness, high bandwidth flow of trade, big transport infrastructure things like ships and planes, and no farms and few roads. Most of America is a mix of rural farm-culture politics and old urban-culture politics. Alaska was neither. Those big Sealand ships, along with airline travel, are what enables modernity in Alaska, and that (with no rural farm ethos to corrupt it) felt more cutting edge than anything in the lower 48. No wonder I love Alaska.

Dead Prez Valentine's Day Riot @ Evergreen State College

Primary articles and writings for reference:

• Evergreen State College divided after riot.
• Peter Bohmer: Reflections on the Dead Prez Concert and Events After Concert.

(TESC is an acronym for The Evergreen State College.)

This is an open letter reply to Peter Bohmer referencing his writing Reflections on the Dead Prez Concert and Events After Concert, and using the Seattle Times news article Evergreen State College divided after riot as my main source of information.

Peter Bohmer,

I am a TESC alumni, graduated with a Bachelor of Science in August 2003. Between September 2000 and June 2003 I was a resident of the TESC dorms. I was politically engaged on campus, putting up posters for a Capitol fountain gathering/rally reacting to Bush's gaining of the White House with a suspicious vote count, and also was in the TESC delegation at the NW student's anti-war conference in January 2002. I give all this info to allow for some credence in what follows.

My opinion is, TESC needs police. The extreme and absolute way in which the students ( from the stage: "*Expletive* the police!") and yourself have labelled police activity on campus is the problem.

Yes, I am sure somewhere in America, likely on a Louisiana highway or West Texas town, a police officer is harassing a good and upstanding member of the community. This is horrible and we need colleges that are incubators of dissent, or better yet, the legal acumen needed to crush that kind of police abuse. Unfortunately, voices like yours, and the resonating student sentiment, want an easy fight where the war is not taking place, you want it conveniently on your own campus and away from where the danger and evil truly lives.

Your "Reflections..." commits a few errors. You set up the hierarchical structure of campus governance as the source of its illegitimacy, making the campus police an easy subsequent illegitimacy. You then use a softer looking form of hierarchy, your own cult of personality, in the request that students and faculty keep this entire issue in-house and stay mute to police investigation. You even admit that there are students and faculty that, of their own volition, want to talk or cooperate with the police ("Let us also oppose the collaboration of the Evergreen administration and some students and staff with police agencies"). My god Peter, thanks for showing us where, when and how abuse of power, the dark side of solidarity in secret societies, and the like take place in flat-hierarchy movements. Class A work there, buddy.

The other error in "Reflections..." is the distortions that occur near its closing statements. Wars, growing militarization, police. It is unfortunate the montage you present as an ultimate justification mixes up good guys and bad guys. The police officers in Olympia, and especially on TESC duty, probably hold extremely progressive world views. I've sat next to the Sheriff of Thurston County and had email exchanges with the TESC police officer while I lived there. Nice people judging by everything I saw. I don't believe they are causing any of the very real problems in our world.

This brings me to a subtle analogy on yours and a massive amount the TESC student body's values. I believe the police are recipients of stigma much like the untouchable class in India. That class in India has several middle class occupations that receive the stigma. It is hardly an analogy, but more like a direct truth that faculty such as yourself, and maybe a majority of students, see the police as an untouchable class. These police officers can commit no good act, nor offer a dialogue that assures us of their progressive values, that would wipe away the irrational and eternal hate many on the TESC campus have for them.

This dovetails back to us needing campuses that are incubators for positive change in our society. The incubation at TESC is becoming more renowned for Earth Liberation Front cells and cop hating, not a real return on our money or our faith.

Moving away from the murky world of values and intent, to immediate pragmatics in an imperfect world. Once during my residence on campus I was one of only five or so students who witnessed this event: a naked student, possibly high on something, had jumped on a moving car and bashed his head in the windshield. I saw him walking, naked, along the soccer field road. The police came up behind him, asked him to stop, he didn't respond, and they wrestled him to the ground, handcuffed him, and took him away without a scratch from their wrestling that I could see. This was a real incident, not conjecture. What would a police-less campus have done? I venture to guess, too little or too much.

Yearly the US has one or more shootings on a campus resulting in many people shot dead. Here is where your polemics meet a stark dose of reality: A guman is killing 5 people per minute on the TESC campus. What then, cop haters with no guns? What then?

JL421 Badonkadonk: Battle Tank for the Masses

• The Donk on Amazon
• NOA Design
• http://www.jl421.com/

Dunbar's number: 150 people

1. Robin Dunbar -wikipedia
2. Dunbar's Number -wikipedia

Dunbar's number is the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.

I am saving it here because the "we can only manage a social network of 150" cliche comes up so often.

It's weird, the pro-evolution crowd are the usually the same crowd that points to retro points in civilization as summations of the human condition. Social primates, village dynamics....big deal. We all know the one who makes it in New York City is the superior person, the hick in the village and monkey at the zoo are their inferiors. But in our era such talk is impolite. Thank god evolutionary advance isn't stopped by prohibitions in language.

CORRECTION: The last thing I said (above) about New York City and the superior person is wrong. In the blog comment below SerpentLord says a much more positive message that challenges Dunbar's number.

"This actually increases our obligation to be politically correct because the phrase "superior person" is just as technically backward as it is politically backward. It is a superior network, not a superior person which gives some people advantages over others.

It also allows us to address issues of "being connected" in a positive way (create an environment which helps people develop and exploit connections) rather than a negative one (create an environment which breaks up connections that give some people more advantages than others.) "

This gives a really good antidote against primitivism ( a contagion on the Left ) and crude elitism ( a contagion on the Right ). The Superior Network.

I truly welcome the Computer Overlords

...Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

-Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Atlantic Monthly

Go Google.

Real Neanderthals in Cyberspace

"Cyber means helmsman, implying steering, which should make obvious that Cyberculture is a group of people capable of steering through the web.

A search engine is the steering wheel.

So this report is mentioning the Neanderthals wondering about our village market as if they are equals, when they are not at all. They do not know or care about steering themselves through the web.

Dustbin of history, here is another class that did not evolve."

-POSTED BY: LANCE MILLER | AUG 12, 2008 1:56:34 AM

The above is my comment as posted at this URL: Why one in two people still don't search the web ( Times Online Aug 7 2008).

RIP: Meatrobot Workers of the Rustbelt

"Detroit's last great hope was the widespread love of its trucks and SUVs, combined with the undying loyalty of the blue-collar middle class. But the blue-collar middle class is dying more quickly than the truck and SUV craze—and it's doubtful either one is coming back."

-Ed Wallace, Business Week
Detroit's Past Isn't Its Future

Good.

Letter to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili

First some assumptions and declarations: If I have an opinion, then it is almost impossible there are no others that have a similar opinion. I am an American citizen, living in Seattle, voting about 80% Democrat, 20% Republican. Will vote for Barack Obama for President.

---

It is now Monday, August 11th 2008, and Russia is winning in the military confrontation with Georgia that begin a few days ago. I applaud Russia. I applaud Russia only slightly because of the legitimacy of their claims, but more because of the illegitimacy of Georgia.

1. The illegitimacy of the alliance of Georgia with the "West", especially the USA.

2. The illegitimacy of Georgia's independence from Russia.

3. The illegitimacy in the form of stupidity in which you invaded South Ossetia with an inferior military, nay, an inferior State, when compared to Russia.

Dealing with the above list, let me expand a little. In the Wall Street Journal you've tried to claim Georgia as a last line of freedom, in your words; "Let us be frank: This conflict is about the future of freedom in Europe". To me your nation is not synonymous with freedom, and my country ( the USA ) is not doing what I would prefer. I want my country to return to the pre World Wars strategy of allowing Europeans to fight each other, and the USA get stronger in the process.

How really different is Georgia from Russia? Is the independence of the Republic more to do with allowing a band of people higher offices and wealth than they would have if a mere region of Russia? Worse still, is Georgia with status of nation in an attempt to wrest economic dominion from Russia and give it to France, Germany, Britain and the USA? To me if this is just a game of nations and corporations, "legitimacy" is a merely a propaganda point for marketers of agenda's, and it is refreshing to see real might in the form of airplanes and tanks trample the flimsy world of hype.

As far as your stupidity in activating your military, go among your streets and look at the dead. They lay there because they are citizens of a weaker power that miscalculated, and equally so because my country and its alliance system are not there to aid. I am not sorry for my country's lack of aid, and wonder if you are sorry for the acting aggressively while being an inferior.

Letter to my representatives: Fight for the USA, sell things to the world. Your intervention only in spots on the map where a corporation has a pipeline, on the grounds of an abstraction such as "freedom", is pathetic. Let the corporations hire their own mercenaries and guards. Don't obscure our language sending our soldiers to guard a mafioso crony's investment in the name of freedom. And outside the border of the USA where the people are killing each other, or war is happening, take some pictures, have NGO's send missionaries or hippies to tell them to be nice, take some videos of the dead for our news outlets (to make some cha-ching) , and thats it.

F_ck you Antioch University

2004-2006 I was in the Whole Systems Design program at Antioch University in Seattle. In the summer of 2005 I took a course called "Visual Literacy Studio: Capturing Mental Images for Creative Thinking" in order to get enough credits to graduate in the standard target time of two years enrollment.

In the course instructor Farouk Seif imposed an anti-rational, anti-literate, anti-language point of reference when he said "in this course, and to be a whole systems thinker in general, we need to access a pre-language portion of ourselves to truly create". It was at that point I knew I was screwed. I have no memory of movement in my visual memories. I have only faint and infrequent memories of still pictures. When I remember a visual of a place I've been, there are no people or moving things in the visual.

I've been researching my autism more intensely these days. One cool thing occurring in the community is a pride, and slogans such as "neurological diversity" that contend that autistics are just another way of thinking, and there is also a growing opinion the asperger autistism is a good mental disposition for internet technology jobs. In my reading on autism I came across this:

"I don't think in pictures. I'm a kinaesthetic thinker, a systems thinker, a musical thinker. Mine is a physical and sensory world of pattern, theme and feel. My mind is like a mosaic, my conscious thoughts intangible until I experience them after they've been expressed- usually through arts."
-Donna Williams
(prolific autistic writer of many text books now used in special ed courses)
http://www.donnawilliams.net/about.0.html

One thing they talk about at Antioch is diversity. Almost every portion of dialogue is framed to allegedly respect diversity. Unfortunately, Antioch is an old institution fighting a specific cultural war, and have hardened into an orthodoxy that can only pursue the overthrow of Anglo-American business-culture and heterosexual hegemony to free any 'people' who are under-represented or repressed by that hegemony. But my own under-representation in mainstream dialogue was not one of the "types" Antioch cared to enable a creative or professional development for, nor even acknowledge. I had spent years identified as a great performance artist in my hometown, and moved on to accolades in the music scene of Seattle, but when I arrived at Antioch I was constantly treated by students and faculty as a "computer geek" and prone to too much logic.

Antioch is famous for providing the underground railroad with volunteers, getting many slaves out of the South and on to freedom in the North. Now they provide an underground railroad, and the cars are jails of orthodoxy in which no minority, either in skin color or neurological type, is well served. It is no wonder that most African-Americans that enroll in the C3 programs at the Seattle campus drop out within the first year. I wish I had been that smart.

Information exchange: An agreement among people

[ 1 ] XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. Data is stored in XML documents. XML is actually an agreement among people (programming people) to store and share textual data using the same method.

[ 2 ] Literacy is actually an agreement among people to store and share textual data using the same method.

[ 3 ] Communication is actually an agreement among people to store and share using the same method.

[ 4 ] Communication is actually an agreement among people to share information using their preferred cognitive methodology (mental processing and way of remembering) and using a common format during the exchange. (format can mean any norm -type of body language, short or long sentences, Elizabethan English, to 1960's era NASA/AT&T english technical.)

[ 5 ] Communication is actually a disagreement among people on the agreed upon method of communication.

I prefer to operate with the goals of [ 2 ] and [ 4 ], the others plunge into an abyss of contention.

Post-Apocalyptic Technology: My Transportation Idea

I have become strangely obsessed with designing a vehicle that fits a particular niche/capability: Interstate highway travel, winter conditions with ice and snow, declining oil supplies, ability to repair by local unsophisticated means.

The Ural Gear-Up or Patrol models come so close, but the Russian motor is not good for Interstate travel and takes lots of tending to. I've checking in with owners and dealers over the years, and the motor has gotten better but still is fragile compared to Japanese engineering. A conversion to a more dependable Japanese or European small diesel might make the Ural the greatest hardcore, survive-anything vehicle. But I'm thinking up another design and showing the gist of it in this blog entry.

I've recently been seeing a Flyrite Bobber in my neighborhood. I'm not into choppers normally, but this is such a beautiful retro technology motorcycle. 1" tubing for the whole frame makes it very minimalistic and lightweight. Everything on it looks very early 60's tech. Flyrite constructs their own frames, and will take custom orders. I would like to take a Flyrite Bobber, have the manufacturer construct a sidecar frame with fender and wheel that matches the standard Bobber back wheel. On the Ural mentioned above, its amazing snow and mud traction comes from dual wheel drive. Having Flyrite make a sidecar frame would be an especially special order, but a transfer case sending power to another wheel might be beyond what they would ever offer as a service. If that is the case, I have a quirky hybrid idea to get power to that wheel. A hub mounted electric motor. Sound Speed Scooters is in my neighborhood, and sells hub mounted electric motors for scooters. I'm pretty sure the scooter motor may not propel a larger motorcycle at 70 MPH, but that may not be necessary. The benefit of the 2nd drive wheel is at slower speeds and especially when stuck or almost stuck with other tire not getting traction. Applying a conservative amount of power to the sidecar wheel might be all that is needed to get the true benefits of 2-wheel drive in winter road conditions.

Flyrite Bobber
EV hub motor

The Structure of the Human Condition

Below are schemas of my own design. They are copyrighted as reusable with attribution for non-commercial purposes.

The Problem Space Reinforcing Loop

• Initialization: Humans born with little climate or fight/flight protections (no fur, claws, or fast legs), but do have big brains, and high contrast eye coloration which enables finer grain communication.

1. The world is a problem space(A).
2. Innovation(A) occurs as answer to problem space.
3. Innovation(A) creates new problems. Problem space(B).
4. Innovation(B) occurs as answer to problem space(B).
5. Problem space( n )->innovation( n )->
   problem space(n+1)->innovation( n+1 ) .

As much as the above maps human cultural evolution, and I just simply like it, the map may be deficient. Maps are meant to be simple abstractions, so "missing information" is a good trait, not bad. But when one one has to call exceptions too many times then the map, or epistemology/world view, is a poor one.

The map "The Problem Space Reinforcing Loop" is a hunter/protection/war intensive scheme. That is maybe why it works so well with the initialization statement, a time when humans especially needed to think about hunting and protection.

I've long accepted the archeological narrative claiming somewhere in the Middle East women began demanding more protein from their mates in return for sex. It makes sense, women need lots of protein during pregnancy. These men became ever improving at the art of hunting animals, and the art transfered over to a heightened capability of warfare. A larger scale, more sustained, intensive warfare was spawned in this time and place of human cultural evolution. Let's call this the "birth of Big War".

So far in this blog posting the material is highly plausible and probably would not be scorned if uttered in academic discourse. What follows is a pet thesis I developed long ago that may be full of holes, or just plain wrong.

The Eurasian Progress Via Many Wars Narrative:

The Eurasian landmass is structured such that it propelled human cultural evolution in a "The Problem Space Reinforcing Loop" that was especially sustained by warfare. The natural boundaries of deserts and mountains ( e.g. the Gobi and Himalayas ) created the ancient divisions of Indo-Europeans, Han and so forth. The land structured an ability to isolate for periods of internal cultural iteration, then military/trade/tribal migrations across these deserts and mountains would spark exchange of culture or militant competition of cultures.

The "Eurasian Progress Via Many Wars Narrative" is a distinction which only becomes meaningful when mentioning the rest of the world. The narrative gains traction when looking at the early years of European colonialism. Before the Anglo-American incursion into India, China and Japan's economy, the list is mostly neolithic, aboriginal people who's lands are invaded. I believe in all these places of invasion, the aboriginal cultures lacked in their cultural evolution two things: 1) a "birth of Big War", and 2) thousands of years of escalating cultural competition such as my "The Eurasian Progress Via Many Wars Narrative".

It as this point of historical awareness that most people stop and take sides. Put simply, the liberal/left/moralist camp stakes a claim of victory in siting Eurasia as a dystopia and the cultures invaded as utopias, due to the very lack of Big War and escalating violent cultural competitions. The right, old school Protestants, and amoralists see the outcome as its own validation -the European inertia of Big War as something to proud of, rather than indicted for.

I believe these opposing camps are posing a problem for our present world and where we are going. They are both right, but claiming they are both right is a useless form of resolution, something more is needed. More maps of historical narrative, and human condition, are needed.

The "The Problem Space Reinforcing Loop" forked in the mid 20th century. In the 1950's visionaries within the largest industrial companies worldwide began to discuss client-side economics versus supply-side economics. From the little I've read it seems the Japanese and Scandinavian counties wholly embraced client-side economics. Client-side economics is driven by consumers, with industry making what consumers want. The consumer is god. Supply-side economics is where the suppliers determine more of the playing field, and consumers are convinced they are being served by use of marketing (called propaganda in its earliest days). The stockholder, and corporate culture, are god.

Supply-side is an escalation of the early modern power structure with an elite, small oligarchy of merchants who crushed Kings and built armed expeditions to extend their markets. Supply-side was a little more refined, it acknowledges consumers somewhat, but believes stacking lies in the right order will fool almost all consumers. American automakers were excellent examples -putting racing stripes and fins on vehicles with engines better suited for garbage trucks, while Japanese and Scandinavians were iteratively getting better at small efficient engines appropriate for family transportation. The Americans get way with it through advertising and national or racist pride, but lose sales every time gas goes higher than prejudiced or gullible people can afford. I should also add that supply-side players tend to develop products for both the military-industrial complex and American consumers.

Client-side economics, to get to my logical endpoint quickly, are more in tune with the interests of the commoner, and the technologies are more peaceful, and less for military application. But this logical endpoint, although I think is valid, has forked.

What are commonly called "terrorists" are using ubiquitous and affordable consumer goods, such as cell phones and automobiles, to carry out deadly militant attacks. This is the fork, in which consumer technological goods are spinning into an ironic competition with the supply-side technologies of the nation-state military.

Maybe the client versus supply side dichotomy has matured to a point where I can't place unlimited faith in consumerist bourgeoisie as the end all, cure all. I do think the answer is in getting more or all people into a bourgeoisie and technological economy. I don't mean "economy" really, but rather an ethos and culture. People should believe in being consumerist bourgeoisie. But the mix in which the counter to consumerist bourgeoisie is surprisingly not an anti-materialist posture, but rather government and corporate supply-side economics.

This belief in supply-side big budget and government encouraged activity as part of the solution comes a day after Barack Obama's speech ( transcript here ) in Berlin. He speaks of world cooperation, big projects such as mitigating climate change, and extending more of the footprint and benefits of bourgeoisie market economy/culture to classes of people that see mostly the exploitative end of the bourgeoisie construct. Maybe supply-side command economy structuring can be the solution when driven by the right visionary, such as Obama.

I will begin closing this blog entry with an iterative improvement on the "The Problem Space Reinforcing Loop". It is designed more for a peaceful consumerist bourgeoisie world without militant harassment from the anti-bourgeoisie nor prejudiced racial wars or social exclusion processes.

The Opportunity Reinforcing Loop

• Initialization: Humans are globally intertwined with almost endlessly recursive transactions, making the enrichment of all an enrichment of all, and the impoverishment of one a quantifiable subtraction of overall wealth.

1. The world is an opportunity space(A).
2. Industry(A) occurs as answer to opportunity space(A).
3. Industry(A) creates new opportunities. opportunity space(B).
4. Industry(B) occurs as answer to opportunity space(B).
5. Opportunity space( n )->industry( n )->
   opportunity space(n+1)->industry( n+1 ) .

There is an extremely new form of large social behavior that is possibly economic, and seems to grow inside the client-side population, still deeper inside that, to the internet-savvy with some amount of leisure time, able to commit to building up a cultural repository for free. Wikipedia is a prime example. The engine of this has some of the old problem space/opportunity space dynamic to it. It propels forward iteratively, with something reinforcing its existence against entropy or pathological attacks. It may be the glisteningly clean apex of consumerist bourgeoisie technological culture -washed of the taint of money and all that is left is serving the problem space/opportunity space transcendently -a different animal altogether because its asceticism is not mystical and its industriousness is not for personal profit but rather globally accessible enrichment.

Move On

This blog entry is going to start out talking about my education, jobs, then technological change, but the real focus is appropriate social justice agendas versus pathological social justice agendas.

I have a Bachelor of Science from Evergreen State College. While there I attended several great courses, interned as a streaming web server admin, and generally had an enriching experience. Came out smarter than I went in.

Through those years of school up till this year I was programming in a way that got the job done ok enough, and was cutting edge in 1999. I didn't even realize how behind I was because the programming worked perfectly well for purposes at my job and homebrew projects. I decided take several O' Reilly School of Technology certification courses. The first certification, Client-Side Web Programming, I am 75% done with. This is an area I have had proficiency in since the year 2000. I took the course just to learn a few things at the last of its lessons, but it turned out so much has changed across the whole field, and the course taught me how to do the most basic things in a more current powerful style.

Here I am in 2008 paying tuition and spending several hours between 3AM-7AM to redo what already sort of was working for me in a field in which I was noted as an overachiever during courses taken in 2000-2003. I am paying money for education, working several hours a day, to maintain my status in the world.

There was an article published recently observing that web programming technologies are constantly spinning off new entire frameworks that take intense investment of time and focus to learn. The point on this is, my experience of finding an old proficiency obsolete and needing to go back to school in order to be employable is very much the norm.

So far this entry you are reading seems to be about my schooling, programming jobs, or the Internet. But think about a piece of rhetoric at least I see all the time in news or opinion pieces:"these people are so destitute, so without hope, so they turn to drugs and crime. We need to provide more jobs in the area in order to reverse this trend". That rhetoric is usually for a rundown inner city neighborhood or a third world country. For the rest, the rhetoric "People want to work, we need to give them jobs" is usually meant to reference all suburbanites, Reagan Democrats and red state Republicans. Jobs? What an empty reference.

Anything I don't buy at the local grocery store I order through Amazon.com. I just bought some Crocs (shoes). The shoes travelled from the manufacturing plant in Mexico, to the company warehouse in Tuscon, and from there it rides in a USPS truck to my door. This Amazon purchase eliminates the need for a local physical store, and all those jobs that would have built and worked inside the store. My spending power eliminates as many unskilled worker jobs as possible. At work we order massive amounts of technology supplies on the same criteria. So do millions of other consumers that use online shopping and choose the cheapest sale of an item they want.

This is the new economy, and it is here to stay.

Just as our political rhetoric throws away the generic citizen into the garbage bin of generic worker, we do they same in claiming default high valuation of life, lifestyles, and cultures. Nothing in the dynamics of reality suggest equality of life, lifestyles, and cultures. They all have varying degrees of success, and the success is very very noteworthy because the diametric opposites are the failures which include slavery, starvation, and death.

To say "look at this, a person/lifestyle/culture, so automatically wonderful" is as ignorant as saying "I have a job now, I can buy everything I need and live happily ever after". Certainly I am not suggesting a hard and fast judgement of these. I am claiming that we've had a hard and fast judgement already for too long, one that is claiming equality. We don't need to swing to other incorrect pole, but need to both recognize the very real and uneven outcomes different people/lifestyles/cultures generate AND recognize the situation is dynamic and relative.

Reality has many rich and wonderful points of reference, but they migrate to new locations constantly. No human or class of humans has a right to these good points, and other humans locked out, perpetually. The good points are open to all, but only those that migrate to the points. Migration implies non-stasis, and implies good things are not everywhere and without access contingencies.

Point is: work for social justice, implore people to migrate to where the good things are, and the migration takes changes in intellect, location, lifestyle, epistemology, or more generally culture. Stasis means a likely eventual defeat.

McCain does not know the Internet, thus, does not know the economy he would lead

(source) Getting Old Versus Keeping Current

Comment by Leonard Steinhorn, Prof, School of Communication, American University
Getting Old Versus Keeping Current

Concerns about Senator John McCain's age may be less important than how he keeps himself current and young, and on that account we must ask some relevant questions. Senator McCain seems physically vigorous, and his medical reports all point to a generally healthy man who gets regular check-ups. And despite his occasional gaffes and verbal slip-ups, which some suggest may be a sign of a tired mind, he appears to remain sharp and mentally focused. But general health isn't really the issue. When Senator McCain admits that he really doesn't get the Internet and describes on-line searching as "a Google," it suggests that he doesn't have even a rudimentary appreciation of the new economy and the next generation he hopes to lead. Arguably, our economic vitality these last two decades has been built on an information and knowledge society structured around high technology, social networks, and the Internet. It's not that Senator McCain doesn't have the capacity to understand our new economy, but it's his lack of curiosity and interest that should give voters pause. How will he inspire young people who navigate a different communication and information universe than his? He claims to speak for small business, but how will he lead the many start-ups that advance the frontiers of on-line communication or at a minimum depend on it. The United States is the first nation in history to seek its wisdom from youth rather than its elders, and that's largely because we've been the most technologically advanced and dynamic society in history, and youth adapt to that far faster than their seniors. A president needs to be cognizant of these trends and currents, or at least interested in them, because policy that flows from the White House has consequences on our culture, society, and economy. So the real test for Senator McCain has nothing to do with his age. It has everything to do with the youthfulness of his thinking.

-Leonard Steinhorn, Prof, School of Communication, American University

See also: McCain in cyberspace: "Ich bin ein beginner".

Messiah Obama

Countercultural revolutionaries take note: In my country, the police will be the good guys working for me, and the criminals will be the bad guys.

Young black aggression on whites ends in death of white. Again.

Young black aggression on whites ends in death of white. Again.

This is a pattern, just as heinous as the white on black acts of violence that was a norm before the 1960's. The pattern does harm to black households, because white households with the money become more likely to move to more exclusive neighborhoods. I'm not at all for this, and think mixed-income mixed-ethnicity neighborhoods are the coolest....if they are equally safe for all classes. If whites receive more acts of aggression in these neighborhoods, they certainly SHOULD get out.

"described as an African-American man in his 20s, about 5 feet, 10 inches tall, weighing about 160 pounds, and wearing a gray tank top, black jeans and a blue do-rag"

• Fatal attack at traffic circle. Retiree gardening in traffic circle is punched and dies.
• Gardener's vigil a cry for safety.
• It's not just traffic-circle rage -- it's a life lost for nothing

Thinking through to the other side

In the last several weeks I went through a mini-identity crisis. This was confirmed by my wife who called it just that. After spending most of my adult life riding bicycles and walking rather than owning a car, living in the urban rather than suburban, and listening to punk rock icons Husker Du, Minutemen, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers....a few weeks ago I asked myself if I was now a Republican.

This was worrisome because I live in Seattle, and also because I have over 20 years invested in friendships forged somewhat on the grounds of being countercultural freaks. Seattle is a liberal victor in the culture war, a city that started making tangible differentiation from the homogenized mall-ification of the USA back in the 1970's. As for me and my friend's atypical stylizations, if you know any of us you'll know what I mean. I'm surrounded, literally, in a counterculture that consciously chose to leave Reagan's America, totally and forever.

If I was to embrace significant portions of Reagan's ideology, I would have no friends.

Then somethings happened: In a quest to save money, I stopped renting a Zipcar on Saturdays for the weekly grocery run to Fred Meyer. I've decided to haul even the big stuff the 2.4 mile roundtrip in a little $20 cart or in the cargo hold of my son's jogging stroller. This kind of self-propelled austerity doesn't fit the with the Republican lifestyle. The other was the death of Jesse Helms, and the Republicans and mainstream media positively framing his life. I danced irreverently on Helm's grave here. Other small incidents were the content of emails from conservative magazine Human Events. One email they sent out had Fred Thompson rallying the Republican zombies to continue supporting small government and little/no taxes by voting Republican. What kind of crack does one have be on to think the Republicans save us money and make us free from government regulations? The Bush regime handed out tax money to defense and police industry's like crazy, and notoriously in ways that don't solve real security problems. I don't join political parties that tell stories exactly opposite of how things are really happening.

Then a magazine article appeared before me, and I began to see the big picture of me, my political direction, and where I fit in it the world of ideas.

The magazine is Salon, and the news feature is Apocalypse Now by Mike Davis. After this point my personal journal morphs into a step-by-step critique of the Salon's Apocalypse Now, I'm changing the webpage format to black letters and white background for visual demarcation.

The article explicitly and implicitly accepts that the Earth is going through a dramatic climate change. I totally agree, and have for at least since 1990. On this logical level, the liberals/left/Democrats have typically affirmed there is a dramatic climate change, and it is man made. The Republicans, along with sister organization Right Wing Protestants, have tried every tactic of rhetorical denial of climate change. This summer I've made a daily announcement to my wife that tornadoes have killed some people in the red state midwest. Sometimes ignorance kills. The article tries to claim the oil dollars going to build skyscrapers in Dubai are a denial that our oil dollars are investing in alternative energy. I sense disinformation from Salon. It should be no surprise the oil sources are taking their income and investing more locally and within their cultural sphere. No one should expect anything else. A more precise question Salon could have asked is how much of US oil expenditures are going to US based companies, and if these companies are diverting this income towards alternative energy development. Salon didn't, and chose to make vacuous rhetorical points with anti-wealth readers by vilifying Dubia 's mega-capitalism. The article believes the rightful distribution of wealth should be communistic. Look at this paragraph and the carte blanche ownership of oil wealth Salon gives the "poor": "This super-charged Gulf boom, which celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas claims is "reconfiguring the world," has led Dubai developers to proclaim the advent of a "supreme lifestyle" represented by seven-star hotels, private islands, and J-class yachts. Not surprisingly, then, the United Arab Emirates and its neighbors have the biggest per capita ecological footprints on the planet. Meanwhile, the rightful owners of Arab oil wealth, the masses crammed into the angry tenements of Baghdad, Cairo, Amman, and Khartoum, have little more to show for it than a trickle-down of oil-field jobs and Saudi-subsidized madrassas. While guests enjoy the $5,000 per night rooms in Burj Al-Arab, Dubai's celebrated sail-shaped hotel, working-class Cairenes riot in the streets over the unaffordable price of bread." Here is my stance: the people born in a country do not inherent the wealth coincidently generated in it. Birth does not grant any resources. The masses are a meaningless glom, and worthless when discussed within a meritocratic space. The windfall profits of oil, computer, informational, or any other industry should never be given to people just because they were born. Birth is a biological event, not an economic qualification. Apocalypse Now states more of it system of justice: "The North's Ecological Debt The real question is this: Will rich counties ever mobilize the political will... to help poorer countries adapt...Will the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted epicenters of drought and desertification like the Maghreb, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Pakistan? Will Americans... be willing to tax themselves to help relocate the millions likely to be flooded out of densely settled, mega-delta regions like Bangladesh?" The phrase "The North's Ecological Debt" is a moral landscape I do not inhabit. If my culture's adaptions and empowerments have destroyed others, then it shouldn't be such a surprise tomorrow when we do it again. If I become captive to a political fascism that involuntarily diverts my tax dollars to the equatorial poor based on industrialized guilt, I care enough to stop that enterprise by any means possible. Why? Its not that I want more wealth at the expense of others, it is forcing a religion on me, imposing on me a certain valuation of life and specific cultures. It is an instance of fascism, the worst kind: self-righteous in its assumed benevolence.

So here I am at the end of this ridiculously long post screaming about anti-industrial leftist fascists. Am I semiotically pushed back in the corner of Republican? No. Of late I'm realizing I'm being semiotically pushed into appreciating the old American ideas of freedom and independence. They were not abstractions protected for their own sakes, rather these ideals were protected because they were the environment for innovation, enterprise, and industriousness in the individual (not just the corporation). To me, the civil rights movement was originally about allowing non-whites access to that same freedom and independence, so they could become wealthier or happier through successful business or professional acumen. After the initial gains for civil rights in the 1960's, white leftists have messed it up for everyone, embedding their anti-merit valuations of life into civic dialogue at every turn, disabling the road to prosperity or happiness for anyone not already wealthy. Centrists supporting the old values of personal industriousness shouldn't allow themselves to be pushed into the Grand Old Party of Low Levels of Competent Industriousness But High Levels of Spin, rather maintain stake in their plebian interests by reasserting meritocracy into the central assumption of civic dialogue .

There. Thats me.

Anthropocene

My son was born in late January 2008. We named him North Ultima-Thule, with the reasoning that he is beginning his life in the beginning of a geological era marked by immense changes especially at the North Pole and the lands immediately south of that point.

A few weeks after his birth the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London declared an end to the Holocene Epoch, and the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch. The London Society is the world's oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale.

The importance of the Holocene Epoch can be stated in short form and without much political controversy: It is the epoch of the last 10,000 years. The last 10,000 years is exactly when agriculture began, and agriculture created settled lifestyles which created the first cities. Before 10,000 years ago humans were like the cavemen in bad movies. ( Not a joke )

That epoch just ended.

We nailed it naming our son based on the epochal change occurring at his birth. While others are wasting their time fighting to turn back the Earth to previous epochs, I'm raising my son and adapting my family for life in the Anthropocene.

While I lack an understanding of the science behind declaring geological periods, I do have personal experience that witnessed the epochal changes. While in Antarctica in 1995-6 I worked amongst scientists while they were gathering evidence of the climate change. After leaving, I received a scary email from a friend still at Mcmurdo Station. He said the road to the airport runway had just melted, a road built across ice these authorities on geological stability assumed would never melt.

Jesse Helms

Obligatory homages are being displayed by the major news outlets in the USA regarding the death of Jesse Helms. They gloss over the nuances of his life's work by simply calling him "conservative". The word "conservative" has a lot of ambiguity. We could confuse a Seattle restaurant owner of Asian descent, known for a only supporting politics that enriches her business and also for strong law and order, as "conservative". This hypothetical Asian I made up is conservative, and Jesse Helms made a career of not representing such an Asian business woman, rather his was a career throwing up barriers to any form of progress.

Jesse Helms was a type, and made a career expressing the political will of that type -dumb and useless whites who look fondly back to the Victorian era as a sanctuary within which they believe they would have had more (slaves). These are usually whites with little professional acumen nor born into a wealthy family, mediocre specimens (at best) of humanity loosing ground every day due to encroaching technological advancement that requires adaptable, functional, smart people to use it.

So Jesse Helms is just one of these dumb dogs in a people suit, and now dead. In the post-apocalypse, his skull will be dug up, kicked around, pissed in, sterilized, and sold to a Chinese warrior king.

Organizational Anti-Patterns

Found a great list of social pathologicals on wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern#Organizational_anti-patterns, I've reprinted the list below but the links are much more functional on the Wikipedia page.

• Analysis paralysis: Devoting disproportionate effort to the analysis phase of a project
• Cash cow: A profitable legacy product that often leads to complacency about new products
• Cost migration: Transfer of project expenses to a vulnerable department or business partner
• Crisis mode (a.k.a firefighting mode): Dealing with things only when they become a crisis, with the result that everything becomes a crisis
• Design by committee: The result of having many contributors to a design, but no unifying vision
• Escalation of commitment: Failing to revoke a decision when it proves wrong
• Management by neglect: Too much delegation
• Management by numbers: Paying excessive attention to quantitative management criteria, when these are non-essential or cost too much to acquire
• Management by perkele: Authoritarian style of management with no tolerance for dissent
• Management by wondering: Expecting a team to define their own objectives, and then wondering what they're doing
• Milk Monitor Promotion: A pseudo promotion (a better sounding title), with no additional responsibilities or pay increase, which is given as a quick and costless way to make the employee work harder.
• Moral hazard: Insulating a decision-maker from the consequences of his or her decision.
• Mushroom management: Keeping employees uninformed and misinformed (kept in the dark and fed manure)
• Stovepipe: A structure that supports mostly up-down flow of data but inhibits cross organizational communication
• Vendor lock-in: Making a system excessively dependent on an externally supplied component
• Violin string organization: A highly tuned and trimmed organization with no flexibility

• Death march: Everyone knows that the project is going to be a disaster - except the CEO. However, the truth remains hidden and the project is artificially kept alive until the Day Zero finally comes ("Big Bang")
• Smoke and mirrors: Demonstrating how unimplemented functions will appear
• Software bloat: Allowing successive versions of a system to demand ever more resources

• Cage match negotiator: When a manager uses a "victory at any cost" approach to management.
• Doppelganger: A manager or colleague who can be nice and easy to work with one moment, and then vicious and unreasonable the next.
• Fruitless hoops: The manager who requires endless (often meaningless) data before making a decision.
• Headless chicken: The manager who is always in a panic-stricken, fire-fighting mode.
• Leader not manager: The manager who is a good leader, but lacks in their administrative and managerial ability.
• Managerial cloning: The hiring and mentoring of managers to all act and work the same: identically to their bosses.
• Manager not leader: The manager who is proficient at their administrative and managerial duties, but lacks leadership ability.
• Mr. nice guy: The manager that strives to be everyone´s friend.
• Proletariat hero: The "everyman" worker who is held up as the ideal, but is really just a prop for management's increasing demands and lengthening production targets.
• Rising upstart: The potential stars who can't wait their time and want to forgo the requisite time to learn, mature and find their place.
• Seagull management (hit-and-run management): The manager flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps all over everything, then flies away.
• Three-headed knight: The indecisive manager.
• Ultimate weapon: Phenomena that are relied upon so much by their peers or organization that they become the conduit for all things.
• Yes man: The manager who will agree with everything the CEO says, but changes mind away from his presence.

• Napkin specification: The Functional/Technical specification is given to the Development team on a napkin (i.e., informally, and with insufficient detail) which is fundamentally equivalent to having no specification at all.
• Phony requirements: All requirements are communicated to the development teams in a rapid succession of netmeeting sessions or phone calls with no Functional/Technical specification or other supporting documentation.
• Retro-specification: To write the Technical/Functional specification after the project has already gone live.