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.

Is the "Revolution" of the oppressed killing their oppressors?

A lot of academic ink has expressed, and orthodoxies of political dissent have rallied around, the immobile poor rising up against those with more. The idea has a ring of justice.

Here is an instance of young, poor, immobile black men killing a successful, UNC student body president, 22 year old woman. The black men entered her apartment, took her to an ATM and got cash ( their are ATM surveillance photos on the web here), and then shot her several times, once in the temple.

This is not just poor doing a criminal act to get money, that can be done easily without killing anyone. This is not about money, this is the immobile poor targeting the wealthier for execution. Take a look at this story and ask yourself if this is a form of dissent you will let stand. Autopsy of UNC student-CNN.

To me, this trend of poor young blacks killing whites, asians, indian grad students, and anyone not immobile and poor is unacceptable. It needs to be named, condemned loudly in the political mainstream, and earnestly fought.

The result if this cannot be spoken about clearly in mainstream media? It stays a silent war and the relatively wealthier will continue to live in non-mixed-income neighborhoods inaccessible to the pedestrian poor. This works fine for those who don't care for urban life. For me economically homogenous suburbs are a bore. I live in an inner-city with a healthy mix of people. The poor who feel justified in killing the more successful are the biggest threat to that healthy mix of people.

Crime Spree 1

Victim: Marjorie Llewellyn, age 72 , white. While visiting the Newnan Wal-Mart the morning of March 7 ,2008, she was attacked by 23-year-old Courtney L. Lockhart. He then told her he was going to rob her, take her car and kill her. LLewellyn managed to resist, and with the intervention of strangers, survived the attack. Victim: Laura Burke, age 18, white. Lockhart held her at gunpoint on campus, forcing her into his car, driving off with her inside, stealing her bank card and attempting to rape her. When she tried to escape, Lockhart shot her, and fled leaving her to die.

Crime Spree 2

Victim: Eve Marie Carson, age 22, white. Carson's body was found at the intersection of Hillcrest Circle and Hillcrest Drive in Chapel Hill at approximately 5 a.m. on March 5, 2008.Police could not immediately identify the body, but at 9 a.m. on March 6, 2008 police investigators and the office of the medical examiner identified the body as that of Carson. Chapel Hill Police Chief Brian Curran said that Carson's death appeared to be a random act. Police recovered her car more than a mile away from her body after receiving a tip from a local witness. Police also released images from a security video of a person using Carson's ATM card. The medical examiner said that Carson had not been sexually assaulted. Carson was shot several times, including once in the temple. Laurence Alvin Lovette Jr. was arrested almost 24 hours after the arrest of a man who, police say, joined him in the murder. Lovette, 17, and Demario James Atwater, 21, were charged on March 11, 2008 with first-degree murder in the crime. Lovette is also now being held in connection with the January murder of 29-year-old Duke University engineering student Abhijit Mahato.

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Supplemental Material:

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More by me on the same subject.
Lockhart murder spree
Atwarter/Lovette murder spree
Loften murder spree

Cellephony: The Anti-Hegemony

A globe of humans all able to call one another on a computer-based cellphone destabilizes and can defeat every evil known to mankind.

I was just reading Benjamin Galbraith's English as Technology (E.A.T.), in which he posits that English is the best universal language, and serves to advance all cultures technologically. (Click here to see full document on EAT.)

It prompted me to coin a more general term, Cellephony.

Cellephony, or maybe cellphonication, is the trend or agenda to put mobil phone computer technology in the hands of everyone above 8 years old on Earth.

As an agenda, Cellephony has these intentions or assumptions:

• Global communication and computation trumps Democracy as a political condition for prosperity, peace and health.

• Preserving ancient, revered lifestyles/cultures is itself a cruel hegemony, and putting cellphones in the hands of all is intended to end all romantically pure ancient ways.

• A globe of humans all able to call one another destabilizes and can defeat every evil known to mankind.

Let Artificial Intelligence Fight Crime

Connect a global network of millions of these, and we are set for letting computers fight crime and terrorists. This is progress, this is beautiful.

UK researchers are working on fitting CCTV cameras with artificial intelligence, allowing them to more quickly respond to crimes.

The technology, being developed by University of Portsmouth scientists, would allow cameras to "hear" violent sounds and react, swiveling quickly in the direction of a broken window or somebody shouting abusively for example, before alerting an operator.

The artificial intelligence powering the camera would also be able to respond to visual cues such as fights, or violent behaviour.

Scientists say the aim is to allow the camera to react just as a human might, hearing a scream and then swinging around to find the source with the same speed as a person, which is about 300 milliseconds.

Over time, the scientists claim the AI algorithms would learn, picking up key words and phrases it associates with criminal activity.

"The longer artificial intelligence is in the software the more it learns. Later versions will get cleverer as time goes on," says Dr David Brown, director of the project.

Article: AI could power next-gen CCTV cameras.-PC Pro Magazine

Progressives in the class warfare game

Below is a copy of a post I found on a Seattle area current events website, and fully agree with the post. Progressives are using blacks in their class warfare game. Blacks are reinforced to believe all faults are in anyone not poor and not black. This ideology has contributed to the trend among blacks to target whites and Asians (anyone they see as more wealthy and mobile) for assaults or murder.

Progressives want so desperately to believe in multiculturalism. But the facts on the ground won't square. If you neglect your kids, beat them, don't read to them, plop them in front of the TV, feed them a bad diet, etc. then it's no wonder they end up in contact with government services. Progressives want to hide from the reality that ghetto culture is responsible for ghetto outcomes. It's not because someone has a particular amount of melanin in their skin that they make bad choices. It's because they believe in a foolish ideology and have that consistently reinforced by guilt-ridden Progressive elitists who love to use them as pawns in their class warfare games.

Skin color has nothing to do with anything. It's about bad choices. Speaking to skin color is a slander on all those of any color who simply work hard, play by the rules, and steer clear of defective color obsessed culture.

The racism of the left is so appalling, and it will continue the downward slide for all those who view their behavior as a function of their color or ancestry.

This is simply a false idea. All humans have volitional consciousness and we can all make choices regardless of our skin color. It's not hard for anyone to figure out right from wrong simply by observing the world around them. It is no secret that better choices will lead to success.

Don't let racist Progressives tell you that you are limited by their definitions of you based on arbitrary attributes.

-Posted by: Jeff B. on June 26, 2008 12:49 AM at http://soundpolitics.com/archives/010992.html

End of Theory, End of Models, End of the Fuel for Social Justice

I am announcing an end to social critique, at least as the most cutting edge and powerful means of social consciousness. Sure, there will still be millions who spout theories that see colonialism, racism, slavery, and aristocratic privilege as a causal circumstance for current social maladies. But these social theories will be a dialogue for those who can't afford the real analysis, which will be analysis provided by machines uninformed by academic social models. Howard Zinn, Marx, Zerzan, and the KKK are all antiquated preachers selling snake oil explanations of our world.

The person dedicating their life to social justice runs on a fuel of social models and historical interpretation. Social models and historical interpretations are now the backwater. Move the fiery indignation of this Anarchist, and that Marxist, over to the same shelf with the preacher who believes God created all life 4000 years ago. Continue to wave the red and black flags of countercultural dissent, but know your historical coherence is no longer a point of confidence.

All points of confidence come from giant computing processes such as Google. All else is a coherence of lies. The next steps for progress should be the removal of psychologists and social theorists from law enforcement and jurisprudence. Let the machines track the crime [like this], decide the guilty, and assign the sentence. Humans just intervene with their social models and pollute the process. After beta testing in the realm of law enforcement, move on to war and diplomacy.

Below are key concepts and phrases lifted from The End of Theory, and then a link to the article.

• No semantic or causal analysis is required.

• All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.

• It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later.

"This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves."

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete -Chris Anderson

The Upward Spiral

Maybe there is a ratio of ever increasing concentrations of power and system disruption, for evolution to be continuing. For instance, humans have a higher concentration of power, able to use fabrications such as clothing, and heated buildings to live beyond the environmental bounds imposed on an animal using body heat and maybe a cave/nest. When a human goes to the South Pole or into outer space this exemplifies the higher concentration of power I refer to. In semiotics the written word is a greater concentration of power over oral histories.

The "glory" is not in the particular practitioners or instances, but in the practice. You are not superior because you can read, "literacy" is the superior "way". Ship building is the superior way, not the subgroup of humans who happen to own the most boats. A small group of people hoarding political power is not a concentration of power, but an attempt at reversing the trend of ubiquity. Thirty people on Earth knowing how to read means that writing is less powerful, everyone knowing how to read makes writing more powerful.

This greater concentration of power is the upward spiral in perpetual disequilibrium. But it would not be perpetual disequilibrium if it was absolutely linear, as absolute linear is a form of stasis. There needs to be systemic disruptions and challengers to to the upward spiral. Fads such a Primitivism, in which all concentrations of power are divested, are challenges to the upward spiral, But since anything anti-upward spiral is inherently not a concentration of power, it will lose energy and die. The upward spiral of concentrated power will co-opt and injest the energy of the dying antithetical challenger, and become stronger.

Progress.

Punk/New Wave urban culture versus Muslim Provocateurs

In London a Muslim woman, acting under advisory from anti-nationalist Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, has successfully created damage to a London hairstyling salon. The salon did not hire the Muslim because of her refusal to not wear a scarf. The salon is currently being fined $7,300. Note the angry, dog faced Muslim woman in the news story photos. She sued the salon because of "hurt feelings". WTF? I thought it was common for ugly people to get feelings hurt. Also, for the style conscious, angry or cold stares are the new stupid.

How I nearly lost my business after refusing to hire a Muslim hair stylist who wouldn't show her hair.

The Monadic Marketplace of Ideas

Wikipedia/Culture/Culture as Civilization:

From the 19th century onwards, some social critics have accepted this contrast between the highest and lowest culture, but have stressed the refinement and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort people's essential nature. On this account, folk music (as produced by working-class people) honestly expresses a natural way of life, and classical music seems superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrays Indigenous peoples as 'noble savages' living authentic unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the highly-stratified capitalist systems of the West.

Today most social scientists reject the monadic conception of culture, and the opposition of culture to nature. They recognize non-élites as just as cultured as élites (and non-Westerners as just as civilized) -- simply regarding them as just cultured in a different way.

[ Retrieved from Wikipedia on June 14, 2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture#Culture_as_civilization ]

It is into this pro-monadic and anti-monadic social science debate that I want to inject the concept, phrase, and meme (about memes): "Marketplace of ideas".

"Marketplace of ideas" seems to be an early 20th century label for all or most of what we mean by the newer term "memes".

Here is where I think the anti-monadic social critics get it wrong: there is one corporeal space, and some cultural memes, which upon implementation, displace others. When the displacement happens, the "power-over" occurs, that is a form of social critique in which the displaced, suppressed, or less used meme receives a negative review. This negative appraisal is not within an academic discussion or populist town hall meeting, it is the primordial ultimate ontology called "THE STARK FIST OF REALITY".

( "Stark Fist of Reality" is an old Church of the Subgenius phrase. I was once best friends with Hypercleets and hung out with Sterno. I am mentioned in some of the books on the church. Within this blog posting I am wielding the term with authority and reinvigorated meaning. )

Its should be stressed that this is not prejudice, but rather post-judgement. It is judgement, at its most impartial moment.

What did Lance just say? Lance just said that the idea of untouched wilderness versus the idea of building Interstate highways were in competition. The idea of Interstates won, because untouched wilderness is not as good of an idea. Intestates are better, according who? The mighty god called Reality.

Reality has its moments, and it also has its continuum. These moments of judgement by reality ( in which some ideas get implemented and others are retired to corporeal extinction and relegated to the dictionary of dead things ) are not without review and reappraisal. We can review actions of the past, and take a different course next time. But this iteration is still a competition of memes, and they will be subjected to the same stark fist of reality, and some memes will win.

The anti-monad social critics have been getting away with a perverse meme: they hate the post competition phase, they hate the outcome of reality, they hate the central functionality of the "Marketplace of Ideas". The "Marketplace of Ideas" is a box, into it goes many memes, out the other side emerge less memes. In this the anti-monad social critics see a violent crime, to them the "Marketplace of Ideas" is Auschwitz.

Because most anti-monad social critics are mentally deficient, too weak to engage in dialogue about reality, and above all else too weak to live a life engaging with reality.

What did Lance just say? Lance just said that New Agers, anarchists, and postmodernists who say "all thoughts are equal", "all things are equal", "its all just energy" are wrong. Wrong enough they should not be allowed to vote.

Now to Piss Off the Right Wingers

One could take what I've said and run with it to make the claim that "whatever has happened, is right and beyond reproach". More meaningfully, one could think I'm taking the side of 18th century cultural academics who thought European civilization was the highest aesthetic achievement on Earth. Or the early 20th century Christian conservative framework of higher excellence in Jerusalem->Rome->London->Philadelphia.

Tokyo, Berlin and Iceland all disprove those conventional lineages of superiority by the old pro-monadists.

The bubbling up of memes from folk music(s) has been great for the world. This is just one example out of many of the benefits of retiring the old elitist ideas about what civilization is. I once owned a classic music theory book written in 1938 that made the claim that black communities do not make music but rather a kind of noise. Reality has thankfully dealt that claim a death blow, with jazz becoming the one of the most respected art forms in the world. But what came to the rescue of black music? The anti-monadist social critics writing papers and lecturing to students? Or the Marketplace of Ideas working inside the heads of both white people and black people, and the songs of Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix becoming the monadic cultural standard?

I contend that the old conventions of pro-monadists were off base most or all the time. Not because they were mean spirited or politically incorrect, but rather because too few ideas came onto their table for review. We make a mistake calling them wrong because they were elitists and unfair, we should rather say they were wrong.

A short word needs to be said about "free market" economics. I actually support this kind of economics, which makes me an enemy of socialists/leftists. I just think the way lobbyists have leverage, and courts intervene to protect what society is clearly trying to kill off, are both examples of how far we are from allowing the free market to work its magic. Short of it is, the government needs to let society kill off the bad ideas.

Progressives need to rediscover the Marketplace of Ideas

Hey flat-hierarchists, know why you have no power in Washington DC, or even in your own home? Because if every idea is equally valid then you can't get anything done, which if we all did lived like you, we would die. It is actually much better having George Bush lead us rather than fall in the bottomless hell pit of a Portland hippie consensus community. We've seen the countercultural hippie way from 1968-2008, and it sucks.

Here is where I make the pitch for an innovative evolutionary step. Don't kill all the flat-hierarchy memes! Just go back to the "Marketplace of Ideas" as a box. The flaky, weak, overly sensitive anti-monadists were freaked out at the killing off of memes at the output end of the box. What was missed is the input part of the box. More memes need to go in.

Thats the revolution, baby. Thats the fairer world. Thats the better world.

Don't hate competition and attrition inherent in the "Marketplace of Ideas", don't hate THE STARK FIST OF REALITY. Use them, they will happen anyway. Rather, hate those who cannot stand having their ideas critiqued and not selected, and also hate not having enough ideas at the start of the process.

Progressives need to fall in love with THE STARK FIST OF REALITY. They need to become cops, bank loan managers, Interstate bridge designers, and hardware store owners. Progressives need to continue their anti-elitist identity, but lose their anti-realist stance. THE STARK FIST OF REALITY weeds out those who cannot deal with it.

Deal with it.

Network Consciousness: The Foundation

Through the 20th century discussions on the feasibility of human-superior AI ( HSAI ) was weighed down by two standard axioms:

• Computers execute commands, and thus are limited to a finite list of commands they are given.
• What computer consciousness there is, is not embodied, and thus can be lost in eternal loops that have little or no corporeal use.

But what about the database query and/or regular expression operating on a global network? Especially within systems such Google and Amazon?

Sure, the computer(s) still execute a specific action after a conditional statement embedded with the query result. It is in the query that we find the novel. Maybe decades ago the query result set was a less interesting place, with general public network activity so low. Post 1995 Metcalfe's law may make the query result set a much richer place for semantic emergence to occur.

I realize databases or log files have domain specificity built in to the data structures. What is open ended is the endless recombination of these data structures. The novel results of new combinations, fed into more databases structured by the novel data scenario, are then the next source of queries. It is the accumulating layers of novelty recorded, re-mined, and reacted to that is emergent. It should be emphasized that before the cloud computing era, such large novel configurations in corporeal space where sometimes apprehended by conscious beings, but were largely dissipated over time due to no means to record the configuration in strongly bounded language. Historically, the best means was poetry.

Just as animals lack a means to store their cognitions in a strongly bounded language, and retrieve many years after the death of the perceiver, humans have lacked a means to do the same for large social enterprises typical of a global economy. A cloud computing platform with access to a high enough amount of network activity and physical environment sensors can make that evolutionary leap -the cognitive grasp, storage, and reappraisal of global activity.

To turn the tangent of perspective, I'll posit that we already do this to some degree with computers. Financial analysis is but one intuitive example. Across all examples it should be noted the action taken after the analysis is in service to a finite domain of activity -whether financial, crime solving or other. The emergence hits a road block of containment within a government department or private enterprise, the exponential rise of value within the Metcalfe Law hits a terminal point. Terminal points are often death in emergent systems.

A jump start to the Network Consciousness would be a transparent, globally accessible system. Here is the sound of rubber hitting pavement: transparent, globally accessible system with all your purchases and every surveillance camera also. Finally, any computer could mine the data, any person could mine the data. Emergence is back on the table.

It is at this point in my spiel that most people say

"Wow, if there is Network Consciousness, and the Network knows more about what humans are doing than I do, I'd like the Network to be the manager of humans. I think computers would be more fair, and our legal frameworks already do not access human judgement, and are bounded by sequential logic. The Network would probably provide better service than legislatures and courts. I'm for world peace, I'm for the Network ruling humans."

Exactly.

Free Speech and the Long Tail

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United States eventually formed the basis for modern First Amendment law.

"The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market," Holmes wrote. "I think that we should be eternally vigilant," he added, "against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death."

This "competition for acceptance within the marketplace of ideas" sounds like an excellent governor in a more linear hierarchical society, but in a postmodern age this changes to multiple marketplaces. And long tail economics positively blows up the "competition" part of the jurisprudent reasoning.

Welcome to the 21st century, it should be an interesting ride.

An Angry Black Male Murdering Jihad?

Crime Spree 1

Victim: Marjorie Llewellyn, age 72 , white. While visiting the Newnan Wal-Mart the morning of March 7 ,2008, she was attacked by 23-year-old Courtney L. Lockhart. He then told her he was going to rob her, take her car and kill her. LLewellyn managed to resist, and with the intervention of strangers, survived the attack. Victim: Laura Burke, age 18, white. Lockhart held her at gunpoint on campus, forcing her into his car, driving off with her inside, stealing her bank card and attempting to rape her. When she tried to escape, Lockhart shot her, and fled leaving her to die.

Crime Spree 2

Victim: Eve Marie Carson, age 22, white. Carson's body was found at the intersection of Hillcrest Circle and Hillcrest Drive in Chapel Hill at approximately 5 a.m. on March 5, 2008.Police could not immediately identify the body, but at 9 a.m. on March 6, 2008 police investigators and the office of the medical examiner identified the body as that of Carson. Chapel Hill Police Chief Brian Curran said that Carson's death appeared to be a random act. Police recovered her car more than a mile away from her body after receiving a tip from a local witness. Police also released images from a security video of a person using Carson's ATM card. The medical examiner said that Carson had not been sexually assaulted. Carson was shot several times, including once in the temple. Laurence Alvin Lovette Jr. was arrested almost 24 hours after the arrest of a man who, police say, joined him in the murder. Lovette, 17, and Demario James Atwater, 21, were charged on March 11, 2008 with first-degree murder in the crime. Lovette is also now being held in connection with the January murder of 29-year-old Duke University engineering student Abhijit Mahato.

All the above crimes were committed by young black men and the victims were white. To these I should add the story of mother and father ( both white ). Two black men kicked the door in on their home around 7:00 PM one evening, made them kneel and the floor, and held guns on them. My dad talked the men out of killing, and the men stole my mother's car. They were later apprehended and are serving time. My mother tells me she regularly overheard blacks talking loudly in front of their house say "we need to get these whites out of the neighborhood". My mom and dad never spent another day in that house, so I guess the racial cleansing by the blacks was successful.

My sister had the misfortune to see 17 year old, and black, Joshua Leallen Loften blow the head off of Dean Worden. a white man, in front of his wife and children. My sister was at close range and actually saw the man be shot and die. The black killer was beating a 50 year-old white woman because she would not give him her purse. Worden had yelled at Loften to stop beating the lady, and Loften killed him. This was in pleasant shopping area on a Sunday afternoon.

Could we have a secret terrorism on whites in the USA? I contend that we do. Within my immediate family there are two incidents of black males terrorizing or killing whites. Definitely a pattern.

The most major social catastrophe that will result from these murders is the eroding of progressive gains in poorer neighborhoods. The public under threat from this Jihad will do more of the same: move to safer and more exclusive regions. The losers will be poor black neighborhoods, full of hard working regular people and home to a few militantly hostile agents.

It is interesting that all the above cases were solved by viewing surveillance cameras. I believe these cameras are saving us. These men are now behind bars because of the technology.

I would like to see the public gain an awareness of this black murdering of upwardly mobile college students as a pattern, give it a name, and start aggressively combatting it. As a culture we should be able to articulate a solution that pinpoints these militantly angry blacks as worthy of death without saying a general statement about blacks -a progressive offensive posture.

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Supplemental Material:

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Lockhart murder spree
Atwarter/Lovette murder spree
Loften murder spree

Asperger's Self-Discovery Chronicles: Cultural Evolution

In previous postings (here) I have grappled with trying to explain myself as dependent on a certain cultural and environmental ambient. Basically I had claimed we are on different evolutionary tracks.

That claim about different evolutionary tracks gets a little more subtle, and loses connection to racism, by adding the ideas put forth in a Kevin Kelly blog posting (here). He brings up a central thesis of Joseph Weizenbaum's book "Computer Power and Human Reason", which basically argues against embracing computer use due to society eventually becoming overly dependent. From the book here is the general form:

"The computer becomes an indispensable component of any structure once it is so thoroughly integrated with the structure, so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that it can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure. That is virtually a tautology. The utility of this tautology is that it can reawaken us to the possibility that some human actions, e.g., the introduction of computers into some complex human activities, may constitute an irreversible commitment. . . . The computer was not a prerequisite to the survival of modern society in the post-war period and beyond; its enthusiastic, uncritical embrace by the most "progressive" elements of American government, business, and industry quickly made it a resource essential to society's survival in the form that the computer itself had been instrumental in shaping."

-Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum

Kevin Kelly goes on to do a semiotic experiment. In the above text and reasoning process he replaces "computer" with "printing". He then goes on to do the same with "writing" and "the alphabet". What emerges from these word replacements is that societies have committed this act of transformation many times over the last ten thousand years. (Think of the US Constitution, it has "freedom of the press" in its forefront assumptions of human enterprise.)

Now let me place myself in this historical narrative: If I was plucked from this electronically networked, literate, secular, and morally ambiguous society I operate within....I would become of these :

• dead ( excuse the drama-agitprop )
• become less effective (which could escalate into less employable or divorced)
• become politically evil/malicious as a fight response to less positive environment.

No wonder I'm so sensitive about where I live, and when I think back to my earlier years in the Bible Belt south I was a less effective and politically evil person. Since moving to Seattle, with a few years also working in Alaska, I have felt a deep sense of coming home. The city has a default literacy ( highest per capita of bookstores in the US), computer proficiency, secularism , and love of big nature (mountains and ocean) embedded into the cultural ambient. The ubiquity of these defaults works in my favor, and I contend that I was born with some hardcoding that depended on these defaults.

In the last year I've started putting the pieces together to understand my neurological type ( Autistic: Asperger's Syndrome). I am starting to understand why some places, and some ideologies, can make me extremely comfortable and happy or extremely uncomfortable and go on the offensive/defensive.

Starting in 1996 when I was in places ( Antarctica, Seattle, Alaska) that offered the ambient culture/environment for my neurological type to succeed, I did. During my tenure in schools (Evergreen State College and Antioch U) where an anti-intellectual and eco-anarchist Primitivism strongly informed discourse, I became many kinds of unhappy. While I support any type of lifestyle choice, most of the discourse in these schools was embedded with real intent to topple the technologic, rational, intellectual and literate world and replace with something more biologically bounded.

Eliminate me in the process. Eliminate my neurological type in the process. Eugenics.

I remember an experience in class with the instructor, Farouk Seif, pursuing an incremental part of the program to eliminate my neurological type. He demanded that our projects to be turned in for the class reflect a certain criteria for creative process. That process needed to access a pre-intellectual level. A place without language ( thus by implication without logic ), a place totally visual and fluid. I do not have moving images in my head. My memories are totally void of movement. When I remember places I've been, I remember the buildings, hills, trees, streets without people, because people move. I also have a blank in my memory concerning time. I have a diminished sense of sequence or duration (my wife noticed this in how I do not know the last things agreed upon in a group discussion). For me, the use of logical constructs is essential in managing reality. It is also key in being creative, I mix and mash-up things based in logical categorization, without this I am as lost in creating as I am in interpreting reality. My instructor, who had a political agenda in which all this anti-cognitivism served, was trying to turn back the clock on humanity and our technological dependencies, and kill me in the process.

No wonder I wrote a meme designed to kill Primitivists.

My Book: Who it is about, What it is about

I have published a 26 page book through Amazon.com's publishing company, and is now on sale. The book is called "Post-Apocalyptic Industrialization". It can be read for free here, and is purchasable here.

In the book I mention enslaving pacifist communities and killing anarchist communities ( in Chapter 2-D ). I want to offer up why this is in the book. First off, the book is a fiction about the future, so nothing in it is literal. The book's 50% goal is a memetic attack on a political agenda called Anarcho-Primitivism, Post-Apocalyptic Eco-Anarchism, and simply Primitivism. ( Google and Wikipedia are your friends on researching this ). My relationship to that community of activists is personal and first-hand, especially while attending Evergreen State College and/or living in Olympia Washington.

My memetic attack is not meant for a more generic anarchist, or pacifist, or person living in a more natural lifestyle. My book is a meme, and it lives to attack a people and their vision. The specific vision I attack is expressed in EXHIBIT A of this post. That rant is totally inline with language and reasonings I've heard from dozens while at anti-war meetings, house parties, and classroom seminar discussions in Olympia.

To cut to the chase, I am an enemy of Primitivists. I am not wealthy, tied to organized religion, nor like the bland, ugly landscape east of the Mississippi River. I am functionally poor, sort of anarchist in social reasoning, atheistic, and demand the presence of big nature in the form 14,000 ft mountains and the Inside Passage. My preferences and marginalization put me in a space perfect for the Primitivist sales pitch. I've listened to the sales pitch, turned down the offer, and the salesmen still keep harassing the whole planet to buy their offer. It's time to X those salesmen out of this world, and my meme is designed to do that.

One assumption in the Primitivist mind is when the big powers ( police, military, corporations ) are in decline or gone the Primitivist ethos, lifestyle, and ideology will gain a reinforcing loop of ascendence. My meme is intended as a bomb in the middle of that reinforcing loop. The power of that bomb is not corporate technology or money, but rather an anarchic type of geek unhindered by the current paradigm of morals and social constraints. In a circular kind of story line reminiscent of Planet of the Apes, my meme could provide some of the initialization of such a geek culture preying on the weak, defenseless Primitivist camps of the Pacific Northwest. That is why it is published in old-school media of paperback, rather than solely digital meme. As a book, it could survive a computer destroying apocalypse, and resurface in the hands of people capable of carrying out its mission.

Exhibit A: Anarcho-Primitivist Stance

You call for a cultural transformation to save civilization, yet there is nothing worth saving. You want to save something which is based on the destruction of the natural world, you're a hypocrite. You say we're wanting suicide but the very nature of continuing civilization is suicidal. Civilization isn't going to be brought down by us, it is going to collapse, and that is all we can do is aid in bringing the collapse faster because the sooner it does collapse, the better off this species will be. Yes, many people have to die, but many people are going to die if we keep with this civilization. How many people a year are dying as a result of carwrecks? Of preventable diseases? Of sickness' from the food? Of police attacks (and yes, police are a result of civilization)? How many a year die of starvation? How many will die because of global warming (which will continue if we keep up with this way of life)? Christ, how many sharks die per year because of this civilization? Are you seriously willing to accept the continual murder of the ocean? Your solution to the problem still is including industrial civilization which is insane. What do you suggest, alternative energy? There isn't enough alternative energy to meet the energy demands of this world, even if we go with the unrealistic options of ethanol and biodiesel. You recognize that civilization is unsustainable, yet you are stupid enough to believe we should continue on with it anyways? Do you understand what that means when something isn't sustainable? As anarchists should we just accept Libertarian thought and go with "lesser" government until we are finally left with no government? Or should we just abolish the whole fucking State? The point being, civilization leads to domination and hierarchy, we all should recognize this by now. It leads to work, exploitation, slavery, war, etc. Your argument of tribal wars ignores that there was no such thing as tribal wars before the rise in agriculture which also created the concepts of priviate property, ownership, and settlement. Primitivism argues that we should go back to living in hunter-gatherer societies. You're calling for a slow change, gradual change, which is completely illogical, and doesn't take into account that we don't have the time to make a gradual change for one, and that it's not worth making. The Earth is being killed and you're willing to accept that because you are too afraid to live without civilization. I'm not. We need this Earth to survive and your leftist bullshit ideas are not going to save us, you can have all the energy efficient lightbulbs you want, but if our lifestyle is still unsustainable then it doesn't fucking matter. If I can't drink the water, breathe the air, and live, then it doesn't matter what kind of world we live in. Read Derrick Jensen's Endgame, or something by John Zerzan, at least figure out what the hell you're attacking before you attack it, this essay is full of flaws and doesn't understand at all the thoughts of primitivists. -posting from anon at http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/2786

Woman = Progressive

Hillary Clinton Presidency Historical Significance:

When there is finally a woman leading the Anglo-American Empire we will have entered a new era of progressive values and thrown off dominance by the aristocracy.

Brooks: Potter > Caulfield && Obama == Caspian

This blog entry is by guest blogger Seth Galbraith.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/opinion/23brooks.html?_r=1&em&ex=1211688000&en=01ff46e1aad3c12d&ei=5087_&oref=slogin

Brooks' "Alpha Geek" stereotype is similar to Paul Kagame's (technology-based) "champion" reputation.

As for myself, not speaking for Brooks, I would go as far as to argue that the alpha geek ethos can be traced to early experimenters with modern publishing technology including the likes of Darwin, Twain, Marx, Tolstoy, Dickens, etc. But a fundamentalist primitivist backlash grew as a reaction to the age of steam, iron bridges, semaphores and telegraphs. This conflict can be seen embodied in literature like Frankenstein and Dracula. Physical manifestations of the backlash included efforts to preserve slavery in North America, wipe out stubborn indigenous populations who were able to survive largely by mobility and trade rather than being tied to the land, and spread colonialism into central africa and asia (i.e. disperse the landed gentry ethos to ensure its survival in an age of increasing technology). I will go as far as to implicate this struggle for the dominance of meat over mind as a major cause of all wars in the last 150 years from the American Civil War to the African World War.

The false dichotomy of "popular healthy jocks vs. socially and physically inferior nerds" promoted by psychologists ("science falsely so called") in the mid 20th century is perhaps a direct result of the climax of WWII in which meat seemed to make a final triumph over mind, with a great blood sacrifice conquering the evil axis "masterminds" (actually meat worshippers themselves) and mind being thoroughly co-opted by meat in the production of the ultimate meat-lovers weapon: the Bomb. But this resurgence of the meat was/is futile. The progress of mind can be slowed, and even temporarily reversed, but in an age of information technology mind cannot be stopped for long without also annihilating the meat.

Extremists: get out of my party

There is a rhetorical strategy you can play if you are a child or adult. The child's goal is this: she does not want to eat any vegetables of any kind. The child is smart, and knows if she announces her true goal the parent will see the extremism of the stance and deal directly to nullify that goal. So the child sits passively waiting on a series of sub-issue questions from the parent: "Do you want carrots?", child: "no"; parent: "Do you want spinach?", child: "no". The parent figures out the brilliant rhetorical strategy of the child very quickly, and moves on to new methods to implement the oppressive hegemony of healthy eating.

Political activists have the same rhetorical tool. It is called "starving the issue". If the activists oppose the death penalty, and attempts at outright banning it failed, then they can change tactic to pursue legal courses banning each of the predominant methods of carrying out the death penalty.

Since September 11, 2001 there has been a predominance in the Not-Right-Wing in the USA towards this sort of issue starvation when it comes to The War on Terror. Whether it be jailing of suspected terrorists, executing a war campaign on foreign soil to seek out and kill an enemy, or investigative work on domestic soil to find fund raising for terrorism -various nonprofit organizations provide the sub-issue "no" to specific methodologies in The War on Terror. In simple dialogue itself, I have made statements pointing to the profile of the terrorists we are at war with ( Islamic + Extremism + Violence), and had progressives counter with horror that I did not include a long list of actions by white Americans in the profile of terrorist.

Thankfully, Barack Obama spells an end to the dominance of this class of activists in the progressive identity. He makes a grand and brilliantly nuanced stance not at all in league with the Neoconservative morons who couldn't command a war at their local golf course, and also not in league with the "No War, Ever, and Shut Down the Police Department" crowd of humanistic anarchists. Obama is the best inconvenient truth to hit both the stereotypical right wing and stereotypical left wing in the USA. He is a brown man, and he would send the US military to foreign soil to kill brown people who are threats to Americans.

Obama rocks.

Please read: Source documents:

• Tough Talk on Pakistan from Obama

• Obama Admires Bush -David Brooks

Post-Apocalyptic Industrialization -the book

FREE-->See and read the whole book here for free. (PDF)

Post-Apocalyptic Industrialization@ click here to goto amazon.com

Please consider posting a review on Amazon.

What I ask of friends and anyone reading this:

1. Don't be offended by the content. It is a very contingent futurist scenario partly intended to undo our assumptions of what the future will be.

2. Read it if you can. Forward this blog entry or the PDF to others you think might be into this kind of material.

3. The actual reading content is under 25 pages. An easy read.

Weapons of Mass Reconstruction

How Governments can use Green Computing, Free Software,
Open Standards and e-Commerce Culture to Defend their Sovereignty,
Promote Social Justice, Save the World, and Get Rich Quick.


By Seth Galbraith

Go to Published Google Doc

Hillary Clinton : The Greatest Video of All Time

Post-Apocalyptic Technology: Sustaining Higher Culture

Yesterday I wrote a vision-spiel about home computer and internet use after a major social collapse (goto that blog entry). I called the next paradigm internet the Organic-Connected-World (OCW).

In the 20th and 21st Century, world systems interventionists have been trying to create varying forms of revolution that shatter global interconnectivity and economy of scale, or trying to turn back the clock to that state of affairs when WASPs ruled the world. I recommend neither. I recommend a dialectic of the two -recognizing that industrialization and global trade brought forth a higher culture, but break the strong semantic and functional binding with anything WASP. To accomplish this a collapse of certain aspects of the global system needs to occur, but not an eternal total collapse such as many leftist systems interventionists dream of.

So I'm asking the reader to jump in sideways to get an idea of the vision-spiel, maybe go to my previous post here, read the comments my friends made in the post also, then proceed to the words below as my stream-of-consciousness tech spec-ing for this paradigm shift that reinvents global trade and industrialization.

The OCW harkens back to the original Internet design spec of Paul Baran -a resilient packet-switching network that can withstand nuclear attack.

Think of that 1969 internet, designed for sustaining communication while nodes are being subtracted by nuclear bombs, viruses, gremlins, or The Chicago Bears. That internet was not for media-propaganda as it is today. By propaganda I am not pointing at the State or Madison Ave only, but also myself and this blog. We have gotten used to this save-my-rant-as-a-one-to-many-document. I believe the OCW would weed out a lot of this superfluous stance-oriented dialogue, and replace with a more functional-in-the-now dialogue.

This would be a major blow to how we've gotten used to dialoguing, but my contention is it would be healthy because it would get people away from living their lives as reactionaries to each others oppositional stances. ( I'm not a naive peacemonger, but do believe most that aren't a murdering thief or religious terrorist are wanting a lot of the same baseline culture.)

So why get online then, in an era of transient and ecosystem oriented content? Answer: To survive, or survive in better style. More specifically: To trade globally(!) THAT is the design challenge of the OCW. The 1969 internet was designed to let military brass and FEMA send messages to each other while the situation was dire and ad-hoc. I'm not anti military-brass or FEMA, but believe trade as its been practiced since colonialism is more responsible for creating higher culture. The OCW's role should allow that.

So there is the design challenge, as I see it. Stepping inwards towards tech specifics, I see these vision nodes:

1. Set up research lab with ability to rewrite Knoppix Live-CD versions. Write the viruses and rewrite the Live-CD as if they are all that exists. The reason: the pieces are not going to connect to today's pieces.

2. Call the Live-CD the hardbits, the viruses the softbits. ( Notice how hardware finally gets dethroned as an important level of the schema in this paradigm)

3. Make the softbits work in a fast scale network modality. From user perspective: User remembers the node addresses of trusted entities. At each boot up user dials to 1 or more of these trusted nodes. If all trusted nodes are dead/evil-infected, then user is SOL and starts finding some. Once a node is reached (evil of good) the user fast propagates in connectivity ( I guess this is just DNS 101). The higher level softbits provide a means to Ebay/Craigslist in this transient ecosystem. At the most ambitious I would like to see the OCW facilitate large scale operations such as motherboard suppliers in Taiwan providing their wares to a computer manufacturer in Seattle.

Post-Apocalyptic Technology: Home Computing

In 2010 the Immediate-Connected-World (ICW) broke. Due to a combination of 1) Corporate dissolutions without replacement 2) Terrorist/activist systems disruptions 3) and decline of uniform and ubiquitous governmental services -the Immediate-Connected-World broke into the Organic-Connected-World (OCW). No, we did not revert to biologically bounded lifestyles ( an intellectual way of saying "living like the New World natives once did"), rather the world shifted a little sideways towards more ad-hoc means of interconnectivity and high technology.

In the realm of personal computer and internet use the world has quickly adapted. Almost universal is the use of Knoppix Live CD's and Android for operating systems. All operating systems that have any success in connecting to the OCW are booted from a read-only configuration. The space in which a user saves preferences/bookmarks and document entries is on The Virus (TV).

TV is a constantly self-redefining, self-regenerating, warring, policing and benevolently serving virus swarm functioning as the glue for the OCW. The interactive EXE and the modifiable DOC no longer lives on the client machine nor on the server farm, but on the TV . The network is still the computer, and Google is still the interface. But since the fall of ICW a user accessing Google search (the OCW version at http://600673.com/) is not likely in direct contact with the Google server farm in The Dalles, but rather accessing a transient ecosystem of bots/viruses that both herd the user's information/interactivity (input) through the swarm and also herd search results (output) to the user. Information is stored in a transient and ad-hoc manner within bots/viruses currently alive on machines. OCW emerged quickly to fill a needed function space, and also achieved a once impossible computer science goal. The OCW is a bizarre accomplishment of the long held desire to share computational power across all computers on the network. In 2008, cloud-computing allowed a small 400Mhz device with 1GB storage to utilize Google CPU/Storage resources. In 2010 every currently online CPU has combined into The Ad-Hoc Cluster CPU TACC.

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Supporting documents:

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