From the UN to VNs

I’m not the first to remark that the hallmark of USA nationalism, at the peak of American confidence (we can say hubris), post WW2, was its internationalism. American Express. Pan Am. TWA. The United Nations even. Liberalism embraced the UN but then the UN was in New York and seemed plenty American. What had been American schools overseas (with that “A-word” in their name) became International schools (A became I). The American School of Manila (ASM) became the International School of Manila. That’s one that I attended (Class of 1976). We just held a reunion in Dallas, which I missed (I’ve been to one), but enjoyed vicariously through Facebook.

Fast forward and the whole nation-state system lacks much confidence, as when borders become too fluid, they simply snap, and then people don’t know if their citizenship means anything and they start to look for new roosts, perhaps within the bowels of an avuncular mega-corporation if such can be found. Become a salary man first and a citizen a distant second; that’s one strategy I’ve seen. Survival being the goal of course. Many turn into refugees.

In the Quaker sphere, we often speak of the refugees we’re always getting from other religions. Some megachurch will implode or explode, due to scandal or other loss of reputation, and families start looking for more ideological security. Unprogrammed Quakers pride themselves on how sparse a brainwashing one needs for Inner Light training. The ideological baggage is fairly lightweight and involves doing, more than believing. Join committees and run a business, the Meeting itself, with your peers, role modeling Good Order. See? Easy peasy. Take your inner light training out into the world.

However Quaker meetings are not all encompassing when it comes to one’s lifestyle. They don’t provide livelihoods directly, meaning committee positions are unpaid, up through and including the Clerk (like head pastor). All these roles rotate, if it’s your typical functional Meeting, with Nominating Committee recruiting a next cast, for Business Meeting to approve. 

So Friends still need jobs, a source of income. We didn’t have UBI yet in 2024, although the old folks had their SSI (social security income) in many cases, in addition to whatever pension. Which is where citizenship comes in again. We’re back to nation-statehood, and ROI (return on investment).

What was eroding the UN were: fluid borders and the shaking loose of families from any security network called a nation. We’d lost nations before, such as Prussia. Plus they had often drastically changed in size (look at Lithuania). 

But that kind of churning was a result of warring, and the whole point of the UN was to impose a freeze. Let’s give our states true self determination, post-colonial self respect, and focus on development instead of warring. That was the vision. 

But in 2024 we’re back to churning. The head of Israel is saying Israel’s neighbors are not real nations. Ukraine was unable to sustain its former unity. Yugoslavia had ominously disappeared in a rain of NATO bombing.

To paraphrase the opening of Grunch of Giants, the author wrote: “I could see from a young age that the nation-state system, as crafted, was not designed for a world that works, as the ethnicities would continue with their culture-clashing and refugees would be everywhere, as humans scrambled to survive aboard their little spaceship. So what I resolved to do, starting around 1927, is tell the world I was working for all humanity, messianic as that might have sounded, but I was thinking more through architecture than religious revival. Having put myself on the spot in that way, I would no doubt grow as a person.” 

Fuller avoided cult leader status by joining the ranks of great writers, where one has fans more than followers. Here is where many will part company as they’ve checked out the writings in question and found it far from great. Here’s an engineer speaking in stilted terms, having never bothered to learn his mother tongue sufficiently, is often the reaction. 

Synergetics is the kind of book an impatient reader slams shut, maybe because they’re not categorizing it correctly. Think of works by Joyce, Pound, David Foster Wallace… their writings were “experimental” in nature, a word Quakers also use. The difference is that Synergetics is consciously about focusing on generalized principles, meaning it’s designed to have pragmatic consequences.

In response to a nation-state system likely headed for a train wreck, Fuller got to work in the early 1920s on a new mindset or framework, involving conceptual art informed by solid geometry. The UN building in New York could gaze upon a Geoscope in the East River, an illuminated global displaying global data. The whole of Manhattan might be domed over, saving on heating and cooling bills if you do the math, as it’s all about surface area to volume ratios. A city of skyscrapers is built like an old fashioned water heated radiator. 

Would the Geoscope ever happen? No. Is New York domed over? No. So was Bucky a failure? No. This was conceptual art, working on the mind of the beholder. Instead of the Geoscope, we got Google Earth. And we do all live in domes: they’re called skulls.

With the crumbling of American self-confidence, typified by the shock and revulsion over the raging battlefields, killing fields, and slaughter zones, that sense of being rendered a powerless bystander, its version of globalism, its internationalism, crumbled as well. 

The UN had been a big part of that. The bright futurism it represented, a kind of globalism, was draining away, and with it went yesteryear’s brands of cosmopolitanism.

The standard narrative of the time was a new “right wing” nationalism was springing up in an effort to save a crumbling system from complete collapse. This could only be accomplished be control over borders. The old timey boomer liberals, raised in the Age of Hubris, were vilified as holdover “leftists” which mean “globalist” in some distasteful way. Resentment of the younger, towards the older, was based on that sense of inheriting only failed, loser ideologies.

As a boomer myself, I saw Bucky as Boho, i.e. Bohemian, from a prior crop of Greenwich Village hipsters that he got to hang out with, Noguchi in particular (they were best friends). He had his cohort of eggheads and patrons, his Cold Warrior friends, both in and outside the Pentagon. 

My generation came later, growing up through a time when Manifest Destiny was being challenged. The legacy of the colonial period, when Europe believed it owned the world (Doctrine of Discovery), had become burdensome on the United States. The conquest of the Philippines led to the General Lansdale era, of guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency, mixed with narcotics trade as we called it. Capitalism’s Invisible Army.

Having experienced American internationalism in its heyday as a youth, I could see the writing on the wall as well. As early as 8th grade, I was reading about the Club of Rome in dad’s Futurist, and thinking about thinking globally while acting locally. I took it for granted that “thinking globally” was a thing. Didn’t Wendell Berry say it wasn’t a thing? He was more in the Schumacher Small is Beautiful school. Bucky wasn’t so committed to a particular scale. Big could be beautiful too.

The transitionary phase has been characterized by those Big Brother mega-corporations and the safety net those have provided their CEOs at least. Some might be worker owned. They have budgets the size of nations. They have a secular orientation that keeps them from competing for religious faithful. Keep to the religion you have, no one will insist you “convert” to anything. Skip ahead to a new religion if you wanna though, or resurrect an old one. Page forward. Page back.

The upshot is today you find families in “virtual nations” (VNs) who think it’s OK for junior to be reading Grunch of Giants and picking up some of that Synergetics. The Bucky Boho stuff, reinterpreted through the boomers, and passing on to Gen X, Millennials and so on, comes with a world map and a habit of doing data science, in a format branded as World Game, which has continued to evolve. Whether Uncle Sam rejoins the living is a different question. In my iconography, that’s happening, via USA OS, a whole literature. 

But it remains to be seen how we want to address those border questions. Citizenship is not a function of what country one happens to live in, in so many cases. Expats help us focus on creating the new rules in new games.

Another 21st Century Curriculum

What is it that I expect to accomplish through curriculum writing? For some decades, I've been this working class dweeb who teaches online programming classes, on the basis of earlier decades developing computer applications, having majored in philosophy at Princeton, but always finding computers cool. 

But then my online content isn't entirely about teaching programming. It's about thinking about geometry with a 3D computer graphics tool at one's elbow. A ray tracer in my case. To make the ray tracer do what I wanted, I had to feed it programs too tedious to write by hand, so I'd have another program do that, and control that one at a high level.

Let's take a look at some code I was writing yesterday:

The raytracer I use is called POV-Ray, a free open source tool that renders slowly compared to say Blender. I don't mind its slowness in the context of what I use it for, to generate animated GIFs such as the one above.

POV-Ray expects to read and process files with extension .pov and in the code above we see I'm opening a .pov file to receive a lot of stuff, through the arbitrarily so-named fileobject: out. I bring polyhedra into the foreground as objects: Icosahedron, PD, Octahedron. PD stands for Pentagonal Dodecahedron. I also have an RD, a Rhombic Dodecahedron. The code for those is in the same module, but once defined, I have a pretty succinct syntax for conjuring them, manipulating their properties, and writing them out in Scene Description Language for POV-Ray to process.

Am I saying I expect other teachers to simply copy my code and use it verbatim? Sure, to start with, one may clone or fork my codebase, slides too. But then many teachers will be more into using their own methods, while picking up on more of the shoptalk, around BASKET modules, Quadrays, Synergetics in general. For them, this material may all be a gateway to 20th Century History and a telling that includes what the Boomers were doing (USA namespace) to propagate the "4D" memes.

As a boomer myself, one who propagates "4D" (e.g. 4dsolutions.net), I'm a student of intellectual history and so my classes and lectures tend to have elements of that. My knowledge is quite limited. I'm a fan of CJ's commitment to comprehensivity but accept, as he did, that omniscience is not necessarily the objective. Carve out a patch and cultivate that, and you'll receive news from afar in ways you might use, within your own garden (not walled exactly, but protected, perhaps even encrypted).

I'm also a political cartoonist, and my work with Holdenweb and Open Bastion was more along the lines of event producer. The logistics supervisor work in hotels in years prior set me up to be at home in such institutions. Not that I don't still have much to learn. At 66, I'm still a noob. But a noob with some experience, I'd be foolish to deny what little I've got.

Finally, I fancy myself a type of science fiction writer, but within the context of curriculum writing and general systems theory (GST) more generally. Science fiction becomes a stand in for what my dad did: regional planning. That field has its specific techniques, over which I am not a master, let alone doctor (he had a PhD), but the idea is similar: conjure a possible future by means of narratives, stories, blog posts, and other artwork.

More Political Rhetoric

:: ranter ::

I've been clear on Facebook that I'm voting for Harris this time. 

I voted for Hillary in 2016 (she'll be speaking in Portland in a couple weeks -- I won't be there, not a fan). I'm ready for a female president with an ordinary, average, representative background, more like Obama's, meaning complicated and multicultural, like America itself. 

The last thing we need is yet another golf clubby rich guy, another aristocrat.

Per an email to a friend:

BTW I'm still voting for Kamala. She's proved herself highly malleable, flexible, not tied to specific positions. She's compliant and works well with the oligarchy. Trump had his chance. I also like that she has female characteristics. Putin and I see eye to eye on this one. Doesn't mean she'll win, but it'd be more instructive for people if she did.

USers are such backsliders, endowing their scapegoats with superpowers before sacrificing them to the gods when all their hopes and dreams don't come true. As if it were all up to a president. Such monarchists. Why not just devolve into Brits then?  Forget we fought for freedom from such ill-begotten superstitions.

To another friend I wrote:

Regarding the presidential contest: I'm ready for a first female president and anyone is gonna have their flaws. "Laughing too much" and speaking in "word salad" don't seem that objectionable. Both may be assets. Plus her background is certainly more average. Like Obama, she wouldn't have come from an aristocratic background, far from it, and to me, that's a plus. If her dad was a Marxist professor or whatever, so much the better. More proof the Muricans have an open mind.

Trump, with his celebrity billionaire background, encourages popular backsliding into thinking a president has to be from some financial elite, in this case New York mafia / slumlord / casino world (one of many subcultures our great nation has to offer). I think a president should be closer to average, and their role should include reporting back to the people what the insiders are up to; a man or woman on the street elected to spy on the government. That'd be how I'd shape it, instead of going with an "imperial presidency" with a lot of pomp and circumstance ala Rome.

However I'm never so tempted to vote for Trump as when the Dems truck out their vile Russophobia and spew it all over the media. Such a stinky vibe. I'll be holding my nose as usual.

Me on Facebook, the text the in above graphic: 

If Trump did give Putin some gift of a covid testing device, that would’ve been a nice gesture. A more constructive relationship between the Kremlin and White House would have been a good idea, and remains a good idea.

Likewise any calls made by Trump-the-private-citizen to Vlad would not be that upsetting to me. As a free American he or I should feel free to phone anyone in the world any time. Of course whomever we’re calling should be free to not take the call. Bibi, don’t call me.

I’m skeptical though, as I think of Woodward as one of those journalists who believes what he’s told by various storytellers with the job of making up stories. These stories have the flavor of being unfalsifiable. But even if they’re true, I fail to experience any outrage, sorry.

I’m not a Trump supporter, but I do find Americans to be mentally ill when it comes to Russians. They’ve always been that way, since I was a kid. One of their least attractive qualities. I’m so glad I grew up outside the states in my formative years and never developed a lot of these crushing mental disabilities.

Back to School

:: pooh gets a bigger brain ::

For context, we were seeing a Planet of the Apes situation developing in western Asia, with various groups clinging to statehood amidst missiles flying in every direction.  The whole idea of "sovereignty" was going up in smoke.

More people escaped Gaza than I'd realized (still not nearly enough), but there'd been no cruise ship convoy nor other highly visible rescue effort. Most of the evacuation was under the radar and largely unreported 

A similar exodus from Lebanon is happening now, as the Netanyahu regime extends its carpet bombing campaign to more cities and towns. Not that Israelis are staying put either. When the missiles start flying, civilians leave in large numbers, if allowed to.

My code school colleagues (Python, data science etc.) and I are these days gearing up for another cohort. I haven't been actively instructing a cohort in awhile, but the workflows are not unfamiliar. I'll have time to get ready. This is not my first rodeo.

Of course the notion of statehood isn't about to fade overnight. The plot line axis hinges around "globalism versus nationalism" where there's some attempt to map these terms to "left versus right" respectively. 

Radical lefty libs like Soros & Son versus righty tighties like Trump wanting non-porous borders, and the freedom to not be pawns within globalist agendas. That's a gross oversimplification of course. This much is sure: there's no way to avoid acting locally, whether or not one is able, or wishes, to think globally.

As an Epistemology group member on Facebook, I recently questioned the whole idea of "left vs right" as "too low dimensional" invoking the notion of Principal Component Analysis. Even Myers-Briggs, akin to Cambridge Analytica's fave personality test, has more than one dimension.

Why do people take it for granted that the terrain we're dealing with is a simple left vs right one-dimensional line? Data science is all about not imprisoning one's thinking inside decrepit obsolete models.  Are we so one-dimensional in our thinking?  

My Princeton prof Walter Kaufmann did not think Marcuse (One Dimensional Man) was that great of a thinker, but then it doesn't take a genius to realize the English language is garbage, out of the box, when kept to factory defaults, but is potentially expressive once fine  tuned. Wrestle with your native language if your goal is to be a philosopher.

Western Metaphysics

More Escapism

RT_E

RT_T

Both RTs have a unit radius IVM ball inside, but only the RT_T is small enough to let it poke through. The RT_E enwraps the uni-ball completely, its body-center to face-center radius matching that of the ball's exactly.

The workflow or pipeline I'm employing is an old one for me, in operation since the 1990s, using POV-Ray the whole time as my final rendering engine, and Python behind the scenes to write the scene description language.

The above eight lines are sufficient to generate all of what's needed to get the above RT_T graphic. Note the 0.9994 which students of Synergetics also learn as an algebraic expression.

A question I get is what does it all mean? 

I usually say it means we have a ladder in spatial geometry for becoming more advanced at CAD (computer aided design). 

Fluency in right-brained spatial imagery is an end in itself, or one could say a skill that comes in handy along many walks of life. 

The ladder is accessible to middle and high school level students, with elementary school segments as well (e.g. All Sixth Grade Assembly).

At the college level, we're talking about America's leading positive futurist, getting smeared and then memory-holed by the Grunch, a monster he helped to foster. 

The fight isn't over however. As Bucky spelled out in Grunch of Giants, a mytho-poetic and prophetic work, the front lines run through our colleges and universities, with some presidents having the guts to allow deeper dives among faculty, in response to student demand. We want our positive future back.

The Global U is coming together, helping to fill the power vacuum left by a fading nation-state system, with the Middle East already in the blender. 

Even as I write this, we're seeing Bibi quit the UN after lecturing legacy diplomats about how he's surrounded by non-nations he doesn't believe in (Jordan, Lebanon...), mere lines in the sand, against a backdrop of targeted explosions and terrorism among the well-armed paramilitary gangs. 

The political data layer is in turmoil, as people try to wrap their heads around the new post nation-state status quo that pertains therein. These gangs help themselves to factory-fresh inventory, amassed and allocated under the cover of nation-state decals, as politicians on the take grease the skids. That inventory proliferates and propagates in a free market, as economists predicted it would.

That means Refugee Planet is here, and is going to need more asylums, places for people to go who aren't wanting to participate in all the outward violence. 

Even soldiers, most of them economic refugees themselves, stuck far from home thanks to low living standards, are not always on board with the oligarchic mafiosi. 

Getting bossed around by privatized criminal syndicates takes some getting used to. One must overcome any sense of patriotism or honor.

Prompt:  Uniformed soldiers and other economic refugees from many countries gather in a playful Epcot-like village featuring high tech yurts and electric ATV vehicles.

Oval Office

Prompt:  The White House tour guide explains to tourists, by pointing to a diagram, how the Oval Office is meant to resemble the human skull in cross section, a secret teaching about the inner president within each one of us, a secular picture of a high position with lots of overview and supervisory powers.

Safety Nets

 

AFSC Stuff

I worked with Martin for many years via AFSC here in Portland. Mostly I was a program clerk meaning the token titular Friend meant to help with the curriculum, which in our case was youth oriented and started out as a way to address tensions between two demographic groups in the high schools: Latinos and Asians. They had other names for one another. Our program was named LAAP (Latin American Asian Pacific program) or something like that.

Another role I played was as apprentice contributing editor for Asian Pacific Issues News published out of our Portland office. Towards the end, I was briefly editor in chief. This newsletter is today very hard to find, a collectors’ item. We used it as currency to exchange for similar newsletters from around the Pacific Rim. We’d all read each other’s stuff, synthesize and summarize, and recycle. Such is a media ecosystem.

Why was I doing all this stuff? I had my skill set as a curriculum developer and had been sent to Boston to learn from an AFSC youth program there, as well as to attend Daniel Ellsberg’s Manhattan Project 2.0, about cleaning up post the original Manhattan Project (at Hanford et al).

Later, I tried to adapt my AFSC ideas, successfully implemented in the form of LAAP, staffed by two directors, one Asian, one Latino, to a different clientele piggy-backing on Glenn Stockton’s dream of an Institute of Integral Design. Glenn had enough skills to impart and inventory to share to fill a “maker space” (a term he despised — “maker” sounded too crude maybe, for craftsman). I would encourage learning moviemaking (skills I’d also like for myself)

For a short time, Portland AFSC itself was casting about for new digs, and we brainstormed this next chapter together (we had a committee). But the days of our youth program were over, at least here in Portland, and people moved on. Martin and I went our own ways but stay in touch over Facebook. I’m considered an AFSC Alumni Network guy.

I did have another AFSC role I should mention: as representative of our Yearly Meeting (NPYM), I was tasked with flying back to Philadelphia for annual corporation meetings. I’ve written a lot about those corporation meetings elsewhere, including when chronicling My Dinner with Kiyoshi (see comments).

Invective

Partly why my Pirate Party wants the USG to take more responsibility for schooling its own future officials, is leaving it to prep schools has been a bad idea by many measures. 

You get too many of these Elon Musk types who seem to assume their high status in life is God-given and well deserved, and that's why it's their burden to take the rest of us over some cliff or other. 

Victoria Nuland comes to mind, or Condoleezza Rice, or Madeleine Albright. I don't look up to these peeps as intellectually suited to their roles. But they managed to pull strings and get plumb positions, too bad for world history, looking back. Not to only pick on women: Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken... total disasters, from a USG point of view.

I think if the USG had boarding school opportunities starting for kids of a young age, not dependent on personal means or family finances, that we might groom (not a bad word) a cadre (not a bad word either) a cohort of future diplomats who were actually good at their jobs for a change, because of their well-conceived educations.

One obvious symptom of our weak privatized system is that big publishing can't turn on a dime, or even take off from a runway a mile long. The inertia is just too much to overcome. 

So whereas we should have been talking about America's greatest futurist subversive, Bucky Fuller, in the same pantheon as Martin Luther King, the only TV we got was either maudlin mourning or poking fun. Cry or laugh, neither serious.

NPR did a really terrible job with the Bucky narrative, botching the story completely. Given the high "spoiled brat" index of the people working there, that's not surprising. 

They didn't get any "Bucky math" in prep school and so assume there's no there there. That's the arrogance that comes with thinking your teachers really knew their stuff. Question authority more?

Anyway, I'm glad at least a few schools are showing promise this fall season (you know who you are) and we have some talent in the pipeline. 

In the meantime, we'll put up with Imposter Syndrome and pretend the USG exists, even though it doesn't for the time being. Uncle Sam is quite dead. In his place: the corporate version: shallow, vapid, devoid of real brains. A zombie. 

Patriots underground work on a next version of USA OS.

I just saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice at the Bagdad last night (crowded!), which might explain why I'm seeing Ghost House tropes in real life. The focus of that movie is phoniness versus what's really real. The difference may get pretty thin. 

When you've lost integrity as a being, a lot of automaticity kicks in and you find your life filling up with involuntary unfree responses. You start lip synching the party line and marching to the groupthink drummer.