Cracking Down on Civil Rights

Freedom of assembly, for the purpose of making views public, by carrying signs, making speeches and so on, is protected by precedent, by the Bill of Rights (US) and so on.  However, the political climate in North America is such that xenophobes get everyone nodding in agreement that a political event is somehow "fake" or "inauthentic" if organized in collaboration with groups not based inside North America.

For example, we Quakers have a close-knit set of relationships connecting the Federated States meetings with those in the United Kingdom.  We might get support from English Friends to divest of our slaves for example.  This happened before the Civil War. 

Many Quakers felt uncomfortable in areas where slavery was still legal in the eyes of the Supreme Court.  They were coached not to tell neighbors what to do, but the neighbors couldn't help but feel some "holier than thou" attitude emanating from Friends in their midst.

By today's standards, if English Friends wanted to help organize an anti-slavery rally in Boston, and set up a Facebook account to help bring that about, the heavy hand of a censor might come along and report the transgression to authorities, and to the media.  Listeners and viewers would learn to vilify anyone colluding on a global basis, rather than on a more narrowly constrained geographic basis. 

Somehow it was to be made illegal for Ukrainians to fund protests in DC regarding their treatment, despite large numbers of Ukrainians enjoying Federation citizenship.

None of this made any sense, as the USG itself was highly leveraged and in debt, needing to collaborate and collude daily just to stay afloat.  Trying to keep its citizens from using social media to organize public protests, while meanwhile engaging in international intrigue itself, was too much of a double standard for brave Americans to take seriously. 

If Facebook wasn't going to champion our rights, we had other options.

We also knew it was our business to protect our right to collude.  The dimwits in DC had picked the wrong friends and enemies too many times to exert much leadership in that regard.  Telling Americans what to do and whom to trade with, was no longer the business of the bankrupt bosses with their obsolete forms of organized gangsterism.

GST for Truckers

How many long haul truckers listen to podcasts?  I imagine myself chugging along I-whatever listening to satellite radio, but maybe also to some Russian classics, maybe Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy. Having some literary criticism, philosophy, biography, history, mixed in, would count towards my PhD.  Driverless trucks don't support learning in this way.  My fleet is dual purpose, in providing truckers with personal workspaces (PWSs).

What is GST again?  That depends whom you ask.  Out there in the wild, these three letters match a lot of strings.  However, I'm following my Quaker heritage to some degree and connecting with Kenneth Boulding, the economist, and the general systems theory he wrote about.  My spin:  lets compete with economics as a discipline, since economics itself suggests that monopolies give rise to lots of inefficiencies.  Why give economics as a discourse any monopoly say over any aspect of planetary affairs?

Of course my detractors point out that inside economics we have Georgists, Marxists, the Chicago School and so on.  If you're driving right now, maybe punch up a podcast on Henry George after awhile?  OK, we're talking semantics at this point.  If you want to inject GST into the economic sphere as another competing economics, that's fine.  As long as you stay competitive.

What happened next in my story, is Buckminster Fuller came along with his Spaceship Earth meme, and his practice of thinking globally while acting locally.  His idea of "systems" was very structural and geometric, as demonstrated by his elaborations on the octet-truss, a fascination for Alexander Graham Bell as well.  He got his truss to curve and make the triangular panels of a geodesic dome.

At the heart of Fuller's thinking was a shape we all probably recognize when we see it, but might not have its name handy: the tetrahedron.  Fuller went so far as to imagine a civilization which had shifted its weight from the cube to the tetrahedron to such an extent that it often measured units of volume using tetrahedral shapes (four faces, six points, six edges).  He wrote two whole volumes (Synergetics and Synergetics 2) exploring this alternative Universe.

The "Sesame Street" of Synergetics, meaning the core neighborhood wherein we might revisit a lot of partially overlapping topics (much as Children's Television Workshop explored the letters and numbers necessary for cultural literacy) is known as the Concentric Hierarchy, a nesting of well-known polyhedrons.  As a former high school teacher, and computer language teacher to this day, I've devoted a lot of resources towards communicating about this Concentric Hierarchy.  The topic lends itself to sculpture and modeling.  When sharing about it with kids, I'll sometimes use C6XTY, Sam Lanahan's flextegrity construction kit.  I have other kits as well, which I truck out during workshops.

What got me interested in trucking?  Not so long ago, I used a computer language called Visual FoxPro to make my way in the world.  I programmed for hospitals, nonprofits, various clients.  However, that work dried up, partly because FoxPro was shelved by Microsoft and taken off the market.  Meanwhile, thanks to my interest in geometry and Synergetics, I'd been building up my Python skills.  What happened next is I met a transportation engineer whose whole business was about using Visual FoxPro to support scheduling and routing in Trucker World.  He had a thriving business.  He was also interested in using more Python in complement with his Visual FoxPro.  He started contracting with me on the side for some apprentice level coding, and giving me insights into the trucking industry from an applications developer viewpoint.

Another aspect of my childhood and young adulthood, was growing up in areas where Peace Corps volunteers might serve, the Philippines especially.  The whole idea of going to distant lands not as a tourist, but as a worker seeking to develop one's skills, was attractive to me.  I recall my friend Hugh Thomford going to Fiji to help establish growing pearls as an industry.  That might not have been with the Peace Corps, but the idea was similar.  Our family was engaged in a similar business.  My dad was a planner, urban and regional, who worked with various sovereignties on their long term development plans.  These sovereignties included Libya, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Egypt, Bhutan, Lesotho.

What if truckers had a way to swap routes.  As a driver, I could apprentice in someone else's rig until I got the hang of it.  We might have more team driving.  You get to know the other person in your cab.  You're a diplomat, bringing your ideas and viewpoints into the situation.  You're learning about another culture, and another system of roads.  Such work wouldn't be for everyone.  However, I could see where it might be attractive to some.  What better test of GST as a discipline than to apply it to something concrete like this?

That gives you some background on the various Medium writings, podcasts and whatever, that you may stumble across as a trucker, whether in the Trucker Exchange or not.  We also call it Truckers for Peace sometimes.

As I mentioned above, I'm extending a Quaker lineage in my writings about GST and the Quakers are always looking to remove the causes of war before things get out of hand.  Having truckers become more empowered and adept at diplomacy and job sharing is a way of building our shared planetary immune system against meme viruses that lead to outward wars.

We still suffer from inward wars, psychological battles, so in terms of being a warrior and a hero, that's still a calling.  We could use your skills and services.  We just hope you'll not have to fall back on using obsolete outward weapons that have nothing to do with improving your psychological health. Many still make a career out of outward weapons but would prefer to do something more creative.  My advice:  study GST.

Martian Math @ OSCON

During the hallway track (what we call people milling about, randomly engaging one another), I had a couple of opportunities to chat up Martian Math.

I was wearing my 4D Solutions name tag.  One guy asked what additional dimension I brought to the table, clearly thinking in terms of "3D + what?".  We're of course trained to answer "time" and that's legit, however my readers know I go in another direction.

My other discussion was with Peter Scott who wrote the Perl curriculum for O'Reilly School (which exists no longer).  Perl 6 is finally available for download, and is a whole different language.  This year's OSCON was not a catapult for specific languages, except maybe Rust.

Sponsors wanted to talk about what they're doing (often collaboratively) around blockchains and such.  IBM has been working on several flavors of hyperledger.

I told both my first inquisitor, and Peter, about Caltrop Coordinates.  Rays emanate from a common origin, with unit vectors being of definite length i.e. like rays but short.  We have a way to reach points by cloning, scaling and adding unit vectors, sticking them end to end.

In XYZ, the three basis vectors i, j, k define like an eighth octahedron, a volume, and through cloning, scaling and concatenation, they span much of space.  I think of any three non-coplanar edges of a tetrahedron, a zig-zag:  that's 3D too, with the complementary zig-zag implicit.

Just looking at a tetrahedron (of two complementary 3-vector zig-zags), do we want to call that 3D or 4D?

The four tips and four faces suggest "four directional" but then all these directions are codependent if we think of the tetrahedron is a symbol for "any containment".  In the philosophical language of Synergetics, height, width and depth only coexist as contained within an a priori 4D space.  That's before we add time (frequency, subdivisions).

Best practice within the XYZ language game is to admit a kind of rotation called negation which begets 180 degree mirror vectors -i, -j, -k.  Now we have the customary eight octants of XYZ space.

XYZ is more like a jack, with six vectors emanating from a common origin.

Quadrays are similar to XYZ except instead of admitting rotation (negation) so soon, we add one more basis vector to the initial three and adjust their respective directions to define four quadrants (versus XYZ's eight octants).

Instead of a jack, we get the caltrop.  The basis vectors go from (0,0,0,0) to the four corners of a tetrahedron: (1,0,0,0), (0,1,0,0), (0, 0,1,0) and (0,0,0,1).  Space is 4D in this sense.

Linear combinations (cloning and scaling) now reach all the same points XYZ does, but with positive 4-tuples e.g. (2,1,1,0) (1,2,1,0) (1,1,2,0)... all twelve permutations of those numbers define the twelve corners of a cuboctahedon.

Because we're using four basis vectors instead of three, we tend to say space is 4D.  We might say 3D too though, as XYZ language is not out of bounds. We may rely on context, using customary locutions to convey our meanings.

In XYZ language, we would not say all four quadrays are "basis vectors" because one of them (any one) is a linear combination of the the other three.  If, that is, we allow negation as a part of our cloning, scaling and tip-to-tail addition process.

Add any three quadrays and flip the result to get the fourth.  In other words:

(1,0,0,0) +
(0,1,0,0) +
(0,0,1,0) =
(1,1,1,0)

and

-(1,1,1,0) =
(-1,-1,-1,0) =
(0,0,0,1). 

In the shoptalk of Quadrays, negation (flipping direction) is certainly defined and allowed, but is not required to span space (by means of cloning, scaling, adding) nor to augment the basis vector set.

Scaling without negation just means adjusting a length, making it longer or shorter but with no change in direction.  Negation adds the directional flip.

We can flip Quadrays, however the four basis rays are independent of one another in the sense that no three create the fourth without flipping i.e. through scaling and adding alone.

On the other hand, we may say four quadrays are "codependent" in that the tetrahedron is our primitive conceptual beginning, a first otherness begetting awareness.  Conceptualization begins with containment, a sense of being "within" or "without" (cite Plato's Cave).  XYZ uses a cube as its corresponding hallmark.

"That's a really geeky answer" said the geek by the food truck, awaiting his burrito (as I was).  I nodded.  We were there to geek out.

Codes of Conduct

I'd say a lot of energy is going into socializing geeks, and lets not pretend that's a new thing.  Engineers tend to have awesome responsibilities and our justified fears of bad engineering encourage society to put them through rigorous training in people skills, starting with the handicap that they don't have any (that's the stereotype to begin with).

In actuality, engineers end up with lots of people skills, rivaling lawyers, which accounts for some of the contention in the area of licenses.  How do we collaborate on the basis of a clear understanding of the intellectual property rules.  The NSA was at OSCON this year to tell us about it, and to specifically solicit the input of "big companies" whose province our little Portland Hub has become.  This talk, which I attended, was more reflective of Washington, DC's ways of thinking than anything else.  We at OSCON maybe didn't appreciate the growing pains, when it comes to USG mandates (plans to run on 20% open source code is commendable, if maybe an awkward codification of the principle).

More worrisome than the social skills of GRUNCH workers, are the hard coded biases that may sneak into conditioned reflexes we have little control over, always the Terminator Scenario.  Lets step back from nuclear war (the debate team favorite) and just talk about simple face recognition, accepting you're human.  On Planet of the Apes, our AI bots may have a hard time treating us as human, Global U students though we be.

IBM is encouraging us to focus on natural disasters, if not their prevention, the management of their consequences.  China has some cities waiting for transplants, were the infrastructure in place for population upheavals.  But they're not.  Rubber boats.  Uncooled trucks.  Refugees are not accustomed to much appropriate technology in their camp.  The technology is so far ahead of its deployment potential, and therefore languishes for lack of use.  Prophecies are self-fulfilling.

Translating human language using state of the art deep (or not so deep) neural nets is helping scrub some forms of bias from the stack, versus hard-wiring it in.  That's the good news.  As humans get better at thinking "cross platform", they'll block less on differences that don't make a difference.  That's a kind of "freezing" in thinking we want to root out.  The Narnia book Ice Queen was such an inducer of semi-paralysis.  You'd stop improving your thinking and get lazy relying on what always worked in the past.  Learning is life long now.

The icosahedron is big this year.  I see it in Onnx, Cognitive Toolkit, and I believe HyperLedger, a reference blockchain.  That's good news for Synergetics (an outgrowth of New England Transcendentalism) wherein the Icosahedron symbolizes a kind of Apollonian braininess associated with geeks, software engineers.

"AI Should be Open" is the theme of the talk I'm in.  Blogging while taking in a talk is not considered rude in this culture.  Lots of geeks have their laptops open besides me.  ONNX version 1 would be my slide of the moment, but I've got the camera packed away, having pigged out on photo ops in the booth crawl this morning.

Data sets that pretend to know what "people of color" means without the services of a translator, are pushing it, in terms of thinking they know what the bias is.  One of our keynotes was by a speaker identifying with her female black student labels, and she eldered our group to improve our social skills, not just as individuals, but as managers of data sets.

Don't go home to your insurance company or Capital One (or Home Depot) thinking that just because you're an engineer, you have no standards when it comes to social engineering.  On the contrary, engineers have their guilds with reputations.  If you have unwanted biases, you will need to look at them first.

Greek Mythology

My standard rap when it comes to marketing and Python, is the Monty Python angle is certainly edgy, a stroke of brilliance on Guido's part, to go with something both snarky, contemporary, and with longevity, as even without the troupe of comedians in the foreground, we have an informative and entertaining backdrop in Greek mythology, with its Python.

I speak, of course, of Mt. Parnassus and the story of the Delphic Oracle.  She and her Cult of Athena temple nymphs were able to prophesy thanks to Python running inside their Virtual Machine (how I think of whatever VM their Python is running on -- a kind of mountain).  Apollo sought to impose rationality on the beast (meant kindly), to slay in the sense of dominate, not render useless (closer to "harness" in English).

People will take it in different directions.  I'm at OSCON again, which I've linked to Gibson Guitar (actually Gibson sent a bizmo some years back, so I'm not saying I acted alone) and the Nashville music scene, noting the proud Temple to Athena in that city, her Python curled in her shield, Nike in hand.

"Just Use It" is one of our slogans, testing reader understanding of the allusions.  I've posted about a sign or poster in the Iceland airport, or somewhere else along a moving sidewalk.  PSF would need to sign off in this use of the logo.

Friday the 13th

I've been working a lot lately, which is good, because I needed money to repair my car.  Some will think I'm crazy to sink way more money into a car than I'll be able to recoup in selling it, but I'm not looking to sell, I'm looking to drive.

Presumably I'll get some more years from this 1997 sedan.  I'm not in the mood to switch horses right now.  I use the car for my business so some percentage of this repair should count as a business expense.  Chassis stuff, not engine stuff.

So today, Friday the 13th, was the big revelation that the FBI has some serious spying powers vis-a-vis Russians after all, perhaps thanks to 3rd party contractors, but what does it matter.  Either that, or we're continuing to read a lot of interesting science fiction (the stuff of spy novels).

Either way, people are much more aware of how the Internet is still a Wild West.  Some degree of paranoia is warranted.  Geeks know that.

The indictment seeks property damages, not extradition.  I'm not sure what amounts would be acceptable, or whom to pay, and whether bitcoin would be accepted, however these are minor details that will come out in the wash.  Perhaps GRU employees are covered by insurance?

The story goes back to the Guccifer 2.0 and APT28 threads (Fancybear etc.), and provides a lot more details. The indictment talks about a server in Arizona for example ("AMS"), a way station between keylogging and screen capturing malware, and those seeking to provide Americans with a much deeper look into their own political underbelly.

Showing "sausage being made" to the lay public is definitely an undermining tactic which left people older but wiser about their dysfunctional so-called democracy (reputable academics have suggested more of an oligarchy by now, more like the Roman Empire).

No one is alleging that the leaked and/or hacked communications were forged, only that they were never meant for the American public.  The DNC's secrets sparked a lot of outrage.  The special counsel is not saying whether the election went the other way because of that.  How could they know?  Maybe voters were just sick of family dynasties?

An earlier special counsel indictment goes back to the "troll factory" story, which alleges it was illegal for Facebook to allow Russians to use its platform for political purposes.

Only Americans are allowed to play politics with Facebook and Twitter, and perhaps the British, owing to a special relationship.  True, Cambridge Analytica had to face the consequences of its own hype regarding its alleged election-swaying powers, however no indictments were forthcoming. 

Mark Zuckerberg had to promise the politicians in DC that social media would stop rocking their boat. However promises extracted under duress may not be all that binding.  Software engineers, Russian or otherwise, cannot stop social media from affecting political careers.

How exactly the Russian troll factory affected the national election remains unclear, as the published memes don't seem to stand out as especially mood-altering.  If there's a secret to election-swaying with psychometrics, its apparently subtle.

What I remember from November 2016 was a lot of Pizzagate hysteria, which I blogged about here.  Many bloggers and tweeters were up in arms about the Clinton Foundation.  Was that the Russians again?

President Obama kicked a bunch of Russians out of their villa (dacha), after Homeland Security and the DNI fingered RT as a foreign agent (much like the BBC in that capacity, on PBS every night).  This was after his party lost in the electoral college.

However the Russian troll farm was not accused of working the Pizzagate vein in particular.  The example posts I saw had more to do with whether war veterans were being sufficiently cared for.

The GU (aka GRU) is accused of spear phishing and then sharing DNC chairman John Podesta's emails, perhaps with Wikileaks, perhaps with others.  Certainly those emails got out, by hook or by crook.  Whether the Russians played a role (as alleged) or not, the content was upsetting to many.

Earlier versions of this election story suggested that Guccifer 2.0 was not actually responsible for these leaks (although he tried to take credit) but the current story makes the case that the DNC was:

(A) certainly vulnerable to cyber-attack (that's clear, from the leaks themselves) and

(B) that Guccifer 2.0 was actually a fictitious persona designed to deflect attention from specific Russian military personnel, the ones who planted the keylogging malware.

The actual indictment tends to bleep over how omniscience was finally achieved vs-a-vs the Russian operation regarding the inner workings of its spy machine.  Skeptics point out that the 3rd parties are partisan.

The Office of Information Awareness, as envisioned by Admiral Poindexter, or some semblance thereof, may have been involved.  Stay tuned.

Blockchain Memes

I'm suggesting those tasked with evangelizing for Blockchain, take some time tuning in the memes around Rust, the computer language.

The financial industry works to correct mistakes and remove ambiguity from transactions, while those hoping to game the system kick up a lot of ink, to obfuscate their wheelings and dealings.

In writing C++, geeks may corrupt memory, leading to crashes, because the compiler is insufficiently strict.  Rust enforces the disciplines a strong C++ coder would bring to the table, through its compiler.  That's closer to what a blockchain does, when it comes to preventing ambiguities that cover for impossibilities.

Bankers may be reluctant to talk about all the double-spending schemes by which people try to auto-boot their fortunes.  Going into nit-picky detail about scams is counterproductive, as to describe exploits is to encourage them.

The cyber-security industry is already hip to this problem, of announcing a weakness in time for the white hats to apply the patch, before the black hats get wind of a new Achilles heel.

Thanks to the miracle of metaphor, akin to transposing to a different key in music, we can talk about "corruption" in the C++ context until the cows come home, thinking how writing systems that don't crash is a similar challenge to that confronting the banking industry.  The original bank is a memory bank or bank of memory cells.

What a blockchain does is impose strict auditing such that multiple observers agree, but also may contend for the right to record.  The global network learns of transactions in different orders, thanks to non-simultaneity of information transfer.  So which chronology should become canonical?

The Bitcoin answer is to hold a contest, and may the best bitcoin miner win.  This contention for control over write access is what some in-house blockchains may surrender.  The metaphor here might be unsafe mode.  Insider Rustaceans are allowed to break the rules when creating the means to enforce safety.

In sum, a C++ code base may be crash prone if open to ambiguity, which malware may then exploit.  Browsers live on the front lines in many use cases, in accepting content through their ports.  IE had to be abandoned for Edge for such problems.

Banks, which lend out and take ownership, as in Rust, may find their bookkeeping turning to garbage if the pointers turn out to not point to anything.  You've promised savings to borrowers, and interest on borrowings to savers, what could go wrong?

Platonic Five

The curriculum we're working on restores polyhedrons to their rightful place, which does not mean we're confined to only Euclidean approaches.

Debate teams understand that mathematics evolves as a dialectic.  It's not all there already, to be chiseled out from stone.  We need those communications.

An issue facing some curriculum writers is where and what to censor.  Do we need the Real Numbers as currently defined?  A computational thinking course spends less time on those, given numbers have discrete digital representations, with symbols like the Greek letter pi suggesting algorithms we might set running indefinitely.

We do want the Platonic Five, that much is obvious, starting early.  V + F == E + 2.  The concept of Duality.  The Platonics are closed under this operation of taking the dual.  However we may also combine duals by criss-crossing edges, begetting new polyhedrons by this process.

Cube + Dual(Cube) == Cube + Octahedron = Rhombic Dodecahedron (RD).

Dual(RD) = Cuboctahedron (1, 12, 42, 92...)

Icosahedron + Dual(Icosahedron) = Icosa + Pentagonal Dodeca = Rhombic Triacontahedron (RT).

These transformations, along with the Jitterbug, are familiar to all our young pretty early.  We'll be sharing these animations in kindergarten in the form of wallpaper and screen savers.

What says Shiraz?

Schools That Pay

Some code schools will offer free training and job search coaching in exchange for a percent of a student's income if and when they get employed.  That's a step in the right direction.

In Education Automation, published in the 1960s, Bucky Fuller suggested scholarships go to create a learning environment, out of which would emerge the geniuses such as himself who more than paid for the whole setup, in terms of making contributions as faculty.

The school gets the scholarship endowment and helps you learn in exchange for access to room and board, or however the campus is designed.  Is this a refugee camp?  Do students live in tents?

You're getting what acts like a cross between a gift card, such as we buy in the supermarket, and a debit card, such as we get from a bank.

The gift card restricts what inventory you're drawing from, perhaps a bookstore or clothing store.  The debit card restricts it to the authenticated cardholder to make the payment.  Your rewards card might give you access to more classes.  Prove you can do X and get a chance to do Y.

Programmable money (cryptocurrencies) could make the bookkeeping easy and verifiable.  Everyone talks about blockchains these days.

I'm in a refugee camp and I study biology several hours a day.  I'm passing various tests, plus learning a new language, and my account gets me access to more time in the microscope lab, which some refugee camps feature.  There's a short cut to becoming a lab technician and studying water specimens.

My hard work as a student is what entitles me to access this or that inventory.  Not every reward is transferable.  I may given the clothes I get to my younger brother, but it's still my account that gets debited.

Some of this circuitry was spelled and under the heading of NetDispenser and showcased at Pycon 2017.  I was an assistant to the main guy, C. Cossé . However, the FSF has not seen fit to give its endorsement.  They may have a problem with Github.

So I've exchanged more than 50 emails with the FSF over the past year, imploring them to help make this project better, or publicly endorse it, or something.  Anything.  After all, a solid 50% of my goal with the project has been to make FS4E development appealing and viable by creating incentive.  (FS4E = Free Software For Education).  Last month Richard Stallman told me that FSF could support the project IF we found an alternative to the Raspberry Pi and didn't use Debian.  Uhh.  Of course that side of the project is not the part that encourages FS4E, exactly, so that feels like overstepping their position just a little.  However, why not keep trying? I asked myself, and so I offered to oblige them on those points as best I could.  Yesterday I got a new transmission from FSF and it turns out that the promotional video I put up last month cannot be on YouTube in order for FSF to support the project.  But that's not all!  They also object to having the project on GitHub!  They advised me to fix all these things and then get back to them and "convince them to support the project".  

I believe this puts the project back on "hold" until further notice.  

NetDispenser is not exactly the same model as described above. It's about students earning more discretionary time on the internet in exchange for passing various tests, running various obstacle courses, designed to be fun and educational by game developers.

The router actually restricts access to only a few websites once the student's account has been depleted. Visit a dispenser site for more credits.

Iran Forum

Portlanders met in Elliot Chapel at the same time as OS Bridge was going on, in the came Elliot Center complex, part of the Unitarian Universalist campus downtown.  We had a panel of speakers and celebrated the lives of commitment of the Huntworks to bettering Cascadia's relationships with Persians.  Here's what I posted to Facebook:

Portlanders gather in a church with Peace Corps vets to strategize regarding Citizen Diplomacy twixt Cascadians and Iranians. The Huntworks, a local couple now deceased, spent a career building connections. Their memory is being honored at this event. Shiraz and Portland have ties. The relationships are strengthening as political leadership is increasingly seen as subservient to tiny psychopath minorities with wars in mind.

OS Bridge (a geek fest) is happening in the same building. Geeks and Peace Corps vets have some commonalities. We know how to collaborate outside of political channels. Engineering is about longer term plans than those concocted by next-term-seeking vote getters who must pander to peoples' basest fears and most negative emotions.

Truckers for Peace has no brochures here. That's like Peace Corps for truckers who wanna get into the Citizen Diplomacy game. Chinese Peace Corps might provide more details regarding opportunities in the Iranian context. OBOR is about infrastructure improvements, including in human relationships (necessary for collaboration).

Swamp City (WDC) is these days quite hostile to the idea of improved relations between itself and just about anyone who doesn't want its weapons.

Swamp City's Banana Republic, a holdover relic, is pretty good at alienating Cascadians these days.

Those of us more interested in people skills have to learned to count on continued clod-like opposition from the Swamp.

Fortunately, the clod-like are pretty awkward.  The more adept find ways to counter the warlord mentality.  Should Portland and Shiraz become sister cities?  We'd need something from our Mayor's Office to make that official, and from Shiraz naturally.

OS Bridge, some might recall, was organized in the wake of OSCON's leaving Portland for San Jose. OSCON later returned, then went to Austin.  This year:  back in PDX.  OS = Open Source (or Operating System in some lexicons).