You'll hear me talk about Diaspora Nations in passing, and may wonder what "math teacher planet" has to do with bringing more Synergetics into the awareness of high schoolers, a top priority of the World Game (judging from Bucky's own style of play).
These curriculum connections (both implicit and explicit) are actually quite obvious in that Fuller was an advocate of the freedom of individuals to travel the planet (as he did so freely), whereas the system of nation-states has a lot to do with inhibiting travel and tourism among some classes of individual, namely those minus the proper documentation.
The undocumented tended to get herded into camps by the United Nations, and abandoned, contrary to their human rights.
Fuller liked to point out that supranational corporations (collectively The Grunch), endowed with the rights of humans by the Supreme Court, per the 14th Amendment (per a spurious argument if we follow Thom Hartmann's research) suffer no such onerous restrictions on their travel, given their elite, transhuman status.
From the standpoint of one proffering this enhanced high school curriculum, with an updated American Transcendentalism woven throughout, it's my aim to provide a smooth, well-designed bridge, especially in the area of mathematics.
I don't want teachers coming to me later saying: "we would have been more than happy to adopt some of these reforms you've suggested, but you never spelled out in any detail how all this could be accomplished."
I'll aim to see any and all such charges dropped, as clearly I carried out my duties as a curriculum developer. If our planetary civilization overheats and blows itself up, I won't have that on my conscience. I was all for moving that minute hand farther back from midnight. Other high school teachers might not have been as conscious of our options. NCTM deleted our public forums after all.
I understand the calls for Guantanamo to serve as New Gaza for now, with the cruise ship flotilla bringing thousands of Palestinians to their new temporary home. I don't know if Cuba has contacted the State Department about this proposal.
Give WDC a chance to do the right thing maybe. I suppose it's the Pentagon, not State, that should get to say "absolutely not" without even thinking, based on its reflex conditioning. "No means no" doesn't mean Cuba shouldn't get its land back. What's critical is to document the reactions for posterity.
The military is gearing up for rule by AI some suggest (the "singularity" is coming!).
Guantanamo is a huge base of operations, not just a torture camp, and Cuba has been dreaming of ways to repurpose it to serve the world more auspiciously. Cuba has chafed under its reputation as a world torture capital, thanks to the Spanish American war era forced annexation and absorption by the IBC (Imperial Borgian Complex ("resistance is futile")).
Making Guantanamo and maybe Okinawa into permanent refugee camps (with lots of turnover) would not be that different from their current role as military socialist IBC R&R destinations, just a tad more serious minded and concerned with the big picture.
The idea of a New Gaza is it gets you back on your feet, but not as a helpless militant with a narrow specialization. The kinds of training offered in an Asylum City amount to usable skills, applicable anywhere. This is not another School of the Americas and we're not stoking future violence with nasty ideologies glorifying same.
The Gazans and Cubans are expected to get along, as fellow long term victims of BDS on a world scale. Both ethnicities have used a lot of ingenuity to cope with their oppression by AI over the decades.
The humanitarians have called for a 24 hour evacuation period for the Gazans, with the United Nations (not NATO) providing the logistics. Unless some planning body had been using the last ten years to plan for this contingency (I'm not privy to such plans), it's unlikely that 24 hours is a sufficient mobilization time, except for the lower inertia objects, meaning wagging tongues.
By wagging tongues and nimble fingers, I mean those of us who share the latest buzz, including regarding the massive logistics undertaking the United Nations is now initializing, expecting help from all its member nations, to whatever level said nations are willing to be heroic and demonstrate their prowess, when it comes to removing innocent civilians from harm's way, by air, land and sea.
We've already been debating the ripple effects and implications in the space of these journals. I'm not pointing to myself as the answer man, but as one who recognizes the plight of refugees is a core topic in sociology that has shaped our institutions up until now, meaning we're no strangers to this plight.
A core challenge is to keep families together, while acknowledging that sometimes families agree to split up, sometimes (not always) with the explicit mission of helping each other later, depending on which took the best course.
Imagine being lost in the mountains, confronted with forks. Groups often intentionally split at such junctures, perhaps with scouts, or runners, for some distance, although preferably with telecommunications and why are these people without GPS devices and accurate maps?
What I'm saying is, when one undertakes to rescue people from a dense community of neighbors and interlocking families, is it not the goal to replicate these neighborhoods on the other end? The whole circus is nomadic, not just the individual acts and animals, not just the tents and the elephants.
Nuclear families are not the sub-units of migration so much as the barrios, neighborhoods, entire zip codes, but then out to what scale?
Are we building a New Gaza somewhere in the Caribbean? On the African continent? Is it supposed to have statehood? Who governs?
I'm aware that in speculating about a New Gaza, far from the current one, I'm sounding like one of those old timey pre Civil War Quakers who didn't align with the "immediatist" ranters, the ones into criminalizing slavekeeping yesterday (even "right now" was "too late").
"Round 'em up and send them all back to Liberia" was a divergent intellectual current back then (long before my time), and has a shameful ring to it, next to a prouder "stand your ground" i.e. don't let them round you up and move you yet again. Isn't evacuating Gaza just pandering to unscrupulous real estate developers?
I'm countering that perception with the realization that "going West" is no longer what it once was. Populations have spread around the world and are increasingly fenced in, with many calling for closed borders and walled neighborhoods where none were formerly present.
We may insist on more conformity and obedience in accordance with a sense that our truths need to be taken more literally and less as if they're just in our heads (so to speak). We get more fundamentalist.
We need a more organized approach for dealing with the n% of humans in refugee mode at all times, for whatever reason. Intake and relocation might be the core business of some "switchboard" cities, designed to serve the needs of transients (those in transit, tourists, backpackers...) seeking new more permanent circumstances.
Opportunities for trafficking? How about escaping being trafficked? Cities help people mix it up and flee captors. Identities created, identities erased.
We call them refugee camps today and Gaza is one of them, but in a global system that's stagnated, turning camps for transients into dead end prisons. To the extent refugees get swept under the rug and forgotten, the whole idea of nation-states is undermined. Suspending disbelief gets too hard and is shrugged off. The pomp and circumstance all dissipates.
We've seen wave after wave of refugee migrations all through recent history, right up to the present. Germans, Syrians, Somalis, Vietnamese, Libyans, Guatemalans... and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Filling an entire Asylum City, or good portion thereof, with a cohesive ethnic mix, a semi-cohesive body all airlifted and/or ferried from danger, and therefore already knowing one another and bonded through common narrative, solves a lot of problems. The refugees come and go, in large groups sometimes, not just as loners. Sometimes they return to a homeland, refurbished. That's not always the outcome.
Humans are masterful when it comes to exploding infrastructure and displacing populations. Plans for those thereby displaced tend to be ad hoc and cursory. Humans express malign neglect for their extended family and give up on themselves and their capacity to not be inhumane.
Since when have camps ever helped people? I'm thinking of some cases. People voluntarily sign up for camps of all kinds.
Even if we've been a Ghetto Planet, we're not condemned to always be one.
If the UN gets its act together around a "rescue fleet" of some thousand ships, for the thousand thousand passengers that might need sudden transport, then that's a fleet to be used again.
And no one is closing the door on New Gazans going home to Gaza later.
At this point in time, we just want to build our muscles and ability to coordinate on saving people from getting stuck in combat and/or natural disaster zones. Prospects for returning to the scene later will vary from case to case.
Long time readers know a lot about my strategy: showcase field tested alternative curricula that reach out from a middle ground, which I call "the high school level" but which we might label the proverbial "layperson's level" even if they have a PhD in some NCR or exotic field.
NCR = non-consensus reality (from Quantum Mind, Dr. Arnold Mindell). CR = consensus reality.
The high school level "middle ground" (cite "radical middle") is our best attempt at a CR, a shared framework, an orienting mythos. In US history, we learn about the wars, revolutions, breakthroughs, transformations. We learn how we became a Nation of Refugees.
Mixed in to my amped up high school (which features Eagle Scout level challenges too, for any genders that want to attempt them) are positive futurist memes from our best 19th and 20th century thinkers, science fiction writers etc.
For these alternative curriculum streams to become better established, they need feeder creeks and rivulets, per the fractal nature of a river basin ecosystem.
Feeding into my curricula are some exotic components that have become the focus of a few PhD'd devotees, here and there. However we're not so "degreeist" as to insist on only Doctors of Philosophy doing the torch passing, meaning my School of Tomorrow's esotericists come in many flavors. We've been influenced by software engineering, a field that advances based on inputs from practitioners in many walks of life. We get lots of polymaths and autodidacts ("comprehensivists" in CJ's terms).
Note: I've distinguished between esoteric and occult elsewhere. Given etymology, I consider occult disciplines to be those employing deliberate deceptions or at minimum some level of cryptography. Even your average shoptalk is a code language of a kind, which may lend an aura of cultishness.
But esoterica may simply be difficult to master, such as an athletic skill. Professional trades may be esoteric yet traffic in ultra-clear training materials, with apprentices and everything i.e. there's no attempt to conceal. I concede there's a spectrum.
An example of "esoteric" would be our inclusion of the Mandelbrot Set in the complex plane, where said plane is itself at the outer fringe of high school mathematics, conventionally.
Publicists for said Set are into promoting and promulgating, not keeping secrets, yet the prevalence of calculator-based arithmetic, the paucity of array-based programming driving colorful screens (displays of the Argand Plane), works against these evangelists for Fractals in high school math. Mandelbulbs too.
Let's not forget middle schoolers. We don't need to postpone enjoyment of the aesthetics, until we get there in computer programming.
Another example of "esoteric" is all the time I spend with Pascal's Triangle, collecting threads already prevalent in the literature, but making sure the idea of a Grand Central Station gets a boost.
Some ideas keep being a destination, and Pascal's Triangle is one of them.
This probably all sounds fine and good but where is "curriculum development" and "curriculum design" in any national debate? We had a would-be Education President in the person of Bush the First, with Bush the Second more of an Alfred E. Neuman type character. We entered a "for dummies" idiocracy as time went on, with presidents more often than not in clown face mode.
We have high school teachers quitting their profession in droves (and telling us why on social media) with a sense an impossible level of performance was being market-demanded from them. Too much for too little, with others greedily piggybacking, not hoeing their own rows.
Health care workers feel the same way, on this first day of the Kaiser walkout (one of the biggest labor actions in US history so far).
What we have in current debates is "student debt" and whether the lifting of the temporary stay on repayments, during the covid pandemic, is going to make some things go snap in the night. What camel backs will crack? As Emily Jashinsky pointed out recently on Breaking Points, many took the social cues seriously and went for the four year degree, but on a speculative basis, betting their incomes out the other end would make this Faustian bargain well worth it.
But what if said four year curriculum were deficient in positive futurist memes?
"Positive futurist memes" are among the most esoteric, as standing back from the human melodrama long enough to get a cosmic background for context, is not necessarily an easy task, especially when light pollution deprives so many of any literal look at the Milky Way galaxy. Out of sight, out of mind. We pretend that the loss of a cosmic context has no effect on our guidance systems. For how long will we deceive ourselves along those lines?
So what we're expecting, but can't predict for a certainty, is that debtors will look for cracks in the walls of their financial prisons, and will find fault with the lack of context they were expected to go forth with.
"Making money" stops working if "making sense" doesn't underpin its value. How do Economists make sense of keeping up with payments on the national debt, in the trillions? And do this even while fighting major wars and providing entitlement programs to those who fight them and/or proffer their allegiance?
Do militaries ever go on strike? Is that what we call a military coup? Did getting a four year degree come with enough problem solving skills to address these questions? How about eight years then? That's a lot of debt to pay back though.
When the pendulum starts swinging the other way, it will become more about investing in our shared future and our young people especially. Instead of saddling them with debt, we need to give them a boost. What positive futuristic memes might we smuggle into our high schools for that to happen, past the miserly Guardians of the dreary status quo? Did they teach us the right stuff? What was missing?
To make obvious how much you feel ripped off, show how much you welcome these new alternatives. Don't encourage further enrollment in the very institutions which failed to prepare you, for your life in the real world. Unless, that is, these very institutions demonstrate some dawning awareness of the "right stuff" and how to share it.
Might there be some UBI (universal basic income) involved? Pay me to learn Spanish, Russian... Japanese. Pay me to learn, in the form of immediate rewards, such as nutrition and a place to stay, even if not with cash. If I study biology, give me access to microscopes. That's what the military offers: a form of socialism. Universities aren't that different.
