Asylum Cities

When people talk "billions for Ukraine" it's usually not with some accompanying breakout, meaning it's left to our imaginations how much is for hospitals and care units of various kinds. One might imagine an entirely civilian budget in other words, and then ask how far short of that are we willing to sacrifice. Another dime on mayhem might not be a dime well spent.

Actually there's likely a breakout and I'm just not seeing it when I make my rounds of the various channels and repositories I visit when harvesting information. Probably a pie chart or other visualization. We're told some of the biggest slices go to the prime contractor irrigation system (Beltway Mafia) and for a lot of family estates, that's reason enough to slobber, in anticipation of more lucrative contracts.

Out here in the Pacific Northwest, we're more concerned with preserving wetlands and salmon. As to whether Oregon could host some civilian construction operations (healthcare oriented), I'm not so sure. My nudging us in the direction of doing epcots, with university connections, encounters resistance, I'm guessing partly because of the negative Rajneesh Puram experience. 

So my sights turn to Canada, perhaps the Yellowknife area? These campuses could stay small. Breitenbush is an inspiration, but I'm thinking higher tech, maybe with electric ATVs powered from batteries charged by wind and solar. Lets just see if that's even doable. Computer animations and simulations don't replace reality outside of AI. We need the harsh realities of Mother Nature to teach us whether our designs are really worthy.

Which brings us back to Ukraine. Something like a flourishing peacetime economy is long overdue, by some decades. Any budget should recognize the need for military disengagement such that mature civilian undertakings might resume in earnest. There's no point trying to masquerade while stockpiling ammo, as these installations will attract tourists and journalists, other visitors. We're not about being secretive so much as role modeling the freedoms that come with keeping it transparently open source.

I'm not suggesting there's any real difference on either side when it comes to addressing civilian needs. The Russian side of the fence needs hospitals, working rail, trucking, internet, the whole works. Devastation is not the goal, for anyone in Greater Europe. 

If your mentality is purely punitive, you must be low ranking. Tales of feuding and revenge get to hog center stage for only so long, as the cast continues to roll over. Deeper themes, such as building new infrastructure, take one further, in terms of leaving a lasting legacy.

But then again, here in the Pacific Northwest we're more focused on the Pacific Rim economy, while those Atlanticist east coasters remain obsessed with their West Asia endeavors. We're East Asia facing, meaning towards Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, China, of course Bali and Borneo, not forgetting the Aussies or New Zealand. Lots more. I was editor of Asian-Pacific Issues News there for awhile (AFSC, obscure), plus the Philippines was my home for some formative years.

To the north, Russia again, but more as an indigenous people than some EU foe, fellow Sibero-Alaskans.

Russian businesses have had their branch offices around here since well before Oregon attained statehood. They had dealings with Tulalip, the established resource keepers. Many Oregonians are ethnic Russkies to this day (even Stalin's granddaughter joined us a while back), plus we have ethnic Ukes too -- these are terms of endearment, we all get silly nicknames. 

Assembling the Puzzle

If you've been following my ("my") emergent (self reshaping) curriculum you'll perhaps recall my graph linking Margaret Fuller to Ada Byron, around the time of Napoleon, after the American and then French revolutions. 

At the same time, I started digging a tunnel from the present, towards this past matrix, including such luminaries as Buckminster Fuller, Walter Kaufmann, Richard Rorty, all contemporaries of mine although I'm living on into the 21st Century, being of a later generation.

I'd already run into the US Civil War as a big deal in the American psyche. Now that I've been reading The Metaphysical Club and listening to its author on YouTube, I'm seeing more of how this tunnel goes. Issues of race and racism, Darwinism, Social Darwinism, feature bigly.

Another feature of my curriculum is I don't ignore Occupy, a movement those fascinated by the "color revolutions" seem to bleep over. Following Kaufmann, and waving the flag of "place based" education, I'm happy to count biography and autobiography as important inclusions. Kaufmann was always turning his critical eye back on the author, the journalist, the news publisher and its (perhaps ideologically driven) editors. Philosophy must continue to involve self reflection and internal disciplines.

I've seized on Rorty's Achieving Our Country as potentially psycho-therapeutic  in that it restores the possibility of continuing the narrative in ways that uphold the values of one's heroes. If the US has to die and go underground, before its rebirth as a phoenix, it's not like we don't have a template. Sounds ancient Egyptian.

Where did pragmatism go? The conventional wisdom portrays the Cold War was a clarion call to zealots of all stripes. Pragmatism seemed too accepting of enemy viewpoints to matter.

I'd say pragmatism left the university and went to Madison Avenue, where it took up the dark arts of advertising and public relations, as a student of Edward Bernays. 

Pragmatists become "social engineers" (a term with negative connotations right out of the gate) and as such they gained their main clientele, the politicians. They founded companies like Cambridge Analytica, based on machine learning.

Instead of harping on the word "capitalism" (a theory of capitals?), let's talk about the commercial sector, also known as the private sector. The idea that "socialism" equals "no privacy" is too unreflective to let pass as a truism. Political talk is semi-paralyzed with cliches.  

One's level of privacy remains an important measure, but perhaps not as a guide in some bipolar taxonomy i.e. "do I live in a capitalist or socialist system?" -- how about neither, how about both? How about we're not a slave to such "ist talk"?

Advice to Some Dieters

I stress the "some" because I'm aware of how we differ widely in the kinds of coaching we each want. Some need a stern lecture and welcome same, if delivered professionally. I'm not adopting a stern manner here, nor a punishing tone.

A sense of power you may develop has to do with your ability to shift your habits, or as we say in psychology, to express and / or extinguish them. Yes, my meaning of "power" is aligned with the old fashioned meaning of "will power". 

The obverse of what I'm saying is "pick your battles" because indeed, some patterns are not especially subject to your will. There's that saying about knowing the difference being evidence of wisdom.

When I tackle my "addiction to" (ingrained habit of consuming) sugar, a term with a refined meaning in modern lore, which I'll get to shortly, I focus less on the substance and more on the appetite, the phenomenon of having a sweet tooth. Then I get curious: what would I be like with less of a sweet tooth? 

Put more as a Bayesian: "what would the world around me have to be like for me to be less of a sweet tooth (in it)?". I'm inviting changes to the whole world, as experienced by me, as a result of my reshaping my appetites. That mere act of reshaping, I'm suggesting, gives one a sense of being powerful.

So here's where discernment comes in. Of course if we all had infinite will power, we'd move mountains and all become beautiful (which we are) and our ideal weight (as if there's just one). Short of moving mountains, do we have the power to resist, with an eye towards extinguishing, the craving for sweets?

The desire for intense glucose rushes, day in and day out, is what we really mean by an appetite for (addiction to) sugar, meaning pizza and pasta, bread, not just cake and ice cream. Phasing out carbs is what a diabetic is advised to do. Stop taxing your pancreas and start burning those ketones instead, throw those ketone logs on the fire, lord knows you've got a real pile of 'em.

The other reminder is not to make it a moral contest, with you against the devil, resisting temptation, and bad sinful you if you give in. Sure, that's a popular mindset to assume, when reshaping, but it's not the only one possible. The search for novelty and variety in a changing world might be more the driving undertaking. You just wanna see what happens if you stop doing this (not cold turkey necessarily) and start doing that (slow acceleration OK).

Put another way, your aim is not to be a goodie two shoes, but to be powerful, but in a way we have a right to enjoy, an earned pleasure. The ability to reshape yourself is tantamount to your ability to exercise your freedoms, as a self. You grow more into your heritage, as a selfhood, in exercising your inborn ability to reshape.

Then there's the mental habit of always thinking one needs to reshape this or that. Watch out for those ruts (those grooves) as well, meaning remember to question your own beliefs as to what habits you need to work on. Maybe you would like the habit of sending more postcards, drinking more tea, riding buses more often... or try listing an entirely different list of habits. The permutations are endless. 

Play with reshaping what it means to reshape.

Colonist Versus Colonialist

We hear a lot about "nationalism" versus "globalism" these days. Probably the easiest way to sound patriotic is to decry globalism, which is roughly perceived as the doctrine (the "ism") of "the one percent" which in turn is shorthand for a much smaller percentage, i.e. not "one in a hundred" is an illuminatus or whatever.

"Colonialism" is highly out of fashion, but what is it, anyway? 

English is a bit slippery, y'all may have noticed. One may have a colony (in the sense of neighborhood) of mostly Urdu speaking Hindus, in this other surrounding culture, but there's no connotation that the colony is taking over. It's an enclave, perhaps a camp of visiting guest workers. 

One has such enclaves all over the world, otherwise known as resort hotels (for the more transient colonists).

That's right: both "colonist" and "colonialist" are defined. 

The former is doing it, whereas the latter is believing in it. 

The true believers are likely wanting to have more of a hand in steering the policies of the host country. 

A simple colonist is glad to have the host taking care of providing room service, other amenities. 

Hotel management is blissfully not hotel guest business.

Then you inevitably get a "spectrum" i.e. hotel guests that are nevertheless doing business with the hotel, by bringing together a conference in that venue. I was privy to this angle quite a bit, thanks to HoldenWeb and The Open Bastion, conference companies I got to hang with thanks to Steve Holden. His team produced Pycons, Djangocons, an ApacheCon or two, among others. I traveled to DC and Chicago for some of them.

I bring up hotels in part because they conventionally (pun intended) host whole colonies, some of which are semi-permanent or at least long lasting, such as in the case of employed workers. In the worker scenario, dormitory digs and workspace may be separated, which is where the "bedroom community" becomes an enclave. One has enclaves of embassy workers for example, a colony from nation X who staff their nation X embassy.

One also gets inter-colony interactions (e.g. Pythonista vs Perl Monger at an OSCON -- I greatly admired both communities), meaning a nation state such as Lesotho will host multiple enclaves associated with multiple embassies, engineering projects, religious establishments, other enterprises. Again, I'm writing from personal experience. 

Religious establishments are a great example, because it's often a religious practice to have one's personnel do tours of duty in distant lands, spreading the religion, sure (missionary work), but also bringing back intelligence and artifacts, potentially advantaging.

When a colonist gets in trouble with the host country, how is this handled? We see from the news that several patterns (templates) pop up in response to this question. Let's come back to this topic down the road.

Sociology Day

I'm in an intensive Sociology workshop today, in my city-as-campus Portland context. Right now, I'm connected to a Pashtun Institute guy based at Rutgers, soon to defend his thesis. We're talking about the concept of "national consciousness" via the Math 4 Wisdom channel. I'll embed the video when it becomes available.

Then I get my time with the retired librarians, drop in personalities, continuing the action at El Barrio, which burned up in a fire at the outset of 2024 (no one hurt, extensive property damage to El Mercado).

Finally, this evening I plan to attend a meetup of the rebooting Thirsters, a group of conversationalists with a strong background in sociology, academically, through Peace Corps and by other means.

I had a good first experience with Sociology as a discipline thanks to my 8th grade teacher at ASOR, Fred Craden. 

In my twenties, when I returned to Portland to settle long term, I achieved an adult level relationship with Dr. Charles Bolton, a career professor of sociology who first crossed paths with my parents in their University of Chicago days (when I was born).

These were notes I took during Aslam's meetup. I also posted some follow-up questions to the listserv.

From the homework readings:

Alt Worlds

from Bonnie DeVarco's presentation to TrimTab Book Club, Feb 3, 2024

Would a sphere that focussed on city mayors more, be detrimental to our endeavors? That's not a tight enough question yet, as who is this "we" with endeavors? What "endeavors" are we talking about? Suspicions abound.

It's not like city mayors don't talk and compare notes already. Portland celebrates an end to the nuke weapons era, now about you guys? Clearly the problem of radio-toxins in need of safe storage has not gone away regardless, with or without an intelligible treaty situation. 

Mayors might compare notes on the safety of their power grids, especially in light of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. But also in light of Maui. That's a part of the job, goes with the territory. Beyond electrical concerns one has transiting traffic, such as chem trains through East Palestine.

But then some avid cable TV view viewer might pipe up saying: only congressional representatives, and even in that case, only a few committees have any official government business prying into the affairs of the Department of Energy and associates. 

Mayors are not invited to that clique. Don't make such calls into interesting, crowd-informing TV. Which lobbies are telling us that I wonder?

I agree though, there's little consensus on how the circuitry must be designed. 

Would it be "wrong" to have a Refugees Channel, as I proposed? Would the religious denominations support it, if it were ecumenical enough to reach their laities? How are generous denizens of the first world going to take part in improving these people's lives -- versus trapping them with razor wire no one told them about -- unless some channel opens up between them?

The improvement I'd make to the Sanders-Yang idea of a socialist safety net (civilian instead of military) would be to (a) make college the norm, work-study the default and (b) make the UBI a scholarship that pays for it, without precluding making more of an income on top of that. At least the UBI level puts a floor under things, meaning lots of jobs building OMRs or whatever futuristic "monstrosities" (a term of endearment in this context). We already have the pattern in our socialist military, with base campuses.

But no, the screenwriters can think of nothing better than a scorpions in the jar scenario, between old laser eyes Biden (out for Maga) and Orange Jesus (Maga King). What a weird cartoon, eh? And yet they say I'm the one who's bizarre? Tell me about it bozos.

Having more mayors weighing in and doing Zoom (or other) calls, with cable and streaming both allowed, would boost a sense of camaraderie among municipalities along with a healthy sense of competition. "What are you doing about the house-less"; "I dunno, what are you doing?" and like that, but more substantial maybe, less Planet of the Apes.

OK, so that doesn't sound like a credible option to you? It was just an example, an exercise in imagination.

When I got to Manila for the rest of high school I was surprised to find some of the dominant corporations were fielding the sports teams on television, meaning the companies themselves were fielding teams, not just sponsoring them with lots of decals. 

The Royal True Orange company, which likely had a parent I'm not remembering, had a team called the Pulp Bits. Their flagship beverage featured pulp bits in case that's not obvious.

I've seen a lot of demonizing of the public-private partnership concept, on which my whole Project Renaissance was premised. By now I must have horns or something, given all the heaped scorn.

Government would get out in front with the prototyping and research, in the nonprofit sector, and the donor funders would turn around and profit from the derivative products. Put that way, I'm guessing many readers will think "well, that's hardly a new idea". Exactly right. The military uses it today.

I was gratified to see Bonnie making so much room for fat pipes between our school of thought (Bucky Fuller informed) and the General Systems Theory literature (GST). I've been milking that connection myself, as some of you know, but it's always heartening to find others who appreciate the continuity here, while roping in Gregory Bateson in the process.

Cultish Thinking

Hollywood East is trying to figure out a screenplay whereby the White House might be seen as taking heroic action in some way, against an advertised foe. 

However the think tanks are at odds and firing at one another, adding to the sense of semi-paralysis that bedevils District "comic strips" these days. Very little consent has been manufactured, that driving the Pentagon over a cliff would be the best thing.

Of course my contemporary readers are well aware of world circumstances and will readily fill in the blanks. West Asia as we're now calling it has turned to jello, such that strict borders seem to no longer persist, such as between Jordan and Syria and Iraq in some places. I've heard the joke about "messy potamia" (not necessarily funny in every context).

You'll remember, if reading in my journals, that I could imagine some Palestinians voluntarily choosing, say at the extended family or neighborhood level, to escape the mayhem for now, and I wasn't restricting their options to elsewhere in West Asia. I well recall how hard it was for Jews during the holocaust to find safe refuge far away from Berlin.

That made me a minority thinker, as evacuation (removing from harm's way) was not a priority. No one wanted my cruise ship flotilla (I was imagining like a rotating convoy, not really knowing in advance how many Gazans would opt to dispatch).

The civilian viewers of channeled media are getting a front row look at what happens when diplomacy breaks down among players. I'm not on the phone with the District either. This is faraway Portland, lightyears distant. I'm more likely to be talking with Canadians these days (a hotbed of the kind of free thinking mixed with geometry I find attractive).

We all know what various characters in that soap opera want to do. If we're free of "just cable" and tuning in YouTubes, we're aware of a wider cast than just the ones the cable cabal puts on. I bounce around watching some of the VIPS crew, often as talking heads on others' programs.