Top Down Templates

Top Down Template is maybe just a synonym for Framework. Using a canned framework is the opposite of home growing all the code, which may amount to reinventing the wheel in the pejorative sense. 

Gene Fowler would argue that we do need to reinvent wheels from time to time, to keep up with our own innate abilities and to not lose touch with first principles, something like that.

Codomyrmex is a Github repo with what we might call generic code, already modularized, well organized, and generalized to a high level. It's a framework. Just reading it is instructive, as it radiates page after page of state of the art best practices.

Grokking History

:: thirsters meet (on a different night) ::

At Thirsters last night, I proposed my thesis that Donald Trump's strategy, of blaming Biden for the war in Ukraine, while maybe not historically accurate, seemed to be working. A side benefit is Biden wouldn't really be taking the blame because his mind was going at the time and he was running on empty shibboleths.

In actuality, the B team (B for president Blinken) was going with a flow established way back in Zbigniew Brzezinski's time. The momentum stemmed from a longstanding insecurity regarding being the world's only superpower through a next American Century. How could this be accomplished?

From one of my outbound emails of April 1, 2025:

Is it fair to characterize Anne Applebaum's views as consistent with those of Zbigniew Brzezinski? Does Applebaum ever explicitly praise Brzezinski? Who are her adjacent ideologues, meaning what historians are most similar to her in terms of how they view contemporary geopolitics. What thinkers would we consider diametrically opposed to Applebaum meaning who are her chief critics, if she has any?

That'd be quoting a prompt I'd already sent to Perplexity.ai.  Here's a link to the LLM's reply.

What Trump is attempting to do is break the news to the American people that the neocon project to "weaken Russia" by allying with Uke Russophobes, was misguided from the beginning and engaged in by losers. 

Their loss could be our win, if we manage to root out the decrepit and obsolete thinking that drove Biden's geriatric policies in the first place.

One of our number used Grok during our meetup, to check up on the likely views of General McPeak (a four star general and former member of the joint chiefs of staff), who may be joining us again. I missed that earlier meetup, but maybe I'll make the next one. 

I'll ask Grok about him too (for this blog post).

Excerpt from Grok's reply:

Comparing the views of General Merrill A. McPeak, a former four-star general and member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with those of retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor on the war in Ukraine is challenging due to the limited public statements from McPeak on this specific topic. McPeak, who served as Air Force Chief of Staff from 1990 to 1994, has not been prominently associated with detailed public commentary on the Ukraine conflict, particularly in recent years. His public record focuses more on military strategy, leadership, and historical operations like the Gulf War, rather than current geopolitical conflicts such as Ukraine. In contrast, Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel and former Trump administration advisor, has been vocal and controversial in his commentary on the Ukraine war, often expressing views that align with a pro-Russian perspective and skepticism of U.S. involvement. Below, I’ll outline their respective positions based on available information, noting where gaps exist for McPeak, and provide a comparison.

We talked about the movie Dr. Strangelove a lot. I hyped one of my other fave Peter Sellers movies: Being There, based on the novel by Jerzy Kosiński. This was before our host, Art, showed up. These days Thirsters meet in his beautiful old Portland home, whereas we used to meet at a McMenamins.

Pound Era Mathematics (School of Tomorrow)

Debate Circuits

I’ve been off the high school debate circuit for a good long while by now. At my high point in participation I co-chaperoned our Cleveland Cannibals to nationals in Indianapolis. Our other chaperone was an assistant coach for the team and an army recruiter who had served in Afghanistan. He did all the driving in our rented Jeep Cherokee.

Gonzo, the lead coach, generously gave me first dibs on the Indianapolis meetup as my daughter had played a pivotal role in both forming the team and propelling it to fame and glory. He’d waited a long time to see the National Forensic League national level game and had earlier accompanied the team to Dallas after their previous best in state showing.

I’ve written about these events before, and shared pictures. I’d never been to a national level National Forensic League championship either and found the whole adventure a highly educational experience.

What I’m wondering about today, from my sideline position, with no contacts in the local high schools to speak of, is whether teams are using current affairs as an opportunity to educate themselves. To what extent have the Cannibals been wrestling with the war in Ukraine for example, or the genocide in Gaza?

I’m turning 67 today and predictably have no kids in high school. My offspring are both working professionals. 

So my habit,, when looking for such information, is to turn to YouTube and search on high school debate teams as a topic, looking for maybe a juicy Lincoln Douglas debate on whether said war in Ukraine was provoked or unprovoked, to use the semantics of this time frame. Or are all such debates confined to Model NATO or Model UN?

To some extent the debate world became self-ostracizing when it came up with “spreading” as somehow a sporting technique. The Lincoln Douglas format was not degraded to quite the same extent in my experience. The sport should work backwards from what’s actually a needed skill, such as speaking in measured tones amenable to simultaneous translation. 

Getting good at spreading i.e. learning to talk insanely fast with breath control coaching, was mostly useful if your career goal was to read those fast-scrolling disclaimers tacked on to some commercials, especially drug commercials. 

But those careers have been turned over to bots by now, for the most part. Real humans aren’t needed when it comes to speed-reading those scripted legal-language voiceovers.

Tiny Homes

For sure we've noticed the Space Capsule Homes website, and I've launched into my usual chatter I'll call "EPCOT West", meaning I'm advocating for alternatives "tiny home" concepts, on the model that the campground offers amenities outside of the pods, such as a cafeteria and meetup spaces, workshops (as in "makerspaces" -- Glenn disliked that term "maker") and whatever.

Today the focus was Caltrop City, or Crescent City, with its monument to the Tetrapod (a caltrop variant). We could have contemplative types, already engaged in religious studies, say, do a stint in a Capsule and report back on the experience. 

The whole point is to (a) garner feedback and (b) give would-be adopters of novel lifestyles a "try before you buy" experience.  We have some of the business model worked out, with help from AI.

Speaking of religious studies, Julian of Norwich has fast becoming a patron saint, for reasons we might discuss in other journal entries.

The period between the two world wars is of core interest in School of Tomorrow coursework. We talk about Huey Long, and we talk about H.G. Wells and his 1922 Washington and the Hope of Peace. 

We study H.G. Wells anyway, for his science fiction, but in this corpus he's hoping to sober up (even though 1920s post-war New York is making him giddy -- that Roaring 20s sensation) and buckle down to prevent a next world war. An exercise we know now was unsuccessful. 

A main takeaway: my recollection, confirmed by AI, is Wells thought the UK and Europeans were overly punitive towards the Russians. Many parallels to the present situation.

Zombie Apocalypse

We have a lot of bureaucracies thinking their job is to determine where to move large populations en masse. Another approach is give every camper a valid travel pass and an expense account (no, not open ended) and let them chart a course for themselves. Asylum Cities might try to recruit them, and might succeed in some cases, but there's no predicting in advance what the dispersal pattern will be.

However the Earthlings currently are trained to think in terms of fenced or walled off territories, with the portculus coming down on any unauthorized movements. You'll need some real ID and a credit score before privatized services, a long time ago public, let you onto their property. With everything privatized, the public has no space, and is expected to sign on with one oligarchy or another is a valued mercenary.

The idea of "nation state" as "holding pen" was popularized by such movies as Hunger Games and Punishment Park. The younger generation is desperate to get out from under the tyranny of oldsters, who've hardened their hearts over the years, calcified their thinking, and now steer with cold dead hands. 

Or call them corporations: unoccupied zombie hulks, long gone inside, but persisting as mega-donors and sponsors of Supreme Court Better Living [tm]. Such is our "democracy racket" today, designed to fool everyone always, but a failure in that respect. Many see through the ruse.

Most of the Palestinians I know are Americans and they have passports to travel back and forth to old haunts in Jordan or Kuwait or whatever places. I don't personally know any who are hankering to return to the Middle East in its present state of lawlessness and borderless no mans' lands. That's a hell hole to be escaped. 

But the United Nations seems content to run open air prisons indefinitely, because the alternative is to offer the privileges of nationhood (e.g. human rights) to the world's dispossessed, its undocumented, and this would be upsetting to the zombie class.

In allowing (a) giant corporations to be seen as people with human rights -- the right to lie included -- and (b) in allowing money to count as speech, such that those with the most money have the most speech, the legislating lawyer class destroyed the worth (the jurisdiction) of the English language, pretty much, in its default state. 

Not only is English a buggy junkyard of broken code, of course. We're all wrestling with the challenge of coding up some new protocols that won't repeat these egregious and thoughtless (actually highly premeditated) mistakes of past, long-gone, generations of naked ape who didn't know any better.