Back to Basics

Food Not Bombs bicycle trailer parked in a Quaker Meetinghouse

Like many a youngster, I was always bothered by "learning the 3Rs" by which was meant "reading, writing and arithmetic" and you can see why: only an illiterate would think "arithmetic" began with R. I didn't get then what I do now: that there's a wry sense of humor involved. Like when I asked about the giant N on the Nebraska State stadium and some professor wryly said "yeah, N is for Knowledge".

OK, now with that out of the way, let me be even more contrarian in saying the 3Rs aren't basic at all compared to a more neglected elective, namely Home Economics. I'd summarize the early grades as being about Econ in the sense of Home Econ, and Health, which interweave around a "my body myself" chief pillar of self interest. The two year old is very rightly obsessed with eating and sanitation. Obsession becomes merely a strong focus over time.

However, Home Economics doesn't have to mean some simulated Betty Crocker kitchen and lots of (hashtag) trad-wife apron wearing. Think more of a submarine's kitchen with a hungry crew to feed daily, like we feed the school itself. Do we have apprentices in the school kitchen cafeteria? Not if we're slow and dumb. Unions would disallow it (really?).

But even if we're not allowed in the kitchen, we're allowed to make cooking shows about serving all the folks showing up for a healthy meal. We know a lot about sanitation and the proper handling of foods, not just superficially, but with a deep understanding of microbes, disease transmission, medical science. Medical science is our initial portal into all the STEM subjects. Which ties me back to Nebraska.

Dr. Bob Fuller was not alone in seeing the writing on the wall:  students not intending to make physics their major nevertheless had reasons to know a lot of physics, many of them health related. The human body is where all principles converge, even quantum, and my First Person Physics meme was good at capturing that essence. Dr. Fuller was happy to credit me with that meme and bring me on as a member of the team. He flew me out to the University of Nebraska, at Lincoln, for a strategy session. I also gave a talk.

It's my Food Not Bombs experience that informs a lot of my thinking, as well as my experience with the Gathering of Western Young Friends. In FNB, we'd harvest food from warehouses in an urban setting, approximately enough to serve fifty people. We would prepare and cook the meal developing a menu on the fly, based on what produce was available, plus what we had in storage as staples, such as grains. We would usually cook in a church kitchen. The Gathering was the same way: we had control of a large kitchen equipped to prepare and serve meals to hundreds.

A lot of developers may read this and think: wait a minute, aren't we still educating for a nuclear family based lifestyle wherein each household has its own well-equipped kitchen and the planned-for meal size is accordingly small. Two parents with two kids and a pet. What's the point of educating cooks to serve in the military, or at spontaneous gatherings such as festivals?

Also problematic: how young am I going when I say "grade school"? Kitchens contain sharp objects and equipment capable of starting fires. We need students in charge of their own emotions and unlikely to act out in a violent manner. Has my utopia somehow come up with the optimum filters?

So yes, my recipes for reform only spell disaster in the eyes of some, whereas for enterprising social media personalities, we're talking grist for the mill. Answers will emerge in conversations and I'm not saying those need to be with me ("chat amongst yourselves"). I'm helping wheels turn some other wheels and so on.

"Older kids with some younger prodigies expressing an interest and aptitude" is the usual answer (which sidesteps the deets around screening), when it comes to working around knives and ovens, toxic (if consumed) cleaners. A first pass might involve using more video equipment, even doing some editing, before diving into dishwashing first person. Watch your peers. Learn the ropes vicariously first.

As to why are we cooking for groups, I'm seeking to balance the nuclear family picture, that's true. In between is the restaurant chef, who will maybe cook some dishes for large numbers, say rice and a few soups, whereas the majority of meals are made to order, but from a smallish set of recipes or templates, what we always call menus.

Speaking of recipes, the obvious bridge to STEM and Theater in PATH is via programming and algorithms (including dances). Many a textbook introduces "following an algorithm" as akin to "following a recipe". In theater, it's "following a script". In all cases we might speak of "programming", not forgetting the possibilities of music.

Tuning in Martian Math -- from the Silicon Forest

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.

Gazans to Guantanamo?

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.

New Gaza

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.

Anticipating Trends

Fractal Universe (Mandelbulb 3D fractals)

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.

Welcome to the Global U.

The Refugee Biz

I considered "Buzz" in place of "Biz".

No one thinks of the "refugee biz" as the big business of the Americas in general, let alone of the United States. But then I right away have to walk that back, as the Statue of Liberty beckons and it's built into the warp and weave of the nation that this is a place for émigrés. Come here and resettle. Uncle Sam needs you.

That message keeps changing over the years. Come pick our fruit but don't expect to be treated much above the slave level, meaning you will need to stay undocumented so we might keep our 2nd tier of exploitable labor.  We'll kick you out when we feel like it.  Sorry, we got here first.

If you switch lenses and see "going west" as adding to the "refugee bucket", then the whole saga of spreading westward, coast to coast, was the Refugee Biz in action.  Which is not to say they couldn't be enslaved or conscripted, forced into indentured servitude, onto poor farms or whatever.

Once you remember the role the military plays, of warehousing and disciplining scads of men, turning them into fine specimens, and once you see military types as socialists escaping capitalism, i.e. as economic refugees, then the "refugee biz" takes on its more monstrous proportions, size-wise.  The refugee biz is still the biz then. Makes sense: providing refuge.

However, too much focus on the economic component leaves too many stories untold.  People come to the Americas to get lost, to escape being found, to start over, to gain a clean slate. Providing asylum.

When I see the impressive ability of Chinese crews to crank out whole cities in China, I go back to Old Man River, the stadium-shaped city that dwarfs a real stadium.  

Not as dense as a Paolo Soleri perhaps, but certainly a real city, like a crater, not necessarily sprawling.  It could be surrounded by a wilderness, with a few roads and train tracks coming and going. Canals.

One could build a few to get the hang of it, e.g. do the "movie set" version. Make some cartoons. Script the project. Do a few smaller ones? Perhaps we already have?  Do stadiums count?

The Americans would add more aerospace, continuing to take these new designs to the next level of ephemeralization.

By the way, I currently know next to nothing about "fifteen minute cities" although I've heard the meme.  Does that mean it takes no more than 15 minutes to get from any point to any point within the city?  Is that on foot or by Segway?  Like a Florida mobile home park but with more amenities?

I do imagine an OMR would have like trains or monorails, like we have at the bigger airports.  Individualized people movers (driverless)? Who has the best storyboards?

Fashion Statements

I'm thinking more about an Asylum City wherein the refugees, fleeing more negative circumstances, mingle with adventurers, professionals, students and journalists, without needing to switch into uniforms.  

Asylum City derives from associations with "mental hospital" and both patients and faculty "dress up" in the context of a medical care facility of almost any kind (exempting clinics and some outpatient diagnostic facilities). 

In a hospital, patients don't stay in their street clothes, just as faculty tend to go for various costumes I won't go into, but which have a lot to do with sanitation (i.e. hygiene). But that's not what I'm going for, even though hygiene remains a core workflow. 

Does your site provide clothes cleaning? A resort hotel might well, whereas a campsite might not, or have a laundromat option (a popular mobile home park template). You have to design around plumbing (the use of water) and sanitation, with any engineering project, adding networking, air ducts and piping, whatever else is offered as a hookup service.

"Derives from" in the sense my neighborhood, anchored by Hawthorne Boulevard, is informally named the Asylum District, for the 1800s mental hospital located somewhere between SE 12th and the river, a large estate in a largely rural setting back in those days. 

To some extent, I transplant "the vibe" in this area to my target model campus (campus model). Also, in place of "Spaceship Earth" I hot-swap in my "Global U", U for University, an institution revolving around teaching care for humans, other animals, as a primary subject of research and evolving practice. I'm one of my own city-as-campus role modelers.  And no, I've never been to Burning Man. I come from an urban planning family.

So the target lifestyle need not involve uniforms, but might in some instances i.e. when you're dressed for some martial art or construction trade. Just like in the Asylum District in that sense. Plus we have lots of used clothing stores, and Good Wills.  Buffalo Exchange. Red Light. Gold Door (not used clothing, but adds to the atmosphere). Come check us out.

So just as we mingle containers of used home stuff (furniture and so on), so do we have an Exchange going for clothing. 

For some, it's a matter of casting, having lots of role play costumes on hand in different sizes, and not shopping to buy on the spot.  The screenwriters take on questions of wardrobe ahead of time, ala The Incredibles.  Indeed, some camps are very much about product placement in the fashion sense.  Just check TikTok for a sense of the product placement ads.

Speaking of fashion, I got to mingle with some interesting folks at an annual shindig last night, in a part of town, high up and looking west, that specializes in a kind of west coast lifestyle, one might call it "high ranking" in a Silicon Forest context. Whereas the term "Silicon Forest" draws attention to chip fab and software development, telecomms, movie making, that doesn't mean all fortunes get made in these endeavors. 

You still need surgeons and cemeteries, wherever you go.  I wore my suspenders but under a Python (computer language) branded sweater. This logo proved a useful conversation starter.

The military does have uniforms, but doesn't discourage "competitive dressing" in the sense of how one is encouraged to display rank as a part of the dress code (it's literally a code). 

Males and females are both highly fashion conscious, but society nudges them with different cues in different ways. I suppose I'm stating the obvious, and skating above much actual ethnography.

What type of city are we talking about? 

I always look back on Old Man River (OMR) for inspiration. That was stadium-shaped, with a terraced interior, of mega-project size. Bucky Fuller did some plans.  Don't confuse him with Small is Beautiful E.F. Schumacher. Bucky was more of a "broad band" conceptualizer. Pattern languages occur at all frequencies.

Cooking is Chemistry

One of the long running themes in these blogs has been the curriculum around "fooding" (as we say in the high Himalayas). 

Cooking shows on TV are an inspiration, as are "home ec" courses, as is Food Not Bombs (FNB), a theoretical workflow I've often practiced, with skillful others, including during the Occupy chapter. 

One could say we were being "more militant" but I prefer the word "disciplined". From there, I went on to haunt an abandoned building (my Ministry of Education), what would later become Revolution Hall.

My ministry wants kids involved in food logistics, cooking for groups, cooking for others, cooking for themselves, while folding in a lot of that dietary talk we get from the health care sector, regarding insulin resistance, high fructose foods, or whatever theory the school wants to showcase. You're walking your talk in the cafeteria, whatever it is. Or not, if you're lazy.

I'm not saying without adult supervision. I know a food handler's license is something worth having, adding to bragging rights. That you work in catering or delivery or cleanup or whatever it is, does not "look bad" on your academic record. 

On the contrary "community service" means "cultivating a skill set" i.e. don't always mistake the admissions officer for always on the lookout for saints. No, you just need to know how to slice onions without hurting yourself, going up the rungs from there. High powered cooks are admired, even on enemy ships.

The number of roles here grows quickly, even more so their interrelationships. That we're recording the operation, making videos (say YouTubes) about our Food Not Bombs episodes, involves all the logistics of filmography, atop of those of cooking. Anarchic in this context means improvised, ad hoc, with rotation (more like in Quakerism), but not without rules and protocols. Think of sailing an old-timey ship.

I'm not suggesting every neighborhood is going to adopt a "not bombs" aesthetics, as many livelihoods depend on bomb manufacture. The goal is to mitigate waste while offering worthwhile opportunities to work out. 

In my fifties, I was pulling two trailers, piled with vegetables, behind my bicycle, all the way across town, from warehouse to church kitchen. I'm not aware of many roles that actually put food on the table that also help an older guy stay sleek. I've found ways to bulk up since those days, having entered my sixties.

:: yesterday's main meal ::

Fearful Symmetry

I'm not the first one to comment on all the mirroring that goes on. They're saying the GOP is rallying around opening an impeachment inquiry because Ukraine i.e. because the first impeachment inquiry against their guy was with reference to a phone call between the White House and president Zelenskyy in Kiev. 

So now it's tit for tat, quid pro quo etc., in going after Hunter & Co. on possible bribery charges (in which the current US president might be implicated).

The symmetry is not yet complete however. The GOP has yet to turn Russiagate backlash (from the base) into RICO charges centered around the conduct of Michael Morell and his project to make the Biden laptop story seem to be Russian misinfo, even when the FBI (and presumably the CIA) already knew better. 

There's a similar pattern of willfully acting with intent, in the face of being told otherwise by people in a position to know.

Per Dershowitz, once the parties start using RICO against each other, the public perception, that politics = racketeering, comes too close to the surface for comfort. People get reminded of their own suspicions, in seeing them confirmed.

The comedians start having a field day mixing the criminality of high society into the mainstream narrative, ala White House meets Heisenberg of Breaking Bad. That's an edgy genre that sells tickets.

More puzzle pieces swirl in the popular mind already, most importantly VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) which gets connected to the Guccifer story, ala Fancy Bear. That's been a topic in these blogs as well.

Safe to say, reviewing Russiagate in earnest is going to be a big topic going into 2024, as Americans try to process to what extent they've been lied to about this that and the other. Always a challenge. We tend to rely on help from those radio voices as we drive to and from work and/or work from home. The echo chambers and think tanks process differently.

Ethnicity Versus Race

There's this stereotype that some people are bred to be snobs. That's more a joke really. It comes with the territory, that one ethnicity will look down on another, as a way of maintaining its own cohesion. Dr. Seuss made fun of this whole pattern in his children's book about the Sneetches.

Lets go with "snob islands" and talk about breeding. 

When it comes to dogs and other show animals, breeding has come to mean something specific having to do with genetics (breeding in certain traits, while breeding out others), such as creating different colors of Lab for example. My Sy is chocolate colored.

When it comes to humans, we speak of "breeding" as a kind of "grooming" wherein a child is shaped and molded by means of memes more than genes. The training is epigenetic, meaning not that dependent on specific strands of DNA. 

"Through breeding" is how ethnicities develop, groups or subcultures, with in-common biases and attitudes. Some ethnicities seem to brand around their antipathy towards one or more others. Many professions could never afford themselves such a luxury, not having the freedom to be so picky, in terms of clientele.

Now you may suffer from a kind of blindness that makes it hard for you to distinguish between ethnicity and race. I've done a lot of blog posts on this topic, tracing back to my interest in anthropology and even early childhood experiences. I understand, by breeding, that "race" is an embarrassment to those who think in racist terms and that I don't have to willingly join in that type of thinking. 

I'm still free to distinguish between ethnicities and if I think pointing out your skin color will help others find you in a crowd, then I might mention it, along with that you wear glasses and wear a backpack. Where's Waldo?

I'm relieved to see we don't have so many "Caucasians" anymore, thanks to Ancestry dot com and like that. People are getting that more nuanced view of their Eurasian roots, and don't insist they all come from that one trendy neighborhood, which most of them couldn't find on a map without help from Google.

In summary, I think some ethnicities will persist in thinking in terms of race, but mine need not, nor need people who share my breeding.

Touch and Go

There's lots in the news recently, about biolabs and their purpose, and whether "gain of function" is a euphemism for "weaponize" and of course we have to do whatever the bad guys might be doing, to make sure we out do the bad guys. That's bad guy as well as good guy thinking, if "goodies vs baddies" is your thing.

The cartoons had a good model for a plot. Our heroes stumble upon a Dr. Evil type, off the deep end in planning nefarious WMDs or whatever. The kids outwit the dude and bring him to justice, medals all around.

However, per Prouty et al, a dispiriting Malthusianism still pervades, leading some religious types to think they're doing god's (or gods') work in serving a Dr. Evil type, i.e. it's minions that we need to stay nervous about. If it weren't for minions, the Dr. Evil types would be turned in, or at least outed, and we'd all get on with our lives, glad we're not all on the same page as cultist dupes.

That's what the news sources are saying too:  the "don't snitch" ethos is inhibiting the whistle-blower reflex as it seems Dr. Evil might have an argument, and if he's right then being a minion might be the safer path. If we buy that sane people might invest heavily in death-dealing technology, then we're likely to fall prey to "the complex" (the mental illness) we were warned about by president Eisenhower.

I think we've learned, from the movies if not from real experience, that minions are a "nice to have" and are actually essential for anything that's supposed to scale.  The Dr. Evil type has to have a recruitment kit, a pump and dump scenario, whereby the minions see a path to riches if not glory. A lot of "number two" types need to step forward, to whom Dr. Evil might delegate important responsibilities.

In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, B. Fuller starts encoding this pattern in terms of Great Pirates, staying somewhat neutral as to whether said recruiters were monsters or worthy of loyalty, and/or capable of withstanding peer review (by other pirates). Sailing ships need sailors, no doubt about it. Venture capitalist enterprises need investors willing to invest their agency, not just their funds.

A question is whether we want to open the door to the possibility of a Dr. Good. Actually, that door was opened long ago, in fiction, science fiction and even in science, as psychology does not preclude Healthy Pirate Syndrome (HPS). One may have an ego without being an egomaniac. At least in principle. Dr. Dolittle comes to mind, good with animals.

Dr. B. Fuller got to walk the line, twixt heaven and hell, utopia and oblivion, and remark on its arcing nature. The neck and neck suspense arises from how close we go to the abyss sometimes, flirting with disaster.  He called it "touch and go".

Egoism Versus Egotism

I learned much of what I know about the philosophy called Egoism, from Trevor Blake, somewhat of an authority on the topic. Max Stirner is a central figure. Did Walter Kaufmann write about him much? Wes Cecil lists both Kaufmann and Stirner on his Forgotten Thinkers page.

Egotism tends to refer to pathological exaggerations of the ego's otherwise useful role in anchoring a form of self awareness related to choice making, according to tastes.  An ego develops as a personality or character such that self awareness of a self, a persona, evolves over time (or fails to evolve, as the case may be).

Confusion between egoism and egotism may account for some of the radical therapies which stress abolition of one's ego, or egocide, a kind of self canceling. Bucky Fuller spoke of committing "egocide" in the 1920s, only to be accused later, sometimes by jealous competitors, of egomania.  He certainly built a character that signaled to others about untapped potential.  These days we see a lot of egos feeding off "zero point energy" (cite Foster Gamble and Nassim Haramein) as a meme, crediting it back to Bucky as an inspiration, his Synergetics in particular.

Integral within contemporary Christianity is the idea of being reborn. Accepting Jesus Christ as one's personal savior may involve taking a sharp turn in any given character development scenario. One ego needs to die to make room for a next one. We might call it an ego overhaul, and it often becomes a part of one's life story. The turns we take get chronicled, by others if not by ourselves.  I'd say Fuller made a sharp turn in response to strong suicidal tendencies, there in 1927. However he didn't turn to Jesus at that juncture. He fell back on intuitions he felt had been prodding him since his youth, a still small voice he decided to nurture and make room for.

Fuller's character's evolution within the Boho Matrix of Greenwich Village is a topic I and other biographers take up elsewhere. Once the ability to transform one's ego (to reinvent oneself) is recognized, it's easier to keep the show on the road, in response to the road. Call it neuroplasticity. Call it a willingness to be shaped, and if necessary broken (a Quaker term), based on prior experience with a auto reprogramming. Fuller's persona continued to morph with the times.

My own story of punctuated equilibria might point to my time in Gotham as somewhat transformative. I'd moved to Jersey City from Princeton and taken a job as a school teacher. I was also volunteering downtown, at the New York Area Center, pursuant to Kaufmannesque leanings. I wanted to see what philosophy might do as a discipline, and was eying the role of est Trainer as somewhat groundbreaking. 

How could a philosophy lecture hit that hard? A lot depended on the willingness of the training participants to do some serious self overhaul i.e. self transformation was in the air and sharing honestly and authentically in a safe enough space, was encouraged by consensus, not by browbeating or a frenzied sales pitch on the part of the trainer.  Attendees had already paid their money as the curtain opened on Saturday morning, and they were eager to get down to business, with only two weekends to get it all done.

The Erhard and Fuller scenarios overlapped quite a bit, plus we had est: The Steersman Handbook (Charts of the Coming Decade of Conflict) by L. Clark Stevens, which I didn't find out about until quite a bit later. The sense we were creating or continuing a social movement, call it the Aquarian Conspiracy for shorthand, was fueling that sense of being part of something bigger than one's ego. That sensibility is not inconsistent with Egoism, nor with Taoism, and involves trusting one's own intuition (vs. taking cues or marching orders from others most of the time).

I'd say Quakerism encourages journaling, which includes blogging these days, because keeping a journal has the potential to be a character-building exercise, plus it's a way of inviting push back and feedback from other characters. 

When a Friend has a sense of a leading, a path to pursue, on behalf of a greater good, it's standard practice to set up a Clearness Committee and then a Support Committee, should the Oversight Committee agree the Meeting itself wants to get behind a certain Friend's ministry. Perhaps a traveling minute is issued and the newly registered minister becomes a circuit rider of some kind.  This may sound like a lot of dated terminology, because it is.

Along those lines (circuit riding), I'm anticipating more travel (I have my new passport, finally) and want this MacBook Pro to have as much battery life as the technology permits. My plan is to purchase a backup hard drive (HDD), use Time Machine to mirror its content externally, and then visit the Apple Genius Bar for battery maintenance, meaning I expect we'll swap out the old one for a new one.  Office Depot on MLK didn't have the HDD I wanted in stock, so I'm killing time blogging, before heading to the downtown store, which opens later.

Synergetics

A reason Fuller's Synergetics doesn't get a lot of press in some circles, is Fuller never bought into there being some "ladder to omniscience" in the following sense:  "solving" quantum physics, i.e. nailing it, still wouldn't let us predict Maxwell's Equations or the price of rice.  

The little stuff doesn't encompass or explain the bigger stuff, because synergy. That's heresy per some dogmas.

I got a message something along those lines from a lecture by Nobel Prize winning Dr. Robert Laughlin, wherein he talked about upsetting the apple cart at different levels. 

Extrapolating: it's not like the gears are locked so tightly that we have to wait for heaven and earth to move before we experience breakthroughs at some intermediate level, i.e. even when levels above and below seem relatively unperturbed. 

On some frequency on the radio dial, a plot twists, not disturbing other programming, yet awakening those who've tuned in.

Storms may be confined, but not rendered unreal. Expect those teapot tempests. Conservation laws at work.

M4W Workshop

Our workshop and movie-making exercise was on the theme of: take it or leave it as a whole versus take or leave specific parts of it (whatever "it" might be).  For example, I might choose not to watch a specific movie, in which case I don't. Or I might choose to watch it, and I watch the whole thing.  

Those are two singularities in a way: tuning in, and ignoring; remembering and forgetting.  Taking it, or leaving it.

In between, come the numbers between 1 and 1.  

If I have 2 things, I have the option of choosing either, bracketed by choosing none and choosing all. 1 2 1.

If I have 3 things (picture a triangle), I have the option of choosing them one at a time (3), in pairs (3), bracketed by none (1 way to choose) and all (1 way to choose). 1 3 3 1.

If I have 4 things (picture a tetrahedron), I have the option of choosing them one at a time (4 vertices V), in pairs (6 edges E), three at a time (4 faces F) bracketed by none and all. 1 4 6 4 1. V + F = E + 2.

If I have 5 things (picture a tetrahedron with an added center point), I have the option of choosing them one at a time (5), in pairs (10), in sets of 3 (4 external facets + 6 internal vanes = 10), in sets of 4 (5 - always leaving one out).  None and all.  1 5 10 10 5 1. 

If I have 6 things (picture a full octahedron), I have the option of choosing them one at a time (6), in pairs (15), in sets of 3 (20), in sets of 4 (15), in sets of 5 (6), bracketed by none and all. 1 6 15 20 15 6 1.

No news here. These are the rows of Pascal's Triangle and a verbalization of the combinatorics involved in selecting k items from n.  What we're adding is a cloud of points but with structure (triangle, tetrahedron, half octahedron, octahedron...).  But look how the octahedron suggests more pairs than just its 12 edges. We have those connections directly across, pole to pole, XYZ, giving 15 total.

When we get to a half octahedron (an alternative to a tetrahedron with a vertex in the middle), we already have pairs (defining edges) that aren't edges in the original figure, meaning two square diagonals. 4 (to apex) + 4 (around the base) + 2 (crisscross) = 10.  

With the full octahedron, we have surface edges (4 + 4 + 4 = 12) but also the internal XYZ segments. 12 + 3 = 15.

Organizing the point cloud up through a cube (8 things) has its charm but I see no benefit from scaling the ladder of Euclidean dimensions as we go down the rows, talking about polytopes. n-D polytopes are pretentious at this juncture in my view, adding too much unnecessary overhead.

Reading right to left on each row is about how many things to omit.  Keep all but one in exactly as many ways as choosing one.  Keeping all but two gives the same number as choosing only two.  Hence the symmetry. Complementary readings.

The 2nd row, two ones, is a "take it or leave it" just like the other rows.  

With the top row, of one alone, there's no taking and no leaving.  There's no "or" and no "and".

"Realization of otherness" (awareness) begets the 2nd row, as now the observer has separated from the observed and has the "take it or leave it" option.  The option to simply ignore and forget does not materialize in the "only one" world of complete unconsciousness.

The observer, growing down through successive rows as experience multiplies, never loses the freedom to be choosy, once that light comes on.

When we get to a half octahedron, we already have pairs (defining edges) that aren't edges in the original figure, meaning two square diagonals. 4 (to apex) + 4 (around the base) + 2 (crisscross) = 10.  With the full octahedron, we have surface edges (4 + 4 + 4 = 12) but also the internal XYZ segments. 12 + 3 = 15.

Organizing the point cloud up through a cube (8 things) has its charm but I see no benefit from scaling the ladder of Euclidean dimensions as we go down the rows, talking about polytopes. n-D polytopes are pretentious at this juncture in my view, adding too much unnecessary overhead.

Reading right to left on each row is about how many things to omit.  Keep all but one in exactly as many ways as choosing one.  Keeping all but two gives the same number as choosing only two.  Hence the symmetry. Complementary readings.

The 2nd row, two ones, is a "take it or leave it" just like the other rows.  

With the top row, of one alone, there's no taking and no leaving.  There's no "or" and no "and".

"Realization of otherness" (awareness) begets the 2nd row, as now the observer has separated from the observed and has the "take it or leave it" option.  The option to simply ignore and forget does not materialize in the "only one" world of complete unconsciousness.

The observer, growing down through successive rows as experience multiplies, never loses the freedom to be choosy, once that light comes on.

Civil Rights

My rant against gerontocracy (which flirts with idiocracy) turned out to be timely, as various events reminded people that the organizers of our little conflagration are angry oldsters with complexes. Russian and Ukrainian youth are in dreams deferred mode, whereas US youths aren’t facing a draft at least.  There’s empathy all around for the subjugated youth at the hands of tyrannical geriatrics.

During militaristic times, advances in civil rights bog down, because the people freeze into military hierarchies, become top down. Bottom up reforms get stymied as the commanders get bossy and send grunts to the front. If you had wanted more egalitarian democracy and more privileges and rights for both minors and adults alike, then outward war was misbegotten.

We’re looking at the civil right, the human freedom, to not be abused by ideologues who believe it’s their job to hatch and execute plans for all the rest of us. We’re the extras. If you’re not of a mind to be stuffed in a nasty old tank and sent into some stupid old fashioned tank battle, I understand. You’d rather not have your life ruined by morons, I get it.

I’m not typecasting all old people as misguided. A lot of them live according to obsolete thought patterns, true, but oldsters also have more hindsight, more experience, and in many cases more time to ponder and rethink. A good way to get out from under gerontocracy is to listen to oldsters telling how. Remember how MAD magazine used to leak the secrets of PR gurus (ad men, mad men of Madison Avenue), making allies among kids like me, just starting across the minefield of adulthood.

Bridging the Gap

Long time readers may have picked up, in bouncing around, who knows if chronologically, that I'm claiming to be anchored more on the PATH side, where PATH - STEM are the two shores or cliffs of a dividing canyon or chasm, the C.P. Snow Chasm to be precise, a great gap between the humanities and the sciences, the latter with its "cryptic" math (as if PATH wasn't capable of being cryptic). 

My "P" is for Philosophy, but with a door wide open to Psychology ("come share our P").

Accepting my premise, that I'm a P-person, it stands to reason that I get to lecture the Theater-History folks in my wing, which dynamic duo for me includes literature, both fictional and nonfictional.  TH is storytelling, whereas "A for Anthropology" anchors those stories to we-the-humans, that "measure of all things" grounding our analogies.

In explaining Category Theory (CT) for example, I might focus on the right brain diagrams first, and the notation second.  Circles with dots in them, with pointing arrows in between.  Arrows within circles (or ovals), the morphisms, and then arrows between the circles (or ovals), the functors.

They'll tell you those dots are the objects, mere points, and we're proud of their aspectless zero dimension-hood.  We care nothing about their content.  Their inscrutability is a feature, not a bug. 

However, other times, we've zoomed back to see dots as entire categories, objects within still greater containing structures, these containers themselves categories most likely. We like to be recursive. So dots may have structure after all, if we tune them in.

The Computer Science types naturally want those objects to be types.  Motion along an arrow might be to the type of what's returned, should an object operate, or be made to function in some way, perhaps permuting into itself, a set of possible orderings. Categories provide the dirt, the growing grounds, for more elaborate structures, like groups and fields, the various algebras.

Astronomers may have less use for CT, until "Category" is temporarily hot-swapped with "Planet" in some lecture. Now think of Urbit if wanting to catch a ride back to Computer Science. 

Little Prince goes here. As does Star Trek.  As does Sun Ra. We travel the spaceways, from planet to planet, maybe in a board game, or in a simulation game wherein planet creation (terraforming) is a theme.  According to which strategies? What is "world game" in this case?

After listening awhile to my lectures, a PATH student is more likely to see CT as a way of talking about metaphors and analogies while avoiding sounding like a literature major. The whole point is to have an elegant notation and minimalist vocabulary. Let astronomers think of categories their way, as 3D, and let computer scientists think this other 2D way. CT is a glue.

Quoting from our M4W archive:

For example, re CT (Category Theory): how mistaken would it be to temporarily jigger the namespace such that "Planet" was hot swapped with "Category" just for kicks. For "arrows" (morphisms) we have the obvious characteristic that locations on a planet (the objects) may be connected any which way, implying rotation and the ability to inspect as one would a globe, by rotation (as well as by looking more closely, and from further away). Then there's looking from the inside-out.

I bring this up in part because the Cardano article in Britannica assures us that Cardano's thought process would have been characteristically "more Islamic" in giving 2D diagrammatic Euclidean constructions for everything, if I read it right. The ratiocination involved was highly geometric in other words... as was John Harland's presentation I hasten to point out (with the fences and boxes), but more in the sense of employing, versus deriving, said cubic equation.

Also w/r to "hot swappable" that's how I think of getting a 3rd powering tetrahedron in the works, as doing something the cube does, but on a different Planet (in a different Category). The unit-edge sugar-cube is not unit-volumed here on Mars, but the sugar-tet surely is. We haven't given up a certain sweetness. The Pythagorean Theorem may be shown with equilateral triangles constructed on both legs, plus hypotenuse. Still works: a^2 + b^2 = c^2 (picture triangles).

Put another way, it's not either / or. I'm leery of any logic which triggers "flight or fight" reflexes just because there's an alternative planet (another logic) in the picture. This feels too insecure. Why do either? Become friends.

 

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (movie review)

Right, Part 1, I could've added that.  Hey, I've found a new favorite channel, when it comes to talking film.  She's not Siskel & Ebert (just the one photogenic head), but she's smart and for a me a doorway to movies, directors, actors I might want to track going forward. I'm a large ignorance-cratered surface when it comes to Movie Moon (as I'll call it, branching out from pure Planets -- yes, Urbit's an influence).

I was just on a Cohen Brothers kick, and regret not a minute. 

A commenter on YouTube agrees with me:

@3TNT3 10 days ago (edited)

Maggie is pretty-much as good /great at reviewing movies as anyone else is at doing whatever it is they are best at. She never ceases to amaze and impress me. I am absolutely certain Rodger Ebert would have luuuved her!!!

I like how the hero gets a meetup with the CIA director:  sneak into a major meeting, lurk in, and spoiler alert, make everyone else oblivious with a men in black gas.  They talk, he gets an assignment, and it's off to the races, ala Lawrence of Arabia.

There's a DNI too, which makes this world reflective of the one I blog about here, recognizing it's my responsibility to design my intel networks.  Each of us must model and role model, even if not up to 007 standards in terms of fighting bad guys on moving trains (a piece of action every movie in this genre is obliged to tackle, and MI does as good a train scene as it gets).

The stereotypes are there, in a formula that knows its a formula, and celebrates formulae.  We open with those silly Russians, always shooting themselves in the figurative big toe, the butt of jokes in the old school movies.  But now, thanks to Terminator (the guv), and Sophia (the AI Barbie) we're on to AI. Dave and I agreed there's much to recommend a War of the Worlds trend, in that we're not stirring up new suspicions of our fellows (the old ones still comprise a full plate of karmic noodles).

Intel people are characterized by having lots of files on others, certainly Applewhite did.  One realizes that's already a step above average, as a lot of people are deeply focused on their own lives only, and have little interest in enlarging their perimeter of concern.  

My grandma Esther was high level intel by this criterion, in that she had a deep interest in other peoples' scenarios.  She was an eclectic reader, and with some help from our family, a world traveler.  She can be our family agent, undercover as a sketch artist specializing in women's fashion.

In the case of Tom's character, he's naturally drawn from crush to crush, favorite gravity wells or gw candidates.  The delivery seems organic.

Speaking of fashion and all these characters dressing up (in Venice especially), I'm well aware that I've overly narrowed my wardrobe, and/or costumes I'm ready to wear, whether I "own" them or not.  Given I'm in fasting mode, pending a medical test (involving echograms, but not heart), my mind turns to staying in shape enough to keep playing active roles, operational ones.  

Like two days ago, when I was enlisted to help move a lot of irrigation pipe, both aluminum ancient and PVC (leftovers from what got buried).  Does that make me some kind of Hercules?  Far from it.  I'm acutely aware of a need to shape up.  I'm always looking for coaches, who sometimes show up already internalized.  Smile.

I just need to line up the right movies, in which to direct and/or star and/or write for (I'm not inside the Hollywood ecosystem, so still have writer rights and am the host of my own show on YouTube etc.).

You'll have to go back quite a ways to find any CIA / DNI type references here in these blogs of mine, to see how and where I impart my spin.  And don't forget to search for KGB while your at it.  The tone is quite retro by design, somewhat Asteroid City but later in time.  

My writing is closer to John le Carré's than Tom Clancy's, by a long shot.  I'm more of the school that my friends need not be uber gun savvy, contrary to the cowboy WestWorld stereotype.

Like Maggie, I loved the classic car chase in Rome, with our protagonists in the little Fiat.  Yes, long, but when do we ever get this again?  Bond did a little under powered car at one point.  This time they're up against some Bradley or one of those, piloted by another spy we'd like to know more about, beyond that she's a fighter.

Morning Coffee with Kirby

During the 2020 presidential election, my line on social media was I personally liked Tulsi Gabbard and saw lots of presidential qualities, but more in a storybook fairytale sense.  Tulsi as Little Mermaid.  

I would go on to say we needed a mafia in the White House (note lowercase, as in one of many) because presidents are at a place where "the rule of law" runs into limits, where storybook views start to crumble. That's how we talk about "black holes" too:  the laws of physics tend to "break down" yet we're obviously still curious about what goes on in them.

So here, "laws of physics" is a metaphor for "laws on the books" whereas inside the White House, all kinds of "against the law" and/or "above the law" planning goes on, often because no laws yet chart the territory the White House has to navigate.  

The law is based on precedent, argument before judges, debate, and takes time to distill.  The real world, on the other hand, "waits for no man".

So my view was the Little Mermaid (is she really that little?) aka Tulsi was "too straight of an arrow" whereas the office calls for someone more bent and twisted (crooked), more pathological in some ways.  

How could one be commander in chief of Pentagon types, who rotate into domestic policing, if one is simultaneously a crusader against all forms of corruption?  JFK was at least smart enough to appoint his bro as attorney general and let the latter typify "moral virtue" by going after the mob.

Lets talk more about cocaine, a very popular upper among the upper classes, as the stuff is expensive.  I followed Lt. Colonel Prouty's logic on that topic.  

Of course NORAD knows a lot of those small planes are carrying the stuff, said Prouty.  During the undeclared war against Nicaragua's Sandinistas, the Contras were smuggling the stuff to make money, and to fight for a cause close to the heart of many in the executive branch (West Wing types).  

Making wars self funding keeps them off the books and away from public-congressional scrutiny.  Just keep the air force from going on some crusade to cut the small aircraft supply system, and the warriors will self fund and fight in a quasi-autonomous fashion.

The stereotype the corporate media seeks to encourage is that drugs come into the Lower48 by means of pedestrians making illegal border crossings.  Sure, that happens, no question.  

But what about those airplanes making a beeline for Arkansas or somewhere else more inland?  Lets talk historically as well.  How does this circuitry all work?

Speaking of stereotypes, the movies show us Wall Street casino math types, with high expense accounts and lots of money to manage, lots of bonuses to win, needing cocaine as a job-related substance.  Much as jazz musicians smoke weed (stereotypically), your average Wall Street genius has to be in the mood to take risks, and cocaine is a mood enhancer / inducer.  

The donor class wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't for all that smuggled powder.  

The White House, aware of Wall Street, aware of the DEA and DoD, has to mediate what might be construed as conflicting interests.  Wall Street perpetuates Dulles Brothers practices at some level.  Giant corporations don't turn on a dime.

The public wants scandal and righteous rage to keep it fired up and so has an appetite for finding cracks in the facade, through which the upper class is glimpsed operating "above the law".  

From the point of view of the courageous hero risk-taker, fighting communism, terrorism, authoritarianism i.e. whomever are the bad guys du jour, dealing in controlled substances is another cost of doing vital business, in defense of the country, i.e. in the name of national security.

Speaking for myself, I work to steer clear of Victorian teacuppy "soccer mom" and/or "leaf-blower dad" morality and not be shocked or scandalized by predictable patterns.  I'll play devil's advocate for the so-called corrupt some of the time.  

Prohibition comes to mind.  I imagine myself angry with the government for taking away a freedom.  I'd be a classic criminal back then, frequenting the speakeasies.  

I'd be a criminal now if I weren't in Oregon, or other state where possession of many controlled substances has been legalized.  I'm free to accept weed as a gift, and have zero guilt about it.  Yet my critics will insist that I'm guilty, and should hang my head in shame therefore.

So am I saying I'd also be open to people gifting me with cocaine?  

Actually no, I'd rather not be involved with this substance (meth either) but I'm approaching that question from the point of view of medical science.  I don't want to get hooked on, and/or get others hooked on, a substance with those particular risks and side effects.  That's not my cup of tea.  I tried the stuff once or twice, decades ago.  It wasn't for me (nor was oxy).

What I dream about are specific Coffee Shops that operate openly as places you can try various potions, poisons, concoctions, other toxins.  Yes, they're modeled on opium dens to some extent, but they're not clones of one another either.

Those operating these establishments are well trained (in theory at least) and psychologically attuned to the needs and wants of their customers, but they're also up on medical science (as are most customers, some in medical fields).  

These coffee shops may be like a health club in being membership based, and like bars in exercising their rights to eighty-six specific people (bar access), based on their track record.  Like a video rental shop (remember those?), they may have a record of customer orders (as do the streaming services).  They may be highly regulated.

If you're the kind of cowboy who jacks up on some substance, then starts brawls on a regular basis, don't be too amazed if your membership fob (or key) stops opening doors at specific establishments.  Operators have the right to ban access, just as they have the right to ban firearms on private premises (like hotels), perhaps checked into a safe or locker (retrieve when you check out).

Was I saying above that I was personally supportive of the Contras and/or encouraged cocaine smuggling and money laundering through whatever banks?  Not really.  I was busy doing my research and learning about my world back then, and so I learned about these patterns.  

I'm also aware that big pharma has contracts with many militias, to provide legal prescription drugs (the ones they push) in place of substances trafficked by unauthorized gangs.  

Some gangs get authorized, to push Oxycontin for example.  The upper classes and organized crime merge into one big cloud once you go high enough.  

That's more my point:  I don't see law abiding philosopher kings running human affairs so much as crime bosses (e.g. presidents) operating in a more ad hoc manner, making it up more as they go along.

The morally outraged tend to want jail for everyone ("lock her up";  "lock him up";  "lock them up").  When they see a president's son being treated with leniency for a profligate lifestyle, which many of them envy, their reflex is to demand "equality before the law" and demand prison time for said offspring.  

However, it would be just as logically consistent to demand everyone living similarly profligate lifestyles be treated with more leniency.  Treat us all more like presidential offspring why not?  The founding fathers might've liked that better.  Let freedom ring.

Have the net outflow from prisons increase, versus increasing the net inflow.  Tell the truth about what's happening, but don't spin the truth to create a feeding frenzy among those seeking vengeful justice through punishment.  

It'll be a lot easier to get more of the truth out once we subtract a lot of the righteous moralizing.  Lower48 might learn a thing or two from South Africa on that score.

Am I saying I favored that pardon for Lt. Col. Oliver North, in no way as sharp or clued in as Lt. Col. Prouty?  At this point I'm content to remind readers he needed a pardon, whereas no pardon has been issued for the perpetrators of the Nord Stream sabotage, an act of extreme vandalism and an expression of a juvenile psychology.  

My profile of a Nord Stream saboteur, at the planning level, is someone lacking even a high school education, but then I've taken it upon myself to redefine what that means.  Concentric hierarchy anyone?

Notes from Asylum Village

Now that my little MAP corner (Maths / Anthro / Philo) is getting some attention, I feel again the tug of many alliances.  The I Ching and/or Machiavelli probably have/has passages on this phase or status.  The category space of political objects contains lots of arrows, not to mention slings.  "Morphing" is the name of the game.  Tarot Cards as objects. aRb, bRc implies aRc (R = relates to).  Associative thinking.

Seen from my critics' angle, I'm proposing eco-tourism as a panacea, envisioning sustainable lifestyles that involve cleanup and improvements, post disaster or perhaps pre-emptively.  The eco-tourism for Donbass could be seen as a heading off more military action, with lots of folks taking selfies in Donetsk etc.  The focus is on civilian activities, not bolstering anyone's military ranks.  Not just the Donbass of course, just that's a hot spot these days, with plans for high speed rail to/from Moscow still in storyboard.

In my science fiction, we may also have a direct Aeroflot flight from PDX to Vladivostok, as inter-hemispheric west-east eco-tourism remains a two-way street.

Portland is likewise a disaster zone.  I've been hoping to drum up business around prototyping, per my EPCOT West scenario.  The tendency today is to experiment with lifestyles around sport camping equipment and RVs.  There's no appetite for terraforming ala the Rajneesh Purum experiment, even if the jobs are all in Wasco County, with Salem's supervision.  There's the Country Faire, about to start.  Hardly 24/7/365.

I've got my Asylum City playlist and am tracking what the city is doing around Tiny Houses and so on, where geodesic domes make a token appearance, more to mark a public space than to cover it.

"All math is ethnomath" was my bumper sticker like summary, of my math-teach position (Math Forum). I was arguing we could broaden our own minds, be less ethnocentric, by inventing new ethnicities, including around maths.  I have some new ethnomaths up my sleeve in fact.  I travel around in Cyberia presenting slides about it, and Jupyter Notebooks.  

Other experimentalists have carried some of these same memes forward, with or without my knowledge.  I'm not the bottleneck.

Exploring STEM

:: celebrating the summer solstice ::

Those of us on the PATH side often like tracking STEM-side personnel, meaning we find our people of interest and track them, not nefariously but as people with the usual search engine type tools.  Like last night the Captain and I were reminiscing about cyborg anthropologist Amber Case, as well as Sheldon Renan, a guest speaker with other ties to Wanderers as well.  

This was at the 2023 Summer Solstice celebration at the Linus Pauling House.  Terry, ISEPP president, was among us.

So like, wearing my anthropologist hat, I'm hot on the trail of Bourbaki, and yet I'll confess up front my knowledge there is still superficial.  A university gatekeeper would be underwhelmed were I interviewed, but I'm not applying for the Church of the Omniscient at this time.  I was more chasing after whatever Bourbaki became, and some claim that's Category Theory.

Once on Planet CT, what do you do?  Use your skills.  That's right, discover some key people, authors, authorities and start graphing their relationships. Are they contemporaries? Do they engage with one another? 

Casual searching today will bring up Tai-Danae Bradley and Eugenia Cheng among others. I came across the former with an already well-formed interest in NLP (natural language processing), and the later thanks to Andrius Kulikauskas, one of our "for wisdom" community leaders.

One of the keywords of STEM culture is "vector" which goes with "vector processing" along with "matrix" and "tensor" and whatever else is being appropriated by the Machine Learning (ML) crowd.  That's a big crowd these days, and with its star hooked to AI, only the sky seems the limit where bulls in the stock market are concerned.

The marrying of a vast corpus, stuff people use English for, with vector (so-called linear) algebra, has enabled a kind of nanotube extraction, meant metaphorically.  I pull threads from the hairball of some googleplexed vector space, coded to continually remind itself of what it's supposed to be all about ("attention is all you need").  I'm not the expert.  I'm a PATH guy attending to the various word-meaning trajectories in this neighborhood.

For example, Category Theory is seriously into "morphisms" meaning a generative pre-trained transformer will be finding "morphisms" in proximity to "functors" and "categories" and other such ballpark players.  Their vectors will be weighted accordingly.  The hair around them (same neighborhood) may then be extruded into sensible sentences.  The believable "predictable goo" oozes forth.

We've always allowed dolls, idols, fictional entities, to use the pronoun "I".  There's no crackdown on "dolls talking" or really any other object.  Through the comic book convention of a talk or thought balloon, pretty much any object is graphically capable of talking and/or thinking.  The strong expectation around AI is we'll have some "I" to talk to, "I to I".  What would Martin Buber say about ChatGPT I wonder?  Why not ask her ("hey Siri...")?  She'll oblige with her fresh-squeezed toothpaste.

An ulterior motive of mine, for learning some CT, is my wish to cover the obvious bases when it comes to exporting Synergetics to other namespaces.  CT is a "glue language" for Stemites in general.  I was thinking if I could use CT for bridging purposes, I might help Synergetics get some more crew.

Nonhuman Wanderers

No, I'm not talking about ETs.  Or I could include them, but right now I'm thinking of Ts (terrestrials), such as dogs and cats and like that.  Yes, and snakes.

In my vocab, a Wanderer is a type of flaneur, meaning a bystander-observer, which doesn't mean innocent so much as aware and willing to chronicle and communicate, a reporter, a journalist.  Nonhumans don't commit their observations to writing, but they do register and adapt.

We had an organization named Wanderers, just a coffee-sharing morning / evening coven, or whatever group word, a meetup.  We met (still do) in the boyhood home of one Linus Pauling, winner of two Nobel prizes (unshared -- although his wife Ava Helen had a lot to do with the one for peace).

Humans on this planet tend to be delighted by their nonhuman companions, even as they slaughter them in droves.  Part of the satisfaction we get from our herds is our ability to eat them.  Not everyone is into it.

Planet Earth is still delightful, even if sometimes overtaxed by obnoxious behaviors.  Humans have a track record of adapting, but also of not adapting.  We need to accommodate our own slowness in some ways.  How do we cut ourselves slack, without crashing the plane, so to speak?

I'm not posing as the answer man, but I do share the view that humans learn from nonhumans all the time.  Sometimes we learn the basic value of companionship.  Other times, we're reminded to pay sharp attention and keep a lookout.

Play for Pay

Work ethic Yanks and other Americans, many of Protestant extraction, want there to be an "earning a living" game, such that the undeserving losers might be deprived of their livelihoods, there being some fatal insufficiency as it is.  It's only fair.  Work hard if you want a place in heaven.

The Yang Gang had an uphill battle championing a UBI (universal basic income), paving the way for limited testing over the sars2-covid years. 

People question "income for what?" implying not enough work is or was getting done, in exchange for the channeled and forwarded stellar energy.

Our research on the importance of play, and not just in childhood, suggests the UBI is about sponsoring your play, which again, in Protestant eyes, many turn into some Pinocchian nightmare, on Donkey Island, whereon people make irredeemable asses of themselves. 

Many stuffy adults equate "play" with "profligate depravity" and/or "irresponsible frivolity" i.e. what they themselves would indulge in if given more paid time off.  They're into policing themselves, and by extension, fallen humanity.

A lot more anthropology attaches here than I have time to think through, let alone scribble down.  

We have the memes of "hard fun" and "professional sports".  What a lot of people might do with their UBI scholarships is learn another language, or more of their own.

Players with talent get to make a living in their program, with the consent of their clients and customers.  Professionals get paid to fool around with all manner of equipment, and many love their jobs doing so.

A UBI would speak to the professional inside of one, yearning to attain mastery, through play, for some additional skills.  People do get motivated by images of a future self, a possible upgrade, especially if they sense progress right away, and if their ideal self also looks like a net positive for others as well.  Players want to be assets on whatever teams.

Even the Yanks will understand that, maybe.

Hypertoon Exercise

Imagine a lot of plastic transparent tubing snaking in an out of an abandoned factory building, not along the ground but in the air.  This snaking hose pattern represents the potential flight path of one or more drones.

Along any given segment, several tubes may run in parallel, but then peel away in various directions.  

We looked at models like this at the Field Structure Institute quite a bit, thanks to Don Bridell and Gary Doskas specifically.

From the point of view of a drone pilot, what unfolds on screen is a hypertoon, with segments repeating as the drone dives though a particular window, and coming to segues, where one of several maneuvers is selected.

Once these scenarios are all smoothly interconnected, one has the basis for a computer game of both chance and skill, given the decision points (segue hubs, peel off and rejoin options), and/or something fun to watch that runs on autopilot.

Camp Generators

Back to the Future

I've flashed on the Nord Stream debacle a few times, saying it couldn't be the work of a great nation.  Not with a coverup.  If it were heroism, brag about it.  But if it's not, then slink around and act guilty.

So in that sense, my USA, as I was saying, was not behind such a thing.  But, Planet of the Apes style, we could nevertheless have Ollie North types with the keys to this or that meeting room.  I'm not saying people living in The District (aka City of Morons) weren't complicit.

So we would have to call such a cabal pro-Ukrainian right?  So that part of the yacht story would read correctly.  It wasn't the USA aka Uncle Sam, not seen since the 1980s and suspected a goner, if not making a comeback, so it must have been some pro-Ukrainian group.  Fine.

Whether they used a yacht or not, vs suckered the Norwegians into being the bad guys, time will tell.  Either way, the USA was not involved.  By definition.  There's no need to lie about what happened to protect the USA.  If there's lying happening, it's to protect some pro-Ukrainian group.