Rat Story

Like most of my rainforest neighbors experience from time to time, we have live-in rodentia, some squirrels, some rats.  They frequent the attic and spaces between the lath and plaster and wooden exterior (I know, Cascadia quaint, with somewhat creaky floors but not nearly as squeaky as Pauling House).

In the attic, an infra-red motion sensor has been firing off pix by email via the Internet (it has access to my router).  A have-a-heart trap of feral cat / raccoon trapping size sits in my living room, a $10 purchase at a nearby estate sale (thanks for the tip neighbor!).  However, the real property damage, to shared stores (Food Not Bombs) and personal stuff (the dog's food bag) has come from a rat or rats not in the attic.  I have less of a heart in some areas.

Speaking of slaughtering innocent furry animals, I also buy mice at the pet store for $1.98 apiece and let them "go free" in a confined volume with a predatory hungry animal, which kills them quickly by suffocation / constriction.  If one believes in moving on, a next life, roll of the dice, should be better than that of a clueless mouse in the pet food business.  But how about being a snake, what's that like?  Philosophers wonder about such things, what it's like to be a bat for example (famous essay).

The rabid consumer in me is pissed off the local grocery has gone with an off brand knock off of the V trap that's always worked well, lets call it Z.  I kept the receipt somehow knowing this could be problem, and sure enough, one night cheese, the next night peanut butter, and both times this super smart rat got a meal without paying the ultimate price.  My respect for the rat has gone up a lot, while my respect for the Z has plummeted.  I'm going to try another store for a V, and if it works then return my two Zs with scientific evidence to back my claim that Vs are better.

Dry as Bones

Thinking about the Honduras Sisters, how I think of them, through Multnomah Friends for a visit not so long ago.  Interesting conversations about membership.  Hey, how 'bout the new Pope!  My Catholic friends have said some glowing things, some of them.  Boosts morale.

Speaking of Multnomah Friends, we're due for a new Nominating slate soon.  It's that time of year.  We do management by rotation, meaning we get to exercise our various talents in different roles.  I'm interested in PR (public relations) so it makes sense where I sit.  Front row seat and all that.

The Curse of the Gothic Symphony was video fare for the non-serious, by which I mean we needed something fun and engaging that would not punish us for dividing our attention.  In my case, I needed to work through Python work, submitted by earnest students of this computer language, named for Monty Python, friends of the Beatles and Peter Sellers.

Python's author is a Dutch guy though, not a Brit, however Python's adoption within the English-speaking world has been widespread.  The 33 keywords (as of this writing) are all English (in, for, is, if, else...) but that's it.  If you wanna have Russian characters, or Chinese, be my guest.

For my current courses, the ones I teach, at least business English is a requirement, somewhat a reflection of our school's tiny size and my not being anything close to polyglot.

I returned The Curse of the Gothic Symphony just now to Movie Madness, resisting the temptation to get Wagner and Me, in my queue for later then, when I have more bandwidth.  The Curse... could be viewed in a Systems / Project Management class, where you study workflows and methodologies like Agile (what I teach, Python being an "agile" dynamic typed language, vs. static).  One might find it on a college's "required viewing" syllabus.  Anthropology maybe.

Raging Against the King

Joe America has a simple model of reality.  The president is a King which is like a superhero, like Superman.  If things go wrong, they're convenient scapegoats, these Incredibles.

In her book EcoMind, Frances Moore Lappé circles our willingness to "build up" (project celebrities) then "tear down" (celebrate their fall from grace) as one of the energy traps that keeps us living more stupidly than need be.

Scapegoating our purported leaders is a major pass time and a hallmark of our irresponsibility.  In radical middle politics, we don't require super heroics to begin with, just a modicum of personal integrity -- even more than a modicum if one can afford it.

Out of the ruins, out from the wreckage
Can't make the same mistake this time
We are the children, the last generation
We are the ones they left behind

And I wonder when we are ever gonna change it
Living under the fear till nothing else remains

We don't need another hero
We don't need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond the thunderdome

Read more: Tina Turner - 

We Don't Need Another Hero Lyrics | MetroLyrics

Portland Water in the News

Properly disinfecting surface water sources kills E. Coli:

Systems using surface water, rather than ground water, are required to take extra steps to protect against bacterial contamination because surface water sources are more vulnerable to such contamination. At a minimum, all systems using surface waters must disinfect. Disinfection will kill E. coli O157:H7.  [source]

So should Portland blame its reservoirs or the lack of sufficient treatment?

Contractors are in place to disconnect our hundred year old system, not because it's broken, but because the EPA says we have to.

Do underground, versus surface sources, also contain E. Coli sometimes?  Yes.

Given E. Coli has nothing to do with why the EPA wants this system shut down, we at least have a litmus test:  any politician using the E. Coli scare to make points for closing is willfully clueless and a self identified lackey for the contractors / businesses standing to gain financially from the EPA's one-size-fits all ruling.

Godzilla (movie review)

I enjoyed this more than I expected, coming in as a skeptic.  Given my birthday was starting around showtime, the Happy Birthday Daddy theme resonated some, and I could appreciate the nuclear family vibe (pun intended).  Allusions to Aliens (egg sacs) and Lost (Monarch) seemed present.  The human familial matrix was mirrored by the creatures, with that intelligent eye reminiscent of whale movies.  We recognize a fellow sentient being in Godzilla and company.

This is a great film for control rooms, so let me underline that meme again in this Control Room blog.  You have them in nuclear stations, on aircraft carriers, wherever command and control is exercised, as well as monitoring (it's a feedback loop).

The film has a young audience in mind and wants to show them bravery, loyalty, discipline and other positives.  What a great lesson in infrastructure.  The importance of electricity is never more obvious than when it suddenly goes away and planes fall from the sky.  EMP is a real danger in our age and in 2012 the planet narrowly missed a solar flare that could have had similar consequences.  Nature is not conducting itself with human life and civilization its front burner priority, though as humans we should take responsibility for developing more backup systems and better shielding.

I'd flown from Reno the same day and had been meditating on the vast wealth humans have created for themselves, in terms of cities, roads, agriculture.  Godzilla likewise reminds us that we live in a fairly advanced global civilization.  The science fiction did not have to push very far, once the creatures themselves were admitted.  The opening credits waste no time in that they help contribute to the back story.  My conversion from skeptic to fan had a lot to do with enjoying the back story.

My thanks to the vast army of professionals who worked on this thing, a visual feast / extravaganza.  We're also celebrating the state of the art in special effects (VFX) in this movie.  Audiences come with high expectations and, speaking for myself, I was not disappointed.  Judging from audience response, I was not alone in feeling appreciative.  The Bagdad's new sound and digital projection system got a great workout.

Prior to show time I tucked into Patti Smith's new autobio at Fresh Pot across the street, a walk through from Powell's (Asylum District) so one may snag and read, and sometimes buy.  I didn't get which Robert she meant until I finally read the dust jacket, given I was in my usual non-linear mode.  Lots of interesting twists.  I missed her co-appearance with Ralph Nader at my 25th Reunion, but certainly raved about it anyway.  Yeah, I thought Horses was good, we all did.

Intellectual "Property"

 I enjoyed the story on quinoa in the recent Harper's, among other stories.  Bolivians are understandably reluctant to contribute to a corrupt system that allows patenting of things they may already know, such as how to create male-sterile varieties.  The author doesn't mention Open Source and the revolution in the software industry that has already occurred.  Pfizer has been talking Open Source.  The biologists need to learn from the engineers.

Speaking of Open Source, I'm in the beautiful Lake Tahoe area, on the California side of the lake, at all all-hands meeting of the O'Reilly School of Technology.  O'Reilly Media, parent company, is a champion of Open Source in the world, as the organizer of the annual Open Source Convention, OSCON.  I'm one of the OSCON proposals readers / rankers though not a program or track chair.  We're in a meeting about the overhaul of our codebase, currently in progress.  Angular.js and Node.js are among the technologies we're moving towards.

Sean is urging that we remain friendly towards our competition.  For example CodeSchool does a free course on using Chrome dev-tools.  Referring our students to that should not be a problem.  We're looking out for what's best for our students.  We're not under the illusion that we have some monopoly or corner on the market.  This is about taking on the Open Source mentality, says Sean, seeing ourselves as part of a larger ecosystem and emphasizing collaboration over mindless competition.

Dan is hoping to improve the student experience with the creation of cloud-based gateways closer to students with fatter pipes on the back end.  We use a lot of terminal servers and a chief complaint of our students is the slowness of this connection.  We have some workarounds that work sometimes, but in this world everything becomes available through the web site.  We shall see.

Our courseware is open, but not our homework assignments as we want students to get the benefits of working through these projects themselves, not find cut and paste solutions on-line.  Having some secrets is not inconsistent with the Open Source ethic, though it may be in conflict with the Free Software ethic.

Slopey Dopey

Hah hah, check out this new way of providing a reclining position angle: slope the seating surface down so the back can stay straight.  Why hasn't that been thought of?  So endlessly creative, these advertising geniuses.

Who'd "sit" on one of these anyway, and was that ever the point?

No, never the point.

Billboards, pretending to be chairs.  The "might have been benches" series, conceptual art.

Fighting for Treaty Rights

Similar in some ways to Five Broken Cameras: land grabby immigrants with some self-justifying mythology seize the assets of a less numerous, less well-defended people.

This is about fighting for treaty rights. The hypocrisy of prosecuting criminals while meanwhile getting away with breaking treaties is what gives Anglo-Euros their "forked tongue" reputation.

The AFSC provided a loan that helped towards making this film, which was repaid in full.

Empty Theatrics

Lots of laughter in Portland as the Water Bureau drains a bazillion gallons because somebody peed in the reservoir.

Is there any science behind it?

I was up there today and watched them hose out a swimming pool the size of a lake.  Ducks poop in that water too, but no headlines then.

I think the point is to:

(a) get some overtime pay, not a problem

and

(b) remind shallow non-thinkers why we need to take the best water in any municipality, fresh from Mount Hood, and turn it into the same underground / canned stuff everyone else has (piss poor).

People hear about Portland having better water and get jealous.

The EPA doesn't like that, makes other cities look bad, raises questions, so the better thing, they think, would be to just make Portland's "best water" reputation go away.

Draining the lake for no good reason is part of the campaign.

But are Portlanders buying it?  Clearly not.  It's a joke.

Taxes Filed

Thanks to Holden Web for the magnificent steak dinner, probably my most opulent in 2014.  Finding an excuse to celebrate was not hard:  Nikki at H&R Block got me through taxes for 2013, with me owed by The Feds, but owing Oregon.  I promptly paid by check, sending via USPO, and feel squared away with the IRS for awhile.

Flask Workshop in Portland

I spent much of the day geeking out with peers at what was billed as intermediate Python level, a dive into a 3rd party micro-web-framework named Flask.  We had the good fortune to be taught by the new O'Reilly author, Miguel Grinberg, software engineer and film maker.  He'll be presenting this tutorial at Pycon later this month in Montreal and was eager for a dry run or dress rehearsal one might call it.  That was great for us, with Idealist sponsoring with catered tamales, a very generous number.  Urban Airship provided facilities in this building used by our wind energy sector (windmills).

When you feed an http request to a Flask framework, it routes to functions with URL bits available as arguments.  The functions usually prepare a response object that goes back to the client browser.  What happens in between (between the ears of the web service) is what we call the application, and Flask is merely a framework, like clay.  Miguel had shaped it into a password protected service that had login, cookies, database access, email, iconic "gravatars", the whole nine yards.  He really touched on a lot of deep features, not dumbing it down for us, yet keeping it moving.  The applause was sincere, and for Flask as well i.e. I think we appreciated its straightforward yet powerful design.

I'm not seeing web frameworks, even just those within the Python sphere, as being at each others' throats in some Wild Kingdom, narrated by some gringo, sponsored by whatever insurance company.  It's not a Darwinian circus.

We're talking more like models of airplane, with Django more heavy / commercial, geared stereotypically for newspaper sites (which covers many cases) and Flask more the ultralight, with many frameworks in between like web2py.

Jinja2 is a sophisticated templating engine.

The back end might be PostgreSQL with postGIS options enable.

So in calling Flask "ultra-light" I'm not suggesting it's under-powered (you sit it behind Apache probably), just simple enough to wrap a lot of power tools and get them working together in a manner that pleases at least some web developers.

You can even just use it locally on your own machine, why not?  Play on some, work on others.

By the way, lest events overtake me, allow me to put a stub link here (in my own blog), Wiki style, to a post I want to write about the most recent Thirsters gathering on East Broadway.  There's an idealist theme connecting them.

I was greatly encouraged to learn more about how anthropologists are conducting themselves these days, adding to my respect of that profession and its ethics.  We had some Reed faculty present, at least one, and Forest Service, not sure what other government agencies.

Our topic was relations with "first peoples" as we might call them, descendents of earlier waves of migrants, going back some 10K years.  There's no sense in which "the Indians were all wiped out" and live on only in museums and interpretive centers.  To think that way is to live in deep ignorance.  However, I do understand where someone living in present day (2014) Philadelphia might get that impression.

Divergent (movie review)

A charming and competent story of love and bravery in a delightfully apocalyptic Chicago, now more like a playground, a self parody, a gotham.

We're funneled into guilds based on aptitude but some of us can't be made to fit in.  Wandering beyond the perimeter appears not to be an option.  The sense of being penned in is palpable.

I'm already drawing a blank on the name of her guild, the Rowdies lets call 'em (boo hiss, I hear you), and they've got the place rigged with secret rope walks and other cool stuff.  Plus they're seriously into drugs.  One gets how Erudite might become power mad and get our heroes enslaved to do their dirty work against Abnegation.  Man, that rings a bell doesn't it.  Always war on the poor (because they're weak and helpless, and might be other nations so laws don't apply).  OK, that's infantile.

We didn't get to see much child rearing going on, like the heroes were all this semi-narrow age group.  I guess we saw some kids, did we?

Anyway, I think there is still room at front at The Bagdad for a platform based performance, of comedians or whatever, i.e. the new first run movie status doesn't physically block these other possibilities, I know nothing of license agreements.

I'd been looking for this Kate Winslet / Weird Al muppets video that must have been removed from YouTube, so her name was fresh in my mind.  She's the wicked witch of the west (not really).

You'd see why comprehensivists would appreciate this moving testament against "tracking" and "aptitude tests" (high stakes testing).  If Lego World was the mind of a younger lad with a control freak dad, this was the stressed out world of an over-tested adolescent geek wanting to hang with a tougher crowd.... was it Drapes?

Wheels Turning

 I've been surfing more web pages on the Ukraine, Crimea, Russia and such.  Wikipedia breaks the paradigm of "encyclopedia" by having such up-to-the-minute reviews, with revisions in progress, narratives in the making.  I've done my share of Wikipedia contributing / editing.  Stressful sometimes.

Multnomah Meeting seems to be gearing up to form a study group or something, but really most of our regional savvy is in Bridge City, with fluent Russian speakers, at least one.  I've been reflecting on my Lithuanian experience and thinking of Facebook pages to visit.

Nationalism in the sense of ethnicity, and nationalism in the sense of nation-states, have a very uneasy co-existence, with the former organic and natural, the latter forced and awkward.  Our maps are nation-free (liberated from those dictates) at least in some of our classrooms.

I'll check for Gorby's opinions shortly, when I have some time.  Haircut next.  Our "NATO professor" needs to look more clean cut.

Pi Day

Not wanting it to go by without mention even though blogging by cell from the airport is tedious.  I'm waiting for Tara to arrive and that's fun and interesting.  What about e Day?  I would it be an e Minute:  Feb 7, 1 hour 8th minute.  True, wrong base, but then so is 3.14.

School-to-Prison Pipeline

This pipeline has become a focus of the AFSC (ACLU too).

Private for-profit companies are contracting with so-called "states" to provide in-school security personnel who fulfill functions formerly performed by vice principals and guidance counselors.

Instead of going to the principal's office, you might be sent to a law enforcement agent.  A bed in a for-profit prison has your name on it in short order.

"Undocumented humans" are also funneled to detention centers managed by these same companies.

The neo-fascist "state" of Arizona is an example a political jurisdiction that has gutted itself and outsourced state functions to corporate entities.

The question of whether we still have a "USA" is up for grabs at this point in time.

Washington, DC, never a state, has declared wars against a number of peoples around the world without the consent of the governed.

Medal of Freedom winner Buckminster Fuller wrote "The USA we have known is now bankrupt and extinct." (Grunch of Giants, St. Martins Press, 1983).  Do they read that in American History class?

CS-enabled Algebra

We've enjoyed a rollicking debate on math-teach recently.  I reiterated a long-time position, that high school students deserved math credit for a discrete math sequence of topics we could provide, as an "excuse" to piggy-back the sharing of newer math notations used by various global subcultures, such as Intel and HP.

What do I mean by "newer math notations"? Simply: computer languages.

Many of them (by no means all) use "dot notation" a grammar of noun.verb() and noun.adjective (or call it property, or attribute).  The period or dot is important.  A.b means A has some feature named b, maybe its age or its level of enlightenment.

With dot notation, you've got behaviors responsive to arguments, and you've got persistent state, and no, that's not the only lingo out there, just one of 'em.  A CS-enabled algebra would be friendly to this ethnicity's lingo, among others (not exclusively).

I've suggested our economy in Cascadia, high technology intensive, could benefit from a school system that allowed for these alternative for-math-credit courses.  They'd be elective in the same sense trig and stats have been elective.  Yet three years of math credit is mandatory, in Oregon, for a high school diploma.  You have various ways of adding up to that.  The goal:  make discrete math courses count (some say "digital math" courses -- the labels are not that critical).

Cascadia, if you've not read Wikipedia, is the Pacific Northwest coastal area north and south of Seattle, some say all the way to the Bay Area, some draw a line at Arcata.  It's more a science fictional jurisdiction and one of the "nine nations of North America" popularized by urban legend and some key writers.  Northward, we could reach well into British Columbia, so-called.  These are thought experiments you may indulge in, as a way to review some geography if otherwise bored.  Good exercise. What other nations might you name?

This script was not my solo creation.  On the contrary, I was overlapping with high school computer science teachers anyway, joining the annual programming tournament at Willamette University through Free Geek.  When I presented at OS Bridge, the Software Association of Oregon was in the audience and it was from SAO that I learned of the concrete proposal to wedge in a discrete math course or sequence, geared for high schools.  Teachers from all over the state were encouraged to brainstorm about content of this for-math-credit offering.  We had a day long meeting in Sherwood, a neighborhood south of Portland out toward Wilsonville along I-5.

To sum up, I sometimes cast myself as an unregistered lobbyist, not often seen in Salem, yet definitely with an agenda.  My Oregon Curriculum Network has consistent / illustrative content.  Determining where I'm coming from is not that difficult, per the aforementioned math-teach thread.

If you want to join in the debate, I encourage finding regional colleagues, as the issues we raise tend to manifest in different ways by region.  Having solutions in one area does not automatically imply a translatable result.  There's no one-size-fits-all panacea.

Princeton Club of Oregon

:: global netnight on mentoring ::

Inequality for All (movie review)

I discovered at the meeting house today that my Samsung Galaxy 3 had no battery charge.  This is my primary surface for reading OSCON proposals.  I plugged it in and left it charging, to watch this documentary from Movie Madness, an employee pick, and a relatively new release, taking in phenomena up through 2011 and the Obama administration.

Because Reich is a former Secretary of Labor, in the Clinton administration, having served in other political capacities in DC starting with Robert Kennedy and Gerald Ford, the narrative is DC-centric and uses a mostly nationalist perspective.

He joked about being an aide to Lincoln when lecturing to Berkeley students, most of whom were not yet born in the Carter years (his students fill a vast lecture hall and spanned more than a single generation -- and that's not counting the DVD and "e-tube" audience). Most of his self-directed humor is not about his age so much as his height (he's quite short), a result of a rare genetic condition.

One of the rich guys interviewed, a talking head, made a point I've been thinking about as well: no matter where you stand on the investments and income scale, a human body is like a 200-300W bulb, burning those calories, building those proteins, replacing those cells, and nothing more than that.  So what is "wealth" at the end of the day?  We're all roughly equal in getting some nature-provided equipment, with which to do stuff and sleep.

I'd say the movie makes an unintentional pun on "karma" and "car", because Reich's Mini Cooper is a focus, an icon, while the rich guy gets to show us his Audi, the best you can get.  So body + car might be a wealth summation.  But I think the lobbyist interview says it best:  you're paying for access i.e. wealth is access.  If you have "good karma" then that means you're lucky enough to have the level of access you need.

But that somewhat just postpones the tautology.  Why is access so valuable?  It's a means to what end?  More wealth == more experiences to treasure (as memories, once over)?  Wealth is a well-sustained expectation of being able to maintain high living standards tomorrow and the next day?  A kind of near term sense of security?  Access to medicines.  Access to education, information, training, skill building exercises.

Much wealth takes the form of public infrastructure, facilities shared by "strangers" and not just some "in group" or congregation / club.  Government that cares about "joe public" and "the middle class" is of a different type than government of, by and for the rich.

When Fuller signaled the demise of the USA of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence in the early 1980s (Grunch of Giants, St. Martin's Press), he's heralding the corporate-persons-controlled Citizens United USA of today, a different "Lego Land" than before, which many rich people find more awesome (although Reich reminds us that even the rich do better with a strong middle class than with a weak one -- the virtuous cycle turns vicious at some point tipping point).

We could go on and on with this investigation, into what people mean by "wealth".

Anyway, the rich guy basically agrees the system lacks smarts, since where his money gets invested stays a black box to him in large percentage, meaning "control" is hardly the right word for what you're gaining.

It's not like he's automatically "in charge" in proportion to his making thousands of times more than the average joe.  Having many times more money does not mean calling proportionally more of the shots.  I'm sure the same might be said of Jack or Jill CEO:  net take home pay is not a measure of commensurate insight into inner workings.

The metaphor of a sailing ship is still apt:  it's your ability to adapt to the shifting weather that sustains you, not some heroic ability to "control".  That ability to adapt depends on more than just you, but on your crew (personnel) and your gear (tools).

Speaking of ships, Reich and Clinton were both Rhodes Scholars and met on the ship the selected scholars would traditionally take across the Atlantic.  That's when they first started to become friends.

During the Joys and Concerns portion of business meeting (at the very end) I expressed my relief that Jen had found another home in which to have her baby, given Carol's ongoing need for that room.  The Buddha Room is still in need of refurbishing (having been reconstructed for $12K), but as a nursery / bedroom?  I expressed my expectation the home birth will go well.

The timing had been ironic in that Peter (another Princeton alum) was telling Wanderers about his time in Vietnam in the far north, aiming to assist leveraging cell phone access to gain better health care for ethnic minority moms, and finding in this particular case that cell phone access was already high and so was birth-in-facility (versus home) an indicator of a developed health care infrastructure in his criteria.

That's what had surprised him.  What surprised me was getting an email that very evening, from someone 8.8 months pregnant, requesting a guest room.  It was just that her original plans had not panned out and finding another place was a long slog.  She's stayed here before, a stalwart of our FNB / post-Occupy (OPDX) community.  She's a joyful, kind woman and should be a great mom.

Gnostic Musings

Glenn tromped through the winter wonderland to Blue House today, though with warmer freezing rain, walking became more treacherous.  He and I would later appreciate the dribble of cinders on 38th.  We weren't the only pedestrians taking to the middle of the street.  Besides, trees were dropping big loads, maybe icicles.  Who wants to be hit by one of those?

We discussed the Gnostic literature, where we overlap some, Glenn being a voracious reader on many topics and me hosting a borrowed collection that's brimming with titles.  I've been sampling, enjoying some memories.  Pico della Mirandola and Cosimo di Medici -- these were figures I'd encountered before.  I hadn't realized Dame Frances Yates, as some call her, had left us that long ago (1981).  I'd read some Pico (in translation) at Princeton.

Cosimo played a role similar to Jung's later, in getting an early bird look at some ancient documents.  Cosimo's score purported to be the writings of Hermes Trismagistus, though a later critic would denigrate their authenticity as such.  Jung helped curate some of the more recent archeological finds, newly uncovered mostly-Coptic sources.  The hay day of Gnosticism is anchored between two and three hundred years after Jesus.  Mining sources for alternatives to established theologies has been a pass time of the rich and famous (who else could afford the risk or gather the information?).

Going forward, we get to Blake and Swedenborg, and Jung whom I've mentioned.  But also the Transcendentalists, including of the New England variety.  Bucky Fuller's Tetrascroll contains the classic Gnostic inversion of the Genesis story, meaning exaltation of the snake (Naga) as an avatar of Sophia (gnosis), Eve the emissary of a higher Self.  Women tended to have full powers relative to men in Gnostic institutions and this, Glenn and I agreed, is maybe what most roiled the emerging Patriarchy, the self appointed Christian Orthodoxy, i.e. those "highly motivated men" hell bent on putting a stop to the Gnostic heresies.

I've been thinking of how Dee's or Bruno's Monad resonates at the far end of the 20th century with Fuller's Dymaxion or VE.  We're talking about an ordinary cuboctahedron, six square faces and eight triangular ones, which in Fuller's Synergetics became the Vector Equilibrium of volume 20.  He'd call it the VE (the strut pattern was a focus, not looking at a "solid").  That kind of metaphysical symbolism marks Synergetics as a work in the humanities, its tetrahedron a bridge to STEM.  But the literary critics have not been too keen to swallow that magnum opus as a work on their side of the fence.  Getting it listed as Philosophy at Earlham College was an uphill battle and then some.

That raises the question of to what extent Quakers might be latter day Gnostics and such.  These matters may be debated as if an empirical truth could be discovered, but of course "it's complicated" is the real answer.  The mystical Quakerism of Rufus Jones is a close neighbor of New England Transcendentalism, some might saw a pure form of it.  By some transitive law implicating Walt Whitman and Emerson to some extent, we get a continuation of the Gnostic tradition.  But again, that's just storytelling and myth, not set in stone dogma.

:: tetrascroll, limited edition full size ::

Wanderers 2014.2.5

Great introductory talk this morning, taking us into the weird world of a nation-state system in shambles, with the still-cannibalizing LAWCAP writing "trade agreements" (aka "treaties") the populace is not allowed to read, yet which are supposed to be passed at the highest levels in DC -- "fast tracked" most preferably.

We were learning about the Trans Pacific Partnership, another NAFTA-like codec.

"Fast track" powers are currently not in effect yet the Obama execs would love the cut of the pie that they'd get if they could heroically deliver the bacon.

The bacon's avid recipients would be those "private investors", the ones busily suing governments to recoup on might-have-been (speculative) profits.  "You said we couldn't, so now pay us for what we might have had."

It's so easy bullying governments, after having successfully dismantled them in so many ways already.  They have no dignity left it seems, pomp and circumstance notwithstanding.

Some of the representatives in the US Congress who still take their jobs seriously are insisting on doing at least some reading of the LAWCAP edicts.

The Intellectual Property and Environmental chapters were wikileaked awhile back which helped stir the public at least a little (mostly the mass media steers clear of TPP).

As someone at the open source / open data end of the spectrum, I wonder which big pharma company will be first to open source some important drugs voluntarily instead of being seen for all time to be fighting tooth and nail in a knee-jerky LAWCAP manner to be a deliberate bottle neck / choke point versus a healer and benefactor of humanity.

You'd think the branding people would understand "brand loyalty" better.  Isn't the market supposed to be drenched in information?  That's what Pareto Optimality is all about, no?  Transparency?  Shared awareness of costs?

Such a ridiculous spectacle these "corporate persons" provide to the world stage.  So worthy of parody.