From a Cube in Nashville

I'm sitting in a large cube in Nashville, Tennessee, waiting for rush hour to finish. Earlier today, I committed some autobio to the Math Forum, talking about my post Princeton years (early 1980s).

We visited the Nashville Zoo this afternoon. Lots of families had the same idea (great weather, no school). Many of the exhibited species had "vanishing animal" icons on their plaques. We'd like to turn that around of course, hence my placement of the elephant clipart on my GST poster (in case you were wondering).

Gnu Math

This is a pun on "new math" (aka SMSG), developed within the cold war context to prod more Americans into a space age frame of mind. The Russians had launched Sputnik and paranoia was running high.

GNU = GNU's Not Unix, Richard Stallman's coin for a Unix-like command line environment, coded from scratch. Gnu Math integrates mathematics with a command line aesthetic, providing future Morlocks with tools of the trade.

For example, Pythonic Mathematics integrates algebra with OOP (the object oriented paradigm), a basis for many of our world game's models and simulations. The USG first got behind Python with its DARPA funding of Guido's CP4E initiative.

The civilian public education system was slow to catch on however, given the ideological priorities of a parasitical political machinery, which used the spectre of terrorism to keep Americans in a state of fear.

The Internet, also originally military, helped Americans develop antibodies to this parasitical ideology.

Thanks to the Internet, Gnu Math continued to make inroads, assisting the engineering community in its efforts to debug and restore integrity to a corrupted USA system.

Identity 2.0

My topic this morning relates to a talk I heard at OSCON 2005, from the main stage, by Dick Hardt. His brief: we need identity servers that authenticate to the various services behind the scenes, so we don't have to always re-enter the same stuff. Identity management would become the identity owner's responsibility. Having it all gathered in one place would actually make its theft much harder, as you couldn't get by with only fragmentary data, e.g. just an SSN or credit card number. Banks would "go to the source" and any hack of an Identity Server would be national news, not just run of the mill fraud, a cost of doing business.

Speaking of identity, I've been trying on "Silicon Forest exec" for size. I think that pretty well sums it up. I wrote to Allegra yesterday that I didn't want to be on BFI's Shelter Committee just now, not because I'm anti-shelter (duh) but because I'm trying to clarify my role in the World Game theater. I'm like this computer geek with aspirations to invest more in multimedia (4D Studios), out of my desire to craft some dynamite curriculum for future Silicon Foresters (no, not exclusively).

In order to pass along this culture, a thriving one, we need to leap frog various bastions of Ludditism, including, I'm sad to say, within the education sector itself. Too many teachers feel trapped in dead end jobs, and take it out on their wards.

In particular, I'd like to see a stronger curriculum served through the Pentagon Channel, as I think military investments will make a huge positive difference, if there's real intelligence behind them. The paramilitary gray zone between hot and cold war, is also the zone of disaster relief and emergency management. We're looking to economize through dual-use technologies. The same Fly's Eye Dome skeleton could contain a variety of hardware and software.

A military that knows how to perform civilian duties provides a stronger career path for would-be recruits, as they won't be irrelevant deadweight in peacetime. And for conscientious objector types, a purely civilian trajectory might be plotted, such that if war breaks out, they'll be tasked with the sometimes extreme services our nation has historically required of its peace-loving leaders.

Taking Stock

I taught Python @ WHVN again today, focusing on nested data structures e.g. how to index into a dictionary of some USA and Canadian cities, each with lat/long coordinates expressed as a list of two 3-tuples. Here's the worksheet we used (PDF).

Kessler has his Common Sense II pilot in Google Video, per my suggestion, bringing the count of Buckminster Fuller clips to five. For a bigger stash, check the EIK site [defunct -- Feb 9, 09].

Search results on Polyhedron/Polyhedra within Google Video still returns zero, nada. Of course I could change that, but I want to measure the Ivory Tower's level of commitment to supplying relevant open source geometry clips, sans my input (drumming fingers, twiddling thumbs). Princeton? Anyone?

Our USA military families are expected to fight and possibly die for their country, with kids expected to part with their parents, perhaps permanently, and yet what support do they receive in return, in the form of relevant education and training? Precious little. Their own American history and heritage is being denied them.

So how is this not tyranny then?

[Addendum, February 9, 2009: up to about 372 Google Videos with "Polyhedra" in the title, 291 on YouTube]

Back @ Wired

So I'm back to my usual haunts in Portland, having returned from haunts near Remote, Oregon.

I liked what Bob Scheiffer said last Thursday (?), about working to earn our trust, not taking it for granted. This Mens Retreat was like that for me -- I had to work building relationships (work I enjoy doing). We had a lot of new faces, plus many more familiar ones (e.g. mine in the mirror), and a lot to communicate, from each to many.

I did a good job anchoring my network I thought, but it's a somewhat nebulous network and I felt it taking me out of the room on occasion. I have so many to check in with. And I know I'm not the only one with big responsibilities (duh).

Fortunately, good Friends like Tom Head are out there doing a lot of checking. He got to the Dan Rather gig in Portland, reported back, and to China for a high level meeting on military matters, goes to London, Philadelphia...

He's an economist, Tom is, based at the nearby George Fox University. Tom couldn't make it to the retreat this year, as I couldn't last year, because he was off traveling some place per usual.

Anyway, I'm glad Larry was around. We talked iTunes and iPods (he had a new nano) -- plus I showed him an excerpt from Yes Men (the "leisure suit" segment), a DVD I purchased and sometimes screen on my laptop or otherwise project e.g. when I'm wanting to share about my GST brand of economics.

This money talk reminds me: I need to be on my way, delivering some pay checks to a client for TBC. Derek is supposed to meet me here; the barista was busy when I arrived, so I don't even have a coffee. Maybe when I get back, it'll be time for a Guinness.

Over an hour later:

OK, so I met up with Ron Braithwaite, tooling around town in his new biodiesel VW. He wondered about lunch and here we were, in front of Than Thao near the Pauling House, so we ordered V8 and V9 respectively.

Derek looked after my Toshiba back at Wired (his is a Compaq), drinking coffee, waiting for Joan.

Ron is steeped in Apple tech these days. If he succeeds in today's mission, Tillamook Creamery should be a beneficiary (Helvetica fonts lady). I was glad to meet up with Ron, who also missed our Men's Retreat this year.

I just got a call from Bernita about a death in the family (from natural causes). My heart goes out to the grieving.

Candid Camera

Art Kohn and Terry Bristol
ISEPP dinner for Roger Penrose
(photo by K. Urner)

More from Quaker-P (revised)

So if the prez wants to advertise why a line item veto might be useful, now would be a good time. You've got a Congress happy to cave to mob anti-Arab psychology, and tacking its deal-killing legislation to a continued funding bill for the war in Iraq (oldest trick in the book -- bind what a president hates to what a president most wants).

The prez could say "OK, I promised a veto, now here it is" and then "I guess that means no more war in Iraq huh?" Troops start coming home, the UAE closes harbors to military shipping unless it's to take hardware out of the region (with other harbors to follow), and we celebrate the re-emergence of civilian control over the Pentagon.

The Pentagon would be only too happy to leave anyway, as what Iraq needs is better civilian infrastructure and more police of the non-death-squad variety. American boys are starting to get cynical about any bright future in the armed services and that's bad for recruiting (helping tsunami victims, on the other hand, made our boys into heroes being all they could be -- girls too).

If you can't back up that noble-sounding rhetoric about defending the Constitution, freedom, democracy, with logically consistent on-the-ground activities, well, that hurts both prospecting and recruiting -- even given the devastation in New Orleans and a compliant not-lifting-a-finger FEMA (yes, if civilian life is made miserable enough, the recruits will keep coming, having nowhere else to turn).

Back to Coalition TV: we've got John Bolton at the UN feeling "a sense of urgency" around Iran's low-level defiance of the IAEA. Iran is at least dimly aware that a nuclear superpower has invaded and occupied the country right next to it, on false pretenses no less (forged documents from Niger, accompanying hype from Cheney). Americans, on the other hand, are busy watching Survivor (so-called "reality" TV) and resent the distraction.

We already know that the UN hasn't the backbone to stand up to the USA's neocons (a principle established in round one) so I can see where Iran's defiance might enter the equations.

Anyway, since when did the Pentagon have any say in this war? The whole show has been out-sourced to beltway bandits like Raytheon, home of the cruise missile (ka-ching) and "no connection to Cheney" Halliburton.

Some days I wonder why we even send journalists to that 5-gon any more. Who even buys the myth of "an American people in control"? Nakedly imperialist aggression is the "way of life" we must defend nowadays. Like, what's the fun in being the only superpower if they won't let you flaunt it?

====

OK, time to go teach Python to 8th graders. You might think I take a dim view of Americans, given my rhetoric. But of course I'm eagerly investing in a bright future for our kids, which means I'm busy giving them basic survival skills, like computer programming (very needed in our urban jungle these days). See my Bizmo Diaries for more info.

And so what are you doing to help America today, if I may ask.

Wanderers 2006.3.7

concentric hexapents by Tim Tyler using Springie

Last night we met with Micheal Sunanda (yes, that's how he spells it, ea not ae) to learn of his adventures in Central America.

He was researching the state of organic homesteading, and ended up spending a lot of time on a coastal permaculture farm, where the infrastructure was good, but staff practices had been rather lame.

Trying to jump start the "humanure" composting system proved difficult because the staff had the usual cultural reluctance to discuss anything relating to poop.

On the whole, Micheal was rather unimpressed with the state of permaculture in Central America, including among "alternative lifestyle" types. People are buying into the processed food economy, instead of perpetuating the older village-based system of complementary growing. Possible costs: loss of self-sufficiency and independence, some deterioration in health.

Micheal sent around little plastic containers of clay plus a mystery substance, which turned out to be cacao steeped in olive oil. He told the story of the centipede "tapping" him on the eyelid (they don't really bite so much as tap), and the screamingly severe pain that caused, ameliorated with clay packs to some extent.

He slept in a cloth hammock, lost in the jungle on occasion. Howler monkeys are really loud.

We had some new faces tonight, mostly friends of Don's, including Chisler, who makes esoteric metal parts for Japanese furniture and such. He liked to interject comments and Micheal got a little testy about that. I appeared to be sleeping through much of the talk, but was actually concentrating or meditating -- I forget which.

Micheal also talked a lot about Earth's magnetic fields (he carries a little magnet on a gimble everywhere he goes) and about "spirology." The conversation then turned to ley lines and the empirical basis for some of this feng shui talk, if any. Art Kohn, back from DC, steered some of this discussion.

Then there was Rob, who wanted to know when he'd be the same age as his dog, so he could have a party on that day. We'd been kicking this problem around for quite awhile (Jon Bunce had actually solved it, but I'd lost the paper) so I finally turned to the open source community just hours before the meeting, hoping to give him a real answer. This proved a success story, as chronicled in a thread on edu-sig.

Still flush with this success, I sent out a call for concentric hexapental spheres to Synergeo, a Fuller School eGroup on Yahoo!, hoping to impress Glenn Stockton with how fast I could get back to him with some images of his Global Matrix.

This morning, I had two relevant images in my in box, plus helpful pointers on how to get more. Tim Tyler's is displayed above, Adrian Rossiter's below.

This was the subject of my OSCON talk last year: how the open source community has made my work as a Fuller Schooler so much easier over time.

Another highlight: Nirel cluing me in to Ashes & Snow.

hexapents by Adrian Rossiter, using Packinon

Politics @ Princeton

"think tank"

Matt and Mike plan to tease me over beers this evening, about my alma mater, thanks to the cover story in the most recent issue of The Nation: Princeton Tilts Right by Max Blumenthal (March 13, 2006).

The article is about some well-funded conservative think tank based at the university, but getting no direct funding therefrom. If you're reading from overseas, don't confuse "conservative" with "conservationist" -- two separate memes.

Geeky aside: if looking back from the magazine cover i.e. from inside the depicted Ivory Tower (not really ivory), the tilt is actually to my left.

As the movie Why We Fight points out: think tanks have become pretty important of late, as government out-sources more of its brains, as well as its brawn, to become a pale ghost of its former self (like a ring wraith?).

Well, I guess that's participatory democracy in action. Plus thinking really doesn't cost that much (brains are quite energy efficient), so having a ton of money doesn't necessarily mean that much. Like, I've got my blogs, and they're world readable at no cost to me. So what if I'm not a billionaire like Bill?

But hey, what if Google gets taken over by Chinese ideologues and my blogs get deleted by busybody censors? There's always room for angst. Old Europe used to have an even more drastic remedy for talking heads it didn't agree with: it'd cut 'em off or strangle 'em (or just burn the whole body alive, at the stake).

The USA's founding fathers tried to curb those Old Europe reflexes (didn't succeed entirely), by enshrining freedom of speech in the U.S. Constitution. But did our founders forecast "artificial persons" having the same rights as the real ones, under the 14th Amendment? Obviously not. But then, they didn't foresee the Internet either, which makes my websites "but a mouse click away," on a par with ExxonMobil's.

I interviewed two candidates for Princeton this year, like I did last year. Impressive achievers, per usual. I didn't hear a lot about community service though. When do high school kids ever have the time to work with the less fortunate, the impoverished? Why doesn't our public school system provide these opportunities? Because there's no more poverty to worry about? Someday maybe. In the meantime, the wall around the privileged seems higher than ever these days, gated communities more the norm (like we had in the Philippines -- I lived in the somewhat ironically named Magellanes Village).

Anyway, as a radical middle guy, I know people will probably cull through my many postings looking for words to use against me, if and when those A & B modules ever start appearing in our nation's geometry classes. Showing synergetic geometry on television (like in a Global Data commercial): that'd be like a match to the fuse of Bucky Fuller's long-running Mission Impossible thread.

Well, my would-be critics'll find plenty of Urner-authored rants and diatribes, stuff to get angry about. Like just today, look what I posted to Quaker-P (more context in the full version):

There is leverage in having someone owe me a debt. There's also the hypocrisy of the USA pushing the IMF to force other governments to repay debts, at great cost to social programs, while it simply sinks deeper and deeper into debt itself, never really forcing the same dynamics internally.

Yes, social programs get cut (FDR era programming has been gutted), but just enough is meted out to forestall a massive popular uprising or backlash -- a day-to-day calculation, requiring close collusion with the corporate media. In the Third World, it's easier to use brute force intimidation, to make activists "disappear." ....

I have this portfolio of investments. It doesn't have to have the USA in it for my operations to be profitable. There's nothing the USA has that I couldn't get elsewhere. Or that's how it might come to seem, if present trends continue.

Besides, there's a sense of poetic justice in watching those USAers join the rest of "the developing world". I'm tired of watching this self-righteous "superpower" strut about on the world stage, arrogant and stupid. I would love to have it go down, but in a controlled and intelligently managed way, such that it doesn't set off its nukes, the way Americans do whenever they feel threatened (sniveling cowards that they are).

Wow! I sound like a dangerous dissident or something. But keeping to the middle way means hanging ornaments in a balanced fashion over time.

I veer left and right, but it's design science, more than politics, which supplies the gyroscope I steer by. I Engineer (downloading it now, from iTunes -- a song Matt turned me on to a long time ago).

Other developments:

Mom just called, about to fly off to the New Europe. Sunanda is back in town, from Costa Rica, Panama and Nicaragua, with lots of stories to share with Wanderers.

FEMA Villages?

I caught some Congress dude pointing to an aerial photo of manufactured homes (huge numbers of them) some 450 miles from ground zero (New Orleans etc.), on C-SPAN (flip flip flip).

He was making a lot of good points e.g. why is FEMA just sitting on these homes, while in the meantime stopping payment on hotel rooms?

OK cool, so Congress is waking up. I'm all for it.

The reason of course (for sitting on these homes) is there's this pervasive assumption among bureaucrats that people are undeserving of the valuable services they might provide.

You find this in India a lot: the greatest satisfaction is in denying others what they most sorely could use. It's a back-handed way of meting out justice (however sick and twisted that "justice" may be). At last, a way to punish, a way to be in control of others, to have some power.

Or on a stereotypical English estate: the biggest snob is the butler. If you buy there's this totem pole or ranking system, and you're three rungs up the ladder, then no way are people on rungs one and two going to get above you, come hell or high water. They're just scum of the earth after all.

In a democracy, we're less enamoured of any totem poles in the social stratification sense. Old timers get respect by default, because their "been there done that" quotient is likely higher. We acknowledge experience.

But in the lifestyle department, we take a more theatrical approach: people live on different stages, act out in different soaps. They're not atop one another. More like Universal Studios: the sound stages are laterally dispersed.

Does this make any sense at all? I think so.

In the social stratification sense, I consider myself as high as I need to be. I've got a middle income lifestyle and that's sufficient. I like being average in that dimension. Ram Dass was a teacher in this regard: "keep to the eight fold bath of the upper middle way" he said (like, I wouldn't mind having a jacuzzi -- might have to up the amps to my fuse boxes though).

And I use my disposable income to man a battle station. That's a luxury, privilege, freedom, and right that I have: to engage in battle, to make alliances, to practice the art of war ala Sun Tzu and Machiavelli. Bucky was my teacher, but not my only one.

Our democracy affords me this opportunity. Thank you Uncle Sam.

Levee Town

I watched lots of stats marshalling on my CBS TV last night, mostly about approval/dis of that Oval Office guy (oval like a cowboy hat they tell me -- so like how many gallons?). In this skit I imagine, some pollster's on the phone: "so whaddya think of the job our prez is doin'?" Ten minutes later, phone rings again: "so how 'bout now?"

It's those levees that've got my attention. Like, I wouldn't move back or invest if I thought The Flintstones were still in charge. Ol' Hurricane Harry of 2010 might obliterate my casino again. And what about those pumps? They tell me one of the last to croak was this 1929 jobber. True? Makes a good story anyway. And some giant screw of Archimedes by Leonardo himself, was still turning at 10 feet under (!) -- not that this helped much.

I recall some dinner conversation in Portland, many months before Katrina, where I soaked up some talk about those levees. New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen, was the gist of it. I listened, wide eyed, incredulous, as if to some episode of Believe It or Not. Little did I realize how soon would come my chance to believe.

And at that St. Helen's viewing center north of here, they show this movie about Mt. Rainier having a bad hair day, shuffing off a glacier or two (no big eruption or anything, just a hiccup, or a sigh), and what that might be like. Picture a sudden river/tsunami smashing through used car lots, playgrounds, Burger Kings. Did the people evacuate in time?

And that IMAX movie: there's this pattern of earthquakes, marching rather predictably it seems, with Istanbul (or some suburb thereof) in the cross-hairs. The older mosques have already weathered a few and are still standing. It's the speculators who throw up the cheap apartments, cut corners against code, play dice with the lives of Allah's children.

Bottom line: many disasters have been queued by Mother Nature, a few of which we're even half expecting. God to humans: "you'll need to stay alert." Humans: (lost in some soap) "upgrading those levees will just have to wait Mr. Almighty Sir, we've gotta keep winning against those godless communists!" Satan snickers. Remember the story: angels were deeply jealous God had found this new love, these wingless humans, and the meaner ones (Satan the meanest) just love it when we goof up big time.

Another skit: journalists break into the Pentagon, inner sanctum, expecting to find all these maps of the Middle East, but it turns out everyone's focused on levees, earthworks, evacuation plans, other civil engineering. "We haven't been into war planning for years," some general confides sheepishly, "that's more a big business thing." Cutaway to Raytheon or other beltway bandit hide-out: now here's a real war room (very reassuring) and yep, a war with Iran might mean selling a few hundred cruise missiles through Congress (kaching!).

And hey, speaking of cruise missiles, did anyone even ask if the word "tomahawk" might be copyrighted? I bet they owe billions and won't pay. Them forked tongue lawyers never pay -- the Injuns learned that early -- far cheaper to just change the law.

Rrrring. "So how 'bout now?"

Boosting Bandwidth

A Math World
(click for larger view)

So if a picture is worth 1K words, then 30 frames/sec = 30K words/sec. That's a lot of info.

Of course the real differences between frames may be small (static background). MPEG capitalizes on that. Gregory Bateson: information = differences that make a difference.

An MTV generation has grown up on fast cuts, slick editing, making music on a multitrack (if privileged), but then comes formal schooling and a sudden slow-down.

One can hear the gears shearing, the cultures clashing.

Like in math class: the... teacher... talks... really... slowly... as she squeaks out some chalkboard algebra, back to the room (spit ball, paper airplane -- anything to add bandwidth (starvation is painful)).

Nothing dances, nothing moves.

Typical adult response: kids have been spoiled by TV, can't concentrate, short attention spans, need drugs (the legal ones). Oh and Johnny, I'll be late coming home from work: watch TV or something.

How about we try meeting them at least half way? I'm thinking of math movies, DVD clips, flashy shorts with high production values. Abacus, subtract in base 10, then in base 8. Play Tom Lehrer's New Math in the background. Lots of video collage (mix in some history: sputnik, Eisenhower, Weisenheimer).

Then let kids dream up their own, editing/recombining from a growing stash of stock footage. Mix 'n match. Hip hop TV, and with some real academic content.

Slow down for talking heads, sure (caution: heads talking).

I'm not saying only teach this way. But at least let's give it a try. I've seen so few good examples to date (Power of Nightmares was pretty good, showed off lots of media literacy, but not much in the way of math).

I know this culture is capable of more, much more. We take pride in our media savvy, yet so often refuse to use it except to push an easy credit, consumer-based lifestyle, combined with fantasies of being one of those smart people on TV (some doctor, cop, or lawyer -- rarely a priest anymore, unless it's Robert de Niro on late night cable, or maybe TBN).

The rest of the world watches our endlessly dumbing it down and rightly wonders: how low will they go?

Sesame Street was something of a breakthrough, but Big Bird doesn't know anything about icosahedra, vectors, or complex numbers (or if he does, he isn't sharing).

Related posts:
Math on video.google.com (the early days) @ the Math Forum
Another Alien Curriculum
Follow-up thinking on edu-sig @ python.org
Follow-up thinking on math-teach @ Math Forum

Back from Catalina

Avalon in February
(photo by K. Urner, Olympus Stylus 500)

After a couple blissful days watching breaking waves on Catalina, a movie makers' haven, I'm back in the world of "breaking news" on airport monitors.

CNN's "Situation Room" aesthetic seems especially shrill, more like a panic room. Whatever happened to simply monitoring events vs. squeezing them for cheap thrills?

Last night CNN was all about fungus in our pillows, close ups of dust mites. I suggest buying a Kirby if that's your concern; they suck pillows big time.

Today we're all up in arms about globalization, as if there's no discernable difference between UAE and OBL (they're both "Arab" right?).

Some idiots blow up a mosque and now it's civil war -- seems there's a real appetite for it, an eagerness for the next disaster, the next spectacle. Will TV be used to fan the flames or cool them? The medium works wonders either way.

OK I'm venting a bit. I've come down with a mild case of misanthropy. I'll shake it soon I hope.

Welcome to Reality

Writer / Director Stephanie Cooper
(photo by K. Urner)

Stephanie Cooper’s Welcome to Reality, a play in nine scenes, is set in Lone Oak, a small New England town wherein all the adults have committed to a rationalist / literalist mode of thinking, with two exceptions: a science fiction writer who speaks of his characters as if they were real, and a civil war buff who believes he was once a rebel captain (sometime before the car accident).

These latter two have no problem relating to Hannah, an eight year old with an imaginary friend, Mr. Teddy the giraffe.

But Hannah’s mother and grandmother take the majority view that an imaginary friend is but a stepping stone to madness. Hannah should be focusing on learning to count past 29 (she has trouble with 30). They and other townspeople conspire to drum the two quirky eccentrics out of town, because of their supposedly subversive influence on the children.

Ironically, many of these hyper-rationalist adults later prove defenseless against meme epidemics spreading through popular culture: Hannah’s father gets sucked in by the Left Behind series, and dissolves his family in order to preach about the coming Rapture in Washington, DC, while Hannah’s grandmother spends her life’s savings on a “Da Vinci tour” in France, organized around Dan Brown’s popular novel, The Da Vinci Code.

I took Stephanie’s theme to be the danger in not recognizing and nurturing the double-barrel nature of the human psyche. We’re designed to think both logically and mythically. Those who fail to responsibly mythologize as free-standing individuals tend to fall prey to mob mythologies created and propagated by others.

To stifle one’s powers of imagination, so evident in childhood, is to risk lowering ones immunity against oft times predatory and/or opportunistic belief systems in later life.

The actors, a cast of sixteen, put a lot of time and talent into this one-time performance of Stephanie’s senior project. Our venue: Ms. Brunel’s drama classroom at Whittier High School, on the evening of February 17, 2006.

American Islam

There's nothing to stop Islam from being a politically constructive player on the USA domestic scene. Malcolm X was a trail blazer in this regard.

These emerging schools needn't take direction from overseas. As a Quaker, I look forward to working with a pacifist branch that understands the Lamb's War, i.e. we're in a battle for hearts and minds, fighting against fear, corruption and tyranny. Outward weapons are for losers.

The Pentagon is shifting gears to focus less on nukes and more on psychological warfare, a positive development (long overdue), and not inconsistent with a warrior class value system, per many Asian examples.

The idea of a war for freedom and liberty isn't specifically Christian (indeed, many Christians hate our freedoms as surely as some Muslims do).

As a secular state, we're free to learn from Islamic schools about how to resist terrorism and parasitism in all their ugly forms.

Jihad

mosque in Alabama, by Temcor

Nuclear weapons = sin (pride, hubris, Satan -- see Paradise Lost).

Allah to humans: be loyal, disarm.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (movie review)

A real joy on this DVD is director Paul Schrader's commentary, which frames what's already a multi-level puzzle box of art about art. The film weaves grayscale memories with color-themed theatrical excerpts from Mishima's works, within the outer frame of the artist's final performance, a kind of paramilitary maneuver and homage to bushido culture.

Mishima was a great post-WWII Japanese writer who, with the rise of film and television, morphed into a media celebrity and cult figure. He used his prominence to make a statement, signed with the blood of his own surreal and spectacular suicide, along with that of his adjutant, on November 25, 1972.

Scharder's postmortem commentary in November 2000, at the Lucas Skywalker Ranch, provides insights into the intricate dynamics behind the making of this 1985 film, which resulted in its being temporarily suppressed in Japan, where Mishima, survived by his widow, remained a controversial figure. Just making this film took guts, especially if one were Japanese (the foreigners were expected to be insensitive and reckless).

My thanks to Trevor Blake for putting me on to this film, and to Netflix for making it easy to come by.

More Adventures in Quakerdom

informative brochure from an outward weaponry museum
(from the chronofile of Annis and George Bleeke)

Tara and I drove out Hwy 26 towards Mt. Hood, to Road 39 past Rhododendron, a small town with a cool relic: a junked articulated bus, extravagantly tagged, likely one of those Hungarian jobbers we used in Portland for some years (they proved a maintenance nightmare). MMM clerk Peter Ford and I snapped pix when going back to the Rhododendron food market in search of garlic and mustard (we found both).

Dawn stayed home to work on the books for MMM (which she converted from Peachtree to Quickbooks) and NPYM among others. I complained to Annis Bleeke that Quakers want too much for their dime, the way my wife gets chained to her computer like that. But of course this was not her doing.

I tried to help with her sudoku puzzle but it had a five-star difficulty rating and Annis, of sound logical mind, obviously didn't much need my help.

I studied her three ring binders, a chronofile of the Bleekes' FWCC adventures for those years when Annis was General Secretary. She had a lot of Africa pix. Annis and George helped me immensely with logistics in Lesotho in 2000, in the wake of the October 13 car accident; the estate sale went very smoothly thanks to them.

Anyway, while we were standing in line, waiting for food, Janet asked if I'd reconsider being the webkeeper for NPYM, now that Steering Committee had implemented some of my suggestions around boosting network security and smoothing turnover around the webkeeper position. I said OK. So my name goes back to nomcomm, and I'll likely be assuming my new duties soon.

Addendum: nope, nomcomm decided to go with someone else, which is good, as it looks like I'll be heading to Switzerland around the time of NPYM's Annual Session this year (combined with FGC).

Yes!

photo by K. Urner, Feb 10, 2006

I usually collect my bizmo pix over in Bizmo Diaries, but I'd just been posting on funding services for children, so I thought here might be apropos.

Outside In is one of our social service agencies working with youth.

Fund the Children?

I just got a solicitation call from a nonprofit tasked with publishing a directory of missing children, a kid finder, a locator of some kind.

It sounded extremely important, and apparently this directory is often used by Multnomah County social services, to assist in its job of providing assistance to juveniles and their families.

I did not offer to send any money. Why?

Because I think County services should get the taxes it needs to generate these directories minus any need to go begging.

That's a problem in this country: anyone with a worthy cause has to beg, while anyone with a sure-fire way to make dough, all ethics aside, is assured of a friend in Congress.

There's gotta be some happier medium, even without crossing that dreaded line into 20th century socialism. 20th century capitalism: it's your company that owns that computer, so use it to do company work, not personal work. Works great if you're a company prez like me, of some nebulous Global Data dot net.

Of course I don't want the guy who phoned me just now to lose his job. I want him to work full time helping with that missing children situation, not begging for hand-outs. Same with Congress, they deserve more freedom from special interests. Like, we make them need gobs of money, just to stay in the game, but then say "oh, but bribery is illegal."

In the original USA theory, elections could be run cheaply, and some worthy individual with drive, but shallow pockets, could get a crack at holding office. Holding office wasn't supposed to be an exclusively rich man's game, not even high office (we differed from Britain in that way). Not even exclusively men (still tends to be though, at least as long as it's war time).

That's all gotten stretched out of kilter by now. Elections were made super expensive (not to mention untrustworthy), and you had to be on the take somehow, just to get inside the beltway. Going back to the old ways won't be easy on any national level.

That's why I'm suggesting we start local and small. Like, let the County do its job, don't make it beg to save the children. Let's just save the children already. That's just our job, as older adults, s'been that way since prehistory (and not just if we're penguins).