City of Morons

Washington DC (WDC) wants to give its prime contractors an opportunity to test new infrastructure, such as permanent bases in Iraq, and is therefore ramping up to attack targets in an area formerly known as Syria.

The nation-state system is in a shambles by 2013, with out-of-control Washington DC bombing whatever and whomever it likes, enjoying it's "superpower" status (a psychopathic state of mind).

The City of Morons should not be trusted with guns, let alone missiles or heavy weapons.  But everyone knows that already.

Maybe chemical weapons were used, but for Washington DC to say "UN, you don't need to check, we have the evidence" is not going to impress anyone.  That's what they said to the UN in Iraq.  They were lying.  They lie all the time.  We tune them out as just noise.  DC is known to instigate wars based on false reports of events, starting with the Indian Wars at least.

That city's continued banking on the credibility of the USA, a once proud nation it insidiously helped to destroy, just makes it look more pathetic than ever.

I agree with this statement from Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich:

"Attempts to bypass the Security Council, to once again create artificial, unproven excuses for an armed intervention in the region, are fraught with new suffering in Syria and catastrophic consequences for other countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa."

You won't bring the dead back to life by not allowing the UN to make its own investigations.  And if "retaliation" is what's needed, how about something other than wanton murder?  Find those responsible and prosecute, don't compound crime with more crime.  Duh.  Chemical weapons anywhere, like nukes, are a disgrace.  Send them back to the junk pile and destroy them.  Do it now.

Start another war without allowing independent investigation of the evidence (again) and you further endanger the very people you claim you want to help (but we don't believe you -- you only help yourselves; you suffer from "cruise missile build-up" and want to release the tension).

DC just doesn't get how untrusted it is, how vile and putrid its track record, how deep its hypocrisy.

Cascadia to Syria:  we're sorry.  We may be next.  They've already done a lot to destroy Hawaii and the Pacific Rim, including with radio-toxic chemicals.  By using DU, they commit chemical warfare on the environment daily, and many die as a result (no one knows how many).

Followup two years later:

NYT backs away from "vector analysis" smoking gun theory (Dec 19 2013)
Questions linger regarding sarin attack (April 6, 2014)
WDC funds both sides in Syria Civil War (April 1, 2016)
Rush to Judgement (April 8, 2018)

Amerish English

JavaScript is the local puppet master, 
in communication with 
a netherworld of cloud based Servers.

HTTP and JSON 
keep the AJAX alive 
as Clients push their shopping carts
or whatever.

Old myths lay just beneath the surface. 

The dragon, atop a treasure trove:
our Python coiled among memory stones, 
latter day oracles,
each full of juicy secrets, 
some authentication required.

I was arguing with Steve and Patrick at Mulligan's the other day, that HTML is in the province of the English teacher, grammar teacher, elementary school language skills teacher.  It's not "computer science" or a "computer language", it's more punctuation, like semi-colons 'n $%&, plus with some auxiliary grammar, the XML concepts (or, as I explained to Uncle Bill SGML concepts, from Boeing).

Patrick shot back that software gets between conventional writing skills and all this machine-oriented stuff, so mastery of HTML is not a prerequisite for mastery of English, that boundary still stands.  My thoughts went back to Gene Fowler's thesis, that Amerish (as distinct from English) did include XML grammars (one could say) much as the Roman language included outlines, argument templates, formats.  A meta-grammar if you will (this was Steve's point).

Assuming Gene has a genuine leading here, lets explore moving move of this HTML stuff into both literature and theater.  For one, you have the Document Object Model (the DOM), which you may think of as an XML outline and a puppet, a segmented floppy thing controlled by strings (or controller).  JavaScript makes the DOM "laugh and play".  You write scripts for JavaScript or you could say JavaScript is but scripts, much as English contains (is, gives form to) what we might call "scenarios" (an overlapping feature with Synergetics, another language, that has those too).

You don't want your JavaScript-controlled client-facing environment to get bogged down or bottle necked owing to not enough attention from the server.  A poorly designed web framework makes the browser wait for updates that could just as well be handled within the browser by JavaScript.  The server gets bombarded by minutiae that could have been handled locally, and so service for everyone bogs down.  "One server per many clients" is the expected geometry here, and the devil is in the details of how that's managed.

If there's no zip code but one is required, or if the puzzle question is not solved (correctly or incorrectly), then lets not go running off to the server half-cocked.  Have all your papers in order before reaching the server's desk, don't be fumbling through your bottomless purse for that elusive passport.  Servers need to move quickly, not sit there grinding away pointing out exceptions, empty blanks, missing data.  The client side should have handled that stuff.  First get the blanks filled, then send only completed forms to the server for transaction processing.

Think of court life in the age of monarchs and needing the King's clock cycles to settle some dispute or obtain permission to build some facility (approval, denial... whatever).  You queue for the King for days and days, bribing the right officials, and some wrong ones, and when you finally do meet the King you realize vital facts are missing from your story, facts that could have been discovered and provided in the time intervening, if only there had been the proper form (template), a list of minutiae that might arise.  If you're thinking lawyers and JavaScript have something in common, as to their role in workflow governance, you may have something there.

Python is happy to delegate that which can be or has been covered.  Widget tool kits and web browsers were and are doing fine without having their guts be in Python.  Google App Engine got outfitted from the inside (I used it for an I Ching application), and novel ways of configuring the back end (e.g. Heroku) kept adding to Python's power on the server side.  As a mediator between SQL engines and HTML, Python was an early "P language" as in the classic "LAMP stack" (Linux, Apache, MySQL, a P-language: PHP, Python or Perl).  So letting JavaScript manage the DOM has always seemed quite natural.  Talk to JavaScript with JSON and everything's smooth.

This was a literature class, not a computer science class.  The "tabla rasa" or "blank canvas" of our day is the web page.  That's where most writing now appears, even when published in hard copy on demand.  Gene had a point about the final repository being more XML-like at the roots, not necessarily applied "later".  The structure and logic of the document requires the DOM to express and define itself.  To argue these are the skills of human language writers, not just machines, is not the huge uphill battle it once was.  "Amerish" (a-MER-ish) is taking shape.

Postscript:  Adobe's PDF format or Portable Document Format is another DOM with its own controller language.  Although servers may create PDFs on the fly and serve them to browsers, PDF has not taken off as an alternative to HTML + CSS + JavaScript.  They each fill their own niche.  PDF remains under-appreciated for its ability to contain embedded media such as videos, as well as internal hyperlinks.

Hotel World

Portland, Oregon Hilton, 23rd Floor

I'm a small timer in Hotel World, so I felt quite privileged to get an invite to tonight's soiree at the Hilton in downtown Portland.

The architects have redone the 23rd (top) floor not as some private penthouse but as a configurable set of rooms which, all opened up, form quite a commodious space.

"Wide open" was the floor plan this evening, with the air walls removed.

The occasion was to showcase the remodeled space to conference organizers and, as a guy on the edge of that business, looking over Steve's shoulder, I sometimes peek in.

Also on display:  some of our best local caterers.  Most wore Hilton uniforms but I noticed some others as well, like at the main cheese station.

These would be caterers the Hilton could put you in touch with.

Also exhibited:  this style of event, with interesting food stops or stations scattered around the margins, all small dishes, nibble food one could say, but with forks or spoons, and quite substantial.

Kobe beef, sushi sized, sizzled on lava.  Top quality shrimp cocktails.  Cheese plates.  Grilled and stuffed mushrooms.  The final cooking step is sometimes done right there at the station.  One sees it's quite fresh.

People helped themselves but given the tiny plates, which one put down -- and they'd disappear, thanks to a deft staff -- the flow seemed natural and encouraged mingling.  We had places to sit, but not too many.

To be alone with your thoughts, I recommend the floor to ceiling windows and a pillar table.  Someone interesting will join you, almost certainly.  It happened to me.

People who wanted to meet, or simply should, easily could.  The bandwidth stayed high.  That's what I like about the space and/or event.

Steve had actually staged an event here earlier, one of a select few, but not in this giant room.

Down the hall, to the south, you'll find a smaller room suitable for a more intimate breakfast or dinner, with place settings and seating for all.  There's still space to stand and mingle in the serving area, where diners go to fill their plates.

Newcomers come directly to this space from the elevators.  We were given floor plans as we took our badges, to help plan our events.

Steve's OSCON Survivors Breakfast was in this sit down format. I was privileged to be there also.

Back to this evening:  I hobnobbed with a Hilton sales guy, Anton, fresh from Chicago.  We talked about pop-up galleries and how these would be ideal in this space.  Artists could debut maybe one or two nights only, say over a weekend, with a few of these food stations going.

Yes, it would be an investment.  Sometimes for charity.

Or one might imagine a traveling museum that only fleetingly appeared and was not easy to just stumble upon or into.  Who knows, maybe it will come through Portland.

The established galleries (or museums) might resent the competition but I'm saying any of them could play too, in some corner of the market.

Top of the world event spaces are perhaps plentiful at the global level and hotels aren't the only ones with those.  The alchemy of creating events, and matching them to the right venue, is not the easiest to master.

The real challenge, or one of them, is in how do you select and screen your guests.  If they need to claim a name tag at the door, this could be at the top of the elevators, where there's more space to aggregate.

They had outside security at the bottom though too however.   A swipe card or ticketed event might set up in the ground floor lobby.  More like The Nines with service counters at street level.

In any case, this was not some wide open public event, but had badges pre-printed.  Weddings are often run this way.  The guest list is meticulous.

I told Steve my story, and Patrick, of going to Junior English School in Rome and having a friend who got to live with his family right inside a Hilton hotel.  His dad was the hotel's manager.

I got to stay over at the Bondis sometimes and order room service for dinner.

To me at that time, this seemed beyond cool, to enjoy a living standard so much higher than any Caesar's, now that we had electricity and TV and Lego and such.

Still no personal computers yet, no smartphones... no i-Stuff.

Yet we were definitely lovin' it back then in the roaring 1960s, hoping we'd live to see 2000.  Those holding atom bombs might not let us.

I'm not talking a whole 50 years ago quite.  Not that far back.

Today is August 22, 2013 and people are remembering the March on Washington and MLK's I Have a Dream speech, and then the horrifying Kennedy shootings and assassination of MLK.

The world got a lot more bleak in a hurry for little people like me.  That was 1963.

By 1969 we were looking back on Woodstock.  I was about done being a cub scout, in Rome.  Hayden Dunn, Mahlon Morse, Kijoon Yu, Reggie Hyde, Joe Montabello... my mom was our den leader, then Hayden's dad was, for Weblos.

Now I'm the older guy with gray hair, still bouncing around in the same matrix, yet it's also different.  The movie The Matrix was still in the future back then (duh).

I'd seen 2001 Space Odyssey with my dad at a theater just off the Via Veneto, closer to Villa Borghesi than Piazza Barberini, not far from the American Embassy (where neither mom nor dad worked -- but friends of ours did, sure).  La Fiametta.

Not having read the books, I was a tad confused by the ending of that film.  I wasn't the only one. What was that obelisk anyway?  Like the beginning was confusing also.  But cool anyway.

I also went to English language movies at the Pasquino in Trastevere (Yellow Submarine) and at the Archimedes (007 movies) closer to my home in Parioli.

But I wander...

Tetrahedron Academy

Yes, I'm playing off Monsters University, and the fact that any challenge to The Cube scares people (scream!).

That's just at first, a kind of shock, as you remember what it's like to first have to think of these things, usually with a teacher making threats if your questions went too deep.  Save those for college. It's triggering.  Spikes the stress level.

I explain this drawing in a lot more detail at the Math Forum.

It's what David Koski and I have talked a lot about, on Verizon: a triangular book, front and back covers laid open, with a triangular page free to flip back and forth.

He births some of his modules from this apparatus, an apparatus akin to some of those in Synergetics, or Myst, or Uru.

I didn't used to imagine a page, and let one of the covers do all the work, but I see wisdom in adding that page, keeping the book "open flat".  It defines two tetrahedrons, complementary.

When the page (shown in blue) is slanted just right to make the page-tip to cover-tip the same length as all the other edges, that's a regular tetrahedron (also blue).

The green tetrahedron, in contrast, is when the page is straight up, normal, upright.  The little green square at the dihedral angle is meant to symbolize this state.  Still five edges are the same length, call it "D", but then there's a longer edge, the hypotenuse.

What's so is if the volume of the green tetrahedron is the same as that of a cube with D/2 edges (or call that length "R").  That's the Earthling unit volume, the R**3 cube.  The blue tetrahedron, known as D**3 to the Martians, has slightly less volume:  sqrt(8/9).

In the namespace of Synergetics, we go with the Martians in letting the blue tetrahedron be one.

Multiplying both volumes by sqrt(9/8) applies a different lens, and D**3 is now unity, whereas R-cubed is a little bigger than unit.

That's heresy for some Earthlings, to have a unit-edged cube be other than unit volume.  They look for a new Bertrand Russell or Officer Spock to defend them against the illogical.

The Martian Ambassador has a simple message:  peaceful co-existence.  The Parliament of World Religions seems inclined to agree.

In the meantime, my Digital Mathematics: Heuristics for Teachers continues to attract an elite audience.  By means of workshops and Pythonic andragogy, I get the word out about our triangular book and this little demo.

It's STEM-worthy storytelling, even if it's science fiction.

Mix it with War of the Worlds and the Red, Blue, Green Mars series (a trilogy) for further reading.

All hail, Marvin the Martian.  V-sign.  As you were.

portland center stage, 2008:  IEEE lecture

PPUG 2013.8.13

Well, here we are 6:38 PM, with a room full of geeks facing expectantly forward.  This will be the first PPUG in a long while not led by Michelle Rowley.  Already, we're late.

I'm on the organizing committee but bowed out of any room-facing role.  Will we see one of our other fearless leaders step up to the plate?  I brought Steve in the car, he's good in a pinch.

OK, we've kick started the ordeal.  This room needs to be miked but UA shouldn't have to shoulder all this stuff, Michelle either.  PDX Python Hack Night is in two weeks, in this very place.

Where are we?  One of the heaviest-looking stone buildings in NW houses two of the most ephemerally named:  Vestas and Urban Airship, the former being a wind energy company.  I love it when it works out that way.

TechFestNW is another sponsor this evening.  Applause.  Now the first speaker.

Steve Holden just announced a 15% promo for DjangoCon, told us the code.  I hope he lists that somewhere, like on the discussion list.  I posted about a job opening there just today.  Splinter.  Andrew Lorente is our speaker.

The giant room is packed.  People are taking chairs down off the stacks.  LOL cat to end the talk.  Splinter sits atop Selenium.  Steve asked a technical question about using mutexes as context managers.

PPUG and Wanderers happen on the same Tuesday every so often.

Eric Holscher is doing the second talk.  There is a mike, which he started with, but now it has cut out. He has a fairly loud voice.  He's delivering a good plug for really writing the documentation.  The half-life of your project depends on it.  "Documentation builds a better community."

Eric's tool uses "markdown" (.md files).  See markdowntutorial.

I should go back to my CP4E pages and document stuff more.  I think I did pretty well at the time, like with the Numeracy Series.

Good documentation covers:
(a) installation
(b) provides a tutorial, maybe a cookbook (recipes)
(c) links to code and issues, for providing feedback
(d) any other ways to get support, community info
(e) a license e.g. (BSD, GPL, MIT)
(f) contributor information (if there's a way to get involved)

No license defaults to closed source, copyleft is explicit.  This same message was drummed home at OSCON XV.  At this rate we'll be done within a single hour.  That's a fast PPUG meeting.

No wait, we'll have a Lightning Talk or two.  That's a good idea.

By the time I got to Rogue, seats looked all taken so I let Steve have some fun while I went around the block for some food.  I invited about twenty new people to my LinkedIn network to pass the time.

A-Bomb Day

Disarm Day, 2013

August 6 is more formally known as Disarmament Day, at least around here.

I'm tethered through my Android, posting directly from the event, having wandered around taking photographs.  I've been doing this every year for awhile now.  Carol (mom) was one of the originators of this event in the 1960s, following her visit to Hiroshima about fifty years ago.

A PSR man (Physicians for Social Responsibility) is speaking about the currently operational reactor, a Fukushima type (GE boiler), following a speech by Kayla Godowa-Tufti, a treaty rights activist.  This year we're finding out more about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, its role in the Manhattan Project.  The plutonium for the first A-Bomb at Alamogordo, as well as for the bomb dropped over the City of Nagasaki, were processed there.

Big wheels turn slowly.  Dr. Dyson's conclusion that the Japanese military was already in surrender-mode prior to the atomic bombings, seems highly credible to me.  The hoarding of nukes has become the hallmark of a form of psychological retardation known as "the military-industrial complex".

Nation-states, if ranked relative to average humans, have a negative IQ (below zero).  They consistently do really stupid stuff.  The UN is like a marathon Beavis and Butthead episode, with "superpowers" among the most doofy.

Nations with huge numbers of nukes are off-the-scale aberrational.  This is hardly news to anyone, and is one reason DC is known (semi-affectionately) as the Moron Capital.  The term "moron" stems from the pseudo-science of Eugenics and is used mockingly (sarcastically, satirically).

Speaking of which, the CEO of Amazon purchased the Washington Post just recently.  That's the headline for today.

Arthur Dye is here.  I should untether and go look for him before we disperse.  There's a follow-up event at a nearby museum.  I see quite a few other people I know here too.

Coal World

The hunger to burn carbon is in a race with another hunger to burn the released carbon dioxide, which is plant life's hunger.  Is glaciation brought on by wild burning, as soils weaken for lack of minerals?

Is another "glacial dusting" in order?

That's an old climatological theory, not one of mine.  I have some glacial dust in the garage I'm pretty sure.  A fertilizer.  Microbes like it, they say.

Some readers know the theory I'm talking about, better than I do.  Hamaker-Weaver, right?  Yes, Wikipedia confirms.

The hunger to consume coal is pulling it down the Columbia by barge through terminals yet to be built.  Cascadians are up in arms and their flag has been flown in a Food Not Bombs bike trailer, where our King of Cascadia (a guy named Pepe) signaled his displeasure.

The revolt was in Vancouver, Washington and well attended.

We have a surfeit of electrical power and have no need for dirty coal ourselves.  This is all deal-making wherein we Cascadians (add to spellchecker) pay the costs, bear the brunt of those  "externalizations" economists talk about (a degraded ecosystem).

Or were you relishing the smell of coal in your nostrils.  You've just been chomping at the bit at the bit for that taste?  Better than beer.  Coke and Coal go together, don't they.

However I have neither video nor stills (yet) from this protest event.  Check cold storage at Facebook.

We've got the flag (one of many) her at Blue House for continued use with Sky Blue (one of the trailers).  You may remember how it featured October 6.  She's down at the same park this evening, with the old office chair left behind.  This is the regular beat, with service from Base R2D2 (sounds like Star Wars).

No, I've been caught up in OSCON and doing my day job, confining the radius of my photography to Oregon State, with a lot of shots of my plates (as in "dinner plates" -- fancy meals I've been having).  Today was Sushi Land, on break as chauffeur (medical appointment for a Friend).

I do have a few shots of Lindsey starting off, with the "PepeMobile" trailing the other trailer.  It'd be switched to Adam later. This was last Saturday.

We would prefer to export clean energy as we do with that Inter-Tie, DC to LA.  We have generators idle a lot of the time, with vast amounts of wind coming on line.

So where's the real time smart grid we were promised?  Is there a Smart Grids for Dummies?  Bonneville was pretty much closed down because of the hiring scandal recently.

Speaking of electrical power, yes those server farms do drink it down.  We used to do more aluminum, until Google came along, then also Facebook.  The hydropower is plentiful and racks need to be cooled, just as your body needs to radiate to keep you happy in that comfort zone.

Electronics have their comfort zone too.  The move to photonics and/or a graphene economy may lower the average temperature, but that remains to be seen.  By how much?  I'm not posing as some expert.  Just another guy with a microphone, asking questions.

Finally, a thought about "nursing homes".  Let me focus on one of the best ones around here, Terwilliger Plaza.  Wanderers went there for a party, and recruited new Wanderers from their midst.  Doug Strain lived there.

You could think of it as a university complex.  Do you think a 70 year old brain is too old to tackle Erlang, a computer language?  What if she or he has already learned some other languages?

We don't allow ourselves enough opportunities for such experiments.  Cruise ships have turned the corner maybe, in harboring intellectuals, but couldn't we do better for our elderly?

More piped in TED Talks might sound like a small thing.

Or what about in prisons?   Build your own infrastructure if you have to.  Focus on finding better ways forward.  That's a sharable mission.

At San Quentin they studied General Semantics, under the direction of the warden.  I met Gene Fowler (poet ex con) through that program, or one like it.  He got to hear a Bucky talk.

You can find missing puzzle pieces if one is at least allowed to look.  Give nursing homes more bandwidth and help 'em search for, and find, those marbles they've supposedly lost -- or maybe never had in the first place (says the joker).

Friends care about prison conditions / philosophies and old people.  Joe Havens took on "treatment of the elderly" as his protest issue, the focus of a hunger strike.   We need to up our skill level around taking care of old people, as that's going to be all of us making it to that age, in this lifetime or another (if you'll permit a multiplicity of life stories in your experience, even if only experienced "vicariously").

Another job for the Chinese Peace Corps: helping Americans get it together to take care of themselves.

OSCON / ORM

Steve held an OSCON Survivors' Breakfast at the Hilton.  I was pleased to have some face time with Deb Bryant, Allison Randal, Eric Holsher, Lindsay Epstein and others.  Some of us Portland natives also attend the Wanderers meetings.

Later that evening, again with Steve as a catalyst, I enjoyed a fine dinner with Julie Steele (with O'Reilly Media), Steve and Yarko, followed by more conversation at Greater Trumps.  From Julie I learned I should never skip the Friday keynotes, which I had.  Good thing they're taped.

The chair's party was well attended.  Edd Dumbhill is the outgoing chair, with incoming chairs Matthew and Simon.  I got permission to invite David Feinstein to this party and introduced him to Simon.  I then drifted off and joined Yarko and Alex Martelli, who were speaking with the Code for America CTO, Michal Migurski.

Code for America focuses on making government more accessible and transparent.  The process has its pitfalls.  Local IT is maybe itching to try its hand with newer technologies but gets slapped down by management.

Then C4A shows up, a whiz bang team, and wins praise from the same management as genius outsiders.  The natives grumble.

How might C4A catalyze more appreciation for in-house talent?  Show management what's possible but then fade away.  It's a tiny program anyway.  Inspire but don't micromanage.

Of course I'm thinking "USA OS" the whole time, what with whitehouse.gov folks working on some public APIs.  These petitions people sign:  there's mineable data there, which should be shared.

The confusion about Open Source versus Open Data is still prevalent.  When you invite development using shared open source tools, you are helping to level the playing field.  They have access to these tools without high cost barriers.  However tools are not data and confidentiality stays important.

When the free tools are used, the schools aren't left out, because they can afford free software. They can also help improve it, to where the free tools are often among the best tools in their class.

One trains up an army conversant with PostgreSQL, other open APIs.  So then what?  Does government have the courage to use the same tools that schools can afford to teach?

That's a critical equation.  In some countries the verdict is in:  yes.

Open data offers its own set of advantages, but should not be confused with sharable tools.  Just because you know how to hack does not mean you have automatic access to private records.

I missed way more talks than I managed to attend, that much is certain.  Netflix gave a good one I'm told.  People are turning to the Internet for their information and entertainment more and more.  Cell phones have only accelerated this trend.

Facebook is building special data centers with their own power specs, for all those pictures you want to keep in your profile, but which no one retrieves on a daily basis.  Cold storage, which doesn't mean unresponsive.  Humanity is evolving new organelles.  Motherboard Earth is an evolving picture.

As usual, I was inspired to dive more deeply into various technologies thanks to these talks.  Simon's talk got me interested in Erlang, while the drone talk (a keynote -- nothing weaponized) impressed me with the relevance of Clojure.  I now have both installed and am working through Safari Books in my copious free time (sarcastic chuckle).

Tomorrow:  more chauffeuring of MVPs.  Another trip to the airport.  I'm happy to play the role.

Congrats to Tara, who attended the brunch, on getting the driver's license and repairing her phone, two summer goals.

NPYM Annual Session 2013

Welcome Friends.  Margaret Coahran is Registrar this year.  I find that one of the most challenging jobs in the Quaker rotation (we tend to manage by rotation).  I've expressed to her a few times my admiration, but not before agitating for a single.  My written note had been miss-transcribed to say I'd dwell with other snorers, but that's not what I'd said.  She and the Pacific University students handling conferences got me a single room efficiently, in Clark Hall.  I was impressed.

At the AFSC meeting during lunch in the Alumni Room, some of the Friends were expressing appreciation for FCNL and AFSC working together on something (I forget exactly what).  For the record, I have mixed feelings about this.

There's a broad brush stroke psychology that has given up on working closely with Washington, DC, which doesn't mean the relationship is necessarily adversarial.  But why bottle-neck everything through one city that way, especially where groupthink (like-mindedness) has proved capable of entirely pathological acts:  invading Iraq for example.  That's enough right there to sideline this city until it learns to play the game ("world game") less awkwardly.  This neo-imperial period is a waste of fossil fuels by living fossils.

AFSC should cater to those not especially focused on Washington DC and its institutions, at least not in the sense of sucking up to them and/or trying to stroke its politicians' egos.  That's FCNL's job and the two approaches are not easily combined.

That's partly why I am not a fan of the "if I had a trillion dollars" video contest:  the "winners" got to visit the very city that's been wasting their trillions, swindling young people out of their could-have-been brighter futures, and now they get to learn how to "lobby" or maybe "write letters to the editor" -- a long list of ineffectual, not-working techniques that have not prevented Washington from making disturbingly horrible mistakes.

Let FCNL teach people how to "lobby".  AFSC should focus on how to work around these clowns and not waste its time inside the beltway so much.

Our Friends in Residence are from Jubilee House in Nicaragua.

I don't know if they associate Jubilee with the idea of hitting the reset button and rebooting key relationships, an old Catholic notion of zeroing out debts.  Recommended:  Debt, the First 5000 Years.  I like the way Greaber points to all the mythologizing that goes on in Economics, about how we got to where we are.  Storytelling R Us.

The Friends in Residence presentation aimed to get at the psychology of community work, something religious people get to take on full time thanks to their religious orders.  Doing work one considers ethical and obviously helpful to those in need is its own reward in some ways, or so the theologians have tended to agree?

Why?

One actually strengthens and develops as a result, and so prospers psychologically.  Doing the work that needs doing, if one can swing such a thing, tends to be satisfying, even when there's too much to be done and one is always facing inadequacy.  There's team work, there's relationship, and there's a shared sense of purpose.

So lets not talk of "great sacrifice" in the sense of giving up high living standards.  You may not be as physically consuming, but for a lot of us that's healthier anyway.  Malnourishment is a much a matter of consuming too much as too little.  "Affluenza" they call it.

I've mostly been hanging out with the old timers, like Sonya Pinney, whom I've known all my life.  Her kids are my age, and their kids are going to college (as is mine).  Gail Sanford.  Barb Janoe.  We sat outside during dinner, comparing notes.

Although I tell people I'm on retreat, I'm actually working full time, not having gotten off teaching.  Given my students are online, all I need is a not-too-choppy Internet connection.

Speaking of which, my 4dsolutions.net disappeared for awhile when Webfaction moved it and set the wrong DNS numbers.  I contacted them from my single dorm room in Clark and they realized their mistake.  I'm about to re-up with the registrar as well and momentarily wondered if the DNS issue was related to that (a company called Jumpline, Inc. is registrar for 4dsolutions.net).

Carol has been working hard with her doctor and Apria to make sure she can get some portable oxygen equipment in early August.  I helped her fill out and return a PDF on-line, harder than it sounds once you factor in all the settings Windows has regarding Wifi authentication.

Tara is maybe doing a few things for The Open Bastion.  Her summer has included working with them, Patrick in particular.  TOB produces Djangocon and Apachecon among others.

Sometimes I look up from my Python and post something math related.  Tonight that was to edu-sig, but earlier today, to math-teach.  Will my postings get through though.  I invest considerable time in those and yet sometimes they don't make it through the moderators.  Sometimes I park them elsewhere then.

eChurch Sermon

Copied from Facebook (hyperlinks added)

Social engineering in Portland: "Parks and Wreck" padlocked their Powell Park pavilion after padlocking the pavilion restrooms, because people were starting to use the park as a restroom. That's what happens when the only restrooms in a neighborhood belong to private residences and/or commercial businesses.

But that's the New America isn't it: mean spirited against anyone without a "business reason" for being outside their own little gated community.

Students at the large high school nearby, locked out of the pavilion, were herded away from the park and into nearby Burgerville, Wendy's and McDonald's, where their "obesity training" (fattening) could proceed apace.

Supersize 'em, then raise their health premiums.

"Parks and Wreck" is complicit, no longer seeing itself as promoting "healthy living". The plan for Colonel Summers: "a surge" (sound familiar?), a pathetic war on Americans without sufficient "net worth" to the corporate non-persons to deserve public facilities.

Portland is not that different because USAers are not that different: lots of pretense to being "generous" but now just trying to dominate the planet with people in uniform, a "surge" to rid the planet of "riff raff" (like in Panama, where Apache helicopters took out shanty towns for target practice).

"The spiritual wickedness of Americans" is the new sermon of choice I'd say, if you're into fire and brimstone. Bishop Tutu, tell it like it is. I think it's more Alzheimer's i.e. as the population ages (on average), it becomes more and more senile. The culture itself is dying: hardening of the mental arteries.

Dirty Wars (movie review)

Having recently read Mary's Mosaic, which drew me back to the writings of Col. Fletcher F. Prouty, I could appreciate the historical trajectory taken up by this film.

JFK's bitter disappointment with the CIA, when it failed to murder Castro, led him to memo the Pentagon saying that the Joint Chiefs would, in future, be the president's assassins and henchmen.

This was a new idea for the Eisenhower generation (Gen. Krulak's crew actually tried to keep Diem away from his executioners), but in Obama's day, the DC president has his military death squads, his hit teams, just what JFK dreamed of.

Scahill's thesis is that the White House is using its secret powers to create exactly the enemy it needs, a diffuse network that defies its will but is fairly easy to target and kill, often by remote control.  Endless target practice with the latest weapons is the consequent opportunity, which means jobs jobs jobs for the weapons engineers.

Case in point, Awlaki starts out the peaceable all-American Imam, incisive with criticisms yet voting for Bush.  Then al-Awlaki watches the post-911 farce unfold, with Americans begging to be lied to and misled so they might feel good about the display of extreme ineptness that followed, with the City of Losers in the driver's seat.  He becomes more bitterly negative.  

At some point, he made the kill list, but has not yet been killed (in the movie).  Jeremy sees he has a real story here, watching a Nobel Peace Prize winning president pull the trigger on a Malcolm X like figure, and then kill his 16 year old boy.   

Nowadays we're watching the Oval Office go after Snowden while making similarly ironic remarks about his being a danger to other Americans.

The Yemeni journalist who first broke the story of a cruise missile attack in Yemen, the same story Scahill is covering, is someone the White House takes a personal interest in keeping behind bars.  

Scahill has a hard time believing it at first, but finds the public memo.  

He was at first skeptical that special forces were extracting bullets from their victims to conceal evidence, and using NATO to tell the cover stories ("the Taliban did it").  

But then he saw the evidence ("the American Taliban did it") and NATO finally admitted it when it became that obvious.

It's Andrew Jackson and the Indian Wars, sightly updated, and with the whole world infested with Indians and their sympathizers.  Sovereignty means nothing.

With vastly superior fire power, night vision, helicopters, you get a blood sport that's more thrilling than computer games, but not necessarily much more dangerous.  

You get a pay check, the president's gratitude, and you get to kill lots and lots of people, and torture others.  What a sweet job, if you're into that kind of thing.

These "American Taliban" as they're known (e.g. JSOC) will likely get more recruits as a result of this film.  Killing with impunity is an attractive occupation for many a psychopathology.  Apparently there's some correlation with having a beard.

It must feel great to have a president (and a vice president) on board, with the bleachers full of adoring, flag-waving fans -- including that war lord in Somalia, gushing with admiration for DC's world class cruelty.

I took my 84 year old mother to this film (she's the one who first told me about it). Living Room Theaters served us snacks.  Then Tara joined us and we went to Jake's, the seafood place.  Mom treated us to a meal, while reminding us there were still "good people" in Washington, DC.

Scahill does a lot to show that a few US citizens still have some common decency, meaning he is doing way more to protect ordinary American lives than any of the president's hatred-inspiring goons.

In questioning the legitimacy of murdering a US citizen and his son, Jeremy shows that at least a smattering of writers have a conscience, a taste for logic and ethics.  A lot of people helped with the editing.

I feel safer, as an American, knowing this DVD is getting out, to places like Yemen.  People will better understand that Washington, DC is a brutal oppressor domestically, not just overseas.

Indeed, that's been the understanding for a long time, it's just that here the story gets updated a little.

JFK's "imperial presidency" is alive and well.  "Murder, Inc." is now global.  DC continues to lose its war for hearts and minds, but then that's not even the goal any longer.

Satisfying a lust for blood seems to be the main theme these days, a rather simple foreign policy, whereas "defending the Constitution" seems to be not in the cards.  The war lords in Somalia feel right at home with this post-Constitution ("bankrupt and extinct" -- per Medal of Freedom winner) United States of America.

Some JSOC personnel do come forward, sensitive about history and uncomfortable with their Planet of the Apes role.  They're not feeling at ease working for the City of Losers.

With a stronger safety net, or even without it, some may find their way to less disreputable jobs.  They're being abused by politicians and career bureaucrats.  War is a racket.

Migrants Everywhere!

I was an invited guest at an intra-office staff meeting of the AFSC today, a joint meeting of Seattle and Portland in advance of some organizational reshuffling long in the cards.

On some level, Seattle may have been interested in Portland's experiment with an Area Support Committee, the latest version of what used to be called a Program Committee, yet more integrated across programs.  Lots of offices have them, not just Portland.

Portland's experiments have produced some useful outcomes, such as more cross-fertilization among the various groups represented (e.g. PSR), however, as always, the devil is in the details and it would be difficult to make sweeping generalizations, or conclusions that apply to Seattle in particular, based solely on Portland's unique experiences.

I learned more about A New Path, an AFSC publication designed to contribute to the ongoing discussion on immigration reform.

The new immigration bill, which has just passed the Senate and is headed to the House (US Congress) is heavy on enforcement and further militarization of the US-Mexico border.

Many of its provisions for advancing towards citizenship are contingent on militias claiming success in their war on freedom of movement and human liberties.   Unless the border is declared "90% secure", some of the proposed pathways to citizenship will remain closed off, i.e. the presumptive landlords will pick up their marbles and go home.

The majority of indigenous Americans have seen nothing but their rights further curtailed as successive presidents have asserted ever greater imperial control over their would-be / wanna-be empire.

Elizabeth Furse could tell you more of the story (she might have assumed Senator Packwood's position were it not for Ron Wyden's strong sense of entitlement).

Speaking of a sense of entitlement, lets add up the number of migrant workers wearing military uniforms, including with US insignias.  You'll find these migrants all over the world, lording it over the "little people" that live there.

Okinawa hosts a large number of such migrant workers, as does Cuba at Gitmo.  Of course these are actually occupations, as the migrants have no need of permission to squat in these countries.  They are present mainly through force of arms (including arm twisting), papered over.

Sometimes they pay rent, like in Kyrgyzstan.

In the case of Cuba, one rent check was cashed, post Cuban Revolution, and this was considered a green light to move in forever.

In the Philippines, it took a volcano to get Clark AB and Subic NB closed, or at least scaled back.

These migrant workers also expect to be serviced by large red light districts in most locations. Local people are encouraged to prostitute themselves for the benefit of these migrants (various types of destruction engineer mainly, trained to destroy life and property).

Talk about the tenant from hell.

We learned more about the "driver card" which gives some North American migrants a right to drive, but doesn't serve as a valid ID the way a real driver's license does, such as when boarding an airplane serving a domestic route.

I think putting a large shroud over the Statue of Liberty is in order, given the utter hypocrisy of the inscription.  It rings too hollow to be seemly in public.  The Shroud Project:  mourning the death of Liberty in America.

Migrants to the US have pretty successfully hijacked the place and now want it for themselves alone, having driven off or rounded up the Cherokee, Apache, Wabanaki etc.

Seasonal migration patterns going back thousands of years were interrupted with fences and now the ranch owners have become vigilante-minded about their so-called Doctrine of Discovery, which was followed by the "annexation" of vast territories (a mental process in Washington DC).

One group of migrants tries to lord it over the rest, as "the defacto landlord".  The landlord migrants rule by de-legitimizing (criminalizing) everyone else.  Vast military encampments (called bases) are just fine and dandy, but if you pitch a tent in a public park, you've criminally disobeyed the ban on camping.

These landlordy migrants are adroit when it comes to twisting the English language to make up whatever rules will keep other migrants subjugated and at their mercy.  Lawyers sometimes act surprised that the subjugated migrants defy the landlords.  Don't they see further encroachment of their rights as better than no rights at all?

Toy Story 3 (movie review)

I've seen the previous two Toy Story movies, but long enough ago that memory fades.  However, like Harry Potter, like Jackie Paper in Puff, you need to grow older with your audience (or freeze in time like Peanuts or Simpsons).

Andy is going to college and is ready for somewhat darker themes, hinted at in a toy modality.

Buzz Lightyear, the most militarized, is the most easily flipped, once Book Worm delves deep to find his primitive psyche.  He turns himself into a thug for Boss Bear, a bear terminally angry at life for the abandonment he experiences.

This is the more horrific world of Scary Baby and Frowny Clown.  "One bright morning in the middle of the night..." topsy turvy.

Our migrant colony, trekking together after a family disownment, falls into a state of servitude.  The connotations might be Biblical, with Boss Bear as Pharaoh.  We needn't press the analogy too far.

Funny though, was how the soldiers were first to bail, seeing the reality of a mission accomplished, another boyhood done.

Although George Bush was ridiculed for his Mission Accomplished strutting and puffing, I think he was doing his best to deliver and bring this media extravaganza / violent orgy to an end.  Let's say "it's over" in a big patriotic gesture, with the president pretending to fly in, to land on that aircraft carrier -- so cinematic. 

The cynics just laughed at this silly swagger because they better knew how far from over this war would be.  They were just getting started it seems, never mind if the White House was happy to call it a win, and a day.

There'd be that trial of sorts, to give people catharsis.

The "conquering" attackers were of course not on trial.

So what was the big win supposed to be after that, or in Afghanistan, with its mission accomplished once again?  Bin Laden had been neutralized.  Later.  In the Obama term.

One could mock the whole farce on television, as a president, even them.  The "stove pipers" had set up a dog and pony show and sold the UN a bill of goods. Some of us watched it on television.  "Aluminum tubes..."

Anyway, back to Toy Story, Buzz somewhat redeems himself with "Spanish mode" wherein he makes eyes at the Cow Girl.  This is easier to forgive than his shill-for-Boss-Bear persona.

The recycling plant is a place to face death.  The very meaning of "deus ex machina" -- that plot device which delivers last minute rescue -- is in fact a machine, and piloted by ETs as luck would have it (fortunately the "toy tribe" is cosmically diverse in this alternative universe).

As we learn in History of Money, there's a circuit wherein the soldiers march across the land, buying provisions (not just pilfering) if planning to sew good relations, but then the sellers (including contractors) need to remit a portion in taxes (or call it tribute).

Contractors need the money, soldiers need the provisions.  The currency stays afloat.

Or call it "foreign aid through conquest," what Washington DC calls "spreading democracy".

The little girl receives the toys with proper ceremony.  There's a passing of the torch.  We've said good bye.  Toy Story 4 will not be necessary, at least not for this generation.

Favorite Montages

from Ghost in the Shell

Iron Man 2 (movie review)

I'd been favorably impressed by The Avengers in Indianapolis a year ago, and knew then I had a hole to fill, the Iron Man movie preceding it.  A year later, I finally saw it.

Of course I'm glad I did, in part because it's redolent with Bucky stuff.  Tony Stark is like a Heinlein character, strongly individualistic (and narcissistic).

Connecting back to World Expo aesthetics, via the dad, a Disney-like character, takes us straight to Bucky domes and Spaceship Earth.  But what may escape more viewers is the epiphany Tony has when connects the dots:  a geodesic sphere materializes, somehow encoded in the positions of the pavilions.

I remember when they talked about Bf is like the discovery of an element.  Anyway that's what Tony is discovering in this scene:  a new form of unobtanium, a next fountain of youth.

Vibes of Superman in his Fortress of Solitude.

The superhero lore alludes to itself.  There's a Cold War theme, with the Russians contributing both the evil villain, and the attractive spy, Natasha Romanova, played by Scarlet Johannson, a character who gets stronger (psychologically) in The Avengers and in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, still in production.

These characters are coming from old comic books you understanding.  I checked out Iron Man 2 from the Comic Book section of Movie Madness.

David Koski phoned during the shoot out in the geodesic dome, or just before, which was appropriate.  I paused the DVD so we could talk for a couple hours.

This wasn't the first time there'd been a dome in the picture.  He'd called me from that TC Howard dome at Pycon 2012, right around when I was asking the ESRI guy to say more on the Fuller Projection.

They flirt with the Bucky stuff, these movie makers. It percolated into the movie Argo as well:  the science fiction theme park that he and Ray Bradbury were supposedly into, which Argo is somehow about (the movie, not the cover story about which the movie Argo was made).

No one says "geodesic dome" when they talk in The Making of Stark Expo (special feature) about integrating the climactic fight scene from its components.  That's Easter Egg stuff you get more of if you dig, i.e. if you do your homework.  Allusions to Cornwall and domes as arboretums (St. Louis).

They're working to capture a Zeitgeist here.  Comics are into that, tapping into that common vocabulary of shared mythology, that Matrix.

David has his up hill struggle finding peers to share with.  Most mathematicians consider "three dimensional volume" to be handled, not an especially interesting area.

You have the Archimedeans on the Poly list and Guy Inchbald, but the excitement Dave's subculture evinces, for a volume six rhombic dodecahedron, brands him an outcast and an eccentric.  Not mainstream.  The culturally literate don't use that dot much, when dot-connecting.

Public Assembly

I was emphasizing in come recent AFSC communique, intra-committee, about the importance of public restrooms:  "I think the City of Portland spends irresponsibly little on maintaining park bathrooms.  This was my standard at Occupy also."

I was also reminiscing about Teresina Havens and her service in Tokyo or one of those as a latrine cleaner.  She was in training as a high level Buddhist and later came to Portland with her partner Joe Havens to start a study group.  My wife Dawn and I joined.  Her husband later started a group as well, dubbed "Quaker Economics" though it may have had a more formal name.

When lots of people meet outdoors for a General Assembly that may take hours, there need to be facilities present.  Sometimes that means Kybos, for those familiar with an obscure reference.  Mobile units may be hauled away or deposited by truck.  However other solutions exist.  A museum exhibit specifically relating to municipal toilet facilities developed in the depression years, under FDR and Eleanor, would attract my attention, and I suggest the attention of many critics.

If your city has public parks with closed, run down, unmaintained public restroom facilities, then ask yourself where the money goes.  Don't your property taxes buy you public parks with facilities we might have pride in?  Perhaps an attendant or two needs to be present, rotating through other duties?  Park regulations should be respected, with all night campers only in the zones designated, with lit pathways to toilets, with sometimes subtle low-glow lighting.

When I say rotating through other duties I'm talking maybe duty aboard a commercial jet liner, hosting hundreds in small quarters as honored guests of an airline.  Park duty in rotation, at cities visited, would further establish the customer service reputation of these hospitable elites.

Join a Food Not Bombs crew and see the inside of a new temple, meet religious people.  These friendships may endure.  Or perhaps your crew is home-bound from disaster relief service in the Caribbean, a big storm having left a path of destruction.  Some people specialize in being there when needed and we honor their service.  At Rose Parade, and Gay Pride too.

I had dinner with a social worker this evening.  A lot of scared youth come to Portland because they feel rejected in their own neighborhoods.  The stigma of "being gay" or "trans" is enough to push people out of homes and into the streets, where social services have to pioneer a humane response.

My social worker friend is proudly and openly gay and suffers no loss of respect as a consequence.  But that such role models exist, though encouraging, does not provide any immediate solution for those drowning in the overwhelmingness of it all.  Some are pregnant.  Some are just being released from institutionalized care, perhaps because the insurance has run out and it is no longer profitable to test tomorrow's banned drugs on them.

Not that all drugs should be banned.  Military units dispense all manner of psycho-actives per this Time magazine cover story.  In some lines of work, you're expected to be "on" something, usually coffee which is both legal and unregulated.  Sometimes something stronger.  Athena's oracles at Delphi had their python vapors.  Some narratives say Apollo slew this "dragon" (a recurring meme), but I say the python escaped to Nashville (TN).

The relative sanity of coffee shop world gives me some hope.  There's precedent for sharing controlled substances responsibly, taken to higher levels in some capitals.

True, hippies flocked to Kathmandu and maybe made a negative impression in some cases. Drug abuse did occur.  They came from a culture of under-privileged, under-served by their cities (e.g. check the public restroom scene) and oppressed by their schools.

The social worker and I coincidentally wore matching jackets, somewhat business oriented but also causally "night out" in flavor (I wore a dark blue buttonless shirt with no tie or collar, subdued compared to her colorful and tasteful tattoos).

 Our venue was upscale Ethiopian, yet homey, not overly institutional.  Ethiopian restaurants tend to be like that, clearly family affairs, with you their guests.  I liked the sort of Southwest Airlines swagger, a joking informality, within a framework that's all business, in the sense of keeping things running smoothly. I paid with Alaskan Airlines visa.

Speaking of keeping things running smoothly, I salute Saburo's Sushi House, where I went for the first time on a Father's Day, with Tara.  We dutifully waited in line like they say you usually have to, and lucked out getting in on a first serving.  We felt well served and privileged, plus the fare was fantastic, right down to the tea and miso.

Two Meetings

I'll try to tie these two meetings together.

The first was a presentation by Allen Taylor at Linus Pauling House about some of the things going on in the private sector around space exploration.

Planetary Resources, a new company interested in mining asteroids is raising money, via Kickstart, for the million dollars needed to add another mini-telescope satellite, this one to offer its services to the public.

You'll be able to get your picture flashed through the on-board camera, with the Earth or Moon as a backdrop, given the external LCD to which the photos will be uploading.  For $25 or so, you can get a wedding picture with a cosmic backdrop.

The second was a presentation by an Iranian-American from Tuscon, AZ who thinks relations between the respective people would improve were more people in the US aware of what a cool guy Mossadegh was.  He has his Mossadegh Legacy Institute to help spread the word.  He's on tour thanks to this vision.

The Veteran for Peace introducing Moji was the same guy who gave a speech at the Eagle Scout ceremony on Saturday.  This was at Portland's Peace House. 

The Huntworks live there, an older couple who raised their family in Iran and have Farsi-speaking children.

Many Iranians have a fascination with space exploration and appreciate that, with a more cosmic perspective, there's a withering of fascination with nation-states.  Human beings and their planetary saga becomes the focus.

The break-down into "nation-hoods" with many humans falling through the cracks as "not documented",  is breaking down.  We have leaders in each nation working to be responsible for a global context, even if their particular position in that context is ethnic-flavored.

I agree with Moji's view that the Persian lineage has much to contribute to the ethics / aesthetics of "modernity" and ongoing "modernization".  What has hurt Persian civilization, set it back was the absorption of modernization within the context of colonialism.  China went through a similar chapter, as have others.

"Future shock" has been real enough (Toffler was right to predict it) but is not a one way street.  As technology continues to morph our civilizations, unexpected synergetic effects of cultural inter-mixing will continue to make us all better off.

Some see such "multi-culturalism" as a threat, as if the mixing of cultures were something new in this world.  That all depends.  So far, Portland is integrating well with Persian culture.

Esoteric Languages

Before I forget this happened, no photos were taken (by me -- there was video happening), let me recall the meeting of the esoteric computer language society, with a name that I'll look up in a sec.

I ran into Dr. Dave DiNucci at Pepinos and he was preparing, getting things ready.

Dekum Building, downtown.

Great talk.

Bart from CompSci / PSU was the opener, with a talk on M4.  He brilliantly made it look hard and easy at the same time.

Then Dave hit us with his Flash and interesting shop talk he invented, with diagrams, to help people manage parallel processes.  He's worked on this a long time in professional settings.

The roles and resources feed into atomic actions which figure into plans and strategies -- all technically defined in a tight system.

He has a new book out on it.

We've discussed it at Wanderers.

Zissou.

Murder Mystery

The Kennedy Era comes into different focus as the generations fly by.  Peter Janney has done a lot of groundbreaking legwork for this book, including digging up and reacquainting people with a cast that has mostly exited by now.  In some cases he's finishing work others started.  As an investigator he tells his story with great proficiency as I am guessing Seymour Hersh would agree.

I see a few names I know in the book, going back to times in Washington / Georgetown and friendships stemming from my deep dive into Fuller School Lit.  Plus I've done some reading in the Kennedy Conspiracy bookshelf, of course taking in the Oliver Stone film.

In particular I've studied the writings of Col. Fletcher Prouty and bought his CD.  Prouty talks a lot about the U2 incident which Janney casts as the CIA engineering its own downfall for some reason.  To derail a peace conference?  That's the story.

Eisenhower was suddenly on the defensive, with Gary Powers on Russian TV.  Allen Dulles didn't seem so in control of the situation either and really needed that "shot down" coverup lest he be seen as outmaneuvered.  He needed to boss the Warren Commission as well, more the outsider than the insider on some days, but loyal to what was obviously the official line.

The whole business of violating the USSR's territorial integrity was creating blow back.  The Cold War would continue, with no peace while one superpower acted like it owned the place and lorded over the other.  People push back in the face of insecurity.  Proxy wars would be waged while a "Third World" struggled to step away, not get sucked in on either side (more like Switzerland).

Prouty also focuses on the Kennedy assassination, but from the point of view of someone more connected to the mixing of American and Southeast Asian intelligence.  He makes it clear that Hanoi Jane was not the first to find these people poetic.  The OSS (called the OS by Janney) had some serious admirers of Ho, an ally against Japanese imperialism in those days.

The foreign policy whereby Vietnam would be handed back to the French and colonialism continued was not the way every school was thinking it should go, especially among America's elite Asia-philes.  Enlisting Nazis to fight the Soviets was likewise not a universally popular move.  Truman came to distrust the CIA as much as anyone, as Janney makes clear.

A key passage in Janney's book is where he portrays JFK as deeply upset upon learning of Ngo Dinh Diem being murdered, with Robert McNamara the source.  This scene should be contrasted with A.J. Langguth's account in Our Vietnam: The War 1954-1975 wherein Gen. Lansdale, ever hopeful of returning to Vietnam, maybe serving as ambassador there, was brought before JFK earlier as perhaps a candidate to orchestrate Diem's demise.  It's not like the Kennedys were any less capable of plotting murders (Lansdale either), or at least wishing for them to happen.  Dragon tears for a fellow Catholic? Lansdale said no, Diem was his friend.

Prouty does not claim Diem's murder was according to plan -- on the contrary, he was supposed to fly to Belgrade that day and got as far as the airplane before turning back, perhaps realizing a coup was likely in his absence and not wanting to face that outcome?  Gen. Krulak's Pentagon office, where Prouty worked, had everything to do with that planning.  Prouty was sent to Antarctica as a military escort shortly thereafter, while JFK went to Dealey Plaza.

McNamara in this scene is livid with Lansdale afterwards when the latter declines such a mission and charge from his commander in chief.  The Secretary of Defense (coming over from Ford) hisses that no one should deny and defy a president (top boss) like that, his survival instinct as middle management lashing out at a relatively quiet general who'd spent a lot of time in the Philippines already, where the US fancied itself the latest landlord in a series (Japanese earlier, with Americans before that -- this was Part 2 with MacArthur in a starring role -- Spaniards before that (though they ate Magellan (my joke from when we lived in Magallenes Village)).

Lansdale's purported idea to scare Castro with the prospect of a second coming (of Christ) also reads like a reminder of Catholic catechism (Colby was also Catholic).  But according to Helms in Veil, Kennedy had other ideas, more prosaic, at least in the early days.  Johnson saw it as "Murder, Inc." i.e. lots of people were getting snuffed or "disappeared".  Yes, that's the way it still was in the 1960s and I'm not saying it all stopped in the meantime.  The US had been a gang land all along, from the Streets of New York to Chicago to Vegas.  Organized crime is a serious power, when you make some of the most wanted things in life also illegal (or too scandalous to talk about in adult fashion with your polity).

The idea that a strong woman was fighting for JFK's soul, trying to "hippify" him, is highly believable.  CIA wives were trying to be a vector for a psychology sweeping the nation (universities especially), and that included using more psychedelics.  The conservative old codgers whom Ed Applewhite assured me made up the bulk of the CIA (akin to Ralph McGeehee's "football players" (Ralph had been one)) would not be at all comfortable with JFK's hippification, and the military-industrial complex was indeed seeing dollar signs in endless proxy wars with a familiar ideological basis:  the defense of "capitalism" against "commies" (this was before the "dot commies" and "software libre" etc., which capitalism has embraced).

They (the industrialists) got more of what they thought they wanted with their man Johnson, a chance to try out napalm and other weapons.  As made clear in the book Human Smoke, the itch to try new weapons is almost irresistible.  War is a spectacle, it's theater.  Some people love it dearly, from the angle they get.  A grand sport (Hunger Games -- like that blockade against Germany).  A great game.  If life is a battlefield, then what's the alternative to loving your fate as a warrior?  These metaphors go back to the Crusades and are more than just metaphors -- people live by these credos, good Christians included.

Prouty is clear that an underlying pessimism and fatalism was acting as an invisible hand in this picture.  He quotes Buckminster Fuller as someone saying astute things in that regard.  Applewhite moved from Mockingbird to retirement to working on Synergetics, per Cosmic Fishing etc. Fuller would continue to write about the CIA (Capitalism's Invisible Army he calls it) right up through Grunch of Giants, mostly as a vector for post-WW2 business interests as inheriting from East India Tea (his own father was a "company man" in that sense, i.e. in the tea business) -- to be followed by the age of networks and networking (the one we're still in, lots of Web foo).

These were scary times and the Kennedy brothers were fighting Irish, not afraid to make some serious enemies.  Having a president who seemed subject to blackmail depended on the sense of scandal that would erupt had the truth been known, about the trysts, the drug use.  The movie industry had yet to do much to crack the surface of "aristocratic lifestyles".  The public was believed to be too child-like, too puritan, too soft, to really face reality.  This seemed a theme in Hyde Park on Hudson (movie) also.

I'm thinking that might be a fair assessment, but in retrospect we let ourselves see more and more, and it's actually a relief to get some of the misinformation out of the system.  Fuller's Critical Path seems an unbelievable fairy tale in some dimensions, as many in the West have a self congratulatory story about their ultimate victory in the Cold War.  Books like Janney's paint a somewhat different picture wherein Russian penetration was more complete. Telling Americans what they want to hear makes 'em shop more (is better for business); they buy more Coke and Pepsi.  So why not pander to a thirst for more truth if they're ready -- and maybe put some coke back in Coke (just a little) while we're at it?  Could be good television.

After some years of pretty edgy TV, I think the general polity is more conditioned to look reality in the face, as Chögyam Trungpa ardently advocated.  Looking at the Kennedy Era with the eyes of hindsight, there's a willingness to see "that of God" as the Quakers put it, in this cast of players upon the stage, on a Titanic in some ways.  This was a time of great turmoil and disappointments, with many killed in wars overseas, but also many in outright urban warfare in the USA's own meaner streets.  "America eats its young" -- sometimes it's well to see it that way.

I'd like to dial back to the scene where Rufus Jones is saying something positive about Cord Meyer.  What was it about World Federalism that failed to stand up under pressure?  There are more routes and trail heads to explore here, thanks to this new groundbreaking.

Of course a lot has to do with archives that are independently managed, estate affairs.  Historians don't get made privy to everything.  People have secrets.  However it may be a cowardly thing to keep too many and Janney is bold about lashing out, being harsh with the dead even.  He sculpts himself as a character for future scholars, and enters the drama himself, not only an investigator, but an affected individual who also had sincere love for the murder victim (as Jack Kennedy did).  He wants to be remembered in that light as well.

Wanderers 2013.5.30

I showed up late for Wanderers this morning (yesterday morning by now -- it's late) and was surprised to find only Glenn.  I was even more surprised to learn of Jay's passing, one of our group and one of Terry's oldest friends.

Dave DiNucci came by when we'd all left, then turned up in Pepino's when I did, having invited The Open Bastion.  Steve is out of town but his small staff continues working in the new office.  Dave is giving a talk tomorrow, to a meeting of an esoteric languages (computer) society.  I will likely try to find it.

Tara had suggested a couple weeks ago that I might like The XX, a band she already liked a lot and followed, but had never seen perform live.  Coexist is the album they were sharing.

Indeed, concerts, rock or otherwise, have not been big on her radar.  We joined with Rose and Elliot beforehand looking for food, though on a Memorial Day our choices were more limited than on a typical Monday.  Parking was free.

My impression of The XX and the opening band,  Hundred Waters, was they were not in the "angry rebellion" school of rock.  That's just one branch in any case.  This group is more introspective.  I enjoy mellifluous and electronic, am a regular on SOMA FM, so these musicians were in my ballpark.

They're on a grueling tour playing all over North America.  The truck and bus were parked out back.  This is serious showbiz with lots of lights and lasers, with voices and sounds strong enough to keep it entrancing and tight.

Speaking of show biz, my thanks again to Uncle Bill for inviting me to La cage aux folles at Lakewood Center for the Arts, in Lake Oswego.  Residents of Willamette View Manor were there in force, packing the house and raising the average age.  Bill chatted with a woman of 94 who may not have understood the play, which is about non-nuclear and classic nuclear families and their attempts at coexistence.

Lindsey Walker continues to record in her basement studio.  Her anti-fossil-fuel-use philosophy means she has no big dreams of truck and bus tours.  Even encouraging local teens to drive to a local venue is something she's given up.  It's experimental music and out there for free.  Free Box is the title.

My evaluations at work have been positive, even though I've been challenging my bosses regarding some of the workflow designs.  We're all co-developing and many variables are in flux.  Consistently good quality performance overall is what allows space for adjustments and "exaptations" (experiments) to happen.  "Learning experimentally" is a Quaker theme and yet obviously not anti-science.  The myth that science and religion have to be at odds is just that, a myth (and not one of the better ones either).