Revisiting Intelligent Design

A researcher on one of these Facebook groups I'm monitoring, brought up Intelligent Design (ID) innocently enough, only to be reminded of the religious wars this shield, or logo, was a part of.  

However, far from being a conversation stopper, that's where my interest picks up, as I'm looking for a graph (in the sense of nodes and edges), a map, explaining the battlefield.  What other shields or logos played a part, and as friends or foes?  

"Intelligent Design" was friendly to whom and shunned by whom and so on?  I'm interested in that stuff. 

Not that "shunning" is the only way to counter a devious foe.  Perhaps we belittle or dismiss with a show of force.  Sometimes in battle, we run full on, like those crazy braveheart guys in the movies, swords drawn. Not intelligent at all apparently.

Ditto for the 911 debacle. Just show me the forks and branches. I'm not looking for the truth, not at first. Did the "no planes" branch fizzle, or merge?  It's like on Github.  I'm looking for the Git history.  Schisms. Regroupings.

We the Wanderers, a group in Portland, had our paths crossing ID's through Terry's interest in widening the platform. Terry helped us keep the Pauling House a center of intellectual activity in our Asylum District here in Portland (Odonarotoop)

I'd categorize Terry, president of ISEPP, as anti-scientism, which is not at all the same as anti-science.  However Terry is also anti-science, but from a relatively undefended angle: engineering > science.

The engineering mindset doubles back on the intelligent design mindset.  Then we look around and admit, our best science and engineering is not yet up to either explaining or recreating the technology around us. Nature's tech is higher than ours.  And in saying "ours" just who are we talking about exactly.  Programs?

Bucky Fuller [link]:

In its complexities of design integrity, the Universe is technology. The technology evolved by man is thus far amateurish compared to the elegance of nonhumanly contrived regeneration. Man does not spontaneously recognize technology other than his own, so he speaks of the rest as something he ignorantly calls nature.

Let's agree if there's a vector towards a kinder, gentler humanity, with higher intelligence to boot, then there's an extrapolation of that vector, along which we'd like to move. Saying God wills us to keep moving along that vector is another way of saying we acknowledge a gradient.  

We feel under some time pressure to finish the work, might be another way of putting it.  

A scientist might easily argue such a "teleological sense" is purely glandular (hormonal) and has its analogs in other nonhuman limbic systems.  Another "god gland" bites the dust.  Is that what just happened?

From an intelligent design point of view, the association of a vector gradient with a molecular processes is not considered some reductionistic objection to an empirical claim, but more as reinforcement for our thinking: that even lizards feel it too, the need to better their lot in life, if not to achieve management level responsibilities, as some say the angels have, and to which some humans may aspire.

Quaker High School

:: Advice to Teachers ::

I did another walk through of my slides.  I'm finally starting to use the Youtube feature that lets one embed hyperlinks to other videos, within the video.  

When I talk about Ezra Pound, I like to Graphing the Poets.  

When I mention Sam Hill, I link to Sam Hill's Quaker Legacy.

My Synergetics talks are about Bucky Fuller's Synergetics, not this other Springer-Verlag Synergetics that the Russians are always writing about.  Fortunately, Wikipedia does a good job of disambiguating.

I entitled this post "Quaker High School" because, speaking as a curriculum writer, in my estimation there's simply no excuse for bleeping over the Bucky stuff, especially given it's had over forty years to mature (Synergetics was published in 1979, Synergetics 2 two years later).  

It's plenty mature now, and highly teachable.  All IVM tetrahedrons have whole number tetravolume, nice.

Ever since Fuller died in 1983, which I learned about on my way to a Friends General Conference, I've connected him to Friends (I wrote an obit in the FGC daily newsletter).  

However, in terms of content, we're talking everyday cultural literacy, as you'll see if you watch the video.

If you feel somewhat comfortable with the content already, as many of my readers already do, I recommend playback at double speed.  

I'm speaking slowly enough that the sped up version isn't incomprehensible, assuming a practiced ear for American English (Amerish).

You'll find in the Youtube notes that I catch myself regarding M.C. Escher's citizenship. He was Dutch. The Canadian connection is through his eldest son.

On Virtualizing Government

Facebook comment:

Like I'd like Housing and Urban Development to have a whole government cable channel to explain itself and show off its inner workings, major scrutiny, FEMA likewise. We have a long way to go when it comes to shelter. Share those simulations, those computer games. Help us see what you see.

A president is someone to meet with foreign dignitaries and sit in on top level meetings, to interpret, for the American people, what the mega trends are, and to personalize it a little. Fireside chats was a good idea. Someone personable.

The idea that a president is at the same time Captain of State, a Monarch, the Ruler, is one we must hope to stamp out in elementary school, as a pernicious myth circulated by would-be monarchists and other vaguely irrelevant schools of thought. A lot of immigrants come here with crazy ideas, especially from Britain and Europe.

The missing ingredient is "cybernetics" i.e. "self organization" i.e. "ouija board". At first, kids are uncomfortable with idea that "no one is in control" as that sounds like anarchy. But just remind them, Spaceship Earth was a disciplined and smoothly running operation LONG before humans got here. Take comfort. The USA operating system, as an engineering feat, is like a ship in the wind, lots of distributed tension, a tensegrity. I may be accused of heresy for saying that though.

Related Reading:

ON VIRTUALIZING GOVERNMENT:
A DESIGN SCIENCE APPROACH

Geek Speak

:: world domination ::

Geeks were collectively smart enough to start down the World Domination road some decades back, and have since lapped the track a few times, owning a next virtual reality time and time again.  Each time around, we make a great leap forward, to sound Chinese about it.

You know other geeks like you, working for other bosses, using a lot of the same tools, are spreading a global culture, combining many languages and ethnicities.  You've developed a shared namespace, a vocabulary, a set of concepts.  You've been working on Codes of Conduct.

However, like most everyone else, the geeks tend to not distill themselves as a class, as their conditioning is they're nerds, and therefore working to fit in, to gain in popularity, to become more socially accepted.  

As nerds, they may even want revenge, for their outcast status.  But as geeks?  What's the difference?

In my lexicon, a geek is a fully matured nerd, meaning early introvert tendencies have largely been transformed into social and media skills, and increasingly, diplomatic skills.  

Relative idealists sometimes have an easier time communicating, as they're not in need of more secretive agendas. Once you're playing poker, you have to factor in more game theory, including calling a bluff.

Business transactions happen faster against the background of shared values.  You're on the same time, as Humans in Universe.

We've talked about some of the buffer zones, in Germany, in Korea, where a kind of reunification in cyberspace creates new opportunities for identification. Hackers live on the edges, connecting and reconciling. They're regarded with suspicion, because of the invisible worlds they frequent.

If the code is all open source, freely fixable and upgradable, then one has the basis for an economy, in terms of accessible tools and marketable skills.  The hackers found a way to survive, if not always thrive. They inhabit an underground, complete with comics.

We call it a "gig economy" and are working on a safety net layer, as actors aren't always working on a project.  We remember Education Automation by RBF, about freeing us, as scholars, to study.  Andrew Yang and MLK pop up in our conversations.

Attachments (Grunch.net)

 I'm still attached to my grunch.net, a literary venture and obvious allusion to Grunch of Giants, a bold work to begin with.  Today it verged on turning into a 403, but for some serious interventions.  I wasn't finding my backup...

I lot of us pile up a body of work out in cyberspace, or really anywhere.  The attachments criss-cross through time and space.

Grunch.net is on a budget server somewhere, not that well protected.  What triggered today's saga was the obvious presence of malware.

Reading Ahead

Let's say you're breezing through Heuristics for Teachers, Fall 2020, as a Youtube experience. You're not doing Orientation, Kick Off Talks, Chirality... exactly, but no matter, nevermind. 

You've discovered the curriculum is multi-modal, a fancy way of saying multi-medium. 

You've become more of a devotee of the blog genre anyway, and so here you are, let us say.

I'd reward you then, with some previews.  

J. Krishnamurti in particular has a language not unlike Ouspensky's in recognizing the botness of we hubots. We Are the Robots (Kraftwerk). Since we're busy bridging to what Russell Brand calls "some sort of Russian shamanism thing" on the channel, i.e. to Ouspensky & Co., Maurice Nicoll in particular, a Scottish Jungian, why not rope in JK? The insights seem consistent.

The ending of the latest Youtube, featuring a Russian Art Museum, is a bridge back to Minnesota, where you'll remember we're finding Sam Hill and family, escapees from the pro-slavery economy.  Today, your average "abolitionist" is chipping away at the tyranny of the nuke weapons lobby, anti-slavery still the objective.

Hexapents for Everyone! (School of Tomorrow)

Tetravolumes with Python

Homework (Fall Term)

Homework:

If you're doing Fall Term, Heuristics for Teachers, consider viewing the below with special attention to the word "secondhand" and its context. Get your hands on a copy of No More Secondhand God. Find the essay on the Omnidirectional Halo, which later appears in Synergetics. American Transcendentalism. 

Soon you'll know American Lit better than most English PhDs (who don't know what "IVM" means guffaw).

TikTok Wars 2020

As one of those grandfatherly Boomers with empathy for GenZ, I'm not on the side of the cowards in the TikTok Wars.  Here are some of my remarks on Facebook, copied here to my blog:

The TikTok platform is bringing the world's people together, psychologically, in a way Facebook has been failing to do. 

The cowardly capitalists have a simple solution: make DC politicians bully TikTok into selling itself to a DC-friendly corporation. I can understand why "American" business is now seen as both craven and insidious -- there's nothing American about it.

Save TikTok from the disgusting low life who want access to all its back doors, but can't get it legally, because they're not in control. Poor dears. When the Lebanese turned off Whatsapp, people poured into the streets. Americans though, are relatively meek and obedient in the face of tyranny, as we've seen. Their Constitution was taken away and they didn't lift a finger, poor slobs.

I have a political cartoon about the situation, showing a GenZer feeling beset by the "powers that be". Although I grabbed said cartoon from Facebook, when I tried to share it on, I got dinged. "We know you probably didn't mean it, but next time..." It had a Mickey Mouse face.  You don't mess with The Mouse (as they say in Orlando). 

#CowardlyCapitalism

Fall Orientation: Welcome to Asynchronous Schooling

Kick Off Lectures

Global Data Corp Update

Looking back on my science fiction:

Much of the Islamophobia was underwritten by banking establishments fearful that certain Sharia practices might challenge compound interest as the de facto standard.
That North American market consumers might simply enjoy the choice to factor in religious affiliation, looks really troubling to bankers, who count on the Secular look and feel of Roman columns, marble floors, the claptrap of a catholic (liberal) Empire.

The strategy was to pretend there's someone in charge of Islam who forbids innovations in FinTech unless that comes with hand chopping and burning at the stake (taking a page from the Christians there). In fact, none of the world religions are actually organized, as admitting mere mortals are behind the scenes (as the organizers) would undermine the underlying premise: that religions transcend mere mortality and somehow reflect a transcendent will.

In point of fact, enterprising imams have the ability to shape the law to suit local community standards. Rather than allow liberal Islam to flower, drawing even with Christians in having female hierarchies, the strategy has been to trap this world religion in its own bad PR, a strategy similar to the one pursued against Russians, making Putinism (invented for the purpose) akin to Stalinism (no need for discussion, just mimic the attitudes).

Christian sects with a strong background in Capitalism are more likely to see how the rules get made (like sausage), and some, like the Quakers, may co-venture with likewise contrarian Islamic sects, in the realm of FinTech.

None of this venturing precludes the participation of other competing religions of course. No one can beat the Mormons in Las Vegas, as the saying goes. Religions and Fintech have gone together like blood and wine over the eons.

The course I've been pursuing, as a science fiction plot, revolves around creating another tech giant, similar to well-known brands, but inside the jurisdiction of a "different Delaware" meaning the foundational DNA doesn't have the look and feel of British bylaws. We're not that Anglo of an operation (not using Tea Company boilerplate).

Picture something Hopi. A kind of movie-making studio, with data centers a necessary part of its business. I gave it a name and started running some ads, ala some kind of Banksy business, in the 1980s.

Time has been on the march all along, and devout Muslims at least, do have alternatives to compound interest, even in Greater LA. It's not like they give you free money, those Islamic bankers. No, bankers want you to make them richer, that's pretty much true across the board. Yet the permutations are endless. Like casino games.

But banks also compete for high profile clients, the kind that doesn't mind bragging a bit, about having Swiss bank accounts (not something to keep hidden). Remember American Express ads?

A Synergetics Slide Deck with Narrative (4D Solutions)

A lot of geeks I know are already into this stuff and pretty well versed. We didn't waste the forty years and established a track record, including websites, published sources, plays, exhibits.

Then you have a lot of 2nd tier think tanks, a lot of them too derivative and downright lazy to have taken a defined position regarding the design science revolution (which has included free open source backlash against intellectual property inventions).

Russiagate Recap

Me on Facebook (today), hyperlinks added.

The CrowdStrike narrative included in the Mueller Report is cleverly crafted, regarding timelines, such that Trump's public speech, calling on Russians to find those missing Hillary emails, actually came to GRU's attention in real time, and there and then they got to work on the phishing expedition that led to Podesta's emails appearing on Wikileaks.

How did CrowdStrike know all this, and more? What forensic evidence was presented to the grand jury? We were never made privy to any of this, and the story sounds rather far fetched without evidence. Putin offered to let the FBI do some recorded interviews of any GRU agents named in the report, if, in return, the Kremlin could do some taped interviews of Browder, the UK oligarch behind the Magnitsky Act, the guy who touts himself as Putin's greatest enemy.

Trump thought that sounded like a good idea, as he saw a path to exoneration (this was before the Dems went for impeachment, only to be stopped in the GOP Senate). He was excoriated of course, because it sounded like he trusted Russian intel to get to the bottom of the story more than he trusted the purveyors of the Steele dossier (British meddling and collusion was never far from the surface).

CrowdStrike, for its part, has not done anything impressive to substantiate its case. On the contrary, the word on the street is they don't really have the evidence to substantiate their version of the Guccifer 2 chapter. That's why the common wisdom, as I sense it, is that Russiagate fell apart and re-stoking it with new fuel has become an important priority of the anti-Trump movement. I'm thinking Trump has done enough and should go play golf in Mar-a-lago, but I don't buy that the GRU played an integral role in the Wikileaks chapter. Not until we see some proof, then I'd be willing to reconsider.

I support the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. I know Biden and his cronies are all about pushing Ukraine into NATO and trying to "win the cold war" all over again, but in my book, the USSA lost Cold War 2. That's over already.

https://www.axios.com/senate-intelligence-russia-interference-971619a8-a806-470a-9de6-1416220ab35b.html

I've been reading the report. Mostly it seems to trace to the same indictments found in the Mueller Report. It repeats the allegation that GRU officers took their cues from Trump when he said in a public speech that the Russians should find Hillary's emails. The Russians then set about spear phishing in response, got Podesta's emails among others, and turned everything over to Wikileaks? Proof?

How exactly this story is proved is not discussed. Rather, it's sufficient in the legal sphere to make allegations, make any evidence secret from the reading public, and then later quote these allegations as further proof. If one is skeptical, as I am, including based on counter-evidence and alternative narratives, then there's a nagging feeling of illusionists at work. This doesn't seem like forensic science.

Black Studies

In recent Youtube channel activity, I've been tracing links between Fuller's positive futurism, and the civil rights movement in North America, through the life story of Kiyoshi Kuromiya in particular.

Kiyoshi and Bayard Rustin were also gay rights activists, which comes under the heading of civil rights.

New Circuit Designs

Always the same mental cartoon about the super rich handing over assets in a "redistribution", if the less super rich get richer (see 23:07 in the above cartoon model).

If your mental picture is motherboard earth the computer is plugged into the wall socket sun, then if neighborhoods start looking better it's not "at the expense of the rich" or "as a result of redistributing wealth" from the rich, it's a matter of redesigning the irrigation system so the daily new flow of wealth, fresh from the solar source, distributes more equitably / efficiently / intelligently than it did before.

I don't want Bezos to have to give up his fancy house. But if other people start living relatively better, in aerospace study-pods, I'm not seeing that as coming from Bezos in the first place. 

Our collective species IQ is learning how to design the motherboard better. Amazon is a part of that circuitry in providing study pods with Amazon Web Services. However the smarts behind Amazon isn't localized to some single 100W bulb (which is the average power consumption of a human animal).

The Columbia Gorge was flowing without help from humans, who figured out later how to plug into the gorge and make street cars go up and down, along with elevators, in Portland. 

It's not that we need hugely more power from the sun. 

It's that keeping millions under arms, drilling / marching / "training", pushing menacing battleships this way and that, burning time in nuclear mass suicide submarines, is squandering 80% of our fortune on inherently meaningless ideologies.

We're a Ghetto Planet with a rotted Cult (set of beliefs), an amalgam of past beliefs we're too lazy to get out from under.

I'm thinking we wouldn't need more raw power to make this a relative utopia, compared to what we have, with simple onboard reprogramming of our neural matter, an undertaking that requires bits and bytes, not heavy steel making.

Pirate Party Planks

Pirate Party Planks:

* copyleft > copyright
* ethnicities are not races
* Govt runs some businesses to showcase its values
* special public schools focus on training for work in govt
* some public schools are residential, some are same sex
* Tulsi's reprimand of Trump > impeachment verbiage
* Russia is not an enemy
* China either
* protect electoral infrastructure
* until elections are more trusted, no party has a mandate

Pirate Party USA: no candidates, only planks, feel free to steal

Shakespeare in the Park

Shared with Public

July 27 at 9:19 AM ·

Midsummer Nights' Comedy (satire):

City: Look there's no socially responsible way to be publicly engaged in making our world better than outdoor summer rallies right now, so we'd like to let this keep going, even support it.

Feds: oo oo, you make our buildings ugly, we sending apes, you not strict.

City: um, no really we know our people, that graffiti can be cleaned up. Our police can handle it, we know our own people, we'll make your building look like new down the road.

Feds: you not strict, we angry, you Portlanders don't respect authority of God

City: anthropological differences exist between us...

Feds: STFU, apes on plane. We coming now.

Experimental Prototype Communities

The military abuses AI, per Manning et al, which is why so many at Google advocate severing ties, with certain programs at least (death dealing by AI doesn't make anyone look good, least of all collaborators).

My philosophy is keep lowering the barrier to entry i.e. all the tools you'll need to build a utopia are within range of the pooled resources of the first investors.

Then grow your community by trial and error yes, but also by reading up on good ideas and/or better, visiting parallel utopias likewise experimenting with new ideas. Watch the video feed that comes from your competition. Send your spies to see if they're lying.

We all learn from the dystopias too (e.g. Rajneesh Puram as a great case study, speaking of Oregon).

What I try to get away from is any implicit assumption that the debate is about how "we all" as in "all of us" need to agree on some innovation before we try it out.

I think in terms of thousands, maybe millions of little campuses, dotting the Earth, each trying different mixes, different fusions of ethnicities.

Some will be more into AI and tech, wanting to dress unisex like on Star Trek. Others will be more into creative anachronism, dressing like we're in some Monty Python episode, lots of rustic implements, amidst some high tech (say for powering the place).

I think of theme parks. I think of EPCOT, the original meaning: Experimental Prototype Communities of Tomorrow.

We need lots and lots of epcots. The design science philosophy is about facilitating in their creation, less about judging them in advance.

Bump It Up