Postmortem

These crazy rioters, egged on by a tiny cabal of true believers in authority, including the president and General Flynn, symbolize the energy that swept Trump into office four years ago. Pizzagate. Conspiracy mindedness.

However, rather than face the mental illness, Russia was blamed, I think by untrusted sources, e.g. CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS.

Going further back, the conspiracy theory that Saddam had something to do with 911 and was plotting to nuke the US, was just as nutty, and was the thinking encouraged by Condoleezza and her crowd. 

Trump incited a crazy populace to storm the Capitol. Cheney incited a crazy populace to trash a hundred palaces and ransack an entire country. I don't see how that was more sane.

We've been without leadership since at least the Reagan Years, when we discovered lunatic nut cases like Ollie North (General Flynn's prototype) were secretly running "US" foreign policy.

The USA (1776 - 1983) descended into Fake Government during the Grunch Consolidation Period (GCP), bringing us to where we are today, to our new world disorder (NWD).

Pyramid in the Sky

Constructing a health care infrastructure that's based on single payer (for what, citizens?) is going to be a huge undertaking, requiring algorithms and computer science beyond the knowledge of current legislators.

If they felt they had the money, they might opt for experiments. Expand the care given to veterans for example. Start there?

It's like asking people who've never built a pyramid to suddenly build one. We do private insurance. We barely do public health. We haven't solved the citizenship puzzle.

If Congress waved a magic wand and allocated a trillion for M4All what would happen? Everyone would scurry to build the pyramid they don't know how to build?

No, the illusion would be broken. The idea that money combined with laws actually drive outcomes (like magic!) would pop like a soap bubble on a warm day.

Congress needs to preserve the illusion of power. Approving pipe dreams no one knows how to put into practice is not the way to fool most of the people most of the time.

Wars on the other hand... Congress knows it can fund nightmares and make those happen. It's the good happy stuff people don't know how to do. No one taught them.

"Well.... I mean no offense... but the Italians managed it."

Yes, but they started decades ago. Italians are Social Democrats and like that. Like in that Michael Moore film about who to invade next: a lot of Euro countries thought they were imitating the American Dream, only to find out later the Americans weren't really serious about it. 

Americans chose to be Team America World Police (South Park Studios). We could have been a health care destination place, or a theme park capital, or... so many choices. But we had the war machine and knew how to crank the handle. 

So now we're decades behind even China, when it comes to caring for our own people. It's humiliating. We hope they notice our fancy weapons instead, as that's where the ego is. Others may have healthcare, but we have more nukes than all of them combined. So there.

Spy Stories

The Navalny story has gotten cringe-worthy, what with the underwear-borne novichok, ew. The tabloids have their readership, expanded immensely by cable television. Hearst was just the beginning.

The SolarWinds story is more interesting. I'm dubbing it Solaris (Солярис), since everyone has their clever "burst of sunlight" metaphor, and Solaris has the Russian angle, although the original author was Polish.

Will Self got me watching it again recently.

The story stays shallow around the most interesting part, which we can leave to "made for DVD" movies. That's where a basement test lab will imitate one of the Fortune 500. Call it Project 501. 

This is where an elite core of Russian hackers, working for the Russian government, set up SolarWinds Onion (a subtle clone, but with a lethal difference) on a supposedly secure platform.  Get ready to infiltrate.

But don't we have to exfiltrate first, to get the new Cozy Bear payload inside the DLL? Rolling a DLL requires source code tobacco.  Microsoft:  almost 4000 lines.

A dynamically linked library that still does its regular job, if triggered, or at least looks like it will.  

If it's seriously bloated with all these fancy new features, you won't need a SHA sig to see it's been tampered with.  Apparently the cybersecurity whiz team doesn't notice when a DLL suddenly bloats. Nothing goes blip on the radar. Makes sense: that's why the digitally signed certs.

I'm looking forward to some side by side comparisons, of:

SolarWinds.Orion.Core.businessLayer.dll

 as usual, next to the one with the payload. The museum of clever hacks is readying a display case even now I bet.  Actually, Microsoft is providing some of that.

Indeed, I'm "advising all my clients" to preserve their businesslayer.dll (just make a copy) if they find out they're using Onion (vs Orion), and many would likely be doing that, even if not my clients. 

The compromised configuration is valuable and any Fortune 500 company worth its salt is going to snag a working version of the hacked product for its people to train on, and for its lawyers to write suits about. Actually, without the source code, the raw binary ain't that useful.  Still... a souvenir. 

We're hoping SolarWinds coughs up the source soon (it has, we're seeing some of it), or is the story it was black bagged in a perfume bottle?

A Late Debate

John Bolton is disappointing. If he was my professor, I'd want my money back.

Penalty Box

I got slapped on the wrist for some unfortunate use of "cannibals" and "Tyson" (as in chicken) in the same comment. Some story about the spread of covid in some corporate setting: we get a lot of those stories in our news feeds these days. Our feed bags.

The last time I got a time out, or maybe it was just a deletion, is when I forwarded a political cartoon in which Mickey Mouse appeared in an unflattering light.  Again, covid related.

OK, that's fine. I'm treading on the edge, hitting up against the Facebook electric fences. I'm assuming this is AI all the way, given the blizzard of snowflakes (comments) assaulting the service very second. There's no time for a human censor.  Perhaps these come along after the fact and audit, en masse.... if government were transparent, we'd know more.

Thinking over the situation, I'm pretty content with the ammo anyone would have, thanks to me in particular, if wanting to pursue a positive futurism, probably the best we've got, since for the most part people don't consume themselves with "planning" as a pass time. I was born into a planning + activist family.  My education was appropriately big picture, as was my worldly upbringing.

Part of the promise of the Synergetics philosophy is inherent in its reliance on tension over compression. This isn't about pushing hard to make happen.  Lets see if humanity wants to pull itself together.  We know it could, has the option.  If it doesn't, that looks more like a choice than some tragic heroic failure.  The angels will chuckle.  Or call 'em demons, whatever.

My efforts and curriculum design have been enabled at every turn by the latest technology, so it always feels like my skills might be equal to the task.  To a point.  Then it's no longer about my skills in particular. I'm happy to kick back. Show me what you've got.

Journaling My Day

Today started with my job at Portland Energy Strategies, Patrick's think tank. We'd agreed on 10 AM for a VS Code workout, experiment with collaboration features, but I overslept.

The experiment for me included finding out if staying with OSX 10.10 is fatal, as far as Live Share is concerned.  It is.  Thanks to C6XTY, I had an alternative desktop available and from there forward, everything went swimmingly.

Next I was on the porch with a retired librarian, who lent me, or gifted me with, these novels about one Reverend Bebbe (Lion Country is what I'm reading). These are fictional characters, and I've done most of my life fairly cold turkey when it comes to fiction, with lots of caveats.  These days, I'm ready to feed again on fiction, if only to limber up the imagination, which can always use more libering.

For those mystified by the VS Code talk, that's a running program that many of today's coders are using to write stuff in the many computer languages.  The motif is rectangles within rectangles on a screen, with lots of typing, but also a shared whiteboard if you install the right extensions.  Both Patrick and I did.

Patrick, for those just joining us, designed a new kind of snake trap, with pythons especially in mind, because of the situation in the Florida Everglades.  Pythons have thrived there.  The trap doesn't keep the snake necessarily, but it does have that capability, as once you've gone to all the trouble to identify the species (AI goes here), you want to reserve that option in front of the patent office at least.

Anyway, after Patrick and Rosalie, I got to visit with Glenn, who is deeply immersed in Korzybski at the moment.  He has done some more homework and I can now see a path from my Youtube channel, through Korzybski, back to Alan Watts.  But an even more intriguing link suggested itself around "timelock".  Korzybski as a specific meaning for that work.  Of course I'm thinking of 4D Timelock by Bucky Fuller.

Now I'm back at the Oregon house, one of the campus dots on the world map.  Another dot would be some 47th floor in Singapore someplace.  We have our virtual nationhood, after all.  I've been discussing that on Facebook, in the sense of how curriculums overlap or are distinct.  The "concentric hierarchy" is my focus, and that implies "tetravolumes" without needing to say so.

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.