America: The Exceptional Nation

Decrying "exceptionalist" as in "spoiled brat" is not the same as claiming someone or something is exceptional. Maybe it is, we don't know yet. Exceptionally bad smelling? Exceptionally expensive? So many dimensions exist.

So for a segment here, if only to be contrarian (we have that right), I would argue for other reasons, let's yak about in what ways "America" (so much to say) is indeed "exceptional" (which it is). 

One thing that's easy to observe is: a lot of the people who came here were underdogs, fighting some establishment back home and ending up with the short end of the stick, as some say. They then had to risk everything to start over here in the New World. And once they got here, they wanted one thing: revenge.

A lot of new Americans came here with a chip on their shoulder.

OK, I'm being a little facetious, but America's shores do harbor a lot of ethnicities within which "getting back" at whomever, is high on the agenda. 

Given how America is a mighty place, and its control rooms appear open to anyone able to pay to play, why not seize those amazing military assets and extract from those enemies back home the price they deserve to pay (something high, obviously)? I mean, it's an obvious agenda to pursue.

Examples come piling in: refugee Gulenists wanted by Turkish authorities; refugee Falun Gongists seeking revenge against Xi, Ukes who hate Russkies, Russkies who hate Ukes, back and forth like that a million times. 

They each want to rule the world, or at least get Americans to rally around their cause. Obviously I skipped over more obvious examples. The list goes on and on.

I think in that sense America is indeed exceptional. A huge number of its citizens came here with axes to grind, scores to settle, plans to get even. 

For many, it was a maybe simple story of succeeding at the personal level, in spite of all odds, and having news get back home that so-and-so was no small town idiot after all. These stories are often heartwarming. For others, the story is more civilizational, about "the people" (or "pueblo") more generally.

Critics who want to play counterpoint will insist we remember all the people already here, before the floodgates were opened to colonization, by the invention of mass ocean going vessels. 

The Mayflower was no Carnival cruise ship, we know that, but it was at least a step in that direction. People indulging in "religious convictions" could finally afford to book passage, and not have to help with crewing the ship or memorizing constellations (considered a pagan fixation by many).

True, Turtle Island was already festooned with stellar cultures, spread out and not forced into interpersonal violence on the scale of say Napoleon's people. Europe was far more densely populated, had more lethal weaponry, and exploited horses. The "Indians" had a lot to learn.

Napoleon decided to sell much of America to those Washington, DC people (a revolutionary avantgard), because he needed his troops to stay in the fight for the long haul. He needed to pay their salaries. 

The Louisiana Purchase helped keep his struggling Empire going against England's. Not so long before, the USA had fought the same foe. The USA kept expanding west, fighting over slavery as it did so, with the industrial revolution more on the side of the Quakers in the long run.

Nothing regarding America's exceptional nature, as a platform for diaspora nations to consolidate and pass on culture, is contradicted by its original network nations, going back to Inca, Mayan, and Aztec to name a few -- the people we tend to call "Hispanic" today, for lack of a more intelligent word.

My narrative is more designed to switch attention from "melting pot" shibboleths (which I also use) and point out how "preserving ethnicity" was never an "unAmerican" goal. 

You're allowed to keep practicing those rituals and rites, whatever they may be, and public schooling is not about countermanding your family's values on that score, as long as you don't interfere with the rights of others to perform otherwise, ritualistically and/or costume-wise (cosmetics, jewelry... we don't all share the same tastes, all right?  Welcome to Walmart). 

Explaining my Workflow: from 2D to 3D

:: reintroducing myself on X... ::

:: ... as a political cartoonist ::

Late August Weekend

So what was my weekend like? As you know, I like to study, and that includes adventures into the environment, such as taking Springwater Corridor to Sellwood and over the bicycle bridge to the Sellwood-Tacoma Max station. Ride Orange Line back to OMSI stop, transfer to FX2 to within blocks from home. That's work-study time.

On Sunday it was walk by Terry (ISEPP prez) and a consultant working on finding homes for left behind office furniture and supplies. I gather the John C. Lilly group has moved to other digs. Onward to Stark Street Meetinghouse (formerly ESI, before that Jantzen) where the testimony was about "sangha" (community) -- although no one actually used that Buddhist word (but many were maybe thinking it, given our demographics (I know I was)).

That night I watched Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, believe it or not for the first time, although having seen clips over the years, it felt familiar in places. I'd checked Movie Madness for it before, and imagined it was rented out, not realizing their Kubrick shelf wrapped around and down. I'm illiterate in so many dimensions I've lost count. Talked with fam through Verizon on my iPhone.

At Quakers, I met up with Dr. Carl Abbott over snacks and thanked him for his excellent presentation on Portland history for Humanists of Greater Portland (HGP), to which I'd been party over Zoom (not the first time I'd caught one of his talks). Urban Studies, PSU. I caught up with Leslie, back from California. 

Also, Megge suggested I join up with Peace & Justice (as it's now called -- did I get that right?). Quakers revolve through a finite set of management committees, learning to see a shared business from the inside, from many angles. Good experience building social and supervisory skills.

I'm just hitting some of the highlights. Weekends don't stand out that much at the moment. I do have a work schedule in the queue, with Clarusway again, but that's always contingent on other outcomes, per some cosmic Gantt chart I'm not privy to.

Speaking of Clarusway, this morning (Monday) I posted to edu-sig, a Python org Mailman group of longstanding, regarding digital roots (or "indigs" as some've called them).

Hawthorne Street Fair!  Slides above.

Posting From Cyberia

We'd like to get it to the point where arsonists in their bunkers, trying to start conflagrations, get treated more as psychiatric patients than as so-called "world leaders". This has to do with my Spaceship Earth imagery (inherited) morphing into Global University (GU) imagery, meaning "teaching hospital" and a lot of  psy-stuff. 

Faculty is working on curricula that turn out students with higher quotients in whatever respects higher quotients are needed. Perhaps we're sufficiently intelligent but insufficiently developed in other directions. What's our consistency score? 

Yes, I'm back to trucking and dirty jobs. The path to a PhD is through extensive practice with toolsets and skillsets. The medical doctor shares a lot of these same "I can learn anything" traits, which leads to some percentage crashing their single or even twin engine planes ("Too Gung Ho" on the tombstone).

Think of it though: to swap long haul driving work with a counterpart, to ride as a sidekick, to take in the language and customs and bring that back. Then study more if you want to and join that same fleet as a driver next time, and repeat. 

Airline pilots know what I mean. There's that inner circle that flies in and out of Hong Kong, or Rangoon or whatever (I had a bouncy ride into Rangoon once, as a passenger, on a DC3 or one of those).

The yahoos in their bunkers, trying to start wars, are already in rubber room approximators, so we shift attention to curbing enthusiasm for short term fireworks. Crushing obsolete institutions is actually a more rewarding exercise, and outward war as we know it has been seeing sunset for quite awhile now. 

We still fight psychologically. That's actually a more even playing field, and we can get back to Victorian values like "fairness" as we talk about it in sports. You know: honor. 

Just blasting zoomorphic creatures from an Apache helicopter is better shifted to simulator, to computer game. Acted out, it's schizo nutso, by horror film Poindexters, except not confined to film.

I've always been a fan of the global network at the city mayor level. Mayors meet and discuss issues. I'm told Portland has gotten better an learning from others, versus letting its earlier fame and glory go to its head. Then came a fall. 

But saying the fall of Portland was independent of seismic shifts shaking up the collective psyche more generally would be like wearing blinders, perhaps intentionally (confining attention to the "Markov blanket" is a systems technique). 

Portland might be talking to Shiraz for all I know (I don't claim to be privy to all that mayoral type chatter).

Denizens of Cyberia, enjoying more overview than ever before in history, have an angle on the arsonists now that everything's out in the open. 

Transparency in government was given lip service as an ideal, but now that we approach a bar that leaves behind legacy media, showing it from the back side (in the rear view mirror), the political process snaps into clearer focus. 

Those who would profit from more slaughter on the battlefield are filmed hyping slaughter to their stakeholders, in pure Hunger Games fashion. Doctors without borders see how capitalism can make you cuckoo, in addition to highly paid. 

However shooting mental patients was never considered much of a cure outside of quack circles, wherein the sickly witch hunters seek scapegoats for bounty (or merely mob approval). The first step is to disconnect psychopaths from their agentic dashboards, such as by unplugging the latter.

There's nothing cowardly about not jumping in the cage with the rabid dog and having it out. For what purpose would one do that? 

Let the dog rage at the cage itself, and think about euthanasia as a kind of putting to rest some core concerns, such as where do we have to draw the borders ultimately. Virtual states have boundaries too, if not contiguous.  

The reputed ignorance, of Americans, of political geography, might turn out to be a good thing, as we go soft focus on these older maps. The global university comes with new floorplans.

Contra Insanity

A Last Straw

:: before ::

In some ways, Working Out would make more sense here, in BizMo Diaries, as it's about physical body stuff, and the "business mobile" (peripatetic action studio) works for a stand-in, metaphor-wise. 

Likewise, this post, about Cybernetics, would make more sense in Control Room, just going by the relevant memes i.e. a "control room" is like a "bridge" or place to make things happen. Another type of "action studio" really (what isn't?), but relatively stationary.

Let's now turn to this meme of "last straw", which is also, presumably, the one which broke that poor camel's back. The camel was already laden with straw, one imagines, and was holding up. But that one last straw proved the tipping point and, snap, the camel's back lost structural integrity.

We tend to empathize with the camel, or in any case, if a beast of burden, now we have no animal to bear our load. Like a car broken down by the side of the road, the connotations are mostly negative, in the direction of increasing entropy. May the tow truck make it all better.

But what about critical "last straws" that, when added, open doors or otherwise lead to positive developments. What's the English language opposite of "catastrophe" and if none comes to mind, isn't that a symptom of something, about English. I've heard "benestrophe" suggested. I must've already added it to my dictionary, as so far my spell checker hasn't complained.

"To cyber" means "to steer" i.e. "cybering" is a matter of rotating a rudder, thereby repointing the craft. That may sound like a simple process but sometimes so much inertia is involved that even the rudder needs a rudder, which reminds us which principle (leverage) is involved.

Let's say you turn hard to starboard or port, and manage to miss the iceberg this time, because you had better intelligence ahead of time. You had more time to react. 

Optimal responses may require cool headed thinking, and lots of it, however if that time is not now, then the usual strategy is to substitute a reflex as a next best reaction, a proxy action, an approximation, perhaps not well-thought out, but at least in the repertoire.

If you escape catastrophe, that in itself is a benestrophe. In ages past, the king or queen might have a monument, perhaps an entire church or temple, in gratitude to whatever generalized principles allowed for a freakishly and unexpectedly positive outcome, what we call "a miracle" in the vernacular.

However, we need to remain open minded with regard to even more positive positives, which are not about surmounting the relatively low bar of narrowly avoiding tragedy. These high bar events may be likewise triggered by feather-light tiny deltas, fourth derivative actions, as it were, as insignificant as the fluttering wings of a butterfly.

SimCity Thinking

I have to admit my admiration for Uber's clever follow-up offer after my finally getting around to using their app and service:  free meal delivered on us, $45 value; then a week later: $25 if you use it now. The sight of a shrinking asset provokes action, although in my case I'm resistant, and it helps that if I follow their offer I'm back in Atlanta (which I'm not, at the moment). 

I think a lot about the delivery economy but maybe not with enough inputs, as I'm not a business consultant so much as a skills trainer in a working class ecosystem. I'll show you how pandas will give your data visualizations that professional zing that makes your cubicle a hub in whatever network you're in. I've never worked for Amazon directly, although my code school was subsidized by its outreach programs that summer, as I recall.

Anyway, the idea of fleets of flexibly routed vans delivering in high volume, versus browsers showing up in parking lots in private cars, leaves me thinking we're likely economizing in shrinking the mall culture. Yes, the web took the place of storefronts in large degree. That's ephemeralization at work, meaning as a species we're under pressure to economize, even when we'd prefer to make a lifestyle more permanent.

Derek and I were in agreement, in recent living room conversation, that better infrastructure, extending camping, for a nomadic lifestyle, perhaps on wheels, as a multimodal adventurer or whatever, would answer a need in some of our subcultures to "live outdoors" in some essential way. Dense urban living is too claustrophobic for them, or too stationary. 

A nomadic lifestyle doesn't have to mean in a tent. A yurt with ample floor space in some hexagonal grid pattern (random lake shaped) would be an improvement over a phone booth shaped tiny house in my view. Electric ATVs come to mind. You might book a yurt for some months or weeks and move on to a next one, with variations in make and model.

A lot of boomers hope to retire to a mildly active lifestyle, recreational in nature, like in Florida. 

I had the privilege of retiring in my teens, while going to high school while based in a mobile home park for retirees. The homeowner association might've frowned on our extended stay (me and my sister) which is why mom flew back to Bradenton and moved us into a roach motel (not that the trailer -- er mobile home -- didn't have "palmetto bugs"). 

Indeed, absent Yurt Villages (high tech), the Florida option still seems a good deal, not that I'm the expert or share that plan for myself. Like I said: been there done that. I'm not dissing that lifestyle, which is pretty comfortable I admit, but I'd use my stays in that trailer (I'd be back) to reinvent myself, perhaps into an airport manager (that book was interesting but I wasn't sure how to break in).

I ended up finishing high school in Manila, dad having scored a gig with UNDP. We had UN passports for the whole family. I proudly display a UN flag as part of my living room decor to this day. I also keep flags of Bhutan, Lesotho, and Republic of South Africa, right here on my desk; places I've come to feel some allegiance to and fondness for, in addition to these various states in North America (Oregon being my home base nowadays -- I'd like to explore them more, Birmingham, Alabama was fun).

Another city older folks retire to is Las Vegas, which markets itself as a destination for recreational living in general. The new MSG Sphere is open, and showing Grateful Dead, a live performance with giant screen backup. I talk about that in this blog post (in my philosophy blog), which is actually a YouTube.

Sharing in Meeting

I remember standing up in Meeting once, a big Meeting in Philadelphia, where AFSC corporation members and directors had convened, and sharing something philosophical-sounding, and also arguably dualistic. "The bodies" I was saying "are innocent of any wrongdoing, yet it's them that we punish".

My point was that of George Fox when he said you can't kill the devil with a gun or a sword or something to that effect. Ideologies circulate like viruses, independently of the animal bodies they haunt (infect, control). To counter an ideology effectively should not involve torturing the animals (the human animals) that express this ideology. 

My view is somewhat that of medical science and its practitioners who take the Hippocratic Oath (do they do that anymore?). Treating human bodies is distinct from psychotherapy although they're intertwined. An anxious psyche is more likely to run a body into the ground by overdosing it with stress hormones. How mind and body interweave is the kind of problem Oliver Sacks liked to study.

The use of physical torture, such as by bombing and/or deliberately starving, is an expression of our weakness in the psychological realm. We have less success than we would like countering an ideology, and so take up arms against it, and attack its adherents (the infected, the blessed). Outward war, according to Quakerism, is somewhat beside the point, as what we're really trying to accomplish is metaphysical (psychological), not physical (physiological).

"Don't blame the meat puppets for crazy beliefs and the strings they pull" might be another way of saying it, "but do work on curing craziness by inward means". In Quaker jargon, "inward" is versus "outward". "Inward" is the world of psychological modeling and processing. "Outward" is the world of sticks and stones and broken bones.

Outward wars are misplaced (in the sense of inept) attempts to avoid dealing more directly with inward wars.

Bat Cave

Does Radio Octopus only play tracks of creature noises? I just tuned in for the first time. Now we're on to bird sounds with piano. Somewhere in France.

I found myself explaining, to a newcomer at our Solstice Gathering, how Wanderers, in my book, includes the nonhumans. I'm not saying all of them. I circled Keiko in particular, better known as Willy.

After a morning "about town" I'm in my "bat cave" for the most part, occasionally bouncing upstairs to use the office. The outside temperature is down to 92 degrees Fahrenheit, was 98 earlier.

I just heard from Kerry Butson, after so many years since our co-worker days. She's in Illinois. We were both employees of a code school in California, she before me. I was brought in by Steve Holden, author of their Python course.

Since those days, I've continued to work in Python. Just today I was hacking on my Google slides about Quadrays, an XYZ-like coordinate system. I've been introducing them to UC Davis.

Dr. DiNucci gifted me with an air conditioner last year, when the original customer discovered she was disallowed such equipment by her Homeowner Association. She surrendered the unit in disgust and gave it to David to give away. It ended up in my living room.

A lot of Portlanders have traditionally gone without air conditioning, preferring to tough it out through the few truly hot days every summer. I was in that category until life made it really easy to add this perk.  Central air for the whole house would make the upstairs more habitable. The ball python doesn't seem to mind the status quo.

From my bat cave, I monitor local and global conditions. I also network and telecommute. The "bat mobile" in the driveway has proved serviceable lately.

Independence Day 2024

We (me 'n my dog) left Portland pretty early, like at 5:30 AM, as I was scheduled to pick up Uncle Bill (age 99) and remembered nightmarish traffic on I-5 on Thanksgivings. 

This drive was a breeze, both going and returning the next day. 

Since I arrived in Seattle plenty early, with time to kill, I drove down the steep streets to Pike Street Market and walked Sydney around amidst other tourists. The place was hopping. The waterfront now hosts a Ferris wheel. Is that permanent?

I really enjoyed my time with the relatives, even if Urners are an obscure branch of the Hancock family by now, so it's not like I was recognized by all or vice versa. That's part of the fun of large family gatherings.

Barb's dad was one of my grandmother Esther's brothers, Esther Person being my dad's mom. Barbara has a beautiful family, and modest, well-appointed lakeside home.

I got to overnight with Elise and Les, some of my oldest friends and Sydney's previous caretakers.