Wanderers Meet on Zoom

This was close to our standard Equinox Party, and in the absence of the pandemic, we'd be gathering at the Linus Pauling House around now.

We're catching up using this higher bandwidth technology, about changes in our lives since our last gathering, months ago.

Fall Term 2020: Kick Off Lectures

Update from Portland (School of Tomorrow)

August Sixth 2020

August Sixth has special meaning around here, and for the world, as it marks the first time an atomic weapon was used by humans against themselves, with strong intent. Another detonation would follow, over the city of Nagasaki.

Humans were nuking themselves in various "tests" as well, irradiating themselves and their environment. Many thought nuclear war was inevitable, and many still do, so low is the average faith in politicians and the political process.  Religion was marginalized earlier.  What's left?  A sense of self preservation maybe?

Portlanders have typically turned out for a simple ceremony, emphasizing Japanese-American friendship, in a park with that moniker.  That ceremony has been suspended this year, has have most formally planned group events for the summer.

We're hoping that friendship stays strong and remains mutual, much though it may have been tested since that darker age.

Visiting Faculty (School of Tomorrow episode)

More about Kailash Ecovillage: 

Camp C6XTY

Leela and Melody got to social distance in my backyard, much like old times.  We had a breezy summer evening.  Naturally the conversation turned to the protests downtown.  Melody has been studying the emergence of private militias in her neck of the woods.  Privatization has come a long way.

I've been continuing to recruit future faculty who might work Martian Math into some already favorite set of topics. My approach is to keep my content Humanities flavored (that sounds somewhat cannibalistic I realize), meaning I'm not spinning my home base as a place within STEM territory.  

We bridge to STEM, over the C.P. Snow chasm, with our C6XTY bridge (there's a marketing angle). The point of casting it this way is to not make STEM, mathematicians in particular, the bottleneck.  Given their track record, we can expect little to no help from the Mathematics Department on this one.  Philosophy has had to step up to the plate, with links to Literature.  We're more in PATH (Philosophy Anthropology Theater History) than in STEM.

You might think the rap above would have nothing to do with the Rastafarian | Pastafarian combo I'd like to see center stage at the Justice Center, once there's some serious equipment.  

Why not a full sound and light show, impromptu?  Food carts?  I'm not saying I'd go, because of Covid.  If the actual downtown presence shrinks yet continues to stream the process, I'll have felt part of something.

Seriously, I'd turn the downtown scene into a reggae festival, given the Blues Festival was denied us this year.  The link is the importance of streaming, and the fact of a larger audience watching from home. That's how our school works as well.  If you were following Lattice Gallery last winter, in downtown Portland, you were probably doing so remotely, perhaps from Japan or Korea.

Portlanders are missing all their favorite summer events and have needed to channel some of that disappointment into an already frustrating push for social change.  There's a need to keep it real and focused and not just go for fluff.  My suggestions qualify as "peanut gallery" as I'm more kibbitzer than producer in this picture.

Dr. D. and Glenn were also properly ordained for the occasion.  I'll plan to invite DB for the next one. We're still keeping the numbers down.  Blue House has been through many chapters.

School of Tomorrow: Place Based History Curriculum

See: Americana in Grain of Sand

Checking In from Portland

About Racism (Lesson Plan)

About Racism (a lesson plan)

Me: memetic, ethnic, cultural, software
Me: genetic, physical, hominid, hardware

Memes are not just miniature billboards on Facebook. I'm stealing from Dawkins ("borrowing") and making memes mean a lot more than commercial jingles or fragments from films. Memes comprise the "daydream" of what one muses about, considers. Memes come up in meditation, sometimes from deeper levels than Surface Me. A lot of memes come through television and other social media.

Genes do not always translate into visible traits and they don't define character, personality, moral qualities, other attributes of a soul. That's all epigenetic stuff. DNA does govern eye color, skin color, nose shape, physical features (inside and outside) more generally, and because physically inherited, is not nearly as transmissible or alterable (flexible) as memes or culture.

What is Race?

A given race is usually a mixed up soup, a mishmash, of both memetic and genetic traits, sufficiently memorable to form stereotypes, a kind of default mnemonic typology (like dwarves and elves). Racist cultures encourage thinking in such racial terms (by definition).

The notion of race closely relates to "breed" in animal husbandry, including the language of mixed or mongrel, versus pure (perhaps with pedigrees to prove lineage).

The names of the races and the stories behind them, form a kaleidoscopic, ever-shifting tableau, made from memes. The Book of Genesis is a good place to start, if looking for conceptual roots (i.e. memetic content), at least for some people.

We will be reading the stories of Noah, and the Tower of Babel to get a sense of how people thought (or even think today). We'll also be watching various animated and live action versions of these narratives. We will discover what forms of racism might be traced to this part of scripture by studying a variety of curricula.

Twilight Zone TV

We're aiming for a format Hollywood knows well:  a dedicated studio audience, providing a feedback loop, and in this case talent, as in a classroom where all are on tap to do Show & Tell. That was my Coding with Kids model when doing in-person classes in the local nearby schools.

If the plan is to keep going nightly through August, producing free content with lots of volunteer security, e.g. Wall of Moms, then the least we can do is corporately sponsor a nicer sound stage.  The idea of writing over the graffitti with other temporary graffiti, simply by slapping up a blank canvas, is being tried elsewhere in town.

The major audience, also taking in advertising, other current events, is what we might call the TikTok crowd, although of course many geezers are following on Facebook or one of those.  Social Media.  The camera people are likewise the audience self organizers. I've been one of the geezers, staying put in my own zip code and wearing a mask in public.  Except when I'm walking by myself or with a trusted-to-be-safe other... anyway, you know the code.

The melodrama spikes when the soap opera turns to images of the president gassing his own people and all that.  Not with lethal gasses.  Deep, long-lasting injuries are authorized. 

Public sympathy is with an underdog and if vandals are mobbing the monuments, per the Dork City narrative, then the federal marshals are underdoggy. 

The Wall of Moms removed some of the fencing getting in the way of the future sound stage maybe.  Bashing soccer moms is a symbolic way of hitting the insecurity button, which tilts the public the other way.

Our corporate sponsors will want to make it clear they're not encouraging tacky S&M (sadism + masochism) complete with costumes. Other banks are lending to that group. 

If you follow the money, we just wanted a better soundstage and some replacement graffitti, with volunteers doing most of the programming ala the public cable TV channel model.  Except we're more reliant on social media. 

We see and process the clips the next day e.g. the Wall of Moms being charged with MacArthur like forces (I'm referring to the attack on the Hooverville in Dork City that time -- Smedley wrote about it).

As with Occupy, I'm wondering where to take it indoors as the weather cools, summer's longest day behind us in this northern hemisphere.  

We didn't have covid in 2011.  I ended up moving the Ministry of Education into Washington High School.  Long time readers might remember that story. WHS was abandoned at the time, but for art colonies. 

In a later chapter, the revamped venue showcased the Buckminster Fuller Archives at Stanford University, set to music by Yo La Tengo.