Adventures in Quakerism

Everyone has a different experience (of life) of Quakerism, in terms of vantage points assumed and/or achieved. I did a lot of the small meetup stuff, in part because my parents found sitting in silence a great way to get to know strangers, who then become Friends in one's own eyes.  The proverbial beholder's.

The above YouTube continues an earlier one that should just was well be entitled "experiments in" (versus "adventures in") Quakerism, which is not meant to sound cynical, as if Quakers were my guinea pigs.  I'm the guinea pig, and I'm encouraged to explore my religion "experimentally".

What's "my religion"?  Again, that's whatever pass for priors in terms of one's own dogmatism.  Not all beliefs can be under the microscope at every moment.  

One has to believe Google Maps or just trust intuition, unless one knows one's way about.  My friend Steve had a cul-de-sac dead end loop for an address, but the mapping software showed the street went through.  The procession of lost vehicles was endless.

What's critical is your religion have an update or upgrade process, whereby "waste beliefs" get dealt with and excreted. Nostalgically curating "bad beliefs" (as in "no longer useful") results in a level of metaphysical constipation that may become uncomfortable, not only personally, but institutionally, depending on one's role in society.

Quakerism, in focusing on silent worship, interrupted with ministry (aka ranting), does not get hung up on a bunch of "credos" wherein people give themselves the self indulgent benefit of being able to debate the trivial stuff quasi-endlessly.  You know you're dealing with the over-entitled when their predilection is to fiddle as Rome burns.

My hope for Quakerism, in a nutshell, is silent worship, as a central practice, as a catalyst, akin to various forms of meditation, will keep some of the least beneficial viral memeplexes from taking root.  Too many religions prove vulnerable to satanic "mind thetans" or whatever we wanna call 'em.

Elevator Pitch

The elevator pitch for the giant dome is survivalist, which immediately gets funny, because of Yes Men and their Survivaball.  Not that domes are the equivalent of space suits.  

But when it comes to heating and cooling a big volume, the logistics of powering a single space comes with an economy of scale, at least in theory.

Inside, you have your sound stage and audience,  a perimeter of concessions.  In neighboring domes, people pitch their tents.  

In some, you stage a quaint village, Medievalish but with amenities, built more with movie set theater prop technology, than with old fashioned brick and mortar, as you're more in a studio than protecting against the elements. 

The dome or other universal studio building is already taking care of wind, rain, cold and heat.

Benefits of rapidly deployed and emergency assembled and disassembled heating and cooling domes include practicing the world game disciplines we've come to take for granted.  People have to choreograph and to some extent improvise.  The moves become smooth to the extent practiced.  

Movie-making comes closest, as a design science, with military logistics providing a complementary theater.  Both center around simulation and planning with models and maps.

The domes in Cornwall provide a good example of what we all expect from the UK.  If British Aerospace can't deploy emergency heating domes, who can?  Raytheon?  

The engineering sector is shifting our attention from "Big Tech" and/or "Big Pharma" in the sense of social media and biochemistry advertisers respectively, as these are small fry compared to the aerospace sector.  We have conventionally allocated aerospace to civilian versus military but there's little to keep this namespace anchored.

Besides, it's not either / or.  Health care is just as big a consumer of computer science warez as the military and weapons vendors.  The arrival of mass casualties during wartime, begot triage and triage tents and all manner of medical practice I know more about from watching movies than from nursing school.  WW1 saw the beginning of many new kinds of war science.

Speaking of nursing, I do appreciate the cram course YouTubes I've been plowing through.  As we all get older, we encounter more issues in health care, for ourselves and for others.  In my case, I also had a professional track running through heart procedure territory, being a chief data harvester for a research hospital system.  

I was not in patient care, unless we count long term outcomes research, a kind of feedback doctors treasure.  I knew heart anatomy pretty well.  Lately I've focused more on lungs and liver.

Could a giant dome be an emergency hospital, like a MASH unit?  People may spontaneously associate such setups with war zones, but disaster scenes more generally feature both the wounded and the infected.  Lately, the world has been dealing with infection and overdose.  That was until they decided to plug and play this retro Euro-war.  Now war wounds are what's climbing again, along with thermal issues.

So we're back to MIT having done its homework, and private firms having their catalog of emergency shelters at the ready, whether or not they'e actually free span.  The more likely shape of anything American is a box, with sliding doors, more like a giant garage, farmhouse or big box shopping center store, like a Costco or Home Depot.

The floor plan of a "camp in" dome is more suburban street mode, with curvilinear walkways (synthetic pavements) and marked out camping sites, like when car camping.  A few golf cart type vehicles offer fixed route services whereas delivery forklifts carry palettes to and fro, complete with kitchen units and entertainment (education) modules.  

Some properties have tents, but a lot of those are outside.  Property holders stack the various units, which need not be equipped with individual heating or cooling units, given the context, of a larger system.  You may have personal devices, such as fans or baseboard units.  There might be a sauna and/or hot tub module, depending on amps available.

The Cornwall Domes use like a Tefzel pillow, I've never toured the place.  J. Baldwin was my source of pillow dome savvy.  I got to interview the guy on camera even, when staying with Rick and company in San Jose.

What do the power stations look like?  That's another whole side of the business.  No doubt NATO, like FEMA, has a large number of plans for such units, with other regional bodies likewise sharing blueprints.  Given the dire needs of the populace, and funding already allocated, it's time to spring into action, right?  Right!

Soap Operas

I just got off the phone with Maureen of Lake Oswego, having gotten all melodramatic, getting stentorian, while telling her melodrama was not my style, enough with the goodies and baddies already!  My impatience comes in waves, as I think is true with many of us, nor am I saying impatience is always a bad thing, on the contrary.

Speaking of soap operas, Don Wardwell was by today, in the wake of Glenn's stuff reshuffling in an orderly fashion (hi Barbara), and he told me the story of a guy he knew who was hoping to get a friend of his to move in with him.  He'd stormed out of the Pauling House when Don suggested his desire to discuss this move publicly might be inappropriate.  That guy was supposedly me.  You say she'd been a Jehovah's Witness, that I was smitten somehow?

One reason I doubt the story is it so closely matches what actually did happen:  at the height of my Food Not Bombs activity, around Occupy, I shared my house with three women (how I think of them, fairly), all of whom I still know and keep track of.  They're blog characters, you can go back and look.  We were in synergy in some ways, and no, it wasn't a harem situation, gosh darn.  More Charlie's Angels?  We're talking soaps after all.

Anyway, I'll go back and check the timeline.  A don't doubt this new angel actually existed, I just don't remember Glenn talking me out of it, or the Pauling House episode (back to Don's recollection).  Apparently my erratic behavior had no consequences this time, as no such creature moved in.

Here's what I think:  especially older people, but really young people too, are prone to develop "like I was there" memories, vivid, sharp, of contrary-to-fact scenarios.  Day care centers get shut down over this kind of stuff, and probably nursing homes too for that matter (I'm in neither business).

Sorry everyone, if I'm the one turning into a leaky bucket, letting important memories fade away.  I pride myself on having a good memory, as Suzanne might remember.  These blogs (Quaker journals) help a lot.

Asylum City Project

Sanitation has to be at the heart of any human settlement design. 

This includes dealing with waste of all types, including sewage.

Bucky Fuller was one of the pioneers in this arena.

Prototyping is key.

Looney Tunes

I'll say up front I'm skeptical of those who assert the "US + UK + EU = The West" in some way.  Like I know that's a common trope among storytellers, I just don't consider it a stable memeplex.  "The West" is the western hemisphere (North, South, Central America) and "The East = Eurasia + Africa + Australia" to just focus on the continents.  Greenland could go either way.  In sum, shop talks that map to the realities of geography likely have more staying power.

Also, geopolitically speaking, I think too many Anglo-Saxons (to use the Kremlin term) fail to appreciate how different the Americans are, from the whites who stayed home in the various homelands, if we might call them that.  

Many Anglo-Euros right here in the Americas may not appreciate that either.  I'm talking about the influence of original peoples, their thought patterns.  As The Dawn of Everything makes clear: the anthropology and psychoanalysis was a two way street, and still is.  It was never a question of which were the savages:  those would be the Brits.

Fast forward and we get those Halloween images of a horror film Truss, still wiping blood off her lips after biting hard into Germany's jugular.  Now the latter has fallen to the floor, shivering, with few prospects.  "It is done my lord" she whispers on her phone, to a vamped up Darth Vader type.  Very cinematic you have to admit.

All joking aside, I think "US + UK = Looney Tunes" is what we're seeing today, with John Bolton as Yosemite Sam, minus the charm.  I would not think it possible for Anglo-Saxons to be genetically berserk, so it boils down to something in the water maybe?  The District = Flint = Jackson, Mississippi?

Yes, I've recently been to a comedy club (actually, a main line theater, that happens to feature comedy from time to time).

So given I'm so remote with my vocabulary to begin with, even questioning the Louisiana Purchase as a truly done deal, you can see where I'm not making the rounds as an interviewee.  No, I'm just a deeply buried Quaker blogger with some political views.

From another point of view, I see the US Congress and the old USSR (the ghost of) on the same side, collaborating to extinguish a kind of ethnic nationalism that doesn't rise to the level of nation state.  These political bodies cannot effectively turn away from their own destinies, as two sides of the same coin.  

You could say I'm being cynical but I think that would require positing a high level of conscious awareness on the part of the perpetrators.  I'm suggesting we're running on automatic, as bots.  That's not a new phenomenon.