DOGE Thyself

Speaking of Superman, the Tai-Chi based MuscleMan app I purchased, I thought for a one time fee, was actually purchased on subscription. 

That's what everyone wants these days, for you to keep buying the same thing over and over, be it a workout app or Windows, or something on top of Windows (like a workout app -- mine was for iOS however).

In a way I got my money's worth in getting sucker punched for not reading the fineprint. By the time PayPal and taken a monthly rental check, it was too late to realize my mistake. Score one for Muscleman. 

That got me poking around in my PayPal account bowels, where I found some other questionable autopay  subscriptions, although I think most were simply leftovers. But they were marked "active" nonetheless. 

Time to "doge myself" and counter my own bad habits, time to clean up the autopay mess.

Now in another sense, it is only I who have this view, that I was somehow being deceived. 

I'm sure MuscleMan has an army of coaches, AI and for real, along with a huge catalog of how to keep oneself fit. I was paying for access to this valuable library. The O'Reilly School I taught at had a similar model: when you're ready for coaching, we're here (and we're not bots).

Silly me for imagining anything so simple as one time fee was our agreement. 

That's what I mean by "learning my lesson". 

Maybe those with eyes wide open going in, already fully committed to becoming proficient in Tai Chi, shedding pounds, restoring fitness, are willing to pay a gym-level monthly fee just for a smartphone app and whatever trainers it connects them with. 

That's discretionary spending I'd rather spend another way, like on a memory stick, or a tank of gas. Even a real gym membership might be the way to go -- I've had many already. I'm really not at all sickly or weak. I'm nursing a back muscle I strained, and hauling a heavy body around, but I have the muscles for it.

Doge Thyself!  You'll be glad you did.

Superman (movie review)

I was on the fence about seeing this one, as I’ve got my Bayesian bias against superhero movies, somewhat newly acquired maybe, thanks to over saturation by DC and Marvel. 

That’s just my own personal bias mind you, as I have nothing against others loving superhero movies and pigging out on them as a central part of their movie-intake diet. 

I have a similar stance towards alcohol: me, I’m not into it these days, but I have some in the kitchen for guests and have no problem people enjoying alcoholic drinks. I’m not into feeling morally superior. It’s more like “I’ve had my share” and it’s not a punishment to refrain, just another life chapter.

Anyway, back to the movie, I enjoyed it a lot. It reminded me that cartoon extremes of action, of violence, such as superhero films feature, are also meant to be extended to the plot. We have all the basics of the Superman universe, sharply rendered, but then we permute it a bit, rotate it, move it in some dimensions. Like Louis is well aware of who Superman is in real life, I mean at work.

This movie has the inter=dimensional wormholes, the evil genius, tortured by jealousy, the well-acted Lex Luthor… but then we have a whole caste of superhumans, of which Superman is but one. The Earthlings have become acclimated to comic book levels of disaster as their city is routinely visited by various monsters, against which Superman must defend.

The biggest envelope push is not Louis knowing the ET’s secret, but the ET’s midlife crisis vs-a-vs how his real ET parents actually envisioned a career for him, a future. He had only ever heard the first part of their message and had been shaped by his human foster parents into a good and noble type of character. That’s who he was. He had chosen that identity. Finding out his ET heritage was not in alignment with his personal values was a coming of age story for an older guy. The lesson: we may go through “coming of age” transitions at any age. We morph into a next chapter.

So back to the top, if I was on the fence, what tipped the scales and got me to go see it? My friend on Telegram, whom I don’t get to see in person anymore due to distance, said it was worth seeing. That was enough. Bagdad is close by. Why not?

Eurasian Affairs

I don’t know how it is in your coffee clutch or coven, but out here in mine, it seems like using Ukraine as a staging ground for long range missiles into Russia is retroactively the justification for why, from Russia’s point of view, Ukraine must be demilitarized, i.e. purged of NATO assets. 

If NATO wanted to stick to its narrative that Ukraine would not be used for such aggressive purposes, then this hardly seems a way to inspire confidence. 

But come to think of it, NATO never made such promises. On the contrary, the whole point of the 2014 coup, enabled by the celebrated Azov group, pumped up by Nuland, Bidens et al, was to teach Russia a lesson in humility. 

Now that the USSR had fallen, the time had come for a global reckoning, or so some deluded neocons (including “McCaine democrats”) imagined.

Now we’re hearing that Germany is keen to enter the battle against Russia on the side of Azov. If Ukraine is to host more NATO missiles, then let them be of German origin, or at least design. 

Apparently there’s a demographic in Germany that feels encouraged by these moves.

I think all factions with empathy for the Ukrainians are eager to stop the air war and bring an end to armed drones wreaking havoc across the land. However there’s a lot of inertia to any war of this scale. The option to simply stop is not there. 

Trains can’t stop on a dime either, which is why some train wrecks that may have looked preventable to casual observers, really weren’t after a certain point.

I’m thinking the eastern Ukrainians have voted with their feet, hearts and minds, and for the most part do not regret their decision to rejoin the Russian federation. The UK does not acknowledge that Donbassers have the right or even the jurisdiction to make such a choice.

But then English has not been an imperial language for a couple hundred years at this point. The Americans have always spoken in many languages. I’d say the Donbass has time on its side as it continues with writing its own history, with elections, with redevelopment projects.

The idea that Germany would step up to the plate as a chief belligerent suggests its people are reconciled to living with wartime rhetoric 24/7. 

So far, the Americans are fighting back, demonstrating a sharp unwillingness to be manipulated by the usual suspects. But then Germany is a much smaller place with a relatively tiny inner circle.

The A-Team Code

:: Ant vs Bee ::

:: high roaders ::

Perambulating

One root meaning of Wanderer is "flaneur", let’s say the random idle gentleman, perhaps a lady in disguise, out with a sketch pad and an eye for what’s happening. Recreational curating. Tourism. 

That’s one reading, and for me, it well fits. 

I wander with my trusty camera, and today also an iPad, around town. In my youth, middle school era, my parents allowed me to roam about Rome. I’d spend some days exploring, hopping one bus, then another. No phone.

Nowadays I’m with phone, although I’m not really using its camera. I have a separate device, somewhat bulky, but it’s my habit. I’ve gone through a series of such cameras, the kind you can just point and shoot, letting it take care of most variables except framing. That’s a typical tool of the flaneur.

Today’s route retraced last week’s trek at the start, so I could pick up where I’d left off on the theme of Rust as a motif. From there I explored the Lloyd Center, with one skater, with another doing floor exercises. They had a coach as I recall.

I roamed over to the Lloyd Center Max station, heading west, to the last stop on the east side, at Moda Center, the swoopy enclosed stadium that replaced the old Memorial Coliseum as a primary venue, although the latter still stands and does service, such as by hosting high school graduation ceremonies. 

I used the Memorial Coliseum as a skating rink, in an earlier chapter, having taken to inline skates as a curious hobby, encouraged by Tom Connolly. I’d circle on smooth concrete, wearing helmet and knee pads, Wrist pads maybe? Memory fades. I remember falling a few times but not getting hurt.

From Moda Center I made my way along well-marked walkways to the East Side Esplanade, a well-thought-out lane for pedestrians and bicyclists mainly. Runners. I think I saw one mono-board or whatever those are called. The bicycles may be mechanically enhanced i.e. battery power assisted.

My walk took me south from the Steel Bridge, east entrance in view, to the Hawthorne Bridge, along a path that’s partly floating and includes bridges. I’ve gone through these same paths as a cyclist many times, but today was about being a ped, and using TriMet, more like my middle school days when I’d roam in Rome.

I mistook a bus 6 for a 14, so ended up adding another walking segment from the eastern shoreline of the Willamette, to Asylum central, meaning the food court by that name, named for the Oregon State mental hospital that had a large property here, a campus with running streams, not some dreary urban structure you might have been imagining. 

This side of the river was all very bucolic back then. I’m drawing from well researched accounts, not sharing personal experience, as I was as yet unborn in this chapter.

The 14 got me back to The Bagdad from which its a short and familiar jaunt home. I had my shoulder bag leather briefcase in which I stored the iPad, camera, brush, kombucha bottle, a random reading from my shelves.

Silicon Forest (not Valley)

Yesterday I went dog walking with a peer engineer, as in software engineer, a loosely used term as there were so many routes to get here, me through applications development for nonprofits and data science types, him through psychometrics and government lab work (Sandia I think it was). We'd both been on the same code school's faculty. He helped me find my way to Clarusway, a source of recent teaching gigs.

Anyway, we were chatting about the difference between NaN and None in Python, walking Sydney and Quinn, enjoying the perfect weather, when I realized various new things, meaning I had some insights, sparked by what we were talking about, a free ranging conversation.

Towards evening, I tackled the task of rounding out my online profile a little more, as the requests or queries need their data to hit against. Lots about me out there, but maybe not always as helpfully cross-indexed as it could be, and I'm in a catalytic position when it comes to connecting loose ends.

For example, I cross-posted my reddit account to DobbsTown, a Mastodon server. I also wired my right side main access panel, on the right margin of World Game (Grain of Sand), to include said reddit and tiktok connections. The content dates back but the links are brand new.

Speaking of branding, it's hardly lost on the market researchers and PR types, that Silicon Forest and Silicon Valley have remained quite distinct in Geek Lore. The former is gravitating into Cascadia, the bioregion (not really a political entity) whereas Valley boys and girls are seeing dollar signs in more military contracting. Washington State gets a lot of that, whereas Oregon's role is more subtle (think field testing), to the point where Oregon actually advertises as a "peace state" in some circles (hint: WILPF). We also have better land use planning than you'll find in many states (another source of pride).

The story goes like this: the Oregon Trail, coming west from the Great East (lots of peeps seeking a better life, refugees from Euro-think), came to a fork somewhere in Montana or one of those. Keep going along a northern latitude, and reach Oregon, with its lush and secure agricultural lifestyle, or turn south and wager your future against the likelihood of striking it rich, laying your claim to fame and fortune. The former sounds relatively prosaic and vaguely communist, whereas the latter is Ayn Rand, bold, heroic, venture capitalist.

Feeding my story (above) is an example: a true life story featuring a young, dashing CEO, looking to base a startup here in Portland, but finding the venture capital culture close to non-existent relative to what he was used to in strike-it-rich California. His idea was to use AI to provide a look ahead feature in any browser that could steer junior away from pornography, a see-no-evil genre product. 

The only problem: he was twenty years ahead of his time (this all happened a long time ago). 

VCs tend to live in the future. Portlanders, given all the rain, and Powell's Books, tend to be bookworms, as likely to live in the past as anywhere. Getting Portlanders to march towards the future is difficult when so many of them still believe they're in Nirvana already (even in the wake of the Joker Riots). 

When PDXers do get around to futurism, it looks like socialism, given half of them are latent Swedes and Finns and see society more as a design problem begging for elegant solutions, than as a source of melodrama and outrage and Protestant moralizing about who deserves what they get.

Memories & History

The Google Earth close up view is not the same as Street View. The structures look a bit cartoony given a computer doing its best to data structure the surfaces. I’m not the expert (never had a job with Google Earth). This is a classic Portland food pod, named Asylum in honor of the facility run by Dr. Hawthorne when this whole area was still more park like, all green with running streams. Oregon State contracted to have its first state mental hospital between SE 12th & Hawthorne and the river. We tend to call the whole area Asylum District, commercially if not officially.

 

Now I’ve switched to actual Street View to capture this facade further north a few blocks from the Asylum food pod. I used to work in the basement of this building when its top floor served as CUE headquarters, CUE being Center for Urban Education. We had a Mac lab in the basement, with LaserWriters, state of the art at the time and a grant from Apple to the nonprofit community in Portland. We shared the tech with a wide variety of NGOs and provided training in its use. That was Steve Johnson’s responsibility more than mine. My job was to train still-working or job-seeking seniors in office-relevant computer skills. We mostly used PCs (IBMs or clones thereof) and left the desktop publishing skills to the others. I’d use the Mac publishing equipment myself for various fun projects e.g. Project Renaissance.

 

Further north along the same street: Revolution Hall, formerly Washington High School (where the young Linus Pauling was enrolled, if oft absent from) and in my own writings HQS (Ministry of Education) for OPDX (Occupy Portland) during a time when said building as spooky-ghostly-abandoned. That served my purposes just fine, as I was simply including it in my curriculum writing to help anchor it geographically.

    

This Google Earth view marks all three locations: Asylum food pod, CUE building, Revolution Hall, with blue balloons, against the backdrop of much of Portland, Willamette River running south to north (bottom to top).

28 Years Later (movie review)

The title had been on the Bagdad marquee for a while, but I hadn’t bothered to search it up. When I finally did some homework, I realized it was in the ballpark of horror sci-fi. That genre interests me, notwithstanding so much slop (nothing new with AI), so I headed out for the matinee. On a hot summer day.

I’ll say up front that I watched it with English subtitles. Not that I need subtitles (English is my first and pretty much only language, unless we say American is something else) but on the first Tuesday of every month or something like that, Bagdad screens the film with captions on. Hearing impaired and/or non-English speakers wanting to learn English, might come to such shows. As it is, I probably picked up on a few lines I might’ve missed, given the accents and everything.

The movie is set in a future England where the virus has ravaged the population and the mainland (Europe and Scandinavia) have quarantined the place. However, a tiny island off the big one, connected only by a tenuous land bridge, has allowed a small English-speaking tribe to keep themselves uninfected. At low tide, the land bridge appears and in principle one of the infected could come storming in their direction. They have defensive fortifications, and bows and arrows. No guns in this universe. No wait, the Swedish have them (we meet up with a Swedish patrol on the mainland, Erik et al).

As I remarked to a friend over iced green tea this morning, having taken the bus, I see movies “guided mediations” in a lot of ways (I used the word "tantric"), and in the hands of a skilled writer and director, the process may serve a given viewer’s mental healing, even if the content is highly traumatic, as it tends to be in this genre (“alas poor Erik” says the doctor at one point). 

In this case, I’d say that was the case: the writing was conscious and well informed by the human condition. Theater students will immediately appreciate the Oedipal triangle, a three body problem we always only explore, never really get to the bottom of, except in a love and death sense.

The protagonist is a twelve year old boy and it’s a coming of age story, the kind my late wife treasured, but probably would not have in this case, as not everyone is in a mood for movie therapy. I’m reminded of Poor Thing. 

I’m also reminded a new Wes Anderson movie was slated to come out this summer, have I missed it already?

Upon arrival at The Bagdad I queried the ticket seller whether this was part of a series and he replied very intelligibly about there being previous movies in this same universe but I wouldn’t need to see them all in order. I pass that on to those wondering the same thing. And yes, the way the film ended left said universe wide open to another rendering, not unlike the worlds of Mad Max or Planet of the Apes.

Saladified Wordings

Prompt: 

A Caesar salad word scramble cryptographic 

scrabble game night at a local diner greasy spoon. 

People still smoked in restaurants back then.

A typical intro to cryptography might be through Caesar Codes, which might be just offsets, mapping the alphabet to itself shifted left or right by some number of letters, going around a wheel. 

This is like a dance, with the drone looking down on two consecutive circles, say women facing out, men facing in. You start with your partner, home position, then the music begins and the men and women go into opposite rotational movements, clockwise and counter-clockwise. 

When the music stops, your new partner represents a letter-to-letter mapping, and so forth around the doubled circle. You’ve got yourself a Caesar Code.

The segue here to “word salad” coming from Caesar salad is tempting, given a next stop: a word scramble. Here we map letters to counterparts more arbitrarily than if circles were involved.  Start with your partner and now run around wildly until the music stops, and form a new pair. No dancers get added or subtracted so the male-female ratio stays 1:1.  

What if we don’t want to divide along gender lines? Who are we asking? It’s up to us. The point is to show off permutations in a group theoretical sense. Every letter and punctuation symbol, including the space character, gets remapped or stays the same. Permutations underlie group theory as the most general operation. To morph is to permute. From morphing arise isomorphisms, homomorphisms, and homeomorphisms… all manner of morphing.

From these examples, we might jump into cryptographic algorithms more generally, and also into hashing, i.e. creating cryptographic signatures from an object. The School of Tomorrow follows the many in going for RSA given its reliance on number theory concepts we want to hit anyway: Fermat’s Little Theorem, Euler’s Theorem, totient, totative, prime and composite. Strangers (relatively prime).

Crypto currency and version control infrastructure follow. Hashes zip blocks together, into chains. Cryptographic impenetrability may not be the point, simply A fits into B seamlessly, and so now we move on. Handshake complete.

What I’d bring into the meme pool at this point are mnemonic systems designed to hang together owing to cleverly optimized links. Memory palaces and like that.

Caesar and Scramble codes are about making the intelligible unintelligible, the visible invisible (in the sense of meaningless) until deciphered on the other end. But memory codes may have the opposite purpose: to render the invisible more amenable to conceptualization. 

The optimizations are not about concealing secrets so much as bringing them to light, but then the reader has to learn the language to bring that light to the equations. Flip the switch, and the tunnels become illuminated.

I think in some of these Indiana Jones type movies and/or narratives, what the explorers stumble upon was never about concealment in the conventional sense, any more than the dashboard of a car is attempting to be cagey or coy about what it displays. Yet the driver still needs to know how to read a dashboard, and that doesn’t happen overnight. Learning a language takes time.

On The Road

cl CogSci CC

Pet Peeve

What good is a blog if the blogger can't use it to vent from time to time? We use our journals for psychotherapy, some of us, some of us Quakers, who journal as a matter of religious practice. I always encourage Quakers to journal i.e. blog, as a part of their faith and practice. Most don't though. They never get over their paranoia about being semi-public with their thoughts.

The customer return lady was understably "I'm not a computer and can't recall all our changing policies, so you'll forgive me if I pick up the phone." And I did, immediately. What I was there for was to see about getting my money back (like $29.99) on a pair of Dataproducts print cartridges meant to emulate HP's 61s, black and tricolor. But does Fred Meyer except print cartridge returns anymore? She made the call. Answer: if the customer has opened it, then no, no refund, tell them to contact the vendor.

Walking home, none the richer, I was reminded of Walter Kaufmann for some reason, one of my teachers at Princeton. He was a firebrand, maybe making up for being short, and I recall a lecture where he criticized Kant for being petty about some chocolate he'd not be getting, because the ship had gone down with all hands. 

I know not to what event he was referring to, only that the message was Kant might not be deep, more like petty and blind to his own ethical blindness (aren't we all). He was an asshole basically (my words, not Kaufmann's, the latter's "Kantsipation" jokes notwithstanding). 

WK went on to say he wouldn't blame us if we thought Heidegger's stuff was pure puke. He never assigned us such vomit in any classes I took. I think he'd waded through Heidegger's stuff himself, poor guy.

So yeah... venting. Where was I?

Rewinding (flash back): I unclipped the plastic shields on each cartridge, which was all I was supposed to do, and put them in their Envy 4500 series ink jet printer cradles. No dice. I was informed these cartridges were non-performant.

"Did you remove the tape?" the printer asked (paraphrase), not in a human voice but on its tiny screen. 

"What tape?" I was thinking, "you mean the plastic clips? Yeah, I did that already" (the printer wasn't listening, I was just thinking out loud).

So what "tape" was the printer talking about? 

The cartridges have some tape on them, and a signature "do not remove this chip" warning. So is the chip behind the tape? I'll be sure not to remove any chip, but I will remove this tape, obeying the printer.

Wrong! The tape is the chip in question, or rather a chip is integral with the tape, which is also a little circuit board. 

But then it wasn't working anyway, before my faux pas. Your honor, I draw the court's attention to my having followed instructions correctly, at least until I didn't, and started trusting my printer.

So Fred Meyer should take the remanufactured inkjet cartridges back right? 

No, it's really my job to complain to Dataproducts -- which is what I'm doing, indirectly. Actually I'm complaining to the whole printer ink industry, which smells as rotten as the Kingdom of Denmark did, to Hamlet that time.

I then found authentic HP 61s, a pair of XLs, for only a few dollars more, but like for much more ink. "Free" delivery (I pay for Prime). Duh. That's the way to get my ink from now on, right?

I also got an extra long shoehorn, good for seniors who don't always have as easy access to their feet as they once did.

People need to stick up for themselves. 

Remember the emperor with no clothes story? What is the moral of that story anyway? It's that people are cowards and won't speak up in a crowd, out of fear of what peers might say or do in retaliation. Only an innocent child, semi-clueless, daring to be naive, manages to blurt out what's on everyone's mind e.g. what was so great about German Idealism anyway?

Noticing England

In addition to the hot war conflagrations that are going on in the eastern hemisphere, aided and abetted by remote cheerleading on our side (western hemisphere), I'm tracking the British scene to some level. 

At this time, right before a meetup at top of the hour, I'm aware of judicial branch action to oust a gangster class, the lawyers around the world starting to realize they're not in control and really, have probably never been in control if we get right down to it, to the pirate layer (see OMSE).

So someone high up in the powdered wig class (what was that movie -- Divergent), told the PM to step down, given all the forensics going on, all the pickling and displaying in museums of the future. Nope, gangsters aren't managed by the powdered wig class, never have been. Gangsters have control of the armies, after all. The White House was eager to show it could set Marines against popular uprisings.

When I say "gangsters" I'm quoting Jeffrey Sachs in a YouTube I was taking in while in the kitchen about an hour back. Yesterday I met with some visiting faculty, and before that David and I were doing our usual BBQ with Fred Meyer burger and Franz kaiser buns. Lots of raspberries. Good weather.

The consequence of privatizing everything and taking government behind the scenes, out of sight of the people, is that you lose the perception that those in charge have anything to do with who's elected. There's taxation, lots of that, but no representation. 

Ever since Citizens United (nonperson personhood citizens), the system has been run by literally soulless creatures: the bots put out by a Dr. Frankenstein legal system, per the Thom Hartmann tome, Unequal Protection.

The same invisible hands keep control of the steering wheel, no matter what the passengers want. That sense of being hijacked runs pretty deep with people, leaving presidents as so much window dressing, and Congress a set of weighted nodes in some DL trained to recognize... 

I dunno, Congress seems in a rush to embrace bad ideas with gusto so I can't really figure out what it's for. I'm sure a lot of you would be able to provide some lectures on the topic. I remember the old theories, from when we followed a constitution. But today? You tell me.

No Kings

I’m ignoring the “tinky tank parade” in the District, other low quality melodrama, and heading out to a hacky sack tournament. That’s my idea of a real summer.

On the way, though, I’ll check out one of the more far flung No Kings rallies, a franchised operation conducting itself nationally, a reminder from the populace that we recognize no monarchy.  

Kings of old could embroil their serfs in wars as cannon fodder no problem, in feuds by proxy. We came to a New World to get away from those guys.

Since I’m on a tight itinerary, I have to avoid the larger No Kings rallies downtown and along MLK, and pick one more aligned with my route and goals. The hacky sack tournament is actually also a chance to rendezvous with one of the faculty I keep blogging about.

I’ll likely be seeing him again later in the week, along with Casey, and later Ryan, as we’re engaging in a kind of mini-summit around the Summer Solstice.

The three of us, me, Don and Dave, attended the final meetup this term of the Dead Mathematician Society at MHCC, for a brilliant talk on Group Theory, Burnside's Lemma, complete with table top game like activities.

I’ve been communicating with the organizers about doing my Quadrays talk or something like it, and did some brainstorming on what we’d do for a tabletop game. I was thinking BRYG and “how would you, if the designer, bridge XYZ and the IVM.” In a way, that’s not a new problem, but the Quadrays aspect makes it more number crunchy.

If you’re new to my blogs, here’s fair warning I’m one of those Americans who mocks The District as a soap opera capital far less talented than LA when it comes to screenwriting. West Wing melodramas really suck. I’m so glad I don’t waste a lot of time with its products, not that the ripple effects can always be avoided.

Bioregionally, we’re Cascadians out here with our Pacific Rim identity. We’re not “Atlanticists” as they’re called, mostly a lotta prep school prima donnas with east coast breeding. Like what we used to call Yankees. I mostly just call ‘em Anglos. They’re still living in the eastern hemisphere in their own heads, thinking the whole world revolves around their Old World fantasies.

Post Travel Debriefing

Yes I got to reconnect with Russell Chu, and see Deb's new place for the first time, in South Seattle. 

Being in that neighborhood with the both of them (Liana at work) brought back memories of our many visits when the kids were young, and of our mini-summit of geometricians and mathematicians, whatever you wanna call us, cultists, back around the time of Java One in the Bay Area. 

Java the computer language was just being kicked off and Gerald de Jong came all the way from the Netherlands to help celebrate is new freedoms, as a former C++ programmer.

Depicted: some of Deb's glass work and, that blue ball on the right: that's the fishing float from Lincoln City gifted to Deb during the fishing float finding festival. They're made locally and finders should remember to register their findings using the number. 

They're called fishing floats because at one time actual Made in Japan glass fishing net floats, a technology no longer favored by the fishing industry, used to wash up this side of the Pacific Rim. Nowadays it's up to glass-working artists to make them and Deb Kasman is a glass-working artist, explaining why she was there.

Regarding the driving experience: in the week prior to departure, my car failed to start after a private screening of The Great Gatsby (DiCaprio interpretation) some miles from my digs. AAA had only a skeletal crew that night so rather than wait, I bussed home, and got the new battery the next day.

Having a new battery has solved all my short term problems, but in the longer term we know said battery will have a shorter life if we don't diagnose why it's losing juice even when turned off. That's not an uncommon issue with older cars and people not driving often will disconnect the battery to prevent draining. Driving the car is a way of recharging it.

Maxi Taxi sat idle for over 24 hours as we took the Mustang EV to and from the birthday party.

Russ and I reminisced about folks we'd both overlapped with, such as Robert Orenstein, a contemporary of Koski's and Bonnie's and me, during the chapter when BFI (Buckminster Fuller Institute) was based in Los Angeles, where D. W. Jacobs lives to this day, and Victor Acevedo. J. Baldwin loved LA. My sis lives in Whittier and I plan to visit her later this summer.  Robert died in the SARS2 epidemic, in Uganda.

Birthdays

Alice and Mary

I’m on my north circuit as another relative’s odometer flips. 

Uncle Bill’s flipped to 100 a few weeks ago. Yesterday, cousin Alice’s flipped to 70, the same day as Tara’s flipped to 31. We’re celebrating today. Catered tacos. Homemade cake. Tara joined us on FaceTime.

While we’re talking family, I’ll chronicle my dog’s adventure. She’s on her farm not far from here, where she lived before joining my household, a gift to Carol, my mom, who missed having a dog, as did I.

Tomorrow, I’ll retrieve her from her farm and take her home. Syd has mostly recovered from “old dog vestibular disease” about which YouTube has any number of videos.

The plan, let’s hope it works, is to stop south of Seattle on my way home to visit with old friends. 

There’s a high probability I’ll reconnect with Russ Chu, my best man at my wedding to my wife Dawn Wicca, at Rhododendron Garden near Reed College, some 32 years ago. I haven’t seen him in a long time.

We used to talk for hours about “the four IVMs” and other Synergetics-related topics. His name is in the literature here and there, and in my YouTubes (see my Graph Theory 2025).

I’m staying these two nights with cousin Mary, Alice’s sister. Their mother, Evelyn, was a sibling of Uncles Bill, Eddy, Howard and Bo Lightfoot. 

Howard’s son Lee is here, and his wife Julie. I’m the grandson of Evelyn’s mother, Elsie’s sister, Esther Urner, wife of Carl mother of Jack.

Quadrays History

This account will be neither exhaustive nor objective in that I’m only able to define a puzzle piece within the limitations of my scope. I’ll say up front, though, that I cop to “running with them” in that US American football sense of heading for a touchdown, once in possession.

Here’s the gist of it: when Synergetics came out in two volumes, Macmillan the publisher, a lot of intrigued readers flocked to it, as many do to this day. They’d pick up on the critique of XYZ i.e. overly rectilinear thinking, but those already steeped in XYZ lore were seeing nothing number crunchy enough to take its place. Any computer graphics involving the so-called IVM (octet-truss or CCP by other accounts) would have to use XYZ coordinates to specify it. QED. Case closed. Synergetics is bunk.

Enter Clifford Nelson. He’d served in the US military and could program in ADA, the US DoD language named for Ada Byron (aka Countess Lovelace), who I introduce in my Graph Theory slide deck. She’s considered the first computer programmer, a title I defend. She lived in the first half of the 1800s, as a contemporary of another high caliber intellectual: Margaret Fuller. Margaret’s grand nephew was the author of those Synergetics books I’ve mentioned.

In my estimation, Clifford was a huge Bucky fan, as am I, and he wanted to fill this gap in Synergetics by retroactively retrofitting it with a non-XYZ alternative apparatus. He came up with something, coded it in ADA, and promulgated it as Synergetics Coordinates, almost as if Fuller himself had designed this new gizmo.

When I encountered Nelson’s work, I was already steeped in yet another alternative: Quadray Coordinates. This is back in the 1990s. Instead of ADA, Gerald was using Pascal, I was using Python and Visual FoxPro, and we were following along with David Chako, who had introduced us to Quadrays on what we called Syn-L, a listserv. I’m not sure to what extent the archives would be recoverable. John Brawley (different from John Braley) was on the list as well. David Koski joined us briefly.

I believe I was using Eudora on Windows as my email client back in those days. 

Somewhere in there, Darrel Jarmusch made himself known to us as the true inventor of the Quadrays and he had the web pages to prove it.

We weren’t really focused on any priority struggles regarding Quadrays though. Seeing their utility vs-a-vs Synergetics, I was doing essentially the same thing Clifford Nelson was doing, meaning we somewhat collided in our efforts. I kept pointing out that his Synergetic Coordinates were nowhere in Synergetics itself, nor were Quadrays. 

I the wanted newcomers to take responsibility for their own work and not try to “blend in” anonymously, as if our contributions had been there all along.

To this day I don’t really understand how Nelson’s stuff works and for all I know that work is still being developed by other developer teams. In ADA? That’s a language I don’t know how to read. 

My own Python codebase for Quadrays has gotten pretty mature in the meantime, but nevertheless let’s remember that:

(a) I am not the inventor of quadrays and 

(b) the code wouldn’t be that mature without contributions from many others

Others such as Tom Ace. Tom developed 4x4 rotation matrices and showed how we could produce the tetravolume of any tetrahedron using the determinant of a matrix comprised of quadrays to its corners.

 

He did all this while remaining skeptical of the Fuller corpus. He wasn’t motivated by the same motives as Clifford and I were.

By the way, if you’re knew to all this, maybe coming from a chatbot, don’t mistake Clifford Nelson for the Clifford behind Clifford Algebra. At least early versions of LLMs seemed to be making that identification, i.e. they were “hallucinating” as it were.

I’ve also had a lot of help more recently from faculty who insist on clarity and won’t accept overly hand-wavy answers as sufficient. Thanks to such peer review, I’ve been challenged to get even more precise and specific with the designs, which is not saying other developer teams are bound by the same decisions I’ve made. Where Quadrays go from here is not entirely up to me, but I expect my framework will be influential. Already, the Crescent City campus is commissioning a Quadrays for JavaScript (and other languages) endeavor. See Project QuadCraft.

What really drove my particular implementation of Quadray Coordinates was POV-Ray, a free open source ray tracer available over CompuServ since even before the GNU GPL had been invented. I’d taken to using that pretty early in my career as a personal computer (PC) programmer. Starting with Visual FoxPro, I would do my computations in terms of quadrays and then write out instructions using XYZ coordinates. Sharply rendered graphics were my reward.

IVM FM

These two images are meant to rhyme, visually. Let me give you some background.

One of our teachers has occasion to make the origin of our Caltrop Coordinate System (CCS) not its center of gravity, but one of its tetra tips, call it Blue. Blue origin. 

We also want to orient our tripod tower vis-a-vis the Earth in an obvious way, akin to that of a radio broadcasting antenna. Call that vertical spoke Green. That leaves two more feet on the ground, aside from Blue. 

Looking from Blue, with Green vertical, have Yellow be on the left, Red on the right. We call this "the bridge" or BRYG tetrahedron (or 4eyes).

The idea is Blue is the actual point of origin, where the record gets played as it were, after which it gets pumped out through the Green tip, high in the sky. Yellow and Red anchor with Blue.

Naturally the two below rhyme as well, and sound the same themes. The camera angle is looking down a little, from a drone point of view. The background is not Earth's surface unless we see that as ice, 

In terms of the CCP, closest cubic packing, there's the question of how we want it centered, on a ball or on a void. 

Where six balls hug a central void, the CCP might be anchored. Likewise the voids at the centers of four balls form two interwoven CCPs. That's four CCPs in all: ball centered, or void centered in three alternate, not-overlapping patterns. 

By "not-overlapping" we mean none of the four IVMs share balls with one another, even as they co-define their shared lattice.

We say Yellow stands for Sun, in the background, providing power, while Red could stand for blood and what's biological (burning, metabolic), the life that covers our Blue ocean planet and turns it Green.

Ball Packing

After developing the QuadCraft Project Jupyter Notebook, I turned my attention back to the Esteban-Struppi collaboration. 

Esteban is someone I met on the Metaphysics group on Facebook, where I unsuccessfully tried to drum up interest in 1.06066 (the Synergetics Constant) and the role this number plays in bridging the C.P. Snow two-cultures chasm. The kids on Metaphysics tended not to remember such a chasm and had little patience for my STEM-looking esoterica.

Esteban, on the other hand, turned out to share my obsession with geometric visualizations and we stayed in touch. Even if he was suspicious of Synergetics, he was fun to try explaining things to. He was engaged. I started sharing snippets of our Facebook dialog to the more publicly archived Synergeo.

Struppi is an established Synergetics shaman with a strong focus on specific hands-on crafts, useful for making lasting educational toys, a continuing source of insights. 

I enrolled in one of his workshops, long distance, after he caught my most recent video. I'd learned from our Telegram conversations that he'd kept up the dialog of Esteban and together they'd been going down a certain rabbit hole and wouldn't I like to go down it too?

I went down it to some extent, turning back around where the color coding got too intricate for my Python framework to follow, even if I was able to follow along conceptually, minus the coding component.  Struppi uses wooden balls, string, and drinking straws, not Python and a raytracer.

What I got out of the session was how one might prefer, when making animated GIFs, to pack from an apex ball to form a growing tetrahedron, with layers having successive triangular numbers of balls.  

Not only that, if one orients a quadrays caltrop (basis of a specific coordinate system) within the context of a tiny human observer standing on planet Earth, then that "apex" might not be defined by the vertical quadray (or call it the radio tower) but the radio station itself, the Blue ball in the foreground. 

Think of blue, yellow and red balls resting on the earth. Maybe imagine the sky and clouds as white and blue ice in arctic conditions.

Below, the packing starts in the Blue position on the BRYG tetrapod (caltrop), and marches rightward, aligning with Red, Yellow and Green in a 1st layer.

I compared these two ways of packing, center-out and apex-out, in a new Jupyter Notebook entitled Building the CCP: Apex-Outward vs Center-Outward Packing.

Happy Birthday to Me

:: virtual birthday cake ::

:: manga avatar ::

From the Minutes (Knowledge Engineering)

Omni-Medium Plummeting Device

An important meme in our corpus is the omni-medium transport, a theoretical device we’re always pushing to a next level, even as milestone prototypes are possibly achieved.

For example, the “flying car”, able to drive along highways, and take to the air, has made great strides and is now on the brink of mass industrial commercialization. But that leaves other media out of the equation: the water’s surface, and underwater. When will the floating bus become a sub?

The same floating bus is also able to take wing or drive up on land.

 And even with all that, we could push further, taking her into outer space, perhaps to the Moon and back.

What we appreciate is that, wholly independently of the practicality of such a vehicle, merely contemplating its possibility, as a futuristic device, feeds our ability to think scientifically as well as mythopoetically.

The chariots of the gods and goddesses have always served as food for our relatively feeble imaginations. Our speculations regarding UAPs and what propels them, anti-gravity engines and so on, keeps our imaginations alive with possibilities and that in itself is a service we need, much as we need random number generators.

Science fiction is a shared social good, a repository of our hopes, our dreams, our nightmares, our paranoias.

Along these lines, I suggest a new Art category in this M4W Coda wherein we test out what we get around prompting for such an omni-medium transportation solution, as well as subsets thereof. It’s fine to focus on airplane-meets-car option, neglecting for the time being the mirroring water-underwater bus-sub option.

 
Yellow Submarine meets Further.

In tandem with fantastical AI generated and/or humanly contrived works of greatness, let us intersperse some of the working prototype examples. For example:

M4W Coda KE Meetup 5/21 agenda

Sister City Project

Long time readers of these blogs already know about the Shiraz-Portland Sister City relationship. Whether that was ever approved or not I'm not sure. Probably back burnered because of all the marching to more federal registers that goes on. 

But I'm thinking at the Mayoral-Governor level, there's no need to resolve which federation a state, stan or oblast is within. Oregon and Donetsk are both states, regardless of other Venn Diagrams. Oregon is also a state on the Pacific Rim. At least some of our state is in Cascadia.

I'm running this Portland-Mariupol Sister City proposal by WILPF as concept art at the moment, with Perplexity drafting a declaration. WILPF = Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, well established in Oregon.

What other NGOs and civic-minded associations might want to get on board in supporting this?

On my School of Tomorrow maps, we're free to toggle between different worldviews i.e. see the globe through the eyes of different cults and subcultures, many of whom divide it up in ways we might not recognize based on our own forms of schooling.

Work Study in Cascadia

As one to take his own medicine, I'm following the work-study program I preach as a university standard: weave in the hard physical jobs as components of reshuffled PhD programs, or call them whatever, connotation: advanced, but more polymathic than some of the predecessors.

The camera shot is obviously posed, but we (me 'n Sam) really did the work of screwing the aluminum wheels onto those lengths of pipe, all meant to be spliced together and moved by a centered "mover", a machine. That's farming 101 (beginner terms) for a lotta ya, sure was to me. The "wheel line" so-called, is not the same as a "reel line" which I've also learned about, in previous episodes of Kirby Visits the Farm.

The picture above gives a better sense of the project: the wheels get delivered in halves which need to be (a) clamped around their pipes by bolts and screws through the provided holes and (b) screwed to one another around the rim. 

These wheel-borne pipes, when connected, support an ensemble of crop sprinklers, water spreaders, fed by highly pressurized water to the pipe at one end, and all of it moved as a unit, very slowly across a wide field, by means of a petroleum combustion engine.

Yes, these wheel lines come in other forms. Sometimes the pipe is held much higher, with wheels supporting tall pillars. Sometimes the pipe is fixed at one end, such that the other end traces out the perimeter of a circle. We often see these patterns of circles from airplane windows, when flying over cultivated lands.

This field, used for wildflowers, eventually grows too high for the wheel lines to traverse. The barley fields are already that way now. At this point, a reel line might come into play, with lanes mowed in a diagonal pattern, through which to drag a sprinkler on a retractable hose. 

If this is still a fertile valley as advertised, one is hoping for rain to also do its part. Irrigation technology alone is not able to win most fights against climate change. Water pumped from a nearby river keeps the show on the road and harvests predictable, provided long term weather patterns (climate) continue to cooperate, which they may not.

Meanwhile, back in the trailer, I was reading through Black Pill, on advice of the Mercado Group (my daughter a member), which no longer meets at El Mercado, an ethnic-themed indoor mall on SE Foster, which succumbed to fire at the start of last year. Rebuilding is ongoing. The group meets other places.

I'm also reading Glorious Bodies, and re-reading Into the Cool.  Mercado Group includes professional readers, librarians, who not surprisingly take in other media with a voracious appetite. I'm oft reminded of my Grandma Esther, a super curious-minded woman, who loved to read about any and everything. Talk about polymathic!

It's at the farm that I sometimes catch up on Rachel Maddow's show (I don't subscribe to cable), whom I've acknowledged is influential, even if we're not always on the same page. When Air America (the talk radio network) broke up, I followed my peeps, like Thom Hartmann, over to RT America, whereas others went to MSNBC. Little was I expecting at the time, RT America's eventual banning, amidst tank, drone and missile extravaganzas, other lurid orgies of monstrous violence.

Rachel did not disappoint, with her strong message regarding EWR (Newark Airport), which had a recent vital infrastructure outage making air traffic controllers unable to perform effectively. They were like firefighters without water in LA. 

The whole Atlantic coast might be becoming more tiredly provincial, awaiting a next long overdue upgrade. I'm not the expert, although I did live in Jersey City, close to Newark, for some years. 

PDX seems to be operating normally, but this coast has a separate economy to some degree, not discounting the huge volume of domestic "land shipping" by truck and rail (nor forgetting barges, nor airplanes used for freight...). Transportation is a big subject, especially if you factor in fuel and power delivery by pipeline and grid, and water delivery by myriad modes, including in plastic bottles stowed in refrigerated dispensing machines.

My work-study program also emphasizes how, in earning academic credit, and in being provided with more than adequate digs for the circumstances, I am not thereby replicating any exploitative migrant farm hand conditions. No one is forced to go undocumented and unappreciated.

March on May First

:: may 1 march ::

I took a somewhat professional insider view of the protest's level of organization, which I found to be high. I"d been on some May 1 organizing committees as the AFSC (Quaker) delegate, over the years. However the last one I was on didn't go as planned, when our police-approved downtown marching route got hijacked by another committee.

We gathered in the park where we listened to speeches designed to focus the message, and practiced the slogans we'd be using along the way. This was a small neighborhood gathering in southeast Portland near my house, on a Thursday during rush hour. The big events are set for Saturday downtown.

The park we gathered at is the same one Patrick and I usually go to anyway, if not to Laurelhurst, to give our dogs some off-leash fun in the sun time.

This preview and warm-up gave would-be participants sufficient information to judge whether they wanted to join. 

Maybe some would be put off by the anti-ICE sentiments. Others might cringe at the word "socialism" which is when I turned to Patrick and said: "this is already a socialist nation, but it's military socialism the people practice".  

The military is largely a sprawling camp system for economic refugees. A lot of the jobs the "illegals" do are similar to the jobs learned in camps, having to do with cooking, logistics, maintenance. Then one learns skills associated with "negative work" i.e. undoing the hard work of others, with explosives etc.

Dried Goods

:: about a conference six years ago, mentioned below ::

I haven’t posted about Costco in a long time, whereas I used to, featuring photographs and everything. Well it’s not like I’ve lost any respect for Costco, but yes I’ve allowed my business membership to expire. These are not mutually exclusionary conditions.

These days it’s Winco, and there’s continuity there, going back to Jupyter Hotel and the special conference for creatives. Our principal organizer with a Winco guy. And yet believe it or not I’d never been to one myself, a well known chain, another check in the “everyone but me” box, right? So it’s cool, right? All those bins of dried goods.

Yes, this is one of those prosaic blog posts where I list some of what I got on my last haul, proceeding directly from Providence, where I’d had an every so often (couple years or so) echo cardiogram. Kudos to the system for populating MyChart with myriad numbers, all back trackable through previous such routine exams. So on to Winco from there.

Dried figs, dried mangos, dates, croutons, trail mix (not the most expensive), wasabi peas (from one of like a hundred dispensers, across several aisles, lots of pasta varieties… and candies…)… this is like a memory test, do we get to once again head around this block… I avoided anymore pasta this time, and left the dried goods section. Winco has more to offer.  Like Diet Dr. Pepper.

My total bill was well over a hundred, and some of you, especially knowing the same neighborhood (we’re talking the Winco at 82nd and Powell), are thing why not Trader Joe's?  I live half way between two of those, what’s up with picking on Winco and not TJs?  I’m I an industry plant?

You know how it is: one gets into loops and routines. In no way have I lost respect for TJ’s, even if my attendance is way down. There’d be a recent spike in the data though, as I went through for old time’s sake. I’m gonna make a joke about “Groceries” now, a Trump obsession, and mention I was shopping for covfefe (that’s gotta be a brand by now, right?). Quoting Google:

Covfefe (/koʊˈfɛfi/ koh-FEF-ee, /kəvˈfeɪfeɪ, koʊˈfɛfeɪ/) is a word, widely presumed to be a typographical error, that Donald Trump used in a viral tweet during his first term as President of the United States. It quickly became an Internet meme. Avatar of Donald J. Trump. Donald J.

This edition of my Safari browser is getting confused by all these fonts from cutting and pasting so I’m gonna save this from my iPad and finish it up in Vivaldi, the browser I’m using on a Mac Pro in the upstairs office. On the way up, I’m gonna check for any dried goods I might’ve missed from my list.  

Dried apricots, I coulda sworn I'd remembered those -- good thing I didn't.

Thrift Store

Slabtown

David and I both went to this Ivy League thing at Breakside Brewery, which, amazingly, I'd never been to. It's in the Pearl, NW Portland. Or is this newly developed area rebranding as Slabtown (a moniker for Portland)? 

When we first got to the neighborhood, we verified where the Ivy League thing was happening, making name tags, but then left, as the first order of business was to find a nearby pizza place participating in Mercury's Pizza Week, meaning a $4 special slice is offered, along with a $25 whole pie. 

However, Ruse Crust Collective Slabtown had a sign on the door saying they weren't doing individual Pizza Week slices, only whole pizzas -- we considered that breaking the rules and thought writing to Mercury might be in order. We went to New Seasons instead, where I ended up spending more on a single salad than I would have on a whole pie.

We returned to Breakside Brewery and joined the 2nd floor throng (I exaggerate -- a small gathering). We both got non-alcoholic beers for $6 each. The topic of conversation, in the clutch we joined (hi Peter), was somewhat predictably the USG's wish to police Harvard's course materials, as a condition for receiving federal funding.

I'm thinking weaning universities off any federal funding might be a good idea given the bankruptcy of the latter (most would say "impending" -- always putting off the day of reckoning). The university, as an institution, predates the modern nation-state, and it may have outlasted said old world order. The "global university" is taking over, as the more dominant Spaceship Earth metaphor (indivisible, still striving for liberty and justice for all).

I find myself imagining an alternative reality in which the USG is explicitly withholding funds from universities that fail to effectively share contemporary American history, by withholding all the memes my Quakerly subculture is trafficking in, namely the Bucky stuff. How are those graduating from these institutions supposed to navigate successfully, if deprived of any reliable compass?

Bucky's Medal of Freedom was famously awarded for Synergetics, by then president Reagan, and yet Harvard, home of American Transcendentalism in Margaret Fuller's day (Bucky's great aunt) is paradigmatic in how little it shares of our paradigm. No wonder the USG is pulling the plug, right? Funny to think in that way, if only for my private entertainment. And besides, Princeton has been doing some stuff around the Geoscope recently. Not every Ivy League school is as slow as Harvard.

A Journey

A tack I took, not documented in Graph Theory 2025 (maybe 2026):

Starting with Freud and others Freudians, really early (8th grade in Rome, and continuing on through high school in the Philippines) I got to Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death (which Woody Allen liked) followed by Norman O. Brown: Love’s Body and Closing Time.

To bring it full circle, I was just chatting with Perplexity about Closing Time a couple hours ago. I’ll copy over the prompt in a minute.

Then when I got to Princeton I found myself switching gears into Wittgenstein, mixed with international relations as I was either gonna be a psychoanalyst (med school ugh) or a diplomat (coming from an already-expat background). I wound up doing neither, directly, but fast forward and I reacquainted myself with fringe figures (from academia’s viewpoint): P.D. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.

But not so much directly as through the Jungian flavored writings of one Maurice Nicoll, a Scot, and admirer of both Jung and Ouspensky.

I found this pathway great for coming back to Synergetics since Fuller was quite familiar with the cult of Gurdjieff and even mentions him by name. Also, I believe P.D. Ouspensky was on the short list of people Fuller urgently should get a copy of 4D Timelock, his first manifesto of sorts. As documented by art-historian Henderson in her award-winning book on Non-Euclidean geometries influencing modern art, Ouspensky as active around the 4D meme, as was Fuller.

What I think binds Fuller’s philosophy closely to Gurdjieff’s is that whole East-meets-West Boho generation’s (Blavatsky…) emphasis on man’s robotic and/or machine-like nature, highly programmable, manipulable, by design, as we’re born as EPROMs, brains as yet far from fully formed, ready to embrace whatever culture said human is born into.

However we’re also able to jump through moments of open mindedness and feel ourselves divinely reprogrammed (it feels like it comes to us, more than we dig it out purely willfully — God’s grace is in response to passive “waiting full of expectation” (the Quaker jargon)). That mostly closed, reflexive, robotic being vs intermittently open model is what comes through in Omnidirectional Halo and brain vs mind.

Caveats

Whereas I found myself in agreement with a lot of the signs at Hands Off!, on April 5, most especially "Hands Off Gaza" and "Hands Off Yemen", I note that neither of these current bombing targets were among those officially listed on the Hands Off! poster itself, along with libraries, social security, other safety net institutions. Along with NATO.

Yeah, NATO is listed first in Wikipedia, regarding the Hands Off! agenda: 

The protests were in response to what the organisers saw as the administration's overreach on many issues: NATO; schools; libraries; courts; veteran services; fair elections; transgender rights; Social Security; Medicare; Medicaid; the federal workforce; abortion rights; and many others.

How'd that happen? It'd seem pretty incongruous to an old timey anti-war activist, to see NATO, a military socialist club, really into money making, listed right up there with Social Security and Medicare. 

Since Eisenhower, we've been thinking the jobs corps and charity programs administered from the Pentagon, as in competition with ordinary civilian public services. And anyway weren't those folks supposed to protect and uphold the Constitution in return for that budget? Did they? I'm afraid by now, it's way too late.

As a courtesy to fellow WILPFers, mom's organization, and by extension to Code Pink (some AFSCers too), I relayed the necessary bonafides, while circling my Venn Diagram overlap when it comes to what I actually do support, for example abortion rights (by free choice, after soul searching and consideration) and transgender rights (the right to change gender, or at least make the attempt). 

I wanted other lefties to know that I'm tracking Medea Benjamin's position, although my own wakeup call came from Garland Nixon (meaning from his YouTube channel).

As I wrote to my inner circle: 

Conclusion:  Whereas I overlap with Hands Off! on many fronts, in fighting Trump ("resonated with most of the signage"), I think Carol, a seasoned activist, would have picked up on exactly what I picked up on: the NATO affiliation. I in no way regret my participation and would do it again with gusto. But I don't mind making my own platform (Pirate Party) explicitly clear in the wake of such meetups. I don't want to be tainted / associated with every aspect of the DNC's propaganda. I'm free to pick and choose. 

Portland Protest (April 5)

:: April 5, 2025, PDX ::