How Iraq Should Have Gone

First, a few what if's settled for this thought experiment:

• assume we had to or at least were inevitably going into  Iraq with the Bush Admin
• assume the "they'll throw flowers and candies" and other characterizations by the Bush Admin were real expectations and motivations

Let's say beyond that we have some flexibility but of course it has to start with a military action, sadly to any pacifists, but I'm taking this as the inevitable result of those in power intent on taking Saddam from power, but while minimizing civilian costs (indeed, costs in general, i.e. encourage surrender). The reason for this was given by the Bush Admin, Saddam was a dictator, indeed, often listed on human rights abuse lists as in the top ten in the world (take that as you will, but no doubt he was a jerk).

So, shock and awe of the traditional sort is out, but really, the Bush Admin did not wage traditional shock and awe.  The air dominance was so unilateral that a more Rumsfeldian type was used.  Starting at this point I think bombing campaigns like we saw in 2003 in Baghdad should have, even by a pro war admin, reasonably be announced with leaflets. 

Other than that they continue with their objectionable bombing.  They ought not have used cluster bomgs, any mine fields should be accurately markes so a complete cleaning is gone (in other words treated as temporary), and one supposed that while pinpoint bombing is objectionable given it is done on such weak intelligence and with no warning, ought to be minimized but given the circumstances and the military leadership at the time, one assumes this would probably have had to still occur since their strategy involved taking out military leadership and "freeing" the people.

The main fuckup comes when it's time to rebuild Iraq.  When I make a video of this blog I'll tell an anecdote about how we our system of martial law and the application of curfew hampered locals that would have liked to start rebuilding immediately.  The big picture is we should not, and there should be a law against it--- have brought in the Bechtels and the Halliburtons to rebuild.  All those billions should have gone to local engineering firms.  Once great firms, prior to sanctions, has disappeared  or whittled down to just a few people, but they were not gone, and could have been rejuvinated.

If there are not enough construction workers, western companies could be brought into train them, but a heavy weight should be given to firms in nearby countries, that is, by distance, because this keeps the money spent as local as possible. The results is a rebuilt infrastructure, and a rebuilt engineering industry, and a natural protection against sabotage and other extra expenses in construction, like the amount and type of security required.

If this seems like some liberal fantasy, go crack some books, the Just War, I mean WWII, and I mean it ironically, did have a smart ending for the antagonist German and Japanese.  They were rebuilt.  They provided world class engineering within decades, and we really don't have to worry about them much anymore, do you think?  Quite the opposite, they are sterling international citizens, such as they go, even if the standards for such things are quite low after the standards-lowering experiences of the 20'th century.

ROUGH: Progressive Libertarianism

What are "progress" and "liberty".  They seem to be words which promise to be good, but which in reality may be anything, progress where, whose liberty, and liberty to do what? I have named my system in part to provide a demand to define these terms, and not assume that progress is, even, defined.

What then do I hope to borrow from these terms if not a concrete and final definition?  Certainly there is a tone or goal to these terms, and I see to say with this name "progress is possible" and "liberty is possible", that I might prove as much. Given a group of "libertarian progressives" you have only such a group, that things progress and liberty are possible, and the system itself exists to find definitions of progress available to the group.  Similarly it seems a group need less adopt my view of liberty as a working definition than to develop it's own, which then could be assumed, however robust, to undergo some adjustments, however checked such change is from frivolous redefinition.

If not a final definition of these terms, taken from the linguistic unconscious, what do I hope to take from progress and liberty if they are not only undefined but subject to an ongoing definitional progress. What I intend to borrow from our ideas of progress and liberty then are their grammar, what we might call their frameworks. Even leaving leaving a  working definition of what is considered actively as progress (and the priorities of progress) open, a lot is left in the grammer of progress.

Progress is a metaphor from spatial understanding, and it's use in politics is related to the fact that all abstracts are thought of as bounded regions which you move into, out of, around and within, with boundaries you are on the edge of, get over, or are blocked by.  The term progress provides a space of possible directions, allows for use of navigation metaphors with explicit, and thus conscious, goals.

The term liberty is meant to be stable, and very slow changing, while progress is meant to have both a stable definition and a sort of priority list of potential actions to do in the here and now, and planned out for the future.

The framing of progress is that we have desired goals.  We can list certain things that would be progress, and we can prioritize which we work on based on costs and stressors of the current situation.  The question at hand is what might the group take action on, which is to say, spend joint resources on.  If you would answer the question "are we making progress?", then the answer will be in reference to some stated goals.  If you achieve these goal only to find the anticipated rewards even if accurately predicted were not as satisfying as expected then in the bigger picture you have not made progress.

Both are true and it's silly to quander question such as "did you really make progress" and instead realize such questions are with reference to scope and scale and with respect to "progressing toward the goal" you did make progress, but with respect to the goal being as expected then you did not, with respect to the latter is the bigger issue. However, the distinction is important, because if you did not progress toward the goal, you need better principles of motion moving from one state to another, whereas if you did achieve the goal and it was not what you thought, you need better models for what a state will be like once you achieve it.

The system seeks to solve the problem of how best to cooperate within a group.  It suggests that on the one hand, you can navigate by calculating values of the current state you think you could improving, bringing the conditions to a new state, and specifically those of common interest.  That's the purpose of progress.

On the other hand liberty provide a map.  A concept of liberty allows us to evaluate locations on the map of all possible conditions, known and unknown, hypothetical or actual.  Progress invokes a metaphor of space, going from one state to one anticipated to be more desirable   If it is, then the progress was real, if not, the progress was in vain. Nazi's made progress to their goals, but were in vain, due to insanity and severe opposite thinking well beyond the scope of useful irony.

So given this, how might we best cooperate? I have stopped here before a different question than that, a more basic notion, a nearly atomic, at least amoebic question which is "do we need to cooperate"?  Is cooperation with others ever required by us rather than by those others?  Is there truly a mutual need of any sort to cooperate, and if so, in the name of liberty, how do we optimize that to a minimum, since whatever else it is, the framework of promoting liberty involves minimizing individual constraints.

  , can cooperation be necessary, or put another way, is there any such thing as necessary cooperation? To cooperate means, literally, to operate together, so cooperation is about action done in concert of some sort with other, that is, it's about actions.

It seems clear for an example that to share limited resources a group must cooperate, but is that necessary? I'd say yet but it also depends on how you think of cooperation.  For example, is individual action sharing?  Or can there be a system that "shares" the resources without any "action of sharing" by an individual.  If the language of this all seem impossible, think about the shared resource of the atmosphere, we all share it, there is no option, yes no one is ever asked to actively "share" their oxygen, the sharing is accomplished naturally and instead of sharing individuals may be asked to "not pollute it"... that is cooperation, so that the sharing works, but is not strictly speaking an act of sharing, which I'm sure, like me, you think of as partitioning something you already possess in order to share it.

Even given the goal the result of distributed common resource, some system will provide distribution, and individual actions take place after that natural distribution.

Also we must as what subset of individual actions can possibly fall under "necessary cooperation" for surely it is only a subset, and in the name of liberty a very sharply defined subset.  One does not have to fornicate in the name of "necessary cooperation", as a matter of personal liberty.  I would say one does not have to go on living (has a right of suicide) and also the right to refuse to die in the name of necessary cooperation.  Some would deny that "share" is an action in that set of things that can be "required cooperation", and may have an argument in their favor if "share" mean actions by an individual instead of the result of reasonable distribution. That is, everyone must get a sufficient "share" (noun) of a vital survival resource (can we assume people should be able to survive... I do) but that doesn't mean the individual does"sharing" (verb) in order to achieve that by readjusting the initial distribution.

If people do not get their share initially, enough to survive and thrive, then I do advocate sharing as a necessary action, but I also think that a system that distributes things that disproportionately such that last minute sharing is a "necessary cooperation" is clearly, prima facia, badly engineered. As a compassionate human, which means I enjoy being nice, being helpful, whenever I can, I think sharing is generally a good thing. I think in both senses it's part of optimal cooperation, but we are talking about necessary cooperation and ideally, once one comes to possession of something, sharing is ideally optional, and the system has already distributed resources sufficiently for survival and beyond necessary arguments.

Forced sharing action is a kludge, a jury rigging, to mitigate the problems with systems that cause stagnant pooling of resources. It's my position we must separate out such things.  We cannot think of things like sharing just as the result, we must think about the means.  A person told to share a resource may be irate about that, if they are thinking of their property, justly acquired.  The same person may likely have no problem if what is meant is operating in a system where it "just works out" that everyone has sufficient share of a common resource (like air).

In such a case, I, as a social theorist, and pointing out it's good when systems are naturally distributed like air, and to a degree water, and more difficult when it is concentrated, like lumber and oil.  We can model how things which are well naturally distributed are so, and apply those models to resources which are not so naturally distributed, in order design systems that accomplish that sort of reasonable distribution.

I don't think politics is about the distribution of resources, or wealth, and originally this essay went directly into the technical design of Progressive Libertarianism, but as I read my essay, I saw that framings that would strike people at the core of how they currently think of political divide would distract from the purely technical intentions of the system I was presenting.

I decided it was necessary to take the issue of a social philosophy first from a place that people were already at.  My technical  system is for people in a particularly technical and practical state of mind, like someone ready to sit down and learn a new software program, so I decided instead to be humble and pretend as if I really have to defend the idea of cooperation itself.

I think the natural desire to cooperate, say with family and freinds, speaks for itself, and I am not interested in defending that.  I'm only interested in the social issues which seem to me to require talking about necessary cooperation and what might be required in terms of cooperation, due to the obvious contraposition of such a necessity and the necessity of

, and a social theorist is merely pointing out that we do share the air.  Instead of taking air and redistributing it.  Just as all the white keys on a piano are the notes of both C major and A minor, depending where you make your base and foundational references, the transfer of money can sometimes be modeled more than one way, and the differences can make a big difference in the overal tenor of the melody.

Do not get me wrong, like many compassionate people my notion of sharing is very positive, and I believe in sharing, dinners, ice creams, and really anything I can, but I don't see that as inherently probable
I tend to think that "sharing" is put on us by nature.  Air and water are shared, geographical place is shared, people share homes, they are even born into many of these situations.  Even desire to play a game, leading to resource issues with the tools of that game, it's field and so, is cultural, and often born into.  We share these desired and needs already, and the issue is how cooperate at least as much as necessary, and ideally, as much as is optimal.

In the name liberty, whatever it meant in history or means to you now as you read it here, it seems to me it can only be the case that we want cooperation to come in an expressive form.  A person should ideally be able to express their desire to cooperate individually, and the result should be overall cooperation within the group, as opposed to the individual having an autocratic leader

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we try to find actions that we can take as a group to accomplish the necessary cooperation.  Further, I prefer expressive systems to allow this action through expression rather than autocratic system which operate by appointing priveledged individuals, when practical.
At any time there will be in practice a set of things that are considered necessary cooperation (e.g. "we all agree not to kill humans", "we all agree not to defecate in the street").  This set of necessary cooperations held by a particular group at a particular time must in some times be built up, and in others winnowed.  In other words the set of cooperative actions considered necessary are not to be maximized, nor minimized, nor to calculated "objectively", but instead it are to be "optimized" using intersubjective logic.  "Necessary cooperations", like many such sets as analyzed in progressive libertarianism, should not be taken as something timeless, nor part of nature.  Take it as something akin to a current attitude of a particular group.  What then concerns us practically is how to collect individual ways of thinking into actions which require shared resources.



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"Progressive Libertarianism" is the name of my political and social philosophy.  It is a skeptical philosophy, and is not represented by a bunch of positions, as a dogma generally is, but as a means for analyzing social decisions, actions taken by groups.

It is my goal it does not distort situations or information, it is meant to be a skeptical philosophy and as a skeptic and materialist naturally I seek a clear lense through which to view affairs of great scale, and to take measurements with a precise ruler with regular and fine markings. Creating high fidelity measuring instruments is a favorite activity of skeptics. However, Progressive Libertarianism is not value neutral.

I explain it in terms of three basic notions, which make up a system two of which are up front in the name.

It is my

Two of these I have recorded in the name I have given the system, progress and liberty, which on the one hand convey values, and on the other, beg thorough definition. The third is not explicit in the name, but I will state here as the first point:

1. A social philosophy should assume people think differently from each other and from themselves over time.  This is not to say these ways of thinking cannot be successfully classified and sorted by various criteria for whatever given purpose.
2. Progress can be defined and worked toward.
3. Liberty can be defined and optimized.

The word progress is not understood merely by its definition, but by its grammar, the semantics of the frame implied by term.  Whatever you think constitutes progress, it's something you move toward, and it can be used to discuss common goals, if they exist, which generally they do.  The word liberty is also not merely a concept of what "makes up liberty" but a semantic framework in which a person's "freedom" is modeled as an amount, allowing use of the language of optimization, maximization, weighting, and so on.  The terms provide a their own logic, somewhat separate from their initial base meanings, which has to do with their entailments as metaphorical system.

To address the first point in such a way that it becomes implicit in all the analysis within this system I think it's useful to formalize the notions involved with a symbolic system. The idea that everyone has their own "way of thinking" can be deconstructed into elements that then each can be given symbols and symbolic operation that operate on them. As with all symbolism, this will introduce sequentialism and discreteness in what are "really", on the natural physical level, parallel and continuous phenomenon, and the affect of this will be addressed later.

It is my view that something called progressive libertarianism must start from the idea that the problem before us in social philosophy is the cooperation of not-entirely-like minded individuals, at whatever level is truly necessary to first order, and to an optimal level beyond that.  And also that it will follow that the best association among individuals with optimal individual liberty exists in a sense specifically to allow what I would like to call cooperative disassociation. To maximize (or optimize) individual liberty then can be understood in one sense as protecting the right of reasonable disassociation for individuals, without jeopardizing, at the least, necessary cooperation.



At any time there will be in practice a set of things that are considered necessary cooperation (e.g. "we all agree not to kill humans", "we all agree not to defecate in the street").  This set of necessary cooperations held by a particular group at a particular time must in some times be built up, and in others winnowed.  In other words the set of cooperative actions considered necessary are not to be maximized, nor minimized, nor to calculated "objectively", but instead it are to be "optimized" using intersubjective logic.  "Necessary cooperations", like many such sets as analyzed in progressive libertarianism, should not be taken as something timeless, nor part of nature.  Take it as something akin to a current attitude of a particular group.  What then concerns us practically is how to collect individual ways of thinking into actions which require shared resources.

How like-minded a group is on a particular issue is something that needs to be calculated and thus we can use the symbology of calculation to represent and abstract it.  However, we cannot read minds and we cannot speak for others, so it's important to realize the appearance of a logical system should not be taken to imply objective means of calculation.  The idea that you can tell someone else what the result of applying their way of thinking is, is counter to any reasonable definition of individual liberty.  Thus, all actual operations in progressive libertarianism involve allowing the individual to represent their own way of thinking authoritatively, regardless of the material fact that an individual can indeed make miscalculations regarding their own view.

To bring things back to the concrete, this is the progressive libertarian explanation of why we vote. So in practice "calculating the group opinion" is done by consulting with the individuals of the society (e.g. including but not limited to voting). However, people assume too much about what voting is, how it has to work, and they generalize their own experience with winner take all multiple choice (WTAMC) democracy. A formalization will allow us to adopt a higher level abstraction. What becomes important is not a specific notion of voting and what one can vote for, but instead voting can be replaced with an abstraction for individual the expression of individual volition. We can attempt to ensure that the individual is able to express their contribution to the whole set of thinking in a culture and that they are free to do so as they honestly wish.

I think all systems require voting in a familiar sense, but there are infinite ways to count votes, many mathematically more reliable and robust than the system we are accustomed to using.

Progressive Libertarianism includes a notational system:

• Let T represent the whole set of all ways of thinking for a set of persons, G, consisting of N people.
• Let T_i represent the particular way of thinking of an arbitrarily chosen individual i from the set G.
• Let A be some joint action done by (using the resources of) G, and consider A as the result of some operation, O(T) over the set of T.

This essentially abstracts all possible ways of voting, including potentially surreal, virtual, hypothetical ways, as "an operation" for combining T_i into an action A.  In practice we have a material "operation" of voting, but in the analytic system we have an abstraction into which we can put a spectrum of possible operations.  Ideally this allows comparison between different ways of combining volitional intention, and we can incrementally increase the validity of our means of taking measure of public opinion, in the sense that, for example, IRV is superior to WTAMC.

This formalism is not meant to imply that one can do such calculations mathematically on one's own as an individual.  It is my position that these calculation can only be done by a group, that is, by a system which involve individual volition and contribution.  I brook no notion one can calculate the effective vote or view of another.  This is a relativistic and skeptical social philosophy and we shall find this abstraction is meant to provide a framework for expressing the desire of a group, melded with what I feel is appropriate for a group to act toward, which is in general has to, for me, involve the ideal of reasonable individual liberty, and that progress is possible which can enable that.

All execution of any group action must map, be traceable to, and must be produced from the volition of the individuals within the group. In modern terms that means by some sort of voting, of speaking for yourself in a way that materially contributes to the action taken in a way reasonable and rational. Reasonable and rational are both terms which the group must agree on, starting from their gramatical frameworks, as with progress and liberty, and which in principle is done by some operation on the full set T.

Keeping this formalization in mind helps me to establish practical meanings for the idea of a working model for the notions of progress and liberty since adopting a definition of progress is itself a group action, A. The action is yielded from the set T, by some operation O(T), which is able to accomodate our assumption that there is contradiction within T, i.e. between T_i and Tj. This is a way of using a mathematical metaphor to say the operation used to decide group actions, should consider the whole set T, in other words, everyone's opinion.

This symbolism provides a framework for careful identification in the practical steps, in real world processes, which are required to combine our many ways of thinking into optimal common action.  For example one can imagine that an individual thinking with system T_i, which is their way of thinking, would come up with action A_i. This action is what they themselves would advise if the decision was left to them alone.  Keep in mind it is still a group decision, that is, A_i involves group resources.

By comparing the distribution of A_i compared to the final group action A, we can judge the operators used to join the set.  For example, it is easy to describe an autocratic decision in this model with an operator O_A, which is "autocraticism", which simply picks the A_i which is from a particular individual and used that as the "combination" or "representative decision" of the full set of possible actions.  A = O_A(T) = A_autocrat. In our modern democracies, the operator O is WTAMC with 50% thresholds and a straight normalized sum.

This notation has allowed me to simulate the ideas of relativistic skepticism and to model other political ideologies from its "point of view".  As with "progress" as a term, the term "liberty" also has a "working definition" at a given time, which is held in common, or strictly, "as if in common".  What I mean by "as if in common is as follows".  A law I don't agree with, but that I agree is valid (that is, it's a group decision which didn't go exactly my way, but I respect that it ought to be a group decision), is held by me "as if in common" with others.  Such cases are stressors and are what we try to mitigate and alleviate when optimizing liberty.

It is obvious, I would think, that the words "liberty" and "progress" already have connotations and that I no doubt have something in mind by advocating "progress", although I acknowledge that in group decisions, the group, somehow, must also be given the power to define such terms.  For example, I am not willing to adopt "as if in common" a notion that liberty can mean "power apportioned by heredity" or a notion of progress which is "a more complete subjucation of other peoples".  It is conceivable some would adopt such definitions, in spirit if not under those exact words, but I'm not willing to.

Progress, generally, by those wishing to use the word at all, can be expressed as obtaining a better situation which throws downfield the difficult question of "what makes one situation better than another?" which upon close inspection has a great many complexities if given any two 'situations' to compare.  Nevertheless, for some situations, the comparison is trivial.  We often focus on difficult situational comparisions, but only because many are too simple to really bother with.  All other things being equal, for example, is it better for water to be more or less poisonous?

The question thus is what is to be considered better by a particular group at a particular time.  This may actually be a still easier question than how to achieve the particular goals which are already agreeable.  If all think cleaner air is better than more poisonous air, we still don't agree necessarily  on how to make air cleaner.  Also, we will likely find controversy in how to deal with the complex comparisons related to what might seem to be, or even actually be, the inevitable undesirable costs.  That is, if cleaner air required dirtier water, as far as we knew, then we have two "simple valuations" that we agree on, that clean water is better and clean air is better, but an apparent or potentially necessary inverse decision to make.

Progressive Libertarianism as I see it anticipates such complexity and attempts to provide a framework for analyzing such comparisons which calls upon individual participation (abstracted as "operations on T") and also systems for executing actual calculations (abstracted from the idea of an "election") from individual action (aka abstractions of "voting").  The debate, thus, in a progressive libertarianism about progress is entirely focussed on what shall be used for the criteria of progress, and which means, experimental or well known, are to be utilized at a given time.

The term liberty is meant to refer to individual liberty, and however it is defined beyond that, it is not to lose touch with the individual case.  In progressive libertarianism liberty is individual freedom... groups have complex ways of thinking, large sets of suggested, potential, and taken actions, and any question of the group's liberty, is to be taken in reference to various summations and averages regarding individual liberty such that it is not possible to calculate liberty in such a way that a small subgroup with a lot of individual liberty within a larger group with negligible liberty (e.g. slaves) counts as an "optimization" of liberty.

The general effort to formalize allows us to talk about these issues using mathematical and logical metaphors, since some operations on a set can be used to track the distribution of something like liberty or power, and not a simple sum.  That is, if one were to say liberty could be calculated by taking the individual liberty of each member of the group as a scaler value and summing them, then one might maximize liberty without regard to the distribution among the group, whereas if one was to measure the average liberty of each individual, one ends up not only getting a different number, but subsequently motivating an entirely different path of action.

As a skeptical system we do not ever assume any of our definitions are perfect, or final, however, we do presume, sometimes, that we have a basis providing consistency, from which measured changes can be rationally made.

I do not think it is, in reality, very controversial what ought to be considered progress, and I feel people whine and fight about it more than is actually sensible. That is, to me, much of the difference seems more emotional than rational at the level of what would obviously be nice.  We agree on progress to a large degree, I think, public health, more security against predictable and unpredictable events, economic survival, efficient technology, non-toxic technology, more individual freedom. Similarly, I think there is a lot of agreement on the sort of things that deter these ideas of progress, such as, individual aggression, counterproductive technology, economic domination, unrealistic thinking, sloth, and so on.  The real controversy at the moment is almost no common agreement on what might affect change to achieve these sorts of things we do actually "agree" on.

For some reason there seems to be a controversy of a boolean nature between the notion that doing something about the problems would be best vs leaving the problems to sort themselves out might be best. Progress by design, the effort to formalize... this should tell you that I do not  believe this is a controversy at all within progressive libertarianism. Progress mean requires engineering.  We can do something.

This political philosophy is first, a methodology for discussing group action in terms of criteria of progress and proposed ideas in a group that does not pre-agree to pretend to be a homogenous group, or a group in which all decisions are considered unanimous once made. I assume a group of people, and indeed even individuals, have spectrums of thought.  I want to work with people that are different than myself, that think things I didn't think, and triangulate.  It can be hard to work with them, because we think so differently, so what does it mean, how do we sort it out?  That's what progressive libertarianism really seeks to address.  That and the theory that sorting that out will lead to progress and liberty.

Carpet Cleaning

I have rarely had carpets as an adult.  My memories of carpet cleaning involved machines much more difficult and messy than the one I just rented.  About four months before my daughter died we moved to a new, much nicer house. I obsessed over the carpets, running around with spot remover.  Nevertheless "heavy traffic" stains showed up and I looked them up on the internet.  I put down throw rugs in those places.  The pets love the wall to wall carpet, I prefer wall to wall carpet.  

I began thinking about carpet cleaning and wondering what one of those machines could really do.  Then my daughter died.  And my family came.  And they are country which means they understand that in Hawaii you take your shoes off when you go in the house, but they it's harder to get them to put shoes on when they go out, and in the wake of my daughter with friends living here 24/7, then my family, the carpets went to hell and it was an odd emotional issue to finally, this morning, rent the machine, which was more reasonable then I expected. 

The nice thing is it's one of the few cleaning gadgets that more or less does what it says.  So the carpets seem remarkably clean.  And my thumb is sore.  And I miss my daughter.  Cleaning her room was the hardest. The stain where she left pink vomit on the carpet was already gone, I had cleaned that by hand the day she died.  That was hard too.  Still, I knew where it had been, and thought I could see it.

I often wonder whats worth living for even though I could name a dozen things including a loving girlfriend.  Maybe it's clean carpets.  But I doubt it.

What is Science

I've been discussing science via video with Barklord and some others taking part.  He has got me thinking about various aspects of how I view science and perhaps take for granted my view, which really is my own view.  There is no concensus that I ever found on exactly what science is, what it means, and our conversation is bringing to the fore various scandals and disgraces which may be laid at the feet of science.

On the one hand some things I do not fathom due to a basic difference of perspective.  I see the scientific  urge, which I see as a natural type of human curiosity, and not the only type, in all environments, in people in more or less, in principle, every village, city and community.

But in considering this, I have to admit, I also could complain about the corruption of science, which itself, it occurs to me, is so long that one could consider "it" (what I think of as corruption) as a part of "science". For example, I was considering good old Archimedes.  He was a military engineer.  I would of course grant that he is part of the history of science, but his work in the "science of throwing things at people".  So I'll write more on that later.

Video Site - JCN

So I accomplished a fairly significant refactor of the video server and I realized I'd like to use the blog to decompress from working on it.  It's a chance to talk a bit of technicals, youtube comments won't really allow proper space for.

So while the buzzword "cloud" has been around for a while, and is just a word for distributed computing... the fact is the true power of distributed computing has flowered slowly.  It doesn't seem that way, but it has.  We  struggle to do these things.  What I'm excited about now is the advent of open source clouds, i.e. OpenStack.  Buzzword-wise, programming on the Google App Engine is using "the cloud" or "cloud computing". But it's proprietary. The OpenStack way allows me to have a virtual machine.  It could even be a windows machine.  And it gets a part of a real machine to run on.  Since it runs in a virtual machine, it can be copied to disk, and then cloned.

So the advantage of this is that if someone is good at designing distributed systems, then when they have a good version, they can take a copy of that image, and it can be deployed in minutes to new servers.  The servers wake up and cooperate (like a cloud) to provide some service.  This is what large web sites do anyway, many servers pretend to be "Google" etc.  The cloud is really a word for operating that way without needing a multimillion dollar server farm, to by parts of that resource at commoditty pricing.

So the server is Ubuntu 12.something something.  I installed some software like clipbucket (tried one called Mediacore) but found it's a pain.  Integrating with it is a pain.  Accomodating it is a pain.  And I discovered that in the last 6 months the first step of the future arrived, the video tag exists in the latest browsers of significance (bite me IE), and they all play .webm.

I am running apache and using mod_wsgi to run a python module.  The standard approach is to use some SQL database, and I figured I'd have to do that, but I'm not that thrilled working with them.  They tend to take over the structure of the project.  My python modules were using the disk directly.  Of course, eventually that is not ok, because they'll write over each other.

However, I've decided to write a C++ server to organize the data on a distributed database idea that allows data to be on disk.  The central server will ensure the files are not corrupted, and will be able to compile indexed files for high speed access as the amount of data gets larger.  People that want to use SQL and SQL based tools on the database will be able to do so, but that will be exported from what the live systems use.  I think, after all, when using a database, you have to get the data into memory and use it somehow, so you can just keep it in that form with lots of data exporting to allow alternate indexing, etc, for different purposes.

Anyway, I got the python apache based server asking the c++ process for the video information instead of using naming conventions and going to disk, via back end http request.  At the moment the data fragments are just JSON that was dropped by the upload program.  This design allows me to support that, and when the number of videos gets to high, or rather, by that time, I'll be able also to compose the complete database into an indexed form that supports the larger number. I'll do this while still allowing utility programs and web page services to drop files like notes.

My data organizer (jcn) uses inotify to watch the disk for new files of interest to index and compose.

Debate Wrapping Up

The debate is of course frustrating.  While Obama would not be my choice for political philosophy guru, I do believe he is at least competent and pragmatic.  I would point out that we do not need a CEO that is expert in the business Romney is in.  These businesses are expert only in seeing where America is failing and profiting by preying on that weakness.  We need investment in infrastructure  that's all that ever does any good.

I don't understand why Obama doesn't use some of his time to say "what loopholes Mitt!??  Where are there 5 billion in loop holes!?!"

Gentle vs Warlike

I was a gentle sort of child from the start.  Though I spent hours with ants and magnifying glasses, and hours burning wood and leaves with hour glasses, it never occurred to me to burn the ants.  When I first heard the idea I was aghast.  Ditto for pulling the wings off flys, turning them into walks. Not funny. As I grew older and found people of more or less good character had done, and quite... well I never did get the gist of that except it's some sort of spiritual damage or something.  Or else we are cats.  I have learned cats are naturally cruel.  Are humans really that way?  Am I not human?

I always saw things from the point of view of the animal.  Once my grandmother and I were standing on a bridge looking down into the water and we saw a fish.  I was too young to remember, but she told me that she said, "look, a fish, should throw in a line and catch him?" and I asked her what the fish ever did to us.  Perhaps my grandmother was making me this way, or perhaps I naturally have this perspective, but I do have it.

So the thing with a fractured family that is literally at odds with one another, one want to endorse them all, if perhaps hoping for them to calm down a bit. One sees the animal as victim of it's fright and anxieties, and it's behavior as merely a symptom of that.

Homo sapiens, the cromagnon, us... we're a pretty terrible lot.  I would like to think our dysfunction is a matter of personality distress due to the traumatic stress of centuries of slavery and war, but it may be that the slavery and war is due to a built in personality distress. It's conceivable and we did kill off all the other homo species. Perhaps it is all our children's nature to treat the weaker animals cruelly, just as kittens torture animals it is said as part of a training their evolution has inclined them to for necessary reason, given their way of life.

But then, am I someone with another way of life?  Does that make me not human?  How social are humans, might we have evolved more than one nature, just as it takes more than one nature to fill the more than one jobs humans have discovered for our group survival?  No doubt it takes a different nature to be a police officer than it does a doctor and than it does a teacher.

Am I one of those types?  What is it's purpose?  Or are there indeed many types, and I'm still not one of them.  Is it my brain development? I have hemorrhaged from a  young age ever couple years until 27, at which time the arterial malformation was discovered and cauterized.  Was my war-brain not able to develop?  Robbed of crucial pathways, it cannot form a coherent argument?

Or do I have the war brain but just like living things?

44 Year Note: a2

The 44 Year Note is a suicide note, intended to take 44 years to write.  I don't take it literally, it's metaphor.  Not that I'm not going to commit suicide in 44 years, but it's sort a commentary on having suicidal ideation which is dangerous and scary (not in that order) but which nevertheless can be handled if it is, as it must be, addressed.  Yet it might not be handled in the way you consider well handled.  This is irony. This is an explanation.  A long explanation.

44 Year Note: a1

I was born a virgin birth baby late in 1967, meaning, of course, my conception was the result of copulation between two (previously) virgins, and subject to speculations of inevitability therein.  This definition of "virgin birth", which I offer, is, if one thinks about it, the only logical material definition possible for "virgin birth" that could pertain in contexts outside pure myth.

I was gestated in the Summer of Love, conceived in the Spring of Love, and born in the Winter of Love. I am a Sagitarius by Tropical Astrology, which is an odd form of astrology if you ask me.  By what logic does one use the Sun for Astro(star)ology... using the names of stars, but assigning equal segments of the Sun's year?  What about the precession of Earth's axis?  Siderially, that is, by the star's themselves, one's sun sign, the one usually quoted, is where the sun is, in the sky. There are 13, not 12 constellations, and the Sun does not stay in each a equal amount of time.  Siderially, I am an Ophiuchan. Take that as you will, I'm atheist myself.

My parents were baby boomers and a scant 18 years old so I was in for a double dose of "unready for the world".  They were also country, a property I value dearly, though in this case it was responsible for their having heard of the sexual revolution but not, evidently, of birth control, it's alleged motivation. Being country myself, to some degree, is expressed for example in my preference to urinate outside.  This is indeed an gateway for even urban men to "go country".  As you may find in this 44 year note, I myself span such subcultures, being also suburban and even to some degree, at least eventually, urban.

Ostensibly, or so the story-to-me went, both implicitly and explicitly, one of my parents' families was from the rich side of the tracks, and the other was from the poorer side.  Each seemed to feel superior because of this. I found out only later that this was a bit of skew on reality, due to small town presumptions, country thinking, and the difference between Bakersfield values and Southwest Harbor values.

In reality both my grandfathers were stable in their career, advancing, and afforded upper middle class standards of living.  My post divorce view (both my maternal and paternal grandmothers had divorced my respective grandfathers prior or near about's my birth). The story goes: my mother's family was wealthy, the patriarch a well respected if small town surgeon and general practitioner.  My father's family was a working class family, closer to the earth, with my Grandfather a lumberjack, and my Grandmother a school teacher.

The truth is my father's families had in fact been working class, but has prospered in the era of the GI Bill, were well employed, and rewarded for hard work, and they did teach me working class values, but they downplayed their own situations with respect to that, compared to what I would later discover about actual sociological conditions.

My Grandfather on my mother's side, who at 13 I would find out was not my biological grandfather, was well known in town, but I found that my school teacher's Grandmother's local notoriety far outlived my maternal step-grandfather's, when each retired.  I also found that my paternal Grandfather was in fact a foreman, a lumber yard manager of sorts, advancing over the years.  He was at any rate was doing well, in an era of pleanty, and in fact better than your average lumberjack.  The family  owned their home, a pool, with a barn for the horse he kept for his daughter, and many other American comforts such as regular travel.

I had a realization there was something false about the working-class/ruling-class mythology in my 20s, when I came upon pictures of my paternal grandparents all the image of Desi Arnez and Lucille Ball, adorned with upper middle class 50s and 60s significancia, "modern" gadgets, conveniences and food technologies. By the time I was aware of such things, my paternal grandfather and grandmother had divorced, he seemed to be doing well, but my grandmother seemed to live very bare (I learned this was more her nature, as she worked two jobs (teacher and school administrator)).  My father was living in Tee Pees tuning out and dropping in on riverside mining claims, which was without money more or less, my paternal aunt (a saint) was a single mother, and it was the early 70s.  I was unaware of the relative wealth they had in fact enjoyed prior to my birth.

The legitimacy of this dichotomy lies in the philosophical roots of each side of the family, and in the fact that one was partriarched by "a professional" and the other, a lumber worker, albeit a manager. The well paid one was still a servant to the system, not from the sort of wealth that supports you regardless of your choices, like all working people, still dependent on continuous pay for continuous work, albeit at a better rate, and thus a greater need.

The less well paid one was nevertheless in the stable upper middle class, the beneficiary of a stronger American economy and steady advancement in the lumber mills of the Pacific Coast, and also in no small part due to his size and belligerent nature. He first advanced to management in the Pacific lumber industry as an axe man, that is, a guy that fires other guys.  He was ideal for this, evidently, due to his naturally and prolifically pugilistic nature, and the crucial benefit that is to someone who's job it is to fire lumber men.  Lumber men tended toward the pugilistic at the time, and also to the larger-than-average.

These and further dichotometric dynamics, of yin vs yang, the tensions between them, played a role in my childhood and life, and leads to the conclusion of this story.  My parents married before my birth but divorced when I was three years old.  I have a few memories of San Francisco, where I must have been three or less, with my parents, but after that family to me is a balance of alleged opposites.  It is a fractal group of people with a lot of animosity to each other, all of whom I love.

I mention the rich man poor man dynamic because this dynamic played a role throughout my childhood as the families feuded after that.  Further complications were that my mother, as I didn't learn until 13, as I said before, was from a previous marriage of my grandmother to my maternal grandfather, a San Francisco lawyer.  That my maternal grandmother was a divorcee was evidently a family disgrace in the view of my maternal stepfather's own mother. At least I was always lead to believe she was the source of the attitude.

My mother's pregnancy was a reason for my maternal stepgrandfather to show his biological daughters the dangers of loose women, and perhaps to cut the losses, so to speak.  My mother had faced a lot of outsider feelings in her family, had evidently acted out a lot, and been difficult, which one suspect may have been related to having lost my biological grandfather, her father, at 13 herself.

Although she loved dearly, and was loved dearly, by her five brothers and sisters, who she took a great part in caring for, being over ten years older than them, she seems to have felt alone, and like an outsider. Although I'm sure my maternal stepgrandfather himself was in reality unconcerned with my mother being a divorcee, he did respect at face value the racy and overly-modern nature of it.  I find he was modern enough for his generation, a Californian, and that might likely have even relished the daring and socially-"unacceptable" nature  of it, the act paying some respect to the propriety of the bigotries against it seemed to have weighed on my mother at least enough that she herself did not tell me about my paternal grandfather. Eventually, at age 13, my stepmother was the one that told me. She had known him well.

I don't want you to get some vague idea that I have some type of pent up resentment, some hard to pinpoint, complex, issue regarding not being told about my maternal grandfather prior to my pracically post-childhood age at the time of 13 years. Instead, you should understand I want you understand concretely and specifically, I was and remain relatively butthurt, and I acknowledge possibly or even probably over-butthurt, about not being told about my paternal grandfather prior the practically post-childhood age of 13.

Cause I am/was.

Debate 1 Not Over Blog

I'm watching the debates, but doing other things.  I'm recording it though to watch with a friend later, so it was easy to let myself be distracted.  I'm not sure if Romney has thrown any zingers but I've seen a few temporarily promising anti-climaxes.

Back From California

My job interview did not go well.  While I was able to do well on the first two technical interviews using the web and phone, the plane trip, etc., was too much for me really.  I sobbed about my daughter, now gone over 3 months for most of the flight. I have a lot of things on my mind. Being in the city struck me the wrong way. My affection for my current work was heightened. I didn't care to prepare further.  As a result I was unable to focus, I over thought the problems which were similar in nature to those I'd had no trouble with. Afterward I was wraught with intense grief, and faced the reality of the fact that I had used focus on that to hold back a lot of emotions.  There was nothing I had not faced in kind, but there was a lot of intensity ducted to resevoirs which inevitably fill with unprocessed emotion,  and fester, not unlike a chemical waste pool.

The company in question, which had contacted me with severely odd timing, just shortly before my daughters death, offered me another chance in the future even as they explained I had not done well. They said I had done especially well in the first interviews and so perhaps it was just a matter of timing, and I was encouraged not to give up. At first I thought they were just letting me down easy, but the recruiter emphasized that it's often a matter of timing, and to please keep in touch.  I told her not to worry, I liked my current job and I appreciated the timine.  I slept on it and realized obviously it was a matter of timing, so I explained my situation and she said to contact her whenever I felt ready.

I am not sure what I will do, I now realize I need to focus on processing this loss and I still don't know exactly what that means in practice. I am also not sure I want to go in that direction, the environment of the city is not particularly calming, the bustle of such environments can be invigorating or wearing.

At any rate all that is somewhat obscured by the fact, which I discovered, that  I was using the interview to cope with the loss of June.  I had thought returning to California would be good for my daughter, this company had contacted me prior to her death, and so there was also an element of holding on to things that we shared, things that existed when she was still around.  And there was a perfect excuse to take a break from mourning for a few hours and prepare for the interviews.

After the interview a lot of that was let out in the form of raw emotion.  It's unprocessable in words and logic, it's just stuff I cry through, memories I repeat and the like, powerful unnamed courses full of energy. Very slowly some sense seems to come from it, ideas that do have words and logic, but this feels due to be crashed into chaos again.

I also lost $500 in Reno, friendliest little city in the world. I was trying to blow $1000 so I really came out $500 ahead. That's huge for me, I like low stakes gambling and usually keep my losses to about $100.  It's largely statistical after all, which means predictable in the long run.

I feel the spiritual value in casino gambling is that one has the opportunity to face loss.  While there is localized victory, for those with the broad view, those are still a part of a greater loss.  However, the emotions through all these experiences are very interesting, and touch the gamblers basic instincts on chance.  I like craps, roulette and to a lessor degree these years, black jack. In each of these games you also face how other people face loss and victory, an emotional dynamic that much of the time is quite palpable and on everyone's mind.

My trip was a spiritual journey about loss and I feel much relieved, though also weary, from it.

Life of Job?

I wonder sometimes if my life has had more, or less, chaos than is average, and also the affect of the type of chaos it might have been.  When I contemplate this I tend to conclude it is much like the cosmos, in which we are all exactly equidistant from the "edge" of the universe. Our minds seek a center between the acceptable and unacceptable.  To find nothing unacceptable about one's personal situation, in comparison to what one may know about a broader scheme of things may seem polite to someone that has acknowledged their privilege but it is not honest.  The mind finds the negatives, like it finds pain when you are hurt in a relatively serious case.  Indeed, pain is relative to the mean as well.

I feel sometimes that my life is like that of Job, not that I'm familiar with his life in any detail, but in terms of my faith in what I contemplate in spiritual moments. This "faith" has been severely tested but the test reaffirm my need to feel spiritual.  This may or may not be advisable.  I understand the hesitance some of you will feel at such a reference, as I myself am atheist and extremely anti-metaphysical, which stands in contrast to what most will probably consider a "spiritual moment".  That is, it is something somehow related to god, ghosts, or myth.  But to me the spiritual follows from a spiritual feeling.  It is something emperical, a spiritual thought is one I either have when feeling spiritual, or a thought like one I would have while feeling spiritual, which I have strength to recollect.

These thoughts are not exclusively good, but my most robust thoughts, the strongest, are always from this set. Furthermore, they come from a wide spectrum of distinct experiences and types of experiences.  They come from virtually anywhere.

The theme I have gathered from my spiritual experiences is that I am connected to all. I have seen there is no negative and positive ivity, there is instead actuality, reality, and ironically, there is potentiality. I have gathered that I am connected to the universe and this gives me, for example, a christlike notion that it is wrong to hurt an innocent animal.  But this idea exists without reference to christ or any authority in order to justify it. Instead it seems natural, like it could be no other way.

The crisis and chaos which has pursued, and at times overtaken me in my life, has only increased my faith in the sort of thought I tend to have when I also "feel" this feeling I call "the spiritual feeling".  While it is objectionable to many modern minds to rely on a feeling, which is merely "called" by a certain name, which is relied on purely for emotional reasons, the fact that I agree with the objection is a negligable fact in the face of the monumental one which is that a human, quite human, mind has nothing else to rely on but emotional reason.  Emotional reason can be refined, it can be subjected to technical analysis, but it remains at heart emotional. It remains about emotions.

Ultimately philosophy is about emotion and feelings related to the apprehension of new ideas, and  remains emotional.  For example, the emotion of eureka.

Welcome to the blog

I have not blogged for about 6 years, when I stopped doing political blogging and focussed on philosophical videos.  The change was not unrelated, I have long felt that the problem is how people judge their leaders and their press, and the solution to this is people need to re-evaluated their values, and at least some of them need to do this via a philosophical process, consciously.

I may put fiction on this blog, as I have never stopped writing fiction on a daily basis, as well as technical treatments of my philosophical ideas.