mindlace

Brad DeLong is an economist I started reading when the NY Times put Krugman behind a paywall. He is erudite and a card-carrying member of the realist school of economics, you know that whacky version where you have to pay for the things you spend money on.

Anyway, he frames the debate well; you should read DeLong’s post. However, Mr. Wilkinson, currently teaching national security at William and Mary’s college, makes a connection that I wish to high heavens would be sounded to the rooftops:

I think we went into this war not too much unlike the way we went into the Spanish American War with the Hearst press essentially goading the American people and the leadership into war.

Vika and I just got done watching Equilibrium, the movie that should’ve had the mindshare that the matrix stole.

I particularly appreciated the role of the protagonist; he was an inside man, raised and honed to be a tool of the machine. Most importantly, he commits atrocities on his way to understanding, and in the end all he wins is chaos.
These days I’m feeling fairly far from equilibrium, a concept itself so inextricably rooted in panhellenic mythos I can’t help but feel it’s part of the game.

No equilibrium, no spiritus vitae, no bloody fucking humours.

I seem to be an agent within a vast and largely senseless machine whose macroscopic behaviours are positively atavistic.

I see all these ways to make the parts fit better together, but I fear that all I would do is make it a better monster.

Ok, so that’s not really the important part… My BFF Sean Stevens was paid $300 by a sub-contractor of Turner to magnetically attach LED pictures of a cartoon character at specific locations in Boston to promote a new movie. Two weeks after he first started hanging them, he was arrested for doing so because the authorities of Boston decided the signs were likely to be explosives.

I went down to represent, yo, and one nice reporting crew actually used some of my verbiage; watch the video on the right.

They misspelled my name, of course, but whatever; and really, the real heroes are Sean and Peter, who kept their sense of humor through the whole bizarre process, and held one of the best press conferences in history.

Update-Update: The media is reporting that charges have been dropped, but Sean hasn’t been notified that that’s the case, so we’re still waiting on that part.

The Generic Republic Universal Protocol (GRUP) is a set of behaviours that allow an individual to participate in the Naught Distributed Republic (0DR). It requires the participation in a number of communication media in order to gain voting capital. Voting capital may be ’spent’ in Request For Action auctions. An RFA auction is like an auction with teams of bidders rather than individual ones. In addition to the “Do Nothing” team, the RFA specifies how many teams there are. The simplest case is where there is only one other team, call them the “Do It” team; other examples are Plan A, Plan B, etc. Whichever team gets the most voting capital at the end of the auction wins, and the named actions must be undertaken by the 0DR citizen in order to retain status.

Prior implementations of democracy had a notion of a “jury of your peers.” In the 0DR the equivalent is three randomly chosen citizens or the natural logarithm fraction of the total population of the republic equivalent, whichever is larger, chosen randomly (NatLogs). These groups are provided with a question with less than four possible answers, review the evidence presented to them and indicate which answer is to be chosen. Remaining a citizen in the 0DR requires implementing any behaviours implied by the answer. If the NatLog participants answer the question differently the question is asked again of (appealed to) another NatLog until a unanimous result is returned.

In any circumstances where non-cooperation ever reaches 10% of 0DR citizens as determined by a NatLog, an automatic revolution occurs, and those who invested in the “let’s do it” team become members of the nth Distributed Republic, where n is a unique integer larger than that of any known Distributed Republic adhering to the GRUP.

After the end of voting periods, voting capital expended become transactional tokens exchanged within the 0DR as a consensus currency. Refusal of tokens for payment generated by any Distributed Republic adhering to the GRUP at the going market rate ends participation in the 0DR. Disagreements between Distributed Republics unresolvable by RFA’s are resolved by a NatLog taken from the sum of their populations.

Any citizen of the 0DR may nominate another person to be a citizen. Provisional citizenship is granted immediately, but violations of the GRUP within the current sponsorship interval subject the sponsor to whatever censure the provisional earns in addition to causing all current citizens ever sponsored by that citizen to be subject to a membership verification.

Membership verification is a process by which a NatLog answers the question “is the agent in question a citizen?” yes or no. If a citizen serving on a NatLog finds compelling evidence of protocol violation they must vote no. If a membership verification question does not achieve unanimity and the terminal NatLog finds that the member in question is not a citizen, all prior citizens voting ‘yes’ are immediately considered not to be citizens.

Citizenship lost for any reason may be restored by being sponsored by the Fibbonachi Sequence interval of citizens, where the interval is the number of times citizenship has been revoked.

I would like to see the entire human population be able to ask about, discuss, and vote on things to do.

This implies several preconditions that the entire human population must have:

Adequate nutrition and freedom from toxins

A healty adult human of whole mind is the consequence of a host of material prerequisites. It comes as no surprise that the absence of these material needs during the development of the mind can substantially impair its function. These needs are remarkably simple to meet given modern technology. In what can only be considered a colossal failure of morality, some two billion people suffer from some form of malnourishment today.

• Humans that are deprived of nutrition, particularly at a young age, are prone to a constellation of neurological disorders that limit their ability to think and communicate. This sort of developmental handicapping cannot be reversed by current medicine or social practice, and therefore needs to end.
• Humans that are exposed to environmental toxins suffer from a variety of developmental maladies that are also permanent.

Heath care sufficient to be free of illnesses that impact their ability to communicate, cogitate, and choose.

While much health care extends individuals abilities, a basic level of lifetime preventative care is the most significant variable in illnesses’ tendency to cripple decisionmaking.

Freedom from abuse

Humans subject to slavery and other forms of abuse suffer permanent neurological consequences that make them particularly subject to unethical forms of suasion.

Access to communications technologies that allow freedom of association.

Humans expend a good deal of effort in limiting individual freedom of association. Assotiation is an important prerequisite to community participation. Communications technologies have already enhanced association in ways that are difficult to suppress through social action; bringing these technologies in a distributed fashion to all will help minimize the effects of sequestration and segmentation tactics.

Energetic resources

Individuals must be able to cause material changes in their environment in order to “do” anything. Lack of access to energy resources keeps many communities from enacting changes that have already been discussed and agreed upon.

I have been hooked by my Evolution of English project and so am burning the midnight oil. I’m a number of algae shy on my herbarium (due Tuesday) and I have to have a presentation on niche consruction for Wednesday. Gods, I wish school was always like this.

Oh yeah… and we’re fucked:

It is deeply saddening that our administration has chosen to torture people. If we are going to torture them, we could at least have the moral fortitude to just kill them when we’re done, rather than letting them live on in misery.

Even a cruel boy knows to kill the grasshopper once he’s done tearing off its legs.

Terror has won.

While it has been a long time since I actually got it up to physically protest Columbus Day, this fine Overcompensating comic perfectly captures my attitude about it:

We have been plagued by blitzkreig memes. Terrorism, war, trial, scandal – we hop from fire to fire. Our elected officials make law for this entire nation based on single cases. A signature example from the 20th century is TWA Flight 800. This poor vessel went down, and two of the available theories were a missile threat, or an onboard bomb. Indeed, to this day the subject supports several active fantasist communities.

Whenever I have a question about whose line of bullshit can hold more maggots, I look to the geeks. In 2003, an Aviation Today article discusses the failure in detail, describes a range of planes with similar problems, and says that the regulation that eventually came down the pike didn’t really fix the problem, because fixing the problem would make it harder to put video screens in every seat.

It took until August 22, 2000 for the investigators to issue their final report. The half-ass fix from the FAA still wasn’t installed on any plane by January, 2003. Politicians have no need for such trivialities as what actually happened when it comes to using tragic events to push stupid and cruel laws.

October 9th, 1996. A mere three months after the tragic day, and a good four fucking years before they finally figured out what happened. But there’s good old Billy, signing a law to protect us from the hypothetical people who maybe could’ve been on the plane and maybe bomb it or shoot a missle at it. Or not, as the bill had no effect whatsoever on Surface to Air missiles, but instead had this beauty of a clause:

SEC. 307. PASSENGER PROFILING.

The Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, the
Secretary of Transportation, the intelligence community, and the
law enforcement community should continue to assist air carriers
in developing computer-assisted passenger profiling programs and
other appropriate passenger profiling programs which should be
used in conjunction with other security measures and technologies.
Federal Aviation Reauthorization Act of 1996

We pass into law surveillance on all jet travelers because of a leaky fuel valve. That should have been sign enough, but no, six years later we had to go invade Iraq because 20 pissed off men who were all subject to this screening ran a plane into the Twin Towers.

The only bright sign in all this is they’ve had a bit of a time implementing it.

Flash forward to the present day. In response to the bombings of London, to which the Londoners replied “you should’ve been here during the Blitz“, the Thin Blue Line on the hard streets of New York City has decided that the best response to a bombing 1500 miles away is random bag searches.

We have to stop this. People get these manias because they talk to each other, and they have a bottomless appetite for laws mandating the construction of the apparatus necessary to start a police state. Let’s put a stop to that. Public officials get to spend 20% of their time in solitary confinement. We let them out in staged intervals, so there will always be a quorum of uninfected hosts. I volunteer to cook for them – I’ve already picked out a cookbook.

“Danes enjoy a happier family life than any other EU nation, a European statistics bureau on quality of life concludes.” A ringing endorsement of the shorter work week, it seems to me.