As most of you know, I'm in the midst of completing my chronology of U.S. warfare and these days my attention is committed to the Civil War. Well, not to sound like a northerner or anything[1], but as far as I can tell, on the large scale, this was truly a war between philosophies and it really came down to self-centered romanticism versus get-the-job-done modern pragmatism.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm well aware of the backwoods Confederates who had never owned slaves, hated the Louisiana ballroom/white columns plantation planter culture, and fought and died for the right to simply be left the f*ck alone. But at the strategy level, up where I'm looking at army versus army, government versus government, the Confederates fought for glory and against the Union armies while the Union just damn well set out to chop up and shut down the Confederate nation.

Even the "cold-blooded" arms of the Confederate military, like the commerce raiders or Quantrill's Guerrillas sought to do harm to Union emotions, spreading fear and panic, I'ld even say fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Meanwhile the Union relentlessly attacked industrial capacity, transport, ports.

Now, inevitably, this was partially a matter of relative strengths and maybe, had they had the means, the Confederates would have blockaded instead of just commerce raiding, advanced into and occupied Union land instead of just doing night raids and terror sweeps.

But I wonder.

As I sit here reading account after account I keep coming across yet another brave advance into fire by Confederates, yet another piece of Union canal digging or dam building. I just read last night about Confederate lancers riding in frontal attack against entrenched Union infantry.

How brave, how gallant, how utterly and completely dimwitted.

The Confederates were acting out their childhood fantasies of being brave cavaliers. The Union armies ran like a Vanderbilt shipping firm.Now, of course, I'm far from the first to point this out. Documentation of Southern officers quoting Walter Scott or epigrams in Latin and Greek while their Union counterparts studied numerical data and industrial capacity is ample. But I hadn't expected it to be so significant on the scale of campaign strategy and tactics. They didn't do the same things with a different feel, from campaign level to squad level, on average, they did different things.

Northern and Southern decisionmakers seem to have genuinely thought differently, an odd thing indeed given how many had been classmates at West Point and Annapolis.

But maybe that's exactly the point. After all, Lee was offered a Union command, as were many other Confederate officers. They chose to be Confederates. And given the number of seccesion movements within the Confederacy by the end of the war and the strength of northern Copperhead strongholds like New York City, maybe that's one of the most important things to understand.

North and south were where they, by and large, lived, but to describe them just as the people who happened to be on one side or other of the Mason-Dixon Line on the day Fort Sumter was taken is a dangerous misapprehension.

The Civil War played out through different approaches because it truly was a war of opposing codes of human conduct. Claiming anything less is a crippling distortion.

-Rustin

[1] For those out there who care about this sort of thing, my father's family probably had soldiers on both sides and my stepfather's on the Confederate side. So I've stood on Lookout Mountain being lectured by my stepfather on how crucial this was and all the rest.

geek + easily amused + annoying neighbors in endless committee hell = Heh, heh, heh.
(Starting at about 1:30 in the morning for fewer witnesses.)

What does that mean? Well, this neighborhood in specific and New York in general has huge quantities of planters, big 'uns three or four feet to a side, that are, at best planted with some ill-cared for single species or in many cases, simply empty, with the occasional empty bottle, a few cigarrette butts, and the like.

For years I've been asking residents and occasionally supers of such buildings what the deal is and do they need help? Uniformly they say that:
1.) the person "in charge" of that isn't around. This is then followed by could I come back on, say, Tuesday afternoons between two and three-thirty and talk to Luis. Invariably if I try that, then "oh, Luis don't live here no more"
or "Yeah, I'm Luis; you gotta talk to Mr. [managing agent]" (fill in more deadended conversations)
or "I'm real busy today, come back again next week" (repeats)
or "we got no money for that" (I offer to pay and do the work myself) "yeah, well, I dunno [strange, contentless, usually non-sequitur answer that is a transparently invented excuse]"
or
2.) "Oh, we're deciding that in our tenants association right now. We're going to do some wonderful things this year." (I ask how long this has been "about to happen" and puzzle out that it's some period greater than ten years, I ask when the tenants association is next considering this and am told July.) or
3.) "No, we gotta leave it like that. Don't wanna attract nobody to hang out in front of the building, ya know? Having stuff growing in those will just make the [drug] dealers stick around or those homeless guys."(Usually followed by self-aggrandizing racist speech about homeless people.)
or
4.) "No man, can't nothin' grow in those. Nobody gonna water it and people throw their shit in there, and all that. You can't have plants there; they'll just die 'cause nobody gonna care for them." (I point out that New York is full of abandoned lots overflowing with lush plants that nobody cares for) "Naw, those ain't plants, those is weeds!"

and so on.

I've been having these conversations, a building or three a year, for sixteen years. Not once has anybody in a building with barren planters said "Okay, sure, it would be nice to have something growing in there".

Note, by the way, I am talking exclusively about raised planters. Big, deep containers of soil too high for passing dogs to piss into, big enough for real variety, deep enough for perennials to build decent roots and for microorganisms and worms to be viable through the winter.

Ya see, back in the sixties and seventies, when these were put in (and a few added on to existing buildings in the eighties), they did do a good job. When I was younger, many more of them *were* filled with plants. But in buildings like mine, with tenants at war with the landlords, nobody is willing to spend on the common areas. Landlords because they want the building to be as ugly as possible to get out long-term tenants like me, tenants to spite the landlord because "that's his responsibility". In the smaller housing projects because the overpaid, slothful union workers aren't paid to do it beyond the bare minimum. And in some of the other rentals and coops because they're tied up in committee hell and they'd each rather waste DECADES than give in on their petty power games.

I hate these fuckers.

So last night, at a bit before two in the morning I fucking went out and planted thousands of seeds in planters and raised beds from 98th to 87th, from Central Park West to Amsterdam. I'm sick of these pathological fucking sons of bitches and I'll fucking well do what I think best to their planters whether they know or care or not.

Does that make me a presumptuous asshole? Yeah, probably. Too fucking bad. Boo hoo. I hate, hate anybody who chooses to make their world ugly. When people start making intentional decisions to make my world ugly, well, I kinda lose interest in what they want. I'd say that they're scum, but, well, scum has nutrients in it. They're toxic waste. And I'm sick of living with them and being surrounded by the kind of world that they create.

So over the past few months I've been accumulating my materials. Ten carrot seed packets bought at ten cents a packet. Sixteen ounces of organic amaranth and sixteen ounces of sunflower seeds from a high-end health food store, the remains of my seed packets from past years, which means some snow peas, nasturtiums, spinach, pumpkin, cucumber, and assorted oddments.
Added to this is about a tablespoon of various seeds bought as spices before the fire and now stale - poppy seeds, anise, a.k.a. fennel, a little assorted this and that, all poured in a bowl. Increasing the legume stash is about two tablespoons of mung beans.

Then on the way home last night I bought the last supplies: six bags of beans, Goya and Jack Rabbit, bought for a buck a bag. Red beans, black eyed peas (best in hotter climates, but oh, well), and so on. I wasn't too particular. Just grabbed a bag of each variety that was near where I stood and dropped 'em in my basket.

I went upstairs, half-filled my shirt pocket with mixed beans, and headed out.

I had hoped to start with my own building, behind the scraggly bushes, but the soil here is so compacted that I'ld have to come back down with sharp objects and spend at least twenty minutes prepping the soil. So I put some bean seeds in where I could (maybe thirty in a block of soil about a hundred feet by eight feet) and moved on. Next were the three huge planters (about six feet around each) in front of the supermarket across the street. I put little clusters of beans, about four beans to a cluster, about six clusters to a planter, in each of those. And on down for a few blocks. I ran out pretty quickly.

I went back upstairs, filled my shirt pocket again , poured about a ping pong ball worth of amaranth into a baggie and shoved the baggie into my jeans, grabbed some seed packets, and went back out.

This time I was a bit more systematic. I've been thinking about doing this for years and years and I've done spontaneous planting of a few seeds now and again, but round one this night was the first time that I had actually set out to do this, with materials, targets, and goals.

Conclusions:

- Man, amaranth seeds are teeny!

- Soil in a lot of places around here is outrageously impacted. Maybe I'll bring worms around some rainy day.
In fact, I'm thinking of creating a worm-addition starter system, by adding a cup of soil and a cup of chopped up veggies into a large takeout soup container, filling the rest with water, and bringing that somewhere along with some worms in a bit more soil, ideally still on a rainy day. That way I can dump the muddy stuff onto the planter, drop the worms and soil on top, and hopefully thereby give them enough water and food to keep them going while they start the job of aereating the soil.

- Even at two in the morning, you never know what witnesses will turn up.

- Speed is of the essence.

- Pine bushes are a menace.

- Now I hate this area even more.


- Rustin

I'm obviously missing something. WTF is going on with these pink bits? I don't come to /. for pink bits. If I want pink bits online I'll go to GBOTW or something.

If I want girly I'll go somewhere like this.

A girly /.? The mind boggles.

-Rustin

There's a nice space travel thred in yesterday's top stories. Actual facts and analysis in the comments, good signal to noise ratio. I've been through the first and third pages so far and plan to go back in a few weeks and save an offline copy of the whole thing.

Makes me miss the /. of a few years ago to see so many scientists and engineers with relevant expertise dominating the discussion. Gives me fantasies of someday helping to create a discussion site (say, in five more years) purpose-built to encourage that sort of thing, maybe even with an architecture that explicitly encompasses meatspace interactions like conferences and more digg-like fuzzy ground between "first page" and "journal entries".

Of course the tagging experiment (I'm taking the time to tag - are you?) and such are admirable moves in that direction. Maybe my pessimism about /.'s future is misplaced and we're just seeing the awkward adolescence of an interaction space nowhere near its mature effectiveness.

That would be really nice.

-Rustin

P.S. Check out the "Vital Stats" JE with something like fifty /.ers laying out our personal profiles and beliefs. Man, that was a blast from the past.

Evidently an ex-military, right-wing, self-styled "adventurer" by the name of Micheal Yon took some photos in Iraq. A U.S. Army guy got a copy and circulated it worldwide, getting it on the front page of Stars&Stripes and all over the commercial media, all without paying a nickel to Yon.
Yon sued, saying that he never gave reproduction rights.

The army response? Since Yon is an embedded journalist, the U.S. givernment can seize any property of his they want, in fact, commit any crime against him they want because the agreement embedded journalists sign holds the U.S. harmless against any form of "injury".

To quote the article:

Army lawyers in the Office of the Judge Advocate General investigated and rejected the claim, arguing that by signing a "Hold Harmless/Release from Liability Statement," Yon agreed to release the Army from liability for any "injuries" -- which the Army lawyers found included the financial injury of the distribution of copyrighted photos.

We are increasingly living under a government that literally considers themselves unaccountable to anybody and entitled to do anything to anybody whenever and however the fuck they please.

There is a word for such a government. Such a government is a dictatorship.

We are deep shit.

-Rustin

I came across a piece in Foreign Policy Magazine that I think is worth a look.


What's Next For Iraq

A talk with Nir Rosen who just got back from a year there.

-FOREIGN POLICY: What does the current stalemate over the appointment of a prime minister say about the political process in Iraq, and whether the tensions on the ground can be discussed and eased at a political level?

Nir Rosen: I think it shows just once more that events inside the Green Zone have really no relation to what happens on the street in Iraq. They are bickering among themselves about how to create a government. But outside the Green Zone, they wouldn't last a minute, not one of these leaders, they would immediately be killed. Events inside the zone have been a big theater: What it does show is that they can't even cooperate at a political level. Meanwhile, their militias are already fighting each other, whether they are Kurdish, Shia, or Sunni. It shows there is no hope of any political rapprochement. Not that that would have an impact on the ground, because on the ground it is the militia leaders who are in charge. Every neighborhood has its own little army, every mosque has its own little army, that's where the power lies in Iraq, with the guys with the guns on the street.

-FP: Is civil war in Iraq inevitable now? Is there a way out?

NR: People have been asking me that a lot lately. There's been a civil war in Iraq since 2004. It's on a low scale, and nobody has really been paying attention because it's happening at night, away from where the journalists are. The casualty numbers are still fairly low, but they've been steadily increasing. In the north, immediately after the war, the Kurds emptied a lot of areas of non-Kurds, and Arabs have "ethnically cleansed" some areas of Kurds. So it's been reciprocal. In the south, soon after the war started, Shiites were taking over Sunni mosques. In Baghdad, Shiites and Sunnis attacked each other's clerics and mosques starting in 2004. In Sunni-majority neighborhoods, they drove out Shiites with threats and killings. There were population exchanges basically. It was sort of like "Bosnia light."

Militias are getting stronger and stronger. Hatred is growing between Sunnis and Shiites. To Sunnis, all Shiites are Iranian. To Shiites, all Sunnis are Baathists, Saddamists or Wahabbis. Iraq is now not just in a civil war, it's practically a regional war, because you have Iran strongly supporting the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, and Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and individuals from Syria supporting the Sunnis because they're terrified of a Shiite-dominated Iraq. And as the civil war in Iraq escalates, you're going to find that the nation-state concept is sort of irrelevant. If a Sunni tribe is attacked in Iraq and they have relatives in Jordan, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, as many do, those tribal relatives are going to come in at a certain point, too, and it's going to draw in the whole region.

-FP: Are these tribal and sectarian ties stronger than the Iraqi national identity?

NR: This wasn't the case in the beginning. I think the United States contributed to this. There certainly were grudges, Shiites had good cause for that, as they were the primary victims of Saddam. But in 2003, nobody used the words "Shiite" or "Sunni", there was a very strong nationalist discourse. Sunnis and Shiites held joint prayers, and sectarian attacks were rare. [Abu Musab al] Zarqawi's movement contributed a great deal, of course, because his ideology despises Shiites more than anything—even Jews or Christians, in fact. And U.S. policy alienated the Sunnis right from the beginning, dismissing the army and the Baathists for example, which disenfranchised the community and treated it as the enemy. And by apportioning seats on the interim Governing Council according to the faction—Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite—we sort of enshrined sectarianism. And we made the Shiites the good guys, the Sunnis the bad guys, this is a process that Washington contributed to. And it's going to get much worse. I think you're looking at Mogadishu in 1991 or Beirut in 1982. Soon we will stop seeing 50 people dead every day, and start seeing thousands. My friends in Amria, the Sunni neighborhood, tell me that three bodies are found every morning lying there on the main street.

-FP: You favor a withdrawal of U.S. forces. Wouldn't a withdrawal empower Islamist extremists and result in even greater bloodshed?

NR: Islamic extremists took over the country on April 9, 2003. The U.S. military was present, but it wasn't in control. The vacuum we created by dissolving the security forces immediately led to clerics and tribal leaders taking over—the most reactionary, conservative forces of Iraqi society. The country hasn't recovered from that. The looting contributed as well, there was no Iraqi infrastructure left, there were only clerics controlling various neighborhoods, both Shia and Sunni. And one of the reasons why Washington resisted Iraqi calls for elections in the spring of 2003 was because it was afraid that clerics and tribal leaders would win the elections. In fact, they both took over in January 2005. So we basically had almost two years of destruction for nothing. At this point, U.S. forces perhaps control whatever military base they're on, but when it comes to ruling Iraq, the clerics are in control.

-FP: In a recent article, you suggested that Moktada al-Sadr is the only man who can keep Iraq together. How?

NR: I don't think anyone can keep Iraq together at this point. But if you try to think of a leader who is respected by all sides, ironically, it's Moktada, because his rhetoric is Iraqi nationalist and people identify him as an Arab, whereas they view the Supreme Council in Dawa as Iranian implants. Moktada, right from the beginning, held joint prayers and demonstrations with radical Sunnis, he helped them in their fight against U.S. forces. And radical Sunnis have helped Moktada fight U.S. forces in the south. So when I speak to insurgents, Moktada is the only leader they respect. His own men refer to the two intifadas they fought against the Americans in the spring and summer of 2004. His staunch anti-Americanism is actually what unites Sunnis and Shiites. But at this point, I don't think anybody can save Iraq, but at least he is somebody who hopefully will be involved in bringing the tensions down at some point, though unfortunately his men have recently been involved in a lot of sectarian reprisals as well.

-FP: How will the Iraq war impact geopolitics in the long term?

NR: I think we are going to see decades of hostility between the West and the Middle East now. Very well-trained fighters who have gained experience in Iraq can now go to Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East. There have been several attempts in Jordan recently. Just last week they arrested 2 Iraqis and one Libyan, with a lot of explosives attempting to bomb some civilian location. Likewise in Saudi Arabia, in Syria, you are going to see increased sectarianism. I think the Muslim Brotherhood will take over in Syria, and sectarianism is increasing even in Lebanon, where Sunni and Shiite hostility had not been so intense before. There were recently demonstrations where Sunnis where chanting for Zarqawi and threatening the Shiites of Hezbollah. So throughout the region you have a huge civil war. It's looking bad everywhere.

I'm not the first one to say this, but Iran is the big winner in all of this. The United States has no leverage over Iran at this point. If the United States were to strike Iran, Iran could simply support the Shiites in Iraq. And if the Iraqi Shiites start attacking U.S. and British forces en masse, it will make the Sunni insurgency look like child's play.

Since the war, radical Islam has strengthened in Iraq. Hamas won in Palestine, and the Muslim Brotherhood gained strength in Egypt. Throughout the region, political, radical Islam, which might have been a spent force until a few years ago, is only strengthening. This is blowback, just like in the 1980s when a generation of Arab jihadists went to Afghanistan and gained skills. We are now going to have a new generation of young fighters experienced in jihad from Iraq. They're going to lead the fight for the next 20 years. When I was in recently in Pakistan, near the Afghan border, I bought a magazine dedicated to the heroes of Fallujah. I was in Mogadishu this summer, and there was actually a store named after Fallujah, and guys walking around wearing Fallujah T-shirts. Throughout the Muslim world, people actually believe that America is the enemy of Islam and even if this might not be true, they have Abu Ghraib and the destruction of Iraq to point to. We've also given reform and democracy a bad name. Suddenly, the dictatorships in the Arab world don't look so bad, in comparison to Iraq, and people are more suspicious of change.

-FP: Christopher Hitchens has proposed a "Nixon goes to China" approach to Iran. What do you think of this idea?

NR: I think that's probably the first intelligent thing I've heard Hitchens say in the past five years. I think that's very important. Had this happened earlier, perhaps Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have not won the elections. The Iranians have been speaking about a dialogue of civilizations for a long time, and Washington has responded only with threats and enmity, really. I think increased business ties would certainly strengthen the U.S.-Iranian relations. I don't think there's any reason for the United States and Iran to be enemies, apart from the Iranian-Israeli hostility. I think they are natural allies. It's about time Washington made an overture to Iran. We certainly don't want to miss the boat and let the Europeans make inroads economically in Iran, a market the United States needs. The Iranian people have no inherent hostility toward the United States. I think such a move would work.

Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New America Foundation. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, and The New Republic. His book on postwar Iraq, In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq, will be published by Free Press in May 2006.

The list of jobs to do sure isn't getting any shorter these days.

Now that I'll at long last have a site for my naked cogitations I need to actually create the muckin' thing. Section heads, topic pages, listings by title and subject and date. Designing a new end-of-page log box, choosing new naming conventions, determining needed graphics.

This is all suspiciously similar to work.

So after sleeping much of the day away and spending yet more hours online, I've been working on that kind of stuff. I suspect that some time soon I'm going to give in on coding by hand and get myself a copy of Dreamweaver or something. Anybody got any OS X, or even better, Mac OS 9 suggestions? I've got about three hundred pages (treating each JE as a page) to review, edit, style, and fit into a uniform schema.

I think that in general my delectable distancing from technology is going to have to retreat. Probably should get a laptop (adzooxs! paging adzooxs!), a Zodiac or other large PDA, and a current legal copy of some web-oriented image editor. Damn, the money goes fast.

Also, since this is, after all, going to be the site for Deep Geek, I think I'm going to have to join the nineties and design this site with rollovers, some forms, eventually some databases. I should even implement RSS.

Double damn. I like ASCII.

Oh, poor baby. Has to sit around and build a huge site as an extention of his grotesquely large ego and desire for self-promotion. Awwww!.

But it's still annoying.

Postscript: As of Tuesday morning, I've got the first few pages up. Primitive formatting but better than an empty site. I wonder how soon the results will turn up on Google.

Pages so far are:
the home page
an essay on why English is the best choice of international languages
a proposal for additional "green" NYC taxi medallions
and a refutation of the idea of NYC seceding from the U.S..

In other words, pretty much what you guys are used to from me, but now being put into a setup where they can be properly accessed by subject, date, etc. -Rustin

Waddaya think, Should I buy it?

After all, it would run on biodiesel.

And then I could buy my own launchpad from Vandenberg AFB to park it next to.

Rustin

So my order from CafePress showed up. The bags suck ass. No color correction and muddy reproduction add up to bleagh! At least they're well made. Other than the butt-ugly logo reproduction they're not bad for under twenty bucks.

OTOH, the bumper stickers and ADD mug are sweet as a summer day. A geeky, easily distracted summer day, I guess, but, well, hey. I've been told that the ADD shirts and Reed&Wright shirts came out well too. Beowulf cluster buttons crop a bit so I'll be redoing those. And, of course, I need to fix the typo on the Sneakers shirt.

Soon. Maybe Sunday.

Well, it's still progress.

-Rustin

Okay, so I'm gonna put together a little list here. Let's see what it adds up to.

Wood lathe, used, basic - $150
Wood lathe, used, better - $400
Metal lathe, used, decent - $600
Drill press, new, half inch chuck - $300
All of above times three - $4,350
Bits, jigs, accessories for above - $2,000
Low end rapid prototyping system - $40,000
4 foot brake - $450
Full set of shop furniture - $6,000
Full set of storage racks - $1,000
Lighting, heating, work fridge, etc. - $2,000

And so on. Seems to me that the cost in equipment of starting a manufacturing company, one that can do it's own metal and plastic castings, precision parts, and so on, has fallen below one hundred thousand dollars.

Seems to me that a bunch of ten techies, half working in their spare time, with three or four hired hands and a big garage (say, 3,000 square feet) to work in could start a real manufacturing company able to do a remarkable percentage of the things the big boys do, just not in such volume.

And with modern drill bits and modern mold release compounds and all the other products of the age, the labor per item made would be a fraction of what a low-tech shop would use up or of what a high tech shop could manage as recently as twenty years ago. Any machinist will tell you the same. Add this to the huge quanitities of unused and underused machinery sitting under blankets of dust in the U.S., Canada, and plenty of other "modern" countries, most available for sale absurdly cheap, and the possibilities are mindboggling.

So, since HP doesn't make their own engines anymore and their quality keeps going down, I'm asking you, what would it take to start a bespoke laser printer company?

Since everybody seems to agree that the ATX form factor is a dinosaur, what would it take to start selling something completely new?

Since /. is permeated with people posting X is crap!, the old ones were much better!, then what is to keep a bunch of folks from taking twenty thousand dollars a person, the amount of money it costs to have an expensive hobby, and just make the things yerselves and sell em?

Now, I haven't included insurance, so that's about five thousand a month right there. And I haven't included rent, though in some parts of the country, rent on a space like that would run maybe five hundred a month. Heating and air conditioning, on the other hand would probably average out to two hundred a month or more. Add in pay for the extra "hands" who, admittedly would come in later, and we'e now looking at a burn rate of about ten thousand a month. A year of that adds another sixty thousand in the first year, maybe a hundred thirty thousand in the second year.

But in a nation about to do a reality show about inventors, with vast amounts of industrial legacy sitting idle, the idea that a serious manufacturer could be founded for a half a mil and, according to the general circulation stats, almost nobody in this country is doing it, is absurd.

-Rustin

It's time to announce my candidacy.

Of course, we did this before in the last election cycle but sometimes it's important to freshen things up a bit.

My platform is:
Plain Speaking, Deep Geeking, Encourage Idleness, Weirdness Is A Strategic Asset

And one more thing. Taxes. It is so much fun to talk about how to spend money, I wanted to be damn sure I included a few ways to raise it. You're not going to like some or all of the means I propose. Thas' cool. But if so, please suggest other ways to generate the needed revenue.

Plain Speaking - Our government, bureaucrats, elected officials, and all, have developed a great skill at doublespeak, obfuscation, and a thousand other forms of hiding the truth. No more. It's time for clarity, brevity, and transparency.

- First the Bush programs to increase the number of classified documents gets cancelled, the Gore declassification program gets reinstituted, and an aggressive program is instituted to create open government across the board.

- ALL electoral districts get redrawn with a mathematical limit to how far they can deviate from the border to area ratio of a square. (Thanks to Pythor for the link.)

- All bills must be under fifty pages long, must be submitted to review at least a month before they are voted on, must be made available on the congressional website as soon as they are submitted. And just like the old days, a printed and complete copy of each law in sixteen point type is to be posted in a major public place in every city or town of more than five thousand residents including jails, hospitals, and so on.

- No government entity can suppress court records as part of settling a lawsuit, require that anybody else do the same, or participate in a settlement that requires sealing any court documents that describe actions of the government or government employees acting in a manner related to their jobs. No more cops strip-searching innocents and then hiding the evidence.

- ALL government programs must submit public itemized budgets. ALL OF THEM. The idea that nobody will know that we might be spying on them in this day and age is utter horseshit. The only exceptions will be ten percent of the War Department budget can be confidential for five years and one percent for twenty and that our intelligence services will have two hundred million dollars a year to spend in ways that will remain confidential for twenty years.

- Did anybody not catch that up there? The "Department of Defence" gets renamed "The War Department".

- The Congressional Record will contain nothing but actual statements spoken aloud to the room on the floor of the Congress. Appendices and such can be made available on a GPO site but will not be equivalent to actual CR statements.

- The word "Homeland" will be replaced in all government names. This isn't anybody's fucking homeland but the Indians.

- "Unemployment statistics" will be redefined to count all people NOT EMPLOYED.

- Whenever possible without infringing on content currently available for sale, all documents used in government hearings will be copylefted and made available on a GPO website.

- I will raise private funds to create a private organization whose job is to document every law in the U.S. into one publicly available, all pdf data archive. One year after this project starts they will move on to their real job. Teams of four will sit down with a given body of law and look for ways to replace long text with short text. They will institute a public bounty system for the discovery of conflicting rules and laws. Once a candidate for simplification is found, the team has one year to get that change on the ballot.


Deep Geeking - The clueless now run things. Brains are considered an embarrassment, actual serious thought even more so. No more. We will bring a systems approach to governance.

- All people elected to congress have for years been taking unofficial classes, usually paid for by lobbyists and organized by subsets of their political party. From now on anybody elected to any job must take a one month course in the structures, history, vocabulary, and instrumentalities of that job. Oh, and two days on statistics, the difference btween precision and accuracy, and how to judge bias in the media. Then another week on economics with a focus on the concept of utility. And rounding out the second month of training is a week on foreign culture and a week on world current events. The test taking and test scores will be public and no staffers are allowed to attend. Classes will be confidential.

- All American junior high schools and high schools will be required to give an exam that is a tougher superset of the one given to people applying for U.S. citizenship. Flunk the class, you flunk the grade.

- All government-funded jobs will be required to spend on each employee an amount at least equal to five percent of annual salary. The nature of that training will be subject to public review every five years. The materials for said training will, whenever possible be open sourced.

- A comprehensive review of electronic balloting will be carried out with the goal of reinstituting paper ballots.

- All government software and hardware usage will be reviewed and at best practical speed all government agencies are to convert to open source applications. Any agency wishing to be exempt must submit a public explanation of why they are continuing to use commercial software for any use beyond fifty seats and ten thousand dollars.
- All government agencies using or considering open source software will be given a budget equal to one tenth of their software expense in each of the past ten years. This funding will be used for bounties on improvements to OSS.

- A tax of one tenth of one percent will be assessed on all software costing over one thousand dollars or contract programming purchases above five thousand dollars. Half of this money will, as a "luxury tax" go into the general pool. The other half will be used to provide scholarships for U.S. citizens to study engineering.

- A five dollar tax will be assessed on all professional, legally required certifications, including MDs, licences to practice law, P.E.s, C.P.A. and notary licences, and so on. One third of this money will go into the general pool. One third will be used for creating and distributing open source educational materials on those subjects. One third will go to high school classes in those subjects.

- All government-owned and/or government-occupied buildings will be reviewed by the LEED Standard and will be given a budget equal to two percent of their assessed value to increase their LEED rating. Facilities managers will be given one week of training in green building practices and a reference library of books on the subject. Facilities managers will be encouraged to be experimental in their purchases and to use local suppliers. As better standards and better techologies become available, further iterations of this funding will be made available.

- An adjunct to the Peace Corps will be created with a highly specialized mandate. They are to do nothing but civil engineering. They will go to the worst pestholes in the world, drop in (with military support), build roads, bridges, toilets, water treatment systems, and homes. BUT all with local labor where possible, NO final systems that include machinery, electronics, most plastics, rebar, or any other things that require the existence of industrialized infrastructure to keep working.
We've discussed this before. No fifties-inspired superhighways. Five meter wide roads four meters deep built to last a thousand years. No complex engineering wonders requiring half the staff of Parsons-Brinkerhoff to make work. Twenty meter long bridges built of girders so huge you could park a row of tanks on it and surfaced in asphalt over steel plate over plastilumber planks with walkway built by local craftspeople. No fancy machines. No breakable parts. No megaprojects. Get in, build it in two or three months, get out.
If it can be done with local materials, good. Cob construction is our friend. Strawbale is our friend.
And the punchline of all of this? All of this is to be documented as they go to create open source techniques for civil engineering. It cost ten million dollars to build a footbridge over a highway near where I work. That is horseshit. With modern materials costs most government construction should cost far less than it does and if the techniques for doing this get documented, then the current Skidmore,Owings&Merrill/Halliburton/etc. bullshit will be shown up for the criminal fraud that it is.

- Provide a one billion dollar per year fund to buy rights of way, any rights of way, with an additional hundred million dollars a year to be used along those rights of way to build utility tunnels as specified here. (Same "Space Age Roman" link given above.)

- A tunnel will be built under the Bering Strait, allowing freight rail direct from Florida to Moscow. (This idea stolen from Stargoat.)

- A subscription to NASA Tech Briefs will be given to every high school, college, and engineering firm in America.

Encourage Idleness - Contrary to current public propaganda, the U.S. has a huge unemployed population. They just are considered invisible if they have some sad-ass part-time make work job, if they aren't "actively seeking work", or any of half a dozen other bullshit rationalizations. But this won't change. In fact, with robotics and off-shoring that number will probably increase. Fine, just get 'em the fuck out of the way of those of us who want to work.
Let's start with a link to the Big Dole JE.

- A tax of one half of one percent will be assessed on all "poured" beverages (sold for immediate consumption) with a per serving price above two dollars. One third of this revenue will go to the general pool. Two thirds will go to provide tax rebates for all restaurants, parks, cafes and other hangout spots open a median of thirty hours a week or more and providing customers, regardless of purchase, with seating, a free water fountain, and access to a bathroom.

Weirdness Is A Strategic Asset - It used to be that America took pride in the range of our opinions, took pride in the range of our behaviors. Not anymore. we live in the age of Standardization, and specifically in the age of government enforced standardization. That's certainly got its good side (things like nutrition labeling on food) but a lot of it is, as the politicos like to say, burdensome.

- All government regulations will be reviewed by a team modeled on Gore's Reinventing Government teams, but this time their job is to find every single government category of spec and make them available in one massive pool. These will then be reviewed for internal conflicts and all that conventional jazz but also, whenever possible replace performance-based specifications with results-based specifications. To those of you out there beyond our clueless shores, I'm proposing a shift from the America approach of absurd micromanagement to one closer to the German approach of far less detail and a more fluid, case by case approach. Simplify not just for the sake of clarity but to allow leeway for those who have found new or simply locally more appropriate ways to address their concerns.
Obviously one starting point for this is the building codes. Another is encouraging things like pollution credits.
The government needs to do its best to get out of the business of telling people what to do and focus more on why we wanted it done.

- Back in the sixties and early seventies a bounty crop of new colleges was created all over the industrialized world. Most of them failed, though some after flaring brilliantly. A few are still with us and now respected.
Any ten or more professors at any accredited college or university will be able to apply for a half million dollar grant to found a new college on the terms that they must be truly independent of existing schools, more than ten percent and less than fifty percent of hours of for-credit instruction must be done by instructors who in the previous ten years have not worked primarily as college level instructors, and the college must generate one open-source term-length curriculum per year.
Such colleges will qualify for $5K per-student-year subsidies for up to twenty full time students and $3K per-student-year subsidies for an unlimited number of full time students. All of this will be conditional on the created institution applying for and receiving accreditation within five years. Subsidies can be portioned out proportionately to part-time students instead of full-time ones.

Other Policy Positions:
- Institute a 0.2 percent Tobin Tax.

- Cut all funding to PBS, NPR, and other general audience content creation.

- Add a ten thousand dollar fee for any copyright extended more than thirty years after the death of the creator.

- Any U.S. battleship that can be brought back into service will be up to a maximum of five. This includes all new engines, gut rehab of the interiors where this rehab will not create major new running expenses or dependencies, and the filling of half of the newly-freed belowdecks spaces with bouyant solids. There are certain things that no weapon can do as well as a battleship and it is appalling that they are being allowed to rot.

- A fleet of twelve pykrete ice warships will be built, five aircraft carriers, five supply ships, two cruisers.

- Half of the nuclear missile sub fleet will be decommissioned with the goal of reducing our nuclear missile arsenal to fewer than one hundred missiles. After all, if everybody is so damn sure that terrorists can reach anywhere in the world with suitcase nukes, why can't we and what are we spending all those billions of dollars on?. And further, if everybody knows that nukes are insane then WTF is with our still going along with a MAD strategy anyway.
As the wargamers have long said, no nukes; make the world safe for conventional warfare.

- Each decommissioned sub will be stripped of its reactor and military-specific equipment. The resulting post-subs will be grouped in sets of four in undersea locations where they will be connected with tunnels, covered in several feet of high-strength concrete, and used as the core of undersea research facilities.
These facilities will be open to researchers from around the world, both to encourage science and to make sure that there are plenty of witnesses to a slow but steady ripping out and restructuring process meant to make them better buildings and ever less capable of being turned back to subs.

- Half of the staff of naval electrical storage contractors will be offered funding for three years to create new civilan battery companies on the condition that their work must not be classified. (For those of you who don't study these things, the batteries in torpedoes and other naval hardware have long been state-of-the-art. We're spending a fuckload of our best engineers in a crucial field who could be designing batteries for cars, laptops, off-the-grid systems, etc.)

- The V-22 program will be required to provide complete plans and access to teams from ten engineering schools, the European Space Agency, American Chopper, and Metric Revolution. Each team will prepare a report of suggested changes and the V-22 team will be required to defend. They've had twenty goddamn years to get that bird stable, it's long overdue that they stop for a year and spend some time going over their result.

And that's how we start.

-Rustin

.

Fear

Uncertainty

Doubt

Sara and I were just talking about FUD; not just Microsoft but IBM, General Motors, Thomas Edison about Westinghouse, and so on.
Seems to us that maybe the most important point that needs to be made when one is fighting FUD is that this has become standard procedure in much of the corporate world. It's not a contextless individual action. It's not an isolated decision by one entity. It is an inherent part of modern corporate culture, from liquified natural gas to frozen yogurt.

People keep fighting the particular examples. We need to, as Sara said, stop just cutting off the hydra's heads and start fighting the hydra. And to do that we need facts. Particulars. Buckets of 'em.

I want to put together a set of examples of FUD that aren't by the folks mentioned above.
Any suggestions?

-Rustin

I just got an email saying that one of my favorite bands has an expanded web site. So I'm sharing that knowledge with you.

Of course I've written about them here before but how could I resist another chance to promote such a, erm, spirited musical experience?

And yes, I admit it, part of the appeal is that some of them are frighteningly cute. You can't tell from the pictures but let me assure you that Marianne DeMarco makes Joey Lauren Adams look like Marty Feldman. I'd damn near marry that girl if I could ever get more than two successive sentences out of my mouth in her presence without sounding like a complete doofus.

-Rustin

p.s. Did I mention that she's a filmmaker? Or that she cofounded and ran my favorite film festival? or...

This past few weeks I've been working like a maniac, at least relative to my pathetic metabolism. Along with my normal baseload of clients and way too much computer time (have GOT to get product finished!), one of my most longterm clients is about to have her schedule completely change so she asked me to come by and do a last, vast blast of work in her apartment to accomodate.

We've gotten things donated (more to go; anybody wanna buy a Rollei slide projector?), gone through about forty bins of papers, reorganized all of the furniture in her office (that means two desks, one work table, fourteen file cabinets (now ten left), three small tables, a huge packing chest...), reorganized her computer setup (how the fuck does Gateway get away will selling two thousand dollar computers with PCI slots that don't work?), redone her hall storage (about half as much stuff as the office), and so on. And on. And on.
At one point Maggie was sorting through papers, a friend of mine was there to look at some closets and walls that need to be redone (my friend knows a relevant carpenter), two pissant high school kids were moving furniture (I didn't hire them - it's a long story), another friend was wandering around and asking questions, and I was trying to coordinate this whole megilla. Too bad I couldn't use cattle prods on the high school kids.

So after all of this I felt justified in going out and buying a few, as Interrobang would put it, "pieces of kit" lost in the fire that I still haven't replaced.

And I have done a scary thing.

Ya see, of all the stuff lost due to the fire, near the top was my beloved and indestructable messenger bag. I loved it. It could survive anything. It was huge, comfortable, looked neither cutesy-flashy (I hate all that brightly colored crap with three hundred useless buckles and pockets and whatever) nor hyper macho (see above but with ten pounds of "ballistic nylon", reliably in all the wrong places) nor the pathetic little toy bags sold by places like The Gap that are barely big enough for four or five reference books. Also no visible logos allowed and it has to look appropriate in a design office, a squat, and yuppie political meeting.
And no thick vinyl liner. Those things always crack, they weigh a ton, they're usually in violently bright colors, and they just feel ooshy. (It's a word if i say it's a word.)

So I've looked all over New York. I've looked online. (Did like these guys.)

So the day before yesterday I went out to buy some or all of what I'm still doing without and found an excellent bag. Cheap (seventy five bucks), huge, comfy, no gee-gaws. I bought it and am very happy.

There's only one thing. I didn't exactly find this at Tenba or a bike shop. I found it at, well, erm, uh, J.Crew.

And the bag? Well, it's, uh, plaid. A really dark plaid. But if you're within twenty feet it's unmistakably plaid.

My preppy childhood is coming out to haunt me.

It's just that, well, it's a really kickass bag. Huge, tough, light, everything I was looking for and more. I even had been hoping to find something with tasteful leather trim.

It's just that while part of me feels that what could be more geekish than to choose the right tool and completely dismiss social conventions as foolishness for mundanes and lusers, a bit of me can't believe that I've now got a bag bought right by the display of cashmere sweaters with frilly trim, just past the rep ties and linen pants.

Am I betraying the geek tribe?

Now, as it happens, there's a warped subtext to all of this. Ya see, that previous paradigm of kickassosity that served me so well? My hand-sewn, ultrablack, perfectly sized wonder of a bag? As it happens I bought it off of a former bike messenger back in '94 while we were chatting in the photo room. While we were both procrastinating instead of working at our jobs in the design department of ...


wait for it.


J.Crew.

Yep. Seems that good ol' Crew is my bag supplier of record.

Oh well.

Rustin

Speaking of geek stuff, y'all could, of course, drop by my geek stuff store. Or, equally of course, my totally shameless Reed & Wright swag store.

I suspect that you'll actually far prefer the geek stuff at my Zazzle store, especially, duh! the "/. addict" t-shirt. After all, you can spec whatever color, clothing type, etc. suits you. Only problem is that I haven't seen any of their product in the real world yet and I'm not sure how the printing will come out.

But hell, after all the promises I'd made back in '04 to do t-shirts that said, for example, "geeks: I want a beowulf cluster of those.", "ADD: I think about more things than you do.", and "yes, I am smarter than you." I decided to get my act together in late January and finish the PShop work, then create the sites.

General rule, btw, the screen shots suck nuclear rocks. Please do look at the largest view to get some idea of how these actually look. On top of that, the free version CafePress and Zazzle UIs are pretty doggone lame so, yeah, you've gotta scroll *way* down to find some of the best stuff.

I just ordered myself a Deep Geek messenger bag. Should be fun to have at trade shows. The CafePress Reed&Wright logo t-shirt (with the logo in the square) actually is very purty indeed. If I had the cash I'd print up fifty and send one to each of ya. Someday.
In the meantime, hey, George, sounds like you've a damn shitty week. Fuckers. Could the Howell household gain from a Reed&Wright t-shirt or whatever? Choose a thing, any thing, from one of the three sites, and it'll go your way, on the house.

Btw, thanks to all of you who were in those discussions way back when and especially to the inimitable Interrobang for staying on my ass about it and helping to perfect these little bits o' text.

Happy days,

- Rustin