Chromatic blogroll

I've added a blogroll of sorts to this blog. The positioning and coloring is based on the 'political compass' displayed in the upper left corner. The coloring is copied directly from the political compass for the four corners, and RGB-interpolated for the other five positions in my 3x3 grid. The left column of my 3x3 grid is in the left column of my blog template, likewise for the right. The center column I didn't quite know what to do with. For now I decided to place it in the center column under the blog entries. It's too obscure a placement for blogroll-type lists, but seemed for now more appealing than arbitrarily assigning it to either left or right, or putting it above blog entries, which shouldn't require navigating past much and should certainly be visible without pressing page-down or the equivalent.

Assigning blogs to pigeonholes of course is on a call-'em-as-I-see-'em basis. If anyone has complaints with their placement (where or if) they will be honored. Just send email to november-eight-charlie-hotel-zulu-at-yahoo-dot-ca.

Another likely 'sporadic E' event

Or it could be the fog. Morning of Thursday July 15, 2010 was hopping for ATSC (i.e. DTV) DX-ing from my QTH north of Detroit. Picked up the following stations:

• 11 WTOL Toledo CBS (+ 11.2 'News 11')
• 15 → 5 WEWS ABC Cleveland
• 17 → 3 WKYC Cleveland NBC (+ 3.2 weather radar)
• 23 ION, Qubo, ION Life (local Christianist station WUDT still logging as 8 → 23.1)
• 26 → 25, WVIZ Cleveland PBS (+ 25.2, 25.3, 25.4)
• 27 WBGU Bowling Green, OH PBS (+ 27.2, 27.3))
• 31 ION, same routine as channel 23, above.
• 34 → 61 WQHS Cleveland Univision

Antenna is a simple single 'bowtie' UHF antenna in the attic.

There were also those pregnant pauses suggesting the receiver really wanted to pull a signal out of digital channels 10, 12, 13, 20, 47 and 50

Anagorism as Neologism, or not

According to one "Flash Card Machine," anagorism means the following:

the point in the plot especially of a tragedy at which the protagonist recognizes his/her or some other character's true identity or discovers the nature of his situation

This is of course unrelated to my own formulation of anagorism simply as an antonym or negation of agorism. The 'original definition' of anagorism nevertheless has a spooky relevance to my own emerging consciousness concerning the inevitability of the agora, and all the inner conflict etc. arising from such realizations. In the interest of advancing the word anagorism as a sort of a meme, I've started using it as a tag.

The following is a parody:

Definitions

Agora

Greek word meaning “open marketplace”.

Agorism

the ideology which asserts that the Libertarian philosophical position occurs in the real world in practice as Counter-Economics.

Anagorism

the ideology which asserts that the Anti-authoritarian philosophical position occurs in the real world in practice with countermeasures against economics.

Anagorist

advocate or conscious practitioner of attempted end-runs around the so-called laws of economics, older terms include Communist and Socialist.

Economics Countermeasures

the intensive study of all licit and illicit economic activity with a particular interest in reverse engineering.

Libertarian

one who believes state intervention is the only possible enemy of Liberty.

Libertarian Left

activist, organization, publication or tendency which opposes parliamentarianism (electoral politics), defends Counter-Economists, and prefers alliances with radical and revolutionary tendencies to those with conservative ones.

Anagorist Left

activist, organization, publication or tendency which prefers alliances with radical and revolutionary tendencies to those with conservative ones, opposes parliamentarianism (electoral politics), defends non-market monkeywrenchers of the state and non-state monkeywrenchers of markets.

More definitions of konkinite terms...

More on Konkin...

Anagorism is revolutionary market-negative anarchism; distinct from both non-market anarchism and market anarchism.

In an anagorist society, law and security would be provided by radical transparency and the resulting mutual trust or mutual distrust as the case may be. Anagorists recognize that situation can not develop by working against the market, but they also realize that working within the market is a recipe for social rank. Instead, it will arise as a result of understanding how the market process does what it does, not blindly following its 'signals.'

As the state is banditry, counterrevolution culminates in the suppression of the criminal state by market providers of security and law. Market demand for such service providers, like all market demand, is need or desire, backed up by cash. Development of that demand will come from those with the resources to be in a position to be demanders in the economic sense (and thus need not turn to the state in its role as monopoly provider of security and law). That sector of the economy is the counter-economy – black and grey markets, which even in the actually-existing market economy are the domain of protection rackets.

The Tribal Anagorist

I once saw a bumper sticker that read: "I don't have anything against God&emdash;it's His fan club I can't stand." Substitute The Invisible Hand for God, and you have the way I've been feeling lately, to a point. To be glaringly honest, I must say I have never really been intellectually capable of not believing in the inevitability of the market mechanism. On the other hand, I have never been emotionally capable of being at peace with its implications. I want to believe that the market is a human invention rather than a force of nature, but I can't summon up enough suspension of disbelief to maintain that belief.

For the sake of argument, let's tentatively classify me as someone who accepts the market as a reality that isn't going away any time soon. As the gnostics have their "Hypostasis (i.e., reality) of the Archons," I'm burdened with the realization (gnosis) of the Hypostasis of the Agora.

In this blog post I would like to outline my current thinking on how best to pursue radical change with both freedom and equality in mind.

While I'm prepared at this point to give up on giving the Invisible Hand a bone-crushing 'bionic handshake,' I'm still determined at least to arm wrestle it to a draw. Human outcomes should be a negotiated compromise between the reality of the market and the hopes and dreams of humanity (or at least the present specimen thereof); prominent among those being freedom from precarity and the supplanting of competition by cooperation.

While solving the Calculation Problem may be theoretically impossible, I believe we may have sufficient information technology to uncloak the Invisible Hand; making it a visible hand. Even under main$tream economic theory, transparency is a prerequisite for a fully competitive market. I'm trying to build a collection of ideas on how to impose transparency on the world and to monkeywrench business models based on asymmetric information. Readers (if any) are encouraged to participate in this effort at the pubwan wiki. Even if the market ultimately turns out to be something we can't control, I'm nowhere near ready to accept is as something we can't understand, and I intend to understand it at a microscopic level of detail.

I reject as false the dichotomy between 'market economy' and 'centrally planned economy' (or more pejoratively, 'command economy'). I see no reason decentralization should be incompatible with economic planning. Wild Pegasus once ridiculed Participatory Economics as 'making Pol Pot look like a piker.' I see this as a gross overstatement. Although I'm not a peace with economic consumption requiring permission (apparently the case under Parecon), I'm equally not at peace with participation in production being a privilege. As far as I know, all pro-market views equate the 'a job is a right' thinking to what they call 'forced sales.'

So, while I can't with any intellectual honesty fully identify with the NMNS or non-market-non-state tendencies, neither can I have solidarity without reservations with the market socialist and related tendencies. I also refuse to jump on the 'post-left' bandwagon as I find rightist ideas such as the free market to be as inimical to social solidarity as statist institutions are to freedom.

Not so much as a middle ground, but as a reversal of stated priories, I will tenatively start labeling myself as MNNS (market-negative-non-statist). Basically I'm addressing the market mechanism as something inimical to my hopes and dreams, but that is theoretically impossible to dispense with. It occupies a position of contempt similar to that of entropy in my estimation. Maybe instead of 'anagorist,' you should call me 'agoraphobic.'

Re-thinking individualism

Came across Maxwell Despard's blog Protean Post-Left Nonsense while browsing profiles on Google. Attention zeroed in on the phrase 'altruistic individualism;' listed first among Despard's interests. Further search linked this term to Gandhi. This comes as a refreshing alternative to rugged individualism, regarded as synonymous with capitalism.

I've generally privately thought of myself as an individualist, but with some caveats, and a generally distancing of myself from self-identified individualism. Unlike the people usually associated with individualism, for whom every aspect of the human condition seems to revolve around a grand dichotomy between the private and public sectors (good and evil, respectively), I've recognized the relevant dichotomy as being between individuals (who I understand to be human beings) and institutions, by which I mean government, business, religion, family, culture, etc. Needless to say, I've run into some quandaries fine-tuning this formulation. Do institutions include organizations in general? My general inclination is to grant a sort of exception for organizations dedicated to both the individualist and anticapitalist causes, but is such an organization an example of a non-oppressive institution, or a non-institutional organization?

Exit strobe light, enter carnival barker

A few years ago, the trend in television advertising seemed to be montage designed to turn my television into a strobe light. I imagine you could kill someone with epilepsy that way. Later the strategy shifted to the audio spectrum, with commercials anywhere from 10-30 dB louder than the content shoehorned into the airtime between them. The decibel blast is still part of the strategy, but more and more, the 'voice roll' is becoming an almost universal feature of television and radio advertising. Salient features include wildly exaggerated inflection, exaggerated difference between loud and less-loud syllables, sustained vowels on 'key' words, the sustained tempo of the hypnotist or preacher. The keyest of the key words are of course the phrase 'Call now!' There also seems to be a tendency to a mid-south accent; along the lines of the 'Tennessee trader' stereotype.

This style of vocal delivery has always of course been characteristic of a certain ghetto of the advertising world; the infomercials, and the types of products that associate with that crowd— the too-good-to-be-true propositions, and the sales pitches built around pressing people's inadequacy buttons. Then of course it spread to the characteristically salesy industries which until recently were doing the strobe light thing—replacement windows and furniture. Maybe it's just my imagination, but the practice seems to be spreading to a larger and larger portion of all TV and radio advertising. Almost all radio advertising, in fact. Perhaps these things go in cycles, and once again the emphasis will be on flashing lights and whooshing noises. There is of course a sort of arms race between advertisers and we the people with our time-shifters, popup-blockers, and recently my rapid-fire trigger finger on the mute button. STFU, folkx!

Building the new allocative mechanism within the shell of the old

A rough outline of this schema was offered as a comment on Non-Monetary Coordination at the Angel Economics blog. That blog suggested use of an input-output matrix to model the processes of production and trace supply chains. My comment related some modeling ideas I've been tossing around over the years using graphs, Pareto optimality and a preference description language
I call 'maxhi schema.' I call this bundle of concepts pubwan. Pubwan was initially intended as a set of tools for studying and mapping the actually-existing economy by reverse engineering the mechanisms of market intransparency and asymmetry. Angel Economics, as proposed, has inspired me to envision applying these and other ideas to the much more difficult problem of modeling economic calculation itself.

My first suggestion was to start with a simple production process; organized around one person or some other small number. Identify the inputs and outputs of that process. This activity should be simple, step-by-step and replicable. A large number of people modeling a large number of processes in this way should start a discovery process that identifies, among other things:

• opportunities to link processes within the community of participants
• as a consequence, transparent, openly documented supply chains
• which processes can be implemented (i.e., which products can be produced) most cheaply in the economy under construction, relative to their prices in the actually-existing economy.

Note that prices from the actually-existing economy are used to initialize the model. It is hoped that prices in general can be phased out, but even if not, the creation of extreme transparency and a cooperative model of production would seem a worthy goal, even if liberation from the the price mechanism itself turns out not to be feasible.

A logical step to take after describing and modeling production processes is to actually implement them. This entails obtaining equipment and supplies, and documenting in detail where, when and at what cost these are obtained. Thus far, except for treating vendor transactions as nonproprietary data, we are describing the setting up of a place of business. The practice of 'business,' like the price mechanism, is something we would like to phase out, assuming we are good little anticapitalists. I should point out, of course, that my interest is experimentation. I would not be inclined to bar people from participation in the project based on their opinions. Here are some important differences between the quasi-business (QB) proposed here, and business-as-usual:

• We are starting with the assumption that all accounting information is nonproprietary, down to the resolution of individual journal entries.
• We are starting with the assumption that the relationship between such 'business' units is entirely cooperative, and not competitive.
• We are not trying to maximize profit, at least as a singular objective.

To some extent, these ideas have been adopted by actually-existing-capitalism, as 'B corporations,' 'open-book policies,' and 'multiple bottom line accounting.' One thing that is different about the QB is that the primary objective here is one of experimentation and data collecting, to see what happens. In particular, the third difference above, about goals other than profit, needs to be fleshed out. Here are some objectives to optimize early on:

• informational closure. By this I mean a preference for pursuing projects that have the potential to fill in informational gaps in the shared database.
• 'autarkic' closure, or the pursuit of relative self-sufficiency by the QB economy. This means seeking to minimize inputs from outside the community, or 'imports,' and a preference for pursuing projects to produce products identified as inputs (especially expensive inputs) of already implemented or modeled processes.

Once a number of closed loops are established within the QB economy, perhaps there will be opportunities to explore decentralized and democratic approaches to allocation of resources.

Slight change in Neighbor Works radio campaign

I couldn't help noticing that the ad copy at one point in Neighbor Works' "Questions Protect" radio PSA's changed from "predatory lenders" to "predatory mortgage lenders." I can only wonder whether this has something to do with the proposed car dealer loophole in the proposed legislation for a new consumer watchdog agency.

Suggestions for modeling non-monetary coordination in the Angel Economy

This was intented as a comment to Non-monetary coordination at Angel Economics, but it got too long to fit the 4KB size limit for comments.

I would like to add some modeling ideas for incorporation into the economic modeling paradigm offered as 'angel economics.' Basically, I am applying the ideas I have set forth as pubwan to the ideas described there.

First to address your information agencies. I see no need for institutional control of information. Your information storage and distribution can be the existing Internet, which hopefully can be made more resilient and independent of commercial activity. It would be good for the community of angels to hedge its bet by developing a parallel or alternative internet from the ground up, perhaps akin to Fidonet back during the era of bulletin boards. Given an internet, the information agency is essentially an open content database in which to store your input-output matrices.

The use of matrices to model production processes is reminiscent of Leontief's input-output model of the economy. You also seem to be advocating using matrices to model the information in a process sheet, focusing on one stage of production and cataloging inputs, outputs, equipment, perishable supplies. The method I propose also uses graphs to model processes. Consider each process as a graph node. Let's also consider people and things as graph nodes. Now draw a line from the process to each of the people and things involved in the process. The people involved can be marked as being members of a particular occupation or profession—more on this later. The things involved in a process include inputs, outputs, machines and fixtures, perishable tooling, etc. Each item should be cataloged using 'is a' and 'has parts' relations to help identify equivalent pieces as equivalent in spite of variations in nomenclature, spelling, etc. As the master graph gets filled in by more people marking up more processes, situations will self-identify where a particular type of object that is one process' output is another's input.

One way to start this project would be to spread the word about your idea of angel economics. Attract as many people (or angels) as you can. The first thing to ask of your participants can be to use matrices and graph nodes to model their own jobs. Hopefully their jobs aren't so monotonous that the whole workday isn't built around a single process operation. In any case any person's current actual job in meatspace should be able to be modeled by listing materials used in each on-the-job activity, as well as internal and external 'customers' dealt with, etc. Additional information to obtain from each participant would include jobs or trades they would be interested in learning, as well as any for which they are expert enough to teach. This lends itself to creating a many-to-many relation mapping participants with occupations, in which each instance of person-in-an-occupation can be preliminarily tagged as 'apperntice,', 'journeycritter,' or 'master.' Sure this brings rank, and potentially rankism, into the equation. Consider it the kind of 'authority' that implies expertise and nothing else. In the angelic social structure we are modeling of course, apprenticeship is more purely for the purpose of instruction, and undertaken without the usual emphasis on bondage, servitude, entry barriers and trade secrets. On-the-job training, of course can be seen as another process to be modeled.

The addition of nodes representing production processes will continually enlarge the database. It is expected that linkages between processes will be discovered in the process. Hopefully this will present a serious challenge to the idea of supply chain as proprietary information.

The next thing to ask of the participant-angels is to similarly model their leisure activities, or their consumption of goods and services. In terms of market-based theory of economics, this entails mapping out one's own 'utility function.'

Getting back to the idea of an information agency: The agency is the database. One activity in the maintenance of the database is closure-seeking. By this I mean the use of systematic methods to identify holes in the information. An obvious place to start is with objects identified as outputs but not as inputs, and vice versa. Wikipedia's most wanted articles feature is an example of a closure-seeking mechanism. Another closure-seeking mechanism for angel economics might consist of identifying products, processes and product destinations that are outside the system, so to speak. These could be thought of as imports and exports from the perspective of the angel economy. While I don't think autarky of production is a sane objective for any economy, I think autarky of knowledge would serve the cause of resilience.

Does all this mathematical modeling effectively replace price signaling? I'm guessing not; at least not in the early stages. Instead of redesigning economics on a blank slate, I would propose taking existing price signals as givens, for example for the purpose of deciding which market baskets are feasible for the purpose of utility mapping. Perhaps this scaffolding can be removed at some point; perhaps not.

This is a text

This is only a text. It is being posted to see whether the recent Blogger outage is really over. If you are reading this text, then it is possible to post text to Blogger from this place at this time.

C4SS questionnaire loaded

The Center for a Stateless Society, like many marketist groups, hosts a web-based Find Your Philosophy Quiz. As is par for the course with these quizzes, I can't find my philosophy in the quiz, precisely because the questions are worded in a way that excludes my philosophy.

7.

Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Strongly Disagree

Big business and government ordinarily work hand in hand, though one partner is sometimes more powerful than the other.

I would think at best they are missing an opportunity by not asking the respondents which (business or government) partner they perceive as more powerful.

44.

Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Strongly Disagree

You are obligated to accept someone’s positional authority only if you’ve consented to it, and even then only if that person asks you to do something that is not immoral.

In my view, if I accept someone's positional authority, it's because I've run out of options that don't involve authority. I refer to this process as resignation, not consent. This highlights profound and widespread controversy as to the definition of consent. If the C4SS were seriously interested in exploring the range of public opinion along several 'axes,' one of the more important and interesting ones would be the spectrum of understanding of what constitutes consent, or alternatively, views on what factors determine the scene of consent.

50.

Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Strongly Disagree

Ordinary workers lack the talents, skills, and temperaments they would need if they were to try to organize their work-lives and make managerial or executive-level decisions.

Here's a news flash. Some of us see managerial and executive level decisions as a net-negative. I pride myself on my lack of managerial background, just as I and other pride themselves on lacking a 'civil service' background. You can see this attitude even in pop culture. Those old enough to remember the TV show ER perhaps recall the kinds of resistance nurse characters and even doctor characters made against 'promotions' to managerial roles. Whether or not the stories are realistic, the fact that they are part of our popular culture says something about our national psyche.
Throwing in 'organizing their work lives' with 'mak[ing] managerial...decisions,' is of course an example of package dealing.

55.

Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Strongly Disagree

People who work at a large corporation or non-profit should be entitled to take it over if it is primarily supported by tax dollars or if it is wealthy because of markets skewed in its favor by government-granted privilege.

If they deleted the if clause from the statement, I would have 'strongly agreed,' without reservations. As stated, I have to decide whether an 'agree' answer will be interpreted as support for the idea of worker takeovers or as support for the idea that all unfair advantage (or privilege) has its origin in the public sector. A rhetorical question.

64.

Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Strongly Disagree

Self-employment or work as a member of a cooperative or partnership is generally preferable to working for a boss, all other things being equal.

More package dealing. Self-employment is seen as less preferable than employment-employment by many, for reasons I find perfectly understandable. Many are backed into self-employment by circumstance, and the self-employed on paper (1099 instead of W2) are de-facto temps, counted as business founders as yet another way of cooking the employment and business startup statistics. See for example:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/fridays-job-numbers-and-w_b_598520.html.
Cooperative economics is something I value in its own right, not only because it is an alternative to working for a boss, but more centrally because it is an alternative to competitive economics.
Partnerships are something I understand to be (by definition) an ownership arrangement, and therefore not a departure in any sense from capitalism, even actually-existing capitalism. Anderson Consulting was an example of a partnership.

69.

Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Strongly Disagree

Someone should be able to homestead land and acquire title to it when the legal owner doesn’t cultivate or otherwise use it for a reasonably long period.

No consistent answer available to someone who believes in squatting but doesn't believe in land titles.

70.

Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Strongly Disagree

Someone who is using her own possessions or is using the possessions of others to which she has voluntarily been given access should be subject to no legal penalties for distributing any text, image, or sound she likes.

They're effectively asking whether I favor censorship, or favor freedom of the press being for those who own one. Another loaded question.

92.

Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Strongly Disagree

True monopolies cannot exist in a free-market economy and ours is a free market economy, so no true monopolies exist in our economy.

As a matter of principle, the word 'and' should be avoided in questionnaires of this type.

96.

Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Strongly Disagree

Wealthy people often use their influence over the government to gain legal privileges for themselves and take resources from poor, working class, and middle class people.

True. They also of course use the built-in advantages inherent in wealth itself.

101.

Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Strongly Disagree

When people work in sweatshops, it’s often because violence engaged in or tolerated by the state has made it hard for them to support themselves in other ways.

Sweatshop labor is a by-product of economic desperation and little else. Yet I hesitated to answer 'disagree' as I feared I would be interpreted as viewing such work as 'voluntary.'

Plain English Glossary

Plain English Glossary

Often we generate more heat than light because we are reading from different dictionaries. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the so-called marketplace of political ideas. Take the word liberal. In terms of what Rush Limbaugh means by liberal, I'm a flaming liberal, while in the sense of what the Economist (magazine) means by liberal, I'm a flaming antiliberal. Then there is the related term 'libertarian,' which somehow during the 20^th century (in America, at least) morphed from being (among other things) an anticapitalist movement to being (among not many other things) a laissez-faire capitalist movement. Libertarians in the American sense (henceforth called litas in this blogentry) cherish markets and liberty, while they disparage egalitarianism and collectivism. My own attitudes are largely the opposite, in spite of very real common ground. My purpose here is to provide a small list of words that are especially prone to multiple connotations, and explain my understanding of what they mean, along with my understanding of the litas' understanding of what they mean. I generally prefer to use words in whatever way is most consistent with what the words mean in everyday, non-jargony English.

market

The pencil-and-paper science called economics conceives of a 'market' as a category of product or service, and that portion of the population who either buy or sell that product or service. This 'market' can be described in terms of a supply curve and a demand curve. It's really all quite abstract. To me, and to many if not most, 'market' is a verb, as in: "In the new economy, you have to market yourself." Market is also, of course, a noun: "I have to go to the market and replenish my supply of cat food." The verb usage of market has the most bearing on my social/political/economic worldview. In my experience, the more 'market oriented' the political climate gets, the harder I have to [expletive deleted] sell, sell, sell myself to get a job offer on the table. I definitely associate market-oriented policy with economic precarity, if not hardship. Maybe that just means I'm a loser, but that's how I feel.

equality

The snarkiest voices among the litas and other rightists frame equality as something that comes in precisely two distinct forms, which they call equality of opportunity and equality or results. The former is possible, if not inherent, in the frictionless plane that is the unfettered market, while the latter is theoretically impossible, and as a stated goal is a symptom of the psychological disorder called sense of entitlement. They love to ridicule it with Diana Moon Glampers jokes or by implying that it implies people being identical. I recognize a third sense of the word equality, characterized by the very widely understood notion of an equal footing. I understand this type of equality to be somewhat broader than the narrow sense of equality of opportunity that seems to imply a society free of de jure privilege. It requires the (to me) more ambitious goal of a society free of de facto advantage. This is in no way equivalent to equality of results.

What does it mean to be on an equal footing with another party? I think most people know intuitively what it means. It means nobody has your head over a barrel. It doesn't mean getting everything on your terms, but it does mean you have enough clout, game, or whatever, to negotiate a compromise in which the other party doesn't, either. Expressions like 'market leverage,' varying degrees of 'duress,' 'boilerplate contracts,' 'getting taken advantage of,' and 'monopoly' are very common figures of speech, even though the litas perform much derivation to demonstrate their theoretical impossibility. Everyone understands what they mean, and that understanding comes from very routine personal experience. Certainly it's possible for the conventional wisdom to be wrong, but I find it to be a more ready guide than theoremsies derived from assumptions such as a universe in which the only economic goods that exist are eggs and root beer.

freedom

Litas love liberty (the 'l' in litas stands for libertarian, after all) and they love the word liberty. I love liberty. What self-respecting person doesn't? It turns out that in recent years I have been more and more reluctant to self-identify with liberty. The liberty equals negative liberty meme has been pounded so relentlessly, at least on the Internet, that I've been conditioned to think of liberty as a basically right-of-center concept. People on my side can and should, of course, remind me not to let our adversaries steal our issues and hijack the language in other ways. I agree, but there is some practical value in ceding the field in spite of my better judgement. Navigate down any blogroll infused with blognames like liberty this, liberty that, CamelCaseLiberty, whatever, and you'll find a rogues gallery of the usual suspects; Birchers and other conspiracists, litas, agoraphiles and other FMF's, as well as a bumper crop of Republicans. Including the word 'liberty' in my blog name would simply create the wrong impression, and would put me in company I don't want to be associated with. So, for better or for worse, the colloquial meaning of 'liberty' has successfully been massaged to rightist specifications. This sort of poisoning of a word is not uncommon. The 20^th century variety of communism fetishized the word people so much with their people's republics and people's liberation armies, that almost reflexively, seeing a sign that said something like 'People's Pharmacy,' my first thought would be, 'I wonder if it's run by communists.' Likewise with the word family and Bible-based Christians.

What about 'freedom?' To the litas, freedom means nobody is holding a gun to your head. It's become quite a cliché. I think of freedom as 'play,' in the mechanical sense, that is, some part is free to move along more than one axis. Analogous is the mathematical idea of degrees of freedom. In this spirit, freedom of action is far more precious than freedom of expression. Freedom of conscience is more precious than freedom of belief. In Plain English, economic freedom is synonymous with the phrase 'set for life.' To the litas, of course, economic freedom means freedom to fail. At least that freedom is universal. I've been trying to popularize the idea that economic freedom means freedom from economics.

capitalist

In Plain English, capitalists are people who are in business for themselves. It's a functional, not an ideological, term. Practicing capitalists, in general, don't mind having the government as a customer.

collective

The ultimate dirty word among the litas, it's not really part of everyday English. Perhaps its most widely recognized usage is collective bargaining. 'Individual bargaining,' or negotiating one's own wages (and of course terms of employment) without representation, is asymmetric. The other side has legal representation, as the job application and other signable documents are professionally-drafted boilerplate. It is also important to note that the other side (the employer) is in almost all cases a collective entity.

Rand Paul and civil rights

Much is being made of the fact that Rand Paul's position on civil rights laws prioritizes property rights over civil rights. This is a well-known feature of the Libertarian Party platform, and the American variant on libertarianism in general. That this was drawn out of Dr. Paul by a blogger rather than a journalist comes as no surprise. With the main$tream media, zero exposure for third party movements is obviously an editorial policy. More troubling is that even the progressive media are discussing the public accommodations aspects of Dr. Paul's troubling priorities, rather than the much higher stakes issue of employment non-discrimination. The consumer marketplace is considerably easier to negotiate than the job market, the customer always being right, and all.

The Ultralight Society

David Brin writes of what he calls the 'diamond-shaped society;' shape in this case being the shape of the socio-economic structure of society. This is proposed as an alternative to the 'pyramid-shaped society,' which is very small at the top and very large at the bottom:

Ever since human beings discovered metals and agriculture, nearly all complex civilizations shared a common structure, a hierarchy of privilege reminiscent of a pyramid, with a super-empowered few on top, directing the labors of obedient masses below. Across 4,000 years and nearly every continent, aristocracies (and the clerics who preached on their behalf) colluded to ensure that the ruling oligarchy would stay on top.

The 'diamond' configuration is wide in the middle and small at both top and bottom. This represents a society dominated by its middle class:

The so-called "American Dream" represents a radical departure from this near-universal theme. Our ideal of a middle-class society is best pictured as a flattened diamond… with a few people getting rich by providing honest goods and services, but the vast majority living not far below this elite in comfort, education, and even political clout. In such a society, a respected millionaire will have earned his or her wealth personally—by helping engender competitive services, solutions and products—rather than just inheriting it.

Below the middle class, numbers are supposed to narrow again. (Hence the diamond shape.) If we must cynically accept that “the poor will always be with us,” then they should be few—sporadic unfortunates who have fallen temporarily, due to bad luck or perhaps bad habits. Either way, society ought to be able to lend a hand so they can rise up again. Or if not them, certainly their children.

I have a number of problems with this:

• I'm not willing to cynically accept that the poor we will always have with us. My political economy agenda is to prove Jesus wrong on that particular prophecy.
• While poverty may be more avoidable in the diamond configuration than in the pyramid; it is a more humiliating experience in the former. Combined with America's cultural tendency toward 'kick-em-when-they're-down,' this could be a positively hellish experience.
• When poor people are a tiny voting bloc, the interests of poor people are especially poorly represented.
• I've been rebelling against middle class social norms for most of my life. Likewise, I reject the popular notion that the middle class is uniquely qualified to implement democracy and other forms of accountability.

These objections raise the question: What social geometry is palatable to me? The mandate to abolish poverty necessitates a form that is not in contact with the ground. The socialist (yeah, guilty as charged) ideal of a 0.5 Gini coefficient is exemplified by a zero-thickness or planar object, such as a horizontal sheet of paper. So, the ideal social geometry is a sheet of paper hovering above the ground. Perhaps a small amount of equality can be traded for some efficiency by folding the sheet into a paper airplane. Unfortunately, every glider must run aground sooner or later. It's a point I must concede for the sake of realism, in spite of my distaste for the hacks and snarks at the American Petroleum Institute and similar astroturfs who delight in such dismalities. In the spirit of the dismal science, we now attempt to negotiate a tradeoff between the fact that we insist on a poverty-free-society, and the Iron Law to the effect that energy-consumption-driven technologies (such as the steam engine) are an apparent prerequisite for the development of a mass middle class; a 'middle mass.' For the sake of sustainability, efficiency should be heavily emphasized over power in this tradeoff; hence the ultralight society.

More mixing board shenanigans at Clear Channel's WDTW AM

Said station is billed as "Detroit's progressive talk," which is fair enough, given that it is the local outlet for some fraction of Air America Radio's feed, about half even carried live, as well as Thom Hartmann live, Ed Schultz on 3-hour delay, and even, giving truth to the "Detroit" part of "Detroit's progressive talk," the locally-produced Fighting for Justice. The latter is paid-for content; technically an infomercial. This week (Nov. 1) at the appointed 10:00 AM time, right after the hourly (gag) CNN Radio News brake, we hear about a minute or so of Fox Sports Radio content, some chitter-chatter about football, it seems. Pre-emption of progressive talk programming by sports programming is par for the course on WDTW. Over the years this has been for live game coverage, as with the basketball team formerly known as the Detroit Shock, in past seasons the EMU football team, Oakland University men's basketball, currently U. of Toledo football, etc. These pre-emptions have always been handled in the crudest devisable manner; unannounced, often breaking in mid-sentence, and very often preceded by studio weirdities such as two concurrent streams in a 50-50 mix, minutes at a time of "dead air" (illegal under FCC rules, unless that too has been deregulated), muzak® or the generic equivalent replacing either commercial breaks or news breaks, and other forms of signal degradation one can only assume are meant to piss off the core "progressive talk" audience, or at least serve as a reminder that the progressive talk community is dependent on the imperious Clear Channel as distribution channel in many if not most markets. Lately, in addition to live sports coverage, there has been an increasing amount of sports talk, such as the NASCAR talk show that pre-empts the second hour of the Ron Reagan Show on Tuesdays, and a talk show boosting U. of T. football overwriting the first hour of the same program Monday nights. Last Thursday, they broke in with about a five minute snippet of the UT booster show over Reagan's show. Perhaps the sloppy audio editing is due to incompetence rather than contempt. It requires less suspension of disbelief, though, to imagine that a typical WDTW listener (who by now is of course conditioned to expect this sort of treatment), when hearing a sports pre-emption at the beginning of "regularly scheduled programming" to simply tune out on the assumption that the whole show has been bumped. This would make sense as a strategy of de-promotion of a radio program. Ed Schultz, for one, points out the difference between a local affiliate that promotes progressive content and one that simply puts it on the air for interested listeners to "discover." On the other hand, Clear Channel certainly uses WDTW to promote its "sister station," of course a sports-talk station, WDFN, "The Fan." This is fair game when done through the usual channels of commercial breaks, but 2-3 weeks ago, on the occasion of the premiere of yet another do-it-yourselfer or "honeydew" themed show over on WDTW, a half hour of that show was broadcast in a 50-50 audio mix with the first half hour of Free Thought Radio. My point here is, the not-so-subtle unprofessionalism in engineering at WDTW points in not-at-all-subtle editorial directions.

Ed Schultz and others have of course pointed out that broadcasting is a business, and that a talk show is best operated on a for-profit basis. I have no argument with that, as economic independence is a pre-requisite for editorial independence. It is necessary to point out, however, that editorial independence is likely as not the currency in which economic independence is paid for. There has been much discussion concerning what changes in FCC policy would best facilitate editorial diversity and independence. The equal-time provision of the long-defunct Fairness Doctrine comes up often, but with little support even among progressives given its bureaucratic division of airtime between both sides of the aisle, and the implicit assumption that there are exactly two sides to every issue. Challenging the oligopolistic nature of the media market via anti-trust laws is another idea that gets much airtime, but with little to no editorial contrast between the five or so major players in Big Media, what reason is there to believe that 10, 15 or 20 medium-large corporations would collectively be less dumbed-down, controversy-shy, or deferential to power? The relationship between a medium-small talk show operation or other content provider, and a medium-large radio network or holding company, would still be basically asymmetrical. The former would still need the latter more than the latter the former, and I think our audio traffic would still get shat upon in the various ways outlined above. For this reason I have more optimism about Thom Hartmann's strategy of distributing his show to nonprofit (including Pacifica!) stations, and Free Speech TV. The distribution of progressive content, like its creation, must become a bottom-up process. The change in broadcast rules that is really necessary is the lowering of the entry barriers to broadcast station ownership, especially for low-power stations. Even given a politically-unlikely (as in politically unfeasible) return of some spectrum to low-power broadcasters, it appears media other than Internet are a lost cause for non-commercial or controversial content. The advertising-driven business model of traditional media is simply too aggressive to allow for independent journalism, let alone critiques of the primacy of business in society. The Internet is probably the last hope for grass-roots communication. I am less optimistic about the Internet's potential for true grass-roots communications than I was when I first encountered it in the early 1990's--a much more "innocent" period in its development. Nevertheless, the entry cost of being "published" in some meaningful sense (at least until one manages to attract a substantial audience) is still effectively zero, even for someone not milking their site for ad revenues, and even server-side netizenship (self-hosting) is within reach of a typical upper middle class household, or even a thrifty lower middle class individual. So, I think net equity is a far more important issue than any of the issues surrounding incumbent (or traditional) media. The digital divide is also very real, and is something which must be addressed.

n	n+1	φ(n)=φ(n+1)
1	2	1
3	4	2
15	16	8
104	105	48
164	165	80
194	195	96
255	256	128
495	496	240
584	585	288
975	976	480
2204	2205	1008
2625	2626	1200
2834	2835	1296
3255	3256	1440
3705	3706	1728
5186	5187	2592
5187	5188	2592
10604	10605	4800
11715	11716	5600
13365	13366	6480
38804	38805	19008
39524	39525	19200
46215	46216	22464
48704	48705	24320
49215	49216	24576
49335	49336	21120
56864	56865	28416
57584	57585	27840
57645	57646	25920
64004	64005	32000
65535	65536	32768
73124	73125	36000
105524	105525	47520
107864	107865	52992
123824	123825	60480
131144	131145	59904
164175	164176	79200
184635	184636	89280
198315	198316	96768
214334	214335	103680
215775	215776	97920
256274	256275	126720
286995	286996	142272
307395	307396	142560
319275	319276	151200
347324	347325	168000
388245	388246	172800
397485	397486	190080
407924	407925	181440
415275	415276	188160
454124	454125	206400
491535	491536	237600
524432	524433	258048
525986	525987	261360
546272	546273	266112
568815	568816	279936
589407	589408	290304
679496	679497	336960
686985	686986	336960
840255	840256	397440
914175	914176	456960
936494	936495	427680
952575	952576	468480
983775	983776	483840
1025504	1025505	504576
1091684	1091685	483840
1231424	1231425	604800
1259642	1259643	604800
1276904	1276905	583680
1390724	1390725	635040
1405845	1405846	642528
1574727	1574728	768000
1659585	1659586	826560

Quotations with links

"I found out I would rather be a brat and take whatever I got than lose my identity. I learned that you could be screaming and begging and curled up in a corner, and still in your head be thinking about your next move. I learned that there was a part of you, if you could keep it for yourself, that would not listen to fear. I learned that if you got angry enough, nothing mattered anymore."--chaotic idealism

"It is far easier for employers and hucksters to ally with ISPs than it is for the little people to maintain the needed gossip flow. ISPs are employers and hucksters too."--Altoid

"The need for human labor is minuscule now, and most jobs are created merely to keep as many people off the streets as possible--not because their labor is needed, but so they can be credit-worthy consumers. Given our global material abundance and overcapacity, what we need now more than anything are consumers, not laborers, but we lack the imagination and will to create a system which accepts and deals fairly with this fact."--Jim Dator

"Imagine yourself having grown up using your fingerprint as proof of who you are, and giving it to every corporation that asks for it. What kind of person would you grow up into? Probably just a person who thinks that biometric scanning and the use of personal information by corporations is just the way things are. Let's turn it around... you have grown up in this world. You grew up in a world where various forms of institutions control your birth, education, work, leisure and death. Can you think of a single activity in your life that is not mediated by a corporation or institution?"--jason

"What would happen if we stopped compromising, stopped playing their game altogether and concentrated all our efforts on creating channels of our own for spreading ideas in new ways? "--CrimethInc

"One of my classmates said something the other day in regard to the march in Cincinnati entitiled 'Way of the Cross, Way of Justice' that I have been thinking about ever since. In effect her comment was 'Why march against poverty, who isn't against poverty?' But the first thing I said was 'if you need people to work for a dollar an hour so that you can sell your goods it is in your interest to have a destitute population from which to draw a work force.' Thus there may not be open advocation of poverty but support for a pure free market is really a hidden argument for social Darwinistic ideas that poverty is a necessary element of economic growth."--David Kowalski

"Have we gone from conspicuous consumption to conspicuous thrift, without going through humility and frugality along the way?"--Martin Laplante

"This rhetoric of liberation has led many a talented and idealistic young person to believe that coding, especially for free, is a political statement. In the guise of an anti-establishment, scrappy, can-do underdog attitude, [Lawrence Lessig], [Kevin Kelly] and their colleagues have created an environment in which well-intentioned people really believe that the commercialization of friendship by Facebook is a democratizing force, that it's progressive for technology entrepreneurs to make billions from the work of artists who get nothing, and that posting book reviews on Amazon and movie reviews on Amazon-owned IMDB is contributing to a public good. In which otherwise intelligent people believe that Google and Twitter are somehow morally different from Microsoft and Wal-Mart because their employees are younger and because they use phrases like 'radical transparency' without living up to them."--Tom S.

"A guest speaker in one of my classes many years ago made the observation that banks are for businesses and credit unions are for people."--boehmian rhapsody

"People that want leadership positions shouldn't have them."--The Meek

"I'm leaving the Democratic party if we don't get the public option. And if things keep getting worse I'll just quit voting altogether. Don't think for a second I'm the only one feeling this way, either. There's no point in fighting for people whose only promise is that you'll be less screwed under them than the Repugs."--djtyg

"Physical reality is coercive: there is only so much of any physical thing to go around. Complaining that one or another economic philosophy is 'coercive' is pointless."--The Raven

"In fact, the G8 leaders used current economic concerns to fail to agree on long-term [carbon reduction] goals. Faced with a choice of 'your money or your life,' our leaders have some pretty skewed priorities."--DJ

"Fuck off and die if you've got a problem with me being angry at oppression and oppressors!"--drakyn

"What fascinates me is the extent to which we have allowed the new media to eliminate the freedoms that we had, in the time of videotape, audio cassettes and early computer disks. True, copyright piracy is (generally) bad. But the bloody inconvenience and blithering incomprehensibility of simply using a modern DVD player to watch a film that you already own - let alone record an episode of NOVA - it is why I keep three VCRs in the house, still."--David Brin

"My experience with Alcoholics Anonymous has been that a lot of the people in the meetings smoke. If 12-Step is such a wonderful program and can keep you from drinking why don't these people us the same program to stop smoking?"--admin

"Moooving on ... I was hanging out in the university library the other day and found some cool stuff on teamwork. Now personally I am opposed to teamwork, because it involves other people and cannot be performed individually. However, I am in the MBA program, and teamwork is all the rage."--Christine

"The Revolutionary act is the orchestration of the disappearance of power. Power, like truth, is the empty place you must know how never to occupy, but that you must know how to produce so that others will be swallowed up in it; a strategy of intelligent subversion would also be to avoid aiming directly at power, but rather to force it into occupying the obscene position (power that insists on occupying this place, power that incarnates power, obscene and impure, and sooner or later collapses admist blood and ridicule) - force it into the position of absolute obviousness. For it is there that, mistaking itself for real, it falls into the imaginary - its there that it no longer exists to violate its own secret."--bioæsthetic

"That top 1% should be very afraid of those with nothing left to lose. Howard Hughes was probably smart rather than crazy."--Suzon

"And personally, I despise sales or any kind. Some people like it, some people don’t. I despise it. If I had to do any sales work of any kind, I would be on welfare. YOu don’t take a fish, put him on a bicycle and expect him to be thrilled."--Uppity Woman