Another NCNW camp has come and gone, and I was right there in the middle of it all, helping to make it happen. Some patterns emerge...

In the months leading up to it, I was all too aware that the organizer's group was too thin, we were too few to create such an ambitious undertaking. My greatest fear was that we would break ourselves against the task, only to have it blow up in our faces and go sour. Which didn't happen. The center held, we pulled it off, and mostly people feel good about our accomplishment.

For me, I'm reminded of the weeks and days leading up to the WTO demonstrations, and how long it took me in the aftermath to feel good about what we'd done: When the project is bigger that the person, it's not easy to look it over and choose parting words.

I *do* feel good about what I've done, what we've done, I just wish I could see more impact. It's not that the effort was wasted, it's more like taking that hill was more expensive than we'd imagined it would be.

My mind can't seem to lurch out of the battlefield metaphors. I find myself thinking that if the right people and the right situation emerge, you can create blooded troops without them having to have killed or died. Weird, eh?

Instead of these michelin man spacesuits, something that shows off the physique of an athlete:




from the American Museum of Natural History

Lately I've been playing some video games. The deep role playing games that tell a fairly large story- every character you see seems to have some kind of back story. With the Mass Effect games, you can even play some of that back story, as a side track to the main drama. It's kind of cool.

It's almost like a kind of fractal tree of narrative. The main thrust of the story is easy to describe: save the galaxy from the reaper threat. That's a pretty big one, and clearly the main thread that you are expected to attend to. But plenty of smaller threads also invite your attention: help a jellyfish critter practice freedom of religion, deliver a package to a destination, help out a former team mate, investigate cerebrus...

It reminds me of how I try to make sense of the 'real' world outside, and the way the media tries to shape that picture I have. If there's a story that threatens to get too big, too interesting, then I expect the main channels to find some other tiny facet that's suddenly very important. Celebrity lifestyles are always rich ground for that sort of thing if it's an otherwise slow news day.

Occupy wall street doesn't seem interested in taking up that bandwidth, except to ask bigger questions. If the infrastructure we use for solving problems can't be trusted, then that becomes a big problem to solve right there. Whether it's oil pollution, fracking wells, radiation fallout, or global warming, none of those things can be addressed with a political system so deeply crippled by money.

I like how George Lakoff puts it: Define your own frame, don't let others do it for you
When I think of my own shopping list for what needs to change, it could easily take on a fractal drama shape: the main trunk of the tree is learning how to live with each other on the planet in a way that can persist beyond the next economic downturn. Side branches from that have to do with communities- queer, poly, geeks, spiritualists - with something to teach the rest of the world, and finding our voices with each other. And way out here on my own little leaf of the branch of the tree, is how to get my own individual needs met when I don't yet really know how to communicate with the dominant species of this planet.

Thinking of it all as a fractal doesn't make the question any easier to frame- but I think it can avoid some trivial distraction. It's something to remember next time some instant celebrity comes on and tries to interest me in their personal life.

Several years ago, (2006? Yikes!) I came back from burning man and saw all the corrugated plastic signs on the side of the road and said to myself, "This is a wasted resource, it should be built with". And I gathered up a bunch of them and discarded the lumber elements and used only the cut signs.

...which made perfect sense to me at the time. The job then was domes, and to have used the sticks would have meant sawing those sticks with annoying precision into weird angles, and I was all about using the carpet knife. So I used a special kind of expensive tape to hold it all together.

...and then I got discouraged and distracted and gave up for a while, and managed to forget my enormous stockpile of around 400 signs I had stacked up in the back yard.

But then somewhere along the line I stumbled onto the hexayurt and it got me to thinking about using those signs for something again.

And I really started to kick myself for having burned up all those sticks as firewood. I realized that if I designed the thing correctly, I could make a shelter out of nothing except the sticks and panels and screws that came off the signs themselves.

The first version took the better part of a week to bang together. I had gone to the hardware store to buy new wood, but then chickened out when I saw they wanted $1.50 per stick! Instead, I bought a bunch of furring strips for about twelve bucks. they are as long and as wide as the sign posts, just not as thick.

the mark 2 shed took two days to build. I could have done it in one day, except I ran out of sign material and had to go gather stuff. both the mark 1 and the mark 2 I took to Occupy Seattle to show them off and hopefully give people ideas. I don't know if either are still standing now.

And somewhere in all of that I came down with a cold, and I just couldn't get out there like I wanted to. And the election came and went, and just when I wanted most to be zipping around scooping up road spam, I was home resting. Yesterday I tried to go out and gather signs, but the weekend had passed and the political volunteers had got there before me. My total haul was something like 6 signs.

That's OK. I have enough material to build a mark 3 if I want. And it was a really good lesson in design. I thought I could bang together something that would work in the field and be easy to move. But it's harder than it looks! Each piece of wood needs at least 2, often 4 precision cuts if they are to go together smoothly. While I'm happy to do that in my nice dry garage, I don't know how much fun that will be for someone on out there on their own.

if this idea were to catch on, it might involve a group of do-gooders gathering the signs, taking them back to a shop and fabricating a bunch of sheds at once, and then going out and deploying these things where they'd be useful. Which is a bit bigger than a one man operation. (not that much bigger. three people could do a *lot*)

There may yet be a no-saw design waiting to be discovered. If all you needed was to drill a few holes, this could be done out in the rain by one person by themselves. I just need to re-think the geometry some more.

And it sucks that I don't have any pictured to post. The object I'm talking about is the size of a tent, there's room to stretch out on the diagonal, and almost enough to stand up. without a coat of oil paint to cover up the graphics, it's ugly as hell. But then, that's part of the point, to embarrass the political class.

I've got the blueprints all in my head, though. Maybe next time I can get someone with a camera to follow along.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZU3wfjtIJY&feature=youtu.be#t=21m26s

here's the nutshell version:


1) from 1820 to to the 1970s, wages go up, productivity goes up.

2)Since 1970, productivity continues to rise, but buying power stays flat.
a) Even in the great depression, wages went down, but so did prices. That's not happening this time.

3)Result? Profit! it costs less to make things, but the entrpeneur class gets to pocket the difference.

4) One consequence of that, is there's lots of money for them to sink into the political system.
b) CEOs begin to think that they are geniuses, and award themselves huge

bonuses... which don't stop when the company does badly.

5) On the wage earner's end, there are two responses:
a) we begin to borrow at an unprecidented scale.
b) we work more hours than any other industrialized country.

So, if you are a business that's big enough to matter, the last 40 years have been great, and there's no reason to want to change things. But if you are working for one of these companies, you are working harder and are deeper in debt than at other time in history.

Fast forward to 1:10:46, here and he begins to talk about ways to make things better.

where do you stand in the class struggle?


I had read that "top one percent" really is only a symbolic marker. the people who *really* run the show, the ones who wield the most control- they are more closely the top 1/2 of 1%. Though it's hard to imagine any serious disagreements erupting between the 99.5%ers and the 99.9%tile.

What I found surprising is my own meteoric rise up the social class ladder. Just 5 years ago, my income was in the lower 14% of American households. A brief windfall put me in the 30% for a couple of years, and I was able to play for a bit, and eventually move in with someone in the 35% slot.

But I notice that my spending habits and my attitudes are still quite a bit different from my housemates. And I have to wonder how much of it stems from family history, especially, how much money we grew up with.

This year at worldcon I spoke to someone who admitted quite freely that she votes in her own best financial interest. If a measure comes up that impacts her income, she'll vote in the way that maximizes it. And I was stunned at how simple she made it sound. It still sticks in my mind, the implications of that statement.

Now, being a fiscal conservative doesn't mean that one is a social conservative as well. Just because she votes her pocketbook doesn't mean that she'll necessarily vote against the gay right to marry, for example. And it's hard to imagine any sort of measure coming up in her ballot box that would let her directly steal from the people below her on the income scale.

Indirectly, though, I think it sends a message. When an Oakland cop is throwing grenades at people, he's responding to social pressure that's built up over many years- this is how hard we are supposed to protect the social order- no matter how morally indefensible that social order may be.


I'm also thinking about this guy- who, before #occupy came to town, probably never had a reason to consider his role in the food chain.

These are the conversations we need to be having with each other. Otherwise I can't blame the 1% for ignoring the rest of us.

I'm starting to notice the occupy wall street movement being called, "leaderless". And that's an easy concept to misunderstand. If the movement can get the work done without singular personalities rising up and shaping the dialog, that's a good thing. But if people then assume that they don't need to exhibit leadership in their own behavior, then wall street has nothing to fear from this mob.

There's a lively debate right now around the drumming circle
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/10/25/141688703/occupy-wall-street-drummers-generate-loud-debate

And if the general assembly can demand quiet from its own membership and be ignored, what does that say about their clout outside the park?

Sound pollution doesn't show up the same way that litter and smoke and raw sewage shows up on film, so it's usually ignored, treated as a cost of doing business with the alternative crowd. But it alienates people who want to more than dance.

When supposed grownups try to teach kids not to do drugs, or not to have sex, their credibility vanishes if they don't acknowledge that sex and drugs are fun. If you or i manage to find a happy relationship with these influences where we're not doing as we're told nor are we being hurt by it- then it's pretty obvious that we got here despite the helpful advice, not because of it.

There's another dynamic like that one, that's not as obvious. In Star Wars the Jedi are supposed to do what they do out of love, not hate. In the matrix, Neo kicks ass for the sake of his human family, not merely in opposition of agent Smith. Frodo manages to destroy the ring without hsving a personal relationship with Sauron.

I think the closest these movies come to what I'm getting at, is the Harry Potter films- our hero is very intimate with his opponent, and the shape of his life is hugely impacted by Valdemort.

So the dirty little secret is this: having an enemy gives a person energy. You gain a huge amount of narrative with such an opponent, and a certain amount of rage is necessary. It gives you a lot of strength just knowing that you can't afford to let the bastard win.

And yet, you also can't afford to drink too deeply of this succor. *that's* really what Kenobi was trying to teach Luke, That is the truth that drives Batman crazy. And in this other, somewhat less imaginary world, I often hear stories of the struggle between the FBI and organized crime turning into a war narrative, and agents choosing sides that don't properly exist. They'll shield one mafia figure in order to do damage to another mafia figure, in hopes that the balance of terror will shift in their favor. And in so doing, become a mafia agent in their own right.

Though I have high hopes for the occupation of wall street, it won't be nearly enough to simply defeat the worst of capitalist greed. It's going to take another paradigm. And all the enemy needs to do to defeat this, is successfully distract us with a fake target.

It almost seems like a kind of zen arhery practice: to defeat one's enemy not through direct confrontation, but as a side effect of getting your way. The goal isn't to win this two sided struggle, the goal is to get your way, live the life you need to- and the enemy loses through lack of attention. The cartoon version of this was realized in the classic Trek episodes, "Wolf in the Fold" and "Day of the Dove".

It's a compelling image that's only hinted at in The Matrix trilogy: Antagonist has his sights zeroed in on the hero, while the hero is only marginally aware of the enemy's agenda. The bad guy can still lose if the good guy gets obsessed, but good only wins if there's some innocence left over after the battle is done.

The US government and its patrons.

Tags: writer's block

One kind of justice for those guys, another kind of justice for everyone else...

It occurs to me that you could graph the typical take from the typical mugging, burglary, and embezzlement, and chart the likelihood of punishment. I'm certain that the more money you steal, the chance of going to jail decreases.

The next question is, where's the break point? How high should I set my sights in order to minimize my chances of getting caught?

I imagine that if you totaled all the money taken by thieves who've gotten caught, it would still be less than the amount grabbed by the plutocracy.