GoodeStreet

Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger released an updated version to the sixteen year old Cluetrain Manifesto. They call it "New Clues" (Dave Winer's Listicle version is here).  Take a moment to read it. The article spells out in understandable, readable detail how and why your future is at stake.

My addition to their conversation is to encourage you to question the culture we are creating with our use of the world wide web. Click-bait words such as: amazing, best, incredible, horrible, and other emotion-laden terms is only a symptom, indicative of the disease but not the cause. Reducing complex ideas to a photo containing only a few words is also only a symptom of a disease.

While at a check out counter in a grocery store, I mentioned to the college kid beside me how the "rags" of 10 years ago, The National Enquirer and similar weeklies, were nearly gone. Their spot, where impulsive purchases are made and which reflect our cultural bias, have been replaced by People, Us, InTouch, Cosmopolitan and Esquire.

Sigh. The aliens are gone. Replaced by photoshopped renditions of people we aspire to be, but of whom most, near all, will never become.

I try to imagine what it was like 10 years ago to be an editor of the National Enquirer going through a grocery store check out. For years you made your bread with articles about the crazy and sometimes nasty things that aliens do on earth. Then you look at the headlines of People, only to see what asinine things celebrities are doing.

"We dream up the most outrageous stuff that an alien could ever be imagined doing, and some dumb ass twenty-something actor comes along and makes our alien look tame? How the hell are we supposed to compete with that?!?!"

How, indeed? How could an alien top what actors, reality "stars" and politicians do - and do without a moments thought, while still being believable? How can a professional writer top the stupid acts of professional celebrity, who arrive laden with fame but without responsibility? How can writers hope to compete with, as philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, ".. composers whose sole function is [to] persuade [us] that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps as entertaining as well. There are great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say."

The age of celebrity worship, and pursuit of similar fame even if only among a select group of our peers, conceals and deflects moral questions about mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperil wars, economic disparities, and political corruption. Our efforts to make life more interesting, varied, exciting, vivid and promising has in the long run, had the opposite effect.

Note: I've been going through posts I wrote but never published, for whatever reason I decided at the time. Usually, I wanted to fact check further, or edit a section that could be made more clear. Decided to scrub that idea, and just hit the publish button. Please consider this as off-the-cuff, unedited remarks.

On the evening of May 4, 2016, during a speech on the day that marks the extermination of 6 million Jews in Nazi Germany during WWII, Holocaust Memorial Day, the deputy head of the Israeli military, Major General Yair Golan, told an audience including a government minister and survivors of the Holocaust:

“The Holocaust must lead us to think about our public lives, and even more than that, it must guide anyone who has the ability, not only those who wish to bear public responsibility.

Because if there is anything that frightens me in the remembrance of the Holocaust, it is discerning nauseating trends that took place in Europe in general, and in Germany specifically back then, 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and seeing evidence of them here among us in the year 2016. 

After all, there is nothing simpler and easier than hating the foreigner, there is nothing easier and simpler than arousing fears and intimidating, there is nothing easier and simpler than becoming bestial, forgoing principles, and becoming smug.”

A brief time after his speech, Major General Golan found himself at the center of a firestorm of criticism for his words - particularly from within Isreal.

In response, Golan felt compelled to reply to the criticism: “On Holocaust remembrance day, it is worthwhile to ponder our capacity to uproot the first signs of intolerance, violence, and self-destruction that arise on the path to moral degradation.

The IDF should be proud that throughout its history it has had the ability to investigate severe incidents without hesitation. It should be proud that it has probed problematic behaviour with courage and that it has taken responsibility not just for the good, but also for the bad and the inappropriate.

We didn’t try to justify ourselves, we didn’t cover anything up, we didn’t whitewash, we didn’t make excuses, and we didn’t equivocate. Our path was – and will be – one of truth and shouldering responsibility, even if the truth is difficult and the burden of responsibility is a heavy one.”

This is what morality and responsibility sound like.

Between 1888 and 1964 the US was involved in the Spanish-American, WW I, WW II, Korea and Vietnam wars. Our country morphed from an agrarian to an industrialized society. Corporations changed from being primarily small, local enterprises to behemoths employing thousands. Labor unions exerted their force across the country. The cold war against the Soviet Union took center stage, as briefly did the American Communist Party. Radio, telephones, television, interstate highways and jetliners made communication and travel easy. Oh, and we can't forget that our nation suffered through a Great Depression, too.

If you wanted to write a script leading to political gridlock and partisanship, you would be hard pressed to find a better recipe than to dream up those events. What this country experienced in the years since 1964 seems tame by comparison. Our flash points have been largely self-created, rather than being the result of profound, systemic change.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

There were forty-six Supreme Court appointees during the 76 years between 1888 and 1964. Forty five were approved by the Senate. That's 45 to 1. Only two percent of presidential appointees were turned down. During one of the most tumultuous periods this country has experienced.

For the years between 1965 and 2010, there were twenty-four supreme court appointees to the Supreme Court. Seventeen were approved. Seven, a forty-one thirty percent ratio, were rejected by the Senate. Why the sudden change in approval rate during a period of our history that is comparatively calm? Something to ponder during the coming months as the next Supreme Court appointment will be revealed.

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. … But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. ~Thomas Jefferson

I get the feeling I could spend a week interviewing Henry Hughes and still come away thinking I had left scads on the table yet to discuss. Mr. Hughes is a combat veteran who made a movie about his war experience. From an interesting and surprising perspective. Read this article to find out more. It will be worth your time. I know that I'm going to watch his Academy Award nominated movie - simply because the guy is so thought provoking.

The movie focuses on the female American-Muslim who was an interpreter for his combat unit. Here's a couple short quotes from his interview about the movie. Please don't grab either snippet below and blast ahead with them to bolster a particular view that you believe the short passages imply. Remember, all is not what it seems. Just my way of saying, read the entire article for the context in which they present themselves.

"Sitting here armchair quarterbacking it, I want to say that we should only be willing to go wars wherein we don’t care if one individual makes it back."

And then there is this beaut (emphasis is mine):

"I mean I totally think that in terms of courage, it takes a lot more courage to be her as a Muslim American woman surrounded by a bunch of infantrymen in Afghanistan than it is to storm up some sort of hill in combat. That’s sort of, intestinal fortitude.

You have to be from such a harsh starting point that she’s from to be able to find your own integrity and your own moral compass against … I was awarded so many times along the way with little Ranger tabs and Airborne wings and atta-boys.

She had none of that shit, man. She had to figure it out on her own what she thought was right. That’s courageous. Growing up your entire life thinking you’re going to be a soldier and risk your life, that’s not courageous, that’s just fulfilling what you were supposed to do, on some level. It takes a little bit of courage, don’t get me wrong, but nothing compared to finding your own way in the world and succeeding at it, with basically no one telling you what right is or that you’re doing a good job. In fact, most people are telling you that you’re an infidel and a traitor and females can’t do this. The best part about it is she was never in your face about it or aggressive, although I’m sure she felt cornered for a large part of her life. She didn’t wear that on her sleeve at all, and that is insane to walk through life like that so elegantly. That’s one thing I find a little bit distasteful about a lot of the war picture stuff. It’s easy to aggrandize and glorify combat. It’s trying to find the real things that are tough in life and I think this is one of them."

Provocative. And I hope it sparks your interest in reading the article.

After arriving home I installed sundials throughout our home wherever I found a clock. Wasn't very difficult. I built clocks and radios and transmitters and receivers and stuff when I was a kid. Tore stuff apart all the time just to see how it works. My mom recently bought a new alarm clock and told my sister she wants me to have it when she dies. With a smirk, she said "I know he'll have it torn apart within 10 minutes."

Back to the sundial story, have wired the sundial output to our alarm clocks, microwave, stove, irrigation controller, thermostat, televisions, wireless home phone (yep, still have one but don't answer it when it rings), clothes dryer, digital audio recorders, video camera, computers, iPods, iPads, iPhones and radios. Even wired a sundial to a pen with a clock in the barrel I received as a gift.

Whew. Had no idea there were so many clock circuits sprinkled throughout our house. If a cop wandered through our front door Barb and I would be jailed for centuries. There are half-bombs strewn all over the place. Had no idea I had become so radicalized. I'm at least half an Ahmed Mohamed.

I think I rewired sundials to all the things with clock displays in our household, but there are so damned many things with clocks in our house I may have missed a few. Oh well. So I may still end in in prison, despite taking extreme precaution. Can't do anything about that. Have done my best to hide my true spirit. I admit it. I'm a Jeffersonian radical.

Only problem left, then, and where I could use your help, is I bought these sundials from a place down under (you know, Australia) without realizing their sundials run backwards in Oregon. Anybody know of a fix, short of flipping our house upside down?

Rather than searching through my photo library, thought I would post a few pics of my designs here so they can be found easier. I like building custom stuff on the cheap. So I hope these photos will spark your imagination of what you can do, too.

First up, our guest room with a narrow, custom-built bookcase:

The guest bathroom. There used to be a shower/tub where the window is now. The room was widened by a little less than three feet. Barb made the stained glass window.

The kitchen area, which used to be a separate kitchen and dining room. Combining the two into one made room for more seating.

The living room. The bamboo ceiling is mostly wall paper.

Our home office. You can also see the door decore and the hallway. Every room in the house has a different color. Which would be really weird unless the hallway, which snakes throughout the house, and most doors, are painted one color - easing transitions while going from room to room.

Posted for a reason, but not relevant for most. Sorry.

Below is the mast raising system I was developing. Unfortunately RA took over my body to the point we decided to sell the boat. The version seen in the photo below was a proof of concept. With a few tweaks, it would have been a quick and easy way to raise the P-18 mast.

Plus this photo (below), also for a reason not obvious. Never will be but to a few folk. Evidence of the third dent I have put in a vehicle - not counting the 30 feet of fence I knocked over with a UPS truck. Fortunately, the lady who owned the fence was happy. Said it was the best reason she had to coerce her husband to finally get around to ripping the damned thing down. The photo below is from a tangle between my Tacoma and our neighbors fence. Call it a draw. Both were injured after the rear bumper fought back.

I came from the generation of kids who watched the moon landing with awe. Reading news that the European Space Agency landed a probe on a comet, after chasing the comet across the solar system for a decade, blows my mind.

But what happens a next?

I’m imagining an alien, whose sensors on a mother ship detect that some kind of a machine is resting on a nearby comet. A crew is sent to investigate.

Recently read an article about a new site called Collectively. The stated purpose of the site is "to inspire and accelerate the shift toward a more sustainable way of life."

Nice ideal ya' got there. What'cha gonna do with it?

To accomplish their goal the site solicited sponsors. Or, perhaps it came about the other way around? Collectively is a site backed by corporate sponsors, edited by an ad agency, in hope of making the world a more environmentally friendly place.

What could possibly go wrong?

Years ago this stuff was called white-washing. Then, PR. Then it was called sponsored content. Most recently it has been called native advertising.

It is still the same old shit, no matter what you call it. I call it barf.

Too bad they didn't look to Patagonia as example. Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia founder, baked environmentalism into his products and processes from the beginning, and continues to make constant, incremental change. He even turned his product company into a subsidiary of a "$20 Million & Change" holding company devoted the saving the environment. Yvon has spent a lifetime proving that actions speak louder than words.

I hope the companies sponsoring Collectively figure out what Yvon and Patagonia understand well, but doubt they will. 

During a recent trip to Boston we visited The Printing Office of Edes & Gill, where Gary Gregory has recreated an 18th century print shop located around a corner from Paul Revere's house. We bought a broadside reproduction of the Declaration of Independence as originally printed by John Gill on July 16, 1776.

Before diving into the main point I wish to make, caused by having read the Declaration of Independence once again, here's a trivia question.

What day did the Continental Congress declare independence from Britain?

Congratulate yourself if you said July 2, 1776, because that was the day members of the Second Continental Congress voted to declare independence from Britain. John Adams even noted in a letter to a friend that July 2nd would be remembered in the annals of American history.

Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence began on June 11th, which was then edited by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston. The fair copy ("original Rough draught") was then read to members of Congress on June 28th, who deliberated and modified the document further until the afternoon of July 4th. The final version of the document was dated July 4th, though it was not signed until August 2, 1776... and even then not all members had signed for various reasons.

"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccesful rebellions indeed generally establish the incroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medecine necessary for the sound health of government." -  Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787

On the evening of July 4th, members of the Continental Congress voted to deliver the draft of the Declaration of Independence to Philadelphia printer John Dunlop, who produced what is believed to be around 200 copies which were then delivered to the 13 colonies. Nineteen versions of John Douglas' broadside, differing in layout, were reproduced by printers from Massachusetts to Georgia.

A new Declaration of Independence?

Reading the grievance section of the Declaration of Independence, I was struck by how easy it would be to replace a few specific terms and the result would be an indictment of our current government. Vestiges of the vision our Founding Fathers had for our Republic can be seen (imagined?) today, however, members of our three government branches have contorted the daily operation to the point that our government is no longer controlled by we, the people. While reading, Benjamin Franklin's retort came to mind when asked what the new government formed in July of 1776 would be: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

We didn't keep it. We lost our republic. It is gone.

We need an "Arab Spring" here to have any hope of getting it back. A revolt by citizens, not through the ballot box, but by whatever force is necessary. Oust every elected member of government simultaneously, banned from seeking office for the duration of their life. Remove every bureaucrat as well, with similar restrictions as with elected members - banned from government positions for life. We will accept members of the military into the insurrection provided they are "of us", the men and women who form the backbone of our military. Anybody of higher rank cannot be a part of our insurrection. No lobbyists and no PR flacks. No spokesman for any group or interest. No business lobbyists or owners or CEO's either. Nobody can join the revolution unless they represent only themselves as an individual citizen who does not use any financial or moral advantage they may possess.

Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem. Translated, "I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude." - Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787

Once the people of our old government are cleared out, rescind all laws except for the Constitution as it stands. Rebuild from there, with the needs of ordinary citizens in mind and for our general welfare as free individuals - to restore faith in American fairness and justice. A guiding principle for the path forward can be found in a letter by Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor in 1816: "And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

I would join that kind of revolution.

"Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of nineteen years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right. It may be said, that the succeeding generation exercising, in fact, the power of repeal, this leaves them as free as if the constitution or law had been expressly limited to nineteen years only. In the first place, this objection admits the right, in proposing an equivalent. But the power of repeal is not an equivalent. It might be, indeed, if every form of government were so perfectly contrived, that the will of the majority could always be obtained, fairly and without impediment. But this is true of no form. The people cannot assemble themselves; their representation is unequal and vicious. Various checks are opposed to every legislative proposition. Factions get possession of the public councils, bribery corrupts them, personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents; and other impediments arise, so as to prove to every practical man, that a law of limited duration is much more manageable than one which needs a repeal." -Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789