May 2007
Possibly the stupidest thing I have ever heard
The US Army tried to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr, the widely revered Shia cleric, after luring him to peace negotiations at a house in the holy city of Najaf, which it then attacked, according to a senior Iraqi government official.
The revelation of this extraordinary plot, which would probably have provoked an uprising by outraged Shia if it had succeeded, has left a legacy of bitter distrust in the mind of Mr Sadr for which the US and its allies in Iraq may still be paying. “I believe that particular incident made Muqtada lose any confidence or trust in the [US-led] coalition and made him really wild,” the Iraqi National Security Adviser Dr Mowaffaq Rubai’e told The Independent in an interview. It is not known who gave the orders for the attempt on Mr Sadr but it is one of a series of ill-considered and politically explosive US actions in Iraq since the invasion. In January this year a US helicopter assault team tried to kidnap two senior Iranian security officials on an official visit to the Iraqi President. Earlier examples of highly provocative actions carried out by the US with
Hearts and minds, gentlemen, hearts and minds.
Nelson Mandela on Mahatma Gandhi
Gandhi remains today the only complete critique of advanced industrial society. Others have criticized its totalitarianism but not its productive apparatus. He is not against science and technology, but he places priority on the right to work and opposes mechanization to the extent that it usurps this right. Large-scale machinery, he holds, concentrates wealth in the hands of one man who tyrannizes the rest. He favors the small machine; he seeks to keep the individual in control of his tools, to maintain an interdependent love relation between the two, as a cricketer with his bat or Krishna with his flute. Above all, he seeks to liberate the individual from his alienation to the machine and restore morality to the productive process.
Nelson Mandela on Mahatma Gandhi for Time.
A little more on the black flag
You can’t trust anybody these days.
At the root of the systems of oppression we labor under is the concept of the Nation State, and the idea that the Nation State has some kind of automatic right to enforce its will on the population unlucky enough to be born within its borders.
It is a direct inheritor of might-makes-right and the divine right of kings. It is, without the slightest shadow of a doubt, the worst arrangements of human affairs other than all the others. I had to explain yesterday to an extremely bright and promising young man that the idea that democracy was the dictatorship of the masses was simply not on. I just don’t know what they teach them these days 
Sounds funny, but it’s not. It’s not until you get thrown out of America that you realize what the Founding Fathers were about. For all that the American government in its current forms stinks to high heaven, cutting away at the rights of the people like a gorilla with a chain saw in each hand, the underlying framework is undamaged. People realize that it is wrong, however dimly. They still recognize freedom when they see it, even if they are not willing to struggle for its place in their own personal lives.
The hexayurt is a technology of freedom because it gives you autonomy. A reasonable place to live, which can be transported on the back of a pickup truck by two people without heavy tools like scaffolding and which costs less than a week’s wages to build. You can, if you have to, pick up your family, move out of the city, and continue to live on your own terms for a while, maybe even for a few years, if you’re willing to do without luxuries like 120V mains and central air conditioning.
I smiled when the survivalists at places like AR15.com started to build them. That told me I was on the right track: they cut through the current direction of the project and asked (as any good survivalist should) “what could I use this for?” Sharp kids.
The Internet is, for a few years yet at least, a technological implementation of the right to free speech and to a lesser extent, freedom of religion through access to the fundamental texts of your tradition, whatever it might be, from west coast Wicca to Zoroastrianism.
You can’t trust anybody these days.
The Hexayurt is an implementation of the right to be left alone. You take your yurt, you buy some land, you move out of the cities, and you mind your own business for a few years or a decade or a lifetime. It’s the right to step out of the national economy if the conditions become untenable (Great Depression, or the Argentine IMF “bankruptcy” crisis) and go back to the land. Add a rifle, and you are now a pre-1776 peasant farmer.
This sounds like a joke. It is not. All over the world, people struggle under the yoke of governments which still run off their local equivalent of the Divine Right of Kings. The State draws its claims of legitimacy not from the will of the people, or the consent of the governed, but from whatever shoddy excuse holds the local enterprise together with some dubious collective of power barons on top of the pile.
There are two options. One is violent revolution. That option has been executed successfully once (America) and partially successfully a few other places, but in the general case it winds up in immediate occupation of the land by an armed band of thugs bent on their own enrichment.
The other option is Gandhian non-violent non-cooperation. Ignore the State until it goes away.
Does it work? Well, we have three partially successful attempted implementations: Gandhi in India, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in America.
Two fatalities before project completion, India is a mess because of partition, South Africa is a miracle even in its current condition, and race in America is still ugly. Needs work. It’s not like democracy was learned over night, and weapon making and war have undergone a continuous evolution over millennia if not longer.
So here’s the call: it’s time to develop a new generation of Gandhian political science, economic technology and non-cooperation methodologies. Armed struggle has plenty of adherents and developers. Gandhian methods have only a handful of people working on applying and enhancing the work of the Mahatama.
It’s up to us to take Gandhi’s legacy, with all the lessons learned from the pasty 60 years of implementations, and update it for the Internet age and beyond. My feeling is that the economic independence possibilities of the Internet and other new technologies are wind under the wings of the Gandhian vision.
Is freedom possible for everybody?
Yes. There is enough food, enough clothing, enough water. With these essentials there is no reason why any person should be starved or beaten into compliance with a law they do not approve of. Let each person migrate to the jurisdiction which suits their personal vision so that political conflicts over the nature of the State are solved as far as possible by individual emigration, rather than war.
Capital can move. Persons can move. The world is big enough for republics with gay marriage, or death for sodomy, or any of a range of drug policies. The world is big enough for fundamentalist nation states who wish war on one another for religious crimes and unaligned secular republics who look on aghast.
A nationality is a membership of a club. It should be possible to buy and sell this membership at an agreed fair-market price. The fact that my body was born in Britain should not give the current band of armed men who run that country the right to tell me what to do by default. This is barbarism.
Organized crime is the sole remaining compelling reason for the existence of the Nation State. Anybody who says the State is not necessary needs to spend some time with the topic of the mafias. But the State as an entity that prevents people from exercising their basic human rights is an anarchonism we need to work on phasing out as soon as possible.
You can see this in America: 8 million or more “illegal immigrants” who everybody in power insists aren’t taking jobs away from Americans.
This is about sovereignty. They are simply amending the rules of the game by non-enforcement of the law for a specific purpose, breaking the compact they have with the poor citizens of their own nation who might want those three or four million jobs for their own. Because the constructs of citizenship are economically inconvenient, the State breaks them. What then is it?
The concept of Citizenship is whatever the thugs in charge say it is.
So think on this with me over the next few years: what concept of the State lives up to Gandhian principles, while at the same time being viable in the face of organized crime. Answer me that question, and I have an immodest proposal for you.
Behind the black flag there is a spinning wheel.
Vinay
I hoist the black flag
This is the official flag of the Planetary Design Science Revelation. PDSR is the internal name for the process that produces the hexayurt project and the various other things I’m working on.
The work is Buckminster Fuller and Gandhi.
The attitude is pure Jack Sparrow.
The politics are being defined.
Game on.
[if anybody wants to take a shot at a better version of the flag, do please]
[you too can join pdsr]
Combined Endeavor, Lager Aulenbach, Baumholder, Germany
Sea of flags on the hill, with massive cable runs all over the place.
Mostly various kinds of radio and computer guys, working to make systems internationally interoperable. Testing testing.
Nearly everybody is either in camo (various nations, you get to know the pattern by eye) or the “working contractor” uniform (a particularly functional, I-work-18-hours-a-day kind of business casual). I’m a suit. The context of being DOD rather than with one of the services, of being an “ideas guy” etc…
Very odd. Very odd indeed. Rather fun, though.
Today’s mission: build a hexayurt. Small size, fully folding. Quite fiddly, everything connects to everything else (of course.) How to do the hinges, how to do the tape, how to work with the small local materials. 4×8 is available, but is a six-week lead time special order (yuck.) Should we have gone with cardboard and varnished it on site? No way to tell.
At least the tape is right. I made a tape anchor this morning and it is deeply right and solid. I tell people this right here is the innovation - it’s not the panels, it’s not the shape, it’s the tape anchor. Without the tape anchor, there is nothing. It’s the kind of insight which only comes from building things and having them not work. Once seen, it’s too simple, too obvious.
I probably won’t be able to take pictures here, but I’m going to try and get somebody to shoot some video and perhaps I can get some stills from there.
Extremely clever color correction hack
Applying the palettes of the old masters to your own digital photographs, using photoshop. So simple, so elegant, so devious.
Works, too.