May 2008
On the microstate endeavor
Why?
I’ll tell you why. There isn’t a government in the world I’d trust with the future.
These pre-communications era ways of dividing up responsibility and power are inane. They’re retarded, and they’re dangerous. Imagine if we ran hospitals or businesses in a manner essentially unchanged from the 4th millennium BC. What we have is, at best, a system of elected despots, and for all the cry of Constitutional Government and Individual Rights, show me in practice these civil rights applied when the government has other interests…
Every country is occupied by the invading army of the State.
For some time, perhaps a decade, I believed that the American Constitutional model was Good Enough, but no longer. I think that the tendency for power to centralize once it is given a foothold is inexorable, and the unwillingness of the American population to burn the white house down every few decades as foreseen by the Founding Fathers themselves has allowed two centuries of centralization of power to result in a state which is converging rapidly on the Soviet equilibrium of massive state-owned industries, gulags, and a no-questions-asked media.
We have to refactor government, at least, around modern communications technology. I feel we might need the foundations to be built on biometrics, to enable an accurate one-person-one-vote tally. But beyond this, we must question our willingness to allow a monopoly of force in the hands of an elected body.
While the government has an army, and the people do not, we have a problem. In theory, yes, the army of the government is the army of the people. But, in practice, the 50% of the population that opposed the war in Iraq were hardly heard, and it is not their army, any more than the people who beat up protesters and torture them with pepper spray are their police.
How can you organize a state without these features?
I don’t think you can. I think you can have people who live together in peace, and who, if attacked, fight like barracuda, but I don’t think you can make anything that looks like a State, and not wind up with an army which does not serve the best interests of the people who it claims to represent.
What more profound injustice is there, than to be taxed at gunpoint to pay for a war which you do not support? It is a draft that cannot get you killed, but a draft none the less.
So within this context, what to do?
I believe - and this, also, is a recent realization - that the modern nation states are doomed. Change accelerates faster and faster, and governments are unable to intelligently respond to these changes fast enough to take appropriate action. Sooner or later, hopefully sooner, alternative mechanisms of organization will take hold which do generate appropriate action quickly. Whatever these dynamic governance structures are, once they have been discovered, odds-are that they will rapidly displace conventional governments in the hearts of the people, and eventually subsume their legal functions.
The fundamental question in any political system is “who has the right to kill and not be punished?”
This is the fundamental question. It is at the heart of sovereignty. We have to understand that no group which is not willing to take life-or-death responsibility is really a political power. Most groups lobby the existing powers which take and hold that responsibility in the same way that small children approach their parents asking for a change of TV channel.
So the threshold for any novel governance structure is life-and-death decision making. Who can kill, and fear no punishment? All else is just talk.
When we start talking about direct democracy, this is the threshold: can you build a system that you would allow control of a uniformed death squad which has the right to kill anybody that the ruleset encoded in the new social structure orders them to?
With that eye, re-read the Constitution. Just barely enough.
This is the bar: control the right to kill by new means. All novel political institutions must be at least capable to be worthy successors to our current systems of government.
The time is short, and the need is urgent. I hope that as we continue to research and think on these issues, we bear in mind how grave the responsibility is, to muzzle lethal force, put it on a leash, and walk it around under the name sovereignty.
Naxalites - India’s Maoist insurgency
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_20/b4084044908374.htm?link_position=link1
One has to respect the Naxalites. I see them as the harbingers of the kind of trouble that could erupt all over the world if poverty isn’t taken more seriously, and an alternate soft development path isn’t supported.
Today, India. Tomorrow… anywhere they can convince the locals they are being screwed. 4.5 billion poor people will eventually develop their own political voice. Let us pray it is not chanting this destructive song.
Link via Barnett, where I said:
Think of it as a sign of political freedom. Because the Indians actually have a relatively thriving political culture, groups like the Naxalites continue to be active. Yes, there are crackdowns, but nothing compared to what similar groups would encounter in China.
And, in Nepal, these guys came to the negotiating table, eventually, took power, and started making changes.
In Kerala, their democratically elected local brand of communism isn’t the Naxalite brand, but has produced a state that has essentially developed world demographics (low birthrate, very long lifespan) and literacy on an average income of some $300 a year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala#Health
So, yeah. Messy democracy sometimes comes back with extremely interesting answers that the totalitarian states miss.
http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2008/05/the_naxalites_are_coming_the_n.html
Global Swadeshi Dialogs - mostly deborked audio
Not perfect, but much improved, audio synch. Turns out that Google Video preserves synch much better on uploaded .mov files than on uploaded .mp4 files.
Basically this is an hour of Marcin of Open Source Ecology and I discussing the long term prospects for long term economic and political freedom driven by free and open source hardware and technology designs. It’s pretty much the best single source for our thinking on the long term future.
Well worth an hour of your time.
Click here for the main interview discussion:
http://www.globalswadeshi.net/forum/topic/show?id=2097821%3ATopic%3A501
Here are the supporting links:
1. Global Village Construction Set (and weblog):
http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/?p=198
2. Open Source Technology pattern language:
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Pattern_Language
3. Development page:
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=CEB_Press
and overview:
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Overview
4. Year 1 of our Life at Factor e Farm
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=First_Year_at_Factor_e_Farm
5. Economic model:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/steve_bosserman/2008/02/09/giving_it_away_making_money.htm
China is ruled by engineers?!
China is ruled by geeks. For the last 30 years, engineers have dominated China’s political system. After revolutionaries such as Deng Xiaoping kicked off its economic reforms, the techies took over and built China into the untested superpower it is today.
In 1987 the Chinese Communist Party first began welcoming engineers into its inner sanctum, the Standing Committee of the Politburo. By 2002, all of the Standing Committee’s nine members were engineers, including President Hu Jintao, a hydrologist, and Premier Wen Jiabao, a geologist. Lower down the food chain, engineers continued their monopoly of power. China’s central banker? A chemical engineer. Its top cop? A petroleum engineer. Last fall when the Standing Committee accepted its first new non-engineer member since 1987 — a lawyer — it was big news.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/22/AR2008052203391.html
Meme selection criteria - or how to get ideas to spread
Humanitarian aggrevation
I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to find a good way to compare various humanitarian sheltering technologies to one another. Here’s the bad news: there’s no effective work in the field as far as I can find.
What I mean by this is quite simple: how do we approach the question of “is this shelter right for this crisis?”
There are three basic factors here:
1> The climate and local conditions, most of which can be dragged pretty quickly out of one database or another. Global climate is well measured.
2> The shelter itself. Here’s the rub. There’s like one paper on thermal modeling of emergency tents that I can find, and maybe one more on cardboard shelters. Maybe I’m just missing a sea of research, but I don’t think so.
How much insulation is enough for any given degree of cold or nasty? How much of a foundation / floor system do you need for various rainfall patterns?
These things are objective research questions. But we’ve got, year by year, millions and millions of people who’re being sheltered in emergencies, and (as far as I can find) no coherent modeling of what’s actually going on at a fundamental level in the basic shelter technologies.
This just doesn’t seem right. This seems like something the military may have worked out in a fair bit of detail, but I’ve yet to make the connection to find the right report in the oceans of .gov and .mil data.
3> The people. How cold is too cold? What’s a minimum sleeping temperature without serious gear? 55F? 40F? 32F? What about for children or babies? What about thermal loading in the day time?
There should be a basic model: this is what people need to survive, and as you go further from that basic core definition of safe, you get bands of increasing mortality. Suppose you want to support a population to the point where there will be only 1 excess death per 1000 people, and they’re in Climate X, what gear do you need to ship them?
This, to me, is the fundamental modeling issue that needs to be addressed: shelter, food, water purification etc. need to be expressed in a standard metric, and I think it’s easiest, fairest and most accurate to work first on excess mortality, and secondly on perceived quality of life.
The following diagram is one suggested approach: the “LifeWheel” - which shows escalating risk towards the edges of the diagram, in the red area, and provides some space to map interdependencies and interactions in the center. Each ring represents a factor 10 increase in mortality from that cause of death, from < 1 in 10,000, which we will call “safety”, through 1 in 1000, 1 in 100, and 1 in 10 which represent escalating risks. 1 in 10 is not unrealistic for things like epidemics following an earthquake, or freezing to death in cold weather disasters.
The “six ways to die” model is then mapped on top of the six ways to die model, which suggests there are six common causes of death:
* too hot
* too cold
* thirst
* hunger
* illness
* injury
The goal of any relief effort is to make sure that people stay alive (initially) and than self-sufficiency is restored (eventually.)
I’m hoping that as we continue to develop these concepts and tools, we will come up with a new way to think through disaster relief and poverty issues, in a way which makes it clear where the research needs to be conducted and where the money needs to be spent to have the greatest positive impact on the worst problems.
Click the diagram for a bigger version which reflects a simple model of a typical cold weather disaster.
Top fungus action
Paul Stamets at TED discussing how mushrooms can be used to solve major problems. He’s a deep mushroom mystic looking at deep structures. However, there’s real engineering here also - cleaning up e-coli, potential anti-flu medications, termite repulsion, food growth process anchoring, and growing fuels.
It’s been floating around for about a decade. Revolution in process?
Thanks to Arto for the link.
Bothering Barnett Again
Unfortunately, the world lacks the natural resources for everybody to be rich and fat unless some truly radical developments take place.
The average American has about 30 times the environmental impact of the average Bangladeshi, and the USA, with 5% of the world’s population, consumes 25% of the world’s natural resources.
Put these two facts together. If everybody in the world had an American lifestyle, the impact would be the same as a global population of about 200 billion Bangladeshis, and we would consume five world’s worth of natural resources.
So, at that point, either we
* develop radical new resource utilization systems (hello Nanosolar, hello Konarka, hello ultracapacitors) or
* we accept that the global standards of living are going to be uneven to a significant degreee, or
* Americans let their standard of living fall to something sustainable globally
I personally favor the first path, but that’s not a particularly well-funded option, particularly if you aren’t interested in nuclear power. Nuclear is a bad idea as a global solution because you can’t effectively separate nuclear power from nuclear weapons, or at least dirty bombs: it’s all dual use at the end of the day. There is no peaceful nuclear future.
What’s the solution?
Here’s my bid: http://guptaoption.com/2.long_peace.php
http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2008/05/globalization_is_the_dominant.html
sea container hotels
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/01/travelodge_buil.php
The plug-in lifestyle of Shockwave Rider inches ever closer.
George Bush has more unconstitutional power than King George had
Adler, a professor of political science at Idaho State University at Pocatello, is the author of “The Constitution and the Termination of Treaties”(Taylor & Francis), among other books, and some 100 scholarly articles in his field. Adler made his comments comparing the powers of President Bush and King George III at a conference on “Presidential Power in America” at the Massachusetts School of Law, Andover, April 26th.
Adler said, Bush has “claimed the authority to suspend the Geneva Convention, to terminate treaties, to seize American citizens from the streets to detain them indefinitely without benefit of legal counseling, without benefit of judicial review. He has ordered a domestic surveillance program which violates the statutory law of the United States as well as the Fourth Amendment.”
Adler said the authors of the U.S. Constitution wrote that the president “shall take care to faithfully execute the laws of the land” because “the king of England possessed a suspending power” to set aside laws with which he disagreed, “the very same kind of power that the Bush Administration has claimed.”
Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, Adler said, repeatedly referred to the President’s “override” authority, “which effectively meant that the Bush Administration was claiming on behalf of President Bush a power that the English people themselves had rejected by the time of the framing of the Constitution.”
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0805/S00367.htm