Realistic monopoly game

Distribute money before game starts by dice throw per actual wealth distribution, and see how much fun it is when one player has 95% from the get go.

Occupy your mouth with delicious food

Get license-sell street food-provide space for leaflets  media, profits to food give away and other occupy

A thousand julian assanges

This might help free Julian ,  have a Julian look alike contest. The top 500-1,000 who look a lot like him get trips to London, visits with him,5 or 10 at a time, and a wardrobe similar to his. Also, a facial recognition foiling hat. Take some wiki leaks money, or special donations
If they decide to charge the doubles with obstruction of justice or mischief, they look even sillier. Girls can enter too, and use facial recognition so even people who don't think they resemble him could submit their faces, choose the best matches and dye hair and go on diets.

The Euro was never necessary

With computer tech, available at the time of introduction, all currencies simply could have been pegged and the nationalistic fervor never stimulated. The fact that wasn't done is a symptom of the control freak personalities of economists and and underlying desire to break the spirit of common people to effect neoliberal policies confirming their Pavlovian Skinnerian theories.

Same thing with postal codes, never necessary, especially in Britain. Unique names like "The Oaks, Somerset" are actually easier and have more possible combinations than numeric codes, and of course more meaningful and easier to remember. the Canadian postal code is particularly egregious with its letter number letter -number letter number. Even computers have trouble with it, confusing 1s and Is and 0s and Os. Just an unnecessary obsessive exercise in controlling others.

Delegalize, Decriminalize, Decommercialize - massive multi-front shift

My father was a compulsive gambler. So my view on the right approach to alcohol, tobacco, firearms (in the US especially), pot and other illegal drugs, as is appropriate to each ones current status is:
   delegalize (a term I thought I just made up, until I Googled  it),
   decriminalize,
   decommercialize.


It is not just Native Americans who have a problem integrating distilled spirits into their communities. as Hogarth's famous 1751 prints show. Societies in the British Isles and Europe in relatively recent times and to this day deal with the difficulties posed by distilled spirits. The crime novels of Denise Mina graphically illustrate the grim legacy of 250 years of the double whammy of the Industrial Revolution and distilled spirits on poverty stricken Scottish and Irish communities. The Balkans and Western Africa have also suffered from atrocities fuelled with distilled spirits.

The US has unique problems from the political power of and successful covert (in the sense that the movement followers see themselves as rebellious independent thinkers not being manipulated by powerful elites) construction of social movements, libertarianism and the Tea party with significant financial and public relations support by the gun industry. Cheap guns and cheap alcohol with and aversion to effective social safety nets lead to communities with far higher violent deaths than are found other wealthy countries.. Essentially, the alcohol, tobacco and firearms, and legal and illegal drug industries benefit hugely from enforcing laissez faire capitalism for this traffic in poor US communities without enough hope in a vicious spiral.

I do not endorse prohibition, which was criminalization, but rather a radical assertion of the right to collectively remove these problematic activities from the commercial sphere. People over the age of majority can grow and brew and gamble to their hearts content, but the might of the state is concentrated on breaking up or, interdicting and fining (rather than taxing which leads to dependence on continued growth)  large commercial concentrations of profit from these activities. Like the tiny gunsmith operations of Northern India, they could build their own long guns and ammunition on a small scale only.

Interdiction has in most cases led to dangerously concentrated intoxicants, which are less risky for profiteers because less bulky and/or prone to detection, but  far harder for communities to integrate and moderate the damage from. Beer vs. spirits, coca vs. cocaine, opium vs. heroin, even weak wild cannabis vs. Sinsemilla and hash oil.

Such a dismantling of multiple multi-billion dollar laissez faire legal and underground markets would require a somewhat violent international revolution of sorts. The UN itself is  currently highly committed to the war on drugs, the interdiction which sustains the huge black market it purports to oppose.

Global warming is only the half of it

Human caused overfishing, ocean pollution, plastic ocean pollution, overpopulation, habitat destruction, forest overexploitation, the pet and animal parts trade, and addiction to economic growth are all additional causes of our current mass extinctions and a threat to all life, including ours. Being drawn into petty skirmishes about details of global warming is fighting the battle on the enemy's terms. Tobacco perception was finally turned ( and the tobacco industry gave up nitpicking) not just by evidence of lung cancer, but by hundreds of studies showing it to be nearly a universal toxin causing dozens of problems aside of lung cancer. So a calm, firm emphasis on the broad picture of human destructiveness is needed in addition to a sober presentation of details and proofs of human caused global warming. Our understanding of the details of any one of these threats will alter over time. There may be anastrophes, unexpected strokes of good fortune, or homoeostatic mechanisms of the biosphere which mitigate some of the threats, like global cooling effects of particulate pollution, But the overwhelming, exponentially increasing planetary destruction of the last 500 years is evident to almost everyone who has looked at it in good faith. It is like we are in a car with bald tires, a noisy transmission, loud knocking and so forth, but we are arguing only about whether to change the oil because the dipstick shows nearly empty and one of the passengers says he can't afford the time to top or change the dirty oil. The vehicle has a high chance of not getting where it is going. of catastrophic failure, unless it is stopped, examined carefully and the time and expense taken to change the odds.

Peacenik stock play - sell arms stocks short

I was thinking because of some news stories, about the real "Dude" , who inspired the Big Lebowski character, and I realized I had a relative and a friend who also lived their progressive political and artistic views pretty much without compromising, and that it led to or at least co-existed with, in the long term, pretty successful financial outcomes in these cases. All of them were more or less in media, arts, show biz.

I wonder if maybe one could work against war and the arms trade and that familiarity with upcoming possible arms and peace treaties, and possible outbreaks of peace, might put one in a position to sell arms stocks short in a timely manner, and as a side benefit. being among the arms "bears" when they are vulnerable. I wonder if Geoge Soros has ever thought of it, the way he famously "shorted" the pound with a 10 billion play once. Of course one would be bucking world history to think that the military part of the military industrial complex, which traditionally grows more reliably than anything, and the cold war peace dividend of the early 90s has been obliterated it seems by new perceived bugaboos.Also another film inspiration, this one very negative, Viktor Bout, who is said to have inspired the film, Lord of War, seems to have beaten an attempt to extradite him from Thailand last August, but remains in jail pending an appeal soon. So all those factors are the major risks one would have to account for. Also if you were a prominent peace advocate and you shorted arms stocks, you could be accused of only promoting peace for short term financial advantage.

At least one can fantasize about a successful bear run against the arms trade in a worldwide outbreak of peace.

new far green political buttons

Ludd was right
Malthus was a schmuck but  right about some things
wildlife corridors around and through cities
march civilization back to abundance
You CAN stop and yes reverse progress, Tokugawa did it
Wealth through shrinkage

Luddite and proud
As Macolm redefined black and white, we need to redefine shrinkage and growth
The Club of Rome was right
Schumacher was right, just wrong on the timing
Live like pirates, in the homes left empty and decaying by the population crash
Let's all do it the easy way- population crash now.
Skip the famines and wars - the easy way is to stop consuming and breeding now
Let the forest and grassland reclaim the burbs
May the maternity wards close for lack of business
7 generation moratorium on most childbirth - the easy way

Why Obama falters

If you just think about health care it doesn't make sense. Nice succinct article about the broader picture that explains it quite well. I would add, how do you expect the many to embrace the moral principle of the stronger helping the weaker when every day they ignore and drive by homeless veterans and others, who die from lack of care every week or two in major population centres, even San Francisco which is so liberal? It also explains how it becomes acceptable for Republican congress reps to use the phrase "those who have earned their health care" referring to those who have coverage in speeches. I presume they are devout Calvinists who feel babies born into covered families are among God's deserving elect.

It is like developing countries with a gated elite that has a strong sense of privilege, but in some ways far more reprehensible, in that the poor minority is so small and the excess wealth to correct it completely is clearly present.

I hope I am wrong this time - a new presidential hopeful for the bitter and hateful

In the mid-nineties, after sending many fruitless faxes, emails and phone calls to Governor George W. Bush about death penalty cases, I concluded he could be the next president. He was negative enough and deaf enough to real concerns and rational objections to unite the angry white people around the country. He would approach the problems of the world the way he dealt with crime in Texas. Kill people. My liberal friends scoffed: "He is a buffoon and a local phenomenon peculiar to Texas." Now I feel the same way about Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. He is taking advantage of changes in immigration enforcement in the Obama administration to defy the federal government and highlight and publicize his unrelenting persecution of immigrants. If the dice of US and world events roll the wrong way...

I hope they don't. I hope I'm wrong.

Evil Funds- a joke that is 6 years behind reality

I thought of the following announcement as a joke last night. When I started to get a few links for it I found my joke had been preceded by reality 6 years earlier: the Vice Fund.
see also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_Fund

Fortunately, the latest performance numbers show that at least one hypothesis, that such "vice" investments as defense and tobacco are recession proof, seems to hold little water - it is down just like most other investments.

Here is my unoriginal spoof - I have not yet researched the second more radical "Ultimate Evil" hypothetical fund . I hope nobody has made it a reality, though I fear a real version exists, even if it is not public knowledge. (Fifty years ago, I met a couple of Canadian billionaires who closed two highly profitable businesses just to punish workers for embracing unions, and bragged about it. )

As an evil twin image of ethical investment funds, these funds tap highly active information sources like Corpwatch to identify potential investments:

1) The Evil Fund maximises profit regardless of the ethical consequences, going boldly where others would hang back out of mundane ethical concerns.

2) the Ultimate Evil fund is for those investors with a triple evil bottom line - even if an investment is less profitable, it may be worthwhile if it generates enough mayhem and suffering.

He's back for the health debate - the scary socialist

On Halloween night in 2008, I was exploring an old warehouse in Oakland California, when I heard an eerie voice singing:
"We shall not , we shall not be moved .."and, suddenly an strange undead apparition emerged from the shadows carrying pamphlets about anarchists and other radicals; a SCARY SOCIALIST. "Brother, I said, shaking, who are you and how did you come to be here?"

"I am as bewildered as you. One minute I was peacefully demonstrating with my fellow Wobblies for the release of Red Emma when shots rang out and the next, a terrifying cabal of the most frightening looking guys I have ever seen were reciting incantations and digging me up in the centre of a circle of black candles in the cemetery near this warehouse. They would not say who they were but I heard the words Skull and Bones and Republican National Committee. They said they had an important job for me for one week, well 4 and one half days, Until Nov. 4th. Well, I says, that sounds swell and I ain't worked in a while , but what do you fellas want me to do? You don't want me to be a scab or nothin, do you? So they says, no no no! just be yourself, hand out your pamphlets, make a speech or 2 - do what you do!"

Then he said" Can you help me find a crowd to agitate?"

So, with some trepidation, I took the scary socialist to a Halloween party I was invited to and it turned out my worries were unfounded: he fit right in. He wasn't the only political type there. Not at all. there was a guy dressed as the Statue of Liberty carrying a sign about same sex marriage and someone dressed as a nurse with signs about health care reform. And everybody was talking about Nov. 4th the next week.

Well, I did not see him in person after the party, but over that weekend, the Scary Socialist seemed to be all that people on the TV news and talk shows were talking about, so I guess the people who dug him up made a valiant effort to scare everybody with him. I thought I might write about him in these pages at the time.

But you all know by now that election day came and they did not scare everybody enough. I was walking by the same part of town the night of the election, and amidst the cheers and horns blowing and I thought I saw him clamber over the fence into the cemetery and disappear into the shadows. I thought that was the last I would hear of him for at least another 90 years. I just forgot about writing about him, thinking he was irrelevant now.

Boy was I wrong. The health care debate heated up and he was dragged back out, scarier than ever, boys and girls. So I thought I would post these photographs and talk about him after all.

Scathing review of British Education reform

A scathing review of British version of "no child left behind", but really reflects trends around the world. To some extent Japanese and Indian education systems supposed successes In math and science were used to lengthen school years, load young kids with homework and rob them of play time, creativity, humanities and childhood, In particular, top business, info and other technology grads around the world are ignorant even of the spirit of the glorious revolution of Cromwell in Britain, the French and American revolutions, the rights struggles of Ghandi in South Africa and India, and the dialogue and struggle on class, race and human rights in the US, the economic, moral and political questions of Adam Smith, Marx, Engels Weber in the 19th century and the continuing development of thought on human rights in the 20th century. More controversially, I would argue, while acutely aware of some recent film, music and other pop culture, they lack depth in the history of classical and popular culture in at least one or 2 regions essential to understanding the richness of language and history.

This trend, which is older than the recent initiatives, really goes a long way explaining the acquiescence of populations of all developed nations to measures and political parties which compromise the Magna Carta, etc. (note that the Google spell checker highlights Magna Carta as an error). The continued development of ideas of equality, rights and environmental justice may rely on the thin ranks of a few progressives in North and South America and the rest of the world such as the Ghandiists.

Smithsonian should acquire Scott Adams' old cubicle

If it still exists. i know people who worked for Pac Bell in Contra Costa and who were given a tour that included Scott Adams' cubicle that inspired Dilbert.

Simple Middle East Peace Solutions

1. - for every child killed in Israel and Palestine a holy site should be bulldozed and put through a pulverizer, then mixed with nuclear waste so not even relics can be accessed for a few million years; the recent atheistic and other critics of the 3 great monotheistic religions have a point.
2. - if another 100 children die. Jerusalem should become a much needed international nuclear wasted dump and Israelis and Palestinians should spend at least 40 years relocated to the Sinai desert in tent cities, until a new generation demonstrates it understands that a child's life is worth more than a holy site.
3. - secular socialists and other Israeli and Arab leftists (there was a recent meeting of Israeli Arab leftists) should be granted at least the equivalent of the billions in money and support poured into Islamic groups like the mujhadeen in Afghanistan for strategic Realpolitik reasons during the cold war. The secular non-theistic strain in the Middle East must be rebuilt,
4. As a matter of fairness, the same rule should apply elsewhere such as in India and Sri Lanka, even though some of the parties are not strictly monotheists. Maybe the atheists have it right: all religion is primarily a destructive force when you tally up history.
   

The Wimpiest Revolution with the Biggest Impact?

The anti-globalization revolution of 1999 snd 2000 seemed stillborn in its aftermath. After successfully shutting down some sessions of the World Trade Organization(WTO meeting in the Battle of Seattle in 1999, subsequent protests in Quebec and Genoa were curtailed by massive military style police crackdowns that kept protestors out of sight and earshot of delegates, and overrode freedom of speech. Police chiefs around the world were mindful of the fate of Seattle's police chief at the time, ignominy and dismissal. Then the September 11 attacks came and the press declared the anti-globalization movement dead in the wave of sympathy for the victims and the anti-revolutionary mood. Indeed subsequent anti-globalization efforts were pale and small. Even some progressive and leftist pundits declared the efforts of the young anti-globalists shallow and unsustainable .

But the Battle of Seattle coincided strangely with the end of the power, even the decline, of the era of ever more encompassing and powerful, international, neo-liberal trade agreements. No agreement was reached in Seattle, even though the the meetings eventually convened, and some blamed the protests and the lame duck Clinton's too peaceful response to them. Since then the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs(GATT), WTO and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have suffered repeated failures and losses of influence. though the failure of Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) dubbed NAFTA on steroids by its nemesis Maude Barlow, who just recently was appointed as the UN's Senior advisor on water, actually faltered in 1998, its successful David character, Maude Barlow of the Council of canadians, was a major influence and intellectual supporter of the following year's anti-globalization movement. Poor Latin American and other countries saddled with huge debts, and forced to abandon social programs following IMF bailouts with strings attached, rebelled against further interventions in spite of their continued need. And now some declare the decline of global capitalism as we know it.

Was the massive international globalization structure fragile in some way. Was it near a tipping point in 1999?

The unprecedented, 10 million strong, global 2003 protests ahead of the Iraq war looked and felt like the anti-globalization protests. Again, the impact seemed minimal and even protestors were demoralized when their efforts did not stop the invasion. But would US and world public opinion have swung so massively against the war later if the predictions of trouble ahead implicit in the protests and the support and limelight it gave to the small minority of investigative reporters criticizing the reasons for the war and the war's conduct in the face of the huge US public relations propoganda machine, without the seemingly ineffectual protests.

One wonders if the ancient Romans poo pooed the impact of the early Barbarian sackings as the attackers withdrew.

US election thoughts

As an international observer, I wonder if the international viewer ratings for the US election will surpass the Oscars or the soccer World Cup or whatever the record is until now.

Robert F. Kennedy and Greg Palast

In 2004 on the morning of election day, Palast listed states and counts of votes which were already discounted or suppressed totalling in the millions. Fortunately he and Robert F Kennedy are proactive issuing a 7 page comic book (linked to below the article above) "stealing back your vote", so voters can actively secure their vote, and do more than shake their heads.

When major scary things are happening, many are in denial as in 2004. Democrats, in my view, seem to accept they have to win a cushion of 5-10% of votes to counter the suppression, rather than fight back vigorously and use the "c" word, conspiracy, which you can't use in polite company and get invited back to the cocktail party. They are fighting more vigorously this year, but the form of "the crunch", when and if it comes, is always different and surprising, and that is when we may see if Obama, unlike Gore and Kerry in 2000 and 2004, is a street fighter (or not). Someone should send him an emergency bullhorn. :>

Michael Moore, working for Dem legislature candidates in Michigan expressed some of this: in Friday on Democracy Now:

Michael Moores feeling:

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/31/academy_award_winning_filmmaker_michael_moore

MICHAEL MOORE: Right, yeah, I know. It seems that—it seems to feel like the Republicans aren’t going to have a very, very good time on Tuesday night. And she’s, of course, obviously, one of the extreme cases of why they’re in deep, deep trouble.

But I have no sense of optimism, as I sit here. You know, way too many times in the past, we’ve gotten far too giddy way too soon. And I am just not going to succumb to that feeling right now. I mean, I hope. I hope it all looks good on Tuesday, but for many reasons, there is a chance that McCain will win on Tuesday. And we have to operate with that attitude in mind, because—I mean, let’s face it. People on our side usually aren’t as driven to involve themselves in a political process that they view, somewhat cynically, as not having operated in the best interests of the people. And so, they’re not often as—often—not as much as the other side is motivated to go to the polls, whereas the other side, under, you know, strict orders from, they believe, the voice of God that’s in their head telling them that they must go to the polls and vote for these good people or remove the heathens that are in violation of whatever it is they’re listening to in their head. So, I’m telling you, I think that’s pretty powerful. They’ve been very successful at it. They’ve always been well funded. They’re very smart about it. They are committed. They are up at the crack of dawn, and they will be on Tuesday. Trust me. We have not lived under the Republicans for twenty of the last twenty-eight years by their side being a bunch of slackers. That’s not the case. So they will be out in full force. And I don’t think we need to wake up on Wednesday with that feeling that we all know too well, that—you know, “Woah, what happened? What happened?” I just—I think that’s happened one too many times.

political affiliations, isolation and attachment, health: Interesting survey or secondary data topic

Are affiliates of right wing or social Darwinist parties more lilkely to suffer from certain chronic preventable illnesses or risky habits like smoking than left leaning affiliates. Does a philosophy that stresses individualism and personal responsibility and personal wealth accumulation (philosophically or in Buddhist terms isolation and attachment) lead to the isolation and guilt over personal faiure associated with some illnesses. If so, in the US one could offer health insurance based on long term political membership and have degree of risk predictability.

Some related observations:

- lots of lefties smoke, drink and overeat too
- poverty is mostly associated with ill health, 2 exceptions being risk of car accidents and alcohol consumption; right wing views are associated positively with wealth I seem to recall
- are right wing views associated with fatalism and disbelief of the research showing that lifestyle changes (or collective/legislative/enforcement against hazards like pollution) can affect health?

ranked choice polling could lead to ranked choice voting

Could polls which say "how would you rank the candidates if your vote would always count eg you could vote green or libertarian and you did not have to fear the most worst if you did not vote for the least worst". Unlike proportional, ranked choice or instant runoff voting leads to a near majority for the winner. at least as a second or third or 4th choice and could be the real way to foster "radical" (in the Harry Belafonte sense) change we can believe in and alternative parties. Excellent Wikipedia entry here.

LHC why can't we just observe collisions in space?

Physicists - please answer my question:

too much noise? - we need 300 feet of rock? could it be done on an asteroid or the moon with a little tube collecting cosmic particles and sending them into a drilled chamber- could we have spent 8 billion developing a satellite and detector that couldl filter out the noise and detect lots of particles?

Because the safety argument that it happens anyway in upper atmosphere assumes it happens at the same concentration - if we are concentrating collisions to any degree beyond that the safety argument, that it happens every day in upper atmosphere falls short.