Musical Innerlube: Brand-X (Live in Tokyo, 1997)

Fretless Bass from Space - Percy

Lawmaker takes 9/11 doubts global

In a September 2003 article for The Guardian newspaper, Michael Meacher, who served as Tony Blair's environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003, shocked the establishment by calling the global war on terrorism "bogus." Even more controversially, he implied that the U.S. government either allowed 9/11 to happen, or played some role in the destruction wrought that day. Besides Meacher, few politicians have publicly questioned America's official 9/11 narrative — until Diet member Yukihisa Fujita.

In January 2008 Fujita, a member of the Democratic Party of Japan, asked the Japanese Parliament and Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to explain gaping holes in the official 9/11 story that various groups — including those who call themselves the "911 Truth Movement" — claim to have exposed.

Fujita, along with a growing number of individuals — including European and American politicians — are leading a charge to conduct a thorough, independent investigation of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

"Three or four years ago I saw some Internet videos like 'Loose Change' and '911 In Plane Site' and I began to ask questions," Fujita said in an interview, "but I still couldn't believe this was done by anyone but al-Qaida.

"Last year I watched more videos and read books written by professor David Ray Griffin (a professor emeritus of philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont Graduate University who wrote the most famous Truth Movement book, 'The New Pearl Harbor') about things such as the collapse of World Trade Center No. 7. This building, which was never hit by an airplane, collapsed straight down. Between the videos showing the way it fell, and the numerous reports of explosions, many are convinced that this building was demolished."

Fujita's presentation to the Diet and Fukuda focused a great deal on yet another aspect of 9/11 that now quite a few around the world find extremely suspicious: the Pentagon crash.

"I don't think (a) 767 could have hit the Pentagon," Fujita reckons. "There is no evidence of the plane itself. Almost nothing identifiable was left on the lawn or inside. The official story says the entire plane disintegrated, but the jet engines in particular were very strong (two 6-ton titanium steel turbine engines). And the damage to the building is much smaller than the size of the supposed airplane. The official claims just don't fit the facts."

While some label that claim "wacky" and label critics of the official 9/11 story "conspiracy theorists," Fujita has impressive company. For one, former Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, who was commanding general of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security until 1984, is quoted on the "Patriots Question 911" Web site as saying, "I look at the hole in the Pentagon and I look at the size of an airplane that was supposed to have hit the Pentagon. And I said, 'The plane does not fit in that hole.'

"So what did hit the Pentagon? What hit it? Where is it? What's going on?"

~ more... ~

 

'It's enough to make you believe in the gods'

That vague understanding can be dangerous. I told people I had read the Odyssey. I deeply believed I had read the Odyssey. I have specific memories, in post-college years, of pontificating about the admiration I had developed for Odysseus; about Athena, the goddess of wisdom who is his special protector, and how one might please her; about traveling, about home, about challenge.

Some of what I said actually made sense. For example, I compared Odysseus to other protagonists in Greek myths and plays. At least one terrible thing happens to almost all of them: Agamemnon kills his own daughter and is killed by his faithless wife; Oedipus kills his father, sleeps with his mother, pokes his eyes out; Hercules goes mad and kills his own wife and children. Theseus causes his father's suicide when he forgets to signal his own safety; Perseus kills his grandfather with a discus; Atreus invites his brother Thyestes to dinner - and feeds Thyestes his own children. That's hardly the worst of it - consider Medea: To help her lover Jason, Medea kills and dismembers her own brother and boils Jason's uncle alive; when Jason then decides - can you blame him? - to marry someone else, Medea kills Jason's bride, Jason's father, and her and Jason's own two children.

Odysseus on the other hand manages to win the decade-long Trojan War (the famous Trojan Horse is his idea). Then, overcoming unimaginable difficulties on his way home, he eventually returns to find his only son healthy and grown, his wife faithful and safe, his father overjoyed. According to at least one version of events, Odysseus lives happily ever after.

That Cyclops episode, probably his most well-known adventure, represents my conception of him perfectly. He can't match the giant bad guy physically, so he outwits him - he calls himself "No-man," so when the fighting starts and the Cyclops shouts that "No-man is killing me," his neighbors figure he doesn't need their help. The Cyclops, like most of Odysseus's enemies, ends up claiming he was cheated. Odysseus wins, but not because he's biggest; he's just the sneakiest.

Baseball fans might compare Achilles, the vain, arrogant hero of the Iliad, with someone like Ted Williams: undeniably great, but not necessarily good for the team or pleasant to be around; Agamemnon might be Ty Cobb, vicious and dangerous but hard to beat; and Menelaus something like Mickey Mantle: great and useful but something of a blowhard. Odysseus would be Pete Rose: the sneaky little bastard who pulls off some kind of trick that you think is beneath contempt, but carries the day. The guy you call a liar and a cheat - unless he's on your team. Then he's just a guy who does what it takes to win. I began to think - and more than once said out loud - that a good way to live your life was to live it as much like Odysseus as possible. I said it often enough that I began to consider it one of my life's principles.

[ ... ]

This book got my interest. This was a book worth more than a simple reading. This was a book, at long last, worth the return. I read it again, then again. I came to see the passage of Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca as a metaphor, a series of adventures in which Odysseus demonstrates what he needs to learn - or unlearn - to live his life. The Odyssey became the book I carried around, dipping into in spare moments - while the car got an oil change; in the waiting room for the eye doctor; for a few minutes before sleep. I had a handbook: The oldest lessons in the world were still the lessons I needed to learn - and they were still waiting for me in the Odyssey. During those post-college years when I claimed Odysseus as my role model, I had been right. I hadn't known what I was talking about, but I had been right.

So Joyce's impossible Ulysses had done me a favor: Homer wrote down the Odyssey nearly 3000 years ago, and we've been constantly retelling it ever since, but I had still managed to miss it. Only by squaring off opposite Ulysses did I stumble my way back to the original, central story. It was the Odyssey, not Ulysses, that had something for me.

STILL, I DID PILFER ONE IMPORTANT IDEA from the Ulysses community: pilgrimage. Like opera buffs or "Star Wars" fans at a premiere, members of an entire subculture find in Ulyssesa binding element for their lives. Its stories become central to them, known by heart and repeated, studied, appreciated. Ulysses serves as a lodestone text to which they return time and again for understanding.

And Ulysses fans return to more than just their book. Driven by obsession, they return, year after year, to Dublin itself, approaching Dublin as pilgrims, visiting its sites as shrines - going where Bloom went to see what Bloom saw, to learn what Bloom learned. Visiting the sites of the stories in Ulysses brings those stories home, gives them life and substance beyond the book. Through their travel these pilgrims thus go beyond merely reading Ulysses - in this small way they live it, and by connecting it physically to their world make it somehow even more their own.

~ From: How 'Leopold Bloom' Shaped One Author's Odyssey ~

 

“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”

Laws of quality

Two ideas are often invoked, either directly or indirectly, to defend the quality of peer production. The first is "Linus's Law" (Raymond, 1998). This holds that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." (The name is a tribute to Linus Torvalds, who initiated the Linux project). The idea that any problem is ultimately trivial comes from software development where, according to this law, the number of people contributing to a project provides a useful indication of its quality. Hence Linus's Law neatly bridges the gap between the quantitative assessments the Internet facilitates and the qualitative judgments people tend to make.

Raymond (1998) formalizes his aphorism to argue that "given a large enough beta–tester and co–developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone." This justification introduces some important limits to the law. First, it suggests a qualitative threshold for participation. The eyeballs of software beta–testers and co–developers are pre–selected for competence and often separated one from the other by the complexity of the systems they are working on [14]. Development is not a task for ordinary users. The law is further protected by another aspect of software coding: solutions must compile and run. Hence, while Open Source software has relied heavily on peer production and to a lesser extent on peer review, for quality, it relies as heavily though perhaps less obviously, on the chip and the compiler as ultimate arbiters. These two both identify problems with the code and reject inadequate solutions [15]. In the absence of such a stern gatekeeper, we have to ask what in other forms of peer production enforce Linus's Law. What might it mean to "compile" a Project Gutenberg submission? How might a Wikipedia entry be said to run? Or to crash? Finally, we should note that Linus's Law is primarily about debugging. It says little about building [16].

The second implied law of quality comes from Paul Graham who claims that "The method of ensuring quality" in peer production is "Darwinian ... People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff spreads, and the bad gets ignored" (Graham, 2005). A surprising inversion of Gresham's Law (that bad money drives out good), this claim deserves to be known as Graham's Law. Like all laws, it is an assertion, not an argument. And like all such laws, it needs to be bounded. Gresham limited his law to money; Moore limited his to microprocessors. Does Graham's Law apply to all peer production? Wikipedia implicitly invokes Graham's Law when it urges readers to trust articles because they are subject to "potentially constant improvement over a period of months or years, by vast numbers of experts and enthusiasts, possibly updated mere minutes before you read it." [17] The Wikipedia entry on Project Gutenberg makes a related argument, "A marked improvement in preserving such text can be seen by comparing earlier texts with newer ones." [18]

Such assertions reflects an optimistic faith that the "truth will conquer." While this optimism has roots in Milton's Areopagitica, it is perhaps a particularly American, democratic belief, enshrined in the First Amendment. Such optimism no doubt makes good political principle, but it does not dictate political process. Freedom of speech is not the same as the freedom to replace other's versions of the truth with your own. The authors of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights may have believed that open debate leads to political truth, they did not believe that the Constitution would improve were it changed at the whim of each citizen's changing view of truth. Consequently, the U.S. Constitution has significant built–in inertia. Committing bug fixes is intentionally a complex process. As this example may suggest, Graham's implication that continuous tinkering only makes things better is highly suspect. It is hard to see why entropy would be indefinitely suspended by peer production. In areas of "cultural production," in particular, progress is not necessarily linear, and neither the latest (nor the earliest version) of a work always the best. As Miles Davis had occasionally to persuade John Coltrane, a good deal of art is the outcome not of ceaseless work, but of knowing when to stop and recognizing when, as Shakespeare put it (anticipating the notion of the "tipping point") "a little more than a little is by much too much."

~ From: Limits of self-organization: Peer production and "laws of quality" by Paul Duguid ~

 

Marshall Thurber’s checkerboard game

Marshall Thurber, who was a close friend of Buckminster Fuller, recently unveiled his new Checkerboard Game at the Positive Deviant Network (the PDN www.posdev.net). A gamesmeister whose Blocks Game (which literally "melts" the right/left brain into a unified state) is the foundation of his long-running Money & You seminar (now taught internationally including China), Thurber's new Checkerboard Game reveals the dynamics behind the formation of financial and power elites. 

The setting itself was rather extraordinary. The Positive Deviant Network was in Dunkirk, NY, to view one of four prisons where PDN member Dr. Cherie Clark (who received her Ph.D based on her study of Buckminster Fuller's principles of Synergistics) co-heads Shock Incarceration (http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/shockny.pdf), a course based on Buckminster Fuller's principles, the 12-step addiction program and superlearning techniques. (80% of Shock Incarceration graduates starting with an average of 5^th grade education receive their GEDs - high-school equivalency - in 6 months with 12 hours of classroom time per week.) 

Where the average prison program lasts only two-to-three years, Shock Incarceration is now in its 21^st year after having successfully graduated 37,000 inmates, significantly lowered New York State's recidivism rates, saved the state of New York over $1 billion dollars and transformed countless lives in the process (Dr. Clark is also the president of Doing Life International, http://www.doinglife.com/company.html). 

The connection between The Checkerboard Game and Shock Incarceration is obvious. The creation of financial elites such as the Bilderbergers creates a world where elites continue to coalesce financial and political power at the expense of others. The rich get richer and the poor now go to prison. The Checkerboard Game and Shock Incarceration reflect that simple but increasingly ubiquitous truth. 

If you have the chance to play The Checkerboard Game you should do so. And if you're ever incarcerated by the state of New York and have a chance to take Shock Incarceration (the U.S. is now the world's #1 jailor so your odds are increasing) the same advice holds. Buckminster Fuller's influence in both is obvious.

~ From: Paper money and paper tigers ~