3/8/12

Footsteps now could contribute to the powering of the world

The World Beyond Cars - speculative fiction: Last Morning: "Bellingham got up early. He never failed to notice the play in the surface below his feet when he got up in the morning. Footsteps now could contribute to the powering of the world. Each step he took on the thin surface - what was once the floor but which was now all sides of all spaces - activated tiny sensors that cumulatively created energy. Outside on the walkway the same play existed. The strength of the surface exceeded that of what used to be called walls. Soundproof. Fireproof. Replaceable. They came from a plant that once made automobiles."




Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

There was an ideal Christian congregation somewhere

One Minute Christian: 1. The Journey Begins:

"Each felt there was an ideal Christian congregation somewhere. And they started to feel that this congregation would not be divided between a concern for organization and a concern for people. Somehow it would have both.

One day the couple learned of a congregation in a nearby community where, it was said, miracles were happening. There was talk of saintly behavior, triumph over adversity and marvelous events in the wider community."

'via Blog this'



Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

If testosterone starts it adrenalin finishes it.

Herodotus meets Ellroy: No big deeds forgotten. Great stuff coming at you.: "A generation passes. Alexander enters the game. Helen becomes his captive. Enter a matter of concern regarding rape in the order of things. Is avenging rape worth lives of hardy male soldiers? After all, these women have minds of their own. Is it really rape if they were willing?

But doesn't take long to overcome temptation. Blood is spilled. Plundering proceeds. History shifts from first to second. The course is set. If testosterone starts it adrenalin finishes it."

'via Blog this'



Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Today to wander is the artist’s way


Today to wander is the artist’s way,
For art is now perception in itself.
The layers of our making are so deep
Reflecting creations beyond all count,
Our coalescent magic can be seen,
And real is now the art that we once sought.
The world is lines, lined up at our museums.
And wanderers who see what time has made.
One day museum lines will cease to be,
As we perceive the world that we create.
Then wandering will be the way for all.
A loosening, a freedom on the road.
Stand still. Or move. It makes no difference.


Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Abba gives prudence a consciousness


Abba gives prudence a consciousness.
A setting within values as a means.
So it can then become our mindfulness.
Submit your prudence then to Abba’s light.
And to the tempering fire of Abba’s will.
Use it less as a reason than a pulse.
An arrow in the quiver of your sight




Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

We need to come clean on war criminality

ACLU in Appeals Court Friday Arguing for Release of CIA's Waterboarding Descriptions | American Civil Liberties Union: "NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union will appear in federal appeals court Friday to argue that the CIA must release cables describing its use of waterboarding."

'via Blog this'

All wars since WW2 have been questionable ventures, practically in order of their absurdity. There has, I'd venture, been a rise in war criminality over time.

Criminality would include actual war crimes worthy of prosecution and general criminality surrounding war including its negative effects on veterans.

War should be included among public health menaces.

War should be abolished as not befitting civilized nations.

The discussion of this issue is so rarified in  "serious" circles that one is tempted to assert that we perish minus a more common vision of the need to question the very foundation of war..




Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

When Size Matters and When It Does Not

Size matters when you have populations of less than 10,000 spread out so that there is no real proximity and no center of community living for that number of people

Size does not matter any more when you encounter "cities" that are more or less county seats of any size

They are usually pretty dead and they are the center of  a web of depopulated towns and rural enclaves

The only size that matters any more is a square mile where you can gather 10,000 people and have all the elements of a city within walking distance

Squares every 200 feet or so, four graded levels, no more than a mile by foot from anywhere. fully cyber-enabled, big screens that are public, schools that are cyberfied and small. jobs that go with a recalibration of everything so that a person can earn a decent living serving the community

We think so wrong about size that it almost makes one cry

See also:

ShortFormContent at Blogger: We lack anything close to an ideal distribution of communities and population:





Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Housing is the problem not the answer

How Good Is the Housing News? - NYTimes.com:

'via Blog this'

Housing is the problem.. Housing, cars and sprawl. In short our society. That is what won't come back. The side effect of austerity is that we will be hunkering down to whatever works. But that does not mean we will go back to what does not work.

Sometime in the hopefully near future, people will wake to the economic bonanza in redesigning society, in zapping existing stratified zoning, in creating modular, walkable communities, in decentralizing work and education and everything else so that communities of 10,000 can spring up and develop economies in their midst.

We should be in no hurry to revive the automobile sand housing sectors. Rather we should reimagine transportation, elevate walkability and see future housing as a flexible, modular affair, closer to lego than bricks, boards and mortar.




Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Lack of Imagination Abounds

Reforms for the New Upper Class - NYTimes.com:

'via Blog this'

Here we have the most lionized authority on divisions in America telling us that the draft was a good leveler.

I'll tell you what the best leveler is and will be. It is free enterprise that is enterprising and free. Build me a community that is eco-sufficient, modular. walkable and high tech and zoned to include everything and open it to anyone who pledges to do no harm and I will guarantee it will fill up immediately with people from all backgrounds with all incomes.

We have structured our society for stratification and defeated everything that works for real integration and real enterprise. We are a mentally deprived society.

It is shameful that the leading authority can do no better than a few bandaids but the reason is obvious. Four bullets defeated vision in the 1960s and all we have had since is pap.

Listen to Arcade Fire on Sprawl on Spotify





Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Your stillest hour is in a ribbon wrapped


Your stillest hour is in a ribbon wrapped,
A gift from Abba, please to recall that.
Who is the still, small voice amid the storm?
Whence come the softest words that have such power,
That mountains move at one whispered command,
And centuries of ill turn round at will?
The stillest hour is now, let it enfold
The agonies, the dead ends and the blocks.
Immobile, you are set to move again.
Struck dumb by living, you will live some more.
Let Abba’s guidance be your resting place.
You are not dead, just silent and enclosed.
Now rise and feel a rising, subtle power.
And move on, lifted by the stillest hour."






Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Mozart on Spotify C Minor Piano Concerto


Mozart Piano Concerto in C Minor on Spotify


Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Really is there graft in Afghanistan?



Really is there graft in Afghanistan
Maybe things have gotten out of hand
Pretty soon there'll be no place to stand
I knew that someday we would understand


Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Regions of between 2 and 10 million are an ideal basis for governance



Regions of  between 2 and 10 million are an ideal basis for governance but we can only think in terms of taking the populations we have and doing what we can to observe this rule in our creation of a new world of car free communities.  The fundamental argument for such population math is economic.

Without a region in which at least 2 million live and move and have their being, we are condemned either to gross congestion or the atrophy of too few people to sustain the basic elements of living.

What my notion of cyber-communities and cyber-cities does is build from the bottom up toward such a regional concept. A cyber-community of up to 10,000 persons can be built from the existing settlements and eventually replace them. These can be connected by yet-to-be invented evolutions of buses and trains - public transit. All communities will be walkable. A cluster of 10 cyber-communities would nest within a larger region containing 100 cyber-communities. A region could consist of from two to ten such nested elements.

Human governance needs to be accessable to communities that are themselves intelligible as living areas. A cyber-community is such a unit. Ten such suggest a reasonable city size.Individual communities would contain a few of the larger structures. Many presently large structures would be be scaled down to function in the cyber-communities. For example a cyber-community would have infirmaries but a hospital would exist to serve ten cyber-communities.

Because cyber communities would be global and trump distances by means of technology there is no reason why, in a nation like the United States, such communities could not be created de-novo anywhere.

Elsewhere I have suggested that interstates be the likely locations for cyber communities.

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Balancing population enhances civilization


Balancing population enhances civilization
The United States exemplifies imbalance
Our population per square mile is very small
But  then we have sclerotic metro areas 
Made less than habitable by the plethora of cars
And roads

The best balance of population would be to distribute
Cyber-communities of 10,000 
Living in areas of a mile square
In clusters of ten 
With distance between of them
For agriculture and so forth

These cyber-communities would be walkable 
With no more than
Four above ground levels
They would be connected to their neighbors by public transit 
Evolved
From trains and buses of the present

Speed would not be of the essence 
Dstances 
Would be modest
A few miles between communities
Ten such walkable, car-free communities forming a viable cluster
100,000
A region would have ten to twenty of these
Viable clusters

The construction of a cyber community requires
Creation of a universal matrix able to
Perform the tasks we assign to the circulation of water, energy and waste
By envisioning a matrix serving 10,000 we arrive at an
Economy of scale

All this thought derives from a reasonable approach to the actual
Distribution of population
Such a distribution would free land between the cyber-communities for
Local agriculture

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

We lack anything close to an ideal distribution of communities and population


All one needs to do is look at this map to see that we lack anything close to an ideal distribution of communities and population. We are behind the 8-ball economically and this is partly due to population densities. It takes around 10K human beings living in proximity to enable the natural growth of occupations and professions that make for a vital community. I have advocated that the interstate grid be used as the transport matrix for walkable communities of up to 10,000 (I call them cyber-communities) clustered in groups of up to ten to create cyber-cities of 100,000 separated by green space devoted to recreation and agriculture.

A cyber-metropolis would be a regional cluster of ten or so cyber-cities.

The genius of this scheme is that a walkable, car-free community can be built in an area a mile square, a miniscule amount of space. A population of 100,000 could be served by an aggregate of  just ten cyber-communities. Creation along these lines would revolutionize manufacturing because the components would all represent new inventions and designs, from the matrix needed to make each cyber-community ecologically sustainable to the mass-produced but customized  elements of  structures and spaces within the cyber-community.

How do we begin to take what we have now, subservient to the car and oil, and morph it into cyber-communities?. We do it first by creating cyber-communities de novo, from scratch. When we find a gutsy entrepreneur who is tired of gadget-capitalism, the fun can begin.





Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Here's the right idea in Colorado no less

The next small thing: How sustainable neighborhoods could reshape cities | Grist: "Bennett is among a group of urban thinkers who envision neighborhoods powered by their own micro-solar or geothermal power grids. They imagine city blocks that operate as single, interconnected systems, saving gobs of energy and resources in the process, and small manufacturing districts where companies make use of each other's waste streams. Planning geeks call them "eco-districts," and say they'll be the next big (or not-so-big) thing in sustainability.

The project in Denver is the brainchild of Living City Block, a nonprofit that adopted two square blocks in Lower Downtown (known by locals as LoDo). Architect Paul Todd says that 20 years ago, the place was a wasteland of boarded up, Victorian-era warehouses. He and his wife (and architectural partner), Kirstin Todd, bought a building in 1991 that was slated for demolition. "We removed the entire second floor and most of the roof," he says. "We completely rebuilt it from the ground up.""

'via Blog this



Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Love this - Bob Dylan's best feel-good song


Can't help it 
It brings a smile every time I play it

Bob Dylan sings Christmas Island on Spotify


Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

More Sins of the Rich - A Damning Digest

Hot List: Richest 1% Swipe 93% of All Income Gains; Robber Barons Continue to Rake in Billions; Market Recovery Is Illusion | AmpedStatus:

'via Blog this'

Saving me a lot of trouble. Obviously there are a few who lie between the poorest and the richest who are co-optable by the GOP or otherwise lulled into moral quiescence by joining the liberal side. I shall insist that those who make the positive history are those who act for tolerance, democracy, helpfulness and above all non-idolatry.



Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

Fugs Morning Worship


Fugs Morning Worship

That would be

(On Spotify)

Be Free

Marijuana

Dover Beach

Morning Meditation

War on Drugs is an extension of virulent racism and prison expansion
Off the War on Drugs
Recover sanity
Sail on with or without marijuana
Heave ignorant armies
Ignite inner thought 
Pace yourself mindfully

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

RECCMENDATION Richard Gordon Quantum Touch

The Slow as Molasses Press