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* Antifragile_ Things That Gain From Disorde - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Nassim Nicholas Taleb/Antifragile_ Things That Gain From Disorder (7793)/Antifragile_ Things That Gain From Disorde - Nassim Nicholas Taleb.epub
:END:
** Notes for page (41 . 4950)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (41 . 4950)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
There is another issue with the abstract state, a psychological one. We humans scorn what is not concrete. We are more easily swayed by a crying baby than by thousands of people dying elsewhere that do not make it to our living room through the TV set. The one case is a tragedy, the other a statistic. Our emotional energy is blind to probability. The media make things worse as they play on our infatuation with anecdotes, our thirst for the sensational, and they cause a great deal of unfairness that way. At the present time, one person is dying of diabetes every seven seconds, but the news can only talk about victims of hurricanes with houses flying in the air.
The problem is that by creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way.
Also consider that lobbyists—this annoying race of lobbyists—cannot exist in a municipality or small region. The Europeans, thanks to the centralization of (some) power with the European Commission in Brussels, are quickly discovering the existence of these mutants coming to manipulate democracy for the sake of some large corporation. By influencing one single decision or regulation in Brussels, a single lobbyist gets a large bang. It is a much larger payoff (at low cost) than with municipalities, which would require armies of lobbyists trying to convince people while embedded in their communities.3
Consider, too, the other effect of scale: small corporations are less likely to have lobbyists.
The same bottom-up effect applies to law. The Italian political and legal philosopher Bruno Leoni has argued in favor of the robustness of judge-based law (owing to its diversity) as compared to explicit and rigid codifications. True, the choice of a court could be a lottery—but it helps prevent large-scale mistakes.
I use the example of Switzerland to show the natural antifragility of political systems and how stability is achieved by managing noise, having a mechanism for letting it run its natural course, not by minimizing it.
Note another element of Switzerland: it is perhaps the most successful country in history, yet it has traditionally had a very low level of university education compared to the rest of the rich nations. Its system, even in banking during my days, was based on apprenticeship models, nearly vocational rather than the theoretical ones. In other words, on techne (crafts and know how), not episteme (book knowledge, know what).
#+END_QUOTE
** Like in jury duty. Also, random choice, if the number is large enough, eliminates the need for elections.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (46 . 4939)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
I immediately thought that perhaps the opposite parable should be written: instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing—and it happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients—again, those ancients!—were aware of it: the members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (51 . 11601)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (51 . 11601)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
On the other hand, social science seems to diverge from theory to theory. During
the cold war, the University of Chicago was promoting laissez-faire theories, while
the University of Moscow taught the exact opposite—but their respective physics
departments were in convergence, if not total agreement. This is the reason I put
social science theories in the left column of the Triad, as something superfragile for
real-world decisions and unusable for risk analyses. The very designation “theory” is
even upsetting. In social science we should call these constructs “chimeras” rather
than theories.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (51 . 19900)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (51 . 19900)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
But I also buy the opposite argument that regulating street signs does not seem to
reduce risks; drivers become more placid. Experiments show that alertness is
weakened when one relinquishes control to the system (again, lack of
overcompensation). Motorists need the stressors and tension coming from the
feeling of danger to feed their attention and risk controls, rather than some external
regulator—fewer pedestrians die jaywalking than using regulated crossings. Some
libertarians use the example of Drachten, a town in the Netherlands, in which a
dream experiment was conducted. All street signs were removed. The deregulation
led to an increase in safety, confirming the antifragility of attention at work, how it is
whetted by a sense of danger and responsibility. As a result, many German and
Dutch towns have reduced the number of street signs. We saw a version of the
Drachten effect in Chapter 2 in the discussion of the automation of planes, which
produces the exact opposite effect than what is intended by making pilots lose
alertness. But one needs to be careful not to overgeneralize the Drachten effect, as
it does not imply the effectiveness of removing all rules from society. As I said
earlier, speed on the highway responds to a different dynamic and its risks are
different.
#+END_QUOTE
** Difference between Buddhism and Stoicism
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (65 . 16129)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
1 For those readers who wonder about the difference between Buddhism and
Stoicism, I have a simple answer. A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says
“f*** you” to fate.
#+END_QUOTE
** The economist who can provide. A joke for Nancy
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (69 . 3802)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The Accountant and the Rock Star
Biological systems are replete with barbell strategies. Take the following mating approach, which we call the 90 percent accountant, 10 percent rock star. (I am just reporting, not condoning.) Females in the animal kingdom, in some monogamous species (which include humans), tend to marry the equivalent of the accountant, or, even more colorless, the economist, someone stable who can provide, and once in a while they cheat with the aggressive alpha, the rock star, as part of a dual strategy. They limit their downside while using extrapair copulation to get the genetic upside, or some great fun, or both. Even the timing of the cheating seems nonrandom, as it corresponds to periods with high likelihood of pregnancy. We see evidence of such a strategy with the so-called monogamous birds: they enjoy cheating, with more than a tenth of the broods coming from males other than the putative father. The phenomenon is real, but the theories around it vary. Evolutionary theorists claim that females want both economic-social stability and good genes for their children. Both cannot be always obtained from someone in the middle with all these virtues (though good gene providers, those alpha males aren’t likely to be stable, and vice versa). Why not have the pie and eat it too? Stable life and good genes. But an alternative theory may be that they just want to have pleasure—or stable life and good fun
#+END_QUOTE
** On writing simply and complex
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (69 . 11864)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
My writing approach is as follows: on one hand a literary essay that can be grasped
by anyone and on the other technical papers, nothing in between—such as
interviews with journalists or newspaper articles or op-ed pieces, outside of the
requirements of publishers.
#+END_QUOTE
** Intelligence (or luck) for starts, then robustness, then options
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (76 . 1908)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The great French biologist François Jacob introduced into science the notion of
options (or option-like characteristics) in natural systems, thanks to trial and error,
under a variant called bricolage in French. Bricolage is a form of trial and error close
to tweaking, trying to make do with what you’ve got by recycling pieces that would
be otherwise wasted.
#+END_QUOTE
** On the connection between education and economic growth
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (82 . 6515)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Further, Alison Wolf debunks the flaw in logic in going from the point that it is hard
to imagine Microsoft or British Aerospace without advanced knowledge to the idea
that more education means more wealth. “The simple one-way relationship which so
entrances our politicians and commentators—education spending in, economic
growth out—simply doesn’t exist. Moreover, the larger and more complex the
education sector, the less obvious any links to productivity become.” And, similar to
Pritchet, she looks at countries such as, say, Egypt, and shows how the giant leap in
education it underwent did not translate into the Highly Cherished Golden GDP
Growth That Makes Countries Important or Unimportant on the Ranking Tables.
#+END_QUOTE
** History is written by losers
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (87 . 6115)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Practitioners don’t write; they do. Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones
who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with
time on their hands and a protected academic position.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (116 . 7892)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (116 . 7892)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The number of cars is the something, a variable; traffic time is the function of something. The behavior of the function is such that it is, as we said, “not the same thing.” We can see here that the function of something becomes different from the something under nonlinearities.
(a) The more nonlinear, the more the function of something divorces itself from the something. If traffic were linear, then there would be no difference in traffic time between the two following situations: 90,000, then 110,000 cars on the one hand, or 100,000 cars on the other.
(b) The more volatile the something—the more uncertainty—the more the function divorces itself from the something. Let us consider the average number of cars again. The function (travel time) depends more on the volatility around the average. Things degrade if there is unevenness of distribution. For the same average you prefer to have 100,000 cars for both time periods; 80,000 then 120,000, would be even worse than 90,000 and 110,000.
(c) If the function is convex (antifragile), then the average of the function of something is going to be higher than the function of the average of something. And the reverse when the function is concave (fragile).
As an example for (c), which is a more complicated version of the bias, assume that the function under question is the squaring function (multiply a number by itself). This is a convex function. Take a conventional die (six sides) and consider a payoff equal to the number it lands on, that is, you get paid a number equivalent to what the die shows—1 if it lands on 1, 2 if it lands on 2, up to 6 if it lands on 6. The square of the expected (average) payoff is then (1+2+3+4+5+6 divided by 6)2, equals 3.52, here 12.25. So the function of the average equals 12.25.
But the average of the function is as follows. Take the square of every payoff, 12+22+32+42+52+62 divided by 6, that is, the average square payoff, and you can see that the average of the function equals 15.17.
So, since squaring is a convex function, the average of the square payoff is higher than the square of the average payoff. The difference here between 15.17 and 12.25 is what I call the hidden benefit of antifragility—here, a 24 percent “edge.”
There are two biases: one elementary convexity effect, leading to mistaking the properties of the average of something (here 3.5) and those of a (convex) function of something (here 15.17), and the second, more involved, in mistaking an average of a function for the function of an average, here 15.17 for 12.25. The latter represents optionality.
Someone with a linear payoff needs to be right more than 50 percent of the time. Someone with a convex payoff, much less. The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming. Here lies the power of optionality—your function of something is very convex, so you can be wrong and still do fine—the more uncertainty, the better.
This explains my statement that you can be dumb and antifragile and still do very well.
This hidden “convexity bias” comes from a mathematical property called Jensen’s inequality. This is what the common discourse on innovation is missing. If you ignore the convexity bias, you are missing a chunk of what makes the nonlinear world go round. And it is a fact that such an idea is missing from the discourse. Sorry
#+END_QUOTE
** The weakest have no rights.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (153 . 4431)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
For Metternich, humanity started at the rank of baron; for Aristotle, as well as, though in a separate form, the English up until the twentieth century, it started at the rank of idle freeman, unpreoccupied with work. It never meant not working; it just meant not deriving your personal and emotional identity from your work, and viewing work as something optional, more like a hobby. In a way your profession does not identify you so much as other attributes, here your birth (but it could be something else). This is the f*** you money that allowed Thales of Miletus to gauge his own sincerity. For the Spartans, it was all about courage. For Fat Tony, humanity started at the level of “self-ownership.”
#+END_QUOTE

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* Breath_ The New Science of a Lost Art - James Nestor
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/James Nestor/Breath_ The New Science of a Lost Art (11274)/Breath_ The New Science of a Lost Art - James Nestor.epub
:END:
** Learn the Five Tibetan Rites. Get the book
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 1613)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The path to everlasting life involves a lot of stretching: back bends, neck bends, and twirling, each
one a holy and ancient practice that had been passed down in secrecy from one Buddhist monk to
another for 2,500 years. Olsson and I need this stretching; even if we breathe through the nose
twenty-four hours a day, it won’t help much unless we’ve got the lung capacity to hold in that air.
Just a few minutes of daily bending and breathing can expand lung capacity. With that extra
capacity we can expand our lives.
The stretches, called the Five Tibetan Rites, came to the Western world, and to me, by way of
writer Peter Kelder, who was known as a lover of “books and libraries, words and poetry.”
In the 1930s, Kelder was sitting on a park bench in southern California when an elderly stranger
struck up a conversation. The man, whom he called Colonel Bradford, had spent decades in India
with the British Army. The Colonel was old—all sloping shoulders, gray hair, and wobbly
legs—but he believed there was a cure for aging and that it was locked up in a monastery in the
Himalayas. The usual mystical stuff occurred up there: the sick became healthy, poor became rich,
old became young. Kelder and the Colonel stayed in touch and shared many conversations. Then,
one day, the old man hobbled away, desperate to find this Shangri-La before he drew his last
breath.
Four years passed until Kelder received a call from his building’s doorman. The Colonel was
waiting downstairs. He looked 20 years younger. He was standing straight, his face vibrant and
alive, and his once-balding head was covered in thick, dark hair. He’d found the monastery,
studied the ancient manuscripts, and learned restorative practices from the monks. He’d reversed
aging through nothing more than stretching and breathing.
Kelder described these techniques in a slim booklet titled The Eye of Revelation, published in
1939. Few people bothered to read it; fewer believed it. Kelder’s yarn was likely fabricated, or at
minimum grossly exaggerated. However, the lung-expanding stretches he described are rooted in
actual exercises that date back to 500 BCE. Tibetans had used these methods for millennia to
improve physical fitness, mental health, cardiovascular function, and, of course, extend life.
#+END_QUOTE
** Lungs capacity are the greatests indicator of life span
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 2844)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
More recently, science has begun measuring what the ancient Tibetans understood intuitively. In
the 1980s, researchers with the Framingham Study, a 70-year longitudinal research program
focused on heart disease, attempted to find out if lung size really did correlate to longevity. They
gathered two decades of data from 5,200 subjects, crunched the numbers, and discovered that the
greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had
suspected. It was lung capacity.
The smaller and less efficient lungs became, the quicker subjects got sick and died. The cause of
deterioration didn’t matter. Smaller meant shorter. But larger lungs equaled longer lives.
Our ability to breathe full breaths was, according to the researchers, “literally a measure of living
capacity.” In 2000, University of Buffalo researchers ran a similar study, comparing lung capacity
in a group of more than a thousand subjects over three decades. The results were the same.
#+END_QUOTE
** Most of the weight is lost through breathing as CO2
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (15 . 10607)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
For every ten pounds of fat lost in our bodies, eight and a half pounds of it comes out through the
lungs; most of it is carbon dioxide mixed with a bit of water vapor. The rest is sweated or urinated
out. This is a fact that most doctors, nutritionists, and other medical professionals have historically
gotten wrong. The lungs are the weight-regulating system of the body.
#+END_QUOTE
** Prayer is regulated breathing. Again how tradition is distilled knowledge
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (15 . 29082)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
A last word on slow breathing. It goes by another name: prayer.
When Buddhist monks chant their most popular mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum, each spoken
phrase lasts six seconds, with six seconds to inhale before the chant starts again. The traditional
chant of Om, the “sacred sound of the universe” used in Jainism and other traditions, takes six
seconds to sing, with a pause of about six seconds to inhale.
The sa ta na ma chant, one of the best-known techniques in Kundalini yoga, also takes six seconds
to vocalize, followed by six seconds to inhale. Then there were the ancient Hindu hand and tongue
poses called mudras. A technique called khechari, intended to help boost physical and spiritual
health and overcome disease, involves placing the tongue above the soft palate so that it’s pointed
toward the nasal cavity. The deep, slow breaths taken during this khechari each take six seconds.
Japanese, African, Hawaiian, Native American, Buddhist, Taoist, Christian—these cultures and
religions all had somehow developed the same prayer techniques, requiring the same breathing
patterns. And they all likely benefited from the same calming effect.
In 2001, researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy gathered two dozen subjects, covered them
with sensors to measure blood flow, heart rate, and nervous system feedback, then had them recite
a Buddhist mantra as well as the original Latin version of the rosary, the Catholic prayer cycle of
the Ave Maria, which is repeated half by a priest and half by the congregation. They were stunned
to find that the average number of breaths for each cycle was “almost exactly” identical, just a bit
quicker than the pace of the Hindu, Taoist, and Native American prayers: 5.5 breaths a minute.
But what was even more stunning was what breathing like this did to the subjects. Whenever they
followed this slow breathing pattern, blood flow to the brain increased and the systems in the body
entered a state of coherence, when the functions of heart, circulation, and nervous system are
coordinated to peak efficiency. The moment the subjects returned to spontaneous breathing or
talking, their hearts would beat a little more erratically, and the integration of these systems would
slowly fall apart. A few more slow and relaxed breaths, and it would return again.
A decade after the Pavia tests, two renowned professors and doctors in New York, Patricia
Gerbarg and Richard Brown, used the same breathing pattern on patients with anxiety and
depression, minus the praying. Some of these patients had trouble breathing slowly, so Gerbarg
and Brown recommended they start with an easier rhythm of three-second inhales with at least
the same length exhale. As the patients got more comfortable, they breathed in and breathed out
longer.
It turned out that the most efficient breathing rhythm occurred when both the length of
respirations and total breaths per minute were locked in to a spooky symmetry: 5.5-second inhales
followed by 5.5-second exhales, which works out almost exactly to 5.5 breaths a minute. This was
the same pattern of the rosary.
The results were profound, even when practiced for just five to ten minutes a day. “I have seen
patients transformed by adopting regular breathing practices,” said Brown. He and Gerbarg even
used this slow breathing technique to restore the lungs of 9/11 survivors who suffered from a
chronic and painful cough caused by the debris, a horrendous condition called ground-glass
lungs. There was no known cure for this ailment, and yet after just two months, patients achieved
a significant improvement by simply learning to practice a few rounds of slow breathing a day.
Gerbarg and Brown would write books and publish several scientific articles about the restorative
power of the slow breathing, which would become known as “resonant breathing” or Coherent
Breathing. The technique required no real effort, time, or thoughtfulness. And we could do it
anywhere, at any time. “It’s totally private,” wrote Gerbarg. “ Nobody knows you’re doing it.”
In many ways, this resonant breathing offered the same benefits as meditation for people who
didn’t want to meditate. Or yoga for people who didn’t like to get off the couch. It offered the
healing touch of prayer for people who weren’t religious.
Did it matter if we breathed at a rate of six or five seconds, or were a half second off? It did not, as
long as the breaths were in the range of 5.5.
“We believe that the rosary may have partly evolved because it synchronized with the inherent
cardiovascular (Mayer) rhythms, and thus gave a feeling of wellbeing, and perhaps an increased
responsiveness to the religious message,” the Pavia researchers wrote. In other words, the
meditations, Ave Marias, and dozens of other prayers that had been developed over the past
several thousand years weren’t all baseless.
Prayer heals, especially when it’s practiced at 5.5 breaths a minute.
#+END_QUOTE
** Over-breathing leads to kidney buffering, which tries to balance blood pH by release bicarbonate into the bloodstream, taking with it minerals needed in cells
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (16 . 35363)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Packman explained that overbreathing can have other, deeper effects on the body beyond just lung
function and constricted airways. When we breathe too much, we expel too much carbon dioxide,
and our blood pH rises to become more alkaline; when we breathe slower and hold in more carbon
dioxide, pH lowers and blood becomes more acidic. Almost all cellular functions in the body take
place at a blood pH of 7.4, our sweet spot between alkaline and acid.
When we stray from that, the body will do whatever it can to get us back there. The kidneys, for
instance, will respond to overbreathing by “buffering,”* a process in which an alkaline compound
called bicarbonate is released into the urine. With less bicarbonate in the blood, the pH lowers back
to normal, even if we continue to huff and puff. It’s as if nothing ever happened.
The problem with buffering is that it’s meant as a temporary fix, not a permanent solution. Weeks,
months, or years of overbreathing, and this constant kidney (renal) buffering will deplete the body
of essential minerals. This occurs because as bicarbonate leaves the body, it takes magnesium,
phosphorus, potassium, and more with it. Without healthy stores of these minerals, nothing works
right: nerves malfunction, smooth muscles spasm, and cells can’t efficiently create energy.
Breathing becomes even more difficult. This is one reason why asthmatics and other people with
chronic respiratory problems are prescribed supplements like magnesium to stave off further
attacks.
Constant buffering also weakens the bones, which try to compensate by dissolving their mineral
stores back into the bloodstream. (Yes, it’s possible to overbreathe yourself into osteoporosis and
increased risk of bone fractures.) This unending grind of imbalances and compensations, of
deficiencies and strain, will eventually break the body down.
Packman was quick to point out that not all respiratory illness sufferers and other sick people have
a carbon dioxide deficiency problem. Those with emphysema, for instance, may have dangerously
high levels of carbon dioxide because they’ve got too much stale air trapped inside. Others may
test with completely normal blood gas and pH levels. But such nitpicking, he said, missed the
larger point.
All these people have a breathing problem. They’re stressed, they’re inflamed, they’re congested,
and they struggle to get air in and out of their lungs. And it’s these breathing problems that slow,
paced, less techniques are so effective at fixing.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (19 . 21670)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (19 . 21670)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
That shove is still perplexing to the few scientists paying close attention to such phenomena. They
ask: How exactly can conscious extreme breathing hack into the autonomic nervous system?
Dr. Stephen Porges, a scientist and professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, has
studied the nervous system and its response to stress for the past 30 years. His primary focus is the
vagus nerve, a meandering network within the system that connects to all the major internal
organs. The vagus nerve is the power lever; it’s what turns organs on and off in response to stress.
When perceived stress level is very high, the vagus nerve slows heart rate, circulation, and organ
functions. This is how our reptilian and mammalian ancestors evolved the ability to “play dead”
hundreds of millions of years ago, to conserve energy and deflect aggression when under attack by
predators. Reptiles still access this ability, as do many mammals. (Imagine the limp body of a
mouse in the jaws of a house cat.)
People “play dead,” too, because we share the same mechanisms in the primitive part of our brain
stem. We call it fainting. Our tendency to faint is controlled by the vagal system, specifically how
sensitive we are to perceived danger. Some people are so anxious and oversensitive that their
vagus nerves will cause them to faint at the smallest things, like seeing a spider, hearing bad news,
or looking at blood.
Most of us aren’t that sensitive. It’s much more common, especially in the modern world, to never
experience full-blown, life-threatening stress, but to never fully relax either. We’ll spend our days
half-asleep and nights half-awake, lolling in a gray zone of half-anxiety. When we do, the vagus
nerve stays half-stimulated.
During these times, the organs throughout the body won’t be “shut down,” but will instead be
half supported in a state of suspended animation: blood flow will decrease and communication
between the organs and the brain will become choppy, like a conversation through a staticky
phone line. Our bodies can persist like this for a while; they can keep us alive, but they can’t keep
us healthy.
Porges found that patients who suffer Da Costa–like maladies such as tingling in their fingers,
chronic diarrhea, rapid heart rate, diabetes, and erectile dysfunction are often treated for each of
these symptoms with a focus on individual organs. But there’s nothing wrong with their
stomachs, hearts, or genitals. What they often suffer from are communication problems along the
vagal and autonomic network, brought on by chronic stress. To some researchers, it’s no
coincidence that eight of the top ten most common cancers affect organs cut off from normal blood
flow during extended states of stress.
Fixing the autonomic nervous system can effectively cure or lessen these symptoms. In the past
decade, surgeons have implanted electrical nodes in patients that work as an artificial vagal nerve
to restart blood flow and communication between organs. The procedure is called vagus nerve
stimulation, and it’s highly effective for patients suffering from anxiety, depression, and
autoimmune diseases.
But there is another, less invasive way Porges found to stimulate the vagus nerve: breathing.
Breathing is an autonomic function we can consciously control. While we can’t simply decide
when to slow or speed up our heart or digestion, or to move blood from one organ to another, we
can choose how and when to breathe. Willing ourselves to breathe slowly will open up
communication along the vagal network and relax us into a parasympathetic state.
Breathing really fast and heavy on purpose flips the vagal response the other way, shoving us into
a stressed state. It teaches us to consciously access the autonomic nervous system and control it, to
turn on heavy stress specifically so that we can turn it off and spend the rest of our days and
nights relaxing and restoring, feeding and breeding.
“You are not the passenger,” McGee keeps yelling at me. “You are the pilot!”
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (20 . 12780)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (20 . 12780)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
As far back as the first century BCE, inhabitants of what is now India described a system of
conscious apnea, which they claimed restored health and ensured long life. The Bhagavad Gita, a
Hindu spiritual text written around 2,000 years ago, translated the breathing practice of
pranayama to mean “trance induced by stopping all breathing.” A few centuries after that,
Chinese scholars wrote several volumes detailing the art of breathholding. One text, A Book on
Breath by the Master Great Nothing of Sung-Shan, offered this advice:
Lie down every day, pacify your mind, cut off thoughts and block the breath. Close your fists,
inhale through your nose, and exhale through your mouth. Do not let the breathing be audible.
Let it be most subtle and fine. When the breath is full, block it. The blocking (of the breath) will
make the soles of your feet perspire. Count one hundred times “one and two.” After blocking
the breath to the extreme, exhale it subtly. Inhale a little more and block (the breath) again. If
(you feel) hot, exhale with “Ho.” If (you feel) cold, blow the breath out and exhale it with (the
sound) “Ch’ui.” If you can breathe (like this) and count to one thousand (when blocking), then
you will need neither grains nor medicine.
Today, breathholding is associated almost entirely with disease. “Don’t hold your breath,” the
adage goes. Denying our bodies a consistent flow of oxygen, we’ve been told, is bad. For the most
part, this is sound advice.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (22 . 18579)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (22 . 18579)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
In a nutshell, this is what we’ve learned.
SHUT YOUR MOUTH
Two months after the Stanford experiment ended, Dr. Jayakar Nayak’s lab emailed Anders Olsson
and me the results of our 20-day study. The major takeaway we already knew: mouthbreathing is
terrible.
After just 240 hours of breathing only through our mouths, catecholamine and stress-related
hormones spiked, suggesting that our bodies were under physical and mental duress. A
diphtheroid Corynebacterium bug had also infested my nose. If I’d continued breathing only
through my mouth for a few more days, it might have developed into a full-fledged sinus
infection. All the while, my blood pressure was through the roof and my heart rate variability
plummeted. Olsson’s data mirrored mine.
By night, the constant flow of unpressurized, unfiltered air flowing in and out of our gaping
mouths collapsed the soft tissue in our throats to such an extent that we both began to experience
persistent nocturnal suffocation. We snored. A few days later, we started choking on ourselves,
suffering from bouts of sleep apnea. Had we continued breathing through our mouths, there’s a
decent chance we both would have developed chronic snoring and obstructive sleep apnea, along
with the hypertension and metabolic and cognitive problems that come with it.
Not all of our measurements changed. Blood sugar levels weren’t affected. Cell counts in the blood
and ionized calcium remained the same, as did most other blood markers.
There were a few surprises. My lactate levels, a measure of anaerobic respiration, actually
decreased with mouthbreathing, which suggested I was using more oxygen-burning aerobic
energy. This was the opposite of what most fitness experts would have predicted. (Olsson’s lactate
slightly increased.) I lost about two pounds, due most likely to exhaled water loss. But trust me on
this: a post-holiday mouthbreathing diet is not recommended.
The nagging fatigue, irritation, testiness, and anxiety. The horrid breath and constant bathroom
breaks. The spaciness, stares, and stomachaches. It was awful.
The human body has evolved to be able to breathe through two channels for a reason. It increases
our chances of survival. Should the nose get obstructed, the mouth becomes a backup ventilation
system. The few gasping breaths Stephen Curry takes before dunking a basketball, or a sick kid
huffs when he has a fever, or you take in when you’re laughing with your friends—this temporary
mouthbreathing will have no long-term effects on health.
Chronic mouthbreathing is different. The body is not designed to process raw air for hours at a
time, day or night. There is nothing normal about it.
BREATHE THROUGH YOUR NOSE
The day Olsson and I removed the plugs and tape, our blood pressure dropped, carbon dioxide
levels rose, and heart rates normalized. Snoring decreased 30-fold from the mouthbreathing
phase, from several hours a night to a few minutes. Within two days, neither of us was snoring at
all. The bacterial infection in my nose quickly cleared up without treatment. Olsson and I had
cured ourselves by breathing through our noses.
Ann Kearney, the doctor of speech-language pathology at the Stanford Voice and Swallowing
Center, was so impressed by our data and her own transformation overcoming congestion and
mouthbreathing that, at this writing, she is putting together a two-year study with 500 subjects to
research the effects of sleep tape on snoring and sleep apnea.
The benefits of nasal breathing extended beyond the bedroom. I increased my performance on the
stationary bike by about 10 percent. (Olsson had more modest gains, about 5 percent.) These
results paled in comparison to the gains reported by sports training expert John Douillard, but I
couldn’t imagine any athlete who wouldn’t want a 10 percent—or even a 1 percent—advantage
over a competitor.
On a more personal note, those first few nasal breaths after ten days of obstruction were so
shimmering and rousing that I got a little teary-eyed. I thought about my interviews with all the
empty nose syndrome sufferers who’d been told they were crazy, that they should just quit
complaining and breathe through their mouths. I thought about kids who’d been told that chronic
allergies and congestion were a part of childhood, and the adults who’d convinced themselves
that choking every night was a natural part of growing old.
I had felt their pain, and was lucky enough to breathe life on the other side. It’s something I’ll
never forget, and will never, ever repeat.
EXHALE
Carl Stough spent a half century reminding his students of how to get all the air out of our bodies
so that we could take more in. He trained his clients to exhale longer and, in the process, do what
had long been considered biologically impossible. Emphysemics reported almost total recovery from
their incurable conditions, opera singers gained more resonance and tone in their voices,
asthmatics no longer suffered from attacks, and Olympic sprinters went on to win gold medals.
As basic as this sounds, full exhalations are seldom practiced. Most of us engage only a small
fraction of our total lung capacity with each breath, requiring us to do more and get less. One of
the first steps in healthy breathing is to extend these breaths, to move the diaphragm up and down
a bit more, and to get air out of us before taking a new one in.
“ The difference in breathing in the coordinated pattern and in an altered pattern is the difference
between operating at peak efficiency and just getting along,” Stough wrote in the 1960s. “An
engine does not have to be in tip-top condition to work, but it gives a better performance if it is.”
CHEW
The millions of ancient skeletons in the Paris quarries and hundreds of pre–Industrial Age skulls at
the Morton Collection had three things in common: huge sinus cavities, strong jaws, and straight
teeth. Almost all humans born before 300 years ago shared these traits because they chewed a lot.
The bones in the human face don’t stop growing in our 20s, unlike other bones in the body. They
can expand and remodel into our 70s, and likely beyond. Which means we can influence the size
and shape of our mouths and improve our ability to breathe at virtually any age.
To do this, don’t follow the diet advice of eating what our great-grandmothers ate. Too much of
that stuff was already soft and overly processed. Your diet should consist of the rougher, rawer,
and heartier foods our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers ate. The kinds of foods
that required an hour or two a day of hard chewing. And in the meantime, lips together, teeth
slightly touching, and tongue on the roof of the mouth.
BREATHE MORE, ON OCCASION
Since meeting Chuck McGee at that roadside park in the Sierras, I’ve been practicing Tummo with
dozens of others from around the world on Monday nights. That’s when McGee hosts a free online
session open to anyone who wants to “become the eye of the storm.”
Overbreathing has gotten a bad rap in the past few decades, and rightfully so. Feeding the body
more air than it needs is damaging for the lungs right down to the cellular level. Today, the
majority of us breathe more than we should, without realizing it.
Willing yourself to breathe heavily for a short, intense time, however, can be profoundly
therapeutic. “It’s only through disruption that we can be normal again,” McGee told me. That’s
what techniques like Tummo, Sudarshan Kriya, and vigorous pranayamas do. They stress the
body on purpose, snapping it out of its funk so that it can properly function during the other 23½
hours a day. Conscious heavy breathing teaches us to be the pilots of our autonomic nervous
systems and our bodies, not the passengers.
HOLD YOUR BREATH
Several months after experimenting with carbon dioxide therapy, I was at home reading the
Sunday paper, flipping through the obituaries, and saw that Dr. Donald Klein had died. Klein
was the psychiatrist who spent years studying the links between chemoreceptor flexibility, carbon
dioxide, and anxieties. He was 90. It was Klein’s research that inspired Justin Feinstein to pursue
the NIH-funded experiments in Tulsa.
I wrote Feinstein with the news. He was crushed. He told me he’d been planning on reaching out
to Klein in the coming weeks regarding what could be a “game-changing discovery.”
It turns out that the amygdalae, those gooey nodes on the sides of our head that help govern
perceptions of fear and emotions, also control aspects of our breathing. Patients with epilepsy who
have had these brain areas stimulated with electrodes immediately cease breathing. The patients
were totally unaware of it and didn’t seem to feel their carbon dioxide levels rising long after their
breathing ceased.
Communication between the chemoreceptors and amygdalae works both ways: these structures
are constantly exchanging information and adjusting breathing every second of every minute of
the day. If communication breaks down, havoc ensues.
Feinstein believes that people with anxiety likely suffer from connection problems between these
areas and could unwittingly be holding their breath throughout the day. Only when the body
becomes overwhelmed by carbon dioxide would their chemoreceptors kick in and trigger an
emergency signal to the brain to immediately get another breath. The patients would reflexively
start fighting to breathe. They’d panic.
Eventually their bodies adapt to avoid such unexpected attacks by staying in a state of alert, by
constantly overbreathing in an effort to keep their carbon dioxide as low as possible.
“What anxious patients could be experiencing is a completely natural reaction—they’re reacting to
an emergency in their bodies,” said Feinstein. “It could be that anxiety, at its root, isn’t a
psychological problem at all.”
This approach is all very theoretical, Feinstein warned, and needs to be rigorously tested, which is
what he will do in the coming years. But if it’s true, it could explain why so many drugs don’t
work for panic, anxiety, and other fear-based conditions, and how slow and steady breathing
therapy does.
HOW WE BREATHE MATTERS
I’ve chatted with Anders Olsson every few weeks since we paid through the nose in the Stanford
experiment. Our talks are never dull. “I have more energy and focus than ever in my life!” he told
me, right after celebrating his 50th birthday. Olsson is a pulmonaut in the purest sense: self-taught
and driven by a sense that we are missing something right in front of us, a truth basic and
essential.
Through all my travels and travails, there is one lesson, one equation, that I believe is at the root of
so much health, happiness, and longevity. I’m a bit embarrassed to say it has taken me a decade to
figure this out, and I realize how insignificant it might look on this page. But lest we forget, nature
is simple but subtle.
The perfect breath is this: Breathe in for about 5.5 seconds, then exhale for 5.5 seconds. That’s 5.5
breaths a minute for a total of about 5.5 liters of air.
You can practice this perfect breathing for a few minutes, or a few hours. There is no such thing as
having too much peak efficiency in your body.
Olsson told me he’s working on several more devices to help us breathe at this rate—slowly and
less. He’s finishing production on his BreathIQ, a portable device that measures nitric oxide, carbon
dioxide, ammonia, and other chemicals in exhaled breath. Then there are other skunkworks to
mimic the effects of perfect breathing: a carbon dioxide suit, a hat, and . . .
Meanwhile, Google just released an app that pops up automatically when the words “breathing
exercise” are searched. It trains visitors to inhale and exhale every 5.5 seconds. Down the street
from my house is a startup called Spire, which created a device that tracks breath rate and alerts
users every time respiration becomes too fast or disjointed. In the fitness industry, resistance masks
and mouthpieces with names like Expand-a-Lung are all the rage.
Before we know it, breathing slow, less, and through the nose with a big exhale will be big
business, like so much else. But be aware that the stripped-down approach is as good as any. It
requires no batteries, Wi-Fi, headgear, or smartphones. It costs nothing, takes little time and effort,
and you can do it wherever you are, whenever you need. It’s a function our distant ancestors
practiced since they crawled out of the sludge two and a half billion years ago, a technology our
own species has been perfecting with only our lips, noses, and lungs for hundreds of thousands of
years.
Most days, I treat it like a stretch, something I do after a long time sitting or stressing to bring
myself back to normal. When I need an extra boost, I come here, to this old Victorian house in the
Haight-Ashbury, and sit beside this rattling window with the other Sudarshan Kriya breathers I
first met ten years ago.
#+END_QUOTE

24
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* Chip War_ The Fight for the World's Most C - Chris Miller
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Chris Miller/Chip War_ The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology (12144)/Chip War_ The Fight for the World's Most C - Chris Miller.epub
:END:
** This on the explosion of digital computing will be useful when talking about the explosion of digital manufacturing.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (23 . 8987)
:ID: 3dcfba08-631c-4fcb-9d1a-34269065beef
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
“In the next ten years,” Mead predicted in 1972, “every facet of our society will be automated to some degree.” He envisioned “a tiny computer deep down inside of our telephone, or our washing machine, or our car” as these silicon chips became pervasive and inexpensive. “In the past 200 years we have improved our ability to manufacture goods and move people by a factor of 100,” Mead calculated. “But in the last 20 years there has been an increase of 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 in the rate at which we process and retrieve information.” A revolutionary explosion of data processing was coming. “We have computer power coming out of our ears.”
Mead was prophesying a revolution with profound social and political consequences. Influence in this new world would accrue to people who could produce computing power and manipulate it with software. The semiconductor engineers of Silicon Valley had the specialized knowledge, networks, and stock options that let them write the rules of the future—rules everyone else would have to follow. Industrial society was giving way to a digital world, with 1s and 0s stored and processed on many millions of slabs of silicon spread throughout society. The era of the tech tycoons was dawning. “Society’s fate will hang in the balance,” Carver Mead declared. “The catalyst is the microelectronics technology and its ability to put more and more components into less and less space.” Industry outsiders only dimly perceived how the world was changing, but Intel’s leaders knew that if they succeeded in drastically expanding the availability of computing power, radical changes would follow. “ We are really the revolutionaries in the world today,” Gordon Moore declared in 1973, “not the kids with the long hair and beards who were wrecking the schools a few years ago.”
#+END_QUOTE
** 'Real men have fabs' is a parallel to self hosting. As the cost of self fabrication at a certain technological level comes down, and the know-how becomes wide spread, self-manufacturing will catch up. All technologies are this way. They are technologies because 1) they don't work in a fool-proof manner, and 2) because they still require significant capital investment. Capitalism is possibly a necessary engine of innovation but not necessary to meet an increasingly complex set of societal needs.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (50 . 1234)
:ID: f273b9a8-8f02-4d93-80f5-2517c561645a
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
“Real men” might have fabs, but Silicon Valley’s new wave of semiconductor entrepreneurs didn’t. Since the late 1980s, there’s been explosive growth in the number of fabless chip firms, which design semiconductors in-house but outsource their manufacturing, commonly relying on TSMC for this service. When Gordon Campbell and Dado Banatao founded Chips and Technologies, which is generally considered the first fabless firm, in 1984, one friend alleged it “wasn’t a real semiconductor company,” since it didn’t build its own chips. However, the graphics chips they designed for PCs proved popular, competing with products built by some of the industry’s biggest players. Eventually Chips and Technologies faded and was purchased by Intel. However, it had proved that a fabless business model could work, requiring only a good idea and a couple of million dollars in startup capital, a tiny fraction of the money needed to build a fab.
#+END_QUOTE

20
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* Farsighted_ How We Make the Decisions That - Steven Johnson
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Steven Johnson/Farsighted_ How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most (12149)/Farsighted_ How We Make the Decisions That - Steven Johnson.epub
:END:
** Perhaps I need a third scenario for [[id:7085168d-8607-4d83-8ec0-2298f33e4a9c][Atoms, Bits and Cells]]
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (10 . 63319)
:ID: 85e15e27-6dc1-42da-ad8f-7996cb255499
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
But he combined all that research into three distinct stories, imagining three distinct futures: a high-growth model, a depression model, and what he called the transformative model: “a shift in values that would amount to a profound transformation of Western culture. Ideas had begun to circulate about living more simply and environmentally benignly, about holistic medicine and natural foods, about pursuing inner growth rather than material possessions, and about striving for some kind of planetary consciousness.” The three-part structure turns out to be a common refrain in scenario planning: you build one model where things get better, one where they get worse, and one where they get weird.
#+END_QUOTE
** TODO Read this book
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (10 . 64842)
:ID: 6f4cc452-6c0e-4aee-a32a-610d1b878a52
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Hawken and Schwartz began thinking about the scenario-planning technique as a tool for making broader social decisions: environmental stewardship, tax and wealth distribution policies, trade agreements. With a third author named Jay Ogilvy, they published a book in the early 1980s called Seven Tomorrows that sketched out seven distinct scenarios for the next two decades. In the introduction, they explained their approach: “Among the many methods for probing the future—from elaborate computer models to simple extrapolations of history—we chose the scenario method because it allows for the inclusion of realism and imagination, comprehensiveness and uncertainty, and, most of all, because the scenario method permits a genuine plurality of options.” What differentiated the scenario-planning approach from most flavors of futurism was its unwillingness to fixate on a single forecast. By forcing themselves to imagine alternatives, scenario planners avoided the trap of Tetlock’s hedgehogs, settled in their one big idea. Like Schelling’s war games, the scenario plan was a tool to help you think of something you would never otherwise think of.
#+END_QUOTE

173
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* Federalist (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Alexander Hamilton
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Alexander Hamilton/Federalist (Barnes & Noble Classics) (2763)/Federalist (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Alexander Hamilton.epub
:END:
** Unity is what makes the United States great
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (11 . 3061)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice, that Providence has been pleased to give this
one connected country, to one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors,
speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of
government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms
and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their
general liberty and independence.
This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was
the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren,
united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous
and alien sovereignties.
#+END_QUOTE
** How militaries came to rule over people
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (17 . 8368)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The army under such circumstances, though it may usefully aid the magistrate to suppress a
small faction, or an occasional mob, or insurrection, will be utterly incompetent to the purpose
of enforcing encroachments against the united efforts of the great body of the people.
But in a country, where the perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always
prepared to repel it, her armies must be numerous enough for instant defence. The continual
necessity for his services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades
the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated above the civil. The inhabitants
of territories often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on
their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees, the people are
brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors. The transition
from this disposition to that of considering them as masters, is neither remote nor difficult: but it
is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions, to make a bold, or effectual
resistance, to usurpations supported by the military power.
#+END_QUOTE
** The difference between a republic and a democracy and the benefits and shortcomings to each
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (19 . 6929)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his
judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay, with greater reason, a
body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties, at the same time; yet, what are many of the
most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning
the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens? and what are
the different classes of legislators, but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine?
Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on
one side, and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the
parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other
words, the most powerful faction, must be expected to prevail. Shall domestic manufactures be
encouraged, and in what degree, by restrictions on foreign manufactures? are questions which
would be differently decided by the landed and the manufacturing classes; and probably by
neither with a sole regard to justice and the public good. The apportionment of taxes, on the
various descriptions of property, is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality ;
yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to
a predominant party, to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling with which they
over-burden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets.
#+END_QUOTE
** This has foreseen the American civil war on lines of slavery. For an African Federation, Federalist 16 here is relevant for Islamic law, on which Egypt is likely to be on the wrong side. Therefore, for a federation coming out of Egypt, the delay of this conflict until a large and industrial part of Afirca has joined the union is good for the cause of secularism
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (25 . 3573)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
It remains to inquire how far so odious an engine of government, in its application to us, would
even be capable of answering its end. If there should not be a large army, constantly at the
disposal of the national government, it would either not be able to employ force at all, or when
this could be done, it would amount to a war between different parts of the confederacy,
concerning the infractions of a league; in which the strongest combination would be most likely
to prevail, whether it consisted of those who supported, or of those who resisted, the general
authority. It would rarely happen that the delinquency to be redressed would be confined to a
single member, and if there were more than one, who had neglected their duty, similarity of
situation would induce them to unite for common defence. Independent of this motive of
sympathy, if a large and influential state should happen to be the aggressing member, it would
commonly have weight enough with its neighbours, to win over some of them as associates to its
cause. Specious arguments of danger to the general liberty could easily be contrived; plausible
excuses for the deficiencies of the party, could, without difficulty, be invented, to alarm the
apprehensions, inflame the passions, and conciliate the good will even of those states which
were not chargeable with any violation, or omission of duty. This would be the more likely to
take place, as the delinquencies of the larger members might be expected sometimes to proceed
from an ambitious premeditation in their rulers, with a view to getting rid of all external control
upon their designs of personal aggrandizement; the better to effect which, it is presumable they
would tamper beforehand with leading individuals in the adjacent states. If associates could not
be found at home, recourse would be had to the aid of foreign powers, who would seldom be
disinclined to encouraging the dissensions of a confederacy, from the firm union of which they
had so much to fear. When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of
moderation. The suggestions of wounded pride, the instigations of irritated resentment, would
be apt to carry the states, against which the arms of the union were exerted, to any extremes
necessary to avenge the affront, or to avoid the disgrace of submission. The first war of this kind
would probably terminate in a dissolution of the union.
#+END_QUOTE
** The most critical moment for the future of Europe turns out to be the three-way partition of Charlemagne's domain after his death. Had he managed a better move to federalism, the future of Europe and the world would have been utterly different
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (28 . 2210)
:END:
]]#+BEGIN_QUOTE
In the early ages of christianity, Germany was occupied by seven distinct nations, who had no
common chief. The Franks, one of the number, having conquered the Gauls, established the
kingdom which has taken its name from them. In the ninth century, Charlemagne, its warlike
monarch, carried his victorious arms in every direction; and Germany became a part of his vast
dominions. On the dismemberment, which took place under his sons, this part was erected into
a separate and independent empire. Charlemagne and his immediate descendants possessed the
reality, as well as the ensigns and dignity of imperial power. But the principal vassals, whose
fiefs had become hereditary, and who composed the national diets, which Charlemagne had not
abolished, gradually threw off the yoke, and advanced to sovereign jurisdiction and
independence. The force of imperial sovereignty was insufficient to restrain such powerful
dependants; or to preserve the unity and tranquillity of the empire. The most furious private
wars, accompanied with every species of calamity, were carried on between the different
princes and states. The imperial authority, unable to maintain the public order, declined by
degrees, till it was almost extinct in the anarchy, which agitated the long interval between the
death of the last emperor of the Suabian, and the accession of the first emperor of the Austrian
lines. In the eleventh century, the emperors enjoyed full sovereignty: in the fifteenth, they had
little more than the symbols and decorations of power.
Out of this feudal system, which has itself many of the important features of a confederacy, has
grown the federal system, which constitutes the Germanic empire. Its powers are vested in a
diet representing the component members of the confederacy; in the emperor who is the
executive magistrate, with a negative on the decrees of the diet; and in the imperial chamber and
aulic council, two judiciary tribunals having supreme jurisdiction in controversies which concern
the empire, or which happen among its members.
#+END_QUOTE
** This is starting to make sense. Standing armies are a danger to liberty. Regulated militias susceptible to the control of the national government are an altrenative to national defense. The national government control the militia with government commissioned officers. Non-comissioned officers run the militia followin the orders of the commissioned officeres and otherwise
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (38 . 2316)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Of the different grounds which have been taken in opposition to this plan, there is none that
was so little to have been expected, or is so untenable in itself, as the one from which this
particular provision has been attacked. If a well regulated militia be the most natural defence of
a free country, it ought certainly to be under the regulation, and at the disposal of that body,
which is constituted the guardian of the national security. If standing armies are dangerous to
liberty, an efficacious power over the militia, in the same body, ought, as far as possible, to take
away the inducement and the pretext, to such unfriendly institutions. If the federal government
can command the aid of the militia in those emergencies, which call for the military arm in
support of the civil magistrate, it can the better dispense with the employment of a different kind
of force. If it cannot avail itself of the former, it will be obliged to recur to the latter. To render an
army unnecessary, will be a more certain method of preventing its existence, than a thousand
prohibitions upon paper.
#+END_QUOTE
** With the posse comitatus in place, there can, and should, be a legal separation between the regulation of the militia and the emergency power of conscription. Militia training and upkeep is normal. Conscription in war or to face disruption is exceptional.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (38 . 3543)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
In order to cast an odium upon the power of calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the
union, it has been remarked, that there is no where any provision in the proposed constitution
for requiring the aid of the POSSE COMITATUS, to assist the magistrate in the execution of his
duty; whence it has been inferred, that military force was intended to be his only auxiliary.
There is a striking incoherence in the objections which have appeared, and sometimes even from
the same quarter, not much calculated to inspire a very favourable opinion of the sincerity or
fair dealing of their authors. The same persons who tell us in one breath, that the powers of the
federal government will be despotic and unlimited, inform us in the next, that it has not
authority sufficient even to call out the POSSE COMITATUS. The latter, fortunately, is as much
short of the truth, as the former exceeds it. It would be as absurd to doubt, that a right to pass
all laws necessary and proper to execute its declared powers, would include that of requiring the
assistance of the citizens to the officers who may be intrusted with the execution of those laws;
as it would be to believe, that a right to enact laws necessary and proper for the imposition and
collection of taxes, would involve that of varying the rules of descent, and of the alienation of
landed property, or of abolishing the trial by jury in cases relating to it. It being therefore
evident, that the supposition of a want of power to require the aid of the POSSE COMITATUS is
entirely destitute of colour, it will follow, that the conclusion which has been drawn from it, in
its application to the authority of the federal government over the militia, is as uncandid, as it is
illogical. What reason could there be to infer, that force was intended to be the sole instrument
of authority, merely because there is a power to make use of it when necessary? What shall we
think of the motives which could induce men of sense to reason in this extraordinary manner?
How shall we prevent a conflict between charity and conviction?
#+END_QUOTE

68
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* Fooled by Randomness_ The Hidden Role of C - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Nassim Nicholas Taleb/Fooled by Randomness_ The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (7792)/Fooled by Randomness_ The Hidden Role of C - Nassim Nicholas Taleb.epub
:END:
** Resilience not efficiency
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 1465)
:ID: fcc81ba8-2b6a-406c-8c32-eb0d274d6810
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
“Survival of the fittest,” a term so hackneyed in the investment media, does not seem to be properly understood: Under regime switching, as we will see in Chapter 5, it will be unclear who is actually the fittest, and those who will survive are not necessarily those who appear to be the fittest. Curiously, it will be the oldest, simply because older people have been exposed longer to the rare event and can be, convincingly, more resistant to it. I was amused to discover a similar evolutionary argument in mate selection that considers that women prefer (on balance) to mate with healthy older men over healthy younger ones, everything else being equal, as the former provide some evidence of better genes. Gray hair signals an enhanced ability to survive—conditional on having reached the gray hair stage, a man is likely to be more resistant to the vagaries of life. Curiously, life insurers in renaissance Italy reached the same conclusion, by charging the same insurance for a man in his twenties as they did for a man in his fifties, a sign that they had the same life expectancy; once a man crossed the forty-year mark, he had shown that very few ailments could harm him. We now proceed to a mathematical rephrasing of these arguments.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (13 . 50441)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 50441)
:ID: 84c93921-60e5-48bd-847a-8aaca21134d3
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
What economists did not understand for a long time about positive and negative kicks is that both their biology and their intensity are different. Consider that they are mediated in different parts of the brain—and that the degree of rationality in decisions made subsequent to a gain is extremely different from the one after a loss.
Note also that the implication that wealth does not count so much into one’s well-being as the route one uses to get to it.
#+END_QUOTE
** Is he talking here about LLMs?
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 3830)
:ID: 90925a28-1664-49a4-919a-708ab6663555
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Randomness can be of considerable help with the matter. For there is another, far more entertaining way to make the distinction between the babbler and the thinker. You can sometimes replicate something that can be mistaken for a literary discourse with a Monte Carlo generator but it is not possible randomly to construct a scientific one. Rhetoric can be constructed randomly, but not genuine scientific knowledge. This is the application of Turing’s test of artificial intelligence, except in reverse. What is the Turing test? The brilliant British mathematician, eccentric, and computer pioneer Alan Turing came up with the following test: A computer can be said to be intelligent if it can (on average) fool a human into mistaking it for another human. The converse should be true. A human can be said to be unintelligent if we can replicate his speech by a computer, which we know is unintelligent, and fool a human into believing that it was written by a human. Can one produce a piece of work that can be largely mistaken for Derrida entirely randomly?
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (14 . 9677)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 9677)
:ID: e7139a71-62a5-455d-be29-e9decdd13d19
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
There are instances where I like to be fooled by randomness. My allergy to nonsense and verbiage dissipates when it comes to art and poetry. On the one hand, I try to define myself and behave officially as a no-nonsense hyperrealist ferreting out the role of chance; on the other, I have no qualms indulging in all manner of personal superstitions. Where do I draw the line? The answer is aesthetics. Some aesthetic forms appeal to something in our biology, whether or not they originate in random associations or plain hallucination. Something in our human genes is deeply moved by the fuzziness and ambiguity of language; then why fight it?
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (17 . 21810)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (17 . 21810)
:ID: 04aab90f-c673-48b6-9318-8e31429bd4c6
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
More practically to me, Popper had many problems with statistics and statisticians. He refused to blindly accept the notion that knowledge can always increase with incremental information—which is the foundation of statistical inference. It may in some instances, but we do not know which ones. Many insightful people, such as John Maynard Keynes, independently reached the same conclusions. Sir Karl’s detractors believe that favorably repeating the same experiment again and again should lead to an increased comfort with the notion that “it works.” I came to understand Popper’s position better once I saw the first rare event ravaging a trading room. Sir Karl feared that some type of knowledge did not increase with information—but which type we could not ascertain. The reason I feel that he is important for us traders is because to him the matter of knowledge and discovery is not so much in dealing with what we know as in dealing with what we do not know. His famous quote:
These are men with bold ideas, but highly critical of their own ideas; they try to find whether their ideas are right by trying first to find whether they are not perhaps wrong. They work with bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures.
“These” are scientists. But they could be anything.
#+END_QUOTE
** The irony of Taleb saying Popper was a terrible listener
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (17 . 25369)
:ID: 8ac58ff0-2de5-49a6-8065-2a267d5a4eb5
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
He was not much better in his youth. Members of the Vienna Circle tried to avoid him, not because of his divergent ideas but because he was a social problem. “He was brilliant, but self-focused, both insecure and arrogant, irascible and self-righteous. He was a terrible listener and bent on winning arguments at all costs. He had no understanding of group dynamics and no ability to negotiate them.”
#+END_QUOTE
** Might be something here
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (17 . 28678)
:ID: 6ba377fc-1812-4ab6-b549-70f80611e868
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Finally, I have to confess that upon finishing my writing of Part I, that writing about the genius of Solon’s insight has carried an extreme effect on both my thinking and my private life. The composition of Part I made me even more confident in my withdrawal from the media and my distancing myself from other members of the business community, mostly other investors and traders for whom I am developing more and more contempt. I believe that I cannot have power over myself as I have an ingrained desire to integrate among people and cultures and would end up resembling them; by withdrawing myself entirely I can have a better control of my fate. I am currently enjoying a thrill of the classics I have not felt since childhood. I am now thinking of the next step: to recreate a low-information, more deterministic ancient time, say in the nineteenth century, all the while benefiting from some of the technical gains (such as the Monte Carlo engine), all of the medical breakthroughs, and all the gains of social justice of our age. I would then have the best of everything. This is called evolution.
#+END_QUOTE

12
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* Good Strategy_Bad Strategy_ The Difference - Richard P. Rumelt
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Richard P. Rumelt/Good Strategy_Bad Strategy_ The Difference and Why It Matters (12140)/Good Strategy_Bad Strategy_ The Difference - Richard P. Rumelt.epub
:END:
** Strategy is centralization
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 35763)
:ID: d94fa45e-cd76-4dab-976d-76f421e9a8b6
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Strategy is visible as coordinated action imposed on a system. When I say strategy is “imposed,” I mean just that. It is an exercise in centralized power, used to overcome the natural workings of a system. This coordination is unnatural in the sense that it would not occur without the hand of strategy.
#+END_QUOTE

30
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* Guns, Germs, and Steel_ The Fates of Human - Jared M. Diamond
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Jared M. Diamond/Guns, Germs, and Steel_ The Fates of Human Societies (1728)/Guns, Germs, and Steel_ The Fates of Human - Jared M. Diamond.epub
:END:
** Another example of curse of resources
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (16 . 20082)
:ID: 3f64f6e6-ebe3-4c99-87bd-5b5efa70ba26
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Taken together, these four factors help us understand why the transition to food production in the Fertile Crescent began around 8500 B.C., not around 18,500 or 28,500 B.C. At the latter two dates hunting-gathering was still much more rewarding than incipient food production, because wild mammals were still abundant; wild cereals were not yet abundant; people had not yet developed the inventions necessary for collecting, processing, and storing cereals efficiently; and human population densities were not yet high enough for a large premium to be placed on extracting more calories per acre.
#+END_QUOTE
** The need for sedentary life changes once carrying your resources becomes viable again. This is posssible initially on seasteads, at least in partial form, then entirely in space. Once again, the first true cities will be in space, but these will be nomadic cities.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (24 . 53559)
:ID: 4e6797c7-6b86-42ca-98b1-32d158b55ba4
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Sedentary living was decisive for the history of technology, because it enabled people to accumulate nonportable possessions. Nomadic hunter- gatherers are limited to technology that can be carried. If you move often and lack vehicles or draft animals, you confine your possessions to babies, weapons, and a bare minimum of other absolute necessities small enough to carry. You can’t be burdened with pottery and printing presses as you shift camp. That practical difficulty probably explains the tantalizingly early appearance of some technologies, followed by a long delay in their further development.
#+END_QUOTE
** Telecommunication reduces the need for a physically dense and complex societies. Automation destroys this even more.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (25 . 48204)
:ID: 52e86437-278f-4539-bf64-b06ca208518f
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
These correlations suggest strongly that regional population size or population density or population pressure has something to do with the formation of complex societies. But the correlations do not tell us precisely how population variables function in a chain of cause and effect whose outcome is a complex society. To trace out that chain, let us now remind ourselves how large dense populations themselves arise. Then we can examine why a large but simple society could not maintain itself. With that as background, we shall finally return to the question of how a simpler society actually becomes more complex as the regional population increases.
#+END_QUOTE

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* How to Hide an Empire_ A History of the Gr - Daniel Immerwahr
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Daniel Immerwahr/How to Hide an Empire_ A History of the Greater United States (12123)/How to Hide an Empire_ A History of the Gr - Daniel Immerwahr.epub
:END:
** This trilemma makes a good model on which to build a new expansionist policy for America, after the white superimacy issue has been solved by demography.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 20175)
:ID: 4ca311db-c080-479c-9f4c-70739b4b9da3
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
This was, not surprisingly, a controversial matter. During the war, during the congressional debates over the treaty with Spain, and during the heated election of 1900, the question of empire was argued at high volume.
In essence, it was an argument about a trilemma. Republicanism, white supremacy, and overseas expansion—the country could have at most two. In the past, republicanism and white supremacy had been jointly maintained by carefully shaping the country’s borders. But absorbing populous nonwhite colonies would wreck all that.
The opponents of empire gathered behind William Jennings Bryan, who had run against McKinley in 1896 and did so again in 1900. Bryan delighted in exposing the contradictions between republicanism and empire. The inalienable rights of man and the injustice of taxation without representation—these were bedrock political values. But imagine, Bryan warned, what would happen if the United States took colonies. Anyone setting forth to speak about republican virtues—say, at a Fourth of July celebration—would be urged to keep silent “lest his utterances excite rebellion among distant subjects.”
It was a compelling argument, and Bryan commanded a large and motley coalition of anti-imperialists. It included such African Americans as W.E.B. Du Bois and hard-line white supremacists such as Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina. Businessmen (Andrew Carnegie, who offered to buy the Philippines for $20 million so he could set it free) and labor leaders (Samuel Gompers, president of the AFL) joined the cause. So did the presidents of Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, Michigan, and Northwestern.
But empire, once seized, was hard to drop. Roosevelt wanted it, and behind him stood the bulk of the Republican political establishment. For many, it was a matter of more than just the economic benefits that Alfred Thayer Mahan had promised. As they saw it, overseas colonization was the next phase of Manifest Destiny, the next outlet for the Daniel Boones of the country. “God has given us this Pacific empire for civilization,” said Senator Albert Beveridge. “A hundred wildernesses are to be subdued. Unpenetrated regions must be explored. Unviolated valleys must be tilled. Unmastered forests must be felled.”
The imperialists offered a different solution to the trilemma. They were willing to sacrifice republicanism, at least as applied to so-called backward races. Roosevelt scorned those “who cant about ‘liberty’ and the ‘consent of the governed,’ in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men.” He continued: “Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation. Their doctrines condemn your forefathers and mine for ever having settled in these United States.”
There was, of course, a third option: jettison white supremacy. The overseas territories could be treated as embryonic states and their inhabitants as full citizens. This solution commanded a great deal of enthusiasm within the territories themselves, where political parties in Puerto Rico and the Philippines inserted demands for statehood into their platforms. With the western continental territories in mind, they imagined their countries, in time, entering the union as equals.
Yet mainland support for this was scant. When the prospect of statehood came up, it did so mainly as a scare tactic—a way for anti-imperialists to underscore the horrors resulting from annexing these places.
At any rate, colonized subjects had little chance to press their case. What is remarkable, in fact, about the mainland debates over empire is how utterly absent Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, and other inhabitants of the territories were from them. Most mainlanders had never even seen a Filipino, a Puerto Rican, or a Hawaiian.
#+END_QUOTE
** Fascinating. The white supremacist side of the argument clearly laid out, and with a hypothetical case of US colonizing Egypt too!
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 27044)
:ID: 99463bba-09d2-4a9c-931b-e164a77c64d3
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The Filipinos made it to Omaha (though the secretary of war had to personally promise that they would return home after the fair). There, they made an impression. “They are stylish dressers,” wrote the Omaha Bee, resembling less a “race of savages” than “a lot of dudes” with their canes, derby hats, and white trousers. Fairgoers expecting the Filipino band to offer exotic folk music were surprised when it struck up a lively rendition of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” the theme song for Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Culturally, the fair’s Filipinos seemed to embrace their new nationality.
Legally, however, things remained unresolved. The Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States. Did that include the territories?
The 1898–1900 annexations had already raised the question of what the United States was, in language and on maps. Now it was coming up in law. And it made its way to the Supreme Court, via a series of connected cases, in 1901.
Weighty legal questions often turn around trivial disputes. Certainly the cases that carried this question up to the Supreme Court seemed piddling: whether an importer shipping oranges from Puerto Rico to New York had to pay a tariff, or whether a soldier returning from the Philippines owed taxes on the diamond rings he’d acquired there. But under them lay a deeper question. The Constitution prohibits taxing commerce between parts of the United States. Did that rule cover the overseas territories, too? In other words, were they part of the country?
The government, which had collected the tariffs, sought to defend its actions. It argued that the term the United States was ambiguous. The name could refer to all the area under U.S. jurisdiction, but it could also refer, in a narrower sense, to the union of states. The Constitution’s references to “the United States,” the argument continued, were meant in that narrow sense, to refer to the states alone. Territories thus had no right to constitutional protections, for the simple reason that the Constitution didn’t apply to them. As one justice summarized the logic, the Constitution was “the supreme law of the land,” but the territories were “not part of the ‘land.’”
This might have come as a surprise to residents of the western territories, who had assumed that they had the same constitutional protections as their compatriots in the states. But, the attorney general maintained, that was a polite fiction with little basis in law. Mincing few words, he reminded the justices that Congress could impose laws on the territories “without asking the consent of the inhabitants, even against their consent and against their protest, as it has frequently done.” He brought up Congress’s dismantling of Indian Country, and he noted that Alaskans had “no right to elect a single officer, or to form a city, or to establish a political system or anything whatever for their own protection.” The overseas territories—which he referred to openly as “colonies”—were no different. The Filipinos in San Francisco Bay had it wrong; they were subjects, not citizens.
This was precisely the sort of talk that raised anti-imperialists’ hackles, but the attorney general plowed on. “To be called an American subject is no disgrace,” he consoled. Moreover, he continued, the government needed the ability to rule its possessions as colonies. This was the age of empire. What if the United States were to annex Egypt, Sudan, part of Central Africa, or “a section of the Chinese Empire”? Would it be forced to apply the Constitution to those places, too? “A great world power, extending its domain from the frozen seas on the North to where the encircling palm trees grow in the Pacific islands, must not be bound by rules too strict or too confining.”
The argument prevailed. The court affirmed that “the Constitution deals with states” and that territorial rights were at Congress’s discretion. Congress could, if it wished, “incorporate” territories into the union and bring them under the protection of the Constitution, as the court judged that it had in the case of the western territories. Some years later, the court also concluded that Alaska and Hawai‘i, the territories beyond the mainland that seemed the most conducive to white settlement, had also been “incorporated.” But the point was that incorporation was not automatic, and the court repeatedly denied that Congress had ever incorporated the former Spanish colonies.
Invoking the notion that there were different “senses” of “the United States,” a concurring justice articulated the reasoning in a notoriously convoluted phrase. Puerto Rico was “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense,” he explained, “because the island had not been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”
Lawyers with long memories would have recognized in that unusual word, appurtenant, a reference to the Navassa Island case of more than a decade before. There, the defense had argued that although the guano islands were “appertaining to the United States,” they weren’t part of it, and thus weren’t subject to U.S. law. The Supreme Court had disagreed. But whereas the Navassa case had affirmed the government’s power to apply federal laws in its territories, the new rulings denied territorial inhabitants the right to federal protections.
#+END_QUOTE
** Sa'ad Zaghloul sucking up to racist Woodrow Wilson
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (15 . 24451)
:ID: fafafc15-96df-4d36-82c5-654caaa1116b
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Getting to Paris, and getting to Wilson, became the chief goal of nationalists everywhere. The Indian National Congress voted to send Gandhi to present its demands. Egyptian nationalists sought to send Sa‘d Zaghlul, a leading reformer. Zaghlul began taking English lessons in the hope of meeting Wilson. “No people more than the Egyptian people,” he wrote to Wilson, “has felt strongly the joyous emotion of the birth of a new era which, thanks to your virile action, is soon going to impose itself upon the universe.” Zaghlul’s supporters organized a new political party around the goal of getting him to Paris. They called it the Wafd, which means “delegation” in Arabic.
#+END_QUOTE
** Even in 1942, Egypt's problem was infrastructure
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (22 . 5100)
:ID: e7842b79-7d87-4f5e-a7ea-39246c621df0
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
It made a certain sense that the United States would fight the war by managing the back end of things, for it had the world’s largest industrial economy and its factories were far from the fighting. By 1940, nearly every independent nation outside Axis orbits had sought to acquire munitions from the United States.
The Roosevelt administration was only too happy to oblige, via an evolving set of schemes designed to circumvent neutrality laws and conserve the Allies’ dwindling dollar reserves. First, there were direct purchases. Then “cash and carry,” “destroyers for bases,” and finally “lend-lease.” Well before the United States declared war, it was sending planes, engines, tanks, and other war goods to the fronts.
That stream of stuff mattered. By early 1941, Britain’s Asian empire hung by a thread. Axis forces had largely captured the Mediterranean, and Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps had knocked the British back on their heels in Egypt. If Britain lost the Middle East, it would lose everything: Iraq’s oil fields, stockpiles of war matériel in Egypt, and the Suez Canal, which connected the British Isles to India, Australia, New Zealand, Malaya, Burma, and Singapore. British officials warned Washington of the complete “disintegration of the British commonwealth.”
It was easy enough for the United States to supply tanks and planes. The hard part was getting them to the front lines—Detroit to Cairo was a long haul. The tanks could be disassembled and shipped by sea around the southern tip of Africa, but that meant unloading them at Cairo’s primitive ports, which had no warehouses, no assembly plants, few railways, light roads, and a dire shortage of mechanics.
“The condition of Egyptian ports” isn’t a subject that would have interested many in Washington in 1935. But now it did. The United States launched a massive Middle Eastern infrastructure campaign. Up went new piers with cranes to unload tanks, assembly plants to put them together, railways and hard roads to carry them to the front, and repair shops to keep them running. By June 1942, the depot near Cairo had a large airport, housing for nearly ten thousand men, a thousand-bed hospital, warehouses, and enough spare parts, tools, and skilled mechanics to keep the whole operation functioning.
That’s what it took to get tanks to the Middle East. To bring planes and smaller goods, the United States blazed a different trail: an aerial highway of bases dipping down from Miami to Brazil, cutting over to West Africa, and hopping across the Sahara to Cairo. This, too, required serious infrastructural investment. Swamps had to be drained, jungles cleared, rock blasted, and sandstorms fought.
And they were. Buoyed by much-needed U.S. supplies, the British Eighth Army struck back at the Battle of El Alamein in October 1942, pouring fire into Rommel’s position. “I have seen many enemy barrages,” recorded one terrified driver behind German lines, “but the intensity of this one is beyond our experience.” Just as the British pushed Rommel out of Egypt into Tunisia, three mighty fleets collectively containing seven hundred ships landed on African shores with the necessaries to expel the Axis from Africa entirely within six months.
Britain’s lifeline to its empire was saved. “It marked in fact the turning of the ‘Hinge of Fate,’” Churchill wrote. “It may almost be said, ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.’”
The campaign also transformed the Middle East, converting it into what the secretary of state called a “tremendous supply base” for the Allies. Factories in Palestine made batteries, those in Iran made antifreeze, and canning plants in Egypt produced rations for the troops. The northern half of Africa, which had been a virtual terra incognita for the United States, hummed with U.S. bases, ports, assembly plants, barracks, and warehouses.
#+END_QUOTE
** As the author explaines below, there is a gradual weaning off resource economies. Following WWI, Haber-Bosch weaned the world of nitrates. Following WWII it was synthetics. Now it seems to be oil, first through the shale revolution in the US and later through fusion energy. Once energy abundance becocmes a reality, most mining will be sea water (not seabed) mining. Landlocked economies will stay poorer and less integrated. Eventually, the ultimate mines, factories and cities will be in space. Another extrapolation of this is increased resilience and autonomy on locality and household levels.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (25 . 4759)
:ID: eac6a972-c214-4fdf-b26b-2a211cf6870b
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The empire-killing technologies ranged from skywave radio to screw threads, and they worked in different ways. But, collectively, they weaned the United States off colonies. In so doing, they also helped to create the world we know today, where powerful countries project their influence through globalization rather than colonization.
#+END_QUOTE
** TODO Fantastic stuff. I need to look for sources on this.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (25 . 32845)
:ID: 33904eef-ceba-4e3b-a4f8-53f337f2e6e3
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
It is fitting, then, that oil is the one raw material that has most reliably tempted politicians back into the old logic of empire. When faced with an Arab oil embargo, Henry Kissinger suggested that the United States may have to take some oil fields. Im not saying we have to take over Saudi Arabia, the secretary of state continued. How about Abu Dhabi, or Libya? It is hard to imagine Kissinger embarking on such unbounded flights of imperialist reverie on behalf of rubber, tin, or any other former colonial commodity.
#+END_QUOTE

4
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* How to Take Smart Notes_ One Simple Techni - Sonke Ahrens
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Sonke Ahrens/How to Take Smart Notes_ One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking (12116)/How to Take Smart Notes_ One Simple Techni - Sonke Ahrens.epub
:END:

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* Lifespan_ Why We Age--and Why We Don't Hav - David A. Sinclair
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/David A. Sinclair/Lifespan_ Why We Age--and Why We Don't Have To (6020)/Lifespan_ Why We Age--and Why We Don't Hav - David A. Sinclair.epub
:END:
** Notes for page (16 . 21754)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (16 . 21754)
:ID: 0c00e840-6ee7-4639-8c78-a5b3b255cc9a
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
All of this means we’re on the way to a fundamental shift in the way we search for, diagnose, and treat disease. Our flawed, symptom-first approach to medicine is about to change. We’re going to get ahead of symptoms. Way ahead. We’re even going to get ahead of “feeling bad.” Many diseases, after all, are genetically detectable long before they are symptomatic. In the very near future, proactive personal DNA scanning is going to be as routine as brushing our teeth. Doctors will find themselves saying the words “I just wish we’d caught this earlier” less and less—and eventually not at all.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (20 . 21317)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (20 . 21317)
:ID: dd0494f4-90fd-469b-9f26-8ed52bb57b36
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
WHAT I DO
Save for “Eat fewer calories,” “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” and “Exercise,” I don’t give medical advice. I’m a researcher, not a medical doctor; it’s not my place to tell anyone what to do, and I don’t endorse supplements or other products.
I don’t mind sharing what I do, though, albeit with some caveats:
• This isn’t necessarily, or even likely, what you should do.
• I have no idea if this is even the right thing for me to be doing.
• While human trials are under way, there are no treatments or therapies for aging that have been through the sort of rigorous long-term clinical testing that would be needed to have a more complete understanding of the wide range of potential outcomes.
People often wonder, when I tell them things like this, why on earth I would subject myself to the potential for unexpected and adverse side effects or even the possibility—low though it seems to be—that I could expedite my own demise.
The answer is simple: I know exactly what is going to happen to me if I don’t do anything at all—and it’s not pretty. So what do I have to lose?
And so, with all that on the table, what do I do?
• I take 1 gram (1,000 mg) of NMN every morning, along with 1 gram of resveratrol (shaken into my homemade yogurt) and 1 gram of metformin.7
• I take a daily dose of vitamin D, vitamin K2, and 83 mg of aspirin.
• I strive to keep my sugar, bread, and pasta intake as low as possible. I gave up desserts at age 40, though I do steal tastes.
• I try to skip one meal a day or at least make it really small. My busy schedule almost always means that I miss lunch most days of the week.
• Every few months, a phlebotomist comes to my home to draw my blood, which I have analyzed for dozens of biomarkers. When my levels of various markers are not optimal, I moderate them with food or exercise.
• I try to take a lot of steps each day and walk upstairs, and I go to the gym most weekends with my son, Ben; we lift weights, jog a bit, and hang out in the sauna before dunking in an ice-cold pool.
• I eat a lot of plants and try to avoid eating other mammals, even though they do taste good. If I work out, I will eat meat.
• I don’t smoke. I try to avoid microwaved plastic, excessive UV exposure, X-rays, and CT scans.
• I try to stay on the cool side during the day and when I sleep at night.
• I aim to keep my body weight or BMI in the optimal range for healthspan, which for me is 23 to 25.
#+END_QUOTE

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:PROPERTIES:
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:END:
** Turns out that 42 was really the year of the answer. I am listening to Ray Dali's Principles. Pain is a sign of evolution. 42 was the year of maximum pain. I am seeing this now as I am on the cusp of a breakthrough in autonomy.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (22 . 14561)
:ID: 2fa878f3-28ce-4fd6-852d-d05b2a291b45
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your life—you have the opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion. The irony is that if you choose the healthy route, the pain will soon turn into pleasure. The pain is the signal! Like switching from not exercising to exercising, developing the habit of embracing the pain and learning from it will “get you to the other side.”
#+END_QUOTE

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:END:
** A generalist would understand, beyond conceptually, what the expert is doing, but is not able to do it himself. My main areas of expertise should be those you use at home, the greenhouse and the workshop. Beyond that, and if I ever delve into industry, I prefer to remain a producer.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (17 . 15872)
:ID: 3c93e812-baec-40a9-a211-d5970ec07e71
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Yokoi was the first to admit it. “I don’t have any particular specialist skills,” he once said. “I have a sort of vague knowledge of everything.” He advised young employees not just to play with technology for its own sake, but to play with ideas. Do not be an engineer, he said, be a producer. “The producer knows that there’s such a thing as a semiconductor, but doesn’t need to know its inner workings. . . . That can be left to the experts.” He argued, “Everyone takes the approach of learning detailed, complex skills. If no one did this then there wouldn’t be people who shine as engineers. . . . Looking at me, from the engineer’s perspective, it’s like, ‘Look at this idiot,’ but once you’ve got a couple hit products under your belt, this word ‘idiot’ seems to slip away somewhere.”
#+END_QUOTE
** This is the story of the Game and Watch and Gameboy. Yokoi specifically wanted to find new uses for cheap, old technologies. This fits in exactly with the manufacturing capabilities of a home workshop and smaller scale industries that cannot muster the capital to compete on the bleeding edge of technology.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (17 . 16822)
:ID: 0f6b7833-8987-4290-b2ab-be51db566ae3
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
He spread his philosophy as his team grew, and asked everyone to consider alternate uses for old technology. He realized that he had been fortunate to come to a playing card company rather than an established electronic toymaker with entrenched solutions, so his ideas were not thwarted because of his technical limitations. As the company grew, he worried that young engineers would be too concerned about looking stupid to share ideas for novel uses of old technology, so he began intentionally blurting out crazy ideas at meetings to set the tone. “Once a young person starts saying things like, ‘Well, it’s not really my place to say . . .’ then it’s all over,” he said.
#+END_QUOTE
** Organizations don't need as many specialists. This is going to increase even more as AI arrives
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (17 . 29820)
:ID: c895fb5c-9304-4859-ae9f-0342f531d81a
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
He became so interested in classifying innovators that he wrote a computer algorithm to analyze ten million patents from the last century and learn to identify and classify different types of inventors. Specialist contributions skyrocketed around and after World War II, but more recently have declined. “Specialists specifically peaked about 1985,” Ouderkirk told me. “And then declined pretty dramatically, leveled off about 2007, and the most recent data show it’s declining again, which I’m trying to understand.” He is careful to say that he can’t pinpoint a cause of the current trend. His hypothesis is that organizations simply don’t need as many specialists. “As information becomes more broadly available, the need for somebody to just advance a field isn’t as critical because in effect they are available to everybody,” he said. He is suggesting that communication technology has limited the number of hyperspecialists required to work on a particular narrow problem, because their breakthroughs can be communicated quickly and widely to others—the Yokois of the world—who work on clever applications.
Communication technologies have certainly done that in other areas. In the early twentieth century, for example, the state of Iowa alone had more than a thousand opera houses, one for every fifteen hundred residents. They were theaters, not just music venues, and they provided full-time employment for hundreds of local acting troupes and thousands of actors. Fast forward to Netflix and Hulu. Every customer can have Meryl Streep on demand, and the Iowa opera houses are extinct. So much for thousands of fully employed stage actors in Iowa. Ouderkirk’s data suggest that something analogous happened for narrowly focused specialists in technical fields. They are still absolutely critical, it’s just that their work is widely accessible, so fewer suffice.
It is an extension of the trend that Don Swanson foretold, and it massively increased opportunities for Yokoi-like connectors and polymathic innovators. “When information became more widely disseminated,” Ouderkirk told me, “it became a lot easier to be broader than a specialist, to start combining things in new ways.”
#+END_QUOTE
** TODO Get the Carter Race case study from Harvard Business School
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (19 . 11895)
:ID: 60ab3bb2-9290-4cd1-bd52-1971c1846257
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The temperature and engine failure data are taken exactly from NASA’s tragic decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger, with the details placed in the context of racing rather than space exploration. Jake’s face goes blank. Rather than a broken gasket, Challenger had failed O-rings—the rubber strips that sealed joints along the outer wall of the missile-like rocket boosters that propelled the shuttle. Cool temperatures caused O-ring rubber to harden, making them less effective seals.
The characters in the case study are loosely based on managers and engineers at NASA and its rocket-booster contractor, Morton Thiokol, on an emergency conference call the night before the Challenger launch. Weather reports on January 27, 1986, predicted unusually cool Florida weather for launch. After the conference call, NASA and Thiokol gave the okay to proceed. On January 28, O-rings failed to properly seal a joint in the wall of a rocket booster. Burning gas shot right through the joint to the outside, and Challenger exploded seventy-three seconds into its mission. All seven crew members were killed.
The Carter Racing case study worked exquisitely. It was eerie how precisely the students filled the shoes of the engineers on the emergency conference call who gave the green light for launch. The professor unfurled the lesson masterfully.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (20 . 3607)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (20 . 3607)
:ID: 7cddb6b9-9a11-4eee-8684-bbc00f5cfa4f
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
What struck me as Smithies spoke was his joy in experimentation. Not just in his lab, but in his life. He embodied a number of tenets I set out to explore in this book. From the outside, he looked like the consummate hyperspecialist. He was a molecular biochemist, after all. Except, molecular biochemist wasn’t really a thing when Smithies was in training. First he studied medicine, until he attended a talk by a professor who was combining chemistry and biology. “He lectured about this new subject which hadn’t yet been invented, in a sense,” Smithies told me. “It was marvelous, and I thought, ‘I’d like to do that. I’d better learn some chemistry.’” He turned on a dime and switched to studying chemistry. He never even thought to feel behind. On the contrary, “that was really very valuable, because at the end I had a good background in biology and wasn’t frightened of biology, and then I wasn’t frightened of chemistry. That gave me a great deal of power in the early days of molecular biology.” What sounds like hyperspecialization today was actually a bold hybrid at the time.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (20 . 10650)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (20 . 10650)
:ID: 32f6a385-c99e-4645-9073-40c2c275c8f3
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
“ It is rather unusual, I have to say. I do not dig deep—I graze shallow. So ever since I was a postdoc, I would go into a different subject every five years or so. . . . I don’t want to carry on studying the same thing from cradle to grave. Sometimes I joke that I am not interested in doing re-search, only search.”
#+END_QUOTE

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:END:
** A republic combines the best of democracy, aristocracy and monarchy
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 37326)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
At the heart of Polybius’ argument, however, lay bigger questions. How could you characterise
the Roman political system as a whole? How did it work? There was never a written Roman
constitution, but Polybius saw in Rome a perfect example in practice of an old Greek
philosophical ideal: the ‘mixed constitution’, which combined the best aspects of monarchy,
aristocracy and democracy. The consuls – who had full military command, could summon
assemblies of the people and could give orders to all other officials (except the plebeian tribunes)
– represented the monarchical element. The senate, which by this date had charge of Rome’s
finances, responsibility for delegations to and from other cities and de facto oversight of law and
security throughout Roman and allied territory, represented the aristocratic element. The people
represented the democratic element. This was not democracy or ‘the people’ in the modern
sense: there was no such thing as universal suffrage in the ancient world – women and slaves
never had formal political rights anywhere. Polybius meant the group of male citizens as a
whole. As in classical Athens, they – and they alone – elected the state officials, passed or
rejected laws, made the final decision on going to war and acted as a judicial court for major
offences.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (13 . 46009)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 46009)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
So what kind of political system was this? The balance between the different interests was
certainly not as equitable as Polybius makes it seem. The poor could never rise to the top of
Roman politics; the common people could never seize the political initiative; and it was
axiomatic that the richer an individual citizen was, the more political weight he should have.
But this form of disequilibrium is familiar in many modern so-called democracies: at Rome too
the wealthy and privileged competed for political office and political power that could only be
granted by popular election and by the favour of ordinary people who would never have the
financial means to stand themselves. As young Scipio Nasica found to his cost, the success of the
rich was a gift bestowed by the poor. The rich had to learn the lesson that they depended on the
people as a whole.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (14 . 33835)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 33835)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The clash in 133 BCE revealed dramatically different views of the power of the people. When
Tiberius persuaded them to vote out of office the tribune who opposed him, his argument went
along the lines of ‘if the people’s tribune no longer does what the people want, then he should be
deposed’. That raised an issue still familiar in modern electoral systems. Are Members of
Parliament, for example, to be seen as delegates of the voters, bound to follow the will of their
electorate? Or are they representatives, elected to exercise their own judgement in the changing
circumstances of government? This was the first time, so far as we know, that this question had
been explicitly raised in Rome, and it was no more easily answered then than it is now. For
some, Tiberius’ actions vindicated the rights of the people; for others they undermined the rights
of a properly elected official.
#+END_QUOTE

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:END:
** This is exactly what I have been thinking of for [[id:7085168d-8607-4d83-8ec0-2298f33e4a9c][Atoms, Bits and Cells]]. I wonder what the third strategy might be in this case. Perhaps it is not necessary after all
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (20 . 8038)
:ID: fb69f672-0a72-4881-af92-e8f9933af0a1
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The trick in any field—from finance to careers to relationships—is being able to survive the short-run problems so you can stick around long enough to enjoy the long-term growth.
Save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist.
Plan like a pessimist and dream like an optimist.
Those can seem like conflicting skills. And they are. It’s intuitive to think you should either be an optimist or a pessimist. It’s hard to realize there’s a time and a place for both, and that the two can—and should—coexist. But it’s what you see in almost every successful long-term endeavor.
#+END_QUOTE
** This describes a generalist. I think this balances with the fact that evolution also requires specialization to fill in ecological niches. Still, good enough my approach for [[id:7085168d-8607-4d83-8ec0-2298f33e4a9c][Atoms, Bits and Cells]].
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (21 . 1310)
:ID: 21952d29-21ac-4bfe-9910-f45547ad1cf0
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
There is no perfect species, one adapted to everything at all times. The best any
species can do is to be good at some things until the things it’s not good at suddenly
matter more. And then it dies.
A century ago a Russian biologist named Ivan Schmalhausen described how this works. A species that evolves to become very good at one thing tends to become vulnerable at another. A bigger lion can kill more prey, but it’s also a larger target for hunters to shoot at. A taller tree captures more sunlight, but becomes vulnerable to wind damage. There is always some inefficiency.
So species rarely evolve to become perfect at anything, because perfecting one skill comes at the expense of another skill that will eventually be critical to survival. The lion could be bigger and catch more prey; the tree could be taller and get more sun. But they’re not, because it would backfire.
So they’re all a little imperfect.
Nature’s answer is a lot of good enough, below-potential traits across all species. Biologist Anthony Bradshaw says that evolution’s successes get all the attention, but its failures are equally important. And that’s how it should be: Not maximizing your potential is actually the sweet spot in a world where perfecting one skill compromises another.
#+END_QUOTE
** War and welfare coming together is a good concept. I think this is a reason why welfare is necessary to recover from Egypt's "war". I have also just finished Stephanie Kelton's book on Modern Monetary Theory where she argues for total welfare by the US government, even without a war.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (30 . 7820)
:ID: 50e5be18-e4e7-47c8-8d24-9d03d3ea604d
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Historian Tony Judt notes that the state of affairs was so bad in postwar Europe that only the state could offer hope of salvation to the masses of displaced people. So it did. Everything from generous unemployment insurance to universal health care became common after the war in ways that never caught on in America.
Historian Michael Howard has said that war and welfare go hand in hand. Perhaps that’s because even the most financially prepared, the most risk averse, and those with the most foresight can be completely crushed by war. Europeans did not get to choose whether they wanted to be caught up in World War II—it became the most pressing issue of their lives whether they supported it or not, and it crushed their sense of control whether they prepared for it or not.
#+END_QUOTE

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:END:
** Notes for page (12 . 11341)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (12 . 11341)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Sharia, in particular the law regulating Islamic transactions and finance, is of interest to us insofar as it preserves some of the lost Mediterranean and Babylonian methods and practices—not to prop up the ego of Saudi princes. It exists at the intersection of Greco-Roman law (as reflected from people in Semitic territories’ contact with the school of law of Berytus), Phoenician trading rules, Babylonian legislations, and Arab tribal commercial customs and, as such, it provides a repository of ancient Mediterranean and Semitic lore. I hence view Sharia as a museum of the history of ideas on symmetry in transactions. Sharia establishes the interdict of gharar, drastic enough to be totally banned in any form of transaction. It is an extremely sophisticated term in decision theory that does not exist in English; it means both uncertainty and deception—my personal take is that it means something beyond informational asymmetry between agents: inequality of uncertainty. Simply, as the aim is for both parties in a transaction to have the same uncertainty facing random outcomes, an asymmetry becomes equivalent to theft. Or more robustly:
No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.
#+END_QUOTE
** Some tribalism is good
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (12 . 20944)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Now what’s the reason? Modernity put it in our heads that there are two units: the
individual and the universal collective—in that sense, skin in the game for you would
be just for you, as a unit. In reality, my skin lies in a broader set of people, one that
includes a family, a community, a tribe, a fraternity. But it cannot possibly be the
universal.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (14 . 21583)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 21583)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
GENES VS. LANGUAGES
Looking at genetic data in the Eastern Mediterranean with my collaborator the geneticist Pierre Zalloua, we noticed that both invaders, Turks and Arabs, left few genes, and in the case of Turkey, the tribes from East and Central Asia brought an entirely new language. Turkey, shockingly, is still inhabited by the populations of Asia Minor you read about in history books, but with new names. Further, Zalloua and his colleagues claim that Canaanites from 3,700 years ago represent more than nine-tenths of the genes of current residents of the state of Lebanon, with only a tiny amount of new genes added, in spite of about every possible army having dropped by for sightseeing and some pillaging.*2 While Turks are Mediterraneans who speak an East Asian language, the French (North of Avignon) are largely of Northern European stock, yet they speak a Mediterranean language.
So:
Genes follow majority rule; languages minority rule.
Languages travel; genes less so.
This shows us the recent mistake of building racial theories on language, dividing people into “Aryans” and “Semites,” based on linguistic considerations. While the subject was central to the German Nazis, the practice continues today in one form or another, often benign. For the great irony is that Northern European supremacists (“Aryan”), while anti-Semitic, used the classical Greeks to give themselves a pedigree and a link to a glorious civilization, but didn’t realize that the Greeks and their Mediterranean “Semitic” neighbors were actually genetically close to one another. It has been recently shown that both ancient Greeks and Bronze Age Levantines share an Anatolian origin. It just happened that the languages diverged.
#+END_QUOTE
** Cato's injunction
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (18 . 7560)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
I am privileged to have other enemies than Big Ag. A couple of years ago, a university in Lebanon offered me an honorary doctorate. I accepted out of respect, counter to my habit of refusing honors, (largely) because I get very bored during ceremonies. Plus, in my experience, people who collect honorary doctorates are typically hierarchy-conscious, and I abide by Cato’s injunction: he preferred to be asked why he didn’t have a statue rather than why he had one.
#+END_QUOTE
** On generational punishement
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (18 . 13530)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The only way we have left to control suicide-terrorists would be precisely to convince
them that blowing themselves up is not the worst-case scenario for them, nor the
end scenario at all. Making their families and loved ones bear a financial
burden—just as Germans still pay for war crimes—would immediately add
consequences to their actions. The penalty needs to be properly calibrated to be a
true disincentive, without imparting any sense of heroism or martyrdom to the
families in question.
#+END_QUOTE
** Rich people are not hated, only the high-salaried are
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (22 . 2383)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
It is safe to say that the American public—actually all publics—despises people who
make a lot of money on a salary, or, rather, salarymen who make a lot of money.
This is indeed generalized to other countries: a few years ago the Swiss, of all
people, ran a referendum for a law capping salaries of managers to a set multiple of
the lowest wage. The law didn’t pass, but the fact that they thought in these terms
is rather significant. For the same Swiss hold rich entrepreneurs, and people who
have derived their celebrity by other means, in some respect.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (25 . 16108)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (25 . 16108)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
ANOTHER BUSINESS OF INTERVENTION
People who have always operated without skin in the game (or without their skin in the right game) seek the complicated and centralized, and avoid the simple like the plague. Practitioners, on the other hand, have opposite instincts, looking for the simplest heuristics. Some rules:
People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.
And it gets more complicated as the remedy has itself a skin-in-the-game problem.
This is particularly acute in the meta-problem, when the solution is about solving this very problem.
In other words, many problems in society come from the interventions of people who sell complicated solutions because that’s what their position and training invite them to do. There is absolutely no gain for someone in such a position to propose something simple: you are rewarded for perception, not results. Meanwhile, they pay no price for the side effects that grow nonlinearly with such complications.
This also holds true when it comes to solutions that are profitable to technologists.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (26 . 6554)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (26 . 6554)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
CONVERSATION
If anything, being rich you need to hide your money if you want to have what I call friends. This may be known; what is less obvious is that you may also need to hide your erudition and learning. People can only be social friends if they don’t try to upstage or outsmart one another. Indeed, the classical art of conversation is to avoid any imbalance, as in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier: people need to be equal, at least for the purpose of the conversation, otherwise it fails. It has to be hierarchy-free and equal in contribution. You’d rather have dinner with your friends than with your professor, unless of course your professor understands “the art” of conversation.
Indeed, one can generalize and define a community as a space within which many rules of competition and hierarchy are lifted, where the collective prevails over one’s interest. Of course there will be tension with the outside, but that’s another discussion. This idea of competition being lifted within a group or a tribe was, once again, present in the notion of a group as studied by Elinor Ostrom.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (32 . 3343)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (32 . 3343)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Different people rarely mean the same thing when they say “religion,” nor do they realize it. For early Jews and Muslims, religion was law. Din means law in Hebrew and religion in Arabic. For early Jews, religion was also tribal; for early Muslims, it was universal. For the Romans, religion was social events, rituals, and festivals—the word religio was a counter to superstitio, and while present in the Roman zeitgeist it had no equivalent concept in the Greek-Byzantine East. Throughout the ancient world, law was procedurally and mechanically its own thing. Early Christianity, thanks to Saint Augustine, stayed relatively away from the law, and, later, remembering its origins, had an uneasy relation with it. For instance, even during the Inquisition, a lay court formally handled final sentencing. Further, Theodosius’s code (compiled in the fifth century to unify Roman law) was “Christianized” with a short introduction, a blessing of sorts—the rest remained identical to pagan Roman legal reasoning as expounded in Constantinople and (mostly) Berytus. The code remained dominated by the Phoenician legal scholars Ulpian and Papinian, who were pagan: contrary to theories by geopoliticalists, the Roman school of law of Berytus (Beirut) was not shut down by Christianity, but by an earthquake.
The difference is marked in that Christian Aramaic uses different words: din for religion and nomous (from the Greek) for law. Jesus, with his imperative “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar,” separated the holy and the profane: Christianity was for another domain, “the kingdom to come,” only merging with this one in the eschaton.* Neither Islam nor Judaism have a marked separation between holy and profane. And of course Christianity moved away from the solely spiritual domain to embrace the ceremonial and ritualistic, integrating much of the pagan rites of the Levant and Asia Minor. As an illustration of the symbolic separation between church and state, the title Pontifex Maximus (head priest), taken by the Roman emperors after Augustus, reverted after Theodosius, in the late fourth century, to the bishop of Rome, and later, more or less informally, to the Catholic Pope.
For most Jews today, religion has become ethnocultural, without the law—and for many, a nation. Same for Armenians, Syriacs, Chaldeans, Copts, and Maronites. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians, religion is largely aesthetics, pomp, and rituals. For Protestants, religion is belief without aesthetics, pomp, or law. Further East, for Buddhists, Shintoists, and Hindus, religion is practical and spiritual philosophy, with a code of ethics (and for some, a cosmogony). So when Hindus talk about the Hindu “religion,” it doesn’t mean the same thing to a Pakistani, and would certainly mean something different to a Persian.
When the nation-state dream came about, things got more, much more complicated. When an Arab used to say “Jew” he largely referred to a creed; to Arabs, a converted Jew was no longer a Jew. But for a Jew, a Jew was simply defined as someone whose mother was a Jew. But Judaism somewhat merged into nation-state and now, for many, indicates belonging to a nation.
In Serbia, Croatia, and Lebanon, religion means one thing at times of peace, and something quite different at times of war.
#+END_QUOTE

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:PROPERTIES:
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:END:
** There has to be a physical end to this dynamic. I guess energy is one.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (11 . 12441)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Think of how, as parts of successive waves, fire, then candles and oil lamps, gave way to gas lamps and then to electric lightbulbs, and now LED lights, and the totality of artificial light increased even as the underlying technologies changed. New technologies supersede multiple predecessors. Just as electricity did the work of candles and steam engines alike, so smartphones replaced satnavs, cameras, PDAs, computers, and telephones (and invented entirely new classes of experience: apps). As technologies let you do more, for less, their appeal only grows, along with their adoption.
#+END_QUOTE
** I made the phrase 'atoms, bits and cells' independently.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 8131)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
FROM ATOMS, TO BITS, TO GENES
Until recently, the history of technology could be encapsulated in a single phrase: humanity’s quest to manipulate atoms. From fire to electricity, stone tools to machine tools, hydrocarbons to medicines, the journey described in chapter 2 is essentially a vast, unfolding process in which our species has slowly extended its control over atoms. As this control has become more precise, technologies have steadily become more powerful and complex, giving rise to machine tools, electrical processes, heat engines, synthetic materials like plastics, and the creation of intricate molecules capable of defeating dreaded diseases. At root, the primary driver of all of these new technologies is material—the ever-growing manipulation of their atomic elements.
#+END_QUOTE
** Biology is the ultimate distributed manufacturing platform. This is why advanced technology is indistinguishable from life, an idea I first encountered in Asimov.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 11124)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
This is the promise of evolution by design, tens of millions of years of history compressed and short-circuited by directed intervention. It brings together biotechnology, molecular biology, and genetics with the power of computational design tools. Put it all together and you have a platform of profoundly transformational scope. In the words of the Stanford bioengineer Drew Endy, “Biology is the ultimate distributed manufacturing platform.” Synthetic biology’s true promise, then, is that it will “enable people to more directly and freely make whatever they need wherever they are.”
#+END_QUOTE
** Good to note, aside from the fact that all food and much else is genetically engineered over millennia.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 20079)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Already genetically engineered organisms account for 2 percent of the U.S. economy through agricultural and pharmaceutical uses. This is just the start. McKinsey estimates that up to 60 percent of physical inputs into the economy could ultimately be subject to “bio-innovation.” Forty-five percent of the global disease burden could be met with “science that is conceivable today.” As the tool kit gets cheaper and more advanced, a universe of possibility becomes subject to exploration.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (14 . 25884)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 25884)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
And yet this is only the beginning of a convergence of these two technologies. The bio-revolution is coevolving with advances in AI, and indeed many of the phenomena discussed in this chapter will rely on AI for their realization. Think, then, of two waves crashing together, not a wave but a superwave. Indeed, from one vantage artificial intelligence and synthetic biology are almost interchangeable. All intelligence to date has come from life. Call them synthetic intelligence and artificial life and they still mean the same thing. Both fields are about re-creating, engineering these utterly foundational and interrelated concepts, two core attributes of humanity; change the view and they become one single project.
#+END_QUOTE
** "Self-play". A Joke: Just like with Alpha Zero, AI will improve its various abilities by something that humans have always done: self play
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (16 . 14633)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Just as today’s models produce detailed images based on a few words, so in decades to come similar models will produce a novel compound or indeed an entire organism with just a few natural language prompts. That compound’s design could be improved by countless self-run trials, just as AlphaZero became an expert chess or Go player through self-play. Quantum technologies, many millions of times more powerful than the most powerful classical computers, could let this play out at a molecular level. This is what we mean by hyper-evolution—a fast, iterative platform for creation.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (16 . 18488)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (16 . 18488)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
A more appropriate term for the technologies of the coming wave is “omni-use,” a concept that grasps at the sheer levels of generality, the extreme versatility on display. Omni-use technologies like steam or electricity have wider societal effects and spillovers than narrower technologies. If AI is indeed the new electricity, then like electricity it will be an on-demand utility that permeates and powers almost every aspect of daily life, society, the economy: a general-purpose technology embedded everywhere. Containing something like this is always going to be much harder than containing a constrained, single-task technology, stuck in a tiny niche with few dependencies.
#+END_QUOTE
** General purpose technologies always end up omni use, including to do harm
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (16 . 19559)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Consider synthetic biology, too, through the omni-use prism. Engineering life is a completely general technique whose potential uses are near limitless; it might create material for construction, tackle disease, and store data. More is more, and there is a good reason for this. Omni-use technologies are more valuable than narrow ones. Nowadays, technologists don’t want to design technologies that are limited, specific, mono-functional applications. Instead, the goal is to design things more like smartphones: phones but more importantly devices for taking pictures, keeping fit, playing games, navigating cities, sending emails, and so on.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (20 . 42017)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (20 . 42017)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
These tools will only temporarily augment human intelligence. They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor replacing. They will eventually do cognitive labor more efficiently and more cheaply than many people working in administration, data entry, customer service (including making and receiving phone calls), writing emails, drafting summaries, translating documents, creating content, copywriting, and so on. In the face of an abundance of ultra-low-cost equivalents, the days of this kind of “cognitive manual labor” are numbered.
#+END_QUOTE
** Regulation is well and good. The main win, however, would be using appropriat technology to give families and communities more resilience against disruption of world systems. Save for isolation, biological disrutions are the most dificult to defend against.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (25 . 63923)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
We need our generation’s equivalent of the nuclear treaty to shape a common worldwide approach—in this case not curbing proliferation altogether but setting limits and building frameworks for management and mitigation that, like the wave, cross borders. This would put clear limits on what work is undertaken, mediate among national licensing efforts, and create a framework for reviewing both.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (25 . 86484)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (25 . 86484)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
On the one hand, total openness to all experimentation and development is a straightforward recipe for catastrophe. If everyone in the world can play with nuclear bombs, at some stage you have a nuclear war. Open-source has been a boon to technological development and a major spur to progress more widely. But it’s not an appropriate philosophy for powerful AI models or synthetic organisms; here it should be banned. They should not be shared, let alone deployed or developed, without rigorous due process.
#+END_QUOTE

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* The Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin F - Mark Skousen
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ~/library/books/Mark Skousen/The Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin_ 1775-1790 (10314)/The Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin F - Mark Skousen.epub
:ID: 19c11d7e-dc51-48e4-a7c7-6d6eef175047
:END:
** This may come as anti-social today, but really good to see how such social rules can be useful. None of this could work without postal service
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 1512)
:ID: 2a14fd16-c80b-4862-835d-474410c25667
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
My father, a very wise man, us’d to say nothing was more common than for those who lov’d one another at a distance, to find many causes of dislike when they came together; and therefore he did not approve of visits to relations in distant places, which could not well be short enough for them to part good friends.
#+END_QUOTE
* The Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin F - Mark Skousen
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Mark Skousen/The Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin_ 1757-1790 (10314)/The Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin F - Mark Skousen.epub
:NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 31680)
:END:
** Such social rules would sound extreme today, and impossible before postal service.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 31458)
:ID: d869c7b7-76ce-439e-8aee-3335833e1595
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
My father, a very wise man, us’d to say nothing was more common than for those who lov’d one another at a distance, to find many causes of dislike when they came together; and therefore he did not approve of visits to relations in distant places, which could not well be short enough for them to part good friends. I saw a proof of it, in the disgusts between him and his brother Benjamin; and tho’ I was a child I still remember how affectionate their correspondence was while they were separated, and the disputes and misunderstandings they had when they came to live some time together in the same house.
#+END_QUOTE
** Franklin agrees the historic times are yet to begin
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (17 . 4430)
:ID: d8e7a83c-7a9e-46a3-ab05-1d0882fee1d3
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The rapid progress true science now makes occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the heights to which the power of man may be carried over matter in a thousand years. We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity and give them absolute levity for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labour and double it produce. All diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of old age, and our lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian standard. O that moral science were as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and that human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity! We make great improvements in nature daily. There is one I wish to see in moral philosophy: the discovery of a plan that would induce and oblige nations to settle their disputes without first cutting one another’s throats. When will human reason be sufficiently improv’d to see the advantage of this! When will men be convinc’d that even successful wars do at length become misfortunes to those who unjustly commenc’d them, and who triumph’d blindly in their success, not seeing all its consequences.
#+END_QUOTE
** Fiat currency pays for war
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (17 . 17118)
:ID: 6fb683a7-556c-4e74-9926-35454a3df58c
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
THIS CURRENCY AS WE MANAGED IT WAS A WONDERFUL MACHINE
The principal difficulty at the time in America consisted in the depreciation of our currency, owing to the over-quantities issued, and the diminished demand for it in commerce. The depreciation of our money greatly affected salaried men, widows and orphans. I received a report from the Congress how the manners of the country were much affected by the depreciation, so that almost every officer, civil or military, felt a desire to engage in speculation, finding that his salary was inadequate to the harping demands which were made upon him for the necessaries of life. I took all the pains I could in Congress to prevent the depreciation by proposing first that the bills should bear interest; this was rejected, and they were struck accordingly. Secondly, after the first emission, I proposed that we should stop, strike no more, but borrow on interest those which had issued. This was not approved and more bills were issued. When, from the too great quantity, these began to depreciate, they agreed to borrow on interest, and I propos’d that in order to fix the value of the principal, the interest should be promis’d in hard dollars. This was objected to as impracticable. When the whole mass of the currency was under way in depreciation, the momentum of its descent was too great to be stopped. The only remedy then seemed to be a diminution of the quantity by a vigorous taxation, of great nominal sums, which the people were more able to pay in proportion to the quantity and diminished value. The only consolation under the evil is that the public debt was proportionably diminish’d with the depreciation, by an imperceptible tax everyone paid as the value fell between his receiving and paying such sums as pass’d thro’ his hands. For it should always be remembered that the original intention was to sink the bills by taxes, which as effectually extinguish the debt as an actual redemption. This effect of paper currency is not understood in Europe. And indeed the whole is a mystery even to the politicians; how we were able to continue a war four years without money; and how we could pay with paper that had no previously fix’d fund appropriated specifically to redeem it. This currency as we managed it was a wonderful machine. It performed its office when we issued it; it paid and clothed the troops, and provided victuals and ammunition; and when we were oblig’d to issue a quantity excessive, it paid itself off by depreciation. An expedition to Canada was deferred for want of a sufficient quantity of hard money. The Canadians were afraid of paper and would not take the Congress’s money. To enter a country which you mean to make a friend of, with an army that must have occasion every day for fresh provision in horses, carriages, and labour of every kind; having no acceptable money to pay those that serve you; and to be obliged therefore to take that service by force, is the sure way to disgust, offend, and by degrees make enemies of the whole people, after which all operations will be more difficult, all motions discovered, and every endeavour used to have us driven back out of their country.
#+END_QUOTE

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* The Death of Conservatism - Sam Tanenhaus
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Sam Tanenhaus/The Death of Conservatism (13614)/The Death of Conservatism - Sam Tanenhaus.epub
:END:
** This is what we have done in Egypt
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (7 . 18849)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Conservatives today face a choice: Will they shine in reflected radiance or spin futilely on their
lonely unlit orbit? If they seriously mean to offer more than nihilism, they must accept the
obligation history places on the party exiled from power: the obligation to rethink and
reevaluate, to undergo the serious work of self-examination and preparation.
Conservatives did exactly that during the long period that extended from the 1930s through the
1960s, a “down” cycle that prefigured this current one. At first many on the right, like Rush
Limbaugh today, promulgated the dogmas of grievance and resentment, insisting in words like
Limbaugh’s own that “the enemy within” had committed “treason” against the United States.
But the movement’s best thinkers grew to understand that such denunciations amounted to a
denunciation of America itself. They chose instead to address the authentic, rather than
invented, crises of their time and tried to fashion serious rather than merely expedient
arguments. They became analysts and critics, theorists and prophets. They observed politics from
an engaged, constructive distance, made their outer orbit a useful vantage point from which to
calibrate where the nation, under liberal rule, might be headed. And they exerted whatever
influence they could through the vehicles of ideas and arguments. Unwelcome in “the
mainstream media,” they could easily have retreated into an alternative universe and limited
their conversation to preachments aimed at the like-minded few. They rejected that course,
electing instead to seize whatever openings they could to join the larger quarrels, adapting their
voices to the idioms and vocabulary of the day. When at last conservatives gained a foothold
within the establishment, political and intellectual, it was because they had earned their way.
They rejected extremism for centrism, purism for pragmatism, revanchism for realism. The
public—including much of the liberal public—deemed them ready to govern. The moon had
become a sun.
Are conservatives prepared to travel this route again? No, to judge from current evidence. The
figures now contending for movement leadership—Limbaugh; the GOP’s new Lazarus, Newt
Gingrich; the aspirant governors Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin—seem contentedly nestled within
their fringe orbit. Even when they speak of reclaiming the center, they do so in the discredited
idioms of the discarded past. This is equally true of the movement’s intelligentsia. Journals like
Commentary, National Review, and The Weekly Standard, once sophisticated publications, are
now mouthpieces of the Republican Party at its most revanchist. During the 2008 campaign one
could read—at times scarcely avoid—effusions like those of Michael Barone inveighing against
“the coming Obama thugocracy” and Jonah Goldberg railing against Obama’s “pals from the
Weather Underground who murdered or celebrated the murder of policemen.” Most unsettling
of all, perhaps, was the case of William Kristol, the founding publisher and editor of The Weekly
Standard, who in his election-year column for The New York Times debased this valued space
into a shabby storefront for the Republican presidential campaign. These conservative
intellectuals recognize no distinction between analysis and advocacy, or between the competition
of ideas and the naked struggle for power. To them the Democratic Party and all manner of
liberals are simply the enemy, and if the majority of the country joins the “wrong” side, then
they are the enemy, too, or its manipulated pawns.
All movements have life spans. They spring into existence in response to particular conditions,
and when those conditions change, often as a result of movement successes, they either disband
or lose their relevance. The abolitionist movement effectively ended once Lincoln signed the
Emancipation Proc lamation. The progressive movement lasted only fifteen years (from 1900 to
1915), but in that time transformed American politics, shaping two of the great
twentieth-century presidencies, Theodore Roosevelt’s and Woodrow Wilson’s, and making
possible a third, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (7 . 28288)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (7 . 28288)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The movement conservatives of our time seem the heirs of the French rather than of the
American Revolution. They routinely demonize government institutions, which they depict as
the enemy of the people’s best interests. But to classical conservatives the two entities,
government and society, are mutually dependent. Burke drew no meaningful distinction
between the state and society—that is, between the formally established institutions of
government and those institutions rooted in patrimony, custom, and habit. The two were
coterminous, at times almost interchangeable. “Government is a contrivance of human wisdom
to provide for human wants,” he wrote, adding a few sentences later, as if following a single arc
of thought, “Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but
that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should
frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can
only be done by a power out of themselves … [T]he restraints on men, as well as their liberties,
are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times
and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract
rule.”
#+END_QUOTE
** Get Kendall's article
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (7 . 32922)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Practically, this vision of orthodoxy amounts to war fought by other means. This was the
argument put forth by Kendall, a disillusioned ex-Trotskyist who emerged as one of the Right’s
most fertile thinkers during the Cold War period. His essay “What Is Conservatism?,” published
in 1963, drew a bright line of demarcation between the Left and the Right. “The line in question
is a line of battle,” Kendall wrote, “a line of battle moreover in contemporary American politics
and a line of battle between two sets of combatants, each fighting to defeat the other.”
#+END_QUOTE
** Democrats in Congress deferred to Reagan
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (7 . 36723)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The struggle between consensus and orthodoxy illuminates as well the contrasting approaches
favored by each party’s congressional caucus. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he
presented a program of steep tax cuts that many Democrats found radical. Yet forty-eight
Democrats in the House and thirty-seven in the Senate voted for it. They did so partly in
acknowledgment of the sweeping victory Reagan had won—51 percent of the vote, less than
Obama won in 2008, but ten points more than the Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Carter, got.
Still, Democrats had a fifty-vote advantage in the House in 1981. They could have stopped
Reagan—or at least made a strong case for opposing him. Instead, they deferred to the popular
will and to the tradition of allowing a new president to pursue his agenda.
#+END_QUOTE
** Clinton was a conservative
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (7 . 40166)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
As it happened, the Republicans were vindicated. The recession cycle had all but ended by the
time Clinton took office, and the economy rebounded. Clinton, recognizing this, adjusted course
and oversaw a period of remarkable prosperity. Unemployment decreased in each of the eight
years he was in office. Like Dwight Eisenhower forty years before, he was a genuine Burkean.
Both presidents struggled to neutralize movement forces in Congress through “a computing
principle.” Both succeeded. And both left office with soaring approval ratings. They are the
modern era’s two true conservative presidents—and the two best.
#+END_QUOTE
** Look up these two authors
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (8 . 4856)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
That the nation should turn to professors in its time of trouble was an affront, a confession of
weakness. To an intellectual like H. L. Mencken, the figure who presided over this change was,
variously, a “dictator,” “chartered libertine,” and the “King in the White House.” Roosevelt
really believed, to Mencken’s astonishment, that “the nation would be vastly benefited if its
present scheme of government could be radically overhauled, and the safeguards now thrown
about property eliminated, and all power and prerogative handed over to men of vision, sworn
to serve and save the lowly.” In fact, the New Deal was “a political racket … and nothing
more,” Mencken wrote on the eve of the 1936 election. “Its chief practical business is to search
out groups that can be brought into the [Democratic Party] machine by grants out of the public
treasury, which is to say, out of the pockets of the rest of us.”
#+END_QUOTE
** The machine made the economy socialistic
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (8 . 36074)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
And with good reason. To Chambers, an avid student of history, well schooled in Marxist
argument, it was obvious that the growing dependency on government was a function of the
unstoppable rise of industrial capitalism and the new technology it had brought forth. “The
machine has made the economy socialistic,” he wrote. And the Right had better adjust. “A
conservatism that will not accept this situation … is not a political force, or even a twitch: it has
become a literary whimsy.” It might well be “the duty of the intellectuals … to preach reaction,”
but only “from an absolute, an ideal standpoint. It is for books and posterity. It does not bear on
tactics or daily life … Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms,
must maneuver within its terms. That is what conservatives must decide: how much to give in
order to survive at all; how much to give in order not to give up the basic principles.”
#+END_QUOTE

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* The Deficit Myth - Stephanie Kelton
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Stephanie Kelton/The Deficit Myth (12157)/The Deficit Myth - Stephanie Kelton.epub
:END:
** This book is making me realize that, due to the way national currencies are organized, there are two parts of the economy in each nation: a local one and an international trade one. The local economy can, and perhaps should, be completely autarkic and disconnected from the rest of the world, with only resource and labour restrictions but no financial (and capital?) restrictions whatsoever, so long inflation is under control. The second part of the economy, or the "second economy" as it is, is related to international trade conducted in the US dollar. This is where restrictions are (except for the US) and where a positive trade balance is favorable. Moreover, the local economy as it grows helps furthering USD inflows as goods and services find their way to the export market.
:PROPERTIES:
:ID: dc05697c-b650-48a5-afa6-f0e8f9edc5c6
:END:
Perhaps custom duties should be collected in USD.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (12 . 969)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Such “free trade” agreements entrench global divisions between rich and poor. They shoehorn poor parts of the world into fossil fuel extraction, helping to hasten climate change. They give developing countries little choice but to submit to export-led growth—which, in reality, means exploitative labor conditions to assemble cheap goods on behalf of the wealthy and advanced nations. They even expand the monetary sovereignty of rich countries at the expense of poorer countries.
#+END_QUOTE
** This is exactly why I think that, for lack of energy abundane, a country like Egypt should continue to import grain only until it can build enough greenhouse capacity to feed itself from Zone 1 and Zone 2 permaculture. Zone 3 becomes viable only with country-scale regenration or with fusion energy abundance.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (12 . 57751)
:ID: 727d70fb-cc65-4b34-b7db-e295da8b35e8
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
In theory and practice, lack of food and energy sovereignty are solvable problems. Even major food importing countries with mostly desert climates can adopt a sustainable agriculture program by investing in more water efficient hydroponic and aquaponics food production. And even countries with no oil or natural gas reserves can adopt a renewable energy program by installing solar and wind farms, and by investing in energy efficiency for housing and transportation. And to the extent that we encourage a global effort to contain the effects of climate change, policies that help the developing world to decarbonize their economies not only lessens their dependency on US dollars to purchase fossil fuels, but also enhances global cooperative efforts to reduce harmful carbon emissions that continue to threaten our planet’s long-term survival.
As long as most developing countries have to import basic necessities, they will remain “developing”—caught in a desperate scramble to acquire the currencies of the rich world. Corporations around the world will keep feverishly chasing short-term profits, extracting scarce natural resources, polluting precious ecosystems, and ruthlessly firing desperate people, all in the name of maximizing shareholder value. Left unchecked, the situation is an open invitation for demagogues like Trump to come along, blaming “foreigners” and exacerbating tensions among the world’s people.
#+END_QUOTE
** According to this, and I am still not sure I like its assumptions, as fiat can only be sustained within a long cycle, social welfare can be perpetually funded by the government, so long the economy is capable of delivering those services in reality (perhaps not a good idea to have the government deliver the services itself, at least not the central government), and as long as the funding inflows create jobs but not inflation.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 62687)
:ID: 9a016756-63e6-4edc-b819-fe55cade1191
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Greenspan was concerned about the demographic changes that are leaving the US with a smaller number of workers to produce our national output. The dependency ratio is a legitimate concern here, not because there won’t be enough money but because we might struggle to make enough of the real goods and services that people will want and need in the coming years. Greenspan understood that it’s not enough to pay monetary benefits to future retirees. The value of that money matters, too. To guard against the age-old inflation problem of “too much money chasing too few goods,” we need an economy that is productive enough to supply the mix of goods and services we’ll need. How do we do that?
First, we must decide what our priorities are. Polling suggests that entitlements rank high on our list of social goals. Second, we should think about how to achieve them, while at the same time making sure our economy is productive enough to meet them without causing inflation.
#+END_QUOTE
** In the case of Egypt, the central government would guaraantee employment, transfer the money to regional (and local) govrenments who will hire contractors to do the jobs and pay workers (directly?). This is a way to push capitalists to find efficiencies in places other than labour.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (15 . 46183)
:ID: 8771bc8f-1c2e-4ea5-9589-38e2e2271498
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
What we envision is a highly decentralized Public Service Employment (PSE) program that offers paid work at a living wage (we recommend $15 per hour) with a basic package of benefits that include health care and paid leave. Both part-time and full-time work should be offered, and work arrangements should be sufficiently flexible to accommodate the needs of caregivers, students, older workers, those with disabilities, and so on. While funding must come from the top (federal government), the jobs themselves would largely be designed by the people living in the communities that will benefit from the work that is performed. As we explain in the report, “the goal is to create jobs in every community, and to create projects that are beneficial to every community, [so] it makes sense to involve local communities in these projects, from the proposal stage through to implementation, administration, and evaluation.”
The program budget could reside within the Department of Labor (DOL), and DOL would specify the general guidelines for the kinds of projects that would qualify for funding. The goal is to provide jobs that fulfill unmet community needs. As we envision it, all of the jobs should be oriented around an overarching goal: building a care economy. We are an aging society in the midst of a climate crisis with more than enough useful work to be done. We can address our good jobs deficit by creating millions of good-paying jobs that care for people, communities, and our planet.
When it comes to creating those jobs, we think it’s important to recognize that the federal government is not in the best position to identify the community’s most pressing needs. The people who live and work in the community are. That’s why we recommend that government agencies work with community partners to assess and catalogue unmet needs so that jobs can be tailored to meet the needs of the community. Together, states and municipalities would work with their community partners to create a repository of work projects. Think of it like a massively scaled-up Shelf Project, but instead of binders full of pay-fors, the shelves would be filled with a wide variety of available jobs. The idea is to keep the shelves stocked with enough potential work to allow people with different skills and interests to walk in without a job and walk out with one that fits them.30
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (15 . 49843)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (15 . 49843)
:ID: 6084dfe9-6505-4e8e-9e8c-8096099259c5
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Argentina’s Jefes de Hogar plan wasn’t a full-throated job guarantee either, but in 2001 it became “the only direct job creation program in the world specifically modelled after” the proposal developed by MMT economists.35 The program was launched as an emergency measure following a financial crisis that plunged the economy into recession and drove the official unemployment rate above 20 percent. It was inspired by the work of Warren Mosler and designed in consultation with MMT economists—Pavlina Tcherneva, Mathew Forstater, and L. Randall Wray—as a way to quickly put people back to work. A first of its kind, the Jefes de Hogar plan created a federally funded, locally administered jobs program that guaranteed four hours of daily work in exchange for 150 pesos per month. As Tcherneva explains, jobs were limited to heads of households with “children under age eighteen, persons with disabilities, or a pregnant woman.”36 At its peak, the program employed some two million people, about 13 percent of the labor force. Almost 90 percent of the jobs were in community projects, and 75 percent of the participants were women. Just six months after launching the program, extreme poverty had fallen by 25 percent. Within three years, half of the participants had left the program, most for jobs in the private sector.37
#+END_QUOTE

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:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Neil Howe/The Fourth Turning Is Here_ What the Seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis (12136)/The Fourth Turning Is Here_ What the Seaso - Neil Howe.epub
:END:
** Notes for page (15 . 16256)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (15 . 16256)
:ID: 73be2c1d-e4fb-459a-8228-53a2060407b6
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Biologists David Sloan Wilson and his coauthor E. O. Wilson have suggested the following rule of thumb: Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Brilliantly enigmatic, the Wilsons formula throws an illuminating spotlight on the opposite solstices of the saeculum.
#+END_QUOTE

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:END:

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:END:
** Notes for page (15 . 27261)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (15 . 27261)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Like all good narratives—and this one is very coherent indeed—it is easy to tell and retell. It was easy to write. Everyone knows exactly what someone who calls himself or herself a conservative purportedly values: military strength, tax cuts, minimal government, fiscal restraint, traditional values, patriotism, and religious faith. This clear message starts conservative candidates with 35 to 60 percent of the vote before opening their mouths, depending on the state or district.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (16 . 5672)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (16 . 5672)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Contentious issues are the issues that arouse emotions. If you cede the contentious issues, you cede passion to the other side. And given that people vote their passions, that’s always a losing strategy. Republicans go straight for these issues, and they now have the confidence that they can do so even when support for their position is in the range of 30 percent, as is the case with their absolutist stance on abortion: that abortion is murder and should be illegal under all circumstances. They can do so with impunity because they know that Democrats usually won’t contest them for fear of offending some constituency or being branded with a slippery-slope argument (e.g., “My opponent believes in abortion on demand,” “My opponent views abortion as just another form of birth control”). The result is that Republicans assert an extreme principle, the public never hears a compelling counternarrative, and gradually public opinion shifts to the right.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (17 . 24523)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (17 . 24523)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Democrats should use a simple rule of thumb to determine whether to woo an emotional constituency (i.e., to build their concerns into the stories they tell and the principled stands they articulate) or to write them off: Are their networks closer to ours or to those who represent extremist positions on the other side? For guns, that means asking, “Are they more like us or Charlton Heston?” If the answer is Heston, the only place they belong in a Democratic narrative is as the antagonist. But if it’s even close, the job of a strategist is to understand their concerns and map their networks because that map may point to some uncharted electoral terrain.
#+END_QUOTE
** Response to war on terror rhetoric
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (22 . 47776)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Fourth, in the face of terror manipulations, as in other political situations, Democrats need to scour Republicans’ words and metaphors for the networks they are activating and think about how to inhibit or turn those networks against them. Bush was fond of emasculating Democrats on matters of national security by claiming that they sought therapy instead of death for terrorists. The phrase “war on terror” actually created a perfect opportunity for turning this around. So imagine if John Kerry had declared during the 2004 election, We are not fighting a war on terror. Terror is a feeling, not an enemy. If the president wants to fight a war on feelings, I suggest he see a therapist. As your president, I will not declare war on feelings. I will declare war on those who create those feelings.”
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (23 . 1100)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (23 . 1100)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Other than telling us how to live, think, marry, pray, vote, invest, educate our children and, now, die, I think the Republicans have done a fine job of getting government out of our personal lives. —PORTLAND OREGONIAN,
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (23 . 10417)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (23 . 10417)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
You wouldn’t know these things from public discourse in America because Democrats haven’t talked about them. For much of three decades, they’ve let the right define Jesus, in whose teachings over four-fifths of Americans believe. In a religious nation such as ours, we can ill afford to allow the right to define faith, morality, virtue, values, and character. In matters of morality, as in every other realm of life, what drives people are their emotions,11 and the moral emotions of the left tend to be very different from those of the far right. University of Virginia psychologist John Haidt has distinguished several kinds of moral emotions.12 What he and other psychologists call “self-conscious” emotions—shame, embarrassment, and especially guilt—often lead us to do the right thing even when we might want to do otherwise. “Other-suffering” emotions, such as compassion and empathy, lead us to feel for others and to try to help them. Along with what Haidt calls “other-praising” emotions, such as admiration for those who behave in ways we consider morally courageous or worthy of our respect or exaltation, these are the primary emotions that define the morality of the left.
#+END_QUOTE

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:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Morgan Housel/The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness (10273)/The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons - Morgan Housel.epub
:END:
** Notes for page (15 . 3874)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (15 . 3874)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Milanković’s theory initially assumed that a tilt of the Earth’s hemispheres caused ravenous winters cold enough to turn the planet into ice. But a Russian meteorologist named Wladimir Köppen dug deeper into Milanković’s work and discovered a fascinating nuance.
Moderately cool summers, not cold winters, were the icy culprit.
It begins when a summer never gets warm enough to melt the previous winter’s snow. The leftover ice base makes it easier for snow to accumulate the following winter, which increases the odds of snow sticking around in the following summer, which attracts even more accumulation the following winter. Perpetual snow reflects more of the sun’s rays, which exacerbates cooling, which brings more snowfall, and on and on. Within a few hundred years a seasonal snowpack grows into a continental ice sheet, and you’re off to the races.
The same thing happens in reverse. An orbital tilt letting more sunlight in melts more of the winter snowpack, which reflects less light the following years, which increases temperatures, which prevents more snow the next year, and so on. That’s the cycle.
The amazing thing here is how big something can grow from a relatively small change in conditions. You start with a thin layer of snow left over from a cool summer that no one would think anything of and then, in a geological blink of an eye, the entire Earth is covered in miles-thick ice. As glaciologist Gwen Schultz put it: “It is not necessarily the amount of snow that causes ice sheets but the fact that snow, however little, lasts.”
The big takeaway from ice ages is that you don’t need tremendous force to create tremendous results.
If something compounds—if a little growth serves as the fuel for future growth—a small starting base can lead to results so extraordinary they seem to defy logic. It can be so logic-defying that you underestimate what’s possible, where growth comes from, and what it can lead to.
#+END_QUOTE
** Definition of genius
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (19 . 8803)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Napoleon’s definition of a military genius was, “The man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy.”
#+END_QUOTE
** Finance is the field where you have to get it right the least of the time compared to other fields
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (19 . 11617)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Peter Lynch is one of the best investors of our time. “If you’re terrific in this business, you’re right six times out of 10,” he once said.
There are fields where you must be perfect every time. Flying a plane, for example. Then there are fields where you want to be at least pretty good nearly all the time. A restaurant chef, let’s say.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (21 . 5140)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (21 . 5140)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Derek Sivers, a successful entrepreneur, once wrote about a friend who asked him to
tell the story about how he got rich:
I had a day job in midtown Manhattan paying $20k per year—about minimum wage ... I never ate out, and never took a taxi. My cost of living was about $1000/month, and I was earning $1800/month. I did this for two years, and saved up $12,000. I was 22 years old.
Once I had $12,000 I could quit my job and become a full-time musician. I knew I could get a few gigs per month to pay my cost of living. So I was free. I quit my job a month later, and never had a job again.
When I finished telling my friend this story, he asked for more. I said no, that was it. He said, “No, what about when you sold your company?”
I said no, that didn’t make a big difference in my life. That was just more money in the bank. The difference happened when I was 22.²⁶
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (21 . 7873)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (21 . 7873)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem:
A wise old owl lived in an oak,
The more he saw the less he spoke,
The less he spoke, the more he heard,
Why aren’t we all like that wise old bird?
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (35 . 2864)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (35 . 2864)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Long-term financial planning is essential. But things change—both the world around you, and your own goals and desires. It is one thing to say, “We don’t know what the future holds.” It’s another to admit that you, yourself, don’t know today what you will even want in the future. And the truth is, few of us do. It’s hard to make enduring long-term decisions when your view of what you’ll want in the future is likely to shift.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (48 . 26467)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (48 . 26467)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Take that mentality and raise it to the power of Facebook, Instagram, and cable news—where people are more keenly aware of how other people live than ever before. It’s gasoline on a flame. Benedict Evans says, “The more the Internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.” That’s a big shift from the post-war economy where the range of economic opinions were smaller, both because the actual range of outcomes was lower and because it wasn’t as easy to see and learn what other people thought and how they lived.
#+END_QUOTE

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:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Colin Woodard/The Republic of Pirates_ Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the (11177)/The Republic of Pirates_ Being the True an - Colin Woodard.epub
:END:
** Notes for page (19 . 32479)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (19 . 32479)
:ID: e10d6a00-fddf-4324-b14c-cbc88e1ac175
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
In a few weeks, Maynard would be a household name from New England to London, Port Royal, and beyond. In Boston, thirteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin, then a printer’s apprentice, wrote and published a “sailor’s song” about Maynard’s accomplishment, which he sold on the street. The text has been lost, save for one stanza ending with the lines
It’s better to swim in the sea below
Than to swing in the air and feed the crow,
Says jolly Ned Teach of Bristol
#+END_QUOTE

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* The World America Made - Robert Kagan
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: Robert Kagan/The World America Made (12125)/The World America Made - Robert Kagan.epub
:END:
** The best chances for the world, China apart, seem to be either for the Chinese to be as rich as Western Europeans at least, and unless China democratises this will empower the illiberal trend, or, even better, for China to collapse and stop becoming a major power.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (10 . 1153)
:ID: e86cc5fb-c9d3-4ee6-bd1b-780480ade073
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The move from American-dominated ocean ways to a collective policing by multiple great powers—even if it occurred—might turn out to be a formula for competition and conflict rather than a bolstering of the liberal economic order. In the nineteenth century, British naval dominance undergirded peace and global free trade, except in times of war, when Britain itself closed the avenues of trade to its enemies and their trading partners. When the world’s navies became more equal—with the rise of not only the German navy but also those of Japan and the United States—both peace and the international free-trade system became imperiled. Historically, a liberal economic order has flourished under only one set of conditions—a great power with a globally dominant navy and a profound interest in a free-trade, free-market international system, the situation that existed in the latter half of the nineteenth century under British naval supremacy, and again after World War II, under American naval supremacy. The multipolar eras that preceded British supremacy and that existed between the two world wars, prior to American naval supremacy, did not give rise to liberal economic orders.
Even if one sets aside the problem of who will police the commons, it is not clear that the great powers in a new, multipolar era would be able to sustain a free-market, free-trade international system, even if they wanted to. They might kill the goose inadvertently, despite their dependence on it, simply because of the nature of their own political and economic systems.
By far the most important player in the future in this regard will be China. Its economy is projected to overtake that of the United States, at least in terms of sheer volume, at some point in this century. China’s ability and willingness to support the liberal economic order will go a long way toward determining whether or not that order survives. But even optimists about China’s development foresee possible problems.
Two aspects of China’s economy raise doubts about whether it could or would play the role of defender of the present system. One is the fact that although the Chinese economy may become the largest in the world, it will be far from the richest. The size of its economy is a product of its enormous population, but in per capita terms China remains a relatively poor country. In 2010, China’s GDP was the third largest in the world, behind the United States and the European Union. But while the United States, Germany, Japan, and other powers had a per capita GDP of over $40,000, China’s per capita GDP was a little over $4,000, putting it at the same level as Angola, Algeria, and Belize. Even if optimistic forecasts are correct, by 2030 China’s per capita GDP will still be only half that of the United States, putting it roughly where Slovenia and Greece are today.
This will make for a historically unique situation.61 In the past, the largest and most dominant economies in the world have also been the richest. That was certainly true of the eras of British and American dominance. And consequences flowed from this. Nations whose peoples are such obvious winners in the relatively unfettered economic system have less temptation to pursue protectionist measures and more incentive to keep the system open. So although they are dominant, they use their dominance in such a way as to permit other nations to grow rich, too.
Chinese leaders, however, may face a different set of problems and temptations. As heads of a poorer and still developing country, they may prove less willing to open sectors of their economy. They have already begun closing some sectors to foreign competition and are likely to close others in the future. The pressure to find better-paying jobs for their people climbing out of poverty into a large lower middle class could lead them to protect certain industries that provide those jobs. A more protectionist China would be neither evil nor unprecedented. Many nations go through protectionist phases during their economic development. The United States certainly did. The problem is that China’s protectionist phase could coincide with its rise to dominance of the global economy. That would be unprecedented. The United States was highly protectionist throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, but as it grew to become the world’s dominant economy, it gradually shed protectionism because it could make more money in an environment of free trade. Britain similarly moved from protectionism to free trade as its economy became dominant. China may be different.
Even optimists about Chinese economic and political development believe the liberal economic order will require “some insurance” against a scenario in which “China exercises its dominance by either reversing its previous policies or failing to open areas of the economy that are now highly protected.” For were it to do so, “given its size, the resulting conflict could undermine the post–World War II system.”62 As the political scientist Ian Bremmer asks, “What happens when the Chinese leadership decides that its development strategy no longer depends on so much foreign investment and prefers instead to use all the tools at the state’s disposal to support local companies and shelter them from foreign competition?”63 American economic dominance was welcomed by much of the world because, by and large, like Hyman Roth in The Godfather, the United States always made money for its partners. Chinese economic dominance, however, may get a different reception.
#+END_QUOTE
** Now that the world's largest autocratic powers are in demise, sooner Russia due to its military loss and later China due to demographic collapse, a more progressive US foriegn policy finally becomes tenable: less nation-shattering aircraft carriers and more ocean patrols, less arms sale and more other advanced technologies.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (10 . 49160)
:ID: e3f21923-2c71-45d7-bb4f-4dce07db392c
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The lesson of the twentieth century, perhaps forgotten in the twenty-first, is that if one wants a more liberal order, there may be no substitute for powerful liberal nations to build and defend it. International order is not an evolution; it is an imposition. It is the domination of one vision over others—in this case, the domination of liberal principles of economics, domestic politics, and international relations over other, nonliberal principles. It will last only as long as those who imposed it retain the capacity to defend it. This is an uncomfortable reality for liberal internationalists. We prefer to believe that a liberal international order survives because it is right and just—and not only for us but for everyone. We prefer to imagine that the acceptance of a liberal order is voluntary or, better still, the product of natural forces, not the wielding of power. That is why the “End of History” was such an attractive thesis to many, and remains so even after it has been discredited by events. The theory of inevitable evolution means there is no requirement to impose liberal order. It will merely happen. This resolves the moral ambiguity—and the practical and financial challenges—of imposing it and defending its imposition.
#+END_QUOTE

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:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Henry Farrell/Underground Empire_ How America Weaponized the World Economy (12162)/Underground Empire_ How America Weaponized - Henry Farrell.epub
:END:
** Read this again
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (8 . 15267)
:ID: b58c3b04-c881-4815-b7a4-26c0cdf3d353
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
By redrawing a line on a map, the NSA could change the world. Hayden liked to compare the new age to the “last great age of globalization,” when European empire builders had discovered and conquered the world. Back then Europeans had gotten “land, wealth, tobacco, and syphilis,” while the colonized world had gotten “exploitation of entire populations, global piracy, and the global slave trade.” The new empire was less visible and less savage. But like the old ones, it relied on the notion of terra nullius, a vast territory inhabited by people who weren’t protected by the law. Hayden himself was surprised at the ease of the “remarkable transition” from a world where “radio waves serendipitously hit our antennas to what became a digital form of breaking and entering.” But he was very happy to bank it. The NSA’s job was to protect Americans. If “you were not protected by the US Constitution and your communications contained information that would help keep America free and safe,… it was game on.” When Republican senator Arlen Specter asked how the United States should protect the privacy of foreigners, Hayden responded with silent contempt; the Fourth Amendment, after all, was not an international treaty.
#+END_QUOTE

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:END:
** Even under a presidential system, the US would fare much better if the two parties are split in half each: a populist social democratic party, a liberal party, a conservative party, and a populist right-wing party. The two centrist parties would find themselves in a situation where they need to work together to avoid a populist show-stopper from either side, and as demographics keep changing, that populist threat is increasingly progressive instead of the current regressive threat. MAGA, as I said elsewhere, is the last wave of Reganism.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 10939)
:ID: ee045ae8-02b5-4b8a-bfd2-395407c7e57c
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
America’s unstable form of government
The most powerful critique of America’s political system was published in 1990 by a Spanish political sociologist named Juan Linz.
Linz was an outsider to American politics and, more important, to its self-serving mythologies. Born in the Weimar Republic in 1927 and raised in Spain under the Francoist dictatorship, Linz both lived through and studied the circumstances in which political systems fail. The causes of collapse were often encoded in the architecture of the government: he showed that systems based around an independent president tended to dissolve, as conflicts between the executive and the legislature were often irresolvable, and irresolvable conflicts end in crisis and collapse.
But America’s political system posed a puzzle for Linz. As an outside observer, he was free from the quasi-religious reverence we afford our founding documents. He knew that the American political system had failed wherever else it had been tried. He knew that America itself was loath to impose its system on other nations—for all our nation-building adventurism, we never give any country developing into a democracy a system that works like ours. But he also knew that in America, the American political system had worked.
In 1990, in a paper entitled “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Linz explained why. The “vast majority of the stable democracies” in the world were parliamentary regimes, where whoever wins legislative power also wins executive power.9 America, however, was a presidential democracy: the president is elected separately from the Congress and can often be at odds with it. This system had been tried before. America, worryingly, was the only place where it had survived.
The problem is straightforward. In parliamentary systems, the prime minister is the leader of the coalition that controls the legislature. If that coalition loses an election, it loses power. But at any given moment, only one party or coalition holds power. In presidential systems, by contrast, one party can control the legislature and another can control the presidency. Both parties, then, have a claim to democratic legitimacy. “Under such circumstances,” asked Linz, “who has the stronger claim to speak on behalf of the people: the president or the legislative majority that opposes his policies?”
It gets worse. What happens when the majorities that the president and the Congress represent are different majorities, who voted at different times and through different methods? Linz noted that presidents tend to be elected by voters but legislatures tend to reflect geography, with small towns and rural areas given outsized power. It’s hard enough resolving a democratic disagreement that plays out among a single electorate. What do you do when you’re facing a disagreement that reflects different kinds of electorates?
It’s a question with no answer. In general, we assume a system like this encourages compromise, and that’s true, when the competing political coalitions are open to compromise. But a system like this can also encourage crisis—crises where, in other countries, “the armed forces were often tempted to intervene as a mediating power.”10
This is why there are no long-standing presidential democracies save for the United States. And it’s why America doesn’t impose its specific form of government on others. “Think about Germany, Japan, Italy, and Austria,” wrote Vox’s Matt Yglesias.
These are countries that were defeated by American military forces during the Second World War and given constitutions written by local leaders operating in close collaboration with occupation authorities. It’s striking that even though the US Constitution is treated as a sacred text in America’s political culture, we did not push any of these countries to adopt our basic framework of government.11
Linz admitted that he couldn’t fully answer the question of why America was different. He suspected that “the uniquely diffuse character of American political parties—which, ironically, exasperates many American political scientists and leads them to call for responsible, ideologically disciplined parties—has something to do with it.” Whatever the explanation, Linz continued, “the American case seems to be an exception; the development of modern political parties, particularly in socially and ideologically polarized countries, generally exacerbates, rather than moderates, conflicts between the legislative and the executive.”12
Linz was writing in 1990, when America’s political parties were far more exceptional, far more mixed and moderated, than they are today. But what read in 1990 like an explanation of what made America’s political system different now reads like an analysis of why America’s system is in crisis. The Garland affair is a perfect example. For all the fury over McConnell’s behavior, what, exactly, did he do wrong?
#+END_QUOTE

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:END:
** The tyrrany of Microsoft and Apple can now be dismanteled because AI promises a possible end to the knowledge worker, either in bureacracies or in the creative domain
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (7 . 659)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Standards and their inevitable lack of prescience posed a nuisance before computers, of course. Railroad gauges—the dimensions of the tracks—are one example. The London Tube was designed with narrow tracks and matching tunnels that, on several of the lines, cannot accommodate air-conditioning, because there is no room to ventilate the hot air from the trains. Thus, tens of thousands of modern-day residents in one of the world’s richest cities must suffer a stifling commute because of an inflexible design decision made more than one hundred years ago.
But software is worse than railroads, because it must always adhere with absolute perfection to a boundlessly particular, arbitrary, tangled, intractable messiness. The engineering requirements are so stringent and perverse that adapting to shifting standards can be an endless struggle. So while lock-in may be a gangster in the world of railroads, it is an absolute tyrant in the digital world.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (7 . 21020)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (7 . 21020)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
UNIX had files; the Mac as it shipped had files; Windows had files. Files are now part of life; we teach the idea
of a file to computer science students as if it were part of nature. In fact, our conception of files may be more
persistent than our ideas about nature. I can imagine that someday physicists might tell us that it is time to
stop believing in photons, because they have discovered a better way to think about light—but the file will
likely live on.
The file is a set of philosophical ideas made into eternal flesh. The ideas expressed by the file include the
notion that human expression comes in severable chunks that can be organized as leaves on an abstract
tree—and that the chunks have versions and need to be matched to compatible applications.
#+END_QUOTE
** This is mental masturbation. Information wants to be free because we want to be free
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (8 . 10383)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
You can think of culturally decodable information as a potential form of experience,
very much as you can think of a brick resting on a ledge as storing potential energy.
When the brick is prodded to fall, the energy is revealed. That is only possible
because it was lifted into place at some point in the past.
In the same way, stored information might cause experience to be revealed if it is
prodded in the right way. A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the
kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are discernible instead of being
scrambled into mush—the way heat scrambles things—is what makes them bits.
#+END_QUOTE
** Notes for page (8 . 34493)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (8 . 34493)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
The new twist in Silicon Valley is that some people—very influential people—believe
they are hearing algorithms and crowds and other internet-supported nonhuman
entities speak for themselves. I don’t hear those voices, though—and I believe those
who do are fooling themselves.
#+END_QUOTE
** Democracy shouldn't be too fast. The recent change of heart France has during the general elections is but one example.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (9 . 28771)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
For instance, stock markets might adopt automatic trading shutoffs, which are
triggered by overly abrupt shifts in price or trading volume. (In Chapter 6 I will tell how
Silicon Valley ideologues recently played a role in convincing Wall Street that it could
do without some of these checks on the crowd, with disastrous consequences.)
Wikipedia had to slap a crude low-pass filter on the jitteriest entries, such as
“President George W. Bush.” There’s now a limit to how often a particular person can
remove someone else’s text fragments. I suspect that these kinds of adjustments will
eventually evolve into an approximate mirror of democracy as it was before the
internet arrived.
#+END_QUOTE
** Marxism was only held back by technology creating better jobs
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (11 . 2583)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Marx was all about technological change. Unfortunately, his approach to correcting
inequities spawned an awful series of violent revolutions. He argued that the playing
field should be leveled before the technologies of abundance mature. It has been
repeatedly confirmed, however, that leveling a playing field with a Marxist revolution
kills, dulls, or corrupts most of the people on the field. Even so, versions of his ideas
continue to have enormous appeal for many, especially young people. Marx’s ideas
still color utopian technological thinking, including many of the thoughts that appear
to be libertarian on the surface. (I will examine stealth technomarxism later on.)
What has saved us from Marxism is simply that new technologies have in general
created new jobs—and those jobs have generally been better than the old ones. They
have been ever more elevated—more cerebral, creative, cultural, or strategic—than
the jobs they replaced. A descendant of a Luddite who smashed looms might be
programming robotic looms today.
#+END_QUOTE
** Here, Lanier, like many, missed seeing the rise of AI before automation
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 902)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
China’s precipitous climb into wealth has been largely based on cheap, high-quality
labor. But the real possibility exists that sometime in the next two decades a vast
number of jobs in China and elsewhere will be made obsolete by advances in cheap
robotics so quickly that it will be a cruel shock to hundreds of millions of people.
#+END_QUOTE
** This is a good critique of the open culture movement and the sitation with streaming services
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 16757)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
What Makes Liberty Different from Anarchy Is Biological Realism
The open culture crowd believes that human behavior can only be modified through
involuntary means. This makes sense for them, because they aren’t great believers in
free will or personhood.
For instance, it is often claimed by open culture types that if you can’t make a perfect
copy-protection technology, then copy prohibitions are pointless. And from a
technological point of view, it is true that you can’t make a perfect copy-protection
scheme. If flawless behavior restraints are the only potential influences on behavior in
a case such as this, we might as well not ask anyone to ever pay for music or
journalism again. According to this logic, the very idea is a lost cause.
But that’s an unrealistically pessimistic way of thinking about people. We have
already demonstrated that we’re better than that. It’s easy to break into physical cars
and houses, for instance, and yet few people do so. Locks are only amulets of
inconvenience that remind us of a social contract we ultimately benefit from. It is only
human choice that makes the human world function. Technology can motivate human
choice, but not replace it.
I had an epiphany once that I wish I could stimulate in everyone else. The plausibility
of our human world, the fact that the buildings don’t all fall down and you can eat
unpoisoned food that someone grew, is immediate palpable evidence of an ocean of
goodwill and good behavior from almost everyone, living or dead. We are bathed in
what can be called love.
And yet that love shows itself best through the constraints of civilization, because
those constraints compensate for the flaws of human nature. We must see ourselves
honestly, and engage ourselves realistically, in order to become better.
** Notes for page (17 . 10811)
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (17 . 10811)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
I well recall the birth of the free software movement, which preceded and inspired the
open culture variant. It started out as an act of rage more than a quarter of a century
ago.
Visualize, if you will, the most transcendently messy, hirsute, and otherwise eccentric
pair of young nerds on the planet. They were in their early twenties. The scene was an
uproariously messy hippie apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the vicinity of
MIT. I was one of these men; the other was Richard Stallman.
Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world—like
the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe’s Flash—the results
of proprietary development? Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many
regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on
Earth? An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been
able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn’t been so good at creating notable
originals. Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural
rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force.
Stallman was distraught to the point of tears. He had poured his energies into a
celebrated project to build a radically new kind of computer called the LISP machine.
But it wasn’t just a regular computer running LISP, a programming language beloved
by artificial intelligence researchers. * Instead, it was a machine patterned on LISP from
the bottom up, making a radical statement about what computing could be like at
every level, from the underlying architecture to the user interface. For a brief period,
every hot computer science department had to own some of these refrigerator-size
gadgets.
Eventually a company called Symbolics became the primary seller of LISP machines.
Stallman realized that a whole experimental subculture of computer science risked
being dragged into the toilet if anything bad happened to a little company like
Symbolics—and of course everything bad happened to it in short order.
So Stallman hatched a plan. Never again would computer code, and the culture that
grew up with it, be trapped inside a wall of commerce and legality. He would develop
a free version of an ascendant, if rather dull, software tool: the UNIX operating
system. That simple act would blast apart the idea that lawyers and companies could
control software culture.
Eventually a young programmer of the next generation named Linus Torvalds followed
in Stallman’s footsteps and did something similar, but using the popular Intel chips. In
1991 that effort yielded Linux, the basis for a vastly expanded free software
movement.
But back to that dingy bachelor pad near MIT. When Stallman told me his plan, I was
intrigued but sad. I thought that code was important in more ways than politics can
ever be. If politically motivated code was going to amount to endless replays of
relatively dull stuff like UNIX instead of bold projects like the LISP machine, what was
the point? Would mere humans have enough energy to sustain both kinds of
idealism?
Twenty-five years later, it seems clear that my concerns were justified. Open
wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t
promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything,
they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped
in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old
software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of
an antique—shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
I’m not anti-open source. I frequently argue for it in various specific projects. But the
politically correct dogma that holds that open source is automatically the best path to
creativity and innovation is not borne out by the facts.
#+END_QUOTE
** No new music since the late 1990s
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (17 . 21512)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Where is the new music? Everything is retro, retro, retro.
Music is everywhere, but hidden, as indicated by tiny white prairie dog-like
protuberances popping out of everyone’s ears. I am used to seeing people making
embarrassingly sexual faces and moaning noises when listening to music on
headphones, so it’s taken me a while to get used to the stone faces of the earbud
listeners in the coffeehouse.
Beating within the retro indie band that wouldn’t have sounded out of place even
when I was a teenager there might be some exotic heart, some layer of energy I’m
not hearing. Of course, I can’t know my own limits. I can’t know what I am not able to
hear.
But I have been trying an experiment. Whenever I’m around “Face-book generation”
people and there’s music playing—probably selected by an artificial intelligence or
crowd-based algorithm, as per the current fashion—I ask them a simple question: Can
you tell in what decade the music that is playing right now was made? Even listeners
who are not particularly music oriented can do pretty well with this question—but only
for certain decades.
Everyone knows that gangster rap didn’t exist yet in the 1960s, for instance. And
that heavy metal didn’t exist in the 1940s. Sure, there’s an occasional track that
sounds as if it’s from an earlier era. Maybe a big-band track recorded in the 1990s
might be mistaken for an older recording, for instance.
But a decade was always a long time in the development of musical style during the
first century of audio recording. A decade gets you from Robert Johnson’s primordial
blues recordings to Charlie Parker’s intensely modernist jazz recordings. A decade
gets you from the reign of big bands to the reign of rock and roll. Approximately a
decade separated the last Beatles record from the first big-time hip-hop records. In all
these examples, it is inconceivable that the later offering could have appeared at the
time of the earlier one. I can’t find a decade span in the first century of recorded
music that didn’t involve extreme stylistic evolution, obvious to listeners of all kinds.
We’re not just talking about surface features of the music, but the very idea of what
music was all about, how it fit into life. Does it convey classiness and confidence, like
Frank Sinatra, or help you drop out, like stoner rock? Is it for a dance floor or a dorm
room?
There are new styles of music, of course, but they are new only on the basis of
technicalities. For instance, there’s an elaborate nomenclature for species of similar
electronic beat styles (involving all the possible concatenations of terms like dub,
house, trance, and so on), and if you learn the details of the nomenclature, you can
more or less date and place a track. This is more of a nerd exercise than a musical
one—and I realize that in saying that I’m making a judgment that perhaps I don’t
have a right to make. But does anyone really disagree?
I have frequently gone through a conversational sequence along the following lines:
Someone in his early twenties will tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about, and
then I’ll challenge that person to play me some music that is characteristic of the late
2000s as opposed to the late 1990s. I’ll ask him to play the tracks for his friends. So
far, my theory has held: even true fans don’t seem to be able to tell if an indie rock
track or a dance mix is from 1998 or 2008, for instance.
I’m obviously not claiming that there has been no new music in the world. And I’m
not claiming that all the retro music is disappointing. There are some wonderful
musicians in the retro mold, treating old pop music styles as a new kind of classical
music and doing so marvelously well.
But I am saying that this kind of work is more nostalgic than reaching. Since genuine
human experiences are forever unique, pop music of a new era that lacks novelty
raises my suspicions that it also lacks authenticity.
There are creative, original musicians at work today, of course. (I hope that on my
best days I am one of them.) There are undoubtedly musical marvels hidden around
the world. But this is the first time since electrification that mainstream youth culture
in the industrialized world has cloaked itself primarily in nostalgic styles.
I am hesitant to share my observations for fear of hexing someone’s potentially good
online experience. If you are having a great time with music in the online world as it
is, don’t listen to me. But in terms of the big picture, I fear I am onto something.
What of it? Some of my colleagues in the digital revolution argue that we should be
more patient; certainly with enough time, culture will reinvent itself. But how patient
should we be? I find that I am not willing to ignore a dark age.
#+END_QUOTE
** Ouch. This must have hurt them.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (17 . 22580)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Digital Culture That Isn’t Retro Is Still Based in a Retro Economy
Even the most seemingly radical online enthusiasts seem to always flock to retro
references. The sort of “fresh, radical culture” you expect to see celebrated in the
online world these days is a petty mashup of preweb culture.
Take a look at one of the big cultural blogs like Boing Boing, or the endless stream of
mashups that appear on YouTube. It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally
open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage
dump.
This is embarrassing. The whole point of connected media technologies was that we
were supposed to come up with new, amazing cultural expression. No, more than
that—we were supposed to invent better fundamental types of expression: not just
movies, but interactive virtual worlds; not just games, but simulations with moral and
aesthetic profundity. That’s why I was criticizing the old way of doing things.
#+END_QUOTE
** This section on the evolution of smell and the cerebral cortex is fascinating
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (22 . 10794)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
So now we are starting to have theories—or at least are able to tell detailed
stories—about how a brain might be able to recognize features of its world, such as a
smile. But mouths do more than smile. Is there a way to extend our story to explain
what a word is, and how a brain can know a word?
It turns out that the best way to consider that question might be to consider a
completely different sensory domain. Instead of sights or sounds, we might best start
by considering the odors detected by a human nose.
For twenty years or so I gave a lecture introducing the fundamentals of virtual reality.
I’d review the basics of vision and hearing as well as of touch and taste. At the end,
the questions would begin, and one of the first ones was usually about smell: Will we
have smells in virtual reality machines anytime soon?
Maybe, but probably just a few. Odors are fundamentally different from images or
sounds. The latter can be broken down into primary components that are relatively
straightforward for computers—and the brain—to process. The visible colors are
merely words for different wavelengths of light. Every sound wave is actually
composed of numerous sine waves, each of which can be easily described
mathematically. Each one is like a particular size of bump in the corduroy roads of my
childhood.
In other words, both colors and sounds can be described with just a few numbers; a
wide spectrum of colors and tones is described by the interpolations between those
numbers. The human retina need be sensitive to only a few wavelengths, or colors, in
order for our brains to process all the intermediate ones. Computer graphics work
similarly: a screen of pixels, each capable of reproducing red, green, or blue, can
produce approximately all the colors that the human eye can see. * A music
synthesizer can be thought of as generating a lot of sine waves, then layering them to
create an array of sounds.
Odors are completely different, as is the brain’s method of sensing them. Deep in the
nasal passage, shrouded by a mucous membrane, sits a patch of tissue—the olfactory
epithelium—studded with neurons that detect chemicals. Each of these neurons has
cup-shaped proteins called olfactory receptors. When a particular molecule happens to
fall into a matching receptor, a neural signal is triggered that is transmitted to the
brain as an odor. A molecule too large to fit into one of the receptors has no odor. The
number of distinct odors is limited only by the number of olfactory receptors capable
of interacting with them. Linda Buck of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
and Richard Axel of Columbia University, winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine, have found that the human nose contains about one
thousand different types of olfactory neurons, each type able to detect a particular
set of chemicals.
This adds up to a profound difference in the underlying structure of the senses—a
difference that gives rise to compelling questions about the way we think, and
perhaps even about the origins of language. There is no way to interpolate between
two smell molecules. True, odors can be mixed together to form millions of scents.
But the world’s smells can’t be broken down into just a few numbers on a gradient;
there is no “smell pixel.” Think of it this way: colors and sounds can be measured with
rulers, but odors must be looked up in a dictionary.
That’s a shame, from the point of view of a virtual reality technologist. There are
thousands of fundamental odors, far more than the handful of primary colors. Perhaps
someday we will be able to wire up a person’s brain in order to create the illusion of
smell. But it would take a lot of wires to address all those entries in the mental smell
dictionary. Then again, the brain must have some way of organizing all those odors.
Maybe at some level smells do fit into a pattern. Maybe there’s a smell pixel after all.
#+END_QUOTE
** On the connection between swearing and smell
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (22 . 18666)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Lngwidge iz a straynge thingee. You can probably read that sentence without much
trouble. Sentence also not this time hard.
You can screw around quite a bit with both spelling and word order and still be
understood. This shouldn’t be surprising: language is flexible enough to evolve into
new slang, dialects, and entirely new tongues.
In the 1960s, many early computer scientists postulated that human language was a
type of code that could be written down in a neat, compact way, so there was a race
to crack that code. If it could be deciphered, then a computer ought to be able to
speak with people! That end result turned out to be extremely difficult to achieve.
Automatic language translation, for instance, never really took off.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, computers have gotten so powerful that
it has become possible to shift methods. A program can look for correlations in large
amounts of text. Even if it isn’t possible to capture all the language variations that
might appear in the real world (such as the above oddities I used as examples), a
sufficiently huge number of correlations eventually yields results.
For instance, suppose you have a lot of text in two languages, such as Chinese and
English. If you start searching for sequences of letters or characters that appear in
each text under similar circumstances, you can start to build a dictionary of
correlations. That can produce significant results, even if the correlations don’t always
fit perfectly into a rigid organizing principle, such as a grammar.
Such brute-force approaches to language translation have been demonstrated by
companies like Meaningful Machines, where I was an adviser for a while, and more
recently by Google and others. They can be incredibly inefficient, often involving ten
thousand times as much computation as older methods—but we have big enough
computers in the clouds these days, so why not put them to work?
Set loose on the internet, such a project could begin to erase language barriers. Even
though automatic language translation is unlikely to become as good as what a
human translator can do anytime soon, it might get good enough—perhaps not too
far in the future—to make countries and cultures more transparent to one another.
#+END_QUOTE
** and in humans too, perhaps
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (22 . 18666)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
These experiments in linguistic variety could also inspire a better understanding of
how language came about in the first place. One of Charles Darwin’s most compelling
evolutionary speculations was that music might have preceded language. He was
intrigued by the fact that many species use song for sexual display and wondered if
human vocalizations might have started out that way too. It might follow, then, that
vocalizations could have become varied and complex only later, perhaps when song
came to represent actions beyond mating and such basics of survival.
#+END_QUOTE
** It has recently taken Apple and entire software development cycle to produce a new set of icons.
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (24 . 5213)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
For instance, the user interface to search engines is still based on the command line
interface, with which the user must construct logical phrases using symbols such as
dashes and quotes. That’s how personal computers used to be, but it took less than a
decade to get from the Apple II to the Macintosh. By contrast, it’s been well over a
decade since network-based search services appeared, and they are still trapped in
the command line era. At this rate, by 2020, we can expect software development to
have slowed to a near stasis, like a clock approaching a black hole.
#+END_QUOTE
** Cefelopods should rule the world, except they are born alone and live alone. They don't have transmitted culture
:PROPERTIES:
:NOTER_PAGE: (24 . 23915)
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Remember the computer graphics in the movie Terminator 2 that made it possible for
the evil terminator to assume the form and visage of any person it encountered?
Morphing—the on-screen transformation—violated the unwritten rules of what was
allegedly possible to be seen, and in doing so provided a deep, wrenching pleasure
somewhere in the back of the viewer’s brain. You could almost feel your neural
machinery breaking apart and being glued back together.
Unfortunately, the effect has become a cliché. Nowadays, when you watch a television
ad or a science fiction movie, an inner voice says, “Ho hum, just another morph.”
However, there’s a video clip that I often show students and friends to remind them,
and myself, of the transportive effects of anatomical transformation. This video is so
shocking that most viewers can’t process it the first time they see it—so they ask to
see it again and again and again, until their mind has expanded enough to take it in.
The video was shot in 1997 by Roger Hanlon while he was scuba diving off Grand
Cayman Island. Roger is a researcher at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods
Hole; his specialty is the study of cephalopods, a family of sea creatures that include
octopuses, squids, and cuttlefishes. The video is shot from Roger’s point of view as he
swims up to examine an unremarkable rock covered in swaying algae.
Suddenly, astonishingly, one-third of the rock and a tangled mass of algae morphs
and reveals itself for what it really is: the waving arms of a bright white octopus. Its
cover blown, the creature squirts ink at Roger and shoots off into the
distance—leaving Roger, and the video viewer, slack-jawed.
The star of this video, Octopus vulgaris, is one of a number of cephalopod species
capable of morphing, including the mimic octopus and the giant Australian cuttlefish.
The trick is so weird that one day I tagged along with Roger on one of his research
voyages, just to make sure he wasn’t faking it with fancy computer graphics tricks. By
then, I was hooked on cephalopods. My friends have had to adjust to my obsession;
they’ve grown accustomed to my effusive rants about these creatures. As far as I’m
concerned, cephalopods are the strangest smart creatures on Earth. They offer the
best standing example of how truly different intelligent extraterrestrials (if they exist)
might be from us, and they taunt us with clues about potential futures for our own
species.
The raw brainpower of cephalopods seems to have more potential than the
mammalian brain. Cephalopods can do all sorts of things, like think in 3-D and
morph, which would be fabulous innate skills in a high-tech future. Tentacle-eye
coordination ought to easily be a match for hand-eye coordination. From the point of
view of body and brain, cephalopods are primed to evolve into the
high-tech-tool-building overlords. By all rights, cephalopods should be running the
show and we should be their pets.
What we have that they don’t have is neoteny. Our secret weapon is childhood.
Baby cephalopods must make their way on their own from the moment of birth. In
fact, some of them have been observed reacting to the world seen through their
transparent eggs before they are born, based only on instinct. If people are at one
extreme in a spectrum of neoteny, cephalopods are at the other.
Cephalopod males often do not live long after mating. There is no concept of
parenting. While individual cephalopods can learn a great deal within a lifetime, they
pass on nothing to future generations. Each generation begins afresh, a blank slate,
taking in the strange world without guidance other than instincts bred into their
genes.
If cephalopods had childhood, surely they would be running the Earth. This can be
expressed in an equation, the only one I’ll present in this book:
Cephalopods + Childhood = Humans + Virtual Reality
Morphing in cephalopods works somewhat similarly to how it does in computer
graphics. Two components are involved: a change in the image or texture visible on a
shape’s surface, and a change in the underlying shape itself. The “pixels” in the skin
of a cephalopod are organs called chromatophores. These can expand and contract
quickly, and each is filled with a pigment of a particular color. When a nerve signal
causes a red chromatophore to expand, the “pixel” turns red. A pattern of nerve
firings causes a shifting image—an animation—to appear on the cephalopod’s skin. As
for shapes, an octopus can quickly arrange its arms to form a wide variety of forms,
such as a fish or a piece of coral, and can even raise welts on its skin to add texture.
Why morph? One reason is camouflage. (The octopus in the video is presumably
trying to hide from Roger.) Another is dinner. One of Roger’s video clips shows a giant
cuttlefish pursuing a crab. The cuttlefish is mostly soft-bodied; the crab is all armor.
As the cuttlefish approaches, the medieval-looking crab snaps into a macho posture,
waving its sharp claws at its foe’s vulnerable body.
#+END_QUOTE
* This principle has even been demonstrated in dogs and monkeys. When Dr.
Friederike Range of the University of Vienna allowed dogs in a test to see other dogs
receive better rewards, jealousy ensued. Dogs demand equal treatment in order to be
trained well. Frans de Waal at Emory University found similar results in experiments
with capuchin monkeys.
#+END_QUOTE

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* في رواية 1984، صدق الضحية في النهاية أن الأفكار يمكن قمعها
:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 5289dd48-ef40-418c-9ba0-16333f3ac193
:CREATED: [2023-08-10 Thu 07:59]
:END:

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: cbc3cc3c-d9c8-4686-b752-55e5ba273393
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:56]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:57]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: تحررية
اللاحكم
ينبغي استخدام قوانين الحكم في هدم الحكم، تماما كرخصة جي.بي.إل المستندة إلى القانون.
تيار الاشتراكيون الأحرار، لا يهدف إلى تكوين حزب.
لا يكفي تجاهل الدولة، بل ينبغي السعي إلى هدمها
الفدرالية تجمع تنظيمات عديدة (و إن لم تكن لا حكمية)
The Council would include members, approved by other existing members and not elected, who would represent different groups of interest with legal formation; for example, every NGO that has a membership of 2,000 individuals. The NGOs can be trade associations, tribe councils, Human Rights organisations, business associations, unions...
Decisions are taken in a participatory/consensus-making way, rather than a vote for majority. Consensus has a history in political Islam in the concept of Ijmaa.
The five Speakers elected via direct poll, will replace the President, They will facilitate the discussion, reach consensus, announce proposals of decision, call for a public referendum

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 101e3be2-15dc-41a4-9b78-821f24572c2a
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:40]
:MODIFIED: [2011-07-18 Mon 10:19]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: Absolute Free Speech
The first series of public demonstrations that clearly focused on freedom of expression took place during late March and Early April 1909. One hundred years later, Egypt's phenomenal efforts in Geneva resulted in the United Nations passing a resolution. About the same time, the centennial celebration of the 1909 protests attracted 300 people at best. The original actions were 10,000 people strong and called for the 'end to dictatorship' supported by Britain and its military bases, the largest being in the Suez.
Some 20% of humans today relatively practice their right to S-3 (Speech minus hatred, bomb recipes and child pornography). For the rest of us in the South, heavy-handed repression uses those three to keep populations under control. After 60 years of the Universal Declaration, is it time for absolute free speech?
Despite Egypt's relatively large comic-reading subculture, crossing age-groups and social classes, the content of comics are hardly anything but Disney's. The stories have been Egyptianised during Nasser's era, and since the operation has been sold in the late 1990s to private publisher al-Adwaa (which main line of business is supplementary text books), naked citizens of Duckburgh are now put back to modesty by the censor's thick black marker, a kind of editing that resembles what a pious Saudi or Israeli publication would do to image of real, human females.
Mohamed al-Shafie's adults-only graphic novel Metro, therefore, is potentially readily available to a large readership. Its message, however, is very different than what you get from Mickey Mouse, or even Donald who is content being from the lower class. The first page from Metro reads: "Today, I decided to rob a bank. I do not know when I grew all this anger inside. All I know is, those people are on one side, and I am on another. I have one thing left: my mind. And finally, I am putting my thoughts to action".
ash-Shafie dedicated his novel to the soul of his parents, and '[T]o the Egyptian bloggers, who make me feel the world is still alight'
I did not buy my copy of Metro before it was illegally confiscated from bookstores and the publisher's office. I 'scored' my copy from the Hisham Mubarak Law Center during a press conference. The same day witnessed
Malamih publisher Mohamed ash-Sharkawi (whom I came to know in 2005 as a democracy activist newly arriving to Cairo from the Nile Delta city of Kafr ash-Sheikh) does not exclude his history as a reason for targeting his publishing house. For the summer of 2006, Sharkawi became an icon of Kifaya, the small-and-loud loose coalition of pro-democracy activists (from all four major political currents in Egypt: Pan-Arabist, Liberal, Socialist and Islamist, making together Egypt's 'New Opposition', which tends to be more militant that recognised political parties from corresponding currents. Political parties are practically licensed by the very people in power) as he was kidnapped from a sit-in support an independent judiciary movement, blindfolded and brutally assaulted by police, before being sodomised in Kasr an-Nil police station with what he thinks is a piece of cardboard, then being kept for two months while his body injuries heal. The story received wide attention, from G.W. Bush and his press corps to the press in Benin.
الكتاب فيه كمال الشاذلي و مفيد فوزي و بز و نيك و كلمات عرص و خولات و سرقة بنك و نؤيد مبارك و قتيل و البوليس مسك حد تاني و تقفيش النسوان في المظاهرات و البلطجية ال ب20 جنيه
و إننا لازم نغير النظام كلنا مع بعض
و شرموط
Karl Popper's definition of an Open Society. Freedom is restricted only by other people's physical safety. Free elections on a Western Democratic model alone do not prevent Fascism. Only an active population, not laws and states, can keep hate speakers in check.

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 345fb896-9c8d-4267-a6fb-387e8e8d8018
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:18]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:18]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: Internal to Ego
#+draft: true
It's a nice day on the planet
if the trees could curse
and the sky could hate
because you only imitate
I think we should testify
you and I
before the jury of this world
that it is only one word... one thought... one dream
I know to you it might not seem
so.. why don't you reach the hand?
rise to a stand?
and rejoin our empty band?
I feel you fear to leave the trance.. be a freelance
look.. we before you took that chance
a few of us did advance.. and closed this great romance
but they hardly make an utterance

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 89223c07-b529-4111-ab8f-eaa80005a5de
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:19]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:19]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: Roger Waters
Question: Could I also go back and forth again between mental suicide and pain resulting from...
Mosaics:
Tweleve hours after my arrival in Cairo, and I find the Lebanon fading. I went there to hear and see Roger Waters. But even before I left I knew I was not a fan.
I was not standing among fans, twenty meters from my prophet, or even a demi-god. Is this what he wanted his listeners to be like, in contract to disciples who attended concerts in the 1970s?
I am shyly thinking of it, but religion is something you cannot miss in Lebanon. "Be gods in yourselves." That's what the PF say, much closer to Nietzsche and Muhammad than to Peter.

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 88c7a7fd-c487-4a89-b4eb-af763209fb24
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 21:38]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: Political compass
** Politics
*** Securalist State/Religious state
*** Military/civil president
*** Democracy from inside/outside
*** Regime’s type : Parliamentary/Presidential/Direct Democracy
*** Free Association/All in one
*** Egypt ready for democracy (Maturity?)
*** Egypt first/ Panarabism
*** Contestation (Strikes for doctors?)
*** Official Media for the State
*** Islamic Institutions (Public money)
*** Military/Police
** Economics
*** Which economic system for Egypt?
*** Tax system
*** Role of the State in the social politics ( Health, Education, Habitat, Employment…etc)
** Society
*** Women’s rights
*** Religious minorities
*** Homosexuals
*** Social equality
*** Censorship
*** Civil marriage
*** Religion on IDs
*** Military service
*** Prison
*** Free use of drogues
*** Torture
*** Prison (punishment/rehabilitation)
*** Legalize Prostitution

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 48453b70-206d-4f44-9b21-688147107edf
:END:
#+HUGO_BASE_DIR: ~/gharbeia.net
#+HUGO_SECTION: ./posts
#+HUGO_AUTO_SET_LASTMOD: t
#+TITLE: Sleeping devil
#+DATE: [2023-07-11 Tue 14:06]
#+HUGO_TAGS: article
#+HUGO_DRAFT: true
When the devil is asleep,
he is just a little child

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: c5375085-bfad-47c4-ac3f-8ca8da142927
:END:
#+TITLE: Street! Go on!
#+DATE: [2009-05-15]
#+HUGO_BASE_DIR: ~/gharbeia.net
#+HUGO_SECTION: ./posts
#+HUGO_AUTO_SET_LASTMOD: t
#+HUGO_TAGS: article
#+HUGO_DRAFT: true
Street! Go on!
I'm too tired to go
I left home just yesterday
but I've always been on the road
I left home yesterday
but I'm already lost

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 1d2b8d41-6b4f-45d4-bd04-bcc2c96b31e3
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:41]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-21 Thu 05:36]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: The Day Before Yesterday, The Day After Tomorrow
The day before yesterday I learned a new word. "Zeit" always sounded mystical to me, regardless what language is used. And what is time anyway?
Yesterday I met Badia, daughter of my grand father's half sister. Badia, dressed in black, carrying weights of time, pain, and her own body with her, had kissed me on the cheeks and called me "my love" before she got to know my name. Such a woman cannot lie, but am I really *her,* whatever? Is this where I came from?
Now I am on the edifice of another future, but how could the past be gone and still is all I am?
The plane seat I am in will take me to a man I have never seen before, yet he is a man who influenced me more than any other. Tomorrow: Could I be relating to Roger Waters the same way Badia relates to me? Is he really *my* prophet? Is this where I am going to?
The day after tomorrow belongs to dreams. A dream that passed shapes my past. A dream forward sketches my desires. In my mind, all this is time passing. Me? I am just my current mood.

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: ab49ed78-6bdc-40be-82c0-66939dc58802
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:32]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-21 Thu 05:33]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: أبانا الذي في الغرب
أبانا الذي في الغرب
تعال و معك قدرك
أبحر بوارجك
اقصفنا بطائراتك
أظهر علينا مشيئتك كذلك على الأرض كما في الفضاء
أدخلنا في التجربة
لأن اليوم لك التاج و الصولجان
و إلى أن يزولا
بك سنظل كفارا
آمين

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 3b8c0e71-8c4c-40b1-a22d-7e7f971cda05
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:33]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:34]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: أساطير مصرية معاصرة
#+filetags: egypt
* ما عندكش بطاقة يبقى ما عندكش شخصية
فقط أقل من نصف دول العالم يحمل مواطنيها بطاقات هوية. و من تلك البلدان من لا تتطلب قوانينها أن يحمل مواطنيها البطاقات طوال الوقت. من بين البلدان التي لا توجد بها بطاقات هوية موحدة أستراليا، و أيرلندا، و الدنمارك، و كوريا الجنوبية، و المملكة المتحدة، و نيوزيلندا، و النرويج، و الهند، و الولايات المتحدة، و اليابان. تحاول حكومتي بريطانيا و الولايات المتحدة مثلا إمرار تشريعات لبطاقات هوية موحدة. تلاقي هذه المحاولات مقاومة كبيرة من المجتمع لأن بطاقات كهذه تعتبر تعديا على سرية حياة المواطنين و على الحريات المدنية.
* الحكومة محتاجة تعرف دينك
الحقيقة لا. لا حاجة للتمييز بين الناس على أساس الدين إلا في حالات الزواج و الطلاق، بالإضافة لحالات الميراث. من بين أكبر البلاد التي أغلبيتها مسلمين، لا تحوي
أفغانستان بروناي-دار السلام إندونيسيا إيران العراق الأردن ماليزيا السعودية تركيا
* الشريعة الإسلامية جزء من القانون في مصر، و القاضي شغلته يحكم
بالشريعة، و الحكومة شغلتها تطبق الشريعة
غير صحيح. المادة الثانية من الدستور تنص على أن "مبادئ الشريعة الإسلامية المصدر الأساسي للتشريع"
* المصريين ما
* الحكومة مسؤولة عن الأخلاق
http://www.youtube.com/v/fzaqXFcsH2U&hl

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* أنا من جيل بي.إم.إكس
:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 3072c626-10ef-4b3a-a666-5da6e192bc83
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:51]
:MODIFIED: [2011-06-27 Mon 13:19]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
أنا من جيل تعلم الكتابة بالقلم و الطباعة على لوحة المفاتيح في سن واحدة.
أنا من جيل الوكمان و الفيديو
أنا من جيل أطفال الحجارة و الدبكة في المدارس و الحطة من رام الله و الانتفاضة الأولى
أنا من جيل أفطر كل يوم على أخبار حركة أمل و تصريحات عبد الحليم خدام، و شيء اسمه الكيان الصهيوني
أنا من جيل جيم أند وونش
أنا من جيل Like a prayer

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 67d35dc0-e721-4c87-bda2-14bdda182c0a
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:53]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:53]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: أوراق جمال عبد الناصر
أوراق جمال عبد الناصر
رواية

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: a50dafef-0565-4c40-8124-2c3e8aaaf62b
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:41]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:42]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: إعلام بريطانيا
احتفلت بسقوط كونراد بلاك في الرابع عشر من يوليو 2007 بشراء الديلي تلجراف، و ما عنوان الجريدة المحافظة التي كانت ملكا للرجل نفسه؟ "بلاك، النصاب".
العقبى لروبرت مردوخ!

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: c2b11382-8c2a-4f47-a93f-c3b954dfe1ee
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:51]
:MODIFIED: [2009-12-31 Thu 14:32]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: إنترنت و الشبكات الاجتماعية و حق التنظيم
* لا تطرف على المدونات العربية
* لا تزال المدونات مرتبطة بالواقع في العالم العربي، و يدل على ذلك تجمعها في شبكات قومية
* المنتديات إلى المدونات إلى الشبكة الاجتماعية: إقطاع إلى رأسمالية إلى شيوعية
Social networks should have a web of trust fiat p2p and LETS currencies based on the web of trust moving-average solidarity call democratic decision making decentralised open source all network transactions should be TORed
Twitter:
http://mobileactive.org/can-social-networking-be-used-social-change
#+begin_quote
[Blain] "Cook said that it costs around $20,000-30,000 for a short code in the US and you can send as many SMS’s as you like. He mentioned that Twitter got a bill for $37,000 in Egypt for only 6000 Twitter users."
#+end_quote
Jaiku:
http://jaikido.blogspot.com/2009/03/jaiku-is-becoming-jaikuengine.html
#+begin_quote
"International SMS also had scaling issues, but for financial rather than technical reasons."
#+end_quote
Which proves that companies will be competing to serve laconi.ca. In all cases, VOIP rules over GSM. This is the future for all telephony.
#+begin_quote
"...للكثير، هم يمثلون دينامية جديدة ستشكل مستقبل حركة التغيير." -- أميرة هويدي، "[[http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/748/eg9.htm][أصوات المعارضة]]"، الأهرام ويكلي 23-29 يونيو 2005
#+end_quote
الملاحظة التي سجلتها أميرة هويدي بفطنتها المعتادة في وقت مبكر جدا مع بداية ظهور ما اصطلح على تسميته "نشطاء الإنترنت" في مصر (كان العدد وقتها لا يتعدى دستة من الناس بأي حال) أثبتت صحتها مرارا على مدى الأعوام الأربعة الماضية، طالما قصرنا "مستقبل حركة التغيير" على حركة تعمل على إحداث تحول ديمقراطي في مصر، و لم نتعداها إلى حركة أقدم و أبطأ و أقوى كثيرا هي حركة العدالة الاجتماعية في أماكن العمل و الأحياء، و التي استطاعت بدء الحركة النقابية في مصر بعد عقود من التوقف التام، و هذا الفرق بين حركتي التحول الديمقراطي و العدالة الاجتماعية هو عين الفرق بين 6 أبريل 2008 و 6 أبريل 2009.
كتب الكثيرون محللين النجاح النسبي لدعوة إضرابي أبريل و مايو 2008، و قارنوا فيما كتبوه بين فشل الطبقة السياسية و الأحزاب و نجاح جيل جديد من نشطاء فايسبوك، و بنوا الآمال على أفكارهم و نشاطهم. الواقع أنه لا فرق كبير بين هؤلاء و هؤلاء--و أنا أقرب لإنترنت--
بداية، نجح نشطاء إنترنت--على المدونات أولا ثم على فايسبوك لاحقا--في تنظيم احتجاجاتهم بالمقارنة بالسياسيين لأسباب لا تتعلق بجيل جديد من النشطاء يحمل أفكارا جديدة، بل لأسباب تتعلق بإنترنت نفسها. أزعم أن المجتمع المصري يعيد احتلال المساحة العامة بتصاعد مستمر منذ وقت يتزامن مع انطلاق الانتفاضة الثانية في فلسطين 2000، و يشترك في ذلك نشطاء الحضر مع العمال و إن عمل الطرفين في تواز و انفصال حتى الآن. شبكة اليوم من النشطاء تجد جذورها في اللجنة الشعبية لدعم انتفاضة الشعب الفلسطيني و في حركة مقاومة الحرب على العراق، و إضرابات العمال يبدو أنها في تصاعد منذ ذلك الحين، إلا أن هناك فرق.
بينما لا يمكن لأحد إيقاف العمال إن بدأو تنظيما واضحا حول قضية محددة، فإن بقية الطوائف-- و نشطاء وسط القاهرة منهم--أكثر عرضة بكثير للتعدى على حريتهم في التنظيم. و هذا عين السبب الذي يجعل التنظيم على إنترنت (لإحراز بعض المكاسب على الأرض) أسهل عليهم
Mapping the Arabic Blogsphere:
Even where digital tools might be used to wrestle power from the hands of authoritarian governments, it would be a mistake to assume this would naturally produce classically Western versions of liberal democracies based on individual liberties, freedom of belief and expression, and a secular political order. Hundreds of Egyptian bloggers forcefully advocate for human rights, freedom of speech, and an end to corruption and torture. But two of the strongest groups among them are radical leftists, the West’s great enemy of the last century, and Islamists, feared by some as the great threat of the new century.

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 3fb20c81-40cf-44d0-880f-100fed46e436
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:53]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:56]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: إيطاليا و اليونان و مصر
في سبتمبر 1878، هرب الناشط التحرري الإيطالي إريكو مالاتيستا من نابولي كي لا يعتقل، و استقبلته في الإسكندرية حركة تحررية نشطة من مصريين إيطاليين

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: f80362af-2e17-445d-b1bf-765617c1cbdc
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:43]
:MODIFIED: [2009-10-22 Thu 09:15]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: البوصلة السياسية
قليلة هي الأيديولجيات و التيارات السياسية و البرامج الحزبية الي تعلن في خطابها أنها ضد قيم العدل و الحرية، و معظم من لهم رأي في الشأن العام و يعملون به يعتقدون فعلا أن أفكارهم هي الحل الأمثل للوصول إلى مجتمع أقرب إلى مثل العدل و الحرية. فبالإضافة لنكات مثل بروتوكولات حكماء صهيون (نحن الأشرار المسيطرون!)، لا يجد المرء في الواقع غير قليل من [[http://everyscreen.com][الخطاب الفاشي]] الذي يجرؤ على قول أشياء مثل أن سبب ارتفاع سعر الغذاء عالميا هو أن [[http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/arabic/world_news/newsid_7355000/7355672.stm]["ثلث الهنود يأكلون مرتين يوميا"]] الآن.
ما تختلف فيه التيارات هو نوع الحل. فبينما يرى الرأسماليون أن حل المشاكل الاقتصادية فردي، و أن هذا أقصى عدل ممكن و أن أي شيء آخر ضد الحرية، يرى الاشتراكيون أن الحل جماعي، و أن المجتمع الإنساني لن يصل إلى عدالة أكثر و حرية للجميع بدون تنسيق الجميع.
بالمثل، يرى السلطويون أن ضمان أمان المجتمع يقتضي سيطرة البعض على الباقين، و بالتالي هم يفضلون مجتمعا طبقيا يعمل من خلال دولة قوية. بينما يرى اللا سلطويون أن ضمان حرية الناس لن يأتي إلا بغياب سيطرة بعض المجتمع على البعض الآخر، و بالتالي يفضلون أن ينظموا المجتمع بعيدا عن سيطرة الدولة، لأن الدولة هي احتكار للعنف بالأساس.
ترى الباحثة الاجتماعية ماري دوجلاس أن بالإمكان إرجاع كل الألوان التي يدرك بها الناس العالم و يفسرون أنشطتهم على أساسه إلى خمسة أنماط نموذجية. واحد من تلك الأنماط يرى أن الشيء الوحيد المعقول هو الانسحاب من الحياة العامة، لأنها كلها شر (تخيل راهب أو صوفي أو سلفي تقليدي مثلا)، بينما يرى الأربعة الباقون أن الحياة تستأهل المحاولة فيها، و أن حل مشاكلها يتم بالاستراتيجيات الأربعة السابق ذكرها: مجتمع سلطوي و حلول فردية؛ مجتمع لا سلطوي و حلول فردية؛ مجتمع سلطوي و حل جماعي؛ مجتمع لا سلطوي و حل جماعي. للسهولة، بالإمكان الاصطلاح على تسمية تلك الأنماط الأربعة الفاشية، و اللبرالية، و اللينينية، و التحررية على الترتيب. دعنا أيضا نسمي النمط الذي ينسحب من الحياة العامة الانعزالية.
تزداد قيمة البوصلة السياسية تضاعفا عندما يدخل فيها تأثير الشبكات الاجتماعية. تطبيق صغير على فايسبوك يستطيع أن يوضح لك موقعك على البوصلة السياسية بالمقارنة بمعارفك .
كي أعرف من من معارفي أقرب إلي سياسيا، رسمت دوائر مختلفة الأقطار مركزها كلها نقطة واحدة هي موقعي على البوصلة.
بإمكاني أن أصنف أغلب معارفي في منطقتين تتوافقان مع الاشتراكية الديمقراطية--على نمط كفاية مثلا--و الأخرى مع نمط أكثر تحررا في تنظيم المجتمع. لاحظت أيضا أن الأفراد عادة أكثر ميلا للحرية من منظماتهم في مواقفها العلنية. شباب الإخوان المسلمين مثلا يجتمعون في منطقة واحدة مع [[http://mabadali.blogspot.com][عمرو عزت]] من [[http://bosla.org][اليسار الديمقراطي]] و [[http://gaberism.net][يساري مصري]]، و هم كلهم أكثر تحررا--اقرأ: أقل محافظة--من شريف عبد العزيز الذي يجد أفكاره في تيارات اليسار الإسلامي.
يتبقى أن نذكر أن انتماءات هيسم غير مبررة على الإطلاق.
#+begin_quote
I now ask the German people to strengthen my faith and to give me through the strength of its will the strength I need to continue to fight courageously at any time for its honor and its freedom, and to be able to further its economic prosperity. I ask it particularly to support me in my struggle for true peace.
أطلب الآن من الشعب الألماني أن يقوي إيماني و أن يمدني بقوة إرادته، فأنا أحتاجها لإكمال المعركة بشجاعة في أي وقت من أجل كرامة الشعب الألماني و حريته، و لأكون قادرا على زيادة رفاهيته الاقتصادية. أطلب من الشعب الألماني خصوصا أن يدعمني في كفاحي من أجل السلام الحقيقي.
#+end_quote
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/posters/hitlerred.jpg

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: dd45e542-989c-427c-a5ef-dac37d5b8fb0
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:46]
:MODIFIED: [2010-07-05 Mon 13:50]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: الطين الأسود
نقول تاني. الطين الأسود، ال هو أرض مصر؛ الوادي من أسوان للقاهرة/منف و الدلتا. الناس ال نحتوا الشق في الرمل دا و شكلوه بالشبر، و ال نشفوا برك و سبخات الدلتا و زرعوا الاثنين كانوا أصلا بدو نزلوا من الهضبة شرق و غرب من عشرة آلاف. الناس دول قرايبهم لسه موجودين شرق بيتكلموا ت-بديوي (ال-بدوي بالعربي) و اسمهم عبابدة و بشارية جامع-اب (ولاد جامع) و محمد-اب (ولاد محمد)، و موجودين غرب و اسمهم البربر. بيتكلموا ت-مازيغيت (الأمازيغية بالعربي) بتنويعاتها من أول السيوي لحد الطوارق.
يا أولاد البربرفيه حد مصري من عائلة الشاذلي؟ دول بربر
الزناتي
خليفة؟ بربري
زويل بربري قبيلة زويلة باب زويلة
القديس أوغسطين
بربري
طارق بن زياد
الإمام مالك
عباس بن فرناس
الوشاحي
هواري
دكروري
همام
البهاليل
المناصرة

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 44f0f6de-f37f-4c3e-aea5-83591525e179
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:49]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:49]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: الموحدون الدروز
زيارتي للبنان
كمال جنبلاط

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 24cd5b25-b9cc-43d0-93b8-8e8657a75434
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:53]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-21 Thu 06:18]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: انتوا حكومة و احنا أهالي
انتوا حكومة و احنا أهالي
هنوريكوا الصوت العالي
انتوا حكومة و احنا غلابة
هنوريكم أهل امبابة
انتوا حكومة إرهابية
هنوركيوا اسكندرية
انتوا حكومة عاوزانا عبيد
هنوريكم بورسعيد
انتوا حكومة و احنا لأ
تحكمونا بأي حق؟
أه يا حكومة الجوع و القهر
هنوريكم أهل مصر

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: de313b0c-5619-4912-b729-46c58a1b548c
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:54]
:MODIFIED: [2009-06-01 Mon 21:14]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: بدائل جوجل
* بريد
* محرك بحث: ياسي
* OpenStreetMap
* مدونات
* ويكيبيديا
* قارئ تلقيمات
* دردشة
* فيديو
* شبكة اجتماعية
* قائمة بريدية
* تأليف مشترك
* روزنامة
* متصفح

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 8915756b-7489-439d-b06c-7c9e5f085ab3
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:55]
:MODIFIED: [2017-04-13 Thu 11:46]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: برنامج حزب الإخوان
* خطوة أكبر للأمام و خطوة أصغر للخلف، و المحصلة ليست فرقا كبيرا
* خطوة للأمام في الإصلاحات السياسية
* غياب أي إصلاح اقتصادي
* برنامج بيئي منحصر في التلوث، و لا أثر لتغير المناخ
* فساد أقل
* تعذيب أقل
* لا تفاصيل حقيقية، و عندما يتناولون التفاصيل، تأتي الطاقة نووية اندماجية
* ماذا تعني آليات المشاركة في الربح و الخسارة بدلا من الفائدة في السياسة النقدية؟
* تخفيض معدلات الضرائب بصفة عامة
* "الإخوة الأقباط". ماذا عن غير المسلمين و غير الأقباط؟
* تقنين الزكاة
* بداية نتجاهل كل الخطاب الدعائي و الأخلاقي في البرنامج، فكل الأحزاب تدعي أنها تحافظ على الأخلاق، و ترعى مصالح الفقراء، و تحقق التنمية. غاب من البرنامج أي تحديد بالأرقام لأي شيء على الإطلاق
* الجريمة: تكلم الفصل عن الحدود و لم يحدد أي شيئ
* في انتقادهم لبرنامج حزب الإخوان المسلمين، يركز القراء عموما على موضوعات المواطنة و الدولة المدنية، على حساب قراءتهم للبرنامج الاقتصادي و الاجتماعي للإخوان، و علاقة ذلك بمزاعمهم الإصلاحية.
* تأمل هذه التدوينة أن توضح غياب أي فارق جوهري بين رؤية الإخوان المسلمين لإدارة مصر، و بين رؤية النظام الحالي.
* الطاقة النووية و الخيال العلمي
* مأزق الإخوان أنهم تنظيم بني دائما على المعارضة، و لا تصور عنده لتجمع حزب يجمع عليه أغلب الإخوان. مأزقهم أيضا أنهم يقفون تاليا في طابور السلطة، فأي تغيير حقيقي يعني وصولهم إلى الحكم، مما يتطلب منهم اتخاذ قرارات حول موضوعات نجحوا إلى الآن في إبقائها غامضة. أي تحرك يؤدي إلى انقسام داخلي، و الإخوان ليسوا كيانا متجانسا: ففيهم القلة اليمينية، و القلة المدنية، و الأغلبية الأخلاقية، و تيارات سلفية، بل و ربما جهادية في الأفكار على الأقل، و إن كانت مهمشة.
* برنامج الإخوان بدون فصول العلمانية و الحق في التعبير هو بالضبط سياسات البنك الدولي و صندوق النقد الدولي، و التي ينفذها النظام بكفاءة عالية.
* الإخوان أعلى التنظيم أذكياء، و هم يدركون أن وصولهم إلى الحكم الآن يعني وقوعهم في مأزق، فحتى لو كانوا أفضل حكما و أقل فسادا، فلا يوجد برنامج إصلاحي يمكنه التعامل مع الوضع الحالي بشكل يرضى عنه عموم المصريين، و لا يمكن إصلاح ما يمكن إصلاحه في سنوات قليلة أيضا. الإخوان ليسوا راغبين في تغيير حقيقي. جاذبية الإخوان تكمن في أنهم جماعة معارضة. ستقل كثيرا جاذبية الإسلاميين عندما يدرك المصريون أن "الإسلام هو الحل" لا تعرض أي حلول حقيقية.
* قد يكون الإخوان أقل فسادا، و التعذيب قد يقل كذلك، و هي أسباب تدعوني لتفضيلهم على النظام، إلا أن مواقفهم من حرية العمل السياسي و التنظيم تأثرت بعد إغلاق حماس نقابة الصحافيين في غزة.
* أمزح دائما أنني على استعداد للتخللي على قليل من حرية التعبير في مقابل إمكان العمل و التنظيم لإحراز مكاسب و إعادة تأسيس حق
* المصريين في الحياة التي يرغبون: النقابات الحرة عندي أهم من البيرة، و خصوصا أن البلد ليس فيها بيرة Guinness.
* لا يمكن استئصال الإخوان من المجتمع، فالتاريخ يثبت ذلك. الحل الوحيد هو بيان فراغ سياساتهم و ضررها. الحل الوحيد للتخلص من شعبية الإخوان هو مرورهم بالحكم، أو تغير ضخم في المشهد المصري تبدأ ملامحه في التشكل الآن.

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 5c1c33a1-1d4b-4e99-bd8a-f93363dc1a88
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:56]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:56]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: بهجت
عام 1989، نشر الرسام المصري بهجت دليلا عن "الدكتاتورية للمبتدئين" صور فيه بهجاتوس. بهجاتوس هو المزيج الأمثل لكل قذافي، و أسد، و صدام، و سادات في العالم. تذكرت هذه الرسمة بعد أن حكمت محكمة مصرية مؤخرا على أربع رؤساء تحرير مصريين بالحبس سنة لانتقادهم قادة الحزب الوطني الديمقراطي الحاكم.

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 7ab584e6-097d-4942-9eef-0d880da33474
:CREATED: [2007-02-11 Sun 23:56]
:MODIFIED: [2011-06-22 Wed 08:41]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: تاونهاوس
نفس الخواطر ال جاتلي و افتكرت زياراتي للتاون هاوس و معهد جوته لما اندلعت موضة الفيديو، و خيبة الأمل.
في رأيي أن خيبة الأمل سببها أن كان فيه وسيلة تعبير، لكن ما فيش موضوع، أو موضوع مستهلك: الناس في الشارع، المصريين البسطاء، الشباب المكافح.
طبعا "الموضوع" عندنا غالبا مش هيعجب المؤسسات.

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: d1c1f387-8d1b-4159-8282-a9cac964f0fc
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:57]
:MODIFIED: [2011-06-27 Mon 13:19]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: تليدعوة
#+begin_quote
شيل الدين من الدنيا هتتحول في ثواني لغابة
بس إزاي الناس هتقرب لو شايفينه كآبة
عارف ليه بيجي لنا أمل دايما و يروح كالعادة
فاكرين الطريق الصح ما فيهوش سعادة
نار أو جنة الدنيا تعيشها انت بتختار بإرادتك
لو ربنا قال لك [...] علشان مصلحتك
ال بيضحك للدنيا الدنيا هتضحك له زيادة
حب و خلي الكل يحب يا ناس دا الحب عبادة
#+end_quote

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: fe70fb25-d745-4de8-8033-8a8017bea2f3
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:57]
:MODIFIED: [2009-06-22 Mon 18:53]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: حملة سريعة لمالك
في أقل من ساعة و نصف، هي الفترة التي كان فيها مالكا مخطوفا، انتشر الخبر و التحديثات بوسائل متنوعة و عديدة:الخبر وصلني من [[http://salomatakmatak.blogspot.com][سلمى]] من مكتبها عن طريق مرسال إم.إس.إن، و تأكد من [[http://manalaa.net][علاء]] على دردشة آي.آر.سي. بعد مهاتفة محامي مالك، نشرت الخبر برسائل هاتفية نصية، إلى النشطاء و الصحافيين، و بقائمة توزيع تويتر الممتازة--التي تسمح بتوزيع الرسائل النصية القصيرة على عدد كبير من الهواتف بتكلفة رسالة واحدة إلى رقم في بريطانيا--، و بخبر على موقع كفاية حُدِّث طوال الوقت. كنت بالصدفة أدردش مع سامي بن غربية على سكايب، و الذي تطوع لنشر الخبر بسرعة على أصوات عالمية عالخط. لمن لا يعرف، أصوات عالمية هي مصب و ملخص المدونات من سائر أنحاء العالم مترجمة من لغات عدة إلى الإنجليزية.
أثناء ذلك، وصلتني رسالة من الصحافي خالد البلشي، و هو المصدر الرئيسي للخبر، مرسلة إلي و إلى عدد كبير من النشطاء و المدونين و المجموعات البريدية. و قبل ساعة، بدأ صحافيون و مراسلون و نشطاء و محامون بالتوجه إلى ميدان التحرير، حيث شوهدت السيارة التي احتجزت مالكا--اعتقدنا أن مالك محتجز مع سبعة آخرين في سيارة ملاكي فورد زرقاء رقم لوحاتها 865171، إلا أن الحقيقة كانت أن السبعة المخبرين كانوا مكلفين بالسيطرة على خفافة الشهيد مالك!
بعد أن فقدنا السيارة، وصلتني مكالمة من ساندمكني الذي تمكن لقربه من ميدان التحرير من العثور على السيارة، و بعدها بدأت رسائل و مكالمات تصل: أربعة مدونين على الأقل--شريف عبد العزيز، و ساندمنكي، و شرقاوي، و سلمى يقفون في أماكن مختلفة حول السيارة، و عمر يعلمني على مرسال إم.إس.إن بتفاصيل اختطاف مدونين آخرين هم جيميهود و الحاج جرجس.
http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2007/03/20/malcom_arrested/
http://twitter.com/gharbeia

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 19d5d1b7-a759-411d-8397-d0c7a21e04dc
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:58]
:MODIFIED: [2009-09-27 Sun 16:45]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: خريطة الشرق الأوسط
كردستان المستقلة ستصير دولة كأفغانستان، زائدة النفط
خريطة رالف بيترز عن شرق أوسط جديد، و مقاله في Armed Forces Journal يونيو 2006
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ralph_Peters_solution_to_Mideast.jpg
ترى لبنى أن الخريطة تشبه خريطة أوربا كثيرا، و بالفعل، فقد مرت أوربا بحرب الثلاثين عاما و دماء أخرى كثيرة كي تصل إلى ما وصلته.

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: fef856e6-2d84-4192-8964-3df69b059fa6
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:58]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:58]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: سفر الرؤيا
"إذا كان يوحنا كتب الإنجيل بعد تدخين الحشيش، فقد كتب الرؤيا بعد تعاطي الآسيد"--جوليا سويني
جيمس لفلوك

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 14d3107e-2566-4f4d-a9f8-ed73f157f462
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:54]
:MODIFIED: [2009-10-05 Mon 02:55]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: سينما في العيد: باب الشمس
متبعا تقليدا مصريا في الأعياد، شاهدت أول أمس فيلم باب الشمس. الصورة السينمائية جيدة.
يظهر في أحد المشاهد من يقول أننا لم نصبح فلسطينيين إلا بعد أن طردنا من الأرض. هذه المنطق في التفكير صحيح، ولكن أن يعني ذلك أن الفلسطينيين لا حق لهم الآن في الأرض هو الإخلال. أن نطلب من العرب الآن أن يصبحوا فلسطينيين أو أردنيين، وسوريين أو لبنانيين--قد يؤلم هذا بعض الأردنيين واللبنانيين--هو فرض ضمني أن نقولبهم في "قوميات" لم تكن موجودة. فالقومية--ذلك الشعب العضوي صاحب الأصل الأسطوري الواحد؛ الذي يعيش كل أفراده حياة صماء في واحديتها--فكرة مستوردة أساسا:الإثنوس أو الفولك، مقارنة بتجانس أكثر سيولة لا تلعب فيه الدولة أدوارا--قد يكون منها التعليم والضمان الاجتماعي--لعبتها تقليديا تنظيمات أخرى كالعائلة، والقبيلة، ومجالس الطوائف والحرف.

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 081883ae-ccb9-416c-9e91-cea051b53a05
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:59]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:59]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: صندوق المعلمين
تذكر مطبوعات صندوق المعلمين أن هدفه هو "ضمان أعضائه من المدرسين المرخص لهم بالعمل دخلا يضعهم في الثلث الأعلى بين المصريين"، وهو يحاول ضم أكبر عدد ممكن من المدرسين إليه طبقا لموارده. يمول صندوق المعلمين من عوائد الزكاة والصدقات التي يجمعها ويديرها في أنشطة زراعية بدلا من أن تصرف على الذبائح والولائم للمساكين.
تصدر تلك العبارة من صوت معدني كل مرة يقترب فيها قطار النفق من المحطة. إنها أكثر ما أسمعه في لندن.محمد سليمان الكريه

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 3c297a59-6f22-49c3-9fdd-e8a8529a7a5c
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:59]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:59]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: صهاينة على الجانبين، و أحرار كذلك
على قدر ما يسوئني هتاف "خيبر خيبر يا يهود. جيش محمد سوف يعود" (أو "على الحدود" في تنويعة الإخوان المسلمين الأخيرة)، فإن ما أدهشني هو [[http://gharbeia.jaiku.com/presence/51221576][أن أسمع الهتاف على قناة الحوار فيما قالت أنه فنزويلا]]. كاراكاس؟ حيث [[http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/arabic/world_news/newsid_7814000/7814691.stm][طرد السفير الإسرائيلي]]؟
http://www.davidrovics.com
David Rovics, Return http://soundclick.com/share?songid=754531
#+begin_quote
لا أقدر أن أمنع ذلك.
لا أهتم إلى أي مدى ترى المثال منطبقا.
عندما أراك تجبر سائق تلك الحافلة على تسلق سقف حافلته صعودا و هبودا
ليسليك
لساعات تحت الشمس الحارقة
أفكر كيف اعتدنا ذات يوم أن نرقص و نغني لهم
بينما هم يطلقون النار على أهلنا.
عندما أراك تبقي تلك المرأة
و زوجها
عند الكمين
بينما تضع مولودها
و أنت واقف هناك
تستمع إلى صرخاتها
و تشاهدها و هي تلد
على الكرسي الخلفي في ذلك التاكسي
أفكر في الحيطان حول الجيتو الذي عشنا فيه
و كيف اضطررنا للزحف داخل المجاري
بحثا عن جرذ لنأكله
بينما نسمع أطفالهم يلعبون
على الجانب الآخر.
عندما أراك تهشم ذلك البيت
و تقتل تلك المرأة
و طفلها
بجرارك المصفح
لأنها لم تمتلك تصريحا
أفكر كيف أجبرنا على مغادرة بيوتنا
تحت تهديد السلاح.
و عندما أسمع الجنرال يقول
أنه كي نتعامل مع الانتفاضة
يجب أن نتعلم من تكتيكات جنرال آخر
اسمه السيد ستروب
في وارسو
أفكر كيف أنهم قصفوا مبانينا
و أطلقوا علينا الناس و نحن نسقط من فوق الأسقف.
و أتذكر
كيف تمنينا أن نقتل أطفالهم أيضا.
و أشعر بالغثيان
غثيان من غضبك الموجه في الوجهة الخطأ
غثيان من خداعك لنفسك
غثيان من محاولتك خداع باقي العالم
غثيان من اتهاماتك بمعاداة السامية
غثيان من احتلالك
غثيان من دولة الفصل العنصري التي تعيش فيها
غثيان من الصهيونية.
لأنه بوقوفي هنا
في أوشفتس، و بركيناو، و وارسو
أرى جينين، و يافا، و رفح.
و أفكر في أسلافنا
الفلسطينيين اليهود
كيف تكلموا بطلاقة
بلغتهم العربية.
إلا أن الأموات لا ينطقون.
و الآن أجد نفسي
ثانية وراء حائط جيتو
أقف مع ملايين الفلسطينيين الآخرين.
و أجد نفسي أهتف
ثورة! ثورة! حتى النصر! [هكذا ينطقها بالعربية]
غدا في القدس
العودة [هكذا بالعربية]
العودة.
#+end_quote

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 6f068376-dfdd-451f-8236-bd9248cbc452
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:00]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:00]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: طاقة نووية سلمية؟
#+begin_quote
"العصر الحجري لم ينته عندما فرغ العالم من الأحجار، و كذلك سينتهي عصر النفط قبل نهاية النفط من العالم بوقت طويل"--الشيخ زكي يماني؛ وزير النفط السعودي.
#+end_quote
إن الحد من انبعاثات غازات الدفيئة، لا سيما ثاني أكسيد الكربون الناتج عن احتراق الوقود الأحفوري في سياراتنا و مصانعنا و محطاتنا لتوليد الكهرباء، أمر لا بد منه إذا أردنا أن نمنع زيادة درجة حرارة الأرض عن درجتين مئويتين فوق معدلات ما قبل العصر الصناعي، و الذي إن ارتفعت درجة حرارة الأرض بعده سيتعرض الكوكب لتأثيرات مضاعفة من تغير المناخ، بدءا من الارتفاع الكبير لسطح البحر، و الأحوال الجوية القاسية من أعاصير و فيضانات و جفاف يجتاح مناطق مختلفة من العالم، وصولا إلى انتشار الأوبئة في مناطق لم تكن لتصلها من قبل، وأيضا الآفات الزراعية التي بدأ الفلاحون يعانون من صعوبتها و طول أمدها اليوم بالفعل.
مهما اختلفت الآراء و تضاربت حول متى سينضب النفط، و من أين سينحصل على الطاقة بعد عقود--كثرت أم قلت، إلا أن كل أصحاب الآراء يجمعون على أنه من غير الممكن الاستمرار في توليد طاقاتنا من الوقود الأحفوري (النفط و الغاز الطبيعي و الفحم) بدون مخاطر تضر بكل الأحياء على الأرض، و من بينها الجنس البشري. و على أهمية الدور الذي لعبه النفط في حياة الشرق الأوسط في القرن الماضي، فإن للمنطقة فرصة استكمال ذات الدور في عالم ما بعد النفط. بإمكان بلادنا في المشرق العربي و إيران أن تصبح مصدرة للطاقات المتجددة في المستقبل القريب تماما كما تعتمد اقتصاداتها اليوم على تصدير النفط بالأساس.
إلا أن رسم خطة للوصول إلى اقتصاد مصدر للطاقة في الشرق الأوسط يعتمد على أن نتعلم من أخطاء الماضي. تتميز الطاقات المتجددة (لا سيما طاقة الرياح و الطاقة الشمسية) بأنها لا تدفع أي بلد لبدء حرب على بلد آخر لاستغلال طاقاته، فالهواء و الشمس متوافرين للجميع. على عكس هذا، فإن الطاقة النووية تعتمد على خامات اليورانيوم الأكثر ندرة من النفط، و الذي تتميز فيه بلاد عن أخرى (ليس من بينها معظم بلدان الشرق الأوسط). إن اعتماد الطاقة النووية كأساس لطاقة المستقبل في الشرق الأوسط لن يفيد، فنحن لا نسيطر عليه كما سيطرنا على النفط. و هذا ليس كل شييء، فبدائل الطاقات المتجددة أفضل و أرخص!
"إذا كان بإمكاننا المخاطرة بنشوب حرب نووية، فلا شك أن بوسعنا المخاطرة بالتخلص من الأسلحة النووية"
التعارض الضمني في الوكالة الدولية للطاقة الذرية و في اتفاقية منع الانتشار النووي
الطريق للمستقبل يبدأ من وكالة جديدة في الأمم المتحدة تعالج خطري تغير المناخ و التسلح النووي بإخراج الطاقة النووية تدريجيا من خريطة إنتاج الطاقة في العالم، و العمل على ترويج الطاقات المستدامة، مما يأسس للسلام العالمي بدلا من تهديده.
ماذا عن النفايات النووية؟
تظل مشعة لمئات الألوف من السنين
الحل الوحيد لمشكلة النفايات النووية هو أن نتوقف عن إنتاجها أساسا.
إتاحة الطاقة النووية للاستثمار الخاص دفعت المنشئات النووية لتخفيض استثماراتها في ما يتعلق بالأمان، و كذلك لتخفيض أعداد العاملين، بينما تعمل في الوقت نفسه على زيادة ضغط المفاعل و حرارة التشغيل و إسراع احتراق الوقود النووي، مما يقصر من أعمار المفاعلات و يزيد من هامش الخطر. معظم المفاعلات في عالم اليوم يزيد عمرها عن العشرين عاما، إلا أن شركات الطاقة تعمل على زيادة أعمارها من أربعين إلى ستين عاما، الأمر الذي يهدد بأخطار جديدة.
مفاعلات الأمان السالب استبدلت العديد من أنظمة الأمان فيها بعمليات "طبيعية" كماء تبريد الطوارئ الذي توصله قوة الجاذبية، إلا أن هذه الإجراءات تجعل المفاعلات أكثر عرضة للهجمات الإرهابية.
"العصر الحجري لم ينته عندما فرغ العالم من الأحجار، و كذلك سينتهي عصر النفط قبل نهاية النفط من العالم بوقت طويل"--الشيخ زكي يماني؛ وزير النفط السعودي.
دراسة مماثلة لمصر: استراتيجية الطاقة حتى 2050.
There are no passengers on planet Earth, only crew
If we can risk nuclear war, then we can risk nuclear disarmament
Peaceful Nuclear Energy?
The most expensive and complex way to boil water
If we can risk nuclear warfare, we can surely risk nuclear disarmament
Alright, my usual rant about nuclear power/arms. Any reasonable person for nukes needs to argue for the following:
1. Earth has enough nuclear fuel to upscale production to good percentage of world consumption, that we won't burn all fuel in a few years and have to go back to fossil and renewables
2. Nuclear power is cheaper than mass scale renewables, even discounting nuclear environmental cost. Trends: Which energies are growing cheaper, and which more expensive?
3. That it is better if we destroy the entire world that if they do. Nuclear war damage is the only thing to outlast a 370 ppm Climate Change damage
4. That's no argument for proliferation. Math proves nuclear weapons encourage their use. Is better if 'we' destroy the entire world that if they do (Do not count me in)
5. Some sense of scale and urgency as well: Nuclear war damage is the only thing to outlast a 370 ppm Climate Change damage
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http://www.ahram.org.eg/acpss/ahram/2001/1/1/FI1E76.HTM
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<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD> <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>: <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD> <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD> <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD> <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD> <20><> <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD> <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
http://www.ahram.org.eg/acpss/ahram/2001/1/1/FI1E83.HTM
<EFBFBD> . <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD> <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD> <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
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http://www.ahram.org.eg/acpss/ahram/2001/1/1/FI1E87.HTM

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: f05307c7-d749-422d-92f2-958a48aa4abb
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:16]
:MODIFIED: [2011-06-27 Mon 14:25]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: عد اللانهاية
لا أملك إلا أن أشعر بالإعجاب بأي شخص أقرأ سيرته الذاتية، فأنا أعتبر أن أفضل ما يمكن للإنسان عمله في هذه الحياة هو أن يعيشها وأن يترك تاريخه الشخصي فيها. يا له من عمل رائع!! وأعتقد أن سبب هذا الإعجاب بهؤلاء الأشخاص هو أن حياتهم تبدو ثرية بالأحداث إلى حد غير عادي. فحياتي الخاصة تبدو للمراقب البعيد -أي شخص آخر- فارغة من الأحداث ولا تستحق الذكر، وهي فعلا كذلك. فلا توجد فيها أسفار في المجهول أو مشاكل وظروف كان على أن أقهرها بإرادتي القوية، أو أفراد آخرين مؤثرين في مجريات الأحداث- أصدقاء كانوا أم أعداء.
وبالرغم من هذا الفراغ في الأحداث، فإن حياتي لم تكن مملة على الإطلاق، بل هي مليئة لأقصى مدى بالمشاعر التي تحتاج لقصاص بارع ليبرزها على الوجه الأمثل. هدوء ظاهر وفوران باطن طوال الأعوام الماضية. كان يجب أن تكوني معي طوال الوقت لتعرفي ما أعني.
وكما يترك الأشخاص على شواهد قبور ذويهم عبارات مثل "موسيقي ناجح" أو "أم حنون"، لن يجد أحد ما يمكن أن ينقش فوق قبري، فحتى الآن لم أحدث تأثيرا على أي شخص أو شيء آخر. لم يكن لدي مشروع يتأثر به الآخرون لأن مشروعي كان خاصا بي لأقصي حد. مشروعي هو أنا. فلا زلت مشغولا بصنع نفسي التي أرضى أن يراها الآخرون -لدي معايير متشددة نوعا- هنا بإمكاني الحديث عن نفسي.
أظن أن هذا التركيز حول الذات هو الصفة الوحيدة الواضحة أمام الآخرين، فأنا منذ طفولتي "المغرور المختلف بامتياز" وقبل وأفضل من أي أحد آخر. ولا يمكن تكوين صورة أسوأ من هذه الصورة عن أي شخص، فأنت تعرف أنه مغرور وأشياء أخرى كثيرة، ولكنك لا تستطيع أن تعرف لماذا (إن كان هناك سبب) وهذا ليس خطأ أحد غيره هو: عمرو بعينه.
يشكل "من أسفل إلى أعلى.. مرة أخرى" أول محاولة من محاولاتي للاتصال بالآخرين تنجح في الحصول على موافقة مني بالخروج إليهم، وأنا في الواقع لم أسمح لها بالخروج لاقتناعي بالنتيجة- كما يتبين في الكتاب- كما أني أدرك الآن أن كل محاولاتي للاتصال بالآخرين بما فيها الكتاب المنشور لم تفعل غير محاولة التحاور مع نفسي، ولكن أليست هذه هي أفضل طريقة لتقديم نفسك للآخرين، فما الذي يمكنك الحديث عنه بشكل أفضل من الحديث عن نفسك.
وبما أنني أومن أنه ليس فينا شرير، سأحاول:
* آلات الصرف الأوتوماتيكية
كنت دائما في حالة انبهار تام بالتكنولوجيا.. وكمثال لطفل المدينة كنت أتعجب من الصعوبة التي يفعل بها والداي شيئا مثل ضبط التوقيت على الفيديو مثلا.. أليسوا هم الكبار؟؟ وكنا حين نذهب للتسوق أجد متعة عظيمة في مراقبة أبي وهو يقوم بسحب النقود من آلة الصرف الأوتوماتيكية ATM، كنت أتصور أن أبي والناس الآخرين يمتلكون سلالا توضع فيها النقود على حدة، وتقوم الماكينة بسحب النقود من السلة عند طلب صاحبها. وكان هذا تفسيرا مناسبا للوقائع خاصة أنني لم أر أبي يتعامل إلا مع آلة واحدة فقط. ولكن عندما قام بعمليتي سحب متتاليتين في غضون ربع الساعة ومن خلال آلتين مختلفتين وجدت نفسي أفكر في تفسير لما حدث، و كان يجب أن توجد مواسير خاصة تحت الأرض تنتقل فيها النقود بسرعة فائقة من الفرع الذي توجد فيه السلة إلى الفرع الآخر. وزاد انبهاري عندما أدركت طول هذه المواسير ومدي تعقيدها بوجود عدد من البنوك التي يمتلك كل منها فروعا في مختلف أنحاء المدينة ، ولا أزال حتى الآن أشعر بنفس الانبهار عند تخيل حجم البنية التحتية التي تعتمد عليها المدن. كم عظيمة هي التكنولوجيا!!
* مايكل جاكسون قي محل الموسيقى
* النوم جانب الباب
* الحاجة إلى الحزن
* ما قبل المدرسة - شنطة سنوبي والانتظار في الشباك
* أبو عماد- الروضة- فرشاة الأسنان- لا أصدقاء مثل الآخرين- Let it be
* السمك الكبير
* جوليانا عبد الخالد
* السيد كنتاكي- الأطفال مساكين ولا يقدرون حق تقديرهم
* الاسترفاع
* المشروع الكبير.. تلخيص المعرفة الإنسانية
* أول يوم في المدرسة- تغيير الفصول
* المدرسة- رحلة كل يوم في عبد الله خلف- التلاميذ- هوشة- هدة- فنجر- شرب الماء
* مشكلتي في الحديث أمام الآخرين... الكبار بالذات -المدرسة.. الاختناق ( لا تزال هذه المشكلة موجودة، فإذا رأيتني أتحدث بطلاقة أمام أحد -أي أحد- فهذا يعني أنني أنظر له من أعلى)
* الغريب... الجاليات.. المنعزل أقدر على الإحساس والإنتاج
* دائما مع الأكبر.. أحمد
* تجليد كتاب التاريخ - الثاني الإعدادي
* أشعر بالخجل حتى الآن من الإفصاح عن هذه التجارب المبكرة، فلم أستطع أبدا التغلب على الخوف من الظهور بشكل ضعيف (كمجرد إنسان) أمام الآخرين
* الشبه بين "من أسفل إلى أعلى.. مرة أخرى" وتطور الموسيقي عند Pink Floyd.
* ماجستير إدارة الأعمال
* دكتوراة العلوم الاجتماعية
* الأنثربولوجيا - طب النفس Psychiatry
* ماجستير الفيزياء الفلكية
* الموسيقا
* اليوجا
* الأعمال
* العمل التطوعي (الصليب الأحمر)
* السفر
* مجتمعات التغيير (الإسلام- مصر- )
* رواية السيكولوجية

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: e796e764-e66d-48bd-91f5-d583ab3daf32
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:00]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:01]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title:فوة 2005
#+filetags: egypt
* مركز فوة 60000 نسمة
* 19000 فدان
* مدينة فوة 63000 نسمة
* مشاكل التسويق
* قطن و أزر
* اشتهرت بالسجاد البلدي و الكليم
* 360 مسجد
* آثار إسلامية و مسيحية
* مصنع الطرابيش من أيام محمد علي 1840
* تعاني صناعة الكليم بسبب كثرة البدائل
* الأرز الياباني 5 أشهر في الأرض
* الأرز الحالي 90-100 يوم
* الحرارة كثيرة السنين الماضية و السبب ثقب الأوزون
* المطر بدأ يزداد، لكنه كان يستمر 6 أشهر قبل ذلك
* آفات كثرت، خصوصا دودة القطن
* منعوا المبيدات السابقة و الحالية لا تعمل بكفاءة "نريد تحقيق المعادلة الصعبة بين البيئة و الإنتاج"
* عادل و محمد "سردينة" أولاد الشوارع

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 6305c4e6-c160-41c6-bff9-5756fdf36fef
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:02]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:02]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: كفاية
#+filetags: egypt
قوموا بنا نقول كفاية
الطاغي يخاف مننا
الحرية لينا كلنا
الخير مالي أرضنا
تعالوا ناخد حقنا
2
ما تسيبوش الفرق تهدنا
مذهب: تعالوا يا اخواني يا خوات يا الله حي عالنضال دي اللحظة ملكنا قوموا بنا نقول كفاية كلمة توحدنا كلنا

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 28ff1fc3-cba8-4423-aa9d-b2359385b2eb
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 22:02]
:MODIFIED: [2009-10-05 Mon 00:49]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: كوزموس
* أبكاني من السعادة
* علامات تحذرك من الخداع. بناء على كتاب كارل ساجان، العالم المسكون بالجن. التالية هي أدوات مقترحة لاختبار الحجج و اكتشاف الخرافي و الخادع منها:
* مهما كان، لا بد من وجود إثبات مستقل للحقائق.
* Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
* الحجج التي مصدرها السلطة لا وزن كبير لها (لا "سلطة" في العلم).
* داعب أكثر من فرضية. لا تعتمد أول فكرة تخطر على بالك.
* حاول ألا ترتبط زيادة بفرضية فقط لأنك صاحبها.
* وضح بالكمية على قدر الاستطاعة.
* إذا كانت هناك سلسلة من الحجج، فإن كل حلقة فيها ينبغي أن تكون متينة.
* شفرة Occam - إذا كانت هناك فرضيتين تفسران ذات البيانات بذات الجودة، اختر الفرضية الأبسط.
* اسأل إذا كان من الممكن، نظريا على الأقل، تخطئة الفرضية (أي أن يظهر عدم صحتها باختبار غير غامض). بكلمات أخرى، هل يمكن اختبارها؟ هل يمكن لآخرين إعادة التجربة و الحصول على ذات النتائج؟

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: a7e8ef53-8eb3-4f7a-b585-8c2d17cbd5e7
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:02]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:02]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: كي تدعم الثورة هناك، ابدأ ثورة هنا

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: c1d6a7f4-7711-4c1e-9aa8-b2cfdeedc025
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:03]
:MODIFIED: [2017-04-13 Thu 11:43]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: ليسوا بهائيين و ليسوا مصريين
#+filetags: egypt
سيناريو سريع على منهج ابن ربيع
بعد حكم المحكمة الإدارية العليا الأخير بعدم أحقية البهائيين ذكر دينهم في المستندات الثبوتية، يلجأ هؤلاء إلى استراتيجية جديدة: يدعموا مطالب طوائف أخرى من الشعب من العلمانيين المؤمنين، و الملحدين كابرا عن كابر، و المسيحيين طالبي الطلاق، و المرتدين، و كل من يحب المواطنة بإثبات شرطة في خانة الدين. تحصل القضية على دعم مئات الألوف العديدة من المصريين لأنها تحل مشكلة "نعمل فيهم إيه؟" التي صارت فيها الحكومة، خاصة أن عدد من يرغبون في ترك الوضع على ما هو عليه أكبر من من لا يزالون يعتقدون أنه لا يوجد بهائيين في مصر، و أن القضايا أمام المحاكم ترفع بالمحرك ذاتي الحركة.
البهائيون حاليا في رأيي هم أكثر مجموعة مضطهدة في مصر. جائزة الحريات المدنية تذهب لامرأة بهائية مثلية زمالكوية.
رفض الدعوى لانقضاء الخصومة

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 1cfc727b-e8af-46d8-b17c-27b783e15edd
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:04]
:MODIFIED: [2009-12-31 Thu 14:39]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: نورا يونس
الأعوام الثلاث الماضية مليئة بالأحداث و الناس و التغيرات لدرجة تبدو أنني أعرف من عاصرتهم خلالها لعمر كامل. مثلا، عندما عرفت نورا يونس، كانت مستقيلة حديثا من البرنامج الإنمائي للأمم المتحدة، و تظهر في صدر غرفة الجلوس في شقتها القديمة صورة جماعية من بين من فيها نورا نفسها مع سوزان مبارك. الأسبوع الماضي [[http://norayounis.com/2008/10/25/307][تسلمت نورا جائزة هيومان رايتس فيرست]] في عيدها الثلاثين--عيد المنظمة و ليس صديقتنا!--باعتبارها علامة لصعود جيل "يستخدم الإعلام الجديد في دعم القضايا الحقوقية".
بالرغم من أن دوائر معارفنا تعود لحياتها الماضية--وحياتي--، إلا أنني لم أقابلها حتى بعد 25 مايو 2005 بيوم أو اثنين. اعتادت قبل ذلك أن تخرج [[http://norayounis.com/2006/02/01/78][لتصوير]] مظاهرات كفاية الأولى دون أن تعرف أيا من الحضور--و هو عين [[http://gharbeia.net/node/14][ما كنت أفعله وقتها]]--إلا أن ذلك التاريخ شكل بداية لصعود كفاية، و حركة الصحافة الشعبية في مصر، و جيل نشطاء المدونات، و هي كلها أشياء مترابطة، و كانت نورا حاضرة في قلب كل ذلك أفضل من معظم الناس، ربما باستثناء المدونات، فهي تمضي نهارها و مساءها و أغلب ليلها خارجا تدبر لشيء ما مهم، و تعيش في بيت بلا إنترنت معظم الوقت، و [[http://norayounis.com/2005/07/19/2][لم تبدأ مدونتها]] إلا منتصف ذلك الصيف الساخن.
يوم تعديل الدستور اعتدت الدولة على ناشطات كفاية، و ضربوا علاء العابر صدفة و سرقوا حاسوبه (و هي غلطة كلفتهم الكثير. لا تسرق من يغضب).
كانت نورا بدأت [[http://norayounis.com/2005/09/26/52][مساعدة أيمن نور]]
في 14 سبتمبر 2005، تأخرنا يوم [[http://norayounis.com/2005/09/12/41][مظاهرة اليوم العالمي لمناهضة التعذيب أمام مقر أمن الدولة]] في لاظ أوغلي. لا زلت أذكر و أنا أحيطها و نحن ندفع الجنود كي ندخل الحصار: "اصرخي يا نورا!". صممت لافتة المظاهرة هذه، و بعدها بعام ردت على نورا بتدوينة عنوانها [[http://norayounis.com/2006/06/26/97][هاللو عادلي.. ولا دايم الا وجه الله]].
كنت أعرف أن [[http://ana-ikhwan.blogspot.com/][لعبد المنعم]] معزة خاصة عند نورا، و لم أتردد في استغلال ذلك لأرمي عليها عبء استكمال حملة له وقت اعتقاله، و هو أمر أعلم أنها كانت ستقوم به أفضل مني، خصوصا أنها كانت وقتها بين واشنطن و نيويورك في منحة تدريبية مقدمة من الحكومة الأمريكية. و بالفعل، [[http://norayounis.com/2007/05/04/234][دشنت الحملة في اليوم العالمي لحرية الصحافة]].
نورا لم تنه روايتها التي أخبرتني منذ أعوام أنها تحاول أن تكتبها، إلا أنها قامت منذ ذلك الحين بما هو أكثر جدا و أهم.
[[http://norayounis.com/2005/07/27/12][مش هنسيبهالكم: تغطية انفجارات شرم الشيخ 27 يوليو 2005]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2005/08/23/28][ضد جروبي و الأمريكين: مظاهرة تضامنا مع عمال الأسبستوس و ضد أحمد لقمة]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2005/08/30/31][جمهورية سيناء الاشتراكية: بداية واحدة من]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2005/09/18/48][زيارات]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2005/12/11/72][أخرى]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2006/07/13/101][كثيرة لشمال سيناء]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2005/09/09/39][جنازة تخافوا منها: حريق مسرح بني سويف]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2005/10/17/64][كمال خليل يدير حملته الانتخابية من على السلم]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2005/12/13/73][هل هناك رفض شعبي مصري لإسرائيل؟]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2005/12/30/74][عار أن أكون مصرية: شهادة يوم اعتداء الدولة على اعتصام اللاجئين السودانيين]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2006/06/01/89][حكاية جيل: بعد سنة من النشاط و عن محمد الشرقاوي]]
[[http://norayounis.com/category/lebanon][تدوينات مختلفة عن حرب إسرائيل على لبنان صيف 2006]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2006/11/09/158][يا حضرة الظابط: عن التحرش الجنسي]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2006/11/19/163][يا صبر أيوب: عن احتجاز المدون أيوب المصري]] [[http://norayounis.com/2006/11/21/164][جزء ثاني]] [[http://norayounis.com/2006/11/30/166][و ثالث]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2007/02/17/173][ماشي الحال: متضامنة مع البهائيين]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2007/03/26/208][مظاهرة في واشنطن العاصمة ضد مبارك]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2007/04/18/231][منعم هيفضل إخوان]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2007/09/24/264][شقيق ضحية التعذيب في الفيوم: معندناش جثث ماتت.. الحزب الوطني والداخلية عرضوا علينا 150 ألف جنية عشان نسكت]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2007/10/06/270][في المحلة قاعدين.. محاولة لتوثيق اضراب عمال المحلة]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2007/12/12/280][الضرائب العقارية تحذر: أحشاء النظام في أيدينا واحذروا غضب الجياع]]
[[http://norayounis.com/category/palestine][في غزة]]
[[http://norayounis.com/2008/05/16/297][ع الرصيف.. وثائقي اضراب موظفي الضرائب العقارية]]
قابلت نورا يوم الشارع لنا 9 يونيو 2005

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 655e41b3-7ac1-48a8-8a5d-09584ae4278b
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:05]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:05]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: يبكي و يضحك
يَبْكِي وَ يَضْحَكُ لَا حُزْنَا وَ لَا فَرَحَا
كَعَاشِقٍ خَطَّ سَطَرًا فِي الْهَوَى وَ مَحَى
قَلْبٌ تَمَّرَسَ بِاللَّذَاتِ وَ هُوَ فَتَى
كَبُرْعُمٍ لَمَسَتْهُ الرِّيحُ فَانْفَتَحَ

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 9f66b42c-54f8-470b-91e3-04dd5aa8fa32
:CREATED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:05]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-15 Fri 23:05]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: يسوع؛ حر؛ تموز؛ أدونيس
* ميلاد عذري 25 ديسمبر
* ثلاث ملوك
* نجمة في السماء
* مولد في اسطبل
* صلب
* موت لثلاثة أيام
* بعث
* ابن الإنسان
* قربان الجسد و الدم
* القمح

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 5629d086-9258-491e-9851-7dc2355413bd
:CREATED: [2005-09-22]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-16 09:44:23+0100]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 19:22:45-0500]
:END:
#+title: 22.09.05 بداية خاطئة
يوم الانتخابات
0815 أنزل من الزمالك. لا أضع في جيبي أكثر من 15 جنيها إلى ميدان الجامع
Xe
إذاعة القرآن الكريم
أمام قصر الرئاسة
الحاجة فايزة و الأستاذ عوض و سيدة أخرى يرشداني في قسم مصر الجديدة إلى لجنة انتخابي
مدرسة الخلفاء
أناول القاضي البطاقة. يسأل عمن معه حرف العين. أذهب إليهما. يبحثان عن اسمي.
عمرو غريبة بدلا من غربية في الكشف
أقترع خلف الستار
أضع الورقة بيدي في الصندوق
أعود لآخذ بطاقتي و لأغمس إصبعي في الحبر
الخط الساخن الحملة الوطنية لمراقبة الانتخابات 080008006800
الريس عطية 0124182971
هتاف باطل(خالد عبد الحميد)

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: eba34021-c1d9-4a9d-8302-82c7f5cd2973
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 11:12]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-16 Sat 14:04]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: 51 Faces
* Leila
* Dana
* Lamis
* Kurty
Kurtty basically is a weird "human being". Human being because he openly
gives an impression he would not mind being a woman.
* Samia
* Manal
* Nour
* Barrada
* Shahed
* Labib
* Yacout
* Adham
* Sara
* Noha
* Tami
* Sue
* Riham
* Jane and Paul
* Sue
* Sharawi
* AboSesda
* Maraachli
* Amir
* Askar
* Dina AboZeid
* Chahe
* Dina Sonbol
* Allam
* Marouf
* Hasan
* May
* Darrag
* Hassib
* Mido
* Rani
* Manal Morad
* Nadim
* Max
* Mona
* Nevine
* Maggie
* Hashish
* Sameh
* Moharram
* Soha
* Tamer MAgdi
* Tareq
* Ahmad
* Father
* Mother

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: f423c9b3-21de-48d7-84d9-6c4c05453dcd
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 11:37]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-16 Sat 11:38]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: I've been in travel since I put my feet down

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 57741fa3-abd0-4ecc-9621-b31fe451594f
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 00:42]
:MODIFIED: [2009-12-31 Thu 16:36]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: أكبر سطو بنكي في التاريخ
#+begin_quote
يا أستاذ أنا موظف حكومة و حتى الرشوة ما بتكفيش.
#+end_quote
سائق تاكسي متحدثا إلي أثناء زحام في شارع عبد الخالق ثروت وسط القاهرة، صيف 2007.
أكبر سطو بنكي في التاريخ
لا المعنى هنا ليس أكبر سطو على بنك، و هو الإنجاز الذي يعود إلى منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية أثناء الحرب اللبنانية. المعني هنا هو السطو الذي تمارسه البنوك على الناس
فودافون كاش
ادفع فاتورتك بكروت الشحن
حول رصيد

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 3455002e-ed05-45e4-8c1b-fa4927e2be83
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 00:46]
:MODIFIED: [2014-12-10 Wed 18:12]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: التقسيم الإداري
ذكرتني إعادة التقسيم الإداري للقاهرة و الجيزة بجمال حمدان
إلا أن صعوبة الحصول على بيانات محدثة دوريا، و ضخامة المهمة، و توزع اهتماماتي آنذاك--والآن--حالا دوني و دون العمل، بالإضافة إلى أنني بدأت أدرك في تلك الفترة أن الإجابات الجاهزة وحدها لا تكفي، و إن كانت صحيحة و مناسبة. الأهم هو أن يشعر الناس بامتلاكهم لتلك الإجابات، و بأنها لست
كان هذا في وقت لم تظهر فيه الويكي و أسالب التأليف و التحرير الجماعية على وب. رأيت في مشروع يوتوبيا مصرية عند ظهوره بذرة لتنظيم معرفة جيد، إلا أن الوقت لم يحين حتى الآن
P1960-01755 تقسيم جمهورية مصر العربية إلى محافظات و مدن و قرى و تحديد نطاق المحافظات

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: c3d33055-0541-4b16-80af-cf4a95a17786
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 02:09]
:MODIFIED: [2010-05-17 Mon 15:06]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: الدولة و الري
#+filetags: egypt
تاريخ مصر على طوله هو فترة استقرار بيئي بين انكماشين. الأول حدث مع بداية الحضارة--بل إنه هو ما سبب الحضارة--عندما جفت الهضبة غرب النيل و نزح سكانها، الذين أصبحوا المصريين لاحقا، إلى الواحات في الأراضي المنخفضة، و أكبر تلك "الواحات" كان وادي النيل الذي اختُرعت الهندسة من أجل ضبطه، ثم الدلتا التي جُففت مستنقعاتها و استصلحت سبخاتها، و استقرت الحضارة فيها إلى اليوم. مصر تاريخيا وليدة تغير المناخ منذ خمسة آلاف عام مضت.
و لم يكن الأمر صدفة أن ظهرت الدولة المركزية في مصر أول ما ظهرت و ليس في بلاد أخرى، فالوظيفة الأساسية للدولة المصرية هي صيانة النيل و تنظيم توزيع المياه بين بين العالي و الواطئ. لهذا، فوزارة "الأشغال" هي الأهم في البيروقراطية المصرية أغلب تاريخها.
البيئة الصالحة للحياة في مصر تمر اليوم بانكماش آخر، فالمياه في النيل ذاته لم تعد تكفي حاجة من يعيش عليها--بغض النظر عن حاجة من يعيش في بلاد أعلى النهر--
الدولة المصرية أقيمت بهدف تنظيم الري. لتحطيم الدولة في مصر، يتعين إيجاد حلول غير مركزية لمشكلة المياه في البلد

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 4d06d0b9-13bd-4a1d-85b3-cdf46cb03f4d
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 11:41]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-16 Sat 11:41]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: حافلات بريطانيا
M25 from Heathrow
أول دوائر المحاصيل في Herdshire
حافلات في بريطانيا اجلس ناحية اليسار
الطريق من Luton Bedfordshire

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: f1fdd3c9-22f4-45d2-b6de-1baaf2921afa
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 00:57]
:MODIFIED: [2017-05-20 Sat 17:39]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: حرية المعلومات
في يوتوبيا تومس مور، كان حكم نقاش الشأن العام سرا الموت

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: e055ca2b-9c1f-42fd-bdf8-959b9fbae763
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 10:43:24+0100]
:MODIFIED: [2009-12-31 14:47:53+0000]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 19:22:46-0500]
:END:
#+title: حزب مصري بوليفياري
#+filetags: egypt
هدف الحزب هو حياة مستدامة لكل المواطنين.
إنشاء مجموعة بديلة من النظم تقوم بوظائف الدولة المصرية
إعادة استثمار الأموال محليا، مع أفضلية الاستثمار في أنشطة تصديرية
استخدام خطاب مناسب للمصريين
إنشاء صندوق الصدقات والزكاة لتلقي الأموال لصرفها في مواطنها "الشرعية": التعليم، والصحة، والأمان الاجتماعي
التركيز على استخدام اللغة العربية و اللغات المحلية
توجيه الأولوية نحو المناطق الحضرية المحرومة اقتصاديا
التعليم
إنشاء صندوق مرتبات المعلمين يضمن حصول أعضائه على دخل يضعهم في الثلث الأعلى من المجتمع المصري
خلق ثقافة الادخار. يوجه نصف دخل المعلمين في قنوات استثمارية
ضرورة اعتماد المعلمين من جهة مستقلة، بالإضافة إلى اشتغالهم بالتعليم
القضاء
انشاء صندوق القضاة يضمن حصولهم على دخل مرتفع
المكتبة الإلكترونية
مكتبة ومسرح المدينة

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 2a8f946f-fc1d-47b2-bbf4-5a5bee114c4f
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 10:42]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-16 Sat 10:42]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: رحلة الجنوب 2005
* عادل عبد الواحد سيد، إدارة البحث الجنائي، أسوان
* ملازم أول، رقم الشرطة 12023، هاني محمد ابراهيم، قيد رقم231 4س30
* “شفتوا الحكم المصري"، “تبقى انت أكيد في مصر"، في القسم الساعة 1730.
* الرائد عمر، أفضل ضابط حدود في مصر في أسوان
* “و بناء على التعليمات بتوسيع الاشتباه"
* وليد رمضان 0121001109
* وائل عباد (زرزورة)
* عوض مركب
* أوراسكم البحيرات
* دليل على بحيرة ناصر
* المول أمام كتراركت القديم في أسوان
* قضية رقم 1176/2001 جنح قسم العجوزة حصر رقم 4513/2001 حكم غيابي بجلسة 17/4/2001 الحكم شهر- تراخيص، هاني أحمد فؤاد الزرقاني، 19 شارع سليمات عبد العزيز سليمان – العجوزة
* من الساعة 1615في كمين أبو سمبل
* هشام مبارك أسوان 097308306
* مصطفى الحسن المحامي 0101016690

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 5fa22373-67e0-4d66-87b2-1b012f60d829
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 01:28]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-21 Thu 07:19]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-07 Tue 19:22]
:END:
#+title: سُورَةُ الَّرَصَاصِ الْمُتَدَفِّقِ
أَحَهَ * أَلْمْ تَرَ كَيْفَ فَعَلَ رَبُّكَ بِغَزَةٍ * أَلْمْ يُسلِّطْ عَلَيْهِمُ إِيْهُودَا وَ وَاحْدَةً مٌزَّةً * فَصَارَتْ تُلْقِيَ عَلَيْهِمُ فُوسْفُورَا مِنْ طَيْرِ حَدِيدٍ كَالِإوَّزَّةِ * فَيَحْتَرِقُونَ عِظَامَا وَ مَصَارِينَا * أَبْرِيَاءً وَ سِيَاسِيِّينَا * أَلَا أَنَّهُم ضَالٌّونَ عَلَى جَانِبَيِ الْحُدُودِ * مِنْ رَفَحٍ لِمَا بَعَدَ أَشْدٌودِ * كُلُّهُمُ بَيْنَ حَمَاسٍ وَ عَبَّاسٍ * مَاتَ حَلُّ الدَّوْلَتَيْنِ * دَوْلَةٌ وَاحِدَةٌ لِشَعْبَيْنِ * رَغْمَ شِيمُونَ وَ خَادِمِ الْحَرَمَيْنِ * وَ يَسْقُطُ يَسْقٌطٌ حٌسْنِي مُبَارَك *

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: fa84f544-ed14-4360-8587-0dd8b6b88a49
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 10:34]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-16 Sat 10:34]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: شخصيات من تاريخ المصريين في قرنين
رواية تاريخية موسوعية على نمط الموسوعة الكويتية

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 8c693463-1d43-49f6-88c9-2e5d435d870c
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 00:46]
:MODIFIED: [2009-10-22 Thu 10:12]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: عملات جديدة
النقود تأخذ قيمتها إما من:
مخزن للقيمة، كالغطاء الذهبي و الذهبي/الفضي. و هذا أمر يعيبه أن وقت الكارثة فإن الذهب لا قيمتة حقيقية له، فضحايا تسونامي مثلا لن يأكلوا ذهبا و فضة، بالإضافة إلى أن مخزون الأرض من هذين المعدنين محدود، و لذا لا يمكن إصدار النقود إلا ما لا نهاية بدون التخلي عن الغطاء المعدني، إما جزئيا أو كليا.
سلعة أو مجموعة من السلع
عملة أخرى: الجنيه المصري، و عملات أخرى كثيرة، تأخذ قيمتها من الدولار الأمريكي، و تتحدد
سلعة--أو مجموعة من السلع. أهم سلعة هي الطاقة.
هذه الأنظمة تفترض أن وجود غطاء للعملة أمر مفيد. غير أن الواقع يقول أن الاقتصاد الأمريكي مثلا حقق أكبر نمو في تاريخه في فترة رئاسة أبراهام لنكولن، و هو من حول العملة إلى fiat money لا ضامن لها إلا الدولة. لكن لم نظن أن نقود الحكومة أضمن من نقود نصدرها نحن أو من ثقة المجتمع في العملة، و في هذه الحالة العملة المجتمعية LETS. دور Ripple هو التشبيك بين تلك العملات.
"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution -- taking from the federal government their power of borrowing." -- Thomas Jefferson
The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes--Benjamin Disraeli 1844
The real truth of the matter is that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government since the days of Andrew Jackson--Franklin Roosevelt 1933
The refusal of King George III to allow the colonies to operate and honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators was probably the prime cause of the revolution--Benjamin Franklin
البنك المركزي يقرض الحكومة بفائدة. من أين تأتي النقود لتسديد الفائدة؟
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies... If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency...the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of their property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered--Thoman Jefferson
If you want to remain slaves of the bankers and pay for the costs of your own slavery, let them continue to create money and control the nation's credit--Sir Josiah Stamp
القانون مرر يومين قبل عيد الميلاد
يا أستاذ أنا موظف حكومة و حتى الرشوة ما بتكفيش.
جدتي اشترت عيد الأضحى الفائت فرخة مشوية بخمس و ثلاثين جنيها. جدتي كانت تشتري خروفا بخمس و ثلاثين جنيها.

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 4ffb9220-61c8-4633-848b-753171ed4a92
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 11:40]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-16 Sat 11:40]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: فاوست
* العلاقة بين روح الأرض و العلم المرح Gay Science
* زواج أوبيرون و تيتانيا Astronomie Domine ميراندا

13
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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: d15176bc-34b9-4b2a-af04-ffd9150e8834
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 00:01]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-28 Thu 20:50]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: قراءة في تاريخ الفكر المصري الحديث
مصر كانت تمر بمرحلة إنشاء الملكية الدستورية و إنشاء طبقة برجوازية و إمبريالية مصاحبة، و هي الآن في مرحلة شبيهة بكرومر.
أستغرب لماذا لم يعمل اسماعيل، و هو معاصر للنكولن، على تغيير النظام النقدي بطبع بنكنوت مقابل لحجم السوق تماما Greenbacks.
مثال آخر لكفاية، حركة مضادة للاستبداد الداخلي و الاستعمار الخارجي، ص75 من الجزء الثاني

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 805a1dd6-8a17-4fb8-bfa0-d82c10399c01
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 01:05]
:MODIFIED: [2009-12-31 Thu 16:48]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: كفاية استهلاك
يمتد وادي دجلة، الذي تشكل ضاحية المعادي جنوب القاهرة دلتاه، ثلاثين كيلومترا حفرتها السيول عاما بعد عام في الحجر الجيري الذي ترسبت فيه بقايا أحياء العصر الإيوسيني. الواقف في قاع المجرى الجاف للنهر الضخم يحيط به جداران يرتفعان لخمسين مترا. أعلن الوادي محمية طبيعية عام 1997 بعد جهد كبير من أسماء الحلوجي وجميعة محبي الأشجار، وذلك لتركيبه وسكانه من الغزلان والتياتل،
وادي دجلة يحتضر. فالعمران شماله على طريق القاهرة الدائري، والتحجير جنوبه في شق الثعبان، وطريق القاهرة-السخنة الجديد يقطعه مارا بالمحمية.
يستهلك العالم من 500 بليون إلى ترليون كيس في العام، أي ما يعادل مليون كيس في الدقيقة
تموت مئات ألوف الترسة البحرية، والحيتان، وثديات بحرية أخرى بعد أكل الأكياس
محمية من 22 تغطي 8% من مساحة مصر
http://www.algomhuria.net.eg/local/detail04.asp
يضم الوادى مجموعة من الكائنات الحية الحيوانية منها أنواع من الثدييات مثل :- الغزلان - التياتل - الأرانب الجبلية - الثعلب الأحمر - الفأر ريشى الذيل - البيوض - الفأر أبو شوك - الخفاش أبو ذيل الصغير وغيرها ، ومن الحشرات : الرعاش - أبو العيد - فراش النمر - أسد النمل وأنواع عديدة أخرى , كما تم تسجيل 18 نوعاَ من الزواحف . أثرت مياه الأمطار التى تتساقط من الشلالات المائية على صخور الحجر الجيرى على مر العصور حيث كونت ما يسمى دجلة كانيون الذى يشبه إلى حد ما "جراند كانيون بالولايات المتحدة الأمريكية
http://www.elakhbar.org.eg/issues/16226/0400.html
http://www.akhbarelyom.org.eg/akhbarelyom/issues/3107/1601.html
http://www.care.org.eg/Triearthalon.htm
خفافيش
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/413/li1.htm
http://www.aucegypt.edu/students/rotaract/past.htm
طتائر الكيس
Some call it the Degla Independence Day
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SaharaSafaris/message/4481
Noha Gaber ivitation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SaharaSafaris/message/4245
Noha Shoky reporting on first meeting
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SaharaSafaris/message/4309
Amr Gharbeia summarising what's going on
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SaharaSafaris/message/4350
Wadi Delga: The Message
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SaharaSafaris/message/4434
Noha Gaber piece
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SaharaSafaris/message/4443
Kamal after the cleanup
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SaharaSafaris/message/4497
Noha Gaber found her calling
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SaharaSafaris/message/4504
Nadine and trash collectors
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SaharaSafaris/message/4526
Toson telling the history of Delgla
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SaharaSafaris/message/4571
Ahmad Gomaa on burning bags
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SaharaSafaris/message/4593
Noha Gaber's piece
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SaharaSafaris/message/4443
Amr Gharbeia on law
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SaharaSafaris/message/4711
البرنامج العام
إذاعة الشرق الأوسط
شبكة الشباب والرياضة
نجوم إفإم
Nile FM
القناة الثانية
Wadi Degla's practical importance concerns its status as the closest retreat for many drained Cairens to get back to nature, only 10 minutes away from Maadi.
As for its geological value, the Wadi's significance lies in its position, and rock structure, which constitute a balanced ecosystem providing habitat, water and nutrition to 64 kinds of vegetation, 20 species of reptiles and 12 species of birds.

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 368a44d3-54e1-4e54-af28-2fed4cbcbf53
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 11:38]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-16 Sat 11:38]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: لعمرو عزت
الديمقراطية تصحيح مشاكل و ليست الحل الأمثل

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 37461ae7-8fcd-46cd-bf7d-1f28fe603868
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 09:40]
:MODIFIED: [2009-10-05 Mon]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: من أسفل إلى أعلى
ألم يحن الأوان للبشرية لتقديم وسيلة اتصال جديدة غير اللغة؟
ترى ما فائدة 30 بليون سنة إلى اللانهائي؟ و لماذا يحب؟ و لماذا يظهر حبه في هذه الصورة؟
الزمن جزء من عيوب النظرية
"وجود فكرة الكمال تثبت وجود الكمال نفسه" عالم الفكر م1 ع1 ص148
"إذا كانت التاكيونات موجودة، و أمكن اختراق مبدأ السببية، فتنتفي الحاجة إلى وجود خالق في بداية الزمكان، و يمكن رد الخلق إلى نهايته على يد الكائن الكامل هناك. و تبقى المشكلة هنا في القفزة النوعية قبل إمكان حدوث خلق الماضي.
ماذا بعد وجود الله كخالق؟ يظل عدم تدخله في الكون، و يظل صراع الإنسان معه و غيرته منه
الوجود لا متناهي - متوحد - و غير قابل للاستدلال عليه لسببين: 1. وجود الإنسان كجزء من الوجود ينفي إمكان الدراسة الموضوعية. 2. طبيعة الوجود غير قابلة للاستدلال النهائي بسبب GUT.
الإنسان في مسار التطور البيولوجي
حافة الوعي
حدود الفيزياء (حدود الحقيقة)
ثنائية الإنسان-الكون و التداخل بينهما

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 00f55acc-ebf7-41e6-9a8e-9bc27a45d3f5
:CREATED: [2009-05-16 Sat 00:04]
:MODIFIED: [2009-05-16 Sat 00:04]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: موقف اليسار من حزب الله
بينما يدرك المرء أن انتقاد المقاومة الإسلامية ليس دوره الأساسي، و لا ينبغي له أن يصطف مع السلطة ضد الإسلاميين و أن لا يختار التركيز على مناقصهم، خصوصا و أن المقاومة الإسلامية هي التي تحمل العبء الأكبر في لبنان و في فلسطين، فإن ذلك لا يعني التماهي معها في المواقف.
استطاع اليسار المصري، خصوصا في جناحه التروتسكي، تكوين موقف مركب من الإخوان المسلمين في مصر، و نشأ عن ذلك الموقف تعاون معهم في موضوعات تتلاقى فيها مصالح و اهتمامات كل من اليساريين و الإسلاميين، و هي عموما موضوعات تتعلق بالحقوق السياسية و المدنية، في موقف صيغ في شعار "أحيانا مع الإخوان؛ دائما ضد الدولة"، و هو موقف أثار الكثير من الجدل في دوائر اليسار--خصوصا أن ذلك التعاون نادرا ما كان مفيدا لليسار و أحيانا compromising--و إن بدأ يخفت مع صعود حركة الاحتجاج الاجتماعي، و وجود فرصة لعمل على الأرض، فيبدو للناظر اليوم أن الموقف من الإسلاميين في مصر--بل و وجود الإسلاميين أنفسهم--أقل الحاحا و أكثر انفصالا عن ما هو مهم و ملح من أي وقت قريب مضى.
بينما لم يكن الوقت مناسبا أثناء حرب إسرائيل على لبنان--و هو كان أيضا وقتا دار فيه جدل كثير حول الحرب و حزب الله--صار من الملائم الآن تكوين موقف مركب من المقاومة الإسلامية، بما فيها حزب الله و دوره في أحداث لبنان مؤخرا، مشابه للموقف المركب و الناضج تجاه الإسلاميين داخل مصر، و ذات الشيء ينسحب على حماس في غزة.

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 00a30854-c8db-4b09-b0bf-d1cbdb6e5e36
:CREATED: [2009-06-04 Thu 13:16]
:MODIFIED: [2009-06-04 Thu 13:16]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: النظام المصرفي: نعبي الشمس في قزايز!
كان رداء [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toga][توجا]] و الحزام و الصندل الجيد مما يلبسه علية القوم في روما القديمة عندما كانت من كبريات حواضر العالم يكلف مشتريه أونصة واحدة من الذهب. اليوم، أي بعد ما يزيد على ألفي عام، تكلف حلة و حزام و حذاء جيد في واشنطن أو نيويورك، حاضرة عالم اليوم، تسعمائة دولار مثلا--يدفعها [[http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A2%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%86_%D8%AC%D8%B1%D9%8A%D9%86%D8%B3%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%86][ألان جرينسبان]] من ماله الخاص، و هو كم من البنكنوت يمكن أن نشتري به وزنا من الذهب يبلغ أونصة واحدة . هل التضخم ضروري؟ ما هو البنكنوت، و لم ظهر، و كيف تغير؟
تاريخيا، و إلى اليوم في بعض الحالات، استعمل الناس المعادن النفيسة، خصوصا الذهب و الفضة، كمخازن للقيمة، بالإضافة لأشياء أخرى: القواقع؛ الزجاج الملون... و على الرغم من أن الذهب حقيقة لا قيمة له، فهو لا يشبع و لا يكسي، إلا أنه مقبول في العالم بأسره مخزنا أساسيا للقيمة، و بالتالي مقياسا لقيم الأشياء الأخرى، أي نقودا تشير إلى قيمة محتملة، و تسهل التجارة في السلع و الخدمات.
إلا أن التصرف في الذهب و العملات الأخرى أمر مرهق، فالذهب معدن ثقيل و هو عرضة للسرقة، و بالتالي يتطلب اهتماما و حراسة تخصصت في توفيرها المصارف، و أتت معها درجة أخرى من تجريد القيمة هي النقود الورقية. النقود الورقية في أصلها صكوك، و منها الكلمة اللاتينية التي أعدنا استيرادها "شيك". هي تعهد قانوني برد القيمة التي يحملها الصك ذهبا. صرنا نترك ذهبنا في المصارف التي تعطينا نقودا ورقية نتداولها فيما بيننا لأنها تشير إلى ذهب يشير إلى احتمال قيمة حقيقة في صورة سلع و خدمات نافعة. تداول الصكوك مبني تاريخيا على التزام قانوني بصرفها ذهبا من المصارف.
أي مصرفي يحترم هدفه في تعظيم أرباحه سيدرك سريعا جدا أن بإمكانه خلق نقود ورقية--يتداولها الناس في صورة بنكنوت و شيكات ورقية--حتى لو لم يكن عنده غطاء ذهبي لها، فالخبرة توضح أن نسبة ضئيلة جدا من الناس سترغب في صرف نقودها ذهبا في ذات الوقت. كل ما عليه هو أن لا تتجاوز أضعاف النقود المخلوقة من لا شيء حدا معينا كي لا يشعر الناس بضعف الثقة في إمكان صرف أموالهم، و تنهار الثقة في المصرف.
و هكذا، بدأت المصارف تعمل على خلق الائتمان من لا شيء. تصور نفسك تطلب قرضا من البنك لتمويل شراء سيارة أو عقار ما. كل ما على المصرف أن يقوم به هو أن يقيد في دفاتره أنه قد أضاف إلى حسابك كمية من المال دون أي يخصمها من أي مكان آخر، و هو بالتالي يخلق النقود من لا شيء. هذا أمر لا يقتصر على البنوك المركزية، بل يتعداها إلى كل البنوك التجارية و الاستثمارية.
دلت خبرة الائتمان أنه من الحكمة وجود حد ما من الأصول التي تغطي جزءا من القروض، و هو حد قدرته [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_Committee_on_Banking_Supervision][لجنة بازل]] ب10%. إذا كان رأس مال المصرف ألفا ، فإنه سيقرض عشرة آلاف مستخدما ذلك الغطاء. بعض البنوك و البلاد لا تلتزم بمعايير بازل تلك، و تقرض ثلاثين ألفا لكل ألف. لكن تعقيد الأمور يتعدى ذلك.
من يقترضون النقود لا يصرفونها كلها أوراقا، بل يتركون أغلبها في حساباتهم أو يدخلون في تعاملات بدون بنكنوت--في ذات المصرف أو في مصارف أخرى، لا فارق. تعامل هذه التحويلات كأنها إيداعات جديدة مضمونة ضمان الألف الأولى، و بتالي يستخدمها المصرف كغطاء لمزيد من الإقراض، و هكذا. نظريا، إذا التزمت المصارف بمعيار بازل--، يصير بإمكان النظام المصرفي أن يستخدمها لإقراض ما يقارب التسعين ألفا: حوالي تسعين مرة قدر رأس المال الذي يفترض أنه تساوي ذهبا في مكان ما.
كل هذا غريب و لكنه لا يزال معقولا، إلا أنه ليس كل شيء، فهناك خطوة أخرى تحول المصارف التقليدية--بما فيها البنوك المركزية التقليدية--إلى البنوك الحديثة.
الواقع أن بريطانيا بدأت في العام 1931 التخلي عن [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard][قاعدة الذهب]] (مقابلة البنكنوت بغطاء حقيقي من المعدن النفيس)، و هي نزعة أنهتها الولايات المتحدة بتخليها هي الأخرى عن أي غطاء حقيقي لنقودها في 1971. كان الغطاء الذهبي الجزئي الذي كان يوفر لعملاتها قدرا محدودا من الاستقرار--عشر استقرار، اذا اعتبرنا أن الغطاء الذهبي الكامل يساوي الاستقرار الكامل. أنا شخصيا لا أرى فائدة للذهب تدعو لاعتباره مخزنا للقيمة.
كل عملات اليوم لا تغطيها إلا سلطة القانون و الشرطة، و كثير من دول العالم تجرم رفض قبول البنكنوت التي تصدره كوسيلة إبراء للذمة.
و على الرغم من غرابة هذا الموقف بحد ذاته، فإن علاقة الدولة بالبنوك أغرب و أغرب.
الدولة نظام سيء، و لأنها نظام سيء فهي تخسر الأموال. تمول الحكومة عجز موازنتها بالاقتراض، فهي تصدر أذون الخزانة و تطرحها في السوق، على وعد أن ترد قيمتها حال الطلب.
في الظروف الطبيعية، يفترض بالناس أن يشتروا أذون الخزانة ليقرضوا الحكومة، و يحصلوا على عائد قليل بالمقارنة بعائد الاستثمار المباشر، إلا أنه مضمون تماما كمدى ثقتنا بالحكومة، و من لا يثق في الحكومة؟
و لأن الحكومة تقوم بأي إنتاج حقيقي، وبالتالي لا تستطيع الوفاء بديونها للناس، يوجد البنك المركزي لينقذ الحكومة. يشتري البنك المركزي كميات كبيرة من أذون الخزانة، و يسدد الثمن بنقود يخلقها من لا شيء، فالبنك المركزي صاحب احتكار طبع النقود بسلطة قانون الدولة. أي أن البنك المركزي يقرض الحكومة، التي هي مفوضة من الناس لإدارة شؤونهم و أموالهم العامة، و يحصل على ذلك فائدة. المحصلة هي أن هناك كيانا قانونيا أنشأته الدولة، يحصل فوائد على الأموال التي يقرضها لعين تلك الدولة. تمول الدولة القروض و الفوائد من حصيلتها من الضرائب التي تفرضها على الناس--بقوة القانون و الشرطة أيضا--و من موارد أخرى.
الأغرب من كل ما سبق هو أن النظام المصرفي يخلق الأموال التي تشكل أصل الدين، لكنها لا تخلق الأموال التي تشكل فوائد الدين. من أين يفترض أن تأتي تلك؟
نتيجة هذا هو أن أساس نظام الائتمان يعتمد على عدم استطاعة كل المدينين الوفاء بديونهم. فكم النقود الكلي لا يكفي لسداد أصل و فائدة الديون لكل الناس. تفليس البعض أمر حتمي. و في الديون طويلة الأجل--كالدين العام للحكومات و الرهون العقارية مثلا--، يتعدى إجمالي الفوائد أصل الدين بكثير. لن تزيد النقود لسداد بعض تلك الديون إلا بمزيد من الديون.
نتيجة النظام المصرفي القائم على الائتمان و احتكار إصدار النقود هو أنه يسحب الثروة من الناس إلى المصرفيين، إما مباشرة من خلال تعامل الناس مع البنوك، أو عن طريق تمويل الناس للقروض التي تحصل حكوماتهم عليها من البنوك المركزية، أو من خلال زيادة الحكومة البنك المركزي للمعروض من النقود من لا شيء، مما يخلق التضخم الذي نتصوره زيادة في الأسعار، في حين أن التضخم هو إثراء الأغنى على حساب الأفقر.
#+begin_quote
هذا هو نظامنا النقدي. إذا لم يكن هناك دين، لن تكون هناك نقود
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriner_S._Eccles][مارينر إس. إكلس]] -- رئيس مجلس الاحتياطي الفيدرالي
#+end_quote
<embed id="VideoPlayback" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=5232639329002339531&hl=en&fs=true" style="width:400px;height:326px" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"> </embed>

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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 730c034f-2417-47a5-80f1-a389b2da6603
:CREATED: [2009-06-04 Thu 11:24]
:MODIFIED: [2011-06-27 Mon 13:33]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: جنون الاضطهاد
ألقيت نظرة على الطرق التي يصل بها القراء إلى مدونتي. يصل الناس إلى الحوليات من جوجل باستخدام كلمات بحث كـ"يوم الشجرة" (طبيعي)؛ "موضوع حلو" (شيء مفرح)؛ "أسرار حسني مبارك" (وقَّف عندك!)
لاحظت أيضا منذ أسبوعين أو ثلاثة مضت أن أيا من المواقع التي عناوينها تبدأ باسم النطاق الذي أملكه لا تعمل داخل مصر. فقط خارجها
تذكرت الآن يحيا الزعيم وهو يضحك على من لا يؤمنون بنظرية المؤامرة.

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* يحيا الزعيم
:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 39a0b0b7-a285-4dd5-bfbc-c98e9fe3cb6a
:CREATED: [2009-06-04 11:34:28]
:CATEGORY: Clippings
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 19:22:46-0500]
:MODIFIED: [2010-04-15 07:49:11]
:END:
يحيا الزعيم
في ليلة من ليالي مايو 2006، جلست أتأمل حولي محاولا تجاهل بهاء الذي يحاول هو أيضا أن يخفي توتره بإزعاج أكبر عدد من المشاركين في النوم على الرصيف المقابل لنادي القضاة، أو كلهم إن استطاع.
نظرا لأن النعمة فاقت حدها
ولأننا مش قدها
ولأن فعلاً إنجازاتك
فوق طاقتنا نعدها
ولأننا غرقنا فى جمايل
مستحيل حنردها
نستحلفك.......نسترحمك
نستعطفك......نستكرمك
ترحمنا من طلعة جنابك
حبتين
عايزين نجرب خلقة تانية
ولو يومين
إسمع بقى
إحنا زهقنا من النعيم
ونفسنا فى يومين شقا
عايزين نجرب الإضطهاد
ونعوم ونغرق فى الفساد
بينى وبينك حضرتك
دا شعب فقرى مايستحقش جنتك
أنا عارف إنه شعب ماينفعوش
إلا شارون وبلير وبوش
عايز يجرب الإمتهان
ويعيش عميل للأمريكان
بيمد "غازُه" لإسرائيل
ويومين كمان ويمد النيل
أهو يعنى نشرب ميه واحدة
ندوب فى بعض
ماء وماء وماء
ونفض سيرة الإنتماء
وبلاها نعرة وطنطنة
وتبقى البلاد "مستوطنة"
متسلطنة ومتسرطنة
إيه اللى خدناه م الكرامة والإباء
حبة خطب وكلام...كلام
إحنا راهننا على النظام
ورضينا بخيار السلام
خيار حنسد عين الشمس بيه
علشان مايطلعش النهار
ويطلع لمين؟
حبة معارضة مغرضين؟
وحسب بيان السلطة
شلة مأجورين؟
ياعم فضك سيرة
وإرضى بقسمتك
دا شعب مش فاهم أكيد
يالا أُطرده من رحمتك
وإن كنت غاوى الحكم
خليك مطرحك
حاغطس وأقب وأعود
بشعب يريحك
راضى وعمره مايجرحك
أخرس وما بيسمعش
وأعميلك عينيه
مش كل قرش يبص فيه
مايقولش لأه، وفين، وليه
يضرب ينفض فى السليم
وعلى الصراط المستقيم
كل اللى يعرف ينطقه
عاش الزعيم
يحيا الزعيم
مين ال كاتب البتاعة دي يا بهاء؟
ما اعرفش. بس حلوة

43
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* أغنية التعيين
:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 48c9894f-1a08-4fb6-9495-bb4644a0f3c6
:CREATED: [2009-07-27 Mon 17:12]
:MODIFIED: [2009-08-01 Sat 19:42]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
مربوط على الدرجة الخامسة، و الناس درجات، و مرشح آخد السادسة، غير العلاوات. ما اعرفش لا كدا و لا كدا و لا أروح ببَّات pubs.
#+begin_src elisp
(defun my/org-move-entry-to-daily-notes ()
"Move the current org-mode headline to the daily notes file based on its :CREATED: property."
(interactive)
(let*
((created-prop (org-entry-get nil "CREATED"))
(created-date (when created-prop
(org-parse-time-string created-prop)))
(year (nth 5 created-date)) ; Extract year (6th element)
(month (nth 4 created-date)) ; Extract month (5th element)
(day (nth 3 created-date)) ; Extract day (4th element)
(target-date (format "%04d-%02d-%02d" year month day)) ; Format date string
(target-file (org-roam-dailies-goto target-date))
)
(when target-file
(org-cut-subtree)
(find-file target-file)
(goto-char (point-max))
(unless (bolp) (newline))
(org-paste-subtree)
)
)
)
#+end_src
#+begin_src elisp
(let*
((created-date "2009-07-27")
(org-roam-dailies-capture-date created-date)
)
)
#+end_src

17
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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: bef73c27-2689-4ac3-b1f0-ec98b60c3496
:CREATED: [2009-08-03 Mon 13:29]
:MODIFIED: [2009-12-31 Thu 16:29]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: نهاية المدونات
أواسط 2005، قام ميلاد يعقوب، و هو الدارس لمنهجية البحث و حينئذ طالب الدكتوراة، بأول دراسة عن مجتمع المدونات المصرية الناشئ وقتها. أتذكر أنني أجبت عن سؤاله إن كنت أرى نفسي أدون بعد خمس سنوات بالإيجاب. لا زلت فعلا أكتب و أتابع ما ينشر، و إن ليس بالنشاط نفسه.
كان ذلك وقتا لا نزال نستقر فيه على تسمية المدونات، و هي و إن كانت تسمية ذكية، إلا أنها في رأيي في مصيرها إلى الانقراض كمصطلحات أخرى كثيرة لا تدل على شيء بعينه. فما هي المدونة فعلا؟ أي تعريف يتعلق بنوع المحتوى (المساحة الشخصية؛ الخواطر؛ الصحافة الشعبية و مثل هذا الهلام) هو غير محدد، و أي تعريف تقني يشمل كل المحتوى المنشور بنظم إدارة المحتوى (و التي يتسع مفهومها هي أيضا كما سنرى). [[http://ruapl.org][برمجية]] مثل التي أستخدمها للنشر هنا مثلا يستخدمها آخرون في الصحف و المنظمات غير الحكومية و الشركات و المنتديات و الشبكات الاجتماعية و لأغراض أخرى. طال الزمن أم قصر، سينحسر استخدامنا للفظة المدونة، أما المحتوى فهو باق. بعد خمس سنوات، بإمكاني الآن القول أن هذا المكان لن يظل مدونة.
عندما كانت المدونات هي المحتوى المنشور بنظم إدارة محتوى يستخدمها غالبا شخص واحد تظهر فيها التدوينات متربة تنازليا زمنيا، و تتيح للقراء التعليق و متابعة أحدث المحتوى المنشور باستخدام التلقيمات، كان الأمر بسيطا. اليوم، تتداخل وظائف المدونات شيئا فشيئا مع الشبكات الاجتماعية.
وجودي على فايسبوك ضئيل جدا http://facebook.com/amr.gharbeia
نمو الشبكات الاجتماعية العامة مقارنة بالشبكات الاجتماعية المتخصصة: المدونات؛ يوتيوب؛ فلكر؛ و قريبا تويتر...

33
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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 6a8e98d1-af56-41fb-b1a1-37a194b93420
:CREATED: [2009-09-08 Tue 17:47]
:MODIFIED: [2010-10-13 Wed 08:30]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: شبكات حرة لمجتمع حر
The Freesoftware model will triumph in all software: computer programme software, music software, news software, books software, and energy software. It is when we reach the energy layer that Capitalism will be really confronted.
Is energy software? No, if I use one watt of energy, you cannot use the same watt.
Mobile-lization.
* للإعلام و الاتصالات دور في مقرطة المجتمع (الفضائيات - إنترنت - المحمول)
* حتى الآن، شبكات الاتصالات تبنى بشكل مركزي و تحتاج استثمارات ضخمة، و بالتالي فعددها القليل و بنيتها الهرمية تسمح بإساءة استغلالها بسبب الفساد في الدولة و ضعف سيادة القانون
** التصنت على الاتصالات
** رفض التصريح بإنشاء الصحف و القنوات الفضائية
** أسعار الاتصالات
* ميزات شبكات الاتصال الموزعة
** تتوزع فيها تكلفة الاستثمار
** تعمل بلا حاجة لتنسيق مركزي
** تتمتع بأداء أفضل لأنها لا يمكن لها أن تنهار بالكامل
** لا تمكن السيطرة عليها إداريا لأن بنيتها "شبكية" و ليست "هرمية".
* بإمكان شبكة اتصالات موزعة أن تضمن:
** شبكة هاتفVoice Over IP على مستوى الحي تتصل مع شبكات أخرى. ستتيح تلك الشبكة إجراء مكالمات هاتفية مجانية (كأي سنترال داخلي في شركة مثلا) من خلال الحواسيب أو الهواتف الذكية (اي هاتف نوكيا من سلسلتي E أو N) مثلا، أو من خلال هواتف رقمية ثابتة.
** النشر: بث صوتي و تليفزيوني و استضافة مواقع محلية و استقبال تلك الخدمات من أي جهاز هاتف أو حاسوب متصل بالشبكة.
** تشارك في الملفات: مكتبة فيديو و صوت مشتركة بين كل أطراف الشبكة
** تشارك في الربط لإنترنت: بإمكان أي عقدة متصلة بإنترنت في الشبكة المحلية أن تشرك بقية الشبكة في جزء أو كل من عرض نطاق وصلتها في إنترنت. نتيجة حدوث ذلك في عدد من العقد في الشبكة هي إتاحة وصول لإنترنت في كل بقعة تصل لها الشبكة المحلية
** إتاحة الفرصة لأنشطة الاقتصادية: بإمكان عقد في الشبكة أن تقدم أيا من الخدمات أعلاه بهدف الربح (اتصالات دولية رخيصة؛ محتوى صوتي و فيديو بمقابل؛ إتصال لاسلكي بإنترنت مشابه "للوصلة". بإمكان الشبكة أن تجمع بين الأفراد و الشركات و التعاونيات، على أن تكون بنية الشبكة نفسها مشاعا.
بناء شبكة محلية هو نشاط يقوي العلاقات في الحي و يخلق هدفا مشتركا بين أفراده

19
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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 6b99a749-f954-422b-9cb9-73b9dcd0b1d3
:CREATED: [2009-09-25 Fri 18:43]
:MODIFIED: [2009-09-25 Fri 18:55]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: Nuclear argument
Alright, my usual rant about nuclear power/arms. Any reasonable person for nukes needs to argue for the following:
1. Earth has enough nuclear fuel to upscale production to good percentage of world consumption, that we won't burn all fuel in a few years and have to go back to fossil and renewables
2. Nuclear power is cheaper than mass scale renewables, even discounting nuclear environmental cost. Trends: Which energies are growing cheaper, and which more expensive?
3. That it is better if we destroy the entire world that if they do. Nuclear war damage is the only thing to outlast a 370 ppm Climate Change damage
4. That's no argument for proliferation. Math proves nuclear weapons encourage their use. Is better if 'we' destroy the entire world that if they do (Do not count me in)
Some sense of scale and urgency as well: Nuclear war damage is the only thing to outlast a 370 ppm Climate Change damage

31
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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 65bbb0f7-7efd-401c-ac4b-a7464b1c7799
:CREATED: [2009-09-30 Wed 18:24]
:MODIFIED: [2009-10-05 Mon 01:55]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
National Liberation Movements
Formulating positions from National Liberation Movements
Deciding positions from national liberation movements is a controversial issue that results in a schism among socialist, perhaps more since the rise of Religious Right in dominantly-Muslim countries. Does supporting nationalism benefit the socialist cause? Are there different kinds of national liberation movements (either before taking power, or during their reign). Does all anti-imperialism liberation benefit the socialist cause? What are the differences between fascist, Islamist, 'liberal', and leftish movements and regimes? What are the criteria upon which socialists should formulate their positions from national liberation movements?
Our positions from national liberation movements should be the result of the working of different criteria:
1. Relation to the people it claims to represent. Position on the compass (left/right * authoritarian/anti-authoritarian): The closer the movement is to us on the Political Compass, the more suitable it is to support
2. Relation to imperialism: the more anti-Imperialist the movement is, the more suitable it is to support. Is this any different than the more imperialism is against the national liberation movement? Anti-imperial national liberation movements are anti-imperial until they are the new
imperialism. Are there categorical differences between North nationalism (and fascism) and South nationalism, or are they on the same industrialisation continuum?
3. Relation to us: we are under no pressure to formulate a position from the Tamil movement or from Islamists in the Philippines as we are from Islamists in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. A concern here is that our different positions of two similar national liberation movements means that we are populist and utilitarian, essentially an anti-socialist position. Another concern of populism and utilitarianism is that socialists are internationalists. The proper socialist rationale here should be the proper socialist rationale there.
How we can influence the national liberation movement, and how the movement can influence us
4. Trajectory: how the movement is developing, and if this trajectory can be beneficial to a socialist agenda.
سامح نجيب في 2006: في مثل هذه الحالات على اليسار المناضل أن يدخل في عمل مشترك مع الإخوان، ولكن هذا العمل المشترك لا يجعلنا نتوقف للحظة عن نقد موقف الإخوان عندما يهادنون من جديد أو عندما يحرفون مسار المعركة نحو قضايا أخلاقية و رجعية. والعمل المشترك لا يجعلنا نتنازل ولو للحظة واحدة عن رايتنا المستقلة.
استطاع اليسار المصري، خصوصا في جناحه التروتسكي، تكوين موقف مركب من الإخوان المسلمين في مصر، و نشأ عن ذلك الموقف تعاون معهم في موضوعات تتلاقى فيها مصالح و اهتمامات كل من اليساريين و الإسلاميين، و هي عموما موضوعات تتعلق بالحقوق السياسية و المدنية، في موقف صيغ في شعار "أحيانا مع الإخوان؛ دائما ضد الدولة"، و هو موقف أثار الكثير من الجدل في دوائر اليسار--خصوصا أن ذلك التعاون نادرا ما كان مفيدا لليسار و أحيانا compromising--و إن بدأ يخفت مع صعود حركة الاحتجاج الاجتماعي، و وجود فرصة لعمل على الأرض، فيبدو للناظر اليوم أن الموقف من الإسلاميين في مصر--بل و وجود الإسلاميين أنفسهم--أقل الحاحا و أكثر انفصالا عن ما هو مهم و ملح من أي وقت قريب مضى.

19
1_thinking/notes/2009-10-01-The-Last-Industrial-Country.org Normal file
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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 0632f4b5-4a95-4949-bd91-8b93b0310075
:CREATED: [2009-10-01 Thu 16:23]
:MODIFIED: [2009-10-01 Thu 17:48]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: The Last Industrial Country
Egypt has been trying to join the Global North since 1805
Egypt is the most recent country to join the Newly Industrialised Countries, merging with China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, the G8 to form G14.
Egypt enters its demographic window of opportunity 2030-2050
An industrialised Egypt needs to be 7-12 million people to be sustainable, but Egypt will peak at 121 million. The difference and climate change is fuel for social change. Climate change will kick in 2040 and it will be impossible for any other country to industrialise
In the end, however, of all the industrialised countries, Russia, UK, Canada and Northern Europe will be competitive, because of their position near the Arctic
To Lobna: Remember when I said that the developed countries will not benefit from web activism, and so the poor countries? I had a few countries in mind, and they are all NICs except Egypt and Iran

10
1_thinking/notes/2009-10-01-نقابات_الصحفيين.org Normal file
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:PROPERTIES:
:ID: 42c0fa0c-3675-439c-a826-800da0d381a7
:CREATED: [2009-10-01 Thu 01:38]
:MODIFIED: [2009-10-01 Thu 01:39]
:IMPORTED: [2023-02-08 Wed 19:22]
:END:
#+title: نقابات الصحفيين
ينبغي على نقابات الصحفيين أن تدعم الصحافة و لا تدعم الصحف. يشترك المجتمع في نقابات تدعم الصحافيين المستقلين و الموظفين بما يجعلهم يعملون باستقلال عن سلطة ناشري الصحف

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