I used to be Afraid of the Dark

My older brother slept in a pitch black room.  I idolized him for that because I was afraid of the dark.  I idolized him enough to eventually develop the habit myself. Now I love the dark.  There are a couple ideas that helped me make the transition, and I want to help you make it too, though not in a literal sense.

One idea is that a lack of light is a disadvantage to a victim just as much as it is a disadvantage to an attacker.  I wasn't really afraid of real attackers though.

I was afraid of ghosts and wraiths and poltergeists.  No physical evidence has ever been produced showing that something supernatural was responsible for any kind of suffering.  I eventually mastered something I call "apophatic" reasoning, which is a term I got from Mark Passio.  The lack of physical evidence for supernatural causes of human suffering is powerful when you understand how quickly and forcefully such evidence would spread.

Supernatural causes, philosophically, are impossible.  "Supernatural" means beyond the nature of the universe.  "Cause" identifies a relationship in the nature of the universe.  Supernatural, philosophically, is a euphemism for "I don't know enough."  Roll a die and it will land on a number.  Can you predict the number?  No, you can't, not if you roll it properly, and it's balanced.  That doesn't make the number supernatural.  Maybe you'll roll three sixes in a row.  That also does not make it supernatural.  If you continue rolling sixes and you cannot get the die to land on another number, then you can pretend it's supernatural, but any decent physicist will offer to analyze your die to see if it's loaded.  Perhaps he will not find the reason.  Would you then call it supernatural?

I wouldn't.  To give up the hunt for the reason your die lands only on the number six is to abandon one of the best faculties human beings have, reason.  It takes a lot of humility to study such a die for weeks and continually admit that you're still "in the dark" about why it always lands on the same number.  Humility is valuable.  It stops us from believing fairy tales.

The non-literal sense in which I wish to help you not to be afraid of the dark is to encourage you to keep looking.  Whatever it is that makes the die always land on six is a metaphor for how we improve the world.  Most people give up, and that's a metaphor for accepting fake authority, also known as relying on government.  When authority is not fake, it does not use punishment.  It has no use for punishment.  It even encourages the kind of thing that fake authority punishes, because that kind of thing (going against the advice of authority) provides great learning experiences.

Governments and police are fake authorities, which is why they punish people for breaking their laws.  A law is a discovery about how the universe works.  Watch a dog with a bone.  If another creature approaches, the dog growls, "This is my bone.  Get away or I'll bite you."  Humans, well, sane humans, do this too.  Perhaps we don't bite (or growl), but we demand that our property rights be respected.  At least we make that demand to other humans whom we view as equals.  Some of us don't make that demand to fake authorities, and that is because we are, figuratively, afraid of the dark.

When we speak truth to power, we are insisting that a balanced die will land on random sides when "rolled properly," no matter how difficult it is to show why a particular die doesn't have this characteristic.  After listening to some lectures on physics by a guy name David Harriman, I blame Immanuel Kant for the idea that it makes sense to give up on finding a reason for the unexpected behavior of the die.  I also lay part of the blame on him for the legitimacy of fake authority.

People like Victoria Roberts and Nancy G Edmunds use fake authority to hurt people, either because they derive some benefit from it or because they don't know any better.  Either way, I wish I were closer to them (geographically) so that I could confront one or both of them.  I'm not afraid of the dark any more.

My MENSA Bio

I joined Mensa a few months ago.  I found a place where members can enter a bio, so here's what I put:

I have always wanted to be a teacher.  I went to UCSD's Teach Education Program (TEP) for one year and decided that there was too much red tape.  Years later, I read John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education, and then a few years after that, listened to his Ultimate History Lesson.  The knowledge I gained that way vindicated my abandonment of the TEP.
I ended up being a teacher anyway, though not in any official capacity.  I learn software (or write software) and then teach others how it works and how it fails.  I learned about bitcoin and now I explain it to anyone who is interested.  I buy bitcoin from those who need to sell it and sell it to those who need to buy it.

Jeff Schmidt wrote a book called "Disciplined Minds" in which he points out that most people who go through a higher education curriculum to get a degree, doctorate, or other credential start out with a view to doing the world some good, but the system through which they get that piece of paper degrades that view, slowly (though he doesn't say so, not inexorably) replacing that view with the brass ring of monetary gain, peer approval, and public stature.  I was lucky that I chose the humble path of becoming a teacher, wherein this trend is more obvious.  Had I pursued math, physics, chemistry, or something as complex (and continued living off my parents and inheritance, and perhaps even putting myself in debt), I imagine it would have taken me longer to feel this change.

As a software engineer after the dotcom bust, my ideals were intact and I started looking for tools that would leverage the Internet in the advancement of mankind.  The increasing density of communication provided by the Internet seemed to offer an excellent opportunity for individuals with great ideas to have their voices heard.  I researched the idea of what is now known as "crowdsourcing" the search for quality writing.  A friend of mine suggested taking a look at slashdot, since it allowed members to register their opinion of comments on news stories in a way the machine could use to identify what the group liked best.  On that site, I learned about Condorcet Voting, so I looked for a site that was using it and didn't find any.

I then started litmocracy.com.  With my writing site, I slowly learned something which is now, finally, gaining traction: There is rarely a single "best" choice for a large group, whether we're talking about candidates, pieces of writing, or things to do.  The ideal way to handle it is to allow the large group to break into smaller groups of people who share the same sensitivities.  That means politics is no good.

My friend Brian Gladish challenged me on using the Condorcet Method to elect public officials, pointing out that any political election involves forcing the minority to submit to decisions made by someone they don't agree with.  It's a lesson running Litmocracy for five years drove home for me.  During that time, I followed Brian's libertarian thinking to its natural conclusion, which is voluntaryism.  Now I am the volunteer webmaster for a site that existed for many years before I ever heard of it, called voluntaryist.com.

School was designed, as Gatto's work shows conclusively, to remove the unique features of children that make them difficult to control, but excellent and conscientious adults.  It's the same thing Schmidt was talking about: normalize and regulate the individual so that all the individuals going in come out roughly the same, prepared to do whatever an authority figure tells them to do.  Stanley Milgram studied that too, and found that it's a horrible scourge to the human race, but subtle enough that most people let it go.  Lord Acton put it this way: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."  J.R.R. Tolkien turned it into a long saga in which two basically innocent people let it ultimately drag them into a pit of lava.

Tolkien's tale offers us hope.  The reason they both fell into that lava was because one of them knew that's where the ring belonged.  So who am I?  What am I?  I am, to most people, a meat suit, kind, intelligent, hopeful, cynical about authority, but optimistic about normal human beings.  To myself, I am the spirit of disclosure, an old soul working on a problem "The One" created for itself, which is this: How quickly can consciousness make an otherwise mechanistic universe identify and then maximize and realize the potential for joy?  I shine light in dark places, and encourage others to follow suit.

Welcome to the Uber Economy

This came to me today through a comment on a post at liberty.me.  The comment was made by a friend of mine who calls himself Ned.  Here is his comment:

Here are some leads a friend sent me that reveal a number of ways of avoiding the command and control authorities of centralization. Some are already covered in David's fine essay, but a few may be new to denizens of Liberty.me, at least they were new to me.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/walden-reports/Manifesto-for-the-Uber-Economy.pdf

Free Your Mind

Dave.

Toward Voluntary Justice

I have been mulling over the possibility of building a voluntaryist justice system of sorts.  It is already in place in some form, but it is neither recognized nor coherent.  I can see the end result pretty clearly in my head: non-governmental folks flood an area with information about a specific person.  That specific person would be a "normal" state agent on whose authority an atrocity was perpetrated, as well as those agents who obeyed the authority and participated in the atrocity.

The easiest way to make this (already existing) "system" more coherent is simply by getting more people to recognize it. Beyond that, information about the locations of atrocious authorities will give those with awareness and information the motivation to saturate the atrocious authority's locale with the information about their atrocious behavior.

A few examples of atrocious behavior are: Judge Nancy Edmunds' attempt to suborn perjury from Doreen Hendrickson, and Judge Victoria Roberts' handling of Doreen's trial for refusing ("contempt of court") in Eastern Michigan, the imprisonment of Ross Ulbricht, or choose any prisoner who is in jail for trafficking in marijuana.

I wanted to be a teacher when I was young, and I have grown up to be one.  I write software, and then I have to teach people how to use it.  Or I figure out how already-written software works, and teach that.  But mostly what I teach is that there are horrible people doing horrible things.  Very few people like to learn that, and so I don't find a lot of success except among those who are already aware.

Perhaps you can help me spread the ideas behind my voluntaryist justice system by helping me find a better analogy than the very disturbing one I started using today:  No one likes to see a person killing infants.  It's disturbing and we don't like to think about it.  But when there is a person doing that, everyone should know, and that person should be kept away from infants.  I'm the guy who points out this murderer and says "Look!  That guy is killing infants!"  That's what I teach: There are people doing horrible things.  The more of us who know about it, the less it will happen.

In a room full of horrible and ugly things, one may wish to keep the lights off. Not I, for I prefer to see and avoid or rectify such ugliness in the world where I live. Let's turn on the bright lights in the ugly places. How do I inspire others to join me?

Proposed Talks in San Diego

I have proposed to give two talks to Mensa in San Diego this Summer.  Following are the details.  Feel free to contact me if any of this stuff interests you.  I think that interest in these things is growing because 1) they are important, and 2) interest in them is not yet high enough.

1. Anonymity: The Dangers and Benefits of Keeping Secrets

Modern technology makes it possible to have relationships with people through thin media like texting, emailing, telephone calls, and interactions through the Internet. These media allow individuals to misrepresent themselves. This, however, is not a modern problem. Trust has been getting violated since human beings learned to communicate, and this presentation explores the growing awareness of it.

The "Delphi Technique" will be described, as well as common political illusions and demagoguery as well as the problems that can be created by these things. We will discuss the solutions available to those participating in the growing awareness of them and invite questions for further pondering in an open dialog.

The Mensa AG Proposal process will be used as an example of a system that relies on some trust, but takes great risk in breaking that trust if it chooses to do so. As a microcosm of the larger society in which it exists, we will explore how the increasing density of peer-to-peer communications helpfully magnifies that risk, not just for Mensa, but for all systems exploiting the human tendency to trust.

2. Why is Bitcoin Still Around?

In 2009, something called a "bitcoin" appeared and someone got ten thousand of them for buying a pizza. At that point, the market capitalization of bitcoin was about the value of a large pizza. It has since died and risen again about 100 times and now has a market capitalization around six billion dollars.

Following are more questions than there will be time to answer, but audience participation always helps with that problem: What is bitcoin? How does one use bitcoin? How does a bitcoin get created? Who invented bitcoin? Are bitcoins anonymous? Who controls how bitcoin works? Isn't bitcoin a work in progress? What is a block? Does the block size matter? How is cryptography used in bitcoin? What is an elliptic curve? What's a "vanity address"? What backs bitcoin? How can I buy or sell bitcoin? What happened with MtGOX? Does bitcoin make it harder to rule people? Does it make it harder to maintain order? Isn't bitcoin mostly used by people doing bad things? How does it threaten the existing financial system? Will inflation eventually destroy all the value in bitcoin?

After a short introduction, this presentation will be open for questions, and everything is on the table at that point. The questions presented above may not be addressed, so be prepared to ask any in which you are interested.

Notes on the Anti-Gov Movement GuideBook

Here is a magnet link (for the file-sharing software BitTorrent) for the "Anti-Gov Movement Guidebook," a pdf created in 1999 through a grant from the State Justice Institute which awards grants to "foster innovative, efficient solutions to common issues faced by all courts." The rule of man over man has some bad effects. I believe one of the worst effects it has is retarding the development of conscience in every individual.  Since common law courts enable individuals to speak truth to power, I feel it is important to publish my notes on this document.

The document suggests that the roots of "[t]he 'common law court movement,' as it has somewhat clumsily come to be called, [which] now exists in some form in every state in the country" can be traced to people who were both violent and racist.  I myself trace it (in myself) to the Magna Carta and Lysander Spooner as presented at Bill Thornton's site and The Voluntatryist.  So I think the authors of this document poisoned the well a little bit there.

The authors present "Posse ideology" as the basis of the movement toward common law courts and provide three tenets for it (apparently ignoring modern refinements). They suggest that the most important one is comprised of "justifications derived from the revelation of 'hidden history.'"  I can attest to that, although the authors' examples of "hidden history," don't match mine.

My interest in common law courts stems from Richard Grove's Project Constellation and, indeed, all the episodes of the Peace Revolution Podcast to which I have listened.  On a deeper philosophical level, Peter E. Hendrickson's work on the legitimacy of the Internal Revenue Code shows respect for the right of any group to demand compensation for giving others the privilege of using its own resources.  The U.S. Federal Government itself is an institution that provides privileges and exercises its right to collect some kind of payback. Hendrickson's work shows that this debt is improperly imposed even on those who receive no such privileges, and that the implementation of Title 26 therefore amounts to constructive fraud.  The behavior of the courts, for example the attempt by Victoria Roberts, Robert Metcalfe, Nancy G. Edmunds, and other federal employees to suborn perjury from Hendrickson's wife to cover it up, demonstrates the insidious nature of this constructive fraud, as well as its purity as a fraud.

Contrast that with the authors' examples of "hidden history": the "missing 13th amendment" or William P. Gale's recognition of the abandonment (rather than lawful repeal) of the Articles of Confederation.  Of course, this guidebook was written before Richard Grove's team of technologists was murdered in the attacks on the Word Trade Center, but apparently the Posse Comitatus group was onto something.

After introducing and bashing Posse Comitatus for a while, the document moves on to implicate the idea of "common law" in the violent racism attributed to the roots of the movement toward common law courts.  The Posse Comitatus group is still used by the authors for more bashing in case the reader sees value in the common law.  Aside from this, however, the document seems to explain the justification and value of common law quite well, even admitting that "The subversion of the legitimate common law was a long process, with many steps."

The authors rely heavily on the word "theorist," most likely to suggest that what is offered, provided, supposed, believed, or even proven or demonstrated by a "theorist" is false.  This assumption was brainwashed into the masses by the CIA through the media after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in order to dim the growing amount of light on a project that was to remain dark. In this guidebook about the movement toward common law courts, the word is leveraged using the term "common law theorist."

I am on page 14 of the 180 page document.  Like the project I started on the Bitcoin Javascript code from pointbiz, this one may or may not be continued.  I think both will have future posts, but I'm going to bed for now.  You have several links to follow if this post interests you :-).

Privatization: The Scotese Process

This can be done without the blessing or involvement of the federal government.  All land "owned" by the BLM belongs to the American people.  ANY ONE of those people is perfectly within his rights to choose a parcel and publish that its ownership can be re-designated through a "Scotese Process."

A "Scotese Process" is a commons privatization process through which all interested parties are compensated for their interest proportional to whatever amount of money they are willing to give up to keep that interest.  Here's how it works:

One or more escrow companies defines the commons (parcel of land in this case) to be privatized, and advertises its willingness to manage the process for a fee.  Interested parties are then invited to secure their interest by offering a price for the commons and pre-paying a percentage of that price to the escrow company.  Once the invitation period ends, a synchronizing process must be undertaken.

The synchronizing process requires that all escrow companies who may have defined a Scotese Process that interferes with another escrow compnay's Scotese Process work out the differences.  This can and should be an ongoing effort to eliminate all possible conflicts.  The "staking of a claim" has similar properties, whereby a claimant must define the boundaries in a way that doesn't interfere with already-defined boundaries.  The outcome of a synchronization process is one of two possibilities.  Either there is general recognition that all escrow companies have accepted the same definition of a particular commons, or there is not.  The process can (and usually will) continue until the first outcome is achieved.  On the other hand, difficult-to-define commons may cause (all) interested escrow companies to abandon their Scotese Process.

Once there is general recognition of the definition of the commons, there still may be multiple escrow companies interested in administering the privatization.  In this case, they simply compare their highest-bidders to see who wins, and each escrow company submits the required pre-payment to the others on behalf of their own winner.  In this way, a single owner emerges.

When this single owner is found, the escrow company (or companies) compute(s) the total of the bids to determine what portion of the final price each interested party will receive as compensation for their interest in the commons, by dividing that total by the interested party's bid.  The winning bidder then submits payment in full to his escrow company, and the escrow company divides the proceeds among the other bidders, and refunds their prepayments to them as well.  The entire Scotese Process goes into a public court of record so that everyone will know who the new owner of the commons is, and also see who "sold" their interest to that new owner.

Escrow companies in the synchronization process may find it worth their while to combine their efforts and normalize their processes and act as a single escrow company in this context.  There are several variables that escrow companies will need to specify in their public announcement of the Scotese Process, including the percentage of a price that must be prepaid to secure an interest, the deadline for bids, the definition of the commons to be privatized, and the fee they require for providing the escrow service (to be deducted from the final sale price before it is divided up among losing bidders).

The Scotese Process is something I invented but I have never seen it tried (beyond trivial examples in my own house).  I'm sure there are possibilities for failure, and if anyone can point them out so that I might revise the process to avoid them, that would be greatly appreciated.