for - adjacency - factor of 20 - town anywhere

for - quote - organized crime in Cape Town

quote - organized crime in Cape Town - Andre Lincoln - Caryn Dolley - (see below) - Why you don’t see it is because it’s subtle, very sophisticated and it is a massive business. - How many restaurants and clubs on these famous streets are paying protection money to criminals? It's pretty startling - And what about construction shakedowns? 63 billion Rand of projects impacted in 2019 - https://hyp.is/Smjb3I5CEe-fXHsx-Sy8kQ/www.inclusivesociety.org.za/post/overview-of-the-construction-mafia-crisis-in-south-africa

for - organized crime - Cape Town - hidden protection scheme - Andre Lincoln

for - polycrisis - organized crime - Daily Maverick article - organized crime - Cape Town - How the state colludes with SA’s underworld in hidden web of organised crime – an expert view - Victoria O’Regan - 2024, Oct 18 - book - Man Alone: Mandela’s Top Cop – Exposing South Africa’s Ceaseless Sabotage - Daily Maverick journalist Caryn Dolley - 2024 - https://viahtml.hypothes.is/proxy/https://shop.dailymaverick.co.za/product/man-alone-mandelas-top-cop-exposing-south-africas-ceaseless-sabotage/?_gl=11mkyl5s_gcl_auODI2MTMxODEuMTcyNjI0MDAwMg.._gaNzQ5NDM3NzE0LjE3MjMxODY0NzY._ga_Y7XD5FHQVG*MTcyOTM1MjgwOS4xLjAuMTcyOTM1MjgxOS41MC4wLjkyNTE5MDk2OA..

summary - This article revolves around the research of South African crime reporter Caryn Dolley on the organized web of crime in South Africa - She discusses the nexus of - trans-national drug cartels - local Cape Town gangs - South African state collusion with gangs - in her new book: Man Alone: Mandela's Top Cop - Exposing South Africa's Ceaseless Sabotage - It illustrates how on-the-ground efforts to fight crime are failing because they do not effectively address this criminal nexus - The book follows the life of retired top police investigator Andre Lincoln whose expose paints the deep level of criminal activity spanning government, trans-national criminal networks and local gangs - Such organized crime takes a huge toll on society and is an important contributor to the polycrisis. - Non-linear approaches are necessary to tackle this systemic problem - One possibility is a trans-national citizen-led effort

for - critique - extreme wealth a reward for rare management skills - Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - Mondragon counterexample - to - stats - Mondragon pay difference between highest and lowest paid - article - In this Spanish town, capitalism actually works for the workers - Christian Science Monitor - Erika Page - 2024, June 7

critique - extreme wealth a reward for rare management skills - Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - Mondragon counterexample - This is invalidated today by large successful cooperatives such as Mondragon

to - stats - Mondragon corporation - comparison of pay difference between highest paid and lowest paid - https://hyp.is/QAxx-o14Ee-_HvN5y8aMiQ/www.csmonitor.com/Business/2024/0513/income-inequality-capitalism-mondragon-corporation

see also: Barnouw, Erik (1993), Documentary a History of the Non-fiction Film (PDF), New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 241–242, retrieved March 30, 2020

for - cape town water crisis - day zero - day zero - mexico city - day zero - bogota - water crisis

for - contact - local contact - Cape Town - art and transition

for - stories - salience of adjacency- imagination - stories - futures - Ernest Becker - self - timebinding - symbolosphere - quote - Brian Eno - book - Citizens - Jon Alexander - Arian Conrad - citizens - not consumers

quote - Brian Eno

• The stories we tell
  • shape how we see ourselves, and
  • how we see the world.
• When we see the world differently,
  • we begin behaving differently,
  • living into the new story.
• When Martin Luther King said
  • “I have a dream,”
• he was
  • inviting others to dream it with him,
  • inviting them to step into his story.
• Once a story becomes shared in that way,
  • current reality gets measured against it and
  • then modified towards it.
• As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world,
  • we begin behaving differently,
    • as though that world is starting to come into existence,
    • as though, in our minds at least, we’re already there.
• The new story becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward.
• By this process it starts to come true.

• Imagining the future makes it more possible.

• Sometimes this work of imagination and storytelling is about the future,

  • as in Dr King’s story.
• Art can play this role:
  • what is possible in art becomes thinkable in life.
• We become our new selves first in simulacrum, through
  • style and
  • fashion and
  • art,
• our deliberate immersions in virtual worlds.
• Through them we sense what it would like
  • to be another kind of person
  • with other kinds of values.
• We rehearse new
  • feelings and
  • sensitivities.
• We imagine other ways of thinking about
  • our world and
  • its future.
• We use art to model new worlds so that
  • we can see how we might feel about them.

comment - This is a really powerful writing from Brian Eno. - Storytelling is an exercise in - the imagination of alternative possibilities to our own reality. - Stories can become both - inspirational and - aspirational - They can paint a picture in our mind of - a fantasy - a world that does not yet exist - but that nonexistent but desirable reality can then serve as the goal for which we strive - Mapping Futures interventions is then, essentially an act of desirable, inspirational make believe, and mustering the resources to turn the fantasy into reality - Progress relies on design, the imagination of unrealities in vivid detail, - in order to turn them into realities - In doing this, it is not an act carried out in ivory towers, - but in the everyday life of every one of us - We are all engaged in desirable fantasies daily whenever - we decide what meal we will prepare or restaurant to dine at - which clothing outfit to wear today - what we plan to write or say next to another - Every decision we make as a choice between different future alternatives - When it comes to planning major future decisions, - we need to have as much detail as possible of the imagined future - The Town Anywhere project conceived by Ruth Ben-Tovin and employed in the Transition Town movement for many years fis an example of such a simulacrum - https://hyp.is/mqeCtAE_Ee-Yxleqg7GFww/docdrop.org/video/cRvhY4S94ic/ - It provides an artistic space for citizens to imagine a desirable fantasy that can be embodied, enacted and deeply remembered through the participatory and collective citizen act of creating a proxy of their future local habitat in the present, and exploring and momentarily inhabiting their simulacrum. - In this way, this compelling experience is like a branding iron, searing the memory deep into our memory, where it can help guide our actions to realize the desirable fantasy. - Couched within a citizen's FREEligion and FREElosophy we generically call Deep Humanity, an open source, open knowledge approach to universal raison d'etre for what it deeply means to be human, Town Anywhere can scale to fire up the imagination of citizens to co-create our collective future. - Town Anywhere, along with other citizen initiatives which I belong to that advocate healthy citizen power such as SONEC, Stop Reset Go, Deep Humanity, the Indyweb, Living Cities Earth and many, many others can emerge a human murmuration to drive the transition - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fleemor.medium.com%2Fmesmerized-by-the-murmuration-on-human-potential-f4c9ffe06ffa&group=world - As Jon Alexander and Arian Conrad write here, we have to find the narratives that matter to us, where WE is the citizens. Other thinkers like Jose Ramos write along the same line: - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Foff-planet.medium.com%2Fdiscovering-the-narratives-that-matter-to-us-327958a2daec&group=world

for - Town Anywhere - Transition Town - town anywhere - Ruth Ben-Tovim - Deep Humanity BEing journey - TPF - Town Anywhere BEing journey - LCE - Town Anywhere - adjacency - rapid whole system change - futures - town anywhere - SONEC

summary - Town Anywhere provides a simulacrum, as Brian Eno talks about in the forward to Jon Anderson & Arian Conrad's book Citizens - https://hyp.is/m_HuigEvEe--6UdGv2HVDA/www.jonalexander.net/the-foreword

Summary - This is a

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-11

Modern day issues of town and gown.

• for: town planning, zoning, uglification, history - car culture, big oil - lobby, history - suburbs

• for: earth system boundaries, cosmolocal, local movement, transition town, circular cities, TPF
• comment
  • integrating science with local communities
  • this statement is key, to bring extra capacity to communities that are handicapped and don't have scientific, technological and engineering capacity -paraphrase
• This project is a collaboration between the global scientific community and local communities to improve societal systems. It's not a one-size-fits-all process, but many different experiments.
• TPF and SRG strategy is well aligned with Science-driven societal transformation ethos:
  • second order science combined with local communities as the building block of civilization
  • AND cosmolocal networking (https://clreader.net)
    • via Indyweb interpersonal computing.
    • https://opencollective.com/open-learning-commons/projects/indy-learning-commons

• for: cape town, cape town - climate plan

• for: sustainable transport, Cape Town, Cape Town - sustainable transport, Heinrich Boiller
• Description
  • Heinrich Boiller study on sustainable transportation for the city of Cape Town

• for: cape town transportation, minibus industry South Africa , Cape Town, sustainable transportation, informal transport
• title
  • Views 0 CrossRef citations to date 32 Altmetric Research Article The spatial and social logic of the Minibus Taxi network: how access may support social inclusion in Cape Town, South Africa
• date
  • May 24, 2021
• author
  • Ruth Joan Nelson
• source
  • Applied Mobilities
  • https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23800127.2021.1926054

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1_RKu-ESCY

Lots of controversy over this music video this past week or so.

In addition to some of the double entendre meanings of "we take care of our own", I'm most appalled about the tacit support of the mythology that small towns are "good" and large cities are "bad" (or otherwise scary, crime-ridden, or dangerous).

What are the crime statistics per capita about the safety of small versus large?

Availability bias of violence and crime in the big cities are overly sampled by most media (newspapers, radio, and television). This video plays heavily into this bias.

There's also an opposing availability bias going on with respect to the positive aspects of small communities "taking care of their own" when in general, from an institutional perspective small towns are patently not taking care of each other or when they do its very selective and/or in-crowd based rather than across the board.

Note also that all the news clips and chyrons are from Fox News in this piece.

Alternately where are the musicians singing about and focusing on the positive aspects of cities and their cultures.

• Question
• Will they develop within planetary boundaries?

Town Hall and Metroum Descriptions

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/27/1131936089/rudolph-red-nosed-reindeer-jules-bass-frosty-snowman

!- definition : citizen action network (CAN) !- question : rapid whole system change at community scale - Can CAN's scale globally for rapid whole system change? If so, how?

A lyric from "I Can Cook Too" written by Leonard Bernstein which appears in the 1944 Broadway musical "On the Town" sung by Nancy Walker and later in the 1949 film.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Town_(musical)

I heard it last night at the end of the final episode of Julia S1, E8 Chocolate Souffle (May 5, 2022).

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10975574/

Is this responsible for some of the "group think" seen in the Republican party and the political right? Imitation of bad or counter-intuitive actions outweights scientifically proven better actions? Examples: anti-vaxxers and coronavirus no-masker behaviors? (Some of this may also be about or even entangled with George Lakoff's (?) tribal identity theories relating to "people like me".

Explore this area more deeply.

Another contributing factor for this effect may be the small-town effect as most Republican party members are in the countryside (as opposed to the larger cities which tend to be more Democratic). City dwellers are more likely to be more insular in their interpersonal relations whereas country dwellers may have more social ties to other people and groups and therefor make them more tribal in their social interrelationships. Can I find data to back up this claim?

How does link to the thesis put forward by Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous? Does Henrich have data about city dwellers to back up my claim above?

What does this tension have to do with the increasing (and potentially evolutionary) propensity of humans to live in ever-increasingly larger and more dense cities versus maintaining their smaller historic numbers prior to the pre-agricultural timeperiod?

What are the biological effects on human evolution as a result of these cultural pressures? Certainly our cultural evolution is effecting our biological evolution?

What about the effects of communication media on our cultural and biological evolution? Memes, orality versus literacy, film, radio, television, etc.? Can we tease out these effects within the socio-politico-cultural sphere on the greater span of humanity? Can we find breaks, signs, or symptoms at the border of mass agriculture?

total aside, though related to evolution: link hypercycles to evolution spirals?

https://thehustle.co/would-you-take-free-land-in-rural-america/

When pushing through ideas like the Homestead Act of 1862, one needs to additionally consider the long arc of history and plan for secondary level changes in decades or centuries hence. It may have been an economic boom for 50 years or so (and shouldn't giving away all that land account for something like that?) but what happens when that economic engine dies from lack of planning?

Could the land and space be given back to indigenous peoples again? Could it be given to immigrant populations which might have different economic drivers for their lives and concerns?

Such brutality and insolence, such debauchery and extravagance, such idleness, irreligion, cursing and swearing, and contempt of all rule and authority ... Our people are drunk with the cup of liberty.

This sounds eerily like some of the same sorts of fears, uncertainties, and doubt that middle America has about our bigger cities. Though I'll note that broadly they feel like they're the party of "liberty" now.

This is an interesting data point in the long-running contention between the city and the countryside that seems to dominate large swaths of human history.

"Liberty of conscience" is a phrase Roger Williams uses in a religious context to denote the freedom for one to follow his or her religious or ethical beliefs. It is an idea that refers to conscious-based thought and individualism. Each person has the right to their own conscience. It is rooted in the idea that all people are created equal and that no culture is better than the other.

This idea is strongly tied to: freedom from coercion of conscience (own thoughts and ideas), equality of rights, respect and toleration. It is a fundamental element of what has come to be the "American idea of religious liberty". Williams spoke of liberty of conscience in reference to a religious sense. This concept of individualism and free belief was later extrapolated in a general sense. He believed that government involvement ended when it came to divine beliefs.

Citation: Eberle, Edward J. "Roger Williams on Liberty of Conscience." Roger Williams University Law Review: vol 10:, iss: 2, article 2, pp. 288-311. http://docs.rwu.edu/rwu_LR/vol10/iss2/2. Accessed 8 Sept. 2021.

A long, but worthwhile read. This goes into some valuable ideas about public spaces that the typical article on the independent web doesn't explore.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Fluffy</span> in Notes: All Our Selves In One Basket (<time class='dt-published'>2021-01-31 12:31:00 </time>)</cite></small>

And this is the problematic part of the internet as a town square: we have no defined governance or pale beyond which to cast people who go far beyond societal norms.

Town of Barre

Charter Amendment requires 10%

Town of Essex

Referendums, Initiatives Require 5%

Size: 1.3m x 2m

HuffPost UK. ‘Exclusive: Public Want Test And Trace Taken Out Of Hands Of Private Firms’, 21 September 2020. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/exclusive-public-want-track-and-trace-taken-off-serco_uk_5f6785ecc5b6480e8970b968.

Hubler, S. (2020, June 28). ‘We Could Be Feeling This for the Next Decade’: Virus Hits College Towns. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/us/coronavirus-college-towns.html

Graham, R. (2020, May 18). My Town Just Lost Its Only Coffee Shop. It’s Shattering to the Community. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/05/my-town-just-lost-its-only-coffee-shop-schoodacs-warner-new-hampshire.html

Greene is okay with Town leaving La Pointe

Town's negative characteristics

Town's chief complaint is too much manual labor

Hall tried to convince Town to stay so that Hall's workload wasn't crazy, but no dice

Mr. Town left La Pointe to start a business and his wife will join him soon

Mr. Greene seems to suggest that Mr. Town should abandon his post at the mission since he is gone from there so often anyway

a chief at La Pointe gives his medicine bag to Joseph Town, except it's actually at Fond du Lac?

Mr. Town will occupy Fond du Lac

What Mr. Town would be expected to do at Yellow Lake

Largely agree. It's all very controlled, with a bit of decent archi. But it certainly doesn't feel 'real', tactile.. like there is any ownership. It belongs to ritzy people, ritzy gov, and ritzy gov-corporate relationships. Yerp.

Awesome news. This MUST be rolled into Crossrail/West Metro planning works.

Good facade articulation to breakdown the mass of the building.

Is alrightish. I like the two-volume articulation.

Nice normal stuff.

BAN dumb names. Just "123 Main Street" allowable.

These sort of renders have a lot to answer for.

Bird-Dogging

Bird-dogging is a technique whereby activists get candidates on the record about their position on an issue. The term comes from the analogy of a bird-dog which flushes birds out of hiding. In the metaphor, candidates for office often want to conceal their positions on controversial issues or keep their language around them vague. Bird-doggers go to events and ask carefully crafted questions on issues they wish to talk about to try to "flush a candidate's opinions into the open."

Bird-doggers often work in issue advocacy organizations, and are less concerned about who wins an election than about getting their issues addressed as part of the campaign.

The term was popularized in 2004 by New Hampshire Quaker activist Arnie Alpert who noted that the way people were asking questions at "town halls" with presidential candidates was allowing the candidates too much wiggle room:

"If you simply go in there and say, ‘What do you think about health care? What do you think about Iraq?’ the candidate can pretty much say anything and have it sound like it’s a good answer,” said Arnie Alpert, the program coordinator in New Hampshire for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group.

So in the lead-up to the 2004 primary, he started teaching people how to ask questions. Basically, it takes planning, precision and a little bit of courage. (see New York Times story)

Albert's techniques were later adopted by Priorities NH, a Ben Cohen (of Ben and Jerry's) group trying to get military spending issues addressed, as well as other groups in the 2008 primary. The rise of citizen video made such techniques an important tool of activism.

Controversy

Rhetoric around a 2016 controversy created by James O'Keefe wrongly portrayed bird-dogging as a Clinton campaign term dealing with the instigation of violence at Trump rallies. The term pre-dates the Clinton campaign and has never been used in this way.

Sources

New York Times Article: Bird-Dogging in N.H. and Iowa, March 2007

From the 2016 book Service Sociology and Academic Engagement in Social Problems: "Bird-dogging means attending a political candidates public appearances with the specific aim of challenging or seeking clarification of a particular issue."

From 2011 book The Young Activist's Guide to Building a Green Movement and Changing the World: "Bird-dogging refers to attending public events where a candidate for public office or an elected representative will appear and calling on him or her to publicly address an issue, support your cause, or reconsider a stance already taken."

I visit my family in Chicago every winter.. I can assure you all it's nothing like this anymore. It's cold outside. Whether there is snow or not (due to storm variations every year) it's cold.. very cold.