Bitcoin Traceability

Yves Smith aka Susan Weber aggregates the best stuff she finds on the Web, adds some comment to it and gives it to me in my morning briefing site: Naked Capitalism.  My goto site for the best stuff.

Concerning Bitcoin she prefaced with the following comment a link cross post entitled: Governments Will Struggle to Control Bitcoin

Yves here. I was extremely puzzled to see various US regulators make cautiously positive remarks about Bitcoin in Congressional hearings. One would expect them to be opposed.

If Yves is puzzled then so am I.  There must be some fire behind the smoke.

I recall the joy of finally cutting the land line telephone cord.  Free at last.  I just naturally hated the arrogance and domination of the telephone company.  Same feeling when I cut cable tv.  However, I am still tied to the internet service the same cable company provides and pay 10 bucks extra for it because I do not also have their cable tv service.

There was also an icing on the cake of cutting land line service.  My telephone number was portable.  It was my number to take with me.  I got out of the land line game and took my ball with me as well.  Joy!

In hindsight, number portability was not only a joy to me but a joy to any entity that wanted another persistent ID number that would follow me everywhere.  Now connected to my cell phone.  Whoever that entity was saw the future where this persistent ID would be valuable to them for some reason.

Entities have always sought to uniquely identify individuals for some reason.  That is why parents give children names.  Even if it is only number one (n number) son/daughter.  An identity that can be associated with attributes unique to that identity that serve to further express the uniqueness of that identity lest there be any confusion or ambiguity.

Christmas is coming.  The holy family was on the move because of a decree to register in the city of their origin, maybe for tax collection purposes?  State control of personal identification.  Social security numbers serve that modern purpose.  I had a service number in the navy.  Originally a 6 digit number then the military changed to using the SSN as the military service number.  I wore it on a metal tag that would be wedged in my mouth if to identify me if I were killed in action.  I knew what that notch in the tag was for.  It was all planned out in advance by someone to be sure that I would be identified with little doubt when the time came.

Money transactions pervade everything we do.  Transactions with digital money connect us to the things that either add or subtract to financial accounts that hold our money.  The only other source of transactions providing as much information are our internet communications.  Information we originate by typing something into a keyboard related to whatever that entry connects us to, perhaps with a payload in the connection like the payload of email content.  Simply going to a website is payload information.

Increasingly we do not even have to overtly enter our identification into the internet.  It is entered for us by virtue of the continuously broadcast wifi MAC address of our computer devices and the extent to which that device is carried with us at all times like a dog tag around the neck.

The cross post link that discusses the government struggle to control Bitcoin is probably not so much control of bitcoin but aimed at control of entities that use the Bitcoin system.  Potentially everyone.  Universal not if but when Bitcoin becomes the universal money of exchange.  Someone is looking forward to that time and it will happen.  Very soon, I think.  Sooner than expected.  Things happen quickly in a crises.

My proposed monetary system is a totally traceable system.  Money stays in a single record independent of account but must be related to an absolutely identified account owner.  Ownership of the single unit dollar changes with every transaction.  The unit dollar does not move from account to account.  The unit dollar is a fixed record.  The owning account to which it is associated is the only thing that changes.  Current owner of the dollar moves to new owner of each dollar with a transaction of n dollars.  Date, time, location, and perhaps even the nature of the transaction and the exact item involved.  Associated transaction information mandatory by design or default and maybe optional at the discretion of the owner/receiver of the unit digitized dollar.  The wet dream of the NSA.  Total traceability and the hook on which to hang any and all associated information.

Someone is looking ahead to a near future where information control structures implemented today will pave the way to facilitate information control using intelligence gathering applications that are not possible today but are so obvious they are written on the wall.  Bitcoin is absolutely traceable.  More traceable in the future when forced by the government to adopt tracing mechanisms that will not be voluntary but coerced because by governmental power to control.

This is big news today:  Cayman Islands and Costa Rica agree to share bank account details with US.  The alleged tax havens have signed agreements with the United States to tell the IRS about funds held offshore by Americans.  It is only the beginning of government control of monetary information.  I am rather amazed that it is happening.  The sanctity of confidential information identifying the accounts of the rich is being breached.  I have read and believe that the biggest money laundering entity in the world is the United States.  Perhaps the Caymans is where the dumb money goes.  Money that Wall Street wants to repatriate for control even more than the government to identify it for revenue.

There are government entities beyond the IRS that want this information and it has nothing to do with revenue. Somewhere there is a quid pro quo in this deal.  What could it be?  I suspect that the NSA has discovered so much criminal activity information in its secret intelligence gathering of Cayman Island bank transactions that the government must take action.  However, it cannot take action based on attribution to NSA spying, something that is a very sensitive issue now.  When the account information the NSA already knows is revealed by the banks then the government can take action.  How is that for a theory.  The government strong arms the Cayman Islands into divulging the information the government already knows so the government can act on it.  Wouldn't it be ironic if the government was strong armed into taking this course of action by some entity that has the asymmetrical information advantage over the government and threatened the government with release of that information.  A case of the government being blackmailed into doing the right thing but only to protect factual revelation of government doing the wrong thing.

This is big news.  It came out on Friday, 29 November 2013.  The day after Thanksgiving.  Is that the slowest day of the year for news that must be released but news that not to be noticed by the public?  Might this news be directly related to a new spike in Bitcoin value over the weekend?  Watch the stock market blue chips on Monday? 

Facts are traceable.

Yves here. I was extremely puzzled to see various US regulators make cautiously positive remarks about Bitcoin in Congressional hearings. One would expect them to be opposed.
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/11/governments-will-struggle-to-control-bitcoin.html#3yKMIVQIAA6VR7yA.99

Yves here. I was extremely puzzled to see various US regulators make cautiously positive remarks about Bitcoin in Congressional hearings. One would expect them to be opposed.
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/11/governments-will-struggle-to-control-bitcoin.html#3yKMIVQIAA6VR7yA.99

Thanksgiving Day - Gratitude For Seeing Things

My waking thought this morning was looking through a cardboard tube when I was a kid.  The kind that paper towels come on.  Toys were simple when I was young.  Dad's 2X4 cut-offs were my building blocks.

I looked through the tube like it was a telescope.  Pretending to see things that could otherwise not be seen without it.  Using imagination to see pirate ships at sea.  A couple of years later I ordered a real telescope from the back pages of Popular Mechanics.  $3.98 with a money order I got from the post office.  Probably a 6 cent stamp and wait for weeks to arrive.  Big and black in the picture.  High power magnification.  When it arrived I found it to be made of cardboard. 

Looking through a tube focuses attention narrowly to see things.  Magnification is not entirely necessary when to look at them closer all that is necessary is to walk up to them.  Climbing a tree to the moon does not get a much more detailed view.  That is where the telescope is valuable.  After the telescope was showing me things that I had already looked at I discovered my mom's magnifying glass.  A new world opened up.  Also the use of the magnifying glass to melt plastic and burn our names onto a piece of wood.  Start a fire with extreme pinpoint concentration if the lens was held just right.  Later, microscopes fascinated me and I learned about staining slides.  I have worn glasses since I was 11.

On long road trips I do not listen to the radio very much.  Just look out the window at the ever changing scenery or do endless miles on the bike enjoying the beauty of what I see, what my bike will yet take me to see. 

Observing things figures them out.  Recently I fixed a frozen pipe.  The solution spoke to me by observation.  All I had to do was listen to it.  Someone asked how I knew what to do, where I learned it.  Was I a repairman?  Dad was, must be in the genes! He did not repair as much as he created solutions.  He was good at it.

Some rule in my life says that if I look at a thing long enough I can figure it out.  For some things in my life there was not enough time in an other's life for me to do that.  Seeing things in real time is often only knowing them later.  My reactions are quick but my mind is slow. 

All things come into view and focus with time and effort.  Effort I have and I do not quit.  time is not mine to own, only use while I have it.

On this Thanksgiving I am grateful for time.  My gratitude is expressed by using it the best I can.  Even if I was blind I could still grasp things in my hands, touch them, feel them move in relation to other things.  I would be even more object oriented, more focused on only the thing that I could touch, that was close enough to touch.

Is that why I close my eyes to kiss?

There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth.  ---Rumi

Tons of Hundred Dollar Bills Sent to Iraq

Update: 10/23/14:  Nobody really looks at this blog.  I'm not surprised.  I write it entirely for myself to record things that interest me.  To formalized my examination of them, the thoughts they generate.
The blog gets hits.  Mostly junk hits, some the random hit on a google search term, etc.  However, this entry, which is old now, has been getting hits.  

Interesting.

There is so much more to this story.  I spent months researching it and the traceability of the 100 dollar bills nd reducing it to documentation and speculation.  What tracing them would reveal.  I actually did tracing at various US locations.  Maybe the real story about billions in hundred dollars bills will forever be secret.  However, it is not like scattering feathers in the wind.  Each one had a number and that put the tracing problem detective work in a data domain to discover what the secret story of where they went, what they did might be revealed.  Perhaps the time and effort I put in on this and what I discovered contributed greatly to my concepts for a serialized, digitized virtual dollar that is totally traceable to the account of a owner and has a history or ownership change that can be data mined either within an anonymized or surveillance system.

Where did tons of 100 dollar bills shipped to Iraq go?  They are still floating around today and it is a fact that every single one of those hundred dollar bills has a serial number starting with the letters "CB"

Why is it that 100 dollar bills starting with the letters CB are not popular in

The New York Federal Reserve Bank sent billions of dollars to Iraq in the form of tons of palletized 100 dollar bills.   The billions in 100 dollar bills sent to Iraq represented transfer to Iraq of funds belonging to Iraq but held by the NYFRB in an account for Iraq.  A total of about 12 billion dollars worth of 100 dollar bills were sent to Iraq from the NYFRB vaults.  8 Billion dollars in 100 dollar bills that were sent to Iraq are unaccounted for.  The 100 dollar bills were received by the CPA for Iraq and managed by the CPA prior to turn over of the CPA responsibilities and functions to Iraq in June 2004.  What happened to 8 billion dollars in 100 dollar bills?  Nobody knows.  They are unaccounted for. 

All 100 dollar bills sent to Iraq were serialized.  The serial numbers of all (emphasis: All) 100 dollar bills printed by the Bureau of Printing and Engraving for the NYFRB are given after a few following explanatory statements about the specifics that might identify 100 bills sent to Iraq by serial numbers of the $100 bills.

It is obvious that stocks of $100 bills on hand at the NYFRB prior to June 2004 must have been included in the cash shipments made by the NYFRB to Iraq.

All bills sent by the NYFRB to Iraq were sequentially serialized when produced by the BEP and then shipped by the original unopened pallet loads to Iraq from the NYFRB.


A total of 29 billion in 100 dollar bills were printed by the BEP for the NYFRB from 2002 to 2004.  12 Billion were shipped to Iraq.  (Some of that was in smaller denominations).


Shipments were made in bulk batches therefore if a single serial number of a single bill was known to be shipped to Iraq it is concluded that the entire pallet range of serial numbered bills were shipped.

In general, if anyone in the world had a $100 bill in their possession within the following range of bills printed from 2002 to 2003 there is 50% probability that it once went to Iraq.  Perhaps the frequency with which these bills may be found today is geographically associated.

Why do some places in the world avoid 100 dollar bills with serial numbers beginning in CB.. They are not welcome in Iquitos Peru and generally refused in Latin America or Myanmar.

Perhaps it is not just the counterfeit myth but the use of "lost in Iraq" bills by some agency for tracing purposes.  Most recently there are a number of stories related to CB serial number bills in Myanmar.  Previously stories related to Pakistan.


Total BEP Monthly Production Reports of all $100 bills produced for the NYFRB, data taken from the BEP website:


October 2002
$100.00 2001 CB 86,400,001 A -- CB 99,200,000 C 12,800,000 $1.2 Billion
$100.00 2001 CB 1 D CB 25,600,000 D 25,600,000 $2.56 Billion

November 2002
$100.00 2001 CB 25,600,001 D CB 96,000,000 D 70,400,000 $7.04 Billion

December 2002
$100.00 2001 CB 96,000,001 D - CB 99,200,000 D 3,200,000 $320 Million
$100.00 2001 CB 1 E CB 67,200,000 E 67,200,000 $6.72 Billion

Janurary 2003
$100.00 2001 CB 67,200,001 E CB 99,200,000E 32,200,000 $3.22 Billion
$100.00 2001 CB 1 F CB 19,200,000F 19,200,000 $1.92 Billion

February 2003
$100.00 2001 CB 19,200,001 F CB 83,200,000 F 64,000,000 $6.4 Billion

Next production batch after CPA turnover:
July 2004
$100.00 2003N DB 1 A DB 32,000,000 A 32,000,000 $3.2 Billion

Look at the total value of bills produced.  This is what the NYFRB had on hand to ship.  It was all palletized, sequentially serialized by within every pallet.  About 20 billion.  12 billion shipped to Iraq.  The rest perhaps to other foreign countries as well as internal US distribution.

These bills were still around.  I found a dozen of them from the production serial range in Sierra Vista, AZ.  Even a couple in my home town bank.


From the Waxman hearing 21 June 2005:

Mr. KUCINICH. Is it within your jurisdiction to provide this com-
mittee with the serial numbers that came through Federal Re-
serve—I take it these were new $100 bills—to provide this commit-
tee with the information with respect to any list on which those se-
rial numbers have turned up on coming back through Customs,
who held those serial numbers? Do we have that?
Mr. BOWEN. No, we do not. And we have not—the measures that
I have described have not produced findings, so to speak.

Mr. KUCINICH. I thank the Chair.
Mr. Bowen, I would like to explore a little bit more about this
cash environment. We know from Mr. Waxman’s testimony that
the administration transferred from New York to Baghdad more
than $281 million individual currency notes on 484 pallets that in-
cluded more than 107 million $100 bills, and he put up on the
screen what the Federal officials called cash packs, pictures of
them, and each one of these cash packs contained 16,000 bills. One
cash pack with $100 bills is worth $1.6 million, and the Federal
Reserve shipped more than 19,000 of these cash packs to Iraq. You
agree substantially with that description, correction?
Mr. BOWEN. Yes, I do.

Cinderella's Slipper - Examining the Myth for Meaning

Looking at the fairy tale in another way.

If we search with slipper in hand to find again the Cinderella (or Cinderfella) that it fits by placing it on every possible foot in the land is that what finds her?  As much as we wish to find the fit and try as hard as we might to make the fit happen might we be carrying the wrong slipper?  The wrong way to fit it to the foot?  Focus on the foot is the most distant body object from the mind.

That would be a twist on the story!  One that requires a higher level of abstraction defining what is fixed, what is variable.  What is where.  What is a physical slipper and and what is its conceptual nature distinct from its physical nature.

Failure to fit physically is not failure to find conceptually! 

How chained to the earth we become by literal fairy tales!

They were not meant to be literal!  It is a challenge to grasp the conceptual meaning.

How many dreams do we fail to find fit the attribute we assign to the slipper we carry with us?  The key attribute that would otherwise find our Cinderella?   Cinderfella?

The conceptual fit of the slipper.

The key and the lock.

A conceptual slipper is better but may often have the same result of not fitting the conceptual foot.

It is a plan B to plan A.

There is no plan C except to try plan A again.

Slippers are conceptually custom made.

Poetry is a princess that lives in a palace located in the lofty wonder of a high level of abstraction connecting our physical world to a high level wonder of conceptual beauty.

Moral Compass

This is my "Moral Compass"

It belonged to my grandfather.  Maybe it dates from about 1900.  A time when traveling in the country required a compass as a basic tool to find the way.  I recall playing with it as a young boy, influencing the needle with a magnet.  Turning it and finding that it always pointed north.  Later, I learned about magnetic and true north.  In the navy I was taught navigation as well as how to steer using it on a chart.

This compass was among the things found to be with my mother after her recovery from the North Atlantic following the abandonment of a burning ship at sea.  It still has salt crystals inside it.

I kept it with me for the remainder of my navy career.  After retirement I carried it with me on my many world wide bike trips.  In New Zealand I had it in the side pocket of bike touring shorts when I fell on the bike and broke the glass case.  Until then I had actually used it often for navigation.  It continued to work but not as accurately.

Now I carry it in a small niche in the dash of my van.  It is a prized possession that I no longer take on bike trips for fear of losing it.  However its conceptual value is separated from its physical existence and will always be with me no mater where in the world the actual compass is pointing the way.  The moral conceptual nature is independent yet related to the object and to that extent I can never lose it but I can lose my way without conceptual structure to guide me.  That is the essence of the idea in the prior blog entry.  The thing in my life that a moral concept is connected to in my conceptual/physical world.  Some people choose other objects to which conceptual structures are connected by association to a representational object of choice.

This guy has his compass:  The Bible.   My Compass is logical truth as I know it by structure of logic created by a logical language used to express pure logic.

The triangle of Logic --Language --Structure.

His triangle:  The religious trinity expressing God through the language of the Bible to create religious structure.  Father ---Holy Spirit ----(as a language)  -----Produces Jesus (the structure of His Word as written in the Bible).

I go with Logic.  It transcends and encompasses the cults that have various degrees of conceptual interpretation purity.

My blog entry on the Trinity Meme.  Also here.

Also expressed elsewhere in my blog entries in various places because it is so conceptually fundamental.   Guess that makes me a Fundamentalist!

Praise the Logic!  The Compass is my symbol.

In Hoc Signo Vinces!

Navigating Worlds

Like the Google Earth scale bar, a bigger picture is presented, even to the magnitude of the earth, that can be focused down to a single object that has grown dimensionally smaller over time.  The initial user interface of Google Earth starts with the globe.  Enter an address and it spins to the part of the world that it is located and then descends upon it with a satellite view to a set number of feet above the location.  From there the user takes control to home in.  It is an excellent way to place a location in geographical context.

Geography and mapping is a point of entry to put things in context.  Given a map anything can be overlayed on it.  Any information related to location can be presented.  Then whatever that information is can be drilled down to find business hours, house value, underground mineral resources, historical significance, etc.  It is a richly object oriented environment from which to leap from the physical domain of location to the universe of conceptual, logical objects that can be extracted to degrees of abstraction from their physical relationship to a thing on earth that we look at.  Google Earth enables us to look at anything on earth.

Google Earth is an App that must be downloaded to your computer that is tailored to present a visual interface point of entry for the user.  If I wanted to go to the Whitehouse then I could use Google Earth to get there.  I could also just enter the address in a Google search box and one of the hundreds of thousand hits returned, probably among the first would be a point of entry to see it as a satellite view.  The remainder of the hundreds of thousands of hits could all be connected to looking at the Whitehouse as a point of entry to an extremely physical relationship to all the physical things it connects to, like every one of us,  as well as all the conceptual things it connects to and the place of those conceptual things in a highly abstract and complex "map" that is structured in a manner that is infinitely more difficult to navigate than the geographically structured world of Google Earth.

How in the world to navigate that conceptual world?  Analogous to navigating the history of navigating the physical world using physical markers and attributes upon which to hang conceptual things like time and position of celestial points of reference and the magnetic field of the earth or the prevailing winds and currents.  Of course, this all depended on the earth being round and the way the universe moves.  Physical certitudes that once proved are anchors to conceptual structures of facts/truths.

The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.  Good way to structure what I think and do during that day.

Looking at Google Earth, shift the focus to the location of the NSA.  It is no secret any more than where our seat of government is located.  The NSA headquarters is  Fort Meade, Maryland.  From that center it has physical and conceptual connection relationships throughout the world.  There is a map of NSA word wide physical geography that can be overlayed on Google Earth to the extent that it can be discovered.  There is also an associated conceptual map connected to NSA global physical presence or associations.  Some associations are physical/conceptual bound to each other tightly.  Others are unbound associations where the physical and conceptual connections are highly abstract.  Made abstract by design.   It is a spy agency.

Google Earth is becoming and Open Source tool.  Open Source to the extent that we can hang any kind of information on it to create a tailored user view of physical and conceptual relationships applicable to anything we desire.  Users can attach theirr own pictures of locations on earth for all to see.  Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a new world mapping of information.  We use it to get from Point A to point B and buy a cup of coffee there.  It is a structure with which to navigate to infinite places of the world and the world of our concepts overlayed on that physical world.

The evolution of our conceptual world is increasingly measured by its abstractness.  Its distance from a reality we call the real world.  Real in the sense of physical world or the reality of conceptual beliefs we hold to equally as true as the ground we stand on.

Taking a break.  This is getting heavy but is going somewhere.  I have to stop and do a map check..something I did often on a recent bike tour in France!

Abstract Crime and Ice Skating

The thought I woke with this morning was Abstraction.  It was probably born of my experience yesterday on a high mountain lake.  Frozen at the beginning of the the winter season into a skating paradise.  It took a couple mile cross country ski to get to it.  It was the finest open frozen lake "wild" skating I have ever done since high school.

There is little or no abstraction in an intimate connection with nature.  Even if the encounter is abstracted to the very high level of poetry.  It started with a one to one relationship of me to nature, us to our world.

Michio Kaku is a brilliant man.  Last week I viewed a video in which he talks about artificial intelligence and high levels of abstraction.  My first encounter with his thoughts was on the web many years ago.  A background comment was that he loved to ice skate.  Thoughts of the nature of the universe came to him when he skated.  I felt a soul connection.  Last week I tucked a note away in my mind to write something about Michio and his latest video.

Waking with a thought to write about Michio I browsed the latest on the web first.  One of the sites I have not been to often since the Iraq war is Counterpuch.  Excellent site.  Still is.  I read this on that site this morning and my focus shifted from writing  about the positive value of reducing our abstracted distance from nature to an up close one on one relationship to the the negative nature of abstraction that distances us from grasping the nature of the one to one relationship at its core.

This negative nature of abstraction is exemplified by this at Counterpunch:  The American Criminal Elite: An Orgy of Thieves.  JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and ALEXANDER COCKBURN are focused on a new war.  The war internal to the Homeland.  It presents the crime of theft as simply as it is perceived to be on a one to one basis.  A thief, a gun and a victim.  Low class crime.  No abstraction of crime there to cover up what it is.  As crime becomes more abstract however it is harder to recognize.  It becomes more abstract because it is made to be more abstract by design.

Higher level abstract crime is practiced with far greater return as demonstrated by those that get the most money from its practice.  Generally called the higher economic class, the wealthy, even though it is a subset of the wealthy that continues to make their money the old fashion way of old school theft in the industrial age abstracted to the technological age.  Bill Black calls it Control Fraud.

High level abstraction is a two edge sword.  Cuts for good.  Cuts for bad.  Either way it is difficult to understand simply because it is highly abstracted from the real things at the foundation of its conceptual structure.  When it serves us and our needs the high level of abstract structure is open to investigation, validation, understanding and refinement.  The "dark side" of high levels of abstraction robs us of what we value through structured control fraud abstractions that is hard to understand, with no documentation.  It must be hidden or, more likely, hidden in plain sight but made so complex by smoke screens fraught with loop holes to hide exactly what it is and the structure that enables it.

The only public description of the abstract structure that supports the criminal elite comes when it is brought to trial and the wheels of justice expose the structured truth of the abstract elite criminal system as evidence of the crime.  The defense of the criminal elite in this case?  Never come to trial.  At least not in the formal justice system.  Never come to trial in the court of popular opinion.  The opinion formed and shaped by the media to a great extent.

This link:  A ranking of the worlds richest people.

That is the dark side of high level structured abstractions that support crimes against society using the tools of the information age.  Now that I have gotten that out of the way I can move on to the glory of Michio Kaku's universe where things are not moving away from us in increasingly abstract conceptual structures of levels but are moving towards us and we come full circle back to the essence of life.

I am going ice skating this morning.  Dance on ice with the thoughts of Michio.

Yesterday:

Update 9 Dec. 2013

Michio expresses an idea here on unity:  Is God a Mathematician  While the YouTube video is more recent it is something that he has said before, perhaps in connection to ice skating.  I recall writing down what he said years ago thinking it was so profound and at a time that I was looking at string theory.  In the YouTube video he gives a supporting explanation of his final statement that I found to be so profound:

"The mind of God is Cosmic Music.  The music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyper space."

It is absolutely logical that the brilliant mind of Michio Kaku would seek the one thing that explains all.  I like the part where he explains the length of the probable mathematical formula that that would hand us the physics explanation solution .  He holds up two fingers about an inch apart.

Skunk Party

Yves Smith aka Susan Weber

When my most intelligent, admired, inspiring analyst speaks she has my full and undivided attention.

Skunk Party Mainfesto

The best political system that money can buy is doing a great job for its customers and a lousy job for the rest of us.
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/11/47719.html#2IJrRQ8JrgIYsJT4.99

The best political system that money can buy is doing a great job for its customers and a lousy job for the rest of us.
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/11/47719.html#2IJrRQ8JrgIYsJT4.99

I feel like I just touched the hand of JFK again.  Any coincidence that Yves chose this day to publish what certainly has had a great amount of thought behind it.

Sign me up for the Skunk Corps!

Let the word go forth from this time and place:  Don't get into a pissing contest with a Skunk!

JFK

I shook hands with JFK.  It was maybe just after he gave his "Peace Corps" speech at the University of Michigan.

He came through Lansing, Michigan on a train.  Got off to make some remarks but all I remember is the handshaking.  My mother and I went to the train station to greet him.  He actually took her hand in his.  I really only touched his hand but somehow I recall it being larger and of a stronger nature than  I might have imagined.  Like the hands of my own father.

JFK was, still is, my hero.  He was the hero of my uncle also.  My uncle had a framed picture of JFK on the wall next to the picture of Jesus.  Mom voted for JFK.  Not sure if dad did.

He proposed the idea of the Peace Corps in 1960.  It caught fire in the minds of my generation.  I was a junior in high school when I shook his hand.  In 1963 I was in my second year of college at Michigan State University.  Having caught the spark of the idea proposed by JFK we wanted to do something embodying and organized a summer trip to Peru to do it.

Service to country.  JFK had something to say about that too in his 1961 inaugural address.  That burned in me too.  I joined the local Naval Reserve unit.  Graduated, went to OCS then Vietnam as the first assignment in a navy career.  I thought it was the right thing to do.

Perhaps it can be said of all times in history:  You just had to be there to know it.  I will never forget it and how inspiration shaped my life.  Never forget where I was when I learned the news 50 years ago.  A man with magnificent faults as well as stature and contribution.  The faults I can forgive him.

JFK and Federal Budgetary Policy 

Yale University Commencement (June 11, 1962)John Fitzgerald Kennedy:

"For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” 

His ending paragraph:

Nearly 150 years ago Thomas Jefferson wrote, "The new circumstances under which we are placed call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects." New words, new phrases, the transfer of old words to new objects-that is truer today than it was in the time of Jefferson, because the role of this country is so vastly more significant. There is a show in England called "Stop the World, I Want to Get Off." You have not chosen to exercise that option. You are part of the world and you must participate in these days of our years in the solution of the problems that pour upon us, requiring the most sophisticated and technical judgment; and as we work in consonance to meet the authentic problems of our times, we will generate a vision and an energy which will demonstrate anew to the world the superior vitality and the strength of the free society. 

Free Range Mind

Every morning I open the cover on the Macbook Pro like opening the front door to the house and stepping out into a different world  every time.  It is my mind that enters the WWW.  Always a welcome and in this case joyous place to roam free.

This is the first place I went following a link that took me there this morning like following a guiding star.

This inspired me:  Oh Joy!

What a way to start the day!  Coffee was anti climactic this morning.

It is going to be a great day.  I actually do out out the front door before even doing anything else, being careful not to lock myself out and shout "Its gonna be a great dane!" Jeanette used to say that.  We had a great dane.  She always had fun with words. 

At 5:30 nobody hears me, maybe the neighbors wonder?  Maybe if anyone heard me it might make their day great too?

Bitcoin Could Destroy the Dollar and PBOC

Two stories from today's headlines. 

Bitcoin Could Destroy the Dollar

PBOC Says No Longer in China’s Interest to Increase Reserves

China is an early adopter of Bitcoin.  The rush is on and those that get there first with the most win.  Winning is dominating in a winner take all game.  Or should it be called taking all from someone that is an easy mark identified by arrogance, over confidence and so focused on extraction thinking they are at the top of the food chain?  

Does China play Macduff to USA Macbeth.  

Who plays the role of the witches?  

 Now come the apparitions. Each is an illusion created by the Witches to lure Macbeth to his destruction, but they can only do so with the help of Macbeth himself. As with horoscopes, everything depends on the interpretation, and we tend to interpret by the light of our own hope and fears.

It is an old story.

Chinese are very clever people.  I have said that before in many prior entries.

Free At Last! Public Money! Bitcoin

Cut to chase and go to the last line of this blog. It is the first line of what I want to write.

We anthropomorphise money.  It walks, it talks, has human attributes and behaviors.  People are fundamentally classified by it.  Rich and poor. 

If money were a person it would be all people collectively as well.  We all have a vital association with it.  All money is debt money.  By our inescapable association with it we are all in debt to the creators of the monetary system.  We are slaves held in bondage by the debt based monetary system owned by the debt creator: Banks.

The US Central Bank is the New York Federal Reserve Bank.  The "Fed".  A quasi governmental agency chartered by law in 1913 and subject to government control through the Federal Reserve Board.  In reality the government is an agent of the Fed and even the government has an obligational bondage relationship with the Fed equivalent to and perhaps even more fundamental than that of monetary debt.  Government provides the ultimate collateral "full faith" backing of the debt based monetary system.

We are slaves to the debt based monetary system and therefore we, collectively as a government of the people compose and entity, our government, that is a slave to the debt based monetary system.

It is ironic and pathetically amusing when slaves in bondage no longer have to be driven in slavery by the master.  When they have been so long in slavery that they become self driven by a whip in their own hand.  That is exactly the scenario being played out with the National Debt issue.

One way to free the slaves of the monetary system, all of us, is the MMT school of thought that says, and it is true, that National Debt is equal to our National Savings, to the penny.  We are not reasonably constrained by debt limitations because we are the creators of money issued into the monetary system by government spending.  The net cumulative debt created by government deficit spending since our nation is in fact equal to our current National Debt of about $16 trillion, which is equal to the $16 trillion in our collective savings accounts.  This is absolutely true but a hell of a way to explain the National Debt.

Explaining the MMT concept of National Debt is like starting with a bad thing by popular definition and explaining that it is not a bad thing at all if you bend over backwards in your thinking.  Not to manipulate it into not being a bad thing by deception, but by changing the frame of reference so that at least is a reasonable thing if looked at in a new way in the new frame.  Nevertheless, the larger frame of the debt based monetary system remains the frame of explanation that debt is savings.  That equation debt = savings is a difficult one to grasp, even if provable to be true, and it is.  Tell it to the slaves and they will continue to beat themselves with the debt money whip and demand austerity.  Less food and more work servitude.

The other way to free the slaves of the monetary system is to change the system from debt based to a debt free monetary system.  That is the reason for the existence of this blog and everything I have written in it.  That was the specific purpose from the first entry made 6 Feb. 2011 with the title "Private Money".  That entry was preceded by a compulsive examination beginning in 2008 in an attempt to understand our monetary system.

Money and the monetary system is a microcosm  of a bigger picture frame were are held bondage to beliefs within a frame of system structure.  At times in this blog I have examined the higher level frame which is simply a problem domain of greater magnitude but solvable by the same methodology.  That methodology is the Object Oriented Paradigm that permeates my examination of the monetary system and produces my proposals for a debt free serialized digital dollar in a unit value of one with an object identity defined by its own attributes and behaviors independent of its associated high level entity called Account.

Bitcoin approached the problem domain of replacing a debt based monetary system with a debt free monetary system in a different manner.  Mine was highly centralized and traceable.  Bitcoin is peer to peer decentralized and untraceable.  However, entirely on intuition, I feel that Bitcoin will become the antithesis of what it presents itself to be a the present time.  It will be highly centralized, controlled and traceable in the Open Source and Cloud frame of the future.  An alternate manner to my approach and implemented in Open Source programmed structure far beyond the structure of thoughts in my head that would go in that direction if I had the time, talent and money to implement them.  Bitcoin got to the "gold standard" of debt free money so far ahead of me that I am still at the start line.  Like racing in different time zones!

I saw Bitcoin coming a couple years ago when it started.  Like I saw Google coming but failed to recognize it to the extent of acting on it by investing, other big things that I knew would be next big thing.  I was content to have invested all I had in Oracle 25 years ago.  Enough is enough. No need to ratify my recognition of a future I see in a crystal ball with a score maintained in dollars.  I just award myself points and I gained a few gazing into the crystal ball of this blog.  I lost a few by not shifting to a priority of focus examination of Bitcoin early on.

If money were a person it would cry out the famous words of Martin Luther King.  "Free at Last."  The "Dream Speech" was prophetic.  It foresaw the day that would come based on a new structure of social justice.   A work long in progress but founded on the right frame for its implementation.  A frame adopted by few long ago but gaining in power and righteousness over the march of time.  It took time.  Freedom from the bondage of our own failed beliefs.  Freed from the domination of beliefs that made us all slaves.

Big things,  paradigm shifts happen much faster now and the primary enabler to swift fundamental change is the internet.

Bitcoin is going to happen fast.  Bitcoin has seized the day and carries the banner of debt free money.  It is going to happen fast because there is a great amount of money to be made on its implementation. 

I want to gaze into my crystal ball and see what the future of debt free money under the Bitcoin banner will be.  However, it will solve the problem domain of the debt based monetary system so perhaps it is time to move on to a higher level problem domain that has lurking in the dark beyond which I have cast some light in the little circle of money.

The bigger the idea, the sooner it wakes me up to capture it.  This one woke me at 3 am.

Must be big.

Still waiting for the big one to hit that keeps me from going to sleep at all.

Maybe I can sleep later after this one if I am free at last from the money problem.

In 1988 I picked up a large, slippery crystal rock from the ocean shore in a tropical area.  I asked myself:  What if this was a diamond?  Then I threw it back in the ocean.  I did not need it but I gave myself points for doing that.  I regret not keeping it and perhaps giving something of real substance to someone that did need it.  Maybe the rock was really was worth nothing at all.  Was the regret that I failed to find out its value for someone else and give it to them.

 A Change is Gonna Come  The ending picture in the video.  What may be his regrets?

What is it that I have of possibly great value to give to someone else when and where I might again be standing with something in my hand on the shore of a tropical ocean?





 

We Are The Stories We Tell About Ourselves

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”  ---William Arthur Ward

 I have my heroes.  They are my heroes because the life stories they tell about themselves are the stories I wish to tell of myself.  To become that good that they are.

Perhaps my greatest bucket list wish is to tell my own story as an expression without attribution of the collective life stories of those I admire most.  Superficially, that would conclude that my character is no more than assuming the role and act out a retelling of the essential admired stories of those I chose.  At times I look internally, deeply, to see that I am a composite of all those that I have loved and what I have loved most in each of them is carried not just in my heart but in my mind-self.  Their story but mine to retell of myself, my way in tribute to them.
  
I find this to be true when I say that I have been inspired by the stories of those that mean the most to me.  I believe that their stories, their lives, were formed by those that inspired them.  Inspiration only therefore lives if it is passed on to others and maybe that is as important as passing on the gift of life.  Inspiration to be good, to do good, even be and do the best.  Or simply better.  

Inspiration is the breathing in and out of the first breath of life we were given.  We might have been kick-started by something divine to take the first breath but it was a loving slap on the butt by another human being that welcomed us into the world of a second breath and the expression of love thru inspiration that kept us and others going until and beyond our last breath of expiration.

"Breathe In - Breathe Out --Repeat After Me".........Maybe a good title for a story I must write!   Last line:   Continue inspiring in memory of me and my last breath will never expire.

My story has been lived in three segments.  Steps in the journey were heroes encountered, left behind, their inspiration carried forward with no load in the knapsack.  Growing up for 22 years, which means until college graduation.  Navy career for 20 years.  A relationship with my hero for 20 years.  A hero initially for what she did and continued to do but then for who she was.  Her life story about herself until I shared her last breath.  More heroes followed on the journey.

Wow!  What was the inspiration this morning for all of this story!!!!  It was this link:  The Myths We Soldiers Tell About Ourselves.  It took me back to my Navy days and experiences.  Stories of heroes from that time that inspired me with honor, courage, and moral goodness.  The counter stories of those lacking in these attributes.  Stories that I would die to avoid telling about myself.  Navy days were only prelude to the next chapter.  It got even better.

The longer story of my life is that I shared the life story of my hero and doing things that were an expression of her story.  She once told me to never call her my hero again.  I may have said the same if she had called me hero.  She did not see herself that way nor did I.  In the end I said it about her but it was always true.

Maybe we are heroes of our own stories but love causes whatever that hero thing is to be expressed in inspiration for the life story of another.  That is what gives love a history story and writes the greatest stories yet to be written.

My memorial to the one that inspired me is a single word story carved into the heart of a boulder by Phil's Trail.  A tribute to her but a reminder to me of the story that I came to tell.  To learn how to tell better by living it.

It is not the hero we need but their inspiration.  Having both intimately in our lives is having it all.

Monetary System Wiki

The best way to explain a digital monetary system is to use a Wiki.  Bitcoin and Ripple are monetary systems that have explanatory wikis  components in the structure of their websites

The Bitcoin Wiki is here at this link.
Bitcoin is the sponsor agency of the Bitcoin system.

The Ripple Wiki index is here at this link.
Ripple Labs (Open Coin Inc.) is the sponsor agency of the Ripple system

The Bitcoin Wiki describes the Ripple System at this link.

The Ripple Wiki has an introduction to Ripple for Bitcoiners at this link.

Wikipedia describes Bitcoin here and it describes Ripple here.

My digital monetary system does not have a Wiki but I examined the need for one in this blog entry.

Bitcoin and Ripple each have a website sponsored Wiki describing them.  BTC is the name of the Bitcoin monetary system unit of value analogous to the US Dollar. The Ripple system name for an internal system unit of value is XRP.  The Ripple external unit of value is any existing currency of choice including Bitcoin system BTC.

Wikipedia describes the US Dollar at this link.  If you looked at the Bitcoin and Ripple Wikis or their Wikipedia description I am sure you would say:  "Where's the Beef?"  Bitcoin and Ripple describe themselves systemically in related wikis.   The Beef is there but it is a thin little patty called "Means of Issue" lost in all the bun and relish of the Wikipedia description.

There are sponsoring organizations for BTC and Ripples.  The sponsoring organization for the US Dollar is the Federal Reserve.  Some might say the government but the government gave away its sovereign right to the monetary system to the Fed and is (as in We) hostage to the debt money banking system.

Surprise!  There is no Federal Reserve sponsored wiki.  Wikipedia however fills that void by Wikipedia description of the Federal Reserve monetary system at this link.  The Federal Reserve is not an open system.  There is a .gov site here describing the Federal Reserve Board.  That small public foot in the door of a private banking system represented a the top of operational monetary system command and control by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

There is no wiki created and maintained by a responsible sponsor agency of the US Dollar monetary system.  We are not even quite sure who that sponsor agency is. Not the government.  Must be the banking system.  The banking system does not intend to reveal itself in a wiki for which they are responsible for a simple structured presentation of the banking system.  They leave that to collective explanation by economists, each in their own way.

If I was president I would task someone to be responsible for establishment and maintenance of a Wiki for the US Dollar monetary system. Who would I task with that job?  The agency responsible for the system, of course!  Who is that entity?  Start finger pointing here.

What ever agency was unlucky to be assigned responsibility for this undesirable job would have to have a public organizational wikipedia entry for National Debt.  Wikipedia describes US National Debt here at this link.  Wikipedia is simply an open source structure of public created knowledge.  Wikipedia.org has no responsibility for it.  Wikipedia is the default explanation for anything that any entity truly responsible for wiki type explanations does not provide in wiki format structure.

This is the Dept of the Treasury website.  .gov websites are generally public interface portals focused on services provided and how to obtain services as well as stories about how well they provide them.  If I were president I would task every single agency of government that has a public website on the internet to include an agency sponsored Wikipedia for their area of responsibility.

Actually, Congress is the law making body responsible for this mandate.  The mandate would apply to Congress itself.

Since there is no Wiki created and maintained by an agency responsible for the US Dollar Monetary System it appears that this wide open opportunity to create a system described by a Wiki to compete with the US Dollar system is the new gold rush!

If I were president I would command (whoever is responsible for carrying out my presidential commands) to have the person responsible for the operation and maintenance of the US Dollar monetary system to be in my office the next day to tell me how it works and leave me with a copy of their comprehensive monetary system wiki, not a power point presentation.

I expect that the next day I would find a command from the NYFRB for me to  appear for a briefing at their convenience.  No note taking or recording devices allowed.

Bitcoin has a wiki and if I were president I would ask them if they want to rename their monetary unit.  Does the President have authority to do that?  Who does have that authority?

TSA Wifi and Bluetooth Device MAC Address Sniffing While You Wait in Line - Cancelled--Really?

I doubt if it was cancelled.  Just living on in a different form under Amor Chroma.

 Continuing my interest in identifying  computer device (cell phone) MAC addresses thru some near field communication detection method for intelligence purposes.  My blog entries about Safeway and also Seattle are related to this interest.

The following from this link: at Homeland Security which explains the system.  DHS/TSA/PIA-037 August 3, 2012 Privacy Impact Assessment for

Automated Wait Time (AWT) Technology 

"TSA’s Automated Wait Time (AWT) system utilizes information broadcasted from Bluetooth®1-enabled devices carried by individuals in the general checkpoint queuing area to calculate wait times and deploy resources, as appropriate, to reduce delays in checkpoint queues.  In the interest of transparency to the public, this Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) is conducted pursuant to Section 222 of the Homeland Security Act to assess privacy risk from the AWT system. In order to ensure that AWT systems sustain and do not erode privacy protections, TSA developed and implemented processes that give effect to the Fair Information Practice Principles while generating statistical data used for improving checkpoint operations."

This only discusses Bluetooth but Wifi world just as well to reveal MAC Address and most people probably have Wifi turned on.  I normally travel with Bluetooth off.

Just waiting in line?  I bet they cover the entire airport.  Especially after the recent incident.  One airport I have been at had a bridge toll booth type of entry for traffic.  Stand-off defense capability dictates detection at the farthest range to increase defense/offense ability.

Blip Systems is a provider of Automated Wait Time Systems

Amor Group, a division of Lockheed is also a provider of AWTS. The link gives fascinating  info on what they provide and to whom.  It is called the Amor Passenger Tracking System.

I have an App on my iPhone called Passbook.  I tried it once for an airline ticket but when I got to the gate I actually used a paper ticket boarding pass.  Forgot how it worked.  Looking at the App it appears to be a scanning App for barcodes.  I think it may go beyond that and you can see where it goes if you touch "Apps for Passbook" at the bottom of the Passbook App Screen.  Many of the Apps are for Airlines.  Selecting a couple of the other Apps, for example Kroger, Walgreens, Home Depot, they are all businesses that are using in store location systems that detect wifi and blue tooth.

With more free wifi and bluetooth services being provided by airports, more people will have these capabilities turned on in their devices.  The TSA link at the beginning of this entry says that privacy is covered because the device owner knows (knows by default of course) that they can turn off these capabilities and opt out.

It behooves an airport security system to provide free wifi services and whatever free services could be provided via bluetooth!

Ya really think that the objective is to measure wait time in a line?  Wait a minute---I've got news for you!

TSA, Seattle, Safeway, etc....they are all Mini-Me's of NSA  We don't know what they are doing.  The big difference is that we can find out via Open Source Intelligence.  That is what this blog entry does.  I can find a lot and make good guesses about the rest I cannot find.

Excuse me, someone is knocking on the door......

Things relate to things, context reveals answers.

The key to getting all information all the time is secretly turning on wifi and bluetooth transmissions overriding any user settings.  Cellular is usually on all the time...if it is not then turn that on secretly too.

IT'S MY PASSENGER! WHO OWNS THE PASSENGER EXPERIENCE IN AMERICAN AIRPORTS?

Who owns the passenger?  Armor has one system that satisfies all stakeholders related to the passenger object.  Certainly including TSA.

Amor "Blufi" tracking here.  Very informative.  Revealing in fact.  Maybe the best summary of capability I have found and it is dated 30 May 2012!  Capability has probably grown substantially since then.  It does not take an Eric Snowden to reveal this.  Blip is a technology partner.  Who else does Lockheed contract with?  Are they an NSA contractor or Partner?  Where did Lockheed Amor get its expertise in this area of business intelligence application?

“Amor Group’s “BluFi” product is an augmented Bluetooth and WiFi tracking solution which provides airport operations with real-time data on their queue times and passenger flows.  Due to the combination of these two technologies we have termed this solution “BluFi”.  This new solution tracks the unique IDs from both Bluetooth and WiFi devices to give a threefold increase in the number of passengers tracked.”

“Amor has identified WiFi data as a rich source of additional tracking information to further augment the intelligence we already gather via Bluetooth tracking.”

“In general, iOS and Android devices cannot be tracked via Bluetooth, meaning that BluFi will capture a large proportion of passengers not otherwise tracked by standalone Bluetooth. “

“From years of deployment experience, the BlipTrack Bluetooth solution tracks between 10-15% of all passengers, 24 hours a day. By consolidating Bluetooth and WiFi data we can now capture up to 50% of all passengers being processed through a terminal. This larger sample rate helps to increase the accuracy of the data captured.”

“Adding WiFi means we can measure a greater number of passengers across a variety of areas and situations including baggage halls and retail areas.

Wait...wait ...hold everything!  This statement by Martin Bowman dated 14 Nov. 2013 says:

These agencies, as indicated by the TSA’s (albeit cancelled) Automated Wait Time project, have a duty to deliver a great experience for travellers.

Cancelled??? I can hardly believe it.  Once they get their foot in the door with any surveillance method or device it is not easily cancelled!  I suspect that it has been superseded by something newer, better, more intrusive and less detectable.

This from March 2013 says it was a test program that was scrapped.

Business can violate privacy easier than government..unless you are the NSA.  I suspect that TSA will simply be getting information from the umbrella Chroma airport system that integrates all info and includes wifi and bluetooth tracking throughout the airport.

Amor Chroma is something that the airport uses to track passengers throughout the airport and provide passenger related information derived from their wifi, bluetooth, and other sensing media to all the various users of that information in the airport.  The charge for the services just gets wrapped into the airport tenant charges.  TSA being just another tenant that has access to "Bluwi" derived passenger info.  So, who is to say how long the airport keeps info in their Chroma data base and how it is to be used?

Internet Kill Switch - Standard Operating Procedure 303 and IPAWS

Update 15 Jan. 2018:  I happened to be on the island of Molokai when the false ballistic missile alert was sent.  Immediately I was convinced it was a mistaken alert triggered by some failure to observe protocol.  Later I have learned how poorly such a critical control system was designed.

I believe that all these public warning systems are poorly designed and furthermore operated by inept personnel that rarely if ever have a real world function to perform.  Easy jobs occupied by slackers over a long enough period of time that the slackers have advanced to high positions of management.  Discipline is the bane of slackers.  Admiral Rickover would fire them all.

There is an opportunity for hackers to get into such a poor system to create havoc for fun and probable profit from the immediate panic.

The original post that follows is worth some second look to see what the situation is today with plans for central control of all major internet media and exactly how and when that control would be implemented by the masters of the system for the "public benefit" as defined by those that proclaim themselves to be the protecting custodians of the common good....by knowing what is best for us.

As a result I see potential enhancement of Fusion Center responsibility and  authority at the state level to compensate for ineptness is state management of crises situations.  More Federal level control riding on the back of increased public fear of attack.

End of Update.

Wikipedia describes the Internet Kill Switch here at this link.  It is officially called "Standard Operating Procedure 303" and is defined here at this link by the IT Law Wiki.

That makes me wonder what the first 302 SOPs are and what is the number of the last SOP?.....In the navy it was called kiss yourself good-bye in the event of a nuclear attack.

Perhaps there is some clue connected to 300 SOPs  to the nature of SOP 303 here.  It connects the National Institute of Standards and Technology of the Department of Commerce to a commercial contractor, SAI Global and the Law Enforcement Standards Office (OLES)

Wikipedia describes the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System here at this link.

This was reported in the New York Times, 13 Nov 2013:

"Homeland Security must disclose ‘Internet Kill Switch,’ court rules"

Coincident with the date of 11/11/13 was a great amount of speculation about an electric grid blackout.  Lot of conspiracy thinking related to it.

This is what intrigues me:  There is an apparent (to me) connection to killing the internet communication system with a switch but there absolutely must be another system that maintains or re-establishes a "sanitized" internet system for command an control.  That might logically be the intent of IPAWS?

Natural Language is a Beautiful Thing

Last night I joined many others to pay honor to the beauty of our language and a person that is an artist that uses the language for poetic expression.  We also paid honor with our applause to those that contributed in a collaborative effort with contributions to the art.  The drawings, the printing, the binding and beyond that to creating the physical and conceptual venues in which all this takes place.

The whole thing was a celebration on many abstract levels involving a whole universe of wonderful relationships all the Via to the Milky Way!

Our Natural Language skillfully and artfully used in the nuances of the art to create beauty will never be replaced by any machine language.  It can however be enhanced by translation or association to other forms and functions of language such as music, math, and all other languages of communication between and among conceptual and real things, individually and collectively.

Our natural language beauty may even be enhanced by a "baking" of the original product with ingredients of other natural and artificial languages.  It comes back out of the oven as a natural language expression but with baked in attributes that make it so much better.

A Thing of Beauty!

Narrative Description of the Real Monetary System

While I struggle to describe a new monetary system based on a debt free, serialized, digitized, dollar existing as a "real entity" object with its own properties and behaviors distinct from simply being a number in an account of the Accounting System......Others are struggling in the attempt to describe the current monetary system (which is wrong because it is debt based) in accurate understandable framwork.

J. D. Alt is attempting to make a fundamental money system narrative explanation for dummies here.  Evaluate the difficulty simply by looking at the comments on what he writes made by those that have a great understanding of the system and the language.

Raul Carrillo  is making his narrative attempt to explain the monetary system here: America is $17 Trillion in Debt — Here's Why You Shouldn't Be Worried

Both are good attempts as well as all the others struggling to get the true picture of understanding the money system model across to the general public.  When the Tea Baggers get it they will have succeeded.  The best I think they can do is get it across to the segment that counts enough to at least prevent the serious crises based on ignorance much less change the nature of the system to a better one that is debt free based. 

They are both handicapped by our Natural Language.  They could explain it in a more refined presentation but the public would not understand it.  Perhaps they should revert to cartoons!  The problem of explaining money is between a rock and a hard place. 

At least Raul Carrillo makes generous use of links.  Some one commented on J. D. Alt's target audience, as being more inclined to dig down into the analysis.  That is what we do on the WWW to discover and learn.  The links to things have to be laid our for us.  Simply, logically in a structure for us to follow, if we care to.

The stumbling block of the ambiguity of Natural Language!  Why do structures that reduce ambiguity have to be so complex!

A thing is explained by the context of the things it relates to.

The Thing --- Reloaded

There is a theme, a thread, a single thing that runs through all the posts in this blog.  Hard to follow for you perhaps.  I write too much volume about that thing and say too little.

There is only one thing to know:  Every thing is a thing.

There are only two parts to any thing:

1.  The object thing

2.  The action thing

Looking at all things as things, which is the simplest way to look at them,  is the object oriented view point.  All things are objects.

The hard part is to see an action as a thing.  It defies our earliest teaching that a thing is a noun and an action is a verb.  The first step in educating us about our natural language.

The Thing

There is a theme, a thread, a single thing that runs through all the posts in this blog.  Hard to follow for you perhaps.  I write too much volume about that thing and say too little.

There is only one thing to know:  Every thing is a thing.

There are only two parts to any thing:

1.  The object thing

2.  The action thing

Looking at all things as things, which is the simplest way to look at them,  is an object oriented view point.  All things are objects.

The hard part is to see an action as a thing.  It defies our earliest teaching that a thing is a noun and an action is a verb.  The first step in educating us about our natural language.

Now I take off in flights of fancy to the world beyond the horizon of what I even think I know but is out there somewhere waiting to become more intelligently understood when I find the pony at the bottom of a pile of stuff.  I believe it is there somewhere.  Maybe not under this particular pile but they all have to be sifted and searched.

............................................................

It makes me wonder about the nature of our "native language" of perception was before we were "educated" into a "natural language" called English?  A language that then became our tool to express and communicate perception.

The "feral child" raised by wolves is the sociologist dream.  The pristine animal consciousness not socialized by anything else but nature.  What is their "native natural viewpoint of the world?  Different I suppose to the extent it is not pre-disposed by the nature of the language we learn to use that connects logic and structure.

Logic (the subject), Language (to express it) and Structure (the object of the subject expressed through language).  Is not unique to humans, only an extension of nature from inanimate things to animate things to us as the supreme animate things.  We are so supreme and self centered that we do not recognize that Logic, Language and Structure permeate everything in the fabric of our universe.

The  universal trinity   key   to   every   thing.

It is that simple.

It is not difficult for me to conclude that the animal (non-human) view point perception of the world is all structured on the thing we call action.  I think that our animal nature generally pre-disposes us to an action/function oriented language that consequently influences the  form of both our logic and structure viewpoints of the world.

Object Oriented Language is Language 2.0.  A paradigm shifting from Language 1.0 which was a Process Oriented Language.

We were a feral society of feral children raised by nature.  Learning the action/function natural language that shaped the way we think.  A mode of thinking that ,at the purest animal level, postulates that all things are actions and objects are action/function derived things.

That last thought is the structure of  the natural world.  A natural world that is the product of three things:  Subject, Time, Object.  Where Time is the action thing, Subject is the Creator/Initiator thing and Object is the function of Subject and Time.

Animals sense time as action.  That perception is action oriented.

Humans conceive of time.  We inherited an animal perception of time but have the ability to build conceptional expressions of reality into conceptual representations of reality that extend time to eternity.  Temporal time extended to eternity is an object of supremacy from which all things derive.

The higher nature of human beings is object oriented.  We have known that from the start and have created the necessary logic an structure to explain it.  Our natural animal nature however has had a controlling influence that puts us naturally in a position of chicken and egg conflict with a resolution that action precedes and determines the nature of objects.

It is a tipping point problem.  We always have been a combination of action and object orientation.  To the extent that orientation has conflicted for dominance of view to shape the other we have been in an internal conflict with our own perceptions throughout history.

The shifting from process/function orientation to object orientation either lifts us to the next level of advancement or is the high water mark from which there is retreat if we do not shift our fundamental action oriented view and structure to an object oriented controlling view point of entry to our problems.

Our primary and majority focus has always been on what a thing does to derive structure.

A shift to primary and majority focus on understanding and controlling what a thing is to derive what it should do to give us the

Context Reveals Answers - IBM's Watson

A story here about the IBM artificial intelligence program called: Watson

Jeff Jonas, who I have been following for years and admire his thinking.  He talks about Watson indirectly here.

He expresses in one beautiful line the nature of his entire amazing professional career:

"Context is looking at the things around some thing to understand the thing." 

I love it!  It is all about the thing!

That one statement is why he is a Chief Scientist at IBM.  I previously made blog entries about him here  and   here  and  here.

He is a super intelligent guy with a moral conscience.  One of the things I admire about him is the ability to describe the complexity of structural relationships simply.  Simply because he starts with a foundational building block like his statement about context.  Then he discovers context around it.  He can also start with that foundational building blog and create new context around it.  The new context is a management structure to use what is discovered.  That is the story about is first contextual discovery system in Las Vegas.

In the process of discovering context around a thing I believe Jeff is the kind of thinker that will say that the established management plan structure that addresses whatever happens to be the problem domain of the thing that is understood by looking at the things around it is an inadequate or dysfunctional plan.

I wish I could talk to Jeff about this monetary system thing!

Here is a summary of a story I told in grade school in the 50's:

There came a time far into the future when the most powerful computer ever made was asked the ultimate question:  (it was a Catholic grade school) What is the solution to the problems of mankind?  The computer began to reply with the words of the First Commandment.  The nun did not quite know what to say except; next.

We are not at that point yet!  However, it is not the computer that gives us answers it is the conceptual structure of complex relationships built with our natural and artificial languages that reveal to us what is our own logic that created the system.

The Logic that creates our systems can be revealed to us by a logically constructed machine looking at our conceptual structures created not by machines but by our brains and reveal our logic to us as either being true or false logic.  False in this context being logic that is inconsistent with the system it knows as the relationships among all real and conceptual things.

Watson is that system taking baby steps.  It is not that we will be the told what to do by machines but that conceptual tools we create will serve us to present to us our social self solutions to contextual problems.  For example:  Environment, Health Care, Politics, Money, etc.

Watson is simply a step beyond writing everything down in our natural language called English in order to organize and manage context with an exquisitely accurate contextual object oriented machine language to do the same thing for us but better.

Context reveals answers!  It might tell us we got the contextual relationships wrong, especially in our social structures but we did the best we could because we were working with a best logic and natural language we previously had to work with.

We really do not need a computer language to reveal the truth in our social structures today and the possible corrections and changes.  We do need a more accurate natural language approaching seamless integration with our artificial languages.  A feedback loop that takes us from natural language through iterations of machine languages to relate to conceptual structure models then backtracking through the process to natural language explanations.

We do not need to learn a new artificial language to interface with artificial intelligence.  We only have to learn our own natural language structures better to improve communication and reduce noise.

The better structure we need to communicate is building itself right under (in front of) our noses.  It is the web structure of the internet.  The same place that Watson goes to find all the contextual relationships, the same place the NSA goes to find them.  Where we go when we search for anything to add to or connect with the conceptual structures in our heads.

Narrative Structure Model

J. D. Alt present "Talking Points for the 99%" at New Economic Perspectives.

It is the narrative presentation of some highly structured concepts.  I have admired his past comments and respect his knowledge and ability to use the narrative form effectively.  As much as I would like to use a more highly structured language like UML I have to admit that natural language narrative will always be the communications common denominator both used and interpreted accurately by those who understand the definitions of terms and relationship of ideas.

J. D. Alt is an architect.  I would have guessed it before I learned it.  What he writes is the product of an object oriented structured design mind.  Structural relationships naturally emerge from the narrative of his words.

Slicing and Diceing Language -- I Want A Lot

I will start and end with this to give a significant morning prayer to myself blog entry a book end symmetry with something handed to me as Pre Amble:

"You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything: the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up. . .

 You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret."
—Rainer Maria Rilke, from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Robert Bly

However you slice or dice it.  It is all language.  It = It.  Not much meaning there but the foundation of creating meaningful things. 

It is all just numbers and strings.  Maybe just strings since strings may contain numbers and other characters.

It is all about the string but as a common language by which to express our common logic in a common structure it gives meaning to the string.  Meaning has great power when it means the same thing to everyone.  Logic and the truth  expressed with the common language.  The trinity of Logic, Language and Structure for everyone.

Uincode.  I put that link in here and now to remind myself to come back to it as an important future blog subject.  Unicode is an elegant thing.

“[Unicode] is [the] standard that enables nearly all those living in the world today to communicate with each other in their native language character sets. It even permits the words of many of those that lived in the past to become accessible to those alive today in electronic form, and in their original character sets as well.”—Andy Updegrove
United States National Standards Strategy Committee

Modern programs must handle Unicode —Python has excellent support for Unicode, and will keep getting better.”

—Guido van Rossum Inventor of Python"

I woke up with the following thought this morning that I also need to write down in order to loop back to at some future blog point:

The Society of English Majors could solve all the world's problems.

One more thing to add:  A concept that permeates everything I think and write about:  High Level of Abstraction.  And of course its structural counterpart doing the work down in the ditches where the rubber meets the road: "Low Level of Abstraction" which in reality is not abstract at all but where hand meets real tool to get the job done.

How does all this stuff come into my mind?

I don't know, I just wake up with it.  Life is all about waking up through levels of consciousness. Starting with a some given state of consciousness.

I start climbing tree to (the higher level) moon here.....the start point is relative, it is not
absolute.  Otherwise I would be climbing in circles.

I think that the highest level of abstraction is expressed by a language we all speak and understand.  That has not happened since Babel.  I wrote about Babel in a previous blog entry here.  When I start linking to my own blog entries I must be building structure!

Unicode is a common means of uniting computer programming world wide.  We may use different natural languages but they all deal with the same things and actions, nouns and verbs and their associated modifiers that are the things of computer languages

Our own Natural Language Programming is done in English.  Music and math are more universal languages for programming.  Wouldn't it be great if we all sang the same tune from the same song sheet.

I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony....take time to go to this link and listen to a poetic high level of abstraction thought.  It frames what follows.

This is the top of my tree.  This is where tree and me at the top reach the moon.  Where I want my structured thoughts to go through language to logic from the bottom in the trenches to the top.  The vision, the goal, the unity, the highest level.  My inspiration to get me there, a beautiful song in a language we all understand at this link:  Sing

Climbing as follows:::::::::::--------

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything: the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up. . .
You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Robert Bly

Translated because it was originally written in German.  Much was lost in translation as per the comments at Amazon.com.  That is the problem a common language solves.  I don't even know German!

All we can do with inspiration is pass it on.  Each pass enhances it.

Thanks for the inspiration.  It is a joyous burden to be responsible for passing it on. 

Publish or perish!  Publishing is passing it on.  Playing catch with myself is not a way to pass anything.

More quotes from Rilke here.  and also here.