THE CENTIPEDE'S SHOES

It’s hard to get up in the morning knowing that by noon there would be another piece of betrayal, avarice, brutality from the very people who were elected because they promised to break up all that.  They have found their enemy and it is us.  

One of the recent presidential declarations — so toxic that it was signed privately, giving up that childish flourish of the felt tip and presentation to the camera that Trump so loved at first — is permission for ISP’s to sell all your private information.  The shoe dropped on a pile of socks already shed quietly and without anything to do with government.  I speak of subcontracting: one’s ISP subcontracts the evaluation and training of their technical employees, subcontracts the “nanny” function of running a “block list” (“black list”) that swallows all transmissions they consider unacceptable or are paid to block, and so on.  My IP's nanny is called "Barracuda."  I have shut it down to the lowest setting and I probably shouldn't tell you that.

Go to <whatismyipaddress.com>  An IP Address is your little thread of identity that connects you to the internet.  You’ll find this website very interesting, because it educates you about a lot of sub-contractors to sub-sub-contractors built on the need to get yourself off a blacklist that is interdicting your messages.  Only by using sources like this one can you discover that you are even blocked.  Otherwise, some indignant relative wondering why you don’t respond is likely to call you on your phone or send a letter, or in the recent case of a friend, send the sheriff out to make a welfare check in case you aren’t answering because you’re dead.

The justification for these blocklists is that people hate getting SPAM and, indeed, it’s miserable stuff (I remember eating the canned glob the metaphor comes from, a wartime food my mother covered with cloves and mustard) and sometimes dangerous, invasive or offensive.  Though I have a hard time getting all upset by naked people.  There are worse things.

One blocklist entrepreneur simply blocked as many IP’s as he could and then demanded money to turn them back on.  I don’t know how it is possible for people to do this without one’s provider knowing, but of course, blackmailers have to tell them where to send the money.

Whole countries can shut off internet service.  Electro-magnetic coding means layers and layers of inscrutable semi-math that only an expert can sort out.  “Pinging” means that anyone can be notified about anything, words, photos, maps.  Then “steps” can be taken because the IP will tell authorities whose door to knock on.

My understanding of all this is primitive and second-hand because I hate having to take the time to check blacklists or complain to my provider, which is a rural telephone cooperative.  They say I’m the only person in Valier who complains so much anyway, so why don’t I get a life?  Meaning their kind of a life.

The real reason I’m the only complainer is that most of the users have alternatives now that there’s a transmission tower alongside the grain elevator.  You can make a smart phone work, most of the time.  There are internet access turnouts along the highways here, not to discourage texting while driving, but because there are only certain sweet spots where transmission works.  Anyone taking an iphone into the mountains and counting on it for rescue had better hope they get into trouble in a high place with a clear line of sight.

There are other problems.  Many of the software operating programs of our computers give access to the designer for purposes of monitoring and updating.  Sometimes they might be interested in other things and they do have the capacity to turn your computer on and manipulate the drive if there is electricity, so I unplug mine at night.  In fact, I keep really personal writing on a second computer that is never on the internet.  The problem is that if I take something from this computer, where I am writing at the moment, on a “thumb” over to the private computer, that program will not have been updated and sometimes will not longer recognize the same program if it’s more recent.  

Sometimes I suspect that there is malware that is reading my thumb before letting it be removed.  Sometimes I wonder if the two computers are talking through the wireless feature. (Which is turned off on every device since I found myself suddenly reading my neighbor’s computer screen — though they tell me that’s impossible.  Oh, yeah?  I haven’t forgotten that in Portland we could sometimes hear the control tower transmissions with airplanes flying overhead in order to land.)

The whole thing is like those parking lots with spikes that come up if you try to drive out without paying.  It’s a use of socially approved force to get compliance and “ta dah”! make money.  Things like the “boot” put on the wheels of your car by law enforcement.  And worse.

There is a kind of malware that has nothing to do with computer code and that’s legal code.  The two are entwined.  Trump’s law cancellation will probably make legal things that are already happening illegally.  But laws can’t be enforced without motivation, monitoring, consequences and so on -- all of which cost money.  Trump knows that and knows that the budget is key: bookkeeping code is the most effective of all.  

But all these codes can be backed out — once the parking lot spikes and the wheel boots are detected and shut down.  I suspect that at the moment there are specialized people backtracking these codes in protected spaces, and finding the trails of betrayal, avarice, cheating.  Trump himself is a cyber idiot, but a social predator, which is why he has no computer on his White House desk, but he DOES run an old-fashioned iphone.  It can be monitored and it probably has GPS.

In a coded world there is no will to chase all this stuff.  The missing element is human conscience, which in the Modern Euro-derived world has been severely challenged.  There is no imaginary papa to scold us, but there are vivid depictions of suffering and depravity.  Many people crumple in the face of those images, so they have to be warned to turn away lest they faint.  They learn not to see anything disturbing, so they step over people living on the sidewalk, maybe dying.  

This is not code, but it is social malware.  Our children are watching.  I hope they are thinking. Maybe they and others read “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” and realized that if two mild-mannered data-gatherers could find out they were hooked on tentacle porn, then the really dangerous tentacle was their ISP.

GERRYMANDERING THE DONUT

When I voted at the town “hall,” I went to the table for the actual town but across the room there was a second sign-in table for the area just outside Valier.  For months I’ve been thinking about the difficulty presented to this town, which is — of course — defined by a boundary and plat that was designed when it was founded and is based on area and a line around the outside.  The rules of life are quite different on the two sides of that line, which creates a gradient.

The main tendency is that the expensive community services (schools, churches, town management, amenities such as sewer and water, street maintenance, building permits) are funded by town taxes and fees and controlled by voting residents.  But because the ecologically possible creation of profit is in raising livestock or growing grain, those things must happen on land outside the town.  Today the enterprises require major machinery and uses of chemicals (including fuel) and therefore investment capital (the bank is in the town) but the families who live out there and do the work depend upon the amenities of the town.  In this dry-land country,  even potable water must be trucked out from town wells.  Irrigation canals for crops can’t be used for drinking.

For the last decades parents have concentrated on getting their kids into college, but the town is invested in maintaining the values and assumptions that have defined the town, which do not prepare kids for college.  Some will manage to make it anyhow, and since cities and college towns are usually far more global, people with college educations vote differently than those who stop at high school graduation.  People who have spent time in the city are more invested in “things to do,” which often turn out to be passive, provided by specialists: athletes, performers, law enforcement, cafés, taxis, actually more “done for.”  And paid for.

At the same time, college grads are more susceptible to the romance of the ranch and since a big technologically advanced ranch (say one that uses hormones to produce and ship genetically valuable bovine fetuses instead of raising cow-calf pairs on grass) is likely to have an international clientele that will love to visit, so they aren’t likely to feel like hicks in the sticks.

The energy, the money, and the contacts around the outside of the town are powerful, but crucial quality-of-life elements are inside — a kind of island.  The ranchers cannot vote on town matters.  These days no church has enough money for a minister.  The culture will not tolerate school administrators or even teachers from outside.  The bank policies are hostile to “little people”: won’t exchange Canadian money though the border is close and people go back and forth a lot, won’t make paper bills into coins for machines, no longer accepts payments for the utility companies in order to spare postage, imposes sizable penalties for overdrafts or late payments.  They are meant to pipeline big money.

Kids, having watched many media shows based on high density populations, can’t imagine what to do in a small rural town, because they have been looking at passive city events in stadiums and theatres.  Even the streets have more action.  Valier, with its old-lady enforcement of leash law, doesn’t even have dogs sprawled sleeping in the streets.  (Plenty of action in Browning, both dogs and people.)  Their idea of “doing” is pre-determined “fun” activities.  In fact, even the school lessons are supposed to be “fun,” a high value of the American culture.  Skill-building is entirely neglected.

With one exception:  because the computer culture teaches itself all the time, kids soon find that thrilling edge where competence grows and it is not limited to the small town nor small town values.  They aren’t skills for dealing with live people.  Home-schooling and charter schools (on the rez) work better than the public schools because they allow more self-determination.  In Kim Williams’ terms, doing instead of being done unto.

Tim used a Paul Krugman quote today:  “Maybe the historic channels of reform — speech and writing that changes minds, political activism that eventually changes who has power — are no longer effective.  Maybe American isn’t special, it’s just another republic that had its day, but is in the process of devolving into a corrupt nation ruled by strongmen.”  At town council meetings I often hear rational thought-out explanations that are immediately cancelled by emotion or suspicion of motives.

I’ve been thinking about gerrymandering, which is fiddling with the boundaries to alter what is included.  Blackfeet know a lot about that, since their boundaries kept being pushed back to move the good grazing outside of it so ranchers could get at it.  Part of the rez is in Pondera County so that Swift Dam would be in the same county as the Pondera Canal Company.  The state voting districts have been redrawn and redrawn to prevent rez people from having control, until some districts look like a snake that swallowed a pretzel. stretching across the Rocky Mountains.

Gerrymandering of regulations doesn’t depend on drawing boundaries of land, but manages categories of definition so that some people are exempted or included as convenient.  The power from being in government comes in part from this, but much of the machinery is never seen because it depends on data, so easily managed with computers now, subtly making all the marbles roll into the right pockets through the use of printed law.  In this election the polling people got overconfident about their data, forgetting that humans set up the categories and humans have a tendency to not see whatever they don’t like or haven’t experienced.  A lot of people are outside the ken of pollsters or those who commission them, which suddenly became obvious when the voting returns came in.

A lot of critics have rounded on the media for misleading us, being tools of the puppeteers.  They are the ones who inform the non-readers.  I was impressed by Judy Woodruff rapping her manicure on her desk and demanding,  “What do they WANT?”  As though there were some mystery about people who want a living wage, security in their homes, enough to eat, and good health.  The mystery is why she doesn’t know that they aren’t getting those things.  (I also have a hunch that Hari Sreenevasan wouldn’t get much chance to say anything if the director weren’t talking into their earwigs and telling the camera to go to Hari.)  

Why aren’t people figuring out that even if they REALLY want something and REALLY WORK HARD, they still might not get it.  When I was preaching, I once addressed this, saying that no matter how hard I tried or how many lessons I took, I would never be an opera star nor a ballet dancer.  The congregation gave a big laugh.  I was shocked to realize that their laugh unexpectedly put me on the verge of tears.  It was a return to reality that the whole country is experiencing now. “Painful,” to use Hilary’s word.  We are never going to have gods and leaders who love us, protect us, keep us from evil, make everything all nice and safe.  These are do-it-yourself tasks and campaigns are just advertising with no guarantees.  You can heart them all you want, but you may discover the world is heartless.

OVERSIZED, UNDERGROUND

The actual world is being overwhelmed by the “virtual” abstract world by means of the single most important fact of this modern nation: a good and progressive thing that has been turned into a controlling oppression.  I speak of the theory that we are a nation of laws that manages power, violence, oppression, and corruption.  That’s the theory.  It’s not happening.  The Repubs want to abolish all of it; the Dems want to reform all of it.  Paralysis.  Talk of revolution.

Here in Valier this last week we hosted a Tar Sands mega-load overnight.  They are forbidden to travel in the daytime because they effectively shut off the roads as they pass.  They are also opposed by activists who do not want the Tar Sands developed for ecological reasons.   http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/09/business/global/leak-at-oil-sands-project-in-alberta-heightens-conservationists-concerns.html?_r=0

A whole economy has developed around this project, including a “virtual” university with press that publishes fine ebooks for FREE.  If you don’t read any further, take the time to watch this series of vids:  http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120137?show=videoTabArea  I cannot publish with this press because I ran athwart of them when they were running the University of Calgary Press and accepted “Bronze Inside and Out,” but demanded secrecy in certain matters, which I did not provide.  I forgive them everything because of the terrific job they did with “Imagining Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.”  Free is a very good price.  But if you watch these vids at the press website, you will hear that the buffalo jump people had to fight hard through UNESCO to keep a power line from being built right through the site.

Back to the oversize load.  About a city block long and peculiarly penile, the thingamajig is as tall as a two-story house.  The view from behind the little one-room buildings -- that may have been homestead claim shacks -- across the street from where the thing was parked give an idea of size.  With the white covering on it, it is a remarkable opportunity for graffiti, but there is a guard who won’t let you walk very close.  He seems cheerful and friendly but he’s armed.

Now I’ll seem like I’m changing the subject, but I’m not because the subject is even bigger than oversize loads.  A couple of decades ago I went to a workshop about exotic animal law that was sponsored by Lewis & Clark law school.   It was about importing snakes and tigers, etc.   Someone on a panel there said that the real action now is NOT in framing up laws.  That’s too public, too available for comment and specialized scrutiny, too general and principle-based.  The category to target, he said, is regulations.  Those are administrative decisions and definitions that get down to basics, like the budget.  Almost anything can be controlled this way regardless of what the law says.  (Of course, if you’re big enough you can even control what the Supreme Court will decide -- just as we have been warned and warned but never quite believed until Al Gore suffered the consequences.)

So, some years ago there began to be a little flurry of surveying along the local roads, particularly along the routes the oversized loads would follow.  Some slumps, some narrow turns, suddenly seemed to demand rebuilding -- all before the public knew anything about oversized loads.  The guys who had been begging for improvement because they travel that road to work were pleased at the sudden change of heart and may have even thought their pleas did the job.

The big rallying cry, as was the case with the MATL high-capacity electrical lines that systematically condemned private property in order to make their rows of poles straight, was that the country needed the energy and we locals needed the money.  When local people successfully blocked the condemnations in court, the corporations simply “influenced” the legislature to change the law on which the verdict was based.  If using a law that was pre-existing legislation is a “grandfather” law, what relative is a law passed for the convenience of the corporate future?  I’d say an ugly stepchild.

Now my attention is attracted by a little three-inch story in the GF Trib noting that Philip Anschutz of Denver, a billionaire, not only owns Anschutz Exploration Corporation, which has just been either (according to whom you ask) been thrown off its rez drilling leases for nonpayment or has withdrawn because of failing to locate enough oil to make the effort pay off -- in spite of 14 exploratory wells and analysis of of multiple hydrocarbon-bearing reservoirs.  They have left their abandoned drilling sites unamended as the contracts required.  If I were writing a novel right now, I’d mention unexplained deaths.  

But another subsidiary of Anschulz -- Xanterra Parks and Resorts, Inc. -- has secured the concessions monopoly for Glacier Park.  They already hold the concessions for Yellowstone National Park, Zion, and the Grand Canyon.  I’m not talking about popcorn stands: these “concessions” are the huge lodges built by the Hill family when the railroad reached the Rockies.  I’m suspicious.  Glacier Park’s season is very short.  It has never been a winter park because the weather is too severe.  There are legal questions about the original acquisition of the Park -- the Blackfeet sold it cheap due to starvation caused by the failure of the commodities due according to the treaty to ever arrive.

Constantly I read about permits mysteriously required, applications lost, inspections neglected, sudden erections of things like the cell tower that went up overnight in Valier after years of delay.  It was controversial in the beginning.  (Not whether to put it up but on whose land.)  There are not enough employees for almost any oversight or regulatory agency except the homeland security people and yet we have continuing problems with contaminated food, bad bridges, unregistered sex offenders, uninvestigated child abuse complaints, and so on.

On the internet, aside from lapses of electricity or infrastructure and big node function (clouds), desperation for money means that the NYTimes limits me to ten articles and then demands that I pay.  I note the topic, google it, and read it at the source the NY Times got it from.  YouTube imposes the most obnoxious ten and thirty-second advertisements possible, so I just drop the link.  The topics are never as compelling as the come-on -- most of the time they’re so trivial that I’m embarrassed to wait for them.  One used to be able to zap the ad, but no more.  In fact, sometimes the screen is frozen until you surrender your VISA number.  Just cut the electricity at your spike bar.

For a year Netflix has been telling me that my email address is bad, but they’ve been sending me emails all along.  Google keeps demanding my smart phone link, but I don’t have a smart phone.  I have one old-fashioned land line with big buttons so I can see them.  iTunes refuses to present (streaming WFMT) what I need in a form I can understand, insisting that I must use some “magic” step that has no explanation.  It’s for kids.  Most of the stuff is for kids.  TED and The Edge.net are my only refuges -- plus all the H-lists, bless them.  

This looks to me like the nose of a camel trying to get into the tent.  I've subscribed to AlJazeera.

The Panthers are Valier High School's sports mascot.