gendocs

Published on by zippy

Autodoc is a great tool for automatic documentation generation for your clojure code (the clojure api itself uses it).

If you are using github-pages to publish the docs, here’s a simple little gendocs sh script to dump into your bin folder to do all the work in one go:

#!/bin/sh
 
if [ -d "autodoc" ]
then
echo "generating docs..."
lein autodoc
echo "pushing to github..."
cd autodoc
git add -A
git commit -m "Documentation update"
git push origin gh-pages
cd ..
else
echo "No autodoc dir!  Run this from your project"
fi

Threshing Rye

Published on by zippy

Last fall I planted rye in the disturbed ground around my house to act as a erosion control.  Just this week my father helped my harvest the rye.  We took it into the basement and, with the kids, danced around on it to thresh the kernels out of the heads.  From about 3 or 4 hours of harvesting and about 2 hours of threshing and then winnowing, all this manual labor produced about half of a 5 gallon bucket’s worth of rye.  That same 20lb of rye purchased from my local Agway would cost around $15.  So clearly, economically there’s an indicator that I should be doing something else with my 6  hours that harvesting and threshing rye, because even if I flip burgers for minimum wage, I’d make more money in that time period that I’d spend on the rye.

That’s economics for you.

It’s so experientially clear to me from this threshing that I did with my dad, that the low price per pound I pay for rye at Agway includes massive unaccounted for externalities, and it’s also clear that the benefits I receive from engaging with the land directly are much higher than can be encoding using only one dollar measuring unit.  But this is in no way saying that I think everyone, or even me, should go “back to the land” and eschew specialization.  I just want to really be able able express all those forms of value, and see those externalities, and stop pretending that they can all be reduced to one price.

I’ll post later about the German “vollkorbrot” I plan to bake with the Rye…

Sanctuary for All Life & land emancipation

Published on by zippy

I’m re-reading Jim Corbett’s Sanctuary for All Life.  I don’t know how to express how powerfully deep this book is.  For me it both opens doors and provides a foundation for a post-civilized world for humanity.

Here’s are some extended quotes, because I think the book speaks for itself:

I think the integration of humanity into life on earth requires that capitalism’s drive for ecosystem dominance be succeeded by a way of life beyond capitalism, and I see this from the viewpoint of the wildland pastoralist whose way of life has really never been integrated into civilization’s orienting viewpoint (that we must live by a command economy that reconstructs life on earth to fit us).  Here’s how a latter-day Whig Manifesto might put it:

1. The richest, most efficient, dynamically stable, “no-waste” economies evolve naturally, as spontaneous orders unmanaged by human beings (for example, the Amazonian rainforest).

2. A highly developed economy of this kind grows through the emergence of new symbioses that strengthen its ability to support life and harmonize diversity.

3. Founded on the  premise that the earth belongs to humankind, civilized economies are degenerative, growing primarily from the impoverishment of the more inclusive natural economy that the city-centered economy invades, plunders, and relentlessly tries to subjugate.

4. “Sustainability” concerns the stabilization of the human economy’s degenerative relation to the natural economy at a level that the natural economy can support without further degradation.

5. “Symbiotic naturalization” concerns the integration of a human economy into the natural economy in ways that strengthen the natural economy’s ability to support life and harmonize diversity.

6. Unlike sustainability, symbiotic naturalization requires the transformation of civilization, to establish the institutional base for human beings to become good citizens of the land’s whole, untamed community, enabled to live by supporting rather than degrading the life of the land.

7. In our deliberations about right livelihood, the need to transform civilization means that we seek to be superseded, but not by a new humanity of ecosaintly Uebermenschen; rather, by an unviolated land community that includes us, freed to evolve into richer harmonies.

8. The integration of humanity into the natural economy necessarily evolves as a spontaneous order in which our stewardship role is just to clear the way, not to impose a plan.

9. The invisible hand that guides the natural economy’s evolution reveals that our best choices are transitional, our best intentions are disoriented, our personal moralities are peripheral, and the covenant community’s guidelines are inconclusive; but universal liberty is fundamental:  The land’s liberation remains focal.

and:

…the problem with civilized humanity’s exploitation of nature goes beyond our treating it as a commons that is just there for the taking.  The problem is rooted in the managerial delusion that the land belongs to us either inclusively, as a commons, or exclusively, as property, to use, degrade, or destroy however we like.  The land is actually a living community to which we belong.  …  The tragedies of the commons and of appropriation will end only when the land community’s enslavement ends–when the land is given back to the land.

and:

Proponents of state control see the solution to the tragedy of the commons as a relinquishment of individual freedom to the state, which must take command in order to save us from ourselves.  Yet, the local, daily, on-the-land, community practice that weaves earth rights into the social fabric is beneath the reach of the state, while the commons really at issue is the earth ecosystem, which is beyond the reach of any state but within the reach of a border-bridging community movement.  A basic society of friends can join to establish earth rights where the cumulative efforts of individuals are fruitless and action by the state is counterproductive.  Even if the state didn’t give its primary allegiance to Money, it couldn’t do what’s needed to give the land back to the land because what’s needed is the societal cohesion that grows from communion rather than coercion, and the state is firmly founded on organized violence.  Locally as well as globally, land redemption is a task for those who gather as “church” (a voluntary society based on communion) rather than “state” (an involuntary society or organization based on coercion).

At the core of his work, Corbett is trying to open a way-of-life in which we can realize that we belong to the land, rather than pretend that it belongs to us.  He is trying to open doors to world in which rather than the command & control relationship we currently have as the land’s enslavers, that we might move to a co-creative one as a people symbiotically re-naturalized.

This means that Land Emancipation must happen.  That possibility is thrilling.

Studies in atemporality

Published on by zippy

Just browsing Bruce Sterling’s studies in atemporality flicker stream. It makes me think of Calvin Luther Martin’s “In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time” in which he claims that paleolithic peoples well understood the technologies of agriculture and building ascribed to the move to the neolithic, but didn’t use them because of their world-view.
I think we too are well ready to step back out of time, and lose our enslavement to a historical outlook. Sterling’s images are teasers for us.

WikiLeaks and open societies

Published on by zippy

There’s an important article over on the Radical Philosophy website about Assange and WikiLeaks. Besides having interesting things to say about cryptography, slowness, conspiracy, and graph theory, it’s got this really nice summation of what WikiLeaks is really about:

WikiLeaks, in the long run, is meant as a way of filtering good/‘open’ organizations from bad/‘secret’ ones, creating an inhospitable environment in which to be secret, and thereby improving governance. Assange is not the nihilistic wrecker-of-civilization fantasized by the American right (who seem to have at last found the Bond villain their impoverished understanding of the world has led them to look for). His work reflects an attitude of intensely moral empiricism, empowered by a programmer’s toolkit for abstraction and breaking big problems into smaller ones. The politics of WikiLeaks is a cybernetic politics, with built-in, auto-correcting feedback loops that tend a society towards transparent institutions and accurate information, because the cost of conspiratorial secrecy is pushed disproportionately high.

This paper also quotes Assange:

Society has grown beyond our ability to perceive it accurately. Our brains are not adapted to the environment in which we find outselves [sic]. We can’t predict important aspects of our societal environment. It’s not designed to run on our brains. We’re maladapted. In our evolutionary history we spent a lot of time tracking the behavior and reputations of small number of people we saw frequently. If we want some of the social benefits that a small society brings then we need computational crutches so when A fucks over B any C considering dealing with A will know. A society that can ‘think’ in this way is able to route goodness to people who do good and away from those people who generate hurt. The decision as to what is good is too complicated to be formulated in regulation and elections are a very coarse expression of what people think is good. Any paper formulation will put power in the hands of a political and technocratic elite. Robust routing decisions must be made by individuals and individuals need tools to manage complexity enough so they can make them effectively in a modern society. — Julian Assange ‘Transparency in the cold light of Finland’, post on iq.org, 30 July 2006.

Which is a really nice recognition for the need for holopticism.

It’s a long paper, but worth the read.