My By Will Alone site came about because of a nonviolent direct action miniatures game I have been working on. I haven’t done much with it since 2007, but if you want you can find the rules I wrote:
I have play tested it a few times, pictures of which you can see from the front page.
Send comments to me via jokeefe at jamesokeefe dot org or voice/txt to (617) 863-0385.
That will have to do until I get around to updating them.
Being a Pirate, I tend to pay attention to issues about privacy and transparency an awful lot. It is easy to oppose our increasing government surveillance state when the NSA is hoovering up our emails, Facebook posts and web searches. We expect that those communications are private.
Likewise, we celebrate when someone whips out her mobile phone and records the police working in public spaces or her house, especially if the police decide to show her their nightsticks or tasers. Those are spaces that are public or that an individual on the receiving end of police attention controls.
When a friend on Facebook asked her friends to share a screen shot of a Facebook conversation between a married woman and a single man that consisted of her hitting on him and his response saying that she should be ashamed for cheating on her husband and he was going to publicize their conversation my response was immediate: I would not share it as:
But even those reasons were not needed since the conversation was clearly private and everyone should be entitled to personal privacy, even people who cheat on their spouses.
This image brought to mind a similar story I came across recently. A man hit on a woman on a flight. The woman tweeted about the encounter, and her followers dug up who he was and most importantly who he was married to.
Clearly he is a cad and a liar, if her story is to be believed, and I can understand her being annoyed that he wouldn't take no for answer. She was in a public place and had every right to tweet about a public conversation. That she crowd-sourced his id and background is quite within her right to do. Everything in a public space is pubic. Now.
Ten years ago it would have been difficult to crowd-source his id and publicize his actions. As a result, such a conversation wouldn't seem public. This change in our attitudes and capabilities both excites and terrifies me.
That it excites me isn't hard to understand, just look at what the Yes Men do. Imagine anyone going up to a CEO or wealthy individual in a public place, misrepresenting themselves and getting said individual to speak far too candidly. One need only recall the reporter who punked Gov. Walker by pretending he was one of the wealthy Koch brothers calling to praise Walker to see how that could go.
Two things terrify me. By recording what you do in public, through your phones or future smartglasses, you are recording what others do and when you share that information, it is there for anyone to sift through, and use to publicize our actions. While it could be used to go after the BPs of the world, and I certainly applaud that use, it can also be used to shame or penalize people for legal behavior.
What terrifies more, though, is that the government will sift through and use such crowd-sourced data to target people it deems a threat without oversight. After all the data is public. It isn't inconceivable for the government to fund a smartphone game that gets people to record events or people at certain places and times and share the recordings publicly. Face recognition technology as well as the quality of cameras, devices and mobile networks is certainly getting better. No doubt the analysis could be crowd-sourced as well.
If the government's use of such technologies isn't checked, in ten years the government won't need a 1984-style surveillance network. We'll carry it around for them.
I have found that using Facebook and Twitter aren't allowing me the level of expression I want, so I will be moving more of my activity back to my blog. To encourage me to post more on my blog and because of my Pirate affiliations, I redesigned it. Additionally, I decided to merge several of my blogs, some of which I kept at arms length, into my main blog. A small part of personal transparency.
I have more work to do including updating the domain names and resizing images, but all in all I am happy with it. Expect me to post more here.
I made a bunch of GHQ paper buildings and some more of IanH’s paper buildings recently.
I put together this photo set of step by instructions for how I built them. Hope you find them helpful.
[I hadn't intended this post to be MY first post of the year, but so be it.]
A friend of mine posted a link to Virginia State Officials Confirm: Gingrich Campaign Being Investigated for ‘Illegal Acts’ recently. Apparently someone in Gingrich's campaign may have created 1500 allegedly fraudulent signatures. More than likely this will get a lot of play among left blogs as a Republican ACORN fraud.
I would love to go there and the pretzels the Republicans will be twisting themselves into to try to cover their keisters will be quite sweet. But, being a Pirate Party advocate and former Green, I want to take a step back.
Ballot access is an issue that is close to my heart, so when I hear that 1500 signatures were allegedly fraudulent, I start to wonder.
Getting on the ballot is difficult. I have been through three signature drives to get 10,000 valid voter signatures Massachusetts-wide. In 2002, we had at most three months to gather all of the signatures. That time we had slightly more than a handful of organizers who were paid. In 2000 and 2006, we had fewer staff to organize the signature drive. Most of the effort was done by volunteers.
Since many people put down the wrong address for where they are registered or write in Mickey Mouse, we always aimed for 15,000 raw signatures to be sure we had enough. If we were close, then we knew our signatures would get challenged and we would likely not get on the ballot.
Indeed, in 2004 in Pennsylvania, Ralph Nader did not get on the ballot when his signatures were challenged. His campaign gathered 51,273 signatures, about two times the 25,697 signatures required. Amazingly after the challenge, he had 18,818 remaining. If that wasn't bad enough, Pennsylvania's challenge process requires lawyers and judges to review every signature.
When Nader didn't have enough signatures to qualify, he got the privilege of being ordered to pay the cost of those judges and lawyers. He had to pay over $89,000 to cover the cost of the challenge.
Let me rephrase that. He was ordered to pay over $89,000 for his own disenfranchisement.
It turns out the Democrats were using state house workers on the public dime to comb the petitions and find signatures to challenge. Highly illegal and completely unethical, but after news of it came out, Nader was still required to pay his fine.
In Nader's case, the judges in question called his signature drive fraudulent, though a more sober review noted that at most 1.3% could be termed fraudulent and he and his campaign were never charged with voter fraud. At least one Democrat, however, was convicted of illegal activities in challenging his signatures. Hopefully, there will be more who pay the price for disenfranchising Nader.
This process was repeated in 2006 when US Senate Green Party candidate Carl Romanelli filed 100,000 signatures. He needed over 67,000 signatures while the Republicans and Democrats needed only 2,000 signatures to get on the ballot. His signatures got challenged and they were able to remove enough signatures to prevent the voters from having the opportunity to select him on the ballot. He was charged over $80,000 for being disenfranchised. [Reference] The Democrats illegally used state resources to challenge Romanelli's petitions as well.
Lets not forget that one of the ways Obama got his State Senate seat was to challenge the signatures of his opponents and get them knocked off the ballot. The Oklahoma ballot signature requirements are so high that there hasn't been a third party candidate in decades.
Darryl Perry has studied how our ballot access laws have aided incumbents since the states took over printing ballots and so deciding who could be on them. He compared the number of candidates in our elections and their probability of getting reelected with Canada, which has easier ballot access laws. The reelection rate since 1950 for the US House of Representatives is 85%, while that for the Canadian Parliament is 60%. That stat comes from a review of his Duopoly book in the January 2012 Ballot Access News.
It is certainly possible that one or more Gingrich staff people, volunteer or paid signature gatherer fraudulently signed 1500 voters on Gingrich's nomination papers. It's also possible that Gingrich's campaign just didn't gather enough signatures to deal with the inevitable errors that voters make when signing nomination papers.
However, the next time someone gloats about a candidate committing "ballot fraud" , I always remember how many times those with power have used the ballot laws to keep voters from having the opportunity to vote for candidates who were willing to run.
Make it easier to get on the ballot and the "fraud" will go away.
Steve Iskovitz, a friend and former Green-Rainbow Party candidate for Cambridge City Council, is unable to publicly share his thoughts on the Occupy Movement and instead suggested that we post those of his friend, Pavlov Katz. I received this post a few days ago, finally got a chance to read it, liked it and decided to start posting Pavlov's thoughts. I am posting them uneditted. His words are his own. You can find all of Steve and Pavlov's posts under the Occupy tag.
Hi everyone,
It's been a really long time since I last wrote. I left New York for a few weeks in early December, and returned later in the month. The timing wasn't too good, since very little happened around here during the holidays, and there was a lot of frustrating, idle time. One positive thing that did happen during that time, though, was that a lot of people worked on creating a sense of community among us who are staying at one of the churches in the upper west side. I'd originally thought of it as simply a place to sleep, and to simply leave in the morning and start my real day downtown at OWS. But some more insightful people saw it as more than that, as a chance to develop our identity as a group, a subsection of OWS. The original motivation for this might have been simple necessity– to reduce thefts and conflicts, but in any case, it's turned into an actual community, an opportunity to meet new people and work together constructively.
Otherwise, things were scattered and thin through late December, until New Year's eve. Earlier in the evening a few of us went around town, happy to get away from the uninspired atmosphere, but came back to the area and walked into Zucotti Park around 10 pm. Several hundred people were there, a low-level party. More people arrived steadily, and the absurdity of the situation became embarrassingly apparent. Here we are, 300, 400, 500 of us, in a park we lived in, a park from which we changed world history, until a mere six ago. And now we're surrounded by standing metal barricades which enforce arbitrary, stupid rules which are arguably illegal. Say, what about these standing metal barricades, anyway?
Eventually a few of the more daring–or bored, or angry, or crazy, who knows?– among us grabbed one of those barricades, detached it from the others, and pulled it away, dropping it ten feet away. Some private security guards contracted out by Brookfield Properties ran out and pulled the barricade back and re-attached it. A few minutes later on the other side of the park, someone pulls another, with the same result. Each time a barricade is removed, a crowd gathers and cheers. Some security guards appear ready to fight over them. As they grab the barricades back and swear angrily, it becomes obvious these people are not trained for this sort of thing. Soon enough the police pull them back and do the work themselves.
After a while a pioneering sort takes a barricade, but instead of dropping it in a random spot, drags it through the crowd into the middle of the park. Maybe no-one had done it before because they were afraid of accidentally hitting someone with it, but with some yelling the path cleared. Well, the police were not about to wade through the crowd to retrieve it, so they let it go. A few minutes later, someone dragged another to the middle. Then another. Soon enoughit simply became the thing to do. A sociologist would have loved it. I actually felt awkward and out of place because I wasn't dragging barricades. The ten-foot-long metal structures began piling up. Soon enough there were so many gaps that anyone could enter or leave the park easily. Someone climbed atop the barricade pile, then another. Soon a crowd of five or ten people stood on top of the five-foot mound, jumping rhythmically on it like a trampoline sort of. Drummers arrived. People were chanting, drumming, dancing, and bouncing on barricades. "Whose year? Our year!" "Occupy 2012!" More people arrived and the crowd became so thick the police seemed to disappear in the background. Someone set up a projector in the park and beamed images onto a building across the street. And that's how we brought in the new year.
It was indescribably fun. The numbers were on our side. We had a huge number of people, just as the police ranks must have been spread thin. I assume there were too many needed in Times Square and other areas. Bloomberg's "private army" (his term) couldn't spare one or two hundred troops, as they might have otherwise. So, we had our moment. The best thing about it was it was totally organic. I doubt anyone had planned it, and it didn't matter anyway. Through sheer inspiration and a little trial and error, we collectively hit upon a winning strategy, carried it out, and celebrated, all at the same time. This was the spirit that started OWS in the first place, and carried it through those early weeks in the park. Yes, there were working groups and on-line discussions even back then, but there was the crowd, the face-to-face contact, the infectious enthusiasm. Since the November 15th raid a lot of that had been lost. Through all our attempts to re-organize, we'd lost a lot of the human contact, so the New Year's party in the park reminded all of us who we are and what we're capable of. We broke the rules, showed the world we're still here, and hurt nobody in the process (and only a few of us were bruised by police).
Not long after midnight, though, the magic began to dissipate, and people decided to keep the energy going with a march around town. I bailed out after a few blocks, not seeing the point. Later, around Union Square, I think, nearly all the marchers left were detained and cuffed. Sixty arrested, some were simply detained and never processed, and all were out by early morning.
Over the next few days, sober reality began to settle in. I found out that Obama signed the bill on the 31st. Now anyone can be picked up for any reason, or for no reason, and held indefinitely. 2012 begins with the realization that the US is now under a state of martial law. Constitution, Bill of Rights, R.I.P.
There's an expression that says something like: "Don't sit and wait for the storm to end. Learn to dance in the rain." I'm starting to figure this out. There is an element of confusion nearly everywhere in OWS. About half of OWS meetings seem to include occasional shouting matches. How many arguments and potential fights have I helped defuse? We get visitors from other Occupy sites. They're surprised at all the conflict. The other night at a housing meeting, one such visitor said, "The rest of us around the country look up to you and try to emulate you. But you act like a bunch of children." Others say similar things.
I think a lot about this. Why is the New York occupation so much more chaotic than the others? Probably a number of reasons: We're a lot bigger. This is New York City, everything is more charged and intense here. The fact that we're a center of attentionn and that we're more dysfunctional seems like a contradiction, but in a way it makes sense. Things that happen here are more important, so people feel more strongly about everything. Also, we might attract people who want to be in the spotlight, whereas an Occupy site in the west or midwest might draw more quiet people who just want to work.
What I'm coming to realize and accept is that nearly every problem that could exist here does. I could write a book about the problems of nearly any group here. A bad decision here, someone who talks and doesn't listen there, a violent threat over nothing, an important task completely overlooked, young people over-relying on technology for communication, I could go on all day listing things.
I wonder, maybe every exciting, dynamic, important movement in history is filled with seemingly endless, ridiculous mistakes and problems. At other times I wonder if we're just a microcosm of American society, that we as a nation have become so detached from reality and common sense that we're incapable of correcting ourselves, beyond the point of no return. Or maybe I'd find the same problems anywhere. I don't know. In any case, I stay here because with all the problems, people still care, and most of are here for ideals, and with all the yelling and confusion and mistakes, we still manage to get things done, even in the winter, even without our park, and even with our money running out.
Thursday night a few of us were on the A train when five cops got on. They stood together for a few stops, then took up positions at different doors for a few more stops. They got off the train right behind us and seemed to follow us a way down the platform. It wasn't until we started up the steps that we noticed they were gone…I don't think they knew we were OWS. I think it's more likely that we looked freaky or poor, that we didn't fit in with Bloomberg and Company's vision of the new New York, and were letting us know.
Oh, one more thing: Police raided the Global Revolution building in Brooklyn a few days ago. Apparently they were the first group to livestream us. Someone I know was arrested for taking pictures of cops badge numbers. They're trying to take our "eyes" away. Okay, unfortunately I don't have a quite place to edit this, so I'll just send it out as is. Til later,
I haven't posted my own words here in quite sometime and so, among other things, resolve to post more in 2012.
Traditionally, I have created different blogs for other interests (By Will Alone & Spontaneous Ideas among them). Some of that is to create separate forums for those thoughts and some is for some measure of privacy. I may merge them into this blog and see how it goes. Or not. We'll see.
I finally photographed the two IanH's 6mm Cognac paper houses I built awhile ago.
I printed the house, cut out reinforcements for the walls using thin styrene sheets, then glued the paper to the styrene sheets using rubber cement. After I put it together, I used styrene square tubes in each corner to reinforce it. See the next picture.
For the roof, I reinforced it using two really thin styrene sheets on either side of the roof, then glued it to the tabs I left from the paper around the walls. I am not satisfied with how the roof went on and need to glue them better in the future.
Looking at one of the houses from the bottom. You can see the thin styrene sheets I used to reinforce the walls and roof. After I put it together, I reinforce it by gluing styrene square tubes to the styrene sheet walls in each corner with Krazy Glue. The tubes were a pain to cut with a scissors, so next time I plan to use an L brace instead.
IanH's paper models are free and fantastic. The only complaint I had was with the model on the left. It looks to me like the sides were swapped and if you built it by cutting out in one piece, then the ivy on one wall wouldn't match the next one around the corner. To get it to look right, I had to cut each wall separately and then glue them together in the order I thought they should be in.
For Christmas, my wife was kind enough to get me a set of C-in-C miniatures, including my first World War 2 miniatures:
As always, the quality and detail of them was astounding. They proved to be quite clean and had little flashing. After cleaning them, I primed them with a gray spray primer. For the Soviet vehicles, I then sprayed them with Tamiya Olive Drab (TS-5). I fear that they are too dark and the fact that it was 43 degrees out today probably didn't help. A bit of dry brushing with a lighter olive drab will hopefully help.
I look forward to trying them with Fistful of TOWs 3 or Kampfgruppe Commander at some point.