The Gupta Option 2019

Nov
14th

Fri

Looks like I’m staying in DCAR for a while

(DCAR press release below)

Things here have been very touch and go - still mopping up snipers, re-IDing everybody to make sure we don’t have further problems - but the DCAR governing council has very consciously decided to try and push forwards as fast as possible with international outreach after the disaster and has retained me in a new role: outreach coordinator with what they’re terming “globally supportive remote resources” - basically, the global public who can learn from DCAR’s example or teach us how to live better.

The biggest part of that is a year-round residential program for visiting scholars: the board feel they’ve proven that DCAR is actually safe in that they stopped Guembe and, ahem, fought off three armies (well, mutinous contingents there of.)

I guess, given what most of them have been through before coming to DCAR, this does look like real safety.

Anyway, I’m as loyal to DCAR as ever, and I’m glad to see that they’re pushing ahead to tell the world we’re here, we’re not going away, and now is the time to forge alliances and help us all move forwards through the wreckage.

I’d never expected to see this level of boldness and authority from the DCAR councils. They have always tended to be fairly timid about international affairs, trying to avoid notice, stay below the radar.

That all changes today.

See you in DCAR!

==============

DCAR PRESS RELEASE

DCAR, the Refugee State, recently survived fighting a bloody battle against the followers of Guembe, a psychopathic African leader with involvement in three previous genocides.

DCAR is rebuilding but needs massive infusions of international support to recover, rebuild, and reassert its stability in the face of violence. The Global Swadeshi Network has long supported DCAR at a technical level, but the time has come to announce a strategic partnership between DCAR and GSN. The objective of this partnership is to provide fully funded university level development and testing facilities in DCAR where world-stabilizing technologies can be tested, developed and the results disseminated globally using the communications networks.

We’re asking for researchers all over the world to consider a one year sabbatical in DCAR. DCAR will provide food and basic housing, researchers are responsible for bringing any equipment they require, and covering their share of the DCAR bandwidth bill. We already have nearly 200 individuals who are making plans to come, and the opening of the new facilities will be in March or April of 2020.

DCAR is relying on the massive international communications reach of the Global Swadeshi Network to take the results of the studies on agriculture, housing, social organization, software for democratic governance and other areas where DCAR has the proven field experience to make good life rise from the ashes, and is relying on a higher international profile for the resources and security required to not only reconstruct ourselves after the damage done in the recent failed genocide, but prove to the world that DCAR has what it takes to succeed as a nation state.

We appreciate your support, either from DCAR as a researcher, or as part of the wider Global Swadeshi Network, where you can help by repeating experiments, publishing research, adopting innovations and providing us with innovations to adopt, and funding our ongoing research into planetary transformation.

In DCAR, it actually has to work. Over nearly 10 years, appropriate technology has made revolutionary changes to the lives of every person who started as a refugee, and two days ago became a Citizen in the eyes of the world. Now we want to work together to spread the lessons of DCAR globally.

Join the Global Swadeshi Network to support DCAR!

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Nov
13th

Thu

What really went down in DCAR

Attached is the full report that the black propaganda “communications intercept” video was made from. We think that some of Guembe’s backers spun it out trying to make it less obvious what was going on, maybe trying to muddy up the area. In the spirit of full disclosure, we’ve published the entire transmission to try and clear the air, so everybody understands what really went on.

DCAR survived a full on assault from Guembe and members of at least three militaries of different nation states, including 12 tanks and multiple other armored vehicles, including two crop dusters loaded with aerosolized ricin. Current death toll looks a hair over 468,000 including combatants from both sides (somewhere under 100k total) and about 380,000 refugees, including about 48,000 killed with the aforementioned weapon of mass destruction.

I’d been on sleep and emotion suppressing drugs for about 14 straight days when that video was shot, so excuse any signs of flatline. The situation really just needed the core team to be functional and able to do the right thing, not to dissolve into heaps at the magnitude of what had happened. We’ll probably stay on at least the emotion suppressants for two or three months, until people are identified, buried and the families are mostly through the grieving process. We really just need the command crew straight right now.

Guembe has almost certainly been taken alive. Our suspect was found in a vehicle that had gone off the road after the driver was shot, and had a couple of cracked vertebrae. They found him lying very, very still asking for a spinal board before he was moved, laughing and joking. Ironically, the injuries are minor enough he could probably have just ran for it and not severed his spinal column, but apparently whatever they took out of him with neurosurgery included some kinds of irrational “just run!” self-preservation instincts. We may never know if this really is Guembe given that he’s clearly had extensive plastic surgery more than once and there are no matching biometric records. We’re considering how to proceed, but for now he’s been spirited out of DCAR and is recovering in a hospital guarded by UN peacekeepers and a few elite friends of ours who are there to shoot him in the head if anybody attempts to remove him from UN custody. Any Guembe cultists reading this: yes, we will, and no, this story is absolutely not true. What we really found and where Guembe is now is obviously secret.

(paranoids, you know? never trust anybody, not even those telling the truth)

In terms of the mopping up process, there are probably four things to know.

Firstly, DCAR appears to have retained its pseudo-sovereignty. No UN or other peacekeepers have been deployed, there have been formal charges filed against the Guembe supporters who commandeered military resources from our respected neighbors. Secondly, we’re now in relatively formal diplomatic negotiations with at least some of our neighboring sovereign entities to negotiate formal borders. It appears that might, even to the level of a few hundred thousand rifles, is enough for us to be taken seriously enough as a threat to get a GPS line showing where we should not go. Major progress. Thirdly, a good bit of the more heavily traumatized population is clustering around some of the more easily defendable terrain, undoing a lot of our decentralization work, but generally making people feel a lot more secure. We may have to accept that we have a city, which is currently being loosely called “The Rock” (which apparently sounds a bit better in the creole.) Finally, and again, hear ye, hear ye, next time somebody comes down here, we’re going to have far better anti-armor capabilities and night vision, maybe even formal defense pacts that will get us drone cover with a phone call. We’ve seen the international community sit with their hands in their pockets while the residents of DCAR were slaughtered once, and its not happening again.

As far as I can tell most of Guembe’s irregulars have melted back into the woodwork. We’ve been checking people against their CheapIDs fairly fanatically to make sure we don’t wind up with large groups of these guys as infiltrators: people who thought we were being paranoid about identity now have reason to reconsider their positions. As far as we can tell, the objective was for Guembe’s people to take over DCAR and run it as a death camp. We weren’t able to get much out of Guembe before we had to get him out of here or face executing him without formal charges being brought (an absolute no-no from the perspective of much of the DCAR leadership) but some of the military folks he brought with him were found with computers in tact bearing population extermination gameulations in which they competed to find swift, effective extermination strategies which maximized the suffering of the living while still eventually rendering everybody dead. I’ll note that there are signs of neurosurgery on at least half of those who appear to have been in leadership positions, which may explain a lot of the Cult of Guembe’s apparent ability to have utter madmen work together in large groups: they seem to surgically alter the leadership in some kind of initiation rite. You really have to wonder why more wasn’t known about this stuff in the past, but once again, we keep excellent records and will publish a full analysis from the autopsies and brain scans of the few prisoners that were taken alive.

We continue mopping up operations, and donations of money, engineering resources or natural resources can be made through the usual DCAR channels.

I’d like to formally thank whoever sent out the drone cover which gave us a fighting chance against the ground troops. However, I’m in no position to do so: I’ve been relieved of responsibility down here for smuggling Guembe into UN hands to ensure we get a trial. But thank you, whoever you are.

I expect to be headed out in two to four more weeks, and I may yet be declared persona-non-grata down here. See you soon, civilization.

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Nov
12th

Wed

Goddamnit. Goddamnit. Goddamnit. Goddamnit. This is not fair, this is not what happened.

Who the hell is leaking this stuff? We should have the real story soon, please, please don’t believe the lies.

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Nov
5th

Wed

Returning to DCAR somewhat urgently

So I’ve been up in Iceland working on some of the genetics issues from the last sample run from DCAR. We have answers: not reassuring ones, but answers none the less. More about that in the next message.

DCAR is getting probed at a technical level: computer security intrusions, shoving against the democracy software, injecting noise into the process. Not systemic attempts to push one agenda, but randomization of results to produce obviously false and spurious errors. Just exactly the kind of thing to destabilize DCAR by weakening faith in the governance systems.

I think we all know what that means…

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Oct
19th

Sun

“Ideas are not medicine.” - Thomas Ubiquitous, aka Infrarad

He’s stepping down as the mission director of Open Source Scientists, following what sounds like at-best political pressure from the Russians. OSS has been a dangerous group in the past to certain entrenched power structures, and the nebulous nature of their leadership has always offered a lot of protection - hard to kill what has no head and not a ton of nervous system.

As for the new mission brief: it’s gotta be a question of ReDs, right? Do they want to merge with one of the ReDs organizations and really make a stand on MyBO4, or are they going to continue with the broad tent approach? Are they really a biohacker’s union, or are they more of an open way-of-life effort, sort of a heavily-housed Unplugger thing?

I guess only the next mission director - could be you - can decide.

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Oct
15th

Wed

The Quarantine of Iceland

So the geographical isolation, the coldness, and all those other factors which have made life in Iceland so hard in the past have turned out to be a gigantic boon in 2019. Iceland is ReDs Research HQ for the molecular biology crowd. There was a pretty good bioindustrial base here from deCODE genetics and spin-off companies and the pharms which grew various things under glass that you might not want running around in the wild and which, by virtue of the climate, could not. No accidental release of insulin-grapes in a country with no vineyards.

One airport, and an absolutely ferociously strict quarantine protocol. Boats crews go into quarantine on their own boats while the cargo is unloaded and reloaded, and if nobody is sick after a week, the cargo is opened. Same thing at the airport - arrive, check into a quarantine-rated hotel, wait. At least they take bandwidth seriously in those places.

The international community throws in some money, and Iceland handles the additional costs of maintaining the defensive line so that if ReDs gets abruptly worse - well, at least there’s a fallback position to do the science from.

Brutal, but nobody knows how this will turn out. It’s a unique place - educated first world society, in the middle of nowhere, in a tough enough climate to keep it clear of most secondary vectors. You make do with what you have.

Street reports next week I hope.

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Oct
12th

Sun

Reminiscences

Hector Valentine is explaining how they came to live in hexayurts. It’s an interesting case.

When I started this stuff just past the turn of the millennium, I’d spent a bit of time living rough - maybe a year all-told, between backpacking around America, riding freight trains, various other adventures. It was a few weeks here, a month and a half there, short hops between couch surfing or jobs that came with hotels.

If I was homeless it was because I did not want a home: I was a wanderer, a homeless person with options. Those were soft, fond, sweet days.

Anyway, that experience, of being more or less homeless at times, informed the design a lot. What could a bunch of hobos pooling their dollars for a home depot run manage? If it’s 12 sheets of plywood, and that’s $6 a sheet… hundred buck house territory.

Yeah, for logistical reasons we tended to recommend lighter materials, but the hundred buck house was always a big part of the pitch. 10 years later? Ballpark guess, 20 million people living in hexayurts and derived structures. How’s it turning out? We didn’t do the analysis in the early days. We just built and taught and pushed it into the world, figuring that Bucky was right when he developed the Dymaxion Deployment Unit.

That’s all we did: we implemented Dymax.

It was an intelligent gamble. Bucky was always a space cadet - I used to joke that he was a reincarnated alien - but although he tended to have terrible problems getting things to work here in the terribly heavy gravity of earth, far from the floating stars - he was right about planetary resource management, right about “one world” resource management, right about all the big stuff.

So we rolled the dice and built it, using our local knowledge of early 21st century manufacturing and materials to implement. And it worked.

We’re at the dawn of a new age. Everybody thinks these Superthreats might be the end, but they’re the beginning. The Planetary Near Death Experience which we need to make us re-evaluate our values, as a species, in the same way that individuals always rethink their values when they see the Great Light (Of The Oncoming Train) in a near-death experience.

We’re having a Planetary Near Death Experience, a collective near death experience, so we all re-evaluate our shared values.

The old environmental movement was about this - the whole “we must make do with less” thing that we’d now recognize as deadly neopuritan thinking. The old environmentalists tried to make it all about moral issues. But it isn’t, and that gap - between the science and neopuritan psuedo-Christian morality - leaves terrible problems that really brought that movement down. Cleanliness, even Ecological Cleanliness, is not next to godliness, and even if it is, it doesn’t matter. We can’t confuse moral and scientific problems and expect to get straight thinking in either area. It’s not about sacrifice, it’s about not causing harm: those are two separate problems.

You can have a life with everything, with no compromises, and harm nobody - if you’re accurate in taking what you want, and leave nothing unwanted behind afterwards. It’s skill, but there’s nothing neopuritan about it. At all. Quite the opposite, in fact, it can be quite indulgent.

The path we’ve chosen is a better one - we talk about it as a matter of desire - we’re done with conventional stories about right and wrong, about do without and do with less. No, what we need is deadly accurate desire.

If you want a hamburger, you want the experience of eating a hamburger. But you don’t want 4000 gallons of wasted water and 400 lbs of carbon or whatever the figures are (Cascio used to know.) Our society has hidden from us the true cost of our actions, but as computers and disaster-sharpened instinct restore our awareness, we have a simple path ahead of us: DO WHAT YOU WANT, AND NOTHING ELSE.

I call this “side-effect free living.”

First, you make the invisible visible. Sterling’s Viridian Movement got that one spot on.

Then you deal with what you can now see. And that’s not about this kind of protestant denialism, this notion of envirosocial sin and sacrifice as the only fix, that’s neopuritanism’s worst excess - to take Christian religious values and apply them to the global environmental crisis.

No, what it’s about is getting smart. TAKE WHAT YOU WANT, AND NOTHING ELSE.

These are simple rules to live by if you try. Take what you want and nothing else we call the law of precise desire.

We owe it to each other to desire precisely right now. If we all take what we want, and nothing else - if we each take the experiences we want, but as far as possible leave or share the things, if we all give our utmost to those people who need us, we will have half of the problems of this planet licked by Wednesday.

So that’s my thought, Hector. I’m sorry you’re stuck in my huts, but I’m sure it’s better than nothing or you wouldn’t have built them. If I could have designed a folding palace, you can be sure I would have, and I’ve spent pushing seven years in them myself so… good luck on the food and medical care situation, mate, and consider talking to the folks in DCAR (the Democratic Central African Republic, our Refugee State for new readers who don’t know) about their preventative medicine agendas. Good research work going on down there. Their lives depend on it, so they look very alertly, notice everything, integrate patterns, train their brightest offspring early and generally make the best of very bad shows.

DCAR is our way forwards globally. The people down there can save us all if we will only listen to them.

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Oct
8th

Wed

Stuck in the Northern Islands by the ReDs-Free-Area regulations

Damn and blast. I took the UN assessment gig to come up and take a look over the infrastructure implementation plans for the Northern Islands - that’s the Shetlands, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland / Greenland. Obviously the big worries up here are food security, and for the non-geothermal countries, energy security. Also took the opportunity to teach a couple of classes on SERAA mapping to good effect. A video clip from those classes is here.

Yeah - totally watch that.

Anyway, the new ReDsWatch stuff is now in force in Iceland. Two to four week quarantine, plus genetic testing to look for contamination etc. That, in and of itself, isn’t a problem - two weeks is a long time, but they’ve got full network connectivity and I can work from anywhere. The goal is to completely isolate Iceland, which is currently ReDs-free, and concentrate a lot of the vaccine development and viral analysis work here so that if ReDs does go pandemic in some really huge way, there’s a stable base of operations to continue the science from.

All that makes perfect sense and I approve of it. But here’s the problem.

A lot of other people who don’t feel that way about living in a plastic-wrapped hotel for a fortnight are canceling their trips to Iceland, and flights are now once a week only, and those are utterly oversubscribed by people leaving. I’ve been trying to pull some local strings here to get a seat but people are so afraid of being unable to leave because all flights would be cancelled (because the flight crews and plane could not return to Iceland in the event of a crisis) that… well…

It’s a mad scramble. I, personally, would not mind being stuck in one of the ReDs-free areas of the world in the event of a major meltdown, but like I said, I can work from anywhere. I dropped off the DCAR samples in Paris, and now… it’s just me and you and the internet, baby.

See you online!

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Oct
7th

Tue

Teaching SERAA (South East Resilience Action Area) Mapping today. I still don’t know why they don’t teach these things in schools, it’s been nearly 10 years since I invented this stuff. How hard can it really be to “make the invisible visible” and show people the life supply systems which surround them, nourish them and keep them safe?

Here’s a typical North American SERAA Map. You can see how reliant we still are, after 10 years of problems, on centralized systems. The SERAA recommended systems are still in use by only a small fraction of the population, although of course the nanosolar revolution has really helped with electrical power.

But you don’t usually die from lack of electricity, usually what nails you is lack of clean drinking water. You got a well?

SERAA Mapping is an essential skill for staying alive during these troubling times. It’s the first thing we teach after reading in the school system at DCAR in Africa and it’s saved countless lives down there, as well as providing people with a shared language to talk about economic necessities in. Here’s a fairly typical DCAR SERAA Map.

You should make your own SERAA Map. It’s easy to draw if you use the SERAA Grid Map layout rather than the Lifewheel.

Do it!

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Back from DCAR

No bandwidth right now for video but I’ll tell you the basics - PCR is negative for REDS in the sample, and positive for engineered algae strains in the contaminated ponds. We’re continuing to investigate, but the initial hypothesis is that somebody didn’t realize we were running a wild type operation and tried to seed them with an off-the-shelf industrial oil algae many of which, of course, produce biomass that’s indigestible to animals.

In short, not a big deal if that’s all it is.

Will be attending the European Friends of DCAR meeting to fill people in on the current status, and from there it’s either another field trip down with a truck full of gear, or I’m going to take another microstate survey contract from the UN and do the North Scots Island States, Iceland and Faeroes run. I’d quite like to spend a bit more time in DCAR but the executions… It was only three people but I don’t believe in capital punishment, even for rape. And I understand that they’re not going to do imprisonment or slavery as punishments, they’re not going to medicate…

I dunno. I never thought DCAR would get this far, but I never thought it would be like this either. We’ve got to continue getting the standard of living raised or their fragile political autonomy and civil rights framework are going to collapse. DCAR, DCAR, why oh why isn’t your luck better?

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Oct
4th

Sat

Superstruct field report from DCAR - the Democratic Central African Republic, a self-governing conurbation of refugee camps and transient resettlement areas running on a mix of high and low technology.

We are having some problems down here. “Technological solutions for social problems” is harder than it looks some times.

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