VISION AND MISSION v3.0 MY GOAL: "To open the channels of communication and to allow people to speak the truth as they see it." Homer W. Smith http://homerwsmith.com homerwsmith@lightlink.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is long, please read the whole thing, but read it in parts. Take a break, read it across a few days with a few donuts in between. It could change your life. Homer VISION AND MISSION Every business and even personal life must have strong vision and mission statements in order to survive. Without these no one knows in the general sense what they are producing or why. Life and work are more than the immediate widget in front of your nose. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VISION AND MISSION? Take the example of the young man who decides to become a Green Beret. One day he is sent on a mission to recover a kidnapped girl and her scientist father and to kill the terrorists who are intending to use the father's secret formula to destroy the world. When that mission is over, he is then sent on another mission, and another and another. These missions can be and usually are very different. Did he join the military because he wanted to save that particular girl and father, no of course not, he didn't even know about them. So why did he join the military? Well that was part of his vision, perhaps 'To make the world safe for democracy.' GENERAL VISIONS AND SUB VISIONS "To make the world safe for democracy' would be a specific sub vision, above that would be a more general vision, something like 'the world living in peace and prosperity and no longer living in terror.' Or more simply "A world without terror." And above that would be the most general vision of all, long term survival for the greatest good for the greatest number, which is common to everyone who is sane. "A world of abundance of survival." So the basic vision is a world of abundant survival. The basic mission is to enhance survival and to fight those, things that are acting or want to de-enhance servival. By survival we do not mean mere survival or hand to mouth subsistence, for that is not survival and those living on the edge that way do not survive for long. Things can never stay the same, so a person is either expanding in their affluence of survival or contracting. Contraction is not long term survival either, so by survival we mean expanding long term affluence for self and for others. Affluence of survival is necessary to provide margin of safety during down turns, but what is sufficient and comfortable affluence will depend on the being involved and the size of his goals and his commitments to life and those that depend on him. Thus to survive means to prosper and flourish relative to the needs of the being and everyone he cares about, which underneath is everyone. THE VISION -> MISSION TREE Life is filled with ideal scenes and situations. Visions are the ideal scenes one dreams of. A 'situation' is the furthest existing deviation from an ideal scene. Missions are derived from visions and the various existing 'situations' that one is suffering from in present time. An ideal scene is how you would like the world to be. That's your vision of how you would like everything to be, for yourself and your loved ones. 'Loved ones' is an expanding circle of people from those closest to you, outwards to encompass everyone in existence except for a few most detested enemies, called Nemesis Ones. Your specific missions are derived by you from your general visions and are how you plan to bring your visions to fruitions. A man without visions or missions and activity directed along these lines is either a vegetable or dead. You consider what your ideal scene might be, note all the situations that deviate from that ideal scene, sort them in order of importance and get to work on each one until handled or improved so you can move onto another. If a ship is sinking, its probably not a good idea to spend time mopping the floors. But if the ship has stopped sinking, you might want to start mopping the floors. Thus visions trickle down into sub visions which give rise to overall missions which finally give rise to micro missions, specific orders to DO something right now to get something done. This trickle down forms an upside down inverted tree with SURVIVE at the top at the main trunk, and the myriad ways we could all be surviving better form the branches leading down from the top, and the missions that arise out of these main branches then are the leaves at the bottom of the tree. (It's an upside down tree!) For example even for the soldier, there are many ways to 'bring peace and prosperity to a world without terror' that have nothing to do with joining the military. In fact all these other ways to accomplish his basic vision are necessary to the final outcome and none of them are sufficient alone. Thus it may be true that 'having a strong military' is a necessary goal to bringing peace to the world, but so is 'having enough to eat for everyone'. But the soldier doesn't know anything about growing food, so that's not up his alley. But he knows a lot about having a strong military, and he ENJOYS being part of making it so, so he chooses that branch of the vision-mission tree to guide his life all the while encouraging everyone else to engage their own branch of the vision-mission tree. SURVIVE -> DO Life is basically a game. Games consist of FREEDOMS, BARRIERS AND PURPOSES Purposes are what you want to have or improve, freedoms are your abilities to act and accomplish things by apply your personal agency, cause, potency and responsibility into the chaos of other cause surrounding you. Barriers are the limitations, handicaps and inabilities and constrain your ability to act. Although there can be serious games and not so serious games, in the end it is all PLAY, WIN AND LOSE. We may not want to call shooting an enemy soldier PLAY, but that's mostly because its a game we feel forced into playing and don't want to play it at all. Mathematically speaking playing chess or tennis is no different than playing 'wipe out the enemy'. The seriousness of the consequences of losing determine the seriousness of the game, and whether we want to play it or not. All of life is this way, all of life is fighting, and all all fighting is a form of life. It does matter whether you are fighting to put paint to canvas or put a bullet through a head. And it doesn't matter how EASY or desirable the fighting is, it is all just combinations of force generated by you against mass trying to change how things are to how you want them to be. A well ordered society operating at SPIRIT OF PLAY on the emotional tone scale, is the flow of action from THE GOAL TO SURVIVE down through the many complex ways and means of life to specific orders TO DO. So the geneticist who is trying to make golden rice with vitamin A already in it and the soldier who is trying to knock off the terrorists, are BOTH working for the exact same vision 'a world of peace, prosperity and without terror' but through completely different mission ways. VISIONS OF THE WORLD Vision statements right below the absolute top level of long term survival, are of the form "A BETTER WORLD THROUGH..." Everyone walking around has an idea of their ideal scenes, of what they would like the world to be. If you were to get people to write down every single thing they could think of for a better world and compare them all, you would find almost 100 percent agreement with some exceptions. More interesting is that if Joe wrote one thing, and Sue another, both would agree with the other's goals too, and quickly add them into their own list. Let's take some concrete examples. Almost everyone would agree that 'A world without war, criminality or insanity' would be a good thing. That happens to be the vision statement of a Church I know. Notice it is a sub vision, one of the main branches coming down from survive or greatest long term good for the greatest number. A world without hunger would probably be an another one. A world without disease, or barring that with affordable medical care for all would be another. A world where everyone was educated, 'no child left behind' is in fact a vision statement of one such group working towards this end. A world where there was social justice, that includes no religious, racial or ethnic bigotry or racism, and equal opportunity for all to take advantage of, according to their God given abilities. Ability consists of a triangle of passion, talent and honed skills. Passion and talent we are born with, honed skills come from experience operating passion and talent :) Without all three, a person is dead in the water and becomes just so much dead weight on the productiveness of the rest of society. He eats what others produce. Thus attention needs to be paid to each and every being to make sure they 'flower' properly so they can operate at their maximum potential. Societies with 'green thumbs' do better than those that suppress, oppress, depress and repress creativity and the ability triangle. Social justice includes human rights for both adults and children and even for animals. And in passing it should be noticed that since study, learn and teach is another very important triad in the operations life, each person is being a Master to some, a Peer to others, and an Apprehentice to even more. Thus study, learn and teach forms a ladder of rungs of accomplishment in applied knowledge in life, every one has people higher than they are on the ladder from from they learn. They also have people on the same rung as they are and they teach and learn from each other. And each person has people below them on the rungs of the ladder who they must teach as the person is being taught himself. So it is very very important to spot who your Masters are, you your Peers are, and who your apprehentices are, than the same for each of them. "At whose feet do you sit, and who sits at your feet?" POLITICS AND MARKETS Then there are the subjects of politics and markets. The purpose of creation, is to trade in expressions of discovery. Politics is the process by which people design a society, and in particular the markets of that society, as without sow and reap, buy and sell, there is no society. A society or civilization is simply one large silo to contain what affluence of produce and knowledge that is still not yet consumed or lost. As we shall see the needs of politics are sometimes opposed to and outweigh the desires of markets, so we need to be very careful not to sacrifice the needs of politics to the desires of markets, lest the social planners end up in a police state run by market criminals. Then there are basic freedoms, freedom to think and speak safely to anyone and everyone, which includes anonymity and encryption for everyone, freedom to congregate, freedom to privacy, freedom to practice religion, freedom to vote, and freedom to bear and carry arms in case some wise acre thinks he is going to get rid of the first 5. So there are a lot of situations in the world today that need a lot of hard work. Let's summarize the various highest level visions that a person might have, and you should take the time now to add any of your own that might have been left out and if you have a chance see if you can get agreement on them from others. Vision statement: "A better world through..." 1.) No WAR 2.) No CRIMINALITY 3.) No INSANITY 4.) FOOD AND SHELTER 5.) PHYSICAL HEALTH 6.) MENTAL HEALTH 7.) EDUCATION 7.) SOCIAL JUSTICE FOR ADULTS, CHILDREN AND ANIMALS 8.) FREEDOM TO THINK SPEAK AND CONGREGATE SAFELY 9.) FREEDOM TO PRIVACY 10.) FREEDOM TO PRACTICE RELIGION 11.) FREEDOM TO VOTE 12.) FREEDOM TO SELF DEFENSE 13.) FREEDOM TO ENGAGE IN POLITICS AND MARKETS" 14.) many many more... DISAGREEMENTS You will find as you walk this planet that there will be people, sometimes lots of people, that will strongly disagree with your estimate of what a better world might look like. CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM For example vast areas of the globe believe that the freedoms to engage in capitalism (a market) is not showing 'love of the people', and they will fight you to the death to get rid of you. Although capitalism is often associated with democracy, and communism is associated with tyranny, we need to keep political systems and economic systems separated in our minds in order to understand government and business. Democracy and tyranny are two forms of POLITICS (government), along with monarchies, oligarchies, kingships, and other forms of rule. Capitalism, socialism, and communism are forms of MARKETS, how we consume, produce, buy and sell. It is quite possible for a communism to be a democracy, and a capitalism to be a tyranny. For example in a true democracy a person is welcome to vote for the communist party, as long as the communist sticks to market issues, and doesn't try to undermine the DEMOCRACY OF VOTING otherwise he is a tyrant commie rather than a democratic one. You see? OK, so what is the basic difference between a capitalism and a communism?. This is important, because if you are going to start a business of your own, you are being a capitalist for the duration of that business. The basic difference lies in the following questions. 1.) What are you going to produce? 2.) Who are you going to sell it to? 3.) How much are you going to charge for it. 4.) WHO is going to produce it? 5.) WHO gets to own the rights of control over the profits? In a capitalism you make those decisions. In a communism someone else makes those decisions for you, a centrally planned committee that oversees all production, and sale of products. A communism believes that a very few, very bright minds, can determine all the GLOBAL actions of a market as defined in those five questions above. A capitalism believes that no single mind can handle the global equations, and thus the problem must be distributed to each and every local entrepreneur to make those decisions for himself. In an ideal communism, all property belongs to the state, which then becomes the Grand Business of the country, and everyone else is an employee of the state. Everyone is paid according to their need, and everyone is expected to produce as much as they can. 'From each according to his ability, and to each according to his need.' Since your need is about 3000 calories a day, that's what you get, and you work all day long for love of the people. The downside is you don't own anything that is truly yours, and the upside is you get your 3000 calories whether or not you produce anything. That means you can fail and continue on, because you are protected from Darwinian selection by the Committee. You get paid for trying, not succeeding. Of course if you don't try, they will take you out back and shoot you. In a capitalism you get to keep what you own as yours. By OWNERSHIP we mean the rights to control. Thus you take out a loan, you invent toilet paper, you sell to millions of people at a penny a roll, you pay back your loan, and you get to keep the rest as YOURS to reinvest or waste as you like. That's the upside. The downside is, if people don't like your toilet paper because it sticks to their butt, you don't sell any, the bank forecloses on your means of production and you are left with nothing. There is no one to take you out back to end your misery, except Darwinian starvation. This, by the way, is one reason why we have politics, no one wants to support a welfare state, but everyone wants a safety net, so you find that the optimum market is actually a mixture of of capitalism, socialism, fascism and communism, although few will agree to that. Politics is where people argue it out. DISAGREEMENTS AGAIN. OK, so let's get back to disagreements with your vision of an ideal scene again. WAR. Some people think that war is good for the planet, it prunes the population, it makes people work under dire necessity to find better ways of doing things, knowledge about how the physical universe works increases exponentially etc. Most of the computer technology you use today came out of World War II, as did the interest in radar and encryption. Although we use encryption for commercial transactions, it was actually developed by people concerned for national security. And even when things are invented in the civilian arena, the military gets interested in it very fast and pours millions of dollars into it. If you think Intel and the Military have no interest in each other you should think again. In fact one can argue that if the planet were so wealthy that everyone could just eat and sit around all day long, people would become like the Eloi in 'The Time Machine', friendly, peaceable, but totally unable to defend themselves. Thus they become easy targets for those that would enslave or eat them as the case may be. Morlocks love to pick their teeth with Eloi bones. Thus you will find people who don't actually want a world without war, they want a world with OPTIMUM WAR, just enough to keep us all on our toes and letting necessity be the mother of invention, but not enough to destroy the place. Besides how is an honest arms dealer going to turn a profit if there is no war? Others would argue there are things to fight besides each other, like that asteroid coming in towards Earth etc, but the arms dealers like the short term profits of feeding lies and weapons to both sides. SOCIAL JUSTICE. It would be hard to imagine anyone against social justice, but when you get into justice for animals, which they sorely need, you will run into people who want the whole world to be vegetarian. So expect some rancor. Anyhow I am sure you get the point, the vision held by the greatest number is the one that has the greatest chance of survival, but don't be surprised if a backrunner comes forward and takes over, particularly if YOU are the one who wants the forerunner. THE MISSION STATEMENT The mission statement is derived from your vision statement. To make this clear, I am going to give a very specific example from our own lives, Lightlink Internet. When dealing with visions and vision statements you are dealing with global ideals, desires and goals that you can share with anyone. You WANT everyone to know your vision statement. Vision statements are goals for the future state of mankind, final ideal scenes of the form "A better world through..." When you start to move into specific mission statements, you are dealing with your personal enjoyment, feelings, abilities and involvement in those higher visions, passions, talents and honed skills. Mission statements are present time actions and short term goals directed at the long term future vision. Maybe most everyone can agree on 'peace on earth', but if you are a soldier rescuing the girl, you might find it hard relating to others about the sweet sound of the breaking of a terrorist's neck. To you it is heaven, to others, well... Thus mission statements have to be made in such a way that they reflect the higher visions from which they came so as to maintain, affinity, agreement and communication with everyone else. You do want them to buy your product, even if your monthly statistic is 'number of terrorist necks broken'. Thus to understand Lightlink's mission statement, to some degree you have to understand me personally. HOMER WILSON SMITH I like, others, long for a better world. I came from a highly regarded, almost famous, medical family, my father was a leading researcher and teacher in the field of human physiology. My mother was a nurse who worked at Oak Ridge during the development of the atomic bomb. Thus my childhood was full of chemistry, physics, electronics, motors, explosives, chemicals that should NEVER be put together, geology, glow in the dark things, math, music and orange juice, milk and corn flakes. But alas I did not have an academic mind, not even a musical mind, although I can do all of the above things with great trouble. I had the mind of a philosopher, and my main interests were the philosophies behind religion, science, art, business and government. I saw a world going to hell in atomic war in the 1st grade, Kennedy and Khrushchev were going at in the 5th grade, and Kennedy was killed in the 6th. I saw that Russia and America hated each other at the government level, mostly born of insane paranoia and no communication. But I had a Russian Nanny, and later after my parents died in 5th grade, I had Jewish foster parents, and I saw that people were people. It just wasn't true that the peasant on the farm in Russia was hateful or fearful of an American capitalist, except maybe for the propaganda that the government fed them about our tendency towards preemptive nuclear strikes, born of WW II. What I did see was a tremendous lack of FREE communication between the people of the planet. By free I do not mean no money, I mean free from suppression, moderation, prohibition etc., Just like in today's world it is dangerous to say "I voted for Trump" or "I voted for Hillary". At the time, there was not much choice, we had radio, we had news papers, the first black and white TV's, I watched Felix the Cat, but not even the President had a clue what was up in Russia, they were still using AMBASSADORS to communicate between Kennedy and Khrushchev. That's nuts don't you see? I went to Cornell in 1969 as a student in Electrical Engineering. Now EE is an interesting subject because it spans theoretical physics at one end, and hard core things like phones, radios, TV's and cell phones at the other. Of course EE can also be used to make bombs and guidance systems for their delivery, and at the height of the Vietnam War in the early 70's I had little interest in that branch of the vision tree. Too many being killed, too many insane at the helm on all sides, too many making money off the insanity, and not enough free communication of the truth. TV started to change that, we saw not only the count of the Vietnam dead, but the dead themselves every night for dinner. This changed how people thought of the war. It is a never ending disgrace that it took SEEING war to change how people THOUGHT about war, but there it is. Later in the 80's, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolt at Tiananmen Square were directly influenced by FAX machines, because now people could write up what they thought, and get it to many many people all at once compared to how it had been before. When free communication can travel between people faster than the police state can move, the police state has little chance to take hold or stay in power. As more people were able to talk SAFELY to more people on all sides of the walls, the walls started to come down. Rather than pointing guns at each other, they started to point advertisements at each other, to come visit and have lunch on their side of the bridge (true story). Before the bridge they were at war, no one wanted the bridge as that would make it easy for both sides to cross the river to attack the other. After the bridge, each side was serving breakfast, lunch and dinner to the other side walking over the bridge during food time, and peace was created by PROSPERITY OF TRADE. So an important law was learned, in the presence of communication, affinity and agreement go up which results in market trade, which results in peace and prosperity, and in the absence of communication, affinity and agreement go down until a point of war is started. Now communication is one part of the highest level of visions written above, namely freedom to think, speak and congregate. Prior to the 80's most communication was one way, namely the owners of the newspapers, radios, TV's or their advertisers pushing their pablum message to us. Once people could start talking freely to EACH OTHER in mass communication, then the world changed forever for the better. POLITICS, MARKETS AND COMMUNICATION So to understand me better, we need to go back to politics, markets and communication. A society is a collection of people engaged in survival, sow and reap cycles, and the markets of trade and fair exchange that arise from them. Thus we could say that society IS the markets that are spawned by the people trying to survive. Those markets consist of religion, science, art and business. Religion is creation, science is discovery, art is expression, and business is trade, where the rubber meets the road so to speak, and where the food meets the table, and where the coin meets the cash register. You could also throw government in there, which is the ultimate manager of the markets and the governor of the mint. Government means 'to govern the mint'. The mint manages all the markers and IOU's that get created in a high speed high action market where barter no longer works. SOW AND REAP, COST AND RETURN, PROFIT AND TRADE. Profit does not come from the Trade, profit comes from the production of the item traded. You plant one seed of corn, and you get a whole stalk of 10,000 seeds. That is a profit of 10,000 to 1. Profit comes from the Sun/Earth system. The sun pushes one seed of corn into 10,000. That is profit. Profit is return on investment over your cost of production. Your cost of production is one seed of corn sown, and whatever you paid the sun to rain sunlight on your seed for a summer. The reap (harvest) of 10,000 seeds is your return on investment. Profit is your return minus your cost. VALUE is defined as the number of useful joules of energy in the product relative to the being who values it. Notice value is not weight, it is joules (calories) of useful energy. The value or worth of a product to a person is NOT how much useful energy the seller put into making it, that is the sellers's cost of production. The value of a product is the amount of useful energy the buyer can get out of it. So much for communism and Ithaca Hours. Profit NEVER comes during the trade of corn for peas, as no party would trade a greater value of corn for lesser value of peas. Trades are always aimed at fair exchange. Thus profit is made in the production not the trade or sale.) BARTER AND MARKERS Barter is cool because A gives B a pound of corn, and B gives A a pound of peas, and the deal is done, the transaction is closed and completed with a full fair exchange of actual value (joules of useful energy, namely food.) But in a high speed market, A gives B a pound of corn, but B gives A a marker for a pound of peas. A marker is an IOU written by B saying the transaction between A and B is not complete. A is down a pound of corn that he gave to B, but up only a marker for a pound of peas. But A can hand that marker to C who gives A a pound of eggs, and then C goes to B and gives him back his own marker for the pound of peas and walks away with the peas that B originally owned A. Now all transactions are complete and B DESTROYS HIS MARKER as it is no longer needed. Markers need to be non counterfeitable as B doesn't want to have to pay a whole slew of people wanting peas who have B's markers copied off a Xerox machine. Present day encryption and digital signature techologies allow anyone to create signed markers for their own services that can not be duplicated, copied or counterfeited by anyone. Bitcoin is simply a generic digital marker, that once created can not be destroyed, and thus used by anyone as valid trustable legal tender. Money is also simply a non digital a generic marker, money exists only because of incomplete transactions of fair exchange between people or between people and the central market that takes in all produce and sells it back out to everyone. A takes his corn to the market and leaves it off, the market gives him 10 bucks. B takes his peas to the same market and also gets 10 bucks. C takes his eggs to the market and the market gives him 10 bucks. But then A goes back to the market and trades in his 10 bucks for C's eggs. At that point A's transaction with the market is complete and closed and his 10 bucks is burned as no longer necessary. So new money is created in the moment that a two way transaction is opened or started but not completed. THE BODY POLITIC Society is designed by the 'body politic' which are the members of the designing committee. In a free society the body politic is everyone. A free society is the one that everyone wants to be in, unless they do not desire any personal responsibility for how things turn out. Usually if you look at the border between two countries, the vast majority of foot prints in the mud will be going towards the freer of the two societies. A balance of trade in footsteps means both societies are doing pretty well, unless the footsteps are being dragged one way. In order for the body politic to function and design their society, people need to be able to communicate with each other in order to express their ideal scenes, views, concerns, problems and solutions. AND THEY MUST BE ALLOWED TO DO SO WITHOUT FEAR OF REPERCUSSION. For example in any group of people trying to form a society, many will be capitalistic and others will be communistic. Sometimes the arguments can get heated to a point of war. Capitalists for example don't like being told that everything they make must be put in a central lot to be given away to first in liners. First in liners for a hand out tend to be the least productive of return on investment in them, because they are busy waiting in line rather than working. If you are brighter and more valuable to society than someone else, produce more, consume less, you deserve to be rewarded by the natural affluence of the return on your production. YOU sow, YOU reap. Get it? Or if your market bent is communism, then its WE sow, WE reap. But never should it be I sow, THEY reap, nor THEY sow, I reap. THE BOAT MAKER For example, say you are an native Indian in a forest, and you discover how to make a boat out of chopping a big tree trunk into the shape of a boat. No one else can do this as well as you, and soon a line is forming bidding for your services, and you end up with a great big pile of wampum as a result. Those that buy your boat, catch more fish, then have more money to pay you for bigger and better boats. Good invention amplifies the return on sow and reap cycles, and the inventor is worthy of his hire. Then some big guys come around and tell you that you need to give them your wampum so they can distribute it to the poor and not quite as bright, and you have a duty to make your boats for free. This makes you madder than hell, but there is some validity to it. The community supports you as best it can, and you should support it the best you can. Further who owns the trees you are carving up into boats? They belong to the community, so you are benefiting from community assets in your process of getting rich. The whole subject of ownership of natural resources and land has probably given rise to more wars and arguments between capitalists and communists than any other single subject. Every square inch of arable land on Earth is soaked in someone's blood. So anyhow, there you all are, arguing this out, as part of the body politic, and it starts to get violent. Some of the capitalists just sort of disappear in the night, and some of the communists are found at the bottom of cliffs. You see how this goes? It is a very serious problem to the body politic of ANY planet and any social design group. Any time you start talking about taking the production of he who is brighter or more able, and giving to the others who are not so bright in the name of 'love for the people', you have a problem. So the first requirement of a communication line being used by the body politic to discuss its agendas in safety, is anonymity. That means no one knows who is saying what, if they don't want to be known. And no one can trace them back to where and who they are, in order to punish, silence or moderate them or their loved ones. Thus the FIRST and most fundamental right of all people in a free society is anonymous, unmoderatable, and untraceable communication to anyone else. This is the right of PUBLIC CONGREGATION. Public congregation doesn't just mean getting together in a crowd out on a street or in a church where everyone is identifiable and easy to photograph, round up or attack. More broadly public congregation means the ability to issue a public communication and feel assured that everyone who wants to receive it can and does in a timely fashion, ALL OVER THE PLANET, and that the issuer and his loved ones can not be threatened, punished or silenced. Internet anonymity provides public congregation in a way that has never been available before. But then sometimes you and your cohorts want to be able to talk to each other, in private without other hostile elements listening in. This is the right of PRIVATE CONGREGATION. Thus the SECOND most fundamental right of all people in a free society is the right to encryption, so only the chosen can understand the communication even if others intercept it. Public key encryption (RSA) now provides people the ability to communicate privately and securely to anyone they wish, in a way that has never existed before. This is the right to privacy, not just in your home, but in your entire web of communication lines, that you extend to those you wish to communicate with, and who wish to be communicated to by you. Do you really want to give the government access to your e-mail? Do you really want the vying parties for power to know who you are going to vote for, before you vote for them? Now often you find that people actually don't mind being known as the author of some idea, in fact they WANT to be known. Soon they are finding that hostile and anonymous forces are posting things in their name and people are getting confused as to who is saying what. Thus the THIRD most fundamental right to all people in a free society is the right to non repudability, to irrefutably sign a document so anyone reading it can verify for themselves who it came from, namely you. To sum up, the three basic rights in a free society are anonymity, privacy and non repudiation. The first is provided by anonymous remailers, and the second two are provided by public key encryption. If you want anonymity to safely talk to a public audience, you use an anonymous remailer chain. Public key encryption allows each person to create a private/public key pair. The private key they keep to themselves, and the public key they publish widely. If you want to talk privately to someone, you encrypt your message with the recipient's public key, and they decode it with their private key. Only they can read it. If you want to sign something as irrefutably yours, you encrypt it with your private key, and everyone can read it with your public key. PROBLEMS WITH NON ANONYMITY AND ANONYMITY. Now there are obvious problems on both sides of the anonymity coin. If good people speak openly, non anonymously, then criminals can hunt them down and hurt them and their loved ones. Try speaking out against the Nazi's in France 1941, or in east Berlin 1970, or in Pol Pot's Cambodia or Stalin's Russia. Even in America during the revolution and afterwards, people chose to speak anonymously in order to protect themselves against those who would silence them. THE HISTORY OF MANKIND IS A STORY TOLD OF ONE SIDE OF THE BODY POLITIC TRYING TO SILENCE AND DESTROY THE OTHER. On the other hand if you provide anonymity to everyone, then the criminals can talk among themselves safely to plot the downfall of the free society. The upside is that good people, if they find out about such criminal conspiracies, can blow the whistle on the criminals in safety using those same anonymous communication lines. So you have two choices. The first is a world where there is no anonymity, where everyone can be tracked and held accountable for what they say. Sounds good for keeping the criminals under control, but bad for the good who know that criminals can't be controlled anyhow, and that the criminals will eventually become the controllers of the good if the good are not allowed to speak and plan anonymously or privately. Or you can have a world where everyone has anonymity, where everyone can speak freely without fear of repercussion. Thus the criminals can talk safely amongst themselves, but the good can blow the whistle on them in safety if they know something. The world has been playing the game of body politic ever since we crawled out of the ocean using the first method, track and kill. Now we can play it using the second method, you can speak safely but I can too. MARKETS But now we have the markets and boy do we have a problem. The problem is that the communication lines that have been created so the body politic can design the market system, ARE THE SAME LINES USED BY THE MARKET SYSTEM TO CARRY OUT ITS OPERATIONS. So someone buys a CD, rips the mp3 onto his hard drive, and sends it on to everyone he knows for free. Markets don't like free communication, markets thrive on secrets, trade secrets, competition secrets, plan secrets, and they thrive on the inability of just anyone to make the product they are trying to sell. Intellectual ownership has become the next war between the capitalists who want to own, and the communists who think everyone owns everything or nothing. The whole subject of copyrights still has the body politic arguing with each other, even AFTER the markets were designed and set in motion. Copyrights were invented in the distant past to protect the publisher, not the artist. Further, publishers were owned by the King (who got his cut), and the publisher could only publish what the King approved of. At the time it was very hard to publish, so copyright violations by the reading public were not the problem. The problem were rogue publishers who may or may not have been loyal to the King. As time went on, copyrights were considered a good thing for the authors too, along with patents and the rest, with limitations on time so that eventually works could belong to the general public, because after all "everyone owns everything." Even capitalists have a sense of the public good. This has given rise to two major problems. The first is the little kid with the mp3 ripper sending songs to everyone else for free. Napster caused the biggest scare in the history of man for the record industry, they thought it was OVER. Napster was easy to shut down, but using anonymity and encryption, music sharing continues to this day. The only limiting factor on it, is people's general ignorance of how to do it, and fear of being caught anyway. The music industry knows there is nothing they can do about it. Thus in some sense, ideas of copyright and ownership become moot because they can't be enforced. Once a technological war starts on these things, it becomes never ending. Someone invents an encryption scheme so CD's can't be ripped, and someone cracks the scheme and posts it to the net anonymously. The other problem is when various people started to patent things that were not their's to patent, such as the genes in your breast that make you prone to breast cancer. Under some interpretations of the law, if your breast has that gene, your BREAST belongs to the owner of the patent. Silly? Think again. There are company CEO's that want every drop of water on the planet, including rain water falling in a cup in your hand or on your house, to be owned by a corporation that then resells it back to you at a profit. Google 'water wars'. But the war over land and natural resource property rights has now moved to a war over intellectual property rights that is bad enough to make both the capitalists and the communists hopping mad. MARKET EFFORTS TO LIMIT THE BODY POLITIC Because the markets have a very hard time with free communication, they try to put restraints it. For example by changing the nature of computers so they can't talk anonymously. That is like putting a cop in every bedroom to prevent child molestation. These kind of solutions of watching over everyone to make sure they don't break market rules, can then be used against them to make sure they stay silent during political debate. PEACE AND SECURITY THROUGH SILENCE AND COMPLIANCE. Market players ARE ALWAYS trying to sacrifice political freedoms of communication to benefit the profits in the markets. This is either very short sighted with a firm belief in a benign government, or it is knowingly selfish or evil. Thus the body politic wants everyone to have anonymity, strong encryption, and non repudiation, while the markets want everyone trackable, moderatable, and with plausible deniability. Trackable means if you write something they can find you and well, do to you whatever they want when they do find you. Moderatable means anything you post goes to a moderator first who then approves or disapproves of your post, and posts it or not according to his whim. 'Unbiased moderator' is an oxymoron. Plausible deniability means you can deny you wrote anything you wrote. There once was a government official who proposed that a committee should be formed to determine which conspiracy theories would be allowed on the net and which would be punished out of existence. Later some people found out about this excreable miscreant, but he denied writing the memo claiming somesone else had written it instead, and no one could ever prove he had actually written it himself. THE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT. Although we tend to think of politics and government in the same breath, politics is actually above the government, politics comes first and in fact creates the the government you get. Thus government fundamentally has no right whatsoever to say word one about politics or how it operates or what communication freedoms it needs to operate. GOVERNMENT IS ON THE SIDE OF THE MARKETS, NOT THE BODY POLITIC, BY INTENTION DESIGN OF THE BODY POLITIC! Once markets are created, we create a government to mange them, and to enforce the rules of fair trade. Fair trade means each party enters into the trade willingly and fully informed. If a criminal sticks a gun in your face and says give me all your produce, you are no longer a willing participant in that transaction and thus it is not a fair trade. We could leave the problem of criminality to vigilante justice, but long history has shown that matters of criminal justice need to be left to objective professionals, who do it full time, and who have a sense of the society that its members may not have, AND NO VESTED INTEREST IN THE MARKET OUTCOMES. Never leave oversight of a corporation to the corporation. The professional justice system includes the court system, from the Supreme Court on down, the cops that arrest criminals, and the lawyers that prosecute and defend them in court. That is an amazing edifice to erect to replace a couple of guys with a noose and a gun. Thus besides governing the mint and the markets, one primary purpose of the government is to enforce fair trade, USING FORCE WHERE NECESSARY, in a way we don't want lesser market players doing on their own. In other words where a person can not defend themselves, we call on the government to defend them for them. Sometimes the government acts poorly, sometimes the government acts criminally, sometimes the government acts like a tyranny, moved by personal fancy, whim, greed and caprice, rather than a nation of law. Sometimes we might feel that anarchy would be better than that tyranny. But eventually a true ANARCHY BECOMES A SEA OF MICRO TYRANNIES. In the absence of government, people coalesce into thousands of little groups, each controlled by the biggest, meanest, strongest, most selfish guy, and thus you have a thousand little absolute tyrannies all over again. Such groups quickly try to throw their self elected tyrant leaders off as soon as they can, rebuild a democratic power structure again, including professional police forces, judges, lawyers and armies! So in the end, the 3 fundamental communication rights of all people in a free society, untrackable anonymity, unbreakable encryption, and irrefutable signature, are controversial and have their collateral damage IN THE MARKET ARENA. However I believe they are necessary to the survival of the POLITICAL ARENA and thus, in the end, to the very survival of the markets, the government and society itself. Thus I formed the first part of my personal sub vision statement, I envision a world where EVERYONE IS FREE TO COMMUNICATE WITH WHOMEVER THEY CHOOSE, ABOUT ANYTHING WITHOUT FEAR OF REPERCUSSION. Yes that means little kiddies can trade nuclear secrets and naked pictures of themselves in relative safety, but the military can use encryption to make sure the kiddies don't get those secrets in the first place. I also believe it is wrong for the government and its markets to wish backdoors on encryption to make sure that its people haven't become overloaded with criminals, but I do believe it is right for the people, as the body politic, to wish back door's on the government's encryption to make sure the government hasn't become overloaded with criminals. When lawmakers outlaw criminals, criminals become lawmakers. It's the only safe place for a criminal to hide. Thus we must never leave oversight of a government to the government. ENHANCING COMMUNICATION Now there are many many ways to improve the communication abilities among the people of the planet, from newspapers, radio, TV, faxes all the way to the internet. But for me personally, I could never understand nor get into any of them, except for the internet which became a natural for me. The two way nature of the internet made it deliciously subversive, Anyone could post in less than a minute to the entire planet faster than any aborning police state could track them. And the internet allowed everyone to be come a publisher overnight without permission of the King or his assigns. And it allowed everyone to speak freely and anonymously to everyone on the planet, and secretly to whomever they wished. the internet was an almost perfect instantiation of the 3 triangles of civilized wisdom. 1.) Study, Teach and Learn. to engage 2.) Passion, Talent and honed Skills. in the roles of 3.) Master, Peer and Apprehentice For me it was a no brainer that this was the way *I* should go towards 'making a better world through communication.' This is where MY abilities locked in, I felt "I can do that" and I can do it better than the other guy, so I had better get a crackin'. Thus from my vision statement I then formed my mission statement. Vision statement: A better world through free communication. Mission statement: To deliver dependable but affordable internet access to those who are under served. So you see we have moved from a vision of how I would like the world to be, to a specific mission of what to do about it. Now lower down the Vision tree, even below the mission statement, we get into explicit orders on what exactly to do in order to deploy that 'dependable but affordable' product. That then becomes all the technogobble about modems, T1's, wireless, DSL, web hosting, e-mail and usenet news. Without the mission statement it is easy to lose my way towards fulfilling my top level vision statement of a better world through free and open communication. The energy to do what I am doing when I am nailing another wire to a wall, or helping another person online, comes down from the top of the tree. "Why exactly am I talking to this idiot on the other end of my phone line? Oh yeah, a world of free and open communication between all people in it." That's why you need a vision statement, and you need a mission statement, because the two of them give you your marching orders. AND THE ENERGY AND WILL DO TO THEM. Homer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Homer Wilson Smith The Paths of Lovers Art Matrix - Lightlink (607) 277-0959 KC2ITF Cross Internet Access, Ithaca NY homer@Lightlink.com In the Line of Duty http://www.Lightlink.com Fri Mar 5 20:01:30 EST 2010 Sun Dec 25 04:24:30 EST 2016