Cascadian Pragmatism: From Blake to Bucky

In broad brush stroke terms: Blake was a Romantic who used his myth-making ability (his imagination) to graph out what he thought was broken, in terms of Fallen Man, and how balance (Edenic existence, Jerusalem) might be restored. 

Spinning off from Romantic: the Gothic, which in turn becomes Noir, which in turn gives rise to a new kind of fiction associated with the Cold War: the spies make it even colder.

But in contemporary discourse we disallow Blake's system to serve as any kind of Hegelian framework, preferring the latter's dialectic and social Darwinism (eugenics). Blake is closer to Kierkegaard in challenging Urizen's rule (aka Newton's Sleep). 

Kierkegaard is still read in Philosophy, under existentialism. Also, we know Nietzsche appreciated Emerson, a Transcendentalist (post Unitarian), so that connects us to philosophy also, at least to what we've called Continental philosophy. 

It's somewhat ironic that the European lineage helps keep American philosophy alive in memory. There's a two-way street across the Atlantic.

But then there's a "two-way street" across the Pacific as well, and we saw a lot of East-meets-West throughout the 1900s. Wittgenstein's later philosophy crossed paths with Zen Buddhism. We got into social engineering through media, ala Marshall McLuhan's global village. 

Now we have Cascadia (the bioregion) and Ruscadia (the Pacific side of Eurasian) holding hands across the Bering Strait, and there's nothing WDC might do to break those ties, which are psychological and indigenous and based in history. On the contrary, WDC fed the beast at a critical juncture, as the USA-USSR business relationship had always looked promising, from a Montreal 67 perspective, in the midst of a Cold War.

So in creating a "Cascadian Pragmatism" that links Wittgenstein to Bucky, via language games and Operation DuckRabbit, we get the computer science side of things (logic, propositional calculus i.e. early NLP), and through Blake we get a mythos consistent with that of Grunch of Giants (a pithy book) and with Rorty's Achieving Our Country ("our country" being a work in progress we're happy to keep hammering into shape). 

Rorty was my main thesis advisor, supervising my explorations into Wittgenstein's later philosophy at Princeton (Class of 1980). See my Graph Theory 2025 video for more context.

At the level of "hive mind" or "groupthink", Cascadian Entomology is pleased to supply all the metaphors we want, with full understanding that we're dealing with memes, not attempting to anthropomorphize the insects themselves. We're doing sociology or even sociobiology if we allow ourselves that term.

What's the opposite of "anthropomorphize" wherein we make "us" more like "them"?  We're the bugs, with buggy languages we need to keep debugging. LLMs, the gossip-bots, keep reminded us of what we've claimed and assists with omnitriangulating.

A tiny detail we might use is Wittgenstein's beetle-in-a-box: we could make that a scarab.

We're deliberately hearkening back to Egyptian motifs, which likewise permeate Art Deco and the "Roaring 20s". 

Futurism seemed alive back then. A lot of our forks and branches stem from those days, which includes a focus on trains (our weak bridge to Ayn Rand).

Steal This Story, Please (movie review)

This was one of those rare cases where I got to be in the same room as the star (Amy Goodman) and one of the directors (Carl Deal) at the close of the movie. This movie is in roadshow phase, making its debut outside the usual corporate distribution networks, making the rounds in art theaters such as Cinema 21, which is where we saw it. My friend Deb was hip to this movie and originally intended to see it in Seattle only to find her vacation, taking her through Portland, was timed perfectly for seeing this with Kirby (i.e. me). I’m glad it worked out that way.

Of course I’m familiar with Amy and Democracy Now!, and I was even one of those few Americans closely following the Timor business when Amy and Allan Nairn showed up there and got a beat up, nearly killed, only to find the toadies in Toad Hall weren’t interested in such matters, given they were obsessed with Domino Theory back then, one of those not-natively-American Eurasian ideologies, very slow (in the sense of retarded, as in “delinquent” (juvenile)). 

However, even if I too was immersed in geopolitics back then (Belau and the Compact of Free Association saga was another one) as a writer and eventually editor for Asian-Pacific Isssues News (APIN), an AFSC publication (Portland office), I didn’t really think of Amy as Jewish. I was simply uninformed. But “Goodman” duh, right? So is John Goodman also Jewish? Sheesh, I have no clue. I’ll check later, if he so identifies.

But saying someone is “Jewish” provides no context or texture, as bad as calling someone “Christian” or saying one “believes in God”. Taken outside of any language games (that’s a technical philosophical term, not an insult or slight) these terms are quasi-meaningless, merely evocative. You’re welcome to “add meaning” from your side, but let’s admit (at least at first): there’s nothing there without the details, which actually do matter. So in Amy’s case: her ancestors, like Deb’s, were from Eastern Europe (as in Poland-Ukraine-Lithuania), like the people at the opening of American Pop, a favorite movie (Ralph Bakshi).

These are what Norman Finkelstein refers to as the American Jews of his childhood, whom he still adores in a nostalgic sense, whereas by 2026 that imagery has largely dissipated and we’re in some kind of twilight zone between paradigms, like when they change the sets during intermission at the theater. A liminal space. Very backrooms. The meaning of “Christian” isn’t fixed either. We study these shifts in “cultography” (similar to sociology). Here in Portland we have lots of “Quagans” (Quaker pagans) and “JooBoos” (Jewish Buddhists). Or did. These brands come and go.

Amy still talks about “leaders of the free world” (meaning those Toad Hall ego-maniacs) which in my mind timestamps her mindset. She and her contemporaries do indeed still imagine a lotta stuff I’ve long ago let go of.  But that’s cuz I’m kinda alien, more of an of outlier, even more anomalous (note I don’t go out of my way to say “further left” — that’s too one-dimensional, per Marcuse), less mainstream. And being “less mainstream” than Democracy Now! is still saying something, right? But hey, as a teacher of Martian Math, I need to practice staying in character.

Amy was a big fan of the Phil Donahue Show, a highly rated daytime talk show that explored divisive topics, demonstrating the power of television to foment mind dynamics, process work, collective thinking. That kind of stuff is exciting to intelligent people (Amy is quite intelligent) and she sent a barrage of letters to Phil’s staff clamoring for some kind of position (she wound up in the audience, a position, where the topic was “being unemployed”). From that chapter, she entered radio. Her voice was recognizable and her content a beacon to a thinking audience. The rest is history.

Speaking of history, between my APIN days and more recently, I’ve continued tuning in Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal, whom I see as carrying the torch beyond where the boomers did (I think of Amy as a boomer).

For Teachers

:: School of Tomorrow stuff ::

A Quaker Rant (School of Tomorrow)

School of Tomorrow: Spring Term Update

Spring Term: School of Tomorrow

 

Portal on Synergeo

Philosophy of Mathematics

What I think high schoolers find disappointing about computing at first is the old textbooks tend to go with "engineering numbers" meaning floating points, which are very low precision compared with "pi to a thousand places" or whatever. "I thought computers were powerful, why do they suck at math?" is the reaction. 

Then we introduce them to arbitrary precision within computer algebra systems, ala Wolfram Language. Keep using trig functions and radicals (surds) in your expressions and only convert to decimal if you need to, and at that point it's up to you how many decimals you need. Phi (φ) to a 100 places is nothing special.

"Ah that's more like it!" say my high schoolers of all ages.In taking this route, with the surds and trig functions, I'm not necessarily buying into the whole metaphysics of "real numbers". Python has no "real" type and these "math objects" have no need for "infinite memory" to be worked with. 

Some numbers are "algorithmic" in nature, which means they're maybe not really numbers? They're objects. We're back to Category Theory where objects are the black box starting primitives if we like.

Put another way, my xyz coordinates for (1,0,0,0) are (√2/4, √2/4, √2/4) but am I thereby using "irrational numbers"? Sure, that's what we say. And Synergetics is cram-packed with such numbers, all it takes is a glance at the Figure Index. Fuller was no stranger to surds and trig functions.

I find a lot of the "real numbers" jazz to be after-the-fact bureaucracy, not essential to my brand of pragmatism. For rhetorical-polemical purposes, I could claim I don't use "real numbers" rational or irrational, never have. I use number objects of various types, computationally, with various behaviors. But I'm outside the namespace of most mathematician-philosophers.

Closer to the truth though, is I have a "when in Rome" philosophy. When I talk to a teacher of the conventional curriculum, I don't act like that way of thinking is going away tomorrow (where "tomorrow" connotes "very soon"). I understand about inertia. 

Even as Synergetics gains traction, which it's doing, everywhere I look, I understand XYZ will stick around for at least another 10K years, maybe more. So will Latin. It's not a matter of either/or. I can teach XYZ math and will happily do so, but the better more elite schools let me phase in more IVM stuff, cuz they, like me, have a sense of the future.

Festival of Lights

Portland, Cascadia, Pacific Rim, 2026

Chief Marketing Officer (CSN CMO)

Believing in Universe (School of Tomorrow)

Cultography Studies (School of Tomorrow)

Media Studies (School of Tomorrow)