Dear Friends :
At last week's general meeting, the Bay Area
Public School collectively decided to pursue the possibility of a new
permanent physical location, in league with Sudo Room, Counter Culture
Labs, and Timeless Infinite Light. This space is presently known as THE
OMNI.
We also decided to have a special meeting this week to
further discuss this space. This meeting will take place this Thursday,
November 21, 7PM at 2141 Broadway. All are welcome, so please join us
to discuss this exciting prospect !
See you Thursday --
Love -- David
sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
First
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came
In November 1945 German Pastor Martin Niemöller visited the former Dachau concentration camp, where he had been imprisoned from 1941 to April 1945. His diary entry about that visit and some subsequent speeches he gave imply that that visit triggered the thought that became this famous quotation.
http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/niem.htm
Was würde Jesus sagen? -- What would Jesus say?
http://www.martin-niemoeller-stiftung.de/4/daszitat/a46
Mayor Jean Quan says she's transparent, yet has not posted a schedule since June 2013
http://www2.oaklandnet.com/Government/o/Mayor/i/TransparentGovernment/index…http://www2.oaklandnet.com/Government/o/Mayor/Connect/MayorsSchedule/index.…
However I'm sure many people are busy getting govt. city paychecks to make sure she's kept quite busy:
http://www2.oaklandnet.com/Government/o/Mayor/a/ContactUs/index.htm
Shall we request a proclamation?
"To request a proclamation from the Mayor's Office: mayors-proclamation(a)oaklandnet.com"
Meanwhile DAC (DOMAIN AWARENESS ) is moving torward an orwellian state for Oakland citizens, normals, average tax payers and travelers who pass through the great City of Oakland:
Martin Niemoller Poem
They came for the Communists,
and I didn't object -
For I wasn't a Communist;
They came for the Socialists,
and I didn't object -
For I wasn't a Socialist;
They came for the labor leaders,
and I didn't object -
For I wasn't a labor leader;
They came for the Jews,
and I didn't object -
For I wasn't a Jew;
Then they came for me -
And there was no one left to object.
updated to 2013:
A city dweller of oakland's Poem
They came for the homeless
and I didn't object -
For I wasn't a Homeless
(houseless, golf courses (a future tent city) and un occupied mansions aside)
They came for the Anarchists, Rabble rousers, Occupy folks,
and I didn't object -
For I wasn't a Anarchists;
They came for the labor leaders,
and I didn't object -
For I wasn't a labor leader;
(still valid today)
They came for the Jews, and I didn't object -
For I wasn't a Jew;
They came for the christians, catholics, conservative patriots,, and I didn't object -
For I wasn't a religious zealot;
They came for the immigrants, nomads, pagans and foreigners, and I didn't object -
For I was born here
[take your pick:
(They came for the Queer, and I didn't object -
For I wasn't a homosexual, transexual, bisexual, lesbian / gender challenged,) OR (They came for the heterosexuals, straight men and women, breeders, and I didn't object - I was Gay)
]
They came for the criminals and Thieves, pimps and prostitutes, and I didn't object -
For I was a "law abiding citizen".
They came for the Drug Dealers, drug addicts, and I didn't object -
For I followed all laws and bought my meds from Walmart or from my Rite Aid/Walgreens
They came for the wierdos, agnostics, atheists,
and I didn't object -
For I was a normal.
Then they came for me -
And there was no one left to object.
-Anonymous
Circa November 2013
based on Martin Niemoller Poem
links of interest:
http://www2.oaklandnet.com/Government/o/Mayor/a/ContactUs/index.htmhttp://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/niem.htm
NYSE: CBG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CB_Richard_Ellishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_C._Blumhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianne_Feinsteinhttp://www.corpwatch.org/section.php?id=17
"Founded in 1969, Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) is a major intelligence, military, aerospace, engineering and systems contractor. It is involved in defense/military (DoD), intelligence community, and homeland security contracting, as well as selected commercial markets."
http://www.corpwatch.org/section.php?id=17http://www.crocodyl.org/spies_for_hire/saic_science_applications_internatio…http://rady.ucsd.edu/beyster/about/
"The work of the Beyster Institute began in 1986 when, as part of the Foundation for Enterprise Development, it took on the commission to spread the visionary ideas of Dr. J. Robert Beyster, the founder of SAIC. These ideas have led to the development of many highly successful enterprises based on the potent combination of employee ownership and entrepreneurial spirit."
http://publicintelligence.net/oakland-dac-saic/
Oakland Domain Awareness Center SAIC Contract Documents
October 12, 2013 in California, Corporate, Intelligence Fusion Centers
The following files contain the majority of the contract documents between the City of Oakland and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) for construction of the City of Oakland/Port of Oakland Joint Domain Awareness Center. The documents were obtained via a public records request made by members of Occupy Oakland.
http://littlesis.org/org/290/SAIC
"SAIC
Science Applications International Corporation"
"A project of the Public Accountability Initiative.
Basic Info edit Types Organization, Business, Public Company
Website http://www.saic.com
Revenue $9.0 billion
Industries Defense electronic contractors"
At age 80, Feinstein is the oldest currently serving United States Senator.
Spouse(s) Jack Berman (1956–1959; div.)
Bertram Feinstein (1962–1978; deceased)
Richard C. Blum (1980–)
http://www.projectcensored.org/social-media-new-medium-terrorism/http://www.projectcensored.org/u-s-senator-dianne-feinsteins-husband-sellin…
I'm forwarding this message from Phuckin' Phylean (cc'd), who's having
trouble signing up to sudo-discuss. Please reply-all or get in touch with
her personally:
_________________________________________________
Greetings Programs,
The last party went pretty swimmingly for only being thrown together at
the last moment. Just a week to plan ain't much in the nightclub industry
but stranger things have happened that were successful but usually only on
dumb luck! So, lets do the next one a little bigger, which means a little
better planning and promoting equals a lot better partying and probably
paying off for all involved in the long run.
So, we need a small staff to run this smoothly, safely, and successfully
without any risk of the typical trials and tribulations that could possibly
become trouble for the venue.
Positions (some paid, some volunteer):
*Door-person (Outdoor greeter/bouncer)
*Door-person (Indoor suggested donation "enforcer")
*Bartender (Tips only basis)
*Moderator (Communicating to the people/members translating to the event
staff)
*Promoters (Facebooking/posting/advertising/notifying/informing/flyering)
*Security (Walking through casually and occasionally checking in with the
front door and bar or bars to keep a general but casual eye on the happy
but drinking patrons)
*Host/Hostess (Not necessary but nice to have if they enjoy the position)
*DJs (Must have their own music, music knowledge, gear, experience, and
some following)
Please text me back if interested or have any suggestions or commentary
because I have no reliable internet access at the moment.
(415) 794-7789
Phuckin' Phylean 15 years of promotion and DJing at your service
--
The best way to contact me reliably is texting my
Cell phone (415) 794-7789
or if it's before 9 pm call the
Studio phone (510) 534-7068
Thanks and take care,
Phuckin' Phylean
Double "P" that is me with "F" that you hear but don't see
"The only thing that brings me peace is the same phuckin' thing that won't
let me rest, music." says I,
Phuckin' Phylean is DJ Jezzebella!
djjezzebella(a)yahoo.com
djjezzebella(a)gmail.com
phuckinphylean(a)gmail.com
http://www.myspace.com/phuckinphyleanhttp://www.myspace.com/phuckinphyleanlivehttp://www.myspace.com/dopesicktighthttp://www.sfgoth.com/djs/jezzebella/index.html
I'm giving another "Arduino For Total Newbies" workshop at San Francisco's newest hackerspace -- RockIT CoLabs, in Chinatown.
Thursday, 5-Decemeber, 7:00pm - 10:30pm
Learn Arduino. It's fun, it's easy. All welcome!
Limited to 25 people.
Registration now open!
Details:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/arduino-for-total-newbies-workshop-tickets-935…
Mitch.
On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 7:50 PM, David Barthwell
<david(a)vergegraphics.com> wrote:
> To all the people sharing fun stories and uplifting anecdotes about
> encountering black people in Oakland: Let's not forget that there are
> actually some on this list. In fact, I'm one of them!
On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 7:57 PM, Sonja Trauss <sonja.trauss(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> what are you saying David - all black people are robbers?
On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 8:17 PM, Sonja Trauss <sonja.trauss(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> David - you're black, do you have any info on the relative safety from
> mugging of black women and men?
On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 1:03 PM, Sonja Trauss <sonja.trauss(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I still want to know whether David has any info/ insights on the relative
> vulnerability to mugging of white v black men.
Are you serious? Is this for real?
I too love a good email thread, but I'm not sure what's the point of all this is, besides
humble bragging about how more miserable our respective origins are from
some other entity on the Internet.
By the time it gets to message 100 in this thread, there will be no sudoroom members left.
Greetings, sudo!
It has been a long time since i have visited! I hope you have all been
doing well. I am taking the time right now as the year draws to a close
to reflect on the current state of things in my world. Perhaps you will
indulge me in reading everything below. perhaps you are seeking a tl;dr
in which case i will ask you,
have you seen my folding plastic table?
have you seen my aluminum ladder?
have you seen my dreams for a shared space and a common future?
I believe I left them laying around here someplace, possibly with my
name scrawled across in marker.
The table is about 3'x6', blown plastic, folds in half. The ladder is
aluminum, 12' high or so, and quite nice. The dreams are like hair or
cuticles, forever growing back even as i try to ignore them and focus on
something tangible or 'important'.
At the beginning of this year I closed Coyote, a shared art studio and
retail space I had been managing in North Oakland. We closed in part
because of the loss of one of our founding members, who moved back east
to live closer to his family. We closed also because of a mismatch with
the neighborhood, admitting reluctantly that where we wanted to have our
art studio was not compatible with where we needed to do our retail work
- to seek customers, and build paying business. We struggled to
integrate into our neighborhood, making friends while seeking to
understand the impact of gentrification. We struggled with an
unscrupulous landlord, mounting costs and flatlining incomes, and we had
to admit that the project wasn't working in its current guise.
The upscale restaurant down the block sought our support, as we were
closing, for a 'neighborhood meeting' about crime. When I pressed the
owner (who had never before visited, in our year and a half in business)
about what their concerns were, he told me that some of their patrons
were being mugged on their way from the tony restaurant to the train
station.
I can't say that I was surprised.
I wasn't surprised that the patrons of this restaurant had been mugged.
The food is not cheap and the place is an oasis of genteel laughter in
a neighborhood more attuned to sirens, car stereos, and the stacatto
passage of these same folks in their cars on their way home to the hills.
I also wasn't surprised that the restaurant owners, after completely
ignoring the existence of their scrappy neighbors, after failing to
welcome their new peers to the block, after ignoring that small business
baksheesh of customer-trading, were still willing to hit us up to come
to their 'community' meeting and talk about how to 'stop crime'.
I ache for folks who suffer through being robbed with the threat of
violence, or with actual violence. It sucks to have something like that
happen to you.
But.
In the time that I bottomlined our business in North Oakland, we lost
about 5% of our sales income in shoplifting. This is in comparison to
basically nil in shoplifting losses in a similar store that I previously
ran in San Francisco, near haight/fillmore. What's different? Income
inequality. Sure, in a diverse place, folks of all different sorts
encounter each other, and there is a lot that is healthy about that.
In this region there do seem to be some entrenched group identities in
the culture war, and I sometimes wonder which side I am on.
I have watched friends and neighbors struggle as their food stamps are
cut. I have listened to the pained conflict that grows up in their
loving homes around money, when there is none. I wondered most
especially which side I was on after George Zimmerman was let free, and
marches passed my West Oakland house every day. I saw the notoriously
violent OPD standing between me and these marches, as if to protect me.
This more than anything else drove me to walk out my front gate and join
those marches, to show with my body where my loyalties lay.
I have watched the region that has nurtured me for the last decade sink
into an inequality that I am led to believe is as deep and deeply
entrenched (meaning the unlikelihood of people to transcend the
circumstances into which they were born) as the period that preceded the
French Revolution.
Only whose head will roll?
In the midst of these questions I was forced to confront the inadequacy
of Sudo's best and most shining efforts. It is a place where I have
made friends, many of whom stay in my orbit & community now as I
re-orient. Sudo is also the only place where my hair was ever grabbed
without my consent. It is a place where I have been accosted in a dark
hallway by someone who repeatedly demanded my attention despite my
demurrals, despite walking away. It is a place I have been yelled at in
anger, as have many others. It is a place I have feared to bring
friends. I watched a community struggle to set boundaries to protect
its members, only to founder as it seeks to define what a 'member' is
that deserves protection.
I say these things not as a condemnation of sudo, and i hope they are
not read as such. I say them as an honest person sharing some difficult
thoughts, and i remind you dear reader that we reside within a culture
that is structurally predisposed against this. It trains us to see
critique as attack, to see critical thought as a threat, instead of what
we hackers know as the fundamental strength we bring to any situation.
We can think. we can assess. we can learn and grow and change, and we
can evolve.
We are meta. We are legion, and we cannot be contained.
I read recently about this space starting in SF, and while i was
gladdened to hear about Double Union, I am extra excited to imagine
another space with such a strong commitment to inclusion.
https://github.com/wallacemax/sfhackerspace
I hope the east bay hackerspace scene continues to grow, evolve, and
flourish.
I understand sudo is changing right now as well. It is well for all
things to change, and I hope that in this case the changes lead towards
the causes of transparency in governance and inclusion for all, which i
always understood to be some of the most fundamental tenets of sudo.
be well, good luck to all, and always,
R.
Hello everyone
On Dec 5 at the Port WorkSpaces at 101 Broadway (at Embarcadero) 2.Oakland celebrates Oakland based tech and innovation. Please join us for community building, fun, music and food at our end of year gathering.
To learn more and register visit http://twopointoakland.com/dec-5-2013-2-oaklands-tech-innovation-celebratio…
Cordially,
Neil
In community,
Neil Planchon CPCC
Life and Productivity Coach, Website Design and Technology Solutions - www.neilplanchon.com
Founding Resident and Webmaster - Swan's Market Cohousing - Oakland CA - www.swansway.com
Board member, Treasurer and Technology Team - Old Oakland Neighbors - www.oldoaklandneighbors.org
Co-Chair and Technology Team - 2.Oakland - www.twopointoakland.com
Steering Committee and Technology - OakX - www.OakXnow.com
OnBoarding, CRM administrator, etc. - OpenOakland - www.openoakland.org (A Code for America Brigade)
Steering Committee and Technology Team - Cohousing Research Network - www.cohousingresearchnetwork.org
Former Board Member, National Tours Director and Fundraiser - Cohousing Association - www.cohousing.org
Continued from my posting under the "crime" topic.
How to setup a microenterprise lending systemand start a bank.
1) Find a local credit union or local bank whose management are willing
to agree to the project.
2) Set up an account for this purpose. This can be done by any legal
entity formed for the purpose.
3) Solicit funds from whoever. All the money gets deposited to the
account. Bookkeeping keeps track of who's in for how much, in case
someone wants to exit the system and withdraw their funds (with simple
savings-account interest). The minimum to shoot for should be
$120,000. Better, shoot for $250,000 which is the limit of a single
FDIC-insured deposit account. The targets can go higher as more
FDIC-insured deposit accounts are opened.
4) Whenthe targetamount is reached, it gets used to tie down a secured
line of credit with the bank or credit union (or more than one as the
case may be). The secured line of credit will probably be somewhere in
the neighborhood of 60% to 80% of the funds on deposit, but that's OK
because it serves a specific purpose (per (12) below).
5) At this point, go into the 'hood and the schools and work with
existing local organizations to seek out young people who have
entrepreneurial smarts and who are seriously at-risk of opting into
crime-world.
6) The secured line of credit is used for lending to the grassroots
microenterprise startups.
7) Work with groups of kids to develop viable business ideas. Do the
whole business planning exercise with them, teach them how to do it.
Ideal case is that the first round of these won't depend on renting
storefronts: rent is a huge expense and a business-killer unless gross
sales can rampup quickly. Best if the group members can continue to
live with their parents (to keep costs down), though this can't be taken
for granted, and shared housing arrangements may be needed.
8) Each group that qualifies gets signed for a startup loan. The loan
is actually taken with the bank or credit union. However, the loan is
secured by the funds in the account under (3) above. This means zero
risk to the local financial institution, and that's the key to getting
their approval for the whole project.
9) The agreement between the organization and the groups it funds, is
that 20% of their net profits, goes back to the organization to grow its
pile of capital. This is in addition to repaying the loan to the local
financial institution. (VCs are typically looking for 30%, so this is a
better deal for the new startups.) In addition, the founders of these
startups are obligated to help withoutreach and mentoring of others,
after they themselves succeed.
10) If a new startup can't make a loan payment, the money is paid
fromthe secured account. The risk is distributed proportionally across
all of the contributors to the account.
11) Stay actively involved with each new startupthrough its first five
years in business. If it survives its first year, it is most likely to
survive the next four years. After five years,it is likely to continue
successfully.
12) Per the agreement with the original financial institution(s), once
a startup successfully pays off its starting loan, it becomes eligible
for comparable credit directly from the institution. This is the step
that leverages the startup fund to obtain independent credit for the
startups after their first couple of years.
13) At this level the system runs steady-state: its ability to fund new
startups is limited by its own funds. But that will change under (16)
below.
14) Once the startups start succeeding, their contributions of 20% of
net will grow the funds and enable more startups.
15) Once there's an asset pool of a couple million dollars, distributed
across a number of FDIC-insured accounts, possibly at a number of
institutions, then it's time to consolidate all of that money into one
entity, and start a new financial institution.
This is the point at which the community organization starts a bank.
16) The new institution starts with a decent chunk of capital,
chartered for smallbusiness and startup lending. And then it becomes
eligible to engage in "fractional reserve" lending, which multiplies the
effective use of its money.
If the reserve ratiois 10% assets to loans, that means $2 million in
cash can theoretically produce $20 million in lending. Note, 10% is
"conservative." In the US, the actual number is abit below 5%, which
means $2 million in deposits can generate $40 million in lending
capability, assuming that each borrower uses the new institution to hold
its own deposits (this can be written into contracts with new
startups). Reality is usually substantially below these theoretical
maximums, but any multiplier is a good multiplier.
17) Fractional reserve lending is how banks "print money." It's an
enormous engine for economic development. But instead of enriching a
small number of investors, plowing it all back into the community
enriches the community.
18) Last but not least, this could be a candidate for a Kickstarter,
starting at step (1) above. However, 100% of funds raised should go
direct to the initial account and to the lending program: this is not
the place to generate jobs for the organizers themselves(that may take
five to ten years or longer).
And, to get back to the original "crime" topic, when at-risk kids start
to see real opportunity in starting legitimate businessesor getting
legitimate jobs working for their buddies, they aren't going to opt into
crime-world. But the point of the exercise isn't just to lower the
crime rate. The point of the exercise is to enrich the community so
people can flourish rather thanbarely survive.
-G.