VISION AND MISSION

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VISION AND MISSION

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 inbetween.

It will probably change your life.

Homer

VISION AND MISSION

Every business 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.'

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.

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 downturns, 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

Missions are derived from visions and the various existing
'situations' that one is suffering in present time.

A 'situation' is the furthest deviation from an ideal scene.

An ideal scene is how you would like the world to be.

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
this 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.

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 scene, 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 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, and repress creativity and the ability triangle.

Social justice includes human rights for both adults and children
and even for animals.

Then there are the subjects of politics and markets. 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. 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, 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.

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.

CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM

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 three
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.

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 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.

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.

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 stat 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, 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 and do all of the above things with great trouble.

I had the mind of a philosopher, and my main interests were
was 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 Kruschev 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 saw 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.,

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 Kruschev.

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, but 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 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).

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 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 coin meets the table.

You could also throw government in there, which is the ultimate
manager of the markets and the governor of the mint.

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.

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 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 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, 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 now 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 theirs 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 wants 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.

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, moderateable, and with plausible deniability.

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
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, although 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, I believe they are necessary to
the survival of the POLITICAL ARENA and thus, in the end, to the very
survival of the markets 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 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.

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,
and it 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.

For me it was a no brainer that this was the way *I* should go
towards 'making a better world through free 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


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================== http://www.lightlink.com/theproof ===================
Learning implies Learning with Certainty or Learning without Certainty.
Learning across a Distance implies Learning by Being an Effect.
Learning by Being an Effect implies Learning without Certainty.
Therefore, Learning with Certainty implies Learning but
Not by Being an Effect, and not across a Distance.

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