Virtual machines?
Consider a machine. Levers. Pulleys. Engines. Computers.
Each has a design that deploys rules of nature to consistently generate a result. Fuel. Flame. Combustion-> Movement. Friction. Ratios.
There are more abstract machines— social machines like organizations. There is no clear conception of “what an organization is” or natural laws on “why they work” but some do and some don’t. Just like other machines. It took many failed attempts at flight before success. But with social machines, organizations, the lack of natural laws on human interaction has led to some uncertainty.
There are even more abstract machines that exist virtually, basic ideas or logics that turn inputs into outputs, maintains order, so on. Democracy is one.
Debt limit
What happens when the debt limit becomes political? U.S. debt is not bad, it serves to stabilize international currencies as gold once did. So … enact a balanced budget and what happens to the value of U.S. debt? Placing the payoff of U.S. debt as a priority above all other things, the tax payers of the united states back the debt, with the balanced budget in place the value of our debt sky rockets as the stability of it is demonstrated to be absolute… it is a no risk bet, but the amount of it is decreasing as we are not generating more debt and are focussed on paying it back.
The resurrection of God: A musing on the of the ethnocentrized, Americanized, technologized & capitalized g[]d of the 21st century.
Technology, specifically the Web, is a grand theodicy of the early 21st century. In the face of evil and societal failures it gives birth to new identities— souls— for individuals, nurtures the ever so important Libertarian freewill, grants such individuals the power to do great evil, and recognizes postmodern natural laws— a stable ‘natural’ medium/experience of the world from the level of computer code and network protocols to human institutions such as Facebook®.
Changes at The New State
Hello colleagues.
I believe that most of you expressed some interest in this as some point in time… if not feel free (as always!) to ignore this message. Last year Brandon Ching created thenewstate.com as an experiment in PA blogging. Though many of us hoped to participate, well… life got in the way. We simply did not generate enough content on a regular basis to… well… consider it successful.
BUT… Brandon is working on an updated site and we are going to try it one more time. There are two reasons for this:
1) We still think it is a good idea. Considering the evolving communication industry, it would behoove us to get some practice in alternative (rapidly becoming dominant) media forms. And writing non-academese is cool. 
The lost introduction to The New State-recovered from the Internet Archives
INTRODUCTION
to the 1920 edition of The New State by Mary Parker Follett
BY
VISCOUNT HALDANE
I HAVE ventured to ask the authoress of what Professor Bosanquet has recently called “the most sane and brilliant of recent works on political theory,” to let me write a few pages introductory to the next issue of her book.
Thoughts on thenewstate.com
Why the new state? We have entered into a new American epoch. Economic, technological, and political structures that have been the framework of the study and practice of public administration have radically changed. In the ever so close past, the ends that governing sought were limited to economic development. Safety, housing, the environment, and education had all become commodities and have been used as means to generate economic development. Privatization, outsourcing, de-regulation, and “creative” finance are just a few of the tools that public administrators have used to generate economic development. But now with the collapse of our economy we have realized that the focus on economic development has left us with crumbling infrastructure, substandard education and environmental policy, over-crowded jails, a food production industry dependent on environmentally devastating practices, massive corruption, a socially stagnant classes with little mobility, and greater wealth accumulation in a ridiculously few. A self interested society, it turns out, is not sustainable.
