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A white steel pole rises out of the sea off the Caribbean coast of Panama, poking above the waves like the funnel of a sunken steamship. Launched into the water last month, this is no shipwreck, but the base of what will soon become a floating home and, in the eyes of its makers, the first step towards building a brave new post-Covid-19 society, out on the open ocean.

Coronavirus is an opportunity to show the world that what were building is actually going to be very useful in the future, says Chad Elwartowski, in a recent video post from his beachside base in Panama. The Michigan-born software engineer turned bitcoin trader is a leading figure in the seasteading movement, a libertarian group dedicated to building independent floating cities on the high seas. Along with the bunker builders and survivalist preppers, their long-held ambitions have been bolstered by the current global pandemic. No matter if youre scared of the virus or the reaction to the virus, he adds, living out on the ocean will be helpful for these situations.

It is not the first time Elwartowski has attempted to realise his dream of a floating future. In April last year, he and his Thai partner Supranee Thepdet (aka Nadia Summergirl), were forced to flee their first floating home off the coast of Thailand, just moments before it was raided by the Thai navy. They had constructed what they declared to be the first seastead 12 nautical miles from Phuket, but the authorities decided that the six metre-wide fibreglass cabin, perched on top of a floating pole, posed a threat to Thailands sovereignty. It was an offence punishable by life imprisonment or even the death penalty. The couple announced on social media declaring their autonomy beyond the jurisdiction of any courts or law of any countries, including Thailand, said Rear Admiral Vithanarat Kochaseni, adding that they had invited others to join them. We see such action as deteriorating Thailands independence.

After a few weeks on the run, dodging Thai patrol boats and eventually making their way to Singapore, the couple moved to Panama to relaunch their company, Ocean Builders with the financial backer of the project, Rdiger Koch, a retired German aerospace engineer. This event has doubled down our efforts, the group said in a statement, following the Thai ordeal. We can all clearly see that seasteading needs to happen now as tyranny creeps ever more deeply into our governments to the point that they are willing to hunt down a couple of residents residing in a floating house in middle of nowhere.

The coronavirus pandemic has given fringe libertarian groups around the world renewed vigour to pursue their dreams of building autonomous new societies. Government-enforced lockdowns and increased digital surveillance have added fuel to their suspicions of state control, while the suspension of day-to-day norms and the spectre of an economic meltdown have amplified their calls to rethink society. When youre not sure which virus is more contagious, says the slogan of a recent meme made by Americans for Liberty, shared on Elwartowskis Facebook page. Covid-19, or those fine with complete government control.

The sentiment lies at the core of the seasteading community, a disparate group that has grown since 2008, when the Seasteading Institute was founded in San Francisco by Patri Friedman. The self-styled anarcho-capitalist (and grandson of Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman) was working as a Google software engineer when he managed to attract funding from PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel to set up the institute. In a founding statement, they described its goal as being to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems. Thiel was nothing if not confident: The nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level, he proclaimed.

A new kind of government arises, born in Earths last free places, fated to advance the human frontier

Seasteading represents the ultimate Silicon Valley approach to governance, conceiving society as a technology that can be hacked and innovated upon as simply as an operating system. It is predicated on the idea that government regulation stifles innovation, and therefore the route to a better world can only be found by unleashing a new generation of start-up societies that are forced to compete for citizens in a free market of ideologies. Dont like the rules of your current micro-nation? Simply move to another one. We will give people the freedom to choose the government they want, said Friedman, instead of being stuck with the government they get. Its boosters see it as the route to salvation; its critics say it would lead to an apartheid of the worst kind.

Progress has been bumpy. Thiels donations soon dried up, and Friedmans plans never got much further than launching Ephemerisle a waterborne version of the Burning Man festival, staged in the Sacramento River delta near San Francisco, where rival floating pontoons compete for the attention of soggy partygoers. He has since moved his focus away from the water, recently launching a company to develop experimental cities on dry land instead. But the Seasteading Institute continues without him, headed by author and self-appointed seavangelist, Joe Quirk.

Nearly half of the worlds surface is unclaimed, says Quirk, who published a book on seasteading in 2017, with the ambitious subtitle: How floating nations will restore the environment, enrich the poor, cure the sick, and liberate humanity from politicians. In an introductory video, he describes the planets oceans as a sort of research and development zone where we could discover better means of governance, and says that seasteading could provide the technology for thousands of people to start their own nano-nation on the high seas, giving people opportunities to peacefully test new ideas about living together. The most successful seasteads, he says, will become thriving new societies, inspiring change around the world.

So far, his own attempts dont bode particularly well for the future of floating utopias. In January 2017, after years of technical feasibility studies and political negotiations, the Seasteading Institute signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of French Polynesia to build the first seasteads in its territorial waters. The designs, developed by Dutch architects Blue21, looked like a high-end resort in the Maldives, depicting a series of villas linked by an undulating green landscape. It was all to be magicked from the waters by an initial coin offering, a form of crowdfunding through selling tokens of a new cryptocurrency, all the rage among the tech community in 2017. Were going to draw a new map of the world with French Polynesia at the centre of the aquatic age, Quirk declared.

The choice of location was strategic. Comprised of almost 120 dispersed low-lying islands and atolls, French Polynesia is at severe risk of suffering devastating consequences from even the slightest rise in sea level. It also happens to boast the worlds largest exclusive economic zone, an area of sea that can stretch for 200 nautical miles from a territorys coastline, over which it can claim exclusive economic rights. At five million square kilometres, French Polynesian waters span an area as large as the landmass of the entire European Union, making it an ideal place to experiment with novel forms of aquatic jurisdiction. In theory.

We explained to the Polynesians how having a quasi-autonomous area nearby was a good thing, says Tom W Bell, professor of law at Chapman University in Orange County, California, who drew up the legal agreement for the project. Look at Monaco, or Hong Kong or Singapore special jurisdictions create a lot of growth outside their borders. In his book, Your Next Government? From the Nation State to Stateless Nations, Bell traces the projected evolution of a seastead. It would begin like a coral polyp, he writes, protected by a countrys territorial waters, where it would start to generate economic activity, enriching its environment and attracting still more life, before breaking free to start a new autonomous life on the open ocean. Ultimately, he imagines seasteads nurtured by different host nations congregating in mid-ocean gyres, sheltered within floating breakwaters. A new kind of government arises, he writes, born in Earths last free places, fated to advance the human frontier.

The reality didnt quite pan out that way in the South Pacific. There wasnt a perfect alignment of interests, says Marc Collins Chen, former minister of tourism of French Polynesia, who co-founded the company Blue Frontiers with Quirk to realise the project. The government was looking for something to address sea level rise and environmental degradation, whereas the Seasteading Institute was more about autonomy. He says that the prospect of a tax-free enclave held little appeal for the locals, given that Polynesians dont pay income tax anyway. One Tahitian TV host compared the situation to the evil Galactic Empire in Star Wars imposing on the innocent Ewoks, while secretly building the Death Star. The libertarian position didnt help either. As Collins Chen puts it: Its very difficult to ask for government support when your narrative is that you want to get rid of politicians. In retrospect, Bell agrees: They already had a beautiful paradise in French Polynesia. The local community wasnt very enthusiastic about the project, and I get it. They didnt need strangers coming in and ruining their view.

Over the next 40 years, the world is expected to build 230bn square metres in new construction. This could be a way to accommodate that growth

Collins Chen has since moved to New York, where he has established a new company to develop further plans for floating cities, this time stripped of any libertarian tax-dodging ideology. I realised that the real future for these sorts of projects has to be closer to cities, he says. They have to be an extension of an existing citys infrastructure, they need to be run by the mayor, and they have to pay their taxes as opposed to being enclaves for the wealthy.

His plan, titled Oceanix City, has been designed in slick Ted Talk style by Bjarke Ingels, the Danish architect beloved of Silicon Valley tech companies. His twinkling animations depict a floating world of interlocking hexagonal islands, where power is harvested from waves and the sun, where residents live on a diet of seaweed and fish, and where marine life is regenerated by artificial reefs. If this floating city flourishes, said Ingels in a presentation, it can then grow like a culture in a petri dish. On a screen behind him, the floating hexagons multiplied until they took up an area more than three times the size of Manhattan, a vision of low-density suburbia sprawling virulently across the sea.

Over the next 40 years, the world is expected to build 230bn square metres in new construction, says Collins Chen, the equivalent of adding one New York City every month. This could be a way to accommodate that growth, without the devastating effects of land reclamation or deforestation. He says part of the appeal is the ability to reconfigure the urban form according to changing needs, in a process of drag-and-drop city building. You could literally float one a city block away and put a different one in its place, when the need for a new school, hospital or university arose.

Remarkably, their sci-fi scheme has won the support of the United Nations sustainable development arm, UN-Habitat, which hosted a round table discussion for the project in April 2019. As global heating accelerates, sea levels rise and more people crowd into urban slums, floating cities is one of the possible solutions, said UN-Habitats executive director, Maimunah Mohd Sharif.

Back in Panama, the notion that floating habitats could be an inclusive solution to global housing need seems a long way off, to put it mildly. Despite the countrys coronavirus lockdown, the Ocean Builders team has been at work throughout, laying the foundations for a factory that will soon house the largest 3D printer in Central America, ready to produce what their website touts as the worlds first 3D-printed, smart floating home with an underwater room wrapped in an eco restorative 3D-printed coral reef yours for between $200,000 to $800,000 (160,000 to 640,000).

In light of the global pandemic, were really focusing on making the homes feel like a kind of lifeboat, says the companys CEO, Grant Romundt, who worked on the Freedom Ship project in Florida in the 1990s, an aborted plan to build a mile-long cruise ship for 40,000 people, topped with a runway. They should be a safe place to escape to and be totally energy independent, with solar panels on the roof, water desalination on board, waste collection by drone, and aeroponic systems to grow your own food.

Designed by Koen Olthuis of Dutch architecture practice Waterstudio, the plans for the luxury SeaPods look like a row of gigantic motorbike helmets on poles, sticking up out of the sea in pearlescent shades of blue, green and grey. We wanted to have something that was very futuristic looking, very clean and flowing, says Romundt. I didnt want to have a 90-degree corner anywhere in the house. I think thats bad feng shui. The interiors recall supersized sanitaryware, envisaged as white, wipe-clean worlds of free-flowing surfaces, echoing retro-futuristic visions of streamlined space capsules. The similarity is no accident: for company founder, Rdiger Koch, seasteading is merely a stepping stone for trialling exploits in space. He has long harboured plans to build a cable launch loop to propel payloads into space without rockets, and he sees the ocean as the perfect launchpad. There are almost only large open spaces at sea, he told German regional newspaper, Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, and you need them to make sure that nothing goes wrong and nobody is hit by possible flying parts.

Romundt insists that the company is merely building floating holiday homes, which will be registered as boats under the Panama flag for legal purposes, and likely operate on a timeshare basis. That would give you the slow adjustment period, he says, then more of an economy would start to build as more people come requiring more services, and it would start to self-perpetuate and grow.

For Bell, the ultimate goal is to see such floating communities raise their own flags in the open ocean. Right now, a self-flagged seastead would have effectively no status at all in international law, he says. The coast guard would show up, assume you were either a pirate or a floating meth lab, and tow you right back in to shore. But if seasteaders can say they have enough people and a big enough territory, and start flagging themselves, thats when things will start to get interesting.

And if they fail? Thats the marvellous thing about seasteads, says Quirk. If a government fails, theres nothing much the people who live there can do about it, but if seasteads fail, they simply disassemble and go away seeing all those bitcoin dollars sink into the sea just as quickly as they were conjured.

Link:
Seasteading a vanity project for the rich or the future of humanity? - The Guardian

The Democrat-led House of Representatives passed a package of criminal justice legislation Thursday night, largely along party lines, to address nationwide protests and demands for policing reforms following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer last month.

By a 236-181 vote, with only three Republicans voting in favor of it, the House passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. The legislation would end qualified immunitya legal doctrine that shields cops from liability in civil rights lawsuitsestablish a national registry for police misconduct, ban police chokeholds and no-knock raids in some circumstances, and limit the transfer of military equipment to state and local police departments. It would also require federal law enforcement officers to wear body cameras and to have dashboard cameras installed in their vehicles.

Ending qualified immunity has long been on criminal justice reform advocates and libertarians' wish lists.

"Qualified immunity is a failure as a matter of policy, as a matter of law, and as a matter of basic morality," said Robert McNamara, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm. "For too long, qualified immunity has denied victims a remedy for violations of their constitutional rights. It's encouraging to see Congress is finally taking steps to fix this pernicious mistake by the Supreme Court."

Although civil liberties groups say the bill is far from perfectthey criticized provisions that would increase federal funding for state and local law enforcementKanya Bennett, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said in a press release that tonight's vote is still "the most significant action that Congress has taken on police reform in the six years that have transpired between the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and George Floyd in Minneapolis."

"Given this significant and historic moment we are in, though, Congress can and must do more," she continued. "We can't band-aid police with more federal dollars or take away just some of the military weapons. Congress must divest entirely from an institution that has brutalized Black people for centuries."

However, the fate of any comprehensive policing reform, at least at the federal level, seems doomed, at least for the moment. The White House and congressional Republicans have made it clear that ending qualified immunity is off the table.

Meanwhile in the Senate, Democrats have blocked Republican's more modest policing reform bill, the Just and Unifying Solutions to Invigorate Communities Everywhere (JUSTICE) Act, introduced by Sen. Tim Scott (RS.C.).

The JUSTICE Act would, among other things, increase the penalties for filing a false police report and incentivize departments to create systems to share disciplinary records with each other to stop problem officers from being rehired. Another section, the Breonna Taylor Notification Actnamed after a Louisville woman who was killed in a botched no-knock raid in Marchwould require states to collect and report data on the use of no-knock raids.

Democrats and civil liberties groups like the ACLU say Scott's legislation doesn't go nearly far enough in addressing systemic problems in American policing. Republicans, however, say their bill balances the need to address problematic policing while still supporting police overall.

"The American people know you do not really want progress on an issue if you block the Senate from taking it up," Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (RKy.) said in a floor speech Thursday night. "They know that most police officers are brave and honorable and that most protesters are peaceful. And they know our country needs both."

For the moment, both parties are at an impasse. In a press release after tonight's vote, Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said Democrats' legislation is "just another thinly veiled Democrat attempt to look like they are getting something done when we all know this bill will never become law."

Read more:
House Passes Policing Reform Package, Including Provision That Would End Qualified Immunity - Reason

Two familiar names are vying for the Democratic nomination in the 25th Congressional District.

Incumbent Joe Morelle and challenger Robin Wilt ran in a four-way race for the nomination two years ago. It was Morelle who ran away with the nomination, and later won both a special and general election to fill the seat that was long held by Louise Slaughter, who died in office in 2016.

The final results wont be known until after June 30, when all the absentee ballots can be counted, but the most current figures show Morelle leading Wilt by 30% after counting the votes that were made in person today and during early voting. Morelle has already secured the Independence Party nomination. Wilt appears to have conceded the race, posting the following on Facebook during the overnight hours:

While we are still awaiting every vote to be counted, we have fallen well shy of our vote goals to be successful in the contest for the 25th Congressional District Democratic Primary. I am honored by all of those who have supported me, and I will continue to advocate for every voice to be heard. I am humbled to have been part of this movement for change, and I realize we have much work left to do. I look forward to the continued engagement.

The Monroe County Board of Elections says 53,318 absentee ballots were sent out to Democrats in NY-25, with 25,746 returned as of Tuesday; ballots have until June 30 to reach the board of elections in order to be counted.

The winner will move to the general election, where they will face Republican and Conservative candidate George Mitris, Working Families candidate Afua Atta-Mensah, and Libertarian candidate Kevin Wilson.

The district includes all of Monroe County except for the towns of Scottsville, Rush, and Mendon.

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Morelle with big lead over Wilt but absentee votes still to be tallied - WXXI News

The Democratic Party is being forced into taking ridiculous positions by its insane base. Defund the police! Dishonor the flag! Throw Christopher Columbus in a lake!

What a wonderful gift! All Republicans have to do is take the other side. Make themselves the alternative to madness.

Instead, Trump and the Republicans have decided theyre going to be Democrats Lite.

Ill let others berate Republicans for doing nothing about the rioting, the arsons, the beatings, the corporate and social media canceling. This column will address the GOPs moronitude in response to attacks on the destruction of Confederate monuments. Works of art are being destroyed by Maoist vandals who have no idea what theyre doing.

Literally no idea.

Quick! Who was Fort Bragg named after? What did he do? Do you even know his first name? When you have to Google the guy on a statue to figure out who he is, maybe its not really the daily humiliation you claim it is.

At this point, the military bases are famous in their own right. No one hears Fort Hood and thinks of Gen. John Bell Hood.

Fort Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne, is many orders of magnitude more famous than Gen. Braxton Bragg. It would be like demanding President John F. Kennedy change his name because his namesake, John Fitzgerald, was a corrupt Boston mayor.

Most obviously, the Democratic Party is going to have to change its name. You want an institution that represents slavery? Confederate politicians were all Democrats, Democrats created Jim Crow, and the founder of the party was a slave holder. (The Republican Party was founded to end slavery.)

Speaking of repellant Democrats, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said on the Senate floor this week that the United States didnt inherit slavery from anybody. We created it.

This is the most ignorant statement ever made on the Senate floor. (And thats saying something!)

Every society has had slavery; it existed long before America did, including by American Indians (though they preferred torturing their captives to death, inasmuch as few of the natives farmed or built things).

From 1530 to 1780, at least a million Europeans were kidnapped by African Muslims and forced into slavery. The vast majority were starved or beaten to death.

In fact, unless were counting the Democrats wearing kente cloth last week, slavery is the only African institution ever adopted by this country. Portuguese not Americans brought the first slaves to Jamestown in 1619 (The New York Times favorite episode of American history!). We, are, however, the only country that fought a war to end slavery.

Isnt slavery bad enough? No, Kaine has to make it extra bad by calling slavery an American invention. A U.S. senator committed a blood libel against his own country.

Anything to say, Republicans? Even Obama would have corrected this boob.

The BLM fanboys complain that other countries dont honor the losing side in their civil wars. Yes, exactly thats why their wars never end. Myanmar has been in a civil war since 1948. Israels been fighting Palestinians since 1948. The Kurds and Turks have been fighting for half a century. At last count, there are two civil wars going on in the Philippines, and at least three in India.

America concluded its civil war by dominating and subjugating the losers, but also honoring their bravery.

Even before the war, the South was eons behind the North in industrial development. If the entire country had been the South, America never would have become the richest, most advanced nation on Earth. (And thats how slaves built America!) After the war, it was like a third world country.

On the other hand, Southerners could take justifiable pride in what everyone agrees was a better class of general and soldier.

At Appomattox, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant allowed Gen. Robert E. Lee to keep his sword. As Lee mounted his horse to leave, Grant saluted him. After announcing the Souths surrender at the White House, President Lincoln ordered the band to play Dixie.

It was an amazing way to end a civil war.

My ancestors were abolitionists who fought for the Union, but you dont have to be a Southerner to care about Confederate monuments. I cant help but notice that the people trying to obliterate our history are not part of that history.

Not that long ago, nearly all Americans had pre-Civil War ancestors. Not anymore! Recent immigrants, by which I mean people who arrived after 1865, think the country started with them. They find it hilarious to destroy anything that happened before they got here.

Talk about cultural imperialism!

What about the black Revolutionary heroes, like Crispus Attucks and Phillis Wheatley? Nope, you can forget about foundational black Americans, too. The first two centuries of our nations history are canceled. Why would that interest someone from Pune, India, Mogadishu, Somalia, or Bangkok, Thailand? (That would be Kshama Sawant, socialist Seattle city council member, Democrat; Rep. Ilhan Omar, Democrat; U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Democrat.)

Corporate plunderers, globalists, the wolf of Wall Street, 8 million diversity jobs (that go to Indians, not the descendants of American slaves, as intended) -- thats the America they revere.

The new arrivals are fine with Red Guards going into cemeteries, ripping up symbols of our heritage. Just dont dare lay a finger on their privately owned Rothkos!

What do the Republicans say? No problem! Senate Leader Mitch McConnell says hes OK with changing the names of military bases. Trump tweets narcissistic bluster.

How about a bill withholding all federal funds from Yale University until it changes its name? The schools namesake, Elihu Yale, was not only a slave owner, but a slave trader.

Quite a dilemma for the little snots who attend and teach there! It will be tremendously damaging to their brand.

After all, true sublimity for a Social Justice Warrior is virtue signaling and advertising their high SAT scores at the same time.

If you refuse to fight, Republicans, dont you at least want to have some fun?

Ann Coulter is a regular contributor to conservative news sites Human Events and Breitbart. She is a native of New Canaan, Conn.

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Ann Coulter: Yale University has to go! | Opinion | havasunews.com - Today's News-Herald

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Politics is inherently a debate. Ideally, it is a tango of perspective and position, with one side advancing an idea and the other retreating until the music shifts and someone else takes the lead. And as everyone knows, it takes two to tango.

College should be similar.

You cannot go to college to learn what you already know. Well, you could, but that seems like a real waste of four years and a lot of student loans. The idea is to train your brain to expand its perimeters by hearing ideas you havent heard before and applying them to things you thought you knew, things you are learning and things you want to discover.

No one ever said you need to believe every idea that filters through a college lecturer. The idea of a diversity of opinion is not to follow what someone else believes but to discover what you do.

And thus it is unfortunate that politics and the American college campus two places where a diversity of opinion are part of the building blocks cannot seem to coexist.

For years, there have been attacks on each other. Conservatives knock campuses for liberal lockstep. Colleges return the favor by shouting down right-wing voices.

It has happened everywhere. UC Berkeley and protests against Ann Coulter. Charlie Kirks Turning Point USA and its Professor Watch List. Penn State was sued by a Georgia man for denying a request for a speech from white nationalist leader Richard Spencer. That suit was later dismissed by a judge.

The most recent example is the response to Carnegie Mellon University bringing in Richard Grenell as a senior fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy.

An openly gay conservative, Grenell is no stranger to the idea of controversy and polar dissent. Adept in social media and a voice in campaigns or administrations for multiple Republican presidents or nominees, there is no arguing the ambassadors bona fides. For the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, he served as U.S. spokesman at the United Nations.

His positions, however, are something else. Allegations of sexism, misogyny and xenophobia have been made. As ambassador to Berlin, he was notably undiplomatic; in his short term this year as acting director of national intelligence, he was seen as primarily doing Trumps political bidding.

The university has had opposition to the appointment from faculty, staff and students, including an open letter signed by 200 individuals and a letter to the school administration from the Undergraduate Student Senate. The critics on Twitter included Gen. Michael Hayden, the Pittsburgh native who served as both CIA and NSA director under George W. Bush.

IPS director Kiron Skinner who has also worked in the Trump administration defended her hiring, saying she brought him on in the spirit of academic freedom. Opponents say she distorts the meaning.

Whether anyone agrees with Grenell or not does not mean there is nothing to learn from him, especially in the field of politics where half of the country doesnt agree with the other half. The IPSs mission is not just handing out degrees but to also build upon the universitys rich heritage of applying basic science to issues of public policy.

Science doesnt care about party or ideology. Science, like that tango, is a give and take of ideas and observations, and refusing to participate in a conversation because of someones politics is especially confusing in the arena of political science.

Without listening to those we dont agree with or even vehemently oppose we have no debate and we learn nothing. CMUs tuition is too high to not teach people to think for themselves by challenging ideas. Grenell, based on his experience to date, will be happy to engage in vigorous debate.

Categories:Editorials | Oakland | Opinion

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Editorial: CMU should be able to handle a Richard Grenell - TribLIVE