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I Have A Dream

40 years ago today, James Earl Ray murdered Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Ray died in prison, 10 years ago (almost to the day); still insisting that his brother Johnny "assassinated" King on the orders of a man named "Raoul", who was working for the CIA.

Ray is nearly forgotten, but King is not; and his words will live on forever.

Sadly, most people have never read them, or heard them in their entirety. "I have a dream" makes a great 2 second sound sample to play in commercials and history montages; but it's meaningless without context.

Some are critical of King (myself included) for his willingness to accommodate the leftists and anti-Americans that flocked around his movement. Some criticize him as a hypocrite, preaching one morality in public, practicing another in private. Certainly, he has been elevated to a position in many peoples minds far above that of a mere mortal man; to a degree I suspect King himself would find distasteful, and perhaps even idolatrous.

But...

His words, and his impact, do live on. They are his immortality.

It's just a pity that so called "black leaders" have followed the worst examples of his time, and become little more than race baiters and poverty pimps.

I think their dream is a bit different from Dr. Kings. I don't think the content of a mans character matters much to them.

ABOVE: Martin Luther King, Jr., delivering his 'I Have a Dream' speech from the steps of Lincoln Memorial. (photo: National Park Service)

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "For Whites Only". We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Martin Luther King Day

I live in Arizona, where this is not a holiday. I am workign today, even thoguh I work for a California company, and I think that's the way it ought to be.

I don't beleive in the celebration of a national holiday for Martin Luther King day; not because I don’t like black people, or Dr. King; but because it might as well be renamed “token black day”.

There are far more deserving historical figures to have national holidays named after: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison et al… yes all dead white men. I don’t denigrate the achievements of King, or his importance as a symbol of the good of the civil rights movement; but MLK day in fact does not honor him, it reduces his legacy to a day off of work.

Martin Luther King day is a convenient way to tokenize the history of black achievement into an easily digestible and dismissable format. It is literally token black day, and they simply chose King as the name of the token.

That I think spits on the goals and ideals of Dr. King.

It's not about race...

... it’s about class, culture, and civilization, and it's about feedback… or rather the fundamental lack thereof.

I haven't said much about Katrina, and I'm not going to say much because ... well basically everyone else has.

But this one subject we need to talk about.

Feedback: In systems/logical analyisis terms feedback is the measurement of the results of a particular action or decision set. This is distinct from other inputs, because it involvs empirical evaluation of results of prior actions.

In a regulated system, there are several different mechanisms for acting on feedback, the most basic categories of which are referred to as "bang-bang", and "Proportional response".

In a bang-bang system, you are always either full on, or full off, with no throttling. You attempt to reach an acceptable average behavior in the system by setting reasonable tolerances, and than averaging out the time spent below and above the median.

In a proportional system, more complex measurements are required, because the aim of the system is to present a response proportional to the deviation from the median, and thus damp out the oscilations inherent in a bang-bang system.

In realtively simple systems like home heating, bang bang is considered fine enough control; but the more complex a system gets, the more complex it's controls must get to achieve the desired results.

Now there are two types of feedback. Negative feedback tells you that you have gone outside your boundary conditions (turn around, slow down, stop), and positive feedback tells you you need to move more towards them (speed up).

Negative feedback is the only type of feedback in bang-bang systems, and it is the easist feedback to implement, as well as the most effective in producing large results. Too much negative feedback however tends to result in wild oscilations of the system, and it's eventual failure.

Positive feedback is necessary for proportional systems to function, however too much positive feedback will also result in out of control systems as they quickly exceed their bounday conditions and fail.

There is actually a third type of feedback useful in more advanced systems known as steady state feedback (it's actually a variant of positive feedback), but that's out of the scope of this discussion.

Now, feedback has the same meaning, in a very different, but related field of systems analysis called Game Theory.

Game theory is the study of optimal decision sets. The object of game theory is to analyze what decisions will produce optimal results for a given situation. Often this is logically represented as a game, thus "game theory"... but game theory applies to MANY situations; and absolutely critical to game theory is the concept of feedback.

Let me illustrate. The classic game theory construct is called "The Prisoners Dilemma", illustrated like this (I'll jsut cut and paste, because it's a standard example used by everyone):

The classical prisoner's dilemma (PD) is as follows:

Two suspects A, B are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and having separated both prisoners, visit each of them and offer the same deal: if one testifies for the prosecution (turns King's Evidence) against the other and the other remains silent, the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence and the betrayer goes free. If both stay silent, the police can only give both prisoners 6 months for a minor charge. If both betray each other, they receive a 2-year sentence each.

It can be summarised thus:

	Prisoner A Stays Silent	Prisoner A Betrays
Prisoner B Stays Silent	Both serve six months	Prisoner B serves ten years; Prisoner A goes free
Prisoner B Betrays	Prisoner A serves ten years; Prisoner B goes free	Both serve two years

Now, in the prisoners dilemma, there are a few sets of assumptions you need to make to play the game. The first, is that every player is trying to minimize their negative result (imprisonment), and maximize their positive result (freedom). The second, is that every player should understand that all the other players are attempting to reach the same result set.

In the first eample, let's assume you are each playing in isolation, with no way of knowing what the other players choice is before the end of the game.

Now, in a single instance of this game, the optimal choice may LOOK like ratting out the other player... but that looks like the optimal result to the other player as well so he would likely choose that and you BOTH serve two years; the second most negative result for each player.

The optimal decision set here is that both players stay silent, and thus both end up doing six months, which is the second most positive result for each player.

The problem is, you can't necessarily count on the other player to keep his mouth shut. He may jsut go for main chance, and hope he goes free (and you get screwed).

If you think he's going to do that, your optimal decision IS to talk.

So how do you make that decision?

Feedback.

Let us say that you are both in the same room and can hear each others decisions.. and look in each others faces when the options are presented to you. You're getting feedback from the other player, even if they dont say a word, and then after they DO you get more feedback, thus can potentially alter your choice; which will tend to produce closer to optimal results.

That's a bang-bang system right there BTW. No proportionality of response, either shut up or talk; and hope the result is closest to optimal.

Now lets say you run this game ten times with the same player. both in isolation again, and the one who spends the least amount of time in prison wins.

How do you decide how to play?

You could always be "the good guy", and not talk; in which case every time your opponent talked (and he would talk every time once he figures out you're "the good guy") he would go free and you'd do ten years.

You could be "the bad guy", in which case you just talked every time, and pretty quickly your opponent would figure out what you were doing, and you'd both spend 2 years

Finally, you can play "Tit for tat". In tit for tat, you start by making the decision set most likely to be optimal for all players, then after each iteration of the game you do to your opponent exactly what he did to you the last time. You give him "tit for tat".

Eventually, your opponent should figure out that you are going to hit him back with whatever he hits you with, and therefore he will over time choose the decision set that produces the optimal result for both players.

This is the concept of feedback memory, or stateful memory. You retain information about (at least) the current state of the system, the last state of the system, and the starting state of the system; and the decision set that made you reach this point.

The more times you play, the more collective feedback you recieve about a player; until in theory, you should always have the same result every time you play. You both end up doing six months each time; and it becomes clear that "Tit for tat" is the optimal decision strategy.

But critical to this assumption, is that you are recieving good feedback in response to your actions. If you don't know what the consequences of your choices and actions were, you cannot judge how best to make your next choice.

And that is the problem we face in society today. Certain groups within our society are attempting to make it entirely free of negative feedback. They wish to create a consequence free society with regards to our personal interactions.

But without negative feedback, a system will either remain the same, or accellerate out of control.

Worse, they also want to create a MEMORY free society, or in game terms they want us to create a steless society (would that were true in political terms).

Essentially they want us all to play the prisoners dilemma with out lives, but they don't want us to be able to play "tit for tat".

The chaos in New Orleans is a vivid and appalling example of what happens when social feedback is distorted by the actions of the state.

Okay so how can I possibly be reducing these people lives (and deaths) to game theory?

Quite simple really: The underclass of New Orleans (which comprises more than half the city) has had much of the feedback removed from their decision set evaluation, because of governement "assistance". Their poor choices (for whatever reason they made them, and I'm not talking about reasons I'm talking about consequences) did not have the proper proportionality of negative result, and therefore the poor choices were made more often. As these poor choices require far less effort than do good choices, out of proportion with the positive results produced by good choices; objectively poor choices were moved closer to the optimal decision set.

Without a proportionality of negative feedback, the second most negative choice can easily appear to be the second most positive choice.

Okay translating into the real world, what does this mean?

Andy and Barbara are Boyfriend and girlfriend. So are Charlie and Donna.

Charlie and Donna get married, and have a child together. Charlie has to work two jobs to support his wife and child, who aren't living very well. Charlie is tired all the time, and Donna doesn't see him very often, and neither does the baby. When Charlie isn't working, he's taking care of the baby and Donna is off working as well. Because of all their hard work, they are all well fed, the baby is being properly taken care of, and they are building some savings.

Andy and Barabara also have a baby, but they don't get married. Barbara goes on welfare, and gets a publicly subsidised apartment. She doesnt work because she would lose her welfare and subsidised apartment. Andy works, but not very hard, because if he works too much then the government takes it away from him to pay back the welfare Barbara is getting. Barabara IS able to stay home with the child, and they are all well fed because of the food subsidies she recieves. They have no savings, and no advancement from this position; and eventually the welfare will run out, but if they put themselves in a better position for when that happens, they will lose the welfare anyway. Plus, they'd both be tired all the time, and they wouldnt get to have any fun.

In a natural system (without government distortion), decision set A-B (andy Barbara) would result in Barbara and the baby starving to death, and Andy going and impregnating some other woman to start the cycle over again.

This would result in the eventual destruction of our society, as no one still alive in it would be willing to breed.

Actually, the more likely result is that all three individuals in the A-B decision set would become criminals.

In the government distorted system, the worst possible decision set, is spared the worst possible result, instead given a marginally acceptable result. ou keep doing that, and there will be a percentage of folks who find that suboptimal result acceptable, and will live in that manner.

But what happens when the government money shuts off?

New Orleans happens