TM Lutas

A stub site is up at welcomewagon.citizenintelligence.org. There’s nothing really there at the moment (thus, stub site). I’ve gotten good advice that distribution is a major key to success so work is starting on that front.

Welcome Wagon has also received our first potential advertising customers.

Thanks to all those who suggested improvements to the mind map in the first draft. The ones I could figure out how to include should be reflected in this second draft below. Volunteers should contact the project email at welcomewagon@citizenintelligence.org . Thank you spammers. So far you have actually provided useful contacts which is a pleasant surprise to this point. When the budget comes together, legitimate companies will get access to the RFPs.

As before, the mind map is drawn up in Freemind. If you want a copy of the mind map file, email a request. We’re not yet to the size where this needs to go to a Git repository.

Is this mind map complete enough for a first version of this aspect of the project? Can we move on to a different way of looking at things?

Conceptually, a welcome wagon is just two things, information and free stuff. The welcome wagon provider gets paid to distribute the free stuff and the new resident looks at the free stuff in order to get to the useful information.

Sometimes it’s useful to just noodle around with a mind map. Here’s a first draft written in FreeMind.

What should I add to it?

On October 8, 2015, Glenn Reynolds’ USA Today column featured a proposal that people in states receiving a large influx of immigrants from other US States work up a “welcome wagon” that would be “Something that would explain to them why the place they’re moving to is doing better than the place they left, and suggesting that they might not want to vote for the same policies that are driving their old home states into bankruptcy.” That was sound advice. Professor Reynolds suggested that some of the money bags supporting the GOP get behind the effort.

So what’s happened over the last five years? Here’s Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit Blog, currently the latest mention of the welcome wagon proposal on November 5, 2020, “Someone still needs to implement my Welcome Wagon Project.”

Five years of waiting for someone else to pick this up is enough.

I’ve cracked open a new email address, welcomewagon@citizenintelligence.org and am giving the project a free three month trial. If you are interested in participating, drop me a line.

President Obama just published an essay regarding George Floyd and policing. It’s a fundamentally flawed recommendation that funnels energy down the same old pathways that have been failing for decades. I responded:

This essay is disappointing and shows a lack of vision. When improperly policed neighborhoods have a security alternative that they can choose, the police will have to compete or face the humiliation of being displaced by something better.
That threat to their jobs, their position in society is already in the law, has been since 1789 when the Constitution was passed, but has been left to molder since the 1913 passage of the Dick Act. A President who understands politics, cares, and actually spent some time thinking about this would have picked up on the opportunity.

President Obama, you blew that 8 year chance. This essay blows it again.

Police were invented because professional police of any serious quality are better than the unorganized militia. But the unorganized militia is better than what happened to George Floyd. Revitalizing the unorganized militia, making training available, updating how to communicate with it, making it a real security alternative would place an institutional floor below which any corrupt or incompetent police force would be replaced because there would be an alternative available and it would be an improvement.

There is a baseline civil rights problem that the minority community faces. Law abiding people who are white have a higher chance of being legally armed than those who are black or latino. The criminals of any color don’t care about the law. That puts minorities in an inferior security position because whites have a higher level of DIY security capability.

Blacks can and should have the same level of DIY security capability. Latinos should have the same level of DIY security capability.
The most dangerous people in your neighborhood should be law abiding members who spend time at the range and can hit what’s aimed at. In white neighborhoods, that’s more often the case than in black or latino neighborhoods. That’s something within your power to change.