Wuh Lax Primar Dissonance, Rationality and the Search for Meaning

At Sunday lunch, I was engaged in a heated discussion about 'truth'. Across the table, my friend stated that truth exists. My position, a very unpopular one, is that we each have a sense of the truth, but no one truth exists.

Opinions

This is the argument that has often been put to me. Arthur, what you say is only your opinion, and nothing more than your opinion. Everyone has an opinion and your opinion is just one of many opinions out there. Live with it! You have only an opinion.

Fairness

Well! What can one say to that? My thinking is that somehow I know better than the average person and thus my opinion is worth more in finding out the truth. My experience is of remembering that I was right when almost everyone else was wrong. No! I remember most often when I was right, when everyone else was wrong. My opinion does not seem to me to be worth just one view. But, then I have to think deeply about this and about the way society makes its determination of what is the best or what is the truth.

In our democratic elections, we have a system of one vote per person. We see this as a fair system, and it meets our basic requirement for fairness, that of equality.

Political process and opinions

In society, your opinion starts out as just one among many, but if you are elected to a political position because of the democratic process of one vote per person, then your views, all of them, are not just one of many, but one with a premium, a higher status. The higher status is accorded from your being an elected person, a chosen one.

The opinions of elected people is most often deemed of greater worth than the opinions of individuals as individuals. In a sense, the elected person is a hero, and you may realize that heroes tend to be worshiped. The greater the majority in votes going to the elected person, the more that person is likely to be seen as a hero. Out of the election of heroes, we achieve a peace of mind. By having a hero leading us, and making decisions for us, we sense a closer association with what we see as the truth.

Dissonance

It is subtly assumed that the hero is closer to the truth than any individual. However, there is a contrary view that we hold because we know that we search for the ideal of equality. We know that the hero is just one of us and that the opinion of the hero is no better than any one of us. Within our mind, there is a dissonance between the mathematics of equality and the process of electing a hero to make our decisions for us.

Rationalizing

Because of the dissonance in our mental calculations, we have the further process of rationalizing. Very quickly, we attach all sorts of reasons for the hero to be 'the one', who is closer to the truth and the one to lead us. We say, for example, that the person is more gifted. By such rationalizations, we move away from our notions of equality to our reasoning that the world of equality is not where its at. We make an inner assumption that the world is basically unequal, and that the world needs heroes, those that can make decisions for us.

Inequality and the Bell Curve of Opinions

The political process just one of many ways that we 'elect' our heroes to represent us. While still pushing the idea of equality, we introduce something statistical, such as the bell curve and say that in society there are those that are at the top end of the bell curve and those people are closer to the truth and will make better decisions for us. Very often, we do not examine the bell curve notion very deeply, but just assume that it is passed on from generation to generation through some genetics inherited by those we assume to be further along the top end of the bell curve.

So it is that societies making decisions move away from one person one opinion in order to get at some notion of the truth. In the electoral process of choosing a hero, we move away from fairness to reason and rationality, but in the process we can lose something. We can disassociate ourselves from the process of ever possessing the truth. By disassociating ourselves from the process of possessing the truth, we may also stop seeking the truth. Our society may stop searching for what is real and truthful. It may replace the notion of searching for truth with the process of searching for the hero.

The Search for Meaning

When we have our heroes make our decisions for us and seek the truth for us, we lose the meaning of truth. We assume that others have that meaning and that our reality has that meaning because they have that meaning. In reality, our heroes give us something that comes from outside us and we thereafter seek to suppress our inner dissonance with it in order to be loyal members of society. In reality, we suppress our understanding of the truth until the next opportunity to vote. If we do not seek the truth, our vote becomes a popularity contest for the election of a hero who can take us further and further away from the truth.

Carl Jung and Gender Issues as Introduced by David Tacey

If you have not already done so, you might take a walk to your nearest bookstore and pick up a copy of David Tacey's book How to Read Jung. Alternatively, you can spend years not really understanding Carl Jung as I did. What Tacey does is remarkable, almost as remarkable as the books by Jung himself. I heard Tacey, an Australian, explain his understandings of Carl Jung recently on Canadian radio in an interview.

Reading Tacey's book led me to reexamine the form and nature of my own reality and fantasies, quite appropriate as I develop plots within my own Wuh Lax book series further over the next few months.

What a student of 20th century history puzzles over is the question why Christian societies produced such monsters as Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. Carl Jung explains this as a failing in Christianity. About two years ago, I was asked the same question by a Jew of the persecution by Christians of Jews throughout history. It is not an easy question to answer. Is there something seriously absent in Christianity that those professing top be Christian perpetrate such serious crimes against humanity and neighbours.

We take an untenable position if we think that it is just Christianity that seems to be missing essential ingredients. Only two days ago, a young man from Plymouth was placing a bomb in a restaurant in Exeter, Devon, England. A recent convert to Islam, the young man was evidently missing something in his religion.

It seems to me that what Carl Jung wrote on the subject of our dark side is relevant to our understanding the nature of our future world and our being able to cope with the forces that are present in the human psyche, if only poorly understood. In trying to be scientific, our modern science logic is missing something as serious as what is missing in Christianity. It has to do with human creativity and the expression of our dark side.

As with many things, our nature individually has a lot to do with our sex, our gender. Jung shows how gender affects our perceptions, particularly those that occur below our consciousness. It is a feature of modern society that we are being told to get in touch with our other side. If we are a male, this means getting in touch with our feminine side. What Carl Jung suggests is that the extent to which we are male or female is only a matter of degree. The problem comes when we as humans do not recognize that we are both male and female at the same time. If we assume that we are only one of these two sexes, we hide the other from conscious view. Many of us do not ever see the alternative or dual component of our sexual makeup.

On a very large scale, the Christian and Muslim religions have strayed in their understanding of what we are sexually, and this absence is the mainspring of the missing component in these religions. In both Islam and Christianity, when we have lost the feminine part of our nature, the nature of every member of our religions, we have lost the truth behind these religions and enter a world of fantasy that leaves us groundless in creating the balance that society in any historical period demands. As a result, the vast majority of people in Christian and Muslim societies have be out of balance and tipping toward insanity. Not everyone, only those who have lost touch with both sexual sides of their being!

If you are one of those people who have lost touch, it is not too late to recognize that you are made up of two sexes and you need to give expression of both in your personality. Only by giving expression to both sides of your sex will you achieve balance. In a later blog, I may explain the nightmares that might result if you ignore both sexes of your nature. Alternatively, you might begin by reading Tacey's book and buy a few of the precious gems written by Carl Jung, 'the non-scientist who knew more than science'.

Credit Crunch Spin

Well the spin artists are at work to explain why the economists failed to foresee and prevent the present worldwide credit crunch. The fact is that any idiot could see what was coming and it does not take an economist to add house prices, energy prices, and interest costs into an inflation index that actually measures the cost of living. People were told inflation was low when it was raging at unprecedented levels. Does the modern economist not know what inflation is? Nor Brown, nor Greenspan! It is no excuse not to act when 'you' know how to act. Why are the spin people presently making excuses why 'you' did not act when 'you' should have acted.

Is it because of the collective greed of those wishing subconsciously for their property prices to rise and then letting them go where they should not have gone. Why does the inflation index these days not measure inflation, nor deflation?

No! The reason the credit crunch occurred was because of the inability of American and British financial authorities. A shrinkage of the financial houses away from New York and London is called for. The financial world seems unable to read history and I doubt whether many economists every studied economic history. What has happened is shameful and should never have taken place. So much for the international watchdogs and the supervisory role of the central banks. They have failed and that is all there is to it. Rather than avoiding inflation, they created it and rather than helping us, they have sown the seeds of the next war. What has happened and what is happening is positively appalling!

Mr. Soros and the Head of the European Central Bank! We owe them a debt of gratitude for seeing through the clouds and surrounding fogs of London, San Francisco, and New York.

Redesigning Towns and Removing the Automobile

You guessed it! The automobile has to go, away, far away, zap! But, what do we do for an encore?

My suggestion is that we build trains again, but ones that can go around corners with shorter carriages and more modular in design to fit in almost anywhere, and to run on electricity. We can rethink our town centers to make them castles of commercial and social activity. By so doing, we will acknowledge that the world of the automobile is a dead duck!

With the present automobile, our problem is the need for petrol/gas and plenty of parking space. Big shopping centers tend to be on the outskirts of population areas rather than in the town centers, which as a result die from lack of patronage. Our challenge with cars is backup space, as with any port. Think of a city center as a port, or port of call. What it needs is arrival and departure areas that feed into the rest of the commercial community as well as providing the system for getting people to and from home, or to and from work.

These days, we tend to think of efficiency in terms of fast travel, but we forget efficiency in terms of getting people to points where they would like to be. If we were to redesign our towns around the community station, we would really be able to get into a more efficient class of design for our travel systems. By building trains that can go almost anywhere we can replace the motor vehicle almost completely while saving money and energy in the longer term. Even if our trains were to run on roads, we could start the process of change our concept of what a train is to build around light-weight curvilinear rather than heavy-weight rectilinear design.

During the next twenty five years we need to redesign our transport systems for small communities and create commercial castles around the ports of arrival and departure. If we think of new designs for small train stations surrounded by activities that people can get to easily by foot after travelling by rail, we can begin to chip away at the dominance of the motor car in our collective preference functions.

To do any engineering redesign on the scale I have in mind would require that we let go our aging love for the automobile. Honestly, the car is not where it should be at. We can invent an automobile heaven and recycle our gas/petrol guzzling vehicles into efficient clean electrical transporters of a myriad of future designs. Face it, the age of gas and petrol is not where its at. We need to think ahead and build for the future by redesigning our town centers and our trains.

The TV Series Lost : Doing and Making Decisions

One of the frustrating aspects about the TV series Lost is that you are an outsider to the predicament of the people who have crashed onto an island in the South Pacific. All of the characters have serious character flaws, which are obvious to viewers, and only gradually do these flaws become apparent to the characters themselves. As a viewer, you become part of the mix. Unless you are extremely detached from what goes one around you, the Lost sequences help you to become emotionally involved with the characters, if only in your desire to move the story line along.

In many respects, our own lives are very much like the series because we frequently observe ourselves making decisions and doing things for which we do not really have any control, for a huge variety of reasons. There is, nevertheless, no excuse available that we do not have the power of choice. The grand illusion of being a human being in the modern age is that you do have control over your actions, and that you are therefore ultimately responsible for everything that you do. There is no room in the modern legal framework for the notion that your actions are predetermined or that you are being controlled.

• When I worked in Washington, I would pass almost every day a man carrying a sign that read to the effect that your thoughts were being controlled and that a secret department of the government of the US had discovered a fool proof method of thought control.


• In the series, Torchwood, there is an episode where an agent of Torchwood is given an amulet by an alien. Wearing the amulet confers the ability to hear the thoughts of others nearby. This new sense gives one an amazing power over others.

Our reality is that we make assumptions about how much we are in control of our thoughts and our actions. The assumptions may not be correct for they are only assumptions.

My feeling, though I have no proof to offer, is that our assumptions that we are in control the majority of time, do not apply to our reality. In other words, we are not really in control, but we have the grand illusion that we are.

Behaviour Arising from Our Subconscious

Many of my readers may have experienced the strange feeling of being controlled by a magician or hypnotist. Deep inside our brain, the older part of our brain, there is possibly an area that results in human behaviour a bit like the behaviour of a moth. Do something to this area of the brain and the response is reliable and automatic. Touch the amygdala as in brain surgery, and the patient may experience anger or fear. Many of our habits have their origins in this type of autonomic response, for example, our breathing. It is a fact, that we have to be shown how to breath deeply. We do not normally breath deeply 'automatically'. When we do, we benefit, but few of us do such breathing.

The autonomic system is only part of the areas of the brain that carry out actions without conscious thought. In fact, we would probably find that most of what we do or decide to do requires little or no thought, and for good reason. Thought slows us down, and possibly those humans that spent a lot of time thinking did not survive the rigors of early life on this planet. Certainly, natural selection would probably weed out those that thought a lot. What remains is a substantial population of human beings that don't really think very much. There is a lot that we would not do were we to think about about it.

Our Predisposition not to Think

We, humans, probably have, as well, a predisposition not to think. The implications of this are quite staggering. What it means is that we do not presently exercise much control over our actions and our decisions. Much of who we are and think we are, is automatically determined. We humans are much like moths and cows though we have the grand illusion that we think and that we have control and that we decide. Our reality is that we do not think, we do not act on the basis of thought, and we exercise very little control.

In the words of Arthur Koestler, we are sleepwalking our way through our lives.

GOD Blog

One of the worrying things about the way people approach God is the assumption that nature and God are somehow the same, but this is to have a naive moment. Nature has its own rules and at best might be seen as a creation of God, but is not the source, evidence, or even the actuality of God.

The myth is that God created the world and he saw that it was good. We can reject that idea, and say that the world could be much better. We even have the imperative to make the world a much better place. Indeed, it seems that we have a role from God to make our world within nature much better and to work with nature and our own natures to improve upon them. The end of the story is not that we are a product of God, but that we are potentially capable of producing good, and bettering the world that we live in.

It is doubtful that nature, as we see it now, is more than a very minor aspect of what we might conceive of as a God-based or a God-driven world. A world that includes God would be better, and we see that nature is not very good. We can work with nature to make it more like what we would interpret as good or benign. God's natural world is neither good, nor benign, even though we exist within it and derive most of our experience from it.

What we have experienced as the presence of God, or would create for ourselves as an image of God has what might be seen as natural aspects, but that is because of God's association with nature. What we see as nature is not the end product of God. If we thought that, we would probably become faithless.

The reality is that if we were to interpret God through nature, we would become very peculiar entities. This is because nature is so closely associated with creation, the materials of creation, the tools of creation, and our own participation in limited acts of creation, reproduction, and 'above all' imitation.

Our nightmare is that we have invented God to meet our need for a God without the proviso of knowing that the God we have created is our myth and not really God.

The Nature of Our World: Wuh Lax Universe Expansion and Everett's Multispace Fragmentation

One of the interesting aspects of our Wuh Lax world is the permiation of light throughout all the manifestations within each cycle of each multispace fragment.

Presence of Light

Light is the one constant that must attempt to break into each world instance, where the number of world instances is beyond our imagination and continues to grow with each cycle.

Not only is the recycling of the fragments continuous, but each has 'real' fermionic content. The fermionic content is a manifestation of a field influence. Each is unique and obeys the 'exclusion principle'.

Rapid Expansion Creates Space as 'We: All Things' Gather Speed.

The gathering of speed allows for the Everett type fragmentation.

To imagine what is happening, one has to remember that each fragment of the instances of our universe involuntarily partakes in an explosion of itself at such a rate that space is created for each and every 'potential' instances. This is the Everett content of the explosive expansion that we see around us and experience every day and which shapes our gravity, our 'time's, our 'spaces' and all our relativities.

Our World is Much More Complex than our Initial Imaginings.

The nature of our world with its many Wuh Lax Multiverse Vectors does not rely on significant elements being wrapped within their cosmic sphere of influence, but rather in fields of influence creating a multitude of structures that tend to get repeated in a non-linear fashion, i.e. not exactly repeated but frequently close enough that differences are hard to detect. The issue is whether these occupy the same space, or whether they are strung out over a vast continuing expansion of space.

There are obviously different ways of conceptualizing this. The reality is hard to conceptualize since what we sense is not reality, but aspects of our boundedness and a partial image of reality that allows us to interpret structures and to gain a sense of limited control.

The Challenges of Tragedy in Asia

One of my observations is the ease with which our minds protect us. We are not anything like what we think we are. It is the mind's ability to construct a rational world that both excites and frustrates us, which makes us human. When we observe what has happened in China and Myanmar, we can see more clearly why the human brain has an automatic shield than engulfs and buffers our emotions and reactions to extreme change.

Our Grief at What Has Happened in Asia

As humans, we belong to a species that has experienced extreme hardship and pain. It is the culmination of all the suffering and grief of previous people living their lives in extremely bad situations that has produced the human mind and given us the gift of peace at times when there is no peace.

As humans, we share a common past in which there was enormous suffering. We presently share in the grief and hardship of our friends in Myanmar and China as they struggle to survive. We know of their pain and we are aware of their grieving. We grieve with them. We share their suffering because, as human beings, we share and have a common past of extreme suffering by man, and this is what makes us human.

It is this shared past of grief and hurting that makes us aware and makes us human. We care because we have knowledge of pain. We love because we have the experience of peace and hope that others can bring to our damaged worlds. Our hearts go out to the people of Myanmar and of China. Let us help you in your grief and in the challenges that you face. Working together there is more hope! You are in our thoughts.

The Nature of Nature

Nature's Characteristics and Way

In my earlier blogs, I have emphasized that our world and the nature of the world that surrounds and sustains us, follows the natural laws of premature death. Although nature is there to give us food, clothing, shelter, information and comforting, it can not and does not work to the advantage of everyone. As a result, within nature there are systems and processes that are extremely unkind and lethal.

Overall, those that do well within our natural environment do so not because they are particularly bright or alert, but because they are relatively fortunate and are located and associated with relatively more benign situations, times and events. Nature, even in the long term, is not about natural selection, nor is it about survival of the fittest, it is more about relative predestination.

That does not mean that one should be fatalistic, far from it. What is does mean is that your position within nature is relative to everyone else's, and every other entity's existence within nature. What moves natural processes is relatively, but not completely, unpredictable. There is scope to extend ones survival against premature death, which nature demands as a normal course of things.

One aspect of our natural world is that living systems can be created and destroyed, and that living systems are not necessarily like an independent body. Life is more than our visible physics even though we tend to see living things are completely dependent on things physically obvious.

Life and Nature

We know that the nature of nature is about the life and death of living systems. These systems may or may not have self awareness, but they have the capacity to live and reproduce. They also have the possibility of being lucky, being located in places and situations that will further their survival and will lead to benign growth of very fragile communities of existence. One of the capacities of those systems that will survive is that they are not only self aware, but that they are aware also of their good luck, and do not assume that it is anything but good luck.

As the products of nature, we are at the mercy of many processes that we, ourselves, in the here and now, can not ever understand. There just isn't enough time for us. Later on, others may understand, but we have limited understanding and have to deal with the world living our lives within our limited understanding.

Gratitude and Trying to Protect Yourself, Your Family, and Community

The most important element of your survival is gratitude for whatever opportunity that you receive within your community of survival. It may be very small and very fleeting.

What gratitude does is affect attitude and attitude brings you closer to understanding your 'true' situation. Without the right attitude, you will predispose yourself towards nature's rule of premature death. Being grateful, means that you focus on understanding what you can, and that you recognize the fragility of your situation, your life and your present luck at still surviving. Being grateful should mean that you reinforce those things that would strengthen your chances of survival because you are aware of the fragility of your predicament. The less you are grateful and understand your fragile situation, the more likely you will be to die prematurely. This appears to be nature's law.

Comments on Art Magazines

The following comments on two of my favourite art magazines were a feature of my blogspot for April 2008. They are now retired to this blog page.

International Artist # 60

In painting, one is very close to the psychology of colour, and one notices the dominant colour mix in every picture one reviews. The thing is that we like a picture partly because we have a preference for specific colours and very specific colour combinations. There is a whole science emerging from Dr. Max Luscher that details using factorial analysis those vectors of association, mostly subconscious, that drive our preference functions. These can be related to our age, our state of health, our monthly period, the time of day, our internal clock, our genetic makeup, our family relationships, our stress, and numerous other factors that contribute to our psychology.

The colours of the art we like and dislike, thus can be thought of as an accurate deep mirror of our health and psychological well being. It matters what your colour preferences are! In awarding prizes for competitions, the judges are driven by colour preferences as well as by a myriad of other more logical measures of an images value to them. The choices are inevitably subjective, and often differ from what you or I might like, for whatever reason. I put this to the test. There is a competition of still life flowers and gardens. Will I agree with the judges?

In international artist issue 60, I see lots that I like. There is a selection of images of more than a dozen finalists. Out of the 12 plus shown, I would not have chosen the Grand Prize Winner by Elaine Ruettiger. I preferred number 2, by Tracy Williams to it. Part of the reason is the colour mix. I once used to have lunch regularly at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. There was a still painting on the wall with an orange yellow mix that I was addicted to. Don't ask me why, but I would just love to sit alongside that image listening to the waterfall, for those who know the Gallery intimately. It is an amazing place to eat, and the salmon they do is usually very good, and not too pricey.

My next choice would have been a finalist by Sandy Delehanty of California. The texture of her image and the colour mix really get to me. What an amazing watercolour!

It was interesting to note that many of the winning images we done on a black background, which reinforces my theory about colour. Black is a strengthener for any colour preference. More than enough of the finalists were white black offsets, which suggests an inclination of the judges towards fairness. I can't argue with that, but the rest of the population is not all that fair.

AMERICAN art COLECTOR # 30

The American art Collector is a magazine with loads of advertising for collectors who want a quick glimpse of genres of images that show houses my have for viewing. Of the adverts, my favourite was that on page 229 for Lindsay Goodwin's image Table Setting at Johnathan Club. There is something about a seductive room with light on a table set for diners. It may be the time of day, such as just before a meal. I remember the wonderful settings and dining rooms on board the vessel Queen Mary 3.

Burma, the Cyclone Nagris, and the Impotence of the Modern Hero

My heart and sympathy go out to the many many thousands who lost their lives to the 'Myanmar' cyclone. I find that new broadcasts and web images are inadequate to bring home to me the enormity of what has happened. Last week, I watched the BBC weather person showing the cyclone hovering over the ocean. It seemed so far away from Myanmar at that point. This is a strange cyclone was the comment. To the weather person, the cyclone had a nature of its own and just seemed to be staying put and not going anywhere.

The cyclone had grown to an immense scale by the time it struck the Irrawaddy delta of Burma several days later. If one examines the news images coming back from Myanmar, one is impressed with the ferocity of this storm, which must easily compare in scale with the one that hit New Orleans.

What one does not see is the true scale of the horror that this massive storm brought to these lovely people. As in New Orleans, the tidal wave or flow seems to have been the real killer of human beings. As in New Orleans, the true scale of what happened as water engulfed people was not known for many days. As in New Orleans, the authorities seem to have been unable to respond adequately, and though it is still early days for these people, one might hazard a guess that there are no modern heroes coming to their rescue.

On Monday, May 5, 2008, the BBC said that over 10,000 were feared dead after Nagris. By Thursday, May 8, 2008, the death toll speculation number has risen to over 100,000 people, a number that is so large that it staggers the human brain. It is a number so large that we cannot even conceptualize it. Our reality is that we do not know how much suffering has gone on in Myanmar over the past week. My guess is that even if we did we would not be able to comprehend it. Our brains are not equipped to understand misery on such a scale on a community that is largely in poverty as in Nyaung U, Pagan.

Images of Burma before the cyclone give some idea of what a cyclone can do because the new images will look very different. A picture on the internet of a railway station in Taikkyi shows some of the people that the storm would have affected. Compare what you find now for the Dhamma-ya-za-ka Zedi pagode. Perhaps many of the beautiful Bagan pagodas will have been destroyed. What we are going to see will no longer be images like these. Our experience in North America of what a cyclone can do comes largely from our experience with New Orleans, and the experience was not a good one!


View Larger Map

We can see where people have their farms alongside the delta waters. How vulnerable these people must be to a major cyclone. We can't even imagine the time it will take for them to recover. The cost of reconstruction is prohibitive. Remembering that in the Iraq war many have lost their lives over a longish period. In Myanmar and in these delta areas, as many people have possibly lost their lives and livelihood in a matter of days.

Tamara de Lempicka - The National Gallery in London

This morning is a Lempicka morning, as I try to recreate some art deco. My canvas has the greys in place, and while I wait for the oil to firm a bit, I will put down a few thoughts about this wonderful artist. In the event that you have not already experienced some of the beautiful images of the mid-war period created by artists such as Tamara, you should plan a visit to London to see them first hand.

What she does is ad value to the vision that we see of ourselves so that we can never see ourselves the same way again. By taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary, Tamara had the amazing gift of transforming an otherwise ugly world into something beautiful. When we would have ignored what it is that we possess as humans that gives us 'chic' or 'pizazz,' Tamara knew how to extract it.

We all have moles and bumps, bursts and curves. Tamara was able to see these for what they did and while our proclivity would be to damage our self image by focusing on the rough edges, she was able to enhance our form and show it for what it could be. Simple objects of life, she gave a value, they never had. In simplicity and spareness, there is beauty and she was able to find it, enjoy it, and paint it.

Tamara belongs to that period of history when the world suffered in the worst way, and while others created images of determination and iron will, she produced a view of the softer side of life. The thirties were a period of conflict in which imagery played an important role in shaping loyalties and values. While the Soviets focused on red and yellows, and the Nazis on reds and blacks, Tamara is able to enhance sensuality with fleshy images and a sympathetic use of green, the colour of independence. This we see a self portrait of Tamara de Lempicka driving a green roadster which for her symbolized the independence of the female spirit that the fast automobile afforded.

Judge for yourself. Have a look at the way Tamara uses her greens.

Why the British and American Financial Authorities are Actually Doing Nothing

Why nothing is really being done in our financial world has to do with power. Power resides in the hands of the very rich, and they are in control of policy, if not directly, then indirectly. Power in America and Britain revolves around electoral processes and a desire to see what jobs are left, remain. This is a false hope.

We have to release the money and let it float away to the off shore and the oil producing havens where it won't do so much damage. Britain and America are building a future based on very weak foundations.

We see Clinton, Obama, and McCain debating and acknowledge that the Fed has to be even handed before an election. We see Cameron and Brown debating and recognize that the Bank of England has to be even handed before a likely election.

We watch tourist paradises being built in deserts.

We see China wanting water from Tibet to flow on without incident. We see the Yangsee River water diverted to the Yellow River.

We see the majority of the world's work force receive much less than what seems fair.

In the United States and in the United Kingdom, the mood is tending towards change. In the UK, the Labour party has sunk almost to an historically low level for council by-elections. Obviously, some people are hurting badly. In the United States, the mood is to do something different from whatever George Bush did. If he likes his coffee one way, you can be almost sure most everyone wants it the other, at least temporarily.

If one wanted to terrorize the two countries the way to do it would be to do as the financial authorities presently are doing, that is nothing that would actually get deserving people in the middle ranks somewhat wealthier. For whatever reason, income distributions are not moving in the direction they need to. It seems that the faster we grow the economy, the worse things become overall. Why is that?

The problem is not that we don't know that the very rich are getting overly rich, but that we are being black mailed into doing nothing about it for fear that they can make our situation much worse. The truth is that in the short term they can, but ultimately we need to have policies that produce a higher average income and a lower extremely high income that is obscene in a modern age.

Have we not had any progress in economic thought on this issue by any political force, or does the political world just drift along in acceptance, or is it fear?

Removing the Protective Shield Associated with Mortgage Lending

How many people in the UK remember the Big Bang? Well, the Big Bang occurred a few decades ago, and represented a radical change in the way high street banks and other financial entities could operate in the UK, allowing them greater scope to enter new markets and offering foreign financial entities increased room to do 'their thing.' The problem with this whole process was that some of the foreign banks were American, and doing their thing is very different from the way things are normally done in London. You might as well say that their is no rule book because in the States if it isn't illegal and it can make you money, you go out and do it. Perhaps, you do some of the illegal things as well. Innovation in finance begins in America, after all, they have the moxy.

It was a measure to increase competition and its resulted in banks competing directly with building societies for the business of home loans and mortgages. With this change, the building societies essentially transformed themselves into banks.

Of course, the British banks were delighted because they could engage in the business of longer term lending and make huge profits without as much risk as lending to business, which they were frightened to do. Actual lending to business outside of the housing market is risky or didn't you know. And, so ended the protective shield associated with mortgage lending.

Now the world, and especially Britain, has caught a Stateside disease of profligate lending, it looks as though we will go through all the symptoms of this disease. We could, as the authorities are now doing, pretend the disease can be fed and driven away, but that is not to understand the nature of the disease. No, to get to the disease the protective shield for the consumer must come up again, and a higher penalty for profligate lending charged. Yes, interest rates will have to rise!

Hemzel - The German Artist that has a Painting in the National Gallery of Art in London

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I am somewhat puzzled at not being able to find any information on the web about the German artist Hemzel, who has a painting in the National Gallery of Art in London. My first thoughts are that I have memorized his name incorrectly, but don't think so. In any event, this artist has this painting that I saw in the Gallery earlier this week. I know this blog is going to receive a lot of hits 'eventually' because there is a dearth of information available about this artist. When I tried to find a reference for him in the Gallery bookshop, I came away with blanks. Look at what you get from a Google search of Hemzel. Possibly, the note under the painting spelt the name incorrectly. How strange!

Why should I be concerned about the obscurity of Hemzel? I am concerned because I liked his work. I could find only a single image of the artist in the National Gallery of Art in London, if you just happen to be there. I keep thinking that I must have done something wrong. Copied his name down incorrectly, or something. How can information about an artist in the National Gallery be so sparce, especially as he appears to have been such a good landscape artist?

What I liked about the image was the wonderful mix of colour and detail. He was obviously interested in representing real space and could capture detail very well. His image, which I can't show because photography in the National Gallery of Art in London is not allowed ... which only helps to keep some great artists obscure. It would seem!

A few things about his image! Hemzel seems to be able to get croud scenes to look like croud scenes, even crouds of leaves on trees seem like crouds of leaves on trees. The colours are vibrant and the image memorable. Well, if like me, you appreciate that sort of thing.

I'll give you a clue. The Hemzel painting is in the same room as a nude image by the Italian artist Hayez. The Hayez picture is awesome, if only because of the way the eyes of the nude follow you. Very entrancing and seductive, which is exactly what the artist intended. Obviously, Hayez knew much about the psychology of art.

One thing to note. The internet image of the Hayez painting is rubbish compared with the real thing. The only way that you will enjoy the image for its beauty is by visiting the National Gallery of Art in London and viewing it. Be there! I might just be standing nearby admiring also, the Hemzel image!

Driving Down the Economy Through Inflation

Inflation is probably our worst enemy. However, one gets the feeling that some governments, particularly the British and the American governments have been unusually complacent about the consequences.

It interesting to see ads for American designed cars on English television. It is almost as if the European market were about to export production to America, and you wonder how the States could recover their competitive position in the automobile industry. Well, we know that what goes into cars comes from a world of sources, literally. But, it makes you think when you realize just how weak the US dollar has become over George Bush's tenure at the White House. So, inflation is not about the cost of things American, but the cost of raw materials.

Well, it would seem to me that we have at least four negative things going on that would feed an inflationary binge. We have:

• High energy prices , particularly, oil prices which will feed into just about every industry. Transport intensive industries are but the start. Gone may be the days of strawberries from Chile on the shelves of British retailers, but I could be wrong. There are just some things that people will buy no matter what the price.

• Growth in national and international money supply well beyond what is called our real economy production, which is goods and services. You know this has to happen during a world crisis in the form of a credit crunch that threatens to deflate the world economy by downward pressure on the marketable value of big things, such as houses. Governments are keeping interest rates affordable so that we don't have further deflation in property values. They are in fact inflating the economies until real demand and monetary demand get into balance. This could take some time.

• People clawing back the real value of what they have been used to, even though their economy can't afford it. Oh yes! Strikes and civil discontent with a general feeling of malaise. Possibly, there is a feeling of being suffocated by the cost of living not retreating. As people are forced to save in real terms, i.e. they can't afford to live as before, they actually save, which means they pay more and profits for things are siphoned out of the economy to pay for energy. The likes of Shell, Iran and Iraq become wealthier while property owners and consumers struggle much harder to keep what they had.

• You wonder how much it costs to build an army these days. Well, we are now paying for military purchases in the future. We are saving for an almighty war preparation effort. Those that will be buying are the energy exporters, who are creating tourist areas in the sun while negotiating arrangements for self protection. Armies and miltiary build up these days can be bought. Our terrorist people may even be receiving some of this money.

Heh! Slow Down! The Hidden Dimensions of Change!

Who do I think I am talking to anyways? Do you ever get the feeling that there is much more to the universe than our physical realities? But, why? What makes you think that? Are you insane, crazy, ill, possessed, religious, philosophical, frightened, desperate, nuts, bonkers, wild, driven, gifted, depressed, dada, strange, born again, revitalized, touched, scared to death, amazed, confused! It doesn't change a thing if you are, or does it? Why so much change and where is it leading?

Why do we react the way we do? Or, maybe you don't react because you are already aware at a deep level that continuous change is inevitable. Call it creative destruction, industrial change, product cycles, globalization, the economy, creative design, Darwinism, survival of the fittest, new paradigms, or just evolution. We see change all around us. We are insubstantial and in a permanent state of flux. We are insignificant in the grand order of things and just plain puny. The only thing is, just about everything that matters suffers from the same condition of being continually changed.

We don't seem to be in control. Yet, we relate closely to much of what is around us and we form attachments and meaning. Some of us derive much more meaning than others. Some see meaning in things others just stare at in amazement and wonder. Some see meaning in things that are just as fleeting as the objects around us, but have no substance. Some see meaning from symbols, words, images, hieroglyphics, mathematics, abstractions, conceptual models, theories, axioms and derivations that completely leave others wondering what is going on.

It is a rare event in one's life to stare into the eyes of a wild animal who instinctively kills for a living. I stared into the eyes of a fox cub that was just a week or more old. It looked into my eyes and saw nothing threatening. I stood still and just watched it looking into my eyes. For a moment something may have happened between us. In a way, we were friends, if only for a short while. Our relationship was conditional. As long as I did not move, the cub would not move.

I do not know whether it sensed danger, or was just puzzled and instinctively knew how to react. In any event, the cub just relaxed and became what it already was, a newcomer to the world, a world in which it would be quickly transformed into an instinctive killing machine with human-like qualities. I wondered at that moment what would define its future. Its parents would ensure that it knew how to kill either in defense or in a proactive feeding effort.

Would this little creature become a killing machine that killed for the joy of killing itself? My feeling is that when desperate, the fox will change into a frenzied unreasoning animal that does what its oldest nature guides it to do, and that is to exercise force on its environment proactively.

Obviously, when you look into the eyes of a baby cub fox, you are changing its perception of the universe. It will remember the event though possibly not in a conscious way. As a temporary friend, you give the future of the fox an element of hope that it will evolve into something less than its basest form.

Hidden behind change is language. The extent to which language is developed predisposes the range of possibilities for change using the words that form the language of change. The extension of language is within the nature of change. In computer science, we use computer language to create objects, and the objects have much the same components as real living things. A programmer can create an object that will behave in certain ways and may even evolve. What can happen within a computer language is that a 'create' routine evolves from the nature of language itself. Language, and by that almost all language evolves to contain creation and destruction processes or words.

There is hidden within the nature of language a dimension that predisposes the language to evolve. This is not a process that one can define as Darwinian, but a possibility that emerges out of the very essense of language. Within language there is a hidden nature waiting to emerge and that hidden nature contains life and death for all any any forms that are part of the language. This is Wooh's second law, which states that 'within language is a predisposition to change and evolution whereby elements of the language are created and destroyed and eventually have the potential to create and destroy. Without these hidden dimensions, the language does not have the potential to be.'

What have I just said? I have said that being arises out of a language and as a language there is the potential for the creation and destruction of all elements of that language. This is very rough and ready I know!

Seven Foxes Down the Lane - Nature and the Demise of Peter Rabbit

Poor Peter! Today, Wooh filmed Peter down the lane, but he was unusually cautious. The large warren of about 100 wild rabbits that had existed last year is now totally empty. That means lots of holes looking for occupants.

Eddy the fox has been busy over the winter and is father to five gorgeous foxlets. They are not very shy. Wooh was able to walk up to the hole of the den and film them for over an hour just by pointing my Canon high definition video camera.

Fox cubs are the cutest little creatures. You could have held one of these in the palm of your hand. I did not see Eddy anywhere, so the cubs were playing near the entrance to their den without a care in the world.

Hot sun and the joy of spring; what more could you ask for? Follow their progress, and those of the other forest creatures in my neighbourhood, here on my blogspot.

Are the Effects of Light Causal or Acausal?

In earlier blogs, I have discussed my views concerning some of the mysteries of light. I posited the notion that light has no motion, but that all matter itself was travelling at very high speed approaching what scientists measure as the speed of light, plus additional motion that expresses the effects of electron energy and magnetic charge. The additional motion follows the order of the second law of thermodynamics by which all chemical reactions require a depletion of energy either directly, or in the surrounding particles, as is described in a current chemistry text, such as that of James Keeler and Peter Wothers, Why Chemical Reactions Happen.

If you follow my conceptualization of physical reality, which you won't find in any text book, as it is only a personal theory, you will question some of the chains of causality that are familiar in everyday events, and possibly have some insight into events that are connected seemingly acausally through channels of light that exist within the physical world.

Light in my sense shines in our reality because of leakages present as nuclear and chemical processes take place. If I am not completely off in the deep end, light because of its ability to overlay itself in our physical world has unusual power to effect physical change through information that acts acausally in the physical realm. This, you say, is of course, nonsense, but I am only throwing the idea into the open as an idea. There is nothing, perhaps, but a convoluted logic to support my ideas.

What I am trying to say is that light is a critical medium in some way between what we regard as the quantum and the Newtonian worlds. Light seems to be present in life processes and the conduits of light seem to be active in information processing of almost all forms from quantum computers to IBM PCs or HP laptops.

One of the great students of light, was the physicist Richard P. Feynman. I have yet to read his book, What do You Care What Other People Think. It might change what I think about light, but for now I have these strange concepts whizzing about in my not so simple brain. It is in the nature of thinking that one conjures up an alternative to what everyone else thinks and then try to see how far you can go with the alternative.

I am thinking that light does not obey many of the physical laws of other forms of matter. Indeed, light is not a fermion, but has the properties of bosons, which means that it does not obey the Fermi exclusion principle. This means that the amount of information that a light particle or wave might represent is staggering. All sorts of tests on light suggest that light may travel faster than the speed of light, which I am saying is the ultimate speed of fermion matter. Joao Magueijo in his book, Faster than the Speed of Light suggests that the standard model of physics may come down eventually to a misunderstanding. There is work that suggests that twisted light travels faster than the speed of light and that twisted light can be used to send information into the past from the future. Twisted light also allows extreme amounts of information to be transmitted very quickly, and indeed faster than the usual speed of light.

What interests me about light is that in its independence from matter, it may afford a medium for the orchestration of material events, causal chains, by means of acausal channels, that is information channels so common to quantum reality, which we understand to interface with photons, which have the property of bosons.

If light can orchestrate matter then it is easily conceivable that matter behaves in the same way that light does. In other words, all material cause and effect chains actually do happen, but we observe only one at a time as light chooses which chain it wishes us to see. Another way of saying this is that light orchestrates matter through a multiverse of which we only see one instance at a time as observers. All the other chains exist, but we can only see one. The reason for this is that we use light as our means of observation in our conscious observing reality.

In our subconscious, we may, however, have access to the other causal chains orchestrated by light, and according to some probabilistic basis. In other words, in our subconscious, we see a multiverse view of the universe, but only the nearest probabilistically at one time. If we fail in our dream to see the alternative reality in which we catch the fair maiden, it is because our subconscious is still running through the most likely multiverse episodes of potential realities.

Thoughts About the Amazing Wealth Owned by A Badger Set

When Wooh decided early this morning that he had better get out before the rain, he had not expected two amazing discoveries. Both are difficult to evaluate. There is a cropped field not far from Wooh's barn on which John the Somerset farmer had sown corn.

Because soil clings mercyless to one's feet, its not the sort of field Wooh likes to take for walking. Nevertheless, the field is very useful as a short cut across the top-lands. It was the fact that the field was a sort of top-land that interested Wooh. The field had possibly been farmed for over three thousand years and there was geological evidence of a mysterious kind that Wooh had been puzzling over for several days. So the walk across the field could help gather more information about the geological mystery.

Wooh decided to take his morning walk in that direction. The field was there and reasonably dry. John, the Farmer, had not yet sown his corn for the 2008 summer season, although there were piles of cow manure ready for the spreader at one end. The field was stumpy with the tops of corn shoots that had not been ploughed under. At a casual glance the field looked rather uninteresting. Along one side away in the distance there stood a row of rather tallish beech trees. They formed an interesting wood that Wooh had never explored. This morning he decided that it was about time.

As Wooh walked across the field he had to step over corn stumps, so he had to look down and watch carefully where he was stepping, otherwise he would trip over. Curiously, the soil mixture was different from the other fields that Wooh had crossed in the area. For one thing, there were loads of small stones. Some of these were quite smooth as one would find along a beach in southern Devon, say at Sidmouth. But, the field was over sixty miles from the shoreline. Some of the stones looked like sand stone while others were like quartz, the sort of stone in which one finds metals, such as silver and gold. Wooh realized that there was no gold in the field but he had to wonder about finding all these small stones on what was after all the shorn-off top of a hill.

At one point, Wooh looked down and found a piece of clay pottery. It was a largish piece, such as one would expect from a drain pipe or a roof tile. Yes, the man made piece seemed to be the remains of a roof tile. How very strange? Why would a roof tile be in the middle of a large field on the top of a hill? There was no easy explanation. The finding of all the stones in a field that normally would be stone free was also without real explanation, as was the mix of smooth and rough stones.

Wooh walked slower and tried to think more deeply about what he was seeing unfold under his feet. He noticed a larger stone that was layered. There were several layers and these layers were of different colours. Again, to find such a stone in the middle of a field of rich soil seemed strange, but it did help to explain why there was a mix of different colours of stone, and possibly why the stones were so thoroughly mixed up.

Wooh knew that the land of Britain was once under the Atlantic ocean. A very long time ago, the shelf on which the land was sitting rose out of ocean and the mountains of Wales were formed. These mountains had stones similar to the ones that Wooh was finding. At last, Wooh began to think that he understood.

The soil of the hills of his countryside was once the result of dust that had fallen on the ocean and had settled down to bottom of the ocean. It was volcanic ash that the water of the ocean had digested and made into smooth particles many epochs earlier. When the mountains rose out of the sea floor, the water of the ocean created streams and the streams formed a moving shoreline from the highest to lowest point. The creation of the landscape must have taken a long time and in the process, small stones were deposited in the field which was the bed of a stream.

Over time the edge of the shoreline moved further south, and the field rose within a topography of many hills formed by streams as they wore down the soft particles. Eventually, the field was higher than the surrounding landscape and as rains came and went streams poured away from the hills in all directions shaping the countryside as a landscape of hills topped with soil that had once been at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean.

These thoughts helped Wooh understand why there might be small stones on the top of a field of soil. The clay roof piece was now a different story. It must have come during a period of human settlement and perhaps people lived on the top of the hill in this field. These people may have had stone houses with clay roof tiles. There was no easy way to figure out when this might have been.

Building in stone and tile is not something that one normally attributes to early Britons. It is thought that the Romans began to use stone and rectangular structures having secured the region. So, it is more probable that the roof tile was something more recent than early Britain though one does not know for sure. Instead, having been found in that field which commands a wonderful view, the discovery of a single tile is suggestive that the field at one time may have had a different purpose from that of being used to sow crops.

In any event, Wooh continued his walk across the field until he arrive at the other side. He found a sight that he had not expected. The trees that he had seen from the other side of the field were an illusion of a forest. The landscape at the edge of the field altered dramatically and fell several hundred feet into the most beautiful private valley that Wooh had ever seen. Indeed the ridge, that he had found formed a large horseshoe shaped valley in which a stream curved around the edge of the horseshoe. There was a sharp drop down to a farmer's field that was being used as grass land. The ridge itself was covered in beech, but the interesting thing was how well hidden the valley landscape was from any vantage point.

Then Wooh found something else, the ridge was a habitat for wild life. Along the top of the ridge there was a stone wall about eight feet high falling down to a a lower level, which fell again like a terrace. Down the ridge, Wooh could see about five such terraces each with pathways that had been shaped and worn by wildlife. It was an amazing site. So here it was, a ridge that housed many badger sets, foxes dens, rabbit warrens and all sorts of habitat for birds and animals of all descriptions.

Wooh climbed down to an area where fresh soil had been dug out of the side of the ridge, which was covered in beech that had held the solf soil of the ridge in place. Wow, he thought, the amount of soil here suggests hundreds of yards of animal's tunnels criss-crossing up and down the interior of this ridge. Wooh was certain that his wild habitat was a gold mine for wild animals and a place that people should preserve for all time. It had been hidden there for many thousand so years and so it should remain.

Thinking in a Wuh Lax World - The Art of Long Range Thought in Britain

In my first book, Wuh Lax and the Cosmic Lantern, my intent was to address a book on the processes of thinking and learning that was appropriate for younger thinkers. At the same time, I was intent on giving them survival techniques were they to understand what the book was all about. The Wuh Lax series is about thinking and surviving in a world that is much stranger than nature alone would have us think. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, if nature would have its way, we would die prematurely and just as certainly as the demise of the Roman Empire, which is the focus of the Wuh Lax series.

What the books about Wuh tell you is that while nature may have designs on your premature death should you not learn how to think, nature itself will die prematurely if the human species does not intervene within its own death process. The book is thus about the survival of the earth and its characters are thrown into the deep end of steering a course of survival for future generations as nature throws its worse at them.

In a very real sense, it is a true story while being an expression of my own psychological fantasy. It is based on an amazing amount of reading into psychology from the age of seven, in Kincardine, Ontario. I feel I know Jung, Freud and Adler like old friends. It is our psychological evolution that will give earth a chance of survival, but only a chance. As a betting person, one would be advised to place a bet for mankind's premature death as nature, the way we know it, itself dies prematurely. It would seem that nature is committing suicide and we are to die along with it.

On a more positive note, what has amazed me is the profound interest in MJ Harper's book, The History of Britain Revealed. Whether this has led to book sales for him is any one's guess, but there is a definite awareness that most English speakers have not really taken the time to think very deeply about the origins of the English language, or the culture. I love Harper's book because it demonstrates what is necessary in order to survive in this world of mass deception.

We British mostly think that the origins of our amazing language have come within two thousand or more years. Along with MJ Harper, I must say that this is utter hogwash, despite readers saying they would pray for Harper's soul. I mean, one has only to examine some of the mathematical feats, pathways, religious centers, stone or metal work created in the periods up to thousands of years before the Romans castrated Europe.

Climate change seems to have brought down the Roman Empire, but I would guess that it was economics that really put the screw in and tightened down the box, much the same as can happen to any community that has not really learned how to think. So this is why I come back to the period before Rome killed off early Britain, killed off societies in which thought was in advance of action despite what some of our illustrious historians would have us think, those that see history as continuous blood and gore. The early Britons survived Rome, but only just, and their story needs to be told. The anglo-saxons are only a very small part of the real story of Brtain that will unfold in years ahead as the archaeologists do their work.

No! Much of early British history was about love and cooperation, about community and sharing, about enjoying nature while at the same time controlling the death process inside human nature, the disease that killed the Romans and paved the way for misery, again despite what those wonderful historians are likely to tell us. Those historians that need to devote more time to thinking along the lines that MJ Harper has achieved. Well done Harper!

The Natural Laws of Survival by Thinking before Doing

So much doing is done without thinking. Those that do without thinking are behaving naturally, and nature has its own designs for them. You will statistically have a better chance of surviving if you learn how to think the DeBono way and the Anne Schaef way. What Anne Schaef described as 'stinking thinking' is what most people do. Now I'm being rude! I am sorry, but its only to get you to think, but not stink.

Stinking thinking is the way that alcoholics think. The addicted person thinks in a way that leads to premature death. Nature actually facilitates in premature death. It is part of nature that many should die before their time, so that natural processes dominate natural worlds. When you do not think, even though you have intelligence, you are letting nature run its course and you will die prematurely. Its all very natural. Just look at Africa!

I would like to help you survive to full age and beyond. To survive you need to learn how to think and you should read the books by DeBono and Anne Schaef. In future blogs, I will explain some of the techniques of thinking, but I really do want you to read the books by DeBono and Schaef. They may save your life. You have been forwarned and that is all I wish to do in this blog page.

Deception as the Nature of Nature

Ok! I have done the preliminaries and its time to get to the core of my ideas about thinking as the way to defend yourself in a world of deception.

Pardon! Did you say that you already knew that anyways and that I was making an ass of myself by telling you something that you already knew? Well, if you think that way, and you have already thoroughly digested DeBono's book and Anne Schaef's books, then you are excused and I apologize. Its good to see so many readers who are ninety years plus around my coffee table, and so well versed.

What I will begin doing is explaining why for most people and relationships things go seriously wrong and as a result people die prematurely or the relationship dies prematurely. I once worked for Barclays Bank alongside the money room, and incidentally, not far from the bullion room. I once worked for the IMF, which will hopefully become the central bank of central banks, because the world needs one. This is to set the stage of where I observed the process of Wooooooh's law first hand.

Let me give an example of the way that nature works in financial circles to kill a nation. Argentina is probably a good example where people forgot to think, or never learned how to think. What happened to Argentina is that it's exchange rate plummeted and there were riots in the streets and bankruptcies everywhere. Or maybe I should select Mexico, or maybe Thailand, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and now Europe, the EEC, as my examples.

My law, Wooooooh's law, is that "nature acts naturally to kill you off prematurely if you don't learn how to think." What nature does, we can see all around us, everyday and everywhere. Nature sets traps and then springs them on the unsuspecting. Nature ends life prematurely for most living creatures and relationships through deceptions that are part of its feeding process. Nature eats and creatures survive or they are eaten. This is not evolution, nor Darwinism, nor survival of the fittest. It is about thinking, not intelligence. You cannot say Europe is not intelligent, nor that the British are not intelligent, or that Argentina, and the Asian countries are not intelligent because they are intelligent. The problem is not intelligence but whether their leadership in critical areas has learned how to think about survival things.

My thesis is that they have not and that Wooooooh's law applies.

Do you think that the leaderships of China has learned how to think and that is why there are so many Chinese? Well, at least, up until 2008.

Edward DeBono's Thinking Course as a Start to Self Defense

Edward DeBono wrote a book entitled Thinking Course. The material on that course was presented on BBC television. Many consider that DeBono invented 'lateral thinking.' His book is a must from my coffee table readers. I won't tell you or point to a place where you can get the book because I am angry with Amazon right now. If you don't have the book, its best that you get off your ass this lunch time. Take a walk to your nearest physical bookstore and buy the book, or a least order it. This will be good for you as you will exercise those leg muscles and get rid of a few toxins.

My preference would be Waterstones in the UK, Chapters in Canada, or Borders in USA and around the world because you can probably get a Starbucks coffee as well. And, if you are lucky you may be able to get a snack that is wheat free, and consequently less costly than wheat and better for your arteries, hopefully! I bought the book at an Oxfam store for £2 and had enough left over for £2 of fair trade dark 72 percent cocao chocolate. So Burt, I did not forget you, and don't make a comment on my blog that I forgot the chocolate.

A Natural Deception as the Way of Nature

See my earlier blog, if you have not already done so. I apologize to those that got the shortened version of this particular blog by email. I have done this deliberately to illustrate a point. The point is that if you do not think, but just react to things around you, then you will be deceived. I refer to this as nature's oldest game. Yes! It is in the nature of nature that creatures of nature feed off each other.

You are never free of this process whereby others feed off you, and if you do not learn how to think, no matter what your intelligence is, you will die prematurely, moreover, the relationships that you do not think about will die prematurely. By this I mean your marriage, your job, your contracts in business, your mortgage. All and any of your natural relationships with people and with creations of nature. It is imperative that you therefore learn how to think, and that you actually practice the art of thinking. That's what this blogspot is all about. Its about teaching people how to think. Not what to think, but to get them engaged in the process of thinking the deBono and Anne Schaef way.

For those that don't know about Anne Schaef, let me say that she worked with the problems of the inner city where she saw first hand the processes of premature death, the results of addiction. What she realized is that society is an addict and the people making up society tend to be addicts, not all people, but most. This, she researched, led to their premature death. It will lead to your premature death if you do not begin to understand natures oldest trick of deception.

Take a cup of coffee. Take a deep breath and register to this blog if you have not already done so. It may save your life. It may save you from premature death.

The Nightmare that Nature Sets Out for its Latest Victims

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, nature is not what it seems to be. Almost always nature will attract you to your premature death, if you do not learn how to think. It is in the nature of things that natural relationships fail to fulfil the original intentions of all the parties entering into those natural relationships. This leads to a premature ending of those relationships if both parties do not have the ability to think, or choose not to think deeply enough about their relationships with natural forces.

I have come to this conclusion after seeing a host of relationships fail and after reading the insightful words of DeBono on thinking, and Anne Schaef on addictive processes and premature death. Together these authors show me, and hopefully you as well, if you continue reading my blogs that you are in danger and you probably do not know it. It is in the nature of nature to lead you to your premature death.

Nature has a night mare in store for you, unless you learn how to think. This is what I am telling you. You can ignor my words, but if you do, you had better make sure that you read those of deBono and Anne Schaef instead. This is not something that you will read elsewhere, at least I don't think so. I am splitting this blog because I want to know whether my readers are following me because for the one's that don't then I am wasting my time. My link to see if you are following me.

The Hidden Nature of Nature and Why We Perish too Soon

In his book on thinking techniques Thinking Course, De Bono tries to get his students to think. That seems obvious, but what people don't realize is that nature itself is a thinking machine and if people don't think, then nature thinks for them and most often this leads to premature death. Anne Schaef in her books on addictive processes says that addiction almost always from its nature leads to premature death. Now you ask yourself what is Arthur trying to tell me in this blog? What does he want to warn me about? What must I do to avoid premature death?

Yes! I am warning you that intelligence is not enough for survival. One needs to also be able to think, and without the ability to think, you and your relationships will almost certainly die prematurely. It is nature's way. It is nature's way to have marriages break down. It is nature's way to be deceived. It is nature's way for relationships to evolve in such a way that one party feeds on the other and the other dies prematurely.

Dominance within a relationship is nature's way. If as a human being you don't learn how to think, you will almost certainly be dominated and die prematurely. That is why it is imperative for you to take your cup of coffee and read what I am saying and then begin use DeBono's methods of thinking. It may save your life and it may help you avoid premature death. It most certainly will help your relationships with all other entities survive. Nature attracts its victims and then devours them. It is nature's oldest trick. Watch this blogspot for more to come.

Amazon's Strategy on POD Called into Question

In the larger picture of things, Amazon's role in print-on-demand will be relatively small now that it has adopted the strategy of demanding independent authors and publishers use its exclusive services. Print-on-demand is much bigger than Amazon, and perhaps the company would do a better job as a warehouse of objects other than books and literature. They are about jungle enough for Amazon to handle. Perhaps they could ask that everything that the world produces be manufactured in one of its plants.

I once worked in a bakery in Montreal. At the time, it was owned by the Weston's company and was reputed to be the largest factory under one roof. That's what I did for several summers before EXPO 67. I painted the interior of the Weston Bakery roof. I worked with a native of a local tribe. He was not afraid of going high except after those nights that he loved his wife. "Today, I can't go up," he would say adding, "I loved my wife."

Westons produced bread for most of Montreal and the Eastern provinces. The number of lines of bread with different brand names was to me, a lowly summer employee, quite staggering. In the end, we would have to strip off the paper as it returned to the factory having gone stale. The returned bread was sold to the local pig farms and the bread ended up as Canadian bacon. Perhaps, the Amazon strategy will unfold in a similar way ending up as pig feed.

If one looks at the trend in new authors and new books, one is staggered by the dimensions. Literature is taking off. We are at the early stages of another cultural revolution. They said the printing press started civilization. Well, it is my feeling that print-on-demand, the internet publishers, and the rise of pluralism in authorship have begun a staggering revolution in the way we partipate in our democracies.

No entity focused on money is going to be able to monopolize this process. If the profit is there, the numbers of new entrants into the industry will be staggering as well. The writing is on the wall for a wave of new publishing companies who have authors to do the vertical integration and marketing of books themselves. My publishing effort, Togwells, with its focus on development of values will participate in this revolution in a very very minor way because the scale of the change is much much too large. It is important that publishers focus on values and work with marketing efforts that focus on values.

Business Advice to Amazon from Several Business Advisers

The world is indeed changing very rapidly. I have just finished reading a good book by Joseph Jaworski entitled Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadship. Joseph reminded me of the words of the independent business adviser in the UK, Ronald Brech, for whom I used to work.

He said that if a business wanted to live for ever, it had to do business in an ethical way.

Jaworski says something similar in the words of Kaku the Chairman of Canon, Inc with reference to the conduct of business by Japanese companies. "The essense of a successful company... is to strive to contribute on three dimensions: to its customers, to its employees, and to society." The thing is that Amazon needs to focus on sharing in the global destiny rather than in its profit line.

As Jaworski writes, "to serving humankind as a whole through its philosophy and activities." p. 165.

Incidently, I bought that book through the post from Amazon, you can order a copy for each of your employees, and get them to read it from cover to cover. Perhaps, they will need to walk outside the office down to a local Borders books, drink a coffee and enjoy the the book in a social atmosphere. Perhaps, we could set up a reading fund for the amazing Amazon leadership and executives!

Now wouldn't that be a 'turn for the books.'

Mind my pun; I could not help it!

You will be 'amazed' at the new world that we are in and what the pressures that the quantum atmosphere of our existence imposes for success.

My Open Letter on Fair Trade to Amazon About Their POD Strategy

Incidently, thank you for reading my earlier communication about how unhappy the independent writers were with your new policy for print-on-demand, those exclusive terms you are demanding, that your firm gets to do the print work. I does not do to get really independent people upset. They believe the mantra that then pen is mightier than the sword, or bullying force as it were.

We Don't Like Bullies

Normally, these things that go on in the business world are none of my business. And, this is the case for many independent writers around the world. I understand from statistic gleaned at the London Book Fair that the revolution in literature and communications has just started, but the dimensions are staggering. I can understand why Amazon at this time might be feeling a bit concerned that the strategies that it had adopted during the last decade might not nourish its growth during the decades ahead. Indeed, there are many alternatives to Amazon emerging in the frontiers of Internet communications. This is why I, and it seems many writers of the independent variety were puzzled that Amazon should attempt a policy of restrictive practices with regard to its marketing of books.

For Many of Us Books and Coffee, perhaps Starbucks and Borders or Chapters, go Together

Generally, we readers, for I speak also as a book buyer, and I have been using Amazon as well as other means to acquire the books of my library, will choose a supplier marketer of books because of the coffee we drink as we sit down and think about what we want to examine in the way of our future reading. Yes Amazon, it is the coffee that is important to us, and not the book seller. Well, we go to Chapters and Borders because we get good coffee there. We also get a feeling of sharing in a larger event and a happy one. We don't like the idea of our writers, our favorite authors and our new struggling writers being forced into a particular mold. We like the idea of freedom of choice, just as we like to choose between a wide variety of books. We will watch other booksellers to see if they implement restrictive practices, for this is what we see your action as, right or wrong. It was not fair trade.

We Now see Fair Trade in Book Manufacture as an Issue ... Thanks

Our real problem these days is that for all the new writers and new books coming onto the market, there just is not enough coffee shops and books stores where we can sit down an read, drink coffee and buy books. You see, we are social creatures and we like the atmosphere of our book stores, our Starbucks. What's more we are addicted to our coffee, which makes us even more choice oriented. It seems to me, as a coffee drinker and book buyer that sitting in front of the computer buying books is not very much fun. Its certainly not as much fun as sitting in a Starbucks cafe drinking my coffee and eating my blueberry oat bar. The thing is I am sure I will now look at the inside cover of the books I buy to see if they are Fair Trade. This is now a new issue for me. I will now post the Fair Trade logo on my books if they are POD printed, and I will try to only buy books that I see have Fair Trade POD certification. I might slip up a few times, but I am not perfect and I think a shift in my buying habits is possibly in order now I realize that writers are people who need to be treated fairly as well. The thought had never really crossed my mind before.

I have other thoughts to convey about Amazon's future role in the big issues of development of world communications and notions of trust and worldwide fair trade practices in a global economy, but this one seems a good start.

A Review of Joseph Jaworski's Synchronicity - The Inner Path of Leadership

Why do things happen the way they do? This is often the question we ask ourselves as we see events unfold around us. Some times, we think that events that affect us arise because of what we do. Other times, we are puzzled and wonder, "That should not have happened like that!"

My main useful training is in mathematical statistics, which should not mean much other than that I tend to look at the world from a probabilistic viewpoint. I am a practicing Bayesian, which means that I tend to work out the numbers given a set of circumstances, and that my statistical reasoning is conditional. I am prepared to view an event as happening in association with other events that run together to effect the event in an associative or causal way.

My training has led me to think that people most often do not know why things happen. In other words, they cannot put together the causal chain that results in an event. This means that there is a division in attitude among period that divides them over time into faith in causal chains and in non-causal instances. The non-causal instances are ones that they cannot say happened because of something they can put a finger on. The tendency is to lump non-causal events or instances with the notion of acausal events, or in an attempt to ascribe a cause refer to the cause as being controlled by something that is mediating or orchestrating events, the realm of God, gods, or some sinister conspiracy on the part of people in a group with evil or clandestine intentions. The fact is that human survival and individual survival may depend on a sufficient attribution of a cause. An example, may be needed.

Suppose that people are taken ill all of a sudden. There is no obvious cause, but it is true that the people are sick. Suppose that the illness occurs over a wide area. The problem with this scenario is that we have no obvious cause for the illness and thus fall back on our most likely models for such an event or series of events. Because many people will have different models the distribution of ideas as to what caused the illness will vary greatly among those observing the illness, or indeed suffering from it.

If out of this gloom, someone announces that they have had a dream and in the dream they saw that the illness was due to the unhappiness of an unseen power, and that to end the spread of the illness, someone had to be sacrificed to that power. Assume, that the visionary then claimed that it had to be done quickly or else the disease would spread rapidly. Such a situation would leave a group of people in a tremendous quandary because it attributes a cause and it proposes an extreme solution. The question is whether people would buy into the cause and the solution. Suppose that the real cause of the illness is a virus that has arrived on earth by surviving within a frozen comet that melted as soon as it hit the earth's atmosphere. Assume that the virus spread rapidly because water molecules showered into the high altitude atmosphere and were carried by clouds until falling as tiny rain drops. Suppose that during the time the virus was being carried in the clouds, it was able to multiply and multiply through out the cloud. Then when it fell within the rain shower it was able to infect a wide area.

Should such a series of events occur as described above, we would have great difficulty in determining cause and effect. To most people, the cause would seem to be unreal or god-like, and as a result, the actions people would take would not not really deal with the true situation, but some imagined situation. Who knows what people would do?

As I read Jaworski's book about leadership, I was wondering whether his mode of leadership would be able to cope with a world in which many of the decisions that leaders must make arise under circumstances in which there is no cause and effect explanation. Our world seems to be a place in which for many events that unfold there still are no easy answers, no certainties, and considerable risk. In such circumstances, the form of leadership that Jaworski proposes would probably be robust enough for it to select a pathway through the uncertainty that would lead to a positive outcome.

If you have ever watched the series 24 hours, you will notice how the hero, Jack Bauer is able to ellicit a positive outcome despite working under the wrong assumptions about who or what the real enemy is. Life is a bit like that, and the principles that Bauer uses to effect his positive outcome are not all that different from Jaworski, except that Bauer is very much emphasized in the series as a super hero. The character of Bauer is well designed because it suggests a hero of humble mentation working against unspeakable odds that push him to do unspeakable things to effect the positive outcome. I would wonder whether this is the sort of world that our future leaders have to deal with. Do our leaders have to be Jack Bauers, or opperate with synchonicity in the way we expect the Anti-Terrorist-Unit to operate, a collective group of heros in action.

Jaworski's book has a strong flavour of the mystical and mythological. He explains the path he has been dealt in life, which he is not able to define in terms of cause and effect, but more in the physics of quantum reality. As a creator of remarkable leadership institutes that draws on the very partial knowledge that we have of unseen quantum relationships, he is certainly a remarkable person worthy of a visit by Gurdieff or Ouspenski, a la 'Remarkable People that I have Met.' He also has influenced, through his being receptive to higher unseen energies, many wonderful synergies, if not synchonicities. He is well worthy of being grouped with Bohm, Penrose, and Jung as a wonderful thinker of our time. His book is a must read for those interested in leadership in an impossible world. My review really fails to do him justice.