Comparing our Potential with our Realization

Being Human Means Being Alone in Your Responsibilies and Sharing in Love







We know that an important part of out being is within the group. We play sports. We have meetings and gatherings. We join in and vote for governments and councils of the wise and wonderful. We engage ourselves in competition with others.

When we are in groups, we adopt a framework that is often less than our human potential. Our efforts and contributions get averaged out over larger and larger numbers. At worst, we lose that very important part of our nature, which is that of our being close to God.

Being close to God is when we are at our best and when we are most alone with respect to others. We often need to check whether our best measures up to the standards that God sets for us. It is one thing to lose oneself in the croud, but quite another to lose oneself whilst alone with the almighty creator and all of creation.

If we are not big in our own eyes, how can we expect God to see us as good in the same way that he sees our potential. When we compare our potential with our current capacity, we do it alone with God who is always there to tell us that we have more potential for good than what we know to be our present realization.

God is potential for good. If one does not experience good nor God, one is certainly less than our human potential for being human is to be increasingly alone and once completely alone we are truly with God our creator.

And, yet when we are with others in God's name, then we are at the crossing between people and Christ, who is the link between people and is often experienced in the form of shared love. When we meet in God's name or in the cause of love, Jesus claims that he as a force will be sitting there with us! God and his derived son in the form of Christ is then a shared experience, and we as humans are not alone from each other, but sit with the Son of God, a powerful force even though an abstract or unseen and frequently unsung being whom we as Christians know as Jesus the Christ, the ultimate expression and being of love in almost all cultures though appearing in many guises.

Being Christian is more than just being. It is a sharing of one's life with the supreme being through the ethereal connection provided in the form of Jesus Christ, the force of good when we are with God or the Son of God!

This is highly abstract until one is alone and tells oneself that one is alone in God's name. In reality we are just as abstract. We are ethereal to the physical universes. We are only a force because we have the gift of life which is truly the most abstract of forms, a form where we can observe the nature if our being!

Alternatively, one can meet with others in God's name and know that the Son of God will be amongst that group. The Son of God will be evident in the sharing of good between people, and for that sharing we use the word love as the noun and the verb. We love and we give love!

The gift of giving

Joys of Thanksgiving!




We almost all of us realize that we have been given gifts of love and caring.

This is no more apparent than at our personal family gatherings. You know that you are most sane when you know that you are happy to have love coming at you from all directions.

God gave you life and watches you fulfil it. Your family gives you company and happy memories along with enormous challenges and experiences. Your friends give you interesting ideas and provoke you to develop and explore the world given to you.




One's biggest concern is whether one can give something back in return. When you think on that you know that you are sane and that you have even more than you thought you had!

Who is the big bad wolf?

My well runs deeper still!



Often in seeking to reassure oneself we engage in castle building. It starts with the three little pigs. One had a house of straw, the other a shack of wood and the third a magnificent abode built of stone.

The straw and stick constructs were demolished by the wolf who blew very hard. So there was one piglet remaining inside a dwelling of stone. The wolf sat outside and thought to hisself! What am I going to do about that ugly monstrosity?

So the wolf called out to the piglet inside the cosy abode. "Heh pig, you got a problem with your little old house."

The frightened little critter looked out his window and wondered what the haggard looking drinking sodden ugly wolf was talking about.

"Look there!" the kind wolf said smerking sadly to hisself. "On the corner you have a crack in your castle and if you are not careful it will leak when the rains come. I'm forecasting heavy showers tonight"

"Really!" exclaimed the surprised piglet, now very worried. He opened the door to have a look and came outside where the wolf was studying his home, his mouth watering!

"I can fix it for you," said the wolf smiling kind to the last bite!

The moral of this tale is never to take your eye off your real problems because the wolf may want you to!

Blessed are the Peace Makers

Congratulations President Obama for winning the Nobel Peace Prize



You deserve it! You have done more for peace in your first year than many Presidents over several terms of office. What amazes me is that so many fellow Americans do not see what you have accomplished. That says it all!

What is a miracle?

God as the supreme observer!




We sometimes are prone to leave the observer outside of physics only to rediscover that the observer is the most important component of any physical process.

This is because the observer has an opportunity to transform what has no meaning into something glorious and full of meaning.

It is the observer's capacity to create meaning through observation and participation in a wondrous creation that makes life what it is, a miracle!

What is freedom?

Normal and Lognormal Distributions of Income and Wealth



A normal distribution of incomes has a bell shape. Real economic growth may be faster in such economies because people generally buy into the growth process. Competition in normal economies tends to be benign and leads to higher overall incomes without distortion of the overall incomes distribution. There are few normal economies, but we are under the illusion that they are the actual norm!

People have normal income distribution illusion not seeing that they are relatively worse off than they think they are.

A lognormal incomes distribution is not so bell shaped and tends to reflect economic growth arising from economies of scale, inflation, monopolization, restrictive practices, unfair competition, hoarding, black market activity, poor overall education, disasters, wars, goose stepping and comradery in societal organization, and so on!

Most people live in communities where the lognormal distribution of incomes prevails and they are not aware of how much of of skew in the distribution against them actually exists. This is relative incomes or relative wealth illusion. That is, not seeing the poor distribution when it is staring them in the face. They might even deny it's prevalence.

Some lognormal tendency arises out of competition if the distribution of supports for competition are already badly distributed. The log normal has in fact become normal because economists have their own illusions of not seeing bad or unfair competive conditions that are staring them in the face. They deny they are bad, that they exist or both!

Listen! You are in a bad income distribution situation if you think like a foot ball fan, goose step, or seek comrade. These are not normal behaviours but the consequence if your group fed illusions! Step outside of them and see yourself as an individual who is being skrewed by a biased mentality of the herd animal.

Raise your sights to that of an active liberated individual. Liberty, equality and fraternity are not normal. Fraternity is not comradery but respect for others! Equality is eqality of opportunity...thoroughly enforced and not the illusion of opportunity, and liberty is being a self sufficient individual and not a codependent member of a semi- feudal society!

Wither the Middle Class

Growth, Democracy and the Middle Class






Economic growth if not distributed according to the normal dustribution leads to a persistent social syndrome which is the decline of the middle class and the birth of the goose stepping and comradery classes.

Too fast nominal economic growth leads to a lognormal distribution of incomes and depoverishment of the middle class. In it's worse cases of extremely rapid nominal income growth the distribution of incomes is a very highly skewed lognormal distrution with almost every one in the base of low incomes and a very few in the top tail.

How does an economy remain normal instead of lognormal in it's distribution of incomes? Easy answer!! To create a normal income distribution one has to have a normal economic generator of incomes.

Thus one has to avoid several generators of the lognormal growth pattern in nominal incomes and wealth.

The main one is inflation in sectors of long term investment, the so called capital goods sectors such as housing, automobiles, land, plant and machinery, and even education and skilled individuals.

Second in importance is overall inflation, which generally can be contained by limiting money supply growth rates.

A third is monopolies. These tend to destroy a normal distribution of incomes. They are usually based on technical economies of scale, but can arise from patents, monosony or monopolizing protections of government, government organizations, unrestricted uncompetitive practices, acquisitions and mergers financed through credit.

Such distortions as listed above are inherited from and promote modern forms of feudelism based on lognormal distributions of the benefits of economic growth. They predispose societies towards instability and unnecessary or excessively rapid evolutionary economic changes that lead to boot stepping or comradery mentalities.

Rough Ride Ahead for World Economy

The Illusion of Recovery and Why Things are Much Worse Than They Seem




My reading of the present situation is largely pessimistic despite potential for strong sustained economic and business development growth outside of real estate markets.

Things seem bad, but they are really much worse than bad. The problem is that the downswing is not a correction but a consequence of doing nothing that really corrects a deep underlying problem. The underlying problem is that of overvalued assets, property, and debt. What caused the problem was excessive growth in the real estate Market unsupported by the growth in real incomes. Now real incomes have fallen further and further away from the real estate costs and imputed values which means an even greater unsupported overhang and the real possibility of major collapse leading to even further distancing of real incomes from supportable real estate values.

What policy makers have not done is link real incomes in America and Britain to supportable real estate values over the longer term. The forces of recession are increasing more than ever as money value illusion creates a larger and larger disjoint!

To resolve the issues it us important that policy makers create the bridge between real incomes and the real value of property that these real incomes must support.

Banks will need to lock in their losses rather than pretend they do not exist. Governments need to provide a bridge to banks in order to do this. If there is no lock in or no government support associated with a lock in, there will be a real reduction in growth, an explosion of debt, and an implosion of bank balance sheets.

I see no efforts to lock in consumers of real estate to property vales and real incomes. Instead banks are propping up real estate values artificially. This will not produce a long term solution because of stop go economic swings that will result over the longer term as economies swing in and out of financial crises several times over the next two decades associated with political and social forces, as governments fail to produce stable economic environments for growth!

My earlier blogs indicated what I think needs to be done to correct the imbalance between excessive real estate expansion and slow growth in real average personal incomes.

Asia is Following an Unbeatable Economic Strategy

Borrowing your way to disaster and the devil of future histories to come for Britain and United States

Or, why Britain and Canada will probably join neighbouring Currency Areas and lose policy making indendence!

Right now the world's worst economic transformation is looming and the two countries at the source of it, the UK and the US are totally impotent to change their borrowing and consuming habits. Driving straight for the cliff, the lemings rush forward to their ultimate transformation into bony skeletons and they take the world with them.

Such a thesis starts from the premise that house and land prices in USA should be stagnant, level, low, whatever word that you understand to mean, there should be no inflation in land or houses. House orices have not been stable nor have not been for many years. What does that mean? It means that land and real estate is still being used by these major debtor countries to pay for their enormous overseas debts that have built up through the imbalance of their trade with Asia.

Much of the debt is in Asian hands and property in USA and the UK will ultimately be owned by Asians. This will occur after the largest deflation in history as the exchange rates of these two countries swing to bring about a balance. Never in history has the imbalance of trade been so great for so long for so much. Asia may see forces that bring about a balance, but it will be eventually through the ownership of land and real estate in the UK and the US. Paper assets will not be enough to satisfy Asian demands for payment. Issuing currency will not be sufficient to offset demands for real assets.

This is not a disaster if it were to stop at increasing Asian ownership, but it won't.

The UK and the US are increasingly beholden to Asian interests and will eventually surrender their independence of economic policy. Made in Asia will be US and UK interest rates. As Americans are removed from their houses through the inability to pay deposits they will become renters of land and real estate. Ownership and control will fall to Asian interests.




The form of ownership will be as multinational firms with Asian names. These companies will produce in America, but they will not necessarily export from America. Profits will go to shareholders and these will increasingly be pension funds of Asian based multinationals.

The degree of imbalance can be reduced, but as the process is like that of climate change, it will not be seen until it us irreversable. Why? Because America and Britain fail to take action to get their savings rates up.

The problem is one of attitude. The British and Americans presently have the attitude that there is no problem with going eternally into debt to Asian interests. However, we sense a different reality, don't we. We know what goes as present policy does not address the debt issues.

Be aware of your independence

Drawing Active Conclusions From Your Feelings

Many readers will be living within countries or cultures where the act of being independent or taking an independent view is discouraged if not flatly forbidden!

It is not experience that prepares you for understanding so much as it is your head being in touch with your feelings.

No amount of feelings are good if you do not have the head to interpret them accurately. No amount of headwork is enough if you do not have feelings to go along with your brainwork. Such is the balance between what you reason and what you feel that they say these activities take place in different parts of your brain. Right side brainwork without left side brainwork predisposes one to lopsided results.

There are internal feelings and there are internal reasonings. Your head may use visual, auditory or touch tools in combination or balanced. When we use all three in conjunction with internal feelings we have more instruments and information to get our reasoning closer to the truth.



Add smell and taste and one is well away. Not only that but your mind can remember all five major senses as well as an infinite amount of internal processes to pin down accuracy. But such use of our bodies requires effort and self confidence!

Use all your senses and capabilities to gain your indendence. Borrow, beg or steal from others to get at the truth, then struggle within yourself to remember it when you most need it. Such self awareness and knowledge may save your life and those of others around you.

Wimteldum's Law

Stability and Instability and Maintaining a Sound Balance

It is a sad fact that one's conservative side tries to maintain endless stability, but in so doing creates the very instability it is seeking to avoid. And, so it is that in history those that sought stability and were conservative foreshortened their existence as they were overwhelmed by those necessary and unnecessary forces that predispose our world to endless unceasing change.

The irony is that we need to change in order to be stable and survive longer.

For example, we need to acquire foreign language skills to survive healthy and competitive lives. It is healthy to do so and may forestall the onset of dementia.

By seeking to be pure, we become impure. If we do not allow a little sinning to taste the bad side of our nature how are we to strengthen our struggle against it and recognize it fir what it is. Without a few vices, we become inexperienced when new vices do hit with fierce temptations. Priests without expression of their sexual personality can fail in their struggle not to become perverted and may seek excess on what they really want to avoid. Balance of forces of the good and the bad help to bring about positive changes that can give us confidence and capability. It you have potential and you don't test it, you probably will lose it.

Wimteldum's Law

Stability and Instability and Maintaining a Sound Balance

It is a sad fact that one's conservative side tries to maintain endless stability, but in so doing creates the very instability it us seeking to avoid. And, so it us that in history those that sought stability and were conservative foreshortened their existence as they were overwhelmed by those necessary and unnecessary forces that predispose our world to endless unceasing change.

The irony is that we need to change in order to be stable and survive longer. For example, we need to acquire foreign language skills to survive healthy and competitive lives. How many of my readers are learning a new language. It is healthy to do so and may forestall the onset of dementia.

By seeking to be pure we become impure if we do not allow a little sinning to taste the bad side of our nature. Without a few vices, we become inexperienced when vices do hit with fierce temptations. Priests without expression of their sexual personality become perverted and seek excess. Balance of forces good and bad help bring about positive changes that give us confidence and capability. It you have potential and you don't test it, you lose it.

The Problem with Free Trade

An arguable thesis is that free trade makes us worse off economically despite it's proclaimed long and short term benefits!

Fact is that no existing school of economists would voluntarily give a PhD for such a thesis ecen though it shines as a sensible alternative to less pragmatic economic treatises. If all economic dissertations were forced to contain practicality we would all be better off, in my view.

Economics theory not history is bunk on the question of theorized benefits from free trade which invariably accrue more abundantly to monopolizing initiatives over the longer term. This in time leads to political change unfavourable to democratic institutions. Examples in history abound as in the rise of many large multinational firms, financial and banking institutions that restrain trade by their corporate practices.

Contravailing policies are always needed to weaken the negative effects of monoplization, but the attempts to curb the negative impacts of monopolization are weakest in regimes of free trade.

There is an economic law that free trade leads to lower total employment in the long run and to maldistribution of the returns to trade in favour of countries and companies seeking to reduce competition and replace whatever competition exists with near monoplies or forms of monopolistic competition.

In the absence of competition we get forms of management of society and its institutions that resemble dictatorships. This changes political institutions towards greater and greater control and eventually fascism where big financial interests dominate.

Free trade concepts are like like perfect competition concepts are hangovesr of failed economic concepts that bear little resemblance with reality.

What goes as free trade is invariably a progress towards monopoly. The problems of free trade are that they do not create competition as text books might profess. On the contrary forms of free trade because of technologies of scale always leads to a reduction of competition a slowing down of growth and employment in total and progress towards monopolies and unfair distributions of incomes.

Instead of free trade one needs balanced trade and investment in which both trading partners as communities voluntarily manage their scale of operation to limits within which real competition of quality survives and dominates. This is hardly the monolithic Monsanto world.

Bad Competitive Situation

Received as email! Think whether you would like this affecting your services. More on this bad economics in Canada in future blogs!

Hello,

We need your help -- we need you to lend us your voice and state your opinion on a recent CRTC decision that could allow the incumbent phone companies (such as Bell and Telus) to discontinue offering services (Internet and phone) to wholesale providers which in effect would eliminate competition in Canada.

With no competition to help fuel the market; Internet innovation could come to stand still and prices for broadband access could skyrocket out of control. The incumbents would also be free to do with the lines as they please. This would open up future privacy invading Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies and direct marketing/advertising based on *you* and *your families* internet activities and habits.

They could also use this same technology to turn the Internet into a pay-per-website service the same way that TV is a pay-per-channel service.

Can you imagine a world where you have to pay to use the Google website to search for information? Then, if you find what you are looking for you may be restricted to the content because your ISP doesn't have a "peering"
agreement with said company.

Please help us stop this major potential catastrophe.

All concerned consumers please visit:
http://www.competitivebroadband.com/consumer/

All concerned businesses please visit:
http://www.competitivebroadband.com

Read the information presented and decide for yourself.

Once you've decided what you think is right, you can click the "Make a Difference" link, fill out the form with your details and send a pre-written

message to Minister of Industry Tony Clement, Prime Minister Harper, the Opposition Leader, and your local MP or choose to write your own.

Together we can make a difference.
Thank you,

TekSavvy Solutions, Inc.

It could never happen again?

A review of 'Defying Hitler' a memoir by Sebastian Haffner

We live in extraordinary times! Some would say that we could in a few years say 2011 have a repeat of a cycle of confluent political and economic forces similar to what occured after Frances invasion of the German Ruhr in 1923, but with the world convulsing in runaway inflation and social upheaval with some gaining riches beyond all imaginings standing alongside those too poor to buy a loaf of bread.

Could this happen? Yes! Will it happen? Probably! And what will be the end result.

The end result could be roaring prosperity and moral depravity on the scale of the 1920's, which brought about the real depression.

Make no mistake Haffner's book is a must read for those willing to look ahead and view the dangers embedded in our extraordinary times.

The choices that we have now are not so diifferent from then except that conflagration that may result will make WWII look much like a picnic in the park!

Oh! It could never happen you say! But, that is before you read 'Defying Hitler' to envision what can and may happen all over again, different actors and different players, but a repeat of a familiar cycle into worldwide insanity !!!

Demon Chaser

Come sit with me!

Sometimes when you are with someone old or infirmed, all you can do us go sit with them quietly. My ninety-four year old father lay near death's door, and I knew that it was too much to expect of him that he would carry on a conversation. With failing tunnel-vision eyesight he could not see who I was and asked very politely, "And, who are you?"

"It's Arthur," I replied.

"Ah hah," he responded, "Arthur, Arthur, ah hah!"

I could not tell whether he understood or not, for he fell silent as if all his energy were devoted to listening or just plain ordinary enjoying the presence of his middle son. That was conversation ended and my father's breathing was constant and deliberate. He knew I was there and he had a soft gentle smile as he stared silently at the ceiling.

I found the book that I had been reading to him. It was the story of Ellen Acland written by her mother Eleanor. I read another chapter, the last chapter of the book, and left.

That night my father passed away.

He left a memory of a Don Quixote character, a hero in his own mind and a conqueror of demons. As his son, I was always reminded of these demons. Dad took great care to make sure that I did not forget that they were around. His practice was to warn all and sundry about the demons of the world at least once, but his family endlessly. As a son, if my father thought that you did not hear what he said, he felt obligated, no driven, to tell you once more. I developed the habit of repeating to him what he had just told me and always agreeing.

On reflection, many of my best friends are like my father in telling me of the world's demons. It's best practice friendship and my father was throughout my life, my best male friend. My mother was my best female friend and she lived to the age of ninety-two.

My mother rarely spoke to me of my demons or anyone elses, but always guided me in the direction of worthwhile challenges. She fed me well and demanded little or nothing in return other than my telling her I was alive and sensibly happy at whatever I was about.

Mom supported the demon chasing and recognized that for a man peace came only after he had given warning or had fought off the demons.

Some iPhone blog editors annoy me

When one types a word into a text editor it will correct some obvious misprllkngs that occur because one's fingers are bigger than the key letters if the touch key pad. ( I am leaving my errors to illustrate the limitations of self correcting text editors.). I don't have a proof reader that us human.

Lately, the editor has corrected the word hole to whole. Either that or I am brain dead at least some of the time!

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Golf and the economy

What imponderables drive the economy? Golfing and forecasting are similar in that they require an understanding of non-linear topographies.

This note is for Cedric who wants to become a proficient derivatives manager.

This is not an idle question as it defines the outcomes that we see from the economy. My view changes from time to time just as the imponderables that drive an economy change from time to time. The driving forces behind economic activity are akin to states of mind. They are almost just as ethereal in appearance, but in effect they are very real, just as states of mind are very real and can have driven outcomes.

Economies are extremely complex in many ways, but they are not unpredictable. They are extremely predictable. They are predictable just as states of mind are predictable and weather is predictable. To predict an economy one needs oversight, an ability to see over the whole landscape of what forces drive an economy. Ronald Brech the author of 'Britain 1984' taught me many things about economy forecasting and most important was that the economy was a balancing act like a teeder-tauter, but one in which there were many vectors that were in or out of balance.

Oversight means that one has to have in view all the vectors that matter in view and comprehend how they are balanced, then apply a host of understandings about what drives each vector in or out of balance and then how each vector's balance with affect the other.

Unfortunately, models of the economy are still very partial examinations of the vectors driving an economy, and that us because of the way habit persistence in the theory of economic forces persists.

Forecasting requires thinking outside the boxes of conventional theories to get an oversight of what is going on. Some vectors will be like a clear day while others will be like a hazy day and still others like a foggy day. A good forecast comes only when all vectors are like clear days and the topography relatively easy to understand. At such times it is relatively easy to make a forecast of a vector and know it will happen as envisaged. At such times we say that the forecast is predefined because the vectors are driven. With a driven system it is easier to see where things are going.

The problem remains of non-linearity. Getting a forecast right is like playing golf and get the ball in the whole. The course has non-linearities and the green has non-linearities. Approximating with a line put will not get the ball in the whole. No linear forecasting system works and no linear golfing system works because the topography is eternally non-linear!

Repeating one's life

Killing!

When you fell a tree, what do you kill?

It seems to me that a tree is not just one living creature, but billions. Thus for me the killing of a single tree is like the killing of a billion creatures dependent on that tree to live.

We think of tree leaves as part of a tree and so they are, but each leaf has it's own individuality and life and death process. Each leaf is a living system dependent on a larger system which is the tree.

The seeds that create leaves are not automatic. They individually need to be warmed, watered and fed by the tree that sustains them. There are billions and billions of creations we call leaves. Each leaf has it's own birth, life, and death.

Have you ever asked yourself whether after a leaf dies, it comes back to life again as the same or a new leaf? What form of awareness does such a simple creation have? Or is it too simple to have any awareness at all? It must have something that we would think of as primitive awareness or it would not develop. Is it water that gives it that awareness? Or light?

That question may seem trivial to you, but are you sure it is not trivial to you. What if your reoccurance is like the seed that produces a leaf and each leaf is like a life. Does the leaf of 2009 bear any common relationship with the leaf of 2008, or are they completely different leaves/ lives? What is the memory and full experience of the leaf? When it dies, does it die each season, or does it die only when the tree dies? What dies?

What one dimensional experience constitutes the life of a leaf?

Death

Killing! What is death and killing all about?

When you fell a tree, what do you kill?

It seems to me that a tree is not just one living creature, but billions. Thus for me the killing of a single tree is like the killing of a billion creatures dependent on that tree to live.

We think of tree leaves as part of a tree and so they are, but each leaf has it's own individuality and life and death process. Each leaf is a living system dependent on a larger system which is the tree.

The seeds that create leaves are not automatic. They individually need to be warmed, watered and fed by the tree that sustains them. There are billions and billions of creations that we call leaves and they all have origins in seeds of some form.

What are these seeds that produce life or leaves? Are they just proteins, DNA, or RNA? Or are they more than that? We see them and we see that they live and that they are like leaves and like lives. Each strand of code that makes up a leaf or life comes from a generator of that code and the history of that generator goes back endlessly in time, or so it appears.

Each leaf has it's own birth, life, and death. Have you ever asked yourself whether after a leaf dies, it comes back to life again as the same or a new leaf? That question may seem trivial to you, but are you sure it is not trivial to you?

What if your re-occurance is like the seed the produces a leaf and each leaf is like a life. Does the leaf of 2009 bear any common relationship with the leaf of 2008, or are they completely different leaves/ lives? What is the experience of the leaf? When it dies, does it die each season, or does it die when the tree dies? What one dimensional experience constitutes the life of a leaf?

Who or what is editing your life in order to create the perfected or improved you? Or have you ever thought of the universe as your editor? It is what generated you. But, who or what are you? When all the coding is complete, are you something more? Do you fall like a leaf forever gone, or do you reappear as a new leaf reborn from the tree that is your generator?

When you fall asleep, you know that you will reawaken a better you. You know that sleep is when your generator rebuilds and works on you! Your awareness on awakening you regard as residing in you. But, what if you are like a cell phone and you are processed outside of you? What if you are reprogramned and your memory is outside of what you think is you and that you are only the instrument and not the complete whole of what is you?

What if time is recorded? What if your brain travels back to that recording? And, wait for it! What if the recording that your brain uses is not in our three dimensional world? Our future is not in this universe, or is it. What if your life is the way a living organism corrects it's mistakes?

It's all about me!

The only things that make any sense.

When I find time to think about such things as cosmology and the big question "why am I a human being and here on earth in the year 2009," there is little in the way of facts that make for handy or convincing explanations. It is not kust me. This question arises for us all. So, how do we explain the universe to ourselves?

I think one of the greatest gifts that we can have is that it is something we can ponder. There is no one forcing me to any particular opinion. I can research the issue and come to my own conclusions. Wow!

What a wonderful gift that is! My brain is relatively clear. I can reason pretty well and my parents are dead so I don't have to believe what they believed. I don't even have to be respectful of what others believe. I can think for myself and make my own mistakes in coming to my own conclusions. I can get lost in the wilderness of ideas and only have myself to blame if I get it wrong. Most of my readers enjoy the same privileges. Not all, but many! Well at least a few! I hope! Oh, please a few, at least. No, I am not the only one.

I can count on one hand the number of people that I know who also have the conviction that everything repeats on some way. I mean everything! Well almost everything! Well, everything that I can ever know or experience. That is the only reality for me that makes it all worthwhile.

I have to conclude that I am totally illogical. Everyone, I know believes in time and that one cannot go back in time. I don't! Time for me is like a line on a field. Every one I know is on the field, and most refuse to move off the line. I am so happy that I do not stand on the line of time on that field. That's what makes sense to me. It is that time is not a line. Time at the very least is a plane. I am thinking it is at the very least a torus and that what I am seeing now repeats itself over and over again not because it exists more than once, and it may, but that it is available to me to experience more than once.

There is probably more than one me, but that is not necessary, as the me that I am is and will always be sufficient because I will re-occur in some space sooner or later just as my world has re-occured for me, this time.

Thanks for reading.

Lost Blog

Using my iPhone I accidently zapped my blog on the film by Nikita Mikhalkov so here it us below for those who did not see it the first time, plus a few comments on Michael Moore's new film on capitalism. If you like to think, these are must films.


In Praise of '12' - A film by Nikita Mikhalkov
Posted: 12 Sep 2009 07:49 AM PDT
This Russian film is an amazing tribute to how far Russia has progressed over the last decade. The story of the film follows the deliberations of the 12 jurors who had to decide the fate of a young man caught up in the violence of post USSR conflict. Entirely in Russian, the subtitles on English were more than adequate.

I think that you will enjoy the many faces of Russian society revealed in this story which is a masterpiece of dialogue.

See it, learn, and enjoy the changing experience from what you thought about Russia to what you can think about Russia!

Michael Moore has produced a film on capitalism. I have not seen the film but Jay Leno says that it is a balanced view of what ails the economic system of the best country in the world, the United States.

What will ail all economies are the two human traits of imitation and habit persistence combined with the technological law of economies of scale, which together lead to the Pareto distribution of incomes, i.e. badly skewed in favour of a few people. It's sad that the economist of Italian fascism was so close to understanding why civilizations fail and could do nothing about it.

The Short Sighted Economist

The New Economy

The new economy is an economy that is based on the notion that it is not beneficial to save. It is an economy produced by governments that want revenue increases that arise from increased nominal and real incomes. The implementation of the new economy has serious consequences for real saving.

As governments keep interest rates extraordinarily low people don't save, but rather make long term decisions that commit them mire and more to a culture if low saving over the long term. This may mean greater spending and stock market growth, and rising property values for extended periods, but it reduces the proportion of long term incomes that people are willing to save in cautious savings media, such as bank deposits.

It means that only very profitable short term activities are supported in the stock markets of advanced economies. Long term investments struggle for financing in industrial economies while short term profitability of increasing production in low wage economies takes precedence. This gradually erodes the capacity of industrial countries to produce and compete because they have not invested enough.

Eventually, low interest rates produce a sagging long term economic equation similar to that seen in Japan.

Dangerous lending

Linking our future to China and larger scale enterprise

It's no secret that there is a close link between research and development and the discovery of useful knowledge, science, iinvention, and possibly innovation. R and D requires a redirection of econonomic activities towards low return activities. But, such cost is not attractive in many sectors, industries, firms, and indeed households of an economy.

Dominant firms protect their positions by reducing the profitability of their competitors positions so as to reduce their rivals ability to conduct competitve or novel r and d. Ultimately, such a process would result in a stifling of competition, and in turn a lowering of the profit rates for all but the most dominant of commercial entities.

In a world of industries based on economies of scale, those with economies will attempt to achieve more and more such economies until the distribution of profit in their area of competition is monopolized.

How then is discovery outside of established industries and concerns possible? Technology is notoriously difficult to dominate in a society where their is independent r and d. Hiwever, discovery isn't possible in societies that are dominated by huge firms the stife novelty as on Africa or in a world dominated by economies of scale unless the dominant firms themselves create new industries. But, one must ask why they would do that.

As a dominant firm, in addition to ruining your competition through economies if scale, you can ruin them by buying their shares and by trying to take control through public markets. Thus, for example, Cadbury's is bought by rival firms. And thus large firms increasingly stifle competition through the profits they mainly gather through achieving economies of scale, domination of profit, and accumulation of competitors shares acquired by higher profit margins.

In addition, the pace of domination can be accelerated without saving when interest rates are low. Borrowing to prevent competition in times of low interest rates means that innovation and growth in an economy can be stifled sooner. The money large firms gather is thus used directly to stifle competition. This process is speeded up when money is too cheap.

Low interest rates hasten the appearance of many undesirable side effects of the modern economy. People can buy houses only to see them lost when their incomes decline. Their incomes decline because solid growth dud not occur in their economy. Apparent growth was in real estate markets as developers achieved economies of scale and gambled on dominating the property markets. The competition arising from low lending rates fir money priduced house price inflation and a dakse sense of economic well being. The profits to builders and banks resulted in monopolization of profit and further maldistribution of profits, savings, and incomes. They banks were bailed out, but the lessons of the period were not understood and the process of destructive market forces in the US and UK will repeat as in the case of Thailand.

The low interest rates do not encourage people to pay off debt as they should, but

In the longer term easy money borrowed from China where economies if scale are enormous hasten the maldistribution of incomes on the US, slow the rates of meaningful innovation and bring about the disappearance of the middle class of society.

Low interest rates, aka easy money, hastens the destruction of social fabrics in the US that leads to fascism, yes fascism and not socialism. The greatest danger from low interest rates is social conflict leading to the many forms of fascism: communism, dictatorship, and outright fascism. Thus a dictatorship can result in the US which was the home of democracy, but is increasingly a place of social conflict and unruly goverance.

Underlying low interest rates is the competition between banks and between the finance rooms of large companies to stifle competition, redistribute profit towards their goals of greater economies of scale and dominance of society's income streams.

The process is addictive and repetitive and can only be foreshortened by slowing down the accumulation of excess savings arising in profits of large firms and banks.

We all, through the IMF, have flooded the world with cheap money thinking that it will produce a solution to the financial market turmoil arising from banks trying to achieve economies of scale by lending more and more at looser and looser terms.

It can only hasten the rise of fascist dictatorial tendencues of industries, countries and firms. Throwing easy money at the problem is not the solution.

Ask yourself why Africa us in such a mess after all the money poured into it through aid, and World Bank development loans. The problem is the weaknesses inherent in the solution that we opted for.

Throwing more money at our economic issues does not solve them when it makes them worse!

We think money in the hands of bankers will promote stability when it will only lead to more competition between banks. Banks are trying to dominate other banks and the more money they get to do this the less they will lend to small industry and the less stability there will be on the world economy.

The best policy right now is the most difficult to swallow if you are dominated by large industry and you are heavily into debt with banks. The policy is that of high interest rates to curb the growth of easy money and to ultimately slow down the pace of political change that is heading towards fascism brought about by social conflict.

The lending binge of the twenties and thirties in the last century led to the most dangerous of periods for humankind as people were pursuaded that the Jewish bankers were to blame for their economic ills. The real culprit was government spending and government demands for reparations. Governments brought about the first and second great wars! Will they bring about another?

Profit Motivation and Incentive Motivation Questioned by Research

What creates wealth? Pink's TED video

In his TED video Dan Pink, a failed law student turned creativity advisor, refers to research that establishes as fact that the profit motive of incentive for business development does not produce the goods as well as other motives! This fact has been well documented by economists of the Schumpeterian School of economics but ignord by orthodox teaching of economics in most US grad schools that do not have a strong historical analytical base.

Economic history demonstrates that innovation is not the result of the search for profit and incidently security.

Rather individuals who are entrepreneurs and innovators are driven by other motivations. This is known by PHD studies of market development as conducted by myself at Cambridge university in the 1970s. The orthodox view of the supremacy of profit as the driver of market development I determined to be false, but most left and right wing economists at the time at Cambridge were hostile to my ideas that other motives drove business innovation and market development.

Now Dan Pink refers to many studies that reinforce my earlier views which are not so different from those of Schumpeterian economists who were ignored by macro economists unwilling to recognize the serious gaps in their thinking and historical realities.

Indeed as Pink says invention and innovation by such companies as Google, Apple and Microsoft tend to follow other economic models where they achieve actual market development. I would humbly add that these models are of my school of thought.

Where companies have perpetrated social injustice frequently is where the profit motive has stifled other motives and resulted in market stagnation and the severe limiting of competition.

Artists Art and the Personality Behind the Image

It's more than personality! It can be genes, sexual preference, religion, culture, predisposition in any direction almost. That's why Dick said to me that there were no rules in art. Another, might say it's in the eyes of the beholder. In my views. for I have more than one, it comes down to states of mind and predominant states of mind. There are no rules to states of mind. We might wish there were!

Art works in many directions simultaneously. We tend to think that we are recipients of art, but the reality is more often than not that we define the art around us and place ourselves where we feel we would be most comfortable with the art we have selected to be near! We fill our homes with art the reinforces our predominant states of mind.

Artists may play along with this and lose themselves forgetting their role as creators of new states of mind. In other words, art can complement existing states of mind or it can attempt to create new ones.

Those artists that swim against the stream may be poor in pocket as well as skills. Or, they may be great artists attempting to create new states of mind.

There are many examples of art work that is strange and leads us down pathways to new ways of thinking. I like to compare the art work of Scientific American magazine with that if the New Scientist. If you have read both, you will grasp what I mean about creativity versus conformity. I won't go into the details here.

In societies where there is considerable social integration such as India, the art contains many layers is social information that is absent in the art if say Canada or Sweden, both of which are highly social communities, but which are rich in providing for fairly specific groups of states of mind.

And, so it is with art. We can surround ourselves with images that mirror our surroundings in some way, or we can use art to build states of mind that we would otherwise have difficulty in sustaining.

The Pfizer Fraud

Ignorance is not bliss. The Pfizer case pin points another enemy of the ordinary person. How is it possible to fight an enemy that uses tactics reminiscent of Nazi Germany? If one had any doubts that one must always always be on one's guard, the frauds by Pfizer should be telling you something.

It is not enough that you yourself research into hidden dangers. It us not enough that you trust only respected brand names. It is not enough that you work within established social norms. And, the reason is because of people and groups like Pfizer who break all the normal rules of society and still get away with it. Who are these people?

Learning one's way to success

Success and Achievement

The meanings of success and achievement are different. For example, it is possible to be very successful without achievement. Most of my achievements come through failures which seems counter logical.

It is even possible that one's greatest failures lead to one's greatest achievements. These one may regard as successes, but it seems more satisfying to think of them as achievements.

The notion of achievement carries with it a struggle against some sort of challenge to one's being successful. If success comes too easily it is downgraded. Why! The reason is that achievement tells you something about the passage to success. And, easy passage may be a success, but it is not so much of an achievement.

Making one's way from A to B blindfolded is more of an achievement than with vision. Doing a blog on the iPhone us more of an achievement than sitting at a large mobile or desk top computer.

An achievement may not be regarded as a success. Because a success and an achievement appear to be the same they may not be regarded as different. After all getting from A to B means that one is still at B no matter how one got there.

Many people view success as the object of it all failing to recognize that achievement on the road to success is also to be valued. Why?

The reason seems to me to arise because of the mistakes one makes getting to a goal. The more mistakes one makes and overcomes may have a value greater than reaching success without mistakes. Of one is very lucky one may make very few mistakes for a time and even for a long time. Nevertheless, the person who has made a lot of mistakes and learned from them is a very different person from the one who made few mistakes and had a relatively easy time becoming succesful.

There may be a price to be paid because of easy successes. A portfolio manager may be very successful and yet not have achieved much because the stock market was bullish most of the time. Boasting of success put of an easy market is, however, foolhardy. Another manager in a bear market may have had less success, but indeed be better prepared because of the smaller achievements sting from cutting one's teeth in periods of hardship. The two managers are very different in their capacities and though one may be regarded as more successful, that person may not be able to manage a more difficult market. This is only one of many examples one can think of.

The problem with today's world is that it fails to see the difference between achievement and success. This is extremely important when evaluating the performance of people or larger units such as economies or firms. An economy such as that of India achieved much to get it's agriculture where it us today. Industrial economies may be more successful in producing crops on large scale and bringing prices down, but have they achieved as much. They can destroy the agricultural sector of India without achieving anything that has lasting value. This is because it is much easier to be successful with economies if scale in agriculture even though it is a minor achievement, easy peasy.

We are in danger of misinterpreting successes as achievements and so miss the point of it all. It is far more important to promote achievement in the grand scheme of things. Having a thriving agricultural sector in India is far more important in it's achievement than the short term success of other countries being able to easily out price Indian agriculture and produce more misery and unemployment in that country while a few firms with machinery in Canada producing wheat make bigger profits.

Say no to free trade. It is not a success story for humanity.

What is Love to You?

Sanity and Love

The feeling of love in the popular mind is very often associated with being out of control. My favourite association of the feeling of love is that of sanity and being in full control.

One might say that a precondition of my favourite notion of love is when one has full control of ones feelings, emotions and rational thought, and yet has that additional process going on of love.

This does not occur when one is overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but when one can calmly experience a deep feeling and know the qualities of that feeling and be guided by those qualities. Such for me is love. It is the height of being sain and healthy, being relaxed and in control, wanting and anticipating without artificial substances, physical or mental imbalances. It is awareness when one is at one's best on health and in surroundings.

Love to ya!

Whither Space-time

As I Write so I Think

Those who know me are apt to be most critical because of the availability of points on which my perception departs from that of others. That people really close to each other can live in very different perceptual structures is well known. That the person next to you may be like an alien being clmes as a surprise that we come to terms with in courts, in work environmentsm, on the street, and in conflicts.

We may look at the sane things with similar tools and yet perceive vastly different entities. That us why science us so successful at building bridges because it forces us to make some of the perceptions in a common frame work of reference and agreement. Unlike religion, science builds bridges to common understanding between people who are sane adults. Religion in contrast seeks to take away copmonly agreed frames of reference in favour of specialized reference which must be learned or experienced.

Our difficulty, however, is that science too is a religion based on the perception of quanta. Quanta are what give the world it's physical qualities and laws. Yes, quanta do exist and they are governed by universal laws. Any breaking of the physical laws requires the whole framework to be reassessed and that is expensive.

It is done, however, over and over again, so much so that science is actally able to make progress while it's competitors, the other religions, remain somewhat stagnant in the development, at least in general terms.

Now science teaches us that black holes exist on enormous numbers and that our universe is a huge upward scaled e entitiy of unbelievably large size. It also says that a considerable amount of energy and matter that could explain the distribution of observed matter is missing.

More of what is, is not, and most of what is not, is! What a paradox!

If our universe is inside a black hole then the light of our universe does not escape because energy in huge amounts is being pulled into our universe and cannot escape as light hitting as it does the boundaries of our ability to observe and the horizon of our universe, the entrance energy edge of the black hole that holds our universe. We are truly captured.

Now suppose that the end wraps time and matter to the full cycle of a loop such that time bends around. This could happen as a ginormous circle and look somewhat like the ancient Egyptian religious symbol that used to be carried around the wrist as a symbol of spiritual / religious understanding.

Alternatively, the image of our universe might look like a huge infinity symbol that represented eternity to the ancient Britons descended from the more ancient Egyptians. The image is akin to the symbol of recycling and return, of the hare.

In any event, it is my guess that although the Egyptians and early peoples could not see all the details of our galaxies and universe, their astronomers may have guessed at it's dimensions. Thus it is that complete societies were devoted to the notion of recycling into another world. It's hard to imagine that they thought the ships, tools, and food that they buried with their dead would remain useful. They probably thought that the structure of supports for life could pass through the same veil of death ad human beings. In other words, all matter is living and just patterns to be used in physical environments that may occur with the passage across the veil of space/time, which may be more immediate than sciences or religions give credit.

Megaspace .. getting to grips with the vastness of the world

It would be presumptuous to say our world because the world is so enormous. It is beyond anything that we can ever imagine.

The way the universe is engineered defies imagination and presents an insurmountable challenge to those that would wish to fathom it whether scientist, religious, or philosophical. There are, however, a number of clues.

I refer frequently to my abstraction, the world of Wuh. This is a universe on which light is motionless and everthing around explodes at the speed of light. Tangential to exploding matter is the world of matter which is what we observe. It too is driven by enormous forces of exploding. These we refer to as the big bang and we do not yet use the vocabulary of the recurring big bangs or the infinite number of big bangs that super-impose their history on our own.

It is almost unbelievable that witih our visible world that we should discover an infinite number of heavy energy objects that defy reason in their number and individual immensity. And, yet within each of these enormous objects there is a universe as enormous as the ones, for there are an infinite number, shaping 'the' or 'our' immediate universe. Within each of the huge energy objects that contain a universe, we can expect to find a billion billion+ objects of similar mass.

What we have here and there us a megaworld that obeys the properties of fractal mathematics. The world is infinitely fractallic. That is not just an observation. It is a law!

We see that law in everything extant or in the motion of creation. It applies to technologies that we create, our immediate economics, the weather, the soup we eat, our plantary life. It even applies to fossils we see that have been around billions of years.

If the universe that we see has been around less than 20 billion years, we would be so lucky because that defies even simple reason that tells us, it is part of a larger construction infinite in age backwards in time and forwards in time. Yet we know that time is only a representation of energy so all time includes all time which has been, is being, and ever will be. Time is unreal. What we experience as time is a differential of force in something already here being visited by light. We are light. We as creatures of light experience time, but time is not what we think it is.

Saving energy

Hours equivalency

It's a vain objective for me to try to equivalize the number of energy units for vehicle travel. But perhaps hours driven equivalency is a step closer in the drirection of reducing one's absolute dependency on motors in a world of urban sprawl.

My proposal to myself is to reduce hours of driving my vehicle. This could be done through the budget approach where I would set a monthly limit on travel costs that rely on energy.

In practical terms this would mean one tripto the store each month instead of twenty. To stockpile, I would buy goods that have a shelf life of a year or so. I would buy precooked foods or foods the are fresh that could be gotten by walking.

On getting from A to B, I would allow myself one hour driving per one hour cycling or walking. This would additionally be wrapped up in a monthly budget allowance that would limit use if fuel that is not shared with others such as drives on my own. I allow myself flights in jets as these are shared and travel by train or bus is shared!

Guess I can but try!

Throw two stones in a pond -The spread of two flus

There are a number of health concerns facing the world right now. I have attempted to address these in my blogs going several years back and though it is not pleasant to review my previous speculations it may be instructive.

My main concern is the very large stone of possible world famine thrown into the world arena=pond several years ago and beating it's way across the middle east into Asia. It is the disease affecting wheat, and seems to have penetrated into Iranian farm lands on it's way into Afghanistan. We should all be concerned as this old danger continues to threaten world stability, take lives, and may bring about failure in attempts to help establish the bases for democracy in Afghanistan.

Left unsolved the problems associated with weaknesses of wheat harvest protection could foster reckless food production of chicken by those threatened by starvation. What we are seeing in the deaths in Egypt due to bird flu is a possible harbinger of worse disease epidemics to come? At the root of the problem is starvation, small farms being put out of production by larger industrial farms. Ever wonder why income distributions correlate with economies of scale?!

On it's own bird flu is not so much a general worry because it dies not seem to spread widely except through areas where people are already experiencing tremendous strain to survive. In thebwaybit spreads, Bird flu is more than one pebble thrown into the world pond and it's frequency of distribution may be correlated with hunger. We see failure to produce enough wheat or the over pricing of rice or rice shortages.

The distribution of some famines and that of bird flu may be correlated. Fighting one may fight the other. Protecting wheat crops in Afghanistan may help reduce the spread of bird flu. Think of a huge number of pebbles thrown into the world pond and you have the risk of bird flu.

The other stone thrown into the pond is that of swine flu. Around the generators of swine flu, the huge polluting factory farms of swine, the risks of generating novel swine flus would predictably be higher.

By being more human to our swine we may save the planet from future pandemics and novel virus strains, over the long term.

Right now the economies of scale of crouding more and more pigs into larger and larger factories is like throwing a huge stone into our world health pond. The risks from new and more virilant strains of swine flu are still being generated by huge unhealthy factory pig farms located in almost every country around the globe.

It is the economics of the technologies of farming on ever increasing scales of food such as wheat, rice, chicken and swine that precurse the presence of novel and dangerous viruses.

If the technology of large scale farming does not produce dangerous flus then that is the greater mystery or the worst of health cover ups.

the upscaling of agriculurtural technologies so as to bring about economies of large scale industry allows for an increasing tof he risks of bigger and bigger systems of waves of disease as we create stronger and stranger varieties of virus. Large scale production also breeds the feeding grounds for catastrophic events such as would happen as enormous plants fail to produce or create unhealthy conditions in the surrounding communities, the spoiling of land habitats for wild animals and vegetations, the overspecialization of types of strains of DNA or methods of manufacture using energy or technologies that express themselves as strains on other technologies, DNAs, wild
life and humane communities, general health of wild and domesticated systems.


Now what should happen in communities where large scale production of pork and chicken co-exist. Yes, the risk of novel diseases goes up as it is less and less healthier for the poor pigs and chickens, or as less care is taken about sanitation and people or creatures in the surrounding areas are placed at greater inconvenience, or risks.

On the really large scale disaster scenario, we need only large wave of fast spreading swine flu to mix with one small but deadly wave of bird flu and presto we have a novel flu that spreads fast and wide and kills like a plague.

Make no mistake, it is the emerging risks of large scale agriculture and production that place humanity in this danger area. The economics of scale in production should be appropriately TAXED to account for these risks.

The burden on world health costs should be born increasingly by large scale industrial farms who are making excessive profits and destroying more balanced income distrutions. To cover our costs, we should prepare our representives in government for placing the costs of antivirals and vaccines onto the shoulders of those who create the greatest risks. They are the upscale swine and chicken farm multinationals who do not allow inspection of their plant by health inspectorates.

We should have world health police to inspect the environments that pose us greatest risk of novel and dangerous disease. Perhaps, it is large industrial farms that head this list!

Smaller is more beautiful, and safer for the world community.

Flu Pandemic - Who is in charge?

The long and short of it is that when a nasty form of the H1N1 virus strikes it is your life on the line!

The problem is somewhat akin to the story of the three pigs deciding whether or not to build protection out of straw, wood or brick. The wolf is out there, but you have no idea which direction it might turn. Others around you are working on their straw, wood and brick strategies. Some are doing nothing. What should you do?

The thing to remember is that a brick protection takes the longest time. It is the only form of real protection. Once you have built one brick or stone structure it gets easier and easier. Castles are the epitome of protection and wolves have no chance of entry except by stealth and hiding in something you bring into your castle. You would not let a wolf across the draw bridge so you had better have an early warning system of it's expected arrival and then as many tools as you can gather to ward it off!

I have news for you. The wolf really is out there and we don't know how dangerous it really is. Remember that it is a wild animal and can play you for a fool if you are little miss Riding Hood and let your guard down. No a wolf is a wolf and highly dangerous on most of it's appearances. We have seen the sheepish quiet side of this wolf, but it may just turn nasty or bring along some if it's friends such as pneumonia which we have weapons against if we would but use them.

Being strong is no assurance that you would win in a fight against the wolf. The strong are sometimes foolhardy and overestimate their capacity to ward off the wolf. Being smart by realizing you are in charge and looking out for your family is the way to go. Plan well ahead and don't be ashamed to build a castle or two with mote and draw bridge if you have a mind to. Yep! The howling can be heard and the wolf is on it's way.

And, I am not crying wolf!

Why Bubbles Occur and why the Bubble economy is So Destructive

On being modern, we can assume unsustainable objectives as a community.

The developmental model used by many people contains concepts of modernity that really don't measure up to what being modern really requires.

I have spent years trying to understand why the Roman Empire failed so miserably and what really were the choices made by people that brought about history's greatest bubble economy. The Roman economy imploded spectacularly, and so too have many others that followed similar developmental paths. What we need to ask is why and what draws communities into bubble development.

Regarded as a haven of civility in a sea of barbarity, the Roman empire was regarded by many wantabe communities as something to be emulated. This tendency towards the large scale governnance of communities continues to inspire.

We saw, however, that the copy cat German Reich under Hitler, the copy cat French imperialists under Napoleon, the copy cat Stalinists under Stalin all produced misery for their nations and those around as these experiments with social expansion on the Roman model failed to sustain viable pathways of community growth.

Russia, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, China, and USA have all experienced the tragedy of societies hell bent on dominance of their surrounding communities. Eventally these 'empires' burst and the bubble of destruction following makes the communities unrecognizable from their ancestral roots.

The history of change based on expansion into the territory of others is replete with the pain it brings to the expansionist community. From within the volcano of bubble growth comes untold misery and destruction as the infected community spreads it's diseases of dissatisfaction onto neighbouring communities.

Seen in this way, we can understand why wars continue to be an outcome of bubble growth in which greed and the trap of debt burst out into the world landscape! It seems that people are drawn onto destructive developmental paths all too easily. Does it have anything to do with scale and the expected returns from increasing scale? I think so.

Economies of scale are a result of technology and the grail of enterprises of all forms: cities, economies, empires, farms, firms, boxes, ships, .... many things!

Organizing on ever increasing scales means greater profits and increasing returns. There is no limit to technology upscaling except that it leads to death!

Technology upscaling is addictive and produces an adrenalin rush for a community that leads that community down a pathway of self destruction. This path is always a death march or funeral corridor for individuals and communities. It arises because the next fix is always larger.

Seen in this context, the expansion of industrial communities is a form of social addiction that will lead those communities towards self destruction. The reason is simply that economies of scale of one community eventually impinge on the adjacent communities who struggle to survive. There is only one winner in the economy of scale process and that us the larger more efficient unit. Farms get oversized, firms get oversized, communities of people get larger and larger.

Miniturization allows economies of scale to be achieved and the process of seeking after economies of scale continues into smaller and smaller quarters. Engines get smaller yet produce larger and larger amounts if energy. Computer chips get denser and denser. Pills become more and more potent and more and more addictive.

This is the inner and outer city of development in modern times and it's outcome is an addictive process that leads to earlier than normal death for the individual or social participant. Cities die young, farm communities cease to have a soul, unemployment rises and the income distribution skews away from even distribution. Managers die in the harness, addicts lose control and waste their lives in narrow pursuits that kill them. People cease to exercise by walking as much as they should and vegetate into sedentary blobs of obesity.

I am speaking of myself!?

Dying in Ontario

Where failure is normal.

What does one do in a society where the acceptance of failure is regarded as normal?

Look around you and you can see failure everywhere! It is normal, but it is highly dangerous. In Ontario, we accept that our agricultural development has been a success story. In fact the story is and was very different. They say what you don't notice about the deterioration about you won't harm you. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are communities in Ontario, such as the religious communities of people who are careful with what they do in their local world. Gone is the basis of Ontario's hardword furniture industry.

Farms are no longer surrounding fields with trees for birds and wild life. Gone soon will be the soils for growing fruit and the small scale fruit industry. What Ontario had is not missed because the young don't remember what they never saw. Rivers full of wild life. Ponds teaming with frogs.

Birds that once thrived are now extinct. Beautiful landscapes carved into ugly unnatural concrete mazes and lifeless deserts where habitats for harmless creatures once thrived.

What are we doing? What can Ontario farmers do?

They must say no to the cities that swallow up the land. People need to say enough with the sprawl that kills the countryside. Children need to experience the beauty of Ontario as it once was. Not the present polluted dump heap of chaotic shyte.

We can clean up the province, but we have to notice that it is dirty first!!!!

Shape of the Universe, Gravity, Light and Time

Space and time are interrelated. We look into space and we perceive light that comes to us from an earlier time. It just happens that in the earlier time space was smaller and light since earliest time spreads out further and further into a vaster and vaster space. It suggests that time is very closely related to scale and size.

I sense that there are three spaces. A space on the inside which to me is the past or inner space and a space on the outside which is the future or outerspace and a sideways or tangential space that bridges the other two spaces.

In my model of the 'world' the three spaces of past, present, and future coexist. This is why the general theory of Einstein works because although the traveller in Eistein's universe does not age because of plasma speed motion he/she can come across others who did not move and who consequently aged.

The problem with the general theory is the e=mc2 misses out -e=-mc2. But, how do you include this other direction of space without bothsides of the equation dropping away. The answer is that there is another element of the equation that us missing and that element is gravity.

The new equation is:

ge=something, where 'g' is gravity.

What can that g be? We know that there are two directions of motion and energy in space time. 'g' links these two to bring about equivalence.

In my model, energy is of direct consequence to fermions but not to light which occupies space and time differently and is not subject to material exclusion principles. We see some of these properties of matter in plasma where motion is so fast that it does not have the time spacial limiting properties of gases, liquids, and solids.

Were we to think of our spaces as tangential motion and energy moving in specific dimensional spaces and gravity as moving in a different but very reacheable space, we would envisage my physical world together. Few people seem to be able to do this simple visualization.

With ge, we are able to see that the universe is recurrent and not unidirectional, that the big bang did not really happen, and that the past, present coexist in a universe without time as a space but time only as an attribute of viewing space in a highly restrictive viewport.

Our problem as human beings is that we do not have the lense of our brains calibrated to see time as only a consequence of our 'electronic apparatus' and not in any way characteristic of our 'liberated' reality.

Remember that human beings are copy cats and that they are creatures of habit. These two mental features are like machines programmed to carry out a small number of tasks, but as yet incapable of seeing or relating to the wider surfaces of their universe.

That too will change as new technologies will be invented to permit the mind/brain to travel forward and backward across 'ge'.

Network Inefficiencies Encourage Hackers

I should add market inefficiencies! As it were to revisit the Napster mechanisms of circumventing unreasonable costs. Where the actual market is artificially restrained by monopoly or poor governmental choices and licensing, one can expect a proliferation of black market activity. This is like a school for scandal! In the case of telecom streams this means hacking will be rife as users perceive the market as being out of wack with what is available from a simple hack. Market leakages to black markets redress some of the inequities produced by excessive market advantages that are purely administrative and bear little relationship to non-political advantages. Such is Canada and it's relationship to European and US markets. The Canadian hacking community will flourish given these incentives of mis-managed market mechanisms.

High Cost of Canadian Cell Phone Use

It would appear that nothing has changed in Canada. It is still extraordinarily inefficient. This is especially the case in telecommunications where monopolies drain Canadians pocketbooks while offering poor service without competition one would like to see so close to the US. Essentially, Canada is moving away from being competitive and will be very vulnerable over the long term to outside shocks.

The Pace of Evolution

We do not see the obvious some times, but it is increasingly evident that technology defines our existence increasingly. We used to see nature as a solution provider, but increasingly it is man's domination of nature that motivates intelligent life. The problem with this is that it reflects an imbalance between constructive and destructive forces, and in evolving, man has all to often become the destructive force. For example, in Africa there is the capacity to grow enough food to end starvation world wide! But what does mankind do with this opportunity? It is destroyed. What are you evolving into? We have the tools to end AIDS worldwide and to end hunger. We gave not figgured out the organization of these tools to do good in the face of unkind opposition that is not well informed. Can we educate people to end the cycles of misery or are there always going to be areas of immense suffering that we cannot ever reach?

Blogging with a mobile phone

Small is better. I've concluded that Microsoft has lost already!

Medical Systems

It might be said that a society gets the medical system it deserves. However, what we are really talking about is how people prioritize the suffering of others. Many communities think of America as somewhat hyprocritical because of the unnecessary suffering that goes on within it's borders. Shame on you, America can't you lead the world in a medical system for everyone.

Left and Right Wing

Does history not tell you more often than not that being on the left means you are trying to reduce people's suffering or the suffering of others, while being on the right means that one wants the status quo even though it means people and creatures suffer! There us nothing shameful about being on the left, but there is something shameful about not being aware of suffering whether you are coming from the right or the left.

Will the madness not stop?

The Internet is very good at highlighting activities of madness where animals or people suffer at the mercy of people making a living or garnishing a 'bloody' profit. Lately the sale of asbestos from Canada to India comes up, as does the silent slaughter of dolphins in coves along Japanese coasts. Neither activity should be allowed by law yet Canadian politicians and Japanese have not passed legislation. What is it with these 'Bushy' governments?

What is it with these Alberta gunslingers that would rather slaughter more than a dozen bears than build fences!? The bears are dead but not the need for an annual cull because the solution is an ass of mental depravity. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Where did all the oil money go if it wasn't into the hands of people who do not care for anything let alone a few very ordinary animals that just might be telling Albertans that they are sleepwalking away from common sense! Who is in the wrong the bears, the dolphins, or the men and women who seem not to have complete grade school?

From the Back Room to the Woods

Computers are indeed evolving. There are now more computers in the wilderness than there used to be in the cities. From cool cellar to office, from office to desk, from desk to lap top, from lap top to hand. You get the idea of an evolution? From IBM to Hewlett Packard to Microsoft to Apple, and the trend continues. Or, do you not see the cycles?

The How and the Why of Ghosts

Do you need to take the idea of ghosts very seriously? Perhaps not, because they are not something that you can ever put you hands on, especially if you are a practical person. Are ghosts relevant in one's everyday life? Possibly not, but you really don't do not know.

Ghosts are very personal things and they are tagged to the past and places of the past. Since most people think that the past does not matter all that much, then ghosts won't matter that much, perhaps.

Our past realities define the how and the where of ghosts. The why of ghosts is more complex. Ghosts do exist, and they do come in many forms. They are a mental fact and reflect how our brain works and what our brain is capable off. If I say that time and space are the same thing a la general theory of Einstein then I might be forgiven if I say that in the future we will visit earth as ghosts. If you travel fast enough the earth will age while you remain young. As a young person you may arrive back on earth to find all your friends of a few moments earlier being presently just ghosts of the past. Yes ghosts really do exist, but we don't yet know the why of the ones we have experienced. We do know that they are possible and that our mind has many ghostlike qualities. We do know that everything we do or say continues on, otherwise Einstein would be wrong and the general theory of relativity would be false. We know that is not the case and ghosts are very real!

Memristors .. Are we ready for another electronics revolution?

Well it seems that nature is telling us that natural electronics still has a few surprises. One of these is a future component of electronic circuits that could make everything that we have seen so far seem like kids play .. welcome the memristor!

Wars are Obsolete and Peace is State of the Art

So many young men and women have gone to war at the urging of governments and organizations that were misled or deranged that we can say that wars are our greatest threat. We can see clearly that those that started war failed miserably. They inevitably lost more than they could have gained through other means. We can easily say that war is generated by losers.

It is also false to say that human nature predisposes people towards war. More accurate would be the assertion that war is a trap of nature coming from outside human desire. People are led into war unwillingly like being channeled down a fast moving river. Those caught in the current drag others in with them in a firm of overwelming madness that goes totally against what is in everyones best interests. Technology is the generator of war and an ignorance of how to manage technology safely is at the source of misuse that ends in war. Religion is a form of social technology that can be misused and the mismanagement of religion is at the root of many wars. Addictions are at the heart of many wars and represent technologies where people are incompetent users. At the heart of peace is the capacity to use technology towards beneficial goals. It is this, the direction of the use of technology, that is at the heart of peace.

Education on the proper use of technologies will create peace. Teach people how to use drugs effectively and how to eliminate addiction and one will create peace where drug wars once were.

Show people how to remove guns from temptations and one can eliminate the urge to use guns as a method of resolving differences.

We need to invest in peace making technology as much as we do in the instruments of war. This applies to religions as much to governments as to war lords and organized crime.

Downsizing as a Way to Reduce Waste

It is a paradox, but the prescription of many economic experts during hard times is to create more waste. This all to often is what economic growth is all about, and it is particularly nasty in the case of small economies.

My favourite economics professor at Cambridge was the growth theorist Lord Kaldor, who was also my examiner on many occasion. Lord Kaldor held that the strongest law in economics was fertility and he associated this with economies of scale and size of productive unit.

Most economists realize that a single enormous plant is now the most efficient way to produce, distribute and sell almost everything. If one can make something smaller as the iPhone has done with computers then one has actally enlarged the something. Accordingly, as the transistor and integrated circuits became smaller they actally became larger on economic terms.

The size of everything is an economic decision and everything in economics is affected by technology. My technology determinism thinking did not go down well at Cambridge University because the more traditional social determinism views of markets and economies held sway. However, our reality is that is you live in a small economy the size of packages of items such as shampoo will be larger because the seller and producer want you to buy more than you need. Think everytime you eat that you are made fatter by oversizing of delivery systems and you will soon see how technologies of scale impact on who you are, who you are with, what you do and don't do. Yes you are a technological not and economic solution!

My finger is not small enough

Ever notice that when you use a touch based instrument you are too large. You are so inefficient!