Mythologizing - A Verbal Art

The challenge of our reality is that it is 99 percent mythology. Some people may be shocked by this, but I can assure you that it is true. What is real has no physical basis. Deepak Chopra the author and philosophy refers frequently to the quantum world that makes up our bodies, which changes almost every atom in a contiuous inflow outflow process.

We are only partially aware that our breath is what gives us some of the the particles that once made up Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Bhuddha, Hitler. We are them and at the same time, we are not them. Our mythologies are the way we come to define our independence while at the same time understand our dependence. Both science and religion, faith and evidence are mythological at their core. Lord Raglan writes in The Hero, A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama: "there are no valid grounds for believing in the historicity of tradition," and he goes on to show how the heroes of our traditions, particularly our religious traditions are mythological. Our heros are not real. Our heros are mythological. All of what we call history is mythology. Where does this leave us?

Our independence is our most purvasive mythology. We think that we are independent, but we are what we are, and that is very different from what we think we are. Our thought is partially a result of chemistry, but it is not chemistry without form, and it is not random chemistry. So what is it? We explain it by use of a mythology. Later on we will need to revise that mythology because we will find out that it is not correct, does not perform in the way we need it to, does not have a true ring about it. Our chemistry means that we can have little constancy of thought as long as the world we think we inhabit is only the now. We rely on the past to anchor the now in some meaningful way, and we need the past to project the future as we fiddle around in the present. Our mythology is that we have a now that we can fiddle around with. We observe things happening, but we think that we are interacting with things, events, and spaces rather than observing what is happening between things in spaces. Our reality is that we observe. Our mythology is that we act.

Wiseacreing - A Verbal Art

The world of the internet is mindboggling. Wiseacreing is what we do when we make use of stuff that we really don't understand, nor have any strong basis of understanding. The past is one of these regions of uncertainty, as is the future. When we discuss these regions we enter the world of wiseacreing because we have to speculate.

One of my passions is travelling through time by means of recorded history. Think what it will mean in the future to have so much recorded history of what is going on in our time. The time when we are alive is when it is all happening, but we can share the worlds of those that preceded us, if we take the time to read and research history. Obviously, much of it is unpleasant, downright horrible, but we can filter out the 'messy bits' to learn more about how to live in the now.

Part of our history is what happened to members of the Bloomsbury Group, the forerunners of the publishing company that brought us Rowling's Harry Potter. Members of the Bloomsbury group of the 1920's travelled to Fontainbleu Castle in France where they studied under a man called G. It was G who used the term wiseacreing with reference to much of what he heard coming from so-called experts or thinkers. Do you know who G was?

Often I do not link the reader to the best of links. Some load slowly. Others present downright disgusting material. And, still others seem off the mark. I apologize. One of my main aims is to bring the reader to realize that there are many points of view. It is not just that we benefit from reading things that we can disagree with, but we are shocked by what we read. This shocking of our sensibilities is a Gurdieffian method that helps us wake up out of our complacency. Without shocks we fall asleep and never really feel awake to the now.

Mugwumping - A Verbal Art

When I first heard this expression, I laughed. I was sitting in my office in Wimbledon as an employee of Ronald Brech Inc a company of economic advisers. My boss was Ronald Brech, a former editor of the Economist during the time of the Great Second War when they rationed paper, used it on me during a serious corporate discussion. He said, "Arthur! Don't be such a mugwump. I want to know what you really think. Explain yourself." I was highly amused. "What on earth does mugwumping mean," I wondered. I knew what a mug was, or thought I did. My thoughts were about the look on one's face, a look of someone silly, mistaken, or full of himself. I thought, "Well! I can't really argue with that. He has a point." But, I was wrong.

Ronald Brech was a wonderful professional economist to work for. I had got my job arriving three hours late for my appointment wearing a trilby. Marjory, his secretary, burst out laughing, the minute I poked my head in the door. It was quite off putting, but I survived a three hour interview and meal at a local pub. Ronald's brother, Edward, is and was an eminent business management consultant and Ronald himself, an economist, had a history of business problem solving behind him. Ronald worked with Patrick Rivett an expert in Operations Research. Together, Ronald, Edward and Patrick were a formidable team of experts in their fields. Ronald was considered the best in the business of providing economic and business advice to companies in the real world. He kept up his contacts in the economist and publishing world and had regular jaunts to the Reform Club in London, an exclusive men's club, where men talked about important issues if you remember Filias Fogg and Around the World in Eighty Days.

Ronald had a list of exclusive clients in a range of vastly different industrial sectors. His world and speciality was the real economy, the workplace of ordinary people, where the real work was being done to pay for Britain's imbalance of payments. It was not the comfortable world of banking that I would join years later with armchair advice and peekaboo analysis.

Ronald's world was an in depth world and he understood it better than any other person alive. An he still does! I was so lucky to join this world working for him, despite my wugmump attitude. We referred to the client companies by code and used their code names in discussions, never their real names. It gave the work a sense of mystery and importance, which of course, it was. I just never really understood how important it was being with a true master of forecasting and analysis. Me, a very wet young 22 with a green masters degree at the baby age of 21. Supposedly, I was a sophisticated statistician, or econometrician, to be more exact. Reality was that I was raw and full of chaotic unpolished ideas. My world was a world of numbers, facts, and mathematical statistics. I would attend evening classes at Birkbeck College and study under the biometrician Cox, who regarded economic statistics with contempt. It was excellent training. Ronald, himself was the Chairman of the Institute of Statisticians, in London, England. He nurtured me through the maze of economic and statistical analysis techniques that even today are state-of-the-art. I could work as an economic consultant, but I am aware of mugwumping, of fence sitting. What Ronald taught me was that it is important to take a view, to get off the fence, to let others have something to measure against even if you know you are wrong or dealing with uncertainty.

I have taught econometrics to some of the best economists in the world. but they were no good until they stopped mugwumping. I would use a technique of Ronald Brech which he referred to as figure less accounting, 'figgaless,' which meant that you had to decide whether some economic variable was going to be more +, less -, or unchanged =. From there you went on to learn how to arrive at an actual percentage change that was credible. I went on to use forecasting techniques learned at Ronald Brech that made future employers many millions.

Yarning - A Verbal Art

Yarning

Telling a sea yarn is an ancient skill and pasttime. We have many of the stories that were told by the many boys and men sailing seas during the four hundred years leading up to the twentieth century. Mariners continue to spin yarns as the while away hours and days.

Spending many months on the waves of vast oceans with many hours confined to vessel with a group of sailors provided an environment in which the imagination grabbed hold. The many hours of sailing would pass into days, the days into weeks, the weeks into months, and occasionally the months into years before a sailor was reunited with his family.

Often, the best yarns were about actual events on board boat. A vessel at sea was a dangerous unpredictable place. In the West end of English Channel storms coming off the Atlantic would regularly blow up suddenly bringing waves over twenty feet.

Inevitably, there would be monster storms with wave over thirty feet, and occasionally during and after the hurricane season, there would be waves within waves within waves within waves within waves, coming from a multitude of directions. In a hurricane there would be a depression, there would be waves coming from one direction for a period and there would be waves coming from another direction for a period all caused by the devastating force of unbelievably strong winds that set currents in motion all across the Atlantic to die down, no one knows where.

The job of the Captain was to use his complete authority in order to have all stations of his command operating smoothly and as a concerted team. In rough weather, the slap of the large waves against the sides of the vessel often tipped it violently forward and back, and from one side to another.

The larger the vessel the greater could be the opposite motion as a wave left a clift edge over which the ship would tumble, not always straight down, but frequently at an angle.

A sailor would develop sea legs that would adjust his balance automatically to the motion of the boat, however, his body could not know the complex patterns of the sea waves slamming the ship up and down, over and about.

My Own Yarn

I once sailed the Atlantic in the proud vessel, the Empress of England. This cruise liner had sailed from Montreal many a time and was used to the waters of the Eastern seaboard. My voyage in 1968 was from the St. Lawrence seaway port of Montreal to the mighty port of Liverpool, England.

It was November 1968, and a hurricane was dying out in the Atlantic. On shore, no-one could guess what was happening hundreds off miles out to sea. The hurricane had not touched land and people breathed a long sigh of relief. A similar event hit the Atlantic in 2000. Another, in 1991. People use the analogy of the monster or perfect storm to describe events in their work.

My experience was that of monster waves as tall as skyscrapers hitting the vessel at half hour intervals. Easily as tall as the vessel itself, the waves made one feel that one was in a rowing boat instead of a huge ship. Our captain wisely allowed the waves to hit the vessel from the side and not head on, as the USS France was doing to its regret. In any event, he probably had no choice because of the difficult of shifting direction of such a large vessel, even with half an hour intervals. Every half hour for about three days, the ship would tip on its side about 30 or more degrees.

On impact of the wave, everyone sitting in chairs on one side of the lounges which were the width of the ship would slide the ships width to the other side. The vessel would then right itself by tipping in the opposite direction, and people would slide backwards to the opposite side. For each wave there were about five such reversals of direction until the ship regained level balance.

I was fortunate that I did not suffer from sea sickness. Nor did I fear the storm because I trusted the Captain and the ship. I was able to run around and help passengers get to their rooms, or pick them up off the floor.

One passenger at night in an outer edge cabin, was tossed out of his bed by a sideward hitting wave that caused the ship to turn on its side. He was thrown onto a cubbard door at the foot of his bed. As the ship turned on its opposite side, he was tossed back into bed. Immediately, the ship adjusted again its balance by tipping in the opposite direction on its side and the passenger was thrown out of his bed onto the cubboard door once again. The ship corrected itself and the passenger was thrown back into bed, but this time the cubboard door flung open and all its contents flew onto the bed with the passenger. As the ship again righted itself, the passenger was thrown back towards the cubboard door, but this time it was open and the passenger ended up inside the cubboard. The door of the cubboard closed behind him and he was knocked unconscious as it slammed his head. The following morning, he was found locked inside the cubboard sleeping soundly.

We Remember Some English Authors and Illustrators

Tom Adams
John Agard
Allan Ahlberg
Quentin Blake
Enid Blyton
Raymond Briggs
Dick Bruna
Johnny Bull
Graham Clarke
Beryl Cook
Anne Fine
Michael Foreman
Tudor Humphries
Dick King-Smith
A.W. Lake - Wuh Lax
Flora McLachlan
Colin McNaughton
A.A. Milne - Winnie the Pooh
Terry Pratchett
Philippa Pearce
Gervase Phinn
Beatrix Potter - Peter Rabbit
Philip Pullman
Ronald Searle - St. Trinians
Earnest H. Shepherd - Pooh
Michael Rosen
J.K.Rowling - Harry Potter
Nick Sharrat
Mary Tourtel - Rupert Bear
Jacqueline Wilson
Benjamin Zephaniah

The Al Gore Phenomenon

What a turn of events! Al Gore would have made a better president than George Bush. I think many of us can agree on that. American history is littered with lost opportunities, events that defy logic and end up in tragedy. While my mind is on the process of how wars come to dominate political thinking, I can't help but think of the idiocy of the American involvement in the civil war of Viet Nam, which President John F. Kennedy, had he lived, would probably have understood much better than Lyndon B. Johnson.

Similarly, it does not take two heads knocked together to realize that Al Gore would probably have understood what was going on in the minds of those involved in the events in New York and Washington. These events were on US soil, and they did have American involvement. Britain came into the present war on terrorism as a partner in that war, but as a more experienced partner having endured for many decades the activities of conflicting groups in Northern Ireland fostered in part by American money coming from New York.

This blog is not to praise Al Gore, but to speculate on the issues of peace, technology and religion, now that it has become clearer that America has assumed a new direction, a much more positive direction. Positive because both the Republicans and Democrats making up America realize that the directions the country has taken under George Bush in war, science, social issues, and religion, were neither enlightened, nor particularly recommendable. Bush's Christian faith must be likened to that of many leaders who did bad things while saying God was on their side. Obviously, God was on Bush's side because he is a richer man, but I don't think Jesus Christ would have been. No, I think Jesus would have been more on the side of Al Gore, but I don't want to put too much of a fine point on that.

The Seeds of War

What is the Pattern of the Planting of War?

It used to be a joke in Montreal that the cement companies, who were controlled by certain Italian interests that had migrated from Chicago required a good project every five or so years. The price of cement was pushed up to $15 from a cost of $5, and a cement tower is added to cream more profit. Thus, we had the St. Lawrence Seaway project, EXPO 67, the Jacques Cartier bridge repair, Mirabelle Airport, Man and His World, the highways to Ottawa and Ontario, the great Hydro projects of northern Quebec, the Liberation of Quebec from Canada, the Unifying of Quebec with Canada.

Canada today is a rather peaceful place and there are those that have recognized the seeds of war and have struggled to exterminate them, put an end to the cycle of destruction. It is possible for strong nations to live together without killing each other without planting the seeds of war in the minds of young people. There will always be those who try, who bribe to have guns, who create the atmosphere of terror and the feelings of hopelessness that are the fields where the seeds of war are planted.

One knew that there was something going on behind the scenes and that our surroundings were being engineered by people who you might have met on the street who never gave you space to pass and whose mothers had hit you with an umbrella. You see them climb aboard the Rue St. Laurent bus without paying for their ticket, entering in by the back door. You know how to avoid them by sitting well away from the doors and leaving seats that you know will be filled by the criminals who go nameless, but who cast large shadows wherever they occupy space, even in darkness. The are the shadows of the dark, the killers of the peace and there are many like them that go nameless and who benefit from killing people.

In the same way, you know that wars do not come by accident, but that they are sown and that they are sown deliberately or unconsciously, but nevertheless, sown like weeds the seeds of war are sown and the bear fruit with the killing and destruction of the children whose parents have planted those seeds, the neighbour kids, or the many unknown friends of other high schools, rivals in sport competitions. The really big wars are those that take a generation cycle of about 15 to 20 years, or about the length of time between the first and second World Wars beginning 1914 and 1939.

The UN, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were created to dampen the growth of the seeds of war. Excessive monetary growth, debt, inflation, unemployment, unresolved homeland issues, territorial disputes between religions, environmental deprivation, fence and wall building, intolerance of differences provide the fuel for the seeds of war and the fields on which the children of war fight. The parents sacrifice their children in the process of feeding the needs of the seeds of war.

Without the war fields, wars could not exist, and that is why there are those who nurture the seeds and the killing fields of war, who hide away from the sources of the devastation they are in the process of feeding. They do nothing to stop inflation and debt creation or they call it something else. They lower interest rates while encouraging people and nations to undertake more debt. While the IMF in surveillance of the world economy tries to dampen the seeds of war, some of the Members Countries of the organization are quietly building the machinery for the next conflict, or they say nothing about stopping the processes that lead to war.

You are possibly chuckling to yourself quietly at your computer. Nervously perhaps, your brain is trying to put together a pattern that you know in your heart, in your feeling centres is very relevant to life and survival. You cannot but be conscious of the seeds of war and the way they grow to become full fledged killing fields. Once the seeds are planted, it may take up to 20 years before the children are ready to be slaughtered on the battlefield, or the innocents be gunned down or bombed out of existence. You know that some of the so called peace makers have sown the seeds and have big investments in the machinery of war, and that they call these investments defensive postures or military protection or home land security. Yes! It takes about twenty years for the seeds to grow into destructive monsters that have their own momentum and cannot be stopped.

I call this process the S-curve of war. The lower part of the S may be flat and long, but it soon rises very rapidly as the competition to prepare for war begins, the plant has germinated and beneath the surface all the machinery of war is being prepared in labs and on personal computers. The pattern of the growth of the war process is lognormal, which means that there is competition that pushes the participants forward in time to create a crescendo of hardware and software (people) capability. Like a huge wave the process of war rises rapidly higher and higher faster and faster then crashes down around us.

What makes the scale of war?

The seeds of war are planted, but the scale of the conflict depends on the size of the killing fields that have been prepared for the children to die on. Young people are nurtured into the process of war by being fed stories and information concerning the food that the war cycle needs if it is to grow. Inflation's are the food of war. People lose their value systems quickly and are drawn into thinking that the only way to end inflation is to have an almighty war, kill inflation while killing the innocents and the children. Yes! That might kill inflation because there are less mouths to feed and hearts to satisfy. Such is the logic of the S-curve of war. The scale of war depends on the amount of fuel fed to those that might participate and the growth of a new generation to be killed. A big war requires lots of dead bodies, and these are the youth who fight the war, or the innocent children in hallways, living rooms, or streets that are killed when the war machinery is put into motion.

Transparency of Peace

In contrast to war, peace arises when the fuels of war are absent; inflation is low, debt is low, shortages do not occur, there is no secret police, public or private army stock piling the machinery of war, the press is like the Christian Science Monitor focusing on the positive, governments shelve military spending and build mass transport systems instead, money retains its value, speculation in fuels cease.

The Outlook for Peace is not Good

The present outlook for peace is not good. The seeds of the next war have already been planted and the processes towards a major international conflict has begun in earnest. Children are growing up and new ones are born to be killed in the killing field of S-curve of war in the period 2020-2025. Inflation and debt, depreciating value of currency, lack of monetary leadership and controls, armaments creation, fear mongering, shortages of basic commodities, alterations in the makeup of war economies, rising unemployment, inability to finance health care and pensions, dismantling of the UN, World Bank and IMF organizations and redirection of focus was from the seeds and fuels of war, religious competition, and territorial competition, lack of hope, and reduction in the braking forces that would slow down the s-curve to war.

Yes! A big war is on its way, make no mistake, many children will be killed, unless!

I leave it to you to help unravel the s-curve to the next great war. You want the children of this generation to live, don't you?

Overcoming Architectural Limitations With New Technology

The February issue of Technology Review has an interesting note by William J. Mitchell on architecture, entitled "Build from Scratch." Innovation in architecture is really possible! What we presently live in and with are building and environmental designs that with resemble hideous ideological concoctions of the worse art forms.

As Mitchell correctly writes architecture is not determined by technology, but the architect can use technology to reflect received ideology. Do we want an archtectural nightmare going on about us. Who chooses the designs for buildings, their location and their fitness for a location? Do the builders even think about anything other than making a short term profit?

I have strong preferences for how we could be creating community environments. This is not to say that I do not like the architecture that I see going up around me, but I really wonder how much time is spent in design and in consideration of wider comfort issues. What I think we need is design that helps us live longer and healthier. I am disappointed with design that adds stress and shocks the system.

We have all heard of cultural shock. Many of us get used to a specific architectural and environmental design and find it difficult to live with anything new. In my ideal world, the edges would be softer and kinder to the eyes. My world would be like a cinetographers ideal world in which I would be transported in my mind to peaceful things. Perhaps the reason that we have so much violence in our world is because we do not love it as it is.

We hate the architecture that we see around us and we want to destroy it and everything that reminds us of it. Had we the love for our world and could we change it into something closer to our dreams, we would perhaps be less likely to want to destroy it. An example would be the presence of flowing water, comfortable banks alongside streams that can be waded in, where pets can wander and places where children can play safely. Can we not design technology for our urban areas that helps us achieve such environments, or are they unrealizable dreams?

Modelling the Diffusion of Technology by TNCs

It has been some time since I even thought about work on technology diffusion and competitive responses of firms moving plant and research from the US to the UK that I undertook in the early 1970s.

Some of this has been published and republished and is available for download on the internet.

One of my articles is available as part of a Google book published through the UN Center for the study of activities of transnational corporations, see diffusion of technology or technology. My articles on inward investment to the UK by US companies in the semiconductor and in the pharmaceutical industries is available on the National Bureau of Economic Research NBER site.

I think this type of research is still state-of-the-art encorporating as it does a way to examine competition using a non-linear model of diffusion. The model combines two types of simple averages, those of position and rate of change, with data on number of expected entrants, their size, previous innovational/copy cat history and other characteristics.

Renovation or Innovation

The February "Technology Review" a magazine published by MIT since 1899 has an editorial by Jason Pontin, who some will remember for his writing in the "Red Herring." Jason's editorial focuses on the geography of innovation and he correctly points to locations of culture and methodology and innovative hubs where there has been difficulty with the innovative process. He mentions the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development as a think tank on innovation. As a former consultant to that think tank and a researcher of knowledge creation and innovation in the pharmaceutical industry, Jason's ideas caught my attention.

There is possibly no better way to understand the innovative process than by reading the many writings of Joseph Schumpeter, the famous Harvard economist of the 1930's. Schumpeter's ideas caught the imagination of economists and propelled innovation in the field of economics itself. What Schumpeter emphasized was the role of new men in the process of innovation, men without the habits of earlier technologies. What Schumpeter was looking for was a cluster of innovations occurring together that would produce an economic upswing and a reversal of the decline in the profit rate.

Schumpeter was claiming that Karl Marx had got the dynamics of the economy all wrong and that innovation produced economic cycles. Marx's notion that it was the issue of capital accumulation which led to immiserization growth was extremely limited, if only because the economic mix of labour and capital was not governed by a linear mathematics, but a non-linear mathematics, one much more difficult to predict and one which could lead to higher profit rates rather than gradually declining profit rates. The key to a new profit stream was new products and new processes.

Innovation in the modern economy usually involves a new division within an existing company. There may be 'new' men or women involved. but they have a different vision of the product or process they are using in order to make a profit.

Occasionally, innovation may require only a new application of an existing product with a minor modification of specifications, such as dosage for pharmaceuticals.

Innovation as Jason correctly states requires a liberal attitude of management because there will be many strikes before home runs.

These figured dominantly in capitalist economic growth but at that time few had researched the process now best called economic development. Innovation and development go hand in hand. What really brought about the end to Communist economics was the fact that innovation occurs in products as well as processes, and that capitalism is driven by a creative destruction of existing productive capacity for both products and processes.

Schumpeter's definition of innovation was that it brought about a fundamental restructuring of the producing or processing base of an economy, and nearly always resulted in higher profits. Innovation was commercial activity that took place after invention and involved a significantly new technology.

What follows innovation is imitation activity or renovation of an existing technology for a product or process. Obviously, there is going to be questions asked whether innovation has occurred or renovation. The best way to tell is to look at the underlying processes that make up the earlier technology and the direction that the technology is applied. Much innovation is accomplished without obvious profit though an examination of value added might be helpful. What you will find is that even innovation involves building on previous technology structures, e.g. tiny transistors superseded large electronic valves; LED's may supersede fluorescent bulbs, and so on.

Much insight into the role of multinational firms and innovation has come from the work of Professor John Dunning who was the former chairman of the EIBA.

The Great Sleep

The political leaders of North America from rich oil producing regions sleep away on design and implementation of environment, health, and science and technology programs. Look at the cut backs and lack of interest in adequately funding and developing the new fusion technologies. Oil interests rule so completely that speculators, including the oil people themselves, know which commodities to speculate with using US dollars that don't know where else to go. We are witnessing another round of speculation as Bush seeks to grab as much as he can before leaving office. This means that the rest of the world will have to assume a bigger role. Watch British Petroleum try to grab Iraq's oil as the country is trying to stand on its feet. Watch Exxon grab its share and enhance its billions of profits that could be used for non-polluting energy sources and healthier environments for all creatures. Why should beef and petroleum oil win every time when they are so uncool.

China is obviously well placed to become the world's largest economy and its currency may ultimately join the US dollar in a basket of preferred currencies of use as people scramble for security in storing economic value. China will join countries that invest overseas and its influence will spread now more rapidly as America hangs leaderless.

Russia is once again in an economic leadership opportunity and should use its oil resources wisely. America's tactic would be to provoke Russia into another arms race which would mean a squandering of Russia's opportunity to gain the major world leadership spot. Putin is probably the only leading politician worldwide, who can claim to be on the right track despite his stance of refusing to share power, probably wise in view of Russia's history of internal conflict and inability to self govern democratically. Its not that the Russian people are not democratic. They are probably too democratic. Its that they don't now how to organize a parliament that balances forward and backward forces adequately.

Wise use of the revenues of Russian oil, unlike the crazy use by Britain, USA, and Canada of their oil revenues, will give Russia the longed for opportunity to join the big six as world economic powers. What will determine the outcome is whether Putin can engineer or encourage a society of level headed individuals who can see through the American corporate game plans for acquiring dominance in world energy.

Its a question of oil and guns. Will the world buy more guns? Will the world continue in its addiction to oil as its energy source. There are alternatives, but the leaders of the world are not pointing in those directions at all. Just watch and listen to what they say and decide for yourself.

Removing Fences to Give Wild Animals A Chance

We don't usually think about fences as being a sea change in the fight for survival of wild animals. Often it is the barriers that humans use to protect themselves and their domesticated livestock whether animal or foul, which makes older ways of life impossible, especially living with animals that need to roam. I am not a vegetarian, but I do think that if we were too become plant eaters of quality plants rather than genetic rubbish, we could add to the richness and variety of our natural environments, those that are close to home.

More specifically, I remember as a child that in the town where I grew up there were few fences and lots of places for kids to roam and pick fruit of the neighbourhood, but going back there as an adult there were loads of fences and very little in the way of fruit. What have we done to our neighbourhood environments? Have we made them more like fortresses than homes. Do our kids walk out the back door into nature or are they penned up like zoo creatures? Have our cities become human zoos?

I think they have!

LED Lightbulbs with an Almost Infinite Life

They are here in Canada in Walmart stores and you can buy them for about $13 a bulb that runs cold and lasts almost for ever (100,000 hours is an understatement). It is an amazing technological story that has the promise that it can save the earth if we all act now and replace our existing light bulbs with LEDs as they come on stream. The fluorescent replacements to incadescent are a big improvement, but the LEDs are the 'major' leap forward.

The fun thing about LEDs is that they can be programmed with artificial intelligence to assume almost any colour of light imaginable and you don't risk the burning your house down. For pennies a year, you can light your home. Can you imagine how this technology will transform our world!

Those interested in promoting LEDs and LED technology can subscribe to a free magazine.

The Grand Assise

I was once a junior civil servant given the task of doing whatever I was told. It seems strange now to look back on it, but the issue of world debt has been an issue with me for much of my career in government and private industry.

Significantly, I remember an assignment that has a familiar ring about it in the age of American debt. My task was to help the former Prime Minister of Canada, the Honourable Lester B Pearson with a project that he had undertaken to reduce world debt.

My task was to send messages to world leaders inviting them to what Lester referred to as 'The Grand Assise.' This was to be a meeting at which the world experts and leaders on debt was discuss ways to solve the global debt issue. The Pearson Commission and its efforts as it became known was Canada's way of assisting in the process of trying to address the issue of debt.

I remember in particular, that in this period of cold war, the Russians were unwilling to sit at the table.

The pledges made by industrially advanced countries to channel assistance to developing countries has had mixed success. Africa remained debt ridden because industrial nations would not trade with Africa fairly fearful of trade unions and lass of jobs. What we have now is an Africa that is struggling despite the discovery of mineral riches. The industrial nations have not understood the nature of African communities and have in competition between themselves caused more problems for Africa.

While it was possible for many new medicines to be developed for African people, this has not been done because the shareholders of the big pharmaceutical companies do not want lower profit rates even though this would help the dying communities of Africa. Such lack of foresight as to the role of the medicine and medical industries has made Africa the carrier of debt unable to meet its role in a balanced way within the world economy. The Pearson vision of an Africa able to stand positively on its own feet was not realized. Africa has been plundered for profits and its environments and peoples depleted. It is time that the world did something to really end poverty in Africa and it must come though health and educational programs that address the real issues of African politics and way of life. Help!

Debt as a Cause of Wars

Over the past year, I have been engaged in taking the first steps towards making a film of the Wuh Lax stories and "The Cosmic Lantern." This is an enormous challenge and theoretically beyond the budget of the most determined independent film producers.

I suppose the mistake of a film producer would be to underestimate the vision that The Cosmic Lantern contains. This is not just a story but a series of stories with enormous potential. It hits at the heart of western civilization with its emphasis on performance above all else. It challenges the audience with the economics of debt which provide an explanation of why otherwise peaceful communities are drawn into war.

Examine what is happening in United States right now and you will see the destruction of a society from within because of debt. Debt management is the forgotten science that will become our futures and will protect us as we deal with a global environmental crisis. Make no mistake about it, debt is potentially the greatest source of misery historically, and it the bane of our modern society. Debt creation brought about the first and second great wars. It brought about the invasion of Britain in Roman times.

Debt creation and the slave system attached to debt is what will destroy the fragile but false harmony of the post war period. When one examines the causes of the second world war, one sees at the heart of it the demands by France for a repayment of war debts. In the case of the first world war, the countries of Britain and Germany got themselves into so much debt building huge ships to destroy each other in gun boat diplomacy that they lost the delicate balance of peace in a mad rush to eliminate national debts by means of conquest. Yes! Debt is the remarkable destructive engine of war and misery.

So! What does this have to do with "The Cosmic Lantern" and a story that focuses on the period of 50 AD. Well, the story about Wuh and his family is a story about how those driven by debt destroy a happy balanced community forever. It is a story of triumph over a horrible period of genocide and enslavement that has remained hidden outside of history for two thousand years. In the filming thus of "The Cosmic Lantern," there is a desire to make people aware of the forces in the modern world and the potential negative political consequences of debt, which are to destroy all that is valuable and lovable in society.

Debt kills. Debt is a monster process that leads to war, to conquest, to greed, and to ultimate destruction of beauty and peace. Debt is the Anti-Christ, the Armageddon, that threatens to destroy our civilization. If we want to leave in freedom, we must educate our children about the consequences of debt and what it does to societies destroying them from within and destroying everything around them that is wholesome and positive. Being lazy in our attitude about debt will only lead to our own destruction and that of the future of our children and of the earth itself.

Explaining the Wu of Wooh

As readers are undoubtedly aware, the author of this blog, AW Lake, is also the author of the very successful book "Wuh Lax and the Cosmic Lantern." The leading character of the book, which is the first of a series of books featuring a large cast of characters, is Wuh Lax, who is a mythological character. I say mythological, but the irony of it is that Wuh is an archetypal hero with a very great presence. As my stories unfold, the devoted readers of the series will become aware that Wuh, the mythological individual, really does exist on an ethereal plane. This is why the books are aimed at the ethereally challenged. But, I should explained a bit about what is meant by the ethereally challenged?

Most of us are ethereally challenged. Wu-wu is a pre-Taoist state in which there is absolutely nothing. Out of the state of wu-wu comes the Tao. The Cosmic Lantern is a story about the new physics. The ethereally challenged include all those reading in the area of the new physics. Scientists are on the threshold of discovering that the cosmic concept of the big bang has to be re-written through revelation coming from both science and inspiration. In reality the concept of the big bang is as much a mythology of science as it is of religion. In the beginning, God did not create our universe. There is very good reason.

The state of wu, of complete nothingness, is a myth, Similarly while Christian creationism spells the mythology of God creating the universe, the Taoists spell out their mythology which results in Ying and Yang. Both are inspired by man's quest to unveil the mysteries of the universe. I say this knowing that my father was a Christian minister, a missionary, and a devout believer in a personal relationship with Christ. His reality was based on an inner transformation that he very successfully documented in a series of daily writings and readings. He insisted that one could come to know God through inner transformation arising from what one saw and read.

It was the ethereal departure of my father, that brought me to create Wuh and to explore those regions of our existence that are rarely explored because our mythologies about truth get in the way. My father was also a devout student of human nature and knew the secret of dancing with God. This is what wu is all about, dancing with the truth. Our fate is that we will never know the truth of what has happened or what is going to happen. That does not stop us from creating our mythology of what the truth is all about and then believing our mythology, and indeed experiencing it as our reality.

God exists, but God exists in the wu, and is the all pervading essense of being, fullness or emptiness depending on whether your glass is half full or half empty. Wu is all about attitude, about dancing with God, about dancing with the unknowable truth. From where do I get my knowledge?

For many years at Cambridge University in England, I studied the nature of invention and knowledge, how it arose and what happened with it. My studies were focused on knowledge creation as it applied to the science of economics, but that did not stop me from understanding the bigger picture. While a student at Cambridge in the early 1970s , some of my fellow students had a little red book that they carried around with them all the time. They constantly spoke to me about Mao and his words, how important they made them feel. They had purpose and direction. To them Chairman Mao spoke the truth and they were not going to listen to anything that I said concerning that truth. Instead my response was to give them a book about the Tao, which I said contained more truth than Mao's little red book. Gary Zukav in his book, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, wrote that science and religion are only dances, and that those involved in these enterprises might claim to be seeking the truth but their reality is that they as dancers and love to dance.

I invented Wuh, but wu is a magician and a worker of miracles. My task was to let him perform those miracles in the minds of my readers. Aloha and Uweeeee!

America's Economic Prospects for the Longer Term

No one wants to hear the bad news. Everyone puts their head in the sands and waits for the stampede to pass. This time it won't be like that. The process of adjustment for America will be slow and arduous as it has been for countries in the Far East. We once called these countries the economic tigers of Asia. Suddenly, they became devalued and we saw goods appearing on our shelves some 25 to 50 percent lower in cost than before. America went crazy with imports and the goods from Asia flowed in like a dam burst of the ice age. Now, its America's turn. Few would recall that the Asian crisis was a result of firms in Asia locking on to the dollar and borrowing until the cows came home.

What they did not expect then was a sudden uplift in the US dollar that would raise the cost of their borrowing repayment stream. Does anyone think that the low interest charges of the present approach to the credit crisis in America will not lead to further misery down the road. Oh please think again because you have not thought it through. Ask yourself what will happen when the interest rates go up and what will happen when the US dollar appreciates. Then act wisely and cautiously in this mad world of floating exchange rates. Act so that you will not be burned yet again by a failed strategy.

America's Failed Economic and Political Policies

Economic policies of the United States over the years of the Bush administration threaten to push the world economy into severe recession and damage prospects for solution to many of the world's energy problems. Why be optimistic about the prospects for solving the world environmental crises when the United States, which should be leading the world forward, has made such a wonderous mess of things? Most disasterous of all is the way the unfair distribution of incomes has hit intelligent and willing people who are in need of resources to participate more effectively in the modern economic age.

There was a time when the Euro was weaker than the US dollar. The fact that the exchange value of the Euro has reached 1.5 should set off alarm bells that America's economic policies come from the scrap heap of economic thought. The current policies threaten stability in the world economy with a return to the beggar thy neighbour approach to macro economics of the depression era. What we are really talking about is the prospect that American economic policies are pushing the world economy towards a major depression. This is not depression by default, but an engineered depression by design. If one examines the record of the Bush administration with its focus on oil economics and politics that have thrown many progressive countries of the Middle East into an economic wasteland, one has to wonder whether the President and his men read at all. Its no excuse that other economic forces overtook the administrations policies. Its more accurate to say that the policies were deeply flawed from the get go. Lets be honest. The economic record of the past half decade has not been anything like it could have been. Bush's people have failed on science, religion, energy policy, Middle-East politics, housing, disaster recovery, interest rates and genuine home ownership instead of speculative rental ownership, inflation, genetic engineering, the search for alternative energy sources. How can anyone support such a failure of application of policy?

What is American doing now other than implementing beggar thy neighbour economics at the expense of Europe? Have these people lost their senses? Or, have they lost their sense of direction? Is policy now just a mishmash of old ideas from failed individuals, but rich ones working for their own selfish interests. Where are the genuine American statesmen?

Breathing, Longer Life and Better Stomach and Small Intestine Health

As the body ages many of the underlying processes of good health that we taken for granted weaken and even fail. It is important to understand that you can take a proactive stance to slow down your own aging process. Of greatest importance is your ability to breath deeply. Without strong breathing, you weaken for first line of defense against depleted health. Whenever you can, no matter what age, practice breathing. Without oxygen in your lungs to feed your heart, you will find that the body cannot do all the other things it needs to do. Oxygen to the heart keeps you alive, so breath to get the air deeply into your lungs below your diaphragm and into your back area.

It is extremely important to keep your stomach in good health. You need to be under constant vigilance to know whether you have any food allergies. Sometimes you stomach may have ulcers, which are often the result of the helicobacter pylori bacterium. Zinc carnosine is a supplement that is used in Canada and USA to help bring about a balance of the mucosal lining cells of the stomach and small intestine. It is used in Japan, where treatment of stomach ulcers by stronger doses of zinc and carnosine has been very successful. Cranberry juice and licorice are also ways to fight deterioration of the stomach.

Who or What is God? Life and Laws!

You may be asked, "Do you believe in God?"

If someone asks you the question its because they are not sure themselves because if they were sure then the question would be irrelevant, like asking someone if they believed in wind. The existence of wind would be obvious as would the existence of God.

The fact that many people ask the question whether God exists may mean that they are unsure whether they themselves exist.

Is God Dead?

The "God is Dead" discussion in the 1970s was about whether a particular definition of God was acceptable to people because many could not see evidence of God according to that definition. The fear was that the established church would lose adherents if people attending church could not experience a meaningful God, or God did not exist for them.

If we examine the question of whether God exists from what we now know of the scientific process, the religious process, the spiritual process, and the mythological process, we have to say that opinions differ greatly. The fact that people do frequently ask the question and people are nervous about how others will interpret their response means that we have a long way to go as a community of minds.

Did God Create Life?

Everyone believes that life exists and that the basis of their life is really something that should be preserved at all costs. There is within normal healthy people the desire to live and an empathy for life in general. This is to be expected because it is pretty obvious. Even though almost all people believe in life, there are many who would rather skip the notion that life in general is a good thing. Such people take a very narrow view of life and act as though only their selection of life matters.

Almost everyone knows that laws exist. Even though laws exist many people behave as if they don't. Observing other people's behaviour may not be a good way to judge whether they believe in something. Many people will behave as though all the laws do not exist. They will be selective about which laws they will obey because they know that for those laws, there is little escape from punishment if the laws are broken. So the question is whether God is a Law or, a Set of Laws that should not be broken?

Are there Laws About Life that We Cannot Break?

Many people behave as if God is nothing to do with Laws or a Set of Laws. Does this matter?
What we do know is that there exists a set of laws that we cannot break. These are physical laws. Is God the set of physical laws that we cannot break?

Another set of laws has to do with living entities, such as human beings and the laws of life that seem to govern our planet. We as a world community are pretty ignorant, even stupid, when it comes to understanding the laws of life that govern our planet. It is pretty obvious that we have failed miserably in understanding life laws. Most life laws are invisible to us. Could it be that we don't see God even though God may exist and may have some influence on the laws governing life. Are we that stupid?

Probably yes!