Robert Paterson's Weblog

The New Food Plate - This will be imposed on your kids school - why it is wrong

If your school in the US and coming here in Canada - wishes to still receive funding - it will have to obey the new Food Plate.

But what if the Food Plate is wrong? 

If you think I am nuts - then start here.

 

What went wrong? Why are we in such trouble? Where do we go now?

How did we get here? And where can we work to get ourselves out of this jam? Our food system is the system that drives our society - how our food system evolved in the 20th century took us here - and how we work to change it will take us home.

Here is the chapter in my book The Fractal History of Mankind that shows us how our food system in the 20th century took us to this place.

It picks up after the American Revolution - when a new dream of a just society was enacted that really did offer liberty and freedom. We see how this liberty and freedom was lost by a new food system! When we understand THIS, then we are equipped to see what we have to do to find a better system.

So here is the Pattern of the world that is now dying around us - here is how the process began and here is how it ends.

The Queen Street Commons - Helping very small businesses - Our Emerging Mission

When we started the Queen Street Commons back in 2005, we were like many Co-Working places - mainly focused on offering very small businesses (1-5 people) a very good space to work in that had all the features of a large office with non of the politics and bullshit. We also hoped that there would be fellowship.

But now as the traditional economy craters and the "Job" in a large company is a dying idea with now 40% of people being "Free Agents", we are seeing a new role emerging for us. Here is the context.

For the last 50 years, the idea behind "development" on PEI was to bring large employers to PEI. Other than the triumph of VAC and the Tax Centre, none of these efforts have really transformed our economy.

Our kids leave because the big city is this dense network of opportunity. Big firms don't come or stay on PEI because we are not. This network diagram shows our reality. We have but one main connection to the main system - Ottawa!

So what then is the better course for PEI to take? I think it is to create a dense network of opportunity here at home. A dense network of the very small firms linked and connected in a network. For on our own, we are weak. But in a network we can be strong.

The Queen Street Commons is going to do its part here. One of the acts that we are taking right now is to set up a school of best practice for the very small business - where the focus is to share best practices in a number of critical fields that will make a very small business more successful.

Here is the first line up.

Our first session will be lead by Matt Sullivan. Matt is the owner of the site What is On PEI and is very plugged into many of the small enterprises on PEI.

Here is what his session will be about:- It's all about doing more for less and faster. 

Part 1. Products/Services that save you money:-incorporation (corpcanada.ca)-VoIP (Skype, Vonage)-PBX (evoice)-online fax (myfax.com)-e-commerce (paypal, evo)-mentors instead of hiring consultants (GCACC, GSACC, CYBF, or on your own)-co-working spaces (QSC)-online invoicing (Freshbooks)

Part 2. How to be tidy when on the run:-access documents from anywhere (Evernote)-CRM (Highrise, SugarCRM)-Project management software (Basecamp, On-Trak)

Part 3. Delegate to save you time:-virtual receptionists-crowdsource (crowdspring.com)-hire freelancers per project-outsource social media (Social Media Ghostwriters)

Suggested readings if you like this presentation:The 4 Hour Work WeekThe E-MythRe-work

You can sign up here.

What we can do is this:

 

Here is some research that reinforces my point:

Our world is dying - but a new one is being born - a better one #fractalhistory

This is the central proposition of my new book - That our culture - is part of a series of cultures that are shaped by food - energy - communication and tools sets that organize how we live - who has the power, where and how. I go further. I make the point that just as the proto human life has a series of mindset phases, it makes sense from a Fractal Perspective - that humanity also tracks this cycle.

If I am correct, we are ending our "Teen"" all about me" phase and are entering the next phase of Young Parenthood.

We are ending a phase where authority is located in the external power figure - the God, the Father and the CEO and is re-located in each of us. We are ending a phase where we have to conquer uncertainty and so nature to one where we become part of what is going on and re-connect in a knowledge filled way unknown to our predecessors with Nature and work with her as our ally.

So here is a quick heads up

Michael Rose - Luther - Pasteur?

A few times in history, a person sees something that changes everything.

I think that Michael Rose is part of that Pantheon. He has seen the true context for life and so the context for health. And it is not to take a pill.

Galileo saw a new perspective in the heavens that made it possible to understand where we lived and so to navigate our planet. Luther saw a new perspective about the relationship between man and God. This created the modern world. Louis Pasteur saw a new micro world that enabled us to understand infection.

All these 3 changed the context of man. Before them, we used false observation. We saw the sun rise and fall and knew that it must revolve around the world. We saw the glory of the church and knew that only through that door could we find God and our salvation. We smelt corruption and knew that disease must be passed by smells.

So long as we were confined by this limited context, we were stuck.

Many of our problems to day are related to how we understand how we operate in the world. We believe in the simple idea of cause and effect. In limited ways, this is not different from seeing the sun revolve around the Earth. Cause and effect DO give us a limited explanation

But we place all our faith in cause and effect and in a machine model. So medicine and health have been corrupted. Each part of the body, each problem is seen in this context. So each part of us is separate from the other. Each pathway is unique. 

What is off the table is the larger context of how evolution has shaped us and how it is our systems interaction with other systems that is the true reality.

The Sun does not revolve around us and the world is not flat. We are not parts of a machine. 

You can see how we would go nowhere if we still believed that the sun did revolve around the planet. Well we are going nowhere so long as we have the wrong context for how life really works. So here is Michael's introduction to how life and health really work. If you wish to go deep, here is the link to the introduction that will then lead you to the 55 Theses where Michael builds up the full case - where like Luther - he offers you the truth of who you are and so the ability to take your power back from the Medical Establishment

Why learning to trust ourselves and to know that we can keep ourselves healthy enables us to step off into Free Lance

Some of you have reminded me how hard it is to give up the idea of a Job. Many of us don't have much of a network outside of the workplace. Most do not have access to health insurance outside the workplace.

I want in this post to tell you a bit more about these barriers. And to offer you a real hope that you can overcome them.

No Network - I worked for 20+ years for a financial institution. It asked all of me. I had no energy left for much outside of work at all. My family was hanging on by a thread and I certainly had no network outside my work. I had clients etc but no group of trusted friends who had things on their mind that I shared. 

About 2 years before the bank and I parted ways, a good friend told me that all my signals were about how much I hated being in the system. This was a surprise to me! I was scared and angry to hear that. But after a few months realized that she was right. But what to do? I asked her if I should quit. She told me not to be stupid. "It's an institution Rob - they don't care one way or the other". Instead she advised me to create a new and parallel life outside the bank. I started to do a lot of public speaking about what I had learned about organizational design. I emerged in to the public eye as a thinker and not just another drone at the bank.

At the same time I was working on our healthcare costs at the ban. Why were so many so ill and why was this getting worse? So I began to get involved in the larger issues of health and I started to talk all the time with others who shared my concern. I did mini projects with them on my own time to help us make headway.

So one day the day of reckoning took place and I said the words that killed me. As I spoke them I knew that the bank would have to let me go. Of course they were very nice about it all - after all I was one of the boys - I was like the son who goes off the rails - still part of the club but you know the nutty one. They were very generous and civil.

The next day I started paid work with 2 of the people I had been working with before. I have never looked back.

I offer this story up to any of you who are feeling trapped "Inside". It's not a bad plan. You must create a real network with people who like and trust doing real things. Not your Facebook Friends. Real friends. Do just talking about stuff but DOING THINGS.

Now onto Health. I live in Canada and am blessed by living in a country where Health Care is not a barrier to free lancing. 

But what I have learned now - all connected to my work on health at the bank all those years ago - is that we can have a lot of control over our health. If we live our lives close to our evolved design. That means eat the diet we are evolved to do best on. Have a social and work life as we are evolved to do best in. And to inhabit our bodies and the world as we are designed to do best in.

If we do this - we are naturally healthy, Of course a car accident is another thing. But most of the risk we have to day is from the chronic diseases of the modern world that DO NOT EXIST AT ALL IN TRADITIONAL SOCIETIES THAT DO LIVE IN HARMONY WITH THEIR DESIGN.

This is why I have my other site - The Missing Human Manual and why I work with the Pasteur of our time, Professor Michael Rose.

There is a huge body of science behind this statement. Much of the Food and Pharma world wants you to rely on them. Just as a conventional employer needs you to rely on them too.

Luther changed the world 500 years ago by telling people that they could trust that they on their own could find salvation and God. That they did not have to use the church as the intermediary. Until then all in Europe had taken it for granted that ONLY the church could save their souls.

Is this not the same? If we organize differently, we can work with people we love and trust to do the things we need and offer to each other the things that are essential to life. If we live more like a Free Lancer we actually live more like a Hunter Gatherer. We have 4 million years of experience hard wired into us and we instinctively know how to be this person.

If we do this, we have our health too.

We lived for 4 million years and had good lives without the need for a job. We got out food, we had shelter, we raised our kids, we entertained each other. We can surely find a new way of taking all mof this back into our own hands now?

We are smart aren't we? That is why I post these little gems showing people who are doing this  - like urban farmers, 3D Printing, Pasture Farming etc.

I am not talking about putting on skins and living in caves. I am talking about using our ingenuity to use what we now know of how nature works to partner with her in gaining her help.

 

The End of the Job - The End of the Corporation as we know it

This slide says it all to me. In 1780, 80% of people did not have a Job. In fact the very idea of a Job was outside of the comprehension of most. Unless you were a peasant, how could you work using that kind of contract? Nearly all work was family centred. 

By 1980, nearly everyone had a Job. It is what all politicians worry about. If you don't have one, there must be something wrong with you.

But as you see, now 40% of us don't have a Job and the news this week suggests that soon there will be more.

When I see this, I don't see "no" Jobs. I see the end of the "Job" as the normal way we work and the end of the Corporation as we know it as the giant of the economy.

In their mature phase large corporations are really simple financial organizations. Whatever makes the money is what they do. First they move the jobs to low cost areas of the world. Then they take out even that labor. Then they use IP as a revenue stream. They make products that they know are bad for everyone and protect their position by buying the regulators.

They don't do much that is useful or real anymore.Worse, many of them make the world worse. I don't think that this is a plot. I think that this is an outcome of the design. If you were a CEO you would do the same thing.

What we can do is to stop worrying about the next Job. It wont come anyway. Start working instead on recreating an economy that is based on mobilizing all of us in networks to do the things that are useful. Such as feed us. Such as house us. Such as help us get well. Such as help our kids grow up well. You know all those boring things that we did not do when we had that really important job selling sugar water or shuffling paper.

It would help as well if politicians woke up too. The Jobs is dead and the large corporation is a vulture. Get behind your people and get behind real work that is going to make your place live again.

We need a new kind of capitalism. We have the workforce - let's get to it

A Fractal History of the World - Part 2 - Can Fractals Reveal the Shape of our Society/History?

One of the wonderful aspects of "seeing" fractals is that when we train our eye to see them, we can see the deep order in all natural systems. I propose that human lives and human societies are just as much a system as any other for which we can now see a Fractal Order. If I am right, then we can make assumptions about our history and our future.

So in this post, let's look at how when we "see" the Fractal Shape, which has usually been obscured, we can understand and predict what seemed before to be unpredictable. 

This is is a hurricane. On the ground it feels like a mess. It is a mess. It is completely unpredictable. If this is all you know about hurricanes, you just have to endure them. You will be surprised every time a hurricane appears. You won’t know what the eye is. You will not be able to predict the intensity. You will just be in the mess.

We live in very messy times. Nothing seems certain any more. We cannot predict anything. We cannot make sense of anything.

Does it not feel as if we too were all living in a hurricane?

But using a larger perspective like this, we can see that hurricanes have a distinct pattern that drive both a structure and a trajectory. We can know the conditions and forces that drive them. We can’t avoid them. But we can plan for them. We can make sense of them. We can adapt to them.

I think we can use the theory behind this to make more sense out of our time and even give us hope for the future. 

How can this be so? The answer is in applying the principles of Chaos Theory to Human History.  There will be a pattern of human history just as there is a pattern for Hurricanes. Just as there are patterns for all natural systems. 

 When we look into the night sky, we can see some shapes.  But what we mainly see are billions of dots. But with the right perspective, such as a telescope, we can see that the universe is filled with a pattern that also drives structure and also trajectories. 

This is the Milky Way - Our Home - Notice how the pattern of the galaxy is the same as the pattern of a hurricane! 

No hurricane or galaxy is exactly the same. But all share the same architecture. All share common and math rooted rules about their dynamics. We now know where we live. 

Inside one of these structures. Space is no longer an aimless void punctuated by dots. We know how galaxies come into being. We know their life cycle. We know how they move. Their movement tells us the age of the universe. We have seen galaxies that were born at the beginning of time. This knowledge tells us who we are at an elemental level.

This is the revelation of Chaos Theory. 

With this new perspective, what seemed without form or order, such as coastlines, mountain ranges, weather and crop cycles, the rhythm of our hearts, birds flocking, forests could be seen anew. Using this new perspective, we can now understand them. 

We can understand them because we now can see the deep fractal patterns that governed them. 

This book is an exploration into what might be the Fractal Pattern that governs Human Society. 

For it must have such a pattern. All natural systems have them. Might it look like this?

 

A Fractal History of the World - Part 1 - Where are we and where are we going

I know that I am not alone in being worried about the state of the world today. Are you? My reaction has been to see if I could find a way of seeing things so that I could understand.

I needed to know where are are - how we got here and where we might be going. I needed context.

So I have been writing a very short book. It is all but finished and I thought now might be a good time to show you at least the premise of the book. So here is Chapter 4 - The Map.

True Health - Part 4 - The Push Back to Paleo and what it means

First they ignore you - then they laugh at you - then they fight you - then you win.

Today I am going to explore how we are about to experience all of this as we see the power of the Corporate World - more powerful than the Empire in India - go down. We see it now in media but we will see the final battle in the arena of health and food.

It is going to be in this area where the public will awake and discover how they and their children have been betrayed. I will show you today how betrayal is the key flash point of revolution that spreads the meme beyond the initiating cadre to the mass. 

All Imperialists from Rome to Britain and the Institutional/Corporate World have had the best of intentions. For after all Rome did actually do a lot good things. But the price of Empire is loss of freedom. And in the end this is what we all want. Espcially if Empire can no longer offer good roads, peace and justice etc.

The road to Freedom often starts with a funny man in a dhoti. How the Titans of the Empire laughed at Gandhi then. 

This process of ignoring - laughing - fighting and losing is what happens to the establishment in any paradigm shift. Who in 1935 could imagine the British Empire leaving India?

Who can imagine the Corporate Titans of our own time losing control of us?

Today time speeds by - what took decades now takes years. The Mad idea of working with nature and using her models, is very new. Maybe only 20 years old. In terms of a coherent way of eating and its relation to food maybe a decade. Blogging about this began in 2005!

In less than 6 years, millions are involved. The time of "Ignoring" has past.

The old system's immune system has been alerted. And the laughing and the attacks have begun.

"Paleo" is being talked about by the mainstream media as a joke - the Caveman Diet. Just another fad. Ignoring the point that this is not a diet but part of a larger context of health - that of aligning how we live to our evolutionary past.

Expect more "Jokes".

The "Attack" is all about Food Safety.

We are seeing concerted attacks on people who raise animals in a truly safe way - small egg flocks - people growing veggies in their front yard. They tell the mainstream that this food is not safe. Ignoring that the factory systems food is at the centre of our long term chronic health crisis.

Expect more attacks designed to raise the fear of the public and fear among the pioneers.

They will "burn" them as heretics. In modern terms they will humiliate us and take away our livliehood. And do it all in the context of keeping the rest of us safe from heresy. 

The establishment are powerful not just because they have a few Titans at the top but because there are so many functionaries below them. People who make their living and have their power as a result of being in the system. 

But the smart revolutionary does not attack this group. They depend utterly on the Titan. When he goes they go too. The News of the World staff get fired and cannot be rehired. The Mubarak inner circle and support melt away when their man falls.

But they cannot be ignored - they will be the ones who attack the new. Not the Titan himself.

You cannot win by attacking this system directly. They will crush you.

You win by allowing them to commit an outrage on you! It's very Zen!

The Titans destroy themselves by going too far in their attacks. At some point they outrage the sleeping people. 

In India, the innocents were killed at Armritsar. 

Look at what is going on in England now. The entire political class in the UK now has to step back from Murdoch. His henchmen/women have gone too far.

The people did not mind the Hugh Grants of the world or the Royals being hacked. But they cannot tolerate the families of war dead, of murdered children being the targets. And now that Gordon Brown has been seen as being defiled by the Titan, all can see that the only way ahead now to to sweep Murdoch away.

The people move when THEY feel the injustice and the betrayal.

So now to us. What will be the moment?

I see two tracks tnat interact. The power of social media and the increase in awareness that we are all being betrayed by the system.

The power of social media means that the secrets of the Titans can no longer be hidden. The big betrayals are amplified by social media. The power of social media means that dictators can no longer oppress their people without the world looking on. The more they assault their own people - such as in Libya and Syria - the more inevitable it is that they lose.

So what about us in the west. The scale of the deception and so betrayal builds every day.

• The War in Iraq was based on a lie
• We have also lost in Afghanistan trying to support the unsupportable
• The press is being shown to be mainly in the pockets of its owners - it has done its best to hide the truth
• Wall Street owns the recovery and the people are bereft - there is no growth in employment
• The young in Europe and the old are shut out
• The Euro zone and America's credit are on the knife edge but we were told that we have to pay back the bankers

Meanwhile the old contract is being destroyed

• The pensions that boughtv our obediance when we worked for them are going
• The schools and roads that we paid for are in ruins
• The justice system is being gamed
• Even our water system is for sale
• We don't own our homes annymore
• Our children did all we asked and there are no jobs
• We are told that we are not safe and our liberties are removed

You can add to this list - the reasons for consent are melting.

All of this is coming out of the New Media and the stories get bigger and get more traction every day - the Titans are shown not to care about us. They are shown to be cynical manipluators.

And now we come to the big lie - that our health and old age will be looked after by a Ponzi scheme of the transfer payments. 

This demographic and fiscal crisis will be the battle ground where the revolt will take place.

Rising oil and food prices and the debt crisis will all come together and the people will have nothing to lose by taking the risk of leaving the system. 

The entire basis of the western deal with its people will unravel and the people will be betrayed just when they are the most vulnerable.

So what to do? What do you and I do? Not easy question to answer but just as there are patterns of history that show us how true paradigm revolts take place, there are patterns that can help us see our best choices and what will happen in a pattern sense as the revolt gets under way.

Check back in a couple of days.