Robert Paterson's Weblog

Are only idiots law abiding now?

Senator Duffy can get away with fidding his expenses - all $90,000 of them. HSBC can get away with money laundering on a vast scale. Monsanto can run the FDA. Apple, Facebook and Amazon can pay almost no taxes. Big Pharma can offer drugs that kill thousands. All vaccine makers have a blanket immunity from prosecution. 

But you try to be creative with you taxes or expenses - you try and offer unpasteurized milk, real chickens, grow veggies in your front yard - you try an influence society by protesting or leaking and bang you are in deep shit. Officials who themselves break the law in attacking the public who protest, get a tap on the wrist. 

It seems to me that the contract between the people and the governers is broken. 

I feel such a fool, don't you. It seems that the rules are only for the Little People - like you and me.

 

Rape - Patriarchy - Food Systems and the return of the Goddess

I think that most people accept that rape has little to do with sex and a lot to do with power and anger. 

In this time when Rape is on the front pages of the news, I want to add a few cents of my own thinking to the mix. For I think that I see a context that might help us make some progress.

It starts with the question of where does Patriarchy, and so this anger, come from? If we can see the roots of this pattern, then we can see how to get at the source.

If we can see that Patriarchy is not an eternal human and male attribute. Then we can have hope.

So where does Patriarchy come from? It comes from the adoption of Agriculture back 10,000 years ago. Only then, did the idea of property enter human culture. Who owns the land and the flocks becomes central. Who inherits comes next. With no legal system. Might becomes right. Do I know if this is my real son becomes a crucial idea. Women have to be controlled. Women and children become property too. Property becomes the central idea of status.

In Agriculture, the key issue is control. You have to defend your property. You have to push back at nature. Nature fights mono culture. Men have to be put in charge of nature who has to be controlled. Men have to control the very symbol of nature - women and the miracle that takes place in their bodies when life is created. 

The Adam and Eve story is the story of the transition from Hunter Gathering to Farming:

3:16  Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

3:17  And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

3:18  Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

3:19  In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

This is a new story that is only at most 10,000 years old. This is not our story as a species nor is it the story of women or men.

It is only at the advent of agriculture that the idea of "Property" and so Control emerged. For all the millions of years of humans being hunter gatherers and so very mobile, the concept of property could not exist. When hunting and gathering, you had to work WITH nature too. So the concept of CONTROL did not exist either. All the forces lined up against humans were too great. We had to cooperate. We needed the skills and knowledge of all the tribe.

For nearly all of human history, the Gods were in everything. Every tree, every animal. Even the inanimate had gods in them. Stones, winds, rivers, mountains all had energy that had to be taken into account. Nothing was separate. The ancestors live on eternally in other forms. The children yet unborn lived in dreams. Men and women lived in separate cultures but were deeply connected. Children were the children of all. It would be hard to imagine monogamy in such a culture. How then could one person own another or have plans for another? It would make no sense.

And then, very recently, after millions of years of living like this. we started to grow things.

The first representation of Gods were Mother Figure Human Females. She represented the power of nature on which all depended and all participated.

With early agriculture, more like gardening, the Goddess remained supreme.  At this time land was inherited via the female line. At this time the King must die. A man would be selected and would be King for a year. At the right time he would willingly be sacrificed for the fertility of his tribe. In the time of horticulture, women ruled. There was a I guess a Matriarchy. 

But over time, it became easier to steal land and call yourself King forever. We see this transition in the transition of the Gods. The Sun started to dominate the Moon. 

Male gods appeared like Zeus. These were jealous gods. They had wives but they were the boss. And then the idea of the ONE God appeared and this male and dominating God became the embodiment of the new culture. He forbade all other gods, especially the female. The only remnant being Mary. Mary is the ghost of the Goddess.

So if I am right, then what?

We are starting to see a new culture emerging where owning property is no longer the central status issue for some. More and more young do not own cars or even have a licence. Few can afford to own a home. More and more systems are emerging that allow us to share the use of things.

This is very new but it harkens back to most of human culture. It harkens back to who we really are.

Most importantly, the new food system that is based on small plots with plants and animals living as they should means that owning lots of land will no longer be the core food model. Instead we will see more and more people grow food in small natural units in the scale of a large network.

BUT! As more and more men are displaced by the failure of the old system, they have to blame someone. Who else but those women who are doing so much better than they. They have to be shown who is really boss! I fear that the transition will be hard. As more and more men hold onto the old and so fail to be part of the new, they will lash out.

This is surely why Tea Partiers want to control women's bodies?

I think that in the end, it will be societies that move swiftly to the network model that will find that the terrible wound of male domination will heal first and permanently. The food system is the key. It birthed Patriarchy. It will take us home to a world where men and women rejoice in the other.

I will not live to see this day but I think my grand kids will.

Networks and Trust - The New Evolution

Last week, prompted by pressure from my son to be more clear about networks in my upcoming book - You Don't need a Job - You need a Need a Network - some new thoughts pushed their way to the front and I wanted to share them with you in sketch book form.

Please help me get them more clear.

The Network Effect and the Trust Network Effect - There is a difference that is important. In the standard network effect, the value of the network to each member is linked to the growth of the connections. It is transactional. So the more phones that are connected to the network, the more valuable the network is in utility to each member. This is the mechanical approach to networks.  

For many people that I see using social media, this is their only goal. Many try and get as many "friends" as possible. If you are a real A lister - this works - you have influence. But for most people, having 7,000 friends on Facebook or Twitter doesn't mean a thing - IF YOU NEED SOMETHING.

I have been working a lot recently using Indiegogo and observing people who seek to raise money using crowd sourcing.

In every case that I have seen so far, the campaigns that worked had activated their core circle of trusted people who themselves had such a circle - who had such a circle and so on. It was this inner circle that did the work. The campaigns that just threw the ask out to the general network, tended to fail. There was no power to the general ask for help. 

Why is this? If I have 3,000 friends on facebook - why don't they help me - they say they are committed but they don't act?

I think of my own behaviour. I will only act if a few people that I know well and trust ask me. For the rest, the answer is always no. How small is this group? Maybe 8 and no more that 30+ depending on the context.

This is my real network. I only act on strong ties not weak.

It may extend further on occasion to people who used to be in the inner circle but for whom time has passed and they have moved further out. So an ex close colleague or friend can call out of the blue and I will be ready to act. They remain people who have been trusted, Any of you who have served in the military will know this. When a ex shipmate or buddy calls, you go back immediately to where you used to be in trust.

I am seeing that this inner circle of trust is the "leverage". You have to pay attention to your reputation and to your inner network. To get you have to give. It's all barn building. 

A high quality inner network is the goal.

This quality is all based on trust. So if I am right, then the drive for many friends is a waste of time and is based on the simple view of the network. We are not simple, we are complex humans! No Trust - No Commitment or Action.

The New Super Trust Leverage - Trust Platforms - What is new then and what I think is the Highland Park Game Changer - are platforms that create this level of trust among people who have never met!

Airbnb is a good example. Here is a platform that enables you to offer your place for rent to strangers. Etsy is another. Here is a platform that enables you to sell your crafts to strangers. Amazon is enabling a new publishing system for the "small" author. Visa is another. Visa is a platform that enables a retailer to take your money safely.

They key to all of these platforms is that they mediate and maintain high levels of trust. Thus enabling us to DO THINGS with small vendors and to be small vendors on a global scale.

They also do this at a very low cost. No Budget hotel chain can compete with Airbnb in price and value. No storefront with Etsy. No publisher can do what Amazon is doing for the small author. This trust mediation gives both sides of the transaction a deal that is impossible for the Factory model to replicate.

There is also a huge secondary impact. That is, as each of us buys from another in trust platforms, the trust that was at first mediated, becomes real. We tend to go back to the same places on Airbnb because we get to know and like each other. We get in touch with authors who use Kindle and start to have a real relationship with them.

So what I see is that the product of each successful transaction in trust platforms is the exponential increase in trust. This in turn increases the utility for all. The line between provider and consumer becomes blurred. This then is when an author can get crowd funding to help him write the new book! This is when the farmer can pre-sell his crop or meat in the spring for delivery in the fall.

The value is not confined to the connections alone but to the overall trust in the system.

This is the game changer. This is a much much better deal for all than the Highland Park system. It was Highland Park that overthrew the old local and artisan system because it was then a better deal for all. So I think Trust Platforms will overthrow the Highland Park world. 

Highland Park was the new factory that Henry Ford opened in 1910 that had all the new features of the Production Line installed. It was the DNA of the process that would be at the heart of all modern institutions. Mass Production killed the small and the local because it could offer a car for much less money than one made by hand by artisans. It also gave a large unskilled work force much more money than a day labourer job could. Both sides of the mass market were created.

This better deal meant that The small and the local got pushed to the fringe. The family farm nearly died. The local paper died. The bakery, dairy, butcher, general store, iron foundry all died. The local banker who knew everyone was no longer needed. The local doctor who had a stake in the health of his community was no longer needed. The local diner that held the community together was no longer needed. All were replaced by Highland Park. And so we ended up Bowling Alone - for as community died, so did Trust.

All became simple transactions. 

We all came to depend on a few vast organizations for all that is important for us. Vast organizations that not only do not care for us but work only for their own needs now. For the Highland Park Contract has been broken. Now most of us have the wages of day labourers, if we are lucky! Now most of the products and services are of low quality or worse, hurt us. 

We are ready for something better and something better is here. 

It's early days. It is maybe the equivalent of 1920. But I see Trust Platforms taking over the role of Highland Parks. They will do this because they are a better system. They offer more value to all. The evolutionary Tipping Point is 20%. Each time the trust platform takes 20% of the gross out of the sector, the Highland Park alternative will fall. 20 employees at Craigslist did this and look what happened to the mass production newspapers.

When 20% of kids  choose the Platform rather than school, most of the universities will fold. When 20% of us stop going to the doctor for our chronic illness, how will they and big pharma cope? Coming will be a local food system that is based on trust and real food. When 20% of us buy all our food locally, how will Big Food cope?

Highland Park is trapped by their fixed process costs. With a 20% loss of gross and a trend of lower gross as the network grows, they cannot stand.

Evolution will work quite well and has a good chance of solving what seems to be the impossible world situation in front of us.  

Choosing the right technology - The "Device Paradigm" - Why Local Food Might be the Best Choice

Zach introduced me to an idea this morning - The Device Paradigm - link here. In short it is about whether a piece of techology makes us more helpless or not. 

My aha was - Well then every piece of technology that you or I choose will take us down a road of being more or less helpless.

Is this why most of us are helpless today?

For instance take heating. My regular Twitter readers - good morning to you! - know that I heat with wood. This is a technology that takes me down the road of being less helpless.  My source of wood is so much more in my control than oil. I could even cut it, if pushed. The stove is all knowable. With no oil I would be helpless. If my furnace broke - I would not have a clue.

I am not saying that we should all heat with wood - for if you live in the city this is not an option really. I am just saying that when choosing for where you are - what choice makes us more or less helpess?

I think this is why I am so comitted to local and real food. This is something that we can all get behind. Local food can be urban. What makes us more helpless than relying on Big Food to feed us?

Again this does not mean we all have grow it. I think it means that as a start we all can buy local. 

On PEI if 15% of us made a committment to only buy local, we would Tip the System.

What choices do we face as a society that make us more or less helpless?

 

When I'm 64? The Squeeze - The "Impossible Bills" to pay as we get older

We are entering a new age in all sorts of ways. One of the new things that we don't talk about much is what it will mean when most people are over the age of 60.

Our world has been designed and constructed around a normal of most people being young. That is most people being able to absorb higher costs. Over the next 30 years, we will face the opposite. As each year passes, more and more of us will not be able to pay more. We old folks will not have the money. We will have less and less and no where to go to get more. And there will be more and more of us.

We have not talked much about what the world will be like when most of us are old and poor. We have to. And we have to now.

The first boomers are 65 this year. PEI is very exposed. We will have one of the most age skewed populations in Canada. So what does this mean for you and for me?

Do you have a generous pension? I don't. Most don't. If you have one, do you really think it is secure? We can see right now in places like Greece where pensions are being cut. We have seen here that corporate pensions are not safe - Nortel. If you get a Government Pension today - how safe will it be when most other people have nothing?

How much money will you have per year for the next 30 years? At my best possible calculation for me it is in the poverty bracket. What about you? How much a month will you have over the next 30 years? Scary isn't it!

So we are entering a time when the basic assumption that next year there can and will be more money is off the table. But how the system works is based on the idea that there will be more money next year. So with the old assumptions, we are on track for a squeeze and then a collision.

How will I pay my property taxes, my heating bills, look after my health and have enough to eat. How will you? This is how I see these things:

Property taxes - They are 10% of my gross income right now. They are among the largest bills I have to pay. Unlike any other bill, if I don't pay them, I can be evicted from my home. This is the one bill that can make you and I homeless. 

Cities themselves know how damaging these taxes are but have no other source of income. They are systemically starved by the higher levels of government.

In 10 years time, the majority of home owners will be pensioners. Their only asset will be their home. Can we still have a system that taxes people who will have so little cash in a way that drives them onto the street? What then?

I have not a clue what to do here -I do see this as being an "Impossible Bill" to pay. It would not be hard to see my property tax double in 10 years. It would be impossible for me to pay. It would be impossible for any senior to pay.

There has to be a new way to support our cities and not destroy our society. Time now to start talking about this.

Health Costs - As we get older our health costs go up. It is not unusual to spend $500 a month on drugs now if you have had a heart attack. At least 30% of adult Islanders will have type 2 diabetes. If you get this, you will have massive health risks and costs. About 40% of us will get cancer. The list goes on.

When most of us were young, we did not pay attention to this. Hey the system would pay. But in 4 years time, the PEI health budget will exceed our total tax revenues. The health care system will not be able to pay. Nor will you.

We cannot continue as if we did not live in a new time with new rules.

What happens when we are really old? -Worse, when we get to a certain stage, we cannot look after ourselves on our own. The current normal is that we go to a "home". Well my mum is in such a place. It costs about $40,000 a year after tax to keep her there. Fortunately she has a great pension from my late father. But few of us will have that. And even for her, with the world going as it is - is her pension a sure thing? What if she lives another 20 years? Will her pension be there? If it is not, how will I cope? I can't imagine how I would cope.

Many of us will be faced with this. The new sandwich generation of 70 year old people looking after 95 year old parents.

There will be 8,000 85 plus year old widows on PEI in 15 years time. That is a cost to PEI of $320,000,000 or half the current health budget. Stuffing us all in Manors just cannot work when there are so many of us. AND when PEI's ability to raise taxes and revenues will be so limited.

It gets worse. When we get put in an institution, our health collapses and the costs of keeping us ticking over go up exponentially. It is when we have no place in the world. So if we institutionalize the elderly, our normal now, their health care costs shoot through the roof. 

We do know though that if the elderly can stay in their home, that this does wonders for their health.

No organization knows more about this than Canada's Veterans Affairs. What VAC have found is that the longer people stay in their home the lower the costs as they remain healthy. so VAC have a program of support, meals , cleaning, yard work etc that helps the frail stay in their home. This is much less expensive and better for all. It also offers a lot of work.

So here we go in a circle. This will have to be the way. For I cannot as a 70 year old look after my paralyzed mother. I will need help if she has to come and live with me. But if paying property taxes means that I have no home..... see what I mean. 

Health Costs - The Hope - There is a way forward on health costs though. I am acting on this way ahead for myself. The chronic diseases that we all think of as normal - heart disease, cancer, arthritis, type 2 diabetes, dementia, Alzheimer's etc are not normal but are a product of our diet and how we live. In a year I have transformed my health and my aging process by eating and living differently. Aged 61, I have the health and the activity ability of a man in his healthy early 50's. I should be able to stay this way until I die.

We can PREVENT these diseases and we can age well.

My regular readers know all about this and if you are new to this - then dig into my site. 

If we do not explore this opportunity, I don't see how we can make it through the next 30 years.

Food the Hope - What such a new way of thinking will do as a consequence is drive out a new food system. Eating right will all depend on access to real food that cannot be raised in an industrial way. Instead of a few big farms, we will need thousands of small operations. Instead osfus buying most of our food in a  processed form from the supermarket, it will mean most of us buying food from local people.

This is a huge work and economic opportunity. It is a huge health opportunity too.

Energy Costs - Oil is like Property Taxes - Heating oil is up 25% this year over last. The heating bill is one of the non negotiables. Heating with oil costs Islanders about $200 million a year. That is the equivalent of a 1/4 of the total PEI tax revenue. So this is the largest family bill we pay. The average is I think about $2,500 a home.

We have no negotiating power with winter!

Helping out a few people each heating season will not work when more than 50% of Islanders will not be able to afford to heat their home. 

We have to find a structural new way. It will have to involve reducing the demand - up to 40% can be saved with better insulation etc - and by changing how we heat so we are not exposed to the global oil price. For surely in the next 30 years, where do we see oil prices going? We have to have an energy strategy that is designed to reduce demand and to cut us off from the rosk of oil prices. No easy thing but there is a lot of thought already.

Food The Risk - Nearly all the food we eat comes from away. Nearly all the food we eat depends on oil too. On oil to farm and on oil to transport. We are so exposed. Look at what has happened to poorer nations, food is all but outside the budget of a family. We have to reduce our exposure to oil and our food. This can only be done, if we grow food in a new way.

Such a way of growing food and such a shift in diet - away from annual row crops that need oil and that contribute to the health crisis - to pasture based animals and permaculture veggies will offer a huge boost to employment. It is a win win win.

My regular readers know that much work has been done to see what such a system would be like and I will not go further here.

So here then is the bottom line for all of us.

IT IS NOT BUSINESS AS USUAL. In 10 years time most of us will be over 50 and many will be close to 70. We will be on very limited and insecure budgets. Our tax system, our approach to health, our approach to food and our approach to energy has to change.

Time is so short. We have to get a lot of the new design done and in action in the next 5 years if we have any hope of making it through the next 30.

Time to start the conversation. Time to help each other and time to help our governments do the right thing.

Going out to work or to get stuff? More and more of us are staying at home - a powerful trend

Created by: College At Home

Rim vs Apple - Product vs Ecosystem - Lesson for Hurricanes too

Rim is doomed. Can you see why? A focus on a product and engineering cannot compete with an ecosystem.

The industrial era is also failing because it makes it focus on a specific product or service and then keeps engineering away to make it cost less while at the same time making the structural investment so high as to be impossible to exit. So we kill the newsroom and keep the paper. We have to milk the product until there is nothing left - HP and the PC.

What Steve Jobs and the team at Apple have done is to assemble an ecosystem. Much of the resources come freely to Apple and us the users from people who are attracted into playing in Steve's place. This is why Apple can trash a quite new product and so keep on the leading edge. They don't have to milk it until it is dead.

HP and Rim have only a spent business and nowhere to go now. But they also have all the costs that they added on to run those products.

The Ford Model (The 1903 Logo) was the winner for 100 years. It scaled vertically based on a product.

 

Apple and others who use the Ecosystem as the model, scale as a network and so can learn and adapt faster and with less risk. For to change the machine is to break it!

It's not just business but everything. We have made efficiency the key. So our schools get bigger and do worse. Government gets bigger and does less. Our striving for efficiency makes us more vulnerable. We rely on vulnerable food and energy systems in particular. Your community has no more than 3 days of food on hand. What if you lost power for 2 weeks? Think it can't happen?

As Hurricane Irene arrives on the East Coast, our entire approach to life will be tested. Machine models of high efficiency can fail when only a small part is taken down. We lost power here this week for 12 hours. Once again, we realized that every part of our lives depends on the system working. Everything came to a stop.

Time to question the model. 

In 1905, when Ford perfected his model, he created a a system that was applied to all parts of life. Is that our problem deep down> Is it time to look to the better alternative?

Gutenberg, Galileo and Luther - Portents of our own Time?

I wrote this for a book back in Feb 2005 - I think what I said then is even more relevant today than then - do you too?

Back to the Future - Going Home!

We are going back to the end of the Middle Ages. We journey back to the beginning of the time that gave birth to our own culture. We go back to Europe of the early 16^th century. We go back to the beginning of our own pattern. A great cultural system is in terminal decay and a new cultural system is being born.

Like now, this is a turbulent time. War has been constant. Plague has killed 25% of the people. A new world had just been discovered that is going to pump money into Europe and will pull adventurers away. Islam has just been driven out of Europe. There has been a tidal wave of social and religious unrest that has been crushed utterly by an invincible combination of a universal church and by Kings that are gaining in power.

More powerful than the sword of the King is the power of the media. 

The pulpit is the mass media. It is the only source of information for the mass of people. Literacy is confined to the Church. Books are rare and very expensive. They are written in Latin or Greek. Knowledge is locked up. Not only does the church control the processes of communication but it has a tight control on message as well. Its two main messages are that salvation is only possible if you give the church your total obedience and much of your worldly wealth. The other message is that God himself has appointed the temporal rulers over you. 

Then on October 31^st 1517 Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. At the heart of these theses was a big idea. That people did not need an institution between them and God. 

A hundred years later, in 1633, the Inquisition convicts Galileo of heresy.  His crime was to use evidence to refute the dogma that the earth was the centre of the universe. 

These are powerful ideas. But when faced with all this power against them, to spread they needed a viral vector. With all this power lined up behind the establishment, open war would have been suicide. Only a virus could get though the immune system of the time.

The viral vector began humbly in Frankfurt, in 1455 at the Frankfurt Book Fair, 

In that year, Johann Gutenberg sells the first copies of his mass-produced German Language Bible.  He sells them for 300 florins each. This was the equivalent of approximately three years' wages for an average clerk. However it was significantly cheaper compared to a handwritten Bible, which could take a single monk 20 years to transcribe. The viral vector was out and the ideas that it carried could not be stopped! The lock on communications was broken. 

Who would have known then that a priest with a big idea, a man with a telescope and a man with a new communication tool would come together to shake the world?  

Who would have known then that the vast power of the universal church and of the divinely empowered monarchs would be soon challenged and be overthrown? Who would have known then that science would be born? Who would have known then that the individual would soon have greater power to communicate than the church or the King?

Can we see our own predicament in this light today? Is this not our pattern too? 

Is not our great problem that the great institutions of our time, government, healthcare, education, arts and entertainment, even business, no longer serve us but only themselves? 

Is not their organizational doctrine based on a dogma of control? Have they not divorced their world-view from observable reality? Is not this split from the laws of nature their dogma? Are they not prepared to fight to the death to preserve this dogma? Do we not see the entertainment industry as an Inquisition? Do we not see the IP industry as the agent of the controllers and not of the creative?

Is not the new “big idea” of our time to disintermediate the institutional middleman and to enable direct relationships? Are supermarkets eternal? Do we need factory universities to learn? Is our health dependent on a doctor? Is the news what we see on TV? 

Is this idea of going direct, the same for us as Luther’s big idea that man could talk directly to God?  Is not the new doctrine for organizations based on the observable working laws and designs of nature the same as Galileo’s observations?

Is not the enabling vector, a new type of communication device that is so simple and so inexpensive that it will give voice and hence power back to individuals and to their communities?  Did not the printing press give men back their voice in the 16th century? Was not pamphletting the blogging of their time? Was not a consequence of printing, mass literacy? Did the use of this new media topple the power of the old media system? Did it not change politics? Did it not push Alchemy aside and give birth to science? Why would we expect less of Social Software?

Are we not standing at the beginning of a new reformation? Has the wheel of history turned full circle?

Why S&P’s Downgrade is No Joke

It’s also true that S&P is hardly some kind of Delphic Oracle.  It and the other rating agencies were almost criminally negligent about the risks of subprime mortgages during the housing bubble.  And it’s not as if S&P told investors anything about U.S. fiscal problems on Friday that they didn’t already know.

So what’s new?

The big new element on Friday was an official outside recognition that U.S. creditworthiness is being undermined by a new factor: political insanity. S&P didn’t base its downgrade on a change in the U.S. fiscal and economic outlook. It based it on the political game of chicken over the debt ceiling, a game that Republicans initiated and pushed to the limit, and on a growing gloom about the partisan deadlock.   Part of S&P’s gloom, moreover, stemmed explicitly from what a new assessment of the GOP’s ability to block any and all tax increases.

S&P was remarkably blunt that its downgrade was mostly about heightened political risks:  “The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed,” it said.

via nationaljournal.com

I think that this is the correct assessment - I cannot see how the political system in America can get to grips with any aspect of the problem.

It's not just the US - is not conventional leadership embedded in a paradigm of rational engineering? Is not THIS the centre of the problem?

This assumes that our enormous institutions are the only way. So no one questions the Education system. They try and make it more efficient but don't consider that we might educate our kids in a way that is not mechanistic. The same for health. We do nothing to help people get healthy - there is no money in that. So we depend on a system that we cannot afford to stop us dying.

The US spends more than the next 20 nations on defence. Has this made America more safe? The reliance on a few super high tech weapon systems - is this really the way?

Our food system depends on a few vast food enterprises that have to make the numbers. So we are dependent on a food system that not only makes us ill but degrades the environment. It can get more efficient but only by increasing the risks.

Our creditors want action. But if we stay in the paradigm that we live in, there is no action that will do anything but make things worse.

This includes each of us in our family settings.

We too have to make the numbers. WE assume that this means that both need a job so that in the limited time we have left, we can pay to have our kids looked after and fed.

Is this the ONLY way really?

Well many of us are finding out a new way because we don't have the job and the income stream any more to pay for our western high costs.

Making our own food, helping each other look after the kids is a start. Then we look ahead and think about college - it's off the table we cannot afford it. So what do we do? We find a way to help our kids get the learning they need in a new way.

We worry that we don't have access to health insurance, and then some might learn that we can live differently and make it unlikely that we get ill.

The real revolution will start with us - not with our leaders who are immune from the pressures of how life is being lived by most people.

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