A great article about a fundamental problem in America: bullying

A great article about a fundamental problem in America, and likely other parts of the world too.

"FOR KIDS: Bullying is an everyday problem"

"Energy Flows Where Attention Goes" applies to the news too

There is a saying that has been around for quite awhile, attesting to its validity, despite its unconventionality: "Energy Flows Where Attention Goes." "Energy" meaning here as "that which makes things happen."

One of the major things that gets my attention is the online news, of a half dozen news websites. Similar to the paper newspapers of my past, the headlines and front-page articles have titles that grab attention.

If I catagorize those headlines and their articles, as to "constructive" vs "tragedy" then the vast majority of them fall into the category of "tragedy."

Thus the logical conclusion that, due to our mistakes, this kind of energy flows to make more tragedy, due to the choices to focus attention on those kind of events instead of constructive types of events.

We could instead similarly focus our attention on the news items about constructive, healing, productive events.

Would this help turn our nation's struggles around, becoming a constructive healthy productive nation again?

Is it even possible to focus our news-attention on this type of items. Are we inbuilt programmed to focus on our internal minute-by-minute affairs, except when outer events are in crisis, to which our attention is drawn lest we be drawn into the crisis or its results? When no crisis, then back to normal busyness, feeding our face, combing hair, etc. Which does not sell newspapers nor get ads to be put in the news to pay for the news gathering and distribution. Is this a Catch-22 kind of thing? It has been with us for a very long time.

On bananas, oxygen and energy

Munching a perfectly ripe nutritious banana for breakfast a few minutes ago, I felt amazed at the amazing transportation system that has provided this nutritious treat, having brought it to here from far away Ecuador, after being grown and harvested there at significant cost and effort, too.

That low cost transportation was powered by petrochemicals, low cost widely available energy sources. Or, so it is said, low-cost.

Petrochemicals are pried or slurped out of the depths of the earth, where they have been stored for eons as sequestered carbon. Sequestered at a great price by Mother Nature. But that was long ago and far away and none of our business, right?

We see the price as merely that of the land that was bought and sold among people, with rights to take those petrochemicals from below. And the cost of extracting the coal or oil or natural gas, and processing and transporting it, and retail sales costs. That is the cost we see. Not the cost of actually making that coal or oil. We get a hint of that cost as we attempt to make biofuels.

Yet, that kind of petrochemical energy is actually only half the energy involved. The other half comes from the air. The same air that we breathe, note. And surrounds this planet with its life sustaining qualities. That oxygen did not come free, either.

Way way back long ago, this planet was much as we know it in terms of size, land and oceans differently configured, but there was no oxygen in the air, just carbon based gasses. We would not have been able to live in it for over a minute or two, then dead, if it were again back like then.

Tiny creatures called cyanobacteria, sunshine powered, munched the hydrocarbon gasses surrounding our planet, and excreted oxygen as a byproduct. So they were sequestering carbon, and producing oxygen. As they persevered, and the atmosphere was depleted of much of its hydrocarbon gasses, other plant life appeared and also sequestered carbon in their bodies, and produced oxygen for the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide got converted by those sun-powered plant beings, the carbon sequestered as their physical bodies, and oxygen being put into the atmosphere. The mass of their expired bodies, such as peatmoss too, got buried by the geological processes, compressing it down into the coal and oil we now can find there in places.

So when we burn coal and oil and natural gas to produce energy, all we are doing is extracting the solar energy that those countless plant beings put into the sequestering of that carbon. We are undoing the processes that made our planet livable for creatures such as we are.

Now, there is lots of oxygen in the atmosphere. And lots of that coal and oil underground. So we can mess with undoing those long ago life efforts to create our breathable atmosphere, and Mother Nature can take the mess, at least for awhile.

We have also multiply documented how the carbon dioxide, put back into the atmosphere, changes the retention of solar heat, raising the temperature of the planet's surface and tinkering with the delicate balance of energies of the weather's modifications to our living spaces around the world. Just how much we can tinker with undoing the sequestering of the carbon and production of oxygen that was done with enormous difficulty way way back when, without messing up our nest way too much, remains to be seen.

Now, this banana, the one I started this post admiring, also was made by a plant that munched airborne carbon dioxide and produced oxygen for the atmosphere too, in the banana's making. I will exhale some carbon dioxide back into the air, eventually. But the vast majority of the carbon dioxide that was put into the air, while consuming precious oxygen from the air, that was used in the process of transporting that banana to me; and there is also no ongoing processes that are making up for that combustion-lost oxygen from the atmosphere as part of that transportation.

So is it really low cost transportation energy? Is the cost of petrochemical energy merely the cost really only that of robbing Mother Earth of its sequestered hydrocarbons and oxygen?

I like to think of it all as a temporary gift Mother Nature has given to us to provide the energy to jump-start us to reach for far better sources of energy to power our vast power-hungry civilization.

Very little of our energy use actually needs hydrocarbons to be burned; the production of cement and steel being some of them.

But the vast majority of our use of energy is used to move us and our stuff around from place to place, heat and cool our places of work and residence, cook our food, power our tools, play our TV's, power our computers. None of these things intrinsically need to use petrochemical burning for energy to make them happen. Seems more logical and overall efficient to go right to the source, the vastly abundant sunshine.

There is energy aplenty streaming in every day from the Sun; all we have to do is adequately and efficiently capture and use it. Roughly a kilowatt of solar energy pours into every square yard of the earth's disk; given that half the earth is receiving solar energy at any given time, with a radius of 4,000 miles, that is a disk of pi R squared area or 50 million square miles, or 1.5 times 10 to the 14th power square yards, each with that 1,000 watts pouring in on it (nevermind the clouds for now) means the Earth on average is constantly receiving 1.5 times ten to the 14th power kilowatts, each hour receiving that many kilowatt hours of energy. 1.5 x 10^14 KWh, 1,500,000,000,000,000 KWh every hour, coming in free for the asking, but thrown away for the ignoring.

Free for the asking, but thrown away for the ignoring!

Yet we still burn lifegiving oxygen while undoing hard sequestered carbon ... just for energy? Just to take out the solar energy that was used to sequester that carbon and to produce oxygen for the air?

Are we smart folks, or not?

I think we can do better, lots better.

We ought to be able to do lots better than using our smarts and skills just by going bananas with our war machines doing our incredibly expensive and messy worldwide Hatfield & McCoys games, worshiping the testosterone god.

It seems to me that we ought to instead be providing totally solar powered rapid ways to get bananas brought up here to Washington State, for example. But since we didn't, obviously I am missing some important point.

The UN's functions

Seeing the article "U.N. is at a critical juncture as it struggles to assert its relevance" article once again I ponder the UN's function. I have long thought that it serves many vital functions in coordinating the world's interactions among its many nations in the complex swirling civilzation in progress. The WDG is an example of the great function type that the UN can do. The world environment's health and wellbeing seems to need to have an international body to provide primary monitoring and recommendations, since individual countries tend to be concerned with their own prosperity regardless on the effect of their input and output on the larger world environmental resource system, which is largely a "closed system" at present (and likely to remain so as long as we are limited to expensive and wasteful rocketry to make the first step up into high earth orbit, from where rocketry can travel with vastly greater efficiency - instead of even exploring kinetically supported structure bridge potentials for extremely low cost high capacity transportation to high earth orbit.)

The UN as a peacekeeping military function provider, seems quite advantageous to the United States, and ought to utilize it far more often, especially instead of launching into unilateral wars as has been happening in the past decade too much. Being an overwhelmingly powerful nation has the same drawbacks as an overwhelmingly powerful man - restraint and wisdom in the use of that power is hard to guarantee. So an overarching entity such as the UN can offer a wider viewpoint and administration of even military force. This can be welcome when insurgents attempt to take over a country, but I wonder what would happen if the United States found itself under military attack, would it heel to the authority of the UN, I wonder. At least one of the political parties would not cater to that moderation, most likely.

About the only complaint I have had in the past is when the UN apparently was trying to assert authority over what modes people can use to maintain their health as well as to recover from illness or injury of any kind - physical, mental, emotional, etc. Attempts to control what health supplements - such as vitamins and nutritional supplements - people can use to improve their wellbeing, just seems quite harmful to people in general.

Here in the US, similar efforts surface occasionally when big businesses seek to use legislation to block business competition in the health and wellbeing fields - such as by taking nutritional substances long in common use beneficially by people that are common foodstuffs, and attempting to require people go to an expensive doctor and get a prescription so as to be able to buy those foods anymore at much higher prices - simply because those foods have been found to help a person's health - and that is easily seen through (by lots of people including myself as a rule) as a business scam, although it is not always certain that government sees it that way, for unknown reasons. Public complaints over this tend to become shouting matches in the media.

This response is instead of efficacy testing, or far better, letting the customer find out what works. Many healing modes are individual-dependent, instead of a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. Over time, an individual finds out what has worked for oneself in OTC items and general foodstuffs. It can be helpful to have expert help and advise at time, too.

Mental models are used in place of real things

Mental models are used in place of real things, as they are far more easily manipulated than the physical worlds they represent.

But the accuracy of the mental model determines the relevance of its conclusions.

The political scene sometimes appears to attempt to directly manipulate other people's mental models of physical reality.

That is because, unlike the objects of physics, the subject scenarios additionally include people, who function as programmable physical objects; thus are changeable in their characteristics.

Some things come together in making sense

Getting up in years now, it is interesting to discover how some things come together in making sense.

One such recent example has been from three items.

One is that 20 years ago I learned about the 700 year old Japanese Buddhism, called Nicheren Soshu Buddhism if I remember correctly the spelling - during WWII they opposed the war with the United States, being pacifists. Their members were given a choice of dying in prison or going to fight. A few that chose the prison route lived to carry on the group after the end of WWII; it then grew in size and at one time extended into the US, where I learned about it in some detail.

Second item on internet in recent times was an article which ferreted out that Japan, a rather small country, had its military spread quite thin in WWII, conquering Korea and China and islands across the Pacific. Where did they get the troops for occupying much of the islands we fought so hard at, like Corregidor and Okinawa? The article had discovered that many of the troops on those islands were not actually of the Japanese elite military. Having conquered Korea, they conscripted the farmers, the women to work in the military fabrication shops in Japan, and the farm boys into uniform and put on the islands; they had no interest in war against America, but were stuck there, no escape possible.

Third item was when listening in on a conversation locally where a man (who always acts a bit threateningly) was bragging about his father in WWII, a man of Amerind descent and used his Indian lore to go ashore before the main invasion of the islands began, and sneak into where the troops slept near the shore, and cut the throats of every other man sleeping in a row, so as to terrorize them. (Now I have known many Amerinds and such behavior was not typical of them, I know. But, there are all kinds in all groups.)

So it all comes together, where those island front line cannon-fodder troops were made of Korean farm boys and Japanese Buddhist peace dissenters, who got their throats slit as they slept. They possibly went to sleep praying for a way not to have the deaths of the Americans on their souls as bad karma; and thus got their prayers answered, although not nicely.

And could be the remaining ones then changed their opinion of Americans to be horrid monsters after all, to be fought harder, thus costing more American lives.

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I think that this was still irritating me a bit when a short time later I was writing the sci fi short story "Bouncing High Above the World", the creative subconscious mind sifting vast data to come up with story elements and flow. The story involves the landing of an experimental German bomber at the local airport where I live, a landing site that could always be counted on to be free of rain and clouds except for 15 days in the winter, back then. So in my sci fi story it was the backup landing site and circumstances forced the returning bomber's landing there, instead of back in Germany after bouncing across the upper atmosphere clear around the world, as it was designed to do. Axis sympathizers had long prepared the airport as a backup site for a fleet of such bombers, and had connections with the grandfather of the two main characters in the story, so as to link in the ranch where the pilot was taken to hide. Looking back, I think part of me was resenting the part about the peaceful Buddhists getting murdered on the island, and so used the stalker - now WWII hero - as the link to the ranch, where the story of the experimental aircraft got told around a campfire, and (in the story) proved true as the bomber was dug up where it had been hastily buried off the runway at the rarely used airport.

Pattern of "divide & conquer" ongoing in America?

Is a pattern of "divide & conquer" ongoing in America?

It is probably way too early in this insomnia night's early morning, but it seems to me that there is a consistent pattern ongoing in America during the past couple of years, the pattern called "Divide and Conquer." This pattern involves a third party, which hazes one party and then the other party in such a way that the two other parties think it was each other that had done the harm. In other words, it is a different group other than Democrats and Republicans, involved in the current dysfunctional state of the nation.

Sure, the Democrats are having a hard time of it pulling the nation along while the Republicans act like a unified dead weight to be dragged along, instead of pitching in and helping this nation recover. Is it really that the Republicans say they won't help the nation until they get to be boss again, even though that is the apparent thing ongoing, I wonder.

Somehow I don't think that the Republicans have become so un-American as to behave that way. I suspect there is a third-party involved, irritating the heck out of the Republicans - in the current time frame - and making it look like it is the Democrats that are doing it.

Who would want to conquer America? Starting in about 2000 - maybe earlier - it looks like someone is trying to divide and conquer us. Is it an internal group or an external group? Some people seem to want to point fingers at other religious groups, maybe sensing the potential for opinion-molding stimulation of action within their own ranks, and projecting that onto those folks of other religions. But this nation is founded on religious tolerance, and time and again America has proven that all religions can function harmoniously within her borders. So long as none of them get riled up enough to do preemptive strikes against their neighbors, of course; nor luring away more women than they provide in exchange, in the games of romance & reproduction. The nature of the tools used to "divide" are subtle, at this point; divide&conquer usually involves such deception processes to work. Subtle stuff is often part of religious activity, but it can be involved in other motivated stuff too.

America has an immense military capability, and that may be the real target of the group doing this hypothetical divide&conquer of America. Such a military arsenal might be seen as a means to wage wars on other nations, maybe even do a world-conquer thing like has happened throughout time and history, some greedy insecure bunch decides to conquer the world, and plots to do so. America's nuclear arsenal would be quite a plum in that viewpoint.

But I don't really think it is that kind of nutty thing going on in the current case. I think more it is the scuttling of the basic competency of Americans and their infrastructure; techniques for causing sleep deprivation will wear down a person, for example; studies long ago showed that a person with severe sleep deprivation for only a few days in a row will display symptoms of psychosis indistinguishable from real psychosis. Lesser sustained sleep deprivation long term will have lesser severity effects, but if you have a group or nation of such people trying to function well, it will be quite a struggle and may not succeed.

Well, this is my current insomnia projecting itself on the world, maybe. But I have long been struggling with sleep problems - I am 74 after all and that is said to go along with age - but many of the younger people I know have also mentioned consistent sleep problems too in recent times especially. Even some articles online; but I think most people would not like to think they have a sleep problem, preferring to say it is their late night TV watching or other observed factor.

It would be easy for a third-party group to first bushwhack one side then the other side, when those folks were all somewhat sleep-deprived, making it look that it was the two other sides doing the bushwhacking. This would get the other two sides to decimate each other, lots easier than attacking them directly by the third group.

In the case of Democrats and Republicans, AKA Progressives and Conservatives, in my simplified manner of thinking, the nation would alternate, like baseball or football teams do, as to who is carrying the ball; the Progressives would carry the ball for awhile, making progress in the nation; then the Conservatives would carry the ball for awhile, integrating the progress that had been made by the Progressives, thus more stabilizing the country after the changes brought on by the Progressive's problem-solving and opportunity-creating. But when things get stagnant again under the Conservative control, and issues are not getting addressed that need response changes, the Progressives then carry the ball again. Back and forth.

But in the recent round of Conservatives carrying the ball, 2000-2008, something went really wacko. We got fooled into going into two wars that were obviously unwinable, for example. That administration took the 200 billion surplus produced under the Progressive administration before them, said it was not to be used to excuse Social Security, and used the money to do war, throwing the money away so it could not be used for the retirees benefit in the distant future. The Social Security Retirement system is a big problem for owner-management's iron fist control of employees' so as to force them to do the bidding of owner-management, herding the "sheeple" is not quite so easy if the sheeple have a way to survive after retirement without the blessing of the employer, quite a threat to the employees, the vast majority of Americans. This seems to me the only purpose for such drastic measures to scuttle the Social Security Retirement system; although I have also heard that the trillion dollars in the retirement system already saved up, would be nice spending money for gamblers if they can privatize the retirement system. Like America's nuclear arsenal and military might, the Social Security Retirement's enormous amount of already saved money, might well be a plum attracting those whose greed and insecurity demands that they try to take the plum for themselves, with which to rampage.

Hmm, now I recall the proverbial viewpoint of corporations that all that Social Security Retirement money was just robbed away from them by the government via taxation, and privatizing the retirement system would just be taking their money back. Employees are supposed to save their own money for retirement; if they are unable to do so, let them die in poverty, in this viewpoint. But, in reality, the system is set up so employers are required through the social security tax to do that savings for the employees in a manner that events cannot take away that part of retirement for them; it was part of the pay the employers gave for the employee.

Well it is 0530 in the morning now, still dark out; but with the Sun's starting to rise, whatever is blocking my sleep will turn off as usual and then I can then get a few hours of sleep. Then I can arise and eventually re-read this and probably say "yikes!"

A bit more about corporations and America: the employee

Still continuing a bit on the subject of corporations and America's economic potential, even though corporations may consider itself consisting of owner-management-investors, the quality of employees it can acquire is also critical to the success of the corporation. Perhaps I am projecting my reduced functional capacities at age 74 now, but it had seemed to me even back in the early parts of this decade, that maybe we were not as competent as we thought we were. We imagined we could still build the kind of things we had built in the past. But we were spending large parts of our life semi-hypnotized in front of the boob tube (television set) and other factors were cutting into our quality sleep time. Instead of spending time and effort in our free time when not at work, pursuing other interests like doing home improvements and tinkering with our cars and electronic devices, instead we were there at the boob tube, and time and opportunity passed us by, day after day.

So from this collection of people, the corporations had to obtain their employees. And whether or not corporations think it is all about owner-management-investors, without the requisite employee's capability, it is not going to produce well. Hiring & firing supposedly fixes this problem: if the employee does not fit the task, dump him/her and hire a different one.

But I recall even back in the mid-1970's companies were having to hire engineers from other countries, since we were not producing them adequately here at home, and as far as I know, and by reading the names on the articles I read online, we are still having to do that. Without adequate respect for the employees, and respect for their right to live their lives as they choose when not on the job, including their rights to their ideas they have and to pursue when not on the job, employees have little urge to develop themselves better. Corporations may say that they just will fire the employees who will then have to shape up or starve, but that two-class system is not the traditional American one that had previously made America great.

The economy and the corporation

The economy and the corporation seem interrelated. And that interrelationship is so complex that I have to draw the line as to the depth of complexity that I'm willing to consider at any given moment. Most everything has both constructive and destructive aspects, too. So, I now have an urge to attempt to put some of that together in a useful way, in this post.

The economy is about productivity, and each human being has an amazing capacity to be productive. Enabling that maximum productivity in a way that integrates it into the nation's wellbeing, is what needs some considered action nowadays.

Large corporations can have the resources to bring together a diverse set of resources and people to create a customer-needed product. This is the established way to bring about such items as automobiles and complex electronic equipment like computers and audio players. Hypothetically, such corporate activity can provide all that people desire and do it with maximum efficiency.

But there are some parts of this scenario that have not worked. And in fact have actually brought the economy to the current severely disrupted state that it is in. What are those problems and can they be fixed, I hope to explore here.

For one thing, the corporation is a business, with the primary goal of making a profit, the most profit than can be gotten out of what they do, and the investors tend to only focus on that aspect, the cash that results for them, regardless of what got done or did not get done so as to produce that easy spending money for the investors. There is no mention of providing for the wellbeing of the national economy in this viewpoint. No mention of bringing in the productivity potential for all the people of the nation, enabling them to be better customers too. So it is no wonder, that a political system heavily influenced by corporate lobbyists, has not provided for the wellbeing of the productive nation. We are expecting corporations to do something they are not designed to do, nor consider it their concern.

In contrast to some of my related previous posts in this subject area, I now explore the possibility of altering the corporate charter to take in the larger responsibility. And even explore - once again after many years - the radical idea of making the entire country a giant corporation, with all the population as being the stockholders.

(This is not going to set well with the relatively few folks who have played the economy as a game for accumulating enormous personal wealth, sucking it out of the nation, away from the general population. Have they given back equivalent improvement to the nation, in comparison to the wealth they have extracted, hoarded? Sure, this subject is likely to get me unpleasant responses. The integrated concepts I have created over the years, such as my Mooncable, Centristation, and KESTS to GEO applications integrated concepts, have found me the squashed victim of big-oil-coal-nuclear-rocketry, since those concepts would have in many cases relegated their wealthy domains involving energy and material resources, into secondary business areas in many cases; those folks are masters of controlling situations, and my potential disruption to their posh situation was easily done to keep me in the poverty and ignored level, discredited by that very state of life, with little options but to rant in this blog. But I have learned in my 74 years, the hard way, that to not solve the correct problem is to just spin one's wheels, much waste with no fixing of problems or enabling opportunities.)

Again, all the population as the stockholders. Not just the wealthy few. It is the overall population that is the vast diversity of customers to keep the wealth in circulation. How many extravagent yachts, fancy cars, comfy beds can one wealthy person occupy at any given moment? Lots more people if the whole nation is included. Lots more customers.

However, this conjectured super-corporation is likely to have many if not all of the harmful qualities as do many conventional present-day corporations. What would be the factors to consider so as to keep the good qualities and reject the harmful ones?

And in fact, similar factors might be able to fix the present problem with excessive corporate control of the nation's potentials, without a corresponding responsibility and accountability to the nation of customers.

So, on to exploring what those possibilities might be.

1. First, my biggest beef in recent times. Provide for corporate accountability to enable the creative idea capacity of all their employees to contribute to the nation's creativity pool, except where specific parts of that creativity is specifically employed to do the specific job in the corporation. That means an actual end to the "employment agreement" technique to block employee creativity from becoming wild cards and loose cannons on deck in the view of management. Blocking potential ideas for technologies that might become rival to some corporate business, would become clearly known as totally out of the best interests of the nation and therefor of the nation's business potentials itself. Let management work a tiny bit harder, to work around this, just getting their production done and let that be their only task, leaving out the suppression of new factors from yankee ingenuity factors of their subordinates, which the required "employment agreement" has been doing to the detriment of the nation for many decades already. Just require that the corporate employer totally keep their hands off the employee's non-job-involved creative technological ideas. Any corporate exploration of utilization of an employee's creative technological ideas, be handled in separate negotiations; the employee might well want to involve his employer in the creation of his/her foreseen inventions and products, especially if he/she gets to play a part in their creation and development. I know I was that way throughout my career. But if the employer automatically "owns" all those employee's creative ideas for new stuff, and no responsibility for those ideas actualizations into products for the nation of customers, it is far too easy to ignore them and let the ideas die right there, as has been going on for many decades. An incredible number of useful new products have been lost to the nation already as a result. And the incentive to be technologically creative has been almost wiped out of the nation, as a result. We are stuck with manager's fantasies of what new products might be creatable - and that generally is not an area of educated expertise of managerial types, unfortunately; theirs is generally a different concern - although they too surely can also come up with good technological ideas too - but not exclusively from all the other employees of the company. This step seems absolutely necessary to begin to get the creative problem-solving capacity of this nation back online. It will take a long time to regain the average employee's trust in the employer, and to once again spend some dream time developing potentially new products and solutions to problems, but it needs to get started so as to get that potential powerhouse of the nation running again.

2. Integration of the corporation's focus into the nation's actual needs. At the present time I am unaware of any comparable function being done, so this has to be a bit more conjectural. It involves the concept of "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts;" so this would be that which guides that "whole's" definition of potentials. We have our Constitution, set of laws, etc, which are often just rules of the playing game for businesses. Maybe it is all just about playing the game to most people; but I prefer focusing more the aims of a more wholesome America. Political parties wold like to take over this domain, I imagine, and effectively do so, in an indirect way. But I am attempting to describe a focus on the wellbeing of all of America including being part of the world and of civilization. From that model then examining the sum output of all America's corporations and businesses as their produced goods an services, and determine where the missing pieces are. From that data output, perhaps businesses can and will fill in the missing parts; or, where not profitable to do so, but necessary for the wellbeing of the country of people, then governemtnt will need to provide the resources to make it happen.

3. Far greater wisdom in the use of advertising and marketing tools to influence what the customer desires. If advertising can be used to get the customer to desire an inferior product that makes the company more profit, it has been free to do so. Thus the nation was stuck with ever more massive daily transportation vehicles consuming greater amount of fuel.

4. And speaking of fuel, consider the incredible economic imbalance of sending over a hundred billion dollars a year to distant counties for fuel oil; those countries now have the money to buy durable goods, whereas we are just left with the smoke remaining after having burned that oil, much of it with our heavy accelerator pedal foot. Wisdom just totally missing. The energy corporations have been making big business money making that happen; thus they do it, with profit bottom line being their only accountability requirement. If the accountability requirement is instead also linked directly to the overall economy, there likely would be some real heavy action on getting the nation energized by other means. And the subterranean hydrocarbons ultimately will be far more valuable for material uses in the future, which also tends to keep the carbon "sequestered," but as plastics instead of as sequestered in the form of oil and coal. Keeping the carbon out of the air, leaving it in solid form like it has been for millions of years, and enabling good quality air for the planet. And many studies show that would be healthy for the world environment too, including weather patterns and seal levels, despite that somehow having become a political issue instead of a scientific one. This is about materials, pollution and energy.

5. Energy. Energy and knowledge have become the mainstays of our civilization. We need energy, low cost energy available in sufficient quantities, at the places it is needed to power our civilization. Is the world short of energy? I recall the local hydroelectric-based power company pointing out that if all the energy of the sun that falls on the area of the city in one day were to be captured, that it would power the whole city for a whole year. There is a lot of potential there! Freeing up the creative potential of the nation per item #1 above, will enable vastly more approaches to utilizing the energy wealth that our Sun shines down upon us. This includes, of course, wind and hydropower, direct heating and storage, as well as solar-electric techniques. With more easily generated new ideas and approaches, businesses can then have more approaches for providing and more efficiently utilizing various forms of energy, to their increase in profitability as well as benefit to the nation and world.

6. Knowledge. Here again, the fixing of the issue explored in #1 above, will enable rapid new additions to the knowledge base, as people are thusly freed to explore their own technologically creative ideas. And we are well aware of the advantage of having a better knowledge base accessible to all people. The internet's supplying of knowledge in all forms, so very efficiently distributes knowledge, at least at this point. Increasing high speed internet access at reasonable cost to as many people as possible, along with creating new kinds of peripheral equipment - such as teleoperated tooling for manufacturing - puts that knowledge into greater potential action. Manufacturing businesses, corporations, could then become increasingly conducted from more casual comfortable and stimulating environs, including employee's residences, reducing the energy costs of physical commute. With widely available instant access to knowledge, education could then shift focus onto techniques for utilizing knowledge. Integrity of that knowledge base needs freedom of speech principles, as well as credibility levels attached, although applicability valuation might be more useful, since a particular bit of knowledge might well be rival or counterproductive to one person or corporation, but the same bit of knowledge capable of being highly applicable and useful to another person or corporation. For example, the wikipedia has become heavily biased in some fields, clearly catering to established businesses, and thus denigrating potential different approaches to fulfilling people's needs; this has been particularly evident in the health subjects. Theoretically wikipedia can be modified to correct such imbalances, but in practice there are folks who are dedicated to maintaining their limited viewpoint on those subjects, hammering down alternate knowledge inputs; these folks no doubt catering to the wealthy businesses that depend on the public not having adequate knowledge of alternate options to their healthy techniques. So the call here is to - somehow - provide knowledge including freedom for all viewpoints, with credibility valuations access including all anectdotal experiences descriptions - because through these we have a vastly broader observational base - that is also unfettered by corporate territorial claims to use of knowledge. Intellectual property is to be used for improving and making new possible products; patents not be gotten merely to block rival businesses from being able to produce better products and are not utilized adequately by the holder of the patents. A corporation currently can utilize a bit of its vast resources to monitor potential rival businesses that are struggling to get going; then use "industrial espionage" common corporate techniques to find out the details of those rival business's technological bases; then use the big corporation's resources to focus on a key component of that rival company's ideas and quickly R&D it and apply for a patent on the rapidly developed device, without which the rival company cannot create their product. Thus the big corporation has scuttled a potential business that might have cut into its profits in the future, but in doing so has deprived the nation's customer base of a good product.

Memories of the Harmonic Convergence

This morning I ran across a reference to the Harmonic Convergence, which occurred on August 16, 1987; bringing back memories. At that time, I had been doing volunteer work helping publish a slick magazine called "Meditation" and was learning lots about the holistic healing and spiritual awakening focus of that time era, in which the Human Potential Movement was still happening and Whole Life Expos were held every year or two, always full of new healing experimental offerings. Health and wellbeing for all people and nations were the aim back then. (I wonder what happened to that healing healthy focus, does not seem to exist much anymore.) The Meditation Magazine's parent group - the IPO it was called, if I remember correctly - was a prime promoter of the Harmonic Convergence, including publishing articles on it in our magazine at times; and as part of the World Peace Prayer organization out of Japan, that very early 4 o'clock in the morning on August 16, 1987, found me dressed in my best dark suit and tie, taking my turn on stage at the Long Beach Auditorium, sequentially carrying a flag of one of the nations of the world, as the whole auditorium full of people and myself chanted the series of peace phrases for that nation - ending with "May Peace Prevail on Earth" - for its land, its flora and fauna, and its people, moving that nation's flag in the prescribed set of motions and with a special kind of meditative prayer as I did so, as I had been taught to do. I took turns with several other members of the Meditation Magazine group, over and over onto stage and off, and eventually we had covered all the nations of the world and their individual flags; then the event was over. Similar ceremonies were being held simultaneously all over the world, that was why the 4 AM time of start, per the time zone in LA. Also, I knew that behind the stage, there were a group of Japanese people sitting in a circle, simultaneously doing a special prayer for the nations each in turn, visible to me as I went back stage to get a new flag and await my next turn on stage.

Since then, on rare occasions such as today, I again see a reference to the Harmonic Convergence. But the most interesting reminders of that activity, was that for several years later, I kept running into odd coincidences related to one or another of the nations which I had happened to carry their flag and do the prayer for them.

And 23 years later, I still have the American flag I bought to use to practice doing those now-forgotten ritualistic flag wavings and prayer for peace of that ritual on stage. Although it had spent many years at the condo of my mother and stepfather in Hemet, CA, since I had been spending that weekend at their place, and drove to and from Long Beach from there that morning; I only got the flag back after my mother's passing. It now stands in my living room, and on special occasions such as Independence Day and Memorial Day, it goes out on the stanchion mounted on the front of my house.

Looks like "jobs" is the planned battleground for America

Once again I have come around to concluding that the battle for America is about jobs. That is, who gets to say who gets to have a job and doing what. Will it be politically-united big corporations, with intent to split America into a two-class system, the owner-management being like medieval lords living high, while the masses are peon serfs (hard-working folks who have no hope to live better, the American Dream now lost)? Or "sheeple" as they sometimes call them nowadays, indicating how easy it is to herd around and exploit them?

It is easy to see that mindset. Owner-management-investor picking what products and services to make happen, using their manipulation skills to make it pay off for them. But the natural resources and workers that are used to fulfill those products and services, are not considered the same kind of beings as owner-management-investors are, but merely stuff to be used and discarded. Much of the basic bully mindset, just wearing suit and tie and speaking ivy league.

Big business has long staked out technological and business territory using a variety of means, and too often unethically blocking potentially competing technologies and inventions. All in the name of maximizing the bottom-line, to the satisfaction of the investors. No responsibility to the nation or the overall systems of nature and people that make it all possible, even giving them life. Fouling our mutual nest on this planet is of no concern to them unless they get "regulated" or massively sued; otherwise, it is business free-for-all bonanza for them, and increasingly crushing on everything else. As I said, basic irresponsible bully-mind guided stuff.

The effort to use taxes to employ people to create a more self-sufficient "green" energy economy has been stalled by rival political folks who want only continued (and unsustainable) hydrocarbon-and-air based energy sourcing, along with vast sums of money going to other nations in return for oil we just burn away. It is as if they do not understand that the brief energy production is created by un-sequestering the carbon that nature stashed away as coal and oil, and provided oxygen to breathe, the oxygen now used up and made into carbon dioxide. We are undoing what nature took millions of years to do long ago. What better way to sequester carbon than to make it into coal and oil, which are long term stable forms of carbon, stashed safely far underground?

The use of people to create more sustainable energy sources, based on the enormous influx of energy from the sun each day, seems a very wise thing to do, considering that our civilization is based on lots of available energy. Little or no human or animal muscle needed to make things happen for commerce anymore. But the easy corporate money is in continuing to burn oil and coal for energy, and they have no responsibility for the overall system in which they exist, so that is what they manipulate to make happen. And bullies manipulate others; that is what they do, and it is reproductively and lifestyle successful, and thus it continues. Easy money tends to win, nevermind the consequences, especially to other people. The jobs bill is still being blockaded by the big corporate-controlled politicians, despite that it would not use taxpayer money and would only be a boon for Americans - the only difference is that the big corporate folks would not be the only ones controlling who gets a job doing what.

The pattern that explains much of it all, as I started this post mentioning, is the apparent vision by the power elite to make America into a two-class system, with themselves in the elite class, and the rest of Americans made into peons existing to serve the whims of those overlords in their corporate castles. And this has been in the works for many decades - look at the so-called "employment agreement" that technically competent workers have had to sign to get a job, that signs over all their creative output despite not being in a job that utilizes any creative effort, nor does the corporation have any commitment to evaluate and produce from those ideas of employees - the corporation only wants to produce from technology they already control and is well known and thus plugs into management routines which they know how to utilize - and using the "agreement" to justify locking-down all the potentially rival new technological seed ideas from the employee base, prevents any wild cards appearing in the business projections, easier management job then. Since nearly all technologically competent workers have to work for some corporation - and thus sign that often-illegal-but-still-required "employment agreement" that has suppressed the basic technological creativity of "yankee ingenuity" that enabled our industrial civilization here in America. And this has been going on for 30 or 40 years. No wonder we are becoming sheeple.

So, what to do with this mess? The jobs bill, and the green-energy efforts seem steps in the correct direction. How to get out from the stranglehold of the "employment-agreement" phenomenon is unknown; it was made illegal in California decades ago but they just ignored it, saying they would have to be sued by the employee; and other companies simply register in places like Virginia in which that kind of employee-idea-robbing "employment agreement" is not illegal.

It seems all just a Monopoly type game to the owner-management brained folks. But America has been massively economically crushed by the effects of such trickery. Folks in other countries, not hog-tied by employment-agreement blocks to employee technological ideas, have been gaining far ahead of America. And our big corporations are not mending their ways, but instead counting on politics to prevent any changes, while they live high and to heck with tomorrow or all those inferior sheeple trying to rock the boat.

Putting a post here without offering solutions to the gripped-about problems, is not productive. So I just point out the existing jobs bill and the green energy job stimulation and energy sourcing, as going in the correct directions, for starters; and I again point to the posts I have made suggesting the concept of a job stimulation and productivity increase at low cost, by use of the internet-coordinated home-based micro-manufacturing combined with on-the-job training & education on the same home workstations - see "home manufacturing workstations" posts I have made, and a few related documents elsewhere on the net. This could bring otherwise-unemployed (and insufficiently employed) people into the nation's productivity and skill enhancement loop. Management by small and large business would also be part of it, but it would not necessarily be the conventional commute-to-corporate-building workstyle. "Telecommuting" has long been done by some; this would simply be expanding it into the manufacturing work arena, enabling greatly reduced manufacturing costs and thus become more competitive in the world economy. Designing and manufacturing the micro-manufacturing peripherals to work with existing types home computers would be an early step in this process, itself a manufacturing and engineering activity. Since it would essentially be a new kind of manufacturing system, it would need to be intelligently and compassionately configured for safety and where needed, securely.

But, since this is not the easy "business-as-usual" direction, no doubt it will continue to be suppressed by the big boys, irresponsible bully experts on manipulating events. Sorry about that.