LISTENING to Gordon Brown’s speech in Docklands, east London today, I couldn’t
help but draw comparison with what I can only imagine was the speech to Parliament
by King Charles I , expounding his divine right to be God on Earth and to ask for the taxpayers of Britain to again put their hands in their pockets as the elite of the nation carried on regardless.


THAT WAS before he had HIS HEAD chopped off !


Simon Schama’s excellent History of Britain television series for the BBC, which explained in exquisite detail the shenanigans [trickery and humbug] behind the public execution of a king and the creation of a republic in the episode entitled THE BRITISH WARS, also reminded me of the tale of Schama’s own experience teaching World History to American undergraduates, when referring to the Second World War, he was asked by one of the shocked students …

“IF you are talking about a second world war, presumably
  there must have been a first, when on earth was that ! “


As I have quoted elsewhere there are as many versions of history as there are historians and in the context of British Politics, listening to Gordon Brown absolutely confirms that there are as many versions of economics as there are economists. Never forgetting that it was he who for ten years of this government held the job of chief economist of the nation in his role as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Second Lord of the Treasury after Tony Blair as Prime Minister and the First Lord of the Treasury.

"For better or worse, with me what you see is what you get," said Mr Brown.

It is a line so at odds with reality, so manifestly untrue, so utterly ridiculous that one barely knows where to start challenging it.


Joseph Stiglitz’s comment the other day on CNBC that the Federal Reserve system “smells bad, it looks bad and it undermines confidence” comes to mind as well as Liz Hunt’s comments that Gordon Brown’s performance at the Chilcot Inquiry ...

“was a masterclass in cynicism, weasel words, prevarication and buck-passing”

in the context of answering the question as to whether the Ministry of Defence had received adequate funding for its needs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More recent events have indeed confirmed Gordon Brown’s betrayal of British troops and by inference the families of those troops, the entirety of the British taxpaying public and the rest of our species on earth – a betrayal that, shamefully, he persists in denying whilst being adamant that the long-overdue strategic defence review, will NOT take place until after the next election.

Tell that to the troops who are still paying for their own boots and who are having to wait until the latter half of 2011 before they get bomb-proof armoured vehicles as well as ALL of those of ALL the species of the earth which suffer the consequences of war.

YET another tragic example of this government creating layer upon layer of non-accountable top down bureaucracy, spending more and more of the budget on consultants to advise them how to do the job, and leaving little over to pay for well trained, adequately motivated and appropriatly remunerated personnel to actually DO the work that the organisation was set up to provide & administer: and even as I pen these words the shear incompetancy of the system IS BEING broadcast over the  airwaves to the undoubted disgust of every hard-working taxpayer in the land, who has NOT succummed to Gordon Brown's MAGIC SPELL.

EVERY investigative report established by this government, for the last 13 years, has stated that "lessons are being learned by the agencies involved"; and yet time after time after time the reality has proved to be absolutely the opposite.

THE king's new clothes

have indeed been found

to be somewhat transparent

as Hans Christian Andersen suggested  in 1837, having been inspired by the Spanish story recorded by  Don Juan Manuel, who lived between 1282-1348.


In the context of Gordon Brown’s treatise that THE ONLY way to recovery IS through growth, growth and more growth and of the more realistic POST PEAK OIL scenario referred to in Richard Heinberg’s ...

Life After Growth – What if the economy doesn’t recover ?  ...

WE MUST ALL ask ourselves IS or IS NOT Gordon Brown & this Labour Government,
as delusional leader of the global economic system ...

   punching 'above' its

   international weight ?

   For entirely the same

   reasons as the King

   WHO lost his head ! 

.

HAS ALWAYS BEEN the founding principle of Google’s seven-point code of conduct.

BUT Google may now have to prove that its famous ethos is intact, even when tested to destruction by the bureaucrats of the European Community, following the latest
European Commission anti-trust investigation.

As far as the REALLY BIG GLOBAL PICTURE goes, however, it is increasingly apparent that IT IS going to GET WORSE before it GETS WORSE, because the collective mind-set of the global community IS BEING LED by those that continue to DO THE WRONG THINGS for THE WRONG REASONS, invariably from the standpoint of self-interested arrogance and greed as well as a disconnect between the factual realities of a diversity of situations and the adopted OLD ORDER MODELS to deal with those situations.

WE are of course talking about ... a CRISIS of economics as well as  science, religion & politics.

The Don’t BE EVIL strap-line could equally and sometimes justifiably, be applied to almost ALL codes of conduct, as well as my own set of values but I want to now address it’s relevance in the context of …

1.    The Economics Community and the peoples’ request of our new masters of the globe, to consider the need for creating a new global model of caring economics. NEW masters of the globe who surprise surprise, now doubt that the global economy is actually out of recession and that there exists a distinct possibility of a double dip or even triple dip recession looming large. A situation which is hardly surprising when one considers that the old order model of the global economy STILL rules OK, is absolutely dependent on growth, whatever the consequences, and is underpinned by an acceptance of completely outdated economic theories.

2.    The Scientific Community and their reliance on computer modelling which has until very recently been entirely based on collective theories which reflect THEIR DENIAL of a living planet;  when IN FACT, more than any other thing, WE HAVE to SEE IT as IT REALLY IS because the lives of our species as well as every other species on this planet are WHOLLY DEPENDENT upon the living Earth. THIS way of thinking makes clear that we have no special human rights; we are merely one of the partner species in THE great enterprise which IS GAIA.

3.    The Religious Communities of the globe, which ALL preach that “THEIR GOD” IS the ONLY interpretation of the spirituality of our entire species and who all adhere to their own self-interested arrogance and “greedy mindset” in protection of old order status quo models which are rooted in a non-evolutionary don’t rock the boat mentality; OR their critics who can't see that secular atheism is a religion IT SELF. The only exception to this rule being the Dalai Lama who tore up the 1000 year rule book and sought to dedicate his life to a better global understanding of the interdependence of religious spirituality, scientific truth and the mutually beneficial politics of  an entirely new global model of caring economics.

4.     The Political Community and THE moral dimension to leadership which President Obama has attempted to establish, as a core principle of bi-partisan mutual benefit for ALL the peoples of the USA, which has already floundered on rocky shores. Equally the democratic ramifications of the Lisbon Treaty and the "staight-jacket" of European Monetary Union is stretching the patience and pockets of the peoples of Europe to the extreme; so no wonder the kind of ourburst, supposedly in the name of ALL the people of Britain gets aired in Brussels; whilst the political systems of both India and China remain rooted in the status quo of “class and caste war”.  ANY wonder then that the people here in Britain DO despair as to who at ALL to vote for as our representatives;  in what has now been revealed as a predominately elitist, conniving and corrupt establishment, which lacks ANY semblance of integrity whatsoever ... 

A SPECTACULAR failure of political leadership  - INDEED! and somewhat disturbing in the context of James Lovelock's prediction that the British Isles is likely to be one of the only surviving maritime nations which will still be able to grow food. 

man can never have enough

without having too much

Perhaps NOW IS THE TIME  for us to investigate further, as Albert has suggested ...

The Curious Case of Being British in the form of a challenge to the CHE-UK.





As James Lovelock has said in his FINAL WARNING …

WE could NOT SURVIVE for an instant on a dead planet like Mars, and we need to understand the difference.

IF we fail to take our planet seriously we will be like children who take their homes for granted and NEVER DOUBT that breakfast starts the day; we will NOT notice as we enjoy our daily lives that the cost of neglect could soon cause the greatest tragedy in the memory of humankind.

The Earth, in its but NOT our interests, may be forced to move to a hot epoch, one where IT can survive, although in a diminished and less habitable state. IF, as is likely, this happens, we will have been the cause.

MOST of all I am pessimistic because business and governments both appear to be accepting uncritically a belief that climate change is easily and profitably reversible.

WE ARE creatures of [Darwinian] evolution (THE best way to understand Gaia IS THAT it proposes a new context for evolution), a transient species with a limited lifespan, as were all our numerous distant ancestors. BUT, unlike almost everything before we emerged on this planet, we are also intelligent social animals with the possibility of evolving to become a wiser and more intelligent animal, one that might have a greater potential as a partner for the rest of life on Earth.

falling leaves

return

to their roots

WHAT IS - IS ... 

and sure ain't  NO ISer ... 

a concept of TRUTH that WE of our species ignore at OUR PERIL.





The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning,
by James Lovelock: Amazon UK, Amazon USA

 

In conclusion I strongly recommend that you read this short and very readable book.
It’s message is a hard one, but it is better to be informed than ignorant, and by some miracle humanity may even wake up to the severity of the problem and take real measures (including dramatic restrictions on human reproduction and the conversion of the population to a vegetarian diet) which will take pressure off GAIA.

.

and NEVER, NEVER, NEVER

forget that WE ARE

the NORMAL ones

who understand that the

electromagnetic force

which encompasses the

totality of THE ONE ...

IS LOVE

" Everybodies problem/s are 

our problems and WE HAVE

the ability to collectively 

change the world."

                                                         

                                           Deepak Chopra



.

the autistics, the dyslexics,

the miss-fits and the rebels,

the integral artists,

the non-celebrities and those

whose dictum is to live life

happily by living unseen,

the ones for whom the switch

has already been flicked,

and those who just refuse to

be the same as the rest.

THE ones whose instinctive conscious ACTIONS are driven by an intuitive wisdom of knowledge of understanding of the collective unconscious.


AS the co-creative collective conscious emerges from the collective unconscious it becomes ever more apparent that information IS the light of that knowledge of understanding; and that the amount of information is evolving at an exponential rate as a result of our species experience of the ever changing and ever more complex interconnected and interwoven components of the web of life which constitutes the multi-verse of OUR parallel universes.





IT IS ONLY our conscious perception of TIME & SPACE, limited as it is by the speed of light, which allows us by a process of holographic mind-shift to consciously interpret the subconscious manifestations of the world and re-act to Buddha’s call to ACTION which was so succinctly confirmed by Jesus, and subsequently by Mohammed, Einstein, Carl Jung,  Teilhard de Chardin, Feynman et al.

HOMO SAPIENS is indeed evolution

BECOME conscious of IT SELF.

.

IS 2 B a collective ...

THEN each and every one

of the individuals which

constitute the collective MUST

rendezvous with their destiny

which IS 2 BECOME ... 

a master of ZEN

one whose ACTIONS SPEAK

LOUDER than words

one whose ACTIONS are 

manifestly appropriate

in SUPPORT of the ONE

one whose ACTIONS have 

BECOME the ACTIONS

of the ONE

Don't ACT - BAD ACT







" AS a CRITICAL MASS of humans evolving toward their new capacities
   arise, humanity will undergo an unprecedented shifting in our entire
   way of BEING on this planet."

                                                                                   Barbara Marx Hubbard




" IT'S a tough message. BUT IT'S THE TRUTH and somebody has to utter it.
   I guess IT'S OUR JOB, because WE ARE the ones who have shown up."

                                                                                           Richard Heinberg




" TO have faith in such a process requires a faith in the good sense and
sincerity of ordinary people - a faith that just about everybody professes."

                                                                                           Hendrik Herzberg





THE ART of ZEN IS THE ART of ACTION - Integral Art through the
Power of Visual Thinking and an understanding of the fact that
Perception is the Medium and The IDEA that IT IS POSSIBLE.


IT IS after all THE ACTION of BEING cool  which personifies ...

THE ART of a master of ZEN

&

LIFE with PRINCIPLE




.

during this particular period 

of the evolutionary spiral,

faced as ever ... both

individually and collectively,

with the horns of a dilemma.

" The word dilemma characterizes a situation in which one must choose between two disagreeable options. This is a good description of the human condition in the early 21st century. Had our species foreseen and begun to adapt to resource limits back in the 1950s or even the ’70s, the transition to non-growing, sustainable levels of population and consumption might have been fairly painless. But now there really are no easy paths from here to a workable future."
            
                                                                      Richard Heinberg - Museletter 210


THE BIGGEST irony of ALL ...

IS THAT our species' propensity to adopt a mindset of denial, when faced with any really urgent or problematical situation ...

IS THAT which may prevent our species ACTING in the very way that we have been destined to do so.

DESTINY IS that which one discovers ... IF every opportunity, with which you are faced, IS responsibly acted upon in all humility.  

FATE IS what you are faced with if you don't.                                                 

When faced with what could be our species most urgent and problematical situation, as a global collective of a multiplicity of diverse situations, the very survival of our species as custodian of ALL LIFE on earth and probably ALL LIFE in this particular universe of the multiverse of parallel universes - the VERY WORK of GOD which
Lloyd Blankfein has declared Goldman Sachs to be carrying out ...


"What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to BE that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy."
                                                                
                                      Matt Taibbi - Inside The Great American Bubble Machine


... IS ONLY part of the ACTION that our species IS REQUIRED URGENTLY to take, in the face of ALL the evidence, in view of the need to restore GLOBAL BALANCE.

"Global Balance should therefore result in systems at the global level which are less in number than the current number of parts operating in the inter-national space. It will need to be managed by a level of thinking that is more complex than the thinking which produced the current international environment."

                                                     Peter Merry  Global Change by Natural Design


As David Korten presented in his speech at the Economics of Peace Conference in October ...

" To use a computer analogy, the Wall Street financial system has become the operating system of the economy and the society. The values and priorities of Wall Street thus become the defining values and priorities of the larger society. Wall Street has one value—money—and one goal: to maximize financial returns to those who control the money system.

Social or environmental consequences find no place in Wall Street decision making.

We begin with a recognition that the old economy is based not only on the illusion that money is wealth, but as well the illusion that we live in a world of open frontiers with endless abundant resources free for the taking. We are only now as a species awakening to the reality that we are passengers on a living spaceship and must learn to live in balanced relationship with our local ecosystems everywhere, working with nature to reuse and recycle everything and to eliminate the release of any substance that nature cannot readily absorb and detoxify.

Spaceship Earth, our Birth Mother, is endowed with a wondrous self-managing, self-regulating life support system that has nourished us as a species through the years of our growing up. As a loving parent, she has absorbed the insults and injuries of our reckless adolescent behavior. Our numbers and the power of our technology, however, now exceed her capacity to absorb."

 

The multitude which is not brought to act as a unity is confusion.
The unity which has not its origin in the multitude is tyranny.

                                                                                         Blaise Pascal

NO BETTER place to start to understand how
to address ALL of these issues than to ...

1.   Take cogniscence of my statement elsewhere

2.   Take a primer on Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats

3.   Watch THIS Deepak Chopra video

4.   Download and read Barrett Chapman Brown's article entitled
      INTEGRAL COMMUNICATIONS FOR SUSTAINABILITY which
      appeared in the Spring/Summer 2005 Edition of KOSMOS

 

LIFE with PRINCIPLE

"KOSMOS takes an integral approach to global emergence that stimulates the mind, awakens the heart and inspires engagment. It has magnetized experienced leading edge thinkers in global governance, economics, institutional transformation and contemporary spirituality who are committed to evolutionary global change through transformation of self, culture and institutional structures. Highly recommended."

                                                                                                   Ken Wilber

 

.

still 18 years old ...

I'd be able to send my own

20 words to save the world

In the context of the

really BIG PICTURE

WHAT would your 20 words BE ?

Consider US

and

Don't go messing with our world !



ConsiderUS  and  Don't go messing with our world !


.

A New Economics That Works

for Business, Families ...

and the Planet.

“A prescription for an economic system that is both equitable and sustainable.
  It should be read and used by everyone who wants a better world!”

                                                                                              Deepak Chopra


" The most important human creations are our cultures. The cultures we create largely determine whether we kill one another and destroy nature’s life-support systems, or live in a humane and sustainable world. And economic systems are a
key element of ALL cultures.

I have in this book argued that we need a caring economics more congruent with the direction in evolution toward greater consciousness, creativity and caring. I realize that speaking of direction in evolution is today a kind of scientific heresy. At best, it’s acceptable to say there is evolutionary movement toward greater complexity and variability. But as Darwin himself noted, the movement in evolution goes beyond greater complexity and variability to the emergence of needs, capacities, motivations, and possibilities of a different order than those present in earlier life forms.

This does not mean that our species, as one of the last to emerge, is the apex of evolution, and thus entitled to lord it over other life forms. Nor does it mean there is a divine plan or intelligent design. We don’t have any way of knowing what ultimately lies behind evolution, and this is so whether we think evolution is directionless or not.
But it does mean that as life evolved on our Earth, it developed an ever greater capacity for consciousness, creativity, planning, and choice. And while these capacities are not unique to us, they are most highly developed in our species.

Whether these human capacities are expressed, however, largely depends on the kinds of social and economic systems we create. This makes us, quite literally, co-creators of our evolution.

We certainly can’t determine everything about our future. But we can join together to create the social and economic conditions that nurture, drive, and promote the expression of our positive rather than negative genetic capacities. Indeed, having unprecedented biological capacities means that it’s our evolutionary responsibility to use these gifts in positive rather than negative ways.

ALL LIFE FORMS – from the smallest to the largest, from amoeba and plankton to elephants and whales – have to some extent altered our planet. Some have done so by simply appearing on the evolutionary scene. Others have built new structures: birds make nests and beavers construct dams. But no species has come close to what we humans have done.

We have used our imagination and our capacity for turning visions into realities to create a whole new human-made world. Some of what we created is extraordinary: buildings as tall as mountains, airplanes that fly higher than birds, and technologies that reveal subatomic structures, explore outer space, and probe the mysteries of the brain. Some of it is exquisite: beautiful music, poetry and art. But some of it is horrendous: gas chambers, torture chambers, nuclear bombs, and invisible biological weapons for instant mass annihilation.

WE stand at an evolutionary crossroads in our human adventure on this Earth.
We can continue with “business as usual” – even though both science and our native intelligence tell us that the mix of high technology and an ethos of domination and conquest may take us to an evolutionary end. Or we can use the great gifts we were given by evolution to create a new economic story and reality – a caring economics that supports both human survival and human development and actualisation.

It is in our power to imagine the world we want for ourselves and our children.
For most of us, this is a world where our basic needs for food, shelter, and safety,
as well as our yearning for nurturing and love, for justice and peace, and for a sense
that what we do has meaning and helps others as well as ourselves, are fulfilled.
Above all, it is a world where our children survive and thrive.

It is up to us to help create the conditions that support this vision. We have been endowed by nature with an amazing brain, an enormous capacity for love, a remarkable creativity, and a unique ability to learn, change, grow and plan ahead.
If we act now, we can use these capacities to co-create the economic and social systems that support the great gifts we were granted by evolution.

We can’t wait for our national and international leaders to act. Every one of us can be a leader by using our imagination and initiative to change consciousness, practices, and policies."

                                                                                                      Riane Eisler




.

... in the evolution of ALL LIFE

on earth, when ...

AT the same TIME  ...

1. China's backing allowed the Sri Lanken president to ignore Western protests and perpetrate the final assault on the Tamil Tigers by surrounding 50,000 civilians inside a tiny enclave.

2. Peter Foster reports from Beijing that …

Zhao Ziyang, the former Communist Party leader, has spoken from beyond the grave to break two decades of official silence on the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 with a wide-ranging attack on the Chinese political system.

Zhao Ziyang is quoted to have said in "Prisoner of the State: The secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang"; published today that  "It is the Western parliamentary democratic system that has demonstrated the most vitality. If we don't move toward this goal, it will be impossible to resolve the abnormal conditions in China's market economy."

3. The "man in the midin" Speaker of the "Mother" of the Western parliamentary democratic system, RESIGNS (the first for over 300 years) because of his inability to control the shambolic state of affairs which has been revealed to the British PEOPLE, by the Daily Telegraph in the last 12 days.

4. "We are being afflicted by a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in years to come - namely "TECHNOLOGICAL UNEMPLOYMENT". This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour." - John Maynard Keynes

5. ALL the efforts of Barack Obama to defuse the problems of the Middle East and to "open the minds" of those that control the lives of the PEOPLE, seemingly are falling on deaf ears.

6. AND NATURE proves that IT IS IN CONTROL of Homo Sapiens NOT Homo Sapiens in control of Nature


I am reminded of :-

1. Dr. Ralph Linton's statement that - "The tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic and political patterns. It is safe to predict that such social inventions as modern-type capitalism, fascism and communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed toward the adjustment of modern society to modern methods."

2. Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson's 2007 epic "FANTASY ISLAND; WAKING UP to the incredible economic, political and social ILLUSIONS of the Blair Legacy";


and am considering that Blair's Legacy IS it self  NOT an "island legacy" but a collective "top-down" legacy of the Thatcher/Blair/Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush "eras";

and remorselessly coming to the conclusion, in the context of my own
long standing commitment to the concept that no man is an island ...

that it is imperative that

each and everyone of the 

PEOPLE of our planet awaken

from the "fantasy island"

mentality of denial;

 

lest IT BECOME a global

fantasy island MIND-SET

of APATHY & DESPAIR.

.

   OUR THOUGHTS and LOVE "R"

   and will ever continue 2B with

   U BOTH as ONE "peace" of

   LIFE's intricate jigsaw

.