A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney

" THE recent remark by Mitt Romney’s senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom that upon clinching the Republican nomination Mr. Romney could change his political views “like an Etch A Sketch” has already become notorious. The comment seemed all too apt, an apparent admission by a campaign insider of two widely held suspicions about Mitt Romney: that he is a) utterly devoid of any ideological convictions and b) filled with aluminum powder."

Thus begins the funniest and most pointed bit of political writing that I've seen since Molly Ivans left the scene (God rest her troubled soul!) This piece is called "a Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney" and was written by DAVID JAVERBAUM and Published: March 31, 2012 in the New York Time Sunday Review. You can see the whole piece here @ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opinion/sunday/a-quantum-theory-of-mitt-romney.html

Bon Appetite!

and thanks for reading - have a great day!!

Smokemaster John

Make a Difference Today - STOP Joseph Kony

OK, here's the starting point for me doing my bit to make this happen - for you who haven't been paying attention Joseph Kony is the self-agrandizing SOB in central Africa who's leading a forced army of child soldiers and HE'S NOT FIGHTING ...FOR ANYTHING MEANINGFUL just his own continued deviant ambitions. His so called Lord's Resistance Army visits the most horrendous acts of violence on innocent civilians routinely and he's been doing it for OVER TWENTY YEARS.

What's different? Jason Russell and a group of determined activists have been spreading the word about his atrocities for some time now but Jason's video has gone viral this week in the virtual world of Facebook & the blogosphere. Here is the link. Watch it. It is very well done for a relative amateur and he makes the point without gratuitous horror. After you've watched it, I strongly urge you to support the campaign. You will hear about whiners and arm chair activists who are complaining about the amount of money spent making film, traveling, and showing film - DUH!! It's a global campaign to make this guy public pariah #1. THAT'S HOW YOU DO THAT!!

Anyway, watch it and pass it on. Thanks for your caring, but most of all thanks for being there and being YOU!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc

Like What You See In The World? BE THE CHANGE!!

My People - Are you happy with the world as you see it today? I have your reading assignment and I do not make it lightly. "With each sector reporting out the overwhelming challenges we were each facing from this perfect storm, we sought to... discern together what we were each to do. One glaring conclusion was that we had our ladders up against the wrong wall in a most dramatic way. With the global economy the dominant world institution, we all assumed that the environment was a subset of the global economy. In fact, the opposite is true. Common sense dictates that, since we are all supported physically by the earth’s air, water and soil, the global economy is actually a subset of the environment. Further, we realized, there is no way we 6 billion+ people can all get down from one ladder, get across the room and get up the other ladder without massive disruption. The transition is not going to be easy and will take every one of us to our limits…and probably past them! All we can do is each take personal responsibility for our lives and our families and start taking care of home….which is literally our own watershed. We each have to help create a ‘local, living economy’ wherever we live." This is an excerpt from "Trojan Horse of Love" by Susan Davis. It is freely available for download at http://www.capitalmissions.com/ (http://www.capitalmissions.com/THOL_Easter_2011.pdf) If you care about nothing more than your family, or you care about the whole of humanity in the coming times, get and read this. All you women in my network, get and read this. EVERYONE, get and read this. It is critically important. When you get done, or before you get done, pass it on, to EVERYONE.

Thanks for reading this, and have a great day!!

What Is At Stake & Why We MUST Change!

Cultural diversity is not only humanity’s hallmark of progress, but an insurance policy against extinction as a species. Diversity gives not only cultural and economic riches derived from different perspectives on natural resources and what it means to be human, but options to problem solving that are stifled in a homogenized society. When such a society is organized around economic goals that are measured by profit margins for private gain by powerful elites, where the demands of those who bear cash as the ticket of admission to the marketplace rule, rather than the needs of people, then those who are deprived – and those who have never been part of such a global economy – must necessarily suffer. The genocide of tribal peoples, therefore, is symptomatic of a deep malaise in the world’s metropolises. Indigenous peoples will suffer the most, but humanity as a whole will suffer the loss of some of its memory, not only of a unique knowledge of the natural world, but of its ability to cope with the future in various, diverse ways.

THY WILL BE DONE, The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil,

Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett

Harper Collins, 1995, p. 685

Blessings in all we do - and must do

John

Should Ron Paul be considered a serious contender for the Republican nomination?

This was the question posed by The Economist website (http://www.economist.com/economist-asks/should-ron-paul-be-considered-serious-contender-republican-nomination) Two response comments were significant and worth repeating here, in the hope that they may get more exposure. I don't necessarily agree with what they are saying about Ron Paul, but what they are saying about the Republican field of presidential candidates is right on:

Current total votes: 10189 as of 3:00 PM EDT 21 August 2011

Voting opened on Aug 18th 2011

TheRedSheep wrote

The exact wording of the question was: "Should Ron Paul be considered a serious contender for the *Republican nomination*," not "for the presidency." The latter is debatable, the former much less so. His problem from past elections--that he comes across as a crank--doesn't really apply when you put him on the same stage as Bachmann. Or Cain, or Gingrich, or essentially anyone at Ames bar Pawlenty.

He sounds distinctly reasonable by comparison; he has crank positions, but he gives the strong impression of having thought them through and done research of some sort. The fact that he's been expounding those same crank positions for decades, without swerving, makes him utterly immune to the charges of flip-flopping that devastate Romney. He has Tea Party cred, but isn't super-strongly associated with them and the gag reflex they presently trigger in the American psyche. Throw in his horde of gold-standard-mujahideen supporters, and you've got a solid contender.

His main problem now, as I see it, lies in his tendency to stammer his responses. That's the downside of actually thinking about what you're saying instead of fishing about your memory for a vaguely pertinent pre-rehearsed sound bite. But what do I know? I'm a left-leaning centrist.

Lucky Buckeye wrote

Ron Paul's steadfast belief in the full validity of returning to the gold standard as an economic cure-all disqualifies him for serious consideration, no matter what else he believes. He consistently displays a rabid, and unfiltered loathing of anything government, and seems to have been educated in the early 1800's. He appears to be detached from reality - not a good characteristic for a US President. Still, these are not his most critical weaknesses.

The US presidency is a demanding job which wears on its occupants like a bad case of the flu. I have watched Ron Paul speak, and it is clear to me that he is too old, too frail, and too weak to be President. He makes Bob Dole and John McCain seem like strapping youngsters.

Due to Republican-instituted changes in election rules in many states, and the current shape of the electoral college (owing mainly to population shifts), it appears to me that a second term for Obama is in serious jeaopardy. I'm not even sure that it would be the best thing for the nation or the Democrats (moderates and liberals) for Obama to be re-elected.

Just as only Nixon could go to China, create the EPA, and retreat from Vietnam, it may be the case that only a sane and decent Republican can deal with the tea party and the other self-obsessed Republican rabble that currently occupies Congress. For that reason, I am hopeful that Republicans will nominate either Mitt Romney or John Huntsman, who at this point in time, appear to be the only Republican candidates who aren't certifiable as lunatics; and I mean that seriously. The others would be considered a joke at any other time in American history. I have never in my many years seen anything like the existing Republican slate of candidates seeking office in America. Their lack of comprehension, sense of 'real history', and compassion is shocking. To propose tax increases on the poor as a solution to the nation's debt problem is vicious and patently absurd, as is labeling the filthy rich as 'job creators'. Their doublespeak and semantic dishonesty is beyond compare.

I am losing hope for America, for the first time in my life. Our Constitution was not designed to deal with politicians who placed only their own interests above all else. Tea Partiers and their ilk would see 10 million people die in the streets before they would consent to one tax increase - even one returning rates to the 1950's. It's truly preposterous.

*****************

It does give you pause to consider, when the best that the rabid-publicans can put forward as candidates are backward looking, intellectually "lights are on but no one's home", certifiable nut cases, Ron Paul almost looks legitimate. Scary!! I feel the same way about Barack Obama that I did about Arnold in California - "You elected the guy to take on the most significant crisis in recent history that was twenty years in the making (or more!!) and then bitch because he hasn't "made everything right in two years???" WTF???!! Are YOU crazy??

Thanks for reading - and have a GREAT day!!

Smokemaster

What I See Emerging In This Time...

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her:

powerless to separate ourselves from her…she has neither

language nor discourse; but she creates tongues and hearts,

by which she feels and speaks… She is all things.

Goethe

My thinking parallels many people’s regarding what we are facing except that I try to bring it all together in one “unified field theory”. Some people focus on the resource issues, some people focus on the environmental issues, some on the human eco-system aka infrastructure, social structure, processes, and communication. I am trying to unite all of it, and as Barbara Marx Hubbard says, find the good in it. To me that means “What is our opportunity?”

So… I see us as having an increasing chaotic set of natural and human conditions. Virtually every major component of the earth eco-system is either in trouble or worse. I see us as having increasingly fragile social structures, with increased breakdown and violence. I agree with the assessment that we are in one of the great global species extinctions. I see us, at the same time, as having almost eliminated “natural selection” (commonly referred to as “survival of the fittest”) in our human world. Other than war, there is little that causes death in a selective way for humans, weeding out “bad breeding stock”. Virtually anybody that is alive is considered to have the basic “right” to reproduce…and we keep almost everybody alive with the advances in modern medicine that we have achieved. While this may seem like a serious problem more often than not (and in the current context it sometimes is) it is also a normal part of nature’s cyclic process of biological re-invention.

Nature is basically up to a numbers game. She doesn’t really care about our human peculiarities or any other species’ peccadilloes. It’s all about survival of life, whatever life can “make the grade”. Everything noted here fits neatly into what has been variously described as a biospheric breakpoint or natural re-invention – virtually the same thing that Barbara describes as the evolutionary transition composed of breakdown and breakthrough, except that there is a “long wave” cycle to this process. Nature has been doing this since the beginning of the world (and possible before, but I can’t speak for that :-) There is a period of what we would call chaos, from which emerges some combination of things that represent stable, “new viable” as a Natural function. The entities that make this up start to replicate, and almost immediately the mathematics of probability comes into play, with the standard bell curve being in force. What this means is that the bulk of the results of replication are within the larger body of the curve, the “norms”, and therefore are “normal”. There are a few that are at the extremes. In the early stages of the cycle, these are not “viable” and they die or are killed off. As time goes by, more and more deviations (5-6 sigma against a normal bell curve) are created and some survive to replicate, creating a combination of percentages of deviations and normal offspringfurther combining with the original number of genetic deviations as a percentage of the whole population(s). Eventually there are enough numbers that deviations start to mate with deviations, creating significant deviation variations and exponentially increasing the number of genetic deviations running around loose. While our localized or personal view of this might tend to be negative, this is a natural process that results in genetic variation (the opposite of natural selection, which limits genetic variation), a requirement for the next cycle of natural re-invention.

Natural selection prevails during the early stage of a biological epoch to maintain stability but fades in favor of genetic variation as the epoch concludes when genetic diversity favors the development of a new viable.

There are common characteristics associated with these breakpoint reinventions.

1) What makes up the new viable has usually been around during the last days of the old cycle but has not had the ecological opportunity to flourish.

2) There are usually one or more trigger events that set in motion the cascading collapse of the old viable support system/ecosystem.

3) The nature of the shift that occurs is usually massive and it occurs relatively fast. In general it cannot be delayed or put off. It is the epitome of inevitable.

4) There is usually a good deal of “thinning of the herd” that happens during these events. They may actually be triggered by an extinction event.

5) Generally what was “old viable” may be around after the main period of the event but is no longer dominant.

I don’t think it is very far afield from what Barbara Marx Hubbard has been talking about at all, just a different frame of reference, to say that I think that we are facing just such a breakpoint natural system reinvention. As such several point are significant:

1) We are in planetary population overshoot right now – by about 5 billion people if you use the pre-petroleum and current numbers as a your standards. It is reasonable to think that advances in materials technology and other technologies as well as improvements in various processes, and information management will allow us to sustain many more people on earth than pre-petroleum numbers in a post-peak oil period leading to an alternative energy future. That having been said, there will be “thinning of the herd” so to speak, and it probably will not be pretty. This may occur by natural means or mans inhumanity to man but it’s likely.

2) For the first time in the history of the earth, there is a clear reality that a species on the earth can understand the nature, scope, and gravity of the situation and take action to favorably influence their place in the new viable schema, by choosing to consciously evolve with the shift! The nature and scope of the required conscious evolutionary effort is not certain or clearly defined. None the less, there is a good possibility that by appropriate critical thinking in advance, by staying attuned to the nature and rate of change as it is happening, and by taking deliberate and focused action the necessary changes are within our reach. It is my personal opinion that the new viable in humans will manifest itself as a new level of consciousness and a very different engagement of emotions, actions, and planetary awareness. This will be empowered by a new sense of self-awareness, individual liberty, and self-reliance at the same time as a fully engaged capacity to act collectively with any and all fellow humans on short notice, without preamble, to achieve the greater good in any situation, no matter the scale of the issue. Outcomes, rather than transactions, will drive the nature of human interactions in professional activity.

3) Old viable will no longer be dominant. Period. Not subject to debate, nor is there any aspect of the old viable that it is worth getting into an uproar over the preservation of. If it belongs in the new viable, it will be there. Otherwise it won’t. No amount of resistance, hedging, or hoarding from and by the old viable players will change that. Some things that we are currently involved, in massive efforts to “stop”, “turn back the clock”, or change, are essentially exercises in futility. We DO need to be thinking about how we respond effectively to the changes that are on the way. It is not an IF but a WHEN.

4) Times will very likely be very difficult for some. It is hard to anticipate the degree or nature of “hard”, but the first smart move that anyone can make is to ensure the maximum emergency preparedness posture for themselves and their family, then establish/re-establish neighborhood ties and community relationships that may have atrophied or never existed. The first level of conscious collective action will need to be the reassertion of physical community where little or none may have existed. It will be necessary for the sheer survival of some and it will benefit all. As Benjamin Franklin once said, in a time of breakpoint change for America, “We must all “hang together”, or assuredly we shall all hang separately!”

Blessing to you and all of us in this work!

Thanks for reading,

Smokemaster

The Water Economy - The Real Threat

As the man said "We've done without oil, we've done without most things that are currently is short supply. We've NEVER done without water!" In case none of you have been paying attention to the REAL issues of our world, so frequently panned by the ignoratti, read THIS article and GET IT!!

Texas ready to tap sewage amid severe drought

$13m reclamation plant will provide drinking water

August 14, 2011|By Angela K. Brown, Associated Press

• • FORT WORTH - In parched West Texas, it is often easier to drill for oil than to find new sources of water.

So after years of diminishing water supplies made even worse by the second-most severe drought in state history, some communities are resorting to a plan that might have seemed absurd a generation ago: turning sewage into drinking water.

Construction recently began on a $13 million water reclamation plant believed to be the first of its kind in Texas. And officials have worked to dispel any fears that people will be drinking their neighbors’ urine, promising that the system will yield clean, safe water.

Some residents are prepared to put aside any squeamishness if it means having an abundant water supply.

“Any water is good water, as far as I’m concerned,’’ said Gary Fuqua, city manager in Big Spring, which will join the cities of Midland, Odessa, and Stanton in using the water.

When the water finally reaches the tap, Fuqua said, its origin is “something I wouldn’t think about at all.’’

Similar plants have been operating for years in Tucson, parts of California, and in other countries. Water specialists predict other American cities will follow suit as they confront growing populations, drought, and other issues.

“It’s happening all over the world,’’ said Wade Miller, executive director of the WateReuse Association based in Alexandria, Va. “In some places … resources are down to very low levels, and this is one of the few resources available.’’

The Colorado River Municipal Water District in West Texas began considering a wastewater recycling plant back in 2000 and broke ground last month on the facility in Big Spring, about 100 miles southeast of Lubbock. When finished late next year, it should supply 2 million gallons of water a day.

The timing couldn’t better. This year’s drought has made a bone-dry region even drier, causing crops to wither and animals and fish to die off by the thousands.

At least one of the three reservoirs in West Texas may dry up if the drought persists through next year, as climatologists have predicted could happen. That means the district’s water supply could be reduced from 65 million gallons a day to 45 million, said John Grant, the water district’s general manager.

“We have limited water supplies in Texas, and you have to turn to other sources of water,’’ Grant said.

The new system could actually improve the taste of the region’s water by removing the minerals and salt that give it a distinctive briny flavor, he added.

The idea to recycle sewage isn’t new. Fort Worth and other cities across the nation have long used treated wastewater to water grass and trees and irrigate crops. But the new treatment plant in West Texas will be the first in the state to provide drinking water."

That's the REAL deal, folks

Thanks for reading

Smokemaster