Fuller's Earth - Bucky Fuller

A brilliant portrait of a dynamic teacher, Fuller’s Earth will be an inspiration to progressive educators today. Toward the end of his life, the visionary American philosopher, inventor, architect, mathematician, and poet Buckminster Fuller was asked to explain to a group of children his vision of how the universe works. The book that resulted from this encounter is not only the most straightforward exposition available of Bucky’s radical worldview but also perhaps the most lovable and personal portrait ever produced of the man who has been called “the planet’s friendly genius.”

Fuller, who wrote more than thirty books, coined and popularized terms such as “spaceship earth” and “synergetics,” and helped develop numerous design and architecture inventions, explains step-by-step the mysteries of the universe, with interruptions by the kids any time they could not follow him.

About the Author
Richard J. Brenneman, an award-winning journalist, is a father of four. He lives in California, where he writes for the Berkeley Daily Planet.

A recipient of the National Book Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, Herbert Kohl was a founder and the first director of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York City. He lives in Point Arena, California.

A recipient of the National Book Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, Herbert Kohl was a founder and the first director of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York City. He lives in Point Arena, California.

- From amazon.com

The above review from Amazon gives a first glimpse inside this new book due out on April 16th 2009.

“Will go a long way towards reconceptualizing the practice of progressive education.”

The Real Book Of Real Estate

Wayne Palmer, my friend and co-student in The Bucky Call just finished writing his new book; the book is called “The Real Book of Real Estate” & is not even under press but TheTrimTab is giving you some insights:

“It is a no nonsense, how it’s really done treatise by Robert, Trump and the Rich Dad real estate advisors.  It is meant to take a giant step out of theory and into application.” says Wayne. “As soon as I have a press release and a picture of the cover, I will forward it to you.  The only chapters I have copies of at this point are my own.  Do you want to review those separately or wait for the entire e-book?

.

Yes Wayne, I and the Dear Readers of TheTrimTab don’t want to wait… Please forward us the chapters you have in hand for a sneak preview.

The Real Book of Real Estate, co-authored by Wayne Palmer, Robert Kyiosaki, Donald Trump and a handful of other Rich Dad Advisors will be published on April 21, 2009 and for sale on May 12, 2009.

Little Voice Mastery, Book by Blair Singer

Coming out on March 26th, The Little Voice Mastery book by Blair Singer.

Product Description
Little Voice Mastery is about… How to Win the War Between Your Ears in 30 Seconds or Less and Have an Extraordinary Life! The Little Voice lives in that short six-inch span between your right ear and your left ear. What s awesome is you can master it in 30 seconds or less and have an extraordinary life. This book de-bunks much of the popular thought about personal growth and gets you down and dirty with real-world, right-now techniques that will help you make profound changes in your life immediately. Blair Singer Little Voice mastery will give you the ability to: Maintain your power in any pressure situation Stop the debilitating chatter in your brain so you can attract what you want now Uncover and realize your lifelong dreams Break through self-sabotaging habits Build powerful, lasting confidence Resurrect the hero inside of you Embody 21 proven techniques to re-programming the Little Voice in your brain in 30 seconds Blair Singer is the acclaimed author of SalesDogs and The ABC s of Building a Business Team that Wins and one of Robert Kiyosaki s Rich Dad s Advisors. He has worked with hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations in over 15 countries helping them increase their income and wealth through little voice management and skill training in the real world of sales, team, money and relationships. When it comes to winning… it s ALL up here! Robert Kiyosaki, Entrepreneur, investor, educator and author of Rich Dad Poor Dad

Buy the book at Amazon.

Little Voice Mastery - Wordle of Chapter One - Gaining Control Over Your Little Voice

Wordle representation of Little Voice Mastery Preface

Surviving Gaia's Revenge

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James Lovelock

· Publisher: Basic Books

· Pub. Date: April 13, 2009

· ISBN-13: 9780465015498

Synopsis

A preeminent environmental scientist contends that it’s too late to reverse global warming—and argues that mankind must prepare to adapt to a very hot future

Biography

James Lovelock is the author of more than two hundred scientific papers and the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis (now Gaia Theory) on which he has written several books. Since 1994 he has been an honorary visiting fellow of Green College, University of Oxford. In September 2005, Prospect magazine named him as one of the world’s top 100 global public intellectuals. He lives in Louceston, England.

From the Publisher

Celebrities drive hybrids, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, and supermarkets carry no end of so-called “green” products. And yet the environmental crisis is only getting worse. In Surviving Gaia’s Revenge, the eminent scientist James Lovelock argues that the earth is lurching ever closer to a permanent “hot state”—and much more quickly than most specialists think. There is nothing humans can do to reverse the process; the planet is simply too overpopulated to halt its own destruction by greenhouse gases.

In order to survive, mankind must start preparing now for life on a radically changed planet. The meliorist approach outlined in the Kyoto Treaty must be abandoned in favor of nuclear energy and aggressive agricultural development on the small areas of earth that will remain arable.

A reluctant jeremiad from one of the environmental movement’s elder statesmen, Surviving Gaia’s Revenge offers an essential wake-up call for the human race.

Buy it now on Amazon

Predicatbly Irrational

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Chapter 3

Why We Often Pay Too Much When We Pay Nothing

Have you ever grabbed for a coupon offering a FREE! package of coffee though you don’t drink coffee and don’t even have a machine with which to brew .What about all those FREE! extra helpings you piled on your plate at a buffet, even though your stomach had already started to ache from all the food you had consumed? And what about worthless FREE! stuff you’ve accumulated the promotional T-shirt the radio station, the teddy bear that came with the box of Valentine chocolates, the magnetic calendar your insurance agent sends you each year?

It’s no secret that getting something free feels very good. Zero is not just another price, it turns out. Zero is an emotional hot button-a source of irrational excitement. Would you buy something if it were discounted from 50 cents to 20 cents? May be?

Would you buy it if it were discounted from 50 cents to 2 cents: May be?

Would you grab it if it were discounted from 50 cents to zero? You bet!

What is it about zero cost that we find so irresistible?

Why does FREE! make us so happy? After all, FREE! can lead us into trouble: things that we would never consider purchasing become incredibly appealing as soon as they are FREE! For instance, have you ever gathered up free pencils, key chains, and notepads at a conference, even though you’d have to carry them home and would only throw most of them away?

Have you ever stood in line for a very long time (too long),

just to get a free cone of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream? Or have

you bought two of a product that you wouldn’t have chosen

in the first place, just to get the third one for free?

ZERO HAS HAD a long history.

The Babylonians invented the concept zero; the ancient Greeks debated it in lofty terms (how could something be nothing?); the ancient Indian scholar Pingala paired zero with the numeral 1 to get double digits; and both the Mayans and the Romans made zero part of their systems. But zero really found its place about AD 498, when Indian astronomer Aryabhata sat up in bed one morning and exclaimed, “Sthanam sthanam dasa gunam”-which translates, roughly, as “Place to place in 10 times in value.” With that, the idea of decimal-based place-value notation was born. Now zero was on a roll: It spread to the Arab world, where it flourished; crossed the Iberian Peninsula to Europe (thanks to the Spanish Moors); got some tweaking from the Italians; and eventually sailed the Atlantic to the New World, where zero ultimately found plenty of employment (together with the digit 1) in a place called Silicon Valley. So much for a brief recounting of the history of zero. But the concept of zero., applied to money is less clearly understood. In fact, I don’t think it even has a history. Nonetheless, FREE! the cost of zero cost has huge implications, extending not only to discount prices and promotions, but also to how FREE! can be used to help us make decisions that would benefit ourselves and society.

If FREE! were a virus or a subatomic particle, I might use an electron microscope to probe the object under the lens, stain it with different compounds to reveal its nature, or some how slice it apart to reveal its inner composition. In behavioral economics we use a different instrument, however, one that allows us to slow down human behavior and examine it frame by frame, as it unfolds. As you have undoubtedly guessed by now, this procedure is called an experiment.

IN ONE EXPERIMENT, Kristina Shampanier (a PhD student at MIT), Nina Mazar (a professor at the University of Toronto), and I went into the chocolate business. Well, SOrt of. We set up a table at a large public building and offered two kinds of chocolates-Lindt truffes arid Hershey’s Kisses. There was a large sign above our table that read, “One chocolate per customer.” Once the potential customers stepped closer, they could see the two types of chocolate and their prices. For those of you who are not chocolate connoisseurs, Lindt is produced by a Swiss firm that has been blending fine cocoas for 160 years. Lindt’s chocolate truffles are particularly prize exquisitely creamy and just about irresistible.

They cost about 30 cents each when we buy them in bulk. Hershey’s Kisses, on the other hand, are good little chocolates, but let’s face it, they are rather ordinary: Hershey cranks out 80 million Kisses a day. In Hershey, Pennsylvania, even the streetlamps are made in the shape of the ubiquitous Hershey’s Kiss. got to (able. We this because we wanted to make sure that we did not attract different types of people in (he different conditions-avoiding what is called self’ selection. predictably irrational So what happened when the “customers” flocked to our table? When we set the price of a Lindt truffle at 15 cents and a Kiss at one cent, we were not surprised to find that our customers acted with a good deal of rationality: they compared price and quality of the Kiss with the price and quality of the truffle, and then made their choice. About 73 percent of them chose the truffle and 27 percent chose a Kiss. Now we decided to see how FREE! might change the situation. So we offered the Lindt truffle for 14 cents and the Kisses free. Would there be a difference? Should there be? After all, we had merely lowered the price of both kinds of chocolate by one cent. But what a difference FREE! made. The humble Hershey’s Kiss became a big favorite. Some 69 percent of our customers (up from 27 percent before) chose the FREE! Kiss, giving up the opportunity to get the Lindt truffe for a very good price. Meanwhile, the Lindt truffle took a tumble; customers choosing it decreased from 73 to 31 percent. What was going on here? First of all, let me say that there are many times when getting FREE! items can make perfect sense. If you find a bin of free athletic socks at a department store, for instance, there’s no downside to grabbing all the socks you can. The critical issue arises when FREE! becomes a struggle between a free item and another item-a struggle in which the presence of FREE! leads us to make a bad decision. For instance, imagine going to a sports store to buy a pair of white socks, the kind with a nicely padded heel and a gold toe. Fifteen minutes later you’re leaving the store, not with the socks you came in for, but with a cheaper pair that you don’t like at all (without a padded heel and gold toe) but that came in a package with a FREE! second pair. This is a case in which you gave up a better deal and settled for something that was not what you wanted, just because you were lured by the FREE! the cost of zero cost To replicate this experience in our chocolate experiment, we told our customers that they could choose only a single sweet-the Kiss or the truffe. It was an either-or decision, like choosing one kind of athletic sock over another. That’s what made the customers’ reaction to the FREE! Kiss so dramatic: Both chocolates were discounted by the same amount of money.

The relative price difference between the two was unchanged-and so was the expected pleasure from both. According to standard economic theory (simple costbenefit analysis), then, the price reduction should not lead to any change in the behavior of our customers. Before, about 27 percent chose the Kiss and 73 percent chose the truffle. And since nothing had changed in relative terms, the response to the price reduction should have been exactly the same. A passing economist, twirling his cane and espousing conventional economic theory, in fact, would have said that since everything in the situation was the same, our customers should have chosen the truffes by the same margin of preference. And yet here we were, with people pressing up to the table to grab our Hershey’s Kisses, not because they had made a reasoned cost-benefit analysis before elbowing their way in, but simply because the Kisses were FREE! How strange (but predictable) we humans are! CONCLUSION, INCIDENTALLY, remained the same in other experiments as well. In one case we priced the Hershey’s Kiss at two cents, one cent, and zero cents, while pricing the truffe correspondingly at 27 cents, 26 cents, and 25 cents. consumer We did this to see if discounting the Kiss from two cents to one cent and the truffle from 27 cents to 26 cents would make a difference In the proportion of buyers for each. It didn’t. But, once again, when we lowered the price of the Kiss to free, the reaction was dramatic. The shoppers overwhelmingly demanded the Kisses. We decided that perhaps the experiment had been tainted, Since shoppers may not feel like searching for change in a purse or backpack, or they may not have any money on them. Such an effect would artificially make the free offer seem more attractive.

To address this possibility, we ran other experiments at one of MIT’s cafeterias. In this setup, the chocolates were displayed next to the cashier as one of the cafeteria’s regular promotions and the students who were interested in the chocolates simply added them to the lunch purchase, and paid for them while going through the cashier’s line. What happened? The students still went overwhelmingly for the FREE! option. WHAT is IT about FREE! that’s so enticing? Why do we have an irrational urge to jump for a FREE! item, even when it’s not what we really want?

I believe the answer is this. Most transactions have an upside and a downside, but when something is FREE! we forget the downside. FREE! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is. Why? I think it’s because humans are intrinsically afraid of loss. The real allure of FREE! is tied to this fear. There’s no visible possibility of loss when we choose a FREE! item (it’s free); But suppose we choose the item that’s not free. Uh-oh, now there’s a risk of having made a poor 54 decision-the possibility of a loss. And so, given the choice, we go for what is free. For this reason, in the land of pricing, zero is not just another price. Sure, 10 cents can make a huge difference in demand (suppose you were selling millions of barrels of oil), but nothing beats the emotional surge of FREE! This, the zero price effect, is in a category all its own. To be sure, “buying something for nothing” is a bit of an oxymoron. But let me give you an example of how we often into the trap of buying something we may not want, simply because of that sticky substance, FREE! I recently saw a newspaper ad from a major electronics maker, offering me seven FREE! DVD tides if I purchased the new high-definition DVD player. First of do I need a high-definition player right now? Probably not. But even if I did, wouldn’t it be wiser to wait for prices to descend?

They always do-and today’s $600 high-definition DVD player will very quickly be tomorrow’s $200 machine. Second, the DVD maker had a clear agenda behind its this company’s high-definition DVD system is in cutthroat competition with Blu-Ray, a system backed by many other manufacturers. Right now, Blu-Ray is ahead and could possibly dominate the market. So how much is FREE! when the machine being offered may find its way into obsolescence (like Betamax VCRs)? Those are two rational thoughts that might prevent us from falling under the spell of FREE! But, gee, those FREE! DVDs certainly look good!

GETTING SOMETHING FREE! is certainly a draw when we talk about prices. But what would happen if the offer was not a free price, but a free exchange? Are we as susceptible to free 55 products as we are to getting products for free? A few years ago, with Halloween drawing near, I had an idea for an experiment to probe that question.

This time I wouldn’t even have to leave my home to get my answers. Early in the evening, Joey, a nine-year-old kid dressed as Spider-Man and carrying a large yellow bag, climbed the stairs of our front porch. mother accompanied him, to ensure that no one gave her kid an apple with a razor blade inside. (By the way, there never was a case of razor blades being distributed in apples on Halloween; it is just an urban (myth.) She stayed on the sidewalk, however, to give Joey the feeling that he was trick-or-treating by himself. After the traditional query, “Trick or treat?” I asked Joey to hold open his right hand. I placed three Hershey’s Kisses in his palm and asked him to hold them there for a moment. “You can also get one of these .two Snickers bars,” I said, showing him a small one and a large one. “In fact, if you give me one of those Hershey’s Kisses I will give you this smaller Snickers bar. And if you give me two of your Hershey’s Kisses, I will give you this larger Snickers bar.” Now a kid may dress up like a giant spider, but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid. The small Snickers bar weighed one ounce, and the large Snickers bar weighed two ounces. All Joey had to do was give me one additional Hershey’s Kiss (about 0.16 ounce) and he would get an extra ounce of Snickers. This deal might have stumped a rocket scientist, but for a nine-year-old boy, the computation was easy: he’d get more than six times the return on investment (in the net weight of chocolate) if he went for the larger Snickers bar. In a flash Joey put two of his Kisses into my hand, took the two-ounce Snickers bar, and dropped it into his bag.

Joey wasn’t alone in making this snap decision. All but 56 one of kids to whom I presented this offer traded in two for the bigger candy bars. Zoe was the next kid to walk down the street. She was dressed as a princess, in a long white dress, with a magic wand in one hand and an orange Halloween pumpkin bucket in the other. younger sister was resting comfortably in arms, looking cute and cuddly in her bunny As they approached, Zoe called out, in a high, cute voice, or treat!” the past I admit that I have sometimes devilishly replied, “Trick!” Most kids stand there, baffled, having never thought through their question to see that it allowed an alternative answer.

case gave Zoe her treat-three Hershey’s Kisses. have a trick up my sleeve. I offered little Zoe a deal:

a choice between getting a large Snickers bar in exchange for one of her Hershey’s Kisses, or getting the small Snickers bar FREE!  Without giving up any Hershey’s Kisses. Now, a bit of rational calculation (which in Joey’s case was amply demonstrated) would show that the best deal is to forgo free small Snickers bar, pay the cost of one additional Hershey’s Kiss, and go for the large Snickers bar.

On an ounce-for-ounce comparison, it was far better to give up one additional Hershey’s Kiss and get the larger Snickers bar (two ounces) instead of a smaller Snickers bar (one ounce). This logic was perfectly clear to j oe and the kids who encountered the condition in which both Snickers bars had a cost. But what would Zoe do? Would her clever kid’s mind make that rational choice-or would the fact that the small Snickers bar was FREE! blind her to the rationally correct answer? As you might have guessed by now, Zoe, and the other kids to whom I offered the same deal, was completely blinded 57 by FREE! About 70 percent of them gave up the better deal, and took the worse deal just because it was FREE! Just in case you think Kristina, Nina, and I make a habit of picking on kids, I’ll mention that we repeated the experiment with bigger kids, in fact students at the MIT student center. The results replicated the pattern we saw on Halloween. Indeed, the draw of zero cost is not limited to monetary transactions. Whether it’s products or money, we just can’t resist the gravitational pull of FREE!

SO DO YOU think you have a handle on FREE!? OK. Here’s a quiz. Suppose I offered you a choice between a free $10 Amazon gift certificate and a $20 gift certificate for seven dollars. Think quickly. Which would you take? If you jumped for the FREÉ! certificate, you would have been like most of the people we tested at one of the malls in Boston. But look again: a $20 gift certificate for seven dollars delivers a $13 profit. That’s clearly better than getting a $10 certificate free (earning $10). Can you see the irrational behavior in action?

Me telling you a story that describes the real influence of FREE! on our behavior. A few years ago, Amazon.com started offering free shipping of orders over a certain amount. Someone who purchased a single book for $16.95 might pay an additional $3.95 for shipping, for instance. But if the customer $10 one and the $20 certificate for eight This time most the participants jumped for the $20 certificate.

customer bought another book, for a total of $31.90, they would get their shipping FREE! Some of the purchasers probably didn’t want the second book (and I am talking here from personal experience) but the FREE! shipping was so tempting that to get it, they were willing to pay the cost of the extra book. People at Amazon were very happy with this offer, but they noticed that in one place-France-there was no Increase in sales. Is the French consumer more rational than the rest of us? Unlikely. Rather, it turned out, the French customers were reacting to a different deal. What happened instead of offering FREE! Shipping on orders over a certain amount, the division shipping for those orders at one franc. Just one franc about 20 cents. This doesn’t seem very different from FREE! but it was. In fact, when Amazon changed the promotion in France to include free shipping, France joined all the other countries in a dramatic sales increase. In other words, where as shipping for one franc-a real bargain-was virtually ignored by the French, FREE! shipping caused an enthusiastic response. America Online (AOL) had a similar experience several years ago when it switched from pay-per-hour service to a monthly payment schedule (in which you could log in as many hours as you wanted for a fixed $19.95 per month).

In preparation for the new price structure, AOL geared up for what it estimated would be a small increase in demand. What did it get? An overnight increase from 140,000 to 236,000 customers logging into the system, and a doubling of the average time online. That may seem good-but it wasn’t good.

AOL’s customers encountered busy phone lines, and soon AOL was forced to lease services from other online providers (who were only too happy to sell bandwidth to AOL-at the premium of snow shovels in a snowstorm). What Bob Pittman (the president of AOL at the time) didn’t realize was that consumers would respond to the allure of FREE! like starving people at a buffet.

WHEN CHOOSING BETWEEN two products, then, we often overreact to the free one. We might Opt for a FREE! checking aCCount (with no benefits attached) rather than one that costs five dollars a month. But if the five-dollar checking account includes free traveler’s checks, online billing, etc., and the FREE! one doesn’t, we may end up spending more for this package of services with the FREE! account than with the five-dollar account. Similarly, we might choose a mortgage with no closing costs, but with interest rates and fees that are off the wall; and we might get a product we don’t really want simply because it comes with a free gift.

My most recent personal encounter with this involved a car. When I was looking for a new car a few years ago, I knew that I really should buy a minivan. In fact, I had read up on Honda minivans and knew all about them. But then an Audi caught my eye, at first through an appealing offer-FREE! oil changes for the next three years. How could I resist?

To be perfectly honest, the Audi was Sporty and red, and I was still resisting the idea of being a mature and responsible father to two young kids. It wasn’t as if the free oil change completely swayed me, but its influence on me was, from a rational perspective, unjustifiably large. Just because it was FREE! it served as an additional allure that I could cling to.

So I bought the Audi-flnd the FREE! oiL. (A few months later, while I was driving on a highway, the transmission broke-but is a different story.) Of course, with a cooler head have made a more rational calculation. I drive about 7,000 miles a year; the oil needs to be changed every 10,000 miles; and the cost per change is about $75. Over three years, I would save about $150, or about 0.5 percent the purchase price of the car-not a good reason to base my decision on. It gets worse, though: now I have an Audi that is packed to the ceiling with action figures, a stroller, a bike, and other kids’ paraphernalia. Oh, for a minivan.

CONCEPT OF zero also applies to time. Time spent on one after all, is taken away from So if we spend 45 minutes in a waiting for our turn to get a FREE taste of ice cream, or if we spend half an hour filling out a long form for a tiny rebate, there is something else that we are not doing with our time.

My favorite personal example is free-entrance day at a museum. Despite the fact that most museums are not very expensive, I find it much more appealing to satisfy my desire for art when the price is zero. Of course I am not alone in this desire. So on these days I usually find that the museum is over crowded, the line is long, it is hard to see anything, and fighting the crowds around the museum and in the cafeteria is unpleasant. Do I realize that it is a mistake to go to a museum when it is free?

You bet I do-but I go nevertheless. ZERO MAY ALSO affect food purchases. Food manufacturers have to convey all kinds of information on the side of the box. They have to tell us about the calories, fat content, fiber, etc. Is it possible that the same attraction we have to zero price could also apply to zero calories, zero trans fats, zero carbs, etc.? the same general rules apply, Pepsi will sell more cans if the label says “zero calories” than if it says “one calorie.”

Suppose you are at a bar, enjoying a conversation with some friends. With one brand you get a calorie-free beer, and with another you get a three-calorie beer. Which brand will make you feel that you are drinking a really light beer? Even though the difference between the two beers is negligible, the zero-calorie beer will increase the feeling that you’re doing the right thing, health wise . You might even feel so good that you go ahead and order a plate of fries.

SO YOU CAN maintain the status quo with a 20-cent fee in the case of Amazon’s shipping-in France), or you can start a stampede by offering something FREE! Think how powerful that idea is! Zero is not just another discount. Zero is a different place. The difference between two cents and one cent is small. But the difference between one cent and zero is huge! If you are in business, and understand that, you can do some marvelous things. Want to draw a crowd? Make something FREE! Want to sell more products? Make part of the purchase FREE! Similarly, we can use FREE! to drive social policy. Want people to drive electric cars? Don’t just lower the registration and inspection fees-eliminate them, so that you have created FREE! In the same way, if health is your concern, focus on early detection as a way to eliminate the progression of severe illnesses. Want people to do the right thing-in terms of getting regular colonoscopies, mammograms, cholesterol checks, diabetes checks, and such? Don’t just decrease the cost (by decreasing the co-pay). Make these critical procedures FREE! I don’t think most policy strategists realize that FREE! Is an ace in their hand, let alone know how to play it.

It’s certainly counterintuitive, in these times of budget cutbacks, to make something FREE! But when we stop to think about it, FREE! Can be a great deal of power, and it makes a lot of Sense.

Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

Fuller’s hope for the future lies in doing more with less. Again and again he discovers that there is no such thing as continuity and the infinitesimal: with sufficient resolution we find that we look at a very large, but finite number of very small, but finite multiples, put together with very great, but attainable ingenuity.  There always appears to be a structure. Computer technology has already moved in the direction of doing more with less. The cost of a modern computer would scarcely be affected if it were made of the most precious metals, for material-wise there is not very much to a computer. What counts is the knowledge of how to put things together to perform usefully. Knowledge is the tool of today and tomorrow and the hope of the day thereafter: education will be the greatest tool-making industry!

The first prerequisite for continued education is a receptiveness to one’s environment. Calluses worn through a faulty environment dull the learning senses. We must educate ourselves to do more with less in creating a suitable environment. Vicious circle? Nonsense: Fuller tells us that no curve can overlap with itself! This is an upward spiral into which Fuller propels us. There is no alternative.

Additional resources:

Arthur L. Loeb memorial at the Harvard Gazette

Full text of Synergetics by R. Buckminster Fuller, coutesy of The Estate Of Buckminster Fuller.

The essence of the myth of the Western tradition is the ideal of an independent life lived in liberty and dignity through family and community. This liberty and independence promotes enterprise and action. Such a myth engendered the human initiative which gave birth to such epoch-changing developments as paper money, financial credit, steam power, the combustion engine, steel hull shipping, electricity, wireless communication, television, air flight, nuclear power, the micro chip and the Internet.

The Western tradition is hopeful, future oriented, ordered and based on action, reflection and compromise. In the event of “either or” the West will opt for both, if possible. Its successful evolution is based on an ever evolving dialectic, never totally true, but always moving toward a more comprehensive understanding of truth. In this manner the natural outlook of the West is not just material or spiritual. It is a synthesis of both: – the body and the soul matter equally.

Professor Carroll Quigley in his book “The Evolution Of Civilizations” noted that there have been at least 16 different civilizations on the Earth that we know about. In his analysis he discovered that there are seven distinct phases in the evolution of a great society. These are:

1.         Mixture
2.         Gestation
3.         Expansion
4.         Age of Conflict
5.         Universal Empire
6.         Decay
7.         Invasion

One of the great mysteries of Western civilization, currently centered in Washington, and which now dominates the World, is the fact that the West has re-invented itself three times. This rebirth came about through the process of circumvention and reform of old inefficient institutions and mind-sets. This process of rebirth resulted in new dynamic engines of growth being designed, developed and applied. In Quigley’s estimation this feat of rebirth had never occurred before in history. He dates the three phases of Western expansion as follows:

1.         970 – 1270
2.         1420 – 1650
3          1730 – 1929

In each case the instruments of expansion were respectively:

1.         Feudalism
2.         Commercial Capitalism
3.         The Industrial Revolution

In summary, Quigley’s thesis was, that for a civilization to develop and expand it must have an instrument of growth. This instrument creates real wealth and is the engine that powers the transformation of the daily lives of all citizens. Over time, this instrument becomes politically dominated and institutionalized, therefore losing its effectiveness. (It becomes a means rather than an end). This stalling of wealth creation, in a system geared for sustained growth, causes more and more crises to affect the society. Eventually decay sets in and the civilization breaks down through attrition and civil war among its atomised power groups. Dissolution and final termination comes with outright invasion by a more powerful civilization, then on the ascendant. For example; Spain’s destruction of the Incas and Rome’s defeat of Greece.

He further noted that each of these periods of expansion ended in a period of conflict:

“The third age of conflict of our society began to display the ordinary marks of such a stage about 1890. At that time, in the principal industrial countries, it became clear that the rate of expansion had reversed itself…

All the characteristics of an age of irrationality began to appear on all sides. Increased gambling, increased smoking, the growing use of alcohol and narcotics, a growing obsession with sex and with the perversions of sex, an increased mania for speed, for nervous tension, and for noise; above all, perhaps, a growing tendency to regard violence as a solution for all problems, be they domestic, social, economic, ideological or international. In fact, violence as a symbol of our growing irrationality has had an increasing role in activity for its own sake, when no possible justification could be made that the activity was seeking to solve a problem.

All the characteristics of any age of conflict are too obvious to require further comment. They arose, as is usual in an age of conflict, because the organizational patterns of our culture ceased to function as instruments but had become institutionalized. This process was evident on all levels of culture. Religious organizations no longer linked men to God but adopted diverse mundane purposes. Our intellectual theories no longer explained anything or made us at home in the Universe. Our social patterns no longer satisfied our gregarious needs, even when we fled from the lonely anonymity of the city to the rat-race uniformity of sub-urbanism. Our political organizations increased the burden of their demands on our time, energy, and wealth but provided with growing ineffectiveness the justice, public order, education, protection, or incidental amenities we had come to expect from them. And on the military level costs rose at an astronomical rate without being able to catch up with our increasing danger.

The core of our problems could be placed on any one of the levels we have mentioned. Indeed, there might be good grounds for arguing that the root of our problem was our success in MAKING LIFE AN END RATHER THAN A MEANS TO SOMETHING HIGHER.”

Quigley describes in greater detail the actual process of decay as follows:

“The process by which civilization, as an abstract entity distinct from the societies in which it is embodied, dies or is reborn is a very significant one. There are at least five steps in the process. Civilizations die as (1) decreasing political security and the ending of law and order make property precarious and make personal violence an increasingly significant element in life: accordingly (2) long-distance trade decreases; as a result (3) town life becomes precarious and there is a general exodus from the towns as people try to find a place in which they can be attached in some stable social and economic relationship to the food-producing Earth; obviously (4) there is a decline and even a disappearance of the middle classes (the property-owning, commercial, literate, city-dwelling groups); and (5) illiteracy rises rapidly.”

Given Quigley’s analysis, where does this leave the West, in general, and America, in particular? Remember, his treatise was written in 1961. At that period in time the author clearly regarded our civilization as already at the conflict phase. Since then, judging by the continuous wars, international conflicts, financial disorder and social disintegration nothing refutes this conclusion. If anything, the crisis has become more critical and more structural.

Using Carroll Quigley’s hypothesis, if the West is to transcend this age of conflict and enter a new age of expansion the only way forward is through human initiative, enterprise and action. This creativity will only blossom in an environment of true liberty and dignified freedom. Repression, on the other hand, would stifle any such initiative and would spell the end of Western society. Hopes could be dashed. Civil conflict could ensue. The current post-socialist model called “pluralism”, does not appear to have at its disposal a new instrument of expansion. Its guiding philosophy seems to be one of atrophy. The modus operandi of contemporary political power evidences a group holding on to money rather than motivating and organizing the creation of new wealth.

Reformation and change can come about through outright reform or circumvention and this latter method I believe is beginning to operate and should be fostered by enlightened leadership. This is a solution in which everybody can play a part. Examples of this trend are:

A.         Open-source, cooperation-based creativity, circumventing competitive capitalism.

B.         Renewable energy theory replacing open-ended fossil fuel destruction.

C.         Barter groups, community credit organizations and WIR (work in return) networks circumventing central bank monetary theory.

D.         Niche media players, operating through broadband, gaining market share over radio, television and newspaper dynasties. As a result, old media is dying.

E.         Home-schoolers (re-invigorating American self-initiative and independence) circumventing federal education monopolies.

F.         Family based community watch groups replacing diminished city policing.

G.         Venture and private capital groups opting for self-funding and embracing innovative long-term projects frowned on by Wall Street “short-termism”.

H.         Private airlines, on mini-budgets, developing more efficient means of space travel and demonstrating the obsolete practices of Government space centres.

I.          Private schools and colleges shunning grants in order to prevent Department of Education interference. Independence allows them to give their students a true education rather than simply a technical conditioning.

J.          Architects, engineers and developers transcending old constraints and rejecting over-specialization in favour of synergetic solutions.

The Evolution Of Civilizations - Pr Carroll Quigley

The list could go on, but you get the message. In essence, co-operative action is circumventing frustration. Eventually this movement, if fostered, will give the current atrophied structure much needed time and options. And options are crucial. As Quigley noted in the past, circumvention will work, but it must be understood by power groups that it is essential and thus should not be destroyed. Such insight is what is imperative from our political masters today. This circumvention must redevelop energy systems, monetary theory, financial practice, political structure, media distribution, integrity and excellence in education, etc. At the end of the day, however, the goal has to be the conceptualization, development and application of a new instrument of wealth creation; a new instrument of expansion. What this is we do not know yet, but human initiative will create it. As it did Feudalism, Commercial Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution.

The open source movement has shown how difficult, complex problems can be solved in community, outside the control of official economic doctrine. The rules are being rewritten and can be interpreted by those who understand what is happening. The explosion of the Internet is but one example of this developing paradigm in successful operation. Through liberty positive change could come about and this may lead the West toward a fourth period of expansion resulting in a new phase of development.

If my understanding of Quigley’s historical analysis is correct, this might very well result in an integrated, One-World civilization around 2100- 2200. This could be a Utopia but if the current mental malaise, regression, atrophy and war are allowed continue the outcome could indeed be more like Armageddon. However, I firmly believe that, as in the past, the beacon of freedom, independence and liberty will guide the spirit of the West towards a renaissance in consciousness, political awareness, social action and, above all, personal initiative.

Reference:
“The Evolution of Civilizations”
Prof. Carroll Quigley
Liberty Press 1961

What The Bleep

The Bucky Call Resources:

DVD “What the Bleep Do We Know?” (also available in the quantum version for more in depth pursuit) it uses drama, computer animation and interviews to explain the interaction of neurochemistry and quantum physics.  Good sound track too. Available through amazon.

Romans 12:2 – Do not conform yourself to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, so that you may judge what is God’s will, what is good and pleasing and perfect.

Gaia theory – the entire earth and all its species are one super-organism.

Spaceship Earth as Bucky would say.

Bruce Lipton, The Biology Of Belief

Signal molecules used by individual cells to regulate their own physiologic functions when released into the environment also influence the behavior of other cells allowing for a co-ordination of behavior among a group of unicellular organisms – allowing them to function as a community. As organisms became more complex specialized cells took over monitoring and organizing the flow of signaling molecules. In humans this has resulted in the brain. Our conscious mind interprets these signals as emotion. There are receptors for these signals not just in the brain, but throughout all tissues of the body allowing for an integrated experience. The mind not only derives emotions through a feedback of the body’s environmental information, the body can use the brain to generate the molecules of emotion and override the system. (psych yourself up or out)

Molecules: The smallest particle of a substance that retains the chemical and physical properties of the substance and is composed of two or more atoms a group of like or different atoms held together by chemical forces.

Physiologic: characteristic of or appropriate to an organism’s healthy or normal functioning

Behavior: The manner in which something functions or operates

Co-ordination: harmonious combination or interaction, as of functions or parts.

Unicellular: Having or consisting of one cell; one-celled

Organisms: An individual form of life that is capable of growing, metabolizing nutrients, and usually reproducing. Organisms can be unicellular or multi-cellular. They are scientifically divided into five different groups (called kingdoms) that include prokaryotes, protists, fungi, plants, and animals, and that are further subdivided based on common ancestry and homology of anatomic and molecular structures.

Subconscious mind is strictly habitual; it will play the same responses to life’s signals again and again. Most reflexes are genetic based instincts. But conditioning (Pavlov’s dogs) can create novel reflex behaviors that become part of the subconscious. Humans have developed areas of the brain advanced enough that we can learn perceptions directly from others. Once our subconscious accepts these truths they become our truths and guide future responses. Our responses to environmental stimuli are controlled by our perceptions, but it’s possible that not all of our perceptions are accurate.

Subconscious: existing or operating in the mind beneath or beyond consciousness: the subconscious self.

Perceptions: Insight, intuition, or knowledge gained by perceiving.

Our Beliefs control Our Biology: Placebo effect vs Nocebo (negative belief that can damage health).

Your beliefs become your thoughts

Your thoughts become your words

Your words become your actions

Your actions become your habits

Your habits become your values

Your values become your destiny

Mahatma Gandhi