Notch Up the Government’s Role with “ObamaWorks” | A Version of Roosevelt’s WPA | Green New Deal

I originally proposed this in 2012. I decided to repost it presently in lieu of the proposal of the ‘Green New Deal‘.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,  Rep D-NY,  the Green New Deal with Bernie Sanders, global warming, Climate Change, Environmental Policy

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Rep D-NY discusses the Green New Deal with Bernie Sanders Climate Change – Environmental Policy

My religion and spirituality is the natural world and my relationship to it. I love and adore all of the different species of flora and fauna, the water, air, wind, the soil of the earth. It is full of splendor and awesome. I value human invented relishes much less.

We all need to re-evaluate and repair our connection to the natural world and to value and cherish that of which we are inextricably a part. We need to radically transform our relationship which has been diminished and twisted in the last decades, due to having a perspective and approach that looked at other forms of life as a commodity to use. We need to revive our love and respect for the natural world and become guardians of it, not just for our children, but for the beings that exist before us right here and right now.

Prior to Obama’s win of the 2012 presidential nomination, on the 5th of October I submitted this query to a dozen American magazine publications, and waited for a response. I received only one, a rejection from The Nation. I continued to wait to see if anyone would wish to publish my ideas, which would preclude putting the information onto my blog, for free viewing. Presuming that none will respond, here it is:

Though Obama supporters surely commemorate his intention to employ the federal government to serve the American public, he could even crank it up a bit, by reenacting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s WPA – Works Progress Administration – under the guise of ObamaWorks. “Renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration; the WPA was the largest and most ambitious American New Deal agency, employing millions of people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. In a much smaller project, Federal Project Number One, the WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects.” Wow, is THAT ever fantastic to hear about! The recognition that the arts and literature are all about inspiring and creating the theatre for human evolution! What is that saying? ‘History repeats itself for those who are doomed to forget.’ A mere google away: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana)

In 1933, as the 32nd president of the United States, FDR orchestrated the “New Deal” in his first 100 days of office. His purpose was to transform a shattered economy, following the 1929 stock market crash. This consisted of a series of economic programs to establish “Relief”, “Recovery” and “Reform”, of which the WPA was a substantial mechanism; operating its own projects in cooperation with state and local governments. In the inception of his second term, Obama could emphatically authorize a series of programs needed to make improvements across America; delineating the jobs required to implement them, and build our economy and morale in the process, as had been achieved through Roosevelt’s WPA. The circumstances surrounding each of their administrations are parallel; both enmeshed in war and coming into power following a Wall Street engendered economic collapse. Whereas Obama’s 44th presidency coincided with a recession, FDR’s corresponded with the Great Depression. Since Obama has already demonstrated his audacity in confronting Wall Street with the Dodd-Frank Act, why not engage in another executive order or two, as were prerequisite for FDR to carry out his Works. Now is the critical time to launch an indispensable ObamaWorks plan; to facilitate the investment in a much needed overhaul throughout the country, prioritized according to national as well as regional and community needs.
 
Though it may seem implausible, given that we’re ensconced in an imbalanced Democracy in which Plutocratic powers often determine what the executive branch may or may not do, this is precisely the recipe to revitalize America! The WPA was one bold aspect of the New Deal, which Roosevelt legislated to put millions of unskilled Americans back to work, including the construction of buildings and roads. “Happy Days could be Here Again”, if instead of side-stepping issues, tip-toeing around egregious lobby groups and getting stalled in bipartisan gridlocks, Obama would simply administer a number of definitive projects, ObamaWorks, and set them into motion. These programs would respond to our need for energy independence, and result in the subsequent investment in renewable energy enterprises and environmentally sound ‘green’ building. America has been lagging in developing clean and efficient transportation infrastructures, as well as in education and efficient communication networks. We need to make decisions that will reflect viable options for the generations to come, without obliterating our environment and the delicate balance of the global ecosystem and economic interdependency. In our quest to achieve international standards in education, we have inadvertently started to impinge on creative teaching methods and the hands-on approach in our classrooms. Yet because Americans are innovative and industrious, as we pull our resources together and share our ‘best practices’, we can resolve road-blocks and work through ever evolving solutions to our problems. As ObamaCare can continually be adjusted according to new insights, so can we all work together, community by community, fused by the U.S. Government’s vision and financial backing; prioritizing our most needed investments and emboldening our spirits.

Carol Keiter aka nomadbeatz welcomes donations for her writing, photography, illustrations, eBook & music composition

The PayPal donation button functions in Safari and Firefox, however is broken in Chrome.

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Jane Goodall Recycle E Devices | Kate Raworth Economy Design – Thrive not Grow

Jane Goodall presently has a campaign:

The Forest is Calling. Answering the Call is Our Only Hope

Jane Goodall, Everything is Connected Everyone Can Make a Difference

Jane Goodall Everything is Connected Everyone Can Make a Difference

It was estimated that up to 50 million tons of electronic waste—mainly computers and smartphones—was dumped in 2017 alone (UNEP).

Jane Goodall The Forest is Calling Answering it is our only Hope

Jane Goodall The Forest is Calling Answering it is our only Hope

Jane Goodall, Recycle unwanted Mobile Devices

Jane Goodall Recycle unwanted Mobile Devices

Jane Goodall, Terribly Important Recycle Old Cell Phones

Jane Goodall Terribly Important Recycle Old Cell Phones

Kate Raworth has an essential concept to consider in her TEDtalk regarding redesigning our economic strategies, away from the dependency on continued growth, in a world with finite resources and space, to one which nourishes the natural world and recognizes the worth of allowing all life to thrive. – an Economy Designed to Thrive not Grow

Kate Raworth Economy Distributed vs. Centralized

Kate Raworth Economy Distributed vs. Centralized

Kate Raworth, TED talk, Economy Designed to Thrive not Grow

Kate Raworth TED talk
Economy Designed to Thrive not Grow

Kate Raworth, Economy Ecological Ceiling Social Foundation

Kate Raworth Economy Ecological Ceiling Social Foundation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carol Keiter aka nomadbeatz welcomes donations for her writing, photography, illustrations, eBook & music composition

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Carol sitting under the trees

Carol sitting under the trees

Storytelling and Stories-Not-Sold in The Politics of Economics | Systems Theory | Social Commons | Happy Planet Index | feat: Rife, Harari, Capra, McKenna, Brewer, Monbiot

The recent mass shooting in Las Vegas lead me to pursue the alternative press because of various allegations that the mainstream media had a completely different reportage than what had been disclosed from other sources. Once I extracted myself from this subject and came up for air, the winding alt digital path lead me to information I certainly hadn’t heard about in any text books.

By entering into alternative media, we are introduced to information that not surprisingly, is quite different from what the main cultural avenues of information have surmised our history to be. Fortunately, we can see clearly how the various sectors of culture play out – from history books, to learning institutions, to government organizations – when only a few are privy to what stories are told. I mention stories-are-sold, because it comes down to economic censorship. The understanding of a needed systems approach to observing all things, is an emergence of the recognition of what is lacking in a one-sided, atomized, mechanistic and hierarchical view of life; from within which our current cultural myths have developed. And as we embrace the realization that all of life is a shared network, upon which humans have arbitrarily exercised domain by collectively believing in our fictional stories, the concept of a commons – of an intellectual and natural resources heritage shared by all – we will have more of a commitment to protect that which is rightfully ours, and to want to extend and share our abundance and happiness, outside of the domain of pure economics. As this balance shifts, we will see the earth and its inhabitants not as a commodity to be used, but as a paradise to love and protect. And as this moves towards a celebration of autonomy while building on the shared intellectual and spiritual network, we will evolve a new way of valuing all life, information, invention, our selves and our communication and motions on this planet.

Did you know that there was a proven cure for cancer, in the 1930’s? And that news of the man whose discoveries and experiments, which were lauded at the time, fell into silence, suppressed by the politics of economics, or the economics of politics? His name, Dr. Royal Rife was suspended from the history books, just as that of Nikola Tesla, a contemporary of Einstein, whose fantastic inventions and successful discoveries were inconvenient for the narrative of the time.

Royal Rife’s genius was the creation of a multi-faceted (thousands of parts) 200 pound microscope design. He was able to observe intercellular activity for the first time, rivaling current technology, with the exception that his microscopes were able to view live material. “Electron microscopes made today are capable of distinguishing even individual atoms, yet they can not be used to image living cells because the process of viewing with electrons, destroy the samples.”

Royal Raymond Rife was specifically focused on the fact that all life vibrates. He proceeded to do thousands of experiments with the optical microscopes he designed; observing, identifying and testing the resonances of pathogens of different organisms with varying frequencies. His aim was to find the corresponding vibration that would single out a specific pathogen, to eradicate it.

Dr. Royal Rife's Beam Ray Machine

Dr. Royal Rife’s Beam Ray Machine

His experiments in the 1930’s lead him to creating the ‘Beam Ray’, which was proven to effectively eradicate cancer and to cure people of a host of different diseases. He measured and utilized specific frequencies to attack specific pathogens through finding the appropriate resonance. “Rife claimed to have discovered the frequencies which destroyed herpes, polio, spinal meningitis, tetanus, influenza, and many other dangerous, disease-causing organisms. His high success rates with different types of cancer were what particularly brought him a great deal of attention and notoriety. Rife used different optical vibrations which he revealed were able to disintegrate specific pathogens, leaving all other activity within the cell unaltered. There were over 50 infectious diseases that he apparently discovered cures for.”

“The ‘Rife machine’ is an electronic device which emits audio and/or radio waves applied to an individual with the intent of bettering the individual’s health. By finding the proper resonance, Rife was able to shatter the virus, just as a singer can use it to break a wine glass. This is why he called it the Mortal Oscillatory Rate.”

vibration

vibration

It works on the principle of sympathetic vibration and resonance, which states that if there are two similar objects and one of them is vibrating, the other will begin to vibrate as well, even if they are not touching. Seems like people as a group could coordinate their efforts and tackle quite tremendous enterprises! It has been proven that people who meditate in unison, and focus their attention together in coherence, produces a distinctly stronger result than if they act independently.

Here’s a video describing Rife’s work and challenges.

Royal Rife musician, inventor, doctor used frequencies in his microscope to detect and disintegrate, cancer, pathogens

Royal Rife musician, inventor, doctor used frequencies in his microscope to detect and disintegrate cancer and other pathogens

Rife’s work was more or less erased from our modern day awareness, due to the influence of one man in particular, who had come to lead the American Medical Association (founded in 1847), Dr. Morris Fishbein. Fishbein had ulterior motives. Morris Fishbein began running the AMA in 1924, and by 1934 owned all the stock in the company. He used his authoritative position as director of the AMA to crush competition and choose what medical approaches would be funded or whether they would even be acknowledged. Initially, he tried to buy out Rife’s machine and when Rife refused to sell his plans, Fishbein proceeded to destroy his work and then his reputation, stealing his records and physically destroying his machines. He used his position of power to dissolve and eradicate Rife from history, just as Rife has used resonances to eradicate cancer.

History, as the word describes, is a story. And the angle of the story, how the information is conveyed and whether or not it is conveyed, depends on who is telling it.

There was another man with hundreds of inventions whose genius would be purged from history until his name emerged again a century later, Nikola Tesla. Edison’s (DC) direct current rivaled Tesla’s (AC) alternating current. Tesla was a fantastic and copious inventor. Notably, his Tesla coil was able to capture and transmit energy with very basic instruments, capturing it for free, from within the electromagnetic field which permeates the entire planet. Tesla recognized that the space around us, everywhere, is not a vacuum, but filled with energy. However, his inexpensive tools to extract and conduct energy were wiped from the slate of possibility, by those who envisioned establishing a monopoly on generating power. They didn’t want free or inexpensively acquired power, they wanted to charge the public. Similarly, Rife’s machine not only was a demonstrable cure for cancer, but an inexpensive device in which patients needed only stand near the machine for several minutes, every few days. They merely needed to have the frequencies of waves wash over their bodies in a non-invasive and non-toxic manner.

By preventing these inventions from reaching media or scientific evaluation, they were effectively obliterated from public awareness, merely by the dictates of a few people. The art of withholding the story, annihilated competition and allowed their profits to flow.

A little bit later I reference Andreas Weber, a biologist who states

“Nothing is more open-source than DNA.”

Joe Brewer recently wrote this article Why Are Universities Failing Humanity? “This is a time of extreme urgency and need, yet almost no major institution on Earth is mobilizing its capacities to address the scale of our predicaments.” Brewer determined through his years of research that in fact not only is the modern approach to studying information too segmented, with each of the avenues of research partitioned from the others, but what information is made available has to do with funding and who is to gain from distributing this information. “The situation is complicated further by the ways that funding mechanisms like the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health in the United States (and their analogues in other countries) set agendas for which topics will get financial support.” Brewer talks of the ‘disciplinary silos’ that create funnels for learning, teaching, research. Funding or lack of it, have created barriers to integration across domains of knowledge, which impede the convergence of information and awareness necessary to perceive a crises on a global scale.”

The biophysicist Mae-Wan Ho known for her critical views on genetic engineering and evolution, wrote a book called “The Rainbow and the Worm The Physics of Organisms”. She similarly points to the problem of the reductionist, mechanistic standards of science, that overshadow and subjugate knowledge, so that one is only seeing part of the picture. Ho claims that analytical reductionism doesn’t see things in terms of their coherent relationship. One has to look at the whole system; including the biology, physiology, chemistry, physics and mathematics. Brewer agrees, an interdisciplinary systems approach, is what is missing.

In his article, Brewer writes that “Scholars and researchers who seek to address systemic issues at universities must paddle against huge organizational currents, as is well known by anyone seeking to be both an academic and a transdisciplinary researcher. We need to stop selecting students, faculty, and grant proposals within disciplinary boundaries and start framing problems at systemic levels around which coordination is found to be needed for adequately addressing them. This means funding agencies need to be reorganized around systemic issues. Ecological disharmony and extreme inequality have already been named as two high-profile opportunities yet to be capitalized upon; dealing with exponential technological change would be another.”

The path of science and the means of instituting information and knowledge in the Western World for the last several hundred years has been one which separates, defines and isolates one discipline from another. From this one-sided approach is emerging the recognition of a completely different model other than the linear one, that of systems theory.

The book that the physicist Fritjof Capra and biologist Pier Luigi Luisi recently published after years of research, The Systems View of Life A Unifying Vision, echoes the recognition of the need for a holistic manner of viewing life and the world. Their awareness of the clear inadequacies of the standard, linear, prevailing scientific approach steered them to actually create the alternative that was loudly making itself clear.

Capra and Luisi see a systemic conception of life emerging at the forefront of science. “New emphasis has been given to complexity, networks, and patterns of organization, leading to a novel kind of ‘systemic’ thinking.” What they realize is that everything unto itself is a perfectly functioning and self-healing entity, which works cohesively and is integrally a part of the whole fabric with which it interacts and cooperates.

“The Systems Theory defines life of all kinds, as not a distinct entity which can merely be quantitatively measured and classified into a particular domain, but that the very essence of life is a qualitative interconnected network of relationships, an ecological system of relationships between different species.”

I wrote about this upon discovering their work in a former blog https://digesthis.wordpress.com/2016/01/26/the-new-story-sustainability-fritjof-capra-pier-luigi-luisis-systemic-view-cel/

Rather than isolating disciplines, or organisms, or parts of a cell into singular events, recognize that all of these are part of a vibrant network and must be regarded and studied within this context. Similarly, in education, interdisciplinary approaches to complex situations, is a natural emergence of understanding networked relationships. We’ve had plenty of situations within our culture that reveal deliberate blockage of information, to benefit a few. In fact, culture becomes more sophisticated as the insights, observations, understanding and inventions are shared by all, not privatized and turned into commodities. Cities are like neurosynaptic centers, where concentrations of information come together, leading to inventions and exchanges, new levels of understanding. Which will lead to the point of the Commons.

The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari in his TED talk, clearly illustrates that human ‘history’ is profoundly and dynamically shaped by the stories that people tell. He mentions that biologically, humans are not terribly different from other species, from fungus to frogs, to chimpanzees. What sets us apart and has allowed homo sapiens to lunge ahead of all other life forms to essentially dominate the planet, is due to our capacity to flexibly cooperate with one another, over large networks. And our capacity to work together is due to our creativity and use of our imagination.

Whatever one imagines, can be created.

Harari states that humans have a dual reality; “They live in an objective reality, but over the centuries have constructed on top of this a second layer of fictional reality; made of fictional entities; like nations, gods, money, corporations. As history unfolded, this fictional reality became more and more powerful. Today, the most powerful forces in the world are these fictional entities.”

George Monbiot has written very often about the challenges of maintaining healthy ecosystems because of the political and economic climate that continually supports large industries (animal, petroleum, agriculture) which disseminate wildlife habitats, destroy environments and lead to more monoculture. http://www.monbiot.com/2017/09/11/how-do-we-get-out-of-this-mess/ In this Monbiot states, “Stories are the means by which we navigate the world. They allow us to interpret its complex and contradictory signals. We all possess a narrative instinct: an innate disposition to listen for an account of who we are and where we stand….Those who tell the stories run the world.

The very survival of rivers and trees, lions and elephants, depends on the decisions and wishes of these fictional entities; like the United States, like Google, like the World Bank, like Palm Oil corporations. Quite brilliantly, Harari says that

“the master storytellers are the big bankers, the finance ministers, the prime ministers.”

“The Burning Paradise: Palm Oil in the Land of the Tree Kangaroo” reveals,
What happened when a giant Korean conglomerate set its eyes on Indonesia’s largest intact rainforest.”

Tree Kangaroos and Birds of Paradise in Papua Losing their habitat to Palm Oil Clearcutting

Tree Kangaroos and Birds of Paradise in Papua Losing their habitat to Palm Oil Clearcutting

Government leaders, finance ministers and corporate executives tell us a very convincing story. And if everyone believes this story, it actually works. Pharmaceutical companies are very slick in their delivery of advertising, with many tentacles in the air waves and a plethora of TV commercials, now surpassing those of the automobile industry. Yet in the case of petroleum corporations, animal or agricultural industries, lumber, palm oil…there’s a distance, and the work that they do is only really witnessed by people whose property is near to the dirty and consuming practices. In the case of Palm Oil companies dismantling and burning up the virgin Rain Forest, very few of us have an inkling of what is really happening in these remote areas, except for through organizations who do the scouting, who trek there, take aerial footage and who risk their lives, in some cases, to get close enough. I rely on the Guardian for example, and more and more alternative press. Like The UTNE READER Propagandopoly: Monopoly as an Ideological Tool and Mongabay, Korean palm oil firm burned large tracts of forestland in Indonesia, NGOs allege and since being informed about the English version of this paper, Le Monde Diplomatique “The century of revolution”

Noam Chomsky stated years ago the concept of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. These fictional realities generate power because of the fact that they are collectively believed and adhered to.

Yuval Noah Harari brilliantly states that “money is the most successful story ever invented and told by humans; it is the only story everybody believes.”

The ecologist Suzanne Simard discerns through her studies that trees communicate with one another regularly and over vast distances. In Simard’s Ted Talk “How Trees Talk to Each Other, she points out that trees are not competitive, but in fact are super cooperators.

Harari points out that stories that we’ve invented and spread around aren’t necessarily ones that are good for the collective species. “States and Nations are not objective reality, same is true of the economic field. The most important actors in the global economy presently are companies which are legal fictions. Corporations mostly want to make money. And our capitalist system is one built on growth as measured by the Gross Domestic Product. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been the healthiest manner of cooperation with the ecosystem of the earth.

Terence Mckenna relates in his talk A Species Addicted

“There is no serious plan to deal with what havoc humans have created with the planet, nature, the other creatures, the diminishing rain forests. Through the propaganda and lies created by our most powerful storytellers, the human race, in an ego-driven manner, is following a culture which is a lie.”

Caitlin Johnstone echoes in her article about feminism in our current political environment, is that the patriarchal history was written by men. “Money is the engine room of the patriarchy. Humans have indeed used our superior neurology to out-survive and out-thrive all other competing organisms, but then we’ve also continued to use it to conquer, kill, exploit and enslave one another throughout the entirety of recorded history, and to decimate the ecosystem which we need to survive. If we end up going extinct due to anthropogenic climate chaos or nuclear armageddon, we will have failed as spectacularly as a species can possibly fail in the extremely short time that we have been here.”

Johnstone says in her article “It Is Evolve Or Die Time” “What few problems we encounter which aren’t man-made (natural disasters, some diseases) could be vastly minimized if our species was pouring all its mental energy and creativity into creating a better world for everyone instead of into economic competition and warfare.”

The journalist Chris Hedges in an interview following his publication in Truthdig September 17, titled The Silencing of Dissent, mentions that the same one-way story embraces media and politics, stemming from the forces of corporate capitalism and proponents of American imperialism. “The utopian ideology of neoliberalism and the primacy of corporate power have branded themselves into the human consciousness as inevitable forms of human progress. And those who have had the say, due to their positions and power, have imposed de facto censorship to shut out critics of unfettered capitalism and imperialism, such as Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn. This has rippled from politics, into the media and our learning institutions, as well as government agencies such as the American Medical Association, American Diabetes Association and American Institute of Health.”

“Do not significantly alienate those upon whom we depend for money and access!”

In the interview Hedges states, “Those who rise in the organization and hold power are consummate careerists. Their loyalty is to their advancement and the stature and profitability of the institution. With the bankruptcy of the ruling ideology, and the bankruptcy of the American liberal class and the American left, those who hold fast to intellectual depth and an examination of systems of power, including economics, culture and politics, have to be silenced.”

In a former blog I wrote WTF | “What the Health” documentary: America’s Medical Societies Driven by Corpocrisy | More Inconvenient Truths | Culinary Medicine | Farmacy I was describing the What The Health documentary film that uncovered excellent realizations about ‘standard procedure’ covert operations in funding and information withheld. This film is about the collusion of industries in their misinformation to the public about diet and health.

Same theme: information withheld, mis-information provided, which the film makers uncovered as they approached various American government health organizations, who toe-the-line of their sponsors. Therefore, instead of speaking the truth about diet and health, they withhold it. You can watch it here. The industries which use the land’s resources precipitously, wastefully and inefficiently to maintain the beef, pork and dairy industries, are in fact the same industries who paid off these large institutions who claim to be representing facts to provide the public with information about health. Therefore since their sponsors are the very same industries who operate food industries that are unhealthy, the various organizations maintain a deceptive policy.

Terence Mckenna mentions that ironically regardless of the wealth and GDP of the USA, the level of unhappiness is immense, there’s an utterly unhappy ruling class. Yet what has begun to emerge along with the awareness of the need for cooperation and diversification, is that certainly the dictates of capitalism and consumerism are not what bring health, happiness or progress, but are about continued growth for the purposes of profit, without regard to the entire health of the system. Mae-Wan Ho describes in The Communicative and Integrative Biology of her book concept The Rainbow and the Worm, that “life is essentially quantum coherent systems, based primarily on the degree to which the various parts of organisms are able to work autonomously but still remain highly coordinated.” She mentions that going against the grain of the established story, all lead to problems; such as lack of courage in addressing the big questions or to disagree with the mainstream, lack of imagination, lack of funding, too much concentration on molecular nuts and bolts, domination of reductionist biology, too much specialization and lack of interdisciplinary training, lack of appreciation of the beauty of nature. In my opinion, to really understand nature, one needs to be both a romantic poet and artist at heart.”

In George Monbiot’s article in the Guardian, Common Wealth, he asserts that two critical factions are missing in the standard assumption that the two main actors in the economy are the State and the Market. “In fact there are four major economic sectors: the market, the state, the household and the commons.” The household is almost entirely comprised of the work of women. Both market and state receive a massive subsidy from the household: the unpaid labour of parents and other carers, still provided mostly by women. If children were not looked after, fed, taught basic skills at home and taken to school, there would be no economy. And if people who are ill, elderly or have disabilities were not helped and supported by others, the public care bill would break the state. What is critically misconceived, is the concept of the commonwealth.

The vast wealth of the economic elite has accumulated at the expense of the populace, through their seizure of the fourth sector of the economy: the commons.

A commons is neither state nor market. It has three main elements. First a resource, such as land, water, minerals, scientific research, hardware or software. Second, a community of people who have shared and equal rights to this resource, and organise themselves to manage it. Third, the rules, systems and negotiations they develop to sustain it and allocate the benefits.

A true commons is managed not for the accumulation of capital or profit, but for the steady production of prosperity or wellbeing. The commons have been attacked by both state power and capitalism for centuries.

Resources that no one invented or created, or that a large number of people created together, (or in several cases where inventions have been submerged from collective consciousness by being dismissed or disregarded by the powers to censor them at the time), are stolen by those who sniff an opportunity for profit.

Monbiot states that “Enclosure creates inequality. It produces a rentier economy: those who have captured essential resources force everyone else to pay for access. It shatters communities and alienates people from their labour and their surroundings. The ecosystems commoners sustained are liquidated for cash. Inequality, rent, atomisation, alienation, environmental destruction: the loss of the commons has caused or exacerbated many of the afflictions of our age. A commons, unlike state spending, obliges people to work together, to sustain their resources and decide how the income should be used. It gives community life a clear focus. It depends on democracy in its truest form. It destroys inequality. It provides an incentive to protect the living world. It creates, in sum, a Politics of Belonging.”

The German biologist, philosopher and nature writer Andreas Weber recognizes the interconnectedness of humans to nature. In his talk at the conference on “Economics and the Common(s): From Seed Form to Core Paradigm” Weber mentions that though we can maintain aspects of our modus operandi of the age of enlightenment, we need to make a paradigm shift to enlivenment; seeing all life in continuous interrelationship. “In our question of “what is life?”, we need to look beneath the ‘operating system’ engendered by the enlightenment in which things, life, humans are measured according to efficiency, competition and egoistical agents. This approach is cutting things down into blocks, separate parts, into arbitrary entities and dead objects. What is missing is that there are no feelings involved.”

He claims, “we need a new bios, enlivenment; stressing the expressive and experiential qualities of being alive. Instead of looking at nature and life in a causal way, when we see things as they are, they are constantly changing, in an unfolding process of freedom, autonomy and value. Every commons is a material and knowledge commons.”

 

Nothing is more open-source than DNA.

 

“The economy of the commons is naturally anti-capitalist. From within a cell to a whole organism, all life is in compartments with its own boundary. However it’s not a wall, but a permeable boundary, in which the inhabitants are continuously interrelating and crystalizing into a whole, a unity. Quantum physics demonstrates that we affect the outcome of the experiment by observing. When we’re talking about the biosphere, ecology, economy, we are always talking about ourselves. The new ism, enlivenment, stresses that we need to recognize and incorporate the fact that we are feeling beings, with living experiences, who wish to feel meaning.”

The Venus Project is about a Resource-Based Economy – All Resources are a Common Heritage.

Venus Project Resource-Based Economy - All Resources are a Common Heritage

Venus Project Resource-Based Economy – All Resources are a Common Heritage

The Venus Project – a Resource-Based Economy Blueprint for the genesis of a new world civilization.

This functioning, healthy system that has already been operating in Costa Rica, which Jason Hickel describes in “Want to avert the apocalypse? Take lessons from Costa Rica

Hickel points out, “If we want to have any hope of averting catastrophe, we’re going to have to do something about our addiction to growth. This is tricky, because GDP growth is the main policy objective of virtually every government on the planet. It lies at the heart of everything we’ve been told to believe about how the economy should work: that GDP growth is good, that it’s essential to progress. Costa Rica proves that achieving high levels of human wellbeing has very little to do with GDP and almost everything to do with something very different.

Redistribution can be a substitute for growth

Every few years the New Economics Foundation publishes the Happy Planet Indexa measure of progress that looks at life expectancy, wellbeing and equality rather than the narrow metric of GDP, and plots these measures against ecological impact.

Those factors which contribute to health and happiness do not go together with uninhibited growth of the Gross Domestic Product.

The Happy Planet Index measures what matters: sustainable wellbeing for all.

“In this sense, Costa Rica is the most efficient economy on earth: it produces high standards of living with low GDP and minimal pressure on the environment.

Costa Rica is a thorn in the side of orthodox economics. In fact, the part of Costa Rica where people live the longest, happiest lives – the Nicoya Peninsula – is also the poorest, in terms of GDP per capita. Researchers have concluded that Nicoyans do so well not in spite of their “poverty”, but because of it – because their communities, environment and relationships haven’t been ploughed over by industrial expansion. A series of progressive governments started rolling out healthcare, education and social security in the 1940s and expanded these to the whole population from the 50s onward, after abolishing the military and freeing up more resources for social spending. Costa Rica is one of only a few countries in the global south that enjoys robust universalism.”

Happy Planet Index is not about GDP but lower economic footprint

Happy Planet Index is not about GDP but lower economic footprint

According to their homepage “Wealthy Western countries, often seen as the standard of success, do not rank highly on the Happy Planet Index. Instead, several countries in Latin America and the Asia Pacific region lead the way by achieving high life expectancy and wellbeing with much smaller Ecological Footprints. Costa Rica tops the list of countries every time. With a life expectancy of 79.1 years and levels of wellbeing in the top 7% of the world, Costa Rica matches many Scandinavian nations in these areas and neatly outperforms the United States. And it manages all of this with a GDP per capita of only $10,000 (£7,640), less than one fifth that of the US.”

To recognize that all land, ocean, soil, trees, air and plants that we have not created but are part of the earth, which sustains us, is our home to protect. To shift our activities to maintain these benefits and resources; caring, maintaining, learning and providing to equally distribute to all, making this commons something we integrally work towards nurturing and protecting. And the more we advance in education and awareness towards constructing inventions that are the least toxic and most energy efficient, is something that we can all participate in with pride. The stories we tell, can lead us to a very happy and harmonious planet.

Terence McKenna A Species Addicted TV

Terence McKenna A Species Addicted; our addiction to objects which he calls object fetichism.

Why not live the adventure of creating and doing exactly what you love to do, and celebrating that everyone else is as well. None is to be privatized or controlled from an outside source with money trickling to this outside source, but kindled and honored and redistributed among all. With the priority being not to make an economic profit, but to have the best quality outdoor and indoor environments, the best quality of education, an emphasis towards local and diversification. A stress on creativity and autonomy among individuals who pull together, cooperatively sharing access to resources and benefits. With cohesion, respect and harmony and intimate interaction with all of the natural world. All of the living world adds delight and dimension to our beings, as we put our full awareness towards these with empathy and joy, with all of our senses. Hearing wind, birds, sensing moisture or heat, seeing the design of nature, smelling the fragrances of plants. The thought of doing anything that has a negative environmental impact to ruin our environment, would be as obvious as not putting waste on a valued space.

We can do it, collectively, because that is our nature. Homo sapiens thrive when cooperating. Not with heroes or figureheads pandering to the same old forged industrially, financially entangled world. We simply need to keep dynamically spreading our joy through being the best that we can actively be and imagine ourselves to be and to live celebrating this diversity of spirit among ourselves, rather than crushing or suppressing this.

Hazrat Inayat Khan, Resonance

Hazrat Inayat Khan quote Resonance

Incredibly, the first thing I saw when I was triggered to write this blog, was a quote from a Sufi master whose name I was familiar with. Several years ago I participated in a ‘Heart Rhythm Meditation’ course taught by a South African pediatrician at Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania. This meditation practice was influenced inspired by this Sufi musician, mystic, and healer Hazrat Inayat Khan.

“A person does not hear sound only through the ears; he hears sound through every pore of his body. It permeates the entire being, and according to its particular influence either slows or quickens the rhythm of the blood circulation; it either wakens or soothes the nervous system. It arouses a person to greater passions or it calms him by bringing him peace. According to the sound and its influence a certain effect is produced. Sound becomes visible in the form of radiance. This shows that the same energy which goes into the form of sound before being visible is absorbed by the physical body. In that way the physical body recuperates and becomes charged with new magnetism.” – Hazrat Inayat Khan

Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan Sufism and the Mysticism of Music, Charlie Sarafan, Infinity

Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan on Sufism and the Mysticism of Music interviewed by Charlie Sarafan for Infinity. Khan speaks of life as a vibration of wave-like patterns, all life having a signature vibration and frequency that can resonate with other life forms. “The tradition of Sufism has been accused of pantheism, as all is considered ‘god’. You can not divide the universe. In as much as something is a fraction of the universe, it has within it the potentiality of all the universe. The origin of all reality is wave-like. Every object in the world has a signature tune. When objects resonate, this is the key to the experience of relationship. One can heal bones by putting them into an electromagnetic field with the same signature vibration.”

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Carol Keiter aka nomadbeatz welcomes donations for her writing, photography, illustrations, eBook & music composition

Batman hitting the earth with oil oozing out

Batman hitting the earth with oil oozing out

Carol Keiter the blogger

Carol Keiter the blogger

Noam Chomsky: US Scandalous Healthcare symptomatic of populations’ failure to defend Democracy | Choice of disenfranchised masses to have blind faith in ruling elite

As the title suggests, in this interview and article by C.J. Polychroniou, Noam Chomsky unveils his expansive view of the United States.

truthout

truthout

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/39064-noam-chomsky-the-us-health-system-is-an-international-scandal-and-aca-repeal-will-make-it-worse?tsk=adminpreview#disqus_thread

Chomsky claims that the rejection of healthcare and lack of a real labor presence is symbolic of the much larger issue in the United States > that people do not participate or defend democracy, but are willing puppets of a political realm ruled by a wealthy few, to whom the population simply does not oppose, but subjugate their passions and dreams to agree to the system dictated by a ruling class – who the population could overpower with their force, if they simply wished to stand up for their rights to represent and govern themselves.

I’ve basically excerpted the article, juggling it around a bit to put the most poignant parts from the conclusion – at the beginning – for those who have no time to read. Hence it’s a sort of ‘cliff notes’ version of the article.

And as I posted on Facebook regarding this Truthout article, thank you so much Noam Chomsky for being the expansive and insightful person whom you are!

Noam Chomsky-information website

Noam Chomsky-information website

“The US health care system has long been an international scandal, with about twice the per capita expenses of other wealthy (OECD) countries and relatively poor outcomes. The ACA did, however, bring improvements, including insurance for tens of millions of people who lacked it, banning of refusal of insurance for people with prior disabilities, and other gains — and also, it appears to have led to a reduction in the increase of health care costs, though that is hard to determine precisely.

Returning to your question, it raises a crucial question about American democracy: why isn’t the population “demanding” what it strongly prefers? Why is it allowing concentrated private capital to undermine necessities of life in the interests of profit and power?

….The question directs our attention to a profound democratic deficit in an atomized society, lacking the kind of popular associations and organizations that enable the public to participate in a meaningful way in determining the course of political, social and economic affairs. These would crucially include a strong and participatory labor movement and actual political parties growing from public deliberation and participation instead of the elite-run candidate-producing groups that pass for political parties. What remains is a depoliticized society in which a majority of voters (barely half the population even in the super-hyped presidential elections, much less in others) are literally disenfranchised, in that their representatives disregard their preferences while effective decision-making lies largely in the hands of tiny concentrations of wealth and corporate power…

Turning finally to your question again, a rather general answer, which applies in its specific way to contemporary western democracies, was provided by David Hume over 250 years ago, in his classic study of the First Principles of Government. Hume found “nothing more surprising than to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and to observe the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is brought about, we shall find, that as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. `Tis therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.”

Implicit submission is not imposed by laws of nature or political theory. It is a choice, at least in societies such as ours, which enjoys the legacy provided by the struggles of those who came before us. Here power is indeed “on the side of the governed,” if they organize and act to gain and exercise it. That holds for health care and for much else.”

The House of Representatives, dominated by Republicans (with a minority of voters), has voted over 50 times in the past six years to repeal or weaken Obamacare, but they have yet to come up with anything like a coherent alternative.

Comparison of the attitude toward elementary rights of labor and extraordinary rights of private power tells us a good deal about the nature of American society.

The expulsion or mass killing of Indigenous nations cleared the ground for the invading settlers, who had enormous resources and ample fertile lands at their disposal, and extraordinary security for reasons of geography and power. That led to the rise of a society of individual farmers, and also, thanks to slavery, substantial control of the product that fueled the industrial revolution: cotton, the foundation of manufacturing, banking, commerce, retail for both the US and Britain, and less directly, other European societies. Also relevant is the fact that the country has actually been at war for 500 years with little respite, a history that has created “the richest, most powerful¸ and ultimately most militarized nation in world history,” as scholar Walter Hixson has documented.

Administrative costs are far greater in the private component of the health care system than in Medicare, which itself suffers by having to work through the private system.

Comparisons with other countries reveal much more bureaucracy and higher administrative costs in the US privatized system than elsewhere. One study of the US and Canada a decade ago, by medical researcher Steffie Woolhandler and associates, found enormous disparities, and concluded that “Reducing U.S. administrative costs to Canadian levels would save at least $209 billion annually, enough to fund universal coverage.

Another anomalous feature of the US system is the law banning the government from negotiating drug prices, which leads to highly inflated prices in the US as compared with other countries. That effect is magnified considerably by the extreme patent rights accorded to the pharmaceutical industry in “trade agreements,” enabling monopoly profits. In a profit-driven system, there are also incentives for expensive treatments rather than preventive care, as strikingly in Cuba, with remarkably efficient and effective health care.”

Carol Keiter, the blogger

Carol Keiter the blogger

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Carol Keiter aka nomadbeatz welcomes donations for her writing, photography, illustrations, eBook & music composition

Obama’s State of the Union Address | A Noble and Inspirational Leader

Obama’s State of the Union Address

I thought it was a fantastic speech, full of hope and inspiration! Tears of gratitude poured down my face several times. What he chose to acknowledge and address for the future and his optimism, grace and noble nature reveal him as a true leader with a spiritual presence.

I sat and typed as I watched the speech, switching between Al Jazeera and CNN. You have to read between the lines and accept the fact that this is as edited as my notes are going to be. I’m sure a copy of the speech is available through various sites: Facebook and Twitter ‘the White House’.

Middle Class economics, instead of Trickle Down Economics.

…about America…
economy growing at fastest pace since 1999
unemployment rate lower than before financial crisis
more people graduating
as free from grip of foreign oil as we’ve been in 30 years
past 5 yrs businesses created more than 11 M new jobs
america is # one in oil and gas
america is # one in wind power

restore the link between hard working and making gains; for EVERYONE
childcare costs more than their mortgage or the cost of one year tuition at Michigan uni

the country gains when everyone plays by the same rules and everyone contributes to our success

Middle Class economics

• helping working families feel more secure in world of constant change
• when the economics forces both parents to work, we need to stop treating childcare as a woman’s issue; treat it as a national issue that is important for all of us – quality childcare, new tax cuts, $3,000/per child/per year
• we are the only advanced country that doesn’t guarantee paid six leave or childcare – helping states that gives every worker in America to earn 7 days paid sick leave
• Congress pass a law to guaranttee that a woman is paid the same as a man doing the same work
• to Congress: if you truly believe you can live and support a family on $15,000 a year, try it!
• need laws to strengthen rather than weaken a Union
• we need to do more to help Americans upgrade their skills
• in a 21C economy that rewards knowledge more than any before. too many people are priced out of higher education: lower the cost of community college to zero. Stay ahead of the curve; make community college available and universal. Connecting community colleges to connect with local business to train them; paid apprenticeships
• give every veteran access; translate their training and experience into civilian jobs
• Michele and Joe Biden helped in a program to get veterans jobs
• 21C businesses need 21stC infrastructure – create more than
• businesses need to sell more products overseas
• china wants to write the rules – trade promotion – trade deals from Asia to Europe that aren’t just fair. 95% of the world’s customers live outside our borders. We need to bring jobs back from china
• rely on american science, technology, research and development = precision medicine initiative to give us access to making headway
• protect a free and open internet, to build the fastest networks – wants Americans to win the race in creating the proestetics, solar system, astronauts to Mars Good luck Captain Kelly will live for a year in space. “Make sure to instagram it!”
• stop the loopholes, reward companies that keep the jobs here on this soil
• simplify the tax system
• stop allowing the top 1% – that truly helps working Americans to get the economy together
• give people the tools they need, to maintain the conditions for growth – make our economy stronger
• we can not separate our work at home from what’s happening beyond our shores
• how can America can lead in the world. look at the broader strategy to live in a safer Worl
• combine military power with strong diplomacy, don’t let our fears blind us. that’s what the terrorists want, to pay us in their hands

We stand united with people around the world – from schools in Pakistan

bankrupt ideology of violent extremism, opposing Russia’s aggression, supporting Ukraine, supporting NATO allies

America leads not with bluster but persistant steady resolve

Cuba’s isolation is long past it’s isolation date
when what what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new
• stand up for democratic values; ending the embargo

• as his holiness Pope Francis; diplomacy is the work of small steps

• he will veto any sanctions
• only go to war as a last result
• no hacker should be able to steal trade secrets
• the world needs to use this lesson; invest in smart development, eradicate extreme poverty, learn how to avoid a global pandemic
• no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change – 2014 was the planet’s warmest on record, 14 of the 15 warmest years have been
• NASA NOA the best scientists in the world are telling us our activities are changing the planet; massive destructions, posing immediate risks to our national security “we should act like it”
• more public lands have been contributed in the last years
• American leadership must drive international action. The world needs to reach an agreement to protect the one last planet we have.
• As American’s we respect human dignity; technology such as drones must be properly restrained, speak out against antisemitism, stop approaching Muslim’s with fear, cut populations in prisons
• we do these things because they are not only the right thing to do, but because ultimately they will make us safer
• increase more transparency; keep country safe while strengthening privacy
build coalitions to build
• lead with our values; that’s what keeps us strong – hold ourselves to the highest of standards
• United States of America in a nation that gave someone like me a chance; Chicago microcosm of country
• Division itself is misguided: I still believe that we can work together. American’s beat back adversity. He knows the good hearted, generosity and optimism of the American people
• to Congress he said: “set a better example, better reflect America’s hopes. There are a lot of good people on both sides of the isle.
• !!! Imagine if we broke out of these tired old patterns and appeal to each others’ basic decency instead of fears!!!! (wow!)
• talk issues, values, facts …. a better politics instead of drowning people in dark ads, but asking young people to join in the mission of building america

• to Congress: Let’s make the debates worthy of this country,

*reform America’s criminal justice system so that it protects and serves all of us

•rebuild trust. that’s how we move this country forward. I have no more campaigns to run “i know because i won both of them” (excellent comment!). My only agenda for the next two years, is to do what i believe is best for America.

• I want this chamber to reflect the truth; people with strength and generosity of spirit to unite, actions to tell every child in every neighborhood that your life matters

•We see our differences as a great gift. Everybody matters, grow up in a country that shows the world everything that we know to be true. We are more than a collection of red states and blues states. I want people to grow up in a country where a young mom can write a letter to the president.

We are a strong tightknit family who has made it through some hard times. Picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves off, and laid a foundation.

Paul Heise Professor Economics | A Happy New Year is your proactive responsibility |

Having not lived in the United States for a while, I’m not familiar with this writer nor his column, yet the contents of his words reverberated. Heise holds a Ph.D. in economics and is professor emeritus of economics at Lebanon Valley College. This was published in the Opinion section of the Lebanon Daily News, January 5th, 2012. He suggests that Americans let go of their fears and apprehension, and open their minds to seizing new opportunities; through actively taking proactive steps and taking responsibility for creating the life that we want, to once again set examples for the world to follow!

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
A happy new year, if we will work at it

By PAUL HEISE

The new year is a good time to seek out and celebrate the opportunities that life presents us.

The actual happiness of this new year will depend not on fate or accident but on how we respond to the opportunities we face. The opportunities are there, and we face a bright future so long as we do not panic and retreat into fear.

Certainly, our highest hopes flow from the physical sciences because they are the base of the technology that sustains us. The theoretical scientists, working in real time, promise new worlds as yet undreamed of.

For example, in biology, DNA research offers the opportunity to change the very nature of humanity. In physics, the search for the boson particle offers us the excitement of a possible fifth dimension. These opportunities are so stunning that they are and should be frightening.

America as a nation spends huge sums on scientific research. While too much of that is military, a lot does spill over to the private sector. Advances in robotics in regard to artificial limbs have been applied to the general population. GPS technology is good for more than just smart bombs targeting terrorists. Similarly, drone technology has been applied to rescue people as well as to slaughter them.

Managing these technologies promises a future of both jobs and wealth, if we are willing to spend the research money directly on domestic needs.

Technically and economically, the world can produce enough to feed, clothe, house, medicate and educate to a reasonable middle-class standard. The only problems in the way of that are political. The 30-year stagnation of the wages of the middle-class and therefore much of our poverty are not accidental. They are the result of class warfare.

We now live in a plutocracy, government by the wealthy, with extremes of inequality in wealth and income not seen for more than 80 years. These inequalities are also the underlying cause of our current depression.

America will get a growing, prosperous economy in 2012 only if we give the middle-class a wage increase commensurate with their increased productivity.

If we want to have a prosperous new year, we must put our political house in order. The financial sector does not have a right to the money it stole or the political power it purchased with that money. We need to demand accountability for the criminal behavior of bank presidents and not just crack addicts.
Our Constitution and all of our universal and unalienable rights, especially freedom from warrantless search and seizure, must be defended and not given up because we are afraid. Corporations have limited liability, uncontrolled size and immortality; no person I know has any of those attributes.
The tea party and the Occupy Wall Street movement agree on at least this much, so the country is surely ready to fight those battles. Coordinated SWAT team action and pepper spray should not deter us.

America is still the most powerful cultural force for good in the world, and politically the world is going our way despite what you hear.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, with its attack on income inequality, was quickly copied across the developed world. Divergent forms of democratic capitalism are emerging and being welcomed. The repressive aspects of Chinese state capitalism are being challenged by the Chinese people themselves. India’s combination of socialism and capitalism is still emerging. Latin America is quietly slipping free of the IMF and North American corporate control. A democratic Arab Spring is outperforming militant Islamism. Across the world, the creation and spreading of wealth is becoming more important than political ideology.

If we revive the middle class here at home and reach out to others, we will have a great year, and the world will go along. Instead of projecting power in the Far East with aircraft carriers, we will share with China the development of an emerging Southeast Asia. Instead of threatening Iran, we will recognize its natural position as a leader in the Middle East. Instead of fighting the world consensus on global climate change, we will be leading the repair of the planet. Instead of fearing science, we will complete that stalled particle accelerator down in Texas. Instead of closing our borders and our hearts, we will open them so we are still the land of the free.

List your own favorite tasks, and we will all have a daunting but exciting agenda.

America and the world face the prospect of a prosperous and peaceful world. But America is still the only country that can lead us all forward. If we succumb to a bickering fear – of technology, of dark-skinned people, of ourselves – we will not lead.

Let’s look at the new year not just as a gift of opportunity but as a task to be accomplished. Then it will be a really happy new year!
A resident of Mt. Gretna, Heise holds a Ph.D. in economics and is professor emeritus of economics at Lebanon Valley College. His column appears every other Thursday. He maintains past columns and can be reached through his blog, paulheise.blogspot.com.

Matt Taibbi | Wall Street has no incentive Not to Commit Crimes |

An informative interview with Matt Taibbi. He’s very articulate and educated about the subject he speaks of and has written a book about; wall street getting away with it, American complacency, the media not necessarily being manipulated from the top-down, but influenced with what will draw the best advertising money….

Guides to Living Longer, Happier Lives – Right Here, Right Now!

I am in the midst of trying to re-organize a lot of things in my life. I have to move, again. I am also in the process of looking for work, because right at the same time I was informed that I must find a new place to live, several of my income sources also simultaneously “dried up”, like a local well suddenly becoming contaminated. Thing is, I have been aware of my need to upgrade to a deeper, larger and more vibrant watering hole before this whole process started, and now have no choice. I’ve been from the start trying to remain calm, and not let these impediments get in the way of things that I’ve wanted to participate in. And then yesterday, in the process of contemplating what I’d like to do, and of thinking about happiness in general, I went on yet another google research whirlwind to inquire among other things, ” Where in the world, people might be happier?”

One study which incorporated economic stability into the picture, according to this necessary ‘bias’ of the Western World…came up with Denmark as being the place where people are the happiest in the World. A dreary, gloomy often cloud covered place, where people enjoy a high standard of living, and also where there are more balanced socialized perspectives in terms of employment. In other words, there appears to be less of a social pecking order pyramid in terms of some jobs having more prestige, and more of an overall appreciation of life over work, and the idea that sharing and communicating optimism on a daily basis to others in one’s community is valued over the type of job one has.

http://www.financialjesus.com/how-to-get-rich/top-10-happiest-countries/

My point is not that I’m considering moving to Denmark. My search continued, and somehow in my trajectory I came upon this link, labeled the Blue Zones, which are what researchers discovered and labeled as the areas in the World which correspond to where people have the highest longevity.

http://www.bluezones.com

And in all of the material that I was reading and listening to, it became clear, that happiness is not a place that I or anyone else can find necessarily in a particular geographical place. It has to do with healthy physical and emotional habits; a balanced diet, a regular amount of physical activity and motion. It has much more to do with attitude than anything else. Having a sense of purpose in one’s life, recognizing the awe of life itself, in whatever way one chooses to approach this grand mystery, surrounding oneself with friends and family and embracing the daily changes with optimism.

In my other searches on ‘where people laugh and smile the most on earth’, since they don’t appear to do so with any high frequency here in Germany where I currently reside, I started doing searches.

It comes down to the fact that humor and laughter is universal in its health benefits, and I recall from the years of Thanksgiving dinners among extended family members, that there was a great deal of humor and laughter around the table, and physical exercise afterwards.

This link gets into a more philosophical inquiry about ‘what laughter is, and why we laugh’. One of the most stunning facts is that babies start laughing in the first months and kids laugh at least twice as much as adults. So, laughter is innate, is contagious just like yawning….and is associated with playful and light-hearted attitudes.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3077386/

We all just need to be more playful, and take ourselves less seriously…in order to transmit good vibes to other people that will also ripple to others; the calming, healthier signals of slowing down, enjoying life and appreciating all of the delicate morsels that it has to offer.

http://www.helpguide.org/life/humor_laughter_health.htm

Note, I had to research this stuff yesterday to be reminded, to not ‘stress’ and to be optimistic, about the task that I have before me. At least now I know, that I don’t have to make a mad dash to set up house in another city/country/continent to be happy or healthy, but merely seek out and incorporate healthy physical and emotional activities into my routine, with humor and delight – sharing with family and friends!

And don’t forget that we’re not alone on this planet ‘-)
http://www.avaaz.org/en/no_more_bloody_ivory/98.php?CLICK_TF_TRACK