A Global New Year on the Way in China: 一个全球性新年在途中在中国

A New Year has dawned here in China. I just awoke. We are seven and a half hours into it here. It is just half an hour before the New year rings out in my homeland Scotland. I feel so comfortable here in China. I almost said my former homeland. I now feel China is my home. I live in a very comfortable apartment in Suzhou tastefully furnished by my wonderful landlady and partner Gong Hui Hua.

I love the kids I and my colleagues teach at the IFY college in Number One School (Yi Zhong). We had a parents day the on Saturday. I told them that their children were not only smart but had good hearts and a capacity for work that truly astounds me. I felt that our future global commonwealth will be in good hands. A significant proportion of it will depend on their children am their fellow countryman's commitment to sustaining its effectiveness. I am sure they will be so committed.


We are staying in Shanghai at the truly beautiful Anting Villa Hotel 700 Yuan a night (£45 GBP) with a decor and setting to die for. The American and French Hotel chains have nothing to rival this in quality and or price. It is in the middle of the old French concession in Shanghai a great European cultural contribution to this great city. The concession is full of lovely broad boulevards and mansions similar in quality to this one.

Gong Hui Hua and I saw in the New Year in the company of our friend's in Shanghai Swing at the equally beautiful Chartres restaurant. We danced the night away till at least 4am. the setting was superb overlooking a magnificent garden and the floor was marble and to die for for dancing. We mainly danced to recording of the great bands of the swing era, Chick Webb, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Glen Millar and Bennie Goodman but two musician friends showed up and about 12.30 and played the night out for us with some great very very fast clarinet jazz. courtesy of the wonderful Mrt Pops.

She is a wonderful "follow". We have only danced a little together. She has only had one lesson in Lindy Hop but she learned the side by side Charleston and the Swing Out last night and performed both almost as well as she can move to her partners lead in ballroom and regular jive dancing. Wow! She is a knock out as a dancer, friend and in reality my wife.

She cooked a most wonderful 14 course dinner for my and my work colleagues celebration of Christmas last week and I set out to enjoy work every day catered for by her to a truly wonderful standard in every department of life that a husband could expect of his wife and more. She is never angry. She is always happy. She smiles all the time and manages to keep me the same way nearly continuously.

I say nearly because while I am well on top of defeating my own internal tensions and the deep rooted sources of anger that have haunted me, and those close to me, for most of my life. I have still not quite made it. I know with her I will. The Way through her has given me the opportunity to root them out for ever and truly enjoy the remainder of my life in a happy positive way radiating her and my happiness outwards for others in the way her smiling joy does for all who touch her. I know for certain I can now get to the same place. I can and am learning how to to keep her and all those around me as happy as I now feel most of the time.

My Chinese improves by leaps and bounds. She and I now regularly have enjoyable very simple happy amusing conversations. Soon I know our electronic dictionary will become a support to our verbal communication as opposed to its main channel and by them I am certain our verbal capacity for relating will reach and surpass our currently highly effective parallel physical, emotional and spiritual channels.

I have truly found my home here in China with her and look forward to participating in building it strong safe and satisfying in the way I feel my small efforts with my kids will do for the future of this great and exciting country in which I now live and work. As each day dawns I have higher and higher hopes for our joint human future.

I will not try and phone my great brother in Scotland. A New Year, hopefully as good, has just dawned there to as I hope it has and will for my lovely ex wife Susan and my lovely big hearted daughter Heather.

一个新年破晓了这里在我醒七和一半几小时入它这里的中国。这以前是正义半小时在圆环里在我的家园苏格兰。我感到很舒适这里在中国。我几乎说我的前家园为我现在感觉中国是我的家。我居住在一栋非常舒适的公寓在Suzhou 由我美妙的女主人雅致地装备。我爱孩子I 并且我的同事教。我星期六有一父母天。我告诉了他们, 他们的孩子不仅聪明但有好心脏和一真实地震惊我的工作能力。我感到我们的未来全球性联邦将是在好手里假设一个重要比例它将取决于他们并且他们我肯定是相似的同乡的承诺对承受它的有效率。我是肯定的他们将是因此做了。我停留在上海在真实地美丽的Anting 别墅旅馆700 元每夜(.45 GBP) 与装饰和设置死为。美国和法国连锁旅馆有没什么抵抗这在质量和或价格。这是在老法国让步中间在上海对这个伟大的城市的巨大欧洲文化贡献。让步是充分的可爱的宽广的大道和豪宅相似在质量到那个我现在居住。I 和我的女主人和伙伴锣惠・华锯在新年在我们的朋友陪同下的在上海摇摆在相等地美丽的Chartres 餐馆。我们跳舞夜直到至少设置是雄伟的俯视一个壮观的庭院的4.am. 并且地板是大理石和死为为跳舞。我们主要跳舞对伟大的带摇摆时代, 小鸡Webb, Ellington, 计数Basie, 托米・Dorsey, Artie Shaw 的公爵录音, 幽谷Millar 和Bennie Goodman 但二个音乐家朋友出现了和大约12.30 和演奏了夜为我们以一些伟大的非常非常快速的clarinet 爵士乐。她是美妙的"随后而来" 。我们少许一起只跳舞。她只有一个教训在Lindy 蛇麻草但是她以及她能搬走向她的伙伴带领在舞厅和规则jive 跳舞肩并肩学会了查尔斯顿和摇摆在昨晚之外和几乎执行了两个。哇! 她是敲作为舞蹈家, 朋友和实际上我的妻子。她烹调了一顿最美妙的14 条路线晚餐为我并且我的工作同事庆祝圣诞节和上星期我下决心享用工作每天由她顾及对一个真实地美妙的标准在丈夫能期待他的妻子和更多生活的每个部门。她从未恼怒。她总愉快。她一直微笑和设法几乎连续保留我同样方式。我几乎说因为当我很好在击败我自己的内部紧张和困扰了我的深刻的根源的源泉的愤怒, 并且那些顶部紧挨我, 为大多数我的生活。我不相当仍然做了它。我知道与她我将。方式通过她提供了我机会根源他们为曾经并且真实地享受我的生活剩下的时间用一个愉快的正面方式放热她和我的幸福向外对其他人就象她微笑的喜悦做为所有接触她的。我知道为确定我能现在去对原处。我罐头和上午学会怎么对保留她和所有那些在我附近一样愉快象我现在感觉多半时间。我的中国人改善由飞跃和区域。她和我通常现在有令人愉快的非常简单的愉快的可笑的交谈。很快我知道我们的电子字典将成为支持对我们的口头通信与它的主水道相对并且由他们我肯定我们的口头容量为关系将到达和将超过我们当前高度有效的平行的物理, 情感和精神渠道。我发现了我的家这里在中国与她和真实地盼望参加大厦它强安全并且满意就象我感觉我的小努力与我的孩子将做在我现在居住的未来这个伟大和扣人心弦的国家并且工作。如同□天破晓我有对我们的联合人的未来的越来越高希望。我不会审判和不会给我了不起的兄弟打电话在苏格兰。一个新年, 有希望地象好, 破晓了那里 对如同我希望它有为我可爱的前妻子苏珊和我可爱的大hearted 女儿石南属植物。

China, My Past and Future: 中国,我的过去与未来

I awoke this morning at Kellian, my Bostonian dancing friends flat in Shanghai. We had spent the previous evening dancing Lindy Hop at Shanghai Swing's Halloween Party. This was held in a pretty little pub in the rather nice Shanghai district just of Huai Hai Road next to the expensive Dong Zhu Hotel. Some of the dancing was awesome. I had slept soundly to awake to the beautiful view over Shanghai stretching out from Kellian's flat.

No one else stirred in the house and I lay on the bed enjoying th eview and thinking about how lucky I was and how good life had been to me.

I was really enjoying China, my students, my colleagues, my social friends and beautiful Suzhou my new city. The first week of the new academic year of the International Foundation Year at our college sited on the premises of Number 1 Middle School on Guan Yuang Lu (Public Park Road) had been a really lovely experience for me. Our students are young fresh and shyly confident about themselves and their future. They had been great fun and a pleasure to teach. My colleagues were all trully wonderful in supporting me personally and in my task as their boss. I am finding the whole business of management, largely because of them, a joy. Together they have made a significant contribution to running the school economically while maintaining our existing high standards. The adminstrative staff have been brilliant in support. Misunderstandings have indeed occurred we are a cultural diverse bunch the expatriates, me a Scot, an Englishman an Australian and a Phillipino and 11 Chinese staff.

Not only is the cultural divide wide so are the wage levels. Our company pays the market price for the best of each group and the expatriates thus earn ten times more than their Chinese colleagues and get free accomodation into the bargain. However every one has played a great part in our work and the storms of emotional upset and even some anger that have flared up did just that that and died away. I am increasingly confident that we have all learnt lessons that will ensure future misunderstaning does not lead to personal hurt.

All this went through my mind with gratitude to my ex wife Susan for divorcing me and letting me in consequence deal with dimensions of life that would otherwise have passed me by. This was to be underlined later in the day when I was on the express train back to Suzhou as I listened to a married couple complaining about the trivia of life to but invariably passing by the other. They were clearly retired and well off touring China at their leisure with a guide but they were missing, oh so much about life and what China has to offer all our futures.

My blessings are legion - true reconciliation with my mother just three weeks before she died two weeks ago, an oportunity to discover myself and make my self whole in my own and other's interest particularly my daughter, a better understanding of human beings generally and women in particular gained at some expense to those who have befriended me and from whom I have experiences motivating hurt and no doubt imposed hurt upon them.

I have a vison of a reconciled world on the "Way" (Dao) by means and in the context set out by Lao Tzu in the "Tai Te Ching". I have written and published twice about this now and have an as yet unpublished manuscript on the way. However to write further on the matters that are of concern to us all. I feel I must understand the key player in all our futures better. So I must learn to speak, read and write Chinese and I am beginning to do all three at a rate that amazes me.

I am also so so lucky in being given a bunch of the brightest and best kids in China to help develop. When my age they will have awesome economic and social power and I can already see their is every chance that they can and will weild it in the caring non-judgemental manner Lao Tzu envisages as appropriate for the most effective social leadership.


今天早上我醒来时kellian,我国波士顿上海楼朋友共舞.我们已经花了前一晚在上海跳摇摆舞交椅的万圣节晚会.这是一个漂亮的小酒吧举行,而在上海地区刚刚尼斯淮海路旁边的朱冬昂贵酒店.有些舞蹈是撼人.我醒来睡稳妥地伸展到美丽,从上海出kellian单位.没有人在家里和我搅躺在床上吃次分类号并思考如何如何好,我是幸运的生命已经给我.我是真的享受中,我的学生,我的同事,我美丽的苏州我的新朋友和社会的城市.第一周新学年的国际基金会于去年在我们学院校址位于一号路中学管渊(公园路)一直很可爱的经验.新鲜和畏缩是青年学生对自己和未来充满信心.他们被教导大乐趣和高兴.真正精彩的同事都在支持我个人和我的任务当作自己的老板.我发现整个业务管理,主要是因为其中一名喜悦.他们一起作出了重大贡献,在保持经济运行学校现有高标准.灿烂的行政人员一直在支持.误会既然已经发生,我们的文化多样一群外籍我一个苏格兰人,英国人和一名澳大利亚人和11phillipino中国员工.不仅如此广泛的文化鸿沟是工资水平.我们公司对市场价格的最好自付每一组和外籍从而赚取十倍以上,并得到中国同行免费住宿的呢.但是每个人都发挥了很大的部分,在我们的工作和暴风雨的愤怒情绪,甚至有些懊恼,却也发作而死亡,只是离开.我越来越有信心,我们都学到教训,确保将来不会导致人身伤害误区.这一切经历我心中当然感激我的妻子苏珊和我离婚让我在生活层面处理后果,否则我过去了.这是当天晚些时候将着重就当我回到苏州快车夫妇听到抱怨生活剪影及格但总是被对方.他们显然和离退休富裕的中国旅游休闲指南>却不翼而飞了,哦太多生命中有什么可提供所有期货.我的祝福是军团--真正的和解与三个星期前,她母亲刚刚去世两周前,一个主调,使我国自主地发现自己整自己和其他的兴趣尤其女儿了解人类特别是妇女普遍得到一些牺牲者,从我和我所结交的经验和激励无疑伤害他们施加伤害.我有一个弥透视世界的"路"(道)的手段,在<老子>中列出的"大清德".我已编写出版了一倍左右,但现在这种未曾手稿的做法.不过写就进一步关心的事情是我们所有人.我觉得我必须了解我们所有期货主将更好.所以我必须学会说话,写中文和我开始做的一切,我惊讶的速度3.所以我也这么幸运得到一束魁首帮助孩子在中国发展.当我年纪便撼人经济和社会的力量,我已经可以看到他们的各种机会,并会在仁爱weild非审判方式酌情老子设想的最有效的社会领导.

Terrorism and Corporate Responsibility

For their own and our mutual security we believe corporate bodies need to recognize that they are thee basic social entities in the emerging global community. It is then reasonable that businesses, including those that are not for profit, should seek a bigger role in creating mutual institutions capable of addressing global security.

The UK government’s assessment of the imminent risk of terrorist attack rose to critical today. The British police acted to pre-empt, and hopefully foil, an imminent attack on global air transport routed through the UK. These events effected corporate business, commercial and other, across the planet. Those transiting through London had their business continuity disrupted. Much of this business would have been unrelated to direct British interest. Crucial meetings were missed, deals failed to close, aid and succour was not delivered. These events were thus a matter of global not just British security.

This global perspective is crucial. Nations are designed to protect the value their citizens and enterprises generate. Modern telecoms, the Internet, global finance and the fast easy international movement of goods and people has created a new global space. This has to be seen as more than the sum of national business activity. Who is, or should be, accountable for the security of enterprise in this new space?

The actors in the global community are corporate bodies: not individuals, not citizens not states. They are Shell, Greenpeace, Unilever, Oxfam, Sony-Ericsson, Amnesty International, Nokia, Medecins Sans Frontiere, Cisco Systems, the Red Cross, Microsoft, etc, etc. These may be incorporated in a nation de jure but de facto their incorporation is global.

A few weeks ago the bombs in Mumbai made clear that the local social infrastructure of an outsourced supplier in India can be as crucial to a US or British corporation’s continuity as is its local infrastructure in Manhattan or the City. The UK air security clampdown occurred at a key hub in the global communications infrastructure.

In such a context corporate responsibility for the security interests of shareholders, customers, staff and suppliers must surely be seen as global not national. On this view corporations need to find ways to act mutually to protect their security. States by definition while corporate are local actors. Clearly international co-operation has a huge role to play in our security. However global society is a corporate creation. Corporate responsibility in such a society surely dictates a need for the social engagement of corporations with each other across industries and the planet.

Wellbeing in WuHU

Cancer, Oncology Cure and Recuperation

I was recently in Wuhu on the Yangtse River in Anhui Province in China中国 as a guest of Dr Hu. Dr Hu is a traditional Chinese physician of some considerable current reputation. He has had significant success in improving the wellbeing of patients recovering from the ravages of the successful but aggressive approach of Western medicine to cancer treatment. I was in WuHu to mark the opening of his new clinic for the post operative care of oncology patients. This clinic seeks to look systemically at the post operative support peoples bodies need to get back into the healthy balance their body needs if they are to sustain the benefits the remission of their cancer proffers

Dr Hu’s grandfather had been a court physician to the Chinese Emperor and Dr Hu is sought out today by people from all over China to assist them in recovering from the ravages of moern Western cancer treatment. His daughter was my student at ANU. She herself is a successful Chinese physician in Sydney. She has been and is passionate about setting and developing high standards for the practice of Chinese Medicine Chinese medicine in Australia and the West.

Through her and because of my general interest in human wellbeing I have become more and more interested in the relationships that seem to exist between physical, intellectual and spiritual wellbeing.

The Chinese approach to health seems to me to be entirely sensible. It is to maintain people in a healthy way of being. This approach is increasingly seen as of interest in the West although healing the sick is still the dominant medical philosophy not the Chinese one of healthy being. The Chinese approach seeks to sustain the continuing health of a specific person in a specific environment. It is of keeping a person well in their real world not curing their illness when they get it.

The approach is systemic. It is always designed for a specific individual in a specific context. It is this systemic vision I love. I see it is indicative of what we need in an age when the wellbeing of our planet is evidently increasingly dependent on our collective attitudes and actions as human beings. For our planet to be healthy and to continue to nurture us we as individuals and collectivities need to work at our own total wellbeing, physical, intellectual and spiritual. Attempts to cure what has become bad are often too much too late for many cancer patients. Dr Hu’s systemic approach to post operative recovery it seems is the beginnings of a start to a better way as is the nutritional and life style approach increasingly being adopted by some in the West

Getting Enjoying and Maintaining (GEM) is what I find myself increasingly advocating and the Hu’s father and daughter offer no less backed up by a long family tradition, professionally honed skills and a balanced approach to the most effective interface they can effect with the kill or cure approach taken by some modern Western curative medicine especially in the treatment of cancer.

Welcoming WuHu: Anhui Province安徽, China中国

Welcoming WuHu

WuHu has given its energy, endeavour and enterprise to China中国 for centuries. In ancient China it was a major distributional centre for foodstuff, particularly rice and tea. In pre modern China its role became international. From all this it has attracted appropriate abundance.

Coming down the Yangtse River it has the first port for seagoing vessels. This port provides direct access from China’s heartland to the world. Wuhu is also a key hub on the Chinese road and rail network. It has excellent links to the North to Heifei, Jihan and Beijing, East to Nanjing and Shanghai South to Fouzhou, Guangzhou and Hong Kong and West to Wuhan, Chongging and Chengdu,

Wu Hu is one of those comfortable quietly powerful, cities that unnoticed power the economic development of great nations. Like Montreal, Detroit, Cologne and Manchester it provides water access from an interior heartland to the sea and so global trade.

This city hums like the turbine hall in a modern power station. Each dynamo sits on solid foundations in perfect balance with itself. Each works quietly but hard to produce with little fuss of bother. Almost, but not quite, silent, each of Wuhu’s industrial turbines, in cars, building materials and air conditioning works quietly, and reliably to take goods, people and ideas forward for 21st Century China.

Wu Hu is pretty but not picturesque, clean but not pristine and hard working but not frantic. In these things it should be contrasted with the two larger cities downstream of it on the Yangtse, Nanjing and Shanghai. Nanjing as a former capital of China is picturesque and authoritative. Shanghai asserts itself with frantic commerce sustaining a pedigree for commercial leadership on China’s Pacific shore. These three Yangtse cities are in the vanguard of the New China’s industrial development.
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Wu Hu’s is less evidently distinct than the others. It has a lower political and commercial profiles but it is more central. It has been commercially embedded for centuries in the interior network of agrarian trade that made China, till the 18th Century, the richest country on the planet. For this reason in the late 19th Century it, like Shanghai and Nanjing became a Treaty Port where foreigners were allowed to trade. This gave it international credentials recognised again today by the Chinese government helping it set up the Wuhu Economic and Technological Development Area (WEDA) .This special status give Wu Hu significant advantages when setting out to attract inward investment.

As a port directly accessible by sea going vessels Wu Hu can bring imported materials to the city without transhipment and export its products directly.

Its commercial past, present and certainty of a great future is reflected in the city’s present. Firstly it still has a number of impressive late 19th Century European style buildings: its impressive Catholic Church, the Garden Hotel once Wu Hu’s first departmental store and the building housing the F. Y. Old Tree Cafe.

These turn of the 20th Century buildings border the lake that is the focus of Jui Zi Garden Park. This is the centre piece of the city. It is separated from downtown and the local university college by a lovely long confidently curved, covered, colonnade leading into an attractive paved marble Plaza. This is dominated by a baroque bronze column festooned with statues of the Jui Zi bird. These mythical birds are symbolic of fruitful endeavour and resilience. Here they stand assertively on a large globe the topmost lifting an other globe up into the unknown but hopeful future. This Chinese Phoenix is entirely symbolic of this city’s passion for rebirth over the centuries based on past substance, demonstrable current successes and belief in its role in its country’s future.

Leading of from this Plaza and the Lake is a modern pedestrian shopping precinct similar to that in modern Central Vienna. This is a wide comfortable curved area flanked by shops, restaurants and cafes catering to the widest of modern Chinese taste rooted as it is in the exuberant flamboyance of a generation who unlike their parents and grandparents have experienced nothing but rapid improvement.

This modernity is reflected in the industrial development estates that are dotted around the city. These are not the dark satanic mills that heralded England’s short sojourn as the “First Industrial Nation” but pristine shiningly clean well organised modern plants with the latest in technology.

The three principle industries here are all at the leading edge of the current boom: Automobiles, Chery; building materials and fitments, Conch; air conditioning, Media and Hitachi. Associated with these are supporting suppliers of substance: Siemens, automotive parts; AMICI automotive components; Conch, cement.

Chery has a big strategic vision. In the domestic market it already competes well on price with VW, Toyota, Hyundai and GM. Its plans to face off to Lexus, Mercedes and BMW on quality. If it succeeds in this it will be the first home grown Chinese car company to hit the high spots of the global automobile industry. Its assault on the US market is to be led by that indominitable and influential American automobile salesman Malcom Brickland. His company, Visionary Vehicles, plan to use low prices underwritten by unsurpassable quality per dollar to take the US market by storm in 2007..

Conch is a traditional and a post modern supplier to the booming Chinese building industry. It manufactures cement and polyurethane products, conduits, double glazed windows, door panels etc. Its ultra modern factory has few workers and expensive state of the art German machinery. It is clear that in an open Chinese market opens its wage advantage will be limited and so it has and is competing directly n quality.

Media is the Chinese air conditioner supplier. There is no doubt it has a fine well designed product but only time can tell if it will be a successful one. The Japanese have set standards of reliability for air conditioners that is hard to beat. Year in year out reliability of the kind they demonstrably offer takes years to establish. Serviceability with little maintenance or repair are the watchwords here.

The Hotels dotted around the city are all clean comfortable. They are all welcoming and inviting but for those who wish to escape from the city in the city the Tie Shan has no competitors. It is in a delightful setting that puts it in the country not 300 metres from the city centre’s bustle. It is set in its own gated secure grounds adjacent to Cuiming Park. This tree covered park rises attractively up from it and the city skyline. The hotel is scattered comfortably around a small secluded lily padded lake surrounded by mature lush bamboo. It is a delight. It is not plush and ultra modern but it is clean, comfortable and charming with everything one needs including free broadband internet, a pool, sauna and gym.

If one were to seek reason to complain as a foreigner one would note that the only television stations available are CCTV and local Chinese ones, no CNN, BBC, CBC, Fox, RAI, RFF, DTV or SKY.

The CCTV’s English language broadcasts remind one of the BBC fifty years ago with its stilted over respectful interviews and constrained, accurate factual unemotional view of news. Even the excitement, and Chinese pride, in the opening of the Tibet high plateau railroad to Lhasa came over as contrived conviviality not politely constrained passionate national pride.

However, one is thankful for small mercies, one is spared the stifling US centric television of the New World. Even on CCTV4 in Chinese the News comes across with a global outlook not just a Chinese one. The rest of the world is evident. US television contrives that the planet outside the USA, with no US lives at risk, does not exist. Chinese television has far more global consciousness.

However the broad minded editorial policy of CCTV does not necessarily reflect Chinese society’s knowledge of the needs of Westerners. I found it difficult to find what I would consider a bar. It was even harder to buy a gin and tonic. This is a small thing. However it is symptomatic of something of wider significance for those wishing to facilitate Chinese contact with the rest of the world.

Wuhu, Anhui and China wish to attract and impress million of visitors over the next few years to the Olympic Games and The Shanghai Expo. This is without considering the real investors in automotive and other services Wuhu itself seeks to attract. Such investors want to send their personnel to communities in which they and their family’s can feel at home. From a Western perspective Wuhu lacks an approach to service such people will seek to find.

Open public social congress by choice is the meat and drink of Western society and business. Westerners like a choice between being ostentatiously seen and seeing and discretion and intimacy. Wu Hu is a delight for intimacy. It is replete with restaurants, cafes and bars full of extremely comfortable alcoves and private dining areas all serving the exquisitely fresh delicious Chinese food the city’s rural hinterland makes available. My hospitable hosts entertained me beautifully in a number of such places. They allow one to indulge in the intimacy with business associates, colleagues, lovers and friends that Westerners normally choose to enjoy privately in their homes or a “pied a terre”.

In private I particularly enjoyed the French restoration charm created in the Y.F. Old Tree Café. It overlooks the city lake in one of the turn of the 19th century buildings described earlier. Its dim lighting, really comfortable sofas, pleasant service and the quite tinkle of the discretely screened off piano all added to an atmosphere in which one would want to entertain a lover.

However virtually nowhere in Wuhu seemed to exist where one could take ones new trophy wife or girlfriend for display or sit down at a bar and engage in the impromptu “badinage” with strangers Westerners like. I thought I had found this in the Royal Crown Café next to the central hospital but found that what I thought were bar stools were not. They were an expensive decoration along the front of the main bar. They were not for sitting on at the bar.

Not to be able to sit at, or in, a comfortable bar, was a major disappointment to me. It is a facility sought and looked for by Western visitors. Those parts of the opening up to Western business have found such places essential. They provide an ambience Westerners feel comfortable with.

Places for public congress do exist in Wuhu. As in French, Italian and Spanish cities on find them in public parks, squares and promenades. There the old, young and unemployed stroll or sit engaged in love, play or conversation. It was a delight in Wu Hu to see them do precisely this in the public parks. However France, Italy and Spain are also replete with bars and cafes providing this commercially. Until I came to China, even in ethno-phobic Japan, I never failed to find commercial ventures supportive of convivial congress.

In Wu Hu the only place close to this bill of fare was the International Student’s Centre. This easily served me a gin and tonic and made social congress easy with stools along a bar at which if one chose one could strike up acquaintance. This I did. With my promptly served gin tonic and ice, but no slice, in seconds I struck up a casual acquaintance with a Vietnamese, Phillipino and German.

It is not that the Chinese are not outgoing and friendly because they are. Smiles interest and engagement are all around one. Contact is easier than any where else on Earth but a social milieu, café or bar allowing one choice in engagement with strangers is simply not there in the manner most Westerners expect.

Westerners need an environment where they feel they feel they engage with others or not. In Wuhu finding this was close to impossible. Even in Beijing it is not easy in non-Western Hotels. For example I did not find it in my comfortable well run Chinese hotel in Beijing, the Continental Grand at the International Conference Centre. I did find it at the US run Crowne Plaza next door.

However on all occasions when an opportunity arose contact with Chinese people easy but often unsought. If anything Chinese social behaviour might be seen as intrusive by Westerners. Questions and attention are directed at one in a outgoing direct manner. To a Scot this is oft ways the norm. So I find this endearingly familiar and not difficult to respond to. However I am certain many Americans and English people would see it as rude and difficult to deal with.

They are wrong to find it so in my opinion but they do. Illustrative of the joy one can find in Chinese intimacy and interest were seen in two delightful excursions I made from Wu Hu. Both are amazingly easy to embark using public transport. My first excursion, given the city’s central situation in China’s agrarian heartland, was to the agricultural community at Jinghu Lake. My second was to the beautiful Huanchong mountain range some 100 kilometres South of Wu Hu.

On the first I spent a delightful morning exploring traditional Chinese agriculture at Jinghu Lake followed by a lovely Chinese meal with local officials. This lake is about 30 kilometres out of Wuhu. Its system of canals, locks and levies are reminiscent of the polder in Holland but were constructed a thousand years ago, not a few hundred, to cultivate among other things, lotus flowers. I ate the sweetly delightful lotus seeds, marvelled and the botanical complexity of the plants and saw the operation of farming them and Chinese style agriculture in general. I was ably guided in this by the colourful leader of the local tourist operation Mr Da. He himself is a farmer and lotus plant horticulturalist and breeder.

On my other excursion I unfortunately did not have enough time to explore the full beauty of the Huanchong range so my attention was focused on a two day trip to Jiuhua Shan. This is one of China’s four centres of mountain based Buddhist contemplation prayer and spiritual rebirth. They are a top mountains as only there is their nothing above one but the sky ad heavens and everything locally on the planet is spread out beneath and around the full 360 degrees of the compass, WOW! what a feeling of uplift this engenders. One can understand why many great Buddhists found there way to such places. Jiuhua and particularly the Monastry atop Heng Feng were palpably spiritual places..

We stayed overnight in a delightful, beautifully clean, bed and breakfast adjacent to the Phoenix Pine, a pine tree shaped like a bird. The food the landlady served was delicious especially the burn trout. I had not tasted such since as a boy I “guddled” for brown burn trout by hand when I was eight years old in the Scottish Highlands. The trout we get in the UK nowadays is nearly all rainbow trout and farmed at that. These Chinese mountain trout were delectable.

In walking around the mountain village on my own in the evening and very early the next morning I had easy enjoyable but uninvited congress with the locals. They invariably accosted me in whatever English they had access to.

On my morning walk I had a prolonged conversation with two shy but engaging teenage girls. They were avidly reading English out loud as I approached. They clearly wished to talk. They wanted a chance to speak with a native English speaker. From this encounter arises a good tip for the foreign visitor to China. If you get stuck for communication ask a teenager.

All modern Chinese school kids are taught compulsory English from kindergarten on. Teenagers are still learning and being tested so are keen to practice their English skills. If you ask them you will have access to all the help you need. The Chinese, unlike the Japanese, are unabashed, in fact keen, in making contact.

Previous to this I had another communication experience worth relating. My landlady’s husband had a computer wirelessly connected to broadband internet via his mobile phone. Our B&B was in a canyon 1/3 of the way up a mountain in the wilds of China yet there were mobile phones and computers everywhere. I never found a mobile phone deadspot anywhere in China. This is in sharp contrast to my experiences in the UK, Australia, the Canadian West and the USA

I therefore quickly found myself accessing my emails. I was almost immediately surrounded by almost everyone in the locale. They looked unabashed over my shoulder at what I was doing. In the end I gave in to their curiosity, and logged into my own website to their delight with its picture of me and wonderful views from space of the Planet and China and the Silk Road in particular.

They clearly wanted to know everything there was to know about my business. As an unabashed self publicist I had no hesitation in satisfying their interest some Westerner’s I know would have found their intrusiveness difficult to deal with.

But so what for me my whole trip was crowned by our party’s intrusion into someone else’s life. A meeting was set up for me with Mr Chau a respected historian. At 70 he has forsaken the comfort of the city for a peasants life as a tea grower in the foothills of the mountains at Jiahua.

He still writes. Over two delectable country meals he shared with us his glowing personality and views on the world the universe and everything. This was to our common and mutual delight. His latest book, translates as “The Child Hood We (Humanity) Have Forgotten”. It is based, as much traditional Chinese scholarship is, on the analysis of ancient texts in this case the “I Ching”. This of course has origins going back to the dawn of Chinese civilisation and is not attributable. It has never not been of record and can be attributed to no single individual. Its origins like all creative knowledge is communal with no copyright dues to pay.

His textual analysis suggests that the distinctions we modern humans choose to make between male and female, individual and communal and ourselves and our environment were invisible to the mind of the ancients. In his opinion technology only appears to have changed this and other features of our lives. Fundamentally nothing has changed. This being so he then argues that all humanity needs to survive effectively is to remember the childhood we have chosen to forget.

I am sure the Buddhist monks who created the communities he lives close to further into the mountains would not disagree as I myself do not. I was greatly moved by his personality, togetherness and confident unassuming satisfaction with his chosen lot. He exuded the quite industrious endeavour that I found epitomised my experience of Wu Hu, its people and commerce.

In this Wu Hu reflects China’s past, and certain future as a powerful state. If his sentiments underpin Wu Hu’s and China’s endeavours, and the rhetoric of the modern Chinese leadership says it does, then there is real hope for a peaceful and effective future for our global community of people, enterprises and states.

In this light one must see the roar of J11 fighters over Wu Hu from the local PLA airbase as like the stone lions outside a Buddhist Temple and the fierce sculpted warriors inside as indicative symbols of peace hard sought. Such symbols like the martial skills of Shaolin monks are their so they need never be used. This reflects the Scottish Presbyterian view that you should walk with bible in hand but carry a big stick

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Journeys

Recently my journeys intertwined. There was joy, pain and hope in this confluence of my physical, intellectual and spiritual being with that of others.

I moved from Canberra, through China to the US then the UK for my daughter Heather’s graduation and then onto to Scotland to my perception of my sanguine soul’s perceived source. In this journey I moved through Chinese, US, European and Multicultural ways of analyzing, feeling, thinking and choosing. I moved from ancient eternal ways to constructed felt ways of being.

Our journeys matter. The relationship between them is often obscurely buried in our subconscious. Even if we think not, they may still be obscured. However, Lao Tzu has given us confidence, born out by experience, that on “The Way” thesis and anti-thesis are a whole born of human and universal at-one-ment, not conflict.

On my journey this seemed challenged.

My journey paralleled that of fellow Europeans, Americans, Jews and Muslims into or out of the current bloodiness of the Middle East in Iraq and Lebanon. There “The People of the Book” whom the Prophet, and God in the Koran, set out to unite under God’s merciful ordinance slay each other every day in a manner inconsistent with their stated shared beliefs in the same God. In their shared vision of God: Muslims should not seek conflict, Jews should not judge when judgement is the Lords and Christians should always forgive. Yet each sees the other seeking conflict, judges the other wrong and shows little capacity for forgiveness. Where is their room in this for their shared vision of God?

In the more ancient tradition of the East, China’s new, legitimate and awe inspiring industrial aspirations must impact heavily on us all. Particularly in this New Age I noted China’s vision of security seems to encompass not only its geopolitical integrity but its wish for a distinct integrity in cyberspace. This blog is unavailable in China. China it seems now leads in marking out political boundaries in cyberspace. This despite the fact that the latter has emerged as an evolved potentially bountiful new truly free range. Through its emergence we are on the verge of finally replacing the free range we abandoned in the Garden of Eden. To do so we require to pay attention to what my new friend, Mr Chou, from Juihua Shan in Anhui, calls, “Valuable Lessons for the Present We (Humanity) Have Forgotten from our Childhood”. We forgot these to farm within defended, eventually national, borders. In the now ending industrial age the latter did evolve to become permeable. First through the hegemony of a few Western nations then as a result of the gains evident to all in industrialisation underwritten by the scale and scope made possible by truly free trade.

In the US I attended the International Society for the Systems Sciences Annual Conference in Sonoma there some feared, as does Lovelock in the "Revenge of Gaia", that the consequence of current human activity and change would either be our planets rejection of us as foreign bodies or its own death. To me this is strange human egocentricity. Evolution has taken 4.5billion years to get Gaia here. Seen as special and distinct from that we may indeed be destructive. But as a small integral part of the universe’s investment in Gaia it is surely a more tenable hypothesis that we are part of Gaia’s constructive means of becoming. With the evolutionary evidence to date I would like to ask if it is likely that we will be eliminated or Gaia die. We can be seen easily as part of Gaia’s nervous system. Through our Internet intra-connectivity we maybe evolving into a key component of an embryonic brain for Gaia. Finally we seem to be the planet’s only currently evident hope for procreation (through our demonstrated wish and capacity to spawn out into the universe). What evolving creature excises its nervous system, eliminates its brain or gives up its potential for procreation. Clearly pathologies exist where this occurs but in general any of these is inconsistent with the broad thrust of observed evolution.

On arrival in the UK I found my loved ones had serious misgivings about my own and others way of wishing to be. Their perceptions, of the above events and our mutually constructed visions of our own present, as a result of past journeys together were painful.

The harmful consequences of our tendency to see ourselves as distinct vulnerable beings only capable of hearing, seeing feeling and sensing each other indirectly with our minds was evident and I fear mutually painful.. The dire consequences of our need for our own strong identity and from that our willingness to judge others quickly without immediate room for forgiveness seems to lead to the attacks we feel are necessary to defend our identities and their views of their own integrity.

However on arrival at Heathrow I met a cherished Internet friend whose journey had taken her coincidentally to Colombia, the Sierra Nevada and the Kogi Indians. She discovered them and their views in her own journey to seek meaning from the childhood destruction of her being. The Kogi feel their duty is to protect the planet from the rest of us. They believe they can. She carried into her journey with them a great unresolved hurt that requires unforthcoming and unlikely atonement within her own and familial being. How can the Kogi succeed if we cannot find the means to produce healing closure from those near and dear to us?

What end can there be to our journeys? Acceptance of our at-one-ment as manifest in the Gaia hypothesis is perhaps a start? In knowing that, and that we may only see through the glass darkly, we would seem well advised to hold back in our judgement of what others are doing, forgive the hurt we feel we know others intend and in doing so avoid conflicts that may stem from our perception not reality. Such cannot be resolved by attacking a perceived source we cannot control.

Following this path does not absolve any of us from accountable responsibility for our actions as they effect others. However empowered thus we can find what we need to heal ourselves without demanding anything from others. In achieving this we can become fit and well to assist the Kogi in enabling our planet become. This will hopefully be into the emergent Serene Dawn of a New Golden Age of sustainable planetary and human wellbeing.

Islam and the Global Brain

We have described a role for the West and North East Asia in the planet’s brain but there is no place for the 1.5billion people in Islam. Islam or the 1billion who live in and about the Chinese. Indian sub-continent nor those in Africa. Africa, South America and the Pacific. Our work has to encompass these if what is developing is to be seen as truly global.

In ancient times Islam provided the data bus needed to connect the principle parts of the medieval planetary mind. It contributed by translating each major part of the evolving planetary mind to the other and in the process, up to the 15th Century, added hugely to human understanding of art, science and commerce.

The Indian sub-continent is the home to the greatest number of Muslims on the planet and in addition is the origin of three of the world great religious perspectives, Hinduism, B, and Sihkism. India thus has the potential to make a huge contribution to the soul of the planet. However more evidently, having been ruled by the English for three centuries, it has become imbued by English culture to the extent that its higher education system uses English as a language more effectively than other part of the planet. Now that English is the language of international commerce and business India now has a significant advantage as a place for doing any business that requires communication and analysis based on the use of the English language.

For a global brain to be in a way meaningful to our current purpose we need a truly dynamic process. As the need arises new thoughts have to be created on a planet wide basis to be let go or intensified as they prove useful or not. It is this on a global scale the Internet and modern Information and Communication Technology (ICT) makes possible.

The educated skills of India together with their development using what is now th universal language of business English give India a huge advantages in the modern world. Arguably at one time Islam had a similar advantage with its shared understanding of Arabic.

If those within the Umah could revert to the attitudes with which Islam was imbued up to the closing of the Gates of Ishtehad Islam could have considerable influence in the modern world. It then evolved massive insight into how best to interrelate the stable communal cultures of Asia with the more chaotic free enterprise of the West.. In doing this it made a huge constructive contribution to the global development of the arts, scholarship and science.

As of now it is difficult to see the global contribution that will be made by the Spanish and Portuguese speakers. In the past they yielded huge wealth up to Spain and Portugal. There is no doubt whatsoever that due to current rates of Spanish speaking immigration into North America they are to have a huge impact on the future of what is now the richest country on the planet the US. This migration is perhaps the means by which the Spanish speaking world will become truly integral to Gaia’s brain.

The Main Structures in Planetary Thought

With these expectations in mind it is relatively easy to identify the distinct parts of Gaia’s emergent brain. The most ancient continuing system of organised coherent thoughts are those of the Han Chinese. These are deeply rooted.

These thoughts are reflected in both major philosophies of the region Taoism and Confucianism. It is strongly conservative and communal. It accepts that the “Way” (Tao) of the universe simply is. It understands that stability comes from the acceptance of this, the suppression of self-interest and the acting out of ones duty, to siblings, parents, family, community and state.

In the West a more chaotic form has evolved. Its origins are equally ancient but not so coherent in form but equally so in process. They come from the free thinking analytically rationality that epitomised ancient Greece. These thoughts are fragmented and incoherent in the sense that they are not based on a persistent vision of proper form but a continuing dialogue between thesis and antithesis from which emerges a view dominant for a time but never forming a final truth.

In the Western system such diverse thoughts are maintained by groups which are often international and intercultural. The most ancient holder of these still evident being the Catholic Church. Of course in modern times maintained alongside its worldview are those of the protestant reformation.

There are also great commercial enterprises that span the planet or parts of it and sustain a system of thought, culture, pertinent to their purpose, Unilever or Shell.. More recently there has arisen a number of viable organisations with moralistic purposes such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace, the World Wild Life Fund.

These respectively project a view of proper human behaviour, the acceptability of an imprisonment and the treatment of prisoners, the care of the environment and the protection of species. Such organisations could be viewed as the developing embryonic conscience for the planet.

Nation states in the interests of their citizens, or their own power, project a particular worldview and win others over to it by propaganda, diplomatic missions etc. Free Trade is one such idea. This has been heavily advocated by such means and led to states acting together to set up the World Trade Organisation to advocate and effect it.

All the above can be seen as thought patterns in the evolving mind of the planet. To qualify they just have to interconnect human beings together to a common purpose and generate the resources to support them in pursuing it. However disparate fragments of thought do not constitute a brain.

Swing Dancing and Global Connection: Dance Movement and Life Long Learning

I have written before about the power and significance of dance.

Last weekend I went to the Merimbula Jazz Festival

http://merimbulajazz.asitis.net.au/

Merimbula is a pretty town on the South Coast of New South Wales, Australia. I had a ball.

Half the music I heard and danced to was Traditional Jazz the balance was Swing. The attendees were mainly in their late 60s or early 70s. They belonged to the generation that led the Traditional Jazz Revival. They were in their late teens after Rock and Roll and before the Rhythm and Blues of the Beatles and Stones.

Few in that generation of Australian’s dance to that music as many do in the UK using Skip Jive or Collegiate Shag in the USA. Virtually none dance in the styles appropriate to Swing, i. e. Jitterbug, Lindy Hop, West Coast Swing and Balboa. Nevertheless I managed to dance to my heart’s content from 11am till midnight five days in a row.

There were about half a dozen swing dancers at the festival. This was a pity given the volume and quality of the Swing music at the 5 available dance venues.

Swing was made new and big in the 30s and 40s by my father’s generation who are now in their 90s. Chick Webb, Benny Goodman, Glenn Millar, Artie Shaw, the Dorsey Brothers, etc played the music service men danced to in the last war. My dad a merchant seaman on the North Atlantic delighted in visiting New York and dancing to their music in the midst of war.

Some of this generation are still dancing. Frankie Manning now 91 was teaching in Sydney this year. Frankie first danced in the 20s in the Alhambra then the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem New York. Frankie with his partner Freda Washington are credited with the first air-step that forms the basis of modern jump jive.

Swing dancing is in the midst of a global revival. In Melbourne the average age is probably about 25. In the USA and the UK they tend to be a little older but not in Europe, Japan, China and Korea where they are nearly all very young.

This Swing dancing revival is truly Global. Dax one of the best US dancers lives and works in Osake, Japan’s great jazz city. Two great British dancers, Ryan Francois and his partner Jenny Thomas live dance and teach in the USA.

This represents a huge "meme" that stretches across the planet especially among the young. This generates connectivity and communication between humanity and the universe it occupies. This occurs at the deep subconscious level. This is not driven by the electromagentic forces that drive the sights, sounds, smells tastes and touch we more consciously respond to. Instead it is driven by the other major force in the universe of which we have awareness gravity.

75% of our brain’s activity is occupied with handling the balance and movement we need to survive. In this we are effectively interacting with the mass of our planet through the force of gravity. As children our brain grew fastest when we did this when learning to walk and move. As adults if we want to engage in life long learning new and unusual ways of moving are a most powerful stimulant. Dance can perform this function

When we dance we learn to communicate with each other using the force of gravity, the interaction between masses. This is not least that between our own bodies mass and that of the planet we live on. This is echoed by higher order interactions between the Earth and our Sun and between that and the stars in our Galaxy. It is good for one’s soul to dwell on this thought for through it in a real sense when we dance we truly do “Dance with the Stars”

The Purposes of Brains and Thoughts

Most of the activity our brains engage in modulate processes that enable us to exist and survive i.e. acquiring, transforming and excreting the substances we use to generate the energy that sustains us as living beings. We need to acquire and distribute oxygen around our bodies. The cardiovascular system does this breathing in air, separating out the oxygen that is then passed into the blood and pumped round our bodies by the heart. The brain keeps this process functioning throughout our lives ending by breathing out, carbon dioxide and the unused nitrogen remnant. The carbon dioxide being then inspired by plants and converted into the oxygen we breath to complete the cycle from Gaia’s perspective

Similarly our brain acts out a process that enables us to acquire food. We ingest this and the brain helps the body to automatically convert it into materials that we can use together with oxygen to create the energy needed for muscle to function. The unused ingested material is excreted out into the environment where it is re-cycled as water and nitrogenous material to be used as food for plants.

Without the cardiovascular and digestive systems we could not survive at all. Much of our spinal cord and lower brain is engaged in supporting the processes required to keep these in being and co-ordinated. However humans have additional capacities. We have the ability to move in co-ordination with others to acquire the food needed to survive and without the speech memory and planning we use to be very effective at this we would not be human.

Different parts of our brain have distinct roles in each of these activities. They represent successive needs in the evolution of living beings and to an extent exist in all animals. In reptiles the last two are little developed while in mammals one finds the sensing and co-ordination function developed though not necessarily the planning and thinking parts. The latter are only really well developed in man though apes and some whales have similar large areas of brain.

Our brain with that of other living things has evolved over eons and as evolution adapts to what exists the old is not destroyed or replaced but accommodated. In consequence the human nervous system has features shared with the nervous systems of all other animals. One might then expect the planet’s brain to evolve similarly with ancient parts driving basic functions, eating procreating, moving; later parts evolved to improve sensing and co-ordination; modern parts evolved to think and plan.

Interview with Brian Hilton on the book he co-authored: "The Global Silk Road"

Interview
Dr Brian Hilton
The Global Silk Road:
Globalisation, Islam and the Creation and Distribution of Knowledge Using the INTERNET.

Interviewer: So what would you say your book is about

Brian: You could say our future but as I do not know that I write about the processes leading to it. This shift in perspective is vital. It empowers one to see, our thoughts and the world they create, in what, I believe, is their true intended light.

Interviewer: But surely your book deals with the impact of the Internet on the relationship between the East and the West. You even suggest Islam is a model reflecting how this can be effected.

Brian: Yes. I cover that. However this is only a current manifestation of the process I truly wish to draw attention to, “evolution” or more correctly “social evolution”, seen as an adaptive process. The East West Global Connection is not new. It is perennial. What is new is the means we have now to effect it.

The INTERNET only makes the process more evident. It does not create it. Globalization or adventurously “Universalization” just is. It is so. It is the truth. One can choose to see that or not. That is our right.

Those that choose to see, for example Lao Tzu 2500 years ago in the Tao Te Ching, provide us with means to see the significance of “The Way” for action. We all see what is sculpted. Some of us see the sculpting. We never see the sculptor. Lao Tzu called it “The Way”, Christ called it “The Way the Truth and the Light”, Mohammed, Buddha et al deal with such realities. We do not.

Instead we take the sculpted form such teachers start from and see that as indicative of the end we believe they wish for us. This is never on “The Way”. We should treat them, and what we see of their revelation, as temporary manifestation of the truth of the process. We never do yet it is only this that never changes. What it manifests always changes. This is what is constant. The form it creates is not. This is true also of the philosophies trying to help us see, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc. These provide pointers to The Way. They are signposts to and on “The Way” but not “The Way”. Fundamentalism thus denies the Universe and so God. Fundamentalism is the ultimate apostasy.

Interviewer: That is strong stuff. Why does the book dwell on business, or should I say enterprise, and networking?

Brian: As I said none of this is new . The only new thing is the speed and pace at which it occurs. This is significant. However “New Age People” and religious philosophers and environmentalists go on as to what we have to, should or ought to, do to save ourselves and our planet. This I believe is presumptive of the universe’s, or if you like God’s, purpose. We can only choose how to respond.

This is enterprise. This is not driven by imperatives, only interests, individual and collective. What currently motivates us determines the end never our perception of the end itself. Our purpose is to adapt to what the universe presented us with. This determines the future not ideals. The enterprising see this others do not.

The patterns of thought on the INTERNET that are significant are those that others support. These unsurprisingly are relationships, collective and personal, pleasure, survival, sex and the technology of the systems itself.

I checked before we started and the things that mattered to people on this planet with access to the Internet as tracked by “Technorati” in the hour we speak are:

Bush China ChristianityEducationFeedpath Firefox Haditha Dan Brown Da Vinci Codes Movies Religion Robert Langdon Tom Hanks Iran Iraq Microsoft MP3 Sex Soccer Web2 Wordpress World Cup Youtube………………………………………….


It is this that fascinates me. It is this we need to pay attention to if we wish to understand ourselves and our futures if we have one. The connections between blogsites and so people these tags represent are like patterns of connectivity in a huge brain that spans the planet

Interviewer: And that is all

Brian: Yes, if our interest is our common future, and that is never determined by what clever people feel we ought to bother about but what people actually choose to bother about that is what really matters. The former may influence the latter but not with any certainty.

This book is about what effects our collective thinking and so planetary consciousness. It is this that determines our future and if you look at the above it is our collective, spiritual reproductive, and recuperative interests that drive collective consciousness. This to me seems neither good or bad. It merely reflects what we are which is what the universe not other human beings expect. One religion is mentioned here but at an other hour it could be Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism and if I had searched in Arabic, Hindi or Chinese then it would probably have been one of these others.

Our books point is that we should focus on the processes driving our connectivity to understand what will occur not the specific subject matter at any point. Connectivity is good as is diversity reproduction and joy and if these exist the universe is happy with us so why would we want anything else?

{Permission is given for this interview to be used as anyone taking it wishes}

June is Here: Haditha May Have Gone as an Issue?

Fear and behaviour in combat is I am sure a strange thing.

I am 60. I have never been in real combat. I have been fired upon accidentally while working as a teacher in Sierra Leone. This was by spent bullets fired randomly in the air dring a riot not shots aimed deliberatly at me.

I choose to play a computer game called Battlefield II. I do so to learn a little of what all the young men and some young women I see in Internet cafes all around the world are doing and why.

I am banned from two sites for team killing. This was never ever deliberate just that in the simulated fear of close combat and in a firefight I fired too quickly, too often, and killed soldiers on my own side. Such carelessness deserves the punishemnet I received. It has also taught me how easy it is to do the wrong thing in the excitement and simulated fear of the intensity of the moment. I can imagine just a little what it must be like when in addition I would be fearing for my own life and that of my colleagues with no chance of pressing a button to come alive and start in combat again.

Soldiers do the wrong thing in the pressure of a moment but of course that is not really a strange thing and is ot the same as in the aftermath of a fierce firefight deliberately with revenge in your heart coldly and deliberately killing other soldiers never mind civilians in Haditha.

i have just seen a US military spokesman saying there was not truth in the allocation in the sam bulletin where I saw an interview with a US Marin eCorps deserter who said his sergeant had told him that they would cover for him if he accidentally killed a civilian and who had talked toa colleague who had lit a cigarette of the burning body of a an Iragi "combatent?" just killled in a firefight. I do not find it difficult to believe both therwsse stories.

I remember such macabre humour when I worked with mountain rescue teams in my youth. They would stick cigarettes in the mouth of corpses on the mountain ledge with them before starting to carry it down the mountain in the blizzard surrounding us.

To those who have never been faced with the intensity of real fear and the actuality of death in the moment such behaviour is difficult to comprehend but it is simply a way for heavily traumatised individuals to cope with their own fear and sustain a degreee if sanity in what is a horrendous and fearful situation.

It is also comprenhesible that after the immediate fear and trauma has subsided one might entertain thoughts of revenge for what one has been through and what your mates have just died from but such thoughts are not actions nor is it defensible that they become so.

In the midst of a firefight when you or your best buddy could die in the moment acting on such thoughts while wrong is comprehsible and so for me excusable but as deliberate acts after things have calmed down never. They may be thought about but ought never acted upon other than by the crazy and over traumatized who at the very least need hospitalized and maybe be desrving of execution.

However please remeber ones enemy always sees and believes things differently. We all use tales of attrocity as justification for our own attrocity. they never can or should be if we hope in the end to be human.

China the Silk Route and the Internet:The East West Connection

Chapter 2

China 中国 the Silk Route and the Internet

Gaia’s Mind

For a brain to work patterns of thought and memory have to exist. We now examine what some of these look like on the planet without exploring in detail how or why they came into being. Such patterns exist where there is an interconnected group of human beings working to some common view of purpose.

Such interconnectivity has always existed locally: in a family, in a village, in a culture, in a society and in enterprise whither it part of the bureaucracy or commerce. All these work precisely because they form patterns based on shared interest and understanding of how the thoughts and actions of others mesh with those of one’s self. That is how they function. This is why humanity through speech and writing has a mechanism for constructing communal visions of the world unavailable to most other animals.

Of course we share with other animals a huge capacity for non-verbal communication and the significance of that for engagement in some forms of co-ordinated activity should not be forgotten. When an impala or a wildebeest senses danger and starts to run all follow its action.

It is also true that even with the old physical limitation to inter human communication that global thoughts did arise. They formed very slowly and imperfectly over many years if not decades or centuries of time. Their formation was restricted to the speed at which people could walk and the extent to which they could learn and understand another’s language. However, planet wide thinking did occur. Most importantly it occurred along the great data bus of medieval times the Silk Road that connected China to the West.

Over this route merchants moved goods, silk, tea, spices, gold, silver etc to be used in exchange motivated by the surplus that could be raised sufficient to justify the merchants efforts in effecting the connection. As a bi-product of this trade information, knowledge and know how would permeate from East to West slowly and imperfectly. The knowledge of how to make gunpowder passed this way.

Most of the activity our brains engage in modulate processes that enable us to exist and survive i.e. acquiring, transforming and excreting the substances we use to generate the energy that sustains us as living beings. We need to acquire and distribute oxygen around our bodies. The cardiovascular system does this breathing in air, separating out the oxygen that is then passed into the blood and pumped round our bodies by the heart. The brain keeps this process functioning throughout our lives ending by breathing out, carbon dioxide and the unused nitrogen remnant. The carbon dioxide being then inspired by plants and converted into the oxygen we breath to complete the cycle from Gaia’s perspective

Similarly our brain acts out a process that enables us to acquire food. We ingest this and the
brain helps the body to automatically convert it into materials that we can use together with
oxygen to create the energy needed for muscle to function. The unused ingested material is
excreted out into the environment where it is re-cycled as water and nitrogenous material to be
used as food for plants.

China on the Way?: 中国 路

中国 路

The current modern age pulsates with potential and buzzes with excitement. The engine driving this is China 中国 . In a very short space of time China consciousness has exploded onto the world stage. To me this seems to have occured in the last two years. In that period I have chosen to live in Australia. Here the North East Asian influence is palpable.

Of course this is nonesense. In global terms China has never been unimportant. It was easily the largest economy in the world well into the 19th Century. It was only temporarily displaced by the UK in the 19th and the US in the 20th centuries.

Such a country, powerful for over two millenium, understandably grew complacent in its political economic self perception. It had a uniquely effective source of power in its soil and its means to exploit it. China was beautifully crafted philisophically and adminstratively to be dominant in the agricultural age.

Such a well adapterd agricultural country and regime clearly had severe adjustment difficulty when the source of wealth and power shifted to that derivable from science and entrepreneurial enterprise, the industrial revolution. In consequence, in the modern era, China's comparative wealth and power declined rapidly. China has spent most of the last century adjusting to the political economic reality of modernism. It is no longer wrong footed with that. Its successfully efforts to catch up on modernism are very impressive. They are doing so at the fastest rate of any country in history. This is the engine driving the current global economy.

However the rest of us are already beginning to live in a post-modern age. It is not yet evident that China truly understands this The basis of political economic power is shifting again. this shift is a way from the machine driven industrial base of the moderism on which capitalism was built to the shifting values of the post modern age based on the creation and distribution of knowledge and perception. The Chineses are not alone in such myopia. It also seems to be a disease of the country that came to dominate the modern era, the USA, which do its own disadvantage lloks far too much inwards to its own huge domestic market of 300mill+ and stable and largely ignores the global market place of 6.5million + and growing.

One family in the US has notably avoided this general myopia the Bush family. They were quickly onto the outword looking post modern game. George Bush senior became the US government's first official representative in China. As such he established deep and lasting relationships between his family and the up and coming leadership of erly 21st Century China.

Few other Americans even acknowledge much beyond the existence of a world outside the USA. 9/11 may have changed that perceptualy but paradoxically, apart from the military, even fewer American's now make the connections the Bush family recognised are essential for success in the New Age. Most American's have found that "they" don't like us and avoid travelling to where "they" are, the rest of the planet.

The Bush family is not only well connected in China. They also connect in that other area of the world signicant to the post modern survival of humnaity, the Middle East. Many years ago they connected into Saudi Arabia, not least to the Bin Laden family. This is to be expected of Texas Oilmen. In fact this is far more to be expected than the Chinese connection. This American family have demonstrated the pay-off from such outreach. It is to be hoped that more and more Americans will get the message. Unfortunately at the moment they do not. If they do not they will be left behind like China but for a different reason.

China is myopic abut post modernism because they see wealth in industrial capitialistic terms and post moderism is politically scary anarchy. The US is myopic about the consequences of post moderism for while a lot of americans are engaged with it their engagement is limited to a field of view determined by the geopolitical boundaries of the USA or even of their own state within it. American's are the children of the world but when looking out from their own situation frequently see themselves in a mirror and believe that to be the rest of the planet.

It is sad that global US connectivity is not more widepread. Such connectivity could presage fruitful, happy, significant wider and deeper satisfying and lucrative relationships. If more US players could learn from the Bush family and choose to put down deeper global roots out future world could be better faster. If Americans would participate with the rest of us to establish strong bases of operation in and between the three most significant geographical regions and philsophical forms of our "Post-modern Age" all our lives would be better faster:-

• China and North East Asian communality
,

• US and North Atlantic libertarian individualism


• the Middle East and Islams balanced marriage between communal responsibity and individual rights and freedom before the power of the universe.

It is evident that the Middle East is reaching out to the rest of the planet as the rest of the planet reaches into it. The wealth generated by its mastery of the planets store of energy is being used to establish global connectivity fromthe Gulf to the Resst of the Planet. Those leading in Middle East know that their current basis of wealth is short term. They are acting to be well placed at the maturity of the Post Modern Era.

China is similarly reaching out but seems to do so in what is a largely passe manner. China is becoming ever more effective at identifying and accessing the natural physical resources needed to dominate in a modernising industrial age. In this their current behaviour emulates that of the UK in the 19th and the US and Europe in the 20th Century. The problem for China is that we are at the beginning of the Post Modern Age. How can a communitarian industrial China jump start itself into such and era? Virtual not physical resources now pave the Way 路 to economic and political power and it is important to us all that China becomes fully engaged in sharing that power with the rest of us.

Terrorism and Corporate Social Responsibility

Globalization brings with it new threats to human security.

States were the traditional providers of security. Globalization and the ICT infrastructure supporting it undermines the geo-political boundaries defining a traditional state area of competence. States now outsource much of their own delivery systems and infrastructure to commercial corporations. For commercial reasons these in turn source their own requirements through using a network of commercial organizations that often span the planet.

Threats to this system whither from terrorism or other sources no longer occur at a border set by a state. Even the infrastructure that seems to be within a jurisdiction is interpentrated by reliance on the global commercial network described. Internal ICT infrastructure now tends to be commercially owned. if it is on eoften finds its integrity depends on a global network of corporate commercial interconnectivity.

This raises three issues for present day Corporate Social Responsibility

First to what extent should a global corporate network use its own resources to assist any one state with data and access to the information that state feels it needs to ensure its own and its citizens security?

Second does any one corporation in such a global network of interconnectivity really know for the risks it is exposing its shareholders, employees and customers to when it outsources in such a manner?

Third in the global environment the jurisdiction of states and individuals no longer runs. The actors are all corporate, NGOs, commercial companies and semi-public international bodies and agencies. Is it legitimate for such corporate bodies to accept coporate social resposibility for their mutual security from terrorism etc when the resources they have access to have been provided to pursue partial not global social interests?

These are serious questions which do not seems as yet to be being addressed publicly by global corporations and theri stakeholders.

AT&T has been accused of being a participant with the Bush administration in the currently questioned intrusions into the privacy of US citizens and ofcourse the US Congress has recently inquired into the co-operation of CISCO Systems, Google, Microsoft etc with the security services of the government in China. At current rates of expansion in its ICT infrastructure China will soon be a bigger customer of these corporations than the US. While currently their national and corporate responsibilities may provide clarity as to where their loyalties commercially and nationally should lie. More ambiguity will clearly soon exist in defining the relationship between their corporate responsibility and theircorporate social responsibility

It is now clearly part of a corporations responsibility to manage the risks to which it exposes its various stakeholders but how can that be assessed in the world we describe. A telephone call or internet message will be automatically routed over the self organizing global network of communications in many different ways even perhaps in the course of one dialogue. Whose responsibility is the security of such a connection? If a corporation outsources its customers service calls to an other coporation in an other country how does it know for certain that the information such systems will inevitably generate, as to the quality and costs of their operation, do not leak to a competitor or a cyber terrorist interest in damaging them as a symbol of the state they emananate from?

Should coporate bodies not now be fully recognised as the indepedent intities they no dout are whither their origins are political, commercial or not for profit and act together in corporate society to protect each other from predation. To an extent this is happening but generally this rle is bein abrigated because such security is often seen by senior executives as the responsibility of the states they pay taxes to and not the coporations themselves.

This may be true but the danger does not exist geo-politically but in the global cyber infrastrucure on which they and us increasingly rely. Who polices those commons? Who can police those commons other than new social entities created by the corporate entities of which it is comprised? As yet only limited evidence exists sugesting that corporations see it is legitimate to act together collectively in the manner suggested here and proposed by ourselves in an organisation we as of now have chosen to call S.A.V.E (Security Advance Via Enterprise)

Islam and Our Common Human Future

Islam and Our Common Human Future

I am not a Muslim as normally understood. However my heart was filled with hope when I heard Amr Khaled talk the other day on the BBC World Service.

It was a joy to hear positive, constructive caring thoughts emanating from what many fear is the negative, nihilistic, uncaring parts of the world as created by many declared followers of the man they see as God’s last great prophet. From what we know of Mohammed’s life and work he was a positive, constructive caring human being. He never allowed rules, even his own, to stand in the way of his compassion. His caring sense of the justice he knew God wished for those willing to follow him out of the love warmth and devotion they felt for their caring, compassionate, merciful God was always evident.

Student’s (Taliban) of God and the Prophet may fear him. One should perhaps ask how could they fear such a God? They clearly feel that it is only by their own strict adherence, and their willingness to enforce that on others, to their understanding of God’s law that they can hope through their own lack of compassion to access God's mercy. This is a strange aspiration give the Prophet's and God's own compassion and mercy.

Language, and humanity's capacity to understand it, is always limited. We do not only communicate in words. Our bodies and our unarticulated feelings also speak for us. Thi sis true even when the words we use are those originally spoken by God in Arabic then recorded for us by the Prophet in the Qu'ran. Human beings are demonstrably capable of misinterpreting each other when speaking to their brother or sister how can we expect them to be any better at interpreting God's meaning.

How can any of us have the arrogance to believe that in our ill educated flawed minds ,especially when using Arabic as our second language, we can grasp God’s true intent. We may do so but not through mere consideration of the words and phrases God chose to utter. In them are decriptions of the object of our devotion and a guide to God’s hopes for our action but how can our own or other’s interpretations of these be anything but flawed.

The emotional content of God’s, and his Prophet’s, messages to humanity are clear in the Qu'ran and the Haddith but not just in the words. One can not read these in isolation from their intent. God’s message is surely for each man to help heal the schisms between God’s children. We are expectd to do so by exemplifying for others, in the goodness of one’s own life, the path others they can follow to find the unity God seeks for humanity. The rules God and the Haddith suggest for those who come to accept God’s hope for his people on his Way are merely means by which God’s followers can express for others the closeness they feel to the at-one-ment that is God’s will.

These intents are manifest in rules God suggests would support human at-one-ness: all humanity should pray at the same time in the same direction with the same purpose every day; at least for part of the year, Ramadan, all men should live as the very poorest so we can truly feel this at-one-ness; differences between men and women that engage lust rather than love and mutual care should be de-emphasised, so that men and women meet as human beings not only objects of sexual desire, etc.

The emotional intelligence and spiritual love through which each of us chooses to approach their understanding of God’s will is sureyy far more important than rigid adherence to ones own or any other human beings limited capacity to understand the will of God as expressed in words in an unfamiliar language

God the merciful, compassionate and all powerful surely understands the validity of our emotions and knows the truth of our love for him and others. God does not need recourse to our spoken or thought words nor on our limited capacity to understand what he deems as right or wrong. How therefore can any of us presume to judge anything right or wrong on God’s behalf.

We may collectively feel we need social order. The pursuit of this is however in our selfish human interest in security. This is not necessarily co-incident with God’s will. It is dangerous for anyone to be arrogant enough to presume it so.

Until 1400, and the closing of the Gate’s of Ishtehad, the Ummah of Islam, scattered along the ancient "Silk Route" that linked East to West, contained within its bounds the most tolerant (Islam forbids compunction in belief) haven (highly protective of individual liberty) on the planet for scholars artists and creative thinkers to relax, mature and grow. If these Gate’s could now be re-opened as Amr Kkaled seems to wish, then Islam might find its Way to the "The Global Silk Road" the Internet. The potential of this to unite mankind commercially, creatively and emotionally is considerable and on fullfilment would unite mankind in a manner consistent with God’s intent as expressed in the Qu'ran.

If this is God’s purpose for me, and the Qu'ran and the Prophet say it is, then I to am a Muslim and more and more of us would be willing so to declare themselves so whither they profess as Christians, Jews, Sikh, Hindus, Taoists or agnostics. Could current Islamic Christian or Jewish believers accept this? I fear not.

Immigration and Outsourcing & Neo-Con Mercantilism

Immigration and Outsourcing
North Americans conservatives seem to have lost the plot a little. Neo-conservative "free traders"(?) seem now to advocate mercantilism.

Let us consider their and other's perspectives on illegal immigration, jobs and other factors in apparent conflict with the USA's economic interest. Outside the Garden of Eden or Nirvana such views are to be expected. But are they wise?

Why should American, or for that matter European workers such as the French, fear outsourcing using the Internet or high levels of immigration? In the "Integral Economic Age", at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius knowledge is increasingly the main source of value and values not physical assets. Immigration or outsourcing as threats are simply not an issue in this era.

Economics as the science of ultimate scarcity has now ceased to exist. If the primary resource is now knowledge this, unlike capital and land, is potentially infinite in extent. Its only limit is the rate at which you are able to create it. If this is sufficiently high then scarcity will disappear as an issue.

Knowledge jobs outsourced to India and physical jobs to China do increase the wealth of the Indians and the Chinese. However this is not necessarily at the expense of the Americans. This is old economic thinking based on the idea of resources being ultimately scarce. The Chinese and Indian middle classes together will, on relatively short time scales, be as large and as rich as the whole US population. This creates an even bigger market for the imaginative goods free thinking American are so demonstrably capably, above all others, of creating.

Creative well living Americans, who have lost their jobs elsewhere, can move to supplying the planet's need for ideas on what such goods and services can be and in doing so they can well do without devoting themselves to the business of servicing each other. That is now done increasingly effectively by Central and South American Spanish speakers.

The USA has the know how, experience and systems to continue to lead the world in creativity if it chooses to allow itself to do so. Nowhere else on the planet does one find so many new jobs generated so fast as when Americans create better:-


1. more comfortable holidays, cultural events and entertainment. It is to die for;

2. ever more effective ways to organize production and distribution

3. understanding among more and more people at an ever increasing rate.


These things together mean that jobs lost to the needy in India, China, Indonesia and the Spanish speaking world (including illegal but useful immigrants into the US from Central America) only create more and more better jobs for Americans. The emerging knowledge economy is truly WIN WIN WIN.

This is truly a return to the Garden of Eden. Hunter gathers then had only to reach up and grab the fruits from any tree bar one, the tree of knowledge. In choosing to take from that mankind, among other things, became aware of property, the idea that one could own a part of a physically limited universe. One could fence it off and own land to cultivate things on or own machines to make things rather accepting the universe's bounty as free to all.

"Don't Fence Me In" and Free Range are not new issues for Americans. Many took part and died in the range wars that ensued from such sentiment over land in the West in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The space to be fought for now is not free range land in the big horizons of the American West but free ranging ideas in the infinite vista of cyberspace.

The Chinese are indeed already trying to fence that using Internet tools. This was evident in the recent Congressional hearings on the actions of Google, Cisco and others in helping the Chinese government draw boundaries in that cyberspace. To the extent it is possible for thme to succeeed in doing so they can only harm themselves. They will fence themselves and their thinkers off from the cutting edge of emerging technology. This still comes in the main from the USA. Provided the Americans do not continue to shoot themelves in the foot technologically with overly protective policy on IPR and restrictive self defeating policies on immigration it can continue to do so.

Controlling the free movement of the new key resource, knowledge, as embedded in people and the ether, is now virtually impossible. Keeping people out in our post-modern age only harms oneself. At the bottom end of the job market it leaves necessary jobs undone, done badly or worse still less productively by people who would be better employed on creative knowledge generating tasks. At the top end of the market such exclusion ensures that the best most innovative ideas will be generated elsewhere.

This is likely to be the case anyway as the creative thrust essential to the New Age is likely to be situated in many not one country. US past concern to protect its defence industrial base ensured that much modern ICT was developed other than in the USA. Current immigration policy, never mind that proposed by neo-con mercantilists will ensure that the worlds brightest and best no longer find there way into the US for their education and post doctoral research. Already they are going in droves to the UK, Australia, Canada and Europe or even increasingly to their own region - nuclear scientists and engineers at home in Iran for example (see our post yesterday).

"The Global Silk Road" predicts the decreasing relative political economic power of both the US and China. Each will grow in absolute terms one more slowly, the other rapidly, but they will both steadily lose out in relative terms. On the other hand those nations who use English as the lingua franca of business and are too small to have a domestic market big enough to support modern technology - Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, etc. will grow collectively in economic power.

Such places have to operate in the global market of 6.5million poor not their domestic ones of a few tens of million relatively rich. The domestic US market of 300 million relatively rich is temptingly too easy for US suppliers of ideas. The Chinese market of 1.5billion poor, with an increasingly substantial and well off embedded middle class, is similarly likely in the end to tempt Chinese entrepreneurs away from the global market place.

Knowledge products have significant upfront costs in creating them but even a $650million cost spread over a global population of 6.500 million is 10cents a copy. The is a product for all the poor not just some of ones local rich.