Predicting the Demise of America (or Attempt at Honorary Doctorate ♯1)

To my knowledge, the theory I’m about to share is completely original.   I think it’s mine.  However, I’m an avid reader of Niall Ferguson, Martin Gilbert and David McCullough, among others, who sometimes comment on the intended topic.

I’m also reading The Invisible Gorilla, by Dan Simons and Chris Chabris, who’ve studied human memory and how it works.  Apparently, we often adopt others’ ideas as our own, and don’t even realize it – it’s called internalizing and happens when we connect deeply with an idea.  So it’s completely feasible that the theory I’m about to share is not mine, and I could still think it is.  As ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’, any plagiarism here surely qualifies.

Having shared that, I really believe this is my theory.  

If it proves to be mine, having blogged it will provide a publishing date.  This could help.  If you’ll indulge an explanation, allow me a diversion before I share the theory.  I’m a college dropout.  After my sophomore year my entrepreneurial calling began shouting and I left Georgia Tech to pursue the almighty dollar.  I’ve had almost no regrets.  Whilst I don’t lament missing an undergraduate or masters education, a doctoral thesis provides an opportunity to spend a couple of years researching a completely new idea, and setting out to prove it.  Wow.  That’d be amazing - to have the luxury of time to investigate something fully, to be a real-life detective, and to potentially lay down a completely unique idea in the annals of human history.  Alas, when I had the time, I didn’t appreciate it – opportunity is wasted on the disinterested.  Now it seems I’ll never have time to get that doctorate.  UNLESS, and here we get to the mini-point, an open-minded or enterprising university official happens to read this blog and decides to award me an honorary doctorate out of admiration for my sheer academic insight!  Yes, this may be unlikely.  Nevertheless, feel free to forward this blog to anyone you think might have the necessary influence.  As a helpful suggestion, it might help if they get stoned a lot, too.  Ok, here's the attempt.

            

History can be shared as the story of Empire.  From the vast Roman Empire to the British and presently American empires, this is where history happens.  Empire develops a form of law and a code of politics, embraces invention and invests in infrastructure.   Following these, it provides an environment for the development of the arts, and time for the appreciation of those arts.  The whole of human existence ultimately benefits from Empire, although clearly, during the height of their power, some relatively small groups benefit far more than others.  Nevertheless, their rise and fall is the story of human history, and countless observers have opined on the reasons for their emergence and demise.

Paul Kennedy has written perhaps the seminal work in this arena, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.  In it, he argues that it is not the winning or losing of wars that leads to power, as it may seem at the time, but the economic strength of that country leading up to and during its wars:

The triumph of any one Great Power in this period, or the collapse of another, has usually been the consequence of lengthy fighting by its armed forces; but it has also been the consequences of the more or less efficient utilization of the state's productive economic resources in wartime, and, further in the background, of the way in which that state's economy had been rising or falling, relative to the other leading nations, in the decades preceding the actual conflict. For that reason, how a Great Power's position steadily alters in peacetime is as important to this study as how it fights in wartime.

In a seemingly unrelated academic field is the work of Dan Ariely, a behavioral psychologist and the author of Predictably Irrational.  In this fantastic book (if you haven’t read it, watch this clip on TED and you may find yourself hooked), he details a variety of interesting experiments about how we make decisions.  We’re quite predictable and irrational, it seems.  It throws the notion of ‘free will’ into its own little tailspin.

Finally, in the little recipe for my intended doctoral recognition, we must add a dash of Einstein.  The little patent clerk realized a great truth about the world in the form of an equation but was, alas, an unheralded outsider of the academic community that would one day herald his genius.   Initially, he was lampooned for his ‘special theory’, but over time the world appreciated the brilliance of his equation, and he was awarded a few honorary doctorates.

My doctoral thesis attempt combines the work of these three academic leviathans into an equation that predicts the future.   Trumpets, please.

Moving on from Kennedy’s premise about the explanations for the rise and fall of great powers, I embrace Ariely’s research to understand that the decisions which lead to an empire's downfall are entirely predictable - it is the function of a simple equation that, like Einstein’s special theory of relativity, is a ground-breakingly unique piece of individual genius.  It will accurately predict when the American Empire will fall.  This equation could be used by banks to short Wall Street and damage the economy, so I think it’s imperative the equation is publicly and widely known as soon as possible.  Get this out there, people.

             E =  S / B³

Where E equals the duration of an actual Empire, S equals the Speed of communication between the centre of that empire and its furthest military outpost at its height, and B equals the length of time it takes me to drink a Beer, measured in seconds.

This may seem an unorthodox quotient, but I’m confident in the research.  If you’re surprised the time it takes me to drink a beer would play a key role in such a groundbreaking equation, imagine how I felt.   Suddenly, all those evenings drinking beer in college count as bona fide research.   If this equation helps me earn some money, they were tax deductible!  

Despite the notoriety and inconvenience of this discovery (I’m mostly a wine drinker now), some explanation is in order.  As you’ve read this far, coddle me a bit longer whilst I share both the principle and the mathematics.

The principle is simple.   The reason the Roman Empire lasted 600 years, and the British Empire for only 360 years, was not because the Roman form of government was superior to the British.  It wasn’t better at collecting taxes or more efficient at spending them.  It wasn’t more ambitious in its conquests or better at administrating them.  It wasn’t stronger militarily as compared to its rivals, or cleverer in its strategies.  The Roman Empire lasted twice as long as the British Empire because of one simple factor.  It took news longer to travel.  Events developed more slowly.

One may rise and fall more quickly than the other, but the stages are analogous.  They have a similar trajectory.  Various historians have suggested a life cycle to be found in all empires, and I’ve amalgamated them into my own version here: 1. The Era of Creators, 2. The Era of Conquest, 3. The Era of Commerce, 4.  The Era of Affluence, 5. The Era of Collapse. 

These stages are like a blueprint.  Every empire goes through them.  If I had time to actually write my doctorate, I would detail the characteristics of each one.  But you get the idea.

The more interesting idea I’m proposing is that the time it takes for an empire to go through these stages is entirely predictable.  And the time it takes for news to travel is the most important part of that equation.  My beer drinking is just a mathematics devise used to show proportionality, but we’ll get to that later.

Consider these ideas.  When Caesar vanquished Gaul, it took months for the Senate to discover.  During this time, Caesar was able to think, plan and act.  He recruited, set up lines of supply, and mobilized his forces.  During the height of the Roman Empire, in about the 2^nd century, it took 63 days for the cursus publicus (Roman mail) to travel between two major economic centers: Rome and Alexandria.  A return letter would thus take six months to arrive.  Whilst urgently good or bad news was quicker (specific time-lines are hard to find) the standard of communication was biannual at the empire’s height.

The British Empire enjoyed slightly more advanced communications.  On 10 May 1857 in Meerat, India, many sepoys mutinied.  It was India’s First War of Independence, involving tens of thousands of soldiers and took the British nearly a year to quell.  The British responded with incredible ruthlessness, in some cases blowing the captured mutineers from cannon.  Some reports consider this the beginning of the end of the British Empire.  Despite the importance of their final victory, it took almost four weeks for reports of this to be published in The Times on 8 June 1857.   Standard news took far longer.  

When the second tower was hit on 9/11, George Bush was informed within seconds.  America enjoys instantaneous communication.  As the American Empire can be said to start in 1989, how long have we got?

Hold on.  Are there true parallels here?  Do the lessons of history teach us anything about today?  

They do.  An examination of the history shows that politicians and generals in the Roman, British and American Empires were (and are) equally brilliant and boneheaded, comparably honorable and sleazy, evenly inspiring and pathetic.  Their stories are similar.  They changed the world.  Their empires’ demise was down to internal factors.  But as the trajectory is similar, and the timing can be shown to be also.

This is where Dan Ariely comes in.  Ariely has proven that, given certain situations, we act very predictably.  These behaviors are irrational and unexpected, but still predictable.  His clever research has provided examples ranging from choosing a holiday to choosing a life partner.   In order to establish this, Ariely did require similar decision platforms to study.  It’s impossible to predict what someone would do when confronted by a twenty-foot dinosaur because we don’t have any patterns of behavior to observe.

Fortunately, when it comes to empires, we have an immense level of history and observation.  Since Plutarch, perhaps the only topics that have been written about more plentifully are romance, sports and cooking.   Therefore, we can use this history to predict exactly when the American empire will crumble.  For those who know the formula, we’ll be able to finally beat the banks at shorting the economy, and go on that holiday and buy that house which proves money isn’t everything, but you can’t believe it for sure until you find out for yourself.

Unfortunately, this blog has been my own little holiday writing diversion, and my holiday is now over.  I don’t have the time to rant further, nor to mathematically prove the brilliance of my theorem.  Einstein would understand - he received lots of honorary doctorates, and never did prove his Unified Field Theory.  Hence, my theory should still qualify for an honorary doctorate, preferably before America implodes.

[Once mathematically proven, the only remaining variable to establish is, of course, the exact timing of the demise of America, which simply requires the time it takes me to drink a beer.  That is top-secret.  Only those readers privileged with the opportunity to buy me a beer, and secretly time the drinking of that beer, will have access to the final pieces to this puzzle.  I encourage and applaud the scholarship and enthusiasm of those determined to overcome these obstacles for their own enlightenment.]

Thoughts about Fitness. Part 2.

             Losing fifty pounds in a few months should require a major life change.  But it didn’t.  Looking back, although it wasn’t easy, it was much easier than I suspected it would be.   

The challenging bit was the group of preconceptions I had about fitness.   I had a lot of junk in my head.  Like the healthy necessity of having three square meals a day, shared in Part 1.  All of these little biases added up to my ridiculous fitness beliefs.  For instance, whenever I exercised I ate more food as a ‘reward’.  And if I exercised a lot, it meant I got to eat and drink a lot.  Especially beer. 

The key point is that once I changed my beliefs, I behaved differently.   Not out of rigor, but out of desire.  These changes in behavior impacted my fitness surprisingly quickly.  And because these changes in behavior were down to new beliefs, it’s been effortless to remain fit.  By effortless I don’t mean without industry.  By effortless I mean that it’s now part of the habit of being who I am, so I don’t think of any of the behaviors as an effort.  The discipline is effortless.

So my thinking had to change first.  No shit, Sherlock, I hear you say.  I make this point because previously I had interpreted a ‘change of thinking’ as idiomatic for ‘get motivated’.  I had been motivated to get fit before.  I once endured the misery that is the Atkins Diet for 8 weeks.   That takes motivation.  And I’ve played rugby through several English winters, never missing a single practice or match, in the effort to get fit.  That takes motivation.  So, I had presumed, I just wasn’t motivated enough.  Or maybe my biology was just hard-wired for lumpy bits.  Or perhaps I just didn’t have the requisite level of selfish vanity necessary to get fit, I had told myself.

It wasn’t my motivation that changed, and this blog probably won’t provide much help to someone looking for motivation.   It was my information that changed.   It was the stuff I didn’t know.   And of course, I didn’t know I didn’t know this stuff, so I was caught in a slightly vicious loop of thinking I knew stuff I didn’t and it was all really my destiny to be chubby. 

Now, the stuff I didn’t know won’t be the stuff you don’t know.  And you’ll know stuff I don’t know.  So I’ll just share the stuff I learned, and hopefully something in here will be useful to someone else, even if it just proves to them how much stuff they know compared to me.

Let’s go back to the impetus.   On my cycling trip I’d burned 12,000 calories a day for three days, and still gained five pounds.  Could this really be muscle?  This is one of the most commonly misunderstood facts about fitness out there.  Yes, muscle weighs more than fat.  But the process of creating muscle takes a lot of energy, and in doing so most people will burn off more fat.  An article I read in Men’s Fitness held that, unless you have less than 20% body fat, when you exercise and gain weight, it ain’t muscle.  

This was a truly eye-opening shocker to me.  To burn 12,000 calories in a day is friggin’ hard work.  To learn this was a waste actually made me angry.  What the hell was going on?

We all know the rules.  If you consume more calories than you burn you’ll gain weight.  I had simply consumed 12,000+ calories a day.  With that much effort, I gained muscle and fat, but with that much body fat, I gained more fat than muscle.  The truth hurt.   

The average man burns off about 2200 calories a day through normal activity, the average woman about 1800.  A friend taught me this when he lost about 40 pounds ten years ago (and kept it off).   He was an advocate of calorie counting.  I thought it sounded tedious.

Reeling from my cycling debacle, I surrendered and started counting calories.  A banana is about 100 calories.  A muffin about 400.  A glass of water has virtually none.  My latte has 300.  It’s fairly disturbing how many calories are in things.  Especially certain things.  Whilst begrudgingly modifying my drinking habits due to the ridiculous calories in a beer, it seemed patently unfair that orange juice had so many, too.

Nevertheless, an interesting thing happened fairly quickly.  I stopped counting.   It’s not that I’d quit.  You simply learn how many calories are in stuff.  I only counted calories for about a month, because by that time I knew how many were in just about everything I ate.  You just remember.  So it wasn’t nearly as tedious as I’d expected, and now I know the calories in my favorite things for the rest of my life.

Calories are, unfortunately, only part of the equation.  The other big factor is what type of food you eat.  There are whole books on this, and I’m just trying to get back in the habit of writing without making it a full-time job, so I’ll share an abbreviated version.

Carbohydrates give you long-term energy.  Protein gives you medium term energy and sugars give you short-term energy.  Most of us need long-term energy at the beginning of the day, and don’t need any at the end of the day.   Carbs in the evening easily turn in to fat while you’re sleeping.

So I started eating carbs at breakfast and lunch only, and in the evenings I had my lightest meal of the day, without carbs.  Often just a soup.  This was the hardest bit.  For the first 10-12 days, by hunger pangs were so bad in the evenings I had to take a sleeping pill to get to sleep.  I’m not an advocate of medicating your life, so I’m not suggesting anyone else do this.  I’m just sharing what I did.

Fortunately, as I’d hoped, within a couple of weeks my body got used to having really light meals in the evening and I stopped the sleeping pills.

The other corollary of this counting carbs malarkey is your daily total.  Previous to this regime, I would work out once or twice a week, for 1-3 hours, and make it a real sweat-fest.  With this new regime I worked out every day, with a goal of 30 minutes but for a minimum of 20 minutes.  I figured, you can always find 20 minutes in a day... and once I'd gotten my butt up and doing it, I was often able to find 30 or 40.  Within that goal, I wanted to burn 300 calories as a minimum. 

My plan was simple.  Eat 2000 calories a day and burn 2500 calories a day.  The weight began to fall off.

However, this was not the effortless part.  I hadn’t put all the pieces together yet.  I was often hungry.

Then I read an article in Rolling Stone about General Stanley McChrystal.  In order to avoid sluggishness, he eats one meal a day.  Now this was extreme, but I often felt sluggish in the afternoon.  And I hate feeling sluggish.  This reminded me of what Bill Bryson had shared about the Victorians inventing lunch.  It also reminded me of climbing Mt Kenya - the Kikuyu porters who carried the tents ate two meals a day, and laughed at us ‘fat westerners’ who ate three meals a day.  Gotcha.  So I decided to stop eating lunch for a month, and see what that was like.

In short, that was the easiest part of the whole thing.  Yes, I felt hungry a bit at first but, because I wasn’t consuming many calories in the middle of the day (I didn’t count a banana or apple as lunch – snacks are allowed), I was able to eat larger breakfasts and dinners that were more enjoyable.

I still avoided carbs in the evenings.   I just tried to eat whatever would sate my hunger, and leave the big meal of the day for breakfast.  And once your main meal of the day is breakfast, you start enjoying them a lot more.  I now make sure my breakfast has lovely fresh fruits, nuts and whole grain carbs.  It’s incredibly tasty.

Which is another point.  Personally, I think a banana and a snickers bar are equally good in taste.  I don’t actually prefer sprite or apple juice to a glass of water.  I like them equally.  But when I didn’t know the caloric difference in them, I treated them as similar decisions.  If I felt low in blood sugar, I was just as likely to go for a candy bar, even though I love fruit.  Now I just grab the fruit.  Which is not only better for you but costs less, too.

The best part was new ideas about hunger itself.  I noticed that I felt more effective in the afternoons.  Could hunger be a good thing?  I did some googling.  It turns out, hunger can be incredibly good for you.  Various research suggests it acts as a natural anti-depressant, increases alertness, and can be good for learning.  It also stands to reason from an evolutionary perspective.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have benefitted if hunger helped improve their vision, hearing and olfactory senses.  I wasn’t able to find any research to support this last idea, but I can attest to it empirically.

This idea, that hunger is good, proved to be the major lynchpin in the whole puzzle of my new fitness routine.  It sparked a review of my associations with hunger since childhood.  As children we’re often asked if we’re hungry and, if we are, immediately provided a remedy.  Hunger is a problem to be solved.  Further, whenever we’re upset or ill, well-meaning adults offer food as mollification. 

Just imagine if, instead, we were told that hunger makes you strong, hunger makes you alert, or hunger makes you smarter.  Which is apparently true.  So I decided to try.  Every time I felt hungry I tried to say to myself something like, ‘excellent, now I’ll be really effective today’.  It seemed to work!

Of course, I’m not talking about starving oneself or being unhealthy.   According to the research on hunger, it’s not even physiologically relevant until one hasn’t eaten for 12-24 hours.  And throughout history, mankind has often gone a few days without eating.  It’s part of our biological makeup.  And I was only skipping an invented meal that one clearly doesn’t need.

And when I was having a particularly hungry moment, I took someone’s advice (sorry but can’t remember who) and just had a glass of water.  It’s amazing how often this satisfied the urge.

The final piece of the puzzle was some ideas about dairy.  I’ve saved this till last as I’m not sure it had much to do with the weight loss.  I’d lost about 35 pounds by the time I started this stuff.  But it’s certainly part of my routine now.

I read an article in Men’s Health that suggested reducing dairy could improve your energy levels.  So just as an experiment I tried some goat’s milk, soya milk and almond milk.  I found all three to my liking.  They’re a bit different, but pretty good after the oddity of the first sip or two.  So I replaced dairy from my diet.

Here’s a question for you.  What kind of creature depends on another for its entire life?  A parasite, right?   A fair and considered answer, my friend.  It’s also a slightly-excessive-but-passable description of my previous use of dairy.  Consider this.  In the west, we spend the majority of our lives consuming dairy - milk, cheese, yoghurt, etc - that was intended for bovine development.  So what - I quite reasonably asked myself.  Perhaps you get it quicker than I did.  We spend our lives drinking the liquid nature spent millennia designing for mammals to grow to an average weight of 1200 lbs.  And quickly at that.  A newborn calf weighs about 80 lbs, and by six months old weighs about 500 lbs.  Mostly from milk.  Isn’t that impressive?  So milk is perfect for getting fat.

Aside from this are the health risks.  It wasn’t until recently I read this article about dairy.  In short, there is mounting scientific evidence that milk is not only actively bad for you, but also that most people, an astonishing 75%, cannot digest it properly past the age of five.  So why continue having it?  I mean, really, it isn’t that good, is it?

            So that’s the stuff I learned.  I’ve gone from thinking that fitness has more to do with exercise than diet (which it may have done a century ago) but in our plentiful society the opposite is true.  You cannot be healthy by exercising a lot and eating anything. But you can be fit by monitoring your diet with only light exercise.   Whilst this may not be particularly revolutionary or insightful, as a package of ideas it’s working for me.  And it’s left me with a mild curiosity about all things fitness.  If you have an article or idea that you think I might enjoy, let me know.

Thoughts about Fitness. Part 1.

Two years ago this week I rode a bicycle across Britain.  It was a modest undertaking by these sorts of treks – starting from the Lake District the journey spanned 200 miles over 3 days and finished in Edinburgh.  It is a beautifully scenic stretch of land with much to recommend it, but that’s not why I was there.  I was trying to get fit. 

My whole life I’d been a big boy.  At 6’1” and 235 lbs, I’d enjoyed an active life of rugby, volleyball and other exercise, but was still chubby.  It seemed to suit my frame.  Even as a kid I was a bit heavy.  I had plenty of girlfriends, though, so I guess it wasn’t too bad.

Only once had I been close to being slim.  In a two-week period I’d climbed Mt Kenya and Mt Kilimanjaro and lost about 35 lbs.  I was startled.  The lesson was clear.  The secret to getting fit was massive, sustained aerobic activity for many days. 

So there I was pedaling a bicycle across Britain.  After several days of riding, the log of which is its own blog account, I arrived in Edinburgh spiritually cleansed by the experience.  I knew from my Garmin bike computer I had burned over 12,000 calories a day.  It was tough as hell at times, but I felt confident about my trimming strategy.  So I stepped on the scale with confidence.  Followed by confusion.  I had gained 5 lbs over the previous 3 days. 

         At first, of course, this was a triumph.  As we all know, muscle is heavier than fat, so I had created a lot of muscle in the previous few days.  Aren’t I impressive, I thought.

Nevertheless, the demands of logic began to gnaw at me.  If I had lost 10 or 15 pounds of fat, as I hoped, then I had created 15 or 20 pounds of muscle.  In three days.  Was this possible?  Think about a pound of beef at the grocery store.  It’s a lot of meat.  I should be able to see 15 pounds of new muscle, right?  Well, I couldn’t see any.  Even being conservative, let’s say after riding all those miles I had lost 5 pounds of fat and had created 10 pounds of muscle.  According to my grocery store calculations, this should still be a visibly palpable creation of muscle.  Only problem was, I couldn’t see it.

This deduction made me question what I understood about my body.  It made me stop and think.  I wanted to understand this stuff.  Over the next few months I learned some things that allowed me to get very fit and lose about 50 lbs (or nearly 4 stone for you Brits).  Two years on I am still 185 lbs with a 32-inch waist. The majority of the difference between then and now has been what I learned.  So I thought I’d share that journey for whoever might find it either entertaining or useful.

         That journey starts in the early 19th century.  Britain enjoyed an unprecedented onset of wealth.  As the sun rose in New Zealand each morning, spanned across its colonies in India and Africa, and set in the Americas, the coffers of British merchants filled with the lode of the British Empire.  It was a period of exploitation and invention.  The ever-resourceful British invented many things, but this blog’s introduction is about a particular invention that has come to permeate Western life.   Not only has this development become ubiquitous, almost everyone that enjoys this creation has no idea it was even invented.  In fact, most people think this discovery has been around for centuries… when it simply hasn’t.

         What had the British invented?  Lunch. 

         As ever, necessity was the mother of invention.  According to Bill Bryson in ‘At Home’, the expanding wealth of the British Empire expanded the role of society in everyday life; the rigors of social etiquette produced a bewildering array of new social graces.  When invited to a meal one must not only accept the invitation but also had to return it.  Which had to be returned.  And so on.   This created a social diary so packed that new occasions had to be created to deal with the overload.  This is why not only lunch was invented, which has been embraced by the majority of Western society, but also tea-time, which hasn’t.  

         To be completely clear, lunch as a midday meal wasn’t what was invented.  In 1750 if you were invited to “dinner” in Britain it was most likely held just after midday.  In much of the north of England, the midday meal is still called dinner.  People ate two meals a day, in the morning and early afternoon.  At the end of the day there was no ‘meal’, although some would enjoy a snack.  By 1850, however, dinner was a formal meal held in the evenings and had become the largest meal of the day, inculcated with Victorian ritual.  With such a long period between breakfast and dinner, and a flourishing social diary to satisfy, the invention of lunch as a third major meal of the day was almost inevitable.

         This was an extraordinary revelation to me.  My entire life, I was taught one should have ‘three square meals’ a day.  It was the healthy thing to do.  Here was evidence this was simply untrue.  Three meals a day weren’t a careful gastronomic strategy for humanity – they were a tool for social climbing in Victorian Britain.  It wasn’t something the adults who taught it to me had thought about.  It was a habit.  Their parents had simply told them the same thing.

         This got me to wondering.  How many other false assumptions lay deeply buried in my psyche?  How often had I tried to make a healthy choice, only to inadvertently fall prey to a habit carried on by generations of unsuspecting supplicants?  What did I actually know about being healthy?

         This multi-part blog is going to share some of the ideas I came across in trying to answer these questions.  Previous to this journey, I thought all the books and articles about this subject were tedious and slightly extremist.   Having spent the last two years exploring this arena I can relate that, essentially, I was right.    So part 2 of this blog will share some tedium and extremism.  I think the essential aspects of learning this stuff is part of why our cultural habits are so much easier to perpetuate.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to distill what I’ve learned in a way that’s enjoyable to read.  In return, I hope you'll share any interesting ideas about fitness you've come across with me, either via comments or email.  

Before and after.  The first was taken on day one of my cycle ride to Scotland.  Actually felt pretty fit at the time.  The second one is a few months later.  Slightly embarrassing to share it, but hey, these things need proof.  And not feeling too embarrassed at 40.

         

The Caterpillar

'The human body grows a new stomach lining every five days. The average lifespan of a taste bud is ten days. The body grows a completely new skin every four weeks. The liver is replaced every six weeks. The human skeleton is replaced every three months.'

I just read this on the BBC website and was utterly surprised.  I wouldn't have shared it  without the venerated source, but... really?  We replace our skeleton every three months?  I'm gobsmacked.  It is simply amazing to think we are constantly changing at a deep cellular level.  At least physically.


The question is whether we do it mentally.  My friend Simon Larcey is convinced we are fundamentally the same throughout our lives.  He thinks we have a kind of 'spiritual DNA'. So our innate level of charity or ambition, for instance, is hard-wired at birth.  Simon suggests the circumstances of life simply provide a foil for a particular trait to display its depth.  For instance, he accepts that a personal failure might provide the environment to exhibit one's personal level of determination.  But it was always there.


It's a clever argument.  I think he's right.  


As James Allen and Proverbs would teach us, "as a man thinketh, so is he."  It's an utterly amazing idea.  When I was four years old, I had my first Damascene moment.  I stood on a six-foot hay-bale and knew, just knew, that the secret to flying was simply believing you could fly.  I also knew, just knew, that as a four-year old I was uniquely qualified to believe I could fly.  Silly adults couldn't believe it.  But I could.  So I jumped.  And I flew.  Yes, I flew.  It may not have been for very long, but I remember it clearly.  


I don't remember landing, but I must have landed as I broke my collarbone.


Despite this early success, my mind's power to change the laws of physics remains limited.  Fortunately, my mind's power to change my context, its ability to focus its perspective and the potential for these to help me fly mentally seem unlimited.


I think perhaps what Simon has yet to appreciate is that we have all-of-it within us.  I think we share the capacity for boundless love and merciless cruelty... at least at birth.  So he's right.   Wherever we are in our journey, we had it in us all along.  If we're down, it was always there.  If we're inspired, it was always there.  And if we choose to have an insight, if we choose to change our minds, if we choose to believe we can fundamentally grow and change as a person, it was always there.


There's another area of this thought I wonder if Simon has considered.  It seems to me his view perceives tragedy as a possibility that might bring out a set of traits.  IF you have this disaster, THEN you'll discover your level of courage or patience (or whatever trait you discover).  I think he's right again.  It's just that everyone has calamity.  We are guaranteed heartache.  It's not if.  It's not when.  It's when next?  And the response one chooses has these wonderful opportunities to develop.  Viktor Frankl said, "When we are no longer able to change the situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."


So at both a physical and mental level, you're developing today.  You may or may not be developing in a healthy way.  Regardless, a completely new you, at the cellular level, is being created today.  Just how are those energies being directed?  If it takes 3 months to replace your skeleton, how long does it take to replace your mind?

Stealing Made Legal. How Cool!

Except this isn't cool at all.  

I've come across an article from my newfound 'personal newspaper'.   On the one hand, I've found it too disturbing to fully distill here.  I'm afraid of my hyperbolic potential.  Plus, this blog isn't intended as a home to geo-political commentary; I'm just not a very geo-political person.  On the other hand, my moral compass impels me to share it.

Therefore, with the reader's understanding, I'll summarise the facts as I understand them.   A recent law was passed by the US Congress requiring the Fed to open its books on the bailout.  Firstly, well done Congress.  It’s a testament to democracy.  Commentators are just starting to pick through the mountain of paperwork - apparently over 21,000 transactions.

In itself, I found this number shocking.  I thought the bailout was just a few payments to a few large banks.   Am I alone?  I've read two books on the crises, and although I'll admit they were more about the general financial conundrum than the specific bailout decisions, I felt educated and would have guessed 50 major bailout transactions.  Twenty-one thousand?  So there were 21,000 separate and distinct payments, bound my contractual law, agreed in the haste of that financial and political cauldron?  This number alone, in that environment, began to prepare me.  

I've always understood corruption existed in America.  I've factored it in alongside poor Referee/Umpire decisions in sport.  Sure, the Braves would have won (at least) 3 World Series in the 90s without crap umpires, and yes, it was amazingly painful to be the best team of that decade but lose that official mantle to the team of Mickey Mantle.  But we had our chances and that's the way the cookie crumbles.  The Braves were not robbed.*  We simply lost a few close games by a few inches, and since we won a few that way, all was right in the world (if not exactly fair).  This was my perception of corruption in today's America: both common and criminal, but hardly a major factor in the general swing of things.  Was I naive, ignorant or stupid?

The article to which I refer was just published in Rolling Stone.  Whilst Rolling Stone is certainly a left-leaning publication, a) this article criticises left and right equally and b) their standard of journalistic integrity is strong to my knowledge.  I'll only include an excerpt.

"Instead of lending directly to car buyers and credit-card holders and students — that would have been socialism! — the Fed handed out a trillion dollars to banks and hedge funds almost interest-free.  In other words, the government lent taxpayer money to the same people who caused the crisis, so that they could then lend that money back to the taxpayer on the market virtually risk-free, at an enormous profit.

"Cue your Billy Mays voice, because wait, there's more! A key aspect ... is that the Fed doles out the money through what are known as non-recourse loans. Essentially, this means that if you don't pay the Fed back, it's no big deal. The mechanism works like this: Hedge Fund Goon borrows, say, $100 million from the Fed to buy crappy loans, which are then transferred to the Fed as collateral. If Hedge Fund Goon decides not to repay that $100 million, the Fed simply keeps its pile of crappy securities and calls everything even."

Out of respect for anyone who doesn't read me for politics, I'm stopping there.  But this is simply the most easily digestible excerpt.  There's more (like the $200 million given to a banker's wife).

I hope this article isn't accurate.  I hope it's a bunch of invented hippy claptrap.  But it sounds to me like it might be the tip of the iceberg.   If it is, I hope it is.  It would be an unfortunate boon to the capitalism inferred in the Federalist Papers by James Madison (vs Alexander Hamilton or Adam Smith's faith in business/elite).  It would perhaps be the painful truth needed to stem the tide of the plutocracy America seems to be becoming.  

Hope springs eternal. 

At least you see why I'm not very geo-political.  This stuff is too bloody serious.

Rick.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-real-housewives-of-wall-street-look-whos-cashing-in-on-the-bailout-20110411?page=1

* Do not talk to me about the '93 series against the Twins, and definitely do not bring up the name of umpire Drew Coble.

Man Motivated by Poem.

While enjoying a beer with a friend recently, he confided his start-up business idea.  It was based on some clever sounding technology, the weather and Twitter.  The conversation soon turned to the 'social media revolution', of which I have been at least a skeptic, at worst a cynic.  So I railed.  I lambasted the shallowness of trawling the internet for opinions.  I ripped into the emptiness of tweets about trivia.  Yet here I am.


Two separate 'logs' broke the camel's back.  The first and smaller log was my friend's description.  He informed me that one isn't required to follow Charlie Sheen or Lindsay Lohan; one can choose to follow Malcolm Gladwell, for instance, who may be a greater 'social media revolution' skeptic than myself.  Interesting.  Employing the vehicle against itself.  He also informed me there were several other regular tweeters and bloggers whose links were thoughtful and enriching.  Like Andrew Sullivan, TED and the New Yorker.  Essentially, he described it as having the ability to publish your own newspaper.  I began to feel both stupid and inspired.

Of course, the immediate drawback to publishing your own newspaper, for me, is the risk of constantly reinforcing my own views and never challenging my intellectual comfort zones.  See Michelle Bachmann.  But this could be countered by following a breadth of commentators.   I have done this, but I'd be grateful for any recommendations.  I've already found choosing who to invite into my Twitter feed is quite a commitment!

The second 'log' was a poem.  I tried to cite it when chatting to my friend, but whether it was the beer or the decade since I'd last read it, my version was woeful.  Written by my favourite poet, e. e. cummings, here's the text in full.

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

It stills makes me think, 'wow'.  I first read this poem when I was 17.  After a childhood raised in the Bible belt, 'even if it's Sunday may I be wrong' hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks.  In the two+ decades since reading this poem, I still find it's message overwhelming.  'For whenever men are right they are not young'.  Simple.  Beautiful.  It invites us to be open-minded and willing to learn.  So here I am.