Gratitude Gardens or Corporate Food Coup D'Etat in the USA???

read the laws and don't bother me anymore until then please

Haha.Sarah, do you have any links to petitions or organisations against this?

no, I'm not aware of any petition Samiran, unfortunately

Oh, ok.

http://www.urgentevoke.com/video/grocery-store-wars
Haha

Very, Very Appropriate.

@A.V. Koshy, I had to run on Saturday and was unable to respond:

A.V. does your bias against mathematical modeling systems include other systems as well; Elliot Wave, Kondratiev, Kitchin, Juglar, Kuznets, stochastics, the exogenous vs endogenous debate, etc.,—or is it rather confined to older, indigenous systems that set you off into such derision and scorn? In my work I have found the same type of results from diverse cultures using various methods (and various names of their systems) which yield similar and in some cases identical results.

So, just curious, what do you think is the basis for why the various mathematical systems which chart various cycles work? (By the way, cycles which the Foundation for the Study of Cycles indicate are all bottoming in and around 2012—the same year the Mayans picked generations ago as the end of their long-count calendar indicative of an important time in the transition of our planet).

Your knowledge of mathematics seems no more relevant than your conclusions about my motivations and character—both are grossly deficient.

I don’t know “Wooden Ships.” I’ll try and find it online…I’m always open to being exposed to new things and deciding for myself rather than accepting some one else’s prejudice. Certainly none of us should be too arrogant about our worldviews…we’ve all been quite brainwashed through history into believing all kinds of incredibly ridiculous things which have and continue to lead us toward planetary catastrophe

@Sarah, regarding the excerpt you posted for me from Taleb. Thanks.

I do remember reading the excerpt you supplied by Taleb. I admire his work and generally agree with his a****sment. In my study of cycles (which includes market cycles) I have focused merely on trying to identify windows of opportunity vs. trying to determine any concrete ideas of what will happen. It is mathematically impossible to derive such, although from a large enough historical perspective one can note repetitive patterns which play out over time. I am reminded of my exposure to Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West which I read while in graduate school. This book had become a classic in comparing and contrasting the stages in the rise and fall of Empires. We cannot predict the future, but we can chart other such similar transitions in history and prepare for the possible outcomes and consequences. For example, in college upon noting the repetitive cycles of economic booms (often manifest as market bubbles) which are periodically followed by long, protracted busts, I asked myself, what could one do to prepare for such eventualities and survive them? My conclusion was to look at those in history that had successfully navigated the economic contractions of their times and emulate their successful strategies for avoiding the most negative consequences of widespread economic collapse.

Our failures in understanding all of the complex variables involved in shaping our world, doesn’t negate the value of using history (and mathematics) as tool(s). As Jeane Kirkpatrick once quipped, “history is a better guide than good intentions,” and certainly better than having nothing to refer to at all (or in having only the perspective of an individual’s relatively short life experience).

Mathematical models, by attempting to understand future trends, are used for all types of predictive purposes. All of these models are predicated on past trends. Where this information usually fails, is in not taking into account the less frequent major disruptions from the norm—the time frame is often too short..

The stock market and insurance industries (as only two examples) uses all types of sophisticated mathematical models to chart future patterns. Our ancestors had their own means of doing the same thing. Civilizations for thousands of years have used astrology. In my research into this much maligned field, I finally realized that it was literally an ancient, encrypted mathematical system which measures the electromagnetic field. This information is then expressed in a symbolic language. (People get way too caught up in the symbols without understanding the underlying expressed mathematics of the energy field—the more I have worked with the system the more I am convinced that it most succinctly and eloquently represents the Unified Field Theory for which Einstein searched.) Once, on being denigrated for my study of this century’s old information, I referred to the definition just cited and lifting up a newspaper, quipping, “This is written in a symbolic language but you know how to read it, don’t you?”

As a young girl I refused to read any thing written before I was born. In an all too typical arrogance that we moderns often have, I could not imagine anything of present value applicable from the past. As I grew up and continued to mature and learn, I begin to understand that there has always been genius on our planet. Just because our ancestors saw the world differently than we do today doesn’t mean that our ways of perceiving the world are superior. In many ways, we can learn from some rather profound truths from the past which have been lost to us. I once read that after every war, things, concepts, or ways of living in the world were destroyed of which we have no concept. Certainly we have seen how often, in times of societal conflict, the first to be killed are the intellectuals and the first things destroyed are the books. Such an idea of retrieving previously shattered knowledge from our violent pasts had captured my imagination and has left me searching for just what may have been lost during the ensuing centuries of conflict.

When we open up to the value of other ways of thinking we actually expand our individual options to navigating our future. It is for this reason that I majored in history and not just Western history, I was fascinated by the various ways others view the world. As an American, whose culture has put too much emphasis on the “rugged individual” and on material things, it was only in my study of other cultures that I was exposed to such important concepts of community, and a myriad of other ideas which are absent from the Western world view. There is always more to learn because, “the past is another country.” Learning to not be so dismissive of that which we don’t understand is an important sign of maturity and one that many of us must struggle with.

You might want to read The Black Swan again Catherine, since you don't appear to
have assimilated the wonderful insights that it was written to communicate.