noSh-​it! Edits Blog

Sus­tain this!…

| By Stephen Glanville | April 9th, 2010

Whoo hoo! Finally! Another post…how long has it been? 2 months? Holy (insert some­thing appro­pri­ately witty here)s Bat­per­son!Discrimination against lazy people

Well, I must’ve been busier than even I thought…

You’ll be happy to know, well I am to tell you any­way, that the project is mov­ing ahead in ways unex­pected, as pre­dicted… Hang on! Is that pos­si­ble? Pre­dict­ing the unex­pected? I sup­pose it is so long as one doesn’t get too spe­cific, oth­er­wise the ‘ways’ would prob­a­bly no longer qual­ify as unex­pected would they? It’s like say­ing ‘noth­ing is impos­si­ble’ or ‘every­thing that has a begin­ning has an end Neo’… ;-P

So, what have I been up to? Where do I start? Ok! Last time I’d just had my first meet­ing with the fine folks at Train4Life. Since then I’ve built 3 web­sites, one of which is my Opus Magnus…well it’s the biggest project I’ve taken on by myself. And you guessed it! It was for good ol’ Train4Life. Go and have a look if you like…it’s kind of at stage one; which means that it’s con­tent ready. Most of the con­tent is yet to be placed. Oh! The address? Hehe! http://​train4life​.com​.au

You could say I’ve lit­er­ally been build­ing myself a job…even a cou­ple. Because along with man­ag­ing this web­site on an ongo­ing basis (which will hap­pen in the next cou­ple of months), I’m also becom­ing a “Trainer and Asses­sor’. In fact I deliver my first courses in a cou­ple of weeks…talk about learn­ing on the job and get­ting thrown in at the deep end ey? :-P

Speak­ing of jobs, and this is what moved me to pro­duce another epic post; I learned some­thing in the last few weeks. And you know me…I just love hav­ing a big fat rant…yeh! And learn­ing stuff is ok too… :-)

Your tax dol­lar at work:

As you know, I spent the last cou­ple of years build­ing a small busi­ness noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Pizza from noth­ing. Finally launch­ing it in Sep­tem­ber last year and shut­ting it down 2 months later, for a raft of rea­sons (most of which are doc­u­mented in these very vir­tual pages), the most fatal of which was that the bank saw fit to lend me enough to start the busi­ness, but wouldn’t help me out with cash-​flow once it started…which inci­den­tally they said they would at the out­set. And here I was think­ing I was ‘doing the right thing’ by going through a Gov­ern­ment pro­gram, guided by experts etc… Hav­ing started out as a poten­tial small busi­ness owner, I ended up becom­ing a bluddy small busi­ness lob­by­ist, fight­ing the very organ­i­sa­tions that pur­ported to sup­port me.

So, for the sake of a few thou­sand dol­lars, my busi­ness, with a measly $300, 000.00+ invested in it’s ges­ta­tion and birth (includ­ing wages of gov­ern­ment con­tracted ser­vice providers, gov­ern­ment per­sonel, my own time and input etc, etc), had the prover­bial rug pulled from under it by the so called ‘small busi­ness sup­port­ers’, I’m back on the dole (not for long though), and the coun­try is now pick­ing up the tab.

The Rub:

I’ve been on the dole for longer than 3 months. At the 3 month mark they insti­gate a process called ‘Inten­sive Sup­port’. Now with all the work I’ve been doing to build my new jobs, and with my stud­ies com­ing up, I thought this would all look very good and fit nicely into an ‘unnamed Gov­ern­ment Employ­ment Ser­vice’ ‘Approved Activ­ity’. Ha! How wrong could I be…

I was duly informed by an appro­pri­ately crest-​fallen con­tracted Job Net­work Provider, that although she could see what I was doing (I pro­vided evi­dence), this did not qual­ify. I had to engage in 30 hours per week of manda­tory ‘approved activ­i­ties’. Guess what they are?

For a start, 11 take home exer­cises that have to be com­pleted and reported and signed off. Things like ‘My Employ­ment Path­way’, ‘My Job Search Tech­niques’, ‘My Inter­view’, ‘My Employ­ment Suc­cess’ (I like that one :-P ), and my favourite ‘My Focus’ (all about Self Esteem, Pos­i­tive Think­ing and Motivation…hmmm! :-P ). So my actual real-​life efforts at cre­at­ing bona-​fide employ­ment for myself amounted to diddly-​squat!

And get this…every sin­gle unem­ployed per­son is going through this malarky, no mat­ter their ‘actual’ cir­cum­stances, and each one walks out the door with over 100 pages of inspi­ra­tional Gov­ern­ment for­mat­ted doc­u­men­ta­tion. Sus­tain­abil­ity? Yeh! Right! Well I sup­pose they at least printed both sides of the pages…

Any­way, you do the math and see if you reckon this crap stacks up to an effec­tive use of national resources in a time of mul­ti­ple, multi-​dimensional crises?

Uncle Kev? I hope you’re watchin’ mate. Aren’t you try­ing to fix up the ‘Health Sys­tem’? And isn’t Men­tal Health at the top of the ‘rapidly grow­ing prob­lems’ lists? Well how about going for some of the causes? And you want tax reform? Ok! How’s this for a start? STOP THE GOV­ERN­MENT WAST­ING OUR BLUDDY MONEY! For Exam­ple! Does any­one actu­ally know how much it costs to admin­is­ter this insan­ity? I reckon that for the cost of this ridicu­lous ‘Inten­sive not really Sup­port’ we could prob­a­bly buy every­one on the dole their own bluddy farm! And they’d prob­a­bly be smart enough to catch the water that falls out of the bluddy sky…you know? In dams?!!!

So that’s my lit­tle rant.

The aston­ish­ing sup­port of ‘unnamed Gov­ern­ment Employ­ment Ser­vice’ aside, my project is going gang­busters. There’s no way that I could’ve designed the path that is unfold­ing before me…unexpected indeed. Good thing I have a pretty good grasp of the notion that all things are ‘inter­con­nected’. Ooh! Isn’t that just so very ‘Zen’ of me? :-)

There’s a lot more to tell, but I’ll save that for next time…in the mean­time, try to stay sane and if any­one asks you to cough up more tax or inter­est, tell ‘em that you’re already col­lect­ing tax for the gov­ern­ment and pay­ing for the priv­i­lege and that they’ll have to do a whole lot bet­ter than they are to gain your inter­est! :-P

Cheers

Stephen G

Also posted in Pizza T-Reks | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Now Depart­ing from Plat­form 9 3/​4…

| By Stephen Glanville | February 15th, 2010

Watch­ing a small ‘failed’ busi­ness turn into a giant ‘unfailed’ ‘Enter­prise Organ­ism’ is not going to be much like a 1 hour Real­ity TV show. Per­haps a bit more like Sham­poo — ‘It won’t hap­pen overnight but it will hap­pen!’ ? :-)

Ya never bluddy know, if ya never bluddy go…! (Click on image to go to source)

Nev­er­the­less, it has begun…

If you’ve seen my now famous (NOT! :-) ), ‘Draft Pre­lim­i­nary Dis­cus­sion Brief’ called ‘What the Hell has this got to do with Piz­zas?’, you’ll know that the over­all vision of the Pizza T-​Reks project is pretty HUGE and just a tad ‘wholis­tic’ (Oh! And in case you haven’t read my ear­lier stuff, this is how I always spell ‘wholis­tic’. Why? Because the word ‘holis­tic’ is just plain bluddy wrong, that’s why! I’m not refer­ring to ‘holes’…I’m refer­ring to some­thing ‘whole’! :-) ).

So!..What’s with the ‘Hogwarts’/Train connotation?…Good question…here’s a clue — Pizza T-​Reks and good ol’ ‘noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Pizza’ have got ‘train­ing wheels’…and ‘of course’ (that’s another clue), they’re magic ones…they have to be! How else do you get through all the ‘brick-​walls’ (that offi­cially may not really be appar­ent, or not…apparently), of ‘small busi­ness sup­port’ and ‘enter­prise devel­op­ment’? :-)

You might remem­ber that in my last post I men­tioned that I had a few meet­ings lined-​up? Well I had them last week and I’m pretty chuffed with the results…beyond even my ‘over-​the-​top’ hopes and well tem­pered expectations…

Cap­tains Flat Com­mu­nity Asso­ci­a­tion — Wednes­day Night:

I’d pre­vi­ously sent the above men­tioned Dis­cus­sion Brief to Peter (Pres­i­dent of the Com­mu­nity Association).

I wanted to meet with these folks for one sim­ple rea­son — just to let the local Cap­tains Flat Com­mu­nity know that I was work­ing on my project, so that they didn’t find out 3rd-​hand some­where down the track.

I met a great bunch of peo­ple who were very recep­tive and sup­port­ive. I’m appallingly con­fi­dent that when this project gets trac­tion, not only can Cap­tains Flat ben­e­fit, but any bio-​region can… because the project para­me­ters are so scal­able and adaptable.

‘Sus­tain­abil­ity’ or ‘Resilience’ in appar­ently ‘Post-​Modern’, ‘Socio-​Economic’ terms, doesn’t have to mean hav­ing less fun, going with­out things or pay­ing more…in fact the oppo­site is true…it has to be! Oth­er­wise stuff like Human inge­nu­ity, intel­li­gence, good­ness, inven­tive­ness, cre­ativ­ity, progress, adapt­abil­ity etc are all just bull­shit, right? :-) . Well I don’t think it’s bull­shit and I’m cer­tain that we can make more money, do less dam­age and be healthier…here’s a good exam­ple of how. In fact this has inspired and likely will con­tinue to inspire the design, imple­men­ta­tion and common-​sense scal­able logis­tics under­pin­ning the Pizza T-​Treks project (and yes I’ve posted this video before…and will again until WE GET IT! :-) …

In this ener­giz­ing talk, Amory Lovins lays out his sim­ple plan for wean­ing the US off oil and revi­tal­iz­ing the economy.

…I reckon we have every­thing we need. The only thing miss­ing on a large scale is a bit of ‘actual’ good will! You know? Doing ‘the right thing’? Fair­ness? Not rip­ping the guts out of your ‘fel­low man’, just because you can and/​or are legally ‘within your rights’? That kinda thing… Oh! And then there’s all the ‘good’ stuff that the World’s 4 Bil­lion or so good Church, Mosque, ‘Sin­ner­gogue’ (oops! I mean Syn­a­gogue :-P ), and/​or Ashram going folk are sup­posed to be aspir­ing to be and do?…INSTEAD OF BICK­ER­ING AND SHOOT­ING EACH OTHER FOR FEAR/​REVENGE/​RIGHTEOUSNESS/​and/​or PROFIT/​POWER etc, etc, etc… ‘ad deatheum’!!!…FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE!!! AND DON’T TELL ME IT’S GOD’s BLUDDY WILL!!! You’ve heard of ‘FREE WILL’? Yeh! Well that’s what GOD appar­ently gave us…ALL OF US! I reckon that kinda gets God of the ‘hook’ don’t you?…anyway, I’m digress­ing a bit…back to the ‘Train’ of thought…Hehe! :-P

Train 4 Life — Thurs­day Morning:

I met with the CEOs of Train 4 Life (Tam & Tess), at my very favourite meet­ing venue…which I’m not gunna tell you, ’cause then every bug­ger and their dog will be going there. Yeh! Right! I have that much influ­ence! (NOT! :-P )…Oh alright! The ‘beeey­ooo­ti­ful’ Aus­tralian Nati­ional Botanic (Titanic :-P ), Gar­dens…just be care­ful not to step on the Water Drag­ons :-) .

This meet­ing IS THE start­ing point for the Pizza T-​Reks project. As is often the case, unex­pected good things hap­pen if one remains open to them. In this case they were par­tic­u­larly great things. I’ll try to explain:

Tam and Tess were bluddy great. In fact I’m still attempt­ing to get my head and heart around the hon­our they bestowed upon me.

Don’t you just love metaphor­i­cal sym­bol­ism? And you thought it was an Advo­cado Tree?…

Both Tam and Tess had of course seen my Pre­lim­i­nary Draft Dis­cus­sion Brief (which scopes the over­all project). At this meet­ing I pre­sented another dis­cus­sion doc­u­ment — ‘Pizza T-​Reks 101 — A Draft Course Out­line’ — which was intended to focus the dis­cus­sion on a start­ing point spe­cific to Reg­is­tered Train­ing Organ­i­sa­tions (RTO)…e.g. Accred­ited On-​The-​Job Train­ing toward employ­ment and/​or even own­er­ship of a Mobile Wood-​Fired Pizza Business.…for a start…

The hon­our bestowed? As of now, I am design­ing courses con­structed from accred­ited Units from approved Train­ing Pack­ages in accord with, among an absolute plethora of pro­to­cols and reg­u­la­tions, the Aus­tralian Voca­tional Edu­ca­tion & Train­ing (VET) sys­tems, National Qual­i­fi­ca­tion Frame­work and the Aus­tralian Qual­ity Train­ing Frame­work . Doesn’t that sound smancy? :-) Kind of a stretch for the notion of ‘noSh-​it!’ though ey? :-P

What this means is that Tam and Tess have been good enough to facil­i­tate a path­way through which I can estab­lish myself as a Trainer & Asses­sor design­ing and deliv­er­ing train­ing pro­grams that pro­vide folks with direct path­ways into actual employment/​business ownership/​operation (nat­u­rally these courses will not be restricted to Pizza T-​Reks). Neat huh? :-) And nat­u­rally this will include how to cook the best bluddy organic wood-​fired piz­zas in the known Uni­verse with­out burn­ing the Planet down. :-)

Max Employ­ment — Thurs­day Afternoon:

Armed with my great news from my ear­lier meet­ing, I met with Mary (my Case Offi­cer — she’s great :-) ), and we began the process of hav­ing my project recog­nised as a ‘Cen­tre­link Approved Activ­ity’. This was pretty easy because I’m now work­ing full-​time on this, and along with design­ing and deliv­er­ing courses, I will also be par­tic­i­pat­ing in some.

Given the aston­ish­ing and much appre­ci­ated oppor­tu­nity pro­vided by ‘Train 4 Life’, there was no need for Max Employ­ment to con­tribute more at this point…however, they are happy to engage as required…this will likely be when the courses are designed and ready to be deliv­ered; which is expected to take at least a cou­ple of months.

There ya go…

Not a bad start I reckon…like I said; way bet­ter than I dared hope… :-)

I expect that I might be pretty quiet for a while as I’ll be pretty focused on this Course Design and Train­ing & Assess­ing stuff…but I’ll try to put as much of the process up here as you can stand. So feel free to prod me if you reckon I’m being a bit slack :-) Pizza_T-Reks_Draft_Logo_Large

Thanks for trav­el­ing Pizza T-​Reks (a Project of noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Pizza), enjoy the ride and try not to go too far off-​the-​rails. :-)

Cheers

Stephen G

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Make it So!…

| By Stephen Glanville | January 31st, 2010

Hi Folks :-)

Ah! So good to get my head outta my arse! :-)

Though the pre­vi­ous 2 posts were a nec­es­sary exer­cise for me (i.e. to begin artic­u­lat­ing this project), it’s so good when the good ol’ ‘noSh-​it! hits the fan and the relaxed clar­ity and sweet­ness of the open air comes gush­ing out of the cre­ative tension…nice! :-)

So here’s what for me rep­re­sents the next step. The name, logo and draft “what’s it like stuff’:
Oh! For Christ’s Sake! This is doin’ some weird shit!…noSh-it!…So weird in fact that because the soft­ware doesn’t seem capa­ble of read­ing html, I have to put this dummy line in for spacing

Pizza_T-Reks_Draft_Logo_Large

The Draft ‘What’s it like stuff”

Vision:

To Infin­ity & Beyond +1!

Mis­sion:

Never Give Up! Never Surrender!

Oper­a­tional Guidelines:

  • Inno­va­tion — Bet­ter to ask for­give­ness than permission;
  • Work­place Rela­tions — A truth told with bad intent beats the worst lie you can invent;
  • Energy — 1+1 ACTUALLY=2;
  • Inter­con­nect­ed­ness — Any thing, can only pos­si­bly be what it is because of every­thing that it appar­ently isn’t;
  • Mar­ket­ing — If you don’t do it, use it or eat it, don’t sell it;
  • Risk & Change Man­age­ment — Prob­lems can’t be solved with the mind-​set that cre­ated them;
  • R & D — If you don’t stuff-​up you’re not get­ting it;
  • Poli­cies & Pro­ce­dures — Pro­hi­bi­tion doesn’t work;
  • Waste Man­age­ment — There’s no waste in Nature;
  • Design (Phi­los­o­phy) — How does Nature do this?;
  • Design (Har­mon­ics) — There are no straight lines in Nature;
  • Design (Prac­tice) — Just add Life!;
  • Major Obsta­cles — There is no spoon!; and
  • Every­thing — Don’t worry, be happy!

Still won­der­ing ‘What the Hell has this got to do with Piz­zas?’…Good! :-) Stick around and watch ‘nature take Her course’.

The biggest fore­see­able strate­gic chal­lenge is ‘anthro­pogenic allowance’…more specif­i­cally, a lack of it!

If we don’t sup­port ‘what can be done’, we’ll just stay in the world of ‘what should be done’…how’s that work­ing for you so far?

Oh! Spoke with Tam, CEO of Train 4 Life, this week…arranged meet­ing for next week :-)

Stay-tuned…and thanks for drop­ping by :-)

Cheers

Stephen G

PS: Yep! I like Dinosaurs and Star Trek…but I can eat a Pizza ;-)

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What tha Hell has this got to do with Pizzas?II

| By Stephen Glanville | January 21st, 2010

jogger_bonzai

There really is no waste in nature… :-)

Hi Folks :-) ,

I thought I’d give sim­pli­fy­ing this ‘thang’ a bit of a whirl…

The Over­all Project

It’s pretty sim­ple really…there! That’s a good start :-)

Butt seriously…in a nut­shell it might well be described as a Sus­tain­able Enter­prise Devel­op­ment Project.

I intend it to be a kind of hybrid commercial/​social enterprise.

The Draft Pre­lim­i­nary Dis­cus­sion Brief will give you a few more broad brush-​strokes, includ­ing key areas addressed (On the Cover).

What have I done so far?

Well, the actual core busi­ness ‘noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Pizza’ still exists, I just can’t afford run it. Remem­ber I did the NEIS Pro­gram? So I have my Cer­tifi­cateIV in Small Busi­ness Man­age­ment, my com­pre­hen­sive Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion, Employ­ment & Work­place Rela­tions (DEEWR) approved Busi­ness Plan and a shipload of use­ful life expe­ri­ence to start with. I just hope the banks don’t repos­sess my pizza equipment…but if they do, I’ll just get more :-) .

I’ve done my pre­vi­ous blog arti­cle which was my first pub­lic attempt at describ­ing and dis­cussing the project. And thanks to Sheila Bas­tard ( long story- @stinginthetail ), Paul Has­s­ing ( Blog­meis­ter & Copy­writer extra­or­di­naire — @PaulHassing ), good ol’ Anthony Sider (@BudgetDude ), Matt Walker ( @MattWalkerAus ) and dear Melody Lea Lamb (@MelodyLeaLamb ), the pub­lic debut of ‘What tha Hell has this got to do with Piz­zas?’, was very use­ful and help­ful indeed.

This is just a bit of a map of the idea and also the cover for my draft discussion brief

This is just a bit of a map of the idea and also the cover for my draft dis­cus­sion brief (Click on the image to view the brief)

Today I sent the ‘Dis­cus­sion Brief’ to Max Employ­ment. They are my chosen/​preferred Job Net­work Provider (Yep! I’m on the dole, since my busi­ness was ‘Small Busi­ness Sup­ported’ into Obliv­ion a cou­ple of months ago. That tale is told on the noSh-​it! Pizza Blog). I chose Max Employ­ment sim­ply because they are known to be friendly and actu­ally inter­ested in and effec­tive at help­ing peo­ple not only find work, but in my case, cre­ate employ­ment for myself and a large num­ber of people.

I also heard back from a local Reg­is­tered Train­ing Organ­i­sa­tion today. They’re called ‘Train 4 Life’. They asked me to send them my brief and have arranged to meet with me next week. They are great peo­ple. I met them when I was a Com­mu­nity Carer…they pro­vide approved train­ing across a range of indus­tries with a strong focus on the Health Sec­tor. I was able to con­nect with them again via my ‘dearly belovem’ (that’s Karen :-) ), who is cur­rently study­ing with them toward a Cer­tifi­cateIV in Train­ing (Karen is spe­cial­is­ing in the Dis­abil­ity Sec­tor where she too is cur­rently a Carer).

I intend to engage their exper­tise to design (where nec­es­sary), man­age and pro­vide a range of accred­ited ‘on-​the-​job’ train­ing mod­ules, ini­tially around the mobile wood-​fired pizza busi­ness, that will cre­ate paid train­ing path­ways directly into employ­ment and/​or busi­ness own­er­ship (thus re-​establishing and even repli­cat­ing the orig­i­nal busi­ness). Nat­u­rally any­one should be able to apply for these train­ing path­ways, but we will have a strong focus on the unem­ployed, dis­abled and homeless.

Oh! And I’m doing this arti­cle, which for me is the next step in clar­i­fy­ing and artic­u­lat­ing the project :-)

What’s Next?

Steady on! :-) Remem­ber ‘Sus­tain­abil­ity’? :-) Yeh, well there’s not much that’s sus­tain­able about work­ing 100 hours a week and run­ning on prescip­tion drugs is there?

This project is all about ‘actual’ ‘sus­tain­able’ devel­op­ment. Not mid-​2oth Cen­tury Production-​Line Indus­trial Key­ne­sian and other post-​modern Insan­i­ties, that make ludi­crous attempts to equate Time with Money and call Health a ‘Cost’! (actu­ally, if you go back far enough it can be seen that that is in fact a 16th Cen­tury Busi­ness Model based on the premise that if I sleep less and go faster, I’ll get more than you. It’s actu­ally a blue print for chronic unem­ploy­ment because it com­pletely ignores inno­va­tion, economies of scale and the laws of dimin­ish­ing returns…but that’s kind of an embed­ded whole ‘nuther story :-) ).

No, no, no, no, no, no, NO! :-) Not this lit­tle refraction-​coloured, gecko-​footed, self-​assembling, solar-​powered Duck! This project intends to estab­lish liv­ing, com­mer­cially viable, prof­itable, mea­sur­able, replic­a­ble, scal­able exam­ples of ‘actual’ sus­tain­abil­ity (which in my view is syn­ony­mous with ‘pros­per­ity’), toward an ‘actu­ally’ resilient econ­omy. So we’re not going to do that by merely repli­cat­ing the clearly dys­func­tional behav­iors and axioms that are cur­rently grind­ing us into the prover­bial dust, are we?

But we can build on them with­out act­ing like ‘Hip­pies’ and try­ing to destroy them. This is not a ‘blank slate’ approach to ‘sav­ing the world’, nor do I advo­cate such insanity…though it does make for an occa­sional good movie :-) . Besides, I don’t reckon it’s the planet that needs saving…if any­thing needs res­cu­ing it’s us! :-)

So there is a lot of work to be done in areas that will facil­i­tate enhance­ment of cur­rent prac­tices, pro­ce­dures and dynam­ics toward ‘actu­ally’ sus­tain­able busi­ness prac­tices and com­mer­cial infra­struc­ture that ‘actu­ally’ sup­ports busi­ness logic and inno­va­tion and the envi­ron­ment and peo­ple, instead of dis­tort­ing and under­min­ing them.

Excerpt from my Dis­cus­sion Brief:

Sus­tain­able Busi­ness does not mean find­ing ways to sus­tain what we’ve been doing. Sus­tain­able Busi­ness here means, doing busi­ness such that all life is encour­aged and enhanced, energy is pro­duced and resources replaced so that resilient economies and envi­ron­ments that sup­port life are evolved, sus­tained and proliferated.

Are there any exam­ples sim­i­lar to this project?

Sure there are! In fact there are gazil­li­ions of projects around the world that are endeav­our­ing to head in this direc­tion. This project will effec­tively con­sol­i­date and exem­plify a lot of what is cur­rently frag­mented through­out a plethora of such ini­tia­tives being car­ried out by folks from Grass Roots to large Cor­po­rate and Gov­ern­ment enti­ties (the best indus­trial exam­ple that I know of is good ol’ Ray Ander­son and his com­pany ‘Inter­face’ and its related sus­tain­able indus­try resource called ‘Inter­fac­eRAISE’):

At his car­pet com­pany, Ray Ander­son has increased sales and dou­bled prof­its while turn­ing the tra­di­tional “take /​make /​waste” indus­trial sys­tem on its head. In a gen­tle, under­stated way, he shares a pow­er­ful vision for sus­tain­able commerce.

The main dif­fer­ences with this project are in the under­ly­ing val­ues and axioms and how they are applied. Key to the suc­cess of this project, and miss­ing from a large pro­por­tion of cur­rent projects are ade­quate and timely economies of scale and ‘actu­ally’ ‘wholi­tis­tic’ (I spell it like that on pur­pose :-) ), design. Design, inspired by nature (e.g. Bio­mimicry), that results in a plethora of ben­e­fits, includ­ing dra­mat­i­cally increas­ing prof­its through rad­i­cal resource effi­ciency, intended to elim­i­nate entrenched inef­fi­cien­cies incurred through the inces­sant need to micro-​control every step of every process. Every­thing in its place, every­thing in its time.

I reckon the best exist­ing over­all tem­plate I’ve seen is what Willie Smits is doing in Bor­neo. This project will employ many if not all of Willie’s replic­a­ble and scal­able recipes to design, imple­ment and mea­sure project ele­ments. Inter­est­ing to note is that he set out to pro­tect Orangutans…but the indi­rect and unfore­seen ben­e­fits are aston­ish­ing. We will sim­ply extrap­o­late and inter­pret these prin­ci­ples and recipes for our respec­tive and indi­vid­ual bio-​regions. Have a look…it’s eas­ier than most con­trol freaks think ;-P:

By piec­ing together a com­plex eco­log­i­cal puz­zle, biol­o­gist Willie Smits has found a way to re-​grow clearcut rain­for­est in Bor­neo, sav­ing local orang­utans — and cre­at­ing a thrilling blue­print for restor­ing frag­ile ecosystems.

And there you have it! :-)

Up to the minute, in your face and absolutely noSh-​it! :-)

I’ll keep you posted.

Cheers

Stephen G

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What tha Hell has this got to do with Pizzas?

| By Stephen Glanville | January 12th, 2010

Hi Folks,

Yep! Con­trary to prob­a­bly nobody’s belief, I breath and blink yet… :-)

This is just a bit of a map of the idea and also the cover for my draft discussion brief

This is on the cover for my draft dis­cus­sion brief. Click on the image to down­load the brief (What_tha_Hell.pdf 930kb)

I reckon the ‘walk­a­bout’ is done. So it’s back down the moun­tain and into it…
I’ve decided to begin this in the noSh-​it! Edits Blog because if any­thing qual­i­fies as an Edit of noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Pizza, this does. What? Ooh! I’m glad you asked. Strap your­self in, here goes:

I’m rebuild­ing noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Pizza with a more ‘Social Enter­prise’ incli­na­tion. Not that I par­tic­u­larly like that term, but it’ll do for now. If I had to come up with a term to describe it, I’d rather use some­thing along the lines of ‘Enter­prise Organ­ism’. Suf­fice it to say that it’s not ‘nor­mal’ and there­fore accord­ing to main­stream prob­a­bly not ‘sane’…therefore at least com­pletely sane :-)

Any­way, this is just my very first pub­lic debut, so pretty much every­thing is up for grabs regard­ing dis­cus­sion, devel­op­ment and realisation…everything except the underlying/​guiding prin­ci­ples and my own integrity. If there is one thing that served me well when I was eaten alive in the name of ‘Small Busi­ness Sup­port’ it’s laugh­ter, and my abil­ity to not rise and fall with outcomes…I sup­pose some might call that resilience. I’m work­ing on agree­ing with that, but you guys don’t see me when I’m not laugh­ing, which is often, but for­tu­nately it doesn’t last long.

So, a bit more spe­cific? Ok! I reck­oned that one of the rea­sons that my lit­tle sole trader busi­ness was so eas­ily squashed by the ‘do-​gooders’ was that it was a lit­tle sole trader busi­ness. Being inclined to go from one extreme to the other, I’ve decided to go from one extreme to the other :-) . I’m going for a great big fat, hybrid, poly­mor­phic, multi-​functional, multi-​everything poly­glot with, you guessed it; no anchovies :-)

Ooh! That wasn’t very spe­cific was it? Ok! Try this:

You wouldn’t believe how many attempts I’ve had at writ­ing this stuff down over the past weeks. Inter­est­ing that I keep going back to my orig­i­nal half-​asleep notes that I spat out early one morn­ing at the begin­ning of my ‘walk­a­bout’. Here they are:

Groups of 2 – 3 houses…just urban ones. Built or bought…doesn’t mat­ter, though built would likely be more eco­nom­i­cal in the long run.

Small restau­rants in the front. Only a small num­ber of tables. 3 – 4 rooms at most. 10 – 15 tables.

noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Pizza — Launch Day 22 Sept 2009

Mobile Units in the Garage. These restau­rants are fran­chised, owner-​operated, and closely guided by me and the own­ing community/​orgs/​companies/​groups; the Fran­chisors. This is just for want of bet­ter words at the moment. I don’t par­tic­u­larly like nor advo­cate our cur­rent expres­sions of cor­po­rate ownership/control…I intend to con­sul­ta­tively design (insert com­mu­ni­ties, busi­ness own­ers, Uni­ver­i­ties, Schools etc here), more appro­pri­ate vehi­cles, but these will do for now to loosely con­vey the gen­eral ideas.

There’s 108 of them….to start.

The décor is quaint, homey, period, sec­ond hand, and all the tables, chairs, cut­lery, plates etc are bought from the Salvos and Op Shops and recy­cling out­lets. Etc.

Each house has it’s own con­tract man­aged herb and vege gar­den. All stuff that is not pro­duced on site is imported from a com­pany owned and run farm as close as pos­si­ble to each store in a town, city or dis­trict. (Any­thing that can­not be pro­duced on the farms is brought in e.g. Smoked Ocean Trout.)

Each Farm is large enough to estab­lish Tim­ber & Cop­ice Crops for Super­an­nu­a­tion, Build­ing Mate­r­ial and Fire­wood sup­plies to the Restaurants.

Each Restau­rant pro­vides live-​in accom­mo­da­tion for trainees (unem­ployed) and at least one home­less person.

Now don’t be fright­ened. This is just a dis­cus­sion point. I won’t even con­sider nego­ti­at­ing this one until the time is right and I have another planet to retreat to :-) No GST or Tax is paid. It all goes to feed­ing and hous­ing the homeless/​running asso­ci­ated community-​based for-​profit projects. It is accounted for to the Tax Office, but pay­ing to be a tax col­lec­tor is just plain stupid.

All ser­vices, Gas, Water, Elec­tric­ity are as sus­tain­able as pos­si­ble as quickly as pos­si­ble. E.g. Tank water & Damns, Grey water to the gar­dens. Wind, Solar, Heat Exchanger Power, Micro-​Hydro where applic­a­ble Etc etc…

The triple bot­tom line of this enter­prise is Peo­ple, Resilience and Energy.

This chap grew a chair. Neat huh? :-)

This chap grew a chair. Neat huh? :-) You can check out more of their cool stuff here — http://​www​.pook​tre​.com

The guid­ing prin­ci­ples that I men­tioned above are pretty much writ­ten in stone as far as I’m con­cerned. And it is likely that these will be the major stick­ing points. Why? Because enough is enough. Poli­cies need to be estab­lished that sup­port busi­ness logic rather than dis­tort­ing and under­min­ing it. The addic­tion to the cur­rent tiered gov­ern­ment pro­tec­tion racket is not viable. That is not to say that I intend to be antag­o­nis­tic toward the government…but as I have said too many times pre­vi­ously, it is not pos­si­ble to estab­lish ‘sus­tain­able’ any­thing in an unsus­tain­able con­text. Local energy must remain local, at least long enough for a sur­plus to be estab­lished and only then exported/​transferred out­side the biore­gion. Account­ing to gov­ern­ment using rea­son­able pro­to­cols is fine, but starv­ing an oth­er­wise viable biore­gion is sim­ply no longer accept­able and this idea will sim­ply no longer be this idea within such an energy drain.

Just last year Barack Obama said, when address­ing the pub­lic about the Global Finan­cial Crisis -

“…noth­ing less than the final ver­dict on an Eco­nomic Phi­los­o­phy that has com­pletely failed.” (Barak Obama – 2008)

So I’m not about to keep flog­ging a dead horse. And this enter­prise is not about any one par­tic­u­lar issue like Cli­mate Change, or Pol­lu­tion or Social Cap­i­tal or Human Rights or Health, but it will address all of them. I’m sick to death of hear­ing all these peo­ple ask stuff like ‘what’s your vision for the ‘new civ­i­liza­tion’, ‘green econ­omy’, ‘bet­ter world’ etc etc ad bluddy nau­seum. Has any­one mea­sured the car­bon foot­print for all that ban­gin’ on? I haven’t seen one. And as for wait­ing for lead­ers, and Global Coop­er­a­tion etc…I for­mally declare my vote of no con­fi­dence in cur­rent pol­i­tics, economies and mind-​sets in gen­eral. I’m just gunna do some­thing about it and if noth­ing comes of it, I’ll bluddy well keep going anyway…

Any­way, here are the guid­ing principles:

Nat­ural Cap­i­tal­ism — I am already a mem­ber of the Rocky Moun­tain Insti­tute (RMI), and I intend to fur­ther engage with and con­tribute to the great body of com­mon sense inno­va­tion that has been qui­etly con­structed over the past 30 years. It’s time has come. China has grabbed this ball and they are run­ning with it…3 Bil­lion legs can crack a fair pace :-) . I’m hop­ing they alone can pro­vide enough pull to flip the cur­rently insane, wrong, stu­pid mar­ket into one that actu­ally func­tions. And no I’m not anti-​capitalism or anti-​government or any­thing like that…if any­thing I’m anti-​bullshit and stu­pid­ity that costs lives…noSh-it! :-) Oh! By the way, the book Nat­ural Cap­i­tal­ism was pub­lished 10 years ago…the 30 years of work done by the RMI is cur­rently cul­mi­nat­ing in a project called ‘Rein­vent­ing Fire’.

Bio­mimicry - This idea has strong ties to the Rocky Moun­tain Insti­tute too…funny about that.

Have any of you read this — Win­ning the Oil Endgame? If not, do so…no excuses. This next video is a good synopsis:

Amory Lovins lays out his sim­ple plan for wean­ing the US off oil and revi­tal­iz­ing the economy.

It was pub­lished in 2004 for heaven’s sake…it’s inde­pen­dent, peer-​reviewed and co-​sponsored by the Pen­ta­gon. This doesn’t require new global lead­er­ship, or top-​down pol­icy dia­tribes (though a few encour­ag­ing admin poli­cies would help). No, this just uses what we’ve got and uses it to cre­ate profit. Why aren’t peo­ple using this stuff?..well they are. It has begun…but because there is so much invested in com­plex­ity and that even for a rel­a­tively small planet it’s still pretty big, and due to scal­a­bil­ity issues, mostly around com­mu­ni­ca­tions and mind-​sets, it is tak­ing a bit longer than ini­tially hoped…go China…yes I know that may seem ironic, but have a closer look :-) . This video Nat­ural Cap­i­tal­ism Ple­nary Dis­cus­sion (2009), is pretty long (about 90 min­utes, so watch your band­width allowance), and the rel­e­vant bit about China is about 2⁄3 of the way through…it’s the only sim­ple ref­er­ence I have.

Key­line Design — in my view the matrix upon which Per­ma­cul­ture was built. Water for Every Farm was pub­lished here in Aus­tralia in 1954!!! And still the best we can do in our Cap­i­tal is pro­lif­er­ate a design model that is over 150 years old…large expen­sive dams and pipelines. I am absolutely con­vinced that our coun­try can be drought-​proofed. How? Because I’ve drought proofed farms and prop­er­ties as a Per­ma­cul­ture Design Consultant.

And last but most most impor­tantly this; it’s another TED Video…AND IT’S A MUST SEE. I had it embed­ded ear­lier but the code was dicky and my arti­cle kept disappearing…which is a pisser because it looked pretty. Barry Schwarz artic­u­lates very well, what for me is the sin­gle most sig­nif­i­cant block­age and solu­tion to Sus­tain­able any­thing. Any­way, you’ll have to make do with this link.

Ok! I reckon that’ll do for a start.

I’m keen to get dis­cus­sion hap­pen­ing on this so dive in. My con­tacts are on the right. I’m on Twit­ter ‘@ noShitWFP’ and I’m hop­ing to get some func­tional mileage out of Google Wave ( nosh.lt.wfp @ google­wave dot com — Please Note: the ‘I’ is a lit­tle ‘L’ in ‘nosh.lt’…I repeat, it’s a small ‘L’…long story :-) )

Oh! And I did this basic Pow­er­Point thingy (approx. 900Kb in PDF), as an intro­duc­tory dis­cus­sion brief. I’m going to the local com­mu­nity coun­cil next week. I’ve already spo­ken with my Job Search Provider and they are keen to talk more.

Thanks for endur­ing this rather mas­sive missive…but hey, gotta start some­where ey? :-)

Cheers

Stephen G

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Don’t for­get your change…

| By Stephen Glanville | December 10th, 2009

Hi Folks :-) ,dont_forget_your_change

As you know I’ve been a bit ‘off the radar’ lately…I thought I’d touch base and let you know some of what I’ve been up to…

I’ve been check­ing out some stuff on Cli­mate Change…and some of it is heart­en­ing indeed.

Owing to my usual ten­dency of hav­ing a lot to say, I thought I’d spare one fella a dou­ble dose of dia­tribe and post my sec­ond com­ment here in response to his blog. Also I reck­oned my response was good and that you good folks might be inter­ested to get into a more tan­gi­ble dis­cus­sion about Cli­mate Change. Though I must say that just over the past cou­ple of weeks, some dis­cus­sions (like those referred to herein), have become more tan­gi­ble, rel­e­vant and potent.

That said, this is hardly doom and gloom…perhaps naively I credit folks with a bit more intel­li­gence than some would con­sider either rea­son­able or safe…but if folks are gunna panic and turn-​on each other, I reckon if we get that crap out of the way while we have some capac­ity to deal with it, rather than if/​when the pooh hits the fan, then we’ll have a bet­ter chance of grow­ing some flow­ers instead just hav­ing great piles of pooh…whadyareckon? :-)

Ok! Wade in and see what ya think. As I said, I’m keen for a ‘real’ dis­cus­sion on this and I hope you are too…

That fella’s name is Cameron Reilly. He runs a site on The Pod­cast Net­work called No Illu­sions with Cameron Reilly (as far as I can tell, but I could be wrong. I’m sure Cameron will cor­rect me if I’m wrong :-) ). He wrote an excel­lent piece called Ethics v Eco­nom­ics. Fol­low­ing my first com­ment on Cameron’s blog, he made a fine com­ment in response (included below), inspir­ing my reply which con­sti­tutes both the bulk of this arti­cle and it’s rai­son d’etre:

This is Cameron’s Com­ment in response to my first com­ment (I hope you guys are fol­low­ing this. It always sounds a lot more con­vo­luted when try­ing to explain stuff like this in writing…it’s buck­ets eas­ier if you just have a look :-) ):

Cameron said:

“Okay, now that we’ve cleared up the nature of our famil­ial connections…

You fin­ish with “what hope have we really got of actu­ally imple­ment­ing any­thing mean­ing­ful and actu­ally use­ful in a timely manner?”

Human his­tory abounds with sto­ries of peo­ple doing amaz­ing things when they needed to. Even in the 20th cen­tury, the peo­ples of the USSR, Ger­many and Japan some­how man­aged to re-​build their coun­tries after the most hor­rific of tragedy of WWII. I’m hop­ing it won’t take mas­sive scale tragedy before we get our heads out of the sand regard­ing cli­mate change and engi­neer a similar-​scale turn­around. It will take lead­er­ship, though. And that’s some­thing we are sorely lack­ing in Aus­tralia. Not just in the polit­i­cal scene – in the cor­po­rate and social are­nas also. We need a gen­er­a­tion of lead­ers to rise up and make the case for change on a national scale. And if WE do it, per­haps lead­ers will rise up in other coun­tries. We might say Al Gore has already taken that role in the USA. We need more lead­er­ship, though.”

I then posted a brief reply to Cameron’s excel­lent response, point­ing him here where I can waf­fle akimbo on my own turf :-) :

And then I replied with this:

Re: “Human his­tory abounds with sto­ries of peo­ple doing amaz­ing things when they needed to.”:

Indeed, I whole heart­edly agree. Yet, as I see it, the oper­a­tive term here is ‘needed to’.

I have recently had the plea­sure of read­ing the work of and engag­ing with Mr. Paul Gild­ing & Pro­fes­sor Jor­gen Ran­ders. In their bold draft dis­cus­sion paper – ‘The One Degree War Plan’ (http://​paulgild​ing​.com/ )– they make the fol­low­ing observation:

“It is clear that soci­ety is capa­ble of respond­ing dra­mat­i­cally to major threats when there is accep­tance of a cri­sis. At that point, all pre­vi­ous argu­ments against action are con­signed to the dust­bin. Mod­ern history’s strongest exam­ple is WWII; oth­ers include 9⁄11 and the recent finan­cial crisis.

This is how it will be on cli­mate change, but not yet. While the increas­ingly urgent sci­en­tific warn­ings are caus­ing rapid growth in the num­ber of peo­ple who believe, as we do, that we are already fac­ing a civilisation-​threatening cri­sis, it is not yet the dom­i­nant view.”

Re: “I’m hop­ing it won’t take mas­sive scale tragedy before we get our heads out of the sand regard­ing cli­mate change and engi­neer a similar-​scale turnaround.”:

I believe, as indi­cated by the above quote from “The One Degree War Plan’, “that we are already fac­ing a civilisation-​threatening crisis.”

There are rafts of rea­sons that our Cli­mate Mod­els are unable to accu­rately pre­dict impacts. Gener­i­cally it is attrib­uted to the num­ber of vari­ables. Our sci­en­tists have been say­ing for many, many years that ‘Cli­mate’ is not just about the weather.

If the cur­rent state of the planet is not a mas­sive scale tragedy I don’t know what is. I’m with you though…I’m hop­ing that the cur­rent mil­lions of deaths scat­tered across the planet as a result of hunger, war, home­less­ness, ‘good gov­ern­ment’ etc, doesn’t turn into bil­lions more deaths due to a sud­den cat­a­strophic event or series of events.

I’m also of the view that the loss of one life, or even a sin­gle depressed per­son, is a mas­sive scale tragedy. In a world where all is inter­con­nected, ‘Prox­im­ity’ is noth­ing more than a con­ve­nient disclaimer.

Re: “It will take lead­er­ship, though”:

Ah yes! Good ol’ lead­er­ship. I agree with you in prin­ci­ple. May I take it a step fur­ther by sug­gest­ing the term ‘Right Lead­er­ship’ (and no I don’t mean Right ‘Wing’ :-) ). I mean that we would need the right leadership.

How can that hap­pen within the con­straints and mech­a­nisms of our cur­rent par­a­digms? With our cur­rent mind­sets, labyrinthine pro­to­cols, pro­ce­dures and cor­rup­tion (Oops! Sorry, I meant hon­our­ing of ‘Con­flicts of Inter­est’), what capac­ity do we have of even recog­nis­ing a ‘right leader’, let alone get­ting him or her into a posi­tion to lead or keep­ing them there (insert Jesus, J.F Kennedy, Ghandi, Man­dela, Gough Whit­lam & Lionel Mur­phy here)? You men­tioned Al Gore. Again, I agree…but is he a leader for the USA? He’s been at it for how long?…40 years? And still some coun­tries and many from the US Cor­po­rate Sec­tor espe­cially, won’t even talk to him…

Barry Schwartz makes a pas­sion­ate call for “prac­ti­cal wis­dom” as an anti­dote to a soci­ety gone mad with bureau­cracy. He argues pow­er­fully that rules often fail us, incen­tives often back­fire, and prac­ti­cal, every­day wis­dom will help rebuild our world.

Along with our shared long term con­cerns, I have some that are a lit­tle more short-​term. It would be great if sud­denly we got all of the right lead­ers in the right places…but how long would it take for their effect to be realised using cur­rent par­a­digms? How long would it take and under what con­di­tions would new par­a­digms be deemed accept­able to ‘the main­stream’? And what hap­pens in the interim?

Only last year the Pres­i­dent of the United States stated pub­licly that the Eco­nomic Par­a­digm that we have worked with for the past cen­tury has failed? What was our response? Busi­ness as usual? It would appear so.

I have no doubts about humanity’s resilience fol­low­ing a cri­sis. What I’m wor­ried about is the dam­age human­ity might inflict on itself as a cri­sis approaches…or in this case, as the con­di­tions of the cri­sis grad­u­ally intensify.

Even if the econ­omy does unravel (and in my view it started unrav­el­ling the moment we began releas­ing money into the mar­ket place as debt rather than credit), I have no doubt that human­ity will sur­vive; but how many peo­ple will be lost dur­ing the process? Or to put a pos­i­tive spin on it; how many peo­ple will live hap­pily through such a transition?

For me, your excel­lent blog arti­cle poses the ques­tion, are we hav­ing the right conversations?

Clearly we are not. But how long will it take to debate and come to a func­tional and effec­tive agree­ment from the end­less nuances of dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines, philoso­phies, terms, def­i­n­i­tions and vested inter­ests (given that it’s taken us this long to get to where we are)?

What is the goal of such debate? An agreed real­ity? Isn’t that what the ‘world’s best’ are sup­posed to be cre­at­ing in Copen­hagen? And on day one, what was the main bar­rier to nego­ti­at­ing an agree­ment? Who pays for what? And part of that still appears to hinge upon a con­tin­u­ing debate about whether or not the issues we face are attrib­ut­able to human activ­ity? That’s like being elec­tro­cuted in a power sta­tion dur­ing an elec­tri­cal storm and refus­ing treat­ment until the First Aid guy deter­mines whether the bolt of elec­tric­ity came from the sky or the station!

Now I don’t pre­tend to be an expert on Inter­na­tional Trade or any­thing like that, but if I was an investor from another planet and a bunch of Earth fel­las turned up and slapped ‘The His­tory of the World – 20th Cen­tury’ on the table as a Busi­ness Plan in the hope that I would invest, my assess­ment would be some­thing like this:

You have a planet/​company that doesn’t even trade with any other planets/​companies and yet it is in extreme debt. Where has all the money gone? Its legal con­text is that of a non-​corporeal entity (there­fore either imag­i­nary or divine), that has full legal rights; so the man­age­ment bare lit­tle or no legal respon­si­bil­ity, account­abil­ity or con­se­quence. It’s insured by Insur­ance Com­pa­nies that it owns, and it inter­prets its own under­writ­ing against ref­er­ence points called ‘Acts of God’ (also inter­preted by the legally immune man­age­ment). The cur­rent con­di­tion of the site & infra­struc­ture pro­vides unas­sail­able phys­i­cal evi­dence (con­trary to the doc­u­men­ta­tion), that the man­age­ment has pre­tended to know what it was doing when clearly it didn’t, and has main­tained that pre­tence at the cost of it’s own peo­ple and cap­i­tal assets…and the man­age­ment change the terms and con­di­tions as it suits them. No, I think I’ll pass on that one thanks.

Philosopher-​comedian Emily Levine talks (hilar­i­ously) about sci­ence, math, soci­ety and the way every­thing con­nects. She’s a bril­liant trick­ster, pok­ing holes in our fixed ideas and bring­ing hid­den truths to light. Set­tle in and let her ping your brain.

Is it pos­si­ble to end a cir­cu­lar argu­ment? Or does some­thing from the out­side have to break the cir­cle so that it can become some­thing else?

Cheers

Stephen G

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Dream­time II…

| By Stephen Glanville | November 25th, 2009

Last year when I was doing Com­mu­nity Care Work, one of my reg­u­lars, and def­i­nitely my favourite ol’ chum was named Bill. I took him out twice a week for over a year.central_butterfly

Sadly ol’ Bill was couped up in a high-​care ward of an Aged Care Facil­ity, not because he required high lev­els of care, but sim­ply because he liked to wander.…everything else was on high-​beam. I reckon he got bored to death. He wasn’t suf­fer­ing from any kind of con­gen­i­tal disorder…he’d had 2 prangs and smacked his head in the same place both times. Must’ve been a few things he’d just really wanted to forget?

As Bill got less and less able to walk long dis­tances (5 klm or more was our norm), we would walk more & more to the pic­tures (for any o’ you young whipper-​snappers in the crowd, that’s ol’ fella talk for ‘Tha Moofies’ :-) ). So over a few months we grad­u­ally saw more movies until we were see­ing roughly a movie a week.

Dur­ing that time ‘Aus­tralia’ (the movie), was released in the­atres, with all the accom­pa­ny­ing ‘hoopla’; I thought, oh, screw that! It looks daggy. And 3 BLUDDY HOURS of it! No way Jose! So I assid­u­ously avoided it. I fig­ured, as with most movies, I’ll wait for the DVD.

Well, bug­ger me, if not a cou­ple of weeks ago, my ‘dearly belovem’ (that’s Karen :-) ), turns up at my place with a bunch o’ movies for our rit­ual week­end veg…Ooh! I mean intense cross cul­tural com­mu­ni­ca­tion stud­ies… ;-P And amongst her high den­sity, high fidelity horde was?.…Have a guess?…No, goooor­rrn! Have a guess!

See? I knew you’d get it…eventually ;-)

And damn, didn’t I put up a fight. I pissed and moaned for a whole day and a half…hang on…did that come out right? Oh well, you know what I mean…

joiningSo, to cut a long story even longer, we even­tu­ally sat down to watch Baz Lurhmann’s por­trayal of our back yard…good ol’ ‘Osstraaalya’. Did I like it you say?

What day is it? The 25th Novem­ber? And the movie showed up on about the 5th. Since then I reckon I’ve watched it about 10 times! Does that answer your ques­tion? :-)

For­tu­nately even I reckon o’l Hugh’s a hunk, so I can at least buddy-​up on Karen’s wavelength…most of it anyway…I’m not quite ready to jump that fence…mate ;-) And although I don’t reckon I could drink enough to wanna put a bit o’ rosie in Nicole’s cheeks (not my cuppa tea), I reckon she’s the best and well deserves every acco­lade & more for her craft…she’s great.

But why 10 times? It touched me…deeply…and does so each time. If I had to put a tag on what was most res­o­nant for me, I’d have to say the Gulipa (the Grand­far­ther, the “Magic Man”), and the sto­ries ema­nat­ing from him…which from my per­spec­tive was the whole Story.

The way the Coori Cul­ture (and I use that as a gen­eral term of respect across all coun­tries, because I don’t know exactly which coun­try the Grand­far­ther was from), was given cre­dence in a man­ner that I can only say I’m damn near proud of, even as a yet shame-​filled white fella…and it’s about bluddy time.

Now I dunno for sure, and it may not even be my place to spec­u­late, but this is my take some of the stuff we con­sider magic or mys­te­ri­ous about other cultures…I’m using our Land Keep­ers and the Gulipa as a ref­er­ence point: You can take most bush­men into the city and their signs are gone…he’s lost…you put most white fel­las in the bush and their signs are gone…he’s lost too…it’s that sim­ple. You grow up in place with your feet touchin’ the ground, there’s nothin’ magic about knowin’ ya way around…it’s just nat­ural. The excep­tion is if you’re a Gulipa and you have songs. Songs bring the land with ya…wherever ya are…and if ya sing ‘em, you can find ya way any­where, ’cause it’s all con­nected. We (lin­ear white fel­las), try to iden­tify, make and remem­ber sep­a­rate words…but what if some folks remem­ber the shape & con­tents of the land. And the shapes and the tones in their voice ARE the land and all her inhab­i­tants and all their rela­tion­ships? Ha! Twit­ter eat ya heart out ey? Like I said, dunno for sure, but that’s how it feels to me.

Any­way, this movie touched some­thing in me…something deep. Since then I’ve been set on a vision course the likes of which I haven’t felt for nigh on 15 years. My dreams have changed…for a start I’m remem­ber­ing more of them lately. I’ve gone on walkabout…at least on the inside. And last night, I went on walk­a­bout and who should I be singing the lines with but my ol’ mate, guide, men­tor & great friend Michael A. I don’t see Michael often, but when I do, it’s always a spec­tac­u­lar hon­our. I miss him. He lives up north near Byron Bay…haven’t seen him here in the Dream­ing for a few years…but last night we spent months in the Dreamtime.

Like my last Dream­time, I’m not gunna try and force it or judge it as it comes out…I’m just gunna write it as it comes. I know I should’ve writ­ten it down this morn­ing, but I had to go to the Dole Office and sign-​up, which really, really hurt and is a whole ‘nuther story (any­one use a well used multi-​functional mere male? :-) )…didn’t enjoy hav­ing to do that very much at all…though the bloke that had the unfor­tu­nate task of assum­ing that I was there to rort the sys­tem & inter­ro­gat­ing me within in an inch of my life was very decent (thanks Chris :-) ).

Michael A. says — “Don’t eat that ya silly bugger!”central_red

I say — “What?”

Michael says -“That? Gotta drink this first.”

No heat…but the desert blazed white orange, ochres and all the colours that are the Andegerebenha. Sky orange like a dark Amber crytal…but not heavy…bright & light and as open as a place with­out time. Air was mov­ing and not…fresh, white…dry, sweet. Could smell water for miles.

Could see exactly where I was all the time…except when we looked at each other. Could see the land all around and from above and below at the same time, like it’s normal.

Sacred places…walked for days in silence. Never tired…never pushed…moved, breathed…as if it was hap­pen­ing to us.

gadjini_centralSacred place. A rise that could not be seen until we were on it…but felt days before we arrived. We sat. Silent. Then in the city…country city…not Syd­ney city. Smaller, older, more country’ish. Michael pissed as a fart..didn’t know him…in a fight…bailed him out. Got pissed with him. Made friends. Back to his house. He’s a painter…he shows me the maps…the dream­ing maps…we laugh..others come and go…all very human, normal…annoying…I’m want­ing to go back…I started to remem­ber the rise in the land. He looks…laughs loud…stuffin’ his face with tucker and we’re gone…back on the rise…he’s laughin’, stuf­fin’ his face with tucker…we laugh.

We walk for weeks across the widest country…right through the middle.

Every now and then I would wake up in the dream and remem­ber I was dream­ing and say “Hey Michael…do you have any idea where we are? I gotta be back for when Karen comes over on Fri­day”. He roles around laugh­ing. Each time this hap­pens I have a wave of fear that passes real quick…like a moment of doubt before tak­ing a shot on a pool table…no big deal…but mas­sive in intensity…fleeting but com­plete. It crashes with my sense of the land…I can see the whole coun­try and feel it and where I am stand­ing in it…massive…red, gold space…central_forest

Michael is sick…we are in a portal…a key­hole in the land…northwest of Uluru…Gadjini’s head…we fall through the ground…floating…can’t speak of where it is…only we know…secret place…strong magic…Michael is sick…white stuff com­ing out of him…he’s cold and hot and weak but his eyes are white hot clear like a wolf on a hunt…he’s strong…I’m relaxed…he’s me & we know it. This is me dream­ing out my white…red dirt…cold & wet…sweet like the desert…rainforest in the por­tal on the surface…no urgency. I float up to the sur­face walk through the for­est eyes closed…singing, picking…float back through the ground…Michael is laying…white stuff all over his throat & chest.

Red earth, green plants, white stuff and moisture…a piece of hair and a drop of blood…a paste…smells sweet. I put it on his forehead…I sing and dance, not forced..I’m sung and I’m danced like it’s hap­pen­ing to me…like some­one is mov­ing me…no battle…feels nor­mal. Paste on my fore­head. A snake comes…a really big black one…She watches. I’m sung, and I’m danced. Days.

dreamtime_ii_transMichael and I wake up way way up north…he’s beaming…lot’s of painted Cooris…young, old…happy. I look all over and see where we’ve been and every­where else…I say to Michael, “did you drag me all this way?” He hits me, laughing…We sit for days…just sit. Singing in the distance…we sit…occasionally we share a look. But the land holds our vision…all of it.

I’m back in my house…a sense of space…massive. I miss him…I have no idea what I’ve done…yet. But I can feel it…I know it’s walkabout…it’s time to sing.

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Blank Can­vas Contest…

| By Stephen Glanville | November 2nd, 2009

Now this may sur­prise you almost as much as it does me… :-)

Blank_Canvas_Entry_1b_021109

My entry — click on image to make it go all big :-)

I sim­ply can­not remem­ber the last time I entered any kind of contest…it’s just not some­thing I’m inclined to do. Actu­ally, now that I think of it, I can remem­ber one…about 22 years ago, myself and a few mates were really pissed at a beach-​front hotel some­where near Coffs Har­bour. We were asked by some pro­mot­ers if we could throw an act together for their tal­ent con­test, as they were short on entrants. We did…we won $5000.00 and got even more pissed :-) …so as you can see it’s been a while…and this time, I’m com­pletely sober :-)

So why did I enter it? Because it’s run by a bloke I have a great deal of respect for. His name is Dr. Stephen Saun­ders. He is THE ONE AND ONLY SHOP­POL­O­GIST! (The only one I know of for sure). It is amaz­ing enough to me that he is a ‘Con­sumer Sci­en­tist’, but that he’s a damn good one is even bet­ter (not that I’m qual­i­fied to judge, but I just find his stuff very digestible).

If you haven’t seen his unique, very prac­ti­cal and extremely use­ful blog and blog­ging tech­nique, then it’s well worth drop­ping in to have a look…it only takes a minute…in fact it only ever takes a minute. That’s one of the things I like about it. At the risk of reveal­ing one of his secrets, I inter­pret his blogs as deftly lever­ag­ing the adage that ‘a pic­ture paints a thou­sand words’. There’s rarely any­thing more than a sen­tence or 2 to read…bluddy bril­liant I reckon :-)

Any­way, Stephen has run this lit­tle con­test to pro­mote his new eBook ‘Open Wal­lets’, and because I’m too stingy to buy one, I thought I’d win one off the bug­ger :-) My entry is above. In case you didn’t click on the SHOP­POL­O­GIST link above, the rules of the game can be found here.

Wish me luck…he’s a hard man :-)

Cheers

Stephen G

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Dream­time…

| By Stephen Glanville | October 31st, 2009

This post is ded­i­cated to a good friend of mine (he’ll know who he is :-) ), with whom I had a fine con­ver­sa­tion upon the day of yester.dream_write

Now I don’t want you to think that I’ve gone all ‘mung-​bean suckin’ hodad’ on ya, but I am human. I do have dreams…it’s just a long time since I have writ­ten them down as they are.

Most of our dreams get trans­lated into stuff like, well, every thing! But rarely do we just let our dreams speak as they are. So, with­out any edit­ing (except spelling & a bit of punc­tu­a­tion), with­out any thought and with­out any fur­ther ado, this is what my dream spoke this morning:

3 guys…2 broth­ers, 1 friend

Large house (brother’s). Older brother comes later.

Younger one still in school. Pho­tographs done in leadlight.

The broth­ers and friend are pri­vate school edu­cated. Older brother is a some kind of Con­sulate Advi­sor. Is Ger­manic decent. Elitist…snobby…very particular…nothing is good enough. His friend is also snobby but more of a follower.

House is expen­sive but sparsely furnished…looks like par­ents have not been there for a while. No housekeeping…just bland, not filthy.

I’m won­der­ing what the fuck I’m doing with these wankas and how the hell I ended up work­ing with a lead­light photo of a school uni­formed pubes­cent. Seemed to be an issue with how the lead­light was curing.

I watched and waited. Some­how the young fella and older brother seemed to be includ­ing me in more and more things. I didn’t fight it, but I didn’t really care much either…except about them. The older brother was so wound up I felt sad for him as he strug­gled to per­fect him­self and every­one around him.

The younger brother sim­ply did his best to aspire to, and please his brother. The friend was ambivalent…he just seemed to enjoy the pro­tec­tion offered by the narky older brother.

Though I cared about them and seem­ingly for them at times, I had no desire to spend more time with them than I needed to. It seemed that the objec­tive was to have a pic­ture (lead­light), that sat­is­fied the almost impos­si­ble require­ments of the older brother. The pho­to­graph was of his younger brother in his Pri­vate School Uniform.

I learned enough about these guys to be able to nav­i­gate them. The young brother grew to secretly love me like a far­ther. Secretly because of his con­trol­ling brother.

The brother grew to respect me, or at least trust me a bit. His friend remained present but ambivalent…like a bal­anc­ing force for the older brother’s volatil­ity. The older brother had no idea how much he relied on his friend to con­stantly val­i­date his very frag­ile ego.

I had the sense that their par­ents were gone…I was not judg­men­tal of the older brother. I seemed to know from the out­set that he was try­ing to be more than he thought he could be…a far­ther, a brother, a friend and a high level Con­sulate Advisor.

I won­dered how dif­fer­ent he was at work. Didn’t get to see that…which slightly annoyed me, because I’m usu­ally aware, as I was here, that this was my dream.

I didn’t actu­ally expe­ri­ence pho­tograph­ing or how they were taken or made. They kind of just appeared, were attrib­uted to me in some pro­fes­sional capac­ity and closely scru­ti­nised. The younger brother was always enthralled and loved the pho­tographs that I generated…for the older brother, noth­ing was good enough.
Organ­i­cally, over time, I taught them to relax…to sleep. The older brother had great dif­fi­culty sleeping.house

The pho­tographs were col­lected around the older brother. In his room (where his friend seemed to live as well), and in and down the hall out­side his room…and even­tu­ally, all over the very large house (very clas­sic light coloured imi­ta­tion french win­dows and attrib­utes with a fairly stan­dard design and mate­ri­als for the rest. The house was that pre­ten­tious almost white colour that tended to cre­ate a ster­ile atmos­phere that drove away fan­tasy and impreg­nated one with a glar­ing and rou­tine author­ity, whether the author­ity was present or not. It was on top of a hill over-​looking coun­try­side, town and ocean…but it wasn’t the largest house on the high­est hill…but close. I didn’t like it…it felt like an old mil­i­tary hos­pi­tal to me. Sharp light, sharp cor­ners and the aspect of the house made even the sun­light wrong. I could tol­er­ate it though because I knew I didn’t live there…in fact I knew I didn’t live any­where. I knew I was their guide man­i­fest, but my sta­tion, rel­a­tively speak­ing was not known, rel­e­vant or even thought about…but I noticed this).

To the older brother’s sur­prise the many things he dis­agreed with me and about me, about, came to pass before his eyes. He could not deny them. He was amazed, impressed, but didn’t know how to express it…so first he was irri­ta­ble, then he relied on his younger brother who unknow­ingly guided him toward an ambiva­lent ver­sion of appre­ci­a­tion. I watched him look­ing at the pho­tographs as they changed and matured. I told him that they required time to cure. That the images would emerge and clar­ify over time by absorb­ing the intent and energy of those around them…particularly the sub­jects of the pho­tographs if present. The older brother saw them change…he began to approve of the pho­tographs. My work was done.

The younger brother went back to school…I had earned the right and priv­i­lege to tease him and joke with him.

I went to his school with him and had some line that I used to both tease and flat­ter him…he loved to be embar­rassed by it.

I was lit­er­ally swamped by teenage girls at the school. One loved the line I used and we began to chant it…there was a full sym­phony orchestra…within min­utes we had put the younger brother’s tease line to music and the whole school joined in a crescendo of singing the song we’d made about the younger brother…he was not embar­rassed any more…he was stunned to blush­ing, welling tears of pride…I faded…they didn’t miss a beat…they didn’t notice I had gone…my job was done.

I remem­ber pass­ing through the house, the older brother was sit­ting on his bland bed in his bland almost white, glar­ing, author­i­tar­ian bed­room cry­ing like a baby. His friend was not there. I watched for a while. He looked up and around the room. He looked at his own reflec­tion in one of the photographs…he walked around the house. I could tell that he was see­ing it for the first time. He went out­side and sat on the steps with the view. He had a pho­to­graph in his hand. It was of him­self. It was bright and clear and com­plete and he could tell. He looked straight at me a cou­ple of times…through me. I felt him in me…as I did every­one in my dream…but he was feel­ing me too, in him…and that was the job done too.

Inter­pre­ta­tions wel­come :-)

Cheers

Stephen G

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Con­nec­tion­eer­ing…

| By Stephen Glanville | October 20th, 2009

Ok! I let my ‘Ooh! I’m so orig­i­nal’ fan­tasy live for a few min­utes before I Googled ‘con­nec­tion­eer­ing’. Once again I had ‘noth­ing new under the Sun’, uncer­e­mo­ni­oiusly shoved down my throat…but at least I didn’t look it up first? :-)

ripples_pond

With Web2.0 sweat­ing through her con­trac­tions, Web3.0 crown­ing and Google Wav­ing furi­ously from the top of ‘Mt Every­thing and to Hell with Con­tra­cep­tion’ (by invi­ta­tion only), it seems that we are approach­ing and deal­ing with the sub­ject of ‘con­nec­tions’ as we do most other things in our hum­ble lit­tle ‘Civilised World’…You thought I was gunna say ‘lit­er­ally’ didn’t you? :-)

INDUS­TRI­ALLY!

I was talk­ing with a good friend just last night…we were talk­ing about among other things, trust, per­cep­tion, what con­sti­tutes a pro­fes­sional per­sona, how does that mix (can it be mixed), with a ‘human being’ and how these are taking/​changing form in prac­tice? And then, when we’d fin­ished mak­ing our cuppas…Na! Only kid­ding :-P

Using blogs as a focal point, what struck me was that I had joined 2 blogs together for exactly the same rea­sons that my friend advo­cated sep­a­rat­ing them.

Why would one sep­a­rate blogs? You know?:

  • A Busi­ness Blog — where I’m very clear and ‘nor­mal’ and a ‘model cit­i­zen’ and oh so car­ing about YOUR needs;
  • A Poetry Blog — where I unleash my inner Swami Wankananda;
  • A Fam­ily Photo Blog — where I show you other people’s fam­ily pho­tos and call them mine so you think I’m nor­mal; and
  • A BDSM Face­book Page where I clev­erly call myself ‘myfisto’ and for­get all about IP Addresses?

Why join them then? I started with one blog for my noSh-​it! Wood-​Fired Pizza Busi­ness. Then I started another blog to explore another busi­ness idea. That became too much of a dis­trac­tion from my nubile mobile pizza empo­rium, so I decided to rel­e­gate it to an inter­est­ing discussion…I looked at my 2 appar­ently sep­a­rate blogs and started to think about why I got into the Pizza Busi­ness and why I started explor­ing other things so quickly thereafter?…My nature? Perhaps?

One could also say ‘bal­ance’ (I’m really start­ing to dis­like that word :-P )…but in the end, for me, like most things, the answer came before the question…back at the begin­ning of the circle…why did I get into the Pizza Busi­ness? noSh-​it! In all it’s forms, philoso­phies and applications…noSh-it! In ‘Osstraaa­lyunese’ you might call it ‘Fair Dinkum’, in the UK the oppo­site of a ‘Pork Pie!’ in the US…ummm, Coke?’… in a nut­shell, doing my best to keep it real…and that’s a bluddy big ask for a Gem­ini :-P

So to sep­a­rate or not to sep­a­rate? I brought my blogs together, mainly because I fig­ured that with com­mu­ni­ca­tion capac­ity and capa­bil­ity prop­a­gat­ing at an unprece­dented rate in all direc­tions, the notion of ‘sep­a­ra­tion’, espe­cially in a Search Engine Opti­mised World had been reduced almost to seman­tics. That if I go hither and thither, com­ment­ing, tweet­ing, rant­ing and rav­ing all over the planet, now it is a mat­ter of course for any­one with a com­puter and any­thing resem­bling an index fin­ger to know exactly who I am, where I’ve been and what I’m try­ing to hide…even if I use mul­ti­ple, cloaked identities…which I don’t, mak­ing it even eas­ier (oh! And just for the record, I don’t have a Face­book page either :-P ).

I fig­ured that inkeep­ing with the spirit of ‘noSh-​it!’, I would just keep it sim­ple, be myself and let the ‘piz­zas’ fall where they may (Mine are yummy cold any­way :-) . And if I was going to do that, keep­ing it in one place seemed to ade­quately address the ‘sim­ple’ part for sure.

I thought, why can’t some­one run a legit­i­mate and even for­mal busi­ness and not be a com­plete nut­ter on their time off? In a world where com­mu­ni­ca­tion is becom­ing liq­uid, does this, can this, should this dam­age one’s pro­fes­sional kudos? It would appear I have placed myself in a fine posi­tion to find out :-P

Hav­ing peeked at the world through these custom-​made lenses, it seemed to me that with all of our expo­nen­tially increas­ing tech­no­log­i­cal means of con­nect­ing, net­work­ing, opti­mis­ing, ‘uber-​ing’, ‘e-​thissing’ and ‘e-​thatting’, that our chal­lenges don’t seem to be dimin­ish­ing at an equiv­a­lent or even cor­re­lat­ing rate.

Which begs the ques­tion — Are we rush­ing to con­nect the dots at the risk of miss­ing the points?

Food is a shared neces­sity — but also a shared way of think­ing, argues Car­olyn Steel. Look­ing at food net­works offers an unusual and illu­mi­nat­ing way to explore how cities evolved

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Polit­i­cal Dynamic & a ‘Safe Cli­mate Bill’

| By Stephen Glanville | October 15th, 2009

Hi Folks,

I just posted this com­ment (per­haps ‘ser­mon’ would be more apt :-P ), on the Greens’ Blog under their post titled — “Launch­ing the Safe Cli­mate Bill” (posted 12 Octo­ber 2009).

Clicking on the image will take you to the Safe Climate Bill briefing paper.pdf

Click­ing on the image will take you to the Safe Cli­mate Bill brief­ing paper.pdf

Right at this moment (7.30pm), my com­ment is await­ing ‘mod­er­a­tion’. But whether or not it makes it past their ‘Thought Police’ doesn’t mat­ter. My ‘Thought Police’ (who wear fluffy slip­pers and carry wands instead of batons), reckon it might make for a half decent conversation…perhaps, a ‘life or deathly’ impor­tant one…see what you reckon?

============================================

Hi Folks,

Thanks for your efforts.

I don’t have any pro­fes­sional or polit­i­cal agenda. I’m not a scientist…I’m just ‘Joe Citizen’….but I have chil­dren, as do most of the peo­ple I care about (i.e. EVERYONE).

I have lis­tened to Christine’s audio brief, but I have not read the entire bill…yet.

I want to make a com­ment on the one thing that has repeat­edly attempted to take my atten­tion away from the issue at hand (if I can see it, it’s a pretty fair bet that it is also affect­ing oth­ers). For want of a bet­ter term I’ll call it ‘Polit­i­cal Dynamic’.

The premise for my com­ment is pretty basic — How can we pos­si­bly hope to cre­ate a sus­tain­able any­thing in an unsus­tain­able context?

What is that con­text? HOW we do busi­ness (and this is largely under­pinned by our Polit­i­cal Dynamic). In other words — It’s not what busi­ness we do, it is HOW we are doing it that needs to be addressed.

There is so much talk about chang­ing infra­struc­ture & leg­is­la­tion, & smart/​intelligent net­works etc, etc, etc. But how is any of that going to stick if we con­tinue with our now painfully bor­ing and insult­ing antag­o­nis­tic short-​term focused polit­i­cal systems/​practices/​attitudes?

We can talk about long-​term focused poli­cies, strate­gies and leg­is­la­tion until we’re all bluer in the face than we already are…but even a pre-​school level explo­ration of his­tory will con­firm that there truly is “noth­ing new under the sun”…that in ‘real­ity’ the atten­tion spans of polit­i­cal enti­ties and the results of their actions (usu­ally amount­ing to label chang­ing at our expense), are nearly as short as that of the media and con­se­quently, the public.

So, what repeat­edly attempts to take my atten­tion away from the issue at hand?

POL­I­TICS of course…

Christine’s audio brief BEGINS, not ends, BEGINS with the following:

““When Kevin Rudd’s Gov­ern­ment was elected, Kevin Rudd promised to be a leader on Cli­mate Change.…however the Labour Party has been a com­plete fail­ure in address­ing Cli­mate Change in the way that the sci­ence demands…”

Clearly, this is a spu­ri­ous argu­ment and only serves to under­mine your own posi­tion. He promised to be a LEADER ON CLI­MATE CHANGE! He didn’t promise to “address Cli­mate Change in the way that sci­ence demands”. There is a difference…a fairly bluddy BIG difference!…especially at the level of National Leadership…you of all peo­ple should know that? Had he not done what he ‘ACTU­ALLY PROMISED’, would we be hav­ing this con­ver­sa­tion? I think not! At the very least he cre­ated a start­ing point. He placed address­ing Cli­mate Change smack-​bang at the top of our country’s To-​Do list. He has also done more than any other leader I know of, to place Aus­tralia in a pos­i­tive lead­er­ship posi­tion on the Inter­na­tional Stage…the Lib­er­als et al have done all they can to sab­o­tage this pos­i­tive ‘Lead­er­ship’ activity…and for what? Address­ing Cli­mate Change?…Yeh right!

I can under­stand that it may seem that I’m defend­ing Mr Rudd, and that there­fore I do in fact have a polit­i­cal agenda…but if you are think­ing that, then it only rein­forces my argu­ment and the need for YOU also, to change your atti­tude. I don’t care who fixes the problem…I JUST WANT IT FIXED! And I’m sick to death of pay­ing taxes to fuel child­ish finger-​pointing and non-​constructive behav­iour in the high­est offices of our land.

So please, please, please, don’t con­tinue behav­ing like the pathetic and embar­rass­ing Lib­eral party, by inap­pro­pri­ately attack­ing oth­ers because you don’t know what else to do…or for any other reason…like get­ting elected…try hav­ing an elec­tion WITH­OUT A PLANET!…WITHOUT A POPULATION…WITHOUT A CONSTITUENCY!!!

Antag­o­nis­tic Pol­i­tics is far more dam­ag­ing and costly than an army of Coal Fired Power Stations.

There has to be a shift in our polit­i­cal dynamic such that our time, money, con­sid­er­a­tions and efforts com­ple­ment, rather than under­mine our coun­try and it’s objectives.

If this cli­mate change stuff is teach­ing us any­thing, it has to be that all things in our world are ‘Inter­con­nected’; that every­thing affects every­thing else and we all endure the con­se­quences of our actions or in-​actions. Where and when should (MUST), we start apply­ing what we are learn­ing? NOW! In the foun­da­tions of our civilization…otherwise we’re just build­ing yet more facades.

Even allo­pathic med­i­cine is real­is­ing that alter­na­tive med­i­cine wasn’t all mung-​beans and fairy dust; that only treat­ing symp­toms and deflect­ing respon­si­bil­ity is NOT con­ducive to healing!

Again, I haven’t analysed your new bill/​s, but your heart seems to be in the right place. If you have come up with a work­able and suit­able solu­tion (or even a start­ing point as the Labour Party HAS in fact done), don’t shoot your­selves and us in the foot by falling vic­tim to ‘tra­di­tions’ (e.g. Tra­di­tional Polit­i­cal Dynam­ics). It’s those ‘tra­di­tions’ (polit­i­cal, indus­trial, com­mer­cial etc), that got us into this mess isn’t it? And even I wasn’t around when all of that Monop­o­list and ‘Franken­stein­ian’ ground­work was laid. I, like you, have inher­ited it.

If we really are going to ensure the future of our chil­dren, then we should be set­ting an achiev­able, viable and respectable exam­ple shouldn’t we?…not behav­ing how we always have (i.e. like children!).

We should be demon­strat­ing that it is both pos­si­ble and enjoy­able to change; that liv­ing sus­tain­ably doesn’t have to be less fun than ‘nor­mal’ life…that it doesn’t have to mean moan­ing about what’s wrong, rid­ing a push-​bike and going with­out air conditioning…

So lets stop point­ing fin­gers (Con­flict Res­o­lu­tion Train­ing is read­ily avail­able), and try­ing to win brownie-​points through antag­o­nis­tic behav­iour. Let’s get focused on the under­ly­ing CAUSES and STAY FOCUSED ON SOLUTIONS…In the mean­time, indus­try and com­merce (even in it’s cur­rent form), can get on with buy­ing us some of the time we need by doing things like this:

Dan­ish archi­tect Bjarke Ingels rock­ets through photo/​video-​mingled sto­ries of his eco-​flashy designs. His build­ings not only look like nature — they act like nature: block­ing the wind, col­lect­ing solar energy — and cre­at­ing stun­ning views.

This is ACTU­ALLY HAP­PEN­ING NOW!

Cheers

Stephen Glanville

============================================

At the risk of repeat­ing myself…

Cheers

Stephen G

Hi Folks,

Thanks for your efforts.

I don’t have any pro­fes­sional or polit­i­cal agenda. I’m not a scientist…I’m just ‘Joe Citizen’….but I have chil­dren, as do most of the peo­ple I care about (i.e. EVERYONE).

I have lis­tened to Christine’s brief ( http://​www​.greensmps​.org​.au/​c​o​n​t​e​n​t​/​g​r​e​e​n​c​a​s​t​/​c​h​r​i​s​t​i​n​e​s​-​b​r​i​e​f​i​n​g​-​s​a​f​e​-​c​l​i​m​a​t​e​-​b​ill ), but I have not read the entire bill…yet.

I want to make a com­ment on the one thing that has repeat­edly attempts to take my atten­tion away from the issue at hand (if I can see, it’s a pretty fair bet that is affect­ing oth­ers). For want of a bet­ter term I’ll call it ‘Polit­i­cal Dynamic’.

The premise for my com­ment is pretty basic — How can we pos­si­bly hope to cre­ate a sus­tain­able any­thing in an unsus­tain­able context?

What is that con­text? HOW we do busi­ness (and this is largely under­pinned by our Polit­i­cal Dynamic). In other words — It’s not what busi­ness we do, it is HOW we are doing it that needs to addressed.

There is so much talk about chang­ing infra­struc­ture & leg­is­la­tion, & smart/​intelligent net­works etc, etc, etc. But how is any of that going to stick if we con­tinue with our now painfully bor­ing and insult­ing antag­o­nis­tic short-​term focused polit­i­cal systems/​practices/​attitudes?

We can talk about long-​term focused poli­cies, strate­gies and leg­is­la­tion until we’re all bluer in the face than we already are…but even a pre-​school level explo­ration of his­tory with con­firm that there truly is “noth­ing new under the sun”…that in ‘real­ity’ the atten­tion spans of polit­i­cal enti­ties and the results of their actions (usu­ally amount­ing to label chang­ing at our expense), are nearly as short as that of the media and con­se­quently, the public.

So, what repeat­edly attempts to take my atten­tion away from the issue at hand?

POL­I­TICS of course…

Christine’s audio brief BEGINS, not ends, BEGINS with the following:

“When Kevin Rudd’s Gov­ern­ment was elected, Kevin Rudd promised to be a leader on Cli­mate Change.…however the Labour Party has been a com­plete fail­ure in address­ing Cli­mate Change in the way that the sci­ence demands…”

Clearly, this is a spu­ri­ous argu­ment and only serves to under­mine your own posi­tion. He promised to be a LEADER ON CLI­MATE CHANGE! He didn’t promise to “address Cli­mate Change in the way that sci­ence demands”. There is a difference…a fairly bluddy BIG difference!…especially at the level of National Leadership…you of all peo­ple should know that? Had he not done what he ‘ACTU­ALLY PROMISED’, would we be hav­ing this con­ver­sa­tion? I think not! At the very least he cre­ated a start­ing point. He placed address­ing Cli­mate Change smack-​bang at the top of our country’s To-​Do list. He has also done more than any other leader I know of, to place Aus­tralia in a pos­i­tive lead­er­ship posi­tion on the Inter­na­tional Stage…the Lib­er­als et al have done all they can to sab­o­tage this pos­i­tive ‘Lead­er­ship’ activity…and for what? Address­ing Cli­mate Change?…Yeh right!

I can under­stand that it may seem that I’m defend­ing Mr Rudd, and that there­fore I do in fact have a polit­i­cal agenda…but if you are think­ing that, then it only rein­forces my argu­ment and the need for YOU also, to change your atti­tude. I don’t care who fixes the problem…I JUST WANT IT FIXED! And I’m sick to death of pay­ing taxes to fuel child­ish finger-​pointing and non-​constructive behav­iour in the high­est offices of our land.

So please, please, please, don’t con­tinue behav­ing like the pathetic and embar­rass­ing Lib­eral party, by inap­pro­pri­ately attack­ing oth­ers because you don’t know what else to do…or for any other reason…like get­ting elected…try hav­ing an elec­tion WITH­OUT A PLANET!…WITHOUT A POPULATION…WITHOUT A CONSTITUENCY!!!

Antag­o­nis­tic Pol­i­tics is far more dam­ag­ing and costly than an army of Coal Fired Power Stations.

There has to be shift in our polit­i­cal dynamic such that our time, money, con­sid­er­a­tions and efforts com­ple­ment, rather than under­mine our coun­try and it’s objectives.

If this cli­mate change stuff is teach­ing us any­thing, it has to be that all things in our world are ‘Inter­con­nected’; that every­thing affects every­thing else and we all endure the con­se­quences of our actions or in-​actions. Where and when should (MUST), we start apply­ing what we are learn­ing? NOW! In the foun­da­tions of our civilization…otherwise we’re just build­ing yet more facades.

Even allo­pathic med­i­cine is real­is­ing that alter­na­tive med­i­cine wasn’t all mung-​beans and fairy dust; that only treat­ing symp­toms and deflect­ing respon­si­bil­ity is NOT con­ducive to healing!

Again, I haven’t analysed your new bill/​s, but your heart seems to be in the right place. If you have come up with a work­able and suit­able solu­tion (or even a start­ing point as the Labour Party HAS in fact done), don’t shoot your­selves and us in the foot by falling vic­tim to ‘tra­di­tions’ (e.g. Tra­di­tional Polit­i­cal Dynam­ics). It’s those ‘tra­di­tions’ (polit­i­cal, indus­trial, com­mer­cial etc), that got us into this mess isn’t it? And even I wasn’t around when all of that Monop­o­list and ‘Franken­stein­ian’ ground­work was laid. I, like you, have inher­ited it.

If we really are going to ensure the future of our chil­dren, then we should be set­ting an achiev­able, viable and respectable exam­ple shouldn’t we?…not behav­ing how we always have (i.e. like children!).

We should be demon­strat­ing that it is both pos­si­ble and enjoy­able to change; that liv­ing sus­tain­ably doesn’t have to be less fun than ‘nor­mal’ life…that it doesn’t have to mean moan­ing about what’s wrong, rid­ing a push-​bike and going with­out air conditioning…

So lets stop point­ing fin­gers (Con­flict Res­o­lu­tion Train­ing is read­ily avail­able), and try­ing to win brownie-​points through antag­o­nis­tic behav­iour. Let’s get focused on the under­ly­ing CAUSES and STAY FOCUSED ON SOLUTIONS…In the mean­time, indus­try and com­merce (even in it’s cur­rent form), can get on with buy­ing us some of the time we need by doing things like this:

http://​www​.ted​.com/​t​a​l​k​s​/​b​j​a​r​k​e​_​i​n​g​e​l​s​_​3​_​w​a​r​p​_​s​p​e​e​d​_​a​r​c​h​i​t​e​c​t​u​r​e​_​t​a​l​e​s​.​h​tml

This is ACTU­ALLY HAP­PEN­ING NOW!

Cheers

Stephen Glanville

Posted in noSh-it! Edits Blog | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

In the name of WHAT?…

| By Stephen Glanville | October 13th, 2009

Pre­fer­ring to deal in per­son, our inno­cent ‘cit­i­zen’ opts for a per­sonal visit to a shop to place an order. Lit­tle does he know the chain of events he is unchaining…

Lit­tle does he know, that he is chained, by virtue of being reg­is­tered and cat­a­logued at birth, to a blind, non-​corporeal behe­moth with legal rights and multi-​dimensional tax deductibility…

Lit­tle does he know…indeed…

I think you get the picture?...

I think you get the picture?…

I remem­ber when I was dri­ving cabs, I picked up 2 cus­tomers at a local club (thank­fully, an Irish Club :-P ). Both cus­tomers were blind. One with a guide-​dog, one with a cane (very lim­ited sight). They quickly approached the cab as I exited to offer assis­tance if they asked for it. They didn’t.

The lady with the guide-​dog took her friend by the arm and pro­ceeded to direct him to the rear door of the cab. I had almost cir­cum­nav­i­gated the cab and was just in time to offer the only assis­tance I believed they required. It just kind of fell out of me…I said -  “now if this isn’t a case of the blind lead­ing the blind!”.

Like I said; thank­fully it was an Irish Club. The only assis­tance they actu­ally required was for me to catch them as they fell about in stitches of laugh­ter… :-)

So our intre­pid cit­i­zen, inno­cently placed his order (worth a poul­try $3000.00 over 2 years), jumped into his dinghy of appar­ent anonymity and unas­sum­ingly sailed back out into the ‘Sea of Val­ued Customers’.

Time passed…but only a billing cycle. Then, utter shock and hor­ror! He was sud­denly very important…he was sud­denly and extremely ‘overvalued’.

To cut a long and very painful story short, or at least give you the option to, I will leave you to read this let­ter, or not, at your own risk — Unval­ued Cus­tomer Let­ter — I’m sure you’ll extrap­o­late the rest…

The point? Not yet! A cou­ple of ques­tions though:

Is there some hid­den, or at least, not obvi­ous, eco­nomic ben­e­fit derived from cre­at­ing a large monop­o­lis­tic, cru­cial ser­vice provider, that is actu­ally intended to waste huge amounts of huge amounts (no, it not a typo), of the public’s time and resources?

Is there some mys­ti­cal muta­tion of the fabled ‘Mul­ti­plier Effect’ (which clearly even the Doyens of Eco­nom­ics can­not agree upon), that facil­i­tates an increased GDP derived from wast­ing the time of large num­bers of the public?

At his car­pet com­pany, Ray Ander­son has increased sales and dou­bled prof­its while turn­ing the tra­di­tional “take /​make /​waste” indus­trial sys­tem on its head. In a gen­tle, under­stated way, he shares a pow­er­ful vision for sus­tain­able commerce.

Or is it some­thing far more obvi­ous like, falsely and unsus­tain­ably inflat­ing employ­ment fig­ures by cre­at­ing heaps of jobs that don’t actu­ally pro­duce any­thing but a Mul­ti­plier Effect? e.g. Com­plaints, Lit­i­ga­tion„ Med­ical, Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, Counselling…?

Or are they just bluddy pompous dick­heads that are so des­per­ate to wring every last cent out of every pos­si­ble encounter that they’ve com­pletely lost site of Cost/​Benefit Ratio­nales, the Eco­nomic ‘Big Pic­ture’, con­se­quences, cus­tomers… and they don’t give a rat’s-arse about how much they cost the coun­try, so long as their share­hold­ers aren’t grumbling?

And all in the name of …God?, Pros­per­ity?, Com­mon Good?, Com­mon Wealth?, Progress, Com­mu­nity?, National Pride?…WHAT????

Posted in noSh-it! Edits Blog | Tagged , , , , , , | 9 Comments

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