The Reusable Sanitary Napkins project is headed by our eldest child at Youth in Act-Uganda Nabirye Moreen who trains the young girls how to make reusable Sanitary Napkins.

We call upon your support to help raise funds for this project and keep a Girl Child in School

Any donation helps.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/keep-a-girl-in-school-sanitary-napkins-project?teamInvite=ndbOwQ2D48Pz5UX55XOQFKZW4HkoqM4duiVv0zc5WLFT5MUV5b7EOYYRvYUGiV48

Hello friends, I warmly greet you in the mighty name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Today, we have received play toys, balls, some clothes, two pairs of shoes, school bags and other items from the world gift Japan. We are so happy for the helping hand rendered to the needy community with us and at the same time glorifying the name of God. Take a look at the pictures.

It's tough to make an impact. Outstanding content is more likely to be retweeted, increasing your reach and audience.

As a marketing channel, Twitter’s no longer optional. Everyone’s using it, which means you need to be too.

But because everyone’s using it, you can get lost in the crowd. It’s tough to make an impact.

The only way to stand out, is to be really good at Twitter. Your tweets need to be A+. Or even A+++:

Outstanding content is more likely to be retweeted, increasing your reach and audience. Your best bet for increasing Twitter reach is to get more of them, and the best way to do that is to post better content.

To help you out, we’ve put together eight quick tips that’ll make your tweets more twitt-ilating.

Shall we?

We also put these tips into a checklist for your office wall. Grab it here.

1. Know your audience

Hint: It’s not everyone. You want your tweets to hit home with the right people, so you’d better know what those people like.

Brittany Berger wrote all about the benefits of social listening. She says it lets you:

• Find out what your customers really think
• Re-evaluate your brand’s strengths and weaknesses
• Supplement hard data with genuine opinions
• Get customers’ views of your competitors
• Find new campaign ideas

Target specific keywords and hashtags that suit your ideal buyer. See what they’re talking about and update your content strategy accordingly.

Just listening will give your social marketing a boost

CLICK TO TWEET

Great marketers can even use monitoring to generate leads.

Let’s see how they do it.

How to listen

Option 1: get familiar with Twitter’s Advanced Search.

It lets you narrow your search to find exactly what you’re looking for. Like a regular search, but more advanced. If you’re listening for generic terms or popular phrases, this helps you eliminate some of the noise.

The best part is you can save your searches – up to 25 per account. It’s like having custom hashtags, just for you.

Create a handful of useful searches and revisit them each week. This is an easy way to follow conversations in your specific niche.

Option 2: use a monitoring tool. These take all of the work out of social media monitoring.

Set up alerts just like you’d build an advanced search. Receive daily reports about conversations on social media, plus real-time alerts when keywords are trending.

For social media, our favorite tools include Hootsuite, Social Mention, and Mention (of course).

2. Talk with your followers, not at them

Buffer’s Kevan Lee says you need to know the difference between “voice” and “tone.” Think of voice as your brand’s personality – a core part of its identity – and tone as your brand’s mood from day to day. As they explain it:

“Voice is a mission statement. Tone is the application of that mission.”

Voice doesn’t change – this is how you want your brand to be represented, always. But tone changes with context.

You also can’t always be selling. Twitter is a giant chat room. Most people are there for conversation, jokes, or education. You can’t spend all your time talking about yourself.

Here are some suggestions to help you balance promotion with other content:

• The 80/20 rule: 20% of your content can be promotional, but 80% of your content should be interesting and engaging to your audience.
• The 5-3-2 ratio: Five relevant pieces from others, three non-promotional from you, then two promotional posts.
• The 4-1-1 rule: Four pieces from others – plus one retweet – for every promotional tweet you send.

Focus on offering value to your followers – that’s what matters. Choose a ratio that makes sense to you, and try to keep to it.

3. Use relevant hashtags

Hashtags are Twitter’s way of bundling information together by keyword. People following hashtags are interested in that content. If your content suits one, you’ll reach an audience that’s keen to engage with it.

If you want to get the most from hashtags, check out Danielle Prager’s hashtag best practices. Some of her key tips are:

• Never use more than three hashtags per post.
• Keep them short. #LongStringsOfWordsAreAnnoying.
• The more precise, the better.
• Make them easy to remember and easy to spell.
• If you’re creating a campaign hashtag, be original.

Finally, a word of warning: don’t try to piggyback on irrelevant hashtags; you’ll look foolish.

4. Know when to tweet

Twitter is time-sensitive. Even with Twitter’s new algorithm, only the beginning of the user’s stream is affected. And it’s optional. That means you’re still relying largely on timing to get your content seen.

It may feel like the whole world is constantly online, but some times of the day are busier than others:

The best times of the day to tweet.

Image courtesy of QuickSprout

Think about television ads. Primetime spots are the most expensive, but they’re not right for every product. Toy brands prefer after-school slots, when their target audience is watching. Likewise, you’ll make the greatest impact on Twitter when your target audience is engaged.

Use tools like Audiense, Followerwonk, and Mention to find out when your target audience is engaged. Prioritize tweeting at these times, for maximum impact.

ways-to-make-tweets-more-impactful

5. Add calls-to-action

You want engaged followers. Every retweet is an opportunity to reach a whole new audience. But people don’t engage with content just because they feel like it. Tell them what you need from them.

Dan Zarella analyzed over 2.7 million tweets to see which CTAs led to the most retweets:

The best calls to action for retweets

“Help,” “retweet,” “please,” “how to,” and “follow” are among the most retweeted words. If you want to see engaged Twitter followers, you’d better use ‘em.

Twitter power use Madalyn Sklar uses CTAs extensively to boost her posts:

Use calls to action to help increase Twitter reach

Madalyn loves Twitter chats, and CTAs help her spread the word about her #TwitterSmarter

6. Realize less isn’t more

Twitter is a “microblogging” site. It would make sense that Twitter content should be shorter than posts on other social networks. Not exactly.

Buffer and SumAll teamed up to make this monster infographic showing the optimal length for posts on various social networks. For instance, Facebook posts with around 40 characters see the highest engagement. For LinkedIn, you’re aiming for 25 words.

The perfect length for social media posts, according to SumAll

Image courtesy of SumAll

Even though Twitter places a premium on characters, the sweet spot for Twitter copy is between 70 and 100 characters.

To improve your copy, Cornell University made this funky A/B tester to predict which of two tweets should get more retweets.

7. Use images

Buffer found that pictures triple the rate of retweets, and nearly double the rate of likes. And because images take up Twitter real estate, your message becomes more prominent with a picture.

But what if you don’t have good, original images to share?

Create “quote pictures”

One Twitter study found that pictures lead to 35% more retweets, and that quotes increase retweets by 19%. I’m no math magician, but 35% + 19% = billions!

Or maybe it doesn’t work like that.

The point is, combine quotes and images for maximum impact.

There are plenty of tools that’ll help you do this. Canva, Pablo (by Buffer), and PicMonkey are all popular choices. Quote pictures are simple to make, and are sure to increase engagement.

8. Be personal

Don’t tweet like a robot. This is social media, and users enjoy a familiar touch.

CLICK TO TWEET

When appropriate, name the person tweeting. It gives a more personal feel to your tweets.

Name the person tweeting to give a personal feel

Harvard Business Review says that “empathy” is the key indicator of whether a company “gets” Twitter or not. They say empathy consists of “reassurance, authenticity, and emotional connection.” Basically, the best brands on Twitter don’t sound like brands. They sound like people.

Your tweets don’t need to save the rainforest (although great party trick, if you know how), you just want to seem human.

So there you have have it

Eight quick and easy tips to make your tweets more impactful. Start using them right away.

Want more help building your Twitter reach? We’ve got ya!

twitter marketing

Patrick Whatman

Content Marketer @Mention

Patrick Whatman is a content marketer for Spendesk, Mention, and other growing businesses. He lives in Paris, loves music, and writes his own brand of cultural criticism for fun. Tweet him @mrwhatman where he mainly talks digital marketing, American sports and New Zealand trivia.

Be in the know

• “The term chemtrail is a combination of the words “chemical” and “trail,” just as contrail is a contraction of “condensation trail.” The term does not refer to other forms of aerial spraying such as agricultural spraying (‘crop dusting’), cloud seeding, skywriting, or aerial firefighting. The term specifically refers to aerial trails … caused by the systematic high-altitude release of chemical substances not found in ordinary contrails, resulting in the appearance of characteristic sky tracks.
  
  “The chemtrail … trails left by aircraft are chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for purposes undisclosed to the general public and directed by various government officials.
  
  “… the existence of chemtrails … phenomena as streams that persist for hours and that, with their criss-cross, grid-like or parallel stripe patterns, eventually blend to form large clouds. Proponents view the presence of visible color spectra in the streams, unusual concentrations of sky tracks in a single area, or lingering tracks left by unmarked or military airplanes flying at atypical altitudes or locations as markers of chemtrails.
  – Wikipedia

(You know when Wikipedia provides such an accurate description, superficial though it may be, that there’s much more to this covert op than even the best researchers have been able to determine.)

For a more in depth discussion we will defer to the experts who have scientifically analyzed chemtrails to the greatest extent possible. Their explanation is as good as it gets.
GeoEngineering Watch

As for the chemical components which have been found in their wake, these known toxins can no longer be denied. The following website is a good place to start to answer these two questions.
Geoengineering & Chemtrails: What In The World Are They Spraying? And Why?

Here is a list of chemicals which are routinely disseminated via chemtrail spraying:

• “Over the past decade, independent testing of Chemtrails around the country has shown a dangerous, extremely poisonous brew that includes: barium, nano aluminum-coated fiberglass [known as CHAFF], radioactive thorium, cadmium, chromium, nickel, desiccated blood, mold spores, yellow fungal mycotoxins, ethylene dibromide, and polymer fibers. Barium can be compared to the toxicity of arsenic. Barium is known to adversely affect the heart. Aluminum has a history of damaging brain function. Independent researchers and labs continue to show off-the-scale levels of these poisons. A few “anonymous” officials have acknowledged this on-going aerosol spraying.”[1]

We in no way mean to minimize the incessant injury to human health across the planet which occurs through the breathing and ingestion of the chemicals which are contained in chemtrails. What good can possibly come from barium salts or aluminum oxide or vaporized mercury or strontium 90 or uranium 238 being sprayed throughout the skies worldwide? Clearly, the extremely deleterious effects to human health, as well as to all living organisms, is self evident.

However, the purpose of this essay is not to further unveil their agenda with regard to human engineering of the physical organism. Rather, the scope of this article is to lay bare the most profound and fundamental alterations which geo-engineering is producing to the planet and its atmosphere. When these are both permanently altered in ways that are irreversible, the human race is then confronted with an extinction level event (ELE). Ongoing, slow motion, insidious, under the radar, pernicious to living organisms, but nevertheless an ELE.

Geo-engineering is a term which includes highly advanced forms of applied science and technologies, various newfangled chemical agents and synthetic materials, scientific bending of physical reality, as well as an assortment of reverse engineered modalities which are combined to produce specific outcomes. Because of the complexity of this essentially callow experiment, there are an infinite number of permutations which can be executed at any given time or place. Therefore, the number of opportunities for things to go wrong can be intensified exponentially.

Of course, the Butterfly Effect takes on new and dramatic meaning in the context of geo-engineering because nothing ever happens in a vacuum on this blue orb of ours. In fact, the more that the scientific community attempts to engineer weather (e.g. by manipulating hurricane and tornadoes or creating rain clouds) the more the boomerrang effect takes hold.

• “A butterfly flaps its wings somewhere and the wind changes, and a warm front hits a cold front off the coast of western Africa and before you know it you’ve got a hurricane closing in. By the time anyone figured out the storm was coming, it was too late to do anything but batten down the hatches and exercise damage control.” ― Karen Marie Moning, Darkfever

For those who have never seen the actual aerosol sprays being ejected from the planes which are specially equipped, here are just a few snapshots. We only wish to make the point that this global chemtrail operation is certainly a ‘little more’ consequential than a butterfly beating its wings in Brazil or Botswana.

• HAARP-generated frequencies being conveyed through chemtrail-laden skies

The rapid proliferation of chemtrail spraying over the past few years has greatly increased the opportunities for frequencies to be disseminated through the ‘new’ atmosphere that is being engineered. These frequencies are set to produce a number of different outcomes, the most significant being to slow down the global warming phenomenon which is currently manifesting everywhere on the planet.

Because of such ill-fated attempts to effectuate such drastic changes in weather patterns that have been established for centuries, we now see drought where rain was once plentiful. And monsoons where there was drought.

For instance there are locations in Northern California and Oregon that have been without rain for six months. The forests in that area are literally dying because of lack of water and their consequent weakening which makes them susceptible to pestilence and disease.

Likewise, there are areas in the Southeast such as Florida and South Georgia which have just seen their first monsoon season in modern history. The meteorological dynamics for both of these radical shifts are directly cause by geo-engineering. In fact, although it is a very complicated story, and one that is almost unbelievable at times, conclusive evidence has been amassed that supports the ubiquitous damage to the environment caused by chemtrailsand geo-engineering.

In our next essay we will lay bare the geo-engineering agenda which has given rise to these climatological anomalies. When evaluated in the aggregate around the globe, it will be understood that weather patterns on Planet Earth will never be the same again. It is for this reason that the Cosmic Convergence Research Group (CCRG) has begun this series on Geo-engineering and Chemtrails.

There is perhaps no greater threat to the sustainability of life on Earth than this issue of geo-engineering. One of the primary reasons is because it remains hidden and denied by the governments of the world. Therefore it continues unabated, and is expanded with every turn of the globe.

Those of us who know and have witnessed its exceptionally destructive results, and have protested, have been faced with fierce resistance. We intend to deeply explore the reasons for this unparalleled obstruction, and reveal how critical it is that humankind terminate this agenda once and for all.

For reasons that will become obvious, the CCRG highly recommends the viewing and distribution of the following two videos:

What in the World Are They Spraying? (Full Length)

Conclusion

How can their possibly be a conclusion to this introductory piece on geo-engineering when we’ve barely scratched the surface?

When glaciers that have survived over millennia are melting at record rates, and the polar icecaps are disintegrating before our eyes, one begins to apprehend the gravity of this matter. Were one to objectively assess the catastrophic weather events over the past ten years, it would become readily apparent that forces are at work that cannot be slowed down. Any attempt to do so will only make matters substantially worse. And so they have.

Because of man’s insistence on playing god with the forces of nature, the normal balance has been irrevocably altered. As the scientific community continues to apply a “pharmaceutical approach” to fix things, it is clear that much worse scenarios are being set in motion. By treating the symptoms of a planetary transformation which must take its course, those governments and corporations responsible have essentially thrown more fuel on the fire. The “fire” of global warming (or global climate change, whichever you prefer) will not be extinguished until Mother Earth has completed a requisite period of renewal and rebirth.

It’s now time for the planetary civilization to participate in, rather than impede, this necessary process of planetary metamorphosis.

Cosmic Convergence Research Group
Submitted: September 11, 2013
cosmicconvergence2012@gmail.com
Why in the World are They Spraying? (Full Length Documentary)

Notes

[1] “Chemtrails: The Consequences of Toxic Metals and Chemical Aerosols on Human Health” By Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri, Global Research, May 12, 2010

Required Reading:

To fully understand why such a fundamentally flawed geo-engineering paradigm
was even created, the following essay will provide some answers:

Cosmic Convergence Accelerates Epochal Planetary Transformation

Author’s Note

The key take-away from this essay is that geo-engineering represent perhaps the single greatest threat to the biosphere. Because of its pervasiveness and profundity, geo-engineering has the potential to perpetuate numerous self-destructive feedback loops many of which have already been operative for decades.
Especially when considered in the context of 2013 catastophism, geo-engineering may very well provide the straw that breaks the back of Planet Earth. Why? Because of the convergence of so many other ongoing events and processes – both manmade and naturally occurring on the earth and within the solar system – which present considerable stresses to the planetary living environment.

When the multitude of ecosystems start to collapse around the world, those breaking points become history. Each of them may eventually translate to a point of no return, if they haven’t already. As certain key environmental thresholds are exceeded, humankind is challenged to reverse trends which may no longer be possible to reverse. Too many detrimental and/or counter-productive trajectories are already pointing northward.

• It is in this global context which geo-engineering can produce many awesome, unknown, and irrevocable unintended consequences. It appears to serve as a trigger for much of what has already been thrown out of balance. By working synergistically with other negative feedback loops, geo-engineering can also serve to significantly accentuate various downward spirals of planetary and atmospheric degradation.

We are looking for forward looking individuals who are guided by spiritual insight to help us create a Spiritual Family Network Community. It is well past the hour when we begin to develop our own Communication Networks for Planetary Work and Social Networking.

Spiritual Family Network has software engineering that combines the best features of Facebook such as Personal and Group Banners, Friends lists, likes, comments, messaging, online chats, views counters, instant share links either on the Community or on Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn and Twitter. It has a Twitter feature called The Wire for posting important tweets. It has many YouTube features for posting videos in a Video Menu and embedding videos in Pages and Blogs. 

A highly organized and full featured Group Plugin with its own menu systems for Group navigation and activity stream for easy viewing of Group activities. The Group Function Virtually creates an Independent Website that can be linked to a Domain Name. It has Quora like features for Questions and Answers an essential teaching platform. A message system as well as an Announcement feature for promoting Events and important information. Plus, a separate Events calendar for posting events and listing attending members.

A full featured Personal Profile with a rich text editor. Both personal and Group Cover Banners and separate profile avatars. It features both member and Group Photo Albums with thumbnails for easy viewing.

All this in a completely advertisement free browsing and Social Networking platform devoted to the spiritual work of this day and generation. A creative online atmosphere with no distractions from the pursuit of higher knowledge and spiritual living.

We have also added a Fundraiser Plugin for sponsoring the spiritual work of the world. Already we have been successful in raising funding and support for Groups engaged in the spiritual work of this day and generation. 

What we are looking for now is advanced human teachers of truth to add valuable thought gems to guide a troubled world of space into a glorious future.

Please seriously consider joining our growing family of truth seekers and spirit livers both here on Facebook and on our secure commerce free server at https://SpiritualFamily.net

Thank you for your time and consideration of this project. Godspeed!

Paul Kemp

Admin at Spiritual Family Network. 

At the himba of Namibia in Southern Africa, the date of birth of a child is fixed, not at the time of its arrival in the world, nor in its design, but much earlier: since the day the child is thought in His Mother's mind.⠀

When a woman decides she's going to have a child, she settle down and rests under a tree, and she listens until she can hear the song of the child who wants to be born. And after she heard this child's song, she comes back to the man who will be the father of the child to teach him that song. And then, when they make love to physically design the child, they sing the song of the child, to invite him.⠀

When the mother is pregnant, she teaches the singing of this child to the midwives and older women of the village. So, when the child is born, old women and people around him sing his song to welcome him.⠀

As the child grows, the other villagers learn his song. So if the child falls, or gets hurt, he always finds someone to pick him up and sing his song. Similarly, if the child does something wonderful, or successfully passes through the rites of passage, the people of the village sing his song to honor him.⠀

In the tribe, there is another opportunity where villagers sing for the child. If, at any time during his life, the person commits an aberrant crime or social act, the individual is called in the centre of the village and the people of the community form a circle around him. Then they sing his song.⠀

The tribe recognizes that the correction of antisocial behaviour does not pass through punishment, it is by love and reminder of identity. When you recognize your own song, you don't want or need to do anything that would harm the other.⠀

And the same way through their lives. In Marriage, songs are sung together.⠀

And when he gets old and he is lying in his bed, ready to die, all the villagers will gather besides him to sing his song for him for the last time.

Published on
Thursday, April 11, 2019
by TomDispatch
byAnn Jones

Thorstein Veblen (detail), 1934. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of the Associates of the Sitter. (Photo: the University of Chicago Centennial Catalogues) 

Distracted daily by the bloviating POTUS? Here, then, is a small suggestion. Focus your mind for a moment on one simple (yet deeply complex) truth: we are living in a Veblen Moment.

That’s Thorstein Veblen, the greatest American thinker you probably never heard of (or forgot). His working life -- from 1890 to 1923 -- coincided with America’s first Gilded Age, so named by Mark Twain, whose novel of that title lampooned the greedy corruption of the country’s most illustrious gentlemen. Veblen had a similarly dark, sardonic sense of humor.

Now, in America’s second (bigger and better) Gilded Age, in a world of staggering inequality, believe me, it helps to read him again.

In his student days at Johns Hopkins, Yale, and finally Cornell, already a master of many languages, he studied anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and political economy (the old fashioned term for what’s now called economics). That was back when economists were concerned with the real-life conditions of human beings, and wouldn’t have settled for data from an illusory “free market.”

Veblen got his initial job, teaching political economy at a salary of $520 a year, in 1890 when the University of Chicago first opened its doors. Back in the days before SATs and admissions scandals, that school was founded and funded by John D. Rockefeller, the classic robber baron of Standard Oil. (Think of him as the Mark Zuckerberg of his day.) Even half a century before the free-market economist Milton Friedman captured Chicago’s economics department with dogma that serves the ruling class, Rockefeller called the university “the best investment” he ever made. Still, from the beginning, Thorstein Veblen was there, prepared to focus his mind on Rockefeller and his cronies, the cream of the upper class and the most ruthless profiteers behind that Gilded Age.

He was already asking questions that deserve to be raised again in the 1% world of 2019. How had such a conspicuous lordly class developed in America? What purpose did it serve? What did the members of the leisure class actually do with their time and money? And why did so many of the ruthlessly over-worked, under-paid lower classes tolerate such a peculiar, lopsided social arrangement in which they were so clearly the losers?

Veblen addressed those questions in his first and still best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899. The influential literary critic and novelist William Dean Howells, the “dean of American letters,” perfectly captured the effect of Veblen’s gleeful, poker-faced scientific style in an awestruck review. “In the passionless calm with which the author pursues his investigation,” Howells wrote, “there is apparently no animus for or against a leisure class. It is his affair simply to find out how and why and what it is. If the result is to leave the reader with a feeling which the author never shows, that seems to be solely the effect of the facts.”

The book made a big splash. It left smug, witless readers of the leisure class amused. But readers already in revolt, in what came to be known as the Progressive Era, came away with contempt for the filthy rich (a feeling that today, with a smug, witless plutocrat in the White House, should be a lot more common than it is).

What Veblen Saw

The now commonplace phrase “leisure class” was Veblen’s invention and he was careful to define it: “The term ‘leisure,’ as here used, does not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is non-productive consumption of time. Time is consumed non-productively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness.”

Veblen observed a world in which that leisure class, looking down its collective nose at the laboring masses, was all around him, but he saw evidence of something else as well. His anthropological studies revealed earlier cooperative, peaceable cultures that had supported no such idle class at all. In them, men and women had labored together, motivated by an instinctive pride in workmanship, a natural desire to emulate the best workers, and a deep parental concern -- a parental bent he called it -- for the welfare of future generations. As the child of Norwegian immigrants, Veblen himself had grown up on a Minnesota farm in the midst of a close-knit Norwegian-speaking community. He knew what just such a cooperative culture was like and what was possible, even in a gilded (and deeply impoverished) world.

But anthropology also recorded all too many class-ridden societies that saved upper-class men for the “honourable employments”: governance, warfare, priestly office, or sports.  Veblen noted that such arrangements elicited aggressive, dominant behavior that, over time, caused societies to change for the worse. Indeed, those aggressive upper-class men soon discovered the special pleasure that lay in taking whatever they wanted by “seizure,” as Veblen termed it. Such an aggressive way of living and acting, in turn, became the definition of manly “prowess,” admired even by the working class subjected by it. By contrast, actual work -- the laborious production of the goods needed by society -- was devalued. As Veblen put it, “The obtaining [of goods] by other methods than seizure comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his best estate.” It seems that more than a century ago, the dominant men of the previous Gilded Age were, like our president, already spinning their own publicity.

A scientific Darwinian, Veblen saw that such changes developed gradually from alterations in the material circumstances of life. New technology, he understood, sped up industrialization, which in turn attracted those men of the leisure class, always on the lookout for the next thing of value to seize and make their own. When “industrial methods have been developed to such a degree of efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for,” Veblen wrote, the watchful men struck like birds of prey.

Such constant “predation,” he suggested, soon became the “habitual, conventional resource” of the parasitical class. In this way, a more peaceable, communal existence had evolved into the grim, combative industrial age in which he found himself: an age shadowed by predators seeking only profits and power, and putting down any workers who tried to stand up for themselves. To Veblen this change was not merely “mechanical.” It was a spiritual transformation.

The Conspicuous Class

Classical economists from Adam Smith on typically depicted economic man as a rational creature, acting circumspectly in his own self-interest. In Veblen’s work, however, the only men -- and they were all men then -- acting that way were those robber barons, admired for their “prowess” by the very working-class guys they preyed upon. (Think of President Trump and his besotted MAGA-hatted followers.) Veblen’s lowly workers still seemed to be impelled by the “instinct for emulation.” They didn’t want to overthrow the leisure class.  They wanted to climb up into it.

For their part, the leisured gents asserted their superiority by making a public show of their leisure or, as Veblen put it, their “conspicuous abstention from labour.” To play golf, for example, as The Donald has spent much of his presidency doing, became at once “the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement” and “the conventional index of reputability.” After all, he wrote, “the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time.” In Donald Trump’s version of the same, he displayed his penchant for “conspicuous consumption” by making himself the owner of a global chain of golf courses where he performs his “conspicuous leisure” by cheating up a storm and carrying what Veblen called a “conspicuous abstention from labour” to particularly enviable heights.

Veblen devoted 14 chapters of The Theory of the Leisure Class to analyzing every aspect of the life of the plutocrat living in a gilded world and the woman who accompanied him on his conspicuous outings, elaborately packaged in constricting clothing, crippling high heels, and “excessively long hair,” to indicate just how unfit she was for work and how much she was “still the man’s chattel.” Such women, he wrote, were “servants to whom, in the differentiation of economic functions, has been delegated the office of putting in evidence their master’s ability to pay.” (Think POTUS again and whomever he once displayed with a certain possessive pride only to pay hush money to thereafter.)

And all of that’s only from chapter seven, “Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture.” Today, each of those now-century-old chapters remains a still-applicable little masterpiece of observation, insight, and audacity, though it was probably the 14th and last chapter that got him fired from Rockefeller’s university: “The Higher Learning as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture.” How timely is that?

The (Re)tardiness of Conservatives

As both an evolutionary and an institutional economist (two fields he originated), Veblen contended that our habits of thought and our institutions must necessarily “change with changing circumstances.” Unfortunately, they often seem anchored in place instead, bound by the social and psychological inertia of conservatism. But why should that be so?

Veblen had a simple answer. The leisure class is so sheltered from inevitable changes going on in the rest of society that it will adapt its views, if at all, “tardily.” Comfortably clueless (or calculating), the wealthy leisure class drags its heels (or digs them in) to retard economic and social forces that make for change. Hence the name “conservatives." That (re)tardiness -- that time lag imposed by conservative complacency -- stalls and stifles the lives of everyone else and the timely economic development of the nation. (Think of our neglected infrastructure, education, housing, health care, public transport -- you know the lengthening list today.)

Accepting and adjusting to social or economic change, unfortunately, requires prolonged “mental effort,” from which the leisured conservative mind quite automatically recoils. But so, too, Veblen said, do the minds of the “abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance.” The lower classes were -- and this seems a familiar reality in the age of Trump -- as conservative as the upper class simply because the poor “cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow,” while “the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands.” It was, of course, a situation from which they, unlike the poor, made a bundle in an age (both Veblen’s and ours) in which money flows only uphill to the 1%.

Veblen gave this analytic screw one more turn. Called a “savage” economist, in his meticulous and deceptively neutral prose, he described in the passage that follows a truly savage and deliberate process:

“It follows that the institution of a leisure class acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as much as it may of the means of sustenance and so reducing their consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale.”

And privation always stands as an obstacle to innovation and change. In this way, the industrial, technological, and social progress of the whole society is retarded or perhaps even thrown into reverse. Such are the self-perpetuating effects of the unequal distribution of wealth. And reader take note: the leisure class brings about these results on purpose.

The Demolition of Democracy

But how, at the turn of the nineteenth century, had America’s great experiment in democracy come to this? In his 1904 book The Theory of Business Enterprise, Veblen zoomed in for a close up of America’s most influential man: “the Business Man.” To classical economists, this enterprising fellow was a generator of economic progress. To Veblen, he was “the Predator” personified: the man who invests in industry, any industry, simply to extract profits from it. Veblen saw that such predators created nothing, produced nothing, and did nothing of economic significance but seize profits.

Of course, Veblen, who could build a house with his own hands, imagined a working world free of such predators. He envisioned an innovative industrial world in which the labor of producing goods would be performed by machines tended by technicians and engineers. In the advanced factories of his mind’s eye, there was no role, no place at all, for the predatory Business Man. Yet Veblen also knew that the natural-born predator of Gilded Age America was already creating a kind of scaffolding of financial transactions above and beyond the factory floor -- a lattice of loans, credits, capitalizations, and the like -- so that he could then take advantage of the “disruptions” of production caused by such encumbrances to seize yet more profits. In a pinch, the predator was, as Veblen saw it, always ready to go further, to throw a wrench into the works, to move into the role of outright “Saboteur.”

Here Veblen’s image of the predatory characters who dominated his Gilded Age runs up against the far glossier, more gilded image of the entrepreneurial executive hailed by most economists and business boosters of his time and ours. Yet in book after book, he continued to strip the gilded cloaks from America’s tycoons, leaving them naked on the factory floor, with one hand jamming the machinery of American life and the other in the till.

Today, in our Second Even-Glitzier Gilded Age, with a Veblen Moment come round again, his conclusions seem self-evident. In fact, his predators pale beside a single image that he himself might have found incredible, the image of three hallowed multi-billionaires of our own Veblen Moment who hold more wealth than the bottom 160 million Americans.

The Rise of the Predatory State

Why, then, when Veblen saw America’s plutocratic bent so clearly, is he now neglected? Better to ask, who among America’s moguls wouldn’t want to suppress such a clear-eyed genius? Economist James K. Galbraith suggests that Veblen was eclipsed by the Cold War, which offered only two alternatives, communism or capitalism -- with America’s largely unfettered capitalist system presenting itself as a “conservative” norm and not what it actually was and remains: the extreme and cruel antithesis of communism.

When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, it left only one alternative: the triumphant fantasy of the “free market.” What survived, in other words, was only the post-Veblen economics of John D. Rockefeller’s university: the “free market” doctrines of Milton Friedman, founder of the brand of economics popular among conservatives and businessmen and known as the Chicago School.

Ever since, America has once again been gripped by the heavy hands of the predators and of the legislators they buy. Veblen’s leisure class is now eclipsed by those even richer than rich, the top 1% of the 1%, a celestial crew even more remote from the productive labor of working men and women than were those nineteenth-century robber barons. For decades now, from the ascendancy of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to Bill Clinton’s New Democrats in the 1990s to the militarized world of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to the self-proclaimed billionaire con man now in the Oval Office, the plutocrats have continued to shower their dark money on the legislative process. Their only frustration: that the left-over reforms of Veblen’s own “Progressive Era” and those of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal still somehow stand (though for how long no one knows).

As Galbraith pointed out in his 2008 book The Predator State, the frustrated predators of the twenty-first century sneakily changed tactics: they aimed to capture the government themselves, to become the state. And so they have. In the Trump era, they have created a government in which current regulators are former lobbyists for the very predators they are supposed to restrain. Similarly, the members of Trump’s cabinet are now the saboteurs: shrinking the State Department, starving public schools, feeding big Pharma with Medicare funds, handing over national parks and public lands to “developers,” and denying science and climate change altogether, just to start down a long list. Meanwhile, our Predator President, when not golfing, leaps about the deconstruction site, waving his hands and hurling abuse, a baron of distraction, commanding attention while the backroom boys (and girls) demolish the institutions of law and democracy.

Later in life, Veblen, the evolutionary who believed that no one could foresee the future, nonetheless felt sure that the American capitalist system, as it was, could not last. He thought it would eventually fall apart. He went on teaching at Stanford, the University of Missouri, and then the New School for Social Research, and writing a raft of brilliant articles and eight more books. Among them, The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1920) may be the best summation of his once astonishing and now essential views. He died at the age of 72 in August 1929. Two months later, the financial scaffolding collapsed and the whole predatory system came crashing down.

To the end, Veblen had hoped that one day the Predators would be driven from the marketplace and the workers would find their way to socialism. Yet a century ago, it seemed to him more likely that the Predators and Saboteurs, collaborating as they did even then with politicians and government lackeys, would increasingly amass more profits, more power, more adulation from the men of the working class, until one day, when those very plutocrats actually captured the government and owned the state, a Gilded Business Man would arise to become a kind of primitive Warlord and Dictator. He would then preside over a new and more powerful regime and the triumph in America of a system we would eventually recognize and call by its modern name: fascism.

© 2019 TomDispatch.com

I Oversaw the US Nuclear Power Industry.  Now I Think It Should Be Banned.

The danger from climate change no longer outweighs the risks of nuclear accidents.

"My journey, from admiring nuclear power to fearing it, [is now] complete," writes Jaczko. "This tech is no longer a viable strategy for dealing with climate change, nor is it a competitive source of power." (Image: Olivier Bonhomme/For The Washington Post)

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1-Auto repair shops will disappear.

2-A petrol/diesel engine has 20,000 individual parts. An electrical motor
has 20. Electric cars are sold with lifetime guarantees and are only
repaired by dealers. It takes only 10 minutes to remove and replace an
electric motor.

3-Faulty electric motors are not repaired in the dealership but are sent to
a regional repair shop that repairs them with robots.

4-Your electric motor malfunction light goes on, so you drive up to what
looks like a car wash, and your car is towed through while you have a cup
of coffee and out comes your car with a new electric motor!

5-Petrol pumps will go away.

6-Street corners will have meters that dispense electricity.
Companies will install electrical recharging stations; in fact, they’ve
already started in the developed world.

7-Smart major auto manufacturers have already designated money to start
building new plants that only build electric cars.

8-Coal industries will go away. Gasoline/oil companies will go away.
Drilling for oil will stop. So say goodbye to OPEC! The middle-east is in
trouble.

9-Homes will produce and store more electrical energy during the day and
then they use and will sell it back to the grid. The grid stores it and
dispenses it to industries that are high electricity users. Has anybody
seen the Tesla roof?

10-A baby of today will only see personal cars in museums. The FUTURE is
approaching faster than most of us can handle.

11-In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper
worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and
they went bankrupt. Who would have thought of that ever happening?

12-What happened to Kodak and Polaroid will happen in a lot of industries
in the next 5-10 years … and most people don't see it coming.

13-Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later, you would never take pictures
on film again? With today’s smart phones, who even has a camera these days?

14-Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had
10,000 pixels, but followed Moore's law. So as with all exponential
technologies, it was a disappointment for a time, before it became way
superior and became mainstream in only a few short years.

15-It will now happen again (but much faster) with Artificial Intelligence,health, autonomous and electric cars,education, 3D printing, agriculture
and jobs.

16-Forget the book, “Future Shock”, welcome to the 4th Industrial
Revolution.

17-Software has disrupted and will continue to disrupt most traditional
industries in the next 5-10 years.

18-UBER is just a software tool, they don't own any cars, and are now the
biggest taxi company in the world! Ask any taxi driver if they saw that
coming.

19-Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they
don't own any properties. Ask Hilton Hotels if they saw that coming.

20-Artificial Intelligence: Computers become exponentially better in
understanding the world. This year, a computer beat the best Go-player in
the world, 10 years earlier than expected.

21-In the USA, young lawyers already don't get jobs. Because of IBM's
Watson, you can get legal advice (so far for right now, the basic
stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when
done by humans. So, if you study law, stop immediately. There will be 90%
fewer lawyers in the future, (what a thought!) only omniscient specialists
will remain.

22-Watson already helps nurses diagnosing cancer, its 4 times more accurate
than human nurses

23-Facebook now has a pattern recognition software that can recognize faces
better than humans. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than
humans.

24-Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self-driving cars are already here.
In the next 2 years, the entire industry will start to be disrupted. You
won't want to own a car anymore as you will call a car with your phone, it
will show up at your location and drive you to your destination.

25-You will not need to park it you will only pay for the driven distance
and you can be productive while driving The very young children of today
will never get a driver's license and will never own a car.

26-This will change our cities, because we will need 90-95% fewer cars. We
can transform former parking spaces into green parks.

27-About 1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide
including distracted or drunk driving. We now have one accident every
60,000 miles; with autonomous driving that will drop to 1 accident in
6 million miles. That will save a million lives plus worldwide each year.

28-Most traditional car companies will doubtless become bankrupt. They will
try the evolutionary approach and just build a better car, while tech
companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will do the revolutionary approach and
build a computer on wheels.

29-Look at what Volvo is doing right now; no more internal combustion
engines in their vehicles starting this year with the 2019 models, using
all electric or hybrid only, with the intent of phasing out hybrid models.

30-Many engineers from Volkswagen and Audi are completely terrified of
Tesla and they should be. Look at all the companies offering all electric
vehicles. That was unheard of, only a few years ago.

31-Insurance companies will have massive trouble because, without
accidents, the costs will become cheaper. Their car insurance business
model will disappear.

32-Real estate will change. Because if you can work while you commute,
people will abandon their towers to move far away to more beautiful
affordable neighborhoods.

33-Electric cars will become mainstream about 2030. Cities will be less
noisy because all new cars will run on electricity.

34-Cities will have much cleaner air as well.

35-Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean.

36-Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but you
can now see the burgeoning impact. And it’s just getting ramped up.

37-Fossil energy companies are desperately trying to limit access to the
grid to prevent competition from home solar installations, but that simply
cannot continue - technology will take care of that strategy.

38-Health: The Tricorder X price will be announced this year. There are
companies who will build a medical device (called the "Tricorder"
from Star Trek) that works with your phone, which takes your retina scan,
your blood sample and you breath into it. It then analyses 54 bio-markers
that will identify nearly any Disease. There are dozens of phone apps out
there right now for health purposes.

39. The future remains bright for Model railroaders (aka: electric train enthusiasts)!

WELCOME TO TOMORROW – some of it actually arrived a few years ago. . .

WILD LIFE PROTECTION:

1. Canada bans captivity of whales, dolphins and porpoises for entertainment

2. Spain bans Bull Fighting at annual Toro festival. Thanks to pressure from PETA & PACMA 

AIR POLLUTION:

3. Germany to close all 84 coal-fired power plants 

HEALTH:

4. Mandatory Vaccinations baned in Sweden 

5. Meditation part of 370 British schools 

6. Vegan Options in New York hospitals 

7. Tim Hortons goes with plant-based breakfast sandwiches in 4000 locations 

8. Poland’s Prime Minister sings Global Appeal to stop 5G 

9. Louisiana calls for study on health impact of 5G 

10. Hungary destroys 1000 acres maize fields contaminated with Monsanto corn. All GMO is banned in Hungary. Banff cancels Canada Fireworks to protect wildlife 

11. Germany opens 62 miles of car-free highway 

12. Netherlands using polluted silt to build artificial islands creating new habitat in Markermeer Lake 

SOCIAL:

13. Tennessee makes community college free 

AGRICULTURE:

14. Plant Based Meats - $300,000,000 plant being built in Indiana as market doubles in 2 years.

15. Beyond Meat Shares jump as news of beef contribution of CO2 is realized 

16. New Brunswick promises a 30% reduction in herbicide spraying on power lines 

LEGAL:

17. $3,800,000 fine to Husky Energy for 2016 pipeline leak of 225,000l of heavy oil into North Saskatchewan River. (where does that money go?) 

FEMALE LEADERSHIP:

18. First female president in Slovakia Vowing to fight impunity and champion justice in a country shaken by a journalist's murder. 

19. Iceland elects 41 yr female environmentalist 

SPEAKING OUT:

20. Robert Kennedy goes public against Big Pharma 

PLASTICS:

21. Maine bans styrofoam food containers 

22. Canada bans single use plastics accessories like straws - (it’s a start) 

23. Water refill stations on streets in Glasgow to prevent single use plastic use. 

24. Japan makes it illegal to through away appliances as part of recycling regime 

TREES:

25. Ethiopia begins planting 4,000,000,000 trees with 200 donators giving $173,000US each for the project 

26. Scotland planted 22,000,000 trees last year covering 11,200 hectares and will continue for 6 years. 

BEES:

27. Ohio planting wild flowers along highways throughout the state. Also reduces mowing and approx. 3000 tons of CO2 emissions each year. 

28. Virginia offers free beehives to residents 

HOMELESS the HOUSING FIRST PRINCIPLE:

29. Tiny houses in Whittier Heights Village in Seattle created by women carpenters 

30. Finland, has created 3500 homes reducing the homeless rate by 35% by adopting the theory that a secure foundation makes it easier to solve the rest. 

31. Homeless Pods in Newport England 

PROMISING TECHNOLOGIES:

32. Philip Ross develops growing bricks from fungi 

33. Transparent Solar Panel Windows using organic molecules to absorb light. Michigan State University 

34. Clothing from pineapple and bananas instead of leather and cotton saving, water, co2, and animals. 

35. Turning desert in fertile soil by spraying clay and water. 

Saving Earth calls on each of us to do 4 things:

1. Stay wise to anti-planet actions
2. Celebrate our small victories
3. Know that we are making a difference
4. Nature is on our side Make your own action plan plus

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