Last of the Chivalrous

At the core of the economic challenges that industry and educational systems face is the unionized workforce. Now that the economic burdens of these corporations have become our economic burdens,  there is a massive blame fest pointed at unions by conservatives. I am a conservative minded but socially concerned citizen, business owner and non-union member.

If corporations are living beings- they are like body builders- and unions are the immune response of an overworked mal-nurished body. The corporation’s role is to trim the fat, build muscle at lowest possible cost.

In this example, getting bail out money is like a body builder using steroids. It ends with a shrunken, saggy and limp business at the end of the day.

Unions would exist as tyrannical gangs if corporations did not exist. Big business nursed the unions. Unions were created out of need. Without them, our basic human rights as employees would have been sold out long ago.

I believe we need to see reform across the board, especially in education, lower, higher and anywhere it is said to be provided. I believe we need to address the ongoing evils of big business as we simultaneously address and explore union issues.

The cost of living has only increased, unions exist to get what is best for the employees. Big businesses do the same. One cannot attack one without addressing the other. This is a natural war. Corporations do not serve the people (nor does government in many cases) and they cannot be trusted to adequately provide for their employee community. It is not a priority and they often use the image to establish an illusion. The inherent nature of corporations is cannibalistic and focused on one thing, profit.

Small businesses struggle with the dichotomy of their roles in the community and their role in the local economy. Corporations are machines and do not enjoy the human condition.  If you laid off the board members and CE-NOs the machine would continue to work like a FORD Excursion in cruise control or a run away freight train.  If they have all the rights of a human being, they need to be held as liable and accountable as a small business.

This is next to impossible without hitting them in the only line they can read- the bottom line. Unions are the natural response to corporate robots and translate human to robot. Let’s mature beyond simply blaming unions for social and economic problems and address the complexity of the issue.

Performance Based Pay

In Business

Job Security was the go to excuse for paying employees less money. Job security turned out to be a complete illusion, ask anyone who recently retired from the airline industry or any number of companies. Depending on the risk and employee history, employers should expect to pay more where employees can percieve the risk of  a short term relationship. Independent contractors do this all the time and since corporations have failed to demonstrate integrity across the board perhaps it’s time that the masses held out and acted as independent contractors more.  The corporate giants would save trillions in health care and people could make a decent wage.

Education

Here is how I see the future of unions playing out in Education, perhaps the most important institution in dire need of reform. The problem with performance based pay is who determines good performance. I believe parents in any given district, graduates, college students, along with district superintendent and the teachers unions should play a  more direct role in determining performance of teachers.

Silly but Incredibly Practical Performance Solutions

Use an A-F or 5 star rating. Rate My Professor, is a great way to analyze teacher performance based on student opinion. If this were balanced with administrative viewpoint and combined into a 5 star rating system, I think we could accomplish more.

Terms in contract where x amount consecutive semesters will force teachers to attend more training camps, programs and resources and ultimately get fired if they cannot perform.

On the primary educational front, teachers in turn should be allowed to issue syllabi  to parents describing expectations, requirements of students and parental involvement. So many parents squirm at the notion but don’t you want what is best for the brats you are sending to public daycare? Parents need to be more involved and if the student needs to be held accountable as well. There are many free programs for the underprivileged and struggling that are under-utilized (though many are being cut as we speak).

Do you ever walk into those moments and get that feeling as if you traveled back in time or fell back into a dream you had? I deal with this every time I get a good night’s sleep. I have vivid premonitions and one day walk right into them at some future point in my life. The difference between this and Deja Vu is that I can remember the circumstances and details  of the situation and describe them  before they happen. I confirmed this with friends by talking about my dreams  especially with the friends who were in the dreams and asking them to remember the conversation, only to creep them out when it happens.

Sometimes, I stop people I recognize from my dreams and confront them, only to find out I have never met them before and then later finding them enter my life again. It is like Quantum Leap but without the cross dressing and the holograms.

This has been going on since I was a child. I have studied it and wondered what I am supposed to do with the ability and what exactly it is. I’ve read some dismissive clinical explanations that were inaccurate to my experience and I’ve also heard many a nut job ramble about obvious hallucinations linked with their drug habits in early adulthood.  I have discovered a few rules and distinctions that allow me to cope with the dreams.

Not all of my dreams are premonitions or they are sometimes tainted by the expression of subconscious fears/desires. When strong feelings are involved it can blur or twist the image. The circumstances are true but the outcome is different. People dismiss the dreams as useless if they cannot produce a consistent reliable result or probability. Yet I know when my fears/desires interfere with what I see and how it is effecting  the vision. It is true that I  can’t always rely on an outcome where strong feelings are involved, however, the circumstances are always correct. Our brains don’t keep time and I can only define a moment by the circumstances, environment and details surrounding it.

Environment is also a great time/location indicator. The smell of the air, the humidity, season are all available to my senses.

A premonition  can flow into a dream. It can flow into one causing more confusion. Consciousness and lucidity sneak up on you as you begin to pay closer attention. This phenomenon functions like peripheral vision or super position in string theory. The instant I pay cognitive attention to the premonition, other more playful and imaginative parts of my brain take over.

Perhaps the obvious reasons for those who find it difficult to explain these phenomenon are as follows:

1. Describing smell and climate is difficult to do accurately. Anyone can write a poem to describe the romantic picture perfect moment, but capturing accurate intel from the future is more difficult.

2. Defining the endpoint.  Interference from the conscious mind as the vision transitions over to a lucid dream get in the way of our vision. The end point is not the end of the dream. I at least don’t have convenient cues in my visions where the credits roll and the directors and stunt men are listed.

3. Strong emotions cannot be ignored by the subconscious and are placed appropriately into the vision. This is like taking the issues, moods, fears and desires of today and placing them on stage in the world of tomorrow. This is further convoluted by the emotions and imaginings of the future moment. My premonitions are visions of myself in my head; experiencing and interpreting an event. I not only see actions but thoughts as well. The events, thoughts and emotions are compressed together and it becomes difficult to distinguish them. This gift is not just the foretelling of the events but also foretelling of thoughts and mindsets if nothing is changed. Imagine a specific critical moment or emergency arising in your life and instead of responding, you freeze with fear, resulting in harm or suffering to yourself or others. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how you will handle a future crisis, allowing you to reaffirm your confidence or focus on change and preparation for that moment? It is quite a nice feature and anyone can do it.

4. Those same strong emotions that can be identified and separated in the vision, can change as they do in the present moment. The perceived future sent from my subconscious allows me to prepare for the possibility and I believe that is all one can hope to do.

5.

What is Going On?

I can’t rule anything out but I believe that we barely have an inkling of an idea of the capacity or capability of the human mind. I believe that the subconscious works with an emotional & logical computer that predicts events as if with mathematical formula. This is the nature of intuition, it is like math that can assign variables for emotions/

I recently dreamed I was on my friend’s boat,  a large boat, maybe a houseboat or sail boat. I know it took place on a warm climate in a location that is foreign to me at the moment. I was confronted with someone who I couldn’t readily recall their name or recognize in the dream but they were from  my past and also had a boat. If this were simply a dream, we’d all be dressed as pirates. The context and story I keep to myself, yet I am curious about the circumstances. I wonder where and when this moment will be? I trust it to come and believe it true just as I trust and believe in the next sunrise.

What do you do with the information given from the premonition?

If you strongly want it to happen or be prevented do not try and force a sequence of events and things into place. The mind is predicting these things given your natural tendencies so interfering by seeking to stop a series of events may not help and may only make matters worse. Why? Fear is predictable and can make us do stupid things. Genuine compassion or love on the other hand, is either harder to predict or given infinite possibility by the mind. It seems to be the only wild card, so only good things may surprise you! These genuine feelings are perhaps more complex. primal or buried more deeply in the human psyche or subconscious.

1. Write it down, every sight smell and circumstance.

2. At first, separate or take away any fears and desires. They are less reliable. Take away the elements you know you have strong feelings about and those are solid details to cling to.

3. You are often left with a vague event with specific circumstances, feelings and thoughts. Explore the thoughts and feelings and try to decide if they were appropriate for the moment. Then, encourage and develop the skills, behaviors and thought patterns that will bring those events into your life.

A scary, true, dramatic,  crazy story.

Years before meeting my girlfriend, I had a premonition about rafting with some friends and a girlfriend, I did not know. I knew at the time that the girl was my girlfriend, and the people my friends. I could feel the mental association and their roles. I could smell the sweetness of cedar and bland minerals and metals of the water. The mountains I thought.

The girl and I were in a kayak, going down a river riddled with rapids in seemingly the desert. We hit a large rapid and crashed into a rock that crippled and flipped the kayak sending us overboard. I remember the temperature of the water and the bulging awkwardness of my life jacket. I swam to the girl and carried her to shore. She had drowned in the water. I remember the fear the most. The fear awoke my senses and I then interfered and lost the vision.

This was startling for several reasons. At the time, I was with another woman, so I found the experience scary and inconvenient foreshadowing. Also, I found it difficult to share the dream with anyone else other than closest friends who would remain unaffected by the change in social roles.  Another basic reason I found the dream frightening the notion of dying or the death of a loved one especially right in front of you is traumatizing. I also didn’t think I knew enough about kayaking, white water rafting and tried to avoid dangerous activities that didn’t involve showing off or massive quantities of alcohol.

I wrote about the dream and wrote notes to  become more comfortable on water and to master fears doing far scarier things than kayaking. The fear kept me in pursuit of knowledge, preparation and confidence. I was not going to let this all happen. I thought that I could keep things as they were if I worked hard to prevent change. The duh factor eventually kicked me in the forehead. Change is the only constant.

Well, life marched on and things changed. I changed. For several reasons I found myself to be an action/extreme outdoor sport junkie and a new woman was brought into my life. I did not recognize her from the dream until earlier this week, when we were putting into the water. My girlfriend had rented a raft, and it threw me off. Things did not click until, upon having the wrong oars and less experience on the raft that we traded with our friends onto the kayak. I immediately remembered the dream and thought to myself about cancelling the trip or changing positions. Instead of crapping my pants or trying to avoid the condition, I remembered that I was shown the events for a reason and I spent the whole trip on the water enjoying the experience and being confidentally aware and ever attentitive to the dangers.

We made it half way down our route, 10 miles down the East fork of the Carson river, to our camp site without a hitch. We got through the toughest section of the rapids without flipping over or hitting any rocks. After camping for a day and a half, I was slightly worried for the rest of the journey, noting if anything were to happen, it would happen on that day. I tried not to think about it and made sure to be extra attentitive when reading the river, rapids and rocks. My girlfriend often poked fun at my overly serious tone- which is often very Indiana Jones on all of my adventures. I made sure to make fun of myself as often as I could and we thankfully avoided calamity and arrived at our destination safely.

The Spooky Ending. Cue the Twilight Zone narrator.

I don’t know if I foresaw a different trip with the same people or if it was my fear that I percieved in the original vision and prepared myself for the possible outcome, thereby avoiding it altogether. Perhaps it is a parallel life or time continuum that I was peaking at in my sleep. One thing is for sure, it was not random neurons firing, or the brain completely at insignificant play. I am quite sure our brains are more capable than we give credit.

duh dunh duhhhh!

Over and out- Post rafting pix soon

Ask yourself this in your day to day, are you focused more on thank you or f@4k you?

If you are focused on the latter, you are likely to be pessimistic and unhappy. The negative outlook is expressed in traffic, or at your job with clients and customers, at home with your kids, spouse, pets and inanimate objects. Think about those two words and how they are working out for your life. Think about the supporting rationalizations of your attitude. Are they accurate? Are they true or are you giving into your own pattern of negativity or fear?

From personal experience, the many business owners, executives and employees I’ve worked with over the past 10 years, I have yet to meet someone who was not taking an active part of their own reality. The f@4k you attitude has yet to be bring anyone I know success and happiness. This tends to be the attitude of  frustration atop layers of stress, worry, and all the way at the root; fear.

It is a quick hobble from fear to negativity in place of a positive, assertive action. Many people are afraid of poverty, boredom, losing their home, job, and livelihood but they make a choice to let that fear turn into negative emotion of resentment, anger, displaced aggression and distress. Fear can and should be used to create positive goals and from the goals comes executable actions and steps to be taken.

Addressing Negativity and Embracing Appreciation

1. Question your attitudes.

2. Question their reasoning.

3. Accept result and commit to change.

4. Schedule time-out to think about things for which you are thankful.

5. Write them down.

6. Rinse and Repeat.

Transforming Fears into Goals

1. Write down fears.

2. Get specific about those fears.

3. Write down goals that eliminate the fears.

4. Write steps that can be  taken to achieve those goals.

These two practices alone  can change your world into one of appreciation, positive attitude and real achievment.

Read more at Get Heroik

NBC’s KINGS, a modern, post apocalyptic, slight sci-fi action-drama, is probably the best thing on Television since Deadwood on Showtime. That was of course until it was pulled off the air, another victim of low ratings and the apathy of the masses. Fear not friends. It is set to come back June 14th.

Here are 6 reasons to take a few idle nights to watch this show:

1. Deadwood’s Ian McShane.

This man has an amazing raspy voice combined with his signature quick witted delivery with words, all of which lure and demand you to listen and comply. McShane plays King Cylas If you liked him in Deadwood as a  crooked yet realistic business man, you’ll love him in Kings.  He has such a guiding and commanding voice that allows him to lead, narrate or sarcastically make a point.

2. The story.

The story line of Kings has impecably perfect timing. In this shaky economy and state of affairs, KINGS offers no escape through super powers, singing stars or pseudo reality gimick.  KINGS plays on the very social and political issues we face today in our country, while providing all the chivalrous tones of  ancient medevil courts mixed with the dramas of modern politics.  The issues are solved by our heroes using cleverness, instinct, tact and every move of every chess piece. Along with those layers is this added layer of divine purpose and connection, something that JJ Abrams could only dream of doing on Lost & Fringe. Other prime time shows give the illusion of connectedness and conspiracy, when the writers of other shows clearly don’t know from one bong hit to the next where the show is going,   KINGS has layers that makes sense. Ogres have layers. Kings has layers. You get the idea.

3. The message.

The world looks for heroes and hope lies in bravery. Phrases like these and many more nuggets of wisdom are stroon throughout the series and are as covetable and quotable as they could be. Every sentence jumps off the screen as if subliminally calling the audience to action. This show really is that powerful. Oh my, for the first time since season one of House, the world can have positive role models again. Children (10 and up) can easily wrap around these characters and admire their traits. I hope there are shows on like this when I have children.

4. The Language

The language spoken in court is a hybrid of ancient words and modern English. It is wonderful to hear and easy to discern and grasp.  David Shepard comes from a rural area and speaks a common tongue, giving us the perfect vehicle of translation in any case.

5. The Characters

We not only see the lives of the current king, the future king, but also the roles of the do-gooder princess, Machiavellian power hungry prince,  the red queen, financial backers, military and religous leader. All are forces to be reckoned with and all are essential to the balance of power. No other show has provided such character depth on the same set.

6. KINGS raises the bar.

This show not only motivates its audience, it requires them to understand the complexities of politics, leadership and morality. As we follow David Shepard’s happenings, we watch them  unwravel in real life. This show is inspiring to those who want more for themselves, their country, their family and want to do so in a humble and respectful way.

7. Episodes 1-6

You are still reading this? Go watch the episodes for free on hulu and judge for yourself!

CLICK HERE TO WATCH KINGS NOW!

In this David meets Goliath adventure, Deadwood’s Ian McShane is perhaps the most interesting

So you want to be a blogger? Here are some writing tips.

1. Monkey see monkey do.

Research other blogs you like and mimic them. Take the good, leave the bad and get started. Don’t spend too much time at the drawing board building something from scratch. Put your own twist on things everyone enjoys.

2. Keep it short when you can (500 words or less) and write 2 new posts per week.

New posts are expected often. Embrace the demand and think of your blog as your very own editorial column.

3. What’s in a name? Titles are everything in a blog.

People read posts with  good titles. The title of the blog is the first impression and vitally important. 80% of people who read the title will not read the article. The web has trained most of us to read title and navigate to the links or vital information.

4. Learn copy-writing techniques.

Good titles are vital to the success of your blog.

5. Be direct and to the point.

Give a summary, the meat and conclusion first, and then provide a link if necessary. This allows the reader to continue to dig at their leisure.

6. If you lack writing talent focus on a good title and useful links.

This is a writer’s work around and is always appreciated by the audience. Don’t be afraid to only post a few lines. Keep it simple

7. Link to the source not another blog.

Unless it is the source of course, you want to link to the original source. Don’t Send your readers on a quest for details.

8. Sync your blog with your twitter account.

This is kind of a duh factor. There are many twitter wordpress plugins and I will be sure to review and recommend some in a future post.

9. Pictures and videos are part of the language.

A picture/video is like a title. It is required not optional.

10. List, question, and quote.

Write list posts ie 8 Ways to Save Money on Car Insurance, 3 Ways to  Bathe 4 Kids at Once, etc. The big and short lists are incredibly helpful and enticing to the reader; organizing main ideas and tips. You can also entice a reader by using a question and answer as a Title ie Just How Many Licks Does it Take to Get to the Center of a Tootsie Roll Pop? Let’s See.

11. There is no Spoon.

Blogging does not require a degree. Even if you are working on a corporate blog- if it is not casual and part of a conversation, the blog is simply a news feed and not much of a blog. THERE ARE MANY TIPS BUT NO FORMAL RULES FOR BLOGGING. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you their book. When AP tries to crank out blog rules in their stylebook- burn those pages.

12. Know your readers and chat whenever you can.

Understanding your audience is easier than ever in this age. Between actual conversations and analytical tools, use it all to your advantage to really get to know your reader. I prefer actual conversations myself, they tend to turn into several new blogposts.

13. Be funny, casual, relevant and memorable.

Use pop Culture to your advantage. Good blogs are a  mix of to the point writing balanced with wit and humor. I am not a big fan of TV but fastforward through many TV shows in a given day to have reference points in mind for my readers. Jack Bauer, the main character of 24, at mere mention, signals a concoction of imagery that can provide clarity on a subject. I don’t watch the show but I know that my readers likely do

A Few Resources

http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2007/05/stepforth-tutorial-blogs-101-part-1.php
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/14/blogging-for-beginners-2

• 9 Great Freelance Revenue Resources for the Road Warrior http://bit.ly/a5Mj0 #

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• Warn out and sun-burnt from sailing in Berkeley yesterday. Worked on a workshop all day. Perhaps a quick Nap before the gym. #
• BTW- http://www.cal-sailing.org/ NON-PROFIT sailing club! Sweet deal- and more affordable than a gym membership! #

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• Warn out and sun-burnt from sailing in Berkeley yesterday. Worked on a workshop all day. Perhaps a quick Nap before the gym. #
• BTW- http://www.cal-sailing.org/ NON-PROFIT sailing club! Sweet deal- and more affordable than a gym membership! #

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• After a 20 mile bike ride and sailing on the lake I am slow to get up this morning, but- off 2 Auburn 2 wear out the dog, the GF, and myself #
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• @john_lithgow is it jeff goldbloom? #
• ahh. a good hike, great bottle of wine, my GF and my dog- good day. #
• Going to watch Buckaroo Bonsai. @John_Lithgow reminded me of it when he ran into Jeff Goldbloom on an airplane today. Twitter is wonderful. #

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