Most of us in western countries were taught that the political process we now call democracy, at least the election part of it, began in Ancient Greece. Indeed, Greece did have a workable democratic system where each citizen had a right to be heard on any subject of interest to the community. However the system broke down when too many wanted to be heard. In fact, the Greeks didn’t have the first form of democratic election.

It shouldn’t be surprising that in the Middle East, the likely birthplace of agriculture and the first known large civilizations, the people of Ebla (in modern day Syria) elected their kings for seven year terms. That was two thousand years before the Greeks got their system started.

We humans aren’t the only species on the planet to vote. Even though honeybees can’t count, they have an elective system for deciding where to locate a new hive. When the time to build a new hive arrives, scouts go out in all directions searching for the best spots. When they return, each has a location in mind. They decide the best one by dancing. The more vigorously a scout dances, the more she is able to persuade other scouts to join her. When the marathon dancefest is over, the scout bee that recruited the most other scouts to her choice wins and the other bees agree to make it unanimous.

At least they make the decision unanimous most of the time. When two or more queens are competing for supremacy of a hive and one can’t manage to kill the other(s), the hive can split and re-establish themselves as two independent hives. The losing queens are killed. Always.

Polling before human elections has been going on for a long time. In the United States, the Harrisburg Pennsylvanian conducted a poll before the 1824 presidential election. The poll predicted that Andrew Jackson would tally the most votes. And he did.

Unfortunately, the US has this strange beast called the electoral college. Each state has a way to determine how its share of members sent to the electoral college after an election will vote. The vote of the electoral college–technically not the citizens who voted in their local communities–determines who will become the president of the United States.

The electoral college vote in the House of Representatives in 1824 gave the nod to John Quincy Adams, who immediately become the president.

The first televised election in which a computer played a major role in the US was in 1952. CBS viewers saw Walter Cronkite sitting beside UNIVAC 1, which made the remarkable prediction that Eisenhower would win after only seven percent of the votes had been counted and registered.

However, what the CBS viewers actually saw was no more a working computer than those of Star Trek or other sci-fi movies. Mr. Cronkite sat beside a cardboard panel filled with massive numbers of Christmas light bulbs that flashed on and off intermittently. The real UNIVAC 1 that did the work of tallying counted votes was in Pennsylvania.

Back in 2007, neuroscientists thought they likely had the best way to determine (well ahead of the 2008 election) which candidates were most likely to have their names on the ballot. They connected to the brains of a large number of undecided voters (in a lab setting) and showed each pictures of the leading candidates for each party.

The results of the survey? The candidates that elicited the least amount of brain activity were John McCain and Barack Obama. While most of us would see that as being funny or strange, sociologists will do similar tests in future elections to determine if low brain activity when viewing a picture of a candidate might be a factor to determine how undecided voters will vote in the election.

In a few countries, citizens are required to vote, by law. Failing to vote is a serious offence and if you didn’t vote you had better have a dandy excuse when the authorities come calling after an election. Belgium has a system for compulsory voting. If you miss voting in four elections over a period of 15 years, you are automatically penalized. The penalty? Offenders are not permitted to vote for the next ten years. (Okay, the system’s not perfect.)

The penalty for violating Belgium’s compulsory voting law–and for those of us who are not US citizens, the hanging chad problem whose resolution elected a president whose primary functions seemed to be to start wars and ruin economies–seem confusing. But they don’t hold a candle (for confusion) to the way the Venetians used to elect their chief magistrate or Duke, called the Doge. For over five centuries (some sources say closer to 1000 years), Venice elected its Doge using the following process. (Warning: This is even more confusing than most stuff to do with elections.)

Thirty members of the Great Council were chosen by lot. Another lot reduced this number to nine. Those nine then chose 40 others for the next stage. Another lot reduced the 40 to 11. (Still with me?)

The 11 then chose a group of 41 who actually elected the Doge.

Historians assure us that the Venetian system worked well to avoid corruption and impact by special interest groups, though the final man selected was inevitably from the aristocracy. The Doge held office for life and lived and worked in a palace beside the Grand Canal, with St. Mark’s Basilica on the other side.

The lever voting machine came into use in the United States in 1892, in Lockport, New York. Its inventor, Jacob H. Myers, intended to “make the process of casting the ballot perfectly plain, simple and secret. Its patent shows that at the time it first came into use the lever voting machine had more moving parts than any other machine in the country.

Moving forward to 2007, the Swiss used some sophisticated new technology to ensure security for their election. It involved the use of quantum physics. Voting was done electronically, of course, with the keys for returns being transmitted using polarized photons.

Back in the United States, the Department of Defense, for the election in 2006, used a web-based voting system for their military personal stationed out of the country and for US expatriates. The system cost over $830,000. Some 63 people used it to vote.

A little sociological voting trivia. Candidates whose names appear on the ballot close to the names of the most popular candidates apparently receive more votes than the polls beforehand suggested they should. Candidates whose names are first on the ballot list tend to get more than their expected share of votes. Australia has compulsory voting and those whose names appear first on the ballots tend to receive one percent of the total votes cast, even if the person is a relative unknown.

Rain changes voting patterns. In the US, for every inch of rain that falls on election day in a given county, the voter turnout dropped by 0.8 percent, in a study.

Think that rain shouldn’t affect an election much? Computer models have shown that if it had rained in Illinois on election day in 1960, Richard Nixon would have defeated John F. Kennedy.

If it had been a sunny day in Florida for the 2000 election, Al Gore would have clearly got more votes than George W. Bush, which would have made Gore the president. With or without the notorious hanging chads.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who are balanced developmentally in all respects, not just intellectually and physically.
Learn more at

http://billallin.com

 [Primary resource: Discover, November2008]

It takes a certain maturity of mind to accept that nature works as steadily
in rust as in rose petals.
- Esther Warner Dendel, writer and artist (1910-2002)

Despite the fact that we are, each of us, part of nature, we understand almost nothing about it.

We have medical healers whose primary function is to make it possible for nature to heal itself within our own bodies. We have psychological healers whose objective is to keep us talking until we can figure out answers to our own problems.

We have those who would have us believe that we could live within nature comfortably if we would only stop destroying it. Not true. No living thing lives comfortably within nature. Living things within nature are all about struggle, not about comfort. Living things that are comfortable either become food for other living things or go extinct because they cannot change. Nature changes constantly.

We have those among us who would have us believe that we can alter nature on a global scale. Those people are either the victims of propaganda or its perpetrators. Take global warming for example. No one disputes the fact that the planet is warming. The dispute is over whether what we do can influence it irrevocably or whether what we experience is simply part of a natural cycle.

Should we believe climatologists whose income depends on our believing what they say so that they can continue to sell their fear mongering collections of “facts” to the media? These people can’t even predict the weather. Where I live in eastern Canada, the government forecaster predicted a hot and dry summer for three months. The weather was so cool and wet until mid-August that the summer insects had not yet emerged and the trees had not changed from their late spring colour of light green.

We have scientists who believe they can make definitive statements about God, about the future of medical science, about how powerful humankind is that it can influence the very existence of nature, yet it can’t tell me for certain if it will rain this afternoon. Or if a tornado will tear the roof off my house. Or if an earthquake will destroy the rest of my house.

We want so much for nature to not change. We want to know that we have not destroyed it and we would know that by the fact that nothing within nature would change. Yet if one thing we know for certain about nature it’s that nature forever and constantly changes. New life continues to pop into existence and other life goes extinct. We don’t even know how, for certain. Call it evolution or creativity, but we don’t really know how it all comes about.

We know that about 65 million years ago a great percentage of land life went extinct as a result of an asteroid landing near the Yucatan in present day Mexico. Yet why did it take over 1500 years for the die-off to complete if the explosion created an instant global cloud? The age of the dinosaurs ended, for sure. But what the fear mongering scientists want us to believe is that it was the cloud that ended the dinos, not the fact that climate was changing naturally around the world and where the dinosaurs lived there was no longer sufficient vegetation to support the giant creatures. Not much vegetation for them in Alaska these days, for example, is there?

About 225 million years ago almost all life on our planet disappeared–about 97-98 percent. Nature seems to have recovered, as it did after the later asteroid collision. It will recover from us too.

If we should be concerned about anything related to human production, it’s that we put half a million chemicals into our air–some of them poisonous and these have caused us health problems to an alarming degree–not that the planet is warming. Of course it’s warming. There was a mini ice age lasting about 400 years that ended just over a century ago. What should we expect to happen when an ice age ends?

We know that air’s ability to hold moisture doubles with each ten degrees increase in temperature. As the air warms, it has more ability to absorb moisture when it passes over the 75 percent of our planet that is covered with water. More water in the air equals, what? Clouds. Clouds block sunlight, which is the sole source of heat for our atmosphere. Less sunlight reaching earth’s surface means a decrease in air temperature. And where are all those flooded coastal cities we were warned about 15 years ago when the climate models said that many low lying cities would be drowned in 15 years?

Get over it! We are not powerful enough to change nature. We aren’t even powerful enough to save ourselves. How many millions of humans die each year of starvation while rich countries throw more than enough food away as waste? How many millions die of AIDS when we don’t even have the will at an international level to teach methods of protection against HIV infection and to distribute drugs that could extend the lives of most HIV positive people for decades? That includes HIV infected parents who could support their children instead of dying and leaving them to starve as orphans.

Instead of huddling in fear of what we are doing to ourselves that most of us can’t do anything about, let’s stand up and tell our governments to do what is right to save the humans alive today from our own self destructive practices. I could count on one hand the number of countries that are in the process of doing positive things to help their people and others around the world to live better and healthier lives. One of them is Iceland, but how influential is that tiny island in the international community?

We only need be afraid of the future if we do nothing about improving it by our actions in the present.

No matter how much we fear the future, nothing will change by our fear. Nothing will improve because we are afraid.

Change only happens when someone does something.

Human rights took a huge leap forward after Adolf Hitler tried to take over the world and killed millions of people in the process. Do we require something that dramatic to recover from for us to make small changes ourselves and to encourage others to make small changes as well?

Even those of us who are not afraid will accomplish nothing to improve humanity and the condition that life on our planet exists in if we do nothing.

As Canadian rock singer Neil Young stated in one of his albums, rust never sleeps. Nature forever changes. If we don’t want nature to change, too bad for us. If we do nothing about improving life on this planet as it is–including conditions that kill millions of our own–we have good reason to worry over things that happen naturally. Worry is the hiding place for those who do nothing.

Worry is the refuge of the terminally stupid. With emphasis on the “terminally.”

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, teachers, social leaders and ordinary folks who want a methodology for teaching children what they should know, not just what industry wants them to know as worker/consumers.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Much misconstruction and bitterness are spared to him who thinks
naturally upon what he owes to others, rather than on what he ought
to expect from them.
- Elizabeth de Meulan Guizot, French author (1773-1827)

My first thought upon reading this quote was about how many people severe the primary relationship of their life because their partner isn’t giving them what they want or need, without considering what they could do for themselves. That is, the partner may disappoint with what he or she gives, but do the disappointed ones do enough for themselves and do they do as much of what they should for the other partner that disappoints?

Before we think about how others disappoint us, let’s consider how much we may fail ourselves and how much we may neglect to give to the others.

What should we give to others? What do we owe to others, especially to those to whom we are not committed?

There’s the hitch. There is no reason why we should not be committed to every other person on the planet, to every other animal on the planet, to everything on the planet. If we do not commit to them, why would they take any interest in committing anything of themselves to us?

So we breathe the air they pollute. We drink the fresh water they poison. We read of how they kill each other, how they enslave each other, how they abuse each other in inhumane ways.

We can’t do anything about that, can we? After all, they don’t care about us, so why should we care about them?

We don’t care about them. Only about what they do. Yet we don’t give a fig about what they may think of what we do.

What do we do? Do we starve, as possibly 20 percent of the humans on the earth are doing today? Or at least their health is destroyed through malnutrition, a problem over which they have no control.

By what measure of ethics or morals is it correct that we allow anyone on this planet to starve or to be starved when more food exists than the world population can eat?

A study was done in the UK recently that showed that 25 percent of the starving people of the world could be saved and made fairly healthy on the nutrition in the food the British throw away as garbage. Every bit of food that is not consumed by customers in restaurants, for example, must be thrown into the garbage, by law.

We have no reason to believe that the amount of nutrition thrown away as garbage by the people of the United States, as another example, would be any different by percent than that in the UK. If the numbers for the US match those from the UK, then starvation could end on this planet if all the nutrition thrown away by Americans were fed to the starving people of the world. The United States is that big and has that amount of wealth that its people can throw away food that would save the lives of every starving person.

In some villages in Africa, almost no adults remain alive because they have all died of AIDS, leaving the remaining children to fend for themselves. Do those children deserve to die because their parents contracted AIDS and had the effrontery to die?

Do the people of Darfur deserve to starve to death (those that are not raped and killed by militias) because the government of Sudan is corrupt and keeps food aid from its own people? Decades ago we put men on the moon, can we not find ways to air drop food to those starving people?

Using a headset or VOIP phone I can speak to anyone anywhere on the planet that is connected by some telecommunications system. In the parts of the world with the fewest numbers of people with internet capability (excepting at the poles, on mountains and in deserts), at least some of their neighbours are starving. Lack of internet capability or minimal capability equals poverty beyond what most of us can imagine. Poverty always means that someone is starving. Always.

Our television networks, news services and NGOs tell us about places where people are starving and where medical assistance is impossible because they have no supplies. We Tsk! Tsk! and wonder why no one does anything to help them.

If there is one sin that every religion would agree on, it’s letting people starve to death when there is more food on the planet than would be needed to feed everyone. The world’s greatest and most widely agreed upon sin.

But those starving people do nothing to help us. They just selfishly keep on starving and dying.

What would you do if you had gone for over two weeks without a bite to eat? If that were true also of your neighbours and the rest of your community, would it turn quickly into something resembling Darfur? It would unless police kept control and others in your country felt compassion for you and your community, enough so to send food to save you. Remember how little police could help in the aftermath of Katrina, in New Orleans?

No matter what you may think that others owe to you, they may feel that they owe nothing or very little. If they are well fed and healthy, they may think that your starvation or extreme illness or disease means little to them unless you can do something for them. Those people include well fed and healthy elected politicians.

If you were starving or dying from some effect of malnutrition, what could you do for those who had the ability to save you?

Well, you aren’t starving or dying. What are you prepared to do see that the people who are get what they need?

If you have what you need, but do not help others, you commit the world’s greatest sin.

To expect those who are starving to save themselves and to reorganize their communities is unreasonable because you could not do it yourself. They may not be able to help themselves.

You can.

Figure out how.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who care as much about what they can give to others as what they can acquire from them.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still; it is we who move in infinite space.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, German poet (1875-1926)

This quote struck me because it turns backwards our thinking about the future.

The way we think of the future, most of us believe that it must bounce around as if trying to avoid us and detection. To many of us, the future is unknown, a mystery that will unfold in some fashion in ways we can’t imagine at this time.

Not so. Rilke says it’s not that way at all.

We are the ones who bounce around, not knowing where we are going.

Our governments seldom have long term plans for the future. As they are elected for relatively short terms, they focus on the duration of their terms, plus a couple of years more. Most give little thought to what they want for their country 25 or 50 years in the future.

They can’t set policies to prepare for a future 50 years hence because they don’t think about it. They only set policies they hope will get them elected next time.

Businesses, especially large ones, set long term objectives. They want to think their way into the future to be prepared for what they will face then. However, their long term plans can turn on a dime when their financial fortunes hit rough patches. In effect, they plan for the long term future, but act in their own best interests in the immediate future. Profit today, not prospects tomorrow, are what counts for them.

As individuals, most of us go through our lives as if we don’t know what to expect of tomorrow, let alone what our lives might be like in ten or 20 years time. Planning might come in the form of retirement investments.

As of this writing, I recently passed my 65th birthday. I have reached the age when traditionally, in western countries, people retire. Then, going by historical records, I could be expected to die within the next decade. But it’s highly unlikely that will happen.

I could easily live for another 30 or 40 years, as my ancestors lived well past the age when their own peers were dying off. I eat healthy, try to exercise enough. I make long term plans because I expect to be able to fulfill them.

Should a person of 65 years have plans for what they might be doing at age 90 or 95? To a younger person, that might seem silly. But unless my peers and I make plans for our future, we may find ourselves in wheelchairs, sitting in hallways of nursing homes for our final two decades of life. That’s not my idea of Golden Years.

The future begins tomorrow. The future 25 or 50 years from now will depend entirely on what you and I and others around us plan tomorrow. We will meet the future knowing what it’s like because we will have planned it. If we plan it.

My wife and I will move to a different home in a different Canadian province within the next two months. Everything will be new to us, except our citizenship. One of the first tasks we plan for our new property will be to plant trees where we want them.

We will plant spindly young trees no taller than ourselves. We plan to sit in their shade for years after they have reached their full height.

Will we do little more than to sit in the shade on a summer’s day? Not at all. Chances are we will plan how to take the world by storm with our new ideas on those future days. As usual, those ideas will be rejected by the majority of people when posed, then be adopted heartily by the same people a few years later when they realize they are better than what they have.

We make our own future by building it, day by day, thought by thought, one daringly new action after another.

The future is nothing to be frightened about. We will build it ourselves, by our actions and sometimes by our inaction.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children how to prepare for the future, how to cope with it and to build it to their own satisfaction instead of just surviving it.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some.
- Jose Marti, Cuban freedom fighter and hero (1853-1895)

When you read the quotation you might be tempted to think that it was written recently. But Marti, Cuba’s greatest national hero, lived well over a century ago. In the sense of this quotation, nothing has changed in humankind since his time.

The observation about life applies both to political/national and to personal lives. The USA and the United Kingdom, for examples, have been involved with wars at least once in each generation for hundreds of years. Were these wars necessary?

For the few hundreds of years leading up to and including Marti’s time, the world was indeed a violent place. The evolution from tribal states to centralized governments took a very long time. That is, though centralized governments try to avoid wars in most cases (the US, UK, some African and Asian countries excepted), many got involved with wars until a century ago for the same reasons our ancestors did, control of land and resources. That’s tribal.

Politically weak leaders in countries with centralized governments, who want to make names for themselves, stir up rumours that another nation is out to get them, that the people had better prepare for imminent attack or all will be lost. As this kind of politicking appeals to our natural sense of caution, fomenting fear within a population is relatively easy. In some cases, simply making up lies is sufficient to get people behind the leader who will defend them in their “time of great need.”

Even in more peaceful times, political parties feel the need to devise the appearance of conflict between parties to get votes and between candidates to help one succeed over another. In most cases, the afflictions (conflict) are more imagined than real, as becomes obvious after an election when a new party in power assumes similar policies that it railed against when it was in opposition.

In our personal lives, some people revel in conflict. In business, for example, succeeding through conflict often gets one person the top job in a company over others who see no valid reason for it. Or who lose the battle.

At the personal level, family doctors see many patients every day who have nothing wrong with them except an overactive imagination and a penchant for hypochondria. Some hand out prescriptions which are nothing more than sugar pills, just to satisfy the imaginary needs of these people to be “cured.”

Any phenomenon that can be called a bandwagon effect plays on the same need for an affliction even if one doesn’t exist.

Is the planet really warming, inexorably and inevitably, as some say? The Arctic ice cap is melting, to be sure, but the ice cap in the Antarctic is increasing in size. That has always happened in cycles. Some parts of the world are getting hotter–more temperature extremes–while others are having colder temperatures in their winter than have been seen since the Little Ice Age.

Oh, that Little Ice Age. It happened roughly between 1450 and 1850. Since 1850, so our records show, earth has been warming. Reason suggests that it is warming naturally, as we would expect after a minor ice age.

Are we truly in danger of warming our own planet to the point of killing off most of its inhabitants? The hubris of that is astounding, that one species believes it has power of that magnitude. Our weather is governed by the sun more than by any other factor. When we learn to control the sun, we can control weather.

But fear over the effects of climate change is our global affliction of the day. I haven’t heard of a single coastal city or even a low island that had to be abandoned because of rising sea levels.

I have heard of many possible causes for the increase of asthma. One primary cause is surely air pollution. We are polluting our air with about half a million chemicals emitted from smokestacks and about half that number of chemicals enter our waterways. That’s the stuff we breathe and drink. Why aren’t we riding that hobby horse, since it affects the health of almost everyone on our planet?

The air pollution scare tried and failed a few decades ago. Now scientists seeking government grants are ignoring our terribly polluted air that actually kills thousands of people in large countries every year in favour of scaring us into believing in the potential tragedies of climate change.

Meanwhile, several older climatologists who claim that climate change is natural and cyclical have been virtually silenced by the younger ones. The older ones are beyond needing grants, while the younger ones have great careers in fear mongering ahead of them.

It’s hard to know what the real facts are because they get obscured by so many who have financial interests and celebrity in mind for themselves.

As Jose Marti said, we need to suffer. There are lots of people around who are well prepared to help us to do just that.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want children to have the skills to be able to distinguish between advertising propaganda and fact so they can live healthy and safe lives without fear of emotional bullies.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

I offer you peace.
I offer you love.
I offer you friendship.
I see your beauty.
I hear your need.
I feel your feelings.
My wisdom flows from the Highest Source.
I salute that Source in you.
Let us work together for unity and love.
- Mohandas K. (“The Mahatma” – Great Soul) Gandhi

Beautiful, isn’t it? It’s a longer version of the meaning of the Hindi salutation “Namaste.”

Why doesn’t it work?

Gandhi himself, perhaps the most peaceful leader in history, was murdered by one of his own, a fellow Hindu. Peace didn’t seem to work for him that way. Why not? Especially when, generally speaking, most Indian people are peaceful compared to the people of most countries.

A concept such as peace must be taught to children, to all children, in order to be effective. Forces that work slavishly to teach fear and violence to children never sleep. In the United States, for example, you would be hard pressed to listen to a newscast or read a daily newspaper that would not incline a child toward fear and/or violence if its contents were taught to that child. Violent news is certainly repetitive.

Concepts we want to impart to our children require repetition, whether peace or violence. The US national anthem is a war song, the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag a commitment to use violence to enforce the safety of the people of the country, if necessary. The US has, since its inception, always found someone to fear, thus a reason to engage in war almost constantly throughout its history.

These two have been daily features in US classrooms longer than anyone can remember. That is, the message that violence is to be considered a primary means to resolve conflicts is taught to children every single day they attend school.

That is but one example. Canada, one of the more peaceful nations in the world has a somewhat similar national anthem, though not a pledge to its flag.

The same teachers who supervise these daily exercises–the US anthem and the pledge–do not place similar emphasis on the concept of peace or peaceful resolution of conflicts. They rarely, if ever, appear in curriculum, though the conflict messages are repeated daily.

Peace, to most of us, means that when the potential for disagreement arises, the parties involved should consider ways of resolving it other than by using violence or psychological coercion.

Until that message is conveyed to children more often than the messages about violence, the message that is taught in a stronger manner will win out in the minds of the kids, who will grow up to have similar beliefs but have access to more weapons.

Indians are taught to adore and to respect the leader who brought independence to their country. They are also taught the concepts of peace and passive resistance.

Canadian children are taught that a Canadian began the concept of international peacekeeping through the United Nations and that Canada is the only country in the Americas that gained its independence from its imperial power by peaceful means.

What children are actively and repetitively taught becomes a way of life for them in adulthood.

Those who love and support violence are tirelessly dedicated to passing their message to younger generations. Those who love peace tend to not have the same devotion to their cause.

If you want change, teach the children.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, what and when to teach children the important life lessons they need to become secure, competent and confident adults. It’s a manual for life.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

One of the most ambitious emperors in history mounted the biggest naval invasion force in history and suffered the greatest naval disaster in history, changing world history thereafter in the process.

Genghis Khan (1162-1227) has the more famous Mongol name as a great emperor of China and invader of foreign territories. His empire stretched from the Black Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Kubla Khan, his grandson, is better known as the kindly host of Marco Polo, the European who wandered east to find the source of the Silk Road.

Unknown to many, Kubla Khan had greater ambitions even than his grandfather. Establishing what is now Beijing as his capital city, he planned to conquer or at least control the whole world. Japan, a rising world power in those times, was one of his objectives. But far from the only one.

In 1280 CE, Kubla Khan ordered the construction and assembly of the world’s largest navy. On target, one year later, his fleet set sail for Japan in May of 1281. His objective was a navy of 12,000 ships. He reached that number in time, but only through a massive construction effort.

(To put that into perspective, the second largest invasion navy ever was involved with the D-Day invasion of France by the Allied Forces, with a fleet of 4,000 ships, many of which were smaller than the Chinese ships of Kubla Khan’s navy nearly 800 years earlier.)

The Khan’s shipbuilders were Chinese, at that time designers and builders of the most impressive ships the world had seen. The warships were about four times as big as European warships of the time. They even included watertight compartments that would prevent water from flooding the ship if one compartment was punctured.

In August of 1281, as the emperor’s fleet approached Japan, a massive typhoon (hurricane)–the top level of storm by today’s standards of measurement– struck the Chinese fleet. Before hapless Japan had a chance to fight to the death to defend itself, 12,000 Chinese ships sank, taking their crews with them to the bottom.

However, not every Chinese ship sank. The ships that held the leaders of the navy (not including the Khan, who was at home spending time with his wives and concubines) survived. Why did the ships of the leaders survive while the rest of their fleet sank? In short, the leaders’ ships were built without flaws.

The Chinese were none too happy to comply with the Khan’s wishes to build naval ships because they had recently been conquered themselves by the Mongols. They toiled as slaves to build the fleet. In response, they built flaws into their workmanship. The ships would not hold together in a bad storm, even though they looked good when they set sail.

It turned out that Kubla Khan’s demand that 12,000 ships be build within one year was far too ambitious. That size fleet should have taken from two to five years. So the naval leaders supplemented the numbers with river boats seized from Chinese fishermen and traders. River boats had little need for keels and were designed more to carry cargo than as warships. They were not designed to withstand the rigours of storms at sea.

In the typhoon, they tipped over easily while most of the other ships in the fleet fell apart and sank.

Japan was saved by the kamikaze (big wind). But the story doesn’t end there. Kubla Khan’s reputation was soiled and the reputation of the Mongols altogether was trashed. Not long after Kubla Khan died, the Mongol reign over China fell apart and disappeared into history.

True, the Mongol tribes were among those who invaded eastern Europe decades later, bringing about the fall of the great empire centred in Rome. But those tribes were not coordinated in their efforts, the invaders integrated into European civilization and the Renaissance blossomed not long (by historical time) later.

But the story doesn’t end there either.

In the time of Kubla Khan, Chinese traders, explorers and settlers had spread over most of the globe. One of their villages has been found in Nova Scotia, Canada, and others are being investigated on the west coast of the USA and in South America. They may even have sailed across the Atlantic to western Europe along with the Norse traders who had been to the Americas before the turn of the First Millennium.

With the defeat of Kubla Khan’s great fleet, China could no longer afford to send ships around the world to explore and to trade. All Chinese ships, crews and settlers were called home from across the globe. From that time on, Chinese culture turned inward, with no significant expansion for centuries.

That left the world open to Europeans. And to Christianity.

The Europeans and their religion did what the Chinese under the Mongol emperor had set out to do, dominate the world.

World history literally changed dramatically and permanently as a result of one storm in August of 1281 CE. No matter where in the world you live, your life is different from what it might have been had that typhoon not occurred.

For one thing, you wouldn’t have been reading this article in English.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a book for adults to learn what they missed in their childhood development so that they can compensate for it and build better lives for themselves now.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others.
- Thomas a Kempis, German ecclesiastic (1380-1471)

Those who live without peace in themselves will not acknowledge the truth of this quote, cannot understand the concept, will scoff at those who use it and teach it.

Could US President George W. Bush, the self-acknowledged “war president,” have peace within himself? He believed that beginning a war in Afghanistan would bring peace to his own country. Is his country more at peace today than it was in 2001?

He was going to “liberate” the oppressed people of Iraq, to bring them peace after a generation of living under Saddam Hussein. There were no weapons of mass destruction, Saddam is dead and many of the citizens of Iraq look back longingly at the maybe-not-so-bad old days of Saddam’s dictatorship.

Though Mr. Bush seems to have settled his differences with North Korea’s Kim Jong Il (the memory of neighbouring Vietnam lingers strong in the memories of American people), it remains to be seen if he will find some excuse to invade Iran before the end of his term of office. Imagine the distinction he would have in US history if he were able to launch three wars within two terms of office!

Nobody wins a war, neither the loser nor the winner. Bush’s wars have cost the US so dearly that the country has all but lost its status as having the currency against which other countries compare the value of their own. China will soon pass the US as the most powerful trading nation on earth. The people of every city in the United States live under a constant alert warning in preparation for…no one knows what.

As the US primaries leading up to the vote in November progress, debates, backbiting and infighting are much as expected, but the level of emotion in ordinary conversations daily has risen as people anticipate the possibility that their once-great nation may be reduced to a second level power, with all of the anxieties of the homeland of an empire but little of the wealth it had in the past.

Thomas a Kempis was of course interested in the peace of individuals. But individuals collectively make nations. Nations that teach the values of war and violence to their children are nations that engage in war and violence.

The only way to have peaceful individuals and a peaceful country is to teach peace to the children. India, for example, is a nation that teaches peace to its children. Though India has its share of violent incidents, the amount of violence in the country of one billion people is far less than that in much smaller countries. India has not invaded another country in the past 1000 years (though it did step in, by request, to stop the slaughter of the people of East Pakistan–now Bangladesh–by the army of West Pakistan in 1971).

Teach right. Teach good. Teach peace. When these become the structure within which children are given their education, they become the guides for living once those children become adults.

Good and peaceful people are seldom aggressive. However, when they leave the running of their country to the aggressive and violent people, the country becomes aggressive and violent because the leaders teach the need for these “to achieve peace.” It’s a lie. It doesn’t work. It has never worked. So wars have become the means for seeking peace. So the warriors say.

All it takes is for enough people to talk about this concept of peace and to vote accordingly in elections.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, when and what to teach children, including the concepts of peace, good and right. The book includes practical guides for teachers and parents.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

When the Soviet military pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, Afghan
citizens cheered wildly because the Soviets had reportedly killed about
one million Afghans during their occupation of the country.

Please read the signature line at the end of the article about a book you should read and a worldwide plan to make the world a safer and healthier place to live.
Learn more about the book and the plan at http://billallin.com
………………………………………………

Those who occupy their minds with small matters, generally become incapable of greatness.
- Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Let’s begin with the declaration that most people have no idea what greatness is in reference to people. They accept what they have been told by others, usually by the media or history books, and embrace it as their own.

Alexander of Macedonia, son of Philip of Macedonia, is known as Alexander The Great because he conquered the known world of his time. He conquered Egypt, Greece and Persia, then crapped out when he reached India and died shortly thereafter. (Nothing west of Greece was important to the world in his time, apparently.) He is known as Alexander The Great, so he must be great. “Everyone” says so, right?

What made Alexander great? Military victory. Julius Caesar is known as a great man because he conquered Gaul and defeated the fractious leaders of Rome to take control himself. Sir Winston Churchill was great because he led Great Britain through the darkest days of the Second World War, encouraging the British people to hold on until the Americans arrived to provide substance to a swindling Allied military.

Virtually all of the people known as great men of the western world were successful military leaders. Even Napoleon Bonaparte, who lost control as often as he gained it, is usually considered great because he led his followers to victory after victory until he became emperor of France.

Very few women of history have earned the accolade of greatness because few engaged in war until recently. Joan of Arc came closest, but she died at age 19 so she didn’t have time to win many wars.

Was Socrates great? The Ancient Athenian philosopher, teacher of Plato and Xenophon (470-399 BC), never committed a word to paper (or papyrus) so far as we know. If it hadn’t been for Plato we would know nothing about Socrates (nor about Atlantis, but that’s another story). Was the first great philosopher a great man, or just great within his particular field?

How about Marie Curie, who won two Nobel Prizes, or Jonas Salk, who created the vaccine against polio?

We have trouble with the concept of greatness in terms of people today because the world is in a state of transition. Before the middle of the 20th century, what was considered most important in the world–thus what was recorded in history books and taught in history classes–was military strength and victory.

After the Suez crisis in 1954, when the world learned that war could be avoided through planning and negotiation (thanks to Canadian Lester Pearson, another Nobel winner), we lost our taste for war as the primary answer to everything. True, wars and genocides have continued since that time, but they happen less frequently now and they are generally frowned upon by the world community. Nations that continue to identify themselves with war are considered brutal or bullies these days in international forums.

Without success in battle, we aren’t certain what we should use to measure greatness. We look to movie stars, chess champions, medical wunderkinds and the like, but we have yet to establish new definitions for greatness, for who should be our heroes.

It’s harder than ever to be a hero these days. The faults and follies of Paris Hilton are as well known as whatever she does right (I haven’t figured that out yet), whereas the public learned mostly of the successes of Marilyn Monroe and little of her problems.

Heroes and great people today must be categorized in terms of their relationship to their particular fields of endeavour. Without rising to international fame, a field-related hero doesn’t have to endure close examination by the media. In other words, we care about the successes of Stephen Hawking the theoretical physicist, but not about any penchant he may have for unseemly behaviour.

We don’t really have fewer heroes and great people today than in the past. Indeed, we have many more than ever before. We may not recognize them because they are no longer military leaders or emperors.

Today’s heroes and great people may be more real than in the past because we recognize them for more than just the ability to kill more people than their enemies. They may be great athletes or great thinkers or doers of great charitable deeds. They may fight battles, but they are battles of words, and for reputation.

That’s human progress of a kind we haven’t seen before in our history.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to advance human progress in many ways other than through war. It’s a plan that works.
Learn more at http://billallin.com