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We Need to Talk
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Scimonoce
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The System
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Rescue Trooper
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Road to Tashkent
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Humor
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Essays and Comments
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all material on this site ©Andy Turnbull, 2006
Andy Turnbull has worked as staff reporter on the Ontario Intelligencer in Belleville, Ontario, the Kingston Whig-Standard, the Peterborough Examiner and the Kamloops News; as a copy editor on the Toronto Evening Telegram and as a photographer on the Kitchener-Waterloo Record. He has been editor of three weekly papers and three trade magazines and is the author of two commercial and three self-published books.
His free-lance articles have appeared in the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Evening Telegram, Toronto Sun, Star Weekly, Weekend, The Canadian, Maclean's, Canadian Business, Reader's Digest and other magazines in Canada, Japan Times in Japan, Spotlight, Spot-On and Fernfahrer in Germany, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Road King, Overdrive and other magazines in the United States, The Geographical, Truck and Trucking International in England, Truck'n Life in Australia and more trade magazines than we can list here. His work has taken him to every province and territory of Canada and also in the United States, Panama, Jamaica, Mexico, England, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Finland, France, Spain, Australia, Japan, Russia, Poland, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
In the 1960's he shot TV newsfilm for CKCO-TV, CFTO-TV and other stations and in the 1970's he recorded feature clips and a one-hour show for CBC radio. His magazine articles have won awards in Canada and the United States and By Truck to the North (co-authored with Debora Pearson and published by Annick, in Toronto) won the 1999 Norma Fleck award for the best kids' book in Canada, was nominated for the Silver Birch Award in 1999 and won the Hackmatack Award in 2000. His first book, Another Way, was published by Deneau and Greenberg in Ottawa, in 1979.
After 40 years writing the kind of stuff that sells Turnbull is now semi-retired and able to write things he considers important. The three non-fiction books in this series (so far) are The Numbers Game, The System and We Need to Talk. In the past couple of years he has re-written and expanded The System and now hopes to place it with a commercial publisher. The Numbers Game has recently been rewritten and updated as Scimonoce, another way to look at economics and The System is now into a second revised (and much expanded) edition.
There is some overlap between these books, because many of the ideas are new and I can't assume that the person who reads one has read the others. There's not much overlap, and it's there only where I think it's needed.
Earlier versions of these books were on line as html files and some were for sale as Kindle ebooks on Amazon, but most are now available free, from this website, in pdf format.
This is a book of ideas about how human culture developed and where it seems to be heading; and how we might guide it into a more sustainable path.
My concern is the future but much of the book is about the past because our future began in the distant past, and if we don't understand the past we can't predict the future.
Sailors know that a ship is not often going in the direction it appears to be heading. There are currents in the sea and if you want to head due east through a northerly current you have to head south of due east. Even a steamship has to compensate for the wind, and a sailing ship often has to 'tack' back and forth across the wind to get where the sailor wants to go.
So if you want to know where a ship is going it's not enough to know where it is and which direction it is headed. You have to know where it started and where it is now, or where it is headed and which way the wind is blowing and the currents are flowing, and how much the sailor knows about the wind and the currents.
Predicting the future is something like predicting the course of a ship, because we can't tell where the world is going without knowing where we started; and how we got from there to here; and we have to understand the social, economic and other pressures that drive us this way or that.
If a sailor sets his course without knowing the wind and the currents, he won't get to wherever he wants to go. If pundits and politicians try to guide us without understanding where we started and the various factors that cause and affect change, they won't get us to where we want to go.
Do you think Hitler knew what he was getting into when he invaded Poland? Did Ben-Gurion intend to create the nightmare of Palestine? Did Lyndon Johnson mean the war in Vietnam to work out the way it did? Did George W. Bush know what his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq would lead to? Not likely.
Some books about the future predict a time of progress and high-tech wealth. That’s no surprise because most books are written to sell and most of us like predictions that we will soon be wealthy and have robots to clean the house while we travel to other planets; but such dreams are not realistic.
I'm not going to predict the doom of mankind but it is a distinct possibility and, if we don't recognize that, it may become a probability. We don't have to go there but to avoid it we have to know where we came from, and we have to understand the forces that are driving us. That means we have to take a serious look at the nature of humanity.
This is the third edition of a book that was published on paper in 2005 and, with a few changes, re-published in 2007. The first two editions were written for Canadians and distributed only within Canada but this edition, which will be published only in electronic format, addresses a wider market.We Need To Talk
Scimonoce
Most of this book was written more than ten years ago, as The Numbers Game and some things have changed since then,but the basic problems are still there and the ideas are still valid.
Scimonoce takes a radical and sensible look at the so-called "science" of economics.
Most economists assume that anything that can be exchanged for money can be counted as wealth. Alfred Marshall, generally recognized as the father of modern economics, once said "a lawyer's brief is just as real as a sack of potatoes."
But if a farmer produces a bumper crop of potatoes our cost of living goes down, and if a lawyer produces more briefs our cost of living goes up. Clearly, the two are not equivalent.
The belief that paperwork is as valuable as vegetables, and other misconceptions endorsed by economists, are driving the world to poverty.
In clear, readable language Scimonoce explains how our economic system counts crimes and disasters as "economic benefits," and how it encourages people to be parasites and predators rather than productive workers.
It explains how banks create their own money, and how this money erodes the value of our national currency. It shows how mutual funds and the stock market encourage the destruction of viable businesses.
It shows how the "global economy" impoverishes rich and poor nations alike, how it spreads pests around the world and how it will someday help spread a plague that will kill tens of millions of people.
It exposes the farce of the "post industrial economy" and shows that when we use the people of the third world for cheap labor, we rob them and ourselves.
Much of the world is now in recession, and governments hope to recover with the same kind of programs that caused the problem. Scimonoce explains what went wrong, and how we can fix it.
Get the pdf
Scimonoce
Most people think the President, the Congress and the Senate rule the United States, the Prime Minister and the Houses of Parliament rule Great Britain, the President, Prime Minister and National Assembly rule France, and so-forth.
Most people are wrong.
Some think a secret society of billionaires rules all three countries and most of the rest of the world.
Wrong again.
I argue that the real rulers of the world are the metaphysical entities that I call metasystems, and that politicians and/or billionaires are successful because they serve those metasystems.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It's nature study, because metasystems are natural developments -- the product of what some biologists call emergent behavior and games theorists call self-organization.
Emergent behavior is common in nature. Examples include the shrimp and small fish that clean sharks' teeth on tropical reefs, birds that clean crocodiles' teeth beside African rivers, thorny-tailed lizards and black scorpions that share burrows in Arabia and dolphins that cooperate with human fishermen.
The shrimp, fish and birds that clean sharks' and crocodiles' teeth do it because they find food there, and sharks and the crocodiles permit it because they enjoy it. When a lizard and a scorpion share a burrow, the lizard will eat any predator that threatens the scorpion and the scorpion will kill predators (mostly foxes and men) that might eat the lizard. Dolphins and fishermen cooperate in some parts of the world because both catch more fish when they do.
Metasystems are relationships that become entrenched in human society. Probably the best-known is the entity we call the Military-Industrial Complex, or MIC.
A nation's armed forces and its arms producers have no formal connection but both gain prestige and profit from international tension; and an arms race between two countries provides benefits for the MICs of both.
The MIC is just one of an almost infinite number of metasystems in any given country, and all MICs around the world are linked to other metasystems.
Some religions, for example, compare themselves to armies, and police forces buy much of their equipment from industries that also supply armies. The Prison-Industrial Complex deals with the same industries, and both police and prisons deal with lawyers, judges and other servants of the law. Ultimately, almost all metasystems are connected in the global metasystem that I call The System.
The existence and behavior of metasystems, and of The System, are obvious once they have been pointed out but, like the hidden pictures in some puzzles, they are difficult to see until they are pointed out.
The development of metasystems may be inevitable in a complex society but, because they are self-organized, metasystems are autonomous and some of them -- like the MIC -- are so big and powerful they can shape our society. They are dangerous because they have no brains or foresight, and no concern for the welfare of humanity.
In the past metasystems have been responsible for the collapse of empires but the collapse of early empires didn't matter much because they were relatively local affairs and -- for example -- the fall of Rome had no repercussions in Asia or the Americas. Modern culture is global and if it crashes we may never build another civilization.
As scientist/philosopher James Lovelock observes, we have used most of the Earth's readily-available oil and other resources and, without modern technology, a post-apocalyptic civilization might not find resources to develop. Oil once seeped out of the ground, but we now look for new wells at the bottom of the sea.
The System introduces new and potentially seminal ideas in sociology, political science, economics and the origins of agriculture. While it is scholarly in nature and I cite my sources, I am an experienced newspaper and magazine writer and editor and I write for the general public.
The first edition of The System was published in 2005, and it was posted here for on-line readers. The new version, with a more detailed analysis of modern metasystems and, I think, a clearer explanation, is posted as a PDF. In fact now we're up to version three, with some changes in wording, some types corrected and the pdf is in three columns which, I think, will make for easier reading. Feedback is invited.
This book is fiction, and a good example of something I deplore when other people do it -- fiction written as propaganda, to make a political point. In this case I don't apologize because I think my point -- that it would make more sense for Canada to maintain an international rescue corps than to maintain conventional armed forces -- is valid. This is a theme I've supported for a long time -- you'll also find the argument in the "Defence" section of We Need to Talk. I wrote this book during the cold war, and had a few copies printed, but it was never widely distributed. It's still a good read, and an idea that makes even more sense now -- in a time of seismic activity and climate change -- than it did in the cold war.
You might also look at it as a lesson in propaganda, because it doesn't look like propaganda and many people would not recognize it as propaganda but, in this case, you have the author's word that it is.
For more than a thousand years traders trekked the Silk Road from Europe across Central Asia to China -- land of the Khans, of silk and tea and spices. The trade was between the ends of the road -- Rome and China -- but the ancient cities of Central Asia took the best of it, and developed legendary cultures.
Tashkent. Samarkand. Balkh. There were no flying carpets or genies, but there were enough wonders that credulous Europeans could and would believe anything.
When the Khans fell warlords took power and much of the traffic failed, but the route has been re-opened and truckers from Europe can now trade with the heirs of the Celestial Empire. I rode with an English trucker across Europe, Russia, part of Siberia and Kazakhstan to deliver a computer to the Bank of Uzbekistan in Tashkent.
Road to Tashkent tells the story of that trip, of modern trucking and of the camel caravans that blazed the trail and built the world we know. The Silk Road is open again, and the truckers and traders who travel it are writing new chapters in the history of trade and adventure.
As a newspaper reporter I wrote the occasional humorous piece and for a couple of years I wrote for a humor magazine. Here are a few light pieces as used by the magazine, and at least one that wasn't.
This is light reading, mostly for fun, and included here partly to boost my ego. Humor me.