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    Operation Toga: Type One Go Ahead
    Operation Toga: Type One Go Ahead
    Operation Toga: Type One Go Ahead
    Ebook83 pages1 hour

    Operation Toga: Type One Go Ahead

    By John Griffin

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    About this ebook

    Learn just how fascinating a TOGA party can be! Interwoven fiction and essays illustrate humanity's chance to Go Ahead into a future of peace and prosperity in an increasingly Type One high-energy and wealthy civilization.

    Nuclear destruction of a major US port hangs in the balance as Max Progress, extraordinary social innovator, joins open-minded twin sisters Athena and Aphrodite and Iraqi scientist Sumaya in a search for the best paths to personal happiness and a better world. Together they explore fresh perspectives on nuclear power, health care reform, education, a national guaranteed minimum income, and other crucial issues. How will their actions and perhaps yours affect the outcome of this ingeniously structured tale?

    Discover how Operation Type One Go Ahead can enliven, even transform, your experiences of storytelling and of our collective future!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateMar 2, 2010
    ISBN9781450207034
    Operation Toga: Type One Go Ahead
    Author

    John Griffin

    John Griffin is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, and President of the Mid-Hudson chapter of the American Culinary Federation. He is a Certified Executive Chef, and a Certified Executive Pastry Chef, with the ACF. Jeff Gold has a long and varied career, from Executive Chef at Lake Tahoe, to his current law practice in LA. He is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, and along with being a lawyer, Je_ teaches in the Hospitality Department at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, CA. Jeff has been on the forefront of taste combinations that include Umami, Koji and other great tastes. Elliott Wennet has won an international reputation as a serious and inventive artist. He has done stage and concert design, and album cover work. Elliott created and produced unique and extraordinary Faux Finishes, Murals, Tromp’l’oiel, Italian and Venetian plaster surfaces. He also trained many future and practicing decorative artist throughout the years.

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      Book preview

      Operation Toga - John Griffin

      Contents

      Foreword

      Long Books Are Too Slow

      Buckley’s Demands

      Dinner For Three

      An Unexpected Encounter

      If the TOGA Fits, Wear It

      Operation TOGA:

      Strategy: Operation TOGA

      Policy 1: Energy Sustainability

      Policy 2: A Negative Income Tax Guaranteed Minimum Income

      for the United States

      Policy 3: Single Payer Health Care Financing, Or At Least Two Big Improvements To US Health Care

      Policy 4: College-level Science/Technology/Engineering/Math Education for All

      Policy Idea for the Future: Energy-based Accounting

      Philosophy: RPPK — the Virtue

      of Wise Selfishness

      References

      Breakfast

      Afterword

      This book is dedicated to

      Gavin, Jane,

      My mother and father,

      Deanna, Paul,

      Christena, Donn,

      And to the dream of a prosperous, peaceful life

      For all children everywhere

      The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous [….] To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.

      — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

      "The concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism. a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.’

      — Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons Of History

      K = (log10W – 6) / 10, where K is a civilization’s Kardashev rating and W is the civilization’s power output in watts. Kardashev ratings nominally range from 0 to 3.

      —Carl Sagan, Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial

      Perspective (paraphrased)

      I remain hopeful that Americans can still rouse themselves to save our democracy. But the time in which to head off financial and moral bankruptcy is growing short.

      —Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis

      If you make a revolution, make it for fun,

      don’t make it in ghastly seriousness,

      don’t do it in deadly earnest,

      do it for fun.

      — D. H. Lawrence, A Sane Revolution

      Foreword

      5699.jpg

      I am a fictioholic.

      Stories of adventure, mystery, fantasy, historical fiction, science fiction and more have fascinated me since childhood. Enjoyment of fiction has always felt natural to me, and it probably feels natural to you.

      But today my addiction to fiction stands largely broken. Today I choose to be more of a TOGAholic than a fictioholic.

      The acronym TOGA stands for Type One Go Ahead. Type One refers to a category of civilization with levels of energy availability and technological development significantly higher than levels we now have on Earth. The phrase Go Ahead expresses enthusiasm for policies and aims that might help us become a Type One civilization sooner rather than later, sooner rather than never.

      I prize the singular dream of a Type One human civilization more highly than the numberless dreams of fiction. Thus, more of my free time goes toward striving for a Type One Earth than goes toward enjoying the fiction I so naturally crave.

      SKU-000121641_TEXT.pdf

      The following book is a set of partial essays nested within sketchy fiction. You will surely find this tale unsatisfying as a story. This is by design. Why?

      There are three main reasons. For one thing, one of the TOGA essays — written by the character Max Progress — proposes ideas outlandish enough to seem more fictional than realistic. How ridiculous, to suggest that within decades we might seriously consider replacing money with energy certificates as currency! While this was, in fact, first proposed as early as the 1920s by members of the Technocracy movement, at first hearing it may sound crazy enough to belong in an imaginary story. Even the more realistic TOGA essay proposals for the United States — development of many new nuclear power plants, a robust guaranteed minimum income program, single-payer health care and universal science/technology/engineering/math education — may seem unlikely at best. So, while I aim to convince you that the Type One Go Ahead agenda is viable and most desirable, fiction feels right as an introduction to this fabric of socio-political dreams.

      The second reason for this book’s structure is my hope that it might help prevent or cure undesirable cases of fiction addiction. I would never suggest that anyone avoid fiction altogether, especially anyone who has as yet experienced little of it. Fiction can be an irreplaceably great part of life, and everyone should enjoy it in whatever variety they like. But how much fiction is too much? At what point does a bottomless appetite for fantasy begin to drown out a person’s — or a society’s — understanding of and engagement in crucial political issues? When fiction becomes consistently more interesting than reality, it is time to free ourselves from fiction’s distractions.

      The third and final reason for this blend of fiction and essays is to point toward the value and possibilities of a yogic, or meditative, perspective on life. The essence of such a perspective is Kindness. In my opinion, the values of Rationality, Productivity, Pride, and above all Kindness — RPPK as abbreviated in the TOGA Philosophy essay fragment — should guide us all. This is because of the practical fact that we are all interconnected, as suggested

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