Congratulations Frank Goetz

I won an award which lead to an article which lead to an amazing academic reaction unfolding this month.  Here is the story:

Special Recognition Award 2016

Thanks to the Frank Goetz persistent determination I finally relented and entered his Kellogg Briandt Treaty (law against war) contest, due in April 2016.  But I was shooting for the stars trying to get a reply out of very busy presidential campaigns.  I didn’t realize the entry required a reply from the person I sent the letter to.  Only after sending in the 800 word letter to Frank Goetz did I learn about the reply contingency.  I tried everybody, Hillary, Bernie, Trump, even Jill Stein and the Libertarians.  No reply.  I sent the text out as another of my press releases on April 23, 2016 because to use ExpertClick.com you have to have 100% new content, so it needed to be posted before widespread dissemination.  Because I did not get a reply, I thought my chances were over.  Then I got an invitation from Frank Goetz to accept a Special Recognition Award for the letter, which I accepted.  That event happened on August 23, 2016, the eighty-eighth anniversary of the Treaty.  The West Suburban Faith Based Peace Coalition (of Chicago) awarded me this special recognition award by printing the letter along with the first second and third place winners of the contest in the award booklet.  This booklet was handed to everyone at the banquet to celebrate the event and raise money for the ongoing cause.  I was lucky to sit at the same table with the top staff person for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, whose son won second place.  I then went on to give a mind blowing five minute speech about empire and the American condition.  I’m used to blowing minds of those who have not heard me before; the research was equally mind blowing to me as I developed it in 1985 and 1986 for the first book called “Peace Economics”.  I learned to emphasize the empire economics aspects of the theory over the course of many years.  A frequent listener to my presentations suggests the empire economics theme is the best way to present my extensive material.

Between August and October 2016

I had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize earlier in the year 2016 with obvious interest showing from the Norwegian Nobel Committee, but this accomplishment did not set the academic world on fire.  I definitely catch a lot of short term attention telling people about that nomination, but then life moves on. What started the academic world on fire was the two entries in the “SAGE Encyclopedia of War, a Social Sciences Perspective” by Paul Joseph, who worked tirelessly helping me perfect those entries.  I was told that the Encyclopedia would go out in October when final editing was approved for my entries in May.  So with the onset of October 1, I put my final copy of these entries out on line in my academia.edu account.  I had come to expect a 10% download rate for my articles overall.  Immediately my 120 (140 today) academic followers took notice and began downloading the article on record pace, especially the “Political Economy of War” article which had a 70% initial download rate per viewing, now 53% after eight months.  Then on October 15^th I posted the “Military Keynesianism” article to a download rate of 35%.  “Military Keynesianism” then got a recommendation from a Nigerian Accounting Professor, former Finance Minister of the country, with over one million views on his academia.edu account.  That got me a 1.1 rating on academia.edu in that category.  Then I upgraded my academia.edu account and found out that I’m in the top 1% there on a 12 month basis (and have been ever since).  With the encyclopedia listings, suddenly three times the usual number of international people have been viewing and downloading my academia papers ever since.  After all this on the encyclopedia, Stephen Sachs asked to republish the piece “Dear Future US President” which he called a fine piece on 10-16-16.  This was finally published in the Winter issue of Nonviolent Change Journal p.298-299, online at nonviolentchange.org in February 2017.

Between January and April 2017

After my presentation at the Telos Institute at NYU, at the end of the conference the keynoter approached me humble and speechless as I offered a few words of advice.  His speech could easily have given me another 10 footnotes to my own, but I gave him the big picture.  In March I went to Lake Geneva for GaryCon and found out that I am a legend of wargaming in the “Dungeons and Dragons” world of Gary Gygax followers.  Some suggest they are a better base of support than academics.  Then in April my Geospatial Summit speech was filmed by the ABC affiliate in Madison, WKOW 27, for a future program on “local voices” in the global warming debate.  I continue to do shows on the Mitch Henck radio program for over a year and a half now, about twice a month. He and his audience have grown to love and admire “Dr. Peace.”

Very Special May 2017

On May 8th I finally got around to posting the article “Dear Future US President” published in Nonviolent Change Journal, which posting I do for all peer reviewed material on academia.edu.  Because I had the material out there in press release and blog form about a year ago, I usually wait for a new press release that fits with the academia.edu paper.  I got tired of waiting and had sent out new postings to the followers list of about 140 now for about a half year since October.  So I just posted it with the press release about the Special Recognition Award as the second article in the same “paper” posting.  Then I got the most unexpected huge reaction, people love the piece.  The first week ending 5-14-17 has seen an unprecedented MORE DOWNLOADS (44) THAN VIEWS (39).  Top 2% (by month) by 5-20-17 for the first time an individual paper of mine has ranked that high.  Now it is #1 in downloads of all my 69 papers in just two weeks, on 5-21-17, with a total of 59 downloads while views increased to 64.  Downloads for this paper are still at a personal record 92% of views.  Another first is the three unsolicited messages almost immediately from three people after the paper posting.  So congratulations Frank Goetz for goading me and lauding me, helping me boost my reputation to record international levels with an assist by Stephen Sachs the editor of Nonviolent Change Journal!  Now even the US people are taking more notice, although some of the new US postings are from foreigners working or attending US universities.  The exponential curve I’ve been waiting a long time for may finally be arriving.  It’s been quite a year.  New ideas need new people to notice and finally the word is spreading and growing around the world.  It used to be that people just read a few of my postings to get a feel for me, now it increasing looks like patterns of thinking are pursued in the choice of postings to read.  That tells me that people are beginning to go deeper in their thinking about me and my work.  In other words, they are beginning to catch on.

Here are the two writings creating all this political excitement around the world:

https://www.academia.edu/32905059/DEAR_FUTURE_US_PRESIDENT_Spring_2016_3_pages

Professor Robert Reuschlein, Dr. Peace, Real Economy Institute,                         Nominated and vetted for the Nobel Peace Prize 2016 and 2017,                                Contact bobreuschlein@gmail.com Info www.realeconomy.com

Game Master Gygax History

Stretching the Imagination

The Role Playing Games Industry (Dungeons and Dragons) emerged from war gaming and the discipline and imagination of Gary Gygax (1938-2008) of Lake Geneva Wisconsin.  Born in 1938, Gary grew up fascinated with fantasy books.  In 1958 he discovered Avalon Hill (AH) war games, and when they introduced a fanzine in 1964, the Avalon Hill General, Gary dominated the early writers and contributors to that monthly magazine.  In 1966, Gygax founded the International Federation of Wargaming (IFW), and encouraged fellow legend of wargaming Robert Reuschlein (later nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016) to join that group that became the largest wargaming group of its time. Reuschlein (age 16), and Gygax (age 28), became fascinated with each other as each developed local groups in the two Wisconsin cities of Madison and Lake Geneva.  They played an epic “play by mail” game of “Battle of the Bulge” in the Fall of 1966 which Reuschlein won, and in 2017 Gary’s son Luke said he hated to lose. “Battle of the Bulge” was the favorite game of Reuschlein and also sixties leading journalist CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite.  Together with the likes of Len Lakofka, Bill Hoyer, and John Bobek, these five dominated the new club from the greater Chicago area.  Gary Gygax developed the first successful wargaming convention in 1968, GenCon, starting with 100 wargamers, now featuring 50,000 attendees in Indianapolis each year.  Reuschlein’s smaller Madison Wargaming Convention started with 24 in 1969 including Gary Gygax, peaked in 1972 at 98, and then crashed the next year to 24 under new management.  Reuschlein was a math and rules wizard with a record of 19-1 as top rated player in the IFW but he stuck narrowly with the AH games genre, while Gary was involved in all things wargaming spending twice as much time per week as Reuschlein and may have written ten times as many articles.  Gary stretched his imagination with land and naval miniatures and eventually castles in a sandbox.  While both Reuschlein and Gygax developed their own games, again Gary was many times more prolific in that as well.  The Reuschlein Gygax bond ended in 1974 as Reuschlein gave up wargaming after winning the first two GenCon AH tournaments and moving to the West Coast after college graduation.  Gary offered to put my games collection up for sale at GenCon as he went on that year to develop “Dungeons and Dragons” and Reuschlein later entered politics 1978 to 1993 in the State of Oregon.  Reuschlein invests in convertible bonds completely unaware his friend Gary Gygax needs money to start the D & D business. Gary’s interest in miniatures, fantasy, and the development of rules for individual combat in the game “Chainmail” lead directly into the development of “Dungeons and Dragons”.  Stretching the imagination with fantasy history and wargaming, detailing the rules with the precision of a claims adjuster, and endless writing experience, lead to the first popular role playing game.

Business of Dungeons and Dragons

In December 1973 Gary forms a partnership named Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) to produce “Dungeons and Dragons”.  One thousand games were purchased in January 1974 and sold that first year.  Doubling every year, within a few years sales were 2 or 3 million a year by 1978-79 and the game became a national obsession.  Gary faced several common issues of entrepreneurs almost immediately.  Starting out he is undercapitalized.  Having lost his day job as an insurance underwriter in Chicago in October 1970, he is forced to turn to shoe repair for a living in 1971. Still in December 1973 he has $1000 of his own, another $1000 from his best gaming friend Don Kaye, and another guy in town, Brian Blume, who is not a gamer.  Starting out with just one third ownership is a big red flag in the small business world.  When you do not have a majority ownership it’s easy to lose control of your company.  The second red flag is the absence of an agreement to buy out owners who want out.  Sometimes this is combined with insurance on the partners so that if one dies, the insurance pays off the spouse of the deceased.  Unfortunately for Gary Gygax both of these issues come back to haunt him.  He is in fairly good shape with his best friend and himself owning a majority.  Then tragedy strikes, as his best friend partner dies in January of the second year, 1975.  Then Don Kaye’s widow sells to Brian Blume’s father Melvin as he outbids Gary.  Now Gary is in the precarious position of minority ownership to the Blumes.  In the summer of 1983, Kevin Blume, Brian’s brother assumes control of the company after Gary’s divorce and Gary is relegated to an entertainment subsidiary and goes to Hollywood.  In late 1984 Gary comes home to oust Kevin for poor performance and seize control of the company in March 1985 using long held stock options.  Then he hires a professional manager Lorraine Williams to run the company who seizes control ousting Gygax after seven months on October 22, 1985.  For a second time he makes the mistake of trusting strangers as his chosen business manager Lorraine Williams buys majority control from the Blumes.

After Tactical Studies Rules

When Gary Gygax took his talents elsewhere, he went on to develop other role playing games, but the spark of imagination that lead to Dungeons and Dragons opened up a whole new field of role playing games with levels of achievement, and eventually much of today’s $100 billion video games industry owes him for this development.  Where would “Grand Theft Auto” and the many war fighting video games be without the basic structure of applied imagination individual role playing games begun by Gary Gygax in 1974?  All these subsequent developments come from the rich imagination of the medieval ages of Western Civilization.  Anthropology and fantasy like JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”, combined with things like “Star Trek” left the door wide open for Gary Gygax to earn the label #1 Nerd of all time in Sync magazine’s 2002 poll.  A lifetime Camels smoker, Gary Gygax died at the early age of 69 in 2008.  Steven Colbert paid tribute to him on his passing.

Summary

Had I known my friend Gary Gygax needed money in December 1973 I might have invested in his business.  Had that happened, I would probably have ended up rich, but as a second fiddle.  I would not have blazed my own path in Oregon politics that lead to the inventions of my macroeconomics and global warming theories that lead to my recent nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.  The world does not always beat a path to the door of the person who develops a better mousetrap, it takes marketing.  My work is only gradually getting recognized thanks to my doctorate in 2009, one year after Gary died.  I regret not seeing him in those last years, especially after I moved back to Wisconsin in 1993.  I had experience with others becoming rich and famous around me, such as “Clan of the Cave Bear” author Jean Auel, who I met and shared campground experiences with in Longbow Campground.  That was the annual retreat place of the Oregon Mensa group in the Oregon Cascades just East of Salem.  So although recognition is slow so far, at least it is not posthumous as in the case of Copernicus.  I do not regret blazing my own path and creating two theories each of which is about an order of magnitude improvement on the fields of macroeconomics long term accuracy and global warming temperature forecasting.  That would not have happened in the shadow of Gary Gygax, much as I love him.  His oldest son told me how he would talk about me a lot, so I underestimated his friendship and esteem for me.  I feared he would think of me as another high school classmate that tries to get in with the rich man, rather than an old friend.  One of many mistakes I have made in life.

More on the Reuschlein Gygax story is here in these past releases and findings on the internet:

https://www.academia.edu/32134382/WARGAMER_File_1964-2017_9_pages.pdf

Professor Robert Reuschlein, Dr. Peace, Real Economy Institute, Nominated and vetted for the Nobel Peace Prize 2016 and 2017, Contact bobreuschlein@gmail.com Info www.realeconomy.com

Telos Institute Lessons

Lessons of Three Great Conferences,  By Professor Robert Reuschlein

Asymmetrical Warfare, Telos Institute, NYU, January 14-15, 2017  

I had great success with the presentation, “Goal of Terrorists: Raising the Cost to Society” at the Telos Institute in New York University.  Asymmetric Warfare raises the cost to society of warfare.  Those in the military industrial complex believe that warfare can enhance themselves and their society.  This belief led to the Iraq War.  Those employing asymmetric warfare believe they can punish the military society’s population enough to make them give up.  This was the strategy that won the Vietnam War.  The asymmetric warrior (aka “terrorist”) believes a militaristic society will implode when enough pressure is put on them.  These so-called terrorists are even more right than they realize.  The eight years of the Reagan Military Buildup tripled the national debt (quadrupling if you add in the 4 Bush years).  The seven years of the second Bush military buildup wars led to the Great Recession, thanks to the surge in military spending in fiscal 2008 and overheated real estate markets in the corruption prone high military states.  Blowback was immediate and internal and escalates over time.  This is exactly what Osama Bin Laden wanted out of the Western response to his provocations, saying in a 2005 speech:  “So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”

In my empire economics speech I outlined the true cost of militarization on America, depleting our capital and research resources leading to economic and social decay, including high crime.  Empire stagnation includes the stagnation of the political process in America.  Militarization leads to the direct depletion of the manufacturing sector much faster than the more obvious and visible trade treaty losses of factories.  In the decade after 2001 terrorism has quadrupled.  Goading us into attack has been a goal of the terrorists.  I gave the keynote speaker a copy of my 24 page booklet after his opening speech; he was not impressed but politely took it.  After hearing my speech he keeps reading it while others spoke.  At the end of the conference, he approached me in the cloakroom speechless with a puppy dog look in his eyes, so I said a few words to him.  His speech could have been used for a dozen footnotes to my speech, but he knew I had the big picture down cold.  Telos Institute is a great place that welcomes new ideas, so a colleague has been encouraging me to present there for some time.  That colleague was right on, they loved me there and I fit right in.

 

Ethics and Mental Health Conference, Viterbo U., La Crosse, WI, April 6-8, 2017

The best presentation here was “Gun Deaths and Public Health: What is the Mental Health Connection?” Steve Miles, University of Minnesota Medical School.  Dr. Miles major finding is that gun ownership is proportional to gun deaths.  Handgun suicides are ten times as likely for a kid from a gun household.  You are 4.5 times more likely to be shot when carrying a gun.  Gun owners are eight times more likely to threaten murder. Gun households have four times the homicide rate, seven times the suicide rate, and sixteen times the accidental gun death rate.

This compares to my finding that murder rates and crime rates are proportional to the military spending of a developed country.  The inference is that a militarized society is more likely to murder, all kinds of murder, but suicides are not proportional to military spending.  Perhaps the more militarized portions of a military society are conversant with guns and inclined to own guns.  Are these the people with military training we are talking about?  I do not know that particular evidence, but it does seem likely that those familiar with gun use would be inclined to either join or be from the military.  Military training has advanced since the fifties into a very effective trainer of killers.  Past wars had as many as 78% of soldiers who never fired guns, and in one case a dozen musket rounds were found in a soldiers gun, so reluctant to kill other people that person was.  That changed in US military training in the fifties.

More detail at this link:

https://www.academia.edu/4862977/CRIME_and_the_Military_1989-1999_3p._1999

 

Geospatial Summit, University of Wisconsin, Madison, April 26, 2017

My presentation was videotaped by WKOW TV for a climate voices unit Greg Jeschke plans to produce in the near future.  My talk was titled “How Climate Change trends impact humans, the economy, and politics.”  Temperature studies by industrial engineers have long shown that human performance is reduced at above normal temperatures, reducing productivity on hot days.  There are at least three other sets of evidence that show this effect on economics:  geography, stock market, and US history.  The major war cycle also comes from economic cycles that come from global warming cycles.  Sharp cooling trends of two or three years duration often precede major wars, and volcanoes can trigger this process.  Economic differences expand in the high growth half of the cycle, leading to peak wealth, a new world order, and a major war about three years into the next slow half cycle.  That economic change at the end of the growth cycle may encourage politicians to look for a way to distract the public from the slowing economy with a war.

This talk explored explanations of these various linkages with temperature and climate change, showing that the three types of cycles are all linked and start with the climate changes.  Environmental determinism is in my opinion a baseless pejorative narrative to paint a rational theory as something it is not, as racist and colonialist.  The proof of this is that human performance, economic history, and the stock market are all confirming the cool improves and heat stifles narrative.  You have to ignore those three other proofs to come up with a racist and colonialist narrative that only sounds plausible in one school of thought, imperialism, not in an interdisciplinary context.  Triangulation from at least three different directions is the standard of proof I seek in all my work on these two great theories of economics and global warming.

 

Summary

These three issues are the main issues in my research.  Empire Economics is my best presentation and a version of that was used at Telos.  With military spending the prime cause, empires decay from a lack of productivity coming from the military resources.  That in turn leads to the social decay of empires, included murder rates, health problems, and lack of social mobility.  In America it is obvious that many celebrities are now sons or daughters of other celebrities, as America has traded places in the last generation or so with Europe in terms of being a class based society. Crime and corruption is strongly correlated with military spending both internationally and within the American states, including the poor mortgage practices leading up to the Great Recession.  Crime is the easily identified exemplar of the social decay of empire concept.  The right wing thinks moral decay is bringing down America, but my work supports the opposite theory, that the self inflicted wound of wasting too much military spending at the expense of manufacturing and construction economic growth sectors causes the long term rise in crime, poor health, stagnant politics, and class divergence in America.

But the key to perfecting the long term 60 year US economic model is the 54 year Kondratiev cycle.  And the key to proving the existence of that cycle is linking up the three versions of the cycle, the natural cycle, the economic cycle, and the political war cycle.  I’ve always sensed it was absurd to consider these three cycles separately.  I’m convinced that the order of those cycles is natural, economic, then political, both by the logic of the linking mechanisms and the slightly diminishing accuracy of the proving phenomena in my 56 events chart.  As always, I’m looking for multiple proofs of concept along multidisciplinary lines of seeing past the silos of isolated thinking into the broader concept of looking at events from multiple points of view to grasp the correct essence of it all.

Link to the actual Telos Institute and Geospatial Summit powerpoint slides are here:

https://www.academia.edu/32759407/EMPIRE_and_CLIMATE_Economics_ppt._29_slide_5_p._2017

Professor Robert Reuschlein, Dr. Peace, Real Economy Institute, Nominated and vetted for the Nobel Peace Prize 2016 and 2017, Contact bobreuschlein@gmail.com Info www.realeconomy.com