The Indypendent: History has a sense of humor, but it appears to be a cruel one. It has bequeathed to us an idiot-emperor clueless about the countries that he wants to bomb into freedom. It’s given us a global war against terrorism that brutalizes those who resist the globalized apartheid. And it’s left humanity simmering from an epidemic of conflicts fought in part to satiate America’s petroleum appetites, even as the earth cooks from a century of fossil-fuel binging. Never before has our world been in so much peril. At one end stands a messianic elite, ready to reshape the world with nuclear weapons as their sword and free trade as their religion. At the other is humanity and the planet, treated like commodities to be controlled, used and discarded. (04/26/02)
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Timothy Wilken writes: I am well into my strongend. Still working on the specifications for GIFTegrity. One of my realizations is that in a network of Giftors-Giftees, there is no place for anonymity. The Giftor/Giftee relationship is only successful when both parties win and when they can trust each other. To trust someone you have to know who he is and when and where you can access him. Our current Neutral political-economic system thrives on anonymity. I don’t care who, where, or when you are as long as I get my money. … I have also figured out some ways to make the process simpler. Simpler is always better. (04/26/02)
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Elisabet Sartouris writes: There is a great deal that we still don’t understand about brains. We can study their evolution and construction, count their cells, record and measure their patterns of chemical and electrical activity, and yet we do not really know how they do what they do. There is a very good chance that our explanations of them will change dramatically in the future. … As we big-brained mammals lost the rigidity of innate behavior and gained freedom of choice, we also gained our unique kind of consciousness — our reflective awareness of what we are doing, our memory of what we have done, and our projected mages of what we might do with our awareness of choice. This conscious awareness that we live in a linear past, present, and future, in which there is cause and effect, makes it possible for us to predict on the basis of past experience what the effects of our behavior will be. Even though physicists now tell us — as eastern philosophies did earlier — that cause-and-effect spacetime is an illusion, this kind of perception of our reality serves as our guide to behavioral choice. (04/26/02)

Peter Corning writes: Far more significant, though, are the widely varying predictions relating to our global future — the ultimate fate of humankind. At this conference alone, we were offered two very different visions of the future. On the one hand, a multi-media plenary presentation warned us of a potential Armageddon — a war to end all wars in a very different sense from what the American President Woodrow Wilson promised after World War One — if we don’t radically change our course. In another conference presentation, however, we were told that human societies are being propelled by an energy-driven pulse — a steep parabola of fossil-fueled growth and inevitable, unavoidable decline — yet a “prosperous” downsizing rather than a great crash is quite feasible. … Predicting the future — the ultimate balm against the uncertainties of life — is a very ancient pastime. The Old Testament is full of inspired prophesies. In Western social thought, the philosopher Aristotle was perhaps the first to propose that human societies had an inherent direction or destiny, what he called an “entelechy”. (04/26/02)
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