Timothy Wilken, MD writes:  The Trustegrities will be three with separate but complimentary missions in service to humankind.

The Earth Trustegrity
will provide: 1) Access to land and natural resources for personal use
at minimal or no cost, and 2) Access to land and natural resources for
synergic production with appropriate charges payable to the Earth
Trustegrity in lease or rental fees, licensing fees, and/or revenue
shares. All rental fees, licensing fees, and/or revenue shares are
entrusted to the Earth Trustegrity for Humanity as Community.

The Life Trustegrity
will provide: 3) Safety from crime and war, and full access to: 4)
Comfortable, safe, healthy housing. 5) Good nutritious food 6) Good
preventitive health services and comprehensive cradle to grave medical
care, and access to the privilege of Reproduction based on fairness,
equality, and mutual benefit to both humanity as Individuals and
humanity as Community. This would include monitoring administrating,
adjudicating the Trust privilege of Reproduction. 7) Access to animals
and plants including native flora and wildlife for personal use at
minimum or no cost. Access to animals and plants including native
flora and wildlife for synergic production with approriate charges
payable to the Life Trustegrity in rental fees, licensing fees and/or
revenue shares. All payments made are entrusted to the Life
Trustegrity for Humanity as Community.

The Time-binding Trustegrity
will provide: 9) Full education to an individual’s ability and interest
regardless of age, 10) The opportunity to participate in synergic
organization and invest their action and leverage to earn revenue
shares and acquire property throughout their full lifetime. 11) Access
to communication with humanity as individuals and to humanity as
community for personal reasons, for synergic production and
consumption, and for synergic consensus utilizing Unanimous Rule Democracy.
12) Protection of the intellectual discoveries and inventions of
Time-binding whether they be in the Time-binding Trust, or the Property
of living humans.

Funding the Synergic Trustegrities

Future Positive was established to help humanity transition from
the present adversary-neutral political-economic mechanisms dominating
human life in 2008 to synergic alternative mechanisms available in a
Synergic Future. In such a future the entire human species could be
organized as a single organization, then there would be no need for
politics, economics, or even money. Certainly the forty trillion cells
in the synergic organization which comprise our bodies do quite well
without politics, economics or money.

As I said earlier, if we humans synergically reorganized, we
could all be wealthy beyond our wildest dreams. If we were to take all
the wealth on planet Earth today, 2008 and divide it equally among the
6+ billions of us living on the planet, we would discover to our
surprise and amazement that every man, woman, and child is a
billionaire. There would never be any need for humans to earn their
livings again. With synergic reorganization, and careful utilization of
the Earth, Life and Time-binding Trusts, the Earth could comfortably
support all of humanity. And this is without any need to damage or
degrade our environment.

Our Time-binding Trust is so enormously powerful and gives
those of us living today such enormous leverage that it is
scientifically possible to solve all our human problems and meet all of
our needs.

We humans are bound to the Earth, and our individual fates are
linked together — we share a common fate. We can survive and prosper
together as a unified species, or we can perish as individuals fighting
and fleeing like the animals. There is no separate peace and no
separate solutions. (10/02/08)
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George Friedman writes: Classical
economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo referred to their
discipline as “political economy.” Smith’s great work, “The Wealth of
Nations,” was written by the man who held the chair in moral philosophy
at the University of Glasgow. This did not seem odd at the time and is
not odd now. Economics is not a freestanding discipline, regardless of
how it is regarded today. It is a discipline that can only be
understood when linked to politics, since the wealth of a nation rests
on both these foundations, and it can best be understood by someone who
approaches it from a moral standpoint, since economics makes
significant assumptions about both human nature and proper behavior.

The
modern penchant to regard economics as a discrete science parallels the
belief that economics is a distinct sphere of existence — at its best
when it is divorced from political and even moral considerations. Our
view has always been that the economy can only be understood and
forecast in the context of politics, and that the desire to separate
the two derives from a moral teaching that Smith would not embrace.
Smith understood that the word “economy” without the adjective
“political” did not describe reality. We need to bear Smith in mind
when we try to understand the current crisis.

Societies have two
sorts of financial crises. The first sort is so large it overwhelms a
society’s ability to overcome it, and the society sinks deeper into
dysfunction and poverty. In the second sort, the society has the
resources to manage the situation — albeit at a collective price.
Societies that can manage the crisis have two broad strategies. The
first strategy is to allow the market to solve the problem over time.
The second strategy is to have the state organize the resources of
society to speed up the resolution. The market solution is more
efficient over time, producing better outcomes and disciplining
financial decision-making in the long run. But the market solution can
create massive collateral damage, such as high unemployment, on the way
to the superior resolution. The state-organized resolution creates
inequities by not sufficiently punishing poor economic decisions, and
creates long-term inefficiencies that are costly. But it has the virtue
of being quicker and mitigating collateral damage.

Three Views of the Financial Crisis

There
is a first group that argues the current financial crisis already has
outstripped available social resources, so that there is no market or
state solution. This group asserts that the imbalances created in the
financial markets are so vast that the market solution must consist of
an extended period of depression. Any attempt by the state to
appropriate social resources to solve the financial imbalance not only
will be ineffective, it will prolong the crisis even further, although
perhaps buying some minor alleviation up front. The thinking goes that
the financial crisis has been building for years and the economy can no
longer be protected from it, and that therefore an extended period of
discipline and austerity — beginning with severe economic dislocations
– is inevitable. This is not a majority view, but it is widespread; it
opposes government action on the grounds that the government will make
a terrible situation worse.

A second group argues that the
financial crisis has not outstripped the ability of society –
organized by the state — to manage, but that it has outstripped the
market’s ability to manage it. The financial markets have been the
problem, according to this view, and have created a massive liquidity
crisis. The economy — as distinct from the financial markets — is
relatively sound, but if the liquidity crisis is left unsolved, it will
begin to affect the economy as a whole. Since the financial markets are
unable to solve the problem in a time frame that will not dramatically
affect the economy, the state must mobilize resources to impose a
solution on the financial markets, introducing liquidity as the preface
to any further solutions. This group believes, like the first group,
that the financial crisis could have profound economic ramifications.
But the second group also believes it is possible to contain the
consequences. This is the view of the Bush administration, the
congressional leadership, the Federal Reserve Board and most economic
leaders.

There is a third group that argues that the state
mobilization of resources to save the financial system is in fact an
attempt to save financial institutions, including many of those whose
imprudence and avarice caused the current crisis. This group divides in
two. The first subgroup agrees the current financial crisis could have
profound economic consequences, but believes a solution exists that
would bring liquidity to the financial markets without rescuing the
culpable. The second subgroup argues that the threat to the economic
system is overblown, and that the financial crisis will correct itself
without major state intervention but with some limited implementation
of new regulations.

The first group thus views the situation as
beyond salvation, and certainly rejects any political solution as
incapable of addressing the issues from the standpoint of magnitude or
competence. This group is out of the political game by its own rules,
since for it the situation is beyond the ability of politics to make a
difference — except perhaps to make the situation worse.

The
second group represents the establishment consensus, which is that the
markets cannot solve the problem but the federal government can –
provided it acts quickly and decisively enough.

The third group
spoke Sept. 29, when a coalition of Democrats and Republicans defeated
the establishment proposal. For a myriad of reasons, some
contradictory, this group opposed the bailout. The reasons ranged from
moral outrage at protecting the interests of the perpetrators of this
crisis to distrust of a plan implemented by this presidential
administration, from distrust of the amount of power ceded the Treasury
Department of any administration to a feeling the problem could be
managed. It was a diverse group that focused on one premise — namely,
that delay would not lead to economic catastrophe. (10/02/08)
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BBC Interview — The co-founder of one of the world’s iconic companies is a reluctant billionaire who wanted to be an engineer first and a boss last.

The man in question is Steve Wozniak, the designer of the first Apple computer and its successor in his spare time.

He learned basic electronics from his father and knew by the time he was at high school that he wanted to be an engineer for life.

“I read books about a young engineer who owned a company with his father. Whenever there was a catastrophe in the world, he went into the lab and worked sometimes for two weeks silently. When he would come out of the door he had a device that solved the problem.

“That’s when I said: ‘Wow, engineering lets you build things that solve problems’.”

Those early experiences inflamed a passion and led the young Woz, as he prefers to be known, to read as much as he could about engineering.

“You become what you want to be in life. I wanted to be an engineer. I didn’t want to run a company.”

Woz had little money so to keep up he crept into buildings housing the Stanford Linear Accelerator to rifle through computers books and magazines in the library.

That lack of money, he told BBC News, was a spur to innovate - it should never be used as an excuse to not give things a go.

“What’s important is not having very much money,” he said, convinced that it was a good discipline to have to think within restraints.

“Lack of resources forces you to do a lot more original thinking.”

From early on, Woz had one aim; to understand the design of computers so he could build his own.

“We had a club (Homebrew) that spoke of how someday everybody was going to have their own personal computer and have control over their own lives,” he said. “We’d make the guy that could program more important than the CEO of a company and that inspired me.

“It made me feel like we little guys are coming up against the big owners of the world and we have a position in the world. I said I want to take my technical talents and design a computer and help other people build them.

“It was about wanting to change the world and make it a better world and we were the first people,” he said. “We were the revolution.” (10/02/08)
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BBC Environment — Environment correspondent Richard Black joins researchers on board the yacht Song of the Whale as they look and listen for whales around the Canary Islands.

Beaked whales are probably the least understood large mammals on the planet, but sound can help us track their mysterious movements. …

The team takes two-hour shifts during the night, one hour listening to the hydrophone and one watching we don’t hit anything.

There are few fishing boats here at any time of day, but there is fishing gear, floating free of constraint on the sea.

When I surface in mid-morning, we are on the trail of some Cuvier’s beaked whales.

Having become accustomed to the darker tones of the Blainville’s species, the lighter shade of these made a striking contrast.

It makes filming a little easier, too. These you can just glimpse before they break the surface, giving an extra fraction of a second to get the camera in just the right spot.

In our first sighting, we saw five. It lasted, as most do, for less than a minute; and then we set course for where we expected them to surface next, given the trajectory they had been taking.

It was a partial success. Three animals emerged next, and the next time a single one. This was evidently a loosely bound pod, not contracted to dive in unison.

After they dived for the final time, we picked up clicks on the hydrophone that were presumably the same group, once more in the depths to which they are so well adapted, and in which they spend a majority of their existence. (10/02/08)
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BBC Science — The arrival of colonial cities in sub-Saharan Africa at the dawn of the 20th Century may have sparked the spread of HIV.

US experts analysed one of the earliest samples of the virus ever found, in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1959.

The study, published in the journal Nature, suggests the virus may have crossed from apes to humans between 1884 and 1924.

They believe newly-built cities may have allowed the virus to thrive.

Aids, the illness caused by HIV, was first reported by doctors in 1981, but the virus had been around for many decades before that.

HIV is not a single virus - there are a number of different strains and subtypes of strains, some sharing the same “founder event” in history, in which a single human was infected.

Scientists believe that these “founder events” may have involved eating monkeys infected with a similar virus.

Research published last year found the viral ancestor of a subtype of HIV responsible for most modern cases in the US and Europe in a blood sample taken in Leopoldville, the capital of Belgian Congo - now Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Now the same team, from the University of Arizona at Tucson, has found another sample containing a different subtype in a 1960 sample from a different patient in the same city.

By analysing the genetic differences between the two viruses, and calculating the amount of time these differences would take to evolve, they now say that the two probably have a common ancestor dating from at least 50 years earlier.

Dr Michael Worobey, who led the research, said: “Now, for the first time, we have been able to compare two relatively ancient HIV strains.

“That helped us to calibrate how quickly the virus evolved and make some really robust inferences about when it crossed into humans, how the epidemic grew from that time, and what factors allowed the virus to enter and become a successful human pathogen.” (10/02/08)
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BBC Science – For the first time in more than 25 years, captive-bred black rhinos have been released back into the wild.

Experts have hailed it as a landmark step for African wildlife conservation.

Black rhinoceroses were once widespread in Africa, but in recent years these huge horned creatures have suffered dramatic declines, thanks to poaching and habitat loss.

In particular, Kenya has suffered huge losses, with numbers plummeting from an estimated 20,000 in the 1970s to some 500 today.

Those that remained were confined to sanctuaries.

The Kenya Wildlife Service has been working with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) to revive rhino numbers. And now they are confident enough to begin releasing these animals back into the wild.

The BBC’s Karen Allen was there to watch the first batch being returned to their natural habitat - and met some of the people who have made it all happen. Watch the videos. (10/02/08)
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