dark energy (or: a vista of primate living)

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The state of nature has hardly ended. We primates, once standing to look across a savannah, have now sometimes become "petroauthoritarian" regimes (Tom Friedman's coinage for Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and others) looking around the planet for primative (sic) petrocorporate clients (e.g., Chad to the U.S., Sudan to China), as the global species sucks the fermented legacy of planetary eons until it learns to fuel its technoeconomies otherwise via, e.g., limitless hydrogen (breeder reactors, fuel cells) and solar power.

Integrating news for a singular world

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The notion of leading news continues to seem tenable. The fact that "more news media outlets are covering less news" relates to several kinds of developments: media market specialization relative to a proliferation of media, daily editorial equilibration (through wire mirrorplays) toward what the leading news is (tendencies toward consensus within the profession), and also regretable trends in the news business.

Ask not what humankind can do for you....

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Dr. Wafa Sultan, Syrian-born psychiatrist living in L.A. created a rage this week on Al Jazeera television with her critique of Muslim violence. She tells the New York Times today:

"The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling. We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."

love those humans

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Mid-1990s, I was a charter member of Howard Rheingold's pioneering child of The Well, "Electric Minds," which bellied up, but some of its members carried on via a less costly software incarnation that survived [until late 2008], with me as a rarely active member. But I started the interesting topic "Becoming Post-Human," and last October cited an odd article from The New York Times called “Beyond Human,” to which "Starling" replied a few days later, and today, five months later, I wrote (including the separator bar and everything following it):

Hamas, grow up!

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Abu Marzouk, who was part of the Hamas delegation in Moscow, said today "I gave the Russian officials a white sheet and I asked them to draw me a map of the Israel they want me to recognize and nobody was able to draw the map."

Evidently, Abu Marzouk needs to know a man's contours—how fat he is—before that man is granted a right to life.

“God” as the wisdom of crowds extrapolated to history

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In an interview for TV today, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said God and history would judge whether he was right to go to war in Iraq.

"In the end there is a judgment that, well, if I think if you have faith about these things then you realize that judgment is made by other people."

evolutionary historicallyin the Palestinian-Israeli conflict

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The Palestinian region is one of the few arable remnants, east of Egypt, of the ancient fertile crescent that began at the Nile and ended at once-Edenic southern Mesopotamia (now the Shi'ia heartland of Iraq). The Mediterranean cradle of Western civilization—so pollinated by Asian civilization (but more adaptable than Asia's adaptability to European early modernity)—left its primordial crossroads behind via seafaring estates that favored the wandering adventurer over the feudal estate (be it Asian, Arab, or Germanic). Life on the move (experiencing environmental diversity) advantages the social evolution of adaptability better than life that isn’t on the move.