the pressure cooker of China

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The Party in China today seems forced to evolve into a utilitarian technocracy dependent on global collaboration in figuring out how to avoid imploding, otherwise forcing the world economy into extended recession.

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"Hong Kong and the former Portuguese enclave of Macau are the only places in China where people are allowed to commemorate those killed in 1989" (Reuters, May 27).

reason #506 why the extraterrestrials don't reply

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Sunday, May 6, a record 18,000 people took off their clothes to pose for U.S. photographer Spencer Tunick at Mexico City's Zocalo square, the heart of the ancient Aztec empire.

Green multipolitanism(beyond transnationalism)

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"...[D]emocracy itself needs redefinition according to a new transnational ideal...," says the publisher's description of Democracy across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi, by James Bohman, MIT Press, May 2007. In his “Introduction” to the book, Bohman shows how he seeks to establish the conceptual foundations of transnational democracy.

evolution for everyone

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"Of course, even as humans bond together in groups and behave with impressive civility toward their neighbors, they are capable of treating those outside the group with ruthless savagery. [David Sloan] Wilson[, in Evolution for Everyone] is not naïve, and he recognizes the ease with which humans fall into an us-versus-them mind-set. Yet he is a self-described optimist, and he believes that the golden circles of we-ness, the conditions that encourage entities at every stratum of life to stop competing and instead pool their labors into a communally acting mega-entity, can be expanded outward like ripples on a pond until they encompass all of us — that the entire human race can evolve the culturally primed if not genetically settled incentive to see our futures for what they are, inexorably linked on the lone blue planet we share....For their universal appeal and basal power to harmonize a crowd, he recommends more music and dancing and asks, 'Could we establish world peace if everyone at the United Nations showed up in leotards?'”

Natalie Angier, "Sociable Darwinism," New York Times Book Review, April 8, 2007

Our evolutionarity is beyond a universal Darwinism

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Indeed, it's our evolutionarity that gives appeal to the idea of unified theory, due to the evolved and ontogenic character of mind that inquires into "as such" prospects: So many modes of change; so, what is change as such? First, more or less, it was the power of a Sun god, then the oh-so-human Face of The Deep Creating the Heavens, etc. Everything is, so "is" Is, too?. But ultimately, we're beyond the question of "Being," back to the Sun, albeit relative to Earth's "goldilocks" water-hole distance from a star, Gaian depths of Time—geologeny, biologeny, paleoanthropogeny, culturality, history.

leading creativity for facilitating evolution

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Currently and through next Tuesday in downtown San Francisco (amid coincidently beautiful Bay Area weather—so far), the world's largest association of scientists is having its annual conference. This year's theme for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—its cohering interdisciplinary focus—is "Science & Technology for Sustainable Well-being."

If you believe that the theme is a piece of tired rhetoric, then you don't know the AAAS: the folks who were pushing the issue of global warming long before it became green chic in the mid-'90s.

an astrobiological perspective

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Today's “news” is largely follow-up on ordinary advents: primate behavior in the Middle East, ongoing geopolitical competition, public health problems, poisoned spies, crashes, bombs, bad weather....You know the story.

Yesterday, the space shuttle Discovery docked with the International Space Station.

Most all lives move on unnoted—mostly in good health (I hope), productive, peaceful, honest, learning. The prevailing story is really about a species evolving fairly well by its own designs. It's our virtue to give so much public attention to tragic exception (but it's never enough).