Blog 21. Needed Now: A Constitutional Amendment

In Blog 20, I described the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court, which gave corporations the constitutional right to free speech and to make unlimited monetary donations to political advertising and commentary. Reportedly, Senator (and previous presidential candidate) John McCain  (R-AZ) said Citizens United is “one of the worst decisions I have ever seen.”

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Blog 18. Social Anxiety Rooted in Inequality?

Angst

In talking with people-including conservatives, liberals, the young adults, and especially the retirees-I detect an underlying tension, an angst, as though something is generally wrong, the world is decaying despite the visible affluence without a particular ill symptom or dissatisfaction. What’s going on? Continue reading

Blog 1. Change and technology

So it’s changing.   So what?

So what?  I see the world changing, largely due to technologies that few people understand and even fewer feel empowered to control. The world has always been changing, but now the rate of change is proportional to the sum of all changes that have occurred before. That’s what we mean by the term, “exponential,” a term used so often in the media that it is accepted as meaning “large,” without the understanding that it means larger than large.  The purpose of these pages is to offer an analytical review of where we’ve come, and where we’re going, and why. The WHY is embedded in the unnoticed rules by which humans affect each other. Understanding the rules by which the individual parts affect each other—that’s the key to understanding and to controlling complex systems, about which these pages will say more. Continue reading