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Considering the mass media's obsession with crime and violence, we might be surprised to discover that violent crime has decreased steadily for the last decade in the United States. Actually the rate in 2004 for violent crime was the lowest ever recorded.
And incredibly it's dropped another 9% in 2005
Some dynamic in our society must have begun changing dramatically around 1994. Some observers have said that the drop in crime rate was partially caused by Baby Boomers getting past the age of crime (18-35). However, if this were true we'd be in the middle of a second surge in crime since the Boomer's Kids would now be in the highest risk age-group. Instead crime rates continue to plummet. 
Has the rise of the Internet resulted in a massive re-enfranchisement of young people leading to a lower crime rate? The timing appears right. From zero in 1993, by 1999 almost 97% of kindergarten children had some access to the Internet. In 1999, 46% of households with 8-18 year olds had Internet access which increased to 74% by 2005. There is a new generation of kids who have been dramatically empowered by the new communications landscape and are pulsing with energy and optimism:
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Hi everyone. Yep, it's been a long time since I wrote anything for Future Hi or anywhere else for that matter. I've been so busy with more practical matters that finding the time to express my thoughts publicly has not been possible.
Indictments and Political Scandal
As you may have heard, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff was indicted on five felony counts. In those moments where I take politics seriously, this could be a big deal and make me happy, but it doesn't. It's quite possible these indictments are only the beginning of seeing this criminal adminstration fall from power as much as it deserves to. Regardless of the probability of that, it all doesn't matter. The damage has already been done. America's reputation has been shattered, the deficts are soaring, dramatic increases in police state powers have been essentially cemented into law , etc., yada, yada, ad nauseum. Basically, the entire political game is a dead end for you, me and humanity. I can't possibly think how any reform, no matter how sweeping will make much of a difference. Politics is dead, lets move on.
Post-Politics:
If we hope to have a future, we need to start thinking post-politically. Some people, might have a problem with that whole concept. They think that has long as individual interact with each other, there will be politics. This is not true. As Timothy Leary made a strong case for, politics is rooted in power struggles within the contraints of a planetary 2-dimensional surface. Iain Banks makes the most compelling case I've ever read. As long as we remain on a planet, there is limited space in which we can travel. Any direction we decide to go in, we will inevitable end up back where we started. All corners of the globe have in some way been explored, colonized, utilized, cordoned off, walled, fenced, enclosed, patented, owned, copyrighted, raped and plundered. There is no wild and free frontier left, no place left to explore or to escape to. Sure, there are some places more free than others, but the differences are often trivial. For most people on the planet, life is hard, brutish and short. For those of us lucky enough to be in the developed world, the walls are closing in, fast. But,
End of Hierarchies and Traditional Power Structures:
Don't loose hope folks, because things are a accelerat'n! The current system with all its corruption, greed and shear stupidity and incompetence can't last much longer. Not only from an environmental and sustainable point of view, but because there is rapid, but still deep current change underway. It's all around us, and it's happening without anyone noticing much. It's not some big monolithic light from the sky change that we are archetypically expecting, but a much more subtle and profound change happening that we won't notice until its already happened. These changes are all around us. Humanity is waking up. People are becoming more aware, we are taking all of these tools and technologies for granted. The network is growing, and will continue to grow. Meanwhile, what we actually see with our traditional conditioning is more laws, copyrights, restrictions and so on. It's all an illusion folks. They only exist if you believe they exist. Most, if not all of these new laws are almost entirely uneforceable. The genie is out of the bottle when it comes to network intelligence, peer to peer technologies, free internet, sustainable energy systems, etc.
Power of the Network:
Here is an example of some of the stuff that the power of the network is producing by motivated programmers:
Netsukuku the Anarchical Parallel Internet (Internet)
Developed by the Freaknet, Netsukuku is a new p2p routing system, which will be utilised to build a worldwide distributed, anonymous and anarchical network, separated from the Internet, without the support of any servers, ISPs or authority controls. In a p2p network every node acts as a router, therefore in order to solve the problem of computing and storing the routes for 2^128 nodes, Netsukuku makes use of a new meta-algorithm, which exploits the chaos to avoid cpu consumption and fractals to keep the map of the whole net constantly under the size of 2Kb. Netsukuku includes also the Abnormal Netsukuku Domain Name Anarchy, a non hierarchical and decentralised system of hostnames management which replaces the DNS. It runs on GNU/Linux.
On the alternative energy front:
don't even know where to begin. Breakthroughs in this area are happening almost daily. If you've been reading blogs like World Changing, you'll see that there is so much going on with alternative energy now, that it is now impossible to keep up with the overwhelming rapid pace of global conversion to post-peak-oil alternatives.
Canda Proposing 30 GW wind farm in far north
On the space migration front:
Spaceship One and Two, and then Space Ship Three hold so much promise. There are only the beginning, but they are the first genuine steps of humanity getting off of the planet. With the advent of mass produced nanotubes, we could soon see the commercial construction of several space elevators. Space elevators mean price to space in the hundreds of dollars. Hundreds to change your life forever. What does this mean for the space game? It means that almost everyone who wants to go will go. When you have millions, billions of people who can now afford to go to space, there will be the infrastructure to support it. Every enterprising, capitalizing individual or group will make sure of that. Because the profit potential of this will be enormous beyond all comprehension. To give you an idea, imagine what the total World Gross Product is today. It will triple within the first 5 years of a sub-$1000 price to orbit, and after that it will continue to grow at a conservative 20% a year. Imagine the total economy of humanity growing by 20% a year. You are not rich now? You will be, and so will everyone else. Nothing will ever be the same after this.
I can already hear people, saying, "But what about molecular nanotechnology?". Yes! What's amazing about the above figures is all of that is possible without molecular nanotech. It only requires some master of nanomaterial construction. Once nanotech assemblers hit the scence, things will really take off.
On the longevity front:
If you make it the next 20 years, you're going to live damn near forever. So you might as well accept it. :)
So, what's in store in the next 20 years and beyond
Have fun! Now for me, back to the work at hand. :)
Sorry for the large number of political posts coming in the wake of this election, but I figure the mood is right to discuss it while we are so hungry for hope. I think all this stuff is VERY relevant to our future because it's going to effect everyone on the planet. Incubating positive and sustainable futures is going to require heroic work by all of us if we want to see it come to pass. It will be to our advantage to see where political forces are moving to best prepare us for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
You may have heard Bin Ladin's latest video communiqué, where he's stated his true intention of bankrupting the United States. Bruce Sterling posted an interesting piece, but the most enligntened analysis I've ever read of Al Qaeda is here.
What I find ironic is that before Bin laden, America already beat him to the punch! America is already bankrupt, but our economy is being artifically propped up by other nations, especially Japan. With Bush having taken turned the countries biggest surplus into the biggest deficit has been nothing but a final blow into the belly of the beast. Bush and Bin Laden can fight for credit for bankrupting the country if that's what they want to do. Who cares, the job is done already. It shoud also be noted that bankrupting the government has long been on the agenda of extreme right fiscal conservatives such as Grover Norquist, who is one of Bush's main economic advisors and has stated repeatedly that is precisely what he intends to do. And if you've been following the news, the Bush Administration recently asked for the debt ceiling to be raised a couple more trillion dollars! What a joke.
All of this of course is completely insane, yet people are getting all upset because supposedly our children and grandchildren will have to pay it off. Sorry, but that is just nonsense. You can't bleed blood from a turnip either. It's time for a serious reality check. America's debt is now so huge that it will never be paid off! And what do debtors do who can't pay off their debts? They declare bankruptcy. The only reason America hasn't done it yet, is that all sorts of foreign investors have kept it from happening, especially Japan. But bankruptcy is now inevitable and will likely occur on Bush's watch, now that he is president again for the next 4 years.
So what then does this really mean for the American Empire and in turn the rest of the world?
Several months ago Future Hi Editor and good friend Flemming Funch posted this interesting analysis, which I've quoted below in it's entirety.
How, then, does a nation deal with debts that so greatly outrun its ability to pay? There are basically only five strategies. All are unappealing. Most are calamitous.The most difficult strategy is, not surprisingly, the honest one: raise taxes and pay your bills. This is what King George III did following the Seven Years War with France in 1763. England had quadrupled its national debt in fighting the War and needed money to pay it off. It turned to the richest people in the realm, the Colonists, and began taxing paper, glass, paint, lead, and, of course, tea. The result, as we know, was the American Revolution.
It was the same strategy-raising taxes on the rich-that Louis XVI attempted in 1789. The French national debt had grown 10 fold under the pharoic opulence of Louis's grandfather, Louis XIV. Louis called the nobility and the clergy together and told them they would have to ante up. They, after all, had been exempted from taxes by Louis XIV in order to buy their complicity in his autocratic reign. Indignant, they refused to pay, precipitating the French Revolution, the most explosive upheaval to established government in the last thousand years.
A second strategy to deal with excessive debts is simply to print money. This is what Weimar Germany did to address the crushing debt imposed by the vengeful Treaty of Versailles. Before it was over the government had inflated the money supply by over a trillion times, leading some to comment that it was a waste of ink to put it onto paper worth so much less than the ink itself. The German middle class, whose assets were held at fixed amounts in government pensions, was destroyed. The collapse gave direct rise to Adolph Hitler.
A third strategy for dealing with onerous national debt is to sell off national assets. This is one of the first strategies the IMF imposes on third world countries that have gotten behind in their payments to western banks. Government-run industries, from telecommunications to water systems, are "privatized" and the country's natural resources are sold off to the highest foreign bidder. This is what Great Britain was forced to do in the aftermath or World War II.
Two world wars in only 30 years had ravaged the British economy and the pound sterling. Facing collapse at home (and revolution abroad), the government surrendered almost all of its colonies, from India and Pakistan to Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. These had been among the greatest wealth-producing properties of modern times, the ones that had made the British Empire what it was. Their loss left Britain a second-rate power with only misty memories of its once imperial greatness.
A fourth strategy for dealing with excessive debt is to repudiate it. This was used for centuries in the early days of the modern world and was revived two years ago by Argentina which brazenly refused to pay some $110 billion in debts it had accumulated over prior decades. More ominously, it was this strategy that was used by the Bolsheviks after they took power in the Russian Revolution.
The new communist government refused to be bound by the debts of the overthrown Romanovs. But the French had loaned heavily to the Russian government for decades before World War I and now were left in a lurch. A cascading series of defaults from one bank to another caused a liquidity crisis on the continent, ultimately setting off the Great Depression.
Finally, there is plunder. When a nation's debt load becomes so huge it cannot plausibly reassure creditors regarding repayment, it must seek some source of wealth, any source, to keep the borrowed money flowing. This, naked predation, is what kept the Roman Empire alive for the last two hundred years of its existence. It is the strategy adopted by the Spanish Empire-silver and gold from America-and which eventually destroyed the vitality of its own merchant and civil servant classes.
Which, then, of the five above strategies will the U.S. adopt to deal with its exploding debt problem?
The author concludes, quite reasonably, I think, that Bush's answer will be a combination of solutions 3, 4 and 5. Sell off big chunks of assets to private interests, negate the responsibility for covering future social security, and go and plunder resources in other countries. Not pretty, but one might possibly keep it going for a while before anybody notices.
I think the world is starting to notice. Question now is what is the world going to do about it?
My thinking is that if America goes bankrupt so will most of the world. Large companies like Halliburton, which have acted as parasites of taxpayers’ money will go down the tubes with it. I can see two possible futures emerging from this. The first is Bin Laden's dream of seeing the entire modern world come crashing down into a new dark ages. The other is seeing all the worlds’ people, empowered by sustainable technologies and global communications, w building a better society out of the ashes of the old. It reminds me of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. When it fell, it was the start of a 1000-year dark age. Can this time be any different? I think so. One very important thing separates us from those 1600 years ago. Today we have technology that is speeding up like crazy. Nanotechnology is right around the corner; perhaps just in time to pick up when everything else comes crashing down.
For half of my life I've heard many people say it's going to get worse before it gets better. Perhaps it will take a disaster of "apocalyptic" magnitude for humanity to self-correct. In my opinion the current system is broken beyond repair. Now with the fundamentalist on both sides declaring jihad, this broken system can't maintain itself much longer. Something is going to give, and when it does I expect the whole house of cards to come falling down with it. Lets just hope that there will be enough progressive and enlightened people in the aftermath to lead us out of the darkness into a new more enlightened golden dawn.
Some parting thoughts via DRT News:
There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.
What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability.
The clear blue skies that dominated the Bay Area since Saturday still shine somewhere up above, but are now out of site, hidden behind a dark foreboding storm front steadily marching across the valley. Fitting on this gloomy day of defeat and uncertainty. When the rain comes, I'll take solace under the roof of our house, calmed by the sound and fury of the weeping heavens.
Voter disenfranchisement and insecure Diebold machines aside, a slight majority of America has affirmed it's distrust of intellectualism, it's fear of diversity, and it's abiding faith in the dictates and dogmas of religion. On the surface it seems ironic that the principles of Christianity include big business, warfare, and destruction of the environment. Yet digging deeper there is no paradox here: LIfe is regarded as a cage of sin and temptation, a relentless moral battle against Evil, whose victory promises release from the bonds of matter and ascendence into the glory of death. Indeed, a cursory appraisal of pop culture in America reveals a deep, morbid fascination with death and destruction. The majority apparently feels it's best to just take all you can get while the getting's good, cause it's all just gonna go up in flames when Armageddon hits.
The America that elected Bush lives in the South and the Midwest - that part of the country that seems perpetually shrouded in the fog of ignorance, happily trapped in the bliss of their own making. These are the people that fear anything different from their own ways. They're ever suspect of intellectualism and the scientific method that so rigorously continues to disprove so much of their cosmology. Those among them who question the narrow world view fed to them invariably try to leave for the big cities along the liberal coasts. The coasts swell with thinkers who find facts to be of greater import than faith, leaving the heart of America to stagnate, lost in stereotypes and archaic logic structures. At the core of their own backwards slide is the opiate of religion feeding fear and hatred and ignorance.
The momentary extension of the Bush Dynasty highlights both the inability of middle America to evolve and the confusion confronting the intellectual caste as they embrace the onrush of technology and information. Arguably, America is far more informed than ever. We just don't know how to sort and manage all of the information - how to apply it our lives. The pace of discovery is too fast for us to properly integrate the truths being revealed. While the backwaters stagnate, the seas are churning, rising up towards a great crest. When the wave breaks no one will be left dry.
The powers of control are scrambling to keep up with the ever-quickening pace of change. But conquerors rise and empires fade. In the heart of order the seed of chaos finds sustenance. Control is predicated on stasis and the oppression of dissent. In a dynamic nonlinear world, control will always be cast off by the forces of evolution. Power-mad apes battling over dwindling resources, driven by competition and the illusory fear of otherness, are simply caught in the spasms of a vestigial tail held on the chopping block.
It's fair to be worried and it's critical to remain vigilant. A lot can happen in 4 years. But history has shown that the human spirit has only ever continued to grow in power, always moving forward against seemingly huge odds. If we're just floating and bobbing along in the currents of life, the political game is like a small boat on the surface trying to make us all believe we need to get onboard in order to survive. Everything we need is right here right now. Blaming politics or foreigners or drugs or any other scapegoat is a cop-out for weak minds unwilling to take responsibility for their own actions.
Evolve yourself and politics will eventually catch up.
Ever since I was a small child I’ve had the most amazing dream life. Although I’ve also had my share of nightmares and even off periods, most of the time my dreams are always deeply satisfying and beautiful. Like most children I lacked the capacity to clearly distinguish between the dream world and reality. However, if you ask the Aborigini’s, such a distinction is meaningless anyway, with the dreamworld being the more "real" of the two. For me this is a belief I share with them and have carried into adulthood. My dreams have offered so many profound insights, and the lucidity of them has been so intense and real to the depths of my being, that to deny the veracity of these experiences would be to deny my very soul – the deepest meanings that guide my life. And it is here that people start to make value judgments that although the inner life of dreams might be significant, the external world is more important, because without it we die. In the West particularly this emphasis has been valued almost exclusively to the detriment to our inner lives. As Ghandi once said when asked what he thought of Western Civilization, he said, "I think it’s a good idea."
So what am I getting at? Quite simply, I have come to believe that dreams are actually quite real, more real the so-called “waking life” and that this waking life is simply part of what we must make authentic via this dream world. I can’t speak for others, but I am now quite certain (as certain as I can be about anything) that my dream life is trying desperately to become manifest here in the real world. This might sound too new agey for some people, but it all makes perfect sense to me. When things go right in my life, they have this unmistakable resonance with my dream life – the feelings, sensations, gestalts and so on. In my dream life all the answers are there, the solutions to our problems, to world peace, to sustainable society, to genuine happiness for everyone. It seems so obvious, so simple in my dream life, and yet so complicated here. I have speculated often about how I think there are “dark forces” that are conspiring in one way or another, perhaps merely out of greedy and banal self-interest to further their own ends, at the expense of everyone else. So as a result over the centuries we now have this overly complex, rigged system that benefits the rich and powerful at the expense of not only everyone else, but now the planet itself.
Bucky Fuller said way back in 1965 that right now we have the capability to feed, house and clothe everyone on the planet sufficiently that everyone would live like billionaires. So why hasn’t this happened? Because those at the top want remain the exlusive shareholders of such graces. To sacrifice their exclusivity would be to sacrifice power and control. Since fear ultimately rules these people, that fear will keep them stuck in this struggle for power. Unfortunately for them, their days of power and control are coming to an end. Despite the signs all around of us of increasing repression, surveillance and control, there is no way the system can sustain itself much longer. I have written about this lack of sustainability here and here.
I started thinking deeply again about all of this since I came back from Burning Man a few weeks ago. The evidence of a build-up towards some kind of cambrian explosion as Ming points out here is all around us. What amazes me these last few years is how much everything has changed from a 'potential' standpoint in terms of connectivity, collective intelligence, communications, smart mobs, internet, global network point of view, yet how much everything has remained the same.
How much longer can the old hierarchies, this old civilization keep hanging on amidst so much grass-roots intelligence burgeoning all around us? Burning Man is a good example of just how much energy and connectivity is there - so much that it was overwhelming... and until I went I had no idea! I could feel it everywhere, the social networks, the people all talking with each other, most of them all on this high vibratory wavelength. It's not a fluke, and it's not just because of Burning Man. It's already there. I compare it to the functioning of mushrooms, which are merely the sex organs of this vast underground mycellia network. This network grows, and grows, and it then reaches a critical point, where it then flowers. I see the same thing now in what I recently called Counter Culture 2.0. The connections are so thick and complex, that no manner of oppression can wipe it out now, except the end of life itself.
And since each day the technologies of connectivity continue to minuturize and grow smarter each day, there will come a point, soon I think, where this huge breakout will occur.
Those at the top are not stupid, they know this, sense this is coming, which is why I think they are so scared, and the global politic is getting so nasty and repressive, especially here in the states, where this connective freedom is greatest. That is no coincidence.
So rather than some smooth "controlled" evolutionary move upwards, its going to be a sudden out of control breakout. I suppose I was hoping for the former, but I'll settle for the latter over stagnation and death.
I'm more hopeful than ever.
Strange, there's only two pages of matches right now in Google on the term "Evolutionary Triggers". I didn't think it was such a well-kept secret. Anyway, it is a term that appears in evolutionary biology, like here talking about the surprising explosion in complex lifeforms in the Cambrian era, a little more than 500 million years ago:
The appearance of such a large range of body plans and life strategies at the base of the Cambrian in an apparently short space of geological time has intrigued palaeontologists for many years. There is still a great deal of speculation as to what caused or triggered the metazoan 'explosion', and why it happened when it did after 3 billion years of potential evolutionary time. It seems obvious that something must have changed or reached a critical level favorable for the building of large, complex bodies and the construction of hard skeletal material. The theories of what such evolutionary triggers may have been can be split into extrinsic or external environment factors, and intrinsic or internal biotic factors.So, something happens which maybe breaks a previous equilibrium, and suddenly it becomes advantageous for new things to develop. Of course something needs to be present in the first place which is capable of evolving. But then a trigger event or circumstance might inspire or influence it into suddenly evolving a whole lot.
I'm not sure if it is an idea that is necessarily popular with the kind of evolutionary biologists who believe that evolution is blind and random. But I don't really care. What I find most fascinating is the use of the meme in systems in general, including human systems.
I've noticed it time and again with people. If we're stuck in the same familiar routine, in the same familiar circumstances, in the same self-consistent worldview, we have a hard time changing. But if we're pulled out of those circumstances, or something drastically changes around us, or something goes over a threshold, change is suddenly much easier. And that is often what at first glance seems unpleasant circumstances that facilitate it. We get thrown out on deep water, or our world falls apart, and suddenly we might discover that we can change quickly, and sometimes for the much better. But we wouldn't have chosen it consciously from within our familiar old frame of reference. It takes a trigger. Sometimes that's somebody yelling at us. Sometimes it is a wise person who doesn't buy into our worldview who knows exactly where to put their finger. Sometimes it is something unexpectedly wonderful that happens that shakes us out of our skull.
Some systems thinking stuff from a page by Paul Herbig:
Systems evolve when they reach a sufficient level of complexity, have flexible feedbacks between their components, are exposed to a sufficiently rich and constant energy flow, and when their normal functioning is disturbed. ( Laszlo 1985)The evolutionary change I'd be most interested in would be some rapid positive changes in the collective consciousness of humankind. You know, the kind of changes that might make us suddenly realize we can live in peace and work together and have a great time at it. The kind of change that would henceforth make it impossible for a few misguided wackos to mess things up globally. Because the rest of us would actually be working together. Doing what is needed, what we're inspired to do, what is fun to do, and what works.It is this factor of disturbance that is the evolutionary trigger for systems. If it is below the critical level, the systems normal feedback buffers it out and a return to stability with no evolutionary change occurring. If it surpasses the critical level, the feedback cycles are disrupted and the previous system vanishes and decomposes to more strongly bound components to another stable level. But just at that critical level, it is moved out of normal flow to another level. When that critical level is reached, a freedom of choice occurs, a bifurcation, and a new system diverges from the old.
Could happen. Not terribly utopian either. Incremental change isn't going very well. The world, however off kilter it is, is trying hard to continue on the course it is on, and will tend to resist reasonable gradual attempts of changing it. There's just too much invested in the status quo, and so many reasons why it can't be any different. What is needed is a whack that is hard enough that it knocks us into a different space, where we actually notice we have the freedom to choose something different. Hopefully it can be a whack that isn't too devastating. It could very well be something obviously wonderful. No reason it shouldn't be. But it has to be a trigger that tips a lot of scales, and makes it impossible to remain the same.
[Also at ming.tv]
Below is a world-flipper of a quote in Timothy Leary's Autobiography
But first, some introductions...
Timothy Leary - Harvard psychologist who kick-started the psychedelic 60s by going around the country "turning on" the intellectual elite in the hopes of passing chemical wisdom into the mainstream.
Neal Cassady - inspiration for the Beat Movement, and friends with Jack Keroac, Ken Kesey, and Allen Ginsberg. You can read more about the Psychedelic 60s and more here
December 1960, Leary invites Cassady to his house to play with drugs. They are chatting it up, and Leary, a novice drug user (compared to Cassady), is describing his challenges.
Timothy Leary
said:
We're doing our best. We've read everything that's been written in the last four thousand years on the subject.
You're cracking me up, man. There are no books written by scientists about ecstasy and cosmic orgasms. it's oral history and poetry. The history books are about meaningless public events like wars and elections and revolutions. (emphasis added) The only important things happen in the bodies and brains of individuals, you understand. That's the great secret of human life that scientists never talk about.
to which Timothy Leary responds, "Is that right."
(Page 52)
Man, that is great! It did a 180 on my perspective on the world.
Such an ugly chunk of my brain is devoted to imitating the gloom laden in the 24/hour news and history books. If you read history, if you watch the news, it feels like the world is this killer cannibal run by a cabal of sinisters. But really, I bike, I laugh with friends, eat good food every day, life is in general good.
The inner story is the ultimate story.
Robin Green has written an insightful piece over at Cyborg Democracy about Hakim Bey's current cynical attitudes about technology, the internet, and possibilities of authentic change. I understand Hakim's cynicism all too well. There have been so many disappointments, and so much stupidity in the wake of 9-11. Along with the mass mobilization of centralized corporate and media control, including controlling the internet, it is easy to get depressed about how all these emerging technologies (so far) have done nothing to reverse the tide towards facism.
Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) has obviously become quite depressed as a result of this relentless onslaught of negativity. Because of it, it can become habit to not see any other perspective, as crying wolf has happened so much, that good news is easily discounted. I suspect this can account for much of the luddite on the left on a variety of issues. Fear is what seems to rule these people, just as it rules the luddites on the right. From a psychological point of view, both of these people need to transcend their ego's for a short while and get a glimpse of the big picture. If more people can do this, we have a better chance of seeing alternatives to the current course, and not discounting signs of those alternatives when they become available. It's been my experience that those signs can come when we least expect it and in places we never imagined previously.