"It will never happen"

Nassim Taleb is only interested in one topic: chance. Particularly extreme and rare events, the "Black Swans", the point where improbable chance falls at the intersection of philosophy/epistemology, philosophy/ethics, mathematics, social science/finance, and cognitive science.

Accept no pundit market-trend forecasts of gloom until you hear out Nassim Taleb and his argument of how our daily lives are dominated by ripples from game-changing disruptions no one expected, those glitchevents that Buckminster Fuller called "Unforeseen Leaps in capabilities", what Sun Ra called "the Greater Unknown".

A Letter to the Leaders

A Letter to the Leaders of the Four Federal Political Parties: "I encourage you not to back down on forming a collaborative government via a coalition (please pay close attention to that wording - collaborative government). Equally, however, I encourage you to extend an olive branch to Mr. Harper, to enable his active participation in developing the economic strategy for this country, assuming he is willing to truly collaborate. ... A true collaboration invites those who can bring diverse contexts into an environment of active and dialogic engagement. The process is far more complex than debate"

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one.

After reading Mark's letter on Collaborative Government, I was reminded of my own short paper on applying re-evolutionary industrial organizational theory to our local municipal stalemate. Do I spot a trend here? Like the money-system, perhaps the party-system is similarly racing to a spontaneous re-birthing?

Gen-We

Gen-We.org Video: Generation We "Millennials" were born between 1978 and 2000 and are now emerging as a social, political and philosophical force. The Future Majority wants to change the political process, they want to restore the environment, they want a healthy economy, and they're going to get it

from an idea found in the Amazon, click through to see the video; old-school curmudgeons like me can also find a nice PDF book to download.

A Pair of Flying Slippers

Phil Patton reviews the Buckminster Fuller exhibition at the Whitney: "'An exhibition is a verb,' writes Whitney museum director Adam Weinberg bravely, in his introduction to the catalog of the museum's Buckminster Fuller show, Starting with the Universe.

He is echoing Fuller's own famous phrase 'I seem to be a verb.' But in fact, a museum show is necessarily more like an arrangement of nouns. And this one includes nouns like drawings, photographs, and models, with a few verbs of video of Fuller talking.

'His vision is difficult to approximate and present, much less encompass in an exhibition,'"
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwbcNmxxSMc&hl=en&fs=1]

When people think of Geodesic Homes, they think of the Whole-Earth-Catalog Natural-Spaces style hybrid old-tech with awkward wood-strut and pentagonal panels that leak, rot and escalate the construction costs, bad acoustics and frustrated angry contractors.

But this was not, by a long shot, what Bucky Fuller meant.

Far from it. Bucky meant for us to live in hard-science efficiently and cheaply engineered and prefabricated self-contained domicile LIVINGRY, air-delivered to any location you like, plugged into the ground like a tree (anchored by the septic, the floors suspended around the utilities mast like a hoop-dress) and the whole open-concept thing elegantly enclosed in a ventable Geodesic Greenhouse to conserve energy and 'valve' the outside elements, creating a human-friendly year-round semi-outdoor experience he called "Living in a Garden".