While pondering the failures and opportunities to reinvent our political systems, it occurred to me that we could make some substantive moves towards a more democratic and less representative society.  One of the main problems with representative government is that every time you hire someone to manage your money, a good bit of it usually […]

In thinking about the political difficulties which inevitably arise every time we generate a too top-heavy oligarchic system, I started wondering how to frame such a challenge to our best thinkers — how would you change society’s rules to take advantage of the tremendous energy towards the accumulation of wealth and power such that those […]

Our sense of group identity is the fundamental failure of our species, perhaps of all intelligent life. The problem arises when a group starts believing the importance of its agenda supersedes that of its originating group. This happens first in governments, a proxy for the group itself when we were hunter-gatherers.  The necessary belief underpinning […]

A friend mentioned having heard an estimate that anyone living past 65 these days has a pretty good chance of seeing 80.  I’m not sure what the national and worldwide statistics show about this belief, but in my own case, I think there might be something to it.  My mother is approaching 90 and many […]