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I love the idea of “catchment in webs of trust” – Blais’ idea that extended networks of trust can begin to harness flows of energy within a group of people. The community can then become a generative social infrastructure for all sorts of amazing endeavors.

Blais urges to go even a step further, however, by recognizing that we must somehow “move beyond the logic of commons/enclosed, of free/private” so that the intrinsic dynamics of nature – beyond human control – can have their play.

She cites the Six Nations of the Lakota, who suggested in the late 1940s that even the very notion of human rights needs to evolve:

- There is a hue and cry for human rights – human rights, they said, for all people. And the indigenous people said: What are the rights of the natural world? Where is the seat for the buffalo or the eagle? Who is representing them here in this forum? Who is speaking for the waters of the earth? Who is speaking for the trees and the forests?

One can imagine the commons being the crucible for an enlarged conception of human rights — one that more closely integrates human needs with those of the rest of the bio-physical world.”

Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. He was vague about the details, though, and quite wrong about some of them (like his idea that artists “sublimate” sexual energy into their work, which would imply that adultery should be especially rare at artists’ colonies). Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored until the end of the century, when Baumeister began studying mental discipline in a series of experiments, first at Case Western and then at Florida State University.

"We are a people who never made singing or dancing an unrespected way of knowing. All of the five-fingered ways of knowing remained open to us."

Pat McCabe, a Navajo writer and scholar, spoke those words at the 12th Language of Spirit Conference. That means the 13th annual conference -- a dialogue "exploring the nature of reality," among aboriginal scientists, scholars, healers and artists and their Western counterparts in a wide array of fields -- is coming up soon.

This year's event, sponsored by the SEED Graduate Institute, will be held Aug. 14-16 in Albuquerque, N.M. The topic under consideration: Science, Technology and Creativity.

“Collective unconscious, a pool of shared experiences among our species, is a term of analytical psychology coined by Jung. Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international collaboration of scientists and engineers recording data from over 65 sites around the world since August 1998 in an attempt to measure subtle correlations that reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world.”
Source: globalbrainpaint.com

Which company can claim the largest journalistic workforce in the world?

It’s Reuters, with a stable of more than 2,900 journalists at last count, and still growing. That’s right: No single company now tops 3,000 journalists, though AP, at 2,300 — and Japan’s Yomiuri — are closer to Reuters’ total. Most of the other companies are closer to a third to a half of Reuters’ size.

Reuters — a household name in the U.K., where it was born 160 years ago — is now an emerging force in the U.S. That push is fueled by the 2008 Thomson Reuters merger, by the great disruption of the U.S. news business, by the launch of Reuters America (“Reuters America Claims New Territory: First Stop, Chicago and Tribune”), and by the rapidly moving effort to make over Reuters News itself