“George Bush was last night branded chicken for scrapping his speech to Parliament because he feared being heckled by anti-war MPs.

The US president planned to give a joint address to the Commons and Lords during his state visit to Britain.

But senior White House adviser Dr Harlan Ullman said: ‘They would have loved to do it because it would have been a great photo-opportunity.

‘But they were fearful it would to turn into a spectacle with Labour backbenchers walking out.'” —mirror.co.uk

This is a Michael Jackson-free zone.

<a href=” http://pro.enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=egelwan&commentid=106728380501077470

” title=””>Peggy La Cerra commented on my item on her ‘energetic evolutionary model’ of the mind:

Thanks for your comments. Maybe I can clarify your understanding of my paper’s content (I also wrote a book on these ideas, with Roger Bingham, called The Origin of Minds, Harmony 2002).

The challenge these ideas about the evolution of the human brain/mind poses to ‘Evolutionary Psychology’ is that they lead to a very different evolutionary model of our inherited neurocognitive architecture. Mine suggests that we inherit a complex set of adaptations that construct the neural information processing networks that give rise to the mind, theirs suggests that we inherit programs that solve specific problems (so-called ‘domain-specific/content dependent mechanisms’ as well as ‘a few or more ‘general processors’ and ‘some sort of integrative circuitry’. The ‘energetic model of the mind’ I propose is integrated and designed to assess the costs and benefits — TO AN INDIVIDUAL, based on his or her personal history of experience in the physical

and social environment over time — of one course of action versus another. There are many other implications of this model that differ greatly from those that fall out of the EP model that are expressed in detail in The Origin of Minds.

Best regards,

Peggy La Cerra

“WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it’s here. We only need to put the pieces together.” This new weblog is deep and rich with the sort of things that interest me. I have only begun to explore it. In a way, it seems to be the latest morph and inheritor of the Whole Earth/CoEvolution ethos.

Gary Wolf, who covers the Dean campaign for Wired: “Here, I’ve offered a Retroactive Manifesto of the Dean Campaign. These are the rules that might have been posted on the wall of campaign manager Joe Trippi’s office, if there were such a list of rules. I am looking for examples and counter-examples – confirmation and correction. Are these really the principles that underlay the architecture of the campaign? Are there concrete examples you can suggest? Is something here plainly wrong? Hack away.

(Each of these rules is taken from the work of the writer whose name is parentheses. )

• ALLOW THE ENDS TO CONNECT (David Weinberger)
  
• DON’T BUILD THE SYSTEM – GROW IT (Kevin Kelly)
  
• SWARM AND SELF-ORGANIZE (Steven Johnson)
  
• UNTETHER (Howard Rheingold)
  
• YOU’RE NOT A LEADER – YOU’RE A PLACE (Joi Ito)
  
• MAKE THE NETWORK STUPID (David Isenberg)”
  

Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Open Source Democracy: how online communications is changing offline politics, is available as a 297K .pdf under an open source license.

Using technology and video to fight for human rights: this organization, founded in 1992 by Peter Gabriel, the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights and the Reebok Foundation, consists of more than 150 ‘partner groups’ in over 50 countries around the world investigating and exposing a wide range of injustices and violations of human rights that otherwise go unnoticed and unreported, often in societies without basic protections and at great risk to themselves. The organization’s fundraising efforts make video and other technology tools available to grassroots human rights groups around the world. Witness’ annual report is online here. Click here to make a donation.