Moving Humanity Toward A More Equal, Fully-Transparent, Open-Source, One-World Government; Not Your Grandfather's "New World Order"

We will only begin to fully address the issue of inequality when we redress the overarching problems of tribalism, nationalism, and regionalism.

When the day comes - and it will if we don't kill ourselves first - on which we have an open-source, one-world government, then and only then can we begin moving toward a global society, respecting local traditions, where the rights of all are guaranteed and enforced by law.

Not the "New World Order" that George HW Bush, et alii, have foretold, but a true open-source, fully transparent, one-world government. A government where every action is available for everyone to see - every contract, every agreement, every email, every phone call, every thing. A government that doesn't need to have a central location because the internet - or its higher-level replacement - will allow the governing bodies to assemble electronically, eliminating the need to spend massive sums on the infrastructure of buildings. A government that realizes that humans will make mistakes and take that into account with backup systems which will kick in in case of corruption. And which will then immediately indict and prosecute the guilty. A government where every voice counts, in a global democratic republican form that follows the wishes of the many while not trampling on the rights of the few, guaranteeing liberty and the right to enjoy life for all of Earth's citizens, human or other.
A government that recognizes the need to take care of the one spaceship we have to journey us through - and protect us from - the cosmos.

As families split off from clans which splintered from tribes and then moved on to form new nations and peoples, with little doubt some scoffed and said that the new ventures would fail. That the new ideas would come to naught. And with little doubt, some will scoff at the idea of a one-world government. And some - many - will publicly decry the change only to give themselves time to retool in order to profit from the new realities. Just as many do today, and probably always have.

But also - as we always have - we will accept that the current system is broken. It served for a time, and served some more and better than others. It's time, however, has come to an end.

Just as we outgrow our toys and clothes when we mature and move onto new attire and new habits, it is time to recognize that we are at one of the most remarkable periods in human history. We stand in the portal of interstellar space flight. Within a century, humans might well be taking the first steps into the unknown beyond the heliosphere, courtesy of the 100 Year Starship, possibly powered by an Alcubierre Drive engine. Before we make that leap, it might well be advisable to put our affairs in order here, on Earth, our home.

It is time to recognize that by leveraging the power to crowdsource ideas on a global electronic scale we can constitute a new way of governance wherein global problems can be solved via global electronic query and whose solutions can be chosen by global electronic vote. All accomplished in the open. A one-world government has no need for secrets. From whom would it keep secrets? Why? It wouldn't for it would have no need, just as it would have no need for armies, navies, or air forces. A professional, committed global police force would handle crime in an open, professional manner taking into consideration that they serve the people they protect. But no militaries would be required, and no money would be needed to fund them.

It would be folly to suggest that violence would come to a sudden end and rainbows spring from every cloud, but removing some of the worst seeds of conflict - national borders - would allow us to begin a process of fixing our problems with the realization from the outset that it would be a process, not a destination.

Imagine turning the money we spend globally from waging war on each other because of national borders to waging war on poverty and hunger. Imagine turning the war onto fixing what we've broken with our home, Mother Earth. Imagine providing a basic guaranteed living standard for every human being so that no person has to be homeless or hungry.

We can move forward intrepidly into an uncertain future full of hope, or we can continue down the same known path to certain destruction and suffering, because it's where we are, and it's where we will continue to go unless we change our path.

We celebrate explorers because they cast off the shackles that bound the race and moved us past oceans and shorelines to new lands, opening the world for us. Are we going to rest on those laurels or are we going to emulate the strong and move on into our own brave futures? We surely won't do it in a world fractured by the fault lines we call borders.

Star Trek, Class Warfare, and Workers' Futures

When you watch a movie like any in the Star Trek franchise, you notice that you don't see a lot of industry happening. Why? Well, much of it isn't relevant to the storyline and would even be distracting, but part of it is that so much would have been automated, by then.

Look at modern factories around the world. Cars are largely assembled by robots. Robotic shipping systems send my packages from Amazon to other receiving and sorting systems in other places so that they might make their way to me via the USPS, UPS or FedEx. 

I live in farm country. I remember doing some of the same tasks as a teenager in Summer jobs that I see being done faster and more efficiently by machines, now. Near where I live, a company makes farm equipment and is on the cutting edge of design and innovation. I expect that some of the farm tasks we currently see migrant workers perform will soon be done by machine. Tractors and other equipment are already being fitted with GPS and systems which guide them through fields to plant and harvest with an efficiency that humans alone can't match. 

So, what will happen to people? Are people going to be made irrelevant and useless? I don't think so. I think automation will free us to do the things we want to do, not just the things we have to do. We won't need to direct all of our energies to earn enough to feed our families and ourselves. We will be able to go, explore, see, research, meet, experiment, and do. Automation might be what saves us from ourselves. Think about it, if people have more time to go and meet others, that is to say to meet people unlike themselves and whom they might never meet if they're tied to a job, they're much more likely to come to understand those people and rather than war...we might wage dinner.

But one's keep would still need to be earned. Surely a future in which one need only contribute to the common weal by means other than manual labor or monotonous mental exertion would be able to find niches where each of us could help move the race forward, outward to the stars, and for those who just couldn't break the old mindset, perhaps help them to look out to new horizons beyond Earth's or even Sol's influence.

But there are roadblocks to that utopian future. First, those who currently possess the wealth aren't going to want to part with it easily. They're not going to voluntarily take on a hundred people to support who do no work for their pay, but who simply draw a paycheck. So the first obstacle is figuring out how to insure that wealth and income are more evenly distributed. This might mean massive purchases by government. As ugly as the concept of nationalization is, it might be the only means of avoiding massive unemployment. The alternative is a dystopian 'Elysium'-like future where the wealthy owners live wholly apart from the rest of us in our downtrodden world. In a sense, it's where we are now minus the separation that the future holds. We're already going in that direction; the wealthy pay less tax now than ever, meaning they get to keep their wealth and use it to avoid the very things which have come to burden the rest of us who are kept just above absolute poverty, many living paycheck to paycheck with no real hope of ever getting ahead. Make no mistake, the wealthy like it that way. 

Next, once the wealth and income are distributed more equally, you have to figure out a way to allow innovators special consideration without tipping the balance and returning to the current system of inequity. This will probably lead to more disagreement than any other area save the next one. But note that I said innovators, not investors. There will probably always be a class of people who believe that it's their right to profit as middlemen. There may be a place for them in the future, but not one that I can see.

Under our current system, wealth is usually passed on by inheritance, but inheritance will necessarily disappear - other than family mementos - in a crowded world. Do the math. If in one generation, 10% of the world's land area is owned, then that percentage will only grow in time. At some future point, it will all be owned, but the population will have exploded, increasing almost exponentially. So, because a relative few families own so much, many others must do without anything at all. That's not fair. It's not fair to future generations who would stand no chance to own something themselves.

The only fair way is the way some societies do it: When a person dies, his house and land are returned to public holding. If he has a family, then of course they can remain in that house, but it passes into their name on loan, not in perpetuity. If several family members died and left no one to occupy their homes, those would go back to public holding. Essentially, we would be saying that this Earth belongs to all of us, not just a handful of us; we just borrow it and therefore accept responsibility for keeping it maintained for future generations in return for free rent. A great deal of flexibility would accrue to the property holders so that they would be able to modify the properties as they saw fit as long as no permanent damage was done and the property was returned in at least as good shape as when it was given for use.

We would want to establish criteria for participation, too. Not work in the sense we see it now, but pitching in when new technologies need to be built or where talent could be utilized, something to earn one's keep.

On the one hand, there's Utopia, and on the other its opposite, dystopia. Our future probably lies in between those two extremes. We can make the same deal that we have for the last few thousand years and continue to go nowhere in fixing the problems that the 99% experience, or we can do as Albert Einstein suggested when he noted that insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting something different: We can change the way people see each other. We can treat others, everyone, as equals, even if we disagree with them. We can stop looking down at the family with the rundown car and clothes purchased at Walmart and we can start accepting that they too matter, just as much as anyone else.

Does that sound Utopian? If so, then it's probably the opposite that we deserve.

Post-Zimmerman vs Martin, An Imperfect World, and Where We Go Now

I think (redacted) hits the nail on the head, in a perfect world. But we live in an imperfect world where prejudice plays a part.

I do agree that we define other-than-white ethnicities differently than we do whites. I'm Scottish, Irish, English, Dutch, and German. And considering that neither the males nor the females in my family, gay, bi, or straight, can keep their pants on, there's a good chance that there's even more than that hiding in our genes. Wilkommen! 

Between the perfect and the imperfect are millions or billions, even, shades of grey. We are people, not paint chips at Lowe's; we're interactive, fluid, transmogrifying. We are this today, and that tomorrow. And we are emotional creatures who strive to be ruled by logic, but we're just too damned human to allow it to happen.

Zimmerman versus Martin will be a case study in law schools because of several factors - an apparently inept prosecution, a knock-knock joke defense, media coverage, public interest, and the fact that there are only 2 people, one now dead, who really know what happened that night. In my heart, I think Zimmerman is guilty, but I can'tprove that. And neither can any other person alive, save one.

The American system of jurisprudence acknowledges its weaknesses, but as (some say) Sir Winston Churchill observed about democracy, our system is "the worst form of..." justice "...except for all the others."

I wholly agree with (redacted) that, moving forward, we need to drop the labels. Humans have a need, and there is a bona fide reason, to label things. But when those labels become the problem, it's time to set them aside and move on to something else. 

After the OJ trial(s!), I thought we had a good opportunity to do just that, but we didn't. It may be that the reason we didn't exists on the surface of every member of humankind: The color of our skin.

If we can't move beyond the surface of those we meet, I fear that we'll never get to know what's inside them.