1938. “The NAACP would hang a banner from its offices in New York City the day after a lynching to alert people of the city to what had happened” (PictureHistory).

Yes, we could have used this flag last October. Thank you to all our friends in the truth loving North. Perhaps this year we’ll begin recovering sufficiently to gradually start repairing some of the deep damage done by fearful and ignorant Southerners. It’s fine to understand the nature and impetus of ignorance and fear – to live Unbiased Compassion – but it’s not okay to let violence crush reason or acrimony damage fine reputations.

Astronaut Ron Garan, founder of Fragile Oasis, is one extraordinary human being. He does a singularly excellent job of communicating what so many astronauts attempt to communicate, from the moment they first experience the ineffable context of space.

The glaring, outsized economic inequities between individuals seem shameful; pointless; avoidable; destructive; unnecessary.

Sixteen nations have worked together to engineer the miracle of the International Space Station, yet somehow, to date, we simply haven’t found a way to engineer a sustainable platform for ending poverty. Not in America. Not anywhere.

For decades this has seemed to me utterly, incomprehensibly, unacceptable. How can others not see this as such an obvious, soluble, top priority for our nation and humanity? All the material accomplishments in the universe completely lose their meaning if we can’t even meet this first fundamental human-scale need.

Here’s an excerpt of what Ron wrote, about his third space walk and the revelations that led to the creation of Fragile Oasis:

At the top of the arc, I was 100 feet above the space station with the Earth 250 miles below.

It was absolutely incredible to see this enormous orbiting space station —  the tremendous achievement of sixteen diverse nations working together on Earth to accomplish a goal in space.

Seeing humanity’s magnificent accomplishment against the backdrop of our indescribably beautiful Earth 250 miles below took my breath away. I wasn’t just looking down at the Earth.  I was looking at a planet hanging in the blackness of space.

It was very moving to see the beauty of the planet we’ve been given. But as I looked down at this indescribably beautiful fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us and has protected all life from the harshness of space, I couldn’t help thinking of the inequity that exists.

I couldn’t help but think of the people who don’t have clean water to drink, enough food to eat, of the social injustice, conflict, and poverty that exist.

The stark contrast between the beauty of our planet and the unfortunate realities of life for many of its inhabitants reaffirmed the belief I share with so many. Each and every one of us on this planet has the responsibility to leave it a little better than we found it.

Apprehending Postscarcity is about taking that responsibility seriously. We can engineer human scale solutions to human scale problems. We must.

I sorely wish that people could understand and mobilize with urgency under the banner of peace; however, that’s never been the case throughout human history, so I suppose the only thing we can do is re-launch the War on Poverty, to cater to the blood lust of those who don’t know how to, are somehow genetically incapable of, responding to anything else.

To get the job done this time, however, we will need Space Soldiers, Scientists, and Engineers, and interdisciplinary Citizen Scholars all out on the front lines.

I’d like to ask readers to question the same biases I began with; to please deeply investigate this topic, and learn firsthand about the math and behavioral economics equivalents to the laws of physics and nature that make a U.S. Basic Income Guarantee not only sensible and achievable, but ultimately optimal in a global context for the 22nd century civilization that we are building for our grandchildren, today.

Look no further.

There may be more than 497 reasons there by the time all three of you read this, in case you needed a few more. Thing is, I bet that our good neighbor and colleague, the author of that post, even agrees with me. At least he’s not shy to say he’s only in it for the nookie.

Regardless, the past couple weeks have been utterly amazing. Much needed vacation (first time taking an entire week totally #offgrid in I don’t know how long) provided some positively transformative context. There are still far more goals on the todo list than a single lifetime will likely allow, short of reaching escape velocity of course, but it will be interesting to explore this refreshed perspective on what really matters and what doesn’t in the days ahead.

The one thing I wish for This Week in Planetary Self-Realization is that more people will follow @BasicIncome and get more educated about how this will actually work to decrease the costs and abuses of antediluvian needs-tested programs that cost orders of magnitude more than they need to and still don’t work as intended.

Granted, it’s complicated, and yet, so simple. Economies are circulatory systems. If 80 or 90% of the liquidity is clotted up in 1 or even 10% of the body — it doesn’t matter what part of the body — the whole body is going down. This much is not rocket science. Currencies go in and out of circulation, not distribution. The latter only becomes an issue if there are unsustainable abuses and skews that cause such a word to describe the return to sustainable circulation.

There are countless workable Basic Income models and plenty of IRL examples that can explain all this far better than I’m able to do in this brief space; so feel free to start here or here, or just go to town searching via DuckDuckGo if you don’t want the Google Filter Bubble biasing your thorough, fair and balanced, investigation.

And so, onward.

Baby, if you ain’t on the cognition grid, You Don’t Know My Mind.

Many actors take a blithe pleasure in pretending to be somebody else, but Laurie seems more interested in blotting out his own personality. When he’s acting, he doesn’t have to be himself. From this perspective, the role of House is a first-class vacation: an abrasive and acid-tongued American doctor. The longer Laurie plays House, though, the more of himself comes through in the part: his comic timing, his musical ability, his fondness for motorcycles. He has slowly remodeled House in his own image: a charming rogue trailed by a black cloud. Escaping yourself, it turns out, is never as easy as it seems.

Is Laurie happy playing House? “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s not a question I ask myself very often. I equate happiness with contentment, and contentment with complacency, and complacency with impending disaster.” Laurie doesn’t make pronouncements like this in the morose tones of Marvin the Paranoid Android; he remains affable, as if he were describing somebody else. “I have spent part of my life projecting what’s expected,” he said. “People expect me to be foolish and goofy, but essentially cheerful. But I am closer to myself than I used to be.”

Gavin Edwards (ge@rulefortytwo.com) is the author of “Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John? Music’s Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths and Rumors Revealed.”

“People shouldn’t see man-made global disasters as a bad thing,” Oberst added. “They should see them as scientific breakthroughs waiting to happen.”

TheOnion just may be the greatest think tank in all the interwebz.

• If you don’t have time to read Eli Pariser’s book.
• DontBubble.Us pretty much sums it up.
• DuckDuckGo provides one way to experiment with various goodies.

Yay, Sonia! Disagree, debate, embrace, or freak out. Whatever your reaction, resistance to engaging with these realities is futile.

Buy, buy, buy!

Yawwwwn. So it’s ground hog day all over again with tired debate over Accountable Anonymity and Online Identity Management in general. Really? This is a valid topic of conversation among educated, intelligent interwebs inhabitants in 2011?

If I had an decent CPC for every time I’ve had to defend Bruce Schneier’s 2006 infinitely logical position on accountable anonymity  – a position I independently began fighting for as early as 2001, if you must know – I probably wouldn’t bother posting another blathering blog entry on such a long-expired and utterly resolved basic topic.

Please, our collective intelligence and attention are far too valuable to squander on this again. Let’s not continue wasting valuable extended cognition resources on yet another naval-gazing rehash of this long resolved, non-problem.

We desperately need some fresh, new global conversation conductors for this online orchestra. Conductors who will whisk us past superfluous accidentals and distractions and get on with the opus of fixing What’s Most Broken on the planet:

The future that is already here — and nowhere near sufficiently evenly distributed.

This challenge, along with climate change, is arguably the urgent matter of our era. We need entirely new ways of circulating value throughout a global economic circulatory system that is rapidly transitioning to a social capital substrate. As tweeted earlier:

“… as quantum physics differs from newtonian, so does social capital growth differ from industrial capital decline …”

People and communities are suffocating at the economic capillary level. This debt ceiling theater — focusing all too scarce and shallow public attention on histrionic, superfluous cardiac bypass procedures — won’t do a thing to support or supply nutrient-starved capillaries.

Please, let’s have the courage to finally move forward to solving the big problems, building upon the best of what’s worked and discarding all that has not worked well; setting forth upon a global course correction, an #EarthOS reboot worthy of the best of our collective intelligence; accelerating change to cultural escape velocity sufficient to finally begin apprehending postscarcity. At the very least, there is no further excuse to postpone ending poverty, beyond our lifetimes.

Avoidance of our fundamental, inter-generational responsibilities will not make them go away. The world has dramatically changed because our understanding has so dramatically changed. What we once thought was a cold, barren universe is in fact full of water, oxygen, and we ourselves are made of the stuff of stars. Amidst all these no longer shocking realizations, isn’t it time to grow up and be responsible, Earthlings?

 “All this is about stewardship.” – Harry Hellenbrand, Cal State University Provost.