CivicActions

Terence McKenna described a fractally eschatonic view of history called the "TimeWave" that posited that history was repeating itself in ever faster cycles, culminating in The Big Event in 2012. That's a separate discussion, but a really cool modern example is the profound symmetry between the Nixon Right's war on John Lennon and his peace advocacy at the height of the Vietnam War.

The US vs. John Lennon Movie is coming to theaters in September, and its timing and message could not be more poignant at this moment in time, where the lessons of history have been so predictably forgotten by warmongers and peaceniks alike. It is frightening and yet strangely empowering to hear Lennon speaking out against the Vietnam War amidst the attacks by the Nixon right waged on John Lennon, all set to this classic soundtrack.

Deanna Zandt (who we work with on the Jim Hightower sites) pointed out that Micah Sifry referenced JimHightower.com along with a number of other Drupal sites over on the PDF Blog along with DrupalCampNYC which we are sponsoring and helping to organize along with Noel Hidalgo (the man on the ground) and some other folks.

The Problem: We live in a world which is literally awash in data and information that has swamped our systems of representing and understanding it, precisely at a moment in Human history when we most need to understand this information. The World Wide Web is a vast and remarkable resource, but viewing web pages a page at a time through a web browser fails to satisfy our need to get the “big picture” and takes waaaaaay too long to grok the fullness.

Similarly, we can gain access to enormous relational databases full of information – such as the databases of nonprofits who seek funding, and their financial characteristics and missions – but most of our views of this data take the form of incremental pages, spreadsheets or limited graphs which do not reveal the complexity of those rich relationships.