What future generations need from us
Abstract What do future generations need from us? Various procedures, including individual and group role playing at 13 locations in nine countries, can help us answer this question. In general, future generations need equal opportunity (a legacy as beneficial as ours was), our caring about their well-being, and attention to their needs in our legislatures and parliaments. Their particular needs are for us to focus on peace and security, the environment, the worst risks of all, governance, the knowledge base, children and learning. The needs of future generations may provide the centrepiece for a new global ethic that improves our prospects for a positive future.
The court of generations
Abstract Proposed herein is an amendment to the US Constitution to create the Court of Generations. The Court, which will reside in the judicial branch of government, will judge whether present society is ‘in contempt of intolerably threatening the security of the blessings of liberty to our Posterity’. The Court will consist of a grand jury, made up of one citizen from each state, and the members of the Supreme Court. It will meet at least once every five years. The Court will have no authority to force the implementation of any social programmes or agenda. Rather, the Court will provide a focus for national discussion and prioritization of such important issues as global climatic change, species extinction, soil erosion and genetic engineering.
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1