Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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ethics

When Cause And Effect Converged With Humanity

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Editor’s Note: Jim wrote the origins of this article and published it in Volume I, Issue 2 of his NEWSLETTER, November 21, 1999. 

This is a story about how cause and effect merged parallel universes and one person made a difference that changed the course of human history.

As the 17th Century dawned on the New World, a manchild was born to the Patuxet tribe. His father named him Tisquantum. They were part of a confederation of tribes known as the Wampanoag (“eastern people”), inhabiting much of what became known as New England.

In time, Tisquantum would become a very important individual to the future of America, but not before his life would change in ways not to be imagined by any 17th-century Earthling. [Continue Reading]

When Blind Justice Had A Good Day

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As you likely remember, the question asked last week in our online poll was: “What do you think about Hunter Biden’s plea deal failing this week?” And we offered these four response options:

  • It’s just more Conservative/MAGA theater to divert from Trump’s assault on the Constitution.
  • Thank God something/someone slowed the Biden DOJ’s banana republic approach to justice.
  • Doesn’t matter. Our country isn’t going to survive as a constitutional republic for much longer anyway.
  • What if we presented both the Biden and Trump cases to a court without names?

Below, along with the other responses, you’ll see that three-fourths of our folks went for #2. They were relieved to see that there’s still some level of blind justice in America today.

Is Hunter Biden, et al, guilty of all of the things being alleged? Well, when allowed to work as designed, that’s what the architecture of the American system of justice is designed to resolve. But as we’ve known since Henry II’s 12th-century legal reforms spawned the immortal English common law upon which our system is modeled, the mill grinds pure when unimpeded by politics.

[Continue Reading]

Blockchain: It’s The Future Of Trust

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A few weeks ago, I introduced you to how Blockchain works. This offering is about how it can create digital trust. But first, let me remind you – Blockchain is a complicated topic, so thanks for your continued focus.

To understand Blockchain, we must first contemplate the primordial role of trust. Just as every chemical process in the human body takes place in the medium of water, every human interaction – each one – takes place in the medium of trust. As civilization, societies, and markets evolved, all were made manifest by the existence of, and singular devotion to trust. It’s the cornerstone, the keystone, and the capstone of our civilized existence. As the original open-source model, trust is the intangibly awesome foundation of equilibrium and creator of order.

This will be on the test: For 10,000 years, humans required analog trust. In the Digital Age, humans will require digital trust. As open-source technology beyond cryptocurrency, Blockchain is enabling trust’s metamorphosis from analog to digital, as it becomes synonymous with digital trust.

For Satoshi Nakamoto, creating Bitcoin was easy. But making his peer-to-peer cryptocurrency deliver on[Continue Reading]

It’s the Digital Age – Ethically Speaking, Things Here Are Different

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As arrogant occupants of 21st-century Earth, who can rightly boast of creating exciting innovations, like the computer, talking paint, and the margarita blender, it serves us to believe we’re also the more enlightened generation.

But honesty demands an acknowledgment that contemporary applications of wisdom, morality and ethical behavior are in fact derivative of concepts first proposed long ago by the ancients.

Consider the 10,000-year-old Chinese wisdom, I Ching, The Book of Changes. Then there are the 5,000-year-old Upanishads from India. And of course, the new kid on the block, the four-millennia-old Mosaic Laws (Thou shalt not …). Indeed, no wisdom is handier than that of King Solomon, from the first millennium BCE in Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and the Psalms.

It must be noted that much of this awesome introspection and self-awareness was first contemplated at a time when receding Ice Age glaciers were still carving Scotland’s Loch Ness and the Great Lakes of North America, on the threshold of the written word.

Alas, ethically and morally speaking, we moderns are merely the new models, not necessarily the better ones. Hold that thought.  [Continue Reading]

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