Notes so I don't forget to write about them. I'm thinking of writing some software that could be called brainstorm. It would use bits of the open source web browser Mozilla to crawl google results using the link:website.com search option. So you would start with an idea like "global patriotism" and the software would find web pages that match, then it would look at all of the web pages that link to the websites on the google results page. It would read through the pages counting the number of times words came up and branch out from the key phrase from there. Lots of ideas for this. I'm going to do it by hand and see what I come up with, if it works I'll write the software. I just did a half assed dry run and found http://dir.yahoo.com/Social_Science/Political_Science/Political_Theory/ So my software would read through all of the links on that page and all of the pages that link to the pages on that page trying to come up with analogies. I think reading the book on Fuzzy Logic is going to help here. What is insight? I don't think the hardest part of coming up with an idea is the fine tuning, that's the fun part, the hard part is the initial aha moment. Maybe the software can spit out random combinations of the popular words from the initial search and branch out from there.

I think this is a good idea, automated research. I know the government found some Al Qaeda websites, I wonder if they ever bothered to check which sites were linking to them.

Here's a quote I like:
"If this trend continues and global “patriotism” transcends nationalism, history could reveal this unification to be the most significant development of the 21st century, as some futurists have speculated. Watch for this spirit of mutuality, grounded in a national self-reliance, to grow in spite of differences in class, race, politics, religion."

Another quote that doesn't bode well for Democracy "the traditionalism of the consciousness of people in developed countries, manifested as an unreadiness of the rich countries to pay welfare on legal bases to poor regions will evoke a political victory of traditionalism in the developing countries and can lead to world war." The word traditionalism in this quote refers to anti-globalism or protectionism.