Month: March 2012

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Event: April 4, National Mall in Wash DC, Who Killed Dr. King?

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, History

April 4, 2012
Who Killed Dr. King? Free the Files, Find the Truth


On the 44th anniversary of the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. COPA will hold a vigil with banners and handout sheets at the new Martin Luther King Memorial site on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The event will start at 9:00 am and last until 10:00 pm in the Forecourt entrance to the Memorial, off Maine Avenue south of the Lincoln Memorial. We want to commemorate the event because we cannot remember his life if we forget his death. Our flyer will focus on the evidence of James Earl Ray’s innocence, the Memphis Civil Trial ruling, and our efforts to release the classified government records on his life and death. The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Records Act is still pending introduction by Senator John Kerry and Representative John Lewis, and people attending our event are encouraged to visit their offices near the Capitol that day to urge them to move on the bill. We have been assisting in an effort to get the Memphis trial transcript up on the web, since it has been removed in large part at the Martin Luther King Center site. I hope you will join us there for a shift. RSVP.

Also see:
+ Videos of William Pepper (King friend and family attorney)
+ Audio interviews + book “An Act of State” by William Pepper
+ Review: An Act of State–The Execution of Martin Luther King, New and Updated Edition
+ Archive.org video talk of William Pepper from 2003 and the audio file version.
+ Honoring Martin Luther King — With Truth

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Marcus Aurelius: Obama’s Face on US Flag Riles Vets

Uncategorized
Marcus Aurelius

I cannot find the words, but certainly share the outrage of the veterans who objected. One has to wonder how such a travesty could make it all the way to being on display.

Vets angry over American flag featuring Obama

http://csc.beap.ad.yieldmanager.net/i?bv=1.0.0&bs=(124u7hqqe(gid$0a9cdbec-6def-11e1-97a0-0764d8d7b04e,st$1331740924048369,v$1.0))&t=blank&al=(as$129669r00,aid$jgLpGUwNjeY-,bi$1200611551,ct$25,at$0)LAKE COUNTY, Fla. —

Tempers are flaring over a version of the American flag flying in Lake County. A veterans group says the flag is an outrage.

The flag, which features a picture of President Obama, was taken down Tuesday afternoon.

Read full article and watch video clip.

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Event: 20 Mar 1200-1330 Religion, Terror, and Error – U.S. Foreign Policy and the Challenge of Spiritual Engagement, by Dr. Douglas M. Johnston

Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

Religion, Terror, and Error: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Challenge of Spiritual Engagement, by Dr. Douglas M. Johnston, president and founder, International Center for Religion and Diplomacy

Date & Time:
Tuesday, March 20th, 2012
12:00 – 1:30 p.m.

How should the United States deal with the jihadist challenge and other religious imperatives that permeate today's geopolitical landscape? Religion, Terror, and Error: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Challenge of Spiritual Engagement argues that what is required is a longer‐term strategy of cultural engagement, backed by a deeper understanding of how others view the world and what important to them. The means by which that can be accomplished are the subject of this book.

This work achieves three important goals. It shows how religious considerations can be incorporated into the practice of U.S. foreign policy; offers a successor to the rational‐actor model of decision‐making that has heretofore excluded “irrational” factors like religion; and suggests a new paradigm for U.S. leadership in anticipation of tomorrow's multipolar world. In describing how the United States should realign itself to deal more effectively with the causal factors underlying religious extremism, this innovative treatise explains how existing capabilities can be redirected to respond to the challenge and identifies additional capabilities that will be needed to complete the task.

Continue reading “Event: 20 Mar 1200-1330 Religion, Terror, and Error – U.S. Foreign Policy and the Challenge of Spiritual Engagement, by Dr. Douglas M. Johnston”

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Dolphin: US and Israeli Targeted Killings

07 Other Atrocities
YARC YARC

Targeted Killings: US and Israeli Specialties

Anticipatory self-defense is illegal except for 2 well-defined exception inapplicable to US and Israeli targeted assassinations.

by Stephen Lendman

International law permits justifiable self-defense. Targeted killings are prohibited, especially premeditated ones like America and Israel repeatedly commit for reasons other than claimed.

These incidents constitute cold-blooded murder. US drone killings and rampaging death squads, as well as Israel's deplorable history and latest ritual slaughter highlight the issue. International law prohibits anticipatory self-defense. It amounts to using force to deter it.

Under the UN Charter's Article 2(4):

Read rest of article.

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Greg Smith: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs

Commerce, Corruption
Greg Smith

Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs

The New York Times, 14 March 2012

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.
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Event: 30 Mar GWU DC Can Buberian Dialogues Temper Political Stridency?

Advanced Cyber/IO, Ethics

The George Washington University
University Seminar on Reflexive Systems
Saturday, March 30, 2012 from 10:00 am-12:00 pm
Funger Hall, Room 320
2201 G Street NW

Can Buberian Dialogues Temper Political Stridency?

Michael Lissack

Stridency and polarization dominate the conduct of political debate in the media.  Like the endless repetition of a bad song, the melody becomes stuck in the public's consciousness and like a squeaky wheel attracts undue attention and energy. Many recognize this problem but as with the problem of drug addiction feel mostly powerless to contain it … never mind stop it.  When the head of a political party can claim, “This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good.” the visceral stridency is nearing crescendo.  Something needs to be done.  Lissack argues that the stridency problem is a direct result of our reliance on label/category methods of explanation.  These explanatory methods are efficient reductive tools – but that efficient reduction has come at a price. Lissack suggests that social complexity theory has a potential answer.

By exploration of narratives based on mechanism rather than labels based on category the hypothesis is that the participants can be rescued from the depths of stridency and brought to a more productive, interactive conversation.  The narratives are to be obtained via what is called “Buberian Dialogue” — where Buber's I-Thou relationship is established between each side's protagonist and an interacting audience. After thus crowd-sourcing the extraction of commonalities underlying the issues discussed, soft systems methodology is used to develop mechanism-based narratives which can be used as the basis for further dialogue. Traditional approaches to curtailing the stridency and its dangers have not succeeded. It is time to try something new.