Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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Worth a Look: Public Call for Wall Street Sales Tax

Civil Society, Commerce, Ethics, Government
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

There is now a petition for a Wall Street Sales Tax online at: http://wh.gov/ARGi

The petition was initiated by the United Front Against Austerity.  It has started off strong, and we want to keep the momentum building, so the more it's shared, the better.  Thank you!

We've got until April 10 to get 100,000 signatures. Twitter people, can you put this in front of people like Robert Reich, Dean Baker and others to ask them to mobilize their networks?

Getting an official White House response would be huge, but this is also a way to push the concept in front of more people.

CHARGE!!!!!!

Phi Beta Iota:  Wall Street transactions (both stock and currency) are among the most numerous in the economy, and they are tax free.  The Tobin Tax and the Automated Payment Transaction Tax both call for the widening of the economic revenue “pie” beyond income taxes — indeed, an honest Congress and an honest Executive could eliminate all income taxes by applying either of these taxes (a fraction of a penny) across the economy starting with the financial transactions — including the shadow banks (hedge funds) — that are now completely outside the revenue stream.  The FACT that the US Government has been BORROWING $1 trillion a year since 1980 in order to fund BOTH a grossly over-extended entitlements program and a grossly under-performing national security corporate welfare program, should be — but is not — a major public grievance.

See Also:

DuckDuckGo / Tobin Tax

DuckDuckGo / APT Tax

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Paul van Tongeren: Infrastructures for Peace New Network and Website

Advanced Cyber/IO, Ethics, Non-Governmental
Paul van Tongeren
Paul van Tongeren

Dear friends,

It is with great pleasure that I can introduce you to the International Civil Society Network on Infrastructures for Peace (I4P).   The network and website are launched today: www.I4Pinternational.org

Many countries lack capacities and structures to deal adequately with on-going and potential violent conflict. This has emerged as a central obstacle to the attainment of equitable and sustainable development. In recent years, the number of conflicts has been increasing once again. We need comprehensive, inclusive and long-term approaches to peacebuilding, which involves the main stakeholders. Infrastructures for Peace and Local Peace Committees can be important pillars to counter these dangerous developments or substantially reduce their impact.

These months, several interesting articles on I4P are released: in the new Peacebuilding Journal, the Berghof-Handbook Dialogue Series on Peace Infrastructures, in Pensamiento Propio and soon a whole issue on this topic of the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development. Our website will tell you how to find the articles on I4P.

Several local peacebuilding NGOs and practitioners felt the need to exchange experiences and best practices about this approach and make I4P more recognised:the network was born and counts now some seventy members. We have established an Interim Steering Committee with members from three continents.

I invite you to see our website and join our network if you are interested.

Best regards.
Paul van Tongeren

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Paul Craig Roberts: Huge Chavez – Challenging Imperialism

Ethics
Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.

Hugo Chavez — Challenging Imperialism

On March 5, 2013, Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela and world leader against imperialism, died. Washington imperialists and their media and think tank whores expressed gleeful sighs of relief as did the brainwashed US population. An “enemy of America” was gone.

Chavez was not an enemy of America. He was an enemy of Washington’s hegemony over other countries, an enemy of Washington’s alliance with elite ruling cliques who steal from the people they grind down and deny sustenance. He was an enemy of Washington’s injustice, of Washington’s foreign policy based on lies and military aggression, bombs and invasions.

Washington is not America. Washington is Satan’s home town.

Chavez was a friend of truth and justice, and this made him unpopular throughout the Western World where every political leader regards truth and justice as dire threats.

Continue reading “Paul Craig Roberts: Huge Chavez – Challenging Imperialism”

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John Robb: Life in a Networked Age

Advanced Cyber/IO

John Robb
John Robb

Life in a Networked Age

Posted: 02 Mar 2013 02:08 PM PST

Here's some idle thinking for a sunny afternoon at the end of winter.

To access it, let's make a simple assumption that economics, politics, and warfare are all a function of the dominant technological substrate.

A technological substrate is the family of related technologies that we rely upon.  In the 20th Century, we were clearly reliant on an industrial substrate.

The challenges posed by industrial age technologies dictated the development of two management forms:  bureaucracy and markets.   Bureaucracies and markets are both decision making systems. These management forms dominated economics, politics, and warfare for centuries.

Neither system of management is sufficient as a solution for industrial economics, politics, or warfare.

Continue reading “John Robb: Life in a Networked Age”

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Eagle: Facebook Strike Two — “Likes” Reveal All — Like It or Not

Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Government
300 Million Talons...
300 Million Talons…

Facebook ‘likes' predict personality

What do your Facebook likes say about you?

Sexuality, political leanings and even intelligence can be gleaned from the things you choose to “like” on Facebook, a study suggests.

Researchers at Cambridge University used algorithms to predict religion, politics, race and sexual orientation.

The research, published in the journal PNAS, forms surprisingly accurate personal portraits, researchers said.

The findings should “ring alarm bells” for users, privacy campaigners said.

Read full article.

See Also:

Michel Bauwens: Facebook Corrupt Arbitrage — Blocking Popular Subscriptions as Extortion Tool

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Theophillis Goodyear: It’s Time for Academia to Coin a New Term: The Post-Journalism Era

Media
Theophillis Goodyear
Theophillis Goodyear

It's Time for Academia to Coin a New Term: The Post-Journalism Era

>Watching Danny Schechter's documentary, “WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception,” a term stood out for me: the era of post-journalism. And I could see immediately that it's an accurate term that should be adopted by academia—-just as the terms, postmodern, neocolonialism, and neoconservatism have been—-because the tradition of journalists speaking truth to power died a long time ago. Business interests are a conflict of interest that contemporary journalism has not been able to rise above. Or as jazz legend Mose Allison once said in his song: Everybody Cryin' Mercy: “Everybody's cryin' justice . . . just as long as there's business first.”

So I entered the term: post journalism era into the Google search engine and I only came up with one decent link: an article by Russ Baker from his website: WhoWhatWhy.com.

Here are the first two sentences of his article: “The Washington Post has great reporters, but as a journalistic institution, it has been strikingly sympathetic to the ruling establishment. Over the decades, reporters there have complained repeatedly about how their efforts to break out of an emerging consensus have been stymied, overtly or more subtly.”

WhoWhatWhy homepage

I also did a dot edu Google search and came up with zero hits for the term post-journalism era. I think this is a term that desperately needs to be coined and spread far and wide, especially in academica. In fact it should have been coined a century ago. But better late than never.

Continue reading “Theophillis Goodyear: It's Time for Academia to Coin a New Term: The Post-Journalism Era”

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John Maguire: Quantum Gas Goes Below Absolute Zero

05 Energy
maguireArticle Summary: “What is normal to most people in winter has so far been impossible in physics: a minus temperature. On the Celsius scale minus temperatures are only surprising in summer. On the absolute temperature scale, which is used by physicists and is also called the Kelvin scale, it is not possible to go below zero – at least not in the sense of getting colder than zero kelvin. According to the physical meaning of temperature, the temperature of a gas is determined by the chaotic movement of its particles – the colder the gas, the slower the particles. At zero kelvin (minus 273 degrees Celsius) the particles stop moving and all disorder disappears. Thus, nothing can be colder than absolute zero on the Kelvin scale. Physicists at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have now created an atomic gas in the laboratory that nonetheless has negative Kelvin values. These negative absolute temperatures have several apparently absurd consequences: although the atoms in the gas attract each other and give rise to a negative pressure, the gas does not collapse – a behaviour that is also postulated for dark energy in cosmology. Supposedly impossible heat engines such as a combustion engine with a thermodynamic efficiency of over 100% can also be realised with the help of negative absolute temperatures.”

A temperature below absolute zero

Atoms at negative absolute temperature are the hottest systems in the world
noble gold