The Ron Paul Revolution in 2008 and the tea party movement that followed shows that the American conservative mainstream is starting to awaken to its own pre-neocon past and potential future. It is seeing itself as the bulwark needed to protect our Republic, the rule of law, individual liberty and our fiscal health against those in both parties whose policies have taken the United State to the precipice of disaster.
For those who think both constitutionally as Dr. Paul does and systemically, it's impossible to distinguish between our national debt and our foreign policy. Dr. Paul is one of the few candidates who offers an integrated and systemic way of understanding the difficulties we face as a country and the means to restore our Republic.
Sustainability experts have called on global regulators to ask companies to report on their sustainable policy and performance, disclosing results in a similar way to financial reporting.
“A ‘report or explain’ approach could persuade more companies to report rather than explain why they don’t,” said Teresa Fogelberg, deputy chief executive of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).
. . . . . .
About 4,000 global companies report their sustainability performance, using reporting guidelines recently updated by the GRI.
These focus on 79 issues including consulting stakeholders on important topics, human rights, the impact on local communities and gender matters.
whether talking about a intelligent knowledge infrastructure, robert's global brain, or suresh's project matching for climate change initiatives, this article seemed useful.
Futurescaper is an online tool for making sense of the drivers, trends and forces that will shape the future. As a user interface system, it is horrible. As a tool for analyzing and understanding complex systems, it works pretty well. Several people asked me about this after my last post, so here is some more detail.
Following the logic of collective intelligence (as part of my my PhD), I broke up the the scenario thinking process into discrete chunks, came up with a system for analyzing and relating them together, and then distilled them into key outputs for helping the scenario development process: 1) Emergent Thematic Maps 2) Revealing Hidden Connections 3) Drilling Down
The first system is called “Futurescaper” and was developed in partnership with the International Futures Forum (IFF), Tony Hodgson and my friend Nathan Koren. This was piloted on a project for the UK Government, exploring secondary and tertiary impacts of climate change.
Using a new “crowdfunding” program called Solar Mosaic, the city is selling solar tiles to locals for $100 a pop and installing them on public buildings
By Maria Gallucci, SolveClimate News
Apr 22, 2011
The city of Oakland, Calif., is getting its residents to help build out a clean energy economy, one solar tile at a time.
By selling 5,000 tiles at $100 each to locals, the city is aiming to piece together entire rooftop solar arrays at seven budget-strapped schools, youth centers and houses of worship. A team of Oaklanders will be trained and hired to install the panels by as early as July.
The city's efforts are part of a pilot program called Solar Mosaic, a web-based marketplace for community solar initiatives that launched on April 15.
Using the “crowdfunding” model, residents can help generate energy savings and scale back greenhouse gas emissions without having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for a solar installation at home.
Phi Beta Iota: The existing tax system in the USA is so corrupt it must be abolished. The public is now ready for line-item crowd-sourcing and the fully-transparent Automated Payments/Transaction Tax.
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has announced a new initiative launching April 8, 2011: The National Conversation at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The National Conversation will examine overarching themes of U.S. international and domestic policy, drawing on high-profile guests and experts from all sides of the political sphere to provide thoughtful, intelligent explorations of challenging issues with the goal of informing the national public policy debate.
From uprisings in the Arab world to troubled economies around the globe, challenges to America’s role in the global community have seldom been greater or more complex. And with economic woes at home and our military capacity stretched thin through involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, many are left wondering about our ability to respond and adapt to a rapidly changing world. At a time when national unity around a shared vision is lacking, there is a growing belief that a new national security narrative must emerge that defines the role of the U.S. in global affairs for a new century. But can we achieve such a national consensus in this era of hyper-partisanship? A possible answer comes in the form of an anonymous “white paper.” Two US military officers have written an essay describing a vision for the missing narrative under the authorship of “Mr. Y.” Join our panel as it discusses the ideas contained in this provocative paper from an unexpected source. Is this the blueprint for the narrative we seek?
The inaugural National Conversation kicks off April 8 from 12:00 to 1:30 p.m., with a discussion on the search for a new national security narrative to guide U.S. policy in the 21st Century. Five panelists will participate in a discussion moderated by award-winning New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman. The panel will feature: Steve Clemons, founder of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation; Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim American to be elected into the U.S. Congress; Robert Kagan, senior fellow for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution; Brent Scowcroft, U.S. national security adviser to President Ford and President H.W. Bush; and Professor Anne Marie Slaughter, former director for policy planning for the U.S. Department of State and current Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.