Michel Bauwens: Sustainable Societies, True Cost Economics, and Appropriate Governance

Crowd-Sourcing, Economics/True Cost, Innovation, Knowledge, Money, P2P / Panarchy
Michel Bauwens

“The “Principled Societies” concept outlined in the book Creating Sustainable Societies is a blueprint for sustainable financial, economic, and governance systems, intended for local implementation. The book starts by pinpointing the central problems within our financial, economic, and governance systems that have lead to high unemployment, massive debt, environmental degradation, mistrust of Congress and big business, and hyper-inequities of wealth and political power. It then proposes a practical, bold plan for addressing these concerns and creating meaningful change.

EXTRACT:  From the Foreword, by Bernard Lietaer:

“I have spent the past 30 years studying monetary systems, both conventional and innovative. During this time, I have written more than a dozen books, have spoken to thousands of audiences around the world, and have taught in half a dozen universities in the United States and Europe. Everywhere, I find dissatisfaction and hunger for a breakthrough to another way of working, of cooperating, of contributing. People are eager for change and are awake to the need for change, even if most public officials, constrained by politics or timidity, appear incapable of rising to the challenges of our time.

In distilling the results of my investigations, I arrived at the sad conclusion that the missing piece in all our monetary arrangements is appropriate governance. This is true for both the official money system (the Federal Reserve and all other central banks in the world) and innovative systems of complementary currencies. This missing piece is what John Boik brings to the table. At first glance, his proposal might appear to center on a complementary currency system, but more accurately it centers on appropriate governance. On the one hand, it proposes a means for collaborative direct democracy as applied to finance, corporate behavior, and social organization: the “Principled Society.” On the other, the very mechanics of the proposed monetary and corporate model, including its transparency, are a manifestation of democratic ideals.”

Wiki Outline  of Book   .   Amazon Page for Book

See Also:

The Commons as a Challenge for Classical Economics

Anthony Judge: Transforming and Interweaving the Ways of Being Stoned — Imagination, Promise, Rocks, Memorials, Petrification

Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy
Anthony Judge

Transforming and Interweaving the Ways of Being Stoned
Imagination, Promise, Rocks, Memorials, Petrification

 Laetus in praesens, 4 Sep 2012

EXTRACT:

This experiment explores analogies between the mnemonic pentagrams fundamental to the Hygieia understanding of health of Pythagoreans and to its current understanding through the Wu Xing system of Chinese culture. The focus here is however on their relevance to the dynamics of “cognitive health”, especially with respect to a global knowledge-based society — whose conflicts are variously driven by societies attaching central significance to the pentagonal star. This follows an earlier exploration of symbolic framings (Middle East Peace Potential through Dynamics in Spherical Geometry: engendering connectivity from incommensurable 5-fold and 6-fold conceptual frameworks, 2012).

Introduction
Fivefold clustering of ways of being stoned
Towards a cognitive variant of the viable systems model
Comprehending cognitive metabolism
Cycles of enstoning forming mnemonic pentagrams: Hygiea and Wu Xing
Potentially health developmental integrity from 5-fold symmetry
Cognitive health as a sustainable cycle of self-reflexivity
Mnemonic possibilities towards cognitive health
Memetic osmosis around a 5-fold pattern of enstoning
Health and sustainability misleadingly framed as target acquisition
Frames of reference and conceptual revolution
Magnum Opus: cyclic transformation of Qi / Chi?
Enstoning as degrees of material formalization
References

Yoda: Integrating Arts Into Sciences

04 Education, Academia, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Knights know that the arts–especially music–are essential to developing the creative and innovative impulses of entrepreneurs.  Put more directly:  no arts in education – fewer entrepreneurs.

Lesson Plans and Resources for Arts Integration

Dance in science, pop art in Spanish, or photography in math — there’s no end to the ways arts can be integrated into other curricula. Educators from Bates Middle School, in Annapolis, Maryland, share arts-integrated lessons and resources that you can use in your school.

Michel Bauwens: Fractional Scholarship

Access, Crowd-Sourcing, Economics/True Cost, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy
Michel Bauwens

White Paper on Fractional Scholarship

So, I've been working with the incomparable Sam Arbesman to write up some thoughts on the concept of “fractional scholarship.” Basically, the idea is that there are a lot of people out there who have the expertise and the interest to contribute to scholarly research, but for whom, for whatever reason, the seventy-hour-a-week academic lifestyle just doesn't work. We need to develop mechanisms that will allow people to participate in research at ten, twenty, or thirty hours a week, and to get paid for doing it.

Obviously, someone working only ten hours a week would get paid a lot less than a university professor, which is part of what makes this such a powerful model. Keep in mind that a typical university professor probably does not spend much more that ten hours a week actually doing research anyway, what with all the personnel-management and bureaucratic tasks that take up so much of their time.

Basically, all the people out there (and there are tens of thousands of them) who got a PhD, but then dropped out of academia (e.g., to have kids) represent a vast underutilized intellectual resource that is trading well below its actual value. Tapping in to that resource is one of the things that we hope to do with the Ronin Institute.

Check out the full white paper at the Kauffman Foundation website, here. [Also Below]

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Mini-Me: Marine Officer on 9/11 – The Anomalies Continue to Surface

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Knowledge, Law Enforcement, Media, Military, Politics
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Phi Beta Iota:  As President Barack Obama faces what David Gergen calls one of three “choice” or turning point elections in modern US history, one has to wonder where he stands on the subject of the truth.  Below the line is a methodical review with many links from retired Marine Corps officer Jim Fetzer, who focuses on the Cheney-dominated US Government at the time.  Equally troubling facts can be asserted on the New York end by focusing on Larry Silverstein and Rudy Guliani.  If ever a sitting President had a ready-made opportunity for eradicating an opposing political party by enabling the truth to be told about a major event in modern US history, Barack Obama is that President.  We do not favor a traditional justice approach here, but rather a Truth & Reconciliation Commission.  If Barack Obama were to sponsor The Smart Nation Act, the Electoral Reform Act of 2012, a Truth & Reconciliation Commission on 9/11, and the immediate decriminalization of marijuana and then of all other drugs [with a jobs program equal to the challenge of existing unemployment and emptied prisons with restored voting rights], it would be game over.  Then instead of having to fight for credibility and traction every day, he might actually be able to govern in 2013-2016.  On the other hand, if President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are intent on demonstrating there is no substantive difference between the two parties that control the electoral process and the disbursement of the public treasury, they should continue to do precisely what they are doing now.

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Chuck Spinney: How Hot is Hot? Case Study in Government Misrepresentation

Knowledge, Politics
Chuck Spinney

Below is a very important 2 part analysis of the meaning of the recent heat wave in the US and and the nature of reported temperature increases in general, and whether or not they can be attributed to increases in CO2 concentrations.

The author, John Christy, is a highly regarded climatologist, albeit a skeptical one.  At the end of Part II, Christie gently eviscerates the recent analysis by climate activist/scientist James Hansen, et al, by definitively showing how Hansen's analysis is biased to produce a preordained answer, both in terms of Hansen's  selection of its data interval and his metric of choice. (See Hansen's op-ed in Washington Post here and I would urge readers to download his report).  Anyone interested in trying to sort the wheat from the chaff in the climate wars ought to study these two papers. (I have not changed a word, but reformatted them in a few places, breaking paragraphs into “bullets” and highlighted i; I also inserted a few comments in [red] to clarify his points.)
Chuck Spinney
Gaeta, Italia
August 13th, 2012 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

guest post by John Christy, UAHuntsville, Alabama State Climatologist

Let me say two things up front.

  1. The first 10 weeks of the summer of 2012 were brutally hot in some parts of the US. For these areas it was hotter than seen in many decades.
  2. Extra greenhouse gases should warm the climate. We really don’t know how much, but the magnitude is more than zero, and likely well below the average climate model estimate.

Now to the issue at hand. The recent claims that July 2012 and Jan-Jul 2012 were the hottest ever in the conterminous US (USA48) are based on one specific way to look at the US temperature data. NOAA, who made the announcement, utilized the mean temperature or TMean (i.e. (TMax + TMin)/2) taken from station records after adjustments for a variety of discontinuities were applied. In other words, the average of the [adjusted] daily high and daily low temperatures is the metric of choice for these kinds of announcements.

Unfortunately, TMean is akin to averaging apples and oranges to come up with a rather uninformative fruit.

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