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| Jimmy "Fishbob" Geraghty , aka "Janitor of Political Waste" |
Saturday, July 9, 2016
Friday, July 8, 2016
From the Atlantic Monthly: "Why Mayors need a UN-like Organization of their Own"
Editor's note: Many people think that Agenda 21 is a wacky conspiracy
theory. But it is a real life initiative of the United Nations created in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Articles on urban planning journals and blogs like this one published in CityLab from the Atlantic Monthly, prove that
serious people are advocating radical political change. Globalist initiatives such as this one seek to erode democratic self determination in service to a UN
type central government.
While I still believe this authors views are on the margins
of political thought, the fact remains, this is how so-called "Smart Growth" and other
manias of politicians and land use planners began.
The reason these initiatives are brought forward are as old as
human history. People want to control others. The lust for POWER and MONEY trumps political ideology.
Liberty and freedom beat central planning any day. The failure of socialism in the 20th Century
proves this. This is why we will beat back Plan Bay Area and other plans to limit our freedom. Mayors are not kings and we are not subjects of the divine rule of central planners.
Why Mayors Need a UN-like Organization of Their Own
The world’s mayors are running the biggest and most important cities in all of human history. They need to have a forum.
There can be no doubt about it: The world’s economic action is centered in its cities. More than half the people in the world live in metros, a figure that is projected to rise to nearly three-quarters by mid-century. The world’s 40 largest mega-regions (geographical clusters of cities, many of them crossing national boundaries) account for less than a fifth of the world’s population while producing two thirds of the world’s economic output and nearly 90 percent of its innovations.
A growing chorus of urbanists argue that mayors are the most innovative, pragmatic, and effective political leaders we have today. These local leaders continue to make progress on fronts where nation-states have been stymied by partisanship and self-interest, including climate change, environmental degradation, traffic congestion, terrorism, poverty, and the trafficking of drugs, guns, and people.
But if mayors are in the vanguard of policy innovation, too often they are compelled to go at it alone. They are inadequately supported by and (at times) at odds with the nation-states in which they are embedded, and they lack the kind of institutional supports that presidents, prime ministers, and even business leaders take for granted.
It’s time for a U.N.-like organization for cities, a global parliament where mayors and other urban stakeholders and leaders can collaborate on policymaking—and from which they can disseminate best practices and standards.
Over the last six months, Benjamin Barber, author of the book If Mayors Ruled the World, and I have been working with my Martin Prosperity Institutecolleague Don Tapscott, a world-renowned expert on the impact of technology on society, and Steve Caswell, one of the pioneers of the email industry, to turn this notion into a reality.
In a new two-part report, we build upon and expand Barber’s idea for a Global Parliament of Mayors, which would support and enhance existing organizations that already promote inter-city cooperation and knowledge-sharing, such as theInternational Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, for example (founded in 1990); the United Cities and Local Governments; and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
A Global Parliament of Mayors would enable leaders from cities with different systems to compare notes and learn from one another on everything from mundane issues like sanitation, building codes, and transportation to more pressing ones like counterterrorism, global climate change, and the challenges of labor migration.
It would also provide a way to bridge and learn from very different models for urban governance. Some cities have powerful mayors and effective city councils, but many others have weak and dysfunctional leadership.
Though very much a real-world organization, its members would not sit in a formal council; they would be linked together virtually. Their dialogue would operate from the bottom up, with a priority of reaching actionable results rather than politically expedient ones. And though the group’s goal would be to produce a new paradigm for 21st-century leadership, there would be no enforcement mechanisms. In other words, there is no way this network would have the power to force mayors to implement policies they don’t believe in.
The good news is that the Global Parliament of Mayors is not just an idea. In mid-September, Barber will convene the body’s third planning meeting with the mayors of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht, along with political advisors and urban specialists from around the world. Just a few days later, the Global Parliament of Mayors Interdisciplinary Workshop will kick off in The Hague, hosted by Mayor van Aartsen and Professor Jouke de Vries, Dean of Leiden University.
At the World Urban Forum in Medellin in April, I called for the U.N. to make cities the centerpieces of their forthcoming sustainable development goals to help overcome inequality, upgrade existing slums and prevent the growth of new ones, provide housing, transportation and access to safe public spaces and services, strengthen resilience in the face of climate change and other natural disasters, and more. With billions more people set to stream into cities over the next half century, we will be spending more money on city building than we have in all of human history. Now more than ever, we need proactive urban planning that protects public space while providing good governance and stable transparent institutions. We need better metrics and much more information on what works and what does not. And we need to understand what drives the growth and development of cities.
Urbanization is the grandest of the grand challenges we face, and mayors are the figures most crucial to addressing it. A Global Parliament of Mayors would give them the forum they need to do so.
A growing chorus of urbanists argue that mayors are the most innovative, pragmatic, and effective political leaders we have today. These local leaders continue to make progress on fronts where nation-states have been stymied by partisanship and self-interest, including climate change, environmental degradation, traffic congestion, terrorism, poverty, and the trafficking of drugs, guns, and people.
But if mayors are in the vanguard of policy innovation, too often they are compelled to go at it alone. They are inadequately supported by and (at times) at odds with the nation-states in which they are embedded, and they lack the kind of institutional supports that presidents, prime ministers, and even business leaders take for granted.
It’s time for a U.N.-like organization for cities, a global parliament where mayors and other urban stakeholders and leaders can collaborate on policymaking—and from which they can disseminate best practices and standards.
Over the last six months, Benjamin Barber, author of the book If Mayors Ruled the World, and I have been working with my Martin Prosperity Institutecolleague Don Tapscott, a world-renowned expert on the impact of technology on society, and Steve Caswell, one of the pioneers of the email industry, to turn this notion into a reality.
In a new two-part report, we build upon and expand Barber’s idea for a Global Parliament of Mayors, which would support and enhance existing organizations that already promote inter-city cooperation and knowledge-sharing, such as theInternational Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, for example (founded in 1990); the United Cities and Local Governments; and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
A Global Parliament of Mayors would enable leaders from cities with different systems to compare notes and learn from one another on everything from mundane issues like sanitation, building codes, and transportation to more pressing ones like counterterrorism, global climate change, and the challenges of labor migration.
It would also provide a way to bridge and learn from very different models for urban governance. Some cities have powerful mayors and effective city councils, but many others have weak and dysfunctional leadership.
Though very much a real-world organization, its members would not sit in a formal council; they would be linked together virtually. Their dialogue would operate from the bottom up, with a priority of reaching actionable results rather than politically expedient ones. And though the group’s goal would be to produce a new paradigm for 21st-century leadership, there would be no enforcement mechanisms. In other words, there is no way this network would have the power to force mayors to implement policies they don’t believe in.
The good news is that the Global Parliament of Mayors is not just an idea. In mid-September, Barber will convene the body’s third planning meeting with the mayors of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht, along with political advisors and urban specialists from around the world. Just a few days later, the Global Parliament of Mayors Interdisciplinary Workshop will kick off in The Hague, hosted by Mayor van Aartsen and Professor Jouke de Vries, Dean of Leiden University.
At the World Urban Forum in Medellin in April, I called for the U.N. to make cities the centerpieces of their forthcoming sustainable development goals to help overcome inequality, upgrade existing slums and prevent the growth of new ones, provide housing, transportation and access to safe public spaces and services, strengthen resilience in the face of climate change and other natural disasters, and more. With billions more people set to stream into cities over the next half century, we will be spending more money on city building than we have in all of human history. Now more than ever, we need proactive urban planning that protects public space while providing good governance and stable transparent institutions. We need better metrics and much more information on what works and what does not. And we need to understand what drives the growth and development of cities.
Urbanization is the grandest of the grand challenges we face, and mayors are the figures most crucial to addressing it. A Global Parliament of Mayors would give them the forum they need to do so.
Thursday, July 7, 2016
Let’s Take a Cue from Brexit and Leave the U.N.
Let’s Take a Cue from Brexit and Leave the U.N.
Instead of stamping out tyrants, the U.N. validates them.
The U.K. has shown its contempt for anti-democratic international unions by leaving the EU. Let’s do the same and leave the U.N.
The U.N. is generally thought of as having evolved from the silly and impotent League of Nations, whose primary achievement was permitting — through naïveté, cowardice, and inaction — the Japanese invasion of China and the start of the Pacific half of the Second World War. Actually, the U.N.’s origins were nobler: It supplanted the League, but it began as an organization of the Allied powers against the Tripartite German–Italian–Japanese Axis.The U.N.’s first communiqué was the 1942 “Declaration of United Nations,” wherein the Allied governments pledged that they,
Being convinced that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world,This, in essence, is the founding document of the U.N. But its point was completely misunderstood by the writers of the U.N.’s charter: The United Nations Charter declares its goal as the preservation of peace. The Declaration of United Nations declared its goal as the preservation of freedom. This divergence is the essence of the failure of the U.N., and the source of its corruption.
DECLARE:
(1) Each Government pledges itself to employ its full resources, military or economic, against those members of the Tripartite Pact and its adherents with which such government is at war.
(2) Each Government pledges itself to cooperate with the Governments signatory hereto and not to make a separate armistice or peace with the enemies.
A civilized world would say, To hell with world peace — give us world freedom. North Korea is at peace. Laos is at peace. Burma is at peace. Turkmenistan is at peace. But anyone in his right mind would choose rather to go back in time and live in London during the blitz than live in Turkmenistan, Burma, Laos, or the DPRK. Or any other of the grossly unfree countries that populate the U.N.
American slaves were at peace in the South, but I suspect they preferred the state of affairs during the Civil War.
Of course, the U.N. claims protecting human rights as a parallel goal to pursuing world peace. That’s the job the U.N. Human Rights Council is charged with. Cuba is a current member of the U.N. Human Rights Council. So is Russia. So are China, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia. So are Qatar, Indonesia, and the Republic of the Congo. And Venezuela.
The U.N. will be corrupt so long as it pretends that governments that do not derive their power from consent of their governed are legitimate, and on that basis gives them a vote in its deliberations. The goal of the U.N. should be stamping out tyrants. What it does is validate them.
That’s why the only country the U.N. Human Rights commissioners are ever concerned with is Israel — because the vote of one Jewish democracy can be cancelled out 21 times by the votes of 21 Arab dictatorships.
Ukraine’s rights as a sovereign nation, as guaranteed by the U.N. Charter, are currently being violated by Russia. What can the U.N. do, when Russia is one of the U.N. Security Council’s permanent members?
Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines — and every other country that enjoys the freedom of international waters — are currently having their rights, as guaranteed by the U.N.’s Convention on the Law of the Sea, violated by China. What can the U.N. do, when China is one of the U.N. Security Council’s permanent members?
There is no fixing the U.N. It is constitutionally incapable of making anything better; it puts the bad guys in charge of making the world less bad. It is a farcical monument to conflict of interest.
The U.S. pays the U.N. $8 billion every year, and covers roughly one-quarter of both the U.N.’s regular budget and its peacekeeping budget. Let’s pull out of the U.N., let it crumble, and put our $8 billion toward a new organization: a United Free Nations, whose goal will be to bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
(And then we’ll actually have world peace: It’s a well-established fact that democracies never go to war with one another.)
Write your congressman.
— Josh Gelernter writes weekly for NRO and is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard. He is a founder of the tech startup Dittach.
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
Should robots have to pay taxes?
If robots are going to steal human jobs and otherwise disrupt society, they should at the very least pay taxes.
That's the takeaway from a draft report on robotics produced by the European Parliament, which warns that artificial intelligence and increased automation present legal and ethical challenges that could have dire consequences.
"Within the space of a few decades [artificial intelligence] could surpass human intellectual capacity in a manner which, if not prepared for, could pose a challenge to humanity's capacity to control its own creation and ... the survival of the species," the draft states.
The report offers a series of recommendations to prepare Europe for this advanced breed of robot, which it says now "seem poised to unleash a new industrial revolution."
The proposal suggests that robots should have to register with authorities, and says laws should be written to hold machines liable for damage they cause, such as loss of jobs. Contact between humans and robots should be regulated, with a special emphasis "given to human safety, privacy, integrity, dignity and autonomy."
If advanced robots start replacing human workers in large numbers, the report recommends the European Commission force their owners to pay taxes or contribute to social security. The establishment of a basic income, or guaranteed welfare program, is also suggested as a protection against human unemployment.
Should robots ever become self-aware, the report suggests that the moral code outlined by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov be observed. Asimov's laws stipulate that a robot must never harm a human and always obey orders from its creator.
The draft report, which was written by Mady Delvaux, a member of the European Parliament from Luxembourg, could go before the full European Parliament for a vote later this year. Its approval would be largely symbolic, however, since EU legislation must originate with the European Commission. The Commission did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
In April, the European Parliament's legal affairs committee held a hearing to discuss the issue.
"Can a robot express intention? I think the answer is very simple when it comes to noncomplex algorithms, but when it gets more complex, I think we have a problem," Pawel Kwiatkowski of Gessel Law Firm said during the hearing.
Monday, July 4, 2016
Google Celebrates Frederick Douglass . So Should You, Esp. If You're a Libertarian.
Google Celebrates Frederick Douglass . So Should You, Esp. If You're a Libertarian.
The escaped slave and ouspoken abolitionist was a classical liberal.
Today's Google doodle is an image of Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became one of the most eloquent and influential abolitionists in American history. The doodle signals the start of Black History Month, which grew out of earlier traditions such as "Negro History Week" and offers a period of intensive reflection on the contributions of blacks to the history of the United States while also reminding the country of the historical realities of slavery and other unspeakable ills pushed on African Americans due to de facto and de jure racism.
Douglass, who was believed to have been born in February, 1818 is of special interest to libertarians for many reasons. As Damon Root has written for Reason, Douglass was a true classical liberal who believed in individualism, strong property rights, and voluntary philanthropy as the best way to create a free, prosperous, and inclusive society. From a 2012 review of Nicholas Buccola's The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass:
“Douglass’s arguments against slavery are, in a very important sense, arguments for liberalism,” writes Linfield College political scientist Nicholas Buccola in The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass, his engaging new study of the great abolitionist. Taking seriously Douglass’ dual commitment to both a “robust conception of mutual responsibility” and “the ideas of universal self-ownership, natural rights, limited government, and an ethos of self-reliance,” Buccola offers a nuanced portrait that illuminates both Douglass and his place in American intellectual history....Buccola notes, “throughout his development as a political thinker, Douglass was presented with a series of ideological alternatives,” including the pacifist anarchism of Garrison, who said the only government he recognized was the “government of God,” and the utopian socialism of John A. Collins, general director of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, who believed “that private property was the root of all evil.” Douglass, Buccola observes, “consistently rejected these in favor of liberalism.”Socialism was then becoming particularly attractive to many New England reformers. Yet Douglass rejected the socialist case against private land ownership, saying “it is [man’s] duty to possess it—and to possess it in that way in which its energies and properties can be made most useful to the human family.” He routinely preached the virtues of property rights. “So far from being a sin to accumulate property, it is the plain duty of every man to lay up something for the future,” he told a black crowd in Rochester, New York in 1885. “I am for making the best of both worlds and making the best of this world first, because it comes first.” As Douglass’ glowing description of his first paying job indicated, he also considered economic liberty an essential aspect of human freedom....
In my opinion, Douglass's 1852 speech "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" is one of the greatest texts in American literature. It simultaneously enacts what is these days lazily called "American exceptionalism" while excoriating the moral failings of the country. Douglass exemplifies the tradition of critiquing the country's laws and customs by examining them in light of rarely attained but endlessly invoked ideals of equality and justice. To me, that gesture, along with a willingness to change and grow as a nation, is what makes America exceptional. From Douglass's speech:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
The three editions of Douglass' autobiography (most Americans know the first one, published shortly after he escaped and made his way north) are phenomenal testaments both to the ideals of American freedom and the ways that ideal has rarely come close to being realized. Perhaps most important, he offered up a critique of the country's history, customs, and laws but also personified and argued for a way forward in which all Americans would both be more free and able to transcend the awful indignities and crimes of the past.
For more Reason on Douglass, go here.
Baby Bird in Nest Inside Blackberry Bush
A huge patch of Blackberry Bushes (1000sf+) in Marinwood Park was removed on June 17, 2016 at the height of the Nesting Season in violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act which protects almost all species of birds (not just migratory birds) during nesting season.
After appeal to the Marinwood CSD to acknowledge the damage, restore the scarred earth and train the staff in sustainable landscape management, we were met with a resounding refusal despite the violation of several laws.
The Marinwood CSD was founded to manage the parks and openspace, fire service and streetlights. It is fundamentally unacceptable that the Marinwood CSD ignore their responsibility to the parks.
Send a letter today to Eric Driekosen, General Manager at edreikosen@marinwood.org and request Responsible Sustainable Practices for our parks and open space.
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| Residents pay huge taxes each year for the care of our parks and open space. They should not have their parks treated like a a construction site. |
Sunday, July 3, 2016
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