Amsterdam embraces sharing economy The City of Amsterdam has made an important step towards the emerging sharing economy. Alderperson Ossel officialy announced the city will continue to allow residents renting out their own property to city visitors through platforms like Airbnb. With this resolution, Amsterdam is simultaneously moving further towards being a ‘Sharing City.’ ‘Occasional rental of privately-owned property as an additional form of accommodation dovetails with a hospitable Amsterdam’, Alderperson Ossel states. Not only is this a significant gesture to tourists visiting the city. It’s a clear sign that Amsterdam actively embraces the rapidly rising sharing economy. ‘We would like to congratulate Amsterdam with this promising decision’, says Harmen van Sprang, co-founder of shareNL. Will this news put Amsterdam on the map as a global forerunner of the sharing economy? ‘We are pleasantly surprised by all the attention for the sharing economy in the Netherlands’, Harmen says. About shareNL
PETER HITCHENS: The sinister, screeching mob who want to kill free speech (And no, I DON'T mean the Islamist terrorists in our midst) By Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday Published: 00:02 GMT, 11 January 2015 | Updated: 01:34 GMT, 11 January 2015 Global shock: Memorials have sprung up around the world to the Paris massacre victims Once again we are ruled by a Dictatorship of Grief. Ever since the death of Princess Diana, we have been subject to these periodic spasms when everyone is supposed to think and say the same thing, or else. We were told on Friday that ‘politicians from all sides’ had lined up to attack Ukip’s Nigel Farage for supposedly ‘exploiting’ the Paris massacre. Mr Farage had (quite reasonably) pointed out that the presence of Islamist fanatics in our midst might have something to do with, a) uncontrolled mass migration from the Muslim world, and b) decades of multicultural refusal to integrate them into our laws and customs. Rather than disputing this with facts and logic (admittedly this would be hard), the three ‘mainstream’ parties joined in screeching condemnation. Why ever not? Why?
Bedreigde Democratie? | Politicologie | Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) Capitalism 4.0 & Neuroplasticity of the Collective Brain | Otto Scharmer I have just returned from an interesting experience in Washington. D.C.: a panel discussion with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The event was sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a leading neo-conservative think tank responsible for much of the intellectual core and agenda of the Bush-Cheney administration. So why would I go to a place that co-engineered much of the thinking that led us into the disaster of the Iraq War and the financial crisis of 2008, costing us trillions of dollars, and causing massive waves of human suffering across cultures? Three reasons. One, I was invited by my friends at the Mind and Life Institute, which hosted one of the panels at the event. That being said, I don't agree with many of the official AEI talking points. But what's missing? So my first takeaway is this: Traditional right-left polarization keeps the political discourse locked into false dichotomies of the past. Searching for Capitalism 4.0 Neuroplasticity of the Collective Brain
The King David You Never Knew Thomas Piketty and his ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ are white hot, but he’s no ‘Tocqueville for Today’—and he and his fan club have Tocqueville all wrong. In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a new Frenchman in town. Armed with progressives’ two favorite things—statistics and a European accent—the celebrity economist Thomas Piketty has hit American shores in support of his new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Sadly for Piketty, his explanatory socialism is a nonstarter for every American except a handful of media, academic, and policy elites. In an ominous example of just how out of touch those elites have become, two of them have produced a wildly mistaken assessment of Piketty’s work—and haven’t raised so much as a peep of objection. The review in question is “A Tocqueville for Today,” written by Jacob S. Hacker and Pierson are respected scholars in their field. Tocqueville, not Piketty, is our best guide to the problem of inequality in America. So far, so good. No.
Johnny Rotten and I agree: neither of us wants Russell Brand’s ‘revolution’ | Polly Toynbee What better antidote to Russell Brand’s nonsense than the man who sang Anarchy in the UK? “Bumhole” is what John Lydon calls Brand for telling young people not to vote. “It’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard.” As I was interviewing him for a Guardian video, he gave that famous Johnny Rotten glare. He would agree with Brand about the need to organise, but blasts him on the vote. Never mind the bollocks, the facts on the ground tell the story. The Intergenerational Foundation tracks the widening divide in everything from the young losing free bus passes while the old keep theirs; paying for degrees that the old had for free; sky-high rents and no chance of owning; McJobs for graduates who will pay for better pensions and care than they can expect for themselves. Has Lydon always voted? What about Brand’s message that all the parties are the same? What happened to anarchy in the UK then? But now there’s Brand plugging his new book, Revolution, with a big following.
The truth is out: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it | David Graeber Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn't know how banking really works, because if they did, "there'd be a revolution before tomorrow morning". Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. To get a sense of how radical the Bank's new position is, consider the conventional view, which continues to be the basis of all respectable debate on public policy. The central bank can print as much money as it wishes. It's this understanding that allows us to continue to talk about money as if it were a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say "there's just not enough money" to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public spending "crowding out" the private sector. In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it's backwards. Why did the Bank of England suddenly admit all this? But politically, this is taking an enormous risk.
Orwell Explains How Socialists Alter Language to Alter History George Orwell wrote that through alterating the past, and by portraying any remembered history as evil, socialist regimes could render classic texts such as the U.S. Declaration of Independence incomprehensible in their original context. People then would be incapable of understanding the original intentions behind them. And as if to demonstrate how close today’s society has come to what Orwell warned of, the Declaration of Independence has been framed just like this today. To demonstrate the full scale of irony, let’s look at what Orwell predicted in his novel “1984”: “In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Orwell then quotes the passage: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Subverting Totalitarianism Orwell saw this coming. Newspeak BlackWhite DoubleThink
Why I have resigned from the Telegraph Five years ago I was invited to become the chief political commentator of the Telegraph. It was a job I was very proud to accept. The Telegraph has long been the most important conservative-leaning newspaper in Britain, admired as much for its integrity as for its superb news coverage. I was very conscious that I was joining a formidable tradition of political commentary. No one has ever expressed quite as well as Utley the quiet decency and pragmatism of British conservatism. My grandfather, Lt Col Tom Oborne DSO, had been a Telegraph reader. ‘You don’t know what you are fucking talking about’ Circulation was falling fast when I joined the paper in September 2010, and I suspect this panicked the owners. The sackings continued. Events at the Telegraph became more and more dismaying. For the last 12 months matters have got much, much worse. Solecisms, unthinkable until very recently, are now commonplace. The arrival of Mr Seiken coincided with the arrival of the click culture.
A Relentless Widening of Disparity in Wealth What if inequality were to continue growing years or decades into the future? Say the richest 1 percent of the population amassed a quarter of the nation’s income, up from about a fifth today. What about half? To believe Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, this future is not just possible. In his bracing “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” which hit bookstores on Monday, Professor Piketty provides a fresh and sweeping analysis of the world’s economic history that puts into question many of our core beliefs about the organization of market economies. His most startling news is that the belief that inequality will eventually stabilize and subside on its own, a long-held tenet of free market capitalism, is wrong. It is possible to slow, or even reverse, the trend, if political leaders like President Obama, who proposed that income inequality was the “defining challenge of our time,” really push. Painstakingly assembling data from tax returns, Mr. Mr. Mr. It didn’t.
‘Thoughtcrime’ Is Becoming a Reality In several Western countries, people are receiving visits from the police to question them about their political views, and some have been arrested. Cases in the UK and New Zealand have involved people who made comments against mass migration and Islamism. In a May 4 viral video posted on Facebook, a New Zealand man is questioned by police for his alleged posts about the mosque shooting in Christchurch. Of course, the real issue isn’t about religious “intolerance.” It’s publicly accepted for people, including public leaders, to openly condemn religions such as Christianity. Condemning state policies has become synonymous with a double standard on “intolerance,” which is punishable by the state. Even in the United States, similar practices are now in place, only they’re being enforced by large corporations. British writer George Orwell warned about such systems with his depiction of a fictional “thought police” in his book “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” ‘Doublethink’ ‘Repressive Tolerance’
Burgemeester Van Aartsen dreigt met collegecrisis donderdag 30 juni 2016, 17:39 DEN HAAG - De Haagse burgemeester Jozias van Aartsen heeft donderdag gedreigd met een collegecrisis als de gemeenteraad blijft vasthouden aan een voorstel om 'etnisch profileren' door de politie tegen te gaan. De raad wil dat de politie gebruik gaat maken van zogenoemde stopformulieren. Deze stopformulieren geven een verklaring over waarom iemand is aangehouden en moeten na iedere staande houding door agenten worden ingevuld. Een motie daarvoor is ingediend door een groot aantal partijen in de raad, waaronder de coalitiepartijen D66, Haagse Stadspartij en PvdA. Daarmee zou er een meerderheid in de raad zijn. Recent speelde die kwestie ook in andere gemeenten waar rapper Typhoon en Feyenoord-doelman Kenneth Vermeer werden staande gehouden vanwege de combinatie van een donker uiterlijk en een grote auto. Van Aartsen nam het tijdens de discussie echter op voor de politie.
To Touch Eternity | Eruditio Abstract Has humanity’s progress been hijacked by a pervasive scientific rationalism that trades spirituality and communality for cold efficiency? If so, does this cultural meme promise anything more than sterile technological miracles that, while solving past problems, ambush our ability to imagine how we might avoid civilized society descending into the barbaric once again? Have we permitted economic growth, wealth creation and the financialisation of almost everything we cherish to become an all consuming obsession, superseding any higher moral purpose? This essay puts a case for curbing our sanctification of industrial economism by reinstating more compelling and empathic narratives as a keystone strategy for the future advancement and survival of the human family. As old age beckons, many things become clear. Solitude comes too – mostly unpredictably, yet always welcome. But serene empathy can also bring dissonance. “We have nobody to blame but ourselves. This was not the plan. 1.