Terry Melanson (June 4th, 2013)

The list of attendees at Bilderberg this year was released early, as well as some of the topics discussed.

• Can the US and Europe grow faster and create jobs?
• Jobs, entitlement and debt
• How big data is changing almost everything
• Nationalism and populism
• US foreign policy
• Africa’s challenges
• Cyber warfare and the proliferation of asymmetric threats
• Major trends in medical research
• Online education: promise and impacts
• Politics of the European Union
• Developments in the Middle East
• Current affairs

The need to analyse “Big Data” has been a goal for quite some time. Storage of large data sets, on all of us, and the machines we use daily, has increased at astounding rates. The technology is getting better at making sense of it through cloud computing, advanced algorithms and commercially viable quantum computers. NASA and Google has begun testing, for example, the breakthrough products of the D-Wave.

Here’s a video explaining what D-Wave has achieved, much to the astonishment of computer scientists the world over. Breakthrough, in this instance, is an understatement.

Applied to the field of Big Data and the capabilities of analysing and acting on the results, it is a game changer in every sense.

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By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
March 23, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

In “One On One: Regulating the Pursuit of Self” (Jerusalem Post, February 4, 2009), Amitai Etzioni states: “There is no philosophy that better describes Obama’s position than Communitarianism,” which Etzioni defines as a term “that would speak for community and the common good.” (In his March 4, 1801 inaugural address, while referring to majority rule and minority rights, Thomas Jefferson was the first president to refer to the “common good.”) Interestingly, Etzioni in his The Essential Communitarian Reader (p. ix) said the term was coined in 1841 by John Goodwyn Barmby, who founded the Universal Communitarian Association (originally called the Communist Propaganda Society). In Dana Milbank’s “Needed: Catchword for Bush Ideology; ‘Communitarianism’ Finds Favor” (The Washington Post, February 1, 2001), Etzioni was quoted as saying George W. Bush’s Inaugural Address was “a Communitarian Text.”

As I’ve mentioned numerous times before, the Power Elite (PE) uses crises to move us toward its ultimate goal of a World Socialist Government. The current global economic crisis is devaluing currencies so that the people of the world will be forced to accept regional currencies and then a global currency, which is an important part of the PE’s plan. …

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Obama and Etzioni

Amitai Etzioni, the high priest of communitarianism, was in Israel recently and was interviewed by the Jerusalem Post.

Here’s a short, but revealing excerpt:

Why did you call your movement “Communitarianism”?

That’s actually an interesting story. I started a little group in 1990, and I tried to find a word to counter excessive individualism. Communitarianism is actually associated with…

Communism?

Well, yes, when it first came up in the mid-19th century, it was associated with communism in East Asia. So we had a very long debate about whether to use it or not. But we just couldn’t come up with another term that would speak for community and common good. And we hoped that our kind of neo-communitarianism would succeed in becoming a kind of a symbol for this other approach. It’s a particularly key point at the moment, because there is no philosophy that better describes Obama’s position than communitarianism. But nobody wants him to label it thus, because it immediately evokes the image of East Asia, Singapore and Japan. So, it may have been an imperfect choice of a term, but now we’re kind of stuck with it.

1) He admits that Communitarianism is traditionally associated with Communism; and 2) he specifically identifies Obama’s ideology as that of Communitarianism.

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William F. Jasper - 30 December 2008

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, can drive communists, leftists, Greens, and one-world globalists to near apoplectic fury. However, the popular Czech statesman (finance minister, 1989-1992; prime minister, 1992-1997; president since 2003, reelected 2008) has become a hero to a growing tide of Europeans from Prague to London who are resisting the increasingly oppressive rule by the European Union’s bureaucrats in Brussels and the socialist-dominated European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Klaus, a free-market economist who grew up under the tyranny of communism, is an outspoken critic of the “new European Soviet” — as former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has approvingly referred to the sprawling EU bureaucracy.

In January, the Czech Republic assumes the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union. Which means that Vaclav Klaus, an adamant “eurosceptic,” will serve as the ceremonial head of the EU, a supranational behemoth which he has described as a threat to freedom and national sovereignty. This will mark a sea change in attitude from that of France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, who is (reluctantly) stepping down from the current EU presidency. Sarkozy has basked in the glory of his EU spotlight and has campaigned for expanded EU powers, most especially for ratification of the stalled Lisbon Treaty. President Klaus has campaigned just as energetically in opposition to the Lisbon Treaty, a slightly disguised version of the EU Constitution that was rejected by French and Dutch voters.

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William Norman Grigg - Oct. 15, 2008

As the finance industry’s meltdown accelerates and Wall Street’s swoon deepens, the media abound in obituaries for free market capitalism. Politicians and pundits insist that we must be prepared to accept a greater role for government in the economy, and perhaps even surrender some of our individual liberties in the name of the common good. This is an old refrain, one sung in previous generations by devout disciples of Marx and Keynes.

Today, however, the call to collectivism has been transposed into a slightly different key. The newest version bears the oddly appealing name “communitarianism,” a label that seems to connote neighborhood gatherings, frontier barn-raisings, and other examples of spontaneous cooperation.

As defined by its chief exponents, however, communitarianism is a doctrine of “community through coercion.” Its practitioners inhabit a continuum running from relatively mild Nanny State bossiness all the way to totalitarian social regimentation.

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Niki Raapana - October 22, 2008

From Yale University Press and amitaietzioni.org, we learn Etzioni’s life started after he graduated from Berkeley …

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Patrick Vessey - 10 October 2008

Amitai Etzioni is sociologist and prolific author. His work has been embraced by political and business leaders around the globe, and his communitarian creed guides much of our public debate today — albeit that it is rarely spoken of openly.

As the label suggests, communitarianism is a belief in the power and importance of community. But it’s not a belief in natural community, that which forms spontaneously from our everyday interactions. When Thatcher famously remarked that there is no such thing as society, she wasn’t saying that society didn’t exist, but that it isn’t the fundamental building block: individual human beings are. These individuals then naturally come together to form changing communities; of course, that too is the position of libertarians everywhere.

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