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KESLER ON THE PLAYING THE RACE CARD IN NEW ORLEANS

I strongly agree with Bruce that looking for a racial angle here is wrong both in the normative sense as well as accuracy and those that go that route are opportunistic jackals. Losing an American city would be pretty high political price for any politician to pay to express personal prejudicial sentiments. Likewise most poor, African-American, citizens of New Orleans were not looters but were the victims of looters, thugs and systemic governmental incompetence.

Bruce Kesler on ” Is it Racism in New Orleans ” at The Democracy Project. An excerpt:

“Some on the left or among Blacks charge that the lack of attention and speed in helping the mostly Black victims we’ve seen on TV is due to racism. I won’t link to them, as I refuse to give their racism further currency. I, also, disagree with some on the right who charge that the fault resides mostly in a welfare or entitlement mentality of those in the Black community or its Black and liberal leadership not making New Orleans a richer city. Again, I won’t link to them, as I refuse to give their ideologically extreme filter further currency.

Both camps miss the simpler explanation. The fault, more simply, lays in both the limitations of any government to foresee and adequately prepare for all contingencies, compounded by the stubborn failure of the city and state leadership to more energetically prepare and their resistance to enthusiastically cooperate with federal authorities. Race and political affiliation has far less to do with either than sheer inadequacy and self-defensive CYA. It was not a Rudy Guiliani moment.”

“It was not a Rudy Guiliani moment”

Of course, Bruce understates… but does it well.

NEW ORLEANS: LESSONS OF A FAILED STATE [ Updated]

Charitably speaking, the debacle that was New Orleans after Katrina was a complete and utter national disgrace. The Department of Homeland Security had its first big test and failed so miserably that the Congress should consider liquidating it and going back to the drawing board. The State of Lousiana and city government of New Orleans also stand revealed as abjectly incompetent and unable to provide even minimal services and rule of law in a crisis situation that everyone had ample warning was coming. Lastly, an ominous percentage of the citizens of New Orleans failed the basic test of civilized humanity and instead reveled in barbarism. By the standard we use to judge nations, New Orleans is a failed state. Sadly, a great American city can now be considered as part of the Non-Integrating Gap.

I referred to New Orleans a few days ago as ” Mogadishu on the Mississippi“. NuSapiens asks if it had become a “ feral city “, quoting Richard Norton:

“In a feral city social services are all but nonexistent, and the vast majority of the city’s occupants have no access to even the most basic health or security assistance. There is no social safety net. Human security is for the most part a matter of individual initiative. Yet a feral city does not descend into complete, random chaos. Some elements, be they criminals, armed resistance groups, clans, tribes, or neighborhood associations, exert various degrees of control over portions of the city. Intercity, city-state, and even international commercial transactions occur, but corruption, avarice, and violence are their hallmarks. A feral city experiences massive levels of disease and creates enough pollution to qualify as an international environmental disaster zone. Most feral cities would suffer from massive urban hypertrophy, covering vast expanses of land. The city’s structures range from once-great buildings symbolic of state power to the meanest shantytowns and slums. Yet even under these conditions, these cities continue to grow, and the majority of occupants do not voluntarily leave.”

What lessons can we draw ? A couple come to mind:

LOGISTICS:

Agencies like FEMA that purport to be disaster coordinators should actually be run people who have the practiced understanding of large-scale logistics. Either bring in retired military personnel with such experience, the U.S. military being the premier logistical organization in the world, or have the Pentagon train USG civvies in the art. Traditionally, FEMA is run by a partisan crony of the president’s. Katrina provided a good excuse to end that practice.

THE UNDERCLASS AS AN INSTANT INSURGENCY:

A few days ago we had a lively debate here about America’s own Non-Integrating Gap and what kind of ” system administration” should happen domestically. Or even if that would be a good idea. Well…I can’t say that the ” what” or ” how ” are resolved but New Orleans just demonstrated why something needs to be done. A critical mass point has been reached.

Every American city ( and not just cities either) has a subset of the population that is so antisocially detached, disconnected and potentially dangerous that disaster planners must expect that ” instant insurgencies” will arise from the underclass in the advent of a natural disaster or terrorist attack. Cook County, Illinois, where I reside, is also home to 80,000 gang members, the most dangerous of whom already exist in sophisticated organized crime entities that have infiltrated the Chicago Police Department and even their anti-gang units. Good behavior cannot be expected from them if a 9/11 or Katrina magnitude disaster hits Chicago.

INDIVIDUAL PREPAREDNESS:

Every family or individual needs to be able to have a plan to cope for a short-time in the advent of a mass disaster for at least five days to a week. That means minimally, food, clean drinking water, basic medical supplies, a battery-operated radio and realistically, a firearm and someone trained in its use.

Not every locality will see the total societal break-down during a crisis that happened in New Orleans but you never know how your neighbors will act until they are put to that test. The U.S. government may not be on hand to help you either – at least not at first.

UPDATE – DHS:

Here’s why DHS needs to be rethought entirely – even when it is aware of a problem it is too enormous, poorly organized and badly run to respond. (Hat tip to Bruce Kesler )

THE SYMPOSIUM OF DREAMS [ Updated ]

Participating in a symposium or various kinds of public roundtable discussions rank lower on the academic scale than publishing books or monographs. Perhaps even lower than getting a good quote in the New York Times. This is understandable. In my view, most of these events are less than dynamic with a lot of faux-casual, self-deprecating remarks and longwinded, meandering, insufficiently moderated, serial monologues by inadequately prepared speakers.

On the other hand, the problem is not really the format but the participants themselves. Having mean expertise in a niche subfield is no guarantee of eloquence. Or brilliance. Perhaps universities and various policy associations would be better off having fewer symposiums except when they can assure themselves of participants who crackle with intellectual force and are willing to get outside their comfort zones in front of an audience. The actual value of a symposium for the participants is the generation of new concepts and perspectives via horizontal thinking and inter/intradisciplinary engagement; the value for the audience comes from the model of cognition being presented.

Here are some hypothetical examples of ” Dream Symposiums” that range from the merely unlikely to the impossible (i.e. the ppl are dead) that would, nevertheless, rock.

AMERICAN STRATEGY

John Keegan, Henry Kissinger, Thomas P.M. Barnett, William Lind, Robert Kaplan, John Mearsheimer, Richard Perle, Bill Clinton,Donald Kagan, Zbigniew Brzezinski

ISLAMISM AND TERRORISM

Juan Cole, Martin Kramer, Oliver Roy, Bernard Lewis, Steve Emerson, Michael Scheuer, Gilles Kepel, Steve Coll, Jessica Stern, Paul Wolfowitz

FUTURISM AND SOCIETY

Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, Isaac Asimov, Mortimer Adler, Freeman Dyson, Carl Sagan, Ayn Rand, Arthur C. Clarke, Richard Feynmann, Neal Stephenson*, Ray Kurzweil **, Thornton May and Richard Thieme ***

FIRST PRINCIPLES IN SCIENCE by Dr. Von

* Jacob H.
** Matt McIntosh
*** Stuart Berman

Many thanks to everyone for the additional suggestions. You gentlemen cued me to some people I need to know more about.

FIRST RATE FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS BY NADEZHDA

Dave alerted me to this – it’s so well done that Nadezhda makes me feel like I am mentally asleep at the wheel in comparison. A stellar post.

UPDATE: Good Lord ! Now John Bolton is receiving support from CKR as well !

BLOGGING AS A CREATIVE FEEDBACK LOOP

The other day Dr. Barnett posted at length on how blogging related to his productivity as a writer and conceptual thinker. It’s a good post on a number of levels.

First, it more fully illuminated the role of one Critt Jarvis as someone who was more than just a webmaster. I always suspected as much from reading Critt’s very occasional posts on his own blogs [ Critt likes to post quarterly I believe :O) ] where he’d hint at some very interesting subjects; from his bio on the old New Rule-Sets Project site; or from things I heard through email. It is now evident that Critt was a driving force in many aspects of Dr. Barnett’s own
” connectivity” in a way that put him way ahead of the curve compared to most other authors of foreign policy books.

Secondly, in terms of general interest it offers insight to a creative process most readers never see and seldom think about when holding the book as a finished product in their hand. This is something I’ve been curious about for a while because I’ve contemplated writing a book for a number of years. I’ve held off partly due to the tender age of the kids since my time is better spent with them; partly because I have not quite decided on ” the” subject, being interested in a lot of esoteric fields; and partly due to a need to learn more about the writing and publishing process. Toward that end I’ve done some research, pestered the always graciously patient Geitner Simmons for updates on his book project and picked the brain of a co-worker who is a successful writer of mysteries ( 5 books so far I think, and some kind of movie/TV deal) under a pen name. So, it was helpful to read about the creative steps Tom was going through as BFA was taking shape.

Thirdly, the post illustrates the blogosphere’s immense capacity as a synergistic feedback loop and sorting mechanism to bring intellects together who might not ever have been in contact otherwise. Along that line, Dr. Barnett was very kind to acknowledge my small contributions to his work and he also cited T.M. Lutas, Michael Lotus and Sean Meade in particular. All of us happened to get in contact only because Critt had talked Tom into setting up a blog. Obviously I’ve drawn a lot of intellectual energy from PNM discussions but I have to say there were many times that I felt a similar powerful resonance while bouncing ideas back and forth with Marc Schulman, Jeff Medcalf, Curzon, Younghusband and Chirol and especially Dan of tdaxp and Dave Schuler. These guys are intellectual peers and blogfriends who have really pushed me to think hard at times.

( Two others Collounsbury and Pundita, who mix like oil and fire, served a different role, occasionally, by sharply questioning my assumptions. in their own hard-edged, sometimes vehement, sometimes witty, highly distinctive manners. This is not the same function as the creative feedback loop but it’s also an invaluable one. Valid criticism does not hurt, it makes you a stronger thinker if you can integrate it and adapt. Invalid criticism you ignore. Wisdom is being able to discern the difference)

Prior to the advent of the internet and in particular the blogosphere, these sorts of group exchanges rarely happened outside of think tanks and universities. Corporate culture discouraged free exchange for reasons of power hierarchy and business focus that encouraged, by subtlety or coercion, extensive groupthink. Politics and law are highly adversarial, competitive, fields where the thinking style is dominated primarily by zero-sum mentalities and vertically-oriented perspectives.

The person who figures out how to productively harnesses this latent, horizontally-directed, creative feedback loop that is inherent in the blogosphere in order to drive an economic entity is going to make a significant mark.