Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006
RECOMMENDED DRINKING
Mmmmmm… good !
Archive for August, 2006
Sunday, August 20th, 2006
H20 GLOBAL !
A great example of attempting to make a systemic imapact by strategically targeting one variable in a complex system that will have very broad, very positive, downstream effects:
Guest posted at Critt’s Conversation Base Blog by Dr. Timothy Foresman:
“Watering Hope with Action and Technology (W.H.A.T)“
” A Proposal
Challenges facing the poorest and most disenfranchised peoples of the planet may seem insurmountable as scarcities of food and income are compounded by disease, ignorance, conflicts, and losses of ecological goods and services to support their survival. These conditions become further compounded as negative impacts from land cover change and climate variability reverberate and exacerbate local conditions. These serious conditions facing humanity will require unprecedented cooperation among all nations and businesses to affect shifts in the current trajectories. Provision of safe drinking water is the one arena for immediate action, above all others that will provide critical relief and ameliorate some of the compounding impacts of poverty and poor sanitation for billions of people. Safe drinking water can mean the difference between life or death, between health and sickness, and between hope and hopelessness.
The United Nations community, and recently the United States of America, have raised the banner of water needs, but underemphasized the catalytic effect that water brings to individuals, families, villages, and regions. With water comes hope. With hope comes focus on the proper direction to follow to seek improvement in ones’ own conditions. When seeking further actions for improvement, behavior changes may be necessary in taking the proper steps towards self improvement and sustainability. And people do need to create the conditions for health, education, employment, and the betterment of the environs within their villages and regions as a necessary prerequisite to sustain their existence. This proposal defines the concept of watering hope for people around the globe by applying a recipe containing the best of design experiences, the best in applied technologies, and the best in community-based financing models but with a significant difference. This proposal puts the call for action into the hands of those in need by empowering villages to broadcast their requests for assistance directly to those that can provide philanthropic, financial, and technical support. All of these are prescribed as scalable ingredients for a global paradigm shift away from our current set of unsustainable practices and programs. Watering Hope with Action and Technology (W.H.A.T.) is the first step for empowerment and uplift of people and villages located around the world in order to equip them with coping mechanisms in preparation for the coming decades of major climatic changes.
In the aggregate, the dimensions of the challenge are impressive if not daunting. Best estimates indicate the requirement for 5 to 10 billion dollars (US) per year to address the provision of safe water and sanitation to approximately two-billion people in most need (ref). A total of 50 to 100 billion dollars (US) will probably be required each decade in the near future to initially guarantee that a human safety net can be established and then maintained during the coming turbulent decades. While this may seem a vast amount of money, perspective can be gained by viewing what the US currently provides at this level of funding to supply military weapons to countries around the world during each decade, using American tax dollars, more often with counter intuitive results when temporary allies transform into enemies. It has been well documented that the civil discontent from the poorest segments of society is breeding ground for conflicts and wars (reference Thomas P.M. Barnett’s Non-Integrating Gap). Therefore, with international cooperation, these financial requirements are not viewed as insurmountable and indeed, economically sound according to leading economists, from a cost-benefit perspective. The peace dividend from these investments represents a fertile area for thoughtful analysis. What has been missing are the political will and a proven blueprint or pathway for success. Watering Hope with Action and Technology provides just such a blueprint.
Dr. Timothy W. Foresman is President of Global Water, a 501(c)(3) Corporation. He has a distinguished career leading technology advances (remote sensing, geographic information systems, water, energy) for international environmental protection and management and has been a pioneer for the global expansion of the Digital Earth vision. “
Sunday, August 20th, 2006
SMART POWER
Joseph S. Nye, Jr. has an evaluation of the Israel-Hezbollah War in the Boston Globe in terms of how ” soft power” was a crucial variable in the outcome of the war ( Hat Tip to Dave Dilegge of the Small Wars Council). An excerpt:
“Lebanon provides larger lessons for the United States about how to conduct a war against jihadist terrorism. The current struggle is not a clash of Islam vs. the West, but a civil war within Islam between a minority of terrorists and a larger mainstream of more moderate believers. America cannot win unless the mainstream wins, and needs to use hard power against the hard core like Al Qaeda because soft power will never attract them. But soft power is essential to attract the mainstream and dry up support for the extremists.”
Read the whole thing.
Friday, August 18th, 2006
GETTING THE COGNITIVE PRIORITIES STRAIGHT
“A Holistic Vision for the Analytic Unit” by Richard Kerr, Thomas Wolfe, Rebecca Donegan, Aris Pappas
There’s a lot to like here from my perspective. An excerpt with some highlighting by yours truly:
“The Holistic Analytic Unit
The advent of a Director of National Intelligence and changes mandated by commission reports on the performance of the Intelligence Community present unique opportunities to apply a new framework for intelligence analysis. Herewith is a vision for an approach that creates analytic units with a holistic view of their mission, responsibility, and capability. They will comprise physical units at their core and virtual units with presence throughout their areas of responsibility.
Implementation should begin with a single country and then expand region-wide. Once decided upon, changes should be made quickly, and high-level attention and enhanced resources will be key. The individual steps of the process should be undertaken simultaneously rather than serially.
Identify six to 12 countries or areas of particular importance to the US. Pick one or two, perhaps Iran and North Korea, as test cases. Create analytic units for the test case countries with the following characteristics:
Internal expertise, mixed with strong abilities to identify and use knowledge not resident in the unit. Avoid the myth of “total resident knowledge”
Very senior leadership, with rich resources in personnel and funding, to include significant amounts of external contract money, with contracts developed and approved within the unit
Creativity the key
Responsibility for the “whole.” Units should:
Perform research
Produce current intelligence and long-term estimates
Identify intelligence requirements
Establish collection priorities
Manage IC funding directed against the target
Non-traditional staffing. Units should include or have close relationships, including formal contracts and informal contacts, with:
Experts without security clearances, including non-US citizens
Private sector firms and Federally Funded Research and Development Corporations for administration and substance
Universities and other seats of knowledge
Inclusive structure
Self-contained assets for research assistance, contract management, conference organization, administration, and security
Embedded representatives from key organizations and customers
Strong external presence to ensure that the unit is regarded as a central player in the preparation of dynamic assessments and the application of existing knowledge
Assign personnel to other principal organizations in the area of responsibility, including Defense, State, pertinent Federal and NGOs, academic and private entities
Institute regular conference calls, videoconferences, visits, and other interactions with country teams, chiefs of station, national laboratories, military commands, State desk officers, and collection agencies
Preside over programs sponsoring in-country research, academic exchanges, student programs, conferences, and other efforts
New products and state-of-the-art dissemination systems should produce intelligence on a near-real-time basis keyed to customer interests and designed to provide reference material to support current issues
Intelligence estimates should be short, validated outside the IC, and focused not on single-point outcomes but on the implications of change
Strong, high-level review, accountability, and measurement of performance to ensure against backsliding “
Obviously constructed by those with extensive familiarity with bureaucratic resistance to positive change.
My only significant concern is the accent on “real-time” adds momentum to an existing IC bias for warp speed “reporting” over “depth” – both in terms of predictive analysis as well as an emphasis on clandestine collection of hard to acquire information, something that requires investment, imagination, persistence and time. The wide dissemination aspect though was really great; an attempt to leverage the advantages of possessing critical information ( Art Cebrowski would have applauded) and get the IC out of the need-to-know-basis/ Cold War mindset.
Read the whole thing.
Friday, August 18th, 2006
OLD BOOKS CONTRAVENING NEWER STEREOTYPES
I’m a huge fan of books and despite the excessive amount of time I spend online, the computer does not replace for me the experience of reading the printed word. Non-literate peoples or adults in literate societies who never become comfortable with reading are akin to those born deaf or blind. A formative experience is missing from their worldview.
This interest of mine includes old as well as new books, some of which I pick up and read if they represent worthwhile historiography. I read something the other day which I found interesting because it so strongly clashed with conventional wisdom regarding world history. The book in question was A History of Europe: From the Invasions to the XVI Century by Henre Pirenne. Here is the passage:
“Raised to the rank of kingdom for the benefit of Roger II by Pope Innocent II, in 1130, the Norman State of Sicily was incontestably the wealthiest, and, in the pint of economic development, the most advanced of all the Western States. Byzantine as to its continental portion, Musulman as regards the island, favored by the enormous extent of its coastline, and by the active navigation which it maintained with the Mohammedans of the coast of Africa, the island Greeks of the Agean Sea, the Greeks of the Bosphorous, and the Crusader settlements in Syria, it was remarkable for its absence of national characteristics as for the diversity of its civilization, in which the culture of Byzantium was mingled and confounded with that of Islam.
…Despite their devotion to the Papacy, these Norman princes, in their political lucidity of thought, allowed both their Musulman and their Orthodox subjects to practice their respective religions.”
The popular view of the middle-ages in the media, influenced as it is by current events and P.C. attitudes, is one of simple civilizational-religious warfare and European-Christian intolerance vs. Muslim-Arab enlightenment. History in reality was far more complex and accuracy is forsaken when you resort to compressing a vast period of time and geographic space into a few jaunty assumptions .
Medieval warfare was always far more savage and frequent in terms of intra-religious conflict than in wars between Christian principalities and Muslim potentates ( and Christians and Muslims alike were dwarfed in ferocity by the pagan Mongols). The crusades, from the Muslim perspective of the time, were a small affair compared with their long march toward the conquest of Constantinople, a city that had already been brutally sacked by fellow Christians in 1204. The crusades themselves were, we must remember, partly an attempt by the Church to put a brake on European slaughter by directing aristocratic bloodthirst outward.
Tolerance also varied tremendously. As a rule, it is historically accurate to say that Muslim rulers practiced greater tolerance toward their subjects than did their Christian counterparts but we musn’t get too carried away. Tolerance here is both relative and varying given the circumstances.
The Christian Levant and North Africa was converted to a Muslim majority by the sword and that this was considered normal for the day and that even the more enlightened rulers allowed their victorious troops the traditional three days pillage after a siege, if military circumstances permitted it ( Wise rulers of small kingdoms, like the Princes of Georgia, tried to avoid this fate by pro-actively offering fealty to would-be conquerers- be they Persian, Arab, Turk, Mongol or Russian. More often than not they succeeded in their policy of appeasement). That being said, we shouldn’t forget that Maimonides wrote in Cairo, not in London, and that the Jews were expelled from Spain to the Ottoman Empire and not the reverse.
Complexity rules history and undermines all stereotypes.
