DOUG CARMICHAEL'S ROUGHCUT

Friday, July 23, 2004

Posted here Friday, July 23, 2004 at 2:14:52 PM

From the Business Week

http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/04_30/b3893091.html

Is Japanese Style Taking Over The World

From Foreign Affairs

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040701facomment83401/james-f-hoge-jr/a-global-power-shift-in-the-making.html?mode=print

Summary: Global power shifts happen rarely and are even less often peaceful. Washington must take heed: Asia is rising fast, with its growing economic power translating into political and military strength. The West must adapt -- or be left behind.

In tech, education, pop culture, social vision, the US is behind. I posted yesterday the UN human development index with the US is 17th place. Europe generally has a more developed social discourse than we have. Many Americans are dispirited. We don't tend to think that thinking, studying, reading, conversation - can really help. A dumb America is a threat to the world and itself.

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Posted here Friday, July 23, 2004 at 1:52:08 PM

Reading the report I see that information sharing is made difficult because of safeguards that are imposed because the system has been misused for political purposes (e.g. Nixon using IRS, Blackmail by FBI's Hoover). The price of vigilance in difficult times is that the government infrastructure be trustworthy, which obviously it is not. Homeland security fears are based on fear of misuse by political types to further private interests or careers. An ethically deteriorated system cannot take on security issues with citizen support, if the citizens fear the system will turn on them.
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Posted here Friday, July 23, 2004 at 11:51:20 AM

From the 9/11 report. This problem of segmentation is with us in many ways. For example, the rise of multinationals and outsourcing is leading to a world where government law is being replaced by private interests, but the law is not following into this blind spot.

The September 11 attacks fell into the void between the foreign and domestic threats.The foreign intelligence agencies were watching overseas, alert to foreign threats to U.S. interests there.The domestic agencies were waiting for evidence of a domestic threat from sleeper cells within the United States. No one was looking for a foreign threat to domestic targets.The threat that was coming was not from sleeper cells. It was foreign—but from foreigners who had infiltrated into the United States.

It is that deeper issue of the ungovernability of current complexities that concerns me. If we look at the Turkey train accident we see that Turkey, trying to modernize, has had a number of systems failures in the context of modernization and high population density (earthquake recovery problems).

I've suggested for a decade that we will just have to get used to large scale disasters, of which nuclear accidents would be one kind. But that "accidents" are intentional, as in terrorism, brings into play a much more difficult problem: how we respond to events that are caused by human agents deliberately. the unconscious goes wild and seeks to lash out, and the possibilities give rise to cynicism, despair - and ambitions. At the same time, the world population is fairly sane. It is leadership tied to old institutions and driven by new possibilities (finance, energy in the context of the failing nation state in the west, and new nationalisms in Asia) that make it dicey.

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