It's no secret what's required in 2012 and beyond: an efficient and effective organization of military power for the optimum utilization of increasingly constrained resources. More specifically, a serious audit of the U.S. Department of Defense, along with a national reset where the roles of politicians, bureaucrats and four stars are recast as servants, not masters, of the national interest. Unfortunately, inside the Beltway where accountability is a dirty word, political and military leaders are free to conflate their personal and bureaucratic interests with the national interest.
As a result, there is still no willingness to comprehend or, at least, admit the truth: America's current national security posture is fiscally unsustainable. Today, the United States' national debt is so large it will swallow almost any legislation the President and Congress agree to pass. It is only a question of time before the U.S. government is compelled to make drastic cuts in federal spending.
I'm often stunned by the lack of questions that adults are prepared to ask.
When you see kids go on a field trip, the questions pour out of them. Never ending, interesting, deep… even risky.
And then the resistance kicks in and we apparently lose the ability.
Is the weather the only thing you can think to ask about? A great question is one you can ask yourself, one that disturbs your status quo and scares you a little bit.
The A part is easy. We're good at answers. Q, not so much.
Many of us believe that networked resilient communities are the key to the future. These communities are not only a way to survive the current global collapse, they are something more: The next step in social/economic organization. For those of us that are successful (by hook or crook) in building a resilient community, it will be a way of life so productive, vibrant and life affirming that will make our current lives look stagnant, backward, and feudal in comparison.
Currently, our big challenge is to find ways to acclerate the shift to resilient communities as quickly as possible. Why? The ongoing and rapid delcine in the global economic and political environment I've been describing here for the last five years, will make it increasingly more difficult to make a successful shift despite a greater willingness to do so (as in: finally seeing how truly screwed we all are). So, how can we outrun the current collapse into economic depression and political chaos?
One of the fastest ways to a) change behaviors, b) deploy tools, and c) route around bariers (political/economic corruption) is to do it digitally. Digital deployment is the way to get the “networked” portion of “networked resilient communities” rolled out. Let me show you how fast it can be. Here's the rate of deployment and adoption for new technologies over the last Century. The chart from Peter Brimelow that I found on Rob Carlson's site:
Click on Image to Enlarge
Note that with each new product, particularly those with strong network effects, we can see two things:
the lag between discovery and deployment is dropping over time.
the rate of adoption has accelerated over time.
Now that nearly everyone has a computer (either on a desk or in a smart phone), the rate of adoption for new tech has dropped from years to quarters. There's almost no lag between development and deployment, and applications that represent major innovations can roll out to globally significant levels in months. Here's a chart from Asymco that uses the most recent Android data.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Wow. Applications that run on these phones deploy even faster. Given how fast things move now, it's not hard to imagine that a new economic system (better design), decentralized financial wire service, or P2P manufacturing system could sweep the world in months, drawing in tens of millions of people into a ways of creating, trading, and sharing wealth. In short, new digital systems that make the transition to local production within networked resilient communities easier and faster since they can help generate the wealth required to do it without starving/freezing and the vision of the future that motivates people to persist despite setbacks.
Phi Beta Iota: To our great surprise, Brother John does not mention OpenBTS in relation to cell phones, or the Autonomous Internet Roadmap. The forthcoming book from Random House / Evolver Editions, THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust, make one core point over and over again: making anything “open” at “root” creates log of log adoption rates–in other words, if cell phone adoption or smart phone adoption is logrithmic now, making the pieces open will make today's adoption rates logrithmic again–meta-logrithmic. This is why there is a power-shift going on–bottom up common sense is being powered by both digital technology, and the access to one another and to information that digital technology brings to the public.
On 12 December, I described a concatenation of warmongering pressures that were shaping the popular psyche in favor of bombing Iran. Now, in a 21 December essay [also attached below], Steven Walt describes a further escalation of these pressures — in this case, via the profoundly flawed pro-bombing analysis, Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike is the Least Bad Option, penned by Matthew Kroenig in January/February 2012 issue of the influential journal Foreign Affairs.
One would think that our recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and our growing strategic problems in Pakistan, not to mention our economic problems and political paralysis at home, would temper our enthusiasm for launching yet another so-called preventative war. But that is not the case, as Kroenig's analysis and the growing anti-Iran hysteria in the debates among the the Republican running for president show (Ron Paul excepted) show. Moreover, President Obama’s Clintonesque efforts to triangulate the pro-war political pressures of the Republicans, while appeasing the Israelis, may be smart domestic politics in the short term, but they add fuel to the pro-war fires shaping the popular psyche. Finally, as I wrote last January, lurking beneath the fiery anti-Iran rhetoric are more deeply rooted domestic political-economic reasons for promoting perpetual war — reasons that have more to do with sustaining the money flowing into the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex in the post-Cold War era than in shaping a foreign policy based on national interests.
While it is easy to whip up popular enthusiasm for launching a new war, our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that successfully prosecuting wars of choice are quite another matter. Nevertheless, as my good friend Mike Lofgren explains in his recent essay, Propagandizing for Perpetual War, devastating rebuttals like Walt's are likely to have little effect on the course of events.
One final point … a surprise attack on Iran would trigger a far tougher war to prosecute successfully that either Iraq or Afghanistan. If you doubt this, I suggest you study Anthony Cordesman’s 2009 analysis of the operational problems confronting Israel, should it decide to launch a surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
If you'd like to read a textbook example of war-mongering disguised as “analysis,” I recommend Matthew Kroenig's forthcoming article in Foreign Affairs, titled “Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike Is the Least Bad Option.” It is a remarkably poor piece of advocacy, all the more surprising because Kroenig is a smart scholar who has done some good work in the past. It makes one wonder if there's something peculiar in the D.C. water supply.
There is a simple and time-honored formula for making the case for war, especially preventive war. First, you portray the supposed threat as dire and growing, and then try to convince people that if we don't act now, horrible things will happen down the road. (Remember Condi Rice's infamous warnings about Saddam's “mushroom cloud”?) All this step requires is a bit of imagination and a willingness to assume the worst. Second, you have to persuade readers that the costs and risks of going to war aren't that great. If you want to sound sophisticated and balanced, you acknowledge that there are counterarguments and risks involved. But then you do your best to shoot down the objections and emphasize all the ways that those risks can be minimized. In short: In Step 1 you adopt a relentlessly gloomy view of the consequences of inaction; in Step 2 you switch to bulletproof optimism about how the war will play out.
One of the most often overlooked aspects of leadership is the need for pursuit. Great leaders are never satisfied with traditional practice, static thinking, conventional wisdom, or common performance. In fact, the best leaders are simply uncomfortable with anything that embraces the status quo. Leadership is pursuit– pursuit of excellence, of elegance, of truth, of what’s next, of what if, of change, of value, of results, of relationships, of service, of knowledge, and of something bigger than themselves. In the text that follows I’ll examine the value of being a pursuer…
Here’s the thing – pursuit leads to attainment. What you pursue will determine the paths you travel, the people you associate with, the character you develop, and ultimately, what you do or don’t achieve. Having a mindset focused on pursuit is so critical to leadership that lacking this one quality can sentence you to mediocrity or even obsolescence. The manner, method, and motivation behind any pursuit is what sets truly great leaders apart from the masses. If you want to become a great leader, become a great pursuer.
A failure to embrace pursuit is to cede opportunity to others. A leader’s failure to pursue clarity leaves them amidst the fog. Their failure to pursue creativity relegates them to the routine and mundane. Their failure to pursue talent sentences them to a world of isolation. Their failure to pursue change approves apathy. Their failure to pursue wisdom and discernment subjects them to distraction and folly. Their failure to pursue character leaves a question mark on their integrity. Let me put this as simply as I can – you cannot attain what you do not pursue.
Adriana discusses her thinking about heterarchy, including initial thoughts about five laws of heterarchy.
A heterarchy is a system of organization replete with overlap, multiplicity, mixed ascendancy, and/or divergent-but-coexistent patterns of relation. Definitions of the term vary among the disciplines: in social and information sciences, heterarchies are networks of elements in which each element shares the same “horizontal” position of power and authority, each playing a theoretically equal role.
“Hierarchies seem to be like oxygen: they’re all around us, pervasive, visible only to those who study them. Hierarchies are the most efficient system for management and distribution of scarce resources… given that the physical world is defined by scarcity of all sorts, it goes a long way toward explaining hierarchy as our default organizational structure….There is potential to come up with alternatives to our hierarchical organizational defaults, and I think that would be good news for all those trapped in stifling and disempowering organizations.”
Lots of people seem to be getting value out of these posts on personal resilience, so I will keep adding them.
Question:
Do you know of any service that will check a person's exposure on the web? I wasn't always as careful with my online activities as I'm trying to be now, and it'd be nice to know what sort of damage control I'm looking at in terms of going forward with my personal brand.
Answer:
Type your name into Google. Take a look at the first 3-5 pages of links you get (as well as the images). If you don't see that much, don't worry about it. If you see anything that you control and can delete, do it now. It will take a couple of months, but it will eventually fade away. Other than that, there isn't much you can do about it.
