This, more than any story I have read in years, shows the absolute corruption and immorality of American healthcare. The ACA does very little to change this. It is simply not possible to have a genuine healthcare system when profit is more important tha! n health. Until we acknowledge that America will always be second class when it comes to the wellness of its people.
When driven by fear, human beings generally go to one of three places:
1)They get stuck.
2)They solve problems that don’t exist.
3)They focus on the wrong problem—which is low leverage and doesn’t deliver the result they want.
In the Industrial Revolution, scientific management principles emerged to cope with the need to produce more, better, faster. And it worked.
Click on Image to Enlarge
But not anymore.
This “Old School” management style is synonymous with what many people think is leadership. This model operates on fear—the team member must perform or we’ll remove their ability to pay their mortgage, kids’ educational expenses, etc. Fear pushes people to take action.
In the Information Age, some of these principles and practices are still sound–hey, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater–but some feel as obsolete as the Ford Edsel they were designed to produce. I have noticed that leaders who are able to grow their organizations rapidly in the face of accelerating technological and societal change—the people who create and foster innovation—exhibit certain characteristics. I call these characteristics “SmartTribe Accelerators.”
Since the end of Cold War, the United States has exercised neither coherent nor strategically minded communication with overseas populations.
The New Public Diplomacy Imperative takes a look at the strategic necessity for strong American public diplomacy. Policy analyst Matthew Wallin examines many of the issues in contemporary public diplomacy, and recommends best practices for policy makers and public diplomacy practitioners.
This white paper provides case studies, insight and guidance to strengthen the effectiveness of American messaging overseas.
On December 5, Mandela died peacefully at home in Johannesburg. Cause of death was respiratory failure. He was 95.
Supporters called him a dreamer of big dreams. His legacy fell woefully short. More on that below.
“The ANC has never at any period of its history advocated a revolutionary change in the economic structure of the country, nor has it, to the best of my recollection, ever condemned capitalist society.”
In 1964, he was sentenced to life in prison. He was mostly incarcerated on Robben Island. It’s in Table Bay. It’s around 7km offshore from Cape Town.
In February 1990, he was released. In 1993, he received the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with South African President FW de Klerk.
Nobel Committee members said it was “for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa.”
De Klerk enforced the worst of apartheid ruthlessness. In 1994, Mandela was elected president. He served from May 1994 – June 1999.
He exacerbated longstanding economic unfairness. He deserves condemnation, not praise.
John Pilger’s work exposed South African apartheid harshness. Doing so got him banned. Thirty years later he returned.
He wanted to see firsthand what changed. He interviewed Mandela in retirement. His “Apartheid Did Not Die” documentary followed.
Through the prism of operations in Afghanistan, the author examines how the U.S. Government’s Strategic Communication (SC) and, in particular, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Information Operations (IO) and Military Information Support to Operations (MISO) programs, have contributed to U.S. strategic and foreign policy objectives. It assesses whether current practice, which is largely predicated on ideas of positively shaping audiences perceptions and attitudes towards the United States, is actually fit for purpose. Indeed, it finds that the United States has for many years now been encouraged by large contractors to approach communications objectives through techniques heavily influenced by civilian advertising and marketing, which attempt to change hostile attitudes to the United States and its foreign policy in the belief that this will subsequently reduce hostile behavior. While an attitudinal approach may work in convincing U.S. citizens to buy consumer products, it does not easily translate to the conflict- and crisis-riven societies to which it has been routinely applied since September 11, 2001.
In article below, Ricks is oversimplistic. Quality may be more important than quantity, but a certain amount of quantity is essential. We may not have months available for a buildup as in ODS/S and OIF. Capability and capacity are both required.)
Thomas E. Ricks is an adviser on national security at the New America Foundation, where he participates in its “Future of War” project. A former Post reporter, he has written five books about the U.S. military, most recently “The Generals: American Military Command From World War II to Today.”
Want a better U.S. military? Make it smaller. The bigger the military, the more time it must spend taking care of itself and maintaining its structure as it is, instead of changing with the times. And changing is what the U.S. military must begin to do as it recovers from the past decade’s two wars.
For example, the Navy recently christened the USS Gerald R. Ford , an aircraft carrier that cost perhaps $13.5 billion. Its modern aspects include a smaller crew, better radar and a different means of launching aircraft, but it basically looks like the carriers the United States has built for the past half-century. And that means it has a huge “radar signature,” making it highly visible. That could be dangerous in an era of global satellite imagery and long-range precision missiles, neither of which existed when the Ford’s first predecessors were built. As Capt. Henry Hendrix, a naval historian and aviator, wrote this year, today’s carrier, like the massive battleships that preceded it, is “big, expensive, vulnerable — and surprisingly irrelevant to the conflicts of the time.” What use is a carrier if the missiles that can hit it have a range twice as long as that of the carrier’s aircraft?
Donors in Saudi Arabia have notoriously played a pivotal role in creating and maintaining Sunni jihadist groups over the past 30 years. But, for all the supposed determination of the United States and its allies since 9/11 to fight “the war on terror”, they have showed astonishing restraint when it comes to pressuring Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies to turn off the financial tap that keeps the jihadists in business.
