Public Intelligence Blog

Arab Spring countries

Egypt: Starting Friday and continuing over the weekend in Egypt, 80 to over 120 members of the Muslim Brotherhood and pro-Mursi demonstrators died in clashes in Cairo, Alexandria and other Nile Delta towns. The health ministry reported 792 people injured. The Brotherhood said 4,500 were wounded.

The interim president has authorized the prime minister to empower the military to make civilian arrests. A final showdown with the Muslim Brotherhood is emerging.

In north Sinai, Egyptian security forces began “Operation Desert Storm” against anti-government elements and tribes. The first official report is that government forces killed 10 militants and captured 20. According to al Ahram, the government estimates there are 500 active militants. The government has more than ten times that number.

Tunisia: A general strike in reaction to a political assassination last week emptied Tunis and grounded some commercial aircraft on Friday. On Saturday thousands protested against the Islamist-led government. Protests continued on Sunday resulting in clashes between pro- and anti-government groups. Anti-government groups have threatened to create an opposition counter-government.

Police clashed with anti-government protestors in Sidi Bouzid. This is the Tunisian town considered to be the birth place of the Arab Spring because it is where the first violent protests occurred in December 2010. The murdered opposition leader, Brahmi, came from Sidi Bouzid.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH: Arab Spring Update”

OPEN CIVICS

Beginning with National Service

I begin with an apology for the three generations that preceded you. I am 72 and a member of the generation of your grand and sometimes great grand-parents. My generation did many things to change our society for the better, sometimes in street demonstrations resembling those you see now in Europe and the Middle East, but we never valued what we had or how we, as Americans, were succeeding. We forgot how to govern ourselves.

And perhaps for that reason, my generation, born between 1925 and 1945, never raised a President. It followed that the post-war generation of Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush would be ill -equipped and unconstrained by the historical perspective necessary to govern *the* Superpower in a unipolar world. As a consequence, your generation, including your older brothers and sisters, have been robbed of the security and promise which supported my youth. Your generation has compensated with new means to communicate and ways to frame your identities. And it is from these ways and means, new ways and means to govern ourselves must emerge.  Your generation can master the new because you are already creating it.  This site, with your help, tests that idea.

The Site opens with Professor Sheldon Wolin's 1988 discussion about American democracy. The democracy he describes differs from the democracy many of us believe ourselves and advertise ourselves to be a part of. Twenty-five years later, your chance to judge the accuracy of his assessment is just beginning.

Continue reading “Penguin: Open Civics – Defining Citizenship”

Toward an era of wise caring

Reason and feeling each have gifts and limitations.  Used well together they generate wise caring.  There are examples of wise caring in earlier human societies and we have an opportunity today to build on them and enhance that capacity in our whole civilization.

Down deep within us – underlying everything that we think, feel and do – we find our needs burning brightly along with our values (the cultural expression of our needs). When I say “needs” I’m referring to deep universal needs, such as our needs for love, expression, nutrition, control, respect, etc. I’m not referring to the specific desires and strategies we pursue – like a new car or time with our children – in an effort to meet those fundamental needs.

Our fundamental needs and values are the wellsprings of our motivations. They stimulate us to understand what we need to do to find satisfaction and happiness. We use two primary tools in that pursuit: feeling and reason.

Feeling manifests as sensation, emotion, empathy, resonance, and gut impulses and responses. Our feelings orient us to what we want and get us moving toward and away from things. In contrast, reason works with facts, evidence, ideas, and logic. It helps us appraise what we want and don’t want, to make meaning of what’s happening, and to clarify HOW we should satisfy our needs.

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