Human Capital Development in Villages in Least Developed Countries

An Open Source model for Direct Citizen to Citizen Engagement

To read this paper, please download the PDF file C2C Concept paper.

The movement toward peace and withdrawal from Iraq seems to be surging. Polls show that most Americans believe the war was not worth fighting, that the administration does not have a clear plan for withdrawal, that the U.S. is bogged down in Iraq, that the war has made our position in the world weaker rather [...]

[A personal rant.]

To understand the Radical Right, you have to understand that they live in a bubble inflated by tautologies [statements not subject to disproof]. If even one of these is discovered to be wrong, then the others are at risk and there can no longer be “certainty” that they are the chosen ones and their bubble is safe.

The Radical Right can not accept the fact that their knowledge is just as imperfect as the rest ours. They can not accept that they make mistakes all the time. Their fear of being wrong, and thus that their tautological world view will collapse, manifests itself as extreme hubris and arrogance — as utter certainty. They can not afford to doubt. In fact, they are terrified of doubt, complexity, contradiction, ambiguity and uncertainty, ie the modern world in all of its multi-dimensional guises.

Our on his Chief Blogging Office blog, Chris Locke has posted an interesting note on Umberto Eco’s essay on Ur Fascism. The essay is in his book “Five Moral Pieces”.

This is how Eco begins his enumeration. You’ll see why I was so excited to find this when you hit the last graf. In what follows, btw, the grafiks, links and emphasis are mine.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

[This post is from a friend with contacts in the national health care arena.]

Bird Flu is only one of the six emerging global pandemics. They are: Super-TB, H5N1 (Bird Flu), Super-Staph, SARS, Super-Malaria and the major threat is still HIV.

H5N1 is going to be very bad, but (at worst) it will cull out 10% of the healthy human population. That would be over 600 million deaths from H5N1. If it focusses on the weak, just what disease is supposed to do, it may be a very perverse partial solution to the tensions caused by exploding global population and the carrying capacity of the earths natural systems.

The most terrifying pandemic tidal wave is the one no-one is wants to address – (Except maybe China).

HIV, using 20+ million Human Petri-Dishes kept alive with long term “maintain” drugs, is evolving at a rate of 3 generations an hour/host into an indestructible, casual-contact, species-buster.

Pronounce that as you would *sigh.* Ok, all together now: *Schiavo.* I’m not happy about talking about this, but apparently it’s important to people and that calls for attention. And I have a question for all those who think that keeping Terri Schiavo alive indefinitely in a vegetative, nonfunctioning, unproductive, uncreative, incapacitated, unresponsive, irresponsible, dependent, [...]

Oliver Willis has a great blog posting that exposes the hypocrisy of the Tom Delays of the Religious Right Party: Where Were the Republicans? This sad event took place in TEXAS last September 25th.

“I talked to him, I told him that I loved him. Inside of me, my son is still alive,” Wanda Hudson told reporters afterward. “This hospital [Texas Children's Hospital] was considered a miracle hospital. When it came to my son, they gave up in six months. … They made a terrible mistake.”

Sun’s death marks the first time a U.S. judge has allowed a hospital to discontinue an infant’s life-sustaining care against a parent’s wishes, according to bioethical experts.

snip…

The Observer, the magazine of the English paper The Guardian, has today published On a wing and a prayer .

snip

‘We think it is only a matter of time before H5N1 or a related strain of the virus becomes infectious between humans,’ Professor John Oxford, a virologist at the Queen Mary and Westfield School of medicine in east London, had warned me before I embarked for Vietnam. ‘When that happens it will be too late to do anything about it, which is why we have to prepare now. Forget al-Qaeda, the biggest terrorist threat we face today is Mother Nature.’

I’m tired of playing defense.

I know. It’s horrible what the Republicans are doing. With judges and Senate rules. With the environment. With abortion. Yada-yada-yada.

But we screamed about it (I screamed, you screamed, we all screamed) for two years and lost worse than before. The warnings weren’t heeded. The policies are going in.

What I wanna know is…when are we going to get back on the offense?

Don’t tell me that if you’re in the opposition the other side gets to set the agenda. They get to govern, not set the agenda.

Your job should be to find those issues where we have a majority, where we can pull people from the other side, where we can recruit the marginal people we need to throw these bums out.

David Brooks’ op-ed in today’s NY Times, The Do-Nothing Conspiracy, is way off the mark. He suggests that the critical challenges facing us are: 1]the rising costs of entitlement programs & 2] increasing polarization of the political class.

Don’t get me started. But Brooks did. A few points to consider. The real and imminent threats we will have to muddle through are NOT at all what Brooks suggests.
If you want a good and honest scare, the real threats will be:

1] Oil is trending to $100 per barrel which will have extremely negative consequences for our oil addicted society;

2] It is only a matter on months before the very deadly bird flu recombines in a human host with a virus, like the common cold, that allows for airborne transmission of the new virus. Best guesses out of a leading research lab in France is that this is less than 24 months away. This will result, most likely, in 10s of millions of dead around the world.