WhirledView

Make It Bigger

by Cheryl Rofer

I can’t recall where I’ve heard “If a problem is intractable, make it bigger.” UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown took a bold step to do just that with Iran’s nuclear program in a speech to the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Conference this morning.

Maybe I’m reading more into this than is there. Certainly the Prime Minister’s news release and The Guardian present it as the same old same old. But I happened on the BBC as they happened on the speech this morning as I was preparing breakfast, and I thought what I heard was pretty remarkable. The BBC said they’d just do a few minutes, but they stayed with the speech for longer than I expected, so maybe they heard it too.

Today's Crabby Post

by Cheryl Rofer

I have come to my limit on phone calls from charitable and polling organizations. I have steeled myself to answer such calls with "Please remove this number from your calling list." I have the advantage of caller id, but some use anonymous or "unknown caller" ids.

The latest was from the American Lung Foundation (organization? whatever).

"Please remove this number from your calling list."

The caller went into his spiel. I spoke over him.

"Please remove this number from your calling list."

Spiel continues.

"Please remove this number from your calling list."

"Yes, I will put your name on our do not call list."

"Thank you."

I really feel like a grinch when I do this. Some of the calls are from genuinely deserving charities. But I can't give to everything, and I've thought out where my money should go.

I thought that, if your number was on the federal do not call list, these people had to have some connection with you. As far as I can recall, I've never had anything to do with the American Lung whatever or the many (supposedly) police charities that call. I realize that polling organizations have an exemption, but they get the same rebuff. It's my time they're occupying.

And then there are the clearly illegal calls, all recorded, offering me a great deal on extending my car warranty...

Morbid Symptoms as the Old Dies

by Cheryl Rofer

The crisis consists precisely in the fact
that the old is dying and the new cannot
be born; in this interregnum a great
variety of morbid symptoms appears.
--Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

Clay Shirky today has a deservedly much-linked article on what is happening to newspapers. Shirky analogizes the coming of the internet to the coming of Gutenberg's moveable type and suggests that we don't yet know the future of news but that, as things change, we can expect chaos.

So we also have, today, Michael Scherer proclaiming that Politico has found the future of news, to break it down into bite-size chunks. An answer, yes, of the kind that Shirky points to as a refusal to see that the change is more profound than any of us can easily assimilate just now. But, of course, Michael Scherer writes for another branch of the dead-tree media, Time Magazine. Very likely, when he was hired, he could see a brilliant future for himself writing those magisterial thousand-word essays telling us all what to think.

Ezra Klein points out one of the reasons that that sort of essay is dying: we all now have access to the transcripts of speeches, interviews, and both the performative and transcripted versions of Jon Stewart's takedown of Jim Cramer, itself an example of transcending the old, magisterial news model.

The old breaks before the new is fully formed, Shirky and Gramsci tell us. And the practitioners of the old will continue to try to point to what they sense will make it an easy transition for them. But it's more likely that the future of news will be different than anything any of us imagine right now. As Shirky points out,

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

Update: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer announced today that it will be the first major paper to shift entirely to the Web. The staff is decreasing from 145 employees to 20.

Clean Up Time at Foggy Bottom?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Early on in my 27 plus years in the Foreign Service I learned that an officer’s corridor reputation and the same person’s promotion record did not necessarily correspond. I figured that the reasons for this discrepancy had mostly to do with the idiosyncrasies of promotion board precepts and personal prejudices of individual board members towards one kind of assignment or country of assignment or another that sometimes crept into the deliberative process. This then combined with the all too well known fact that certain officers were far more adept at promoting themselves personally than others whether they were, or were not, either more competent or more qualified.

I also understood that very few FSOs came across as either super stars or as total duds particularly after the first few years. Rather, the records of the vast majority were pretty indistinguishable one from the other so the rank ordering demanded of the selection boards was, in fact, often more arbitrary than those on the outside would care to believe.

Although I had heard years ago of one officer’s name being vindictively removed from a State Department promotion list for reasons that I will not go into here, I thought that this had been an aberration not the norm.

But maybe it’s not. I recently learned of another similar case that happened just a few years earlier so the problem may be more widespread and longer-lived than I had previously – perhaps naively – believed.

Or maybe the situation’s just gotten worse in recent years.

I don’t know. Whatever. I do know, however, that this outmoded cutthroat, rank-in-person system that has been in place since well before I joined the service in 1970 was made worse under the Carter Administration when it instituted a new super grade Senior Foreign Service comparable to the Senior Executive Service - supposedly to instill greater accountability in government service overall. I have no doubt it was done with the best of intentions, but the Foreign Service – unlike the Civil Service where no one has to retire until death-do-us-part - always included a variety of accountability checks and ways to separate people from the service – for good and bad reasons - at all ranks.

As far as I can tell, the primary consequences of the current two tiered system hurt not only too many individuals personally but over time has also worked to the detriment of the quality of the Foreign Service as well.

US Nukes in Europe

by Cheryl Rofer

The United States maintains two hundred or more nuclear weapons in Europe, say Pugwash and the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) in reports issued in January.

The nuclear weapons are B61 gravity bombs, which are classified as tactical nuclear weapons. If you thought that all American nuclear weapons had been removed from Europe, you were probably thinking of strategic nuclear weapons, the kind that are mounted on missiles and are controlled by treaty in ways that tactical nuclear weapons are not.

A Foreign Policy Insurgency?

by Cheryl Rofer

Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, Thomas P. M. Barnett, Putnam, February 2009.

This is the second part of my review of this book. The first part is here.

What Tom Barnett is doing is at least as interesting as his book. The book describes some of it, but not all.

Connectivity, a central concept in Barnett’s thinking, is changing the world. The connectivity provided by fax machines and primitive e-mail helped to undercut the Soviet Union and got the Tianmen Square rebels’ story out in 1989. Now we get tweets as Mumbai is being attacked. We have hardly begun to exploit that connectivity.

Every day, enormous numbers of people discuss enormous numbers of topics on the Web. More people now get their news from the Web than from any other source. Can it be used to develop policy? David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, will tell you that it can be used to elect a president. Developing policy is harder.

Superempowerment?
I belong to a cluster of bloggers who discuss foreign policy and other topics. We read each other’s blogs and link among them. Barnett calls us, if I understand him correctly, superempowered individuals. I’m not entirely happy with the jargon aspect of that phrase or what Barnett seems to mean by it. I have access to a great many things through the internet, true; but there are limits to the power that gives me. One of thosee limits is being heard. If I write a blog and nobody reads it, does it really exist?

Bits and Pieces - Spring Flowers Edition

by Cheryl Rofer

My winter jasmine is blooming, and all sorts of other things are coming up or, if they were green over the winter, perking up. A couple of little cactuses that collapsed into small piles of spines over the winter are back to showing green between the spines, the iris are growing the shoots that stayed green, the daylilies are sprouting, and a few hapless tulips and daffodils that didn't do at all well are pushing green through the soil.

And an orchid is blooming indoors. As soon as the bloom I bought it for died, a new stem started vigorously. This is the result.

So many topics to blog about, so little time! Here are a few I've been thinking about lately.

The Smart Grid that President Obama has been talking about will be really important for the country. The Washington Post explains the energy-saving aspects of it pretty well, but I think that two other factors will be extremely important. One is that it will be much more robust to power failures, isolating them to where they happen, rather than propagating them, as the current grid tends to do. The other is that it will allow back-and-forth power trading. So if you build a windmill in the back yard and you don't use all the power, you'll be able to sell it to the power company. Of course, that last will require legislation as well, to require the power company to buy electricity from its customers. A few states have this, but not all.

Update: Much, much more about the smart grid at Knowledge Problem: Parts one, two, three, and four of a five-part series. The rest of the blog has even more about energy and economics. Check it out.

Thinking Public Diplomacy

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Sometimes interesting ideas come from the unlikeliest of places. That’s how I read the 2004 RAND Occasional Paper “Public Diplomacy: How to Think About and Improve It” by Charles Wolf, Jr. and Brian Rosen that recently came to my attention.

It’s not exactly as if either Wolf or Rosen have the public diplomacy practitioner or academic credentials to write about this politically charged topic in any kind of depth.

It’s also not exactly clear how this short study was financed or why it so recently resurfaced – but I think both are important because different players in the contentious public diplomacy debate have different objectives and perspectives. Since RAND is often closely associated with the US military, I’m going to bet that this Occasional Paper's funding comes from the “strategic communications” side of the US government house. But who knows – I could be wrong.

Some ideas that Wolf and Rosen presented in this paper are – in my view – zany, ill-informed or tortuously argued and not worth the time it took me to read them. So skim the pages on why public diplomacy and public relations are not the same and why parts of public diplomacy should be “outsourced” to the private sector. But please read on . . .there is at least one core idea identified that remains crucially important.