Cool places to work: The Situation Room
View the video on YouTube.
Now this would be a cool place to work. You might have a tiny chance of stepping foot inside if you’re a member of the U.S. intelligence community, Homeland Security or the military (or if you become President), but for the rest of us, this tour of the White House’s Situation Room will have to do.
Look at the executive look and feel they’ve designed for the meeting room. It’s created to mimic Air Force One’s meeting rooms. It lets the President know he’s at work and he’s the boss. Look at the technology. They’ve got top-notch everything. Even the high backed throne chairs and top-secret telephone booths look like something out of a spy film.
That’s not to mention the gravity of work that gets done in a place like The Situation Room.
An inspiring workplace, indeed.
That Ken Starr?
Google News trends caught my eye last night when, Kenneth Starr showed up. I thought he may had died — as that tends to be a popular topic online — only to find that he had been charged with massive investment fraud on a Madoff scale. I soon discovered it wasn’t the independent prosecutor assigned to Whitewater and the Lewinsky affair but a New York financial advisor with the same name.
You can’t win ‘em all…
Campaigning, Alabama Republican Style
I thought this was a great video. This candidate for Agriculture Commissioner says it like he means it.
Ex-military leaders: Young adults ‘too fat to fight’
Before the fried PB and banana sandwiches caught up with him.
CNN has a story about one of the latest threats to US national security:
More than a quarter of young adults are unable to meet physical requirements to join the military, creating a potential threat to national security, a group of retired armed forces leaders said Tuesday.
“It’s not drug abuse, it’s not asthma, it’s not flat feet — by far the leading medical reason is being overweight or obese,” said retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Norman Seip at a news conference.
This is a security issue for the simple reason that in the highly-unlikely and unforeseeable event of total war whereby the civilian populace must form a fighting force, standards will simply have to be lowered. On a more practical level, eligible numbers of recruits for the existing armed forces will decrease if entry standards aren’t lowered.
Years ago, during one of the many brouhahas with the DPRK, then-Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld explained to the press the paucity of North Korea’s living standards by explaining that the minimum height requirement for entry into the North Korean army had to be significantly lowered due to mass malnutrition.
You could argue that while this malnutrition comes from mass prosperity, it has similar consequences.
First Phograph of a Human
This blows my mind a little. We presently do not have any known photographs if a human being before this point. According to How to be a Retronaut, this is a picture of Boulevard du Temple, taken by Daguerre in late 1838 or early 1839 in Paris.
Cannon accuses Russia of ‘pulling stunts’ in the high North
OTTAWA — Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon accused Russia of “pulling stunts” in the high North as Canada seeks a science-based, diplomatic approach to resolving looming disputes over the resource-rich Arctic.
Responding to reports that Russia has plans to drop paratroopers at the North Pole, Cannon said no country can stake claim to the area that is “international territory.”
Read more in the Toronto Sun.
Paris Review interviews Kurt Vonnegut
INTERVIEWER
What was your dissertation?
VONNEGUT
Cat’s Cradle.
INTERVIEWER
But you wrote that years after you left Chicago, didn’t you?
VONNEGUT
I left Chicago without writing a dissertation—and without a degree. All my ideas for dissertations had been rejected, and I was broke, so I took a job as a PR man for General Electric in Schenectady. Twenty years later, I got a letter from a new dean at Chicago, who had been looking through my dossier. Under the rules of the university, he said, a published work of high quality could be substituted for a dissertation, so I was entitled to an M.A. He had shown Cat’s Cradle to the anthropology department, and they had said it was halfway decent anthropology, so they were mailing me my degree. I’m class of 1972 or so.
INTERVIEWER
Congratulations.
VONNEGUT
It was nothing, really. A piece of cake.
INTERVIEWER
Some of the characters in Cat’s Cradle were based on people you knew at GE, isn’t that so?
VONNEGUT
Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the absentminded scientist, was a caricature of Dr. Irving Langmuir, the star of the GE research laboratory. I knew him some. My brother worked with him. Langmuir was wonderfully absentminded. He wondered out loud one time whether, when turtles pulled in their heads, their spines buckled or contracted. I put that in the book. One time he left a tip under his plate after his wife served him breakfast at home. I put that in. His most important contribution, though, was the idea for what I called “Ice-9,” a form of frozen water that was stable at room temperature. He didn’t tell it directly to me. It was a legend around the laboratory—about the time H. G. Wells came to Schenectady. That was long before my time. I was just a little boy when it happened—listening to the radio, building model airplanes.
The interview can be read in its entirety here. I recommend taking twenty minutes out of your day for it.
Strategic communication for international organizations
As you long-time readers know, I’m fascinated with academic study of crisis communication and since finishing my MA and pursuing work in PR, I’ve posted nothing on this. It’s time I shared something I came across.
What I found was a comparative study of strategic communication between the EU’s European Rule of Law (EULEX) Mission for Kosovo and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for Afghanistan.
Peters found that five factors determine the communicative roles of international organizations:
1. the role of the member states
2. the need for domestic ratification
3. the possibility of promoting the international organization through the operation
4. the international organization communicative capabilities
5. the importance of the foreign public to the success of the operation
The member states’ communicative activity largely determines the communicative tasks of international organisations. If member states require domestic ratification, they are likely to boost their domestic communication efforts, which makes a ‘unity of message’ difficult for international organisations that then have to focus primarily on coordinating member states’ domestic communication efforts. Additionally, member states are generally more reluctant to communicate to foreign publics, forcing international organisations to assume communicative leadership.
One of the things I like about this is that it deals with communication on such a massive scale. You can read the abstract (which I’ve summarized above). Or download the entire paper in PDF.
Audacity of Change
I was reading through Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech.
War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease – the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences.
Do you know someone who can acknowledge something that seems immutable but wants to change it?
Is it possible?
A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
You can find the complete Nobel speech here.
About Me
Hi, I'm Michael (of Vancouver, B.C.). Welcome to my blog. Read more about me.