Kicking Command and Control Blog February Archive blog.topic  

Barry Schwartz tells the story of the father who went to buy a cold drink for his son at a ball-game and innocently brought back one that had a fraction of alcohol in it.  The security guard spotted the kid with an illegal drink, hauled them out of their seats, called an ambulance, sent them under guard to hospital. Tests showed no alcohol in the kid's system,  but the welfare worker took him into care and sent him to a foster-home for three days.  A judge concurrently ordered that the father should move out of home into a motel for further reports and after three weeks allowed him to be reunited with his family.

Read more: BARRY SCHWARTZ ON WISDOM AT THE TED 2009 CONFERENCE [click]

This tale of folly, arrogance and betrayal was in the Guardian today.  The catastrophe stems ultimately from the Command and Control mindset that permeates every level of education, politics and government.

Politicians wreck our kids' education
The result of rigid, centralised control of the curriculum has been inadequate schooling for a generation of children
Francis Beckett
Friday February 20 2009
guardian.co.uk


I once asked Professor Marie Clay of Auckland University (she developed Reading Recovery, the only system yet designed which cures dyslexia in young children) why New Zealand schools had a much better record for teaching literacy than British ones.

Read more: Wrecking Education in the UK [click]

A few days ago,  Tom Engelhardt wrote an excellent piece for TomDispatch that 'joined the dots', first on global epidemic of fires and droughts, and then on the melt-down of the Global Monetocracy. [ Burning Questions: What Does Economic "Recovery" Mean on an Extreme Weather Planet?]

He quotes Tim Flannery at length, and Flannery has a fascinating review in the NYRB about the evolution of ant-organisms at NY Books, The Superior Civilization 
Flannery ends the review by hoping that

Read more: THE BURNING QUESTION [click]

Is there a tribe, a nation, or a people whose identity does not rest in part upon the heroic, even mythic exploits of its greatest leaders and liberators? From Moses and Joshua, Pericles and Alexander, Horatio and Anthony, Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible, on to Arthur and Alfred, through Columbus and Pizarro, Joan of Arc and Napoleon, Elizabeth and Drake, Washington and Lincoln, Nelson and Wellington, El Cid and Cortes, Tecumsah and Sitting Bull, Bolivar and O'Higgins, down to Churchill and Montgomery, Stalin and Zhukov, Roosevelt and Eisenhower, Jinnah and Nehru, MaoZedung and Chou Enlai. It matters not whether these heroes were morally good or morally bad. Their status as national or tribal heroes is beyond rational debate. They are embedded in the consciousness of their descendants and immune to the judgements we bring to bear on lesser mortals.

But who follows them? Kennedy? Thatcher? Reagan? Blair? Bush? Hardly.

Read more: 21ST CENTURY LEADERSHIP SKILLS: PART ONE [click]

THESE THREE ARTICLES APPREAED IN THE GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER ON 14TH AND 15TH FEBRUARY 2009.

The banks couldn't contain dissent
 Anthony Evans
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 14 February 2009 
 

Finally! It's almost six months since Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy
(and in doing so marked the onset of the current financial crisis), but only
now are we seeing evidence that the bank's bosses had been confronted with
concerns about the riskiness of their lending. But no one should be
surprised that the knowledge required to avert this disaster was there all
along.

Read more: THE PRICE OF COMMAND AND CONTROL FOLLIES [click]