Now an average American teen sends or receives around 2,200 text messages per month, but one 13-year-old  managed to handle 24,000.

We are more and more in a hurry. Time blurs because Internet and technologies bring us means that make us connected ever faster and ever more seamlessly. We want to have more done and achieved in less and less time. Competition is fierce. What we don’t realize that in these times of accelerated realities our perceived effectiveness or success based on doing more rapidly or in less time is illusionary. Once we come to that realization, it is usually too late. We become disconnected from our friends, families and even teh very realities with which we were trying to keep abreast of.

In trying to stay ahead of our lives in the accelerated 21st century, we all start feeling the strain of our pace, personal and professional, in our everyday lives. We start feeling the need to unplug. In one generation we have moved from exulting in and worshiping time-saving devices and gadgets that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time.

In 21st century, we have more and more ways to communicate but less and less to say. We don’t have time to think. We need to say as much as we can in as little a time, assuming otherwise to stay behind. Facebook, Twitter and plethora of means of communication, while admittedly helping us to receive, create and share more information, also take out of us our innate ability to reflect, ponder and consider, all of which require focus and time, of which we have less and less.

However, the urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser men have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Famous American writer Thomas Merton noted that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Well-known New Style designer Philippe Starck claims that he stays consistently ahead of the curve by never following news or watching TV. Highlysuccessful Malaysian businessman Vijay Eswaran attributes his success, taking his company QI Group from launch to the billion dollar mark in 10 years, to his practice of reflecting in silence for one hour everyday. Even in negotiations and sales, silence is the ultimate key to success.

A series of tests in recent years has shown, according to Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows“, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio “deep thought and empathy that are essential in our love lives are inherently slow and not in concert with our speedy lives.“

There is an irony to our story of becoming the most advanced in terms of tehcnology. As we created trains, machines, robots and programs, designed to address every type of needs we have, we were only able to do so, by creating and guiding those technologies and machines. Machines and technologies that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier cannot teach us how to make the best use of themselves. There is no meta level to technological revolution.

How do some of us try unplug from the information overflow?

Recent trend is mushrooming of Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China, which save kids addicted to the screen.

Another fashionable trend, especially among business professionals of all types, is yoga or meditation. Yet others go for long weekend walks in forests or hike their way up hills or mountains.

With an ever-increasing amounts of information, connectedness and speed, our innate faculty of regenerating ourselves, re-creating our inner serenity and reconnecting with nature, friends and family intuitively leads us back to many an old and well-trodden paths of our forefathers. And this is to be expected.

I just wish that with all the noise, technology and gadgets, popping up around us and affecting every aspect of our lives in more ways we would like to admit or imagine we don’t forget what we are. We are humans and all the technology in the world cannot make us any more human than we already are. If anything, it has been turning us into the very machines we have striven to create.

The middle of the 21st century will resemble nothing so much as the Middle Ages of the 8th to 15th centuries, from the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths, in 410, to the fall of Constantinople, in 1453. This was a long and uncertain period and thus an ideal metaphor to characterize our times. It was an age of plagues and progress, commercial revolutions, expanding empires, crusades, city-states, merchants, and universities. It was multipolar, with expanding empires on the Eurasian landmass, and apolar, with no one global leader. The new Middle Ages—synonymous with the age of globalization—have already begun.

First let us take the empires. Charlemagne’s efforts to resurrect the Roman Empire have been succeeded, over a millennium later, by the multipronged armadas of Brussels Eurocrats steadily colonizing Europe’s periphery, in the Baltics, the Balkans, and, eventually, Anatolia and the Caucasus. The Eurocrats’ book is not the Bible but rather the acquis communautaire: the 31 chapters of the Lex Europea, which is rebuilding EU member states from the inside out. By 2040, even depopulated Russia, with any luck, will be an EU member and the West’s front line against the far more populous East.

By then, a rebranded, globalizing China will be just a decade shy of the centennial of its civil war’s end, in 1949; the Communist Party has long declared that 2050, not 2008 (the year of the Beijing Olympic Games), will mark the country’s real coming-out party as a superpower. A half century from now, China may still be the world’s most populous country, and if the exploits of its 15th-century explorer–statesman Zheng He are any guide, its demographic, commercial, and strategic presence from Africa to Latin America—to say nothing of its diplomatic and cultural dominance in East Asia—will have substantially increased.

The world’s third center of gravity will be the United States, demographically stable but also more thoroughly amalgamated with Latin America. Almost a century after John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, the country will have rediscovered its southern neighbors, especially Brazil, for an industrial partnership to boost the Western hemisphere’s competitiveness against Asia—and to achieve energy independence from the Middle East.

What then of the Middle East, the current center of geopolitical travails? Monarchies may still support dreams of a caliphate, but a unified Islamic ummah, such as the Abbasid empire attempted, is unlikely to emerge. Global energy resources will be more diversified than they are today, so oil and petrochemicals will sustain only a modest degree of Arabian cultural expansionism, even if they still support a few Islamic crusades. With something of a reformation under way in parts of the Muslim world, one of the most practiced religions on Earth will be ever more fractured and embedded in diverse geographies, much as Christianity is today.

Meanwhile, the resurrection of the city-state, the most prominent medieval political unit, will continue. To the current list of global cities—Dubai, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, São Paulo, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo—we may add additional globalized nodes, such as Alexandria, Istanbul, and Karachi along major trade routes. Now, as then, city-states are commercial hubs all but divorced from their national anchors, reminding us that corporate actors will be paramount well into the future. City-states will pay for protection as global security privatizes further into corporate hands—the 21st century’s knights, mercenaries, and condottieri. Today’s sovereign-wealth funds, fused with city-state savvy, will be tomorrow’s Hanseatic League, forming capital networks that disperse the newest technologies to nearby regions. Not Oxford and Bologna, but rather Silicon Valley, Singapore, Switzerland, and their like will be the standard-setting centers.

The Middle Ages witnessed a number of innovations—from the cannon to the compass—that were geared to intensified global exploration. In the 21st century, the speed of communication and transport will bring us ever closer to simultaneity. As the ranks of billionaires soar beyond Gates, Branson, and Ambani, mega-philanthropists will become the postmodern Medicis, financing explorations in outer space and the deep sea alike and governing territory and production in the manner of medieval princes.

And, as in the Middle Ages, humanity faces diseases and invasions in the decades ahead. AIDS, malaria, SARS, and other maladies could become plagues like the 14th-century Black Death. What will be the impact of the coming migratory hordes, potentially unsettled by wars and environmental disasters? Who will be the next Mongols—small, concentrated hordes who violently establish their own version of peace, law, and order? How will contemporary diasporas—the millions of Chinese, Indian, Turkish, and Arab peoples living outside their home countries—blend into European, African, and American societies?

Finally, the fundamental reality of the Middle Ages was feudal social stratification, whose return the global economy may be accelerating. In medieval times, diverse power structures—religious, political, military, and commercial—all vied for control in shifting alliances. All of this is true again today and will remain so until a dominant form, like the nation-state in the 16th century, finally emerges. For now, the state is still in flux: declining in the Near East, resurgent in Asia, and almost nonexistent in Africa. Establishing a new system of global governance will take centuries, hence the uncertain leadership and complex landscape of the mid-21st century. The next Renaissance is still a long way off.

Let’s start with Branding 101 before trying to understand the message of Apple. Branding and marketing are two different concepts. Branding has one and one objective only. It aims to establish and cultivate an emotional bond in your heart associated with some specific product or service or process. Marketing rationalizes and appeals to our logic whereas branding caters to our hearts and emotions. Marketing emphasizes quality, features and advantages whereas branding tries to establish an emotional bond, playing on our passions and aspirations or human irrationale, inciting us to act in a desired manner (buy a product/service).

Branding is simple enough to perceive intellectually, but difficult enough for many companies/people, not least because they don’t get the underlying psychology, to implement.  Apple, as well as companies like Nike and Disney, is very good at putting into practice this psychology-based business practice. There is no magic here. It is a business practice of branding  with expected results coming to fruition.

Coming back to Apple’s message in that ad. Many perceive the Apple message to be, “everyone wants to be a rebel.” In my view this is a wrong perception. Rebel is an outlier, an outcast of a society. He/she is challenging every status-quo and convention, Our societies are made of 98%  of the completely opposite stock, i.e. those who care about making living and leading their lives in as predictable and affordable way as possible. About the only time they pay attention to rebels is when a rebel becomes famous, for good or bad reasons.

Costs of being a rebel usually far outweigh advantages. Why then some become rebels and even succeed? Either a combination of character/aspirations/perseverance or purely statistical (for every successful rebel there is many that get thrashed by their societies, friends, etc.).

Successes of those successful ones, rebel or not, appeal to us. We all want to indulge in glories and successes of successful rebels, but we don’t want to shoulder the accompanying costs and challenges.

Apple, because of its “corporate rebel” status has until last few years been an underdog of the corporate world. Its branding has been its forte and that is why its brand value has been so high and still increases. Increasing number of Apple products, not least the notorious iPod, have competitors with in many cases some and in few cases many advantages over their Apple equivalents. We don’t know about those products, some of them with names Sony, Creative, etc., because of Apple’s unsurpassed branding strategy.

Apple’s ad was perfectly in line with its own mentality and branding. What it did was to create a personna of its own brand, associating it with some notorious rebels in science, etc., and by doing so elevating even further our emotional excitement. In this ad, Apple counted itself in ranks with Einstein, Martin Luther King, etc. Apple tried to lure customers to its products as Einstein would have lured students to attend his lectures or read his books.

Apple’s DNA has always been about exclusivity, coolness, simplicity (for customers) and, of course, being a rebel.

Being a rebel is always about bringing forth, advocating and fighting for change, which flies flatly in the face of a society, convention, tradition, or status-quo. We humans, however, are neither comfortable nor happy with change, let alone a dramatic one.

Berlusconi was born to a middle-class family of a bank employee in Milan. In primary school, young Berlusconi wrote homework assignments for his classmates in exchange for morning snacks. In high school, he played the double bass and sang with a band. He attended Milan State University, from which he graduated in 1961 with an honors degree in marketing. While at university, he signed on to cruise ships as a musical entertainer. Since his university days, he was accustomed to party and fun, treats that he would showcase regularly throughout his business and political career.

A twenty something, party-lover, self-motivator, Berlusconi started up in the construction industry. He would buy and sell land in and around Milan. His break came when he acquired a vast stretch of empty farmland near the Milan airport. His fortunes turned when the landing pattern was changed and that patch of land, obtained for pennies, became an overnight fortune.

He didn’t stop at construction. Being a musician, a performer and an extrovert by nature, his attention was naturally drawn to TV. Local TV stations, limited in number, were forbidden by law to become national, avoiding competition with state-owned RAI networks. Defiant Berlusconi & Co set up local TV stations and dispatched motorcycle riders to main cities disseminating news pre-recorded on tapes.

In the end of 80s, Berlusconi and his family/friends were heading a conglomerate of companies in media, publishing and broadcasting obtained through mergers and acquisitions. Coincidentally – this contributed to Berlusconi’s soaring fortunes – Italy was on a sharp economic rise during the same period; in 1987 it became the 5th economic power in the world, with its GDP rising by more than 18%. Berlusconi crowned himself the king of Italy by becoming the owner of a star soccer team of AC Milan.

As of 2011, Berlusconi is worth an estimated $6.2bn (according to Forbes, 3rd wealthiest in Italy, 118th wealthiest in the world in 2011).

Notwithstanding his business acumen and success, Berlusconi’s fortunes in politics were not quite on par with his business achievements. On his political count there were three election victories (1994, 2001, 2008), two defeats (1996, 2006), more than 23 judicial investigations (mostly related to corruption), more than 51 votes of confidence in his government (since 2008).

Inside Italy, Berlusconi inspired awe, disgust and respect at different times. Internationally, his idiosyncratic character earned him friends and accolades in quarters where no European was previously seen. His close friendships with Russia’s Putin Lybia’s – now defunct – Qaddhafi and, at the same time, America’s Hillary Clinton were considered controversial.

Berlusconi seem to have always intermingled personal and professional relationships.

One example is information revealed by WikiLeaks about Berlusconi’s politically disguised business activities: deal arrangements on a Gazprom-Eni joint venture bringing gas from Russia to Europe; Berlusconi’s unconditional support of Putin during the Georgia-Russia conflict in 2008; decisions on Italy’s foreign policy to be based on Berlusconi’s inner circle and business associates rather than the country’s foreign interests.

Another example is his relationship Socialist PM Bettino Craxi (Berlusconi’s political mentor) who became godfather to one of Berlusconi’s children. Mr. Craxi’s brother-in-law was a mayor of Milan, which was also power center of Berlusconi’s business empire. In 1994, the recently deposed Tunisian leader Ben Ali – whose rise to the presidency was directly supported by Italy – provided refuge to Mr. Craxi.

But Berlusconi has been vocal in pointing out his political achievements to all and any who would listen. Thanks to his fiscal policies – as he boasted in international conferences in front Germany and France – Italy avoided the housing bubble, its banks did not go bust and its unemployment rate hovered around 8.5% (>20% in Spain). The budget deficit in 2011 is estimated to be circa 4% of GDP (6% in France).

However, these numbers are deceptive. The Economist’s special report revealed that only Zimbabwe and Haiti had lower GDP growth than Italy in the period of 2000-2010. GDP per head in Italy fell, and the public debt is still 120% of GDP.  Berlusconi’s Italy is 83rd in the World Bank’s “Doing Business” index, below Belarus and Mongolia, and 48th in the WEF’s competitiveness rankings, behind Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.

Thus Berlusconi leaves behind an embittered, inert and economically-degraded Italy.

His businesses are running as usual and his macho attitude and chase of women continues to date with late-night parties, which have affected his health dramatically and irreversibly.

Berlusconi’s is thus a rather sad story of how a successful businessman wouldn’t – he most probably could have if only he tried –  do the same for his country as for his businesses. I guess this makes him the most unpatriotic and un-Italian of all Italians.

As for Italy, things look grim. If the newly appointed PM Monti does not get his game together fast, Italy might yet turn to be another Greece.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.

This is Marx quoting in The Communist Manifesto. It seems to describe well what is happening now in the world.

Occupy Wall Street is the visible symptom of societal sickness induced by “bad” capitalism. It highlights the fact that more and more people are starting to think Karl Marx was right about unregulated/loosely regulated markets. An image below does a pretty good notional mapping.

Marx welcomed capitalism’s self-destruction. He was confident that a popular revolution – a grassroots revolution of proletariat spreading from city to city – would occur and bring about a communist system, an egalitarian and fair system where everyone will have his/her chance to be heard, get an employment and lead a happy life.

He understood well how capitalism destroys its own social base, the middle-class. A self-sustaining middle-class is essential for any healthy and happy society. That was the greatest contribution of Henry Ford, who created the middle-class America.   As economists realize, middle-classes are the ones being most affected by bad economic practices on corporate/institutional levels and it is their movements that are currently showing their lion’s head.

Marx considered capitalism as the most revolutionary economic system in history. Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, while agricultural and feudal societies have been in existence many hundreds of years. In contrast, capitalism (with its early roots in 9th century Muslim world) is evolutionary. It transforms everything it touches, making and unmaking societies,  industries, markets and companies.

Most importantly, capitalism also destroyed the very way of life which it preached and depended upon. In the UK, the US and other developed countries over the past 20-30 years, industries have stalled, markets stagnated, job security gone away and jobs outsourced or discontinued.

More and more people live from day to day, with little idea of what the future may bring. 18th-19th century middle-classes used to think their lives unfolded in an orderly progression. It seems no longer to be the case with middle classes of 21st century. There seems to be no upwards stairs. We’d be happy if we could stay on the same level.

While capitalism created and accelerated the industrial revolution, its detrimental effect, especially during last few decades, has given to most people unstable, precarious lives. Admittedly, middle-class incomes are higher then 100 years ago, but there is little effective control over the course of our lives/careers.

Unfortunately, Western governments are quite reactive. Their panacea to the crisis is austerity. Even rich from the West now ask for austerity. They don’t realize one important thing. In Victorian times, the rich could afford to relax provided they were conservative in how they invested their money. It is no longer possible in 21st century, where even the rich get bankrupt from one day to another even without any risky undertakings.

Austerity is a band-aid, a short-term relief against current economic and social sickness afflicting most of the developed world. In a time of zero-interest rates, spending/consuming cuts, melting savings, rising prices, and contracting industries, thriftiness and austerity will yield a negative return on money and over time erode the accumulated/preserved capital.

In a society that is being continuously transformed by market forces (capitalism), one cannot abide by or get used to traditional values (and life standards) for long time, risking to end up on the scrapheap. It’s a person who borrows heavily, who starts a business, who goes on creating jobs and initiatives that survives and prospers. That is the foundation of Schumpeter‘s ideology.

Being sympathetic to Marx’s cause but going one step further, Schumpeter realized the inherent self-destructive nature of capitalism and preached entrepreneurship and disruptive innovation to counter this effect by creating and recreating new economic values, in turn resulting in societal values and traditions. Schumpeter, while thinking that capitalism will cause its own demise, didn’t think it would be by means of communism. His idea, “creative destruction,” explains well why grassroots instability takes place and what the potential cure might look like.

Our single-minded focus on the expectations market will continue driving us from crisis to crisis to ruin—unless we act now.

Says Roger Martin, author of Fixing the Game. Perhaps, he is right. Perhaps, we need to lower our expectations. Perhaps, we need to love what we already have rather than want what we don’t. That and “creating incentives for individuals to act in mutually beneficial and productive ways” (Schumpeter would agree) is what might save the Western world.

Perhaps, there is still hope.

To summarize the most generic and underlying (for all UN agencies) reasons of the UN failures are:

1. The UN has deviated from its primary role of preventing conflicts and over-extended into fields extending from education, to health, to humanitarian issues, to social and cultural fields.
2. The UN today has emerged as an overextended empire with vested interests to enlarging its extent from New York to Paris to Rome and all sorts of UN advisors present from Africa to East Timor.
3. The UN bureaucracy is too heavy and flabby with no justifiable functions.
4. Millions of US dollars are spent on United Nations functions and operations other than the primary role of conflict prevention.
5. UN operations and functions which could be performed by regional organisations or players are abrogated or duplicated by United Nations organisations.
6. Millions of UN dollars are spent on various committee meetings and honorariums to their select members which have no connection at all with global security.
7. Non-traditional security threats are being given priority at the expense of conflict prevention. This again is part of United Nations empire-building by vested interests.

While admittedly there are worthwhile, inspiring stories and exceptions among UN agencies, the large chunk of the UN, like a dinosaur’s rotting flesh and bones, make the stink spread far and wide, obfuscating the few healthy and productive organs it has. As of 2011, the UN remains what it has always been: for most part a debating society, a humanitarian relief organization, and an occasionally useful resort for power diplomacy.

The part blame of UN failures rests with the mindset of UN administrators, who think that no problem in the world is too intractable to be solved by negotiation. These mandarins fail to grasp that men with guns do not respect men with lotus flower. A good example of this incomprehension was Annan’s negotiations with Saddam Hussein. In 1998, Annan undertook shuttle diplomacy to Baghdad, reached a deal with Saddam to continue weapons inspections, and declared him “a man I can do business with.” Almost immediately Saddam flouted his agreement with Annan.

No doubt the UN, conceived in the context (before discoveries/inventions/introduction of DNA, cell phones, computers/Internet, neurosciences, global economy, reserve currency, and the list goes on) and accordance to its own times and needs, must be either dissolved or reorganized into a modern, 21^st century global entity. The UN is highly bureaucratic, inefficient and obsolete as it stands today, a far cry from a modern global and efficient framework assigned to address and solve virtually every problem the world has been facing since millennia and only became aware in the beginning of 20^th century.  The immediacy that is common place today did not exist when the UN was founded. Much of the activities of the UN were not known to most of the world. This is why in the first 40 years sanctions by oppressive governments were largely ignored.

Soem of possible ways of fixing the UN, include:

1. Abolish the SC. Can anyone envision PRC, Ghana and the Republic of Congo adheres to the same principles of human rights as Belgium, Italy and United Kingdom do? In practice, even if those conventions are ratified, there is little effort put in monitoring or enforcing them.
2. Perform SWOT analysis of all UN agencies and either downsize or fully eliminate those which do not adhere to a number of pre-defined strict criteria. Agencies such as UNAIDS need to go or reinvent themselves dramatically.
3. Drastically downsize the UN Secretariat and associated bureaucratic apparatus – it stands along the way of idea exchange, institutional innovation and cross-pollination. Bureaucracy needs to become a friend instead of being an enemy.
4. Initiate a strong reassessment of UN human resources – downgrade/upgrade accordingly, in addition to tieing some of salary or other incentives to employee performance – yet another good business practice the UN can benefit from.
5. Bring in network theory specialists and a study of how its practices can possibly be implemented inside various UN agencies in in order to increase impact and efficiency of their performances.
6. The UN must loose/divert its military (and those adjacent complementing and leading to military) muscles. Passing meaningless resolutions against Israel, China, Russia, and the US with political agendas attached, historically served no purpose except to expose the UN’s weaknesses and soft political underbelly.
7. Divert funds into world education, health and social development, letting go of political and economic aspirations in member countries.
8. All UN member countries come to an agreement of having a “world police” –  the US tipped the prime first candidate (it can be rotational and performance-based). This country will not act under jurisdiction or other legal tie of the UN but independently as a legitimate representative of all the UN (and few non-UN) countries.

The UN was designed to prevent the occurrence of another global war, which it did, without being able to prevent smaller wars/conflicts with even bigger human and other resource loses. Making the UN a more viable organization, more non-political and more relevant for the 21^st century is essential for its survival and relevance in a modern world. Otherwise it should be relegated to the bone yard where its present course is now headed.

• The first and foremost is that it has prevented the occurrence of any further world wars. Instrumental in the maintenance of international balance of power.
• It played a significant role in disarming the world and making it nuclear free (well, almost). Various treaty negotiations like ‘Partial Test Ban Treaty’ and ‘Nuclear non-proliferation treaty’ have been signed under UN.
• Demise of colonialism and imperialism on one hand and apartheid on the other had UN sanctions behind them.
• The UN acted as vanguard for the protection of human rights of the people of the world, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948.
• UN agencies and affiliates such as WHO, UNICEF, and UNESCO have keenly participated in the transformation of the international social sector.
• Limited but moderately successful peace-brokering arrangements and peace-keeping operations in a number of conflict zones (since 1945, the UN has been credited with negotiating 172 peaceful settlements that have ended regional conflicts).
• The world body was also instrumental in institutionalization of international laws and world legal framework.
• Passage of various conventions and declarations on child, women, climate, etc, highlights the extra-political affairs of the otherwise political world body.
• UN interventions in a number of peace missions in Africa have done reasonably well to control the situation.

How do UN affiliates fare? Let’s review World Food Program (WFP) and World Health Organization (WHO) who are in charge of health and food correspondingly in the UN world of affairs.

WFP

Before reading on about food issues, make sure to read these stats from World Food Program (WFP) and these hunger myths by Rehydrate project.

Few organizations that were created after WW2 – including the FAO, the World Bank and the World Food Program – tasked with weaving together a safety net for the world’s poorest.  Some analysts claim that decades of neglect of agriculture by those agencies have left many countries with less food to feed their people.

The FAO has become the target of increasing criticism. In 2007, an independent review concluded that the agency had lost the confidence of donors, who have steadily reduced funding to the organization over the past decade. That same year, World Bank commissioned an internal review of its agricultural programs in Africa, concluding that “over time, the importance of agriculture in the Bank’s rural strategy has declined.” The bank’s Independent Evaluation Group noted that total international agricultural aid fell from $1.9 billion in 1981 to less than $1 billion by 2001, and that the bank cut its number of agricultural specialists for Africa from 40 to 17 over the past decade.

Over 80% of the world’s poor are in rural areas, but the World Bank seems to have decided, for past 30 years, that if market signals don’t support agriculture – they support low-end tech and junk finance mostly – so it won’t support it either.

Both the EU and the US Congress passed tweaked their legislations, writing off billions for farm subsidies, including for the production of ethanol. That last coupled with the fact that Western (European) governments have continued to stick to an import ban on high-yielding, genetically modified crops, thus dissuading African nations from using a technology that could increase production.

Nonetheless, WFP has been receiving and wielding billions of dollars on poor countries. Where does that money go and what purpose does it serve?

One investigative article sheds light on that question. According to it,

…tens of millions of dollars of aid to Ethiopia during the 1984–1985 famine were used for arms.

…an estimated 50 percent of food delivered by the U.N. agency is essentially being stolen—not only by the WFP’s own personnel and contractors, but also Somalia’s armed militias, some of whom are radical Islamists.

Three Somali businessmen won about 80 percent of the agency’s $200 million in transport contracts last year, in what is described as a 12-year-old “de facto cartel.” One of them, Abdulqadir Nur “Enow,” apparently staged a hijacking of his own trucks in order to sell the food. In another case, the report cites witnesses saying Enow’s company sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of food aid in local markets, an outcome made possible by the fact that WFP depended on a local agency run by Enow’s wife to verify his deliveries. Meanwhile, a second WFP trucking contractor, Abukar Omar Adaani, used his wealth to finance a rebel militia that launched an offensive in Mogadishu last year against Somalia’s U.N.-backed transitional government and African Union peacekeepers. Adaani also persuaded the WFP to fund a road officials said was designed to give Islamist insurgents access to an airstrip, according to the report.

…in Ethiopia (one of the largest recipients of food aid in the world), the WFP has spent millions on contracts with transport companies controlled by the country’s increasingly authoritarian ruling party… claimed the Ethiopian government uses food as a weapon, a mere 12 percent of food reached the people for which it was intended in 2008, according to figures from the U.S. State Department.

…for its $1.2 billion, three-year food-relief program in Afghanistan, the WFP’s trucking and shipping costs for food were two to three times above commercial rates… noted that less than 40 percent of the mission’s budget was actually for food.

WFP’s planned shipping costs to send more than a half billion dollars of food aid to North Korea were inflated — prompting the agency to admit that some of its shipping budget went to companies owned by dictator Kim Jong Il’s government.

All this looks like a morbid plot planned by evil malfaisants, whose sole objective is to waste huge amounts of money in their attempt to perpetuate the end of the (poor parts of the) world. But is it? How is it not then?

Has the demonic Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) been scrapped – it accounted for 48% of the EU’s budget in 2006, i.e. circa 50 billion Euros of keeping alive zombie farming businesses?

• Have the debts of the world’s poorest nations been cancelled?
• Is each country in the world paying its fair share into helping those most in need?
• What about China and Russia and Malaysia and other countries with oil interests in Sudan and other places where their corporate not only damage environments but also cause (indirectly and sometimes quite directly) civil unrest and political turmoil?

WHO

World Health Organization (WHO) is considered by many one of the most successful UN affiliates. While unquestionably impactful, it had its fair share of failures in the past. Starting on the positive note though, WHO’s greatest triumph was in 1977 when it announced that it had achieved its aim of eradicating smallpox from the globe. But some of its successes were marred and look bleak in the wake of facts such as that cholera, diarrhoea and tuberculosis still kill thousands of children and adults each year in the developing world despite cures being available. In the case of the latter, misuse of antibiotics has caused severe problems with the disease becoming resistant to the initial treatments.

But before we plunge into its past, let’s review one of its biggest to-date efforts on vaccination and immunization, Global Immunization Vision and Strategy (GIVS).

GIVS was launched in 2006 in cooperation with UNICEF being first of its kind first 10-year plan of tackling global vaccination and immunization matters for most endemic deceases. Its goals are noble and ambitious. But some of its strategies, at least seem to be, quote strange. For example, the “Strategic Area I:  Protecting more people in a changing world” contains:

• Strategy 2:  Increase community demand for immunization
• Strategy 3:  Ensure that unreached people are reached in every district at least four times a year
• Strategy 4: Expand vaccination beyond the traditional target group

What does the Strategy 2 imply? Why would we want an increase in demand for immunization? There is a natural demand, driven by carriers of deceases and those potential at risk of contagion. It is this demand that has to be met, not less, not more. Unless we are talking business, revenue increase and improvement of margins for pharmas regardless of whether there is or not a need for more immunization medicine, something that has had its spotlight and caused much embarrassment for those high flying firms.

Strategy 3 propounds and advocates a quarterly reach for everyone. Why is it 4 times?? Is it because there are four seasons in year? There seems to be no other logic as any infectious decease or epidemic has its own embryo-time, cycles and post-contagious period. Or it is a rule of thumb, a sort of a “just-in-case check-up/immunization”? That would be even dumber as we are dealing here with billions of taxpayer money, significant human and other resource commitments, economies of scale and whatnot. All this is easily convertible into monetary units.

And last but not even close to the least, Strategy 4 sounds like a new idea of a push-sales strategy of a firm that sees its sales stagnate. Traditional group – or so anyone would assume – is the target group which are those who need vaccination/immunization. To propose to enhance it beyond this group sounds little – well, not quite – silly, unless again commercial interests of pharmas are at stake.

Now that the bigger picture and mentality behind GIVS give us some notion about its inspiration – read between the lines – and goals, let’s have a look at numbers. 35% of estimated vaccine costs for 72 poorest countries (which host an estimated 733 million people) comprise 35% of total costs (an estimated $35 billion), the rest of expenditures (65%) spent on systems costs (maintenance of current system and scale up) and campaigns. GIVS assessed that US$ 11–15 billion of the overall resource needs are unmet in those 72 countries, if the GIVS goals are to be reached.

Applying an elementary algebra, we divide the total budget ($35 billion) by a total population (733 million) for those 72 countries. $47 – this is the average to be spent on each person for vaccination/immunization.  Next step was to see whether this sum is big or small for stated goals? According to this abstract, the average cost per fully immunized – only against malaria – child (FIC) in Tanzania increases almost linearly from US 4.2 dollars per FIC at a vaccine price of US 1 dollar per dose to US 31.2 dollars at vaccine price of US 10 dollars per dose. What does this tell us? That even nominal costs to fully immunize against malaria are high, and not inclusive of marketing and other administrative expenses. Thoughts? There seems to be something wrong with numbers – or with my brains.

Let’s now focus on WHO’s treatment of swine flu and AIDS.

Swine flu

World Health Organization conceded serious shortcomings in the agencies handling of the H1N1 swine flu pandemic. The most worrying problem included a failure to communicate uncertainties about the new virus as it spread around the world. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s top influenza expert, said “The reality is there is a huge amount of uncertainty (in a pandemic). I think we did not convey the uncertainty. That was interpreted by many as a non-transparent process.” Fukuda targeted the U.N. agency’s six-phase system for declaring a pandemic had sown confusion about the flu bug which was ultimately not as deadly as the widely-feared avian influenza.

A vocal minority of scientists and government officials around the world have accused WHO of overplaying the danger of the virus, while others have claimed its decision to declare a pandemic was unduly influenced by commercial interests. Critics have said the WHO created panic about the swine flu virus, which turned out to be moderate in its effect, and caused governments to stockpile vaccines which went unused. Questions have been voiced regarding the WHO’s links to the pharmaceutical industry after companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Aventis made massive profits from producing H1N1 vaccine.

Falsely reassuring words of the officials regarding the “safety” of the swine flu vaccines, developed in haste, are now openly incriminated by the Finnish authorities for causing narcolepsy, a serious neurological disorder, which has been observed in several children and adolescents.

AIDS

The WHO’s failure to hit its “3 by 5″ target – a plan to put 3 million AIDS sufferers on life-extending antiretroviral treatment by the end of 2005- is the result of it placing too much emphasis on treatment, and not enough on prevention. As a result of this misprioritisation, new cases of AIDS are piling up faster than they can be treated.

Philip Stevens, director of health projects at International Policy Network said: “Instead of learning from its mistakes and changing direction, the WHO is actually asking for more money so it can beef up a strategy that is clearly failing. This is entirely the wrong way to go about fighting AIDS in Africa.”

That was swine flue and AIDS. How is WHO fairing in on other infectious deceases and endemics? According to the Wikipedia entry of “eradication of infectious deceases,” resulting from the global health efforts, smallpox was successfully by WHO in 1977. Rinderpest, on the other hand was finally declared to be eradicated by FAO in 2010. Global eradication is underway for polio (led by WHO, UNICEF and Rotary Foundation) and dracunculiasis (led by Carter center, not WHO).

In regional efforts of elimination established or under way for malaria (initiated by  Bill and Melinda Gates and creation/funding of Roll Back Malaria Partnership and their Global Malaria Action Plan), lymphatic filariasis (treatments donated by GlaxoSmithKline and Merck), measles, rubella (WHO missed its own set eradication target of 2010), onchocerciasis (Onchocerciasis Control Programme, a joint collaboration of WHO, World Bank, UNDP and FAO, eliminated onchocerciasis as a public health problem by 2002 but as of 2008, about 18 million people were still infected of which 300,000 permanently blinded, the decease still currently endemic in 30 African countries, with circa 120 million people being at risk for contracting the disease), yaws (WHO has moderate success tackling it), bovine spongiform encephalopathy and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease.

The above illustrates that, with one important exception of smallpox, WHO has a sidekick’s role (polio, malaria, onchocerciasis), is a loser (tuberculosis, rubella) or almost entirely absent (dracunculiasis, lymphatic filariasis, measles, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease) from the global health playground, shielding itself by (co-) commissioning studies and conducting surveys.

I leave it up to you to judge success rate and “RoI” of WFP and WHO.

In 2010 Google estimated that there are about 130 million unique books in the world. Google Books launched in 2004 (by now 15 million books), GoodReads in 2007 (5 million members), Copia in 2009, New York Times e-book best-seller lists in 2011.

What are we doing with all this information and opportunity? What is the most accessed item on the internet? Sex.

“To Read, or Not to Read,” a report based on research conducted in 2007 by the National Endowment for the Arts found that while young Americans spend almost two hours a day watching television, only seven minutes of their daily leisure time is spent reading. Almost half of 18-24-years-old Americans read no books for pleasure.

Societies have always institutionalized inequalities of one sort or another. In the past, the pursuit of knowledge and culture was very much an elite preoccupation. In the Renaissance, for example, whether it was Leonardo da Vinci (scholar/scientist in pursuit of art/knowledge/etc) or the MEdici (commissioning creation of art/knowledge/etc), the engine of culture that produced advances in science/technology/art/philosophy was driven by a minority. It is thus not counter-intuitive that despite the overall increase in educational attainment, a large segment of society reflects “non-elite” interests. In this view, “high” (i.e. educated/intelligent) culture has always been the prerogative of the few/elites. Modern political/economic/social democratization/development has therefore merely placed majority culture (which was always there but not exposed as much) in full view.

The transmission of knowledge/tradition is one of the most important functions of any society. Usually, this function is fulfilled by the intelligentsia/elite/minority of the society. The problem is not that the elite failed to “bring culture to the masses,” but that the usual mode of cultural transmission has been inverted—the supposed culture of the masses has become the currency of the intellectual elite. As the decline in literary reading amongst the most educated indicates, the pursuit of ignorance has become a cultural imperative.

Paris Hilton’s latest leather bag, Brad Pitt’s latest sunglasses and alike are the buzzword and bread of masses who do not and want not to know anything say for example about global economic crises under way, or climate changes that already affect us.

Firstly, modern intelligentsia is no longer a transmitter and beacon of high culture but more a great zombie that spearheads trashy, hippy and vulgar (from Greek term meaning “popular”). In the past, this transfer was impeded by a myriad of factors including, lack of access to information, unavailability of information, transportation/transfer difficulties, information/knowledge reproduction costs, etc.

Youth who has university degrees – if I were to generalize somewhat – is the staple good of the (“intellectual”) society and which represents a large proportion of its future leaders.

Yet, according to professor Bauerlein’s book (2008) “The Dumbest Generation,” more than half of American school leavers score below basic achievement levels even in American history; 52% think that Germany, Italy and Japan were US allies in the WW2. It is the Digital Age which has, he postulates, stunted and diminished not only the knowledge young people attain, but the very tools they require to attain it. Calculator – adding numbers. Google Translate – translate entire text without review/analysis and thought. Baroness Susan Greenfield uses the term “mind change” to highlight the potential danger to human cognitive development in the unmonitored and unregulated exposure of young minds to digital technology/media.

Second reason, apart from reversal of knowledge transfer from the elite to masses, is the manner in which education is “packaged” and delivered at schools/universities. History books, for example, are narrow in their scope and tend to have biases (for example, history Easter Europe usually doesn’t get much adequate exposure in most modern European historic treatises – a notable exception is Fischer’s history of Europe). Thus, packaging is wanty. Delivery as well became less comprehensive as teachers are less and less educated/prepared for their jobs.

A third important aspect is that history has become more idealized/romanticized. In the pursuit of “real history,” history courses depict an ideological construct that they fabricate largely in the absence of evidence or filling in the “desired” course of actions (depending on history and politics of a country). Many contemporary history courses are actually a-historical, in which the social experience and context of the past float in a timeless and eventless “now” and where all regional/temporal differences are ignored.

Socrates realized that to “know thyself” one has to go through interaction with others. We are social animals, and understanding the “other” is essential to how we live and learn. The process of gaining this knowledge to inner worlds of others is called theory of mind. It’s a developmental process whereby children gradually achieve understanding that their mental view and perception of the world is different from that of others. Older children begin to be able to place themselves in someone else’s position, to understand something from someone else’s point of view.

Reading – check the fabulous introduction to Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin why we need to read – is the ultimate form of exercise of theory of mind. It places us within the consciousness of both the writer and the characters of the book, while also giving us access to the writer’s world/experiences/imagination.

Current trend is that people want to be read, they don’t want to read. They don’t have time, nor feel there is much knowledge (beyond what they already know) that can enrich them – there is always some excuse.

The failure of our social/cultural institutions to counterbalance unwanted consequences of modern socio-technological pressures is what might bring to the point of make-or-break our modern society and its intellectual and economic achievements.

There are specks of hope though. In the spring of 1971, a librarian Marguerite Hart set out to inspire the Troy (America) youngsters to read and love the library. Her letter-writing campaign invited writers, actors, musicians, politicians to share what made reading special for them. She got 97 letters, including notes from Neil Armstrong and Isaac Asimov. The collection became known as Letters to the Children of Troy.

What about other agencies of the UN and their areas of responsibility and action? Besides the maintenance of global peace/security, the UN has a three-pronged raison d’être: economic, social and political betterment of the world. How has the UN been fairing on these dimensions?

Ivory Coast (political)

The United Nations had a plan for Ivory Coast: to oversee elections and install a “winner-takes-all” state president.  Having failed to secure a political solution, the UN joined with French forces and one side in the civil war in Ivory Coast to forcibly overthrow the government that had lost the election but refused to quit. The discovery of mass graves of civilian victims of gruesome violence suggests that the UN may have reignited the North-South civil war instead of healing it.

Kenya (health/society)

The orthodox account of how HIV is transmitted in African countries is inherently racist.

UNAIDS have rarely been heard to refer to any kind of non-sexually transmitted HIV except to deny that it exists. And they have to spend their time thinking up ad hoc explanations of why a virus that is difficult to transmit sexually is almost always transmitted sexually in (some) African countries and hardly ever in non-African countries.

Syria (political)

It is deplorable that some members of the United Nations Security Council – most disappointingly, Brazil, India and South Africa – were reluctant to pass a resolution condemning the Syrian military’s continual attacks on unarmed demonstrators. At long last, on Wednesday, the council issued a “statement,” which does include the verb “condemn,” but carries less authority than a resolution.

Iraq (economic/social)

“I went to the U.N. as a die-hard supporter of that organization. I left as one of its most outspoken critics,” Spertzel, who formerly led the U.N. biological weapons inspection team in Iraq after the first Gulf War.

“The Oil-for-Food people spent most of their time in the cafeteria, as opposed to being out in the field making sure that the material was going to the locations that it was supposed to,” Spertzel said. “It was such common knowledge it had to be known.”

In an arrangement negotiated by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the UN collected 2.2% of every oil sale — totaling $1.4 billion in all — to ensure Oil-for-Food was on the up-and-up. Instead, Saddam stole billions, collecting kickbacks from oil buyers and dishonest aid suppliers who often stuck the Iraqi people with third-rate food and medicine that was unfit for human consumption.

DR Congo (human rights/social)

The UN has consistently failed Congolese women, at every level from the troops on the ground to the Security Council that deploys them, from the array of UN agencies present in the DRC to the Secretariat in New York and the Secretary-General charged with leading the bureaucracy. It has failed to understand the problem, to address it, to acknowledge its own mistakes, to assign responsibility, and to substitute effective action for rhetoric.

Hutu members of the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR) who had participated in the 1994 Rwandan genocide fled that year over the border into the DRC. By 1996 they had penetrated deep into the Congo. Now there are about 6,000 FDLR fighters who use the DRC as a base, and are deeply involved in exploiting that country’s minerals. They have raped women without pause or hesitation since arriving.

Against this background, the UN’s actions and inaction over the last 14 years have led to the latest episodes in Luvungi and other areas in eastern Congo. Local Congolese rebels together with the FDLR took over Luvungi from July 30 to August 3 and raped hundreds of women. The world was informed not by the UN, but by an NGO, International Medical Corps, which was approached by victims who sought help. This is astonishing until one looks carefully at the UN’s role in the DRC.

Pakistan (environment/social)

“The United Nation’s One UN Joint Program is a wonderful project, but unfortunately this pilot and test project was totally failed due to the recruitment of the incompetent staff at the key posts.”

… people hired are only those who have been recommended by the incumbent government. He said that the hiring process favors hiring family members of other UN employees.

… initiated by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). A best example of these failures is the Mountains Areas Conservancy Project (MACP), which has failed badly. This project was considered a failure because the UN didn’t generate any awareness among the Pakistani people about the conservancy of the mountains.

Needless to say that the bigger picture here looks quite as bleak as for the SC.

What is to be done – if there is anything possible – to make the United Nations to live up to its name and act more responsibly, effectively and in a more considerate and impactful manner? The part-3 will elaborate on that..