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Joost Bonsen's Opinions on How Money, Ideas, and Talent can
Enable Health, Wealth, and Happyness for Each plus Achieve Liberty, Prosperity, and Vitality for All and Ultimately Help Us Spread Beyond Our Cradle Planet Earth
"Across Timbuktu, in cupboards, rusting chests, private collections and libraries, tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of manuscripts bear witness to this legendary city's remarkable intellectual history, and by extension, to Africa's much overlooked pre-colonial heritage. [...] They provide unique insights into Timbuktu's emergence as a trading post, and by the 1500s as a famous university town, full of students and scribes. They also help refute the notion that sub-Saharan Africa produced only oral histories, with little or no written records. Some of the documents discuss social and political problems, usually in an Islamic context, while others offer medicinal advice, including one 13th Century herbal remedy to help treat women in labour."Kudos to the South Africans for stepping forward to financially support saving this history, but one has to ask, Where's Google? Surely there won't be any copyright complaints around digitizing these books!
Dr Comer is perhaps best known for his creation in 1968 of the Comer School Development Program (SDP), the forerunner of most modern school reform efforts. He is the author of nine books, including Maggie’s American Dream, and Leave No Child Behind, and has served on multiple boards, advisory committees, and more.
"The MIT Media Laboratory is launching a Social Health Initiative, and a series of inaugural keynote lectures. Our goal is to create a network of organizations and tools that help people thrive, staying healthy and happy during their entire lives. Because social health is intimately intertwined with social support, adequate wealth, self-determination, and security, a successful social health system must take a holistic view of life."This Social Health Initiative is worthy of your close attention.
"John Prendergast, who worked in the Clinton administration on Africa policy, co-founded "The Enough Project," which works to expose war crimes. He says Congo is stuck in a vicious cycle of war -- in which rape and other atrocities are common -- due to the outside world's demand for the precious minerals it holds. "If you do a conflict analysis, you will find that when there are spikes in violence, it has something to do with contestation over the mineral resources, gold and the rest of them," he tells Pelley. Congo also holds vast quantities of copper, tin and coltan -- an essential ingredient of electronics. Militias will attack civilian populations near the mineral supply to take control over a source of income. "It's chaos organized in order to exploit the gold and other minerals for the enrichment of these armed groups and it just keeps the cycle going and going," says Prendergast."Pelley goes on to interview the jewelry industry and draw parallels with "conflict diamonds" which are banned. Seems to me that commercial pressures are only one vector of influence. Surely this is a clear-cut case for armed humanitarian intervention -- Peacemaking -- as Paul Collier argues for -- "Security Assistance through Military Intervention" -- which is something rather beyond the Peacekeeping currently being tried. See here the 60 Minutes piece...
"Ideally, a strong identity provides continuity and consistency, allowing a business to prioritize opportunities efficiently. For instance, when laser vision-correction surgery emerged as a possible substitute for eyeglasses, the Luxxotica Group, the maker of luxury and sports eyewear brands like Chanel, Prada and Ray-Ban, chose not to participate. “We are an eyewear company and, simply put, our best opportunities for growth going forward continue to be in our core business,” says Kerry M. Bradley, president of Luxxotica Retail North America. “From this perspective, we passed on laser vision correction.” In contrast, laser techniques fit well with the identity of Bausch & Lomb, a contact lens maker that defines itself as an eye health company. It developed its own laser eye treatment, called Zyoptix. So each company responded to the opportunities of laser surgery in a way that was consistent with its identity."Better this than getting stuck in the "identity trap"! Other interesting ongoing cases include Philips, Sony, Xerox, Kodak and many more.
"...leaders arriving in the Caribbean will be presented with two reports, both of which are remarkably blunt, considering that one was funded in part by the Commonwealth’s small Secretariat, and the other came from the Royal Commonwealth Society, the largest of the NGOs that promote the club. Both reports suggest that the group must acquire more bite, as a promoter of democracy and human rights, or else it might as well shut up."I hope the leadership do not focus too myopically on primarily human rights and environmental issues instead of more broadly and constructively -- on issues of free trade, the everyday economics of families, increasing entrepreneurship, education for all, essential infrastructure, sustainable development, and other core elements of human prosperity -- i.e. those things crucial to our common wealth, in short. Overall, I'm quite personally enthusiastic about what I think of as THE Commonwealth -- a global institution that can embrace a growing family of humanity (as evidenced by including ex-Portugese Mozambique and hopefully ex-Belgian Rwanda), that emphasizes the practical benefits of common English language for business, basic rule-of-law, emphasis on investments, and the like. The Commonwealth is a platform for prosperity in sub-saharan Africa and greater south and east Asia -- and prospectively even in the MENA region currently outside the bloc. Indeed, I think the English-savvy countries of the EU -- especially the Dutch, Germans, and Scandinavians -- would be better off banding together joining into the current Commonwealth and building towards a global Economic Commonwealth. This seems like a natural secular successor to NATO, for instance, one emphasizing common economic prosperity instead of narrowly defensive security. Furthermore, it would be neither limited to geographic co-location -- the challenge of most economic groups from ASEAN onward -- nor blithely open to anyone, malevolent dictators and kleptocrats alike -- the prime problem of the UN (and for that matter, the AU and USAN)
"Consider the basic cook stove -- a low-cost option that can dramatically reduce pollution. More than half the world's population burns fuel indoors to cook and heat their homes, according to the World Health Organization. Those indoor fires emit small particles that can get lodged in the lungs and that account for 1.5 million deaths annually, says the organization, which calls the fires "the killer in the kitchen." The fires also contribute to a smoggy plume known as the Atmospheric Brown Cloud. Studies, including some from Stanford University, say the cloud is trapping heat in the atmosphere. Several companies and nonprofit groups are trying to sell large numbers of low-cost stoves, particularly in India. The stoves look like pasta pots. Because of their design, they cook a meal with less wood, which they burn more cleanly. So the stoves can slash emissions of pollutants by more than half, manufacturers say."One exemplar of this effort is Envirofit, the US social enterprise whose well-engineered, low-cost cook stove is pictured and whose co-founder "BOPreneur" Paul Hudnut is a key player in the growing development ventures movement!
"...offers cutting-edge medical care in India at a fraction of what it costs elsewhere in the world. His flagship heart hospital charges $2,000, on average, for open-heart surgery, compared with hospitals in the U.S. that are paid between $20,000 and $100,000, depending on the complexity of the surgery. The approach has transformed health care in India through a simple premise that works in other industries: economies of scale. By driving huge volumes, even of procedures as sophisticated, delicate and dangerous as heart surgery, Dr. Shetty has managed to drive down the cost of health care in his nation of one billion. His model offers insights for countries worldwide that are struggling with soaring medical costs, including the U.S. as it debates major health-care overhaul."Perhaps even more widely known is the story of the Aravind Eye Hospital as reported on by PBS NewsHour's Fred de Sam Lazaro in Two Decades On, India Eye Clinic Maintains Innovative Mission...
"The late ophthalmologist Govindappa Venkataswamy founded Aravind in 1976, after he retired at fifty-five from the government hospital in Madurai. Dr V, as he was widely known, combined a religious zeal to serve and his fascination with businesses like McDonald's and the "other chains you have in America" that were able to provide a uniform product on a massive scale. Methodically, he built on the concept of high quality assembly line patient care, forging close ties to public health experts at the University of Michigan and to the Berkeley-based Seva Foundation. [...] Aravind began by offering care to paying patients, using the proceeds to offer free care to those who could not afford it."Both of these are excellent examples of innovative healthcare approaches emerging out of developing countries!
This spawned a boom in planning applications and a community volunteer body, Plant*SF, to advocate and spread more such gardens. What a great little story of DIY urbanism making for every more beautiful, livable, and vital cities!"...her garden thrived. In fact it attracted the attention of the local community and passers-by for positive reasons. People stopped to chat when she was out weeding and several neighbours asked her how they might go about planting their own front-of-house gardens. Indeed this modest patch of succulents, evergreens and native flowers in one of the city’s densest neighbourhoods became the launch-pad for an ambitious greening project that has seen significant expanses of pavement replaced with gardens across San Francisco."
"I staggered into a tiny village called Korphe, where the impoverished residents gave me food, shelter -- and a mission. One afternoon, I watched 82 children scratch their lessons in the dirt with sticks. Among them was a girl named Chocho, who appealed to me to come back one day and build Korphe a school -- one that would be open to all children, even though, in that part of the world, the privilege of learning to read and write has traditionally been reserved for boys. Three years later, I kept my promise. The organization I founded, the Central Asia Institute (CAI), has kept right on building. Today, in the mountains of rural Pakistan -- where schools are scarce and all too often supported by the same radical Islamist money and ideology that fuels al-Qaeda and the Taliban -- CAI now has 91 schoolhouses. We serve 19,000 students -- three-quarters of them girls."Mortenson's written about his experience in a to-be-published book, Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. About that aborted climb, though?
"A few months ago, I gave a talk in Durango, CO. A young girl raised her hand. "Will you ever go back and try to climb K2 again?” she asked. "No," I replied. "I’ve found a better mountain."How beautiful is that -- A Better Mountain to climb!