What is Jordan.. but Amman by Jamil Shawwa

The other day I was having lunch at a Middle Eastern restaurant in the DC area, in Virginia. While ordering the food, I came across a server who ‘happened’ to be from the Middle East and particularly from Jordan. Before knowing where he was from exactly, I asked him to tell me and he said Jordan, I then asked, from Amman? And he responded spontaneously by saying, of course, what is Jordan but Amman. The obvious explanation to his answer is that Amman is the capital, the biggest, the richest city so clearly he must be from there, where else. Beneath this simple direct answer lies a volcano of how the people in the Middle East feel about their countries and how the rulers have ruled in the past fifty years. Since the early fifties, all resources in the Arab world, the Middle East have shifted to the capitals of the Arab countries, the government, the financial power, the capital, etc. People from all over the respective countries started to migrate towards the capitals searching for better life. There cities, towns and villages did not have the resources to maintain them. Investments have shifted to the capitals and the very surrounding areas. The capitals became congested, crowded, randomly designed to accommodate the thousands and millions newly immigrants, case in point is Cairo-Egypt.
Cairo became a monster in random buildings and designs, by the way, the Arab world shares this problem with other countries elsewhere like Mexico, etc. The feeling became since the late fifties that if you want to succeed you must go to Misr, meaning Cairo, this is Egypt’s name in Arabic and also Egyptians refer to their capital as Misr. Nasser, Egypt’s leader then almost ignored all other parts of the country and focused on Cairo. The problem became bigger and bigger by time and now as the Egyptians try to expand outside the city, the solutions are very hard to implement. The concentration of power was one of the reasons that those leaders focused on the capitals. They wanted the capital to have the power to control the rest of the country. Another reason was the socialist model that many Arab countries have copied from the defunct Soviet Union. Again, the solution resorts in few words, democracy is one of them, the private initiative and the powers of the market. These solutions that are easy to talk about but difficult to implement, however the gate has opened and it has to be done in the near future. These solutions will overcome the void the Arab youth feel and will steer the focus into building rather than destroying.

Air France 309, and the making of the news

CNN was first, in The USA, to report the unfortunate accident of Air France 309 while landing in Toronto Airport coming from Paris. MSNBC was second, and then FOX, then the rest. What caught my attention in that coverage is that all, everyone, including so called aviation experts assumed that no one could survive such an accident, that the pictures are so clear and the precedents are there, a similar Delta crash twenty years ago, to back up those experts claim that there is no way that anyone survived. I, a no expert in aviation, felt that the plane looked as if it did not went to flames immediately, and that there was no immediate explosion. I kept watching to see how the news media either love to jump into conclusion, take short cuts, or just hungry for a juicy piece of news, unfortunately the possibility of no survivors, or all the above would cover the news. It's amazing how CNN brought an anchor by the name of Miles O'Brien who has some, or a lot, of aviation experience who swore on his ancestors grave that there is no way that there could be any survivors. He even brought a friend of his who was a Captain of US Airways to talk the same talk. Wolf Blitzer who was running the show then tried to make sense out of all this and tried to keep brining the Delta crash to show that he also knew what he was talking about. At the end, or just an hour after the coverage the truth came and that all passengers and crew survived this accident. Oh, poor news media, what a disappointment. No one dared to predict the possibility of survivors, at least not any of the ones I watched. Again, mediocrity in the coverage, not much gut to swim against the norm or the obvious, taking the safest and what I call just scratching the surface approach to news or things.

NASA, why?

What is happening to the Nasa Space Shuttle Discovery is the least to say weird. When NASA started the space program over 50 years ago, it seemed that it knew what it needed to do. The leaders of this great organization had vision, know how, means and most important they had leadership that set a business model, goals and structure to get the job done. What went wrong? Maybe the lack of competition made the people there go easy on the quality of the program, Russia is no more a viable competitor, Asia and Europe lag behind and most important no one has a similar shuttle program. To send a shuttle full of human beings, qualified scientists to space knowing that it is not perfect is a scandal. When it comes to such missions, everything must be examined, reexamined and perfect. On earth maybe we can tolerate imperfection, but out there, in the outer space, everything must be perfect. Instead of focusing on the mission, we are now focusing on how to repair the shuttle and prevent it from exploding in the space or when it comes down and enter the earth. This is a shame. It's a shame that we were better when we first sent Columbia to space and after over 20 years we are worse. Why? Maybe because of the reasons I stated above, probably the lack of leadership. We have political appointees that worry about cutting cost and taking risks rather than a methodological approach to our mission. Fix the problems at NASA by having experienced visionary leaders who have the knowledge or can acquire it. Leaders who can set the tone and the stage for a great space program. Kick out the short cuts and mediocrity from the program. Please review the Busboys article in my site for related information.