Recommended Reading

I’m back!

Top Billing! In honor of  Monday’s roundtable, some visualization and explanation of the intellectual journey of John Boyd from Dr. Chet Richards -“Where Boyd Got the Discourse“.

 The Lounsbury -“Dollars, Gulf Politics & MENA Economies, tip, tip toeing….”  Given the interest over the Fallows article on the Dollar-based hedge policy of China, Collounsbury weighs in Qatar trying to hedge against the dollar’s weakness and econ conditions in MENA. His remark on the 1970’s resonates for those who recall the bombshell of Nixon taking Connally’s advice to let the Dollar float and ending it’s ethereally abstract tie to gold. Nixon did so because foreign dollars reserves vastly exceeded the ratio under which the old policy had been sustainable.

John Robb – “PANDORA’S BOX”  The heterogeneity of warfare’s downward spiral in an era of interconnective globalization and state-decline.

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett – “Barnett: Better days, just not right now”  Tom and John could go on the road as The Odd Couple of geopolitical security analysis; here Tom outlines the upsides of our current national malaise.

Jeremy Young – “Blogging and Peer Review”  Jeremy squarely hits the nail on how blogging as a platform threatens gatekeeping elites in academia and the “rule of the journals”. Let’s be honest here. Peer-review journals enforce scholarly standards in terms of form but how often have we read an article in one where the argument was so strained and intellectually shoddy, the citations weak or irrelevant that we had to wonder how in the hell it was published if not via some personal connection between author and editor? 

SWJ Blog – “Are We Ready for Hybrid Wars?” Summarizes a new argument by top level military thinker Frank Hoffman.

Swedish Meatballs Confidential puts their (meat)ball back into blogospheric play after a long holiday hiatus. Welcome back !

Matt Armstrong gets noticed.

That’s it!