Recommended Reading

….The recent decision by President Obama to commit to a “Strategic Pivot” to reinforce our presence in the Western Pacific has left the Navy with hard choices to do more with less, as it plans to retire 16 ships and now 7 more cruisers and 2 amphibious ships next year. Some in Congress have begun to question the logic and soundness of the Navy’s decision. This topic has spread to the influential naval centric blog of Information Dissemination, where this post generated lively debate. Amid the plans for pivoting to Asia is a rather large fly in the ointment named Iran. Reading the “Tea Leaves” tends support the phrase, plan for the worst, and hope for the best.

Thomas PM Barnett – WPR’s The New Rules: In Tough Times, America’s ‘Dirty Harry’ Streak Re-Emerges  

President Barack Obama has presented himself as the ender of wars. Moreover, where the preceding administration went heavy with its military power, the Obama administration goes laparoscopically light. And as if to culminate a quarter-century trend of U.S. military interventions that have all somehow devolved into manhunts of some sort, America now simply skips the intervention and gets straight to hunting down and killing bad guys. We stand our ground, as it were, on a global scale. Give us the wrong gesture, look, attitude or perceived intention, and wham! One of ours might kill one of yours — in a heartbeat. You just never know.

If that sounds like the resurrection of the “Dirty Harry” mindset, it has a lot to do with our still-tough economic times. As a nation and society, we have a long and persistent history of adopting a decidedly illiberal attitude when income growth lags. Jostled by hard times, we feel little remorse about dispatching those who transgress, trespass, threaten or terrorize us.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Why We Don’t Know What We Talk About When We Talk About Probability 

I will rephrase the previous two points, as they are nonseparable. 

Luckily, we do not use probabilities in daily(and less daily) decisions,

at least not in the raw form presented in the literature -doing so 

would have made us exit the gene pool.

To Be or to Do –Frederick the Great, Baron Von Steuben, and the Value of Practice, Practice, Practice 

Danger Room–Navy: We’re 4 Years Away From Laser Guns on Ships and FBI: Russian Honeypot Tried To Sex Obama Cabinet Official

Outside the Beltway (Dr. James Joyner) –Republican Stupidity Widens Gender Gap 

Chicago Boyz (David Foster) –Rogues’ Gallery: The Convicts of Early Australia 

What kind of person keeps $ 10 million in cash at home?

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