zenpundit.com

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday…where action is the attraction…

Top Billing! Threatswatch.org – Mexican President: Gov’t Does Not Control Areas on US Border

Steve Schippert pushes attention toward the greatest underreported national security problem of recent years. Other than John Sullivan,  John Robb, Adam Elkus, Stratfor, Fabius Maximus and a few other small blog sites, is anybody paying regular attention to our Southern neighbor becoming a failed state ?

Congrats to Winslow Wheeler and Dr. Chet Richards for Stanford University Press picking up America’s Defense Meltdown.

Tim Stevens has a new article up in World Defence Systems.

Complexity and Social Networks Blog – Alone in the Crowd: The Structure and Spread of Loneliness in a Large Social Network

Is loneliness contagious ? More evidence on the dynamic qualitative nature of networks.

The Glittering Eye – Visualcy, Newspapers, and Political Communication and Case In Point

Visualcy has been a continuing on/off subject of discussion between myself and Dave

CTLab Review – Dr. Marc Tyrell – The Fight For Academic Hearts and Minds (warning: rant)

I like a good rant. 🙂

John P. Sullivan & Adam Elkus – SWJ – Postcard from Mumbai

The postmodern urban insurgency.

Fabius Maximus –  The media doing what it does best these days, feeding us disinformation

FM takes on “advocacy journalism” ( case in point Newsweek, which explicitly practices this model)

Abu Muqawama –  Special Abu Muqawama Interview: Craig Mullaney

Perhaps Craig Mullaney’s book, The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education (Penguin USA), will be the Fiasco, the defining book, for the war in Afghanistan. Looks good and Mullaney is getting a lot of attention. Great title.

SWJ Blog – The Unforgiving Minute

Review by Dave Dilegge, another indicator that Mullaney may have written “the” book re: Afghanistan war for some time to come.

Top RAND defense intellectual, David Ronfeldt now has a blog,  Apropos Two Theories ( hat tip to Shloky)

David Armano – Battle of the Brands

“Brandividuals” ?

Danger Room – Scientist Looks to Weaponize Ball Lightning

Cool.

Scientific American – Six Ways to Boost Brainpower

Finally! Research we can use ! Guys – it justifies our excess caffeine consumption and playing of video games!

Recommended Viewing:

Courtesy of Tim Stevens of Ubiwar, the PPT of General  (res.)  Dr. Shimon Naveh of the IDF, feautured in a post here last week.

Shimon Naveh PowerPoint

View more presentations from ubiwar.

From Jamais Cascio of Open The Future:

Art Center Summit talk – Future: To Go

View more presentations from Jamais Cascio. (tags: futuro de)

Dan Robles of Ingenesist ( Hat tip to Dave Davison at Thoughts Illustrated) 

Innovation Economics Next

View more presentations from ingenesist. (tags: innovation economics)

That week went by quickly.

Top Billing! John Arquilla – NYT – “The Coming Swarm”

Arquilla was ahead of the curve long before most other defense intellectuals. Glad to see him getting ink in the top MSM organ. (Hat tip to John)

Thomas P.M. Barnett in Defense News

Exposition of the role of private sector in Sys Admin.

Selil Blog – University systems at a crossroads: Furloughs and funding of futures and fantasies

A superb post by Sam. A must read.

Information Dissemination – Friendly Advice of the Day

Galrahn knows his stuff. I’d really like to see the Pentagon or the Navy hire him for the same reason I think that Matt Armstrong should have an office at the State Department – they can help get things up to speed in terms of communication and message.

John Robb – JOURNAL: The Notre Dame conference

I should have gone to this one, damned sched!  John Robb meets Martin van Creveld says it all.

HG’s World – Announcing! The Great Powers Junto Club Reading Group

HG99, himself a historian, is modeling the club after Ben Franklin’s original Junto.

Coming Anarchy – The Post-Nuclear Iran World

Ominous.

TDAXP – Building a Table of Contents for “5GW: The Fifth Generation of War?”

The next Nimble book project from this corner of the blogosphere, edited by Dan of tdaxp.

Counterterrorism Blog – Congress Moves to Keep Attention to Bout’s Extradition Process

“Viktor Bout” is a free-lancer like Colonel  Bob Denard was independent of French intelligence.

Eeben Barlow –  Strategy and Tactics of War

A practitioner’s advice.

The Strategist – “I must die. But must I die bawling?”

Umm….that’s Epictetus, not Kotare. : )

That’s it!

Let’s see…..

UPDATED!

Top Billing! Dr. Mark Drapeau -“Government 2.0: Rise of the Goverati”

Some dread excess Obamoptimism here but an interesting and thoughtful take on how the new White House crowd are digital natives and successfully assimilated digital immigrants. Then again the twitter page for the Obama administration has not exactly been a house of fire. Neither has the White House blog which continues to underwhelm.

CTOvision – “Foreign Spies Make Recession Worse and Steal Part of Our Future”

Updated trend of the old Soviet bloc desire to steal as much as possible through industrial espionage, something that goes back to the days of AMTORG – and yes, we still suck at stopping it.

The Telegraph –  “CIA warns Barack Obama that British terrorists are the biggest threat to the US”

As long as we are on a CI kick today, maybe the easiest thing to do is to start social network mapping adherents of radical mosques for a strict scrutiny list regarding travel or funds transfer into the U.S. You want to attend services with a guy who preaches my murder and enslavement, fine, just don’t expect to come over here for a visit or to get an education or a job here or that we’ll easily let your relatives in either.

SEED –  Blogging the Origin

Doing for Charles Darwin what Chicagoboyz is doing for Carl von Clausewitz . The Smithsonian also has What Darwin Didn’t Know up.

SEED x 2 Here’s something important to consider for all COIN and 4GW enthusiasts:

“Chaos begets Chaos”

“A new study supports the controversial claim that people can be morally swayed by the state of their surroundings.”

Foreign Policy – Parag Khanna “The Road to Kabul Runs Through Beijing (and Tehran)”

Not endorsing but interesting. Good follow up on Nexon yesterday.

THANKS! to those who linked to my interview with Tom Barnett at SWJ last week, including Andrew Sullivan, FP’s This Week at War, HG’s World, Rethinking Security, Global Guerillas , MountainRunner…

TDAXP offers up the Hitler Downfall collection

Open the Future – Flunking Out

Like AE, Jamais Cascio is unimpressed with Singularity U.

That’s it!

Going for an odd juxtaposition today.

Top Billing! On Google:  LA Times – Google ready to pursue its agenda in Washington and The Guardian – Google plans to make PCs history

Let’s be very clear. Google will be to the Obama administration what Halliburton and Blackwater combined were to the Bush II administration…and maybe then some. That doesn’t make Google “evil”, some of what the search engine giant desires from the USG is good policy but it means that those watching the intersection of politics, public policy and technology need to give Google below the radar scrutiny in order to be ahead of the curve.

MountainRunner – Noteworthy

Check out the link to WindowonEurasia ( hat tip Galrahn ). This fits the growing “neo-Eurasianism” ideology of the Siloviki clique around Putin.

Haft of the Spear –  Book Update 

I will post on this topic when it goes “live” on Amazon.

Global Guerillas – PROTECTION RACKETS

An interesting analysis by John Robb on the nature of the state.

Conversations with History – Niall Ferguson

Committee of Public Safety – Neglected Strategists: Kautilya, the Arthashastra, the Spectrum of Power, and 5GW

An introduction to the Machiavelli of India ( China’s Machiavelli was Han Fei-tzu )

SEED – Seed Salon: Albert-Laszlo Barabasi + James Fowler and  Revolutionary Minds

Network theory’s great figure and cutting edge thinkers.

On Networks and Time: 

“Time-Dependent Complex Networks: Dynamic Centrality, Dynamic Motifs, and Cycles of Social Interaction*”   by Dr. Dan Braha and Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam

This stretched my brain and I’m not qualified to vet the work BUT for military/intel types, this research implies IMHO that “targeted assassinations” or less than total war “EBO” campaigns may only have transient effects or at least less effect than expected because the dynamic nature of nodal roles gives the network more resiliency than a casual analysis might lead one to believe. Shane and Dr. Von are cordially invited to weigh in and correct me here.

Logic and Emotion – Thinking Visually

Thinking Visually

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: storytelling presentation)

That’s it!

Top Billing!: John Hagel – Pareto Power and Leveraged Growth and Pareto Paring – Achieving Strategic Cost Reduction

The “Pareto Curve” of Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto is bettern known in the blogosphere as “The Long Tail” due to Chris Anderson of WIRED who wrote the recent bestseller The Long Tail, (Revised and Updated) and Nassim Nicolas Taleb‘s  The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable which expounded on “Black Swan” events occuring on the “Extremistan” end of Pareto’s distribution curve.  The Pareto Curve has powerful applications, particularly well in a globalized, information economy, environment and John Hagel is, for me, always an educational read.

Scientific American – Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies of Psychology and The Future of Man–How Will Evolution Change Humans?

“…Harpending and Hawks’s team estimated that over the past 10,000 years humans have evolved as much as 100 times faster than at any other time since the split of the earliest hominid from the ancestors of modern chimpanzees. The team attributed the quickening pace to the variety of environments humans moved into and the changes in living conditions brought about by agriculture and cities”

Lexington Green – Clausewitz, On War, Book I: The Enduring Value of Clausewitz’s Articulation of the Nature of War

Also courtesy of Lex….

John Robb – Fewer Teachers more Automation

I want to tackle this post in detail later.

Fabius Maximus – “Some people just want to see the world burn”

I agree with FM. Mr. Bowman does not understand the psychology of the warlord, or those who would sign up with them. From my view, the world contains no shortage of armed bohemians.

Josephfouche – The First Rule of 5GW is, You Do Not Talk About 5GW

Heh. Dan of TDAXP meets his match in the smooth, original, Open Office, color graphics for war theory department.

SWJ Blog – A Proposal for a Unifying Strategic Doctrine for National Security

A discussion starter.

The Claremont Institute – Bennett and Cribb on Post-Racial Politics

There appears to be an interesting – though warily executed by both parties – reachng out going on between the conservative intellectual establishment and the incoming administration of Barack Obama. Sort of a political detente in progress for a possible strategic triangulation on issues where common ground can be discerned. 

John Seely Brown on “Creativity”:

That’s it !