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Top Billing!  Information Dissemination – Theories and Considerations

Missed this when Galrahn originally posted it. It’s a “must read” post for understanding where US Navy strategy could go in the next decade. First rate work!

Thomas P.M. Barnett –  “Why Ahmadinejad Is Better for the U.S. Than Moussavi”

I strongly agree here with Tom that the Pasdaran clique of Iranian “siloviki” from the IRGC and security ministries have now gained the upper hand over the clergy as a whole, by aligning with the hardest line minority of clerics. Guns trump turbans.

Whirledview (CKR) – Turning Points

Cheryl Rofer’s next post in our 1913 discussion.

Edge Perspectives with John Hagel- Shift Happens Redux

John details his new longitudinal Shift Index.

The Committee of Public Safety – The Soviet Package of Liberty

The Soviets as strategic spoilers.

Rough Type – The sour Wikipedian

Nick Carr makes the argument that Wikipedians – and by extension, social media user types – are basically loner a-holes. Thanks Nick! 😉

Zero Intelligence Agents – Interstate Conflict and Genetic Similarity; Consequences for COIN  and Fog of COIN

The second post is not by Drew Conway, but is a guest post by Thomas Zeitzoff of NYU and a review of David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla.

Progressive Historians (Ellman) – Living On $2 A Day: An Interview With Economist Jonathan Morduch

A fascinating look at the often sophisticated market activity of the world’s “bottom billions”.

SWJ Blog (Dilegge) – War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age

Book review.

physicsworld.com – In search of the black swans

Is the professional and institutional culture of scientists discouraging future paradigm shifts ?

Howard Bloom – In Praise Of Consumerism – Bees, Bacteria And The Value Of Wasted Time

The latent creativity and discovery for the many in the “wasted” time of the few.

PARAMETERS –    “The End of Proportionality” and    “Responsibility and Proportionality in State and Nonstate Wars”

Jonathan F. Keiler and Michael Walzer discuss how the concept of “proportionality” in the Laws of War are applied and (more frequently) misunderstood and misapplied.

SEED – Did Cooking Make Us Human?

Did a piece of cultural evolution – cooking food – drive human evolution ?

The Jamestown Foundation – Mystery Surrounds Alleged Hezbollah Links to Drug Arrests in Curacao

A somewhat older article. It begs the question of  to what degree has Hezbollah penetrated the Lebanese and Arab diaspora in Latin America?

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

Paul Collier on “Post-Conflict Recovery” – salvaging failed states (2009).

Iran’s internal politics,  a conversation with Karim Sadjadpour (2007)

 “Now, prepare to witness the power of this fully operational battle station!”

Hat tip Mithras.

THE FIRST EUROPEAN – NOT ENTIRELY HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS – 35,000 BC

A British forensic scientist, Dr. Richard Neaves, has recreated the head of one of the earliest modern human ( some differences in brain case and teeth)  hunter-gathers from fossil remains, in the same manner of reconstructing the identity of homicide victims.

His recreation offers a tantalising glimpse into life before the dawn of civilisation. It also shows the close links between the first European settlers and their immediate African ancestors. To sculpt the head, Mr Neave called on his years of experience recreating the appearance of murder victims as well as using careful measurements of bone. It was made for the BBC2 series The Incredible Human Journey. This will follow the evolution of humans from the cradle of Africa to the waves of migrations that saw Homo sapiens colonise the globe.

….’Richard creates skulls of much more recent humans and he’s used to looking at differences between populations. ‘He said the skull doesn’t look European or Asian or African. It looks like a mixture of all of them. ‘That’s probably what you’d expect of someone among the earliest populations to come to Europe

As with the example of Kennewick Man, efforts at forensic paleo-anthropogy shatter modern racial assumptions regarding our earliest ancestors, regardless of whether those assumptions emanate from archaic stereotypes or modern PC ideology. Kennewick Man bore little or no resemblance to Amerinidian tribal groups that he long preceded, and Native American activists responded to the startling archaeological find  by attempting to have the remains seized, scientific analysis of them banned and the site bulldozed. The “First European”in turn, looks nothing like the Aryan mythology of the Nazis or 19th century European racialist agitators. Instead, he appears somewhat like an Africanized Yul Brynner.

These reconstructions demolish our casual, self-referentially anachronistic, projections of our own demographic groups backward in time. We want to see ourselves in the people “back then” just like we wish to imagine that kind of continuity in a far-flung future. I’m dubous that we will look like “us” 100,00 or 250,00 years in the future and wonder if such a  people will even acknowledge their kinship with us any more than we do with Homo Habilis.

One of my Twitteramigas pointed this out. A re-post from STRATFOR:

Mexico: The Third War

….Then there is a third war being waged in Mexico, though because of its nature it is a bit more subdued. It does not get the same degree of international media attention generated by the running gun battles and grenade and RPG attacks. However, it is no less real, and in many ways it is more dangerous to innocent civilians (as well as foreign tourists and business travelers) than the pitched battles between the cartels and the Mexican government. This third war is the war being waged on the Mexican population by criminals who may or may not be involved with the cartels. Unlike the other battles, where cartel members or government forces are the primary targets and civilians are only killed as collateral damage, on this battlefront, civilians are squarely in the crosshairs.

There are many different shapes and sizes of criminal gangs in Mexico. While many of them are in some way related to the drug cartels, others have various types of connections to law enforcement – indeed, some criminal groups are composed of active and retired cops. These various types of criminal gangs target civilians in a number of ways, including, robbery, burglary, carjacking, extortion, fraud and counterfeiting. But of all the crimes committed by these gangs, perhaps the one that creates the most widespread psychological and emotional damage is kidnapping, which also is one of the most underreported crimes. There is no accurate figure for the number of kidnappings that occur in Mexico each year. All of the data regarding kidnapping is based on partial crime statistics and anecdotal accounts and, in the end, can produce only best-guess estimates. Despite this lack of hard data, however, there is little doubt – based even on the low end of these estimates – that Mexico has become the kidnapping capital of the world.

….Between these extremes there is a wide range of groups that fall somewhere in the middle. These are the groups that might target a bank vice president or branch manager rather than the bank’s CEO, or that might kidnap the owner of a restaurant or other small business rather than a wealthy industrialist. The presence of such a broad spectrum of kidnapping groups ensures that almost no segment of the population is immune from the kidnapping threat.

Colombia went through a similar cycle, opportunistic criminal gangs taking advantage of the accelerating civil war between the Colombian government, FARC and ELN in order to kidnap 25,000 + people per year. We can speculate that this state of affairs, where the civilian population was being chronically terrorized, was a precursor to the formation of the AUC Loyalist paramilitaries by the small businessmen and big landowner class, and promptly began clearing rural areas and small towns of rebels, rebel sympathizers, habitual criminals and family members of the same by savagely killing them off.

I will wager that Mexico is going to hit this phase in less than a year.

This clip has a classic statement from Senator Barry Goldwater at the 1960 Republican Convention, which I think may be food for thought for all the conservatives of a general libertarian-pragmatic  bent who may be unhappy with the drift of the Republican Party.

And check out this post at Security and Liberty.