RECOMMENDED READING
A day late but perhaps not a dollar short.
Top Billing!: Larry Sanger – ” Who Says We Know: On The New Politics of Knowledge“
The consequences of an epistemic economy are no less inescapable than are those of an attention economy or the ” real” economy of GDP, brick and mortar stores and monetarism.
Businessweek – “The Greatest Innovations of All Time” ( hat tip to PurpleSlog)
Dr. Marc Lynch – “Our Enemy’s Enemy” ( hat tip to CKR )
Colonel W. Patrick Lang – “Lecture on Islam“
Dr. Martin Kramer – “Geopolitics of the Jews“
Michael Tanji – “Brave New Review“
The first blogospheric review of John Robb’s Brave New War. Mine will be coming soon.
That’s it!
April 24th, 2007 at 12:37 am
Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow
“Mega-contractors such as Halliburton and Bechtel supply the government with brawn. But the biggest, most powerful of the ‘body shops’—SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the ‘expertise’ behind the Iraq war.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703
See also:
Company of the Week: Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)
http://divedi.blogspot.com/2007/04/company-of-week-science-applications.html
April 24th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Thanks Dimitar !
Halliburton’s relationship with the Federal government, through its subsidiary Brown & Root, stretches back to the early New Deal. See Robert Caro’s LBJ trilogy
April 24th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I got my copy of Brave New War too.
He should mount a publicity campaign–regardless of the merit of the concept (which tdaxp attacks) it does have the flashy potential for a Tom Friedman-type popularization.
April 25th, 2007 at 2:33 am
I received Robb’s book today as well. A quick skim has me thinking that if you’ve read the blog, you’ll find little new in the book. But that’s a quick skim, and I’m interested in digging deeper to pull out the most important observations.
Haft of the Spear’s summation is pretty cool:
“Tom is Pooh Bear, John is Eeyore.”
And…who is Tigger?
April 25th, 2007 at 2:54 am
In “greatest innovations” that they left out writing is inexcusable. And the phonograph.
And putting weapons as #1 is embarrassingly stupid. Weapons are tools. Tools are weapons. Since chimps have been observed using tools (and weapons) it’s reasonable to suppose that tool use pre-dates our species and doesn’t really belong on this list at all.
Money is puzzling. Unless, that is, they mean paper money in which case I’d agree. But to that should be added banking—a tremendous development.
April 25th, 2007 at 4:28 am
Hey Curtis – I’m the Tigger of blogospheric quasi-mil theorists !!! ;o)
Hi Dave,
Yeah, that was a somewhat sloppy, list I concede. Ironically, I think I have intuitively higher standards for bloggers than for MSM writers.
Money as modern credit instruments starting in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were highly innovative ( see Ferguson, House of Rothschild vol. 1)
April 25th, 2007 at 7:20 am
Larry Sanger’s essay is absolutely brilliant.
April 25th, 2007 at 9:32 am
I have a post up exploring Sanger’s essay through the lens of 5GW:
“Notes Inspired by Larry Sanger“
Mark, you always have this way of finding the links I need to further my thinking on 5GW — or for confirming it in a “group think” way. As if, you already have my thoughts in mind when you post those links. 5GWarrior? Hmmmm.
April 26th, 2007 at 4:24 am
Hi Curtis,
At times I push certain ideas but in this instance I was already being encouraged by Dave Davison to look more closely at collaborative/wikinomic models when I just happened to run across Sanger’s piece while searching something else. Weird coincidence ( or Davison is the 5GW master, not sure which)