Marc | January 12, 2010
CBC just carried a story that Sarah Palin will be joining Fox News as a commentator. I think that her comment that
It’s wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news.
just about says it all. Needless to say, I will continue my personal classification of Fox News as an amusing, [...]
Category: Social Theatre |
8 Comments »
Tags: Fox News, Sarah Palin
Marc | November 13, 2009
One of the things that is often forgotten these days is why people fight – not nations, not governments; people. All to often, especially during long conflicts with not actual “fighting” in a homeland, we forget and dismiss the conflicts and blame those who go to do the fighting as being “war mongers” and “myrmidons” [...]
Category: Ethics, Social Theatre |
No Comments »
Tags: attitudes, remembrance day, why people fight
Marc | September 18, 2009
My friends Adam Elkus and Mark Safranski just released what is one of the more insightful, and scathing, critiques of US “Grand Strategy”. The short article is entitled Theory, Policy, and Strategy: A Conceptual Muddle (abstract | PDF) and focuses on one simple observation: grand strategy for the US is now being driven by operational [...]
Category: Epistemology, Social Theatre |
No Comments »
Tags: Grand Strategy
Marc | August 17, 2009
I probably will not have a chance to blog this week since I will be off at the TRADOC Senior Leaders Conference and blogging from there. The posts will be going up over at the Small Wars Journal and SWJ and TRADOC are both hoping for a lively exchange of ideas and questions from the [...]
Category: CMC, Social Theatre |
3 Comments »
Tags: Small Wars Journal, TRADOC, TRADOC Senior Leaders Conference
Marc | August 15, 2009
Yesterday, Friday August 14th, was to have seen a talk given by Lynddie England at the Library of Congress on her new biography Tortured: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib and the Photographs That Shocked the World. The talk, however, sparked a very strong reaction from Morris Davis, a veteran and employee of the Library of Congress [...]
Category: Social Theatre, Uncategorized |
No Comments »
Tags: Library of Congress, Lynddie England, Small Wars Journal
Marc | July 10, 2009
Q: Since when are university regents “administrative officials performing functions analogous to those of judges and prosecutors” (quoted here)?
A: Since July 7th, 2009.
Category: Ethics, Events, Professionalization, Social Theatre |
16 Comments »
Tags: Ward Churchill, Witch Hunts
Marc | February 10, 2009
Tom Ricks has a series of posts on the Battle of Wanat last summer over at Foreign Policy that is well worth reading for a number of reasons. First of all, Tom has done some excellent research and, unlike many, offers questions rather than answers (although he has a few of those). Second, his research, [...]
Category: COIN, Epistemology, Ethics, Social Theatre |
No Comments »
Tags: Ethics, Organizations, Wanat
Marc | January 9, 2009
One of the more interesting activities that humans come up with is games (loosely construed). Back in the day, aka before the Methodist onslaught destroyed play as a serious activity in the 17th century, games and play acted as educational and/training events for people. We can see this in activities as varied as cossak (or [...]
Category: COIN, Social Theatre |
13 Comments »
Tags: Creativity, Games, Reality Construction, Valhalla Simulation Games
Marc | December 17, 2008
The many woes of the HTS, at least the public casting and presentation of them, have been ably collated by my colleague Max Forte at Open Anthropology (e.g. here, here and here amongst many other places). What truly bothers me, in addition to Pravda being considered as a reputable publisher < rolleyes>, is that the [...]
Category: Anthropology, Human Terrain System (HTS), Social Theatre |
36 Comments »
Tags: Human Terrain System (HTS), Program Review
Marc | September 25, 2008
Galrahn over at Information Dissemination, just produced another brilliant piece on the realities of 21st century networks called The Challenges of the 21st Century Conversation. While the subject of the post is US Naval “evangelists” (“Champions” in business terms), the post itself examines the complex interplay between narrative, myth, discourse control and the role of [...]
Category: Epistemology, Professionalization, Social Theatre |
No Comments »
Tags: Evangelists, Renaissance Networks, Small Wars Journal, US Navy