World leaders who recently met with him are being notified.
World leaders who recently met with him are being notified.
Adam Elkus from Rethinking Security tweets about a recent critique of the current US strategy of strategic communication in the Muslim world. The critique was penned by non other than Admiral Mike...
Maureen Dowd's op-ed Stung by the Perfect Sting rattled some cages in the blogosphere this week. Laura McKenna calling her a whiner, implying the post was really about her own bad blogger press. Tim...
Yesterday Channel 4 in the UK aired the above video, allegedly recorded on a mobile phone and smuggled out of the country by human rights activists, apparently of Sinhalese soldiers massacring Tamil...
Preliminary results show it is too close to call; the Guardian interprets this as Karzai having a narrow lead.UPDATE: Oh, crap.
UPDATE: The original version of this post was "Children and the Media." It was basically a little tirade about the absence of genuine news media for children. What was ironic about this post is that my rant was triggered by a visit to BBC's website (upon following a link from BBC's homepage to their "Children's" page, I found primarily a bunch of games rather than substantive news for children):"What a statement of contemporary assumptions about children's role as citizens! It's as if BBC thinks kids have no interest in current events or need for relevant, age-appropriate journalism. Too...
Bob Drogin at the LA Times is the latest to regurgitate the misinformed claim that Raymond Azar, whose human rights appear to have been violated as he was extradited from Afghanistan to Washington on bribery charges, is "the first target of rendition under Obama." The incident described yesterday by Drogin, in which Azar was arrested in his home and then allegedly hooded, photographed, subjected to a cavity search and told he would "never see his family again unless he confessed," actually occurred on April 7th; Azar is now in detention in or around Washington DC and has also claimed that...
I spent ten hours today playing Risk with my son. What would normally have been simply a time-killer on a rainy Sunday became, after my earlier perusal of P. Michael Phillipps' treatise on the non-decline of the non-Westphalian-system, a day-long exercise in thinking about political geography. By lunchtime we had grown tired of the Classic version and took a break to run down to World Apart Games and pick up the 2008 version for an "updated version of the map" (advertised online). But when we had a chance to look at the gameboard we were disappointed at the changes, which didn't make the new...
Mark Safranski has a useful post up at Zenpundit critiquing LTC P. Michael Phillips' Parameters article Deconstructing our Dark Age Future."(I cannot remember the last time I saw an article written by a military officer, rather than a civilian post-modernist, whose title began with the word "Deconstructing.") Phillips argues (like many before him, not least Yahya Sadowski) that:The Westphalian state system is not in fact in decline; this arrange- ment, as we have imagined it, never really existed beyond a proposed behavioral model exemplifying the American experience. Instead, territori-...
[Cross posted at bill | petti)Christopher Penn crafts an interesting piece arguing that piracy (i.e. copyright infringement) is, among other things, a market signal:Piracy indicates that something is sufficiently valuable enough that it’s worth stealing. It’s worth making an illegal copy and spreading without compensating the creator.Do you want the most accurate, unbiased, unmanipulated measure of how popular and valuable something is? Go hit up a site like The Pirate Bay or Demonoid or any of the other file sharing services and see if someone is stealing it.Now, I think this is an...
David Rothkopf has a nice piece in today's Washington Post giving a positive review to Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State. He makes the prescient point that she has revitalized US Diplomacy by revitalizing both the department and its approach, taking on important yet not headline grabbing issues that will have a profound impact on the relationships that define the US role in the world in the coming decades. While the White House and DoD focus on Iran and Afghanistan, Rothkopf notes how Clinton is able to address:Which nations will be our key partners? What do you do when many...
Today's Wall Street Journal notes that the number of private military contractors (PMCs) current outnumbers the number of military personnel serving in Afghanistan, and the numbers are extremely close in Iraq:A few points to make:The data illustrate that with the troop surge in Afghanistan has come a slight uptick in the number of PMCs, but overall contractors have far outnumbered troops in that theater. What the article does not discuss is the distribution of duties and roles for PMCs and how that may have shifted over the past few years. I'd be interested to see how fallout from various...