On the road home from South Carolina I posted notice of Laura Sjoberg's critique of militarized masculinity in her analysis of DADT-repeal discourse. Now that I'm settled in, I've realized it's the comments thread on that post where the real action is and I feel...
What would the world be like after a nuclear attack of some type? That's the question answered by the President's National Security staff in the June 2010 second edition of the Planning Guidance for...
Courtesy of our friends at The Economist:PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey...
Continuing the Duck series on highly improbable dystopian scenarios, here is an advertisement for the not yet released video game, "Homefront." Â The story is set in 2027 when a united Korea under...
Whatever your relevant holiday is, if it happens tonight and tomorrow, then very merry.And remember -- put Mithras back in Christmas!
Rob Farley notes the existence of long-standing conservative opposition to arms control. While the hacks at the Heritage Foundation lost this battle, Rob argues, their influence on Republican international thought is waxing rather than waning. Thus, more of opposition to New START was principled than many observers recognize, and this bodes ill for future arms control.The New START debate over the last month has been held largely under the assumption that the treaty would die if it wasn’t ratified during the lame duck session. I suspect that this assumption is accurate. Moreover, the two...
The repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is official now, signed by the President and a celebration of what is, by most accounts, an incredibly productive lame-duck Congressional session. It is certainly, in my mind, high time that this both on-face ridiculous and insidiously discriminatory policy make its way out of United States law and military practice. It is also, in my mind, just plain stupid the ways in which the United States does not recognize people it perceives to be homosexual as full citizens of the state; the repeal of one of them is a sign that maybe that will be (if slowly)...
I finally finished the final book in The Hunger Games trilogy. (I was not expecting that ending, though in hindsight I'm not sure why.) For those of you unfamiliar with the dystopian premise: the United States is gone. Its successor nation, Panem, consists of an opulent, entertainment-obsessed capital somewhere in the Rockies and thirteen impoverished districts in which inhabitants farm, mine and manufacture. The Districts are kept in line partly through a Tribute system (developed after an uprising 70 years ago in which the thirteenth district was exterminated): every year a boy and girl...
...when ideology reigned over science in arms control debates. With the new START about to pass through the Senate, here's a classic from San Fransisco's KRON Channel 4 back in 1986:
This post originally appeared at Beyond the Box Score. Â If you are a baseball analysis fan and don't already read BTBS I highly recommend it.2010 marks the end of the "ought" decade for Major League Baseball. Â I thought I would take the opportunity to analyze the last 10 years by visualizing team data. Â I used Tableau Public to create the visualization and pulled team data from ESPN.com (on-field statistics) and USA Today (team payroll).The data is visualized through three dashboards. Â The first visualizes the relationship between run differential (RunDiff) and OPS differential (OPSDiff)Â as...
An ideologue of information freedom? A capitalist? Something else? Now that he's been named Time Person of the Year (Time readers' poll and the preferences of the Fuhrer notwithstanding), these are questions worth discussing.A number of commentators, myself included, have positioned Zuckerberg within the wider hacktivist subculture in which Julian Assange is rooted - not because the two share a common objective (they don't: Assange targets powerful institutions, Zuckerberg targets the social fabric) but because of their seemingly shared belief that information wants, deserves, to be free -...