Yesterday the FBI arrested a Massachusetts man, who has been subsequently charged with a number of crimes related to terrorism. [1] This is the latest in a string of plots that the U.S. has successfully thwarted, yet it raises alarms for many Americans who have felt...
In addition to filling an open faculty line in international relations (IR), I was hired in 1991 by the University of Louisville with the idea that I would eventually direct the Grawemeyer Award for...
Not to make light of ongoing troubles in the Horn of Africa and beyond, but... well.If you want to go beyond the five A's, click here.
The banner image of the ICRtoP (International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect) website  features a photo of seven boys under the protective gaze of a UN peacekeeper as he carries his...
In my post last week I talked about the three main arguments against removing the combat exclusion for women: the physical standards argument, the moral argument, and the cohesion hypothesis. My main point was that with increased research on physical standards, the intangibility of the moral argument, and increased evidence that women already are in combat, the cohesion hypothesis remains as the most significant set of arguments against GI Janes. There are two main premises to the cohesion hypothesis: 1. cohesion is causally linked to group (in this case military unit) performance; 2. women...
Frank Gaffney is calling for a new HUAAC -- actually slightly renamed to House Anti-American Activities Committee...because apparently "un-American" is not tough enough: Earlier this week, he wrote: Absent a fundamental course correction, America will go the way of Europe and others before it, succumbing to an insidious totalitarian doctrine known as Shariah whose purpose, in the words of its prime practitioners — the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) — is to "destroy Western civilization from within."Wow, I hadn't realized that Europe has already succumbed to the insidious totalitarian doctrine....
H/T PhDComics. Hey, there are all kinds of nerds.
Is the IMF growing a pair....? This past week, the Fund's new Managing Director, Christine Lagarde, delivered a rabble-rousing speech in Jackonson Hole, Wyoming in which she called for a mandatory capital increase for European banks, using public funds if needed. I'm not convinced that's going to fly, but I have to say that I admire Lagarde's moxy. Today, Kenneth Rogoff, the Fund's former Chief Economist, published an op-ed in which he suggested that the Fund may finally be pulling away from the party line and demonstrating some willingness to contradict its European masters. Maybe. I had to...
OK, OK, OK, I know life is short and some of us need to get a life (I'm not in Seattle by the way), but this is a really cool app from Uppsala: From the iTunes description: "Data on 300 armed conflicts, more than 200 summaries of peace agreements, data on casualties etc, without having access to the Internet." I actually do think this is really cool and I can see real benefits to having this type of data at one's fingertips, but I do wonder how these dramatic changes in the ease of access to select types of data and data summaries (even from reputable places like Uppsala) will alter research...
In an article last week in the Financial Times on "Sex, Lies, and the Pitfalls of Overblown Statistics," John Kay bluntly wrote: "Always ask yourself the question: where does the data come from?" It's a good question, and one I frequently ask myself when I read yet another story about the hottest craze in the international development aid business today: the Open Data Initiative of the World Bank. Don't get me wrong. I think the World Bank's Open Data initiative is freaking awesome. You can now get free access to the Bank's World Development Indicators (hitherto accessible, but by no means...