Paypal has just launched PayPal Galactic "to figure out what currency can be used and how commerce should be regulated off Earth" once all the space travel and tourism picks up." More from MercuryNews.com: "...serious challenges such as space law -- an uncertain...
Hey. Here's your linkage... Data Mining No, I don't care where Snowden is going next... but I am happy to see that Hong Kong used the opportunity to request clarification about US hacking of their...
The "debate on missile defense" leaves Robert Farley feeling very, very tired. Sean Kay wants the US to go cold turkey on European troop deployments. Heh. Heh. "Snowden Crash." Heh. "The...
Jay Ulfelder and I had a Twitter conversation on this question in the last few days (here and here). But Twitter has such limited space, I thought I would break out our discussion on the blog and...
Contrasting views on Obama foreign-policy and realism from Daniel Drezner and Sean Kay. The BBC's profile of Iranian President-elect, Hassan Rouhani. Michael J. Geary and Kevin A. Lees examine how the NSA scandal might impact Obama's trip to Europe. Chris Fair's testimony at the Hearing on “Protecting the Homeland Against Mumbai-Style Attacks and the Threat from Lashkar-e-Taiba" (PDF). Vladmir Putin: the most powerful man in Russia, sex symbol, former spy, and sports-memorabilia thief. And also: Gerard Toal discusses his new co-authored article, "Cartographic Exhibitionism? Visualizing the...
I'll admit that this is a rather anodyne title, but the alternatives involved language not suited for above-the-fold content. The tenure process involves power asymmetries that make life very unpleasant for assistant professors. They have to worry about alienating their colleagues and their administration. They interact daily with people -- who are too often petty, fickle, or, at least, mysterious -- who hold tremendous power over their careers. Then there's the whole publish-or-perish thing. Now, many of these indignities don't even rise to the level of first-world problems. Compared to the...
The Australian Defence Force (ADF) finds themselves in yet another sex scandal this week. The force has barely recovered from last year's 'skype scandal,' which involved members of a defense force academy videotaping sex without permission and streaming it to other members of the academy. This time it is alleged that officers have videotaped sex with other colleagues and civilian women and distributed the videos via the defence email system. It is a disappointing revelation considering the promises to rid the force of sexism following the scandal last year. If the allegations prove true, it...
I thought Charli's return meant I was off this beat, but what the hey. What if Shakespeare wrote Star Wars? Check it out here. Come to think of it, the whole brother and sister not knowing each other and almost falling in love seems like a Shakespeare comedy, does it not? Oh really? Never mind.
Why, yes that is the Indian Foreign Minister, Salman Khurshid, and Norway's Foreign Affairs Minister and Political Scientist, Espen Barthe Eide, in Svalbard. Are they trying to tell Duck fans something? [Discuss]
For those of you who don't monitor the front page of the APSA website on a daily basis, you may have missed the online petition for the recognition of a new African Politics section of APSA. I urge all of you -- including those who don't work in Africa -- to take a look at the petition and consider signing. At first glance, this may seem a strange throw-back: area studies has been passé in political science for some time, and it has become typical for Africa-focused job candidates to stress that they are "general comparativists who just happen to work in Africa" (ditto on book marketing). *...
Note: this post was co-written with PTJ. Apologies for the comparative lack of structure and the fact that it is a bit repetitive. Note also that it contains a link to a temporarily un-gated copy of Jackson and Nexon (1999). Thanks, SAGE! In yesterday morning's post, Phil writes: One manifestation of this misunderstanding is that “rational choice” or “choice-theoretic” work is often said to favor the agency side of the structure-versus-agency debate. See, for example, this recent post by Dan Nexon, or the paper it’s based on. I don’t mean to single my Duck colleagues out, though — the...
General David Petraeus advises Americans and their allies to be coldly realistic about what force can achieve. Oddly, he also advises them to prepare for a future where small wars are pretty much inevitable, where America must intervene early to prevent worse things happening later on, and where ‘stabilisation’ is a core part of war itself. Because, ultimately we sometimes have no choice. Looking back on the ‘lessons’ that have been ‘written in blood’ in America’s wars since 9/11, Petraeus thinks he can see the greatest lesson, but repeats a common fallacy: Our enemies will typically attack...