Aside from some abortion rights Texas senate filibuster coverage, this week's morning linkage is all about climate change and President Obama's Tuesday speech at Georgetown University. The announced plan aims to use existing executive branch authority, including the EPA's ability to regulate pollutants under the Clean Air Act, to initiate measures to control carbon pollution and other greenhouse gases. This move obviates the need for additional...
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Wednesday Linkage
Yesterday was an exciting day in American politics, featuring legislative time-traveling, a Supreme Court turning back the clock on voting rights, and of course the invalidation of DOMA and the death-by-default of California's Prop 8. But I assume you have Facebook and that you already knew all that. Here's some items you might have missed: Former PM Kevin Rudd ousted Australian PM Julia Gillard as Labor Party leader but not (yet?) as prime...
Tiwesdæg: the Left-arm of Non-linkage
Collection and promulgation of links today was interrupted by my daughter's minor sports injury. For all ten of you who care: my apologies. Go read Cherly Rofer's Edward Snowden timeline. Or about a nearby star "crowded with super-Earths." Or focus on today's gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Or about the game that's stolen my partner. Or something. Just so long as you change your profile image to an equality sign. Cause that will totally...
Become the Survey Participant! New Survey on Teacher Evaluations
In case you are interested in expanding our knowledge of the use/misuse of teacher evaluations, Lisa Martin of Wisconsin-Madison has a short survey that is worth taking: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KDWNCXS Results may make it into what looks like a very exciting APSA panel on "Minding the Gender Gap in Political Science."
Civil-Military Relations– Why A Little Conflict is OK
Robert’s review of The American Culture of War yesterday was both extremely funny and informative. It also mentioned a problem I’ve seen in a lot of the civil-military relations literature: too much over-identification with a political leaning or ideology. This area of scholarship reminds me sometimes of Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men” – if I’m walking around the annual conference of the Inter-University Seminar at Armed Forces and...
Welcome Changes in America’s Funemployment Rate
As the Great Slump continues to grind down Western twenty-somethings, some welcome news: America's funemployment rate is slowing. Funemployment, as the Los Angeles Times put it, is the trend by which twenty- and thirty-somethings, finding themselves cast aside from their temporary and entry-level jobs, turn instead toward self-improvement. Of course, this information might be unwelcome: perhaps Generation Y is merely discovering that there's...
Call for Participants: Interpretive and Relational Research Methodologies
“Interpretive and Relational Research Methodologies” A One-Day Graduate Student Workshop Sponsored by the International Studies Association-Northeast Region 9 November, 2013 • Providence, Rhode Island International Studies has always been interdisciplinary, with scholars drawing on a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques of data collection and data analysis as they seek to produce knowledge about global politics. Recent debates...
Agree with Heinlein’s ‘Citizens vs. Civilians’? then this US Military History is for you
I was asked by a participating member of the H-Diplo/ISSF network to review The American Culture of War. Here is the original link to my review, but it’s off in some far corner of the internet, so I thought I’d repost it here. In brief, I found the book a pretty disturbing rehearsal of right-wing tropes about the military in a democracy, especially from an academic, and there’s no way I’d ever use it with undergrads as Routledge suggests. The...
Monday Morning Linkage
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 computer systems. (h/t E. Webb) Drones Paradoxically, there's something about James Bridle's outline of a reaper drone on the steps of the Corcoran Gallery that makes the idea of drones more tangible and murderous. Of course, the drone pilots...
Sunday Reading
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 Strangelove Caucus." Cute. And also: Virtual transitions: The World SF Blog ends, The Smoked-Filled Room celebrates one year of correctly hyphenating a compound-adjective.
Could the Youth Protests of the EU, Middle East, Turkey, and Brazil Spread to Asia’s Corrupt Democracies?
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 ask what others thought. Watching all these riots – driven heavily by youth dissatisfaction, it seems – is making me wonder if this might spread to Asia’s democracies. A lot of the problems these protests are identifying exist in spades in Asia:...
The Whole of Government Needs a Game Changer
Here are some recent phrases that entered the policy lexicon in the last few years that I absolutely hate – “whole of government” and “game changer.” There is a faddishness to tropes in the policy arena that proliferate, that capture a certain sentiment of the moment that soon become over-used. Earlier, it was “tipping point.” I kind of hated that one too. These words are useful short-hand. Ah yes, a game-changer, that which changes the game, a...