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...
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The Good Old Days….
...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:
PoliSci-unrelated post of the day: Visualizing Major League Baseball, 2001-2010
This post originally appeared at Beyond the Box Score. 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. I thought I would take the opportunity to analyze the last 10 years by visualizing team data. I used Tableau Public to create the visualization and pulled team data from ESPN.com (on-field statistics) and USA Today (team payroll).The...
What is Mark Zuckerberg?
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...
Fun with Ngrams
If you're a nerdy professor trying to avoid grading, like I am, you might want to play around with Google Lab's new Ngram feature. The feature allows you to see how often a particular word or phrase has appeared within a large number of books over time. For examples, here is a chart comparing the use of the term "failed states" to "rogue states" from 1960 to 2010 in English language books scanned by Google Books:Or, here is a comparison of...
2010 US Grand Strategery
Dear Duck Readers:I've been contemplating a post on the current state (or lack thereof) of public discussion on matters of US grand strategy. It occurs to me however, that I don't really know of any touchstone pieces on the subject published in 2010 -- except for the rather lackluster NSS, QDR, and QDDR. Am I missing something?
Striking Blows Against Secretive Conspiracies….
To see the tooltip, go to the source.
Richard Holbrooke
I am sure there will be many views and probably a few forthcoming books on the life of Richard Holbrooke. To be sure, he was a tough and skilled diplomat. It is well known that at times, he was arrogant, self-absorbed, self-promoting, and occasionally petty. And at other times, he was engaging, generous, and charming. He was always smart and hard working.I first met him shortly after his first visit to the Bosnian war in 1992. He went to...
The Constitutionality of the Individual Mandate
Perhaps because I am not a lawyer, I found the section of Judge Hudson's ruling dealing with taxation powers difficult to make sense of. Hudson argues that Congress did not intend to use its taxation powers, because (1) it removed the word "tax" from many points in the document and (2) it invoked commerce-clause powers in its preface to Section 1501. I don't entirely understand how this is relevant to the constitutionality of the "mandate." If...
‘Tis the season
This year began with a human tragedy of horrific proportions -- the earthquake in Haiti. We may never know precisely how many people died, but the government in Port-Au-Prince estimated 230,000 in February. The news did not improve as the year progressed. Consider this ANI news report from Saturday about flooding in Pakistan -- and keep in mind that floodwaters have not yet receded in some areas even though the worst flooding occurred months...
7/7 five years on: Conflicting memories make an official record difficult
Aldgate station plan, London undergroundA month into the official inquest into the ‘7/7’ London bombings of July 2005, it is clear that the governmental imperative to arrive at a clear, authoritative and final account of what happened on the day might prove impossible because of the unreliability of human memory. This was an event in which cameraphone footage from the scene was reaching the BBC within 20 minutes of the first of four explosions,...
Feminist IR 101, Post #4: Common Myths about Feminist IR (and the ‘truth’)
Here are some common misperceptions of feminist IR; the "truth" is below the "fold" ...1. Feminist IR is a paradigmatic alternative to other IR paradigms - there's realism, liberalism, constructivism, poststructuralism, and then ... feminism. It is its own "ism," and therefore should be a chapter in each textbook proposed as a dialogue with and/or critique of International Relations. 2. Feminists are whiners - either the field of IR see, e.g.,...