by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 21 Mar 2010 |
Nemesis. No, I don't mean the tenth Star Trek film, a film that many of us Trekkers would like to simply imagine never happened (and thanks to J. J. Abrams' rebooting of the franchise, we now can). Instead, I mean the long-theorized stellar companion to our Sun -- perhaps a brown dwarf star -- the existence of which could perhaps help to explain cycles of mass extinction on Earth. NASA's WISE satellite, presently conducting a survey of the...
by Charli Carpenter | 21 Mar 2010 |
1) A small puppy, if walked real hard first, will sit quietly outside long enough for a decent taping with no unseemly background noise. (I had worried about that.)2) It's important to spell out your acronyms on the first use in speech just like in writing. 3) I say "um" a lot more than I ever thought. Anyway, check it out. UN Dispatch's Mark Leon Goldberg and I talk about pirate economics, the Somalia aid scandal, gender politics, and the...
by Rodger Payne | 19 Mar 2010 |
In my U.S. Foreign Policy class this semester, students read the latest book from historian Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008). As in his prior work, Bacevich is critical of the apparent militarism in American foreign policy. Primarily, he argues that the U.S. is too willing to use military force as an instrument of policy and that the American people and its leaders overestimate the effectiveness of...
by Jon Western | 19 Mar 2010 |
Our political discourse is seriously out of control. Retired Marine Corps General John J. Sheehan -- an ardent opponent of gays in the military -- testified before the Senate Armed Services today that the decision by the Dutch government to allow gays to serve in its military contributed to the events at Srebrenica in 1995. Apparently, the Dutch decision --and the overall "liberalization" of the Dutch military -- contributed to its "weak"...
by Charli Carpenter | 17 Mar 2010 |
Random connections between things: Today, I'm at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy giving a guest lecture on global advocacy networks, in a class on Statecraft taught by my colleague Dan Drezner, who has an article coming out in the next issue Brown Journal of World Affairs on whether or not the Internet and social media empowers civil society or instead simply offers states new tools of repression and governance. Then, with all that...
by Laura Sjoberg | 16 Mar 2010 |
In the print version of Time Magazine, the story linked in the title of this post is itself titled differently. Instead of "The Rise and Fall of a Female Captain Bligh," the story is called "The Sea Witch." Much of the story is the same, however: a female captain in the United States Navy was relieved of her command for "cruelty and maltreatment" of her crew aboard the U.S.S. Cowpens. Among the (ir)relevant tidbits about Captain Graf in the...
by Charli Carpenter | 16 Mar 2010 |
I've been thinking this weekend about Gary Solis' WAPO op-ed of Friday about CIA drone pilots being unlawful combatants - unlike drone pilots serving in the US armed forces who may arguably be violating the laws of war but at least have the right under international law to engage in combat:In terms of international armed conflict, those CIA agents are, unlike their military counterparts but like the fighters they target, unlawful combatants. No...
by V Haufler | 15 Mar 2010 | Featured
Just a shout-out to NPR Planet Money for sharing the rock 'n roll reference in the Dodd financial reform proposal, or at least, Dodd's summary of it. A "no escape" clause for companies seeking to evade supervision is called the Hotel California Provison. Yup, it's right there in the text. We assume it's referring to the line about how "you can check out any time you want...but you can never leave." (although "we are all just prisoners here...of...
by Vikash Yadav | 15 Mar 2010 | Featured
[I don't mean to rail on the Washington Post's coverage of the war in Afghanistan two posts in a row, but the coverage is honestly a bit dismal this week. In my last post, I showed why Rajiv Chandrasekaran's article "At Afghan outpost, Marines gone rogue or leading the fight against counterinsurgency?" completely misunderstood the strategic importance of the town of Delaram from which the report was written.]An Op-ed article in yesterday's WaPo...
by V Haufler | 14 Mar 2010 | Featured
Are we doing better or worse than in the Great Depression? Are we coming out of it, or still sinking... or, is there worse to come? Should I be frightened?? Recent reports of millions more foreclosures made me wonder what direction we are going in. A couple of things I've been reading recently:Over at Vox, Eichengreen and O'Rourke answer the question on a lot of minds: is this crisis as bad as the Crash and Great Depression of the 1930s? They...
by Vikash Yadav | 14 Mar 2010 | Featured
Rajiv Chandrasekaran's article in today's Washington Post, "At Afghan outpost, Marines gone rogue or leading the fight against counterinsurgency?" paints a picture of Marines grudgingly guarding a town in no man's land on the edge of the desert:"DELARAM, AFGHANISTAN -- Home to a dozen truck stops and a few hundred family farms bounded by miles of foreboding desert, this hamlet in southwestern Afghanistan is far from a strategic priority for...
by Vikash Yadav | 14 Mar 2010 | Featured
Now that the fighting is over in the town of Marjah, how did the Afghan media perceive Operation Moshtarak? Here is a cursory round up of opinions from some of the newspapers in Afghanistan.(Unfortunately, I am dependent on reading translations of the local newspapers from thousands of miles away, but I still think it is fruitful to try to see events through the eyes of local elites rather than relying on military propaganda.)1. Weesa...