by Rodger Payne | 19 Jan 2009 |
Obviously, it is slow around here over the long holiday weekend.Here's my brief winter holiday weekend report:1. My wife and oldest daughter left Louisville early Saturday morning to attend the Inaugural. They do not have tickets to any events, so they will be among the masses tomorrow. However, they did have a well-placed friend for a pre-Tuesday function. As a consequence, they already met the President-elect and the rest of the Obamas! More...
by Rodger Payne | 15 Jan 2009 |
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband says "for a couple of years now the British Government has used neither the idea nor the phrase 'war on terror'." Miliband was in Mumbai, speaking (transcript here) at the recently targeted Taj Hotel. He made a number of points that new American leaders should embrace. For example, a "war on terror" creates an enemy that does not exist: ...ultimately, the notion is misleading and mistaken...The notion of...
by Peter | 15 Jan 2009 |
Ezra's post on Texas A&M's proposal to reward a faculty member with $10,000 for the highest score on its teaching evaluations has generated a whole lot of response across the blogosphere, much of it from fellow university faculty who do in fact take teaching seriously.I too wanted to chime in with how foolish this idea is, and how little understanding of what we, as faculty, actually do (or what my colleagues do because I in fact do something...
by Charli Carpenter | 14 Jan 2009 |
Earlier this year I threw up some results from a survey of folks interested in the concept of "human security," in which my research team asked them to name the most important items on the human security agenda; and also to answer the question: "What problems do you know of that are not getting enough attention from the human security network?" A first cut at coding this data shows highly salient issues include the following:Problems not...
by Dan Nexon | 14 Jan 2009 |
It seems to me that, in the lands of Israel and Palestine, the going rate is far too cheap for such a dear commodity.
by Rodger Payne | 10 Jan 2009 |
Somehow, last summer I missed a Foreign Policy article by Michael A. Cohen, Maria Figueroa Küpçü, and Parag Khanna, which appeared in the July/August 2008 issue. Unfortunately, you won't find much of the article at that link unless you are a subscriber. I happened to see the piece in the November/December Utne Reader. The on-line excerpt is a bit longer there, but you still won't find the full essay. Sorry about that.Nonetheless, the authors'...
by Rodger Payne | 8 Jan 2009 |
Back in September, I blogged about the new Northern Command, which oversees deployment of an Army Brigade Combat Team inside the US -- putting active American troops on the homeland for the first time since 1878 (other than during national emergency). The recent post was a somewhat paranoid followup to one I wrote on July 4, 2007, about NSPD 51. That White House security directive asserts presidential leadership of government during...
by Charli Carpenter | 7 Jan 2009 |
So this is a spoof of facebook news feed created for the Battlestar Galactica Miniseries. Hat tip to Robert Farley. Also, Season 4.0 was released today, so any of us who didn't follow the series in real-time from the start now have ten days to quickly catch up on all our episodes before the final season begins on January 16th... Yikes, too bad I'm in New York doing interviews and can't start until this Friday... Gods help me...
by Peter | 6 Jan 2009 |
Leon Panetta was named to head the CIA today.Its a surprise move, as no one had Panetta on any lists for a major appointment, and many were looking for someone with "intelligence experience" to head the CIA. While Panetta has never worked in the IC, he was a Congressman, head of OMB, and Chief of Staff to the president. The top thing Panetta seemingly had going for him? His strong stance against torture and the distance he provides from Bush...
by Dan Nexon | 5 Jan 2009 |
I haven't found a great many voices claiming that the Russia-Ukraine gas dispute is some sort of Russian power play. Which is a good thing, because, as a friend recently explained to me, it isn't. While some of its dynamics are fairly complicated, there's also a very simple process at work here.Gazprom is badly over-leveraged from its many acquisitions--some driven by its apparent goal of becoming a Russian zaibatsu.Gazprom itself is mired in...
by Rodger Payne | 3 Jan 2009 |
Many Duck readers probably already noticed the announcement, but perhaps not everyone given the holiday period: two prominent international relations scholar-bloggers are teaming with various scholars, journalists, and former policymakers at Foreign Policy magazine to create a new venture in journalism, blogging and policy analysis. Effective Monday, neither Marc Lynch, aka Abu Aardvark, nor Dan Drezner will be blogging at their former...
by Rodger Payne | 29 Dec 2008 |
Today, I took the family to the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma. If you've never heard of Rogers, then you might want to learn. He was quite a man.Rogers was an entertainer, a writer, a public speaker, amateur philosopher, etc. In 1931, he went on the radio with President Herbert Hoover to talk about the Depression. He seemed truly troubled by what was happening: So here we are in a country with more wheat and more corn and...