by Peter | 3 Nov 2008 |
This, SNL's cold-open with John McCain from this past Saturday, was quite funny. As I mentioned earlier, SNL has done a really good job pointing out the fundamental flaw in the McCain campaignIts not just that McCain is so tied to Bush, or that he's a true Maverick--a Republican without money--but that he's allowed himself to become such an object of satire, so open to ridicule. All of the punch-lines in that sketch are points that McCain has...
by Dan Nexon | 3 Nov 2008 |
• I will stop cycling through the same seven websites all day.• I will start writing a piece I promised to Culture11 on the foreign-policy challenges facing Obama the next President. • I will start researching, writing, and copy editing again.• The Duck of Minvera might see significant content once again.
by Dan Nexon | 3 Nov 2008 |
Some days ago I mentioned the resurrection--in spirit if not in name--of the Strategic Air Command. Robert Farley echoed the dominant explanation in the media: the Air Force has badly bungled its handling of the nuclear forces. This is all a bit ironic, as the "big scare" of this kind in the 1990s was the decrepit state of the Russian nuclear arsenal.Now we learn that our guys took five days to respond to a bad-wiring indicator in a Minuteman...
by Dan Nexon | 1 Nov 2008 |
A one day sample in one tracking poll shows McCain +1.Wake me when there's some real evidence of tightening.
by Dan Nexon | 30 Oct 2008 |
Binyamin Appelbaum writes in the Washington Post that:U.S. banks getting more than $163 billion from the Treasury Department for new lending are on pace to pay more than half of that sum to their shareholders, with government permission, over the next three years.The government said it was giving banks more money so they could make more loans. Dollars paid to shareholders don't serve that purpose, but Treasury officials say that suspending...
by Charli Carpenter | 30 Oct 2008 |
The judicial organ of ECOWAS has found the government of Niger guilty of failing to prevent slavery within its borders. "The landmark ruling, the first of its kind by a regional tribunal now sitting in Niamey, Niger’s capital, ordered the government to pay about $19,000 in damages to the woman, Hadijatou Mani, who is now 24.Slavery is outlawed throughout Africa, but it persists in pockets of Niger, Mali, Mauritania and amid conflicts like the...
by Dan Nexon | 25 Oct 2008 |
Paging Robert Farley.Roughly sixteen years ago, the US military disbanded the Strategic Air Command (SAC). But now the USAF plans to bring it back... with a new name.The US Air Force (USAF) is planning to set up a new Global Strike Command for its nuclear weapons as part of a re-organisation after recent mishaps.The move follows the discovery that six nuclear weapons were mistakenly flown across the US, and that nuclear missile fuses were sent...
by Dan Nexon | 25 Oct 2008 |
Russians can make the funny on YouTube too!
by Peter | 24 Oct 2008 |
is best articulated here.
by Charli Carpenter | 23 Oct 2008 |
A couple of weeks back I visited Arlington for the National Science Foundation's Human and Social Dynamics PI conference. The HSD Initiative is one of NSF's "cross-cutting" programs, which means the same pool of money funds political scientists, neurologists, roboticists, physicists, anything under the sun if the proposal is smart enough and vaguely related to the RFP. The point of their annual gatherings is in part to create interdisciplinary...
by Dan Nexon | 23 Oct 2008 |
Nothing like a global financial crisis to make the IMF relevant again.In all seriousness, though, after the 1997 East Asian financial crisis it seemed that the IMF was in danger of irrelevance. Very few countries were willing to accept the conditions required by the IMF for loans. But with the world only a few steps back from the brink, that appears to be changing. And with the outcome of the Ukraine-IMF negotiations pending, we may soon get a...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 20 Oct 2008 |
Perhaps the only response to reprehensible exclusivity, or to the appropriation of common rhetorical resources ('America') for purely partisan purposes, is satire:Unreality Is Expanding.The question is: is satire enough? One clearly can't argue with "real America" language, so what can one do except satirize it?