by Rodger Payne | 6 Feb 2007 |
Scholar Larry Diamond resides at Stanford's conservative Hoover Institution, but he worked for the Bush administration in Iraq just a couple of years ago. He thinks that a war with Iran might be in the cards: President Bush's neoconservative advisors and pundit supporters have been beating the drums of war with Iran since 2003, when the president declared Iran to be part of an "axis of evil." Recall that a senior administration official told...
by Dan Nexon | 6 Feb 2007 |
Artist's rendition of the Svalbard Air, Nuclear, Land, Sea, and Polar Bear ForcesCan someone explain to me why the CIA World Factbook lists Svalbard as ranking 22nd in military defense expenditures (at $ 5,501,000,000)? Most of the sources I can find seem to agree that Svalbard, a territory of Norway, was demilitarized as part of the 1920 Paris Treaty. I'm not the only one to have noticed this, of course.Is someone at the Agency a Pullman...
by Peter | 5 Feb 2007 |
It is the single most viewed television event in the United States annually, and one of the most watched events in the world (and yes, its no World Cup, but there is no cup to watch this year...).After that first play, when Hester returned the opening kick-off for a Touchdown for the Bears, I thought to my self: well, game over, the Colts have won.I wasn't the only one.Still, how crazy is that, the same opening, the same result for the two...
by Dan Nexon | 5 Feb 2007 |
Does anyone know of a systematic comparison of the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials? The US and UK ones don't seem very different--as much as it pains me, the UK PC stacks up surprisingly well against John Hodgman.The German and French variants look to be just dubbed version of the US editions. I can't parse the Japanese ones, but they seem to be about as localized (or not) as the UK versions. At the very least, the ads might provide a...
by Dan Nexon | 5 Feb 2007 |
The Super Bowl score is the AP's lead story right now; needless to say, I dropped down through the wire reports. I discovered that India not only leads the US in cheap call centers, but that the country also enjoys a capital/labor comparative advantage in surrogate motherhood. Surrogate motherhood is among the latest in a long list of roles being outsourced to India, where rent-a-womb services are far cheaper than in the West."In the U.S. a...
by Dan Nexon | 3 Feb 2007 |
You have nothing to lose but those pesky questions about whether your methods actually prove anything....[Warning: what follows will likely only be of interest to practitioners and students of academic IR][UPDATED 2/4/07]Almost a year ago, but two months after the conversation had moved on, "IR scholar not philosopher"--who, to his/her credit included an amusing false email address (empiricist@empiricist.com)--posted an interesting comment in...
by Dan Nexon | 2 Feb 2007 |
I share Daniel Drezner's puzzlement concerning Jacques Chirac's retraction of pretty reasonable claims about the implications of Iranian nuclear proliferation for the Middle East. Example:Mr. Chirac said it would be an act of self-destruction for Iran to use a nuclear weapon against another country.“Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel?” Mr. Chirac asked. “It would not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be...
by Dan Nexon | 2 Feb 2007 |
Mark of Zenpundit, one of my favorite people in the blogsphere, recently announced that he's joined some outfit called "Chicagoboyz." Now, I'd never heard of them, but they're clearly much higher up on the foodchain than the Duck. If I read Reynolds I would, apparently, find many links to them.Their politics? I quote from the masthead:Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in...
by Peter | 31 Jan 2007 |
I was actually intending to do a more thoughtful post inspired by this, (or maybe a more sarcastic one inspired by this), but, as I scanned over the NYT website, I actually gawked--out loud--in disbelief as I read this:President Bush took aim Wednesday at lavish salaries and bonuses for corporate executives, standing on Wall Street to issue a sharp warning for corporate boards to "step up to their responsibilities" and tie compensation packages...
by Rodger Payne | 31 Jan 2007 |
Much of my academic scholarship is concerned with the idea of deliberative democracy. Nayef Samhat and I have argued, for instance, that norms of transparency (or openness) and participation (or inclusion) promote public deliberation.By contrast, secrecy and exclusion distort public debate.Today, the Union of Concerned Scientists, together with the Government Accountability Project, told a House Committee about their survey of nearly 300...
by Peter | 25 Jan 2007 |
I actually did watch the SOTU on Tuesday, in part because there was nothing else on television, and in part because I figured it might be a good topic to discuss in class. Wednesday night I was the substitute teacher for a colleague's graduate seminar on the Domestic Sources of US Foreign Policy. We ended up talking about the ideals that put the "American" in American Foreign Policy, and the assigned reading for the day was Samuel Huntington's...
by Rodger Payne | 24 Jan 2007 |
I didn't watch the "State of the Union," but I skimmed much of it already and will read it soon. I noticed that President Bush has again somewhat ambiguously suggested that Iran has provided "support" for Shia militias in Iraq. Rumors have been flying in Washington that the administration is making the case for war against Iran -- and preparing for it militarily too.Here's the kind of hearsay the President has apparently heard about Iran in...