From the BBC: A parrot that died in quarantine in the UK has tested positive for avian flu, the government has said.Insert the appropriate Monty Python joke here. I know, I know, it's not funny. It's serious.

Brad DeLong criticizes Dan Drezner thusly,danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: Blog: [Colonel Larry] Wilkerson also points out, however, that there was a stronger pre-war consensus on Iraqi WMD intellgence than many want to believe..."WMD" means chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Nearly everybody in the intelligence community was confident that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. But there was no consensus that...

Apropos my last post: this gem.Words fail me.Filed as: Goldberg

Robert Farley puzzles over Jonah Goldberg's new book, Liberal Fascism : The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton. I haven't read it, but that's never stopped me from making ill-informed comments before. Here's the editorial summary:Since the rise and fall of the Nazis in the midtwentieth century, fascism has been seen as an extreme right-wing phenomenon. Liberals have kept that assumption alive, hurling accusations of...

One of the main reasons I started blogging was to force me to keep up with current events. I spend so much time reading history and social theory that I often lose track of why I wanted to study international relations in the first place. Sometimes, however, the news just isn't all that good, as it was last night.The worst news continues to come out of South Asia, where reports place the death toll at over 79,000. Foreign aid remains inadequate...

John J. Miller on the Time book list:"Also, I was pleased to see C.S. Lewis and no Philip Pullman."Words fail me.(Hat tip: "JJE".)Filed as: hackery, hacks, hacktitude

A few days ago Younghusband posted some thoughts about an old post of mine, in which I argued that, from an IR theory perspective, "neoconservativism" is not an alternative vision of international politics on par with realism and liberalism. I further claimed that neoconservativism shares more with the liberal than the realist tradition of IR theory. Younghusband asked, in essence, if neocons were leftists (let's put aside jokes about old...

Astute readers will already have noted the lack of new content here since last Thursday. I can't speak for the rest of the crew, but I've been swamped with genuine academic work. I expect a flurry of posting will start again within the next few days.In the meantime, a very few links:* I suspect the Reuter's editor who came up with this title must have been feeling a bit punchy.* My colleagues at Georgetown, Robert Lieber and Tony Arend, discuss...

I want to take a break from the standard fare here (whatever that is) to very publicly wish my wife, Maia, a happy anniversary. Maia and I eloped, so we never had the big wedding. We always figured we'd do something major for our tenth as compensation; but I dragged her to Columbus for the year, away from our closest friends and our family. Also, it would appear, away from being able to find a babysitter for the night. So, no party, No dinner...

There's been something of a debate in IR journals over the past decade about what a reunified Germany was likely to do, since the basic components of its foreign policy as set after the Second World War rested on assumptions that were no longer valid. Specifically, postwar Germany was a) divided into two pieces which were b) integrated into separate alliances which were c) implacably opposed to one another in the titanic global settlement...

Last night my wife and I watched Epsiode 9 of Serial Experiment: Lain. Over the course of the episode viewers are given a synopsis of UFOlogist claims about Roswell and Majestik 12, Vannevar Bush and his concept of the memex, John Lilly’s psychedelic experiments and his ‘contact’ with ECCO, the Schumann resonance, theories about human beings as synapses in a vast neural network of collective consciousness, Ted Nelson's invention of hypertext,...

The Congressional Research Service has recently (October 3) estimated that the Iraq war is costing about $6 billion per month. DOD’s current monthly average spending rate is about $6 billion for Iraq, $1 billion for Afghanistan and $170 million for enhanced base security for the first nine months of FY2005. Compared to FY2004, those averages are 19% higher for Iraq, 8% lower for Afghanistan, and 47% lower for base security.That works out to...