Amidst the continuing stories of tragedy and survival emanating from the Gulf Coast, this article in this morning's Washington Post caught my eye: Ursinus College, a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, has turned the higher education clock back by requiring all freshmen to take a required philosophy and literature course that covers what we might think of as the Usual Suspects in the Western Canon: the book of Genesis, Plato, Descartes,...

Dan Drezner writes a post I considered and rejected for the Duck.Today's Washington Post has a story entitled "Chernobyl's Harm Was Far Less Than Predicted, U.N. Report Says." Here's what Dan writes about it:Good news about ChernobylPeter Finn reports in the Washington Post that twenty years after the disaster at Chernobyl, the health effects have been much less than prior estimates would have suggested:The long-term health and environmental...

John Ikenberry has a new post responding to Timothy Garton Ash's comparison between Britain c. 1905 and contemporary America. John goes much further than I have in my own posts on the subject, but his conclusion is similar:The problem with this analogy is that Britain really was overstretched and on the way down, whereas the United States is not. The United States is vastly more powerful than fin de siecle Britain – and its opportunities to...

Riggsveda is horrified by the commentary at Jane Galt:Friday, September 02, 2005Do These People Live On My Planet? From the weblog of the objectivistly-named Jane Galt, here is the worst of American reaction to the New Orleans disaster in a nutshell. Below find samplings of statements that reveal a seemingly bottomless capacity for churlish, selfish, callous, racist cruelty by self-congratulatory blog barnacles who coolly watch the NOLA tragedy...

From John DiIulio's famous memo: [the] remarkably slapdash character of the Office of Homeland Security, with the nine months of arguing that no department was needed, with the sudden, politically timed reversal in June, and with the fact that not even that issue, the most significant reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the Department of Defense, has received more than talking-points-caliber deliberation. This was, in...

Having been dumped by Uzbekistan, is the United States looking to Turkmenistan for a rebound? Curzon and Nathan Hamm interpret recent events differently.Curzon says: "There are precious few totalitarian regimes left in Eurasia, but Turkmenistan is one of them. Eurasianet says the US may be exploring a base deal with Turkmenistan. I really, really hope not."So do I. Is the US really so stupid as to squander whatever gains it got by getting tough...

AFP: Merkel attacks defensive Schroeder in head-to-head German debateReuters (UK): Schroeder edges Merkel on TV, but no knock-out blowPostwar German reconstruction was clearly a success: the Germans still favor defense over offense.

Nice post at the Glittering Eye. A small snippet:The disaster that has occurred in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is enormously larger and will, undoubtedly, be significantly more costly than any of the disasters above. The size of the area affected is hundreds of square miles. We don’t yet know how many people were killed.There are several key factors that were present in all of the disasters reviewed above:Civil order was maintained...

Dan's absolutely right about progressivism, which among other things led us to the situation that we had for much of the twentieth century in which the role of the government involved providing services for citizens in need. The nature of the social contract was altered by such initiatives as Social Security, income taxes, and the Federal Reserve system: government became a way to coordinate resources so as to roughly equalize social...

I haven't posted much, in part because I've been at APSA. But I also have trouble bringing myself to write anything more about Katrina. We lived in New York on September 11th, 2001; for all the horror of that day, the slow unfolding of the disaster in New Orleans, the gross incompetence of our government and our elected officials, and the bestial situation people faced in the refugee pens (what else are we supposed to call the Superdome,...

If you want to read a followup dispatch from New Orleans by Dr. Greg Henderson, I've found one and posted in on my blog. It's a holiday weekend, so I don't know how many people will be reading or searching. However, "Greg Henderson pathologist" has become a very popular search term for those finding my space in blogtopia. Filed as: Greg Henderson

This is the first year I've actually enjoyed APSA. The quality of the international-relations panels I attended was higher than I'm used to. The conference organizers did a great job of making sure that related panels were close together. I didn't have to do a lot of hopping between distant hotels.We had the usual SNAFUs. A number of panels with similar target audiences ran at the same time, making for hard choices about what to attend. The...