President Bush's address on Iraq made choosing today's maxim very difficult. Many of Guicciardini's maxims put a different spin on the speech, and particularly about what people are writing about its strengths and weaknesses. So, given a wealth of possibilities, I...
I'm slated to teach International security this fall for the first time in a couple of years and have been thinking about what to cover. It is a broad topic, of course, and people have all sorts of...
I don't agree with Rodger that the Iraq War was totally unjustifiable. Rodger and I do, presumably, agree that the Bush administration's marketing of the war was marked by "threat inflation" at...
There's another mention of "dog-whistle politics" over at Political Wire. Taegan Goddard quotes from a recent Congressional Quarterly article by Craig Crawford:Dean and Durbin were trying to rally...
To get a reputation for being suspicious and distrustful is certainly not desirable. Nevertheless, men are so false, so insidious, so deceitful and cunning in their wiles, so avid in their own interest, and so oblivious to other's interests, that you cannot go wrong if you believe little and trust less (Series C, 81).Renaissance Italy certainly must have been a fun place, eh?Filed as: Guicciardini and maxims
"Speak Victorian, think Pagan." Kaplan's clever phrase is also the motto of Coming Anarchy. I wonder, though, if Curzon takes that maxim as seriously as he should.In his June 20 post, "Thanks for Nothing", Curzon writes:Thanks all of you who pushed for the US to break with Uzbekistan after the Andijan massacre that left hundreds dead. You got what you wanted! Uzbekistan has now imposed flight restrictions on our "K2" airbase, all while saying it has nothing whatsoever to do with our response to the Andijan massacre aftermath. (Yeah, right.) The Turkish Zaman reports that the US is now moving...
Robert Farley's posted the first of a six-part series on the future of Sino-US relations. If the quality of the first post is any indication, the whole series will be an excellent primer on the debate, as well as a terrific analysis of the key issues at stake. My only concern so far is that Robert may be relying too much on "straight-line" projections: in taking current trends and extrapolating them into the future.For example, Robert is entirely correct (as I noted previously) that China's stopped making noises about recovering territory and influence it lost during the "century of...
I guess that's what I get for waiting until everyone else has already posted. Ok, so I need to comply with the “five books I liked enough as a teen/young adult to read again as an adult” meme. After reading some other folks’ lists I am a little weary about posting mine, since I didn’t do all that much reading as a child (my teachers are still shocked that I am pursuing my PhD, as are many of those who ‘knew me when’—lets just say I wasn’t always ‘intellectually engaged’). The bit of reading I did do consisted mostly of biographies, books about baseball, and comic books (at one point I was on...
Listing beloved books from my adolescence is so much more enjoyable than prepping for class…Also, I'm choosing to interpret the meme quite strictly, as asking for fictional books read as an adolescent (middle school/high school) that I felt were good enough to read again later on (college or later). This isn't a list of the books I read that had the most impact on me; that list is here. And this is not an exhaustive list; I recently re-read John Christopher's "Tripods" trilogy (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire) because I remembered them fondly, and I'm...
Yesterday, Dan "tagged" me and the other bloggers at the Duck to participate in one of those circulating book threads (or "memes"). I am now supposed "to describe the 'five books I liked enough as a teen/young adult to read again as an adult.'"Hmmmm. This is tough.First, I'm older than the other guys and have thus had more time to re-read more books that I read as a teen/young adult. Theoretically, my list could be very long.Second, and this is related to the last point, I have two children and have read many books aloud to them that I liked as a kid. I've also read books to them that I...
Not that long ago I questioned whether David was giving realism a fair shake. Recently, David shared an email on his blog that does the work I should have done:First off, the notion that a nuclear Iraq would be problematic but not inherently disastrous isn’t some bizarre notion – the fairly-insane regimes of Stalin and Mao proved manageable even once they got nuclear weapons. The same arguments made in favor of stopping a nuclear Iraq were also made in the early 1960s about stopping the PRC from getting the bomb (see Frank Gavin’s recent work on the Gilpatric Commission) and have been proven...
Daniel Starr explains:I'm not happy with the CCP today: it turns out that they've made the Asian bird flu virus resistant to the best antiviral drug we would have relied on to tame the next outbreak of avian-based flu in humans. They ignored the advice of the World Health Organization and had farmers drug their chickens with antivirals instead of vaccinating them. In effect, they evolved the virus strains for drug resistance. Now the antiviral is useless against the bird flu -- useless not just to poultry, but to humans.From the Washington Post article Dan's reacting to:Although China did...