Okay Ducks, here are your links from South Asia and Beyond! Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim, the Vice President of Afghanistan, has died of natural causes at age 57. Â Marshal Fahim fought along side the Lion of Panjshir, Ahmad Shah Massoud, during the Soviet Occupation....
After last week's diplomatic overtures on Syria, we've entered a period of relative calm and back to our mixed bag of stories of interest. NPR is running a fabulous series on Brazil in the lead up...
It's late Friday afternoon -- here are a few things worth reading: Betcy Jose asks, with all of the attention on chemical weapons, why does it matter how people die in conflict? Sohail Hashmi and I...
If you are like me, you have been transfixed by the unfolding story on Syria, the diplomatic gambit that has forestalled an imminent military strike. Alongside this important news has been the more...
Good morning...  These aren't the linkages you're looking for... Owen Jones reviews the hierarchy of death in the wake of the Boston bombing or what Judith Butler, in Frames of War, might call (un)grievable lives. Deepak Sarma at Racialicious writes about "Being Brown After the Boston Bomb Blast." (Hey the dudes who did it turned out to be white.  Brown and black people can chill now right? right?? Those false early reports about "dark skinned" suspects were just an honest mistake... Yeah, let's move on...) Tom Scocca at the Gawker asks, "Is the New York Post Edited by a Bigoted Drunk who...
Our readers may have noticed the lack of Saturday linkage. I was at the MD/PA/WV/VA combined state Tumbling and Trampoline state championships, in a facility with Faraday-cage properties. I am pleased to say that my daughter qualified for National Junior Olympics in her two main events -- trampoline and double-mini trampoline. Along the way she took first place and fourth place, for Maryland, in her age-group and level. Below is video for her Level 6 tramp routine. Although most Americans' attention was focused on the dramatic apprehension of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, quite a lot of...
Via Marginal Revolution, the always-interesting Xavier Marquez writes about Randall Collins' sociology. [Abandoned Footnotes] Obama staffers find jobs in white-shoe Washington. It turns out that the new boss is much the same as the old boss [The New Republic] Phil Schrodt talks about GDELT: Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone, a global events database that Jay Ulfelder has called the future of political science. Rolf Friedheim gives a detailed case-study of using the data in R to map some Russian protests. Good news for (consumers of) higher education: Marginal Revolution argues that...
Good morning ducks!  Here are your links... Even more well off people will be able to exempt themselves from TSA's airport security theater thanks to Visa credit cards.  Well, it's not like potential hijackers could afford the annual fee or first-class tickets anyway.  Oh wait... Do you enjoy being frisked, finger printed, and rapiscanned at airports? Then you'll be delighted to know that Homeland Security will be expanding its use of biometrics to US immigration offices.  Already a citizen? Great! Because the FBI is planning to amass data on US citizens gathered by law enforcement...
The above video includes Sean Kay speaking about US-European relations and international security. Kelsey Davenport: "How to Read the North Korean Nuclear Missile Threat." Scott Harold and Lowell Schwartz: "A Russia-China Alliance Brewing?" More Sino-Russian cooperation on alcohol production would be awesome! The National Security Archive has a nice roundup of their materials concerning discussions between Thatcher and Gorbachev. Spoiler: the 'no German unification' agreement seems to have failed. And also: Holy !!#~@#! Has it really been two months since I put up an interview at New Books...
And I bet that you all thought that I'd completely forgotten.... Robert Farley on the lessons of the Falklands War... for the PLA-N. Adam Elkus ruminates on the relationship between theory and math. Robert Murray: IR Theory and North Korea. Patrick M. Morgan's award-winning article: "The State of Deterrence in International Politics Today" (PDF). The (Proposed) US Global HIV/AIDS budget. Can Islam Karimov's daughter succeed him? And also: Jay Ulfelder is very, very excited about GDELT. Xavier Marquez riffs on another one of these "common human myths? Ecological event!"...
Good Mornin' Ducks!  Here are some links on the crise du jour... Tim Shorrock discusses what what the US media is missing in its coverage of North Korea on FAIR's CounterSpin. (MP3 Podcast at 9.30 - 18:25) Kongdan Oh discusses how to understand North Korea and the "Republic of Pyongyang" on Brookings FPRI E-notes. UCSD's Stephan Haggard argues that Kim Jong-Un is not crazy. Professor Yoon Young-kwan at Seoul National asks us what would have happened if the Realism of Metternich guided our approach to North Korea. The CFR's Scott Snyder and the Duck's very own Robert Kelly discussed the...
ISA News:  Congratulations to Dan and Patrick!  They will be involved with ISQ -- ISA's flagship publication for the next five years.  Dan has been selected as the lead editor, Patrick as the web editor.  Congrats! I'm not a fan of the new grading software technologies, but maybe I can be persuaded -- grading while at ISA does suck. Already?  Minerva (note: not Duck of) a threat to MOOCs. We have an answer to the universe?   It's all code? Cool. The decline in critical thinking in the US is becoming a national security concern. Can we securitize the liberal arts? Barbara Walter, Daniel...