Quantitative and formal analysis of international relations, comparative politics, and American politics.
A quick update on goings on in Libya. US Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman visits rebels in Benghazi. Members of the rebel "organization" have apparently been invited to open offices in Washington DC. The article also discusses the deployment of attack helicopters by France and the UK to Libya to directly assist the … Read more
This sort of reminds me of this. Really one passage in particular, I suppose: We tend to marvel at the Darwinian perfection of organisms now, saying 'this must have been highly selected for, it's a tuned and sophisticated machine'. In fact, it's a mess – there's so much unnecessary complexity. Bear with me. The preceding … Read more
What effect would a cut in US aid to Pakistan have on Chinese involvement in the region?
Dan Drezner has the most recent in a line of posts discussing the role of elites vs. masses in policymaking (See Drezner for links to the other posts in the series–they're worth reading). I don't really have much to add to the pile here–these are some pretty smart folks and they've said a lot of … Read more
The New York Times (this may cost you one of your monthly alloted articles) reports on a new article by Levitt and Miles that argues that poker is a game of skill and not a game of chance. The policy-relevant implications for the study deals with legalization – several prohibitions against poker are codified with … Read more
I am glad to see someone has taken the opening episode of Deep Space 9 and created a clip of one of the more theoretically interesting segments of the episode. Granted, this was uploaded 4 years ago, but I had not come across a short version of the clip until now. I watched the show … Read more
Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy has a piece up regarding the changes to US-Pakistani relations that may be coming out of this week's events. Rogin is specifically discussing the debate in Congress over cutting military assistance to Pakistan. Clearly this discussion has a long way to go, and the article indicates that significant divisions are emerging in both houses of Congress over what the appropriate response is.
More below…
On last night’s episode of The Colbert Report, Colbert interviewed Amy Farrell, Professor of American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Dickinson College, and author of the newly published book Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. Here is an excerpt from the summary of the book on Amazon: “Tracing the cultural denigration of fatness … Read more
I previously wrote a bit about the document released a few weeks ago by Colonel Mykleby and Captain Porter. Well here is a NY Times article (a brief one) on the issue. I suspect the quick references to Bin Laden were added after this article was essentially finished, but there's probably more room here to … Read more
Here are some interesting observations from the Situation Room photo from yesterday. 1. The photo on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's laptop is blurred. This is obviously a classified document. 2. As some of the people on Reddit pointed out, there is a burn bag next to Obama. Burn bags are used to burn classified documents. 3. Everyone … Read more