Cure-alls and Remedies
Peter Levine’s blog has been more-than-usually insightful over the last month or so. He has pieces on Charter Schools , agency collaboration with citizens’ groups , The Tempest , Massachusetts v. EPA , and a wonderful declaration of principles almost identical to those I’ve espoused in this blog and my actual scholarship. Despite all the…
A month without internet ? He writes like it’s an addiction, and it probably is: constant stimulation, freedom from reflection, instantaneous access to the opinions of others. Why think yourself? Why bother to formulate a position that’s anything other than a reaction to the latest rant? During weeks two and three, I watched the first…
The Tanner Lectures are available online . Here’s a selection that I found interesting: Ben Barber’s “” Democratic Alternatives to the Mullahs and the Malls ” Seyla Benhabib’s ” Reclaiming Universalism: Negotiating Republican Self-Determinism and Cosmopolitan Norms ” Stephen Breyer’s ” Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution ” Umberto Eco’s ” Interpretation and Overinterpretation: World,…
According to Phil Agre’s ” How to be a leader in your field ,” the first step to disciplinary domination is to “Pick an issue.” This, it turns out, is so very hard that he devotes the majority of his paper to this important decision. One of many issue-spotting techniques is this: (m) Ask yourself,…
Please read these two extracts from Clive Stafford Smith’s forthcoming book Bad Men , recounting his experience as a lawyer for prisoners at the military base in Guantanamo: ” No fairytales allowed ,” and ” Have you received your gift pack? ” From the first: One of the escorts told me that, on pain of…
Incrementalists win. That’s the take-away message from today’s NYTimes article on the aftermath of Gonzales v. Carhart , where the Supreme Court upheld a ban on partial birth abortions : The court did not talk about big concepts and issues like privacy, but about the small, gripping details of how abortion works, said Professor Hendershott,…
Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can…
The recent peaceful return of British soldiers to the contrary, (and so smartly dressed! ) it appears we are currently involved with groups carrying out military operations in Iran : Most recently, Jundullah took credit for an attack in February that killed at least 11 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard riding on a bus…
Check out the newest slang from the Global War on Terror : Bohica, Fobbit, Echelons Above Reality, Full Battle Rattle. I loves me some jargon. The title phrase means, basically, “The situation is bad, but deal with it.” Via Metafilter .
Two recent “Intelligence Briefs” from PINR caught my eye: ” Iran’s Covert Operations in Iraq ,” and ” The Implications of Strategic Withdrawal from Iraq .” As some readers know, I’m a big fan of PINR for supplying ‘open source intelligence,’ which is to say, generalized insights into foreign policy and educated guesses based on…