Small Precautions

Clearly there is hope now for West Africa: Photo credit: JB

Apposite to my screed the other day about the stupidities derived from using modernization theory to understand the Afghan situation , here ...

This post is pretty narrowly associated with my academic interests, but one of the things that continues to stun me about modernization theo...

Robert Strange McNamara died last week, and with his passing virtually all the major policy players involved in the conception and implement...

I read Matthew Glass's Ultimatum this weekend. Only so-so. What's weak about it, as a scenario exercise, is that Glass creates his ...

Remember that DHS report on the threat posed by domestic "right wing extremists" -- you know, the one that got the, well, right w...

From the Washington Post this morning: When anti-narcotics agents first heard that drug cartels were building an armada of submarines to tr...

So David Carradine, who was found dead yesterday in a Thai hotel with a rope around his genitals and neck, apparently died from auto-erotic...

The Republicans are in such serious circular firing squad mode that Peggy Noonan is using the WSJ op-ed page to opine that the movement to d...

All the perfervid talk of the economy showing some "green shoots" because the second derivative of some key economic variables ha...

The first of presumably many meetings between Obama and Netanyahu happened yesterday, with much chatter ahead of time that Obama was plannin...

I've made a number of dire predictions on this blog, some of which haven't happened (yet) and some of which have been disturbingly v...

A very useful discussion of how regulatory capture takes place: Two archetypal scenarios for regulatory capture exist. The first is an unde...

Dmitry Orlov, commenting on the swine flu: Another thing that's peculiar is that some nations, notably China and Russia, have banned th...

Bill O'Reilly makes explicit the conservative political agenda: to defend " the white, Christian, male power structure."

A portrait of Sarah Palin's "Real America."

Doesn't look like we're there yet, according to the number crunchers at Zillow. As shown in the purple line in the graph below, hous...

Former Baltimore Sun reporter and the creator of The Wire (the best TV show ever made), David Simon talks to Congress about the crisis of n...

Containment of the swine flu is no longer an option , according to the WHO. My guess is that the number of cases may abate now as the flue s...

The idea that Washington is mentally enslaved to Wall Street has a hoary pedigree, and has received any number of articulations, ranging fro...