Parodies Gone Awry

I don't know whether to be proud or embarassed that the Oberlin administrations made a parody of Hangover.

The HangOber from Oberlin College on Vimeo.




It has great production values, mixed acting, and only a few decent jokes but overall disappointing writing.  Too much devotion to the source material?  That the President of the university played two parts pretty decently says good things.  Overall, I give then an A for effort, but only a B for the movie.  A's were not easy to get at Oberlin. 

Best line is towards the end, explaining why the Pres does not have a sunburn.

A is for Army, not for Accountability

My twitter-stream is chock full of ire this morning.  Why?  Because the American Army seems to think that accountability is, what, Canadian?  When a Canadian general has improper relations with a subordinate in Afghanistan, he is immediately re-called, court-martialed and reduced in rank.  When an American colonel engages in a variety of crimes and breaks a bunch of regulations--including fraud, bigamy, conduct unbecoming an officer, he gets fined.  His wife's take:

"Justice was certainly not served," Mrs. Johnson wrote. "This is a reinforcement of the notion that if your father is a general, and or, you are a colonel or senior leader, and or, you graduate from West Point, you can be found guilty of illegal activity, and conduct unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman in the United States Army, and yet you can retire with full pay and benefits. Its my opinion that this is not a good message and does not reflect the Army values.

Perhaps Colonel James Johnson III was protected by the West Point background.  Perhaps because his father was a three-star general.  Whatever.  It sends a clear message that Colonels are essentially above the law even though they often have the job of enforcing behavior.  Sure, he lost his job as commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, but he should have been sent to jail and reduced in rank. 

This is just awful, awful, awful.  So, the Army seems to have similar ethical problems as the USAF.  Lovely.

Twitter Retrospective

In honor of my 20,000th tweet (which I messed up by hitting enter as I was editing it), I thought I would consider the past few years of many, many, many really short messages. 

Like many, I was a twitter skeptic.  I didn't think one could say much or learn much in 140 characters.  However, the ability to have links to websites and pics shrunk immediately meant that twitter is an incredibly way to share stuff.  Much more handy than just telling people where I am going or what I am doing.

I have not maintained a consistent twitter profile.  My twitter stream is much like my blog posts here as much as I thought that I could maintain distinct personalities.  But my lack of filter/attention deficit disorder means that both outlets are pretty scatter-shot.   I cover mostly the same topics now in both areas, with the addition that I use twitter to advertise my various blogs here and thither.

The key advantage of twitter for me, compared to blogging, is that it is far more interactive and conversational.  I have had interactions with a range of people from all over the world on a variety of topics from Australia's efforts in Afghanistan with a couple of Aussies yesterday to folks studying Yemen to TV critics to Ottawanians long before I actually move there to folks deeply embedded in policy-making debates in DC (think tank dwellers and beyond).  The past year's highlight was participating in Twitterfightclub, which allowed me to meet and learn from a bunch of national security experts.

Thanks to twitter, I do not feel like I am Rudolph anymore.  Or at least, my red nose is useful for something.  I don't really believe I have "klout" on things like cafes, Dubai, Android, Oslo, Media, Social Justice, Pirates, the Dark Knight, Georgia or Advocacy, despite klout.com may think.  But I do not feel as left out as I used to feel.  The joy of twitter is that one can select who to follow, which can help to create a very biased worldview, and folks can choose to follow me or whoever, creating virtual communities.  I have found these electronic communities to be pretty damned supportive and definitely very engaging.

I find it both strange and thrilling to have followers.  What a concept.  I do respond to most folks who engage me on twitter, and have found these conversations to be entertaining, engaging and educational.  Thanks!

I absolutely spend far more time on twitter than I should, but I get so much more information about things I need to know about, thinks I want to know about, and thinks I could not care about.  For someone whose primary personality flaw is impatience being a lousy listener sloppy indiscreet narcissism curiosity, twitter is incredibly addictive and fun.  I look forward to the next 20k tweets which will be mostly the same except for less stuff on Montreal roads, Quebec politics, undergrads (since my new job will not involve teaching undergrads) and more stuff on Canadian politics, Ottawa, and complaints about food selection (Montreal is hard to beat).

No Such Thing as Bad PR (Protest Category)?

I see that it is now students' turn to seize defeat from the jaws of victory.  Just as we see a spate of articles outside of Canada that, more or less, gullibly swallow the student line on things, the student protestors start indicating their contempt for the cops by, well, Nazi-saluting them.  Holy bad photo op, Batman!

From the National Post

Sure, they are trying to be snarky and sarcastic and are not really indicating that they are Nazis or prefer fascism.  They are trying to do the opposite.  I get that.  But it does look really bad on TV and in newspapers.  It allows folks to take offense, as they are wont to do when Nazis are invoked.

To be abundantly clear, there are damn few parallels between Maple Spring and the uprisings around the world that have Spring in their name.  This is not Prague Spring, where the Czechoslovaks sought to democratize in the face of Soviet tanks in 1968.  This is not Arab Spring, where folks protested against dictatorship.  This is a year where we actually had a spring in Montreal--nice weather, that is.  Yes, the riot police have targeted some bystanders, but compared to other outbreaks of dissent, the level of repression, even in Bill 78, is modest.

So, likening the Montreal police to the Nazis just makes the students look like they are the ones that are out of touch, that they are the ones who have lost perspective, that they are the ones who need to re-think.  Indeed, even the leader, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, of the more extreme group, CLASSE, has disavowed this even as he was slow/reluctant to disavow the violence of the spring (smoke bombs in the metros, vandalism, violating injunctions).  Perhaps he knows his PR better than he knows what civil disobedience really is (emphasis on the civil). 

I am not really offended by the outbreak of Nazi-esque salutes.  I am not surprised.  As this goes on and on, the organizations involved on all sides have more opportunities both to make bad decisions and to lose control of their supporters/agents.  On the other hand, I am offended by folks who buy into the rhetoric too easily.  Maple Spring, my ass!

Defining Civil War Again, FFS!

CNN has a post today pondering whether Syria is or is not a civil war.  It almost gets things right and then cites a bunch of people with strange ideas.  I have posted about this before, but because there seems to be much confusion and it is so easy to crap all over the CNN post, here we go.

The post does mention folks reporting the classic definition: two or more sides (that each has killed at least 100 so that it is not just a mass killing [genocide/politicide may co-exist with civil wars but are not the same thing]) of some severity.  The 1000 battle death total is arbitrary--it could be 100 or 500 or 10000.  1k was borrowed from the inter-state war scholarship because it made for less measurement error.  Using a lower threshold, like 25, might mean missing heaps of conflicts and maybe mis-coding things that are not really civil wars.

But the point is that a civil war is a violent set of events involving two or more sides, contesting the governance of a country.  It can be separatist--the contest is over who governs a spot of territory within the country.  It can be about regime change.  It can be revolutionary--who gets to re-shape the social and political order.  The goals are political--not just an outburst of violence aimed at another ethnic group--that would be a riot.  Two or more sides, violence, who governs. 

A popular uprising may or may not be enough to be a civil war--depends on whether there is two-sided violence that is more than just a single outburst.  So, this line is not entirely right:

"Syria did not start out as a case of civil war because the opposition to the government mainly took the form of a popular uprising in March 2011," she said. [Anuradha Chakravarty, assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina,]

One could say that it started out as repression and then become a civil war once folks started fighting back.   Which is what Chakravarty then says.  So she is very much on target as are Stephen Biddle and James Fearon who are also cited in this article.

Other folks?  Not so much.
Assad?  Well, we don't expect him to get it right.  A sectarian conflict can be a civil war if the state is the target.  Two groups fighting with each other is often called communal conflict and may not be a civil war, like the battles between Hindus and Muslims in India are violent, but not aimed at the state.  But plenty of civil wars are "sectarian" if that means ethnic or religious--that groups with different identities combating to control the government is very much a civil war.  Sectarian conflict and civil wars are not mutually exclusive.

Michel Weiss is simply wrong:

"Civil war suggests the previous state that exists all but failed and collapsed," he said. In some regions, the government lacks control and there is a "growing equalization" of forces, he said.

The article had just cited Fearon's example of the US Civil War, where the US was hardly a failed state in the north.  Indeed, most civil wars are between various groups and a government that still exists.  The contest is often uneven and "equalization" is hardly inevitable.  Indeed, many contenders to the throne government lose.  Biafra lost its battle to secede from Nigeria--it did not become equal, it got crushed.  Many civil wars can be sustained for a very long time, especially if one side chooses to engage in an insurgency.  Not all insurgencies are civil wars, not all civil wars are fought via insurgency. 

Steven Heydermann suggests there is some threshold that has not yet been crossed.  Where is that threshold?  For most scholars of civil war, a civil war exists if it is in one part of a country--it does not have to be all over the place.  If Libya and Lebanon are the "models" for civil war, it is not clear why Syria is not, as he insists, given the size of the opposition in Libya last year vs Syria this year.  Now I am really confused.

Jeff White, a fellow at an institute, at least makes it clear that this is his definition (which is a good thing since it is not one shared by many):

"My definition of civil war is a situation which is characterized by conflict between two, or more, segments of society. I still see the situation in Syria as one of fundamentally an armed and unarmed insurrection against the government. That is, the people are fighting the state, not each other."

Um, huh.  So, the American Civil War is not a civil war, since the South fought the US government?  One of the problems with fixations about failed states and the ethnic security dilemma (sorry about that) is that governments do not disappear once the firing starts--they are combatants.  Not just any combatant but the one with the most guns and most capability much of the time.  What would Jeff White call this thing where people fight the state, if not a civil war?  What was Libya last year?  Oh, and by the way, when people are fighting the state, the state is made up of people who fight back.   White's entire definition is not of civil war but of ethnic conflict.  Not all civil wars have ethnic cleansing.

This is all reminiscent of Rwanda where folks avoided calling it a genocide since that seemed to require an international response.  BUT there is a convention against genocide that requires a response.  Responsibility to Protect is not nearly as established, but perhaps may be responsible for some of this hedging about the Syrian civil war.

I read this piece because someone complained via twitter--did we really need such a long piece defining civil war?  No, we didn't.  The article could have stopped after Biddle's quote, Chakravart's or Fearon's.  Oy.

Falklands Retrospective

I have been engaging in a twitter conversation as a result of a tweet about the Falklands war, which ended thirty years ago.  The tweet was in response to a British retrospective that referred to the war as doing the impossible.  I reacted immediately to this because my memory of events in 1982 did not register expectations back then as impossible.

Well, apparently some folks did think the UK effort to re-take the Falkands/Malavinas was impossible.  That the islands were too close to Argentina for the British carriers to safely operate, that the British jump jets (Harriers) were unproven against fast jets (Harriers are slow), and so on. 

Why did I think then that this was not impossible?  Well, my mother worked for the US Navy at the time, ordering spare parts for planes, including the Harrier.  So, perhaps I had overly high expectations (which were met, they did fine).  I was also reading a lot of books at the time on the US submarine campaign in the Pacific, so I expected (if I am remembering correctly) that the British sub advantage would matter a a great deal.  Indeed, after a British sub sunk one of the biggest Argentine warships (the Belgrano), the Argentine navy became a non-factor.  Perhaps I was a bit stuck in the past/racist to think that the Brits easily handle any third world country because I was, well, 16. 

The real key is that Generals and Admirals are such lousy politicians that it messes up their day job expertise.  This case is the classic exemplar of a diversionary war--that the Argentine junta sought a fait accompli against the Brits to distract their population from their illegitimate government and its poor handling of the economy.  Otherwise, they would have waited a year or two because the British were planning on cutting back on its navy, including several of the ships that played a key role at the time.  And, as a democracy, the Brits made these plans quite public.  As my twitter conversation partner mentioned, winter would have been a better time given the difficulties of operating in bad weather.

Anyhow, I was surprised by the "impossible" word.  Hard, yes.  Impossible, obviously not in retrospect but not even at the time, at least to young me and to Maggie Thatcher.  I didn't agree with her on much, but on this, sure.

Mad Men Is So Frustrating

Oops, what I mean is that the coverage of Mad Men is So Frustrating.  I enjoy listening to podcasts and reading reviews/recaps of this show and a few others.  Alan Sepinwall and Dan Fienberg, Tim Goodman, and the folks at Grantland are the ones I listen to/read the most consistently.  I, of course, select out and do not listen to folks who are very scathing.  I understand that I identify with that which I like and do not want to have my feelings hurt by listening to stuff that makes me feel bad by association (a lesson Spew Junior should follow).  Also, folks who are really brutal about Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, etc. are obviously wrong, so why listen to them?

Anyhow, I explain my frustration below the break, as I must refer to this entire fifth season of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, the two seasons of Game of Thrones, Sopronos, Friday Night Lights, and Lost.  So, spoilers dwell beyond:

Peacekeeping and Violence

My latest at CIC: Peacekeeping involves violence http://bit.ly/M3q8zm Obvious? Yes.  Needs to be said again and again

Games of IR

If only I was still teaching Intro to IR, I could use the Game of Thrones Game.  Indeed, I cannot think of another piece of pop culture that could provide distinct characters to each of 600 students.  Alas, this will have to do:

'Game of Thrones': The Board Game -- powered by Cracked.com

H/T to PT.

The Pug Strikes Back

H/t to Joshua Foust for tweeting this bit of brilliance:


Josh seems surprised that his Pug/Star Wars tweets get more play (RT's) than his policy stuff.  Um, duh, dude!  Star Wars is universal--his opinions not so much.

Oh and he also tweeted this:

Just more proof of the pop culture supremacy of Star Wars.  Anyone do this to Buffy or Matrix or Bradbury (to use Mrs. Spew's comment)?

Status Addiction

The NYT has a piece on trends on frequent flyer elite status.  I did not care about such stuff because, well, I didn't travel enough to qualify or even care that much about perks.  But then I engaged in this most recent project, which involved a couple of trans-oceanic flights a year, leading to Silver status at United.  I almost hit gold, but didn't feel it was right to fly someplace at the end of 2011 just to get some more mileage to put me over the top.  If I had known that United (and the others) were going to devalue Silver a bit, as the article discusses, I might have taken just one more flight. 

What have I gotten with my Silver status for the past couple of years (pro-tip: going to Australia once a year makes hitting Silver much easier)?

• I got free access to Economy Plus seats--which do have more space--discernibly more room.  Last year, I could choose my EP seats earlier--new change to silver means it is a check thing which means less of them.
• I have been bumped to first class a couple of times, including once with my daughter on the way back from Orlando (wife was on separate flight to sneak across the border with expired permanent residency card).
• Getting on the plane earlier than other folks.  I don't have a lot to cram in the bins (just my computer bag), but with more fees for baggage, other folks fill them up quickly, so getting on early is desirable.  
• I get to put one bag into the cargo hold for free when on United but not on its partners (Air Canada). Sometimes, my bags come out first since they are supposed to be priority.

What else?  Well, with these perks, I am  now hooked.  I have been planning this year's travel with a heavy eye on what it takes to hit Silver again.  I could travel without these benefits, but since flying is such a hassle, I have come to value and become addicted to these various perks even they are not as super-special as they used to be. 

No, I am not the George Clooney character in Up in the Air, but I am thinking a bit more about how to max my points.

Winning Theme Song?

Maybe, as recommended by https://twitter.com/#!/ConBGone/.




Why does this video work?  Well, the gauzy lens-ing helps to obscure things, not unlike the denial sauce NATO likes to pour on stuff at times.  There are explosions!  "A world with too much choice" sounds like one with wars of choice to me.  "Be Anywhere"?  Ok, then: Afghanistan!

Any other suggestions for theme song for "NATO and Afghanistan: Fighting Together, Fighting Alone"?

Unbeatable NBA Finals Prediction

Tonight starts the finals between two teams we should hate: the anti-team Heat and the stolen Sonics.  I will root for the latter as I really enjoy how the Thunder play, even if I dislike how they got to OKC. 

But the big prediction is this: people in the media will develop really strong opinions and over-react to every single twitch along the way.  As the games progress, you will see commentators alternatively blasting Lebron as an awful teammate and as a tremendous player.  You will see people condemning the Thunder if they lose and switching stances when they win.

 I have not followed basketball that much in my life, but I have taken to listening to sports podcasts (in addition to other ones I like).  I was behind in my listening, so I kept hearing out-dated opinions, like the Spurs are inevitable, like the Celtics had no chance and then the Heat had no chance.  By listening just a few days late, I was able to amuse myself with being out of synch with the wildly swinging pendulums. 

My basic question is this: does the proliferation of media require over-reactions to every single event?  Any series that goes more than four games is going to have ups and downs.  Many matches of good teams will either go six or seven games.  But perhaps we always need to react to the latest event.  Everything new is bigger/better/louder than that which is old.  For instance, is this the golden age of the sitcom?  Parks and Rec & Community would suggest sure, but that would mean forgetting the era of Taxi/WKRP/MASH/Newhart/Cheers/Soap/Barney Miller/Happy Days/etc.  There is a recency bias, but the b-ball coverage takes it to an absurd degree where the most recent game is all that matters.

So, here is my prediction: heaps of over-reactions.

Bad Pop Social Science

Slate posted a piece on the academic study of pop culture.  It found that academics studied Buffy the Vampire Slayer most.  Well, actually, no, it found that more folks studied the Buffy than the Matrix, the Simpsons, Aliens or The Wire.

This led to a FB discussion of selection bias.  We can discuss the merits of these five and ponder why the Simpsons did so poorly (perhaps we need a consistent plot progression?), or why the Wire is under-valued yet again.  That the 2nd and 3rd Matrix movies sucked so much that they sucked all the air out of the studying the Matrix enterprise? But what is most obvious is that this "study" is that it ignored the big, enduring elements of pop culture that we have been obsessing about for years/generations: Star Wars, Star Trek (which is tossed off as an side), Lord of the Rings, and, more recently, Harry Potter.  Using just the Berkeley source, Star Wars appears to be ahead of Buffy.  Using scholar.google:

• Buffy produces 6k hits; 
• Star Trek: 30k; 
• Star Wars: 51k (affected by Reagan's naming of the Strategic Defense Initiative);
• Lord of the Rings: 22k; 
• Harry Potter: 32k.

To get a more systematic view, I used Publish or Perish, which relies on scholar google to build comparisons. If there are over a 100 papers, it just does the stats for one hundred (maybe I am lousy at setting the parameters, but this is a blogpost, not a submission to a journal).  There is plenty of error, of course, but there are some systematic patterns.

	Papers	Cites	Cites per paper	Cites per year	H index*	Most cited piece
Buffy TVS	100	4303	43	269	28	836
Harry Potter	83	6770	81	339	43	1296
Lord of the Rings	100	8339	83	83	33	1961
Star Trek	100	7192	72	153	37	926
Star Wars	100	9915	99	275	37	816
Simpsons	100	3164	32	44	24	507
The Matrix Trilogy	100	973	10	22	14	100
Alien Movies	100	370	4	2	9	54

Star Wars has the most citations but probably the most error given the aforementioned SDI bias.  What this does show is that the classics (old) double more or less Buffy while the new (Harry) has 50% more citations.  In terms of which papers have the most impact on average, again Star Wars  prevails but Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter lead the rest (and probably have fewer accidental cites along the way).  Harry Potter has the highest rate of cites per year since all of JK's stuff came out since 1997.  This produces the highest H-index.  Buffy performs quite well, certainly outclassing the Matrix because, well, quality does matter after all.   The Simpsons do pretty well.  Aliens?  Scary but not worthy of citations.  Star Trek is a steady performer, among the leaders across the border, and with fewer false positives than Star Wars.  The Wire, well, hard to measure since even restricting P&P searches to social sciences gives way too many non-The Wire hits (same goes for Breaking Bad and Mad Men).  I guess folks will have to settle for The Wire remaining the best TV program in most folks' minds and perhaps the best application of social science in a TV show.

Aside from the lesson that Slate does apparently poor pop social science, what can we learn from this exercise (other than my priorities are lousy--I should be doing something other than this--including my summer project of finally watching season one of Buffy)?  That we live in a golden age of pop culture and its over-analysis?  That Harry beats Buffy?  That Star Wars and Star Trek fans have something else over which to fight?  That the Matrix really did suck?  What conclusions do the readers have?

Of course, one could argue that I have some selection bias myself--that this was hardly a systematic study of pop culture.  There might be other books/tv programs/movies that get more analysis than these.  But I did do due diligence, web 2.0 style by crowdsourcing first. Certainly, one can do this better if one is writing a dissertation.  And surely someone is.

*  from P&P: H-index aims to measure the cumulative impact of a researcher's output by looking at the amount of citation his/her work has received. Publish or Perish calculates and displays the h index proper, its associated proportionality constant a (from N_c,tot = ah²), and the rate parameter m (from h ~ mn, where n is the number of years since the first publication).

Searching for a Theme Song

Because we are in the final stages before we submit our manuscript, my co-author, Dave Auerswald, and I are contemplating a theme song.  Hell, why not?  The book focuses on the complexities of alliance warfare--how countries manage their participation in multilateral military operations with most of the focus on ISAF and Afghanistan (we have a chapter on Libya). 

Thus far, the nominees via Facebook and Twitter are:

• "Leaving on a Jet Plane" nominated by Stephanie Levitz.
• "He Ain't Heavy" nominated by Tricia Wood.
• "You Can't Always Get What You Want" nominated by Erin Simpson. This happened to be my first thought as well.
• "The Bravery of Being out of Range" nominated by Ora Szekely.
• "Citizen CIA" nominated by Peter Trumbore.  I don't get it either.
• "Land of Confusion" nominated by Alexandre Carette (I prefer the Disturbed edition), who has spent significant time in Afghanistan working for Canada's Foreign Affairs department.

 So far, the winner appears to be:

Winter Is Here

No, I have not moved to Australia, although Ottawa may be the Canberra of Canada.  No, I am referring to the long cold barren period of TV between Sunday night and next spring now that Game of Thrones and Mad Men have ended their seasons.  The good news is that Breaking Bad is a month away.  So, to commemorate the end of another great MM season, I found this:

Yes, Mad Men + X-Men = awesome thanks to this site.

Discrimination in IR? No? Yes!

Check out my first piece at Political Violence @ a Glance.  It attempts to deploy a bunch of scholarship  about intervention in a straightforward way.  Let me know if it worked (besides the fact that I need to edit more).

Please, Call Her Bat-Woman

Just a great old PSA about pay equity:


I wonder if Yvonne Craig got residuals of any kind from the show.

Checks and Outrage

The Obama administration's stances on all things Justice-related have driven me bonkers.  Best illustration of the non-sensical, anti-democratic and anti-American stance on drones:
Go here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/04/1096071/-Schoolhouse-Rock-the-sequel

I have no words.

Choosing the Right Lyrics

This guy decided to use Blink-182 lyrics as pick-up lines:"


First question: is it the lyrics or the delivery?  I am not sure he really sold it.
Second question: is this the right band?  I do enjoy Blink-182 very much, but perhaps start with the Beatles or some less, well, somewhat angry music?

Just a thought: what say you?

Blogging Overload

The challenge of writing in a virtual world is that it is easy to over-commit and lose track of things.  Someone commented on my Facebook ad for my latest outlet about the number of different places I am posting stuff these days, and, well, it is true.  I am now posting at:

• my own blog (right here);
• the occasional post at Duck of Minerva as a guest contributor;
• an essentially weekly piece at the Canadian International Council [CIC];
• a quarterly column at Current Intelligence including a new piece on NATO;
• and, now, one or two posts a month at Political Violence @ a Glance.

I think that is it.  Hmmm.  So, a few questions arise?  Why so many?  What differentiates the stuff I write?  Good questions, reader, glad you asked.

Why so many?  Mostly because each outlet is distinct and because I have not thought hard about what I want my web-presence to be.  Each opportunity that has arisen just seems cool and hard to decline.  Plus I think I am still feeling the effects of Rudolph disease.  Spending six years in West Texas and coming out of a grad program that was on the rise but not yet well networked (well, for the grad students) meant that I spent my early career feeling left out of the various reindeer games.  As a result, I have a hard time saying no when interesting opportunities arise to hang out, even virtually, with smart and interesting people.  Not only have I been blogging like a Mad Man (wait, no blogging in the 1960s), but I have been doing a whole lot of edited volumes lately.  Probably has something to do with feeling less than welcome in other settings.

I started blogging because I viewed as it an opportunity to think aloud about stuff.  Perhaps working in semi-isolation during the summer pushed me into seeking outlets for my opinions.  I do my best thinking (not saying much) when writing, so by writing more, I have been able to ponder more stuff, especially now that I use driving/riding the train/biking have turned into listening activities--listening to podcasts (good thing my i-pod is not waterproof so I still think in the shower).  Not to mention blogging allowed me to embrace my inner (and outer) narcissist.

My blogging here at the Spew eventually led to posting occasionally at the Duck.  Duck of Minerva has a bunch of very interesting folks, and posting there has given me opportunities to meet these new people and drink beer with them at conferences.  So, the incentive here is obvious!  That, and they have a broader readership.  I could cross-post my IR stuff more over there from here, but I tend not to see most of my ordinary posts here as Duck-worthy.  The nice thing about DoM is that it is a blend of sharp policy and theory stuff and straight-out silliness.  My most recent post there applied my research on NATO and Afghanistan to understand how the Avengers and S.H.I.E.D. probably interact with the American government.  The Duck has a long tradition of using pop culture to explore and understand IR, so I fit in well there.  I am still intimidated by the quality of the stuff there.

Women Are 20% of the Population

When talking about women's issues, the media tends to talk to men.  Maybe it is because women are only 20% of the population?




Thanks to http://ilovecharts.tumblr.com/

The Dilemma Illustrated

Voyaging through I Love Charts tumblr this morning.  Found this illustration of a basic dilemma (Afghanistan, marriage, jobs, etc.]

Media at Risk and A Big Dose of Perspective Sauce

Check this figure out:


From the Guardian, with h/t to I love Charts.

The Post-Cold War era has not been kind to journalists.  We criticize the media all the time (I bash them regularly here), but the reporters out there in the field, whether that is Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, Moscow, or someplace else, literally put their lives on the line.  That we must take seriously and remember on occasion if not always.

Gentlemen, We Have No Learning Curve

I have been taking shots at the US Air Force Academy for the past several years.  No reason to stop now that we see nearly 80 students cadets get caught cheating and apparently have only their wrists slapped.

There is an honor code: 'According to The Cadet Honor Code, a cadet "will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does." Penalties for violating the code range from probation to expulsion.'  But apparently folks at the academy did not feel like living by it.  Why not?  Well, the recent past at the USAFA has been pretty ugly, where the focus has been on following the right God but not necessarily being all that righteous otherwise.  Yes, it is true that there has been cheating at the other military academies, but when you learn about how they set their priorities and design their system compared to other academies, these events are hardly surprising.

I am not sure we should just kill the academies and rely on ROTC and other sources of officers, especially since West Point and the Naval Academy have produced lively debates about the course of their respective branches and the future of warfare.  But I am starting to buy into the idea that perhaps the USAF should be broken up with its pieces put under the other services.

Oh, and the title here is sexist because, well, ask the women who went through the USAF academy.

Back to the Past

Just got this email from McGill:

 

A message from Jim Nicell, Associate Vice-Principal (University Services)

As has been the case at dozens of other institutions in recent days, McGill has been the recipient of an envelope containing a white powder.

In all other cases of envelopes containing powder the substances have turned out to be harmless.

Police put a small area in the James Administration Building off limits for a short period of time, before advising us that the area could be reopened. The police informed us that they are of the view the substance is not harmful and business throughout the James Administration Building can continue.

Not only are there literally limbs flying around the country, but someone is imitating the anthrax-folks of 2001, sending powered via the mail to various places to protest.  This time, the protest is aimed at Liberals and Anglophone institutions in Quebec (the body parts seemed to be aimed at a variety of targets).  The powder has proven to be harmless, but, if the intent is to scare people, then it is ... terrorism, right?

Is this a proportionate response to the protests of the spring and the provincial government's attempts to squash said protests?  Nope.  No, this is not probably being done by the main student groups, but their fellow travelers are doing them no favors.  Or favours for that matter.

Lovely.

Flying Over Pakistan

Stuff flying over Pakistan has been a recurring theme of late.  Of course, the focus has been on drones.  So, let me briefly address one point on those before moving to helos.


Drones, by their very nature in 2012, are easy to shoot down.  They move slowly .... mostly in circles.*  Pakistan has an air force (Libya could not shoot down the drones after having its air force and air defenses destroyed), and has shown in the past that they could shoot down Soviet fighters.  A flying lawnmower would be easy pickings.  So, if Pakistan's military really objected to the drone strikes, the US would not be striking via drones over-flying Pakistan, at least not for long.  The real questions are whether the civilians in the government understand this and whether they have control over the military.  Seems to me that Pakistani leaders are playing the same double game that Karzai is--blaming the outsiders while relying on them.  I am not an expert on drones, on Pakistan, or on drones over Pakistan, but I do think some basic logic applies here.

*  Yes, some secret ones may fly faster, higher or more stealthily, but the coverage of the drone strikes seems to make it clear that most of the drones flying over Pakistan these days are fairly ordinary and extremely vulnerable. [update: see this explainer for details for why I am mostly but not entirely correct]

Ok, onto helicopters.  There is a story that NATO helicopters overflew North Waziristan. I found it strange that the helos were described as NATO.  Who else would have helos in the area besides the US?  This part of Pakistan neighbors the sectors of Afghanistan that are American Areas of Responsibility [AOR].  The handy dandy ISAF placemat makes this pretty clear.  The Poles, the non-Americans closest to this area, do have helos (or at least did), but would have to overfly an entire province beyond their AOR.  Plus many countries operating in Afghanistan have rules that make sure that they do not get too close to the border, so flying into North Waziristan would be most unlikely and unlucky.  So, if you had to bet, bet on these helos being Americans, but I doubt Vegas would give you decent odds.

Unions and Student Protests

For those who ponder why I would be less than thrilled with Quebec unions or why I seem to skitter along the political spectrum, the latest stories (in French, in English) about the role of Quebec unions makes it abundantly clear.  What people have long suspected is now quite apparent--that the big unions have been providing significant financial support to the student groups, funding their mobilizations outside of Montreal (subsidizing the buses), for example.

Why would the unions do this?  Of course, they take the stance that they support Quebec's left as a matter of principle.  Sure.  What that really means is that they will support anyone or anything that will screw over Jean Charest and the provincial Liberal party.  The unions have long hated this current government and have long been aligned with the separatists. 

I get it that unions were/are important for being some kind of counter-balance to the power of corporations.  Jacob Levy examines the pro's and con's of unions quite well, although I am not a libertarian so I do not exactly share his point of view (not a surprise to him).  So, I see their necessity, but I also have seen how the combo of strong unions and ties to one side of the political system can seriously warp things. 

The Republican readers of mine (all three of you) are probably gleeful about this, but this combo does not really exist in the US.  Unions are very weak and they are not so embedded in the political system.  Yes, many unions support the Democrats, but this support is weak at best.  They give some money but cannot promise voters.  They certainly do not disrupt ordinary life to make the government of the day look bad.  American unions cannot even mobilize their members that much on election day. 

When I lived in the US, I supported the idea of stronger unions since the political system favors the corporations.  After ten years in Quebec (actually, after a few months), I realized that powerful, entitled unions that are eager to disrupt, prone to sabotage, are hardly ideal.  That they jumped in on the side of students, despite the fact that this ongoing mobilization and the increasing debt crisis are both counter to the interests of their members, is hardly surprising.  Any chance to mess with Charest and the Liberals makes sense to them.  But given the polls, where the student movement is hardly popular, it is pretty clear that the unions' strategy of remaining in the background was their wisest decision. 

I wonder if the student organizers realize that they are a stalking horse?  Maybe if they went to classes?  Probably not--they will just consider themselves the vanguard of the proletariat. 

More Than a Band of Brothers

While the paratroopers tend to get heaps of attention when we think about D-Day, this Band of Brothers was more than just the 101st or the 82nd.  While Omaha was the toughest beach, the others were not so easy.  This video (h/t to Stephane Roussel on fb, a noted tank aficionado) provides a short illustration that this Band was quite big and quite multinational:


Update: The Army site on Normandy makes it clear that the selection bias towards paratroops is not entirely unwarranted.  That is, four US divisions (in addition to the Brits, Canadians and Poles)--two infantry (1st and 4th ID's) and two paratroop (82nd and 101st).  On the other hand, other tales of the war, such as the Battle of the Bulge focus almost entirely on the 101st, when the gravestones I saw nearby clearly show that many, many units had a role to play.

Selection Bias and Academic Experts

This column is so on target but also so off target: that lazy media outlets end up using quotes from the academics that they can reach instead of those that have expertise.  Yes, relying on an expert on Greece is a particularly egregious example of an ill-suited academic expert.  I know whereof I speak since I have been asked to speak on things that I know poorly, such as the likelihood of suicide bombing if the US were to invade Iraq (asked in early 2003). 

Even when I know what I am talking about and when the pre-interview focuses on questions that I can answer with some degree of certainty (even if I am wrong, at least I might be certain), the interviewer often goes off-script asking questions entirely unrelated to the pre-interview.  The same goes for how one is described.  I have tried to tell the producers that I am not a terrorism expert or an Afghan expert, but an expert on ethnic conflict and, more recently, an expert of sorts on NATO.  But the anchor/reporter will often then indicate that I am expert on things that I have never claimed to be an expert.  I make fun of myself by saying that my ten days in Afghanistan in 2007 make me an expert--it is a JOKE. 

But back to the main point, media outlets tend to go to the same well time and time again.  Sometimes this makes sense, when someone is an expert on Canadian defence procurement.  Other times, it makes less sense like the aforementioned expert on Greece. 

The problem with this particular article is that it uses this critique of the media and of academia as part of a screed about progress in Afghanistan.  That the academics are wrong, that Afghanistan is making progress.  Maybe, maybe not.  The more one learns about Afghanistan and/or about counter-insurgency, the more one realizes how hard it is.  I am sure we can find ill-informed experts saying how wonderful things are in Afghanistan as well.  So, this column really is a good example of biased selection rather than a good indictment of experts or a good argument that there is heaps of progress in Afghanistan.

Still, I will try to be a bit more cautious for at least awhile in what I say to the media since I don't want to be the poster boy for the next screed about academic experts in the media.

Short Dose of Honesty

The Republican Party has focused heaps of attention the past decade (and then some) on restricting the ability of people to vote.  Citing the chimera (that is, the illusory threat) of voter fraud, the GOP and its minions have tried to kick people off the rolls.  Today, the issue is whether to allow people in line to vote when the polls are supposed to close in Wisconsin.  The obvious answer, if you support democracy and freedom, is this: let people vote.

But if you consistently try to prevent people from voting, that says much about the nature of your party regardless of whatever justifications one presents.  It means that any stance on freedom is, well, bullshit since there is no more basic freedom than the right to vote.  In the past, the courts always erred on the side of freedom.  Where are they now?  I don't know. 

The Republicans can talk about voter fraud all they want, but there has been no systematic evidence of abuse of voting, except if one includes elected officials denying voters the ability to vote because they might vote for the Democrats.

So, when you hear voter fraud, you should think: the apparent threat is a fraud and those citing it are frauds.  Those who raise the threat are con artists trying to deny people the most basic of rights.  Can I say it any plainer than that?

Bonjour-Hi

There is a secret code for folks shopping in Montreal: when in a store, the clerk will often say Bonjour-Hi.  And then you pick in which language the rest of the transaction takes place.  At first, I tried to do these transactions in my poor French, but that just caused confusion and frustration.  So, I just would say hi and move on in English.  This is pretty cool for a city where people speak multiple languages.

Well, unless your job is to enforce French supremacy.  Don Macpherson has a piece today about how the language police office is upset that 13% of transactions in downtown Montreal begin with Bonjour-Hi.  Worse, the Liberal language rep is "concerned."  Oh, please.  This is all just posturing for the language nationalists.  That sales folks want to make customers feel comfortable by operating in their language of choice, 13% of the time downtown, that is, is something to be concerned or irritated about? 

Ah, the joy of misplaced priorities. This, I will not miss.  Absolument non.

The Wire As a Musical? Count Me In

The Wire: The Musical with Michael Kenneth Williams from Michael Kenneth Williams     

oh my!

More Expertise on Political Violence

There is a new blog on the block: Political Violence @ a Glance.  I would recommend it even if I were not one of the bloggers.  I am in great company as the folks who will be blogging here are a bunch of sharp people who study political violence--IR scholars and Comparativists and especially those who dwell at the intersection of these two fields.

Assoc Prof Blues

A colleague posted this article on dissatisfaction in the academic world, where it found that Associate Profs are the most unhappy.  This seems surprising since these folks are mostly tenured, and the stress of the job falls mostly on those seeking tenure.  Not so surprising really.

First, as the article notes, whatever protections one has from additional work (and this varies among institutions) while pre-tenure, these drop away after tenure.  One ends up doing far more service to the profession and the university, one usually does far more supervision especially of grad students, and the toll accumulates.  Studies of gender and academia (that I have read but not read myself) indicate that the service problem is worse for women who get more requests to do this sort of stuff.  This is especially the case where there is uneven burden-sharing--where Full Professors pass on responsibilities because, well, they can.

Second, and, critically, where you stand depends on where you sit in time.  My colleague pondered whether time in rank might matter--that is, there are two kinds of Associate Professors--those that are on their way to promotion to Full Professor and those that are going to be Associate Professors for the rest of the their career.  Those who find themselves stuck at the same level for too long may become frustrated and bitter, even if their situation is a result of declining productivity post-tenure (or getting tenure despite not having a strong trajectory). So, you might find that folks who have been Associate Professors for less than seven years might not be that displeased as opposed to those who have been in that status for more than a decade.  To be clear, there is a third kind of Associate Prof--ones who deserve to get promoted to Full but do not for reasons of politics, personal politics.

I will not get into the details about how I fit into that third category.  My friends know only too well as I do not suffer in silence.  Clues abound in my three years of blogging. To be clear, I would be leaving McGill this summer anyhow as the opportunities at Carleton are just too good, that my Canada Research Chair was ending in any case, and Montreal, well, wore me out.

The bad news is that the folks who thwarted me have no learning curves (I also might have become Leeroy Jenkins).  The good news is that time will ultimately end this problem as the accomplishments of those behind me are too great to be denied for too long, and the Fulls are getting mighty old.  The best news is that doing right by the profession (publishing in leading journals, getting cited, doing interesting research, placing graduate students in good tenure track jobs) is its own reward.  Moreover, by doing those things, I was able to get a great job offer.  As a result, my blogging this month will be spotty as I prepare for the move while reading three dissertations and finishing one book.

Completely Different, pt II

Continuing my journey back in time:

Axl Rose: Hard to work with?  Who would have thunk it?

One of many videos that MTV was surprisingly reluctant to play.


Tone Loc: Wild Thing.  MTV took a while to get to rap, but not as slow as I.

Meet the Mets!

The NY Mets are the first team I was ever aware of, having been raised my first few years in the shadow of Shea Stadium.  So, I am mighty pleased that they finally had a no-hit game by Johann Santana.  Santana has been hurt much of his time in NY, making his big contract seem not worth it.  But if any big contract can be worth it (debatable), finally giving the Mets its first no-hitter gives Santana reason not worry so much about the $$.  Given how many great pitchers threw for the Mets and how many of them ended up with no-hitters in their post-Mets destinations, it is cool that they got a great pitcher who threw one for them for a change.  Woo hoo!

The Future Is Not Yet Written

Ah, Doc Brown, you had it so right and so write:




From this story.  Also see below.



The future keeps getting further and further away. Or does it?  Damn, where is my hover board?

Quick Hits and Runs on Quebec Protest Stuff

Another depressing morning reading coverage of the Quebec protests and what they portend for the future of the province (have I mentioned how thrilled I am to be moving in 25 days?  Oh, I have?  Never mind). 

Let me just address a few stories and reactions:

• There is an interesting piece in the Globe and Mail about some entrepreneurial folks who have been translating the French press into English since there seemed to be such a divide in coverage and perceptions.  There are a few problems with this.  First, there are Anglophones who have been supporting the students.  Just check out the past couple of days of pieces in the Montreal Gazette written by McGill profs.  Second, maybe the problem is with the French media?  Given that public opinion is not pro-student and is especially not pro-student outside of Montreal, perhaps it is not the English media that have a bad grasp of what is going on but the French media.  Of course, there are language politics in play, as ably analyzed by Jacob Levy, but not all of the French folks love the status quo.
• Past QC protests gave us the current generation of leaders. which explains much.  If this is true, then the future of Quebec is mighty dark indeed.  These student protest leaders have little control over their groups, their groups have dubious legitimacy given how voters were conducted and given how the overwhelming majority of students are not represented by these groups.  Oh, and the leaders' positions on injunctions raises questions about their democratic credentials if democracy has anything to do with the rule of law.  Yes, I sound like a reactionary, but when Your Rights are more important than my rights because you feel yours intensely, well, that is not good for me or actually even for you.  
• As I remarked the other day, this impasse is entirely understandable given the politics of the situation.
• There is an interesting question raised and addressed today: why this battle?  why now?  Charest has often surrendered quite quickly and easily to smaller protests.  Perhaps he read the public well and the students poorly?  That is, the public was/is not willing to pay higher taxes for low tuition, but he misread the staying power of the students.  I am reluctant to draw big lessons from all of this because the protestors themselves are hardly a unified entity.  People are seeing in this effort what they want to see.  If this was a great awakening, then wouldn't the protests continue if the government froze tuition for a few years?  No, the students will go back home, having won their narrow objective even as little progress would have been made on really making the government accountable.  Of course, I could be reading too much in to this.  Perhaps this is a genuine awakening---but again only of 1/3 of the population are "awakened." 
• I have mixed feelings about Mario Dumont, who used to lead a popular third party that did well in one election by relying on xenophobia.  But he is right here:

“Would you consider the total incapacity to make change in a society an awakening? I'm not so sure,” says Mr. Dumont, who embraces the free-market ideology the protesters are railing against. “It's a bit exaggerated. The basis of this whole thing is the refusal of one group to pay more for a given service. There's nothing more ‘business as usual' than that.”

And that is why I am relieved to be leaving Montreal--the longer I stay in Quebec, the more right-wing I feel: anti-union, pro-law and order, etc.  That makes me very uncomfortable.  I am not sure how things will change when I move to Ontario (as I am aware that province has problems as well), but I am pretty sure that my position on the spectrum will shift back to the middle, more or less, where I am far more at home.

Now For Something Complete Different, pt I

No, not Monty Python.  Just a few videos that caught my eye.  I read the new MTV oral history book, and thought I would check out some of the videos that had interesting stories.

First, Milton Berle and RATT:


Then, a classic A-ha, Take On Me:

Best Reason to Have Another Child

So cool.  Ok, I am not going to have any more kids, but thanks to DesignTAXI.com and to https://twitter.com/#!/caidid/ for the link!  Yes, they used canon characters from the books and not just the movies.

Riddle Me This: What Counts as War?

Yesterday's NYT had a big story about drones being used all over the place by the US.  Today's has a story about the cyberwar the US has been engaged in against Iran.  I am more focused on the latter today: given that the US has been pushing for NATO to consider a cyber-attack as an act of war that would activate Article V's attack upon one is equal to attack upon all commitment, these attacks upon Iran are pretty, well, war-like. 

So, my question is: is this a new war that the US is fighting against Iran? Or is it an on-going war that is being fought by alternative means?  Iran has reputedly been supporting terrorism against the US since, well, the revolution.  Its support of the taking of hostages at the embassy made that event more of an inter-country thing than a random act by a few students.  Iran apparently supported the groups behind terrorist attacks against the US Marines and French in Lebanon in 1983 and then other attacks as far away as Argentine.  Perhaps those efforts might be too distant from Iran, but Iran's provision of the most advanced roadside bomb materials for insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan is much more direct and clear.

I am actually less worried about antagonizing Iran since the Iranian actors (elements of the government or the entire enchilada) seem to have no qualms given what they did to assist the insurgents in I/A, and more worried about the computer viruses spilling over and increasing the expertise of the folks who are now seeing the start of the art. 

But there is this larger question about what counts as war.  The usual dataset question relies on body-counts, but cyberwarfare kills centrifuges and other equipment, not people thus far.  Is it a matter of scale, like body counts?  That specialized, focused efforts do not cross the threshold, such as attacks on nuclear programs, but a cyber attack that wiped out the electricity production of a swath of a country would? 

I am sure scholars of cyber-stuff have asked these questions.  This is way outside my expertise, but I am curious.  What say you?