Earlier this year, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) published a withering critique of the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan. The report generated much media attention because it was written by no less than the top intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn. Among the provocative statements in his assessment: Eight…Continue Reading…
Experts who are grappling honestly with the national security/climate change nexus will wince when they see this post by the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson. It’s the kind of blatant political exploitation of recent headlines that some scholars warned about when the climate security meme was picked up prominently by mainstream media last summer. Johnson, doing…Continue Reading…
It’s never a pretty sight when the behaviors of subcultures are suddenly isolated and thrust into a harsh, public spotlight. In such cases, context matters, right? What’s fair for climate scientists should also be for combat soldiers, right? So casting aside whatever opinion you might have of Climategate, let’s say Steve Easterbrook is correct when…Continue Reading…
Now this initiative bears watching, because it gets beyond the fuzzy climate change cause-and-effect rhetoric. If adaptation is going to be done right in Africa–or anywhere–then this approach strikes me as a really smart way to go about it: “It is not enough to say that Ethiopia is vulnerable,” says Joshua Busby, an assistant professor…Continue Reading…
Who else but Clay Shirky would draw on Joseph Tainter’s seminal 1988 book, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” to discuss the downfall of a once dominant business model? Noting the regeneration of media on the web, Shirky also makes this very interesting observation: When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old…Continue Reading…
There was a time in the mid-2000s when it seemed that every other Thomas Friedman column was about the connection between U.S. oil consumption and terrorism. Here he is in 2005, in “No Mullah Left Behind”: By adamantly refusing to do anything to improve energy conservation in America, or to phase in a $1-a-gallon gasoline…Continue Reading…
Liberal bloggers are befuddled, enviros are outraged, and the opposition party, as President Obama likely anticipated, is scornful. Most of the conventional analysis is trying to make sense of the Administration’s decision in the context of the Senate’s tortured energy bill negotiations. And because that doesn’t seem to make sense, people are scratching their heads….Continue Reading…