In honor of Ken, I wanted to post a quick heads-up to this post by Tom James at Futurismic, which has the excellent title "I, For One, Welcome Our New Robodog Overlords." Money quote: According to Prof Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University: “What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack...
A couple of months ago, I blogged about the possibility that Blackwater would support the African Union's peacekeeping mission in Darfur. That hasn't happened yet, but the company seems to have found another line of work -- fighting pirates off the coast of Somalia: Blackwater Worldwide and other private security firms — some with a reputation for being quick on the...
Career diplomat Nicholas Burns has an essay in Newsweek on the whole "negotiate with adversaries" kerfuffle. (Yeah, I said "kerfuffle" because that's about all it deserves.) He begins: One of the sharpest and most telling differences on foreign policy between Barack Obama and John McCain is whether the United States should talk to difficult and disreputable leaders like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...
Sundays are a bit slow around OJ, so I thought I might offer (unless my confreres think it too far off topic) a series of indeterminate run, Sundays with Stendhal, featuring quotes from various works of the master. Stendhal was a diplomat in much of his career, a figure of a transborder European elite culture, and is also a figure...
Take five minutes out of your busy day and watch this interview, which would be hysterical if it was a Saturday Night Live send-up of an interview by a conservative newscaster, but is just sad because it's real. Notice how little the interviewer -- who is clearly animatronic and programmed by Powerline and Hugh Hewitt -- knows about "socialism" and...
Over at the excellent polls/politics site FiveThirtyEight, Sean Quinn describes an Obama volunteer working doors in Virginia: Back in Charlottesville, we encountered Alex Englehard, a German from Heidelberg pursuing his legal degree and on break after his fifth-year exams. Englehard, a dedicated full-time Obama volunteer, said many Americans "don't realize how big an impact this one election has on the rest of...
Of course law school associate deans and admissions people are focused on the internals of this data, but even in the midst of crashing law school endowments, lowered giving, and so on, can we assume at least that law school itself is counter-cyclical to the economy overall? When the economy tanks, students and recent grads take refuge in professional schools?...
Last week the ICJ issued an order for provisional measures (pdf is here) in the Case Concerning Application of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Georgia v. Russian Federation) . This case, along with the recent referral to the ICJ for an advisory opinion on the status of Kosovo, are the latest cases arising out of...
Today, Friday, October 24, is United Nations Day. If you are in the United States, however, your reaction is more likely to be - huh? What United Nations Day? This is not a feature of a right-wing blackout to prevent takeover by the 'black helicopters' - neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post (I checked the paper copies,...
In a sign of increasing election-eve desperation on the Right, respectable Republicans (Andrew McCarthy, for one) appear now to be taking seriously the argument that Obama does not meet constitutional eligibility requirements for the presidency. A suit has been filed in Pennsylvania seeking declarative relief to that effect, on two grounds: 1) he was born not in Hawaii but...
One further side note to the discussion of Roger's article in Virginia journal on Nobel Prize winners ...
I'm just back from 9 days in Madrid -- my first visit, and it was great. Of course, while there I couldn't ignore the international law-related story of the day. Judge Baltasar Garzón (of Pinochet, al Qaeda, and Eta fame) is at it again. This time he's agreed to open a criminal investigation into thousands of disappearances and executions surrounding...
