Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Gabe Rivera has a new blog-quoting robot that looks interesting. I’m not sure whether it’s actually updating yet, but it’s a good start. Headline placement is determined by blog linkage ratings.
This kind of news aggregator can be useful if well done (I think this means: specialized, thoughtfully opinionated, and not a Google-style attempt to copy mainstream-journo “headline news” style). Gabe’s site seems to be Anglospheric in orientation. I wish him well.
Over on Arcturus, I rashly promised to post something about how I’d do the whole Moon-Mars thing. And so I shall, but with no pretense of technological or future-historical accuracy, though I’ll mention some technologies and dates; instead, I’ll be building a strawman proposal, with attention to its project-management aspects (in what follows, all definitions are taken from A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge [PMBOK® Guide], 2000 Edition; Project Management Institute).
The first of those being assumptions, whose formal definition is “factors that, for planning purposes, are considered to be true, real, or certain.” In particular, I’ll assume that stakeholder (“individuals and organizations that are actively involved in the project, or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected as a result of project execution or project completion; they may also exert influence over the project and its results”) interests have already been balanced.
They haven’t, of course, and the game-theoretic aspects of a program slated to stretch through as many as seven future Administrations, twice that number of Congresses, and nearly thirty Federal budgets, render the prospects for the new space policy rather bleak, I’m afraid. So let’s pretend that isn’t true. The American public is united in its support (or perhaps cowed into submission, or merely indifferent enough to raise no objection): we’re going to Mars! How do we get there?
This site, Regiments.org, has a mind-boggling amount amount of information about the land armies of the British Empire and Commonwealth, and much ancillary information. I have been picking around on it, becoming increasingly impressed by it, and decided to share it with y’all.
UPDATE: This site, Britain’s Small Wars is an excellent source on these little-known actions. I suspect there is much to learn from the way the British handled these difficult situations.
I look at the website of In theNational Interest from time to time. There is usually something good on there, and I commend it to your attention.
I recently noticed this interesting review of a book called The Inevitable Alliance: Europe and the United States Beyond Iraq, by Vittorio Parsi. Since it is in Italian, I’m not likely to ever read it. Parsi is yet another person who notes that the international system based upon state sovereignty which originated in the treaty of Westphalia is disintegrating. This is often taken to be a good thing by liberals, who hope to see an over-arching, supra-national world order emerge. However, the reviewer summarizes Parsi’s view as focusing not on some new superstate emerging. Rather, “…the emergence of failed and other rogue states as well as the menace of non-state terrorism—the latter being essentially a return to the privatized violence that marred pre-modern times.” Parsi notes that it is the supposedly unsophisticated United States, not Europe, which has “avant-garde grasp of the ‘new world disorder’”.
