I almost forgot about yesterday’s anniversary– I didn’t think of it at all until the fulsome tribute before Thursday night’s football game. I actually waffled for a bit about whether to put up the annual moment-of-silence post. It’s been eight years, everybody’s concerns have shifted to other things, and September 11, 2001 doesn’t loom quite […]
Category: War
Manute Bol
Former NBA player Manute Bol spoke on campus last night. Bol, who was born in southern Sudan, is currently working with a group called Sudan Sunrise to promote peace and reconciliation efforts in that country, and specifically to build a school in his home village. Bol spoke for an hour or so about his experiences […]
A Word from Our Middle East Correspondant
Checking in from Cairo, Senior Uncertain Principles Middle East Correspondant Paul Schemm, with a wire story titled “Ultraconservative Islam on Rise in Mideast”: Critics worry that the rise of Salafists in Egypt, as well as in other Arab countries such as Jordan and Lebanon, will crowd out the more liberal and tolerant version of Islam […]
Yemen
And now, a report from Uncertain Principles’s Senior Middle East Correspondent, checking in from Yemen in the wake of the attack on the US Embassy there: For years, the Yemeni government has let some al-Qaida figures and other Islamic extremists go free in political deals hoping to keep them quiet. Now it finds itself having […]
Torture Is Wrong
Fred Clark of Slacktivist points to the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and specifically their Banners Across America project: NRCAT is making June the month for Banners Across America! We are asking congregations of all sizes, from every state, and all faiths, to join in a public witness against torture by displaying a banner outside […]
Heads in the Sand by Matthew Yglesias
Matthew Yglesias‘s first book arrives burdened with one of the longest subtitles in memory (“How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats”), which is a little off-putting. Of course, it also features a back-cover blurb from Ezra Klein calling it “A very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been […]
Neil Lewis of the New York Times
The much-promised peer-reviewed research post is going to slip by another day, becuase I had forgotten about a talk by Neil Lewis last night on campus. Lewis is an alumnus of Union, and a writer for the Times best known for writing about the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and he was speaking as […]
Dispatches from the Class War
Via Inside Higher Ed, the Boston Globe reports that the Pentagon opposes increasing GI Bill funding. Why? Because if they gave them full tuition, eligible soldiers might not re-enlist: Now, five years into the Iraq conflict, a movement is gathering steam in Washington to boost the payout of the GI Bill, to provide a true […]