Robert Farley

Sonar kills whales, but the Navy wants to use sonar in exercises to prove strike group readiness, because sonar also (indirectly) kills submarines. Some discussion of this came up last year in response to a Marc Kaufman article on the effects of sonar on whale populations. Specifically, the Navy wants to conduct sonar exercises off […]

Echoing Ezra, here’s a question; why isn’t Mitt Romney being treated as the overwhelming frontrunner in the Republican race? He’s won two of the four contests so far, and placed second twice. Moreover, Michigan differs from the other three contests in that it’s inhabited by actual people, twice as many as the other three states […]

Query for Matt; what’s the difference between takfir and excommunication, as practiced by the Orthodox and Catholic churches? —Robert Farley

Wow. “I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend […]

Australia is doing its bit to maintain the NPT. Reversing a decision of the Howard government, Australia is now refusing to sell uranium to India because of the latter’s lack of participation in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This is precisely how the NPT is supposed to function, maintaining a norm of non-proliferation through shaming and […]

Hilzoy makes the case against Clinton. I agree on much, but I’m not certain about this: In this context, I think that nominating Hillary Clinton would be a disastrous mistake. Of all the people whom we are at all likely to nominate, she is the one whom people would be most inclined to believe the […]

Jeffrey Lewis at ArmsControlWonk has a couple of good posts on the purpose of arms control in the post-Cold War era. Lewis points out that some of the traditional objectives of arms control (ensuring strategic stability, building trust, saving money, and creating the grounds for disarmament) are in tension with one another, and thus that […]

…for abolishing the Air Force better than I ever could. In a rather incoherent op-ed in yesterday’s NYT, Major General Charles Dunlap makes the following series of claims: The military success of the Surge is due to an increase in “boots on the ground”; so much for those “boots on the ground zealots“. The counter-insurgency […]

Charlie Gibson in the Dem debate: If you take a family of two professors here at St. Anselm, they’re going to be in the $200,000 category that you’re talking about lifting the taxes on. As Media Matters notes, the average salary of a tenured full professor at St. Anselm is $77,000. The average for an […]

As has beenreported in a lot of places, a group of Iranian boats buzzed a trio of USN vessels in the Gulf this morning. It’s unclear whether the Iranian ships were gunboats or simply fast boats with small arms, but the USN vessels included a cruiser, a destroyer, and a frigate. Apparently, no shots were […]