Friday Frivolatry

So hey folks, Spring Break is almost upon us here at GCC.

All of which means that even though I do not blog frequently, that I will probably not blog at all next week.

So, I am going to upload two things to enjoy thinking about today.  One is from Research Wahlberg

So students, yes I know life is hard, everything does not go well in our research, but hey, just GET IT DONE.



The second is for musical enjoyment:

Have a great weekend, and a great week.  And yes, for my two cents, Joe is one heck of a guitar player.

Some Thoughts on C.A.R.--Part III

So, I have addressed the C.A.R. in two ways, the question of blame (Christian vs. Muslim), and the question of ethnic conflict or religious strife.  The final area I want to address (thanks AM for the question) is what should the U.S. do in regard to this situation?   And to say that I am torn on making a suggestion is only slightly less obvious than to say that I am usually torn between which 15-20 year old, single malt Scotch I should choose at a bar that has several to offer (full disclosure, I go for the Islay stuff first).

As a Christian I am appalled by the wanton disregard for the beings I believe are created in the image of God as well as the disregard for stewardship over the flora and fauna of the area which those created in God's image are given responsibility for on the face of the earth.  So, any destruction of human life by direct action or indirect cause (unintended consequences) leaves me queasy, and I say this regardless of the potential necessity of endangering human life as a matter of individual or group security (I will never support rash decisions regarding use of force by any agent of government or man).  In the C.A.R. I am troubled by the rashness of action on both the part of Seleka and Anti-Balaka (hey, anti-Balaka means anti-machete in Sango and Mandja (the local languages), so how do you justify chopping someone up with a machete if you are anti-machete?).  If human rights, and the right to breathe is foremost among the rights of mankind in my humble opinion, matter to us in the U.S. then we should take action.  Now, the extent of that action is the real question.  Do we provide humanitarian aid--medical assistance, food and water, shelter building supplies--or do we take direct action to stop the root cause of the humanitarian problem--armed intervention?  I am more inclined to the former than the latter.  And this inclination is where I am torn.

My inclination is based on also considering the limited resources of government and role of government as opposed to the role of man.  Government is responsible for, in my estimation and based on years of considering the question, defining and protecting the property rights and fiscal interests of their citizens.  If we choose direct intervention in any hostilities in any country we must first ask whether or not intervening in this affair is necessary for the protection and promotion of the property rights/fiscal interests of our own citizens.  As man, and as Christian, I am all for promoting the call to action on behalf of those whose quality of life can be improved by our own personal actions--so I donate time and money to efforts that will improve lives.  However, as a responsible citizen I cannot see making government responsible for the quality of life for people in other countries unless direct connection with our own citizens property and fiscal interests are at stake.

So, for my own two cents, the fight in C.A.R. is not one in which the U.S. government should invest in direct intervention.  Our course of action should be dictated by humanitarian concern.  Our course of action should be provision of aid and support for improving the quality of life of all people in the C.A.R.  Our course of action should be condemnatory of the violence regardless of the party responsible for the violence.

Restructuring the U.S. Army; Fiscal Responsibility and Strategy Too?

Secretary of Defense Hagel has delivered the Fiscal Year 2015 Department of Defense budget preview.  The budget proposes cutting back on the active duty U.S. Army and the elimination of some weapons systems.  And yet, in the face of fiscal realities the proposal has been castigated in a manner that is recognizably more about opposition to Barrack Obama than it is about any challenges to U.S. security created by the cuts.  So, let me delve into this issue and give you my two cents worth.

Several complaints have been aired about cutting the U.S. Army to about 440,000 active duty personnel and about cutting weapons systems like the A-10.  The cuts would bring the active duty army as close to pre-WWII levels as it has been, well since pre-WWII.  By the way, the U.S. Air Force was part of the U.S. Army until 1947, so the number 440,000 is actually nearly twice as large as the ground force of the U.S. Army in 1940, and the cut represents only 125,000 active duty personnel from a total force structure (active, reserve, guard) over 1 million strong.  Did anyone notice that the U.S. Marine Corps remains about ten times larger than it was in 1940? 

Wow, the A-10 is impressive to watch as it shoots the heck out of stuff.  The massive cannon tears stuff up and wow, we really love seeing metal shredded.  The U.S. Air Force tried to give the A-10 away to the U.S. Army about 20 years ago.  The Army wouldn’t take it if the Air Force did not also throw in the costs of maintaining this high maintenance Cold War relic.  The A-10 exists today because it gives visibly rewarding performances in air shows, not because it is a necessity for close air support of ground troops. (Full disclosure moment--I love this airplane, looks cool, sounds cool, rips metal to shreds, but...) 

I, however, do not think that cutting troops and weapons systems represent a negative for our country on two grounds:  fiscal responsibility and grand strategy.  For a moment let us talk reality, fiscal reality.  The Department of Defense through regular budgetary spending and contingency spending spent over (U.S.) $610 billion in 2013, representing about 17% of the U.S. government’s total spending.  Estimates are that personnel costs (pay, benefits, retirement, uniforms, food, and housing) are about 70% of the cost of military spending in the U.S.  So, if we want to reduce military spending, the reduction of military personnel is a logical place to start.  Fiscal responsibility means we cut everything except absolute necessity and required debt payments.  Look at your own family; can you be more fiscally responsible in your own budget?  Sure, we do not quit feeding the kids, but do I have to feed them by trips to the steakhouse, fast-food take-out, etc. or can I go to the store by groceries and make dinner at home?  The same required services from government can be provided without spending more money in many areas, and particularly in the area of national defense.

What exactly does the military exist for in our society?  Arguably, based on the thinking of the Founding Fathers of the United States, the military exists to help provide the common defense and promote the general welfare.  Our country’s first major military expenditure was on naval force—necessary to protect and promote commerce, useful for the projection of force.  As modernization of systems of government and economic life progressed in the 1800s and early 1900s militaries took on the additional role of protecting favorable balances of power for states competing to be the most powerful in the world.  By fortune, and proper use of force (both economic and military) the U.S. emerged from WWII as one of the predominant powers in the world.  By appropriate focus of energies during the Cold War the U.S. emerged as the predominant power in the world in the early 1990s.  At that point in time the balance of power was most advantageous to the U.S.  What strategy should be chosen at that point in time for survival and maintenance of this advantageous balance of power?  How should the U.S. prepare to face future challenges to the balance of power?  These questions should have been answered, but were not, with the U.S. opting instead to be an arrogant overlord.

Instead of choosing a strategy, we chose to use force to solve every situation we faced that did, or might at some point, have adverse effect on the security and power of the U.S.  Reduction of the force structure and removal of weapons systems will force us to look at these questions realistically in terms of what can be accomplished with a force that is shaped in part by being fiscally responsible.  Perhaps we might find ourselves more willing to engage in buck passing and offshore balancing.  We can and should get other states to promote their own security.  We can and should get other states to act in their own interests and piggy back on those efforts if they match our own interests.  And, we may have to let some struggles be lost, because they simply do not rise to the level of threatening our advantaged position in the world.  If we act in this manner, we do not need the large standing military and can concentrate our resources on dealing with real issues at the domestic level.

Friday Afternoon and I'm Still at Work

So much for always managing your time, I am actually still at work on a Friday afternoon at 4:30 pm.  Well, all is not so bad, I still have found time to offer up #9 on the Gibson Guitar's Top 50 Guitar Solos.  Ya'll enjoy, I gotta get back to work.

So Kristof Has Spoken, So What?

While I watched wrestling all day Saturday, uhm no, not wrastlin', but real wrestling (my seven year old wrestled in his first "open" tournament, not a great experience for a novice, but hey he had fun and I got some great action pics during the 12 hours spent in a gym) and then went to church, did some grocery shopping, took a nap, watched some Winter Olympics on Sunday, the blogs and tweets of my Political Science colleagues went up in arms over Nicholas Kristof calling us irrelevant in an op-ed piece in the New York Times.   So, I read Kristof's piece a few moments ago, and so what?

Kristof is entitled to his opinion.  His opinion boils down, if I read it correctly, to most social scientists being irrelevant because we are not heavily engaged in public policy prescription and exploration in our research. Kristof uses one of the Political Science journals to make his point.  Apparently Kristof is unaware of the hundreds of other political science journals, dozens of which are actually aimed at taking our in-house discussions and debates (which are published in many of our journals) and making them accessible to the public.  Oh, maybe Kristof means that we are irrelevant if we are not conversing with the Washington DC crowd in our research.  Well, so what?  My research allows me to make policy prescriptions to draw conclusions about human behavior and pontificate on what governments might do positively or negatively to change the circumstances that lead to human behaviors or how governments might act because of what human behaviors tell us about the impact of political process and decisions.  I do not express in great detail the technical aspects of how I arrived at my understanding of human behavior when discussing the potential responses.  However, in our professional academic journals and in professional academic conference papers I do engage in the specifics because my target audience wants and needs those specifics.  Kristof, for my two cents just simply is not wide read in social science or he, if he chose to be honest in his appraisal, would have recognized the numerous forums in which we as Political Scientists are engaged in public discourse.  We have not abandoned society, and if society believes we are irrelevant, well so what?

Some Thoughts on the C.A.R.--Part II

So, in the interest of full disclosure before talking about Christian vs. Muslim violence and whether or not what is happening right now in C.A.R. is ethnic cleansing or not, and because I am just dumber than most of the natural scientists out there, I am a Christian.  But this entry in my blog is about whether or not what is happening in the C.A.R. is an ethnic issue or a religious issue.  I'll start here by giving a definition of ethic group (borrowed from Wikipedia--and I hear the gasps from my students already--because it is easy to access for all potential readers).

Ethnicity or ethnic group is a social group of people who identify with each other based on common ancestral, cultural, social, or national experience.^[1][2] Membership of an ethnic group tends to be associated with shared cultural heritage, ancestry, history, homeland, language (dialect), or ideology, and with symbolic systems such as religion, mythology and ritual, cuisine, dressing style, physical appearance, etc.

Ok, so religion is a part of ethnic identity for some ethnic groups?  But simply having a common religious identity is not the same as a shared ethnic identity.  Look I know a whole bunch of Christians here in PA.  Does that make Christian our shared ethnic identity?  Not likely, since I consider most of them to be Yankees, and I am a good example of unrepentant Southerner.  Would our shared Christianity be the basis of national identity if building a country?  Well, the U.S. is a multinational country, it comes with being a recipient (and I believe the receipt is for the better of us all) of immigrants from many locations around the globe mixing with the original inhabitants (so we have been multinational since the arrival of the first Europeans to land here and stay a few hundred years back).  On the other hand, religion can be a seriously large part of ethnic identity (anybody ever heard of Israelis and Palestinians?).  

Right, so back to C.A.R.  Are the Christians and Muslims of different cultural heritage?  Does the mythos of history among the Christians and Muslims show either of these groups to have been negatively differentiated in relation to the other group?  Do they have different languages?  Are they cultural different in enough ways to show them as truly being different ethnic groups?  Honestly, I started searching for answers to these questions a few months back as I used the C.A.R. as an example of intrastate communal violence in Sub-Saharan Africa in teaching about such incidents in African Politics.  So, I am not an expert in the C.A.R., but I have spent a few years studying ethnic political conflict and intrastate conflict (wrote a dissertation and a book about ethnic conflict), and I cannot find an answer in the affirmative to any question I would ask to determine that religion is a key identifier of ethnicity in C.A.R.  However, I find plenty to indicate that religion is a key identifier of political organization.

So, what does this mean?  For my own two cents it means that Amnesty International is stretching definitions in ways in which they should not be stretched to call what is happening in the C.A.R. ethnic cleansing.  I would also ask Amnesty where they were when the Muslim dominated, Seleka supporting government recently deposed by politically organized Christians, looked the other way as Muslims engaged in the same behaviors against the Christian population of C.A.R. that we are now castigating the Christians for engaging in against the Muslims?  Both sides are wrong in their use of violence to attain their political goals, period.  But the violence is not ethnopolitical, it is political and the political organization is based on religious lines.

I am not entirely certain where this leaves the world in determining what to do in C.A.R.  Hats off to the French and the African Union forces in the country.  I'll pray for their success in ending the political violence in C.A.R. while I consider the question of what actions should be taken to restore positive political life in the country and whether or not those actions necessarily require the active participation or support of the U.S. government and population.  (But that will wait until the third part of this conversation).        

So I Guess I'm Dumber than a Physicist

An anthropologist from Finland has authored a paper arguing that social scientists are more likely to be extreme in political opinion an more openly religious than their counterparts in the natural sciences.  The report's argument on why these observations are made--natural scientists are just smarter than social scientists.  You can read about the report and some reactions to it here. 

I personally would be an outlier in this analysis if the sample were taken from Grove City College.  I am considered less extreme in my political views and almost apolitical (interesting when you consider that I am a Political Scientist) than many of my colleagues in the natural sciences.  I am also considered less religious by many of my colleagues--probably because I am not of the reformed theological persuasion. 

For my own two cents, I am perfectly content to not have an IQ score as high as some others.  I make up for it by being well read in and outside of my academic discipline.  And hey, Sheldon, football is great and you should try giving Amy a kiss more than just on Valentine's day.

Friday Frivolity

So, I watched the Super Bowl with great anticipation of commercials and some hope of a good game.  Well, we got neither a good game nor great commercials.  Doritos missed the boat with the stupid commercial of a boy riding a dog and roping his brother.  Sorry whichever Japanese automaker, Bruce Willis telling me to take a moment away from stuff to be with my family did not excite me nor make me any more likely to support purchase of your vehicles.  I was really disappointed by most of the commercials, except for one.  One commercial, for my two cents, was entertaining and may entice me to do some shopping.

Seeing Dee in costume running down an aisle (Twisted Sister), Paunch (who didn't watch Chips in the later 70s early 80s), Hulk Hogan (Saturday morning was for wrestling), Chuckie knifing up the carpet--was fabulous.  But for my two cents how do you top Mary Lou Retton stealing the phone from the counter?

Some Thoughts on C.A.R.---Part I

Ya'll might recall that one of my former students had a guest blog about the role of France in Africa.  Hats of to AM for his continued following of issues in Africa, particularly the case of the Central African Republic.  He recently sent me a short list of questions regarding the conflict in C.A.R.  I am going to address some of these questions in a multi-part blog.  So this blog is part one of three.

The C.A.R. is a landlocked country in central Africa (hence the name, duh) of about 623,000 square kilometers bordering Cameroon, DRC, Congo, Sudan, South Sudan (might be what we call landlocked with bad neighbors or at least landlocked in a bad neighborhood).  C.A.R. has vast plains, but only 3% of the land is arable.  Large forests exist and mountains in the border areas with Sudan, South Sudan, and DRC (This area is where Kony and the remnant of the LRA are supposedly hiding out).  Deforestation and lack of potable water are issues, diamond, timber, coffee, and cotton are the major exports and the GDPPC is about U.S. $900 (2012 estimate). 

In 2011 President Bozzize was re-elected in what was regarded as a flawed process by many international observers.  Bozzize's government catered to the Christian majority (about 65% of the population claims protestant or Roman Catholic ties, but much of this population's Christianity is highly laced with animistic and shamanistic practices) to the economic and political disadvantagement of the Muslim minority (about 15% of the population claims Islamic faith).  Bozzize's heavy-handed approach and use of the military led to the formation of Islamic based rebels, who outmaneuvered the governments forces and Bozizze fled the country in March 2013.  The minority based rebel movment placed their leader Djotodia in the presidency.  Djotodia proved to be just as heavy handed and unable to control the Muslim rebel army from misconduct.  The majority Christian population spawned numerous rebel movements which have unseated Djotodia and forced the Muslim rebels out of the capital.  French and African Union peacekeepers are now trying to keep Christian mobs under control as they attempt to engage in retaliatory beatings, burnings, killings against the Muslim rebels who engaged in such practice after unseating Bozizze last spring.   For my two cents, this situation is truly tragic and deserves careful consideration.

In the next two installments I will consider whether or not this civil unrest is an ethnic conflict, whether the U.S. should take any action, or whether what is being done already by the French and the AU is enought.

It's Signing Day, It's Signing Day

Please have some perspective sauce (thanks Steve Saideman) with your overly enthusiastic Steve Martin style eupohoria. I am really happy to see that my favorite college football team has enough commitments from enough 18/19 year old athletes to be considered the national signing day champions.  Hey, apparently it does matter that you find the best athletes and get them to come to your school (3 national championships in five years, 11 wins or more per year for five years).   On the other hand, the best quarterback (go AJM) was only a three star recruit.  The one and only Heisman Trophy winner at Alabama was only a three star recruit.  So, have some perspective, this is fun, but who knows whether or not these young athletes will pan out as stars.