Thursday, April 24, 2014

Anti-Semitism and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

At a joint EU-US news-conference on 26 March 2014, Presidents Barroso, Van Rompuy, and Obama discussed the problematic Russian invasion of the Crimea province of Ukraine.  The “chairman” of the European Council and the “chief executive” of the European Commission both responded to concerns that the European Union had not stood up to its business interests in order to enact economic sanctions capable of putting Putin back in his pen. Even though the two EU presidents sought to "puff up" the force latent in the sanctions already in place, Barroso insightfully made the more significant point that aggressively sending tanks across a border was no longer tolerable. Perhaps from “lessons learned” from Hitler’s exploits in the twentieth century, global challenges such as global warming (and, relatedly, the species’ over-population), and an internet-enabled closer world in the twenty-first century, a paradigm-shift in international relations may harken some sorely needed progress in international relations (i.e., political development)  in the new millennium. The key would be a stark refusal to tolerate a practice that had been tacitly accommodated, even in opposition, just decades earlier. 

The essay is at WR-International Relations: "New Rules: Invasions and Anti-Semitism in the Twenty-First Century"

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Aereo v Broadcast TV Networks

Internet start-ups can be said to profit, at least potentially sometime in the future, by leveraging the commons, or public space, even enlarging it in the process. Companies founded on the scarcity paradigm of privateness and even public policy based on a de facto privatized tenet have accordingly gone on the defensive. Although Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions would suggest that the old guard must die off before the new paradigm can come into its own, the internet revolution has shown a remarkable yet subtle persistence in “seeping through the cracks” into the “light of day.” 

The essay is at WR-Government & Markets: "The Internet Eclipsing Television Networks: Toto, We’re not in Kansas Anymore"