A friend of mine who reads this blog and is an academic recently said he was surprised to hear that I had written something negative about MOOCs since he had only heard positive things. 

That's funny--I have only heard (and thought) negative things.  Then again, I have been known to hang around with historians, who are a critical and even dour lot who often a good sense of the reliability of gauzy future projections.. (Especially if they have the foggiest idea about the reshaping of labor as it has emerged over the past century as means of social and economic control).

Me, I don't intend to take part in (or be silent during) the dismantling of American higher ed, or the hollowing out of the virtues of small colleges and small classes.

There has been a lot of discussion about Amherst's big rebuke of edX's MOOCs (and their 2 million dollar price tag).  That was gratifying to hear.

"Sitze, though, compared edX and MOOCs to a litany of failed dotcoms, including other education ventures with similar ambitions. He said MOOCs may very well be today’s MySpace – a decent-looking idea doomed to fail.

“What makes us think, educationally, that MOOCs are the form of online learning that we should be experimenting with? On what basis? On what grounds?,” Sitze said. “2012 was the year of the MOOCs. 2013 will be the year of buyer’s regret.”


Ouch. The Myspace comparison is always a bit deadly.

But Amherst is as elite as they come, so they are free from ever having to yield to these new trends.  Not so the poor state university systems, the mid rank colleges and universities, and no less the  hopelessly and cluelessly trend-following locally-focoused provincial schools (names withheld)

For more trenchant thoughts on MOOCs I referred him to More or Less Bunk, as I have linked to before.  He gets how the new technology is being rolled out as a means for the professoriate to eat its own young. Or maybe to sit immobile while its young is devoured, a la the end of Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark. 

Now that I think about it, that is precisely the situation in which we find ourselves...

Today Rees writes:

"In the name of increasing access to higher education, extremely well-meaning liberals are cooperating in destroying its quality. They’re sending a signal to the people who make higher education budgetary decisions that an automated education is henceforth and forever acceptable. You want to fight permanent austerity? Tough luck. Davidson has already raised the white flag of surrender on your behalf. ["If I had a magic wand...," she repeats like a mantra, thereby implying that real change is impossible almost by definition.] She’s also raised the white flag on behalf of most of the world’s potential college students for generations to come.

Education is supposed to be an exceedingly personal enterprise. This is why forcing students into MOOCs as a last resort is like automating your wedding or the birth of your first child. You’re taking something that ought to depend upon the glorious unpredictability of human interaction and turning it into mass-produced, impersonal, disposable schlock."

All of these future promises and technological makes me want to re-read the founding document of Hampshire College, which was visionary and also not immune to some technological pie in the sky. It is , Franklin Patterson and Charles R. Longsworth, The Making of a College: Plans for a New Departure in Higher Education, published by MIT of all places in 1966. I have an old copy of it somewhere and will dig it up.  It envisioned video lectures available remotely, among other innovations.  But of course it was all in service to an experimental little school built on community that soon recapitulated itself into a radical little place (though the radicalism mitigated over time).

I remember a shortlived snarky little rag published at Hampshire when I was there that if I recall correctly was modeled on Spy Magazine (if you are old enough to remember that) which skewered some of the more b.s. parts of that book

UPDATE wait--you don't have to be old to remember Spy, Google has helpfully digitized it all. Worth it to link through even if just for the covers, which are still amusing. As in

this has been a weirdly cool spring, but the bees don't seem to mind and have been doing quite well. I have been making up a lot of nucs to replace some of the winter losses at the school.  I myself lost no colonies this winter, so there is something about the school that warrants further investigation since bees do not do well there recently for reasons unknown.

Lark has been helping me out with the bees this year, here are a few pics of her in the beesuit (which I think is half of the fun. The other half is eating honey).

4 hours of work, 6 hours of sleep, 14 hours of other

My post-1979 class just talked about Occupy a bit, particularly wondering at its results (?). So this piece piece by David Graeber is definitely worth reading and was timely to have read.  I gather it is a selection from his new book.

A friend of mine has been encouraging me to read Graeber's Direct Action, which is on the stack but as yet I haven't cracked into it.  


This will do in the interim:

"At the moment, probably the most pressing need is simply to slow down the engines of productivity. This might seem a strange thing to say—our knee-jerk reaction to every crisis is to assume the solution is for everyone to work even more, though of course, this kind of reaction is really precisely the problem—but if you consider the overall state of the world, the conclusion becomes obvious. We seem to be facing two insoluble problems. On the one hand, we have witnessed an endless series of global debt crises, which have grown only more and more severe since the seventies, to the point where the overall burden of debt—sovereign, municipal, corporate, personal—is obviously unsustainable. On the other, we have an ecological crisis, a galloping process of climate change that is threatening to throw the entire planet into drought, floods, chaos, starvation, and war. The two might seem unrelated. But ultimately they are the same. What is debt, after all, but the promise of future productivity? Saying that global debt levels keep rising is simply another way of saying that, as a collectivity, human beings are promising each other to produce an even greater volume of goods and services in the future than they are creating now. But even current levels are clearly unsustainable. They are precisely what’s destroying the planet, at an ever-increasing pace.

Even those running the system are reluctantly beginning to conclude that some kind of mass debt cancellation—some kind of jubilee—is inevitable. The real political struggle is going to be over the form that it takes. Well, isn’t the obvious thing to address both problems simultaneously? Why not a planetary debt cancellation, as broad as practically possible, followed by a mass reduction in working hours: a four-hour day, perhaps, or a guaranteed five-month vacation? This might not only save the planet but also (since it’s not like everyone would just be sitting around in their newfound hours of freedom) begin to change our basic conceptions of what value-creating labor might actually be.

Occupy was surely right not to make demands, but if I were to have to formulate one, that would be it. After all, this would be an attack on the dominant ideology at its very strongest points. The morality of debt and the morality of work are the most powerful ideological weapons in the hands of those running the current system. That’s why they cling to them even as they are effectively destroying everything else. It’s also why debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand."

I often present the notion of the 4 hour work week to my intro classes when we are talking about radical 19th century ideas like the 10 hour workday, or the later insanity of the 8 hour workday.

The four hour plan always elicits the same response from my students: "but then nothing would get done."

I generally feel comfortable leaving the deconstruction of the menace that MOOCs pose to high education to Jonathan Rees over at More or Less Bunk. Everybody should be reading this blog. He is, simply, nailing the multiple issues that MOOCs raise, from the exploitation of labor to the intellectual incoherence of them.  His relentlessness and good sense on the issue brings to mind (albeit focused on other contexts) Glenn Greenwald. We need more of this kind of relentlessness.

And yes, I did just use the word "albeit". It's ok.

So, since it is being done so well elsewhere, I'm actually not here to whale on MOOCs, just to note a kind of amusing state which illustrates much.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a story describing how the California State University system is beginning to destroy itself by expanding its use  of MOOCs. 

"San Jose State last fall used material from an edX course, “Circuits & Electronics,” as part of a “flipped classroom” experiment in its own introductory course in electrical engineering. The university offered three versions of the course: two conventional face-to-face sections and one “blended” section, in which students watched edX videos on their own and then participated in group activities, sans lecturing, during class time.

The pass rates in the two conventional sections were 55 percent and 59 percent. In the “flipped” section with the edX videos, 91 percent of students passed."

These seem like Great Leap Forward style passage rates.  Any chance these stats speak to other factors involved, just possibly?

The pictures I posted the other day were a hit so I am yielding to requests for more.

Here is Miss Lark sitting in the garage acting as dj while I work on bee equipment.  She loves to change the radio stations on this old radio when I am working out there.  Though he tastes run to top 40, which is pretty rough on the ears. It was rainy and cold this day and she came out dressed like a flapper. I have no idea where she got that hat.

 

the babies have learned how to open car doors, and are really into it

me with the two ladies

perpetually smiling, like his mom

and like his sister

yet another reason to keep bees

I was heading home over the weekend and stopped off at a garage sale just a few blocks from my house, where my eye was caught by an upright piano. I have a piano already, though it is a spinet and something that my piano tuner said was sold in the 1950s more as furniture than as a piano.  Made in America, but still more furniture than piano. 

This garage sale piano was a full upright that sounded great and for some reason was calling my name.  I called my ever-patient and always-lovely wife and asked her what she thought of me acquiring another piano. She replied, rightly, that I was insane.

Being insane, I did not listen to reason.  The price was right.

I ended up swapping 5 pounds of honey for this piano. And the guy helped me put it on a dolly and wheel it back to my house and pop it into the garage.  He had five pianos and was happy to get rid of one since he is moving down to Chesapeake (and not far from my beeyard down there either)  5 pounds of honey is a good deal for a piano, insanity reigning supreme or not. And I may have gained another spot to put bees down in Chesapeake as well.

The piano is a Knabe upright which the serial number reveals to have been made in 1913.  The Knabe name is a very good one in piano circles.  They have been made in the US since 1837.  Lots of fame was associated with Knabe pianos which therefore pushes me into some august company.  Francis Scott Key owned a Knabe piano.  Robert E. Lee used to pal around with the Knabe family.  Albert Einstein had a Knabe, as did Brigham Young, who had three in his house.  (These factoids are gleaned from a Knabe piano serial number website.) 

You are now equipped to answer the question: what did Francis Scott Key, Robert E. Lee, Albert Einstein, and Brigham Young have in common?  Or, better yet, to answer the question: what did Francis Scott Key, Robert E. Lee, Albert Einstein, Brigham Young, and Nunal have in common?

So assuming that I get this thing into top playing form I may have realized some small corner of my destiny.

"they did what their training dictated that they do.”

Following up on the earlier discussion about the regularly invoked power of the state to kill its citizens without restriction and without even having to use pilotless drones, we have this truly tragic and clearly avoidable situation where a man named Robert Ethan Saylor, who had Down Syndrome, was killed by police in a movie theatre in Frederick County, Maryland for no meaningful reason. and with no repercussions for the police. 

Apparently Mr. Saylor did not respond immediately or adequately to the request of the police, and for this he was restrained in such a way that he died.  It seems like unintentional murder, or manslaughter, at least. But police officers who were not charged by a grand jury.

"Saylor was known for his hugs and was so fascinated with the police that he would sometimes call 911 just to ask a question.

In January, he and an aide watched “Zero Dark Thirty” at a Frederick movie theater. As soon as it ended, Saylor wanted to watch it again and would not leave the theater.

Officials say this is what happened next: The aide, an 18-year-old woman, was getting the car when a theater employee called the three off-duty officers, who were working security at the Westview Promenade shopping center, and told them that Saylor needed to buy another ticket or leave.

Smith, who would not go into great detail about the investigation, said that when the deputies confronted Saylor, he verbally and physically resisted their attempts to remove him. He said they restrained him using three sets of handcuffs because of his large size. Smith said that when the deputies placed Smith on his stomach, it was for “one to two minutes” and that once Saylor began showing signs of distress, the deputies removed the handcuffs, called for help and administered CPR.

Krevor-Weisbaum said that a witness heard Saylor cry out for his mother, who even though he didn’t know it, wasn’t far away. Alerted by someone to what was happening, Patti Saylor was on her way to the theater and was almost there, Krevor-Weisbaum said.

In February, the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Baltimore ruled Saylor’s death a homicide as a result of asphyxia. On Friday, Smith said that the report indicated that Down syndrome and obesity made Saylor more susceptible to breathing problems.

Krevor-Weisbaum said that Saylor had no ongoing health problems. She added that his parents had not seen the autopsy report, although they have requested it, along with all the files from the investigation. She said the family has been concerned that the investigation was handled by the same sheriff’s office that employs the deputies.

Since February, the deputies have been on paid administrative leave. An attorney for them said Friday that they welcomed the chance to testify and did so voluntarily

“They’ve stood by patiently waiting for this day to come,” attorney Patrick J. McAndrew said. “This was an unfortunate set of circumstances. Each of these professionals, devoted law enforcement officers, did what was necessary under the circumstances, and they did what their training dictated that they do.”

 

 

 

 

I've been promising pictures of the progeny for some time without following through, so here are a couple of recent pics from around here these days:

Here is Miss Aura with the Lincoln costume she created:

The Little Buddha playing traditional Hawaiian songs of her own creation:

Two smiling ladies of the Ochsner-Margolies variety:

 

 

 Going for a ride in the backyard:

The Dismal Swamp beeyard as it looks this week:

Surely one of the worst results of the sequestered budget is the early closing of the National Archives.  It used to be that the Archives were open until 9 W-F, which meant it was entirely possibly to get a nice 44 hours in the archives in only a few days, W-saturday. Now the building is going to be open only until 5 except for one week a month.  And they are going to do fewer record pulls each day overall.  Since you have to wait for materials under the best of circumstances, everything is going to be slower. This is truly terrible news all around. The late hours made it very easy to go to DC for a long weekend and get an enormous amount accomplished with some good 12 hour days. Now it will take more time and cost more as a result.  (Though it will mean more time to eat chapulines tacos, which I like to get at a restaurant right near Archives I in DC. At Archives II in College Park, I prefer to go get Korean food)

The article says only 17% of users stay until 9. I can't imagine that there is much budget associated with these late hours. The staffing was skeletal, most of the building is closed, and there ar eno record pulls.  Why not let a bunch of people sit around and sort through old records?  I am quite certain a year of archival costs is eaten up in a month of the jet practice runs going on just over Virginia Beach each month.

Glenn Greenwald is at his caustic and incisive best on the hypocrisies and fallacies of the liberal defense of Obama's drone policy and the attempt to smear Rand Paul as just a paranoid nut of the black helicopter variety.  I'd love to quote the whole thing, but it is a typically lengthy post, so go read it here.  Here is just a sample:

"The primary means of mocking Paul's concerns was to deride the notion that Obama is about to unleash drone attacks and death squads on US soil aimed at Americans. But nobody, including Paul, suggested that was the case. To focus on that attack is an absurd strawman, a deliberate distraction from the real issues, a total irrelevancy. That's true for two primary reasons.
First, the reason this question matters so much - can the President target US citizens for assassination without due process on US soil? - is because it demonstrates just how radical the Obama administration's theories of executive power are. Once you embrace the premises of everything they do in this area - we are a Nation at War; the entire globe is the battlefield; the president is vested with the unchecked power to use force against anyone he accuses of involvement with Terrorism - then there is no cogent, coherent way to say that the president lacks the power to assassinate even US citizens on US soil. That conclusion is the necessary, logical outcome of the premises that have been embraced. That's why it is so vital to ask that.
To see how true that is, consider the fact that a US president - with very little backlash - has already asserted this very theory on US soil. In 2002, the US arrested a US citizen (Jose Padilla) on US soil (at the O'Hare International Airport in Chicago), and then imprisoned him for the next three-and-a-half years in a military brig without charges of any kind. The theory was that the president has the power to declare anyone (including a US citizen) to be an "enemy combatant" and then punish him as such no matter where he is found (including US soil), even if they are not engaged in any violence at the time they are targeted (as was true for Padilla, who was simply walking unarmed through the airport). Once you accept this framework - that this is a War; the Globe is the Battlefield; and the Commander-in-Chief is the Decider - then the President can treat even US citizens on US soil (part of the battlefield) as "enemy combatants", and do anything he wants to them as such: imprison them without charges or order them killed.
Far from being "paranoid", this theory has already been asserted on US soil during the Bush presidency. It has been applied to US citizens by the Obama administration. It does not require "paranoia" to raise concerns about the inevitable logical outcome of these theories. Instead, it takes blind authoritarian faith in political leaders to believe that such a suggestion is so offensive and outlandish that merely to raise it is crazy. Once you embrace the US government's War on Terror framework, then there is no cogent legal argument for limiting the assassination power to foreign soil. If the Globe is a Battlefield, then that, by definition, obviously includes the US."

Today in 1922 the great conjunto accordionist Juan Lopez was born in Jackson County, Texas. He was known as "El Rey de la Redova". And it was true, he could play redovas like few others. Fast, articulate, and powerful, he has always been one of my favorite accordionists. He played very traditional style, very fast, and in forms that have fallen out of common nowadays.

Through a weird quirk of fate, I came across Juan Lopez's recordings almost exactly 20 years ago and it was his early work with Ideal Records that first introduced me to conjunto music. I was lucky enough to hear the best stuff first! Since conjunto has become a central focus of my listening, music making, and scholarly research, I feel a great debt to El Rey.

Interesting fact: Juan Lopez had 16 children and 49 grandchildren when he died in 2008.

When I was in San Antonio just recently I was fortunate to meet Felipe Perez, who played bajo with Juan Lopez while growing up and learned his specific style, and who is now a true master accordionist himself.  Perez has a a video of him playing with Juan Lopez that I am supposed to get sometime, and I am very interested in seeing some live footage, which is extremely rare.

There is quite a bit of Felipe Perez on youtube, fortunately.  Here is Felipe Perez playing accordion on a redova himself, a very similar style to Juan Lopez, and here a truly fantastic quick polka. He is an incredible player himself, every bit the musician as Juan Lopez.  I am looking forward to hearing him play more when I return to San Antonio.  Perez is so good that a few years ago when Santiago Jimenez, Jr . heard him play live on KEDA, the conjunto station in San Antonio, he called the station to find out who was playing the accordion. The two soon thereafter recorded a cd with Felipe on accordion and Santiago on bajo. It is great, as you'd expect.

When I was in I was arriving at Santiago's recently, I walked up to the studio door to hear some fine accordion playing. Opening the door I find Felipe and Santiago playing together. A truly magical moment, not least because it was so unexpected.

"It's for community safety."

I happy there has been an intense discussion on the use of drones. I personally believe this kind of extraterritorial and extrajudicial killing is the central political issue of our time, not to mention a profound moral issue that we can ill afford to ignore.  It is almost certainly going to become a key aspect of our projection of force abroad, and therefore a key aspect of American imperial governance that requires observation and critique (yup, and oppostition if not resistance).

I know as a historian that this breed of unilateralism is nothing new. We were in fact engaging in wide array of extraordinarily similar extraterritorial and extrajudicial killings in the latter half of the 19th century as a matter of foreign policy (as well as extraterritorial abductions and other extralegal acts) with much less sophisticated technology. 

Let me say self-aggrandizingly: If you don't have time to read the book I wrote about these topics, try out this reasonably short article I wrote, especially the first section on General Ord.

The drone issue has been churning with great intensity among legal scholars at the usual places like Opinio Juris and Lawfare, and a nice recent historically minded post by Ben Coates at the Legal History Blog.  It is nice to see that Rand Paul might have at least a temporary utility to force it into the public view. A little theater is always welcome.

I don't expect much to change in the growth of the industry or in the slipperiness of the parameters for drone use.  I definitely don't think the usage of drones is going to do anything but explode in the coming years, both abroad and at home. 

But it seems to me that whether or not the drones are used to kill American citizens is a straw man argument for understanding their use in existing systems of power and surveillance.

And it is definitely worth noting that the state already yields the power and authority to kill citizens, sometimes innocent ones.  We already authorize all police officers to use deadly force when they feel it is appropriate.  These shootings occur regularly, all over the country, by obscure officers who rarely face punishment or sanction for the deaths of suspects. (here is a brief discussion on it. And another discussing the fact that most people shot by police are mentally ill.)  The way the LA cops ran violently though an innocent populace looking for a loose cannon killer is but one recent and tragic example (there was a very good discussion of this back in February at the ever-interesting Gin and Tacos).

Meanwhile, out in the provinces, the changes of the new era have already arrived at police distrcts in North Carolina. 

"

MONROE, N.C. 

Monroe City Council has approved buying a drone for its police department.

The council voted this week to spend $44,000 in drug forfeiture funds to buy a battery-powered mini-drone with a rotating infrared camera.

City officials say detailed policies will be in place before they use the drone. Officials expect to use it at crime scenes, in searches or in case of natural disasters.

Not everyone thinks it's a good idea.

"We'll have a lot of citizens say, 'I don't want that thing flying over my neighborhood,' and I agree with them 100 percent," Councilwoman Margaret Desio said Thursday.

American Civil Liberties Union chapters in North Carolina and 22 other states filed public records requests Thursday asking police agencies to explain how they are using drones and other equipment chiefly used by the military.

The requests in North Carolina include police departments in Burke, Cabarrus, Catawba, Gaston, Mecklenburg and Union counties.

"We're concerned about public support and public input into its use. We're concerned about whether it's cost effective. And we have broader concerns when these sort of tactics come into play." said Chris Brook, a legal director at the ACLU's North Carolina chapter.

Monroe Police Chief Debra Duncan said concerns about privacy and other issues will be addressed in the policy for the device's use.

"It's not like we're going to send it up and see what you are doing in your backyard," Major Bryan Gilliard said. "It's for community safety."

Duncan says it will be several months before the drone is ready. It is 3 feet long and weighs 2.5-pounds."

 

Lots of things jump out of this story. I like the combination of crime scenes, searches, and natural disasters. The first and second are pretty straightforward. But what about the searching? The major helpfully links it not with the usual definition of searching but with "community safety". Ah, yes. Safety.


What I find especially concerning, though not surprising, is that the police department is utilitizing $44,000 in drug forfeiture funds to buy the drones. What a neat circle! Of course, such drug forfeitures are a core, cash intensive component of modern police work. The police are deeply incentivized to follow up drug cases, even ones that never end in successful prosecution, because it allows underfunded police departments to confiscate large amounts of money and propertythat can be frittered away. It is essentially a form of 100% tax, made even more sinister by the fact that it is collected involuntarily from people accused of crimes or of aiding in the commission of a crime. The people whose property is taken are not necessarily convicted of any crime or even accused of criminal activity themselves. (for example, here, here, here, here, and so on. Oh, here you can see what the U.S. Marshals Service is auctioning off.


At first you might think only cranks would get exercised about the abuses, but they are widespread enough to be a system. As DrugSense.org notes, "In 2009, U.S. Attorneys seized over one billion dollars in assets, roughly four times more than in 1989. During that 21 year span, the value of forfeited assets totaled 11 billion dollars, five billion short of the 2011 federal drug control budget."


so why not use this easy money to buy drones to increase surveillance of the public? And presumedly this surveillance could yield more asset foreiture opportunities.


We need to divide our critique of the use of drones in foreign relations acts and the use of drones in domestic politics since the systemics of these two uses are very different in their motivation, in their social impact, and in their moral weight. The likelihood of regular unwarranted surveillance is far higher than the likelihood of assassination from the air and it should be the place we start the conversation.

 

There is a worthwhile approach linking the game of Go to questions of national security and international relations in a course at Penn State called "Using Serious Games to Promote Strategic Thinking and Analysis". 

I'd consider using Go in this way as well, if I had anything but the most rudimentary approach to it.  I used to like to watch the old timers play down by the stream side in our neighborhood in Seoul. A bunch of people would gather around these games.  I could follow some individual moves but definitely have no operative sense of strategic flow in the game.

What I really need in terms of strategic training is an afternoon or full day sitting in Seoul streamside, playing Go with the old timers.  There must be a grant application in this concept...

I just read what I thought was an interesting book called The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life, by Donald Lopez. In it, Lopez details the European colonial invention/imagination of a scientific Buddha that was utterly unlike the Buddha in context in Asia, and critiques (if not outright dismantles) the connections made between science and Buddhism in the past century and a half.  But this post is not about the book so much as the response, which (as you might guess) has been pretty strong on all sides.

Poking around for some reviews I've come across this avowedly provocative site from Glenn Wallis, which is worth reading if you are in a strident frame of mind at the moment: Speculative Non-Buddhism.  Also its related publication "Non + x," which bills itself as "an experimental e-journal dedicated to the critique of Buddhist and other contemporary cultural materials."  The review of Lopez's book is here, (coupled with a review of Buddha’s Brain: the practical neuroscience of happiness, love & wisdom, by Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius). The review (by Tom Pepper) is worth reading.  Here is a sample of its approach

"What this book [Buddha’s Brain], and the current interest in Buddhism and neuroscience, offers us is the greatest illusion of the dominant ideology of global capitalism: the belief that we can achieve the state of infantile imaginary plentitude, and stay there for eternity. ...

 

Given the prevalence of this core fantasy at the heart of our global-capitalist ideology, how can Buddhist practice possibly be of any real use at all? This is where I want to return to the one point on which I absolutely disagree with Lopez....

It is, then, exactly because of this dependence on causes and conditions that we can reduce human suffering. And we can do so not by a "mindful" retreat into bodily comfort, but by understanding the social, rather than neurological, causes and conditions which produce the self, and which produce it in such a way as to cause suffering. As with so many empiricist theories, Hanson and Mendius offer us only idealism in the guise of materialist science. A true, non-dualistic materialism would recognize the real causes of suffering, not in a world-transcendent mind temporarily trapped in a poorly adapted brain, but in the real, concrete social formations which are the causes and condition of the subject’s existence."


The way that Glenn Wallis defines "Non-Buddhism" this way:

"The work of François Laruelle has given impetus to my specific formulation of “non-buddhism.” Think of my notion of “non-buddhism” (and of Laruelle’s “non-philosophy”) as somewhat akin to non-Euclidean geometry. The difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry lies, of course, in the behavior of a line. Euclid’s fifth postulate assumes parallelism. In upholding this postulate, along with the other four, Euclideans radically limit the field of possible forms. Rejecting this postulate (though preserving the other four), non-Euclidean geometry envisions, so to speak, radical new possibilities; namely, it permits elliptical and hyperbolic curvature.

This image is instructive. “Non-buddhism,” as I conceive it, makes no decision about (1) what postulates properly constitute “Buddhism,” or (2) the value, truth, or relevance of any of the claims made in the name of “Buddhism.” Such non-decision enables a speculative, and perhaps even applied, curving toward or away from the ostensible teachings of Buddhism, as the case may be. Crucially, though, the criteria for any given move lie wholly outside of “Buddhism’s” value system. From within the fold, such a move is unpalatable, even heretical; for, the integrity of the system—its premises, authorities, and institutions—must, axiomatically, remain inviolate.

Non-buddhism stands outside of the fold, but not as a violent revolutionary storming the gates of venerable tradition. Accepting the postulate of requisite “disenchantment,” non-buddhism is too disinterested in “Buddhism” for such a destructive stand. This disinterest, however, does not manifest in rejection. Non-buddhism is acutely interested in the uses of Buddhist teaching, but in a way that remains unbeholden to—and hence, unbound by and unaccountable to—the norms that govern those teachings. As Laruelle claims for non-philosophy, I claim for non-buddhism: once we have suspended the structures that constitute Buddhism, once we have muted what to the believer is Buddhism’s very vibrato, we are free to hear fresh resonances."

Hard to read that and not at least want to read more, is it not?

yup, nuclear war apps exist

I'm teaching a class on the U.S. since 1979 this year, so we are spending some time talking about the Reagan military buildup and the anti-nuclear movement in the early eighties. This means we are also talking about the meaning of possible nuclear war, which is not actually something my students have spent much time thinking about.  I was surprised, but then again the Cold War is paleolithic to them in most respects, even in a military town.

So, to focus the mind, it was necessary for the class first to listen to the Minutemen circa 1983, who keep thinking about World War III.

The onto to this weirdly compelling nuclear war app, which allows you to track the devasation of a wide array of weapons (from 1945 early U.S. bombs to the largest in the arsenals to recent North Korean sized weapons) on any map you wish.  (There are actually quite a few similar programs.)

Here is the radius for a Minutemen missle landing on my house. 

And to the size of the damage that would be produced by the largest Soveit-era weapon tested.  This one would take out all my far-flung beeyards too! 

You can admit a certain morbid interest.

some thoughts on "DIY devices"

People are beginning to wonder how long it will be before someone in the US decides to arm a drone himself ( and yes, it's likely, though not certain, to be a guy).

Remember this is the country where people are now printing totally functional high capacity guns with 3D plastic printers

So it won't surprise you that arming drones is already here for people with a little (very little) money to burn.

I have been pretty busy though, despite a couple of weeks dragging around barely surviving.

Last weekend I had a great time at this Southern music conference down at UNC.  This was an exploration of the global in Southern musical cultures. And like a lot of music conferences, there were not only interesting papers on musical topics, there was a fair bit of music being played as well.  Conferences are always much better with live music sufusing them. Historians, take note!

 Here you can see the array of topics, fascinating stuff.  One of the most interesting ones was Erich Nunn's totally unexpected paper on South African musicians who modeled there music and their yodeling on Jimmie Rodgers.

The conference worked out perfectly for my research into some different Mexican migrant music cultures and music at Virgin of the Guadalupe celebrations.  I'm especially always happy to talk about jaripeos, Mexican rodeos that take place throughout the South and especially in North Carolina.  I believe you could hit a jaripeo every weekend in the warm months. And all of the jaripeos feature music.

 Check out this promotional video for a jaripeo in Wendell, North Carolina in 2012. (sorry, can't get the embed code to work). This captures some of the energy of these events.  Pay attention to the dance competitions. 

Gives you a different view of North Carolina, to say the least.

If it all works out, and the funding materializes, I plan to complete a project on these jaripeos this summer.

Next year I won't wait so long to get the flu shot.  Not a good way to start the new semester.

I was in San Antonio a couple of weeks ago and as I was leaving town I decided to stop by and take one last picture of Lerma's. I was afraid that it would be torn down before I had a chance to come back to town, especially since it was now fenced off and looked like more than a bit forlorn as a result.  Lerma's was shut down a couple of years ago because the building had code violations. I believe if you scroll down in this blog you can see an exterior shot of Lerma's without the fence from when I was out there a year or so ago.

Lerma's is a legendary conjunto club in SA at which all of the conjunto greats have played at one time or another.  It is apparently the longest running conjunto joint in all of Texas. Santiago Jimenez Sr. played there for many years (If I recall correctly, 10 years) every weekend, which in the conjunto world means Friday, Saturday, and Sunday dances.  Tough schedule.  Henry Zimmerle also had a longstanding gig there. I was fortunate enough to see him play there over the years I've been traveling to San Anotnio, as well as many other conjuntos.  Many of the old timer musicians I know in SA played at Lerma's over the years, and just about everybody has gone there to dance at one time or another, if not regularly.

Anyway, it seems to be turning out that my last visit might not have been my last. There is a fundraiser to keep Lerma's alive.  The Esperanza Peace & Justice Center in San Antonio bought it and is looking to keep it alive. They just need to raise $700,000.  So now you know where to direct your year-end charitable contributions...

Of course, there are a lot of other places to hear great live conjunto in San Antonio every day of the week, even if Lerma's is currently closed.  When I was in town I had the chance to hear Los Dos Gilbertos, Flavio Longoria, and Ruben de la Cruz play in a single night at a VFW down by the Missions, just incredible.  Henry Zimmerle plays once a week at the Royal Palace Dance Hall, itself an institution.

 

 

 

I have a bunch of stuff to post and will get around to it later this week. Yup,  Nunal has been more than a bit neglected these past few months. But there are important reasons for it.

Have the Republicans begun to demonstrate an awareness that denigrating women is not good politics?  Not in the great state of Wisconsin.

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D), Wisconsin's new senator-elect, is confident that she will be able to understand the federal budget without the assistance of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).
In an Associated Press interview on Wednesday, Johnson said he hoped he would be able to work with Baldwin in the Senate -- as soon as he explained the "facts" of the budget to her.
"Hopefully I can sit down and lay out for her my best understanding of the federal budget because they're simply the facts," he said. "Hopefully she'll agree with what the facts are and work toward common sense solutions."
"I was a double major in college in mathematics and political science, and I served for six years on the House Budget Committee in my first six years in the House," Baldwin responded in an interview with The Huffington Post on Friday.
"And I am very confident that when proposals come before the U.S. Senate, I will be able to evaluate them as to how they benefit or harm middle-class Wisconsinites. A yardstick of 'does it create jobs,' 'does it lower the deficit' and 'does it help grow the middle class' is an important one. I'm quite confident that I have those abilities," she added.
Baldwin has served in Congress since 1999; Johnson took office in 2011.

You can't have a sexually explicit license plate in Virginia, but you can have an anti-Muslim one.

If the Department of Motor Vehicles is going to let people praise certain religions or ethnicities on their license plates, it also must let people denigrate individuals of those faiths and nationalities.
That's the opinion of a Circuit Court judge, who ruled last week that part of the DMV's guidelines governing vanity tags is unconstitutional.
The ruling stemmed from an appeal from an Iraq War veteran who disagreed with the state's decision last year to revoke his personalized plates, which read "ICUHAJI."
"Haji" is a common and often derogatory term for Arabs used by U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The veteran's attorney, however, said his client did not intend to offend anyone.
Judge John W. Brown wrote in his ruling that the DMV must either return the license plates - which can be read, "I see you, Haji" - to Sean Bujno or find a permissible reason to keep the tags from the Chesapeake resident.
"There are going to be people who will disagree with this opinion, and there will be people who support it, but that is the beauty of this country," said Andrew D. Meyer, who represented Bujno with another attorney, T.J. O'Brien.
A DMV spokeswoman said the department is still reviewing the judge's 14-page opinion. She said no decisions have been made regarding Bujno and his license plates.
Bujno, a former Army sergeant who was honorably discharged in 2009, displayed the plates on his car for more than four years before the DMV revoked them. In a Nov. 3, 2011, letter, the DMV informed Bujno that the tags violated a prohibition on letter combinations that could reasonably be interpreted as being "socially, racially, or ethically offensive or disparaging."
The DMV apparently was responding to a citizen complaint, Brown said.
In his defense of Bujno, Meyer noted the traditional definition of a Haji: a person who has made a "hajj," or Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. He said his client has expanded the meaning to include all U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq, not just Arabs.
In court earlier this year, an attorney representing the DMV disagreed. Assistant Attorney General Janet Westbrook said Bujno requested "HAJIKLR" plates in 2007 and was denied.
When he revoked the "ICUHAJI" tags, Commissioner Richard Holcomb also noted a bumper sticker on Bujno's car. It read: "God Bless Our Troops, Especially Our Snipers."

 I have never actually heard any harsh words at my school, believe it or not, though I have heard all manner of political opinions.  We have a very diverse school and the student body I think tacks pretty much to the right.  But there is no racial turmoil at all.

The same welcoming attitude can't be said for Hampden Sydney, where some bozos rioted in response to the election (the same at Ole Miss is not a surprise to anyone, is it?) Story on both here

I have lots of thoughts on the election, of course, none of them particularly deep, and perhaps most of them simply marvelling at what it is like to vote in a mostly African-American neighborhood in the South, which is where I live.  I never encountered lines or had any problems voting in Illinois and Wisconsin, where I voted in any number of elecitons at all levels.  But here it is, inevitably, always something.  I am tempting to see it as pure incompentence, given Occam's razor and all of that.  But the consistency of it, time and again, and the universality of it across districts, and the obvious historical roots, they are just nagging, aren't they?

I didn't actually have to wait that long. I had friends in other demographically similar districts in other parts of town who waited in line for 4 hours.  At an hour-plus I got off relatively easy.

I was not surprised that the poll was set up so that we all had to wait out in the cold (and it was cold on election day, especially by Norfolk standards) and the gym we voted in was set up in a way to maximize under-utilized space so that all the people in line were left outside

I was interested though that when I walked in I tripped over the power strip that was powering the whole operation.  A single strip from which all the other plugs ran.  It was plugged into the wall next to the line. I borrowed some duct tape and taped down the cord. But I kind of wonder what would have happened to all the voters and the votes if this plug was removed?

Overall I am definitely free of the irrational, ultimately unfounded, and totally uncharacteristic optimism that burbled up in me four years ago. At the time I not only said but actually felt optimistic about the direction of the country, or at least its potential direction.

How liberating to be back in fully sound mind and free of all of that optimism and hope, cloying and clotting as it is, and to be facing things as they are and as they inevitably will be.

A student of mine from last year stopped by to shoot the breeze about the election and started the conversation by asking "what can we expect in the next four years."  I had no answer, just some guesses, and none that I want to be held to.

That said, I am filled with vaguely contented thoughts about how this all turned out.

I am especially pleased with the results in Virginia.  I liked Kaine as a governor fairly well, and am just pleased as punch that George Allen has been nullified. 

More locally, it is worth noting that my Representative Bobbie Scott received a Soviet-like 83% of the vote.  So gerrymandering helps some Dems too.

Have you noticed how large the flags on politicians' lapels have become?  There is flag size creep, and it is real.

Of course, all politicians these days have a little enameled flag pin on their lapel since 9-11.  But both Romney's and Ryan's flag pins are just a wee bit bigger than their opponents.  Take a look at the next debate, I am not making this up.  The Republicans seem to be pushing a somewhat subtle claim that they are just that much more American.

The darksuit and blue or red tie is a uniform.  Adding in the flag enhances the uniformity of the whole. Increasing the size of the flag is a development that seems to warrant close attention.

If the flag migrants from placement on the lapel to a band on the shoulder, we are in trouble.

update: ok, I see now that others have noted the same.  Here I thought I was a trendspotter or something. Apparently, if I read tweets I would have seen this.  I prefer the slow accretion of my thoughts on this largely unread blog....

I enjoy watching presidential debates, but I truly do not understand people who shape their opinions of the candidates from these brief episodes, or who are undecided.  Do they simply pay no attention during the previous year plus? Read nothing at all?   Don't answer these questions.

The Dalai Lama was at William and Mary yesterday, you can watch his talk here.

George Allen has feelings. Other revelations from the campaign

Living in  a swing state - or, even, perhaps, in the swing states of all swing states-- means a lot of political messanging of all forms, constantly. It is not an exaggeration that we receive a mailing and a phone call (usually several) every day.  Most are robocalls or pollsters.   I don't watch broadecast tv except every once in a while so I largely am spared the ads with those intoning deep voices.

Every once in a while something good comes along in the mail.
'
This mailing struck me as something akin to the iconic Lyndon Johnson daisy ad in terms of subtlety and willingness to exploit a little girl for political gain.

Here is the train bearing down on the little girl.  "The conductor of this runaway train doesn't know when to stop"

And the conductor is...yes, yes, you guessed it:

The hat is what pushes this mailing into the realm of inspiration.

The train is probably Amtrak too, the socialist!

I did see one TV commercial today that made me marvel at the general tawdriness of George Allen.  I saw the ad today and simply could not fathom its message.  Allen has reached what has to be a new cynical low by exploiting the death of a Marine and the grief of his mother Rhonda Winfield in this new ad for no reason that serves any purpose other than emotional manipulation.  This is not an ad extolling his support for veterans or for the injured who have come back from multiple tours only to face woefully inadequate support.  Plenty of political hay could be made out of that (though not very effectively if you are a Republican, though that is perhaps too obvious a point).   It is, frankly, appalling and immoral what has been done to the returning vets.  The deaths in the unnecessary war in Iraq are even more immoral and unacceptable.  Obscene, actually.  But that is not the point of the ad. Nothing like that at all is being said in this ad.  It is, instead, simply built around Allen's sensitivity to the mother for her loss (which, of course, is the worst possible imaginable).  The commercial as played on tv has the mother talking and the tag line "I am George Allen and I approve this message."  But what is the message?

What does this ad say except that George Allen is willing to put this mother's pain in front of you for 1:27 to prove....? That he is a human being?

The mother is quoted on the webpage as saying ""'George Allen cared enough to reach out as father and husband to a grieving mother, committed to carrying on my son's legacy with leadership and strength. I saw in George Allen a public servant whose leadership is not just for what others see but who he is person to person."  OK, but what does that mean? Anything? 

How "person to person" is a guy who greets a grieving mother and then turns around and makes a political ad out of his compassion?

I've been getting complaints that the twins haven't appeared here since they have gotten so big and beautiful, so here you go:

That is Birch on the left, Aura on the right

The zombie bees issue returns to the NYTimes in a well written piece that manages to quote both Lenin and SpongeBob SquarePants

news territorial

I've been meaning to post these for several days but finally had a moment.

This is an interesting story about a stateless man trapped in a U.S. territory operating at this moment as a anomalous zone.

"Instead of a five-day holiday to the lush, tropical US territory in the South Pacific, the 39-year-old has spent more than nine brutal months there caught in an immigration law hell. Experts agree it’s an unprecedented illustration of America’s broken immigration system.
The key sticking point: Though he’s lived legally in Houston and the Los Angeles area for years under a special arrangement with the Department of Homeland Security, Sebastian is stateless, with no citizenship at all. The federal government argues that during his vacation he “self-deported” from the United States — despite the fact that American Samoa is a US territory."

also worth reading is this story about the other hotly disputed tiny islands in East Asia, these between Japan and Korea. The most amusing detail in this potentially distablizing conflict: The Korean expansion of 3G coverage to the islands

"In the case of these islands, known as Dokdo in South Korea and Takeshima in Japan, the show of Korean control is pushed to extremes: Only two non-government employees live here, a fisherman and his wife, both Koreans. But three South Korean telecommunications companies provide the islands with 3G cellphone service.
The notion of symbolic control has grown increasingly important in recent months amid a region-wide surge of nationalism and upcoming political leadership changes in South Korea, Japan and China. As a result, countries that once played down territorial disputes now use them to foment national pride. These small islands have become dangerous friction points between Asia’s most economically linked countries, with all sides calling their claims irrefutable and just, and brushing aside the idea of compromise."

This is a fascinating story about yet another new problem for honeybees in the U.S. 

Washington state’s first ‘zombie bees’ reported; parasite causes bees to fly erratically, die

It turns out that there is a spreading problem of the parasitic takeover of bees by a species of indigenous fly, Apocephalus borealis, which lays eggs in a bees abdomen which in turn hatch into larvae that control the bees behavior.  The bees fly at night, which is very irregular, and then die as the larvae eat them from the inside.  Perhaps inevitably, the bees under this parasitic control get called "zombie bees".  There is a project sponsored by San Francisco State University to track these zombies.

I am planning on checking our bees on campus to see if we can find any evidence of infection.

This type of behavioral control via parasites has been getting a lot of intention recently.  There was that McAuliffe piece in the Atlantic over the summer that revealed how toxoplasmosis controls a huge range of human behavior (maybe even yours?...)

I just got back from a few days in South Texas, one of my favorite places to be because of the music, the people, and, not a distant third, the food.

I love it that people always say "I wish I knew you were coming, I would have made some barbeque!"  I especially like this when people say it the first time I meet them, which has happened several times.

Most anyone reading this blog or talking to me knows I have a passion for conjunto music, which is the main reason I went down there.

I was in San Antonio talking to Santiago Jimenez, Jr., working on his autobiography (which is going to be of the as-told-to variety).  We had some seriously fascinating conversations over many hours, covering his life and music and also that of his legendary father, Don Santiago Jimenez.  This book is going to be a remarkable document, I am really happy with how it is coming together.

 I'd tell you all about it-- but you'll have to wait for the book!  In the meantime, I thought a few photos would be worthwhile.

One of the most interesting things we did was go through the Santiago's old neighborhood on the West Side.  Here he  is in front of his old house, 1619 Saltillo Road.

 He lived here starting in 1959, with his parents and 7 siblings. They later moved across the street and lived at  a house at the Good Samaritan Center.  The road was a narrow dirt track wide enough only for one car at the time when they lived here.

We also took a really fascinating trip to Seguin to look at the places Don Santiago played at regularly during his heyday, and also the clubs where Santiago Jr played. 

In case you don't know, the national anthem of conjunto music is Santiago, Sr's "Viva Seguin." Every conjunto plays it, as standard as they come.

Santiago loaded a video of himself playing it:



Notice his use of the the two row accordion, which is what his father played.  Nobody plays two row anymore except Santiago.  Another key part of his playing that is directly in the lineage of his father is the use of bass buttons.  Modern players almost never play the bajos, and many actually even remove the reeds.

Almost all of the places that Don Santiago played in Seguin are gone, now empty lots or fields or overgrown wooded areas.  This is a serious erasure of the infrastructure of a critical period of time.  These are the equivalent of historic juke joints or places on the Chitlin Circuit.  If people didn't remember these places then the existence of these legendary locales would be totally forgotten.  There are a great many old timers in Seguin who remember going to dances where Santiago, Sr., played.  I even met people who knew or were related to the woman named "Margarita" for whom Santiago wrote his polka of the same name.  I am not aware of an oral history project of the area but it is something that needs to be (and soon!)

Santiago Sr. used to play for big dances at a pool in Seguin, but it is long gone.  Part of the foundation of it remains.  That is the diving board platform on the right.

This was once a club that was known as a particularly rough place where people were shot and killed during dances, now it is a house. 

Every Sunday nowadays, Santiago plays at a restaurant on the West Side called Carnitas Uruapan.  The music is only accordion and bajo sexto and it is perfect.

I have a lot of footage of it from a  couple of different Sundays and will put some up here once I get it loaded onto youtube (hopefully soon, but it may be a bit).  To my ear, this is the best place to go hear traditional conjunto played just as it should be

 The place itself is almost comically picturesque, just a perfect and visually arresting spot.  It looks like time has stood still there for a half century or more. 

The outside is covered in paintings, this is my favorite wall.



There is a lot more but I'll pause for now.  We'll end with some iconic footage of father and son playing together decades ago, from Les Blank's "Chulas Fronteras"

Eleven years after September 11 it is hard to find something meaningful to say in a short space, though I am approaching a moment where I feel like writing about it in some detail because I feel like the distance has become sufficient.

Every year I have asked my students if they had any thoughts on the anniversary of 9-11, and I must say that since that date that nothing has been said that I thought was worth mentioning.  Very little thoughtful at all. A usual diversion was into storytelling.  I do think a particular strain of self-storytelling is one of the legacies of that moment.

This year my students had something interesting to say. In particular, there was a robust disagreement in one class between those you appreciated the church-y memorial service the school created and several others who found it abominable.  This group preferred only one thing: silence.

I was fortunate today to realize to talk to the daughter of an old and now deceased friend and colleague of mine, Tom Fanney.  Tom was a mathematician, a surfer, and an extremely friendly and welcoming person.  He died seven years ago, a truly tragic loss that those trite words do not adequately convey.  I don't think it was an accident to think of him on this particular day, just fortuitous timing.  I think often of a conversation we had on September 11, 2002, at a session organized at the school to grapple with the one year anniversary of it.  Tom's response at that time, a fraught and terrible time, to say the least, was so peaceful that it since served as a model for me as well as something of a touchstone.  You are missed, Tom.

Structuring an academic book tends to be a bit over-determined and formulaic, though this is not unwelcome when wanting to crank through a pile of monographs with the greatest efficacy. Teaching to use structure to one's advantage is something we usually teach students very early on, in fact.

I modeled my book Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations on 2666, thinking as I did it that unfortunately it was not likely anybody would read it that way.  (Don't worry, I had no grandiose visions they were equal works,  I just liked the structure as much as I liked the book itself so I had it in mind while writing.  And, alas, nobody has yet said to me, 'this reminded me of 2666.' )  But, of course, in the spirit of meeting the requirements of academia, I tacked an introduction on the front which 2666 mostly definitely did not have.

But now upon some further thought I am a bit swayed by the structure adopted by Richard Gombrich in his What the Buddha Taught, a really interesting introductory text of use to my students this semester which also happens to offer a fine example of alternative structuring.  Instead of placing his methodological discussion in the front, he sticks it in the middle in a chapter (seven) called "assessing the evidence."  The first section of this chapter, subtitled "A Bogus Subject" discards the word 'methodology' with this: "There is no such subject as methodology. Mediocre academics like using long words, and at some time in the past generation someone decided it would be more impressive to call method 'methodology'".

He then discusses the virtues of conjecture, and the need for scholars to relax into the "asymmetry here.  What people think of as 'facts' or 'data' are themselves theories....Rather than be unwilling to make bold guesses, we should simply understand that in an empirical subject, be it philology, history or physics, there is no final certitude: all knowledge is provisional.  But this is not relativism.  It is evident that knowledge does advance.  So the fact that our theories may always turn our to be wrong should not depress us, but on the contrary make us realize how exciting intellectual work can be."

But maybe the best idea is to have the kind of last chapter he writes, titled "Is This Book to be Believed?"  A lot of books would be improved if they had to answer that.

One of my favorite classes to teach these days is my fairly new one called "Space and Place in the Global United States".  This is the third time I've taught it and I believe it will be the best.  I've slowly wrestled formidable mountains of spatial theory into something I can make functional for the students--while still managing to fit in coverage of everything from historical patterns of Vietnamese settlement in New Orleans to the first performance of "4'33" to the enduring cultural and regional significance of the taquachito.  It is a fun class to teach, and the diversity and quality of the student research projects at the end makes the often grueling semester worthwhile.

The class starts out by taking a look at a collection of my photos of migrant spaces in North Carolina and Virginia (and a few from Nashville).  It occurred to me that I never linked through to the site maintained by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond.  Here is the site

This gives me a chance to sing the praises of the Digital Scholarship Lab, which did an amazing job on this site as they have on their other projects (which are quite different).  I actually developed the class initially as part of the Tocqueville Seminar at the University of Richmond in 2010, so this has been a very fruitful relationship overall.

Thinking of "4'33", I wanted to mention that last year, the student response to hearing "4'33" when we studied soundscape and the conenctions between silence/noise/music and other issues was almost unbelievably hostile. I wasn't totally surprised, but it was a bit intense.  I am hoping that perhaps fortifying them with Kay Larson's concise article in the most recent issue of Buddhadharma might mitigate the impact a bit.  We'll see.

Since you can read just an excerpt online if you are not a subscriber, you might as well just buy her new book on John Cage, it is worth reading in full.

If you are teaching classes on foreign relations and law at the moment, Duncan Hollis' list of canonical cases for teaching about international law is thought provoking, as well as useful:

Essential International Law Cases for the Classroom (Six Years Later)

though of greater utility to historians, and essential reading, is his recent book chapter "Treaties in the Supreme Court, 1861-1900," which is available from SSRN here.