Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

The Wall Street Journal reports on the niche, but growing, market for so-called “hard money” loans.  Good reporting by Dawn Wotapka on an undercurrent in the credit markets.  Hard money loans feature borrowers with credit problems that cause them to be shunned by banks; very high interest rates; short term; substantial if perhaps illiquid security; […]

Via Professor Mankiw’s blog, I don’t quite know whether this is a genuine academic paper or a submission for the Ignobel Prize.  As Professor Mankiw says: These may be the least expected sentences I have read lately:  “This paper explores the link between economic development and penile length…. The GDP maximizing size is around 13.5 […]

It’s not just me.  The Economist also observes that the future belongs to drones.  In this case, referring to the F-35 fighter and the many problems in the production program. The future belongs to the drones But the longer-term outlook for the F-35 is uncertain. Its costly capabilities are intended to make it effective against […]

I have a new essay up at SSRN, “Accountability” as “Legitimacy”: Global Governance, Global Civil Society and the United Nations.  It appears in the new issue of the Brooklyn Journal of International Law, a special symposium on accountability and international NGOs, at which I was privileged to present last fall.  The conference was excellent and […]

I write a lot about drones and warfare, robotics on the battlefield and the legal questions it raises, but my interest in robotics is much broader than that.  It extends to the effort to build and utilize (see, I resisted the battlefield word “deploy”) robots in society, and particularly in day to day interactions.  For […]

Viz., what amount of productivity in the US economy has been sacrificed this week by people playing with G+ and trying it out?  I will be the first to say that mine has been somewhat impaired … on the other hand, short term versus long term, I think in the long term it will contribute […]

The article itself is interesting and worth reading for its substance – Defense Secretary Panetta on Al Qaeda, strategy, and Iraq.  Though it does make a bit of a mountain out of a molehill – Panetta seems to have been looking to find ways to tell troops still facing dangers in Iraq that theirs is […]

Increasingly I think the light-bulb issue is one of those fault lines in attitudinal American politics, in which one can reasonably easily read off most people’s attitudes on a pretty wide range of political issues on the basis of supporting or condemning the current legislation.  I’m not claiming extraordinary accuracy here, so no need to […]

Peggy McGuinness discusses the international and federalism legal issues over at Opinio Juris.  Essentially, she notes, the issue comes down to federalism and the avenues of a domestic remedy: The problem for Leal and others whose death penalty convictions were obtained following a clear and acknowledged violation of U.S. obligations under the Consular Convention is […]

Consider the following:  “He’s stuck with her” and “He’s stuck with her.”  The first of these, with the inflection on “stuck,” carries the connotation of “can’t get rid of her.”  The second, with the inflection on “with,” carries the connotation of “stuck by her.”  Importantly, the ambiguous meaning, which is clarified by the shift in […]

At least, not in my life and, my best guess, not in yours.  Wherein the reason why, up until a week ago, I had let Facebook go and Twitter with it.  I don’t really want to inflict my political views or professional concerns on all my nieces and nephews, and I don’t really want to […]

Yesterday’s Washington Post had a well-researched front page story by William Wan and Peter Finn describing how dozens and dozens of countries are acquiring drones for military and other uses.  The article is careful not to call this an “arms race” in drone technology, which is one of the elements that makes this an astute […]

Breaking radio silence here in the Eastern Sierra Nevada … this is not bear-blogging, but mountain lion-blogging – well, not actually a mountain lion, but a mountain lion kill in the snow.  The mountain guide at Sierra Mountain Center (which is a great resource for all forms of backpacking, rock climbing, trekking, etc.) thought it […]

Adieu.  I am going off line for everything but a few crucial things while the family is on vacation here in the Owens Valley, Bishop California, God’s Own Country, and the Eastern Sierra Nevada to all of you. This is the land of the perfect, utterly perfect light, and it has been a cool year […]

The ace Wall Street Journal national security reporting team, followed closely by the Washington Post and the AP, have been reporting in the last couple of days on the CIA being tasked to carry out an expanded Predator drone targeted killing program in Yemen. I’ve been meaning to blog on this, but meanwhile Robert Chesney […]