Center for Strategic Communication

Human Sacrifice and State-Building

[by Mark Safranski / “zen“] A while back I had a longish post that argued that the mass executions practiced by ISIS drew from the long pagan tradition of ritualistic human sacrifice. Today in the news, some social scientists see evidence of human...

Elite Failure and Populist Trump It

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“] GOP Front Runner, Donald J. Trump A friend sent an essay by the prolific IR scholar, Professor Angelo Codevilla that had been posted at Powerline Blog.  It was good. For the unfamiliar, Codevilla often writes on national...

Intellectuals and their Romance with Political Barbarism

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“] Martin Heidegger, Eric Hobsbawm and Ezra Pound A  meandering post inspired by Reason Magazine and Charles Cameron. Reason.com is best known for giving a scrappy libertarian take on current events, crime, technology and pop...

Infrastructure is a critical national security issue

On April 7th much of the District of Columbia lost power. Traffic lights stopped working, metro stations went dark, and even key government buildings—including the White House and the State Department—suffered power failure. While the power outage was determined to be...

Bad Things Happen in the Dark

Brian Rich, COO of APR Energy, moderated the second panel of ASP’s “Electricity Supply: What it Means for Security, Development and Geopolitics,” “The Challenges of Generating and Delivering Electricity.” Panelists Dante Disparte, CEO and Founder of...