Mike Pence says the era of strategic restraint is over. Pointing to the quarter-century since the United States first confronted North Korea over its attempts to build nuclear weapons, the vice president said a period of patience had followed. “But the era of strategic patience is over,” Pence declared. “President Trump has made it clear that the patience of the United States and our allies in this region has run out and we want to see change.

The kiddo enjoyed his “first” Easter this weekend. At 18 months, he’s now self-aware of the fun.

Midwest post-mortem

Last week I attended the Midwest Political Science Association annual conference in Chicago. AS conferences go, I was pleased with the event and the payoff was well worth the time and energy it cost to attend.

Wonderful new book, Exporting Freedom (Anna Su 2016), on the rise of religious freedom in American foreign policy. Anna Su looks at the construction of the international legal regime during the 20th century and finds that the efforts of promoting international religious freedom long predate the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. Although I’m skeptical that some of the early cases could rightly be read into the history of American foreign policy regarding religious freedom, I am open to persuasion and, more importantly, she didn’t write this book on the grand strategy of international religious freedom.

My 2010 Macbook Pro finally died. I was hoping to get one more year so I could finish the PhD on the same machine I began it with, but alas. While setting up my new machine, I realized how much I benefited from having my .emacs file on GitHub. So here’s a link in case anyone finds it helpful. A note of caution that it is a work-in-progress and some of the features are not fully active (like RefTeX) but I’ve been too busy with the dissertation to fix it.