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Refutes arguments that Carl Schmitt exerted significant influence on conservative political & legal thinking in the US that bridged interwar German fascism & post-WWII conservatism. The alleged connection is claimed through deconstructing the thinking of influential German immigrants such as Friedrich Hayek, Hans Morgenthau, Joseph Schumpeter, & Leo Strauss. The author debates this dubious reasoning by pointing out that Schmitt never wrote or advanced many of the interpretations credited to him. He also reviews evidence showing Schmitt's slight relationship with & influence on Hayek, Morgenthau, Schumpeter, & Strauss & points out the lack of scholarship concerning greater & more concrete influence sources. Discussed in contrast is Carl J. Friedrich, a person with a long relationship with Schmitt who was directly influenced by him. L. A. Hoffman

Outlines the concern of Philadelphia's Italian-Americans at the attitude of the US government toward Italy and describes how after the outbreak of war between the United States and Italy, US foreign policy became the main determinant of their voting behaviour, causing the establishment of a Republican majority in their community in 1942. Notes how the alleged mishandling of Italy by the Roosevelt administration after the armistice and charges that Truman had imposed a punitive peace on her consolidated the pro-Republican polarization in the postwar years. (Original abstract - amended)

Abstract
Scambaiters have emerged as a proactive means to targeting fraud offenders. Put simply, scambaiters act as an incapacitator, seeking to deliberately engage fraud offenders to waste their time and reduce their communication with genuine victims. For some, this is a deliberate act of vigilantism that seeks to respond in a way that authorities (such as police) cannot. This article uses a well-known scambaiter website, 419eater, to examine how scambaiters present narratives of fraud victims and fraud offenders. It argues that victims are positioned as vulnerable and undeserving of their victimization, while offenders are positioned as rational beings and as a criminal 'other'. This last narrative is used to justify the behaviour of scambaiters towards alleged fraud offenders. Overall, this article argues that while both narratives are based largely on facts, the interpretation and use of these narratives (particularly the offender narrative) are problematic in terms of a broader discussion around the policing of online fraud and cyber vigilantism.

This article addresses the influence of race on Ku Klux Klan theology in the 1920s in order to highlight possible relations between Protestant theology and white radical nationalism. Through the analytical concept of 'racial exegesis'—meaning a biblically based view on the supposed origin of human races—the main argument is that the Klan did not invent anything in the racial and theological domains. The Klan's self-proclaimed mission to uphold white Protestant hegemony in America resulted not only in the identification of imagined racial and cultural threats. As important were mythical interpretations of history, according to which the white race was believed to be destined by God to thrive on American soil. The synthesis of racial ideology and Protestant theology in the Klan resulted in a self-identified vanguard of white, native-born, Protestant Americans seeking to follow Christ as 'Criterion of Character' by which Klansmen hoped to enhance the resurgence of American nation in accordance with the Founding Fathers' alleged religious and racial ideals.

AbstractAccording to most of the literature available so far, international and European cross-border banks and investments firms are considered the primary beneficiaries of the CMU and related revitalization of securitization. Nevertheless, an in-depth analysis of the transnational financial industry lobbying and influence, in the light of the final agreement on the securitization reform package, is still missing. This paper intends to fill this gap in the story by assessing if, and to what extent, the alleged industry beneficiaries played an active role in shaping the regulatory agenda within the CMU project and its related outcomes. An in-depth analysis of corporate lobbying in the securitization reform is thus provided, by looking at the interactions between structural and political contextual factors in shaping private/public coalitions along the different stages of the EU policy-making process. As it is argued here, the policy entrepreneurship of the European securitization industry has been the key factor to explain the emergence of the EU regulatory approach and its legislative outcomes.

On May 2, U.S. law enforcement indicted Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) on charges of taking at least $360,000 in bribes from companies controlled by the government of Azerbaijan. In exchange for money, Cuellar would attempt to shape the U.S. foreign policy towards Azerbaijan by spreading narratives favorable to that nation's interests through speeches and legislative measures.
While the challenge of undue foreign interference in U.S. politics is not new, the case of Azerbaijan highlights a particular vulnerability in U.S. foreign policy: Washington's fixation on inflexible alliances and enmities provides a fertile ground for foreign actors to exploit it to promote their own parochial agendas that have little to do with U.S. interests.
Azerbaijan has been an adept player on the Washington scene since the early 1990s when the country's abundant hydrocarbon riches boosted its claims to geostrategic relevance. As detailed in a Quincy Institute brief, since 2015 Azerbaijan spent over $7 million on lobbying efforts in Washington, according to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) records. And, as the indictment of Cuellar shows, that is likely only a tip of the iceberg: Azerbaijan has a long track record of illicit influence operations known as "caviar diplomacy" consisting of bribing politicians in the U.S. and Europe to promote its interests. In fact, in January 2024 the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) voted to suspend Azerbaijan's membership due, in part, to those corrupt dealings.
Azerbaijan's efforts have to be seen in the context of its decades-long conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh — a historically Armenian-majority region but within the internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan. To garner U.S. and EU support, Baku's lobbying machine, including PR firms, friendly politicians, pundits, and think tanks pitched the country as the West's geopolitical asset against Russia and Iran — Azerbaijan borders both. As a Washington insider, who requested not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, familiar with Cuellar's case and Baku's broader lobbying schemes put it, playing up Russian and Iranian threats is an old trick used by Baku to "attract attention on the Hill."
The text of Cueller's indictment confirms that analysis: the section on the congressman's dealings with Azerbaijan includes an exchange with the nation's then-ambassador to the U.S. Elin Suleymanov, in which the diplomat tried to pin blame for the flare-up of tensions with Armenia in July 2020 on Russia's alleged attempts to disrupt the "pipelines and transportation routes" in the region by using Armenia, its formal security treaty ally, against Azerbaijan. That version of events never withstood even cursory scrutiny. In fact, in hindsight, the flare-up in July looks merely like a rehearsal before a much larger, and ultimately successful, military effort Azerbaijan launched a few months later in September of 2020. Significantly, Russia failed to intervene on behalf of its ally Armenia. Yet the manipulative invocation of the Russian threat was enough to spur Cuellar and other Baku lobbyists in the West to action.
Azerbaijan uses the same threat inflation tactics when it comes to Iran. In that case, Baku's lobbyists leverage the nation's close and highly beneficial relationship with Israel, one of the main sources of sophisticated weaponry that helped Azerbaijan defeat Armenia militarily. The influential network of hawkish DC-based think tanks promoting the positions of Israel's Likud-led government, such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Hudson Institute, and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), do Azerbaijan's bidding likely because it's in Israel's interests, and what is in the interests of Israel, in their view, must also be beneficial to the United States. In fact, JINSA's mission statement says that "Israel is the most capable and critical U.S. security partner in the 21st century and a strong America is the best guarantor of Western civilization."
It follows, then, that the U.S. must support Azerbaijan. In fact, in its report on a trip to Azerbaijan in March 2024, JINSA's experts called on the U.S. government to "block Iran's efforts to stymie the budding cooperation between Azerbaijan and Israel." The report then concludes that "greater U.S. engagement with Azerbaijan is critical to building a coherent and comprehensive approach to addressing two of our key adversaries, Russia and Iran."
Yet JINSA and Baku's other supporters in Washington choose to disregard or downplay the booming relationship between Azerbaijan and Russia. In fact, both countries signed a declaration on "allied interaction" in 2022, just a few days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the relationship has only grown stronger. In April 2024, Azerbaijan's president Ilham Aliyev went so far as to say that Russia "will never leave the South Caucasus because it is in this region." Even Azerbaijan's much-touted role as a source of diversification of gas supplies to Europe to wean it off Russian imports can only be viable on the condition that Azerbaijan itself gets resupplied by Moscow.
Azerbaijan's relations with Iran are arguably more complicated as Iran, unlike Russia, borders Armenia and has opposed Azeri expansionism in the region. Yet Baku has also sought to moderate tensions with Tehran, by signing a raft of agreements to boost regional connectivity.
These examples show just how far detached the views of Baku lobbyists are of Azerbaijan from the realities on the ground. It's not an argument to pressure Azerbaijan to change its policies — as a sovereign state, it is entitled to make its own choices, all the more so when it comes to relations with powerful neighbors like Russia and Iran. Yet there is no reason why Washington's own policies should be based on false, manufactured premises. Rep. Cuellar's case highlights the pernicious effects of undue interference. But it should also serve for a broader reflection on how nearly unconditional attachments to some countries and equally rigid hostilities to others helped create space for corrupt foreign interests to exploit.

SIMPLE SUMMARY: The role of the socioeconomic status of dog owners in canine welfare concerns is not fully understood. We conducted a retrospective study of 107,597 canine welfare complaints attended by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) Queensland from 2008 to 2018. We explored the relationship between the owner's socioeconomic status and reported (rather than confirmed) complaints about welfare of dogs. The socioeconomic status of the owner was estimated from the postcode of where the alleged welfare issue occurred, using government statistics for Socio-Economic Indexes of different regions of Australia. Reported complaints were correlated with socioeconomic scores. There was a lower median socioeconomic score in our study group compared to the entire Queensland state, indicating that alleged canine welfare concerns were more likely to be reported in areas with inhabitants of low socioeconomic status. The status was also low if the complaint was about a crossbred rather than a purebred dog. Among the purebred dogs, complaints involving working dogs, terriers, and utility breeds were associated with the lowest socioeconomic scores. The following complaints were associated with low socioeconomic status: cruelty, insufficient food and/or water, a dog not being exercised, a dog being confined/tethered, failure to provide shelter or treatment, overcrowding, a dog being in poor condition or living in poor conditions. Increased status was observed in alleged cases of a dog being left in a hot car unattended. ABSTRACT: Human–dog relationships are an important contributor to the welfare of dogs, but little is known about the importance of socioeconomic status of the dogs' owners. We conducted a retrospective study of canine welfare complaints, using Australian government statistics on the socioeconomic status of the inhabitants at the location of the alleged welfare issue. The socioeconomic score of inhabitants at the relevant postcode was assumed to be that of the plaintiff. Our dataset ...

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to look at safeguarding documentation in relation to 50 adult safeguarding files for the period April 2010 to March 2011. This was followed up with semi-structured interviews with a small number of Designated Officers whose role it is to screen referrals and coordinate investigations. Findings from the research were used to redesign regional adult safeguarding documentation to ensure Designated Officers have access to the information necessary to assist them in reaching decisions. Designated and Investigating Officer training was also updated to reflect learning from the research thereby reducing the potential for variation in practice.


Design/methodology/approach
– A file tool was developed which examined the recorded information in safeguarding documentation contained within 50 service user files. The review tool looked at the personal characteristics of the vulnerable adult, the nature of the alleged abuse and the decisions/outcomes reached by staff acting as safeguarding Designated Officers. A semi-structured interview schedule asked Designated Offices to comment on the training and understanding of the process as well as the factors they believed were central to the decision making process. Their responses were compared to data obtained from the file review.


Findings
– A key finding in the research was that while factors such as type of abuse, the vulnerable adults' consent to cooperate with proceedings, identity of the referrer, etc. did influence decisions taken there was a lack of clarity on the part of Designated Officers in relation to their roles and responsibilities and of the process to be followed.


Research limitations/implications
– The research was limited to one Health & Social Care Trust area and had a small sample size (n=50).


Practical implications
– The findings of the research led to a revamping of existing safeguarding documentation which had failed to keep pace with developments and was no longer fit for purpose. Adult safeguarding training courses within the Trust were redesigned to bring greater focus to the role and responsibilities of designated and Investigating Officers and the stages in the safeguarding process. Adult Safeguarding leads were established within programmes of care and professional support mechanisms put in place for staff engaged in this area of work.


Social implications
– Better trained and supported staff alongside more efficient safeguarding systems should lead to better outcomes in the protection of vulnerable people from abuse and harm.


Originality/value
– The research built on existing albeit limited research into what potentially influences staff involved in critical decision-making processes within adult safeguarding.

This article investigates the change in relations between Parisian haute couture and the French textile industry in the 1950s and 1960s. This study is grounded in the multiple changes that occurred between the two decades with the end of a state-sponsored and textile-backed aid to couture plan in 1960, the dematerialization of fashion in the 1960s and the advent of brands and licenses, and the waning of couture's influence throughout the period. It cross-references archives from multi-stakeholder meetings between the state, couture, and textile representatives with the couturiers' trade association archives and diplomatic archives to show how the changing fashion landscape impacted their interactions. This study shows that while the couture and textile industries drifted apart, the government's interest in couture grew. This reframes the narrative on couture's alleged influence as the spearhead of the textile industry while illustrating its wider prestige influence and its relevance to the state.

This article investigates the change in relations between Parisian haute couture and the French textile industry in the 1950s and 1960s. This study is grounded in the multiple changes that occurred between the two decades with the end of a state-sponsored and textile-backed aid to couture plan in 1960, the dematerialization of fashion in the 1960s and the advent of brands and licenses, and the waning of couture's influence throughout the period. It cross-references archives from multi-stakeholder meetings between the state, couture, and textile representatives with the couturiers' trade association archives and diplomatic archives to show how the changing fashion landscape impacted their interactions. This study shows that while the couture and textile industries drifted apart, the government's interest in couture grew. This reframes the narrative on couture's alleged influence as the spearhead of the textile industry while illustrating its wider prestige influence and its relevance to the state.

AbstractProponents of system dynamics expound its benefits for understanding and managing complex social systems. However, usage of system dynamics remains low, which questions the true value that policy‐makers gain from the approach as currently delivered. Feedback systems thinking and causal loop diagrams currently dominate the representation of problem situations. Although substantial benefits are claimed for this approach, it embeds serious theoretical and pedagogical flaws, notably by separating the problem behaviour from the structure alleged to cause it, by ignoring scale and timing of behaviour, and by excluding the fundamental and unavoidable properties of asset stock accumulation. Policy‐makers are thus unlikely to be provided with actionable solutions, whether from feedback diagrams alone or from subsequent simulation models, a failure that may have irretrievably alienated a significant fraction of management who have been exposed to system dynamics. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

It is well-known that Russia seeks to undermine the Western order in the Balkans, such as supporting Serbs in their rejection of NATO membership for Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). However, some assertions of Russia's influence discussed here show no merit and seem to have been brought to delegitimize the Western installed peace order vital to the stability of the region: the 1-2-3 Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) with one state, two entities, and three constituent peoples (Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats). The meaningless assertions include disinformation against High Representative Schmidt as a Russia man; the misrepresentation of the U.S. -E.U. led electoral reform as the one benefitting Russia; the frequently repeated falsehoods that NATO and EU member state Croatia is aligned with Putin or that some U.S. officials embrace Russia's values. Such disinformation narratives do not show the ties between the supposed Russian assets and Kremlin, nor do they demonstrate that the alleged pro-Russian actors pursue pro-Kremlin policies. Instead, they tend to be based on the ludicrous claims that the very support for the Dayton categories of ethnic power-sharing reflects the embrace of Russia's values under President Putin. Striking at the core of the Dayton peace bargain, the anti-Dayton unitarists want the DPA to guarantee BiH's external borders, while urging the international community to dismiss the DPA designed two-entity state structure (important to Serbs) or ethnic power-sharing (important to Croats) to impose a centralized, unitary state with a majority rule, or the so-called "civic state." However, besides thwarting (Serb) secessionism and (Croat) separatism, the purpose of Dayton has been to prevent (Bosniak) majoritarianism. The intensity of the debate surrounding the disinformation activities discussed here shows that--though the DPA still remains relevant to the BiH postwar peace and the Western Balkans stability--the consensus on what Dayton is or should be is now collapsing.

Human&ndash ; dog relationships are an important contributor to the welfare of dogs, but little is known about the importance of socioeconomic status of the dogs&rsquo ; owners. We conducted a retrospective study of canine welfare complaints, using Australian government statistics on the socioeconomic status of the inhabitants at the location of the alleged welfare issue. The socioeconomic score of inhabitants at the relevant postcode was assumed to be that of the plaintiff. Our dataset included 107,597 complaints that had been received by RSPCA Queensland between July 2008 and June 2018, each with the following information: the number of dogs involved, dog(s) age, breed(s), suburb, postcode, date received, and complaint code(s) (describing the type of complaint). The median index score for relative social advantage of the locations where the alleged welfare concern occurred was less than the median score for the population of Queensland, suggesting that welfare concerns in dogs were more commonly reported in areas with inhabitants of low socioeconomic status. It was also less if the dog being reported was not of a recognised breed, compared to dogs of recognised breeds. Dogs reported to be in the gundog breed group were in the most socioeconomically advantaged postcodes, followed by toy, hound, non-sporting, working dog, terrier, and utility breed groups. Reports of alleged cruelty, insufficient food and/or water, a dog being not exercised or being confined/tethered, failure to provide shelter or treatment, overcrowding, a dog being in poor condition or living in poor conditions were most likely to be made in relation to dogs in low socioeconomic postcodes. Reports of dogs being left in a hot vehicle unattended were more likely to be made in relation to dogs in high socioeconomic postcodes. It is concluded that both canine welfare complaints and dogs in specific breed groups appear to be related to the owner&rsquo ; s socioeconomic status. This study may be used to improve public awareness and to tailor educational campaigns toward different populations.