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That the Department of Defense will undergo its first financial audit ever is the kind of news few people can probably relate to, like the discovery of a new terrene planet or the evacuation of a housing development built over a Hawaiian volcano. Okay, so now what? With more than $2 trillion in assets, the […] Around the same time that the Pentagon was learning how to control independent battlefield news reporting by “embedding,” i.e. leashing, professional correspondents in deployed units, executive editor Abe Rosenthal hired a general to cover the military for the New York Times. Bernard Trainor stepped directly from 39 years in the Marine Corps into the Times […] When the son of a hardscrabble Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, insurance agent found himself one September morn in the same Princeton dorm room as Donald Rumsfeld, part of a freshman class of ’52 that included James Baker, you might say that stars were ominously aligned. This side of paradise was about to get nastier. None of […] “If activists want to make headway on reining in gun violence, they need to understand gun culture.” So opines the subtitle of a recent article in Texas Monthly about why there will be no grassroots movement coming out of the Lone Star State after the Santa Fe school massacre. It’s a mistake, we learn from […] American mass culture no longer lionizes writers of literary scope while also amplifying their personal voice on the great social and political issues of the day. Post-war archetypes like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal are gone and–I can attest as a teacher of undergraduates–forgotten. The death of Tom Wolfe marks the disappearance of another member […] The military secrecy industrial complex got a nice cadeau from Chief Judge Colleen J. McMahon of the Southern District of New York last week, which will enable the CIA not only to manufacture secrets but selectively market them outside its own shop. As succinctly explained by Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News, McMahon ruled that the […] The release of a heavily redacted table of contents from the secret cybersecurity research journal JSCoRE highlights the audacity of a hermetically sealed intelligence community that feels free to call this homegrown publication “widely-recognized, high-quality” because, well, trust us. That it is similarly deemed to be “peer-reviewed” adds another layer of chutzpah to the illusion […] Anyone in academic circles expressing dismay over the apparent demise of the “U.S-Korea Institute” at Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington now that the government of South Korea has cancelled its funding might pause to ask why Seoul was paying for USKI lock, stock, and barrel in the first place. Hopkins is […] If Google were to take the (highly unlikely) step of nixing participation in Project Maven, employees gung-ho about military tech can always jump to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which has never seen a Pentagon dollar it wouldn’t glom (most of its budget is secret, so I’m compelled to make this reasonable assumption). With […] Like “yellow rain” and aerosolized anthrax, we now have another wide-open accusation of Soviet–well, okay, Russian–CBW capers that will be denied and disparaged by Moscow while Western governments sit tight on whatever evidence they claim to possess. Thank goodness that Matthew Meselson at least put an end to the bee poopIf untreated, the disease can […] |