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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 […] The Pentagon has decided to pull its blackout curtain over news about Ballistic Missile Defense flight tests, claiming a need to “safeguard critical defense information.” That this need has never existed before for such trials raises the timeworn question of whether what’s so terribly critical is the information or the risk of embarrassment. The latest […] News that Russia is developing a nuclear-powered cruise missile will send aerospace buffs to the history stacks to peruse Project Pluto, a wacky 1950’s U.S. Air Force project that epitomized Cold War technophilia. About $2 billion in today’s dollars swirled down the loo before it was cancelled in 1964. No doubt such contraptions wouldThis herbal […] Daytime temperatures returned to the normal mid-60’s this weekend in Los Angeles, but for the past couple of weeks they rose to the paradisiacal 80’s in clear skies and sweet morning air that answered the old question of why anyone would want to live here in a semidesert on the grinding edges of two tectonic […] Required reading on State-of-the-Union day. “History is kind of, you know, it’s quirky sometimes.” In days of yore, when The Bomb was new and the Commies were everywhere everyday, the halls of academe and government teemed with suits who made prosperous livings by theorizing about how Washington’s nukes and Moscow’s nukes matched up against each other. From the paskudnyak Herman Kahn’s homebuilt Hudson Institute to the endowed chairs of […] Bill Broad and David Sanger seem to have nothing else to do in the twilight of their New York Times careers than beat the North Korea anxiety drum. In the tradition of Drew Middleton, who never met a general whose bugle he wouldn’t blow on page one, they continue to pen the creative nonfiction prologue […] What better way to begin another embattled year for American journalism than reading James Risen’s Intercept account of how top editors at the New York Times dragged the polish off their shoes to delay publishing revelations about NSA domestic spying? It takes a long, long time to rise to that paper’s masthead–years of demonstrating what […] |