Hamid Dabashi: An American and an Arab Walk Into a Saudi Consulate….One (Thomas Friedman) Come Out Smiling and Writes About Saudi Reforms, the Other (Jamal Khashoggi) is Tortured, Dismembered, and Never Seen Again. What Can We Learn from This?

An American and an Arab journalist walk into a Saudi Consulate On Thomas Friedman, ‘his friend’ Jamal Khashoggi, and our duty to expose the malicious ignorance of imperial messengers. Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. The New York Times is the barometer of the health and sickness …

Stephen E. Arnold: Excitement at Oracle — Amazon Effect

After reportedly butting heads with Larry Ellison, Oracle’s top cloud executive is leaving the company Kurian’s departure comes just weeks after Oracle announced he was taking a break from his position overseeing Oracle’s cloud efforts, and after Bloomberg reported that a conflict with Oracle co-founder, executive chairman, chief technology officer, and person whose opinion seems …

Berto Jongman: Beacon and Warning: Sherman Kent, Scientific Hubris, and the CIA’s Office of National Estimates

Beacon and Warning: Sherman Kent, Scientific Hubris, and the CIA’s Office of National Estimates J. Peter Scoblic, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School, is a fellow in the International Security Program at New America and the author of U.S. vs. Them: Conservatism in the Age of Nuclear Terror. “From bias to probabilities, Kent anticipated …

NYT Editors: The Catholic Church’s Unholy Stain UPDATE: Robert Steele Letter to Editor

The Catholic Church’s Unholy Stain It’s long past time for penitence and promises on clerical pedophilia. Pope Francis must act. The latest barrage of revelations and developments — including a gut-wrenching report by a grand jury in Pennsylvania detailing seven decades of sexual abuse of at least 1,000 children, and probably thousands more, by more …

Steven Aftergood: Army Admits Intelligence Sucks

ARMY NEEDS INTELLIGENCE TO FACE “PEER THREATS” U.S. Army operations increasingly depend on intelligence to help confront adversaries who are themselves highly competent, the Army said this week in a newly updated publication on military intelligence. Future operations “will occur in complex operational environments against capable peer threats, who most likely will start from positions …

Robert Steele: Letter to Atlantic Monthly – Donald Trump Is Neither A Tyrant Nor Lost

I beg to differ with Eliot A. Cohen, whom I knew long ago, and his contribution, “How This Will End: Sooner or later, tyrants are always abandoned by their followers,” (Atlantic, 24 August 2018). As a proponent of holistic analytics and a long-time enemy of the Deep State and Shadow Government that leverage and loot …