Month: May 2021

Hierarchy

The Trouble With Hierarchy

It is fair to say that many people react negatively to the word “hierarchy”. The allergic reaction to the word has deep roots, going back to the Reformation and the secularism of the Enlightenment. Protestants of the sixteenth century tended to identify hierarchs with the distant and pompous prelates of […]

Cummings Show

The Dominic Cummings Show

The former chief strategist for Prime Minister Boris Johnson was in a stroppy mood before the UK parliamentary Health and Science committee.  For seven hours, Cummings unleashed salvo after salvo against his former boss and the government coronavirus response. Boiling down some points of the Cummings show: there was a […]

The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski Doctrine

For two decades, the Pentagon has been applying the “Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine” to the “wider Middle East”. Several times, it thought of extending it to the “Caribbean Basin”, but refrained from doing so, concentrating its power on its first target. The Pentagon acts as an autonomous decision-making center that is effectively outside the power of the president. It is a civil-military administration that imposes its objectives on the rest of the military.