Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. Yesterday, I went on Judge Napolitano’s show, and we talked about several challenging issues. Among them, the Trump administration’s military coup in Venezuela and the illegality of the same, the difficulty of...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. Recently, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists featured a fiction contest: “Write Before Midnight.” I sent in an entry, which, sad to say, didn’t win. (The winners can be found here.) But that’s OK: I enjoyed...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. Perhaps you’ve heard the quip that no matter who you vote for in America’s presidential derby, you get warhorse John McCain. Well, not literally John McCain, but someone much like him, someone who believes in...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. In Venezuela, one might say President Trump said “You’re fired!” to Maduro without any firm plan of succession and without any authority to fire Maduro in the first place other than the authority of guns....
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. Today I caught this grim summary on Twitter/X: The scary part is that the official death toll of 76,134 is an undercount. So many bodies remain under rubble or just plain obliterated by bombs. Of course, the...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. One of my all-time favorite movies is “Witness” (1985) with Harrison Ford. It’s set within the Amish community in Pennsylvania. One quiet scene has stayed with me. A small boy, Samuel, talks to his grandfather...
The Pentagon has failed seven audits in a row. It hasn’t won a major war since 1945. Money and assets that are missing or otherwise unaccounted for measure in the trillions of dollars. This year’s Pentagon budget is roughly another trillion dollars. The cost of new...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. File this under “You can’t make this stuff up”: The Trump administration has rebranded the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) as the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, complete with the president’s name installed...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. Again, this is big picture, and I’m not a lawyer. Laws only mean something – they only have real authority – when powerful entities are held to account. If only the weak are subject to laws, whereas (for...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. American exceptionalism and megalomania, combined with threat inflation, creates a toxic brew that drives trillion-dollar war budgets and global violence. I was reminded of this as I reread a review I wrote in...
