Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. The Pentagon has failed eight consecutive financial audits. For decades it has been unable to account for trillions of dollars. It has not won a major war since World War II. That is not a record of...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. Back in 2007, Senator John McCain suggested that if the U.S. lost its war in Iraq, it wouldn’t be the military’s fault. It would rather be the fault of opponents of that war, who formed an irresolute and...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. Two headlines caught my eye this AM in my email media stream. From the New York Times: “How the Trump Administration Rushed to Judgment in Minneapolis Shooting” There was no “judgment” displayed in the...
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. Wow. Just wow. That was my response after reading “The Trillion Dollar War Machine” by Bill Hartung and Ben Freeman. The book’s subtitle captures the “wow” part succinctly: “How runaway military spending...
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...
