Recent content by Brad Sallows

Also do not underestimate the importance of deliberate simplicity, pre-war industrial planning, delegation of authority to "make things happen" to private captains of industry, focus on a few proven systems, etc. The factors which account for the war production differences between the US...

Sure. The audience is always laughing at him, not with him.

Prosecutors play a role in deciding what to charge (and whether to over-charge, which is common in the US in order to produce plea bargains), and in asking for sentences. Not innocent. All kinds of rioters walk home from riots without being taken into custody, though, let alone charged.

He made a joke. He can't make jokes now?

I can guess a couple of the topics at the top of the list are "cost" and "vulnerability", which I doubt have changed since the Golden Age of aviation (Vietnam war), leaving aside the "which branch controls it" parochial/practical discussion. On pg 52 of "The Rise and Fall of an American Army"...

We might have to cede some of the usual ground here to secure the assets against sabotage and other attack. I would rather place large areas completely off-limits than expend a bunch of resources trying to find ways to fit dual-use in without compromising security.

Defence expenditures aren't nation-building; they're nation-preserving. The necessary and sufficient conditions for a society are the means and will to defend it.

I am certainly more interested in any mention of Ebola surfacing than I ever was in COVID, or in hantavirus. There is much less margin for subordinating the medical risk to political exigencies with this one.

The premise of that discussion is that corruption isn't already normalized, which is not the case. At the same time people are working to uncover and oppose corruption in the Trump administration, some of them are also working to protect the long-established pathways by which corrupt abuses of...

A Canadian or European opinion of what constitutes liberty or tyranny is not worth much in the US. But that goes back to what prompted my original comment. The impressions many people outside the US are forming are influenced by the caterwauling of Democrats and the chattering classes outside...

All states have both Republican and Democratic voters. What is the evidence that people leaving a predominantly Democratic state are mostly Democratic voters? It's likely true that as voters leave a "blue" state for a "red" one, both states become more Democratic. (All that has to happen is...

Yep. They're winning bigly. Migration from "blue" to "red" states is moving electoral votes and House seats into the Republican column. The census bureau has admitted the 2020 census was statistically flawed in ways that probably benefited Democrats by a couple of seats, which will eventually...

One corrupt president isn't the US going off the rails. I don't care whether probable evidence of corruption takes the form of day trading, inexplicably large contracts to family businesses for indeterminate services, or large foreign donations to foundations controlled by politicians. It...

Yes. For some of the folks, yes. I didn't single out courts. Yes, there are mechanisms. They were created. Another one is being created. People will have to apply. I don't claim anything is corruption-proof. Rather the reverse. Pretty much everyone in the US political establishment...

The US isn't going off the rails. The fortunes of the Democratic party are going off the rails - which is only a temporary state of affairs - and they are loud about it. Equating party values and national values isn't a novel idea.