Following up on the angst of Anne Applebaum, the Washington Post devotes ample front page ink to the devastating news that Great Britain’s defense budget has shrunk from $57.7 billion to $57.7 billion from 2004 to 3013, or from 2.4 to 2.3 percent of total gross national product. To the surprise of absolutely no one…
Search Results for: military spending
Pinch Me, I’m Dreaming! Politico runs two—two!—articles calling for REDUCED Pentagon spending!
Yes, you read that right. Middle of the road just the facts, ma’am, Politico actually ran two articles, one “liberal” and one “conservative”, calling for Congress to stop spending so gosh darn much on defense. Both pieces are waaay too timid by my standards, but to hear two voices speak up in what has been…
Who won the Cold War? Why, Jimmy Carter, of course!
At least, that’s the way Chris Miller tells it in Chip War The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, his best-selling but not always convincing story of the computer chip and how it “changed the world”. It seems that in 1977, Silicon Valley entrepreneur William Perry was brought in to serve as undersecretary of…
Another $2 trillion down the rathole
“Another $40 billion down the rathole,” Secretary of the Treasury Gordon Humphrey used to sigh, contemplating the Defense Department’s annual budget requests under the Eisenhower administration.1 But that was then. Now we’re up to $2 trillion! Well, on the one hand, that $2 trillion, to update our nuclear deterrent, will be spread out over 25…
California’s high-speed rail project not so hot, the New York Times discovers
This just in! How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails! Yeah, the NYT’s Ralph Vartabedian has the story on California’s long-struggling mega-mega project, a 200 mph bullet train running between San Francisco and LA, aka “the train to nowhere”: America’s first experiment with high-speed rail has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare. Political compromises created a…
Ukrainians brave, Russians cowards! Ukraine good, Russia bad! Well, yeah, but couldn’t I get a little nuance on the side?
War, no matter what anyone wants to tell you, is not a morality play, where one side is ever brave and virtuous, and the other ever sneering and evil. And, to amplify that point a little, we shouldn’t end up fighting World War III just because the Russian invasion of Ukraine is deeply immoral. The…
The F-35 Flying Turkey, Fiercely Flapping Its Wings
Well, turkeys can fly, can’t they? So what’s the problem? Over at Forbes, David Axe brings us totally predictable (and predicted) news: The U.S. Air Force Just Admitted The F-35 Stealth Fighter Has Failed. Dan is extrapolating, just a little, from a recent article in Air Force magazine, Brown Launching Major TacAir Study with CAPE,…
Political Notes from All Over: Paul Krugman is cool, Ross Douthat is mad, Kamala Harris is “necessary” (probably), and Black Lives Matter is living down to Billy Barr’s expectations
Tough to be a man! Or a woman! Or even just a little kid. But stuff happens, as Donnie Rumsfeld liked to say, and this is some of the stuff that’s happening. First up is the good news: Paul Krugman is cool! I’ve frequently though not necessarily bitched about the way the Krugman too often,…
George F. Will showing some signs of improvement. Emphasis on the “some”
Recently, I’ve slackened off making fun of George F. “the ‘F’ stands for ‘Frabjous’, son” Will, first because George has largely been a good boy, leaving the Republican Party in disgust with its abandonment of free market policies, doubling down on that disgust at the nomination of Donald Trump, and going the extra mile by…
Cutting Ike’s pages, and cutting Ike’s prose
I recently read a new book by Slate’s Fred Kaplan (if a webpub can be said to possess a man)—The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War—which is an interesting read, though I wouldn’t call it “definitive”, unless perhaps when Fred says he’s giving us the “secret history” he implies that he’s…