Recent content by Copernicus

I don't think that it is off-topic to discuss threats of nuclear war in connection with Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Those threats are directly connected to the question of how the West should respond to the invasion of Ukraine. Should we take the threats seriously? Should we ignore them? It...

Hence the federal criminal investigation of his campaign finances now underway.

The assumption being that all the failsafes in place work to prevent a rogue action by some military unit with control of a nuclear weapon somewhere. I have more confidence that things are better under control in the US than in Russia, where ever more frequent threats of a nuclear strike keep...

Regarding deficit spending, Keynes once joked during the Great Depression that it would be better for the government to pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up rather than to do nothing. He didn't mean this seriously, because deficit spending should always be to produce...

I recommend that you take a look at Barbara Tuchman's book, The March of Folly. People can see the future and still ignore it--like we are doing with global warming. Before those wars ended, a lot of people were calling them mistakes that we should have left way earlier or, better yet, stayed...

I think that you underestimate the way things play out politically when so much effort and treasure has been spent to save Ukraine. No politicians are going to want to be seen as the ones who "lost" Ukraine. The US stayed in Vietnam well after everyone knew that we were going to lose. They...

Typical of barbos, he did not source his article, which was published in August. You can find it here: Six months into war, Russian goods still flowing to US The reality is that only about 3% of wood imports to the the US come from Russia, but there are some products such as the Baltic birch...

I think you may have attributed a more sophisticated understanding of economics to my grandfather than is warranted by that short autobiographical anecdote of mine. My grandfather lived through the Great Crash of 1929. He lost all faith in banks, and the groundbreaking theory of Keynsian...

Unlike the wannabe Stalin president of Russia, who was a murderous KGB clown in occupied East Germany in his prior life. The KGB clown doesn't know a thing about being good at TV shit, but he is still pretty good at murdering people. Stalin would be proud.

We are the biggest arms supplier in the world, and we have a lot of orders to fill. I believe that both Taiwan and Poland have high priority back orders--the Taiwanese to beef up defenses against imminent attack and the Poles to replace the old Soviet tanks that they sent into Ukraine. There...

It seems pretty obvious that someone with enough money to buy a congressman bought the election. There are a lot of people who could use one for nefarious purposes. By virtue of being elected, Santos gets a security clearance. He'll have inside information that wouldn't necessarily be...

The president of Chechia is largely a ceremonial post, although the post is influential in the politics of the country. Its outgoing president is Milos Zeman, who was known as something of a Putin supporter until last February's invasion. So he was in favor with barbos earlier on in this...

Now that Ukraine is getting more modern weaponry, the difficulty of repairing and maintaining it necessarily relies a lot of communication with remote teams. How to fix a howitzer: US offers help line to Ukraine troops

Carter is known to have a big heart.

One of the greatest favors that barbos can do for you is to put you on his ignore list, because then you don't get hooked into trying to engage him in a rational discussion that is never going to happen. It is better to be a spectator of, rather than a participant in, those conversations. I...