""Political correctness" has taken politeness and turned it into a weapon of censorship and intimidation. In the workplace, on social media, and even at the dinner table, Americans are confronted daily with a laundry list of words they're "not allowed" to say--and that list is updated constantly and without warning. How did so absurd a concept become so dangerous--and come to dominate our public discourse over the last quarter-century? In Speechless,...

"According to the American Library Association (ALA), there were more attempts to ban books in 2021 than at any time since the group began tracking three decades earlier. The latest, unprecedented wave of book banning is driven mainly by conservative parents and politicians, who are also behind extreme new censorship laws in many states that restrict what teachers and students can read and discuss in the classroom. Free speech defenders say the laws...

"The First Amendment grants kids and every other citizen five monster privileges: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right to petition the government. If the First Amendment is everywhere in their lives, shouldn't kids know more about it? Yes! In Your Freedom, Your Power, middle grade readers get a focused look at their freedoms and rights through the lens of this all-powerful First Amendment....

Throughout her busy days, Moon wonders what it would be like to be wild and free until the day she meets a wolf and learns his "wolfy ways."

Reviews the escalating actions of the United States in Afghanistan, using airstrikes and other tactics to eliminate the Taliban and its leader, Osama bin Laden, after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

In 2016 the Calexit movement exploded with the election of Donald Trump as America's president. 32% of Californians according to multiple polls said they wanted to secede now. One of the largest stumbling blocks to developing large support for the idea of California independence was the fact that most Californians felt that the Calexit movement members must not actually understand government, and the law. This belief existed because they never...

This book studies the impact of cultural factors on the course of military innovations. One would expect that countries accustomed to similar technologies would undergo analogous changes in their perception of and approach to warfare. However, the intellectual history of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) in Russia, the US, and Israel indicates the opposite. The US developed technology and weaponry for about a decade without reconceptualizing...

At peak utilization, private security contractors (PSCs) constituted a larger occupying force in Iraq and Afghanistan than did U.S. troops. Yet, no book has so far assessed the impact of private security companies on military effectiveness. Filling that gap, Molly Dunigan reveals how the increasing tendency to outsource missions to PSCs has significant ramifications for both tactical and long-term strategic military effectiveness-and for the likelihood...

This book addresses one of the basic questions in military studies: How can armies cope effectively with technological and doctrinal surprises-ones that leave them vulnerable to new weapons systems and/or combat doctrines? Author Meir Finkel contends that the current paradigm-with its over-dependence on intelligence and an all-out effort to predict the nature of the future battlefield and the enemy's capabilities-generally doesn't work. Based on historical...

This book develops a new approach to the analysis of civil-military relations by focusing on the effectiveness of the armed forces in fulfilling roles & missions, and on their efficiency in terms of cost. The approach is applied to the United States using official documents and interviews with policy-makers. In addition to analyzing the impact of defense reform initiatives over the past thirty years, the book includes the recent phenomenon of "contracting-out"...