Geopolitics

Incredible to me that the current US administration has looked at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and concluded that the real problem with the US military is that its officers weren't good enough at killing stuff but knew too much history, anthropology, theology and international relations.

i‘m using it for a column but i want to share here this line from lincoln on jefferson because it is applies to our situation as well. you can find it in his april 6, 1859 letter to henry l. pierce.

Really good thread countering the latest battle in the war on Senior Service Colleges.

Evidently, something was broken with the other link. So, here, I've written about the right-wing attacks on PME and civilian educational institutions. othermeans.substack.com/p/the-myth-o...

I am once again asking leftists to understand the Pentagon budget and not just scream at it like it’s their mom or girlfriend when there are no Uncrustables in the house.

It's a very conscious choice to report a quote in this way, and it's hard to see it as anything other than malicious. Whether you agree with her or not is irrelevant - as a journalist, it's embarrassing to witness such a blatant attempted hatchet job

So you're saying ICE is incompatible with the rule of law as practiced in this nation from the founding? Think I see a pretty easy solution here, champ.

If you are wondering what words the all-male Congress found so "blasphemous" that they felt compelled to literally scrape them off the monument, they were: ''Woman, first denied a soul, then called mindless, now arisen, declared herself an entity to be reckoned.''

Puzzling that the author is emphatic about shifting focus of PME away from politics, economics, and other related topics and then asserts that military leaders should have been the ones to object to politicians’ goals on the basis of their deep knowledge of the same topics that they’d be ignoring.

Everything this administration does undermines something else this administration says it wants to do

I'm sure we've all seen the graphic that lays out the United States ' relationship with slavery. It's good, but I never thought it was quite impactful enough. So I made my own. I've used a few key events, including my birth, to highlight how recent these events are in history. 1 square = 1 year.

Every “apolitical military professional” the moment they decide they don’t like policymakers telling them what to do:

At the top level our job mostly reduces to putting cards in the hands of FSOs to negotiate a new status quo that's both favorable to us and stable enough that we don't spend our careers deploying to the same places over and over. Also, the FSOs are honestly better at this job than we are.

and ofc the athenians went on to get their shit rocked, not bc they were woke nerds but bc they alienated their former allies by indiscriminate use of force to get what they wanted. at long last, we are doing the melian dialogue from thucydides's classic historical work Don't Do The Melian Dialogue.

Of course I do. We're the indispensable logistical chain that takes TLAMs from INDOPACOM and delivers them to CENTCOM

Marshall said of World War II "I doubt there was any one thing, except the shortage of LSTs, that came to our minds more frequently than the political factors."

After ‘The Godfather’ made him a movie star in his 40s, he remained a beloved character actor for half a century, adding ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’ to the cultural lexicon. on.wsj.com/4ak0Py6

📡Ukrainian UAVs will be equipped with reconnaissance SAR radars from the French company Harmattan AI, which will enable reconnaissance even in the presence of clouds or fog. 🔗Read details: militarnyi.com/en/news/ukra...

read that first paragraph if nothing else:

Sort of gives away the lie that they're arresting hardened criminals who are drags on society when they're setting up traps to lure in Good Samaritans

I always like to tell this story but during WWII, a 23 year old PHD mathematician from Harvard was able to solve the 8th Air Force’s gunnery problem in like 2 months without spending a day in the military (turns out you have to lead your target)

First place I ever skied

The FBI posted about being careful about online scams and being catfished for Valentine’s Day and the replies with photos of Kash Patel with his country singer girlfriend were getting so much traction the FBI deleted the tweet.

Again, this is the through line of American history, from the failure of Reconstruction to ICE killing people in cold blood on the streets of Minneapolis, with lots of ugly "City Folkz are not Real Americans and their votes don't need to be counted" stuff in between: bsky.app/profile/mcop...

The long-term damage Trump 2 has done to the US in one year makes Brexit look like a stubbed toe

Don’t worry, the guy who helped cover up the Ohio State scandal perpetuated by men all over the Epstein files is chair of the judiciary committee so I’m sure there will be fair oversight

i think this is what drives me nuts. people talk about how, say, the UN was founded by "starry eyed idealists" who didn't understand "reality." the truth is that the UN was founded by those who had just fought and *won* the bloodiest war in human history.

👇🎯 Also, for the very first time since Iran-Contra (if not 1865; bsky.app/profile/mcop...) , we actually have to send a bunch of senior elite individuals to jail & shame the rest forever from polite society & lucrative ex post sinecures at corporations, universities, think tanks, & media outlets.

This is a hell of a headline:

This is so spot on

Osthrobothnian Finns in shambles as a SWEDE is the first to try to open a second front yle.fi/a/74-20210310

The commander in chief telling troops who they have to vote for is itself a presidency ending impeachable scandal.

A fun one is attempting to get an explanation of how this is different than FAMM and why, if this was truly a thing SOCOM thought they needed, they wouldn't just throw in to buy some extra FAMMs "Stuff is more better when RDT&E is MFP11" is basically what it boils down to

Thurogood Marshall was correct, the Consitution was defective from the start and every1 knew it! It was designed to rectify the flaws of the articles of confederation, but it was a compromise designed for the moment. That's why the explicit power to amend exists.

Zelenskyy in Munich: “The Ukrainian Army is the strongest army in Europe, thanks to our heroes. “And I think it is simply not smart to keep this army outside NATO.”

I realize media doesn’t think it’s a big deal that Trump, Vance & Hegseth continue to give partisan political speeches to troops, evidenced by the fact that they are never asked about it nor are members of Congress, but it is one of the most dangerous things happening right now.

Schmidt is overindexing on certain lessons from the Ukrainian War of Independence at the expense of other, also obvious but maybe not glamorous or profitable, lessons.

There will be people who are understandably desperate to hear this, but it's important to be clear-eyed about Rubio himself and what the Trump administration is doing. 🧵

This NYT column by @polgreen.bsky.social is the truest thing I've ever seen about the REAL reason public trust in the media collapsed

no foreign foe has ever dreamed of being able to sack and pillaging this country the way Trump admin and its congressional and scotus enablers do every day.

if you're an older person who finds words like mogg and maxxing annoying, just starting using them. people over the age of 30 have the superpower to end trends by simply adopting them

The IRS illgally shared THOUSANDS of taxpayers private data with ICE As CDT's Tom Bowman notes, the scandalous and reckless data sharing between IRS and ICE shows "precisely why strict legal firewalls exist and have — until now — been treated as an important guardrail.” apnews.com/article/trea...

The text threads visible in here where agents are congratulating him on "good shooting" and glowing feedback is pouring in all the way up the administration also shows why: not is there there no accountability mechanism, this is what they're told the job is.

Oh ok, so we're gonna have to actually do re-education camps. This is is insane, pure unadulterated cruelty. These people will run Dachau if we let them. I take back what I said about concentration camps earlier. The only reason they aren't yet is they haven't worked up the courage to mass murder

Steven Rattner: Without immigration, the American population is expected to start shrinking by 2030. Without a 2-3% pa population growth, the US will face economic contraction.

thesis: fast food spending is down in the aggregate, and when people do spend, they're going for topline (mc'd) instead of competitors

This is just unconscionable man