A peak at what's coming to the troopdata package. Data for US states!

See a lot of people trashing this based on a single screen clipping that grossly distorts the author’s message (social media—who’d have guessed?). It’s actually a pretty good read. I just wish he spent more time at the end developing some of these thoughts. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

International travel for business and tourism can affect US power projection. Another reason why the idea of closing down immigration processing at major international transit hubs in the US is a ridiculous idea.

It’s hard to overstate just how crazy it’s been over the last year watching foreign policy be made by people who are focused on coming up with ideas that play well to a small subset of the electorate that’s glued to cable news but actually inflict tremendous damage on the country as a whole.

The idea that this would even be 5% of the word document outlining the deal is ludicrous.

remember when you used to learn this information quietly and at the age of roughly eleven

@zingherpolisci.bsky.social with a fantastic article on the educational divide between women and men. www.liberalism.org/p/educationa...

New paper w/ @carlammm.bsky.social in JCR! 🎉 Q: Does U.S. military training actually create influence with foreign officers? (Short answer: Yes!) Using interviews & a survey experiment with Turkish officers, this paper provides an answer: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I think one of the most challenging things about dealing with AI as a professor is that it frequently pits my deep seated hatred of cheating against my deep seated aversion to wrongfully railroading someone.

A burst manhole cover on our street. Storm surge was pretty crazy.

Higher level rhetoric filters down to state level politicians. Kansas state representatives are using Trump’s remarks about running for a third term to appeal to national fundraising networks. This seems like a big deal but it’s kind of buried at the end.

A slight detour from the central topic here, but after years in academia and observing the highly variable quality of methods training/skills I often wonder how much of the supply side of the whole MAHA thing is attributable to people who genuinely don’t realize how out of their depth they are.

The Mandalorian and Grogu and Grogu.

One thing that repeatedly stuns me is stuff like this—it's almost like they actively seek out opportunities to display their complete lack of respect and propriety in the most grotesque ways possible. Actions that are sure to provoke public outrage, and are completely unforced.

One under-appreciated part of having children is that you can raise tiny humans who think it’s normal—dare I say “cool”, even—that you narrate mundane daily activities like scooping yogurt in the voice of 1980s Skeletor.

I’ve written a decent amount of public facing stuff over the years but I’ve somehow never received rabidly anti-Semitic hate mail for it until now.

The middle turned out pretty cool!

The kid wanted a rainbow pastel cake. I didn’t quite stick the landing on the top but I’m pretty happy with it for a first cut.

Every now and then Apple Music deletes the CDs I imported from my library so it’s been a while since I’ve listened to this, but today I’m reminded of just how perfect this album is.

@carlammm.bsky.social, @ma-allen.com, and I wrote another piece for the Conversation where we talk about President Trump’s threats to withdraw more personnel from Germany and how deployments and basing go beyond allied defense. theconversation.com/why-trumps-c...

My Excel spreadsheet wouldn’t have to deal with this shit.

So I take it all of Canvas is experiencing a cyberattack?

Like 80% of the lethality of the US military rests on a foundation of overseas partnerships and allies that the administration actively alienates on a daily basis.

A complex series of buoys and ushers. He says “go that way.”

Now do it all at 6AM classes. But seriously, the progress is hard earned, often seems invisible, and you truly have to learn to get out of your own way if you want to improve. It’s not something you can bullshit or bloviate your way through. Valuable lessons that carry over to the rest of the day.

It's out, everyone. It's out! Julia is one of the most brilliant translational methodologists I know, and it was a real honor to work with her on this paper. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback! (BTW, I'm a psychologist now?)

I like to spend time talking to students about the STD campaigns the military conducted during the world wars as a way of illustrating how a big part of sustaining a military force involves basic public health and herding cats.

@carlammm.bsky.social @ma-allen.com and I wrote a new piece for The Conversation on Iran, NATO, and how the current conflict might affect the future of the alliance and US influence. theconversation.com/natos-intern...

A consistent feature of this administration has been wild and extreme exaggerations when it comes to how degraded enemy capabilities are as a result of IS military strikes. We went through this just last summer and here we are again.

A cool example of how you might use these models that dovetails nice with IR/conflict studies topics—pairwise comparison models were used to help determine weights for various soldier attributes used to prioritize discharges from the Army after WWII.

Finally finished up a blog post on estimating Bradley–Terry models using brms. www.m-flynn.com/posts/2025-1...

Bradley–Terry Models and Pairwise Comparisons in brms Whew—it's been a minute since I've written a blog post. But I recently published a paper that seemed like it would lend itself nicely to a new post, so here we are! Before I move on I'll note that this is an abbreviated version of a longer post…

Finally finished up a blog post on estimating Bradley–Terry models using brms. www.m-flynn.com/posts/2025-1...

It will be interesting to see how the media treats this. Inflation came down a lot by the 2024 elections, but reporting made it sound like it was still up to 9%. But this is a huge jump in gas prices coming right before end of school year travels for lots of people in the US. bbc.com/news/article...

I really enjoyed this episode. I think it had some really useful information on the technical issues associated with military military operations in and around the strait. I also appreciated the perspective that it provided on military leaders evaluations of what constitutes “success”. 1/

Watching the full press conference and it's amazing that nobody is asking why, if Iranian capabilities have truly been degraded to the extent described, the US would concede control and taxation authority over the Straits? www.bbc.com/news/live/c5...

Having Iran tax the strait of Hormuz would be an enormous strategic defeat for the USA and extra perilous for Iran’s neighbors. But it is also a staggering blow to Israel.

My terrific RA, Caleb Dixon, and I tracked the military firings and replacements so you can judge whether the military leadership is being politicized: www.aei.org/military-ous...

Lots of focus on energy supplies/prices but the degree to which the agricultural production capacity of many countries is also tied up with the free flow of shipping through the Straits gives Iran a significant amount of leverage over food supplies.

This is along the lines of what I feared he might be going for with the dramatic escalation, but it only works if you have a pliant media outlet that will print anything even if it doesn’t pass a basic smell test. They didn’t just churn out this plan suddenly after he started in with mass killings.

This would translate to something like ≈$110 million per day and ≈$40 billion annually for Iran based on pre-war traffic?

It seems possible there’s some sort of agreement between the US and Iran (even if only short term) pending. If so it makes the president’s insistence on using genocidal rhetoric all the more reprehensible because he, of all people, would be aware of such developments.

I would have preferred to have the "draw the rest of the owl" meme on the cover, but this will do. Seems like it is on schedule, and we'll leave some typos so you know we didn't write it with AI.

AEI is making a fired flags tracker so you can assess the replacements are more political. Coles out Monday.

Well this is probably going to be bad.

The present war with Iran is a hell of a thing to hang NATO's value on. There seems to be an utter failure of imagination when it comes to considering the problems they *don't* have to deal with because NATO exists and the US is a part of the alliance.

Via @ma-allen.com www.twz.com/news-feature...

I am happy that this paper with @flynnpolsci.bsky.social is finally in print. If you need to turn text into a number for rigorous analysis, this is likely the solution you are looking for. Short story: pairwise comparisons (A vs. B) are better than naive LLM scaling (0-10 placement).

Truly flabbergasting to hear this as they still seem to be struggling to grasp that Pete’s “just bomb them harder” doctrine isn’t working.

Treating war as a video game not only degrades trustworthiness of information from the government, it’s morally wrong because it trivializes the risks our forces are experiencing.