Dark Laughter

Trump did not announce a U.S. policy then walk it back. That is not what happened, and media presenting it that way does a disservice.

Trump said words he thought might appeal to his audience in the moment, with no connection to actual policy, then did that again with a different question/asker.

Ah, right, in that case I guess its value is mostly just laying out a coherent history of air strategy, although I'm probably also going to refer back to it as a good explanation of how lucid theories turn into bad charts in the pubs.

Maybe hit him up on LinkedIn and see if he has a way to share a copy of the lecture video?

No, but it's great. The premise is like "I know none of you will read Arms and Influence or Bombing to Win, so I'm going to briefly explain their arguments and the counterarguments against them." It ends with him breaking down one of those dumb doctrinal competition continuum chart's links to both.

Yeah, as always, the best concepts of operations tend to be the ones where the mechanisms to create strategic effects are the easiest to explain. Stuff like Zarqawi's al-Askari mosque bombing or on our side Travis Patriquin's Anbar Awakening. abcnews.com/images/US/ho...

Thinking today that the Air War College had this REALLY good lecture by Reagan Schaupp called A Taxonomy of Air Strategy that looked at 1966, 1996, and 2025 as case studies, but its opening line of like "National leaders don't just throw airpower at the wall and see what sticks" hasn't aged well.

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Reach out if you have questions

You know the difference between sailing a supertanker through the Strait of Hormuz right now and Ahab taking the Pequod on a suicidal revenge quest after the whale that took his leg? At the end of Moby Dick, Peleg and Bildad could file an insurance claim.

I know several ship captains with Master Unlimited licenses who have piloted the largest vessels on the oceans and they are—to the man—the most risk-adverse people on Earth. They are responsible for dozens of lives and hundreds of millions in assets. 0% chance any sail through Hormuz for a while.

Iran seems to have a pretty sound plan to end NATO by getting Turkey to invoke Art 5, which will prompt all the countries that kept Turkey out of the EU to ask whether they're really willing to let Erdogan chain gang them into Bibi and Trump's war with Iran.

I'm guessing he's going to announce he's pulling millions of bbls out of the strategic reserve, placing price controls on oil through some dubious legal mechanism that relies on emergency powers, saying he's personally taking control of the war, or all three.

Movies that cost less to make than disgraced former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem's $220M ad campaign:

Iron Man
The Matrix
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Top Gun: Maverick
Barbie
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 2)
The Hunger Games
Oppenheimer

I do not like it when my bank sends me emails with the word "geopolitics" in the title.

When Hegseth tries to do the Mattis quote thing it just sounds like "I don't shit the bed, the bed shits me."

This is Sgt. Benjamin Pennington. The Pentagon identified him this morning as the latest U.S. military fatality in the war against Iran.

Pennington, 26, died yesterday of injuries suffered March 1 in the initial wave of Iranian counterattacks. He was at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

OMG they released the deposition videos where they revealed that these two DOGE bros were just feeding grants into ChatGPT and saying "tell me if this is DEI in less than 120 characters."

www.techdirt.com/2026/02/19/d...

I don't think Graham will succeed, not just because you can't trust Bibi to lie to you, but also because Graham has fallen from being personally briefed face to face by Bibi to making this request via the same communication channel I used to ask Klondike to bring back the Choco Taco.

While on the one hand there are many valid arguments against the idea of American exceptionalism, on the other hand it honestly becomes a lot easier to explain modern US history if you know what plot armor is. tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwik...

Cross posted from the bad place:
When I was a professor at the woke Naval War College, I had fellowship 20 yrs ago with the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, which produced this very woke study about going to war in places like, say, Iran. Some of my very woke predictions
/1

Yeah, never underestimate the ingenuity of stupidity.

me paying $30 in gas to buy imported things that have been hit with tariffs bc joe rogan is learning about politics at age 58

Prime minister supports war in Iran.

How will this affect the Riyadh comedy scene

I'm not saying they're villains, I'm describing cartoons. In real life, China has built a coalition of Russia, the DPRK, Myanmar, Cuba, etc. in the hope of counterbalancing the network of US partnerships, but all China's partners are just Israel-level headache/embarrassment generators.

a group of cartoon characters are standing next to each other with the words by your polluting powers combined ALT: a group of cartoon characters are standing next to each other with the words by your polluting powers combined

I'm referring to a common trope from Saturday morning cartoons where previously independent villains try to create their own team to counter the heroes and it ultimately fails because they have no common interests besides hating the heroes.

I am like 90% sure this is exactly what they've already done. We'll see if the week opens with them trying to solve this with strategic oil reserves.

With the exception of four loser tech executives, it ceases to be LARP once you're in uniform. Maybe they just want to renew the Boomer LARP of talking about how they almost served. Like if we draft one guy, 20 million dorks will spend the rest of their lives swearing they were just one number away.