Dan Nexon

The Russian delegation at the Geneva 'peace' plan negotiations with Ukraine on Sunday

FWIW, RUMINT, but pretty reliable:

1. Vance key to US embrace of Russia plan on Ukraine, Rubio (and even Trump) out of the loop.

2. Vance-Rubio relations “awful.”

3. Rubio told the senators exactly what they said he told them.

4. Hegseth paranoid he’ll be shoved out, Driscoll will replace him.

It’s a concentration camp, a prison camp, and a reeducation camp.

“They also vow stern measures to move homeless people to the remote site and force many of them to undergo treatment…

Difficult to overstate how profound a failure DOGE was. Spending in FY2025 was not only than in FY2024 – but higher than it was projected to be when Trump first took office.*

The little bit of spending DOGE cut has already killed hundreds of thousands and will eventually lead to millions of deaths.

The NASA Manned Spacecraft Center minimum-energy crewed Mars mission study (1968-69) post is coming along well. I got bogged down in the math for a while, until I realized that nearly all of it is approximations. They lacked data sufficient to know what would really work.

Now I am free and writing.

Congrats to everyone who covered the obviously bad faith, unprecedentedly illegal, & wildly unconstitutional data theft & dismantling of the federal government by a billionaire criminal Nazi & his henchmen as a legitimate process of “government efficiency.” Truly, well done.

Oddly enough, in media coverage of Dems' video warning against carrying out illegal orders, there's very little discussion of *whether it's actually reasonable to fear Trump is giving illegal commands or not.*

The evidence is strong that he is. Media should say so:

newrepublic.com/article/2035...

When Hary met Donald: the billionaire key to Trump’s Indonesian plans Hot-mic moment puts US president’s relationship with Hary Tanoesoedibjo in spotlight

Indonesia discovers the way to Trump heart is through billion dollar real estate concessions. www.ft.com/content/12c4...

Hell, are we better off with a doddering narcissist or under J.D. Vance and the night of long knives? We'll find out when we find out.

That it’s happening in America is exceptionally terrible not because we’re this paragon of virtue but because the US is still so powerful. It can affect everyone. Probably in ways we haven’t even thought of yet.

This regime would be gone tomorrow if everyone in the executive branch remembered that their oath to protect the Constitution didn't begin and end with Article II.

Unpack the Court and it won't be any shield at all. Assuming he lives long enough, which seems unlikely.

But you know what -- when SCOTUS is the enemy of the rule of law, maybe the next pro-democracy government needs to start treating them accordingly.

That's the worst part. It's all so senseless and stupid. Careless people destroying complex systems that they don't understand. Grifters extracting rents, with no concern other than to hoard whatever they can. Decades of knowledge purged from the agencies that keep Americans safe.

We can keep up the drumbeat in outlets that do reach people with some agency. We can celebrate the victories. We can document the atrocities. We can donate to food banks, immigrant-rights groups, politicians, INGOs...

And we can be willing to take real risks if necessary.

We can't stop the mass deaths in Africa. We can't stop the regime from committing murder in the Caribbean and the Pacific. We can't stop the bombs from falling in Venezuela. We have no control over what happens to Ukraine. But we can protest. We can try to help those around us.

Right. And it sucks. It's horrifying. It's soul-crushing.

We — and here I mean a bunch of us on this thread — have been warning about where this was headed for a decade.
It didn't matter.

We just have to do what we can, no matter how small.

what is going on

High school senior, a U.S. citizen, detained by ICE in Oregon The 17-year-old was held more than five hours Friday in an ICE facility, his brother said.

Kavanaugh stop. Smashed the kid’s car windows and arrested him. He told them he was a U.S. citizen. The officer replied “I don’t care.”

www.oregonlive.com/portland/202...

Yeah, I wrote a long 'moody' thread a few days ago, inter alia I noted that I'm already getting anxious that the next two election cycles go so badly for the GOP that they don't even try to overturn the results. And our electeds go back to pretending that our institutions work.

That's why @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social is right, the frame is trying slow and then stop authoritarian consolidation. We have to assume a slow grind — and that we won't be able to stop a lot of the bad shit. Many of our futures get to regime defeat via routes we've seen in Latin America or the FSU.

I'm getting increasingly optimistic that we can deter or defeat a coup, even if Trump is still alive and conscious in 2026 and 2028 — although I'm still terrified that there's not enough contingency planning among Democrats.

But what comes after? The scope of massive reforms needed? Not so much.

Not like modern global GDP data, which we all know is super-reliable all across the world.

Oh, wait.

Wait are you telling me Maddison Project estimates aren't reliable enough to use in serious quantitative work? Perish the thought.

It does feel like the odds have improved. But @profsaunders.bsky.social is entirely right that the Trump administration has been wildly successful in creating a loyalist, well-equipped, domestic security force.

The irony of course is that Black Americans are probably far more likely to be descended from people who lived in North America before 1776 than white Americans are.

There were a lot of credible reports that the White House was pressuring Ukraine to accept, so I assume someone convinced him that he would look weak and gullible if he persisted.

Joe Lepgold. The whole story is so terrible I debated whether to even post about this. But I think it's important to drive home how contingent even moderate levels of "success" are in the field.

At least all those academics who work on "grand strategy" are getting a test of whether it outperforms a toddler choosing between "A" and "B" over and over again.

And yet they can be killed by a ballista fired from a f—ing ship!

Wasn't Martin setting up some other mechanism for challenging dragon military dominance? The later books are kind of a blur for me.