Phil Klay

eventually politicians need to start advocating for criminal and civil penalties for people involved in fabricating stories to get citizens incarcerated.

or, put another way: a society that would like to keep functioning has to discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

The Books I Have Not Read, by Shel Silverstein

usual rates of death and wounding, and so erode more quickly than the general mass of the force.7 This selection-destruction cycle means that a force with too high a proportion of elites—an army with too many special forces units, a navy that diverts too many of its most aggressive junior commanders into the submarine arm, or an air force (like that of imperial Japan) with aircrew standards that prove unsustainable over a long war—can actually damage its adaptive potential. Such a force experiences a brain drain, where individuals who would have been leaders in regular units (and would likely have survived to spread their knowledge to others) are instead segregated into subgroups where, even if they survive, their talents are lost to the wider force. Meanwhile, major combat formations can cease to be much more than feeders for specialized units, providing the recruiting base for elite forces that increasingly usurp normal combat roles, exacerbating both the brain drain and the selection-destruction cycle that Beaumont describes.

You’re welcome

Oh boy

Review | To Steven Pinker, human knowledge is just a game In ‘When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...,’ the best-selling cognitive scientist writes about an interesting subject but gets sidetracked by hobbyhorses

“As he sets about demonstrating that our apparent irrationalities are in fact the work of our inner game theorists, the reader wonders if he has ever read a novel or interacted with another person.”

—Becca Rothfeld on Pinker

www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/1...

If you are a skeptic of war powers reform, I would invite you to check out the commander in chief's social media posting.

Trump’s Speech to Generals Was Incitement to Violence Against Americans Military leaders’ quiet professionalism offers hope amid a maelstrom.

Kori Schake: “Yesterday morning, Trump and Hegseth behaved reprehensibly. Their speeches…were tantamount to incitement—a genuinely dangerous effort to suborn the military’s oath and condition them for using violence against their fellow Americans.” foreignpolicy.com/2025/10/01/t...

One other thing about this whole dumb affair. In what universe did Hegseth think inviting comparisons to Patton would work to his benefit?

I’d rather have George C Scott as SecDef

Pete Hegseth Wants a ‘Warrior Culture.’ Does He Know What That Means? The secretary of defense talks a lot about peace through strength. In his speech to the military top brass, he projected weakness.

“The Marines I fought alongside knew a thing or two about warrior culture. Watching Hegseth’s speech, I was struck by the glaring absence of two traits those Marines embodied that he does not: competence and humility.”
Elliot Ackerman in @thefp.com

www.thefp.com/p/pete-hegse...

@deadcarl.bsky.social

‘The appeal to the mystical image of the “warfighter” is that it avoids having to discuss war in concrete terms. It sells the attractive myth that by doing more of the parts of war that look cool and really make you feel like a man, you can actually win wars.‘

www.deadcarl.com/p/clausewitz...

The Secretary of Defense was lecturing military leaders about the warrior ethos when he should have been ensuring military pay was exempted from the government shutdown.

Pete Hegseth Is Living the Dream A man who retired as a major lectures hundreds of generals about the need to meet his standards.

“[Hegseth] was ridiculous…it was the kind of thing that a battalion commander might say to some scruffy lieutenants and sergeants. His dream world is the world of Ranger school (from which he never graduated), not the actual world of complex military operations.”

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

If they’re going to attempt to promote partisanship within the ranks (to the detriment of American national security), I guess it’s better to have it done by someone repellent.

In retrospect, it’s probably a good thing Trump chose a SecDef whose character, knowledge and comportment could only fill a genuine military professional with contempt and loathing.

It's easy to see this speech as just weirdly performative, but there's a lot more—and a lot worse—going on here.

The meeting & speeches are part of a larger project aimed at promoting the military leadership’s partisan alignment with the administration.

How? 1/

One early morning in Feb ‘04 outside of Fallujah I was next to a then MAJ who called in AC-130 fires so close to our position that we were pelted with debris from the target building. That now 4⭐️ had to fly in from Europe to listen to Pete talk about Lethality™️ and standards.

A Novice Defense Secretary Lectures the Brass on What It Takes to Win

“[That’s] an insane insult to his senior officers, who all made their bones fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Elliot Ackerman, who led Marines in the second battle of Falluja...“Those guys have got a lot more dust on their boots than he does.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/u...

TONIGHT! At Fairfield University I’ll be in conversation with Thomas Chatterton Williams bout the cultural and political convulsions that led up to our current, fractured politics, and what we can do about it.

Episode 83: Resist and Howl Podcast Episode · Manifesto! · 09/29/2025 · 1h 20m

At the Howl obscenity trial, the deputy district attorney cross-examined the literary critic Mark Schorer:  “What are ‘angelheaded hipsters’?”

Then he asked him to paraphrase, “With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls.” 

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

Yum

I like Coates. His best essays are incredible. But it’s interesting to see how differently they come at the present moment.

You know, it must just be my particular feed but I don’t often see the toxicity on here that other people talk about so much.

Ha! Of course. It’s worth listening to. I tend to side more with Klein. I also felt that, for a guy who’s like “my job is to tell the truth” Coates definitely tries to evade some hard questions.

Yeah? Why?

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines Podcast Episode · The Ezra Klein Show · 09/28/2025 · 1h 9m

Good interview between @ezraklein.bsky.social and Ta-Nehisi Coates

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Only about a hundred pages in but so far it’s a hell of an experience

Only about a hundred pages in but it’s extraordinary so far

“this unbelievable story, this foolishness that there's really no way to believe, and I think what I really believe in is the force of this foolishness, the power of thinking this way,”

Jon Fosse, Septology