Chris Levesque

FYI (for funsies), my comps exams were in

1. Military & Naval History
2. Modern European History (1648-)
3. Modern United States History (1877-)

Six written exams (2 per field) and an oral exam.

Luckily, my last speeding ticket was back in 2005.

In brief, we are going to get more catastrophic decisions as automation bias and stupidity are baked into decision making as first mover morons demand systems without guardrails. And this author thinks it's vaguely a good thing.

‘Nazi heaven’: Inside Miami campus Republicans’ racist group chat The chat is the subject of a Florida International University police investigation.

The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s GOP started a group chat for conservative students — and within 3 weeks, it was filled with over 400 instances of the N-word, Nazi rhetoric and writings of "dozens of ways of violently killing Black people"

Image of Sammy Hagar singing “I can’t drive 55”

🧵

'Large explosion' on tanker as oil gushes into sea and vessel 'takes on water'

A 'large explosion' has been reported on an oil tanker near the coast of Kuwait, with large amounts now feared to be gushing into the Gulf waters with potentially disastrous environmental impacts.

Is a Senator who interferes with Capitol Police to break the bones of a Marine Corps veteran who's staging a protest subject to arrest for battery, or does that somehow fall under the Senator's constitutional privilege?

One of my grandfathers was on Okinawa. He was a sailor who was supposed to help build the new civilian government. Fighting was still going on when his ship pulled in and he ended up carrying ammunition forward to Marines. Wouldn’t talk about the war until he was over 90 years old.

Yep. Ford represented a very specific kind of Being Cool By Being A Dipshit that used to be right at the heart of American pop-culture depictions of masculinity.

Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart both excelled at it.

Nobody hates living veterans more than Republicans. Dead veterans they can exploit in videos. But living veterans with opinions and medical needs are literally offensive to conservatives.

I agree, quite apart from the merits of the case. Alito could only defend the Supreme Court's authority to intervene by grievously misrepresenting the facts. The reality is that there's no plausible argument SCOTUS had the power to do what it did. Why didn't that matter to six justices?

That’s a long walk

The fundamental tenants of IHL/LOAC—principles like not targeting civilians or not torturing POWs—can’t be set aside out of convenience or military necessity.

IHL says nothing of ROE; commanders can set or change them. Those in authority complaining about ROE are walking Spider-Man memes.

Our government is being run by people who never really left junior high behind them.

One was an executive at a paper mill, and the other was an electrician at the paper mill. Both served in the Pacific during World War II.

If you look at the list of peptides, one of the peptides on that list (Melanotan II) is one where my husband treated someone in the ER who lost the ability to speak in words for half a day after injecting it.

Let's go a bit deeper on this. For every target selected from the JIPTIL & placed on the targeting list for approval for a set of strikes (a tranche), we do a collateral damage estimate (CDE). CDE's help deconflict things that should't be targeted that are near to the proposed target. 1/

I think it sucks that as far as I know the only way to get off a starter pack you don’t want to be on here is to block its creator but here we are. If anyone knows a more graceful way to exit a starter pack please lmk.

The entire thing could be described as super dumb.

Iran Update: Why Not? - Lawyers, Guns & Money Not respecting the theater of operations… A U.S. submarine sank an Iranian warship off the southern coast of Sri Lanka, killing dozens of sailors and dramatically widening Washington’s pursuit of the Iranian navy. Sri Lanka’s deputy foreign minister identified the warship as the frigate IRIS Dena, and said it was heading back to Iran from an eastern Indian port. […]

Iran Update: Why Not?

As long as we don’t go through parachute pants and moon boots again.

Folks, that was a rhetorical question. I know why Kurds keep working with us.

Every time this happens, I wonder why the Kurds keep trusting us?

I keep seeing posts about ai models like "actually they're good at this thing now!"

but once you understand that ai tools are being built by fascists in service of attacks on humanity, whether or not they can generate useable code or do basic searches kind of stops being the main question

Not for nothing, but many writings from the era of the Founders were exactly this — pamphlets, zines.

The Guardian is the only other source I’ve seen this in.

It will be interesting to see how the phone chip in this laptop performs in the wild not just lab tests.

...nothing. Literally nothing. We already had this conversation when evopsych and data science tried to do "Big Data History" and we don't talk about it anymore for a reason. Guys. We're not idiots. Coding doesn't actually change every field every time it happens.

This "Into the Stacks" feature was very fun to contribute to, in large part because it gave me a chance to highlight all of the wonderful work that @shafrhistorians.bsky.social have been doing in the past few decades to integrate religion more holistically into the study of U.S. foreign relations. 🗃️