@ericmmurphy.bsky.social
Birds, Math, Literature, & Airpower. BoD Member @Strategy_Bridge, #Strategy, #Development, #NationalSecurity, #MilitaryAffairs. Repost is not endorsement. Nothing interesting to say.
“Tennis”
Margaret Avison
folkways.si.edu/margaret-avi...
A little extreme, perhaps, but this but always made me laugh.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=5qqA...
It’s so good. I didn’t realize in 2012 how good it was, but re-reading it since it becomes better and better. It’s not a book that tells us what to do, but it helps us think about why.
19.02.2026 02:46 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Teaching some stuff tomorrow. Wanted to assign Ikle, but struggled to make that work within my constraints. Instead, I re-read it today.
There are some books that should be on every military planner’s shelf and read repeatedly.
I have a new windmill at which to tilt. If a single person gives these folks a single dollar, I’ll have failed.
19.02.2026 01:29 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0Love it! Both are love letters to Yale’s Grand Strategy program. My opinion is that Gaddis is the inferior text here—I loved it, but I have issues—and Hill is fantastic. Enjoy!
19.02.2026 01:27 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Fly-by-night schools designed to extract your money with no real payback are everywhere…but at least University of Phoenix et al. Have the courtesy to get accreditation so your money matters (at lest a little).
Stay away from this snake-oil. As far as you can get.
www.theacademy.university
Again? At least they’ve stopped advertising these Constitutionally problematic (!) and personally offensive shindigs via the mass email lists and systems that sustain the DMV region. Maybe that’s good news for new-found discretion?
19.02.2026 00:37 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Happy to share that there is no “leftist discourse” that I’m aware of in my syllabus…or any other syllabus at any of the institutions where I’ve studied or taught.
My opinion, such as it is, renders the author as a toddler throwing a tantrum in the supermarket of ideas.
To be fair…there are any number of people we both admire publishing their own “screeds” essentially anonymously.
I’m with you—and I think the author of this mess is a dolt, evidence of problematic EVERYTHING during GWOT—but I’m wary of double standards. 🤷♂️
I’ve been a @dcunitedofficial.bsky.social fan since 1996 (John Harkes was my favorite player). We’ve been to every home game & @screamingeagles.bsky.social members for 5 yrs.
These guys (starting min 58) are optimists.
I’m about to NOT be a DC fan. They SUCK in SPECTACULAR and continuing ways.
Helps to know he’s writing about “The Rokeby Venus” (or “Venus at her Mirror” or “the Toilet of Venus”) by Diego Velázquez.
16.02.2026 20:07 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
“The Rokeby Venus”
Robert Conquest
m.youtube.com/watch?v=KoQX...
He’ll always be Augustus McCrae to me…and now I miss my dad, with whom I watched “Lonesome Dove” more than once.
16.02.2026 19:56 — 👍 6 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
They did, at various points. Here’s a good book on the PRC’s strategic thinking since 1949.
www.amazon.com/Active-Defen...
Yet another chucklenut who didn’t read the assigned text and now willfully misunderstands it for partisan rhetorical purposes. God deliver me from Dort.
16.02.2026 15:20 — 👍 14 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0*shoo-in
😉
Then read Roald Dahl’s all-too-real account of his daughter’s death from measles complications.
RFK Jr is stupid and mendacious, but his platform and his power make that evil. He is the villain in this story.
www.immunize.org/clinical/vac...
When RFK Jr peddles his utter nonsense about miasma and how people don’t die from flu, COVID, measles, etc.—because he doesn’t understand what “secondary cause” means and because he is stupid, mendacious, evil…or all three—read this.
15.02.2026 01:07 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0Weirdly, I’ve read a substantial subset of these. Most aren’t books I’d recommend. A few are at least interesting introductions to certain concepts. A few are quite good. Most an essentially irredeemable.
15.02.2026 00:50 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
“Of Robert Frost”
Gwendolyn Brooks
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43321/...
The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish. My hand draws back. I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage. Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake. Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle. He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gentle tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy. He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die— when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back. On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic. The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year— wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns . . . Shaw's father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son's body was thrown and lost with his "niggers." The ditch is nearer. There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages" that survived the blast. Space is nearer. When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons. Colonel Shaw is riding on his bubble, he waits for the blessèd break. The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.
“For the Union Dead”
Robert Lowell
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57035/...
I was rather changed by reading this book (and by arguing endlessly over gin and tonic) with Ev. A great mentor.
13.02.2026 02:00 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0File this under, “Duh. But the Senator is neither the target nor the audience for such an influence effort.”
12.02.2026 22:51 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Teaching tomorrow.
I love to revisit old articles, read many times, with new perspective.
Another exciting laundry night, this time with Walt’s IMPORTANT and brilliant—but also seriously problematic—“I’m a PhD…wheee!” contribution to IR.
Someone needs to tell him he’s a closeted Constructivist.
This thread is kinda glorious.
11.02.2026 22:29 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
“The Fire at Alexandria” by Theodore Weiss (1 of 2)
“The Fire at Alexandria” by Theodore Weiss (2 of 2)
“The Fire at Alexandria”
Theodore Weiss
m.youtube.com/watch?v=QtnU... (read by the poet, at 14:35).
Makes Machiavelli look like Kant by comparison. 😉
10.02.2026 03:57 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0
