*chuckling and putting down my copy of the financial times* President Trump executed Order 66? Doesn't that clown know that'll be bad for military morale?
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*chuckling and putting down my copy of the financial times* President Trump executed Order 66? Doesn't that clown know that'll be bad for military morale?
Jerome Adams, who served as US surgeon general during President Donald Trump’s first administration, is calling for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be fired as controversy continues to swirl over his handling of vaccine approvals. https://cnn.it/47s9lKt
Yes, I do accept Dan Lanning as my personal Lord and Savior.
Trump administration trying to destroy two satellites gathering critical climate change data www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/trum...
This is abhorrent. America should not tolerate a president relishing in Pinochet-style rule over our own citizens.
I also wrote a book on targeted killings carried out by the US and wow, as Nicholas points out, this is so far outside of any previously settled practice or norm. Absolutely, unambiguously abnormal and well into 'murder' territory by any established convention.
Conservatives have been selling this narrative for decades and it is so painfully stupid. Worse, the absolute wrong sorts of officers lap it up like it's manna.
This is their theory of why we lost the War on Terror
Some more thoughts on the F/A-XX nationalsecurityjournal.org/no-f-a-xx-fi...
SEALs in North Korea: Some Ramifications of What We Know and Why We Know It www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/seal...
It has its ups and downs. I have enjoyed this season, although mainly on a conceptual level rather than in terms of character beats.
To be honest it’s a bit of a slog in parts but the Empire stuff is awfully interesting, especially as comparison with Star Wars.
I have reservations about giving Emperor Cleon a Death Star in Foundation... but the idea of imperial management through planetary annihilation is obviously interesting and I kinda wanna know what @chriskempshall.bsky.social thinks... www.vulture.com/article/foun...
Guys The Atlantic actually went out and got an Ole Miss Chi O to write this. They found a ball knower on their staff and said fuck it write it up.
Did the President’s Strike on Tren de Aragua Violate the Law? www.lawfaremedia.org/article/did-...
Trump Is Squeezing U.S. Farmers on All Sides foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/05/t...
The Unlikely Saga Of Venezuela’s F-16s www.twz.com/air/the-unli...
Nope. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
I'm torn between knowing that changing the DoD's name to the War Dept is dumb, and also knowing that the creation of the DoD failed to do all six things it was meant to do: Save money, end redundancy, improve joint operations, fix intelligence, end naval aviation, and disband the Marine Corps.
My god it's an episode of It's Always Sunny with a body count
“Killing a bunch of fishermen and then stabbing their lungs so they don’t float when you drop them to the bottom of the sea” is a level of sociopathy I found difficult to even contemplate
My "I don't think we are in a constitutional crisis" T-Shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my t-shirt.
Also find it grotesque. Risk/reward seemed wildly out of proportion. They showed up, killed three innocent people and then stabbed their dead bodies, and then slinked away in the night.
'The US military’s killing of 11 alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers is illegal. Unless this dangerous precedent is condemned and curtailed, it will enable US authorities to summarily shoot anyone they choose by simply declaring a “war” against them.' www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
High, hard truth from @lblackford.bsky.social www.kentucky.com/opinion/lind...
Love it. Fucked things up in the only region they even pretend to care about, and then just kind of do the Urkel. There's a Quad summit planned in November, should be a fun one!
I also thought that was an interesting choice. I interpreted it as a bit of dry humor...
THE RESTRAINERS!
Thank god that as a general rule the North Koreans are pretty relaxed and not really touchy or weird about this sort of thing.
Jeebus. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/u...
The most important source of international law is "customary international law" which is almost literally "deriving legal precepts from what states do as a matter of practice."
This doesn't mean it's irrelevant but it does mean arguments about whether you're violating international law are technically fraught and practically limited in application.
International law is by necessity more "realist" (although I hesitate to use that term because it means different things in law and international relations) because black letter is scarce, decent people disagree, and there are no concrete enforcement mechanisms.
In short, if you feel like insisting that this was illegal under international law, you're more or less on solid ground and I wouldn't argue overmuch with you. But the admin has lawyers who will make the case that it's perfectly legal, and beyond "learned opinion" there's no real arbiter.
"The US government can do whatever it wants" isn't quite right, but it is the case that international law brings itself into compliance with state practice as often as the converse. And "reasonable interpretation" often depends on state practice and on justification of that practice.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There's enough gray space that the administration can claim legality under both domestic and international law. In a classroom you could probably push back harder on the latter than on the former, but no one will ever face legal repercussions for this. www.bbc.com/news/article...
Mistakes were made.
Aw this reminds me of the time I got detained at a UT football game…
News Analysis: By ordering the U.S. military to summarily kill a group of people aboard what he said was a drug-smuggling boat, President Trump used the military in a way that had no clear legal precedent or basis, according to specialists in the laws of war and executive power.
The USCSS Maginot is indeed a bit on the nose... www.avclub.com/alien-earth-...
this might be worth a post from @lemieuxlgm.bsky.social
yeah this is going to blow up in the league's face.
Some people just don't realize how much they missed by not growing up in the 1980's.
Prince Hisahito and Japan’s Imperial Future thediplomat.com/2025/09/prin...
Look, there are going to be people in your life who are going to tell you that the Buck Rogers intro theme was NOT awesome. These people are toxic. Cut them off yesterday, if not sooner. youtu.be/v32VypWeF0I?...
The Quincy Institute: maybe the Trump administration will have a more restrained, peaceful foreign policy. The Trump administration:
Administration has wide latitude to identify "terrorist" organizations. When a designation is made it has wide latitude to undertake military actions against those organizations. War on Terror left a lot of legal weapons lying around.
It's a MAGA foreign policy shop that includes a few token anti-anti-Trump lefties. That's all it is.
The Quincy Institute for Russian Statecraft strikes again.
Trump just launched a barely legal lethal strike that killed eleven people. Drug runners? Terrorists? Migrants? Who knows, and evidently nobody cares. Quincy would prefer that you worry about France sending troops to Ukraine.
Restraint! Trump’s New War on ‘Narcoterrorists’ foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/04/t...
RFK Jr. is the most dangerous Trump cabinet member. www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...
South Korea’s Hypersonic Cruise Missile Emerges In New Test Photos www.twz.com/air/south-ko...
The Goddess of Grift www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/the-...
Ukraine Now Flying Former Azerbaijani MiG-29 Fulcrum www.twz.com/air/ukraine-...
Uzbek Fighters in Russia’s War Face Relatively Mild Punishments at Home thediplomat.com/2025/09/uzbe...
Beshear’s first guest on the network is U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, whom he will interview in SiriusXM’s New York studio.
Thanks, Mitch. That’s a real help. Glad you did something about it when you had the chance. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Election of the Day: Autonomous Region of Bougainville www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/elec...
Our legal authority is deez nuts www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/j-d-...
Regardless of one's feelings about land acknowledgments, this policy is a clear violation of academic freedom
Congratulations to Andrew Johnstone @historyandrew.bsky.social l on his new book on the history of the public relations industry and US foreign relations! www.cambridge.org/us/universit...
Donald's plan to win a Nobel Peace Prize by extra-judicial killings seems flawed. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...
New post just out: Part 2 of answering your questions - this time from @ldfreedman.bsky.social on Ukraine, what will change Putin's mind, the threat to NATO. He covers all of this: (£/free trial - but with a long free bit) samf.substack.com/p/what-dont-...
The Hertie School is thrilled to welcome Mauro Gilli as its new Professor of Military Strategy and Technology and a core member of the @hertiesecurity.bsky.social research team! A heartfelt thanks to the Ax:son Johnson Foundation for supporting his professorship!
Query: If one were trying to teach film through King Kong (1933), King Kong (1976) and King Kong (2005), is the 2017 Skull Island movie sufficiently close to the original material to count? I'm inclined to think not but I'll entertain counter-arguments...
Nine grafs deep into the article and we find out: "Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters."
Wes Moore: we need more venture capital to ensure DoorDash for all. Andy Beshear: here in Kentucky, we don't have DoorDash, but we do have kindness. Rahm Emanuel: (on the run from Illinois State Police, present via satellite from an undisclosed location) the last five Roman emperors were—
Five days after Lincoln's assassination: "Mr. [Andrew] Johnson is, in many respects, better qualified for the work to come than was Mr. Lincoln.”--Frederick Douglass www.smithsonianmag.com/history/hist...
Spoke with @nytimes.com about the serious problems with trying to apply the legal framework from the “war on terror” to criminal groups like Tren de Aragua. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...
The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
Silver Threads and Golden Needles www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/silv...
The U.S. Is Inching Toward Regime Change in Venezuela foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/03/t...
Fear, ignorance, and stupidity www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/fear...
Perhaps the most pathetic thing about Trump trying to bribe Adams and Silwa out of the race is that he seems to think that Cuomo actually has a chance of winning www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/the-...
This video is fantastic and absolutely true. We're going to get to some of this later in the series on peasants but the time-labor demand of 'household chores' before ten seconds ago was enormous. One 1900 report put the average food prep per week per woman at 44 hours; another 14 hours on laundry.
Maybe unpopular take but I think "during COVID" is fine! Death data show a clear acute phase from spring 2020 until spring 2022. Since then deaths have steadily trended downward and this winter fell below flu deaths. You can take COVID seriously and still talk about the worst of it in the past tense
Woke Wikipedia doesn't even include "Yippee ki yay motherfucker" on this list. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
Woke Media denigrates the sacrifice of our fighting men by claiming Kong defeated by “beauty” rather than planes.
Oh hey look at @bourbonerin.bsky.social for KY-6! www.kentucky.com/news/politic...
Thai week’s podcast is on the Polish navy’s defensive operations in the Baltic in the first week of September 1939 open.spotify.com/episode/4Bcg... #navalhistory #ww2
China’s New DF-61 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Breaks Cover www.twz.com/nuclear/chin...
Watch a Tesla Cybertruck Struggle to Finish the Rubicon Trail www.thedrive.com/news/watch-t...
If you read the Quincy people as not writing in good faith, the explanation is that they are not writing in good faith.
Incidentally, I clicked over to see if the Quincy-ites had anything to say about the distinctly non-restraint decision to use the US Navy to blow up Venezuelan boats. Their priorities are pretty clear.
Outfit famous for ball-washing blood-soaked tyrants issues more apologia for a blood-soaked tyrant's imperialist war of aggression. In other news, water is wet. If you care about human liberty, these weirdos are your enemies.
It's sick fucking bullshit, and it's not very surprising that they've lined up institutionally with MAGA.
The Ukraine War is an awful problem for the Restrainer caucus; they try to solve it by blaming everything on NATO and Ukraine, then on Azov, and then they try every trick to pretend that "restraint" is the solution to a democratic country being torn apart by its autocratic neighbor.
The fixation these folks have with "armed neutrality" is based *entirely* on the promotion of US restraint. They don't want security guarantees because they don't want the US on the hook, and they're willing to lie to themselves and everyone else about how unstable "armed neutrality" really is.
Look, the problem is baked into the cake. Even a reasonable noble concept like "Restraint" is poisonous if it is treated as an end rather than a means.
Bessner!
"Vladimir Putin would never be willing to accept even a trace of reactionary authoritarianism"
I mean Christ, you're just a fucking piece of shit if you agree to work with these people.
