cod 4: modern warfare is the one that would make the best movie I think. the aftermath level is amazing www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Bloomberg News Global Defense Editor. Novelist, aviation geek, bartender, dad. Ex-NYT, Reuters. Grew up in Midwest, moved to Mideast. Views my own. Wrote a fun book about Chinese missiles: https://tinyurl.com/2p94pay6 Ad astra per aspera
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cod 4: modern warfare is the one that would make the best movie I think. the aftermath level is amazing www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
kju calling all his top generals into the room to scream about the pickleball gap
yeah, to me this all seems very self evident but there is a lot of navel gazing on the subject
enter sandman
and like no, twitter isn't "getting out of your bubble" it's just marinating in bad and often offensive information. "debating" racism, or whatever, on line does nothing but signal racism is a thing worth debating, and not rejecting out of hand
I personally am not sure what the value is in participating with twitter, which is full of extremely harmful people and posts, but it's a choice you can make
in all the haughty debate about twitter vs bluesky, the thing that is most clearly true is that twitter is juicing the system toward a certain type of post and ideology, and bluesky is not
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/u...
I have my own unshakable opinions about this, but I recommend reading this lengthy (and well done) piece all the way to the end www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
The indictment was handed down 2 days after career prosecutor Richard Barker, the acting US atty for eastern Washington state, resigned. In a social post, Barker wrote “I am grateful that I never had to sign an indictment or file a brief that I didn’t believe in.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
no, I mean the name is established by law. to change the name you have to change the law
so the thing is, there is an actual law, the 1949 amendment to the national security act of 1947, that says he can't do this congress can pass a law changing it, and the senate could ratify, and the president can sign. but this is not executive order stuff
Some consultant will make a fortune advising that the new companies be named "Kreinz" and "Haft" www.wsj.com/business/ret...
Tesla's long-awaited entry into India underwhelms, with just over 600 orders falling well short of the company's target.
"...Mr. Musk and his artificial intelligence company, xAI, have tweaked the chatbot to make its answers more conservative on many issues, according to an analysis of thousands of its responses by The New York Times. The shifts appear, in some cases, to reflect Mr. Musk’s political priorities."
everyone loves a parade www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
... 2) oil is a major pain point for russia, not just in terms of a strategic consumable for its war effort, but for its economy. russia budgeted for an oil price of about $70/bbl this year, but the actual price is well below that
couple of points here: 1) an issue is that russia is simply too vast to defend everything, especially with a high-intensity war to feed. the u.s. is insulated from this fate by two large oceans (unless it gets in a war with mexico or canada, but anyway....) and also...
making an airfield unusable, btw, requires a lot more firepower than you might thing. runways are (relatively speaking) cheap and easy to repair hitting support infrastructure has longer-lasting effects but again, you can harden it to mitigate that
yeah, jokes aside, the calculation is that hardening is a cheap way to reduce losses, and combined with IAMD and left-of-launch wand-waving, could mean the u.s. barely gets its hair mussed
seems like these two sites might be related
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
gerry doesn't mind if he doesn't make the scene he's got a daytime job he's doin' all right
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremlin...
destroying an area the size of france
good morning from the financial times
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
today I learned the u.s. considered at one point a 10 gigaton nuclear warhead
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
Pope Leo XIV met with one of the most prominent advocates for greater LGBTQ+ inclusion in the Catholic Church. The Rev. James Martin said Leo told him that he intended to continue Pope Francis’ policy of LGBTQ+ acceptance in the church and encouraged him to keep up his advocacy.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
my favorite example of this is how pf chang's, the chinese chain you find in malls all over america, has lineage you would never guess
yeah, I am not mad about this and I will also personally always rally to the defense of "american chinese food," which is definitely a thing and is no less authentic than the stuff you find in china
Benny Johnson, a right-wing podcaster, is among the new media figures who enjoy rare access to the Trump administration in exchange for their promotion of the White House’s agenda to millions of online followers. He stands out for his record of plagiarism and promoting false claims. nyti.ms/4gb5yn1
BREAKING: Deaths from a 6.0 magnitude earthquake in eastern Afghanistan rise to at least 610, and more than 1,300 people injured, a spokesman for the Taliban says.
A large part of Zeitoun, a neighborhood in Gaza City, was still standing just three weeks ago. But as Israeli forces have expanded their military campaign, the area has been turned into a barren wasteland, according to satellite images reviewed by The New York Times. nyti.ms/4lVj3bR
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
pro-gun justifications batting well below the mendoza line over their career
turns out firearm proliferation does not in fact protect against tyranny
you guys are both doing it wrong
we were so close to the opening scenes of a great james cameron movie
I need someone to tell me the story of this woman, circled in pink. Last night at Braves-Phils, she periodically held a printed sign that said, in red script, “Bunt More.” This is her face when Brandon Marsh (successfully) bunted with the bases empty. Note that NOBODY else is reacting.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/h...
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
A federal grand jury has declined to indict another person arrested as part of President Trump's D.C. crime surge. This was the only case we know of in which the National Guard participated in an arrest. After the grand jury declined to return an indictment, DOJ moved to dismiss the case.
the f-104 hit mach 2 in the late '50s iirc
eh, gonna disagree with you on that one... india has done some interesting uncrewed stuff but I wouldn't say amazing. they have a lot of work to do from heavy lift boosters to crewed spacecraft imo
lol
the finish line was the moon we know this because the ussr tried and failed to get there
I, too, like to claim victory in a marathon after leading the first mile (also u.s. didn't just have first man on the moon, but 11 others, and also is the only country to have done so)
Trump admin planning to change student visas from lasting for duration of academic program to fixed 4-yr term, and then much harder to renew Could destroy US ability to attract global talent, particularly those seeking advanced degrees in STEM. The median time to complete a PhD is 5.7 yrs per NSF.
This is bad
250-mile air-launched range, and 3,000-plus rounds, does open up some things for ukraine tho, visible by drawing circles on a map also bolsters ukraine's hi-lo mix, which allows them to use cheap plywood drones to stress russian air defenses
the funniest thing about the erams being sent to ukraine is that despite the cheap/fast way they have been cooked up in huge numbers, there are still no published images of them artists' renderings: basically a bomb-looking thing? with wings? www.dsca.mil/Press-Media/...
this is one of those things where "nuance" is just a smokescreen obscuring the core issue, which is--again--that lee and the confederacy committed treason against the united states, and then got beaten soundly in the resulting war, which was about the legality of slavery
I am a simpleton, but it does not make much sense to me to hang a picture of a literal traitor in the halls of your military learning institution www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/u...
a neat looking plane for sure, but it never broke mach 2!
one of my favorite warning labels
some of the cold war was fun, as in designing stuff like the xb-70 (the world's greatest plane now and forever) but most of it was distinctly terrifying
exactly, this guy knows his stuff almost as well as I do
for journalists of a certain age I think it's THE PAPER
I just went on tv and said eram was "basically put together from parts the us had stuck under the couch cushions," ama
"machine gun" is the proper term for the assault rifle 15, as well as any other firearm manufactured with machinery. all firearms have been machine guns since about the mid-19th century #gunfacts
"clip" is the proper term for the device that holds/feeds ammunition into a gun. a "magazine" is a box of five or more clips... so named because during world war ii, soldiers were told to wrap their clips in oil-soaked copies of the new yorker to keep them dry #gunfacts
did you know the picatinny rail got its name because when it was invented, sights and scopes were made entirely of tin to avoid using more valuable strategic material... to mount a scope, you "picked a tinny" #gunfacts
the ar-15, so named because it's the 15th model of assault rifle ever built, is a machine gun #gunfacts
otoh, ban them all
NEW: Inside the meetings and disagreements over vaccine policy that led to Susan Monarez's ouster at CDC — and a series of other agency leaders' resignations www.statnews.com/2025/08/28/c...
if I had a job where I had to hide my face with a balaclava or gaiter because people hated me wherever I went and tried to jeer me until I left, I would feel super good about it for sure
I mean I can do two of those three things
I mean she is american, that much is correct
what
“The departures are the strongest public signal yet that Meta Superintelligence Labs could be off to a rocky start.” Yeeeeeah www.wired.com/story/resear...
I have posted this before but when I worked on coverage of the christchurch mosque shootings as they happened, the shooter's manifesto was *riddled* with obviously empty messages, memes and jokes "I learned to fight on the fields of fortnite," stuff like that. all irony, all hollow
taylor swift's engagement in the news www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...
Tulsi Gabbard surprised CIA officials last week when she included an undercover senior CIA officer on a roster of 37 current and former officials she stripped of security clearances.
a weird element to this story that isn't really conveyed by the headline is that *he called the police* to tell them the girls had found pills in their ice cream (but did not eat them) then with minimal investigation the cops figured out he put the pills in
lots of incredible details in this story www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...
horrific
several people have suggested "why not both?" as a possibility and you're not wrong
the thing about hitting civ neighborhoods with missiles is either you mean to do it--which is bad because attacking civs is a war crime--or your missiles suck, which is bad for you as a military
🚨 BREAKING: Russia has struck the EU delegation building in Kyiv. Read the developing story: ow.ly/N2RW50WNllP
I swear all we get are medicine ads
Yellen not at all pulling her punches in this op-ed for the FT www.ft.com/content/d2ea...
yeah, I didn't mean to imply it was wing ice! (I assumed before reading it was a pitot-type issue tbh) I was just making the general point that planes hate ice this does not seem to be design-related at all
DID YOU KNOW: skynet 6 is a real thing, a satcom system run by the british government anyway happy wednesday
what
*also* if you read the f-35 article you'll see that the primary issue was water in the hydraulic lines so like... you wouldn't say a plane crash because of fuel contamination was a design flaw. same deal here
modern fighters, and especially stealth designs, are aerodynamically unstable, which makes them more maneuverable (and/or stealthy), but also means that if you don't have fly-by-wire and a computer between you and the control surfaces, you're boned
this is not really an "f-35 is flawed" thing as much as it is an "ice is really bad for aircraft" thing wing ice will make an airliner fall out of the sky *however* the f-35's design complicates thing--and this is true of many modern fighters--because manual control isn't really possible
(those figures were for violent crime btw)
the thing of it is that big cities almost uniformly have lower crime rates. chicago is barely in the top 100. little rock is no. 4 this stuff is not a secret either, the stats are all public etc etc etc
and I'd just to like to say a thing I often say when stuff like this happens, which is: what you might hear on a police scanner is not necessarily true or accurate, and in fact is often not, because it is literally just cops talking as they themselves try to figure out what is happening
I try not to swear On Here but I am very, very tired, exhausted, from years of this exact thing happening and then american policymakers pretending like there is nothing that can be done about *the one common thread all of these shootings share*
goddammit
one thing i've taken away from surveys asking the public to evaluate trump's most authoritarian moves is that the ordinary americans have a much clearer sense of what's happening than most professional political observers
it doesn't just stop cheating, it's more challenging to write an essay longhand and I think that's a good thing