Beware the ingredient labels! Not just the sausages, but the news…
- Since no one really knows what an emolument is anyway, I suppose it's just fine for the entire House of Orange evade IRS scrutiny. At least until some judge or another takes a closer look, and another judge limits branding opportunities, and still other judges determine that he has to pay damages assessed a couple years ago. But at least it isn't more weaponized identity politics, right? Right?
- So the Orange One is demanding that applicants for Green Cards return to their home countries to do so, eh? Well, I nominate some prominent naturalized US citizens for similar (retroactive) treatment, especially those from shithole countries. <SARCASM> If you're going to impose the original intent on immigrants, you just can't allow people to take advantage of loopholes, right? Correcting mistaken noncompliance with that original intent by half a century of prior Administrations is the least that can be done!</SARCASM>
- I've long thought that career politicians were cockroaches, scuttling away from light, spreading dirt and disease, able to survive a nuclear strike… here's proof. And mislabelling "political operative" as "public service" among those who never gave actual national service (let alone dodged the draft when it was in force) gives mislabelling a bad name, even for that reservoir of lower-value human capital.
- That, however, seems positively productive compared to providers of writing advice who don't advocate, first and foremost, "read more, you ignorant gits!" Consider the cognitive dissonance that this is merely a book review appearing in a now-disreputable source that actually doesn't want anything truly creative (and hasn't for four decades) — just a fresh coat of paint on little (quasiliterary) boxes (so long as they're somehow about Manhattan rather than Daly City — and the less said about the true problems with "plaster versus sheetrock" the better… particularly as I've both lived in Daly City and repaired plaster walls).
Here's a hint to the writing-advice subindustry: Maybe — just maybe — y'all can learn something from the scientific method, in which one looks at data first and theorizes afterward, then tries to confirm the theories with more data. That's how one avoids bullshit like asserting that all stories fit within a limited number of (mislabelled) "plots" , simultaneously ignoring substantial material and silently redefining terms. I realize that may undermine your there's-a-secret-method-for-success-that-only-I-can-explain model, but then I've spent virtually my entire life opposing that bullshit in various contexts. Like this one:
- All of which makes much more sense than relying on USNA graduates to explain military strategy and theory. To identify just a couple of fundamental errors in that article (by the guy who popularized "shock and awe" as a way of life — something that doesn't work against the desperate and the ideologically driven):
- The British and French did not have "superiority in the quality of and quantity of weapons" during France '40. For one thing, their individual tanks lacked the radios found in virtually every German tank — and rapid, across-battlefield communications are just a little bit important in both quality and quantity of effectively employable motorized weapons platforms. And in the air, the quality/quantity disparity was far, far worse (especially as to the French, and most especially of all as to training and logistical support).
- The Japanese didn't actually care about making the US "capitulate" prior to Pearl Harbor; they only wanted to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and actually preferred nonmilitary means of expansion of influence rather than outright occupation/conquest/"victory" (for values of "victory" requiring acceptance of non-Western conceptions thereof). Yamamoto's writings explicitly denied that anything more than a temporary vacuum, rather than a capitulation, was either necessary or possible.
- Neither North Vietnam nor the Afghan Taliban were "militarily naked compared to the US and its allies" in their own territories. Abstract measures of the "theoretical balance of forces" without regard to where, when, and how long they will be engaged, let alone for what purpose, have less validity than IQ scores… as demonstrated by the first War of American Secession two and a half centuries ago (c. 1774–81).
- Ullman's never-explicit (but all too convenient) redefinition of "asymmetric and hybrid tactics" focuses, or tries to, on "the battlefield" rather than the Clausewitzian "what legitimate political objectives can be either advanced or impaired by the organized application of violence." As to the two contemporary conflicts he dances around — Russia-Ukraine and US/Israel-Iran — he never engages with the fundamental asymmetry: The objectives of the various parties. That's the bedrock of "decisive strategic thinking" — understanding and thinking about not just one's own objectives, but one's opponents. Conversely, the implicitly-redefined "asymmetry" the he does consider never engages with either unconventional forces (the more-traditional context of "asymmetric warfare") or the distinction between force presence and force projection. On the other hand, this is precisely the kind of blindness (and rhetorical shiftiness) that I long ago learned to expect from the Atlantic Council.
And that's before considering their too-common impulses to prefer immediate policy preferences to the rule of law and the Constitution they swore to support and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic. This BS is not quite as credible as appropriating someone else's comic-book characters as branding for one's weaponry — and less likely to enable conquering the Roman Empire.