I've definitely become a believer in the thesis that protracted COIN/irregular warfare is fundamentally corrosive to good civ-mil relations and military culture generally. Harder to inculcate respect for LoAC when most people's primary experience is fighting irregular forces.

Reading about smoking ban proposals before the tobacco master settlement in 1998 is always a trip: www.nytimes.com/1984/02/15/u...

aged 79 and a half, Donald Trump made his second ever friend.

Mamdani has S-tier charisma and one of the qualities of that, I think, is that he - like Clinton - genuinely and sincerely cares about you when he's talking to you. My hope is that he's one of the rare people for whom that's still true even after you're not in the room.

I agree with whoever said a rather under-appreciated dynamic is the extent to which Professional Politics Opinion Havers flat out just find the left interpersonally irritating in a way they do not find the right so, and I think a lot of the talk of a vibe shift was wish-casting their irritants away.

The polls and numbers show THERE ARE MORE OF US THAN THERE ARE OF THEM - but that doesn't feel real and visceral to our institutions, which imagine a silent MAGA majority hiding under their bed.

You know what feels real? Ten million people in the streets, saying "Look around, THERE ARE MORE OF US"

Aside from shattering core state sovereignty, it's saying one state's Guard (TX) is somehow more loyal to the national authority than another's (IL). It's treating the latter as something bordering on hostile, or at least alien. One part of the country and its soldiers are more America than another.