Greg Olsen

Put on Deee Lite’s album World Clique and I am getting nostalgic for the carefree 90s.

Pentagon's failure of imagination. Nobody thought, "Gee back in the age of piston driven planes we used to use anti-aircraft artillery. Navy ships are equipped with CIWS for last ditch defense, why not something equivalent ashore?" The Army retired VADS decades ago. Maybe rethink that.

I did the back of the envelope calculations per the classic paper "Force Requirements for Stabilization Operations" by Quinlivan, and for a low threat peacekeeping deployment you'd need ~185k troops, ~610k for a counterinsurgency, and up to ~2m for a surge to quell a civil war.

It has been years since I saw The Third Man. I got the itch after a bit of dialogue from an episode of The Recruit: “Vienna is the espionage Olympics.” The Third Man is a great movie. The lighting and cinematography especially.

I danced in an Argentine tango show from 2003 to 2008.

I have read it three times and I am still trying to parse that sentence.🤷‍♂️

After having my bare foot shredded by Tangerine for the second time in three days, I have clipped her claws. Please 👏

How to maximize corporate productivity from a spy novel: "Have a clear aim, a reason for a meeting, know what it is you want to come away with; if you can't state your aim in a sentence, don't put the agent to the risk of a meeting." If all meetings met this standard...

Alan Judd, Legacy, p. 160.

Yeah. I bought the Traveler. It’s my second Akubra.

I needed a hat for a trip to Africa. Akubra makes really nice hats. Expensive but you get what you pay for.

Hopefully you got to visit the Field Museum of Natural History. It is a really fine natural history museum.

Must be nice to not have an HOA telling you that you can't put stuff in front of your house.

Imb tink yuo alle noe wut to do #tacotuesday

Using a Star Trek GIF, post where you're at right now.

F-15 loses its perfect record to the HORNET?????

Pretty kitty.😍

It goes back to the earliest days of the republic. See George Washington's circular to the people of Canada. The message: you subjects need to be conquered into freedom as citizens.

Democratic-Peace-Hypothesis-as-grand-strategy that the US lurches to in its own revolutionary way is a great destabilizer certainly. This was one of Yehezkel Dror's insights in Crazy States. The US behaves as a crazy state in its zeal to spread democracy.

He's probably just mad about having to take the mandated CBT in sexual harassment prevention that takes an hour or two to complete.

The sticking point is a uranium enrichment program. Iran could have climbed down by taking the offer like other NPT countries who exchange fuel for a civilian nuclear power program with a great power, but Iran looks to emulate Pakistan's grand strategy.

Not a best case for Israel at all because it means Iran will still have nuclear autarky and the ability to dash to a nuclear weapon as a deterrent, and enables an insecure revolutionary regime to pursue jihad as a grand strategy under a nuclear umbrella.

Hugo Friedhofer's score is outstanding in The Best Years of Our Lives.

I replied to @drjlhazelton.bsky.social with a plausible scenario yesterday. Unlikely best case scenario: civil war, whoever is in the capital answering the mail asks the UN to intervene, the Secretariat does its "good offices" thing, brokers a transitional regime, and supervises elections.

I really have to stop using my phone for posts. The AI is so bad at predicting the text I am writing that I end up with garbled posts.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into on of the charismatic megafauna of conflict.

With the world gone crazy, I had to put on some sublime music: Cherubini’s Missa Solemnis in G. Is there a more beautiful piece of choral music?

LORAN makes a comeback?

TBH, all I care about in the waning years of Curry and Draymond’s career is that the basketball is entertaining. I like the energy of the youth movement. When they play clean basketball and don’t beat themselves it is fun to watch. Same attitude I had toward Don Nelson 1.0 teams.

Tortitude in action

It's been a while, so quote this skeet with your favorite $20 word.

I'm going to start in hopes you all y'all escalate:

- baleful
- fissiparous
- anodyne

Now you all y'all go: