Michael Flynn
@flynnpolsci
Troop deployments. Security cooperation. New Yorker in the Midwest. Semi-competent Bayesian stats enthusiast. Slowly becoming less bad at jiu jitsu. Impatient woodworker. #polisky #rstats #dataviz
None of this is exculpatory. It’s an explicit acknowledgement that they’re participating in theater designed to deceive the American public and degrade independent journalism aimed at keeping leaders accountable. In any other context we’d call this behavior duplicitous, deceptive, and abusive.
We found a small brood of baby bunnies in the back yard this morning.
A peak at what's coming to the troopdata package. Data for US states!
Higher level rhetoric filters down to state level politicians. Kansas state representatives are using Trump’s remarks about running for a third term to appeal to national fundraising networks. This seems like a big deal but it’s kind of buried at the end.
The kid wanted a rainbow pastel cake. I didn’t quite stick the landing on the top but I’m pretty happy with it for a first cut.
Every now and then Apple Music deletes the CDs I imported from my library so it’s been a while since I’ve listened to this, but today I’m reminded of just how perfect this album is.
Like 80% of the lethality of the US military rests on a foundation of overseas partnerships and allies that the administration actively alienates on a daily basis.
It will be interesting to see how the media treats this. Inflation came down a lot by the 2024 elections, but reporting made it sound like it was still up to 9%. But this is a huge jump in gas prices coming right before end of school year travels for lots of people in the US. bbc.com/news/article...
There was a time when this one paragraph would have triggered a relentless onslaught of congressional investigations and swift impeachment proceedings. www.cnn.com/2026/03/13/p...
It should not be a surprise that the decision to immediately target senior regime leadership would precipitate an extreme response. Just a flabbergasting lack of planning and imagination. www.cnn.com/2026/03/12/p...
Puzzling that the author is emphatic about shifting focus of PME away from politics, economics, and other related topics and then asserts that military leaders should have been the ones to object to politicians’ goals on the basis of their deep knowledge of the same topics that they’d be ignoring.
Notable that Miller isn't listed here, which suggests that much of this will continue in some form for the foreseeable future until he's also removed. This is his brainchild.
Afghanistan is actually a great example of how burden sharing works. It's not just about defense spending, but how other costs and risks are distributed across alliance and coalition partners.
I've been meaning to check on this for a while but kept getting sidetracked. Anyway, the US has had a continual US military presence in Greenland since 1950. In the early Cold War years it was pretty big. Even in more recent years it's one of the highest percentile deployment locations.
This last question though. 42% of Americans really just working with soup brains on this one.
All of the emphasis on the second strike, but I don’t think we’ve seen any public disclosures as to what intelligence has been used as the basis for *any* of these strikes, or why extrajudicial killings of civilians are an acceptable measure even if the allegations of drug smuggling are true.
#RStats question: I'm working with a shape file that includes some strange "buffer" geometry around the core polygons of interest. For example, the cloudy dark gray edges that extend beyond the white lines on the left side. Is there a simple way to remove this kind of excess material?
This perfectly summarizes my refusal to integrate “intelligent” uses of AI in a class like, say, US foreign policy. To use it in even a remotely intelligent way they need the underlying knowledge and understanding to evaluate the AI content. That knowledge is a process thing, not an outcome thing.
The big readings for the semester are over so now Carlos and I can get in to the really interesting stuff—the political and economic history of sugar.
It's time to talk about the allocation of the US sugar import quota in class.