My daughter was ambivalent about the on-field action but she LOVED the shouting -- seeing the grown-ups model it, doing it, participating in it with others. From the positive, e.g. "GIVE IT A RIIIIIDE" to the standard "COME AAWWWWN" and of course the eternal "YER MISSIN A GREAT BALLGAME, BLUE!"
Validated 👇Kid-won library ticket baseball game attender here.
It sure would 👇And the double tragedy is that even though hindsight may show that the navies of those eras might have wanted the "wrong" ships given how events played out, they might at least have actually built them and have them to put to use today. Instead y'got almost nothing
"Ooooh," I hear you saying -- what if they put little mines to mine our mine mine mine mines? The only answer is we've got to cut ahead of them with mine mine mine mine mines
I, for one, am concerned about a gap between our mine mines and the mine mine mines that they'll deploy as a countermeasure. We need mine mine mine mine YESTERDAY
This is important because *no one* including your United States Navy, can say what its mine countermeasures capabilities truly are right now. The ships and equipment in the region that would have to try to clear any Q Channel and do the other things are untested operationally. Risks & stress = high
... even as reports about the mine peril appeared to cool somewhat on Tuesday p.m. ET, the question is: could the US and Israel keep up the punishment to such a degree that Tehran pushes the Mine Button? Or is the right answer for the US + Israel to walk this down to try to avoid that?
Excellent takeout on the splashy sitch by @samlagrone.bsky.social and colleagues. As this explains, mines qua mines would be a desperation move for the Iranians because it would obstruct the strait for *everyone* including them. But, but, a thousand times but: they've done it before
For the Red Sea? The full might of the United States Navy.
For the Strait of Hormuz? The USNS Walter Mondale will be available in 2031. It’s a laundry ship.
Here’s a table setter for what an escort mission would look like. With lots of stuff on mine warfare.
The sun rises behind a tree sprouting early spring buds near Washington, DC
Spring has pounced on us
A red-bellied woodpecker on a tree
A red-bellied woodpecker prepares to enter the bird cave it has excavated in the bark of a tree
A red-bellied woodpecker climbs into the bird cave it excavated in the truck of a tree
A red-bellied woodpecker emerges from the bird cave it's excavating in the side of a tree with a crumb-sized bite of wood in its beak. Crumb by crumb the bird has widened and deepened a hole big enough for itself
This woodpecker lives across from my daughter's school. All day, every day, it removes a tiny crumb of bark with its beak. It has hollowed out this knothole so much that the whole bird now can climb inside. I think it's trying to teach us something.
oh just a thought if your plan for overthrowing the Iranian government depends on the Iranian public rising up, you likely shouldn't have defunded the American government run news agency that speaks in Farsi.
☹️
What are the downside security risks of a Mega Libya on the Persian Gulf that devolves into civil war/anarchy like a Super Lebanon where people nurse an implacable hatred for their neighbors, Israel and the US for another generation or more? It may be another curse of our times to find out
... that's what's so baffling -- it would appear that the right time for all this, if these decisions had been taken, was earlier this year when so many protestors and activists were still alive or out of regime dungeons. Can you bomb them loose and bomb them into power somehow? Another test
Does anyone believe that airpower alone can degrade the institutions of power in Iran sufficiently that a Mehdi Mandela could step up and somehow take power and form a new government more palatable to the GCC, Israel and the US? The regime already prolly killed that Mehdi weeks ago in the crackdown
In our whirlpool of cynicism there is a savage logic that clearly appeals to the WH and supporters about doing a Libya II and not, repeat not, an Iraq or an A'stan -- because what Americans opposed, ultimately, was the messy reconstruction and COIN, not the exciting boomy-shooty. But Iran ≠ Libya
Since we're being brutally honest let's not stop: The United States (and to a lesser degree, its allies) have had a hand in ruining so many countries in our era, from A'stan to Iraq to Libya to Syria and now Iran, with no real domestic political blowback. Another test now is: maybe that'll change?
Neither the US nor Israel appear really to be trying to do anything but beat the mullahs about the head and shoulders -- it's not "regime change" but it is regime diminishment ... and if we wind up with a Mega Libya in Iran with no nuclear or regional weapons, they'll prolly call it Iran Good Enough
The old busted Iran nuke deal was Dems saying to the Israelis, no you can't -- you can't play whack-a-mole at the level of the head shed and do this every couple of years. We need a lasting and durable deal. Israel & Rs opposed it and now they're taking their turn.
The whole thing is a test of whether Israel's time-tested approach of "mowing the lawn," as they used to call it, scales from onesey-twosie local raids in Lebanon or Syria all the way up to the Corporate HQ: take away hostile pers & equipment to buy medium term stability.
He was right! I want nothing to do with it. BUT I think this horse is out of the barn for today's edu-Chromebook kids and Cupertino is paddling upstream if it thinks it can bring them back to the good side with this laptop
Concur 👇
These aspects of the way people use tech are fascinating. My number of active browser tabs, for example, is exactly the number that I am using at any given moment. If I finish a thing, I close it. But I sat next to a guy on a flight recently with more Chrome tabs open than I could count & I was all
... so if this is an edu-Chromebook competitor/ First Laptop For Kids In Apple Households product, that seems like a strange omission given what we know about how the kids expect to interact with these devices.
