Tom Cowan

off the aft may work better
I hope you have floats
have you looked at spotter planes that battle ships used?

The Reagan Revolution occurred during my teenage years and I bought in whole-heartedly. I believed less government was better, people should look not to government to solve their problems but to themselves, and that lower taxes on the wealthy and less regulation on businesses would make us all wealthier.
 
So when it came time for college, of course I chose Business Administration. And that's where I learned how things really worked. You can't administer a modern business without understanding this stuff, so how things work were stated plainly and in positive terms. Things like transfer pricing to minimize taxes, regulatory capture to blunt regulation, and public relations to manage perceptions were just items on the syllabus.
 
That sort of stuff nudged me a little to the left, but one of the things that drew me over the line was learning the history of business in the US. One of the key lessons was antitrust, because it intersects with so many outrageous abuses by monied interests.
 
But of course, by the time I was in college, antitrust had already been undermined by the neoliberal view that all that mattered when it came to antitrust was "consumer harm." That led to 40 years of weak antitrust enforcement that's allowed some of the abuses of the past to come back -- as long as a figleaf claim of no "consumer harm" could be made, industries across the economy were allowed to combine and grow more powerful with little pushback. Who cares if all the buyers of a given farm commodity combine and farmers are forced to sell to the one remaining buyer in their area at ruinous rates, as long as consumers aren't affected? And if that one buyer slowly but steadily raises prices on consumers as well, then no one's going to be able to show "consumer harm."
 
So one of the few bright spots recently has been the Biden administration's antitrust stance. Finally we have an FTC that is at least making noises about doing its actual job. Along with Chairwoman Lina Khan and Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya is making waves. Bedoya's recent speech made plain the early history of antitrust in this country, how judicial activism worked before FDR brought the courts to heel for a while, and how much suffering the system tolerated even as laws changed and decades passed.
 
The speech is fully footnoted and is a good read for anyone interested in the intersection of antitrust, the courts, the legislature, and labor.
 
Here's a link to the PDF if anyone's interested:
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/bedoya-aiming-dollars-not-men.pdf
 

Well, Red Doom could be trying to bring back the "good old days" of the USSR.  Any heroes ready to help Poland? 

Perun's latest defense economics blog post steps back from the war in Ukraine to look at NATO and what the US gets from its military alliances that make them good deals both militarily and economically. A bunch of stuff that Donald Trump never understood and probably never could understand.
 
What caught my notice, though, was his mention that the oldest still-operative military alliance is the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, formerly adopted in 1386. Not only is it still legally on the books, it was invoked as recently as 1982 when British ships used Portuguese naval bases in the Falklands Crisis. Wikipedia, of course, has more:
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Portuguese_Alliance
 
Apart from being a nerdy-cool piece of trivia, it warms my heart to know that two countries *can* be true to their word to each other for six centuries and counting. History isn't always just vicious opportunism.
 
Dean Shomshak

He's gone. 

Exactly. The Hittites of Anatolia were pioneers in the science of iron working, but the Assyrians were the first to apply large-scale forging of iron weapons and armor to their large standing army, which greatly facilitated their systematic conquest of their neighbors. It wasn't that their iron was superior to bronze, but that they were able to equip more of their soldiers with metal than their opponents could.
 
EDIT:  Come to think of it, that suggests what could be an interesting world/campaign premise. Small, relatively peaceful Bronze Age realms are conquered by a ruthless iron-using invader. In addition to fighting and evading the imperialists, goals of the campaign would include stealing the secret of iron working and spreading it among the subjugated peoples.

I couldn't help it. 
 
 

Well,
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/urgent-trump-hit-criminal-charges-212734615.html

Well,
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/urgent-trump-hit-criminal-charges-212734615.html

The body cam video shows the officers passing the (pixelated) body of one of the victims, the 9-year-old girl who supposedly pulled the fire alarm to warn her classmates, and got killed for her trouble.

Kari Lake Still Expects God To Make Her Arizona Governor
 
From the editorial--
 
"I am not an expert in the ways of the Almighty, but it seems likely that her prayers already have been answered. Just not with the reply she’d hoped to receive."
 
Reminds me of the M*A*S*H episode where a pilot claiming to be Jesus was asked by Dr. Sidney Freedman, "Does God answer all prayers?"
 
The man replies, "Yes.  Sometimes he answers no."
 
Please take the hint, Ms. Lake.