Japan's postwar pacifism is an exception, and it is ending. He describes Japan before the end of World War II as disciplined, industrious and warlike, and notes it has not spent over 2% of GDP on the military since, against 3% or more for the great powers. Japan has now passed a record defense budget of $55 billion a year on paper.
He suspects Japan is secretly spending more than declared. This is his own opinion, likening it to what he believes China does; he still judges Japan has a long way to go to catch up to the great military powers.
Adults lose childhood wonderment by defaulting to cynicism, and "charitable assumption" is the author's proposed fix. Drawing on Will Guidara's Unreasonable Hospitality, he argues that giving people — like a complaining restaurant guest — the benefit of the doubt, rather than assuming bad faith, restores the openness needed to feel awe rather than jadedness.
Deliberate surprise, as practiced at Eleven Madison Park, is what generates genuine delight in adults the way novelty does in children. The restaurant researched guests in advance to personalize moments of surprise; the author argues adults can't manufacture daily surprises for themselves but can practice the underlying mindfulness and gratitude that make surprise land.
Play, not just openness, is the other missing ingredient — citing Rick Rubin's The Creative Act. For a toddler, play is work; adults lose that experimental, fear-free relationship to their own work as they age, and reconnecting with why they started it is framed as a route back to wonderment.
The essay is framed around the 2025 Mariners' first ALCS run since 2001, a franchise that has never reached a World Series since 1977. The author treats attending games with his mother as itself an exercise in charitable assumption and mindfulness — a "win" regardless of the outcome on the field.
GeoHussarThe US rejected Venezuela’s “everything” offer: part 5. #Venezuela #Maduro #Karakas #LatinAmerica
He expects Maduro to flee rather than face a US invasion. He says the US now faces no obstacles and its president wants to crush Venezuela's government, but predicts the US will "spook" Maduro into fleeing, followed by a more America-friendly government. He expects half or more of the population, including the military, to celebrate.
Major Russian or Chinese concessions could still avert Maduro's ouster. His caveat: if Russia pulls out of Ukraine, or China and Russia both offer some large concession to the US, he thinks the ousting would not happen.
He would not be surprised to see Machado lead Venezuela. He says the opposition candidate (González Urrutia) won the 2024 election by international recognition while Maduro claimed victory, and points to Machado dedicating her Nobel Peace Prize to the US president as a reason she might end up in charge.
Biden owns the loss as party leader, not for any single reason. Responding to a clip arguing Biden is why Trump is president, he agrees the refusal to step aside after the midterms and allow a robust primary played a huge role, but says the whole four years cost the election.
Biden's team avoided blaming Trump, fearing the look of weaponization. In his reading, with Trump under investigation and indictment, they never tied inflation or energy prices to him, never raised the 2020 OPEC deal, and instead blamed oil companies for price gouging; he cites studies attributing roughly half of inflation, or 2–3 points of a 7% rise, to energy in late 2022 and 2023.
Poor messaging, not poor results, sank the administration. He credits Biden with real accomplishments but says they were badly sold, the climate-policy attack on fossil fuels hurt electorally, and Trump campaign claims were left unanswered, such as the belief that a pipeline set global oil prices.
Losing the White House erased the accomplishments. He likens it to leading a football game and losing on a last-second field goal, arguing Trump is now systematically undoing everything Biden achieved.
NATO patrols would force Russia to look weak or thin Ukraine. He argues that if NATO patrols begin, Russia must either leave them unanswered or divert resources from Ukraine, which he says would give Ukraine's military a chance to reclaim territory.
He discounts the nuclear threat because Russia's arsenal is degraded. Citing his earlier post on Russia's failure to maintain its nuclear program during and after the Cold War, he claims Russia is unsure how many warheads work, can be launched, or would make it out of Russia.
Russian incursions hand NATO a justification to escalate. He reads Russian drone and fighter-jet incursions into NATO territory as giving the US and NATO a "tremendous opportunity" to escalate their side of the conflict.
NATO pays the US directly in investment and arms sales. He claims the US receives at least $100 billion a year in foreign direct investment from NATO allies and another $100 billion or more in weapons purchases, and gains R&D partnerships with the best weapons developers outside the US, all NATO members.
NATO leadership underwrites US leverage, above all the dollar. He argues the alliance is why other countries comply when the US sanctions Russia or limits Venezuela's oil sales, and why it can wield the dollar, "its primary weapon," which he says has destroyed several countries, with oil priced primarily in dollars.
Russia still behaves as the Soviet Union did. He tells Americans that although the Soviet Union is gone, Russia is still invading neighbours and trying to take over their governments. He sets up, without yet answering in this clip, why former Warsaw Pact countries historically allied with Russia eventually sided with the US after communism fell.
The Gripen E can match anything below the F-35 and F-22. He explicitly concedes it could not take on those two US jets, but argues that below that tier it competes, citing road and highway takeoff, easy maintenance, sturdiness, the ability to jam almost any radar, and one of the lowest costs per flight hour of any fighter.
Sweden's dispersed-takeoff capability is nearly unmatched. He says the only other fighter able to operate this way is Russia's MiG-29, which he puts at over 40 years old. He reports that the Swedish jets look set to join Ukraine's fleet, and argues that both are built to take on several enemies at once.
GeoHussarSweden is the definition of smart power: part 4. #Swedish #GRIPEN #FighterJets #Warfare
Sweden's Stirling-engine submarines are uniquely stealthy and deadly. He calls Sweden the only country to put a Stirling engine successfully into a submarine, the Gotland class, and says it is being succeeded by the even more formidable Blekinge class. He points viewers to an earlier post on it from February.
Sweden is built for war, with highways that double as runways. He attributes this readiness to Russia's proximity and says almost all of Sweden's road and highway system is built for fighter jets to take off from. He singles out the Saab JAS 39 Gripen as one of the few fighters that can compete with American jets.
Tomahawks in Ukrainian hands would cost Russia Crimea. He predicts Ukraine would knock out the Kerch Bridge, leaving Russia unable to reinforce troops on the peninsula, which would fall back to Ukraine. He adds that Russian military and energy infrastructure within a 1,550-mile radius would be taken out.
He suspects the US already has something better. His reasoning: releasing Tomahawks to Ukraine means China will eventually recover fragments and try to reverse-engineer them, so permitting it suggests to him the US may have developed a more sophisticated successor.
Rivals can't match Tomahawk accuracy, so their hypersonics likely can't either. He says the submarine- or ship-launched Tomahawk hits within 5 to 10 m, which neither Russia nor China matches with a conventional cruise missile, and infers they cannot do it with a hypersonic one. He cites a first test launch in 1976, service entry in 1983, over 2,300 uses, and the Block 5 version from 2021.
Interoperability is the Tomahawk's biggest edge over Russian and Chinese weapons. He says it is usable by most NATO countries and fully integrated into NATO weaponry. He argues Russian and Chinese missiles cannot be used in each other's systems.
Four redundant navigation systems make the Tomahawk hard to defeat. He lists GPS as only one of four, alongside an internal inertial tracking system, terrain contour matching (TERCOM), which compares radar-measured terrain to a stored digital map, and digital scene matching area correlation. He calls the last the scariest, since it compares infrared images of the ground against pre-recorded photos of the target.
Understanding a city requires understanding its culinary staples, and the author argues the bagel is New York's. He frames the bagel as more than kettle-boiled dough — a marker of the city's immigrant history and culture — and treats trying it as a way to understand New York better, not just eat well.
He tested every bagel on the New York Times's "best bagels" list and found the list itself flawed and incomplete. The project, including a stop at the iconic Russ & Daughters, is presented as a corrective to relying on the first social-media or Yelp recommendation when exploring a new place.
He previews an upcoming piece on Putin's economic war machine, arguing it is designed never to stop, with parallels to the Soviet Union's failures in Afghanistan. That analysis is flagged as forthcoming behind a paywall rather than argued in this post.
GeoHussarThe US Tomahawk would destroy Russia: part 2. #Tomahawk #defense #Military
Terrain-hugging flight, not speed, makes the Tomahawk threatening. He notes it flies at only 550 mph and is not hypersonic, but argues that neither hypersonics nor most other conventional weapons can hug terrain as it does. It flies at 50 to 150 ft, which he says evades most radars and almost every type of tracking.
The Tomahawk is nearly untrackable once launched. He says it emits zero signals after launch, leaving the enemy nothing to detect. He adds that its navigation system carries pre-programmed irregular flight patterns for low-altitude flight.
Tomahawks for Kyiv would sink Russia's Ukraine campaign. He reports Russia's president warning that Tomahawk supplies to Kyiv would ruin US-Russian relations, and counters that they would only ruin Russia. He predicts Ukraine could receive them within this year, reasoning that threatening the US president makes him more likely to act.
Though decades old, the Tomahawk has no Russian or Chinese equal. He concedes it was developed in the 1980s but says neither country has anything comparable. He gives its range as about 1,500 km or more (about 1,000 miles), putting a wide radius of Russian targets within Ukraine's reach.
GeoHussarWe need Canada: part 4. #GeoPolitics #MiddleEast #Military #Troops
The US Middle East presence now exists mainly to balance energy prices. He says it is far weaker than 30 years ago and serves trade and politicians who want to keep gasoline prices down for re-election, since catastrophic instability there raises oil prices for China, Japan and Europe.
Canada insulates the US from an oil supply shock. He argues the US and Canada can meet their own energy needs, so a Middle East shock would mainly let them sell oil at higher prices, and the US would suffer far less than the rest of the world; he credits his infographic to Visual Capitalist.