It is difficult for me to characterize what Scott, Elizabeth, and myself discussed on the latest LGM podcast, better known as “the tightest 117 minutes in the history of podcasting.” Our writ was to discuss the latest Paranoid Style album, “Known Associates,” as well as to talk about Elizabeth’s contribution of liner notes to The Replacements’ Let it Be: Deluxe Edition and we did indeed discuss these things, but there were digressions. Some questions that emerged and re-emerged over the course of the pod:

Transcript is here.

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On the latest LGM podcast, Dave and I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Michael Strausz, long-term friend of the blog and Professor of Political Science at Texas Christian University. Mike works on Japanese politics, and so the podcast focused mainly on the recent Japanese election, although we digressed into a variety of topics associated with the Japanese political scene, including national defense, housing, and immigration.

Transcript is here.

Photo Credit: By 首相官邸ホームページ, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=178708232

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On the latest LGM Podcast Erik, Scott, and myself sum up the state of the NFL in the days before Superbowl LX. We talk through the coaching changes that have ensued since Black Monday, ruminate on the failure of Bill Belichick to make the Hall of Fame on his first try, review the games of Championship Weekend, and project some expectations for the least likely Super Bowl in NFL history.

Transcript is here.

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In the latest exciting edition of the LGM podcast, Rob and I join special guest star Dave to discuss the NFL playoffs and Black Monday (including BREAKING NEWS on Black Monday +1). All predictions guaranteed to be true unless they prove to be false.

Transcript is here.

Photo Credit: By Mike Morbeck – Flickr: [1], CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22199032

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Alex Wellerstein’s The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age challenges standard preconceptions of President Harry Truman’s role in using nuclear weapons. It goes on to trace Truman’s role in developing policy around nuclear weapons, including civilian control and sole authority.

It’s an important book. Truman was faced with an utterly new situation that he knew little about. It’s easy for us to forget that there was a time when nuclear weapons didn’t exist. Alex gives a picture of when that changed. There are lessons for today.

Rob Farley and I interviewed Alex last week. Alex talks about how he came to the subject and Roosevelt’s irresponsibility. Check it out.

Rob apologizes for his substandard audio.

Transcript is here.

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On the latest LGM podcast Scott and I were fortunate enough to speak with Hannah Pittard, professor at the University of Kentucky and author of several novels, including If You Love It, Let It Kill You. Hannah was part of a a New York magazine profile that covered the dissolution of her marriage, also detailed in her autobiographical work We Are Too Many. Our conversation ranged from these works to life in Lexington to talking cats to the struggle of engaging with the modern student. Give it a listen, especially if you’re the sort of person who waits until the last last last last moment to finish off your Christmas list…

Transcript is here.

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On the latest LGM Podcast, the National Security Gang (NSG, or me, Dan, and Cheryl) talked through the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, which Cheryl better characterized as “a long expansion of Fourteen Words.” We discussed its vision of a cultural war against the American left and against Europe, its Utopian aspirations, and what it might say about the future of conflict within the administration.

Here’s a link to the NSS itself, and what some other folks are saying…

Transcript available here.

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On the latest LGM Podcast Cheryl, Dan, and myself talk through the “peace” deal that the Trump administration attempted to foist upon Europe, Ukraine, and possibly Russia last week. We work through what we now know of the several-day process of revealing the plan, discuss its prospects, and then move to a point-by-point discussion of its elements. Time constraints prevented us from getting all the way through, which is probably for the best because the plan has now been reduced to nineteen points. Our assessment? This is less a plan than a mess of contradictory impulses, and it will be a struggle to develop anything useful out of it.

Some links:

Transcript is here.

Photo Credit: By Dsns.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=173759048

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It is the end of an error in Cleveland, and we can now celebrate the dumbest tank job in the history of dumb tank jobs:

A shrewd snakeoil salesman always knows when the jig is up.

Paul DePodesta could see that the 2025 Browns were boring deep into the earth’s mantle toward a new low, even for them. He had burned through a decade of benefit-of-the-doubt from Stockholm Syndrome-suffering Browns fans and the often-fawning media. He could hear the hecklers, as well as the whispers about the man behind the curtain. DePodesta knew that once the Browns burned through both Dillon Gabriel and Shedeur Sanders — the team’s desperate double-reverse flea-flicker Hail Mary effort to replace the quarter-billion-dollar imaginary-friend quarterback he traded their future for — he would no longer be able to sell his swindle.

And there, sitting on his LinkedIn page like a rube fresh off a turnip truck or a lonely, diamond-studded dowager, were the Colorado Rockies: a perennial doormat of a baseball franchise coming off a 119-loss season.

So DePodesta, the Duke and Dauphin of Moneyball, tied some bedsheets together and slipped out the back window of Browns headquarters before anyone could nab him.

“The Browns were good at planning for the future to win while DePodesta was here,” wrote Jason Lloyd in The Athletic. “They just rarely got around to the actual winning. It was like booking and planning elaborate Caribbean vacations but never taking them.”

No, Jason, that’s not quite correct. What DePodesta did was like investing money needed for food and roof repairs into cryptocurrency, then telling the family over a crackers-and-ketchup dinner that they were too stupid to understand his daring long-range vision.

DePodesta, the Browns’ former Chief Strategic Officer, was at least magnanimous enough to accept a tiny sliver of blame for the Deshaun Watson fiasco. Sort of. When cornered by the Rockies media about Watson in his introductory press conference, DePodesta said:

Here’s what I would say, and I truly believe this. I believe that most of the decisions, especially the big ones like that, are organizational decisions, right? I’m not a believer in the ‘King Scout’ situation where there is one guy who makes every call. The jobs are too complex, the decisions are too hard. They impact too many different things. So I always think these sort of collective decisions, it can be hard to get unanimous (opinions) on those types of things. Everyone who was a part of that? We all own that. We just do, that’s part of the deal.

What an absolute cheesedick. DePodesta sounds exactly like the “consultant” who comes to you, the assistant manager, and says: Replace all our desks with standing work stations and the coffee machine with inspirational posters. You can sign off on those decisions. I was never here.

I will never stop being amused by the earnest discussions about which sequence of years of deliberate non-competitiveness made their organization the best in North American pro sports, the Cleveland Browns or the Philadelphia 76ers. (If you don’t deliberately lose as many games as possible for years at a time, how can you acquire a truly indispensable superstar like Ben Simmons?) Still, it’s hard to top intentionally going 1-31, passing on DeShaun Watson to take an F- prospect in the second round, drafting a solid if not transcendent QB #1 overall, trade the solid QB for a 5th round pick, and then invest an enormous amount of trade and salary capital in the QB you passed on after he had proven to be a serial sexual harasser because of some numbers inflated by a lot of garbage-time stat padding on a 4-12 team. Amazing stuff. Admittedly, it’s not entirely on DePodesta — Haslam was obviously a major factor in the world historically catastrophic Watson trade — but a share of responsibility is enough to damn him in any court.

Perhaps he will be better back in his native sport, and it would be hard for the Rockies to get worse. On the other hand, I would have said that about the Browns.

Also, check out the Midseason Report pod.

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On the latest LGM Podcast Scott, Erik, and I jabbered about this most unusual NFL season. We recorded on Wednesday evening and nothing about the result of last night’s Buffalo-Houston game exactly transformed our conclusions, rather reinforcing the enigma that is the Josh Allen Bills. We also decided to just go ahead and publish the whole thing rather than break it into two parts, so save this one for a really long drive/run/walk/train ride/colonoscopy.

Transcript is here.

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