Lawyers, Guns & Money

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: The plan, annotated The plan, annotated again. Thoughts on the origins of the plan. Rubio tries to make the plan make sense. Ukraine’s reaction. Transcript is here. Apple Podcasts Android Youtube Podchaser Podcast Index Subscribe by E-mail Audible Spotify Amazon Music Photo Credit: By Dsns.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=173759048 The post LGM Podcast: Twenty-Eight Points appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

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. The post NFL Open Thread appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

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. Apple Podcasts Android Youtube Podchaser Podcast Index Subscribe by E-mail Audible Spotify Amazon Music The post LGM Podcast: NFL Midseason Report appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

On the latest LGM podcast Dan and I had the opportunity to interview Joel Willett, candidate for the Democratic nomination for Kentucky’s 2026 US Senate seat. We talked about: Joel’s reasons for joining this race. Tulsi Gabbard’s political retribution The threat of the Trump presidency The biggest foreign policy challenges facing America A day in the life of a US Senate candidate Leeroy Jenkins Joel’s donation page is here and his website is here, from which you can follow all of his socials if that’s the kind of thing you would normally do. Transcript is here. Apple Podcasts Android Youtube Podchaser Podcast Index Subscribe by E-mail Audible Spotify Amazon Music The post LGM Podcast: Ditching Mitch in ’26 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

On the latest LGM podcast Scott and I spoke with friend-of-the-blog and current candidate for the Democratic nomination in Kentucky’s sixth district Erin Petrey, who many of you will remember from previous posts. We talked about Erin’s reasoning for joining the race, some of the positions that she has staked out on the campaign trail, and finally some snippets from the day-to-day life of a Congressional candidate. Also, the best question is the Nazi tattoo question. Erin’s donation page is here and her website is here, from which you can follow all of her socials if that’s the kind of thing you would normally do. Transcript is here. Apple Podcasts Android Youtube Podchaser Podcast Index Subscribe by E-mail Audible Spotify Amazon Music The post LGM Podcast: KY-6 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

On the latest LGM Podcast I had the opportunity to speak with longtime contributor Chris Koski, who is currently at Ground Zero in Portland, Oregon. Chris and I talked about the current state of anti-ICE protests, the legacy of the 2020 George Floyd protests, the possible effects of a National Guard deployment to Portland, and the general cultural impact of years of anti-Trump protest. Transcript is here. Apple Podcasts Android Youtube Podchaser Podcast Index Subscribe by E-mail Audible Spotify Amazon Music Photo Credit: By Another Believer – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=168216844 The post LGM Podcast: Trump vs. Portlandia appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

On the latest LGM Podcast I had the good fortune to interview Dr. Tim Benbow, Professor of Strategic Studies at King’s College London. Tim has recently been researching the history of the Royal Navy’s decisions to keep, and then to give up, its battleships after World War II. We talk through the role of the battleship in Royal Navy doctrine prior to and during the war, tracing changes in attitudes as the course of the conflict brought other technologies to the fore. Give it a listen. Transcript available here. Apple Podcasts Android Youtube Podchaser Podcast Index Subscribe by E-mail Audible Spotify Amazon Music The post LGM Podcast: Twilight of the Battleship appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

On the latest LGM Podcast I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Kate Epstein of the Rutgers University Department of History. We talked through her two books, Analog Superpowers (about fire control equipment) and Torpedo (about, well, torpedoes), the latter of which I reviewed here. We discussed the mechanics of fire control and the history of theft, plagiarism, and legal dispute in the UK and the US, talked about how to build a legal regime that can support an innovative defense industrial base, worked through how these legal structures created the environment in which the Manhattan Project prospered, compared the “young and hungry” versus the “old and established” military organization in terms of innovation, and finally made some observations about the state of the modern defense patent regime. If any of that sounds interesting, tune in! Transcript available here. Apple Podcasts Android Youtube Podchaser Podcast Index Subscribe by E-mail Audible Spotify Amazon Music The post LGM Podcast: Analog Superpowers appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Dean Spears, an economist and author known for his research on demographic change, joins the discussion on global depopulation. He explains the significance of declining fertility rates and dispels myths surrounding population growth fears. Spears analyzes the relationship between cultural narratives, climate policy, and immigration's role in innovation. He emphasizes the ethical challenges of coercive population policies and the value of creating good lives over merely increasing population size. This insightful conversation reshapes our understanding of the future.