Jesseb Adam

Engage the mind. | Understand the heart. | Be willing to be wrong. | Christian, Husband, Father, Lover, Teacher, Thinker, Reader, Man.

[Barry R McCaffrey @mccaffreyr3]

Hegseth fired the Army Chief of Staff Gen Randy George. Immediately.

Gen George probably the best leader I’ve encountered in uniform. Integrity. Experienced combat leader. Solid judgement. Courage. Modesty. Takes care of soldiers. A war going on.

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

JUST IN: You do not fire your Army Chief of Staff in the middle of a war for no reason. You fire him because of what comes next.

Pete Hegseth called General Randy George on April 2 and told him to retire immediately. The Pentagon confirmed it within hours. No reason was given. Not publicly. Not privately. A senior Army official told Fox News that Hegseth offered George nothing: no misconduct, no operational failure, no policy disagreement on the record. Just a phone call and a career ending in the middle of the most significant American combat operation in two decades.

George is the 24th general or admiral Hegseth has removed. But he is not the 24th. He is the one that matters. The Army Chief of Staff. The man whose signature sits between a president’s intent and the order that sends soldiers across a beach or into a tunnel complex. The 82nd Airborne is deploying right now. Marines from the 31st MEU are staged on the USS Tripoli. JSOC operators are at forward bases in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Kharg Island, 90 percent of Iranian oil exports, sits 16 kilometres off a coast that someone will have to decide whether to approach. And the four-star general whose job it was to advise whether that approach should happen was removed 48 hours after Trump told the nation the war would continue for two to three more weeks.

The replacement is Vice Chief General Christopher LaNeve. He was Hegseth’s senior military aide before this appointment. The man who carried the Secretary’s briefcase now commands the Army the Secretary is reshaping. The chain of command did not break. It shortened. The distance between a television studio and a combat order just collapsed to zero intermediaries who were not personally selected by the man giving the order.

No reason was given. That is the tell. When someone is removed without explanation during a crisis, the explanation is the crisis itself. George either objected to something or was about to. The ground option. The power plant strikes. The Kharg raid. The escalation that turned a highway bridge in Karaj into rubble on the same day he was told to leave. Something in the next two weeks requires a chief who will not push back, and the Pentagon solved that problem by installing one trained as Hegseth’s aide.

A former Fox News weekend host just fired a four-star general with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, replaced him with his own former assistant, and did it during a live war in which the next decision could put American soldiers on Iranian soil for the first time in history. No hearing was held. No misconduct cited. The Army woke up on April 3 with a new chief it did not choose, in a war it did not start, preparing for a phase the previous chief apparently could not be trusted to execute.

The question is not why George was fired. Every general in the building knows why. The question is what order is coming in the next fourteen days that required removing the one man in the chain of command who might have said no.

The war has no perimeter. The chain of command has no objectors. And the next phase has no one left to stop it.

https://t.co/dAOBBMsgDS

[Jesseb Adam @JessebAdam]

This. Is. Nuts. 😳

[Chris Bianchi @BianchiWeather]

Colorado's statewide snow water equivalent is 3.3". That's our average snowpack level on...May 30th.

In other words: Colorado is currently on pace to melt off its snowpack (or just about) in mid-late April, roughly two *months* earlier than average.

#COwx

[Anand Sanwal @asanwal]

Wharton researchers gave nearly 1,000 high school math students access to ChatGPT during practice problems

Result: chatGPT is the perfect trap.

Look at the red bars.

Students with ChatGPT crushed their practice sessions.

The basic ChatGPT group solved more problems and those on the "tutor" version did even more.

Now look at the gray bars. That's the exam.

No AI allowed.

The ChatGPT group scored 17% worse than kids who practiced with zero technology.

And the fancy tutor version?
No better than working alone.

The researchers called AI a "crutch."

When they analyzed what students actually typed into ChatGPT, most of them just wrote - “What’s the answer?”

The kicker: students who used ChatGPT believed it hadn't hurt their learning.

They were confidently wrong.

This is the AI trap in education.

Outsourcing your thinking.

Of course, lots of half-baked AI literacy curricula being rolled out in schools now

Let’s of course ignore that basic literacy (the ability to read) is possible for <50% of 8th graders

Source: Bastani et al. (2025), "Generative AI Can Harm Learning," PNAS

[Jesseb Adam @JessebAdam]

Our students love AI because it is easy, but they aren’t aware of the risks and don’t have the background knowledge to flesh out these problems! Scary world we live in.

[Kyle Clark @KyleClark]

Every once in a while, I throw research queries into AI to test it against what I know. It fabricated a quote and attributed it to a DEA official in Colorado. When I called it out, it apologized for the "imprecision." I pushed back again and this was the response. Wild.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

In advance of tonight's State of the Union Address, some @CatoInstitute tariff facts:
1) Studies show Trump's tariffs are overwhelmingly paid by US companies &amp; consumers, raising the overall price level (CPI/PCE) by a little less than 1 ppt
https://t.co/YAuzZ34Wwt #CatoSOTU

[Christopher C. Cuomo @ChrisCuomo]

Cato. Conservative. Voting by "illegals" is not a thing.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

Shocked - SHOCKED - that CBO would find basically the same thing re tariff incidence that the St Louis Fed, Kiel Institute, @TaxFoundation, Harvard Business School, Gopinath/Neiman, &amp; others have found.

Shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

[Michael McFaul @McFaul]

Trump loves to claim that Putin didn't invade Ukraine while he was president (forgetting that the war continued for all 4 years of his first term), but does not seem to have noticed that Putin vastly expanded his killing in Ukraine during Trump's second term.

[David French @DavidAFrench]

This is a beautiful, heartfelt post from Beth. I stand with her.

[Tolkien World @TolkienWorldG]

Sir Ian McKellen at 86 expertly reciting Shakespeare last night!

[Kyle Clark @KyleClark]

COMMENTARY: We should believe President Trump

[Cato Institute @CatoInstitute]

Immigrants saved US government at all levels $14.5 trillion from 1994 to 2023 because the taxes they paid cut budget deficits by nearly one-third in real terms, a new Cato Institute study reports. Learn more from @David_J_Bier.

https://t.co/zK4oPfocrO

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

Bc of tariffs, US manufacturers in advanced industries (aerospace, automotive, energy, etc) now pay MUCH more than their global competitors so that a few well-connected cronies can make windfall profits &amp; a few US politicians can cut a ribbon at a factory we don't actually need

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

"DHS is not prioritizing the 'worst of the worst.' It is running up its arrest numbers and then using a relatively small number of serious criminals to smear everyone else." https://t.co/bt0ogUHp2W via @CatoInstitute @David_J_Bier

[David French @DavidAFrench]

Do not let anyone tell you that you shouldn't record law enforcement (so long as you're not physically impeding them). Citizen video has decisively rebutted the administration's lies. The evidence of our eyes contradicts the dishonesty of the administration's words.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

The US since 1990:
• Real GDP per capita: +68%
• Real median wages (PCE): +34%
• Infant mortality: -42%
• Life expectancy: +4 years
• Nonfarm employment: +46% (50M jobs)
• Median household wealth: +128%
• Industrial capacity: +76%

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

It is not up to the military to put a stop to Trump’s ghastly ideas of war against NATO. The United States is not run by the military, nor should it be. Americans, and their elected representatives, must take this burden away from the armed forces—now.
https://t.co/VQ2mZwz15k

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

Here's the full Kiel paper on US tariff pass thru, with key findings excerpted below.

Conclusion: "The claim that foreign countries 'pay' these tariffs is a myth. The tariffs are, in the most literal sense, an own goal. Americans are footing the bill."
https://t.co/8SyBYtr48q

[Nick Timiraos @NickTimiraos]

By analyzing $4 trillion of shipments between January 2024 and November 2025, researchers found that foreign exporters absorbed only about 4% of the burden of last year’s U.S. tariff increases by lowering their prices, while American consumers and importers absorbed 96%.

The tariffs had a significant effect on trade volumes: Facing higher U.S. tariffs, Indian exporters maintained their prices but reduced the volume of shipments to the U.S. by 18%-24% relative to the European Union, Canada and Australia, the report found.

Rather than acting as a tax on foreign producers, the tariffs functioned as a consumption tax on Americans. The $200 billion in additional U.S. tariff revenue last year “was paid almost exclusively by Americans.”

https://t.co/ORN8xsgyk8