Colorado FSO

When I arrived in Rome, my predecessor had been gone for some time.  His assistant, who would be my assistant, had been handling the science job until my arrival.  I had not had Italian language training, and the main issue for the office was fisheries, which was handled by the…

The Washington Post reports that as part of its attack on European countries for their democratic institutions, the State Department is revising its human rights reports to be more critical of leftist views. I think I wrote the first human rights report on Brazil while I was working on the…

As I was finishing my tour as the deputy director of the State Department’s “green” environmental office – responsible for living things like forests, animals, and humans – the office across the hall that was responsible for supporting foreign service science officers in the field asked if I would accept…

In the New York Review of Books, Christopher Brown writes about what a “Manchurian Candidate” would do if elected, and it turns out to almlst exactly what Donald Trump has been doing. He says: Imagine that the president of the United States was a “Manchurian candidate,” an embedded foreign agent…

I am disappointed in Bill Maher’s readout of his dinner with President Trump. Maher found Trump charming and gracious, with no name calling or epithets. My theory is that Trump could do this because he won, and Maher lost.  Unspoken but underlying the conversation was Trump’s view that I kicked…

In the course of a general talk I said that the first preoccupation must be to prevent further aggression in the future by Germany or Japan. To this end I contemplated an association of the United States, Great Britain, and Russia. If the United States wished to include China in…

Early the following morning I lay in bed in my saloon on the train composing, in the light of the general discussion which had taken place, a note on my views on post-war security. I called this paper “Morning Thoughts”. One paragraph is possibly worthy of preservation in the light…

A number of senior US officials on a Signal call to discuss the US attack on the Houthis inadvertently included a journalist who should not have been on the call. The Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote the story, Michael Gordon, used to call me at home to seek confirmation…

I am disappointed in how Trump deported the 200 Venezuelans on …  There seem to be several legal complications, mainly whether the Trump administration violated the judge’s order not to proceed with the deportations by continuin with the deportations.  These are important and should be resolved.   My personal concern is…

Wired Magazine reports that European countries are becoming more wary of doing business with big US internet and cloud firms like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. , “There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could…