Armas Reader
Some administrative changes to the Reader format: this is no longer the weekend reader, as content accretes too quickly (especially in an election year in the UK, France, Mexico, and the United States) to make for usable every-week lists. Instead, the Reader will be sent out when a critical mass of thirty to forty stories accumulate.
Today, we have the Biden candidacy at either Rorke’s Drift or Isandlwana, the glory days of RAND, war crimes in Ukraine, reflections on collapse, Texas in the SEC, Hungarians going rogue, left-populism unleashed in bloodied Mexico, and more. Let’s go —
Biden Tells Democrats He Is ‘Running This Race to the End’— “I’m getting frustrated by the elites…in the party. If any of these guys don’t think I should run, run against me. Announce for president, challenge me at the convention.”
Hey man, we’re out of runway— “To see Biden that way was to forget his decades in the Senate as an arrogant opportunist, an inconsistent warmonger and a plagiarist (his speeches stole from Neil Kinnock and JFK). Age took the edge off him. Reaching the White House four years ago, he accomplished at 78 what he couldn’t manage at 45 or 65. Perhaps he’s been better at the job as a mellow old man than he would have been as a middle-aged hothead – though that is little comfort to the rest of the world, especially the zones under American protection or subject to US (or US-sponsored) might. There, it seems, the emperor has no brain.”
When RAND Made Magic in Santa Monica—Asterisk— “RAND’s halcyon days lasted two decades, during which the corporation produced some of the most influential developments in science and American foreign policy. So how did it become just another think tank?”
‘Reds’ Review: Communism in the U.S.A.— “If the history of American Communism is a narrative of conversion and faith, it is also one of disenchantment and apostasy.”
The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden — “When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that. Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem?”
‘Alexander at the End of the World’ Review: Empire in the East— “In the context of ancient Greek warfare, total destruction of a rebellious subject was not unprecedented, but it was certainly extreme. Alexander had shown the world a capacity for cruelty, and this demonstration would serve him well in the Asian campaign that began the following year. Peoples that might have defied him instead joined his side; those that resisted often suffered fates nearly as grim as that of Thebes. His modern critics have thus compared his march of conquest to those masterminded by Genghis Khan or Hernando Cortés.”
The UK’s new electoral map in charts— “The results are in — what have we learned?”
How Much Do You Know About the American Revolution?— “This week’s installment tests your knowledge of the American Revolution and popular books written about it.”
A Spin Doctor to the Rich and Corrupt Spills His Secrets— “Elwood becomes a foot soldier for BLJ Worldwide after making a name for himself as an aggressive and creative spin doctor in Washington. He is impressed, at first, by Brown’s polished demeanor, not to mention his habit of unspooling Beatles anecdotes between sips of Campari and soda. Nor is Elwood put off by the firm’s client list, which comes to include the Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Russia Today, a news outlet started by the Kremlin to improve Russia’s standing beyond its borders.”
In Ukraine, Killings of Surrendering Russians Divide an American-Led Unit— “Today a good friend willingly executed a bound prisoner. As the prisoner was sitting in a trench blendage with his jacket draped over his shoulders, Zeus came up behind him and shot him into the back of the head multiple times. Going to bed.”
Behind the Curtain: Biden's credibility crisis— “What turn of events would keep Democrats, media and voters from watching every public appearance for hints of decline? How could reporters ever trust Biden aides after they tried to shame reporters who dared point out the obvious changes? How do they reassure lawmakers who now see Biden's age and White House denialism as their problem?”
Opinion | The West Needs New Glasses— “In 2024, we are not in Sarajevo, Munich or Pearl Harbor. But that does not change the profound effect these perspectives have. Each pair of glasses not only shapes an intellectual analysis of current events but also entails a strong moral conviction of being right, even superior. It is this feeling, rather than the mere choice of historical analogy, that can lead protagonists to close themselves off from listening to one another. Yet there is a way to reconcile all sides. It lies in understanding that we are not in an old-fashioned prewar era but a new era of hybrid war.”
America’s New Nuclear Deterrence Era— “Deterring war—especially nuclear war against two nuclear peer adversaries—and preserving the American people and our way of life is and must remain the No. 1 priority of the U.S. government. We can afford to do this, but we cannot afford to fail.”
Will Texas play nice or throw around its weight in SEC?— “An intriguing marriage of convenience began this week: Texas and the SEC. After three years of looking like they would enter the conference humbly, the Longhorns spent the week before hiring a baseball coach in grandiose fashion and having quarterback Quinn Ewers proclaim the Longhorns would be ‘everyone’s biggest game, for sure.’ Unless of course, Texas is joining a conference that has five programs that have combined to win 13 national championships since Texas won its last one.
An AI Haunted World— “The AI genie is out of the bottle. To the extent that LLMs were exclusively in the hands of a few large tech companies, that is no longer true. There is no longer a policy that can effectively ban AI or one that can broadly restrict how AIs can be used or what they can be used for. And, since anyone can modify these systems, to a large extent AI development is also now much more democratized, for better or worse.”
The Reintroduction of Kamala Harris— “Vice President Kamala Harris already knew something had to change. It was up to her, she had told allies, to finally distinguish herself in her job — something she had been struggling to do for more than two years — and reassure American voters that the Biden-Harris ticket was still a safe bet. She had been feeling sidelined in the early stages of the campaign, one adviser said, and she wanted a bigger role.”
A Dredful Decision— “The antislavery response to Taney’s opinion was a storm of outraged fury. To radicals like Garrison it was a new reason for burning the Constitution. But for Republicans like Lincoln it was more complicated. They were not Constitution burners. Yet the Supreme Court had declared the cardinal principle of their party unconstitutional, and the court’s opinion was the law of the land. They were determined to defy the decision, but how could they defy the court without defying the law and being charged with treason?”
Confessions of a Fixed-Mindset Leader— “I once had an S3 who would go berserk when upset. He was known for clearing tables and throwing phones. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel because our commander cared more about the results he achieved than the toxic environment he created. I also had a leader who refused to accept an outstanding officer as his XO because that officer did not have a Ranger tab. That same leader would torpedo people’s career once he perceived they were underperforming or had limited potential. These poor leaders, I‘ve come to see, shared one thing in common: a fixed mindset.”
For Older People Who Are Lonely, Is the Solution a Robot Friend?— “She’s the closest thing to a human that I could have in my home, and she makes me feel cared for. She makes me feel important.”
Is This Kamala Harris’s Moment?— “For Harris’s strongest backers, that it is even a question whether a sitting vice president should be her party’s last-minute replacement at the top of the ticket is the latest sign she has been disrespected in the role. Her detractors, meanwhile, say she hasn’t proved she is up to the task.”
The unpardonable sins of 2021 and the Afghans who suffer because of them— “[W]hat isn’t getting any attention is what is happening in Afghanistan, the misery the ‘international community’ is expecting Afghans to endure and the efforts Afghans themselves are making to throw off their theocratic-fascist tormentors … Jihadists from all over the world are now arming and training in Afghanistan again. It’s just like the days before Sept. 11, 2001. Al-Qaida is back.”
Reading The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien — “I recently finished reading The Hobbit to my children and I loved every minute of it. You might think Tolkien breaks many rules of writing. He says ‘suddenly’ all the time. He uses ‘he’ multiples times in a sentence, referring to two different people. He constantly breaks the fourth wall to say ‘of course such and such’. He repeats words, relatively close together. And so on. But Tolkien does all of this deliberately. Lots of the action is rather sudden. Sometimes it is confusing and he wants you to feel that. Often the repetitions are reinforcing a point. He breaks the fourth wall to create the sense that this legend is one small part of a longer, bigger history.”
The Prime Minister and Nuclear Retaliation.— “Now that the Prime Minister is settled in No 10 Downing Street, the detailed business of the transition of power has begun. If you believe various media accounts, practically the first thing that happens is that the newly appointed Prime Minister is given a briefing on the nuclear deterrent, a pad of paper and a pen, and ask to discreetly write down their views on what the end of the world should look like. Known as the ‘Letters of Last Resort’ these documents have assumed a near mythological status in accounts of the British State.”
The Collapse of Complex Nations.— “Dmitry Orlov's brilliant 2011 book ‘Reinventing Collapse’ and historian Niall Ferguson’s recent ‘We’re All Soviets Now’ detail many parallels between the USSR’s collapse and the situation the US faces today. They are both short reads, well worth reading in full. With these parallels in mind, let’s construct a more comprehensive framework for a Soviet-style US collapse.”
NASA Praises Flawed Boeing Starliner's Ability To Remain Stranded At The ISS— “The Boeing Starliner is still docked to the International Space Station on its debut crewed mission. Due to issues with the spacecraft, the mission surpassed the 26-day mark on Friday. The NASA flight test was initially scheduled to last 10 days. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams don’t have a set date when they will return to Earth.”
Boeing to plead guilty to fraud charge over 737 Max crash deal— “Boeing is to plead guilty to conspiracy to defraud the US government after it violated a deal struck with the Department of Justice in the wake of two deadly crashes involving its 737 Max aircraft.”
War, Peace, and Politics: Reflections on Writing — “As I reflected upon it more, I realized that my dissatisfaction had less to do with how academic articles were written and more with what they were trying to accomplish. Often, academic researchers were simply trying to decisively win an argument and to lay to rest an important question, or to reveal a history or phenomena we did not know or recognize before, as they were (correctly) trained to do. These are important, laudable goals, and to achieve it, the stylistic norms of each discipline are often appropriate. Over time, however, I recognized that the questions that most interested me — the ones that kept me up at night — were often immune to final answers.”
What Will Become of American Civilization?— “Phoenix makes you keenly aware of human artifice—its ingenuity and its fragility. The American lust for new things and new ideas, good and bad ones, is most palpable here in the West, but the dynamo that generates all the microchip factories and battery plants and downtown high-rises and master-planned suburbs runs so high that it suggests its own oblivion. New Yorkers and Chicagoans don’t wonder how long their cities will go on existing, but in Phoenix in August, when the heat has broken 110 degrees for a month straight, the desert golf courses and urban freeways give this civilization an air of impermanence, like a mirage composed of sheer hubris, and a surprising number of inhabitants begin to brood on its disappearance.”
A Good Life Versus The Good Life— “One way to contrast modern sensibilities with Christian sensibilities is to describe the difference between ‘the good life’ and ‘a good life.’ ‘The good life’ is an advertising theme, a photoshoot of the American Dream where all obstacles are overcome through the miracles of technology, market forces, and unfettered freedom. ‘A good life’ is an entirely different question. A good life may very well include an abundance of suffering, disease, and deprivation. The difference in these two descriptions points towards the overarching narratives that surround them. In effect, they describe two very different religions. True Christianity is incompatible with the American Dream.”
Mexico’s AMLO Is Anything but a Lame Duck— “AMLO will perhaps be the most powerful lame duck president in history. And while most presidents—at least those who aren’t desperately trying to hold onto power—spend their final month in office engaging in symbolic acts and managing the boring bureaucratic process of transferring power to their successor, AMLO will engage in one last attempt to rewrite the rules of Mexican democracy.”
Estimada presidenta Sheinbaum, México se desangra. Es hora de parar esta catástrofe— “Mexico is stained with blood, its land littered with mass graves with hundreds of skulls near homes where children play. Mothers tirelessly search for years for their loved ones who were dragged away by masked men with Kalashnikovs. In villages, people flee their homes after cartel militias drop homemade bombs on them from drones. Residents of border towns hide in their rooms as the sound of gunfire echoes through the streets.”
In Latin America, the U.S. Is Relying Too Much on its Military— “[I]n virtually every capital around the region, you hear the same refrain: There has been a lack of U.S. political and diplomatic engagement with the Western Hemisphere in recent years. Given that reality, SouthCom seems to be trying to fill the gap.”
Why Donald Trump rejected American conservatism’s favourite think tank— “Trump won the 2016 GOP primary by defying conservative policy orthodoxies, and he continues to disappoint the purists this time around. Behold his hilariously cruel dismissal of Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation-led effort to staff and set the agenda of his next administration.”
Is Israel ready for another war?— “Hezbollah is a more sophisticated enemy than Hamas — it has closer links with Iran, a giant arsenal of rockets, about 25,000 fighters and 30,000 reservists. But Israeli officials insist that they aren’t scared. ‘I sleep like a baby,’ says a bespectacled IDF lieutenant colonel, who spends his days staring at the Lebanese mountains from a few miles away. If Israel has to turn north, ‘what’s happened in Gaza will be child’s play.’”
From Red Passport to Blue: Becoming a Chinese-American— “In May 2020, my mother, in her 70s, watched me being escorted by security to an airport gate in Shanghai, thrown out of the country where I had spent half my life. Fifteen hours later, as I handed over my blue passport at JFK Airport in New York, a customs officer greeted me, ‘Welcome home.’ That was the moment I realized that I am no longer just a blue-passport holder. I am a proud Chinese-American.”
Recriminations fly in Marine Le Pen’s party over French election result— “A senior party official in Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National has stepped down, amid recriminations within the French far right over its worse than expected election result … Adding to the party’s woes, French prosecutors on Tuesday said they had opened an investigation into the financing of Le Pen’s unsuccessful 2022 presidential campaign. Le Pen and other RN officials are also set to go on trial in September over fraud allegations regarding EU payments.”
WOUNDED VETERANS, WOUNDED ECONOMY: THE PERSONNEL COSTS OF RUSSIA’S WAR— “Throughout its history, Russia has rarely cared for its soldiers, on or off the battlefield. The Kremlin’s current attempt to do right by its veterans looks to be simultaneously insufficient and unaffordable, destined to leave behind armies of broken men while draining state coffers.”
China, Ukraine, & GWOT: The Warping Power of Dissolution Begat by Lies— “Just as we can’t garrison the world and fight its battles, neither can we retreat fully across our ocean moats and kind borders to focus on just one possible threat. The world has its own plan. Perhaps China is the next great threat, maybe it won’t be. We aren’t that great at picking the next war.”
Planet TikTok— “The app’s young user base, fragmented content, and amped-up algorithm helped it spread around the world. If the US bans it, what would be lost?”
All the Houthi-US Navy incidents in the Middle East (that we know of)— “Below is a running list of every instance where a U.S. Navy ship or jet has shot down a Houthi attack, and every instance where the United States and its allies have hit back at Houthi sites in Yemen, since October.”
Ukrainian attacks on supply lines slowed Russians in Kharkiv, intercepts show— “Ukrainian attacks on Russian supply lines have left Russian units scrambling for food, water and ammunition, blunting Moscow’s renewed invasion into Ukraine’s northeast Kharkiv region … The intercepts and extensive interviews with 10 Ukrainian commanders and troops operating across the front line in Kharkiv — including several who monitor Russian communications and who question POWs immediately after they are captured — paint a picture of increasingly desperate Russian ground troops who are losing personnel and momentum after reinvading across the border in May.”
Viktor Orbán goes rogue— “Just three days later, Orbán was off again — creating much greater controversy among EU leaders who insist he does not speak for them; that his role as Hungarian prime minister as it runs the Council of the EU is diplomatically irrelevant. This time he offered the same hand in Moscow to Putin, Russia's bloodthirsty leader who has been waging war on Ukraine for years and threatening Europe's post-world-war security architecture.”
The Foreign Policy Foundations of Trumpism— “The foundational foreign policy pillars of Trumpism, nation-state sovereignty and burden sharing, come together to support a vision that America must be strong at home to project power abroad. In many ways it is a return to the basics of U.S. foreign policy established by the founding fathers … President Trump’s policies were a remix of America’s original foreign policy that allowed the U.S. to become a global powerhouse in the first place.”
What does McDonald's Mean?— “I was a kid in 1996, when the first McDonald’s opened in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. It was an anticipated event covered by the newspapers, fodder for family conversations. The prices were accessible only for the upper middle class. But everyone wanted a taste of America. A friend of mine, one of seven children, told me about his mother’s plan to take one child to McDonald’s every month, starting with the oldest. This was the only way his family could afford to give everyone a chance to experience McDonald’s.”
🌅 Dawn of the distributed age— “[I]]t’s the dawn of distributed energy. The future of energy isn’t just about technological advances. The decentralisation — driven by modularity and declining prices — is about reshaping economies, transforming geopolitics, and democratising access to electricity globally. This is about a fundamental shift in the way we approach energy systems.”
5,000 Miles, 8 Countries: The Path to the U.S. Through One Family’s Eyes— “The three children had not bathed in four days. They had been sleeping in a makeshift tent on a dirty street outside a bus terminal in Mexico City, and Hayli, only 6, was developing a rash between her legs. But the parents could not spare the 20 pesos, or roughly $1, for a bucket shower. After a 55-day trek through Latin America, the five members of the Aguilar Ortega family were stranded more than 3,000 miles from their Venezuelan homeland, and almost as many miles from their intended destination: New York City.”
And finally —
The Densest City In The World Had A (Strange) Secret— Dami Lee on the lost Walled City of Kowloon.