“Western strategists tend to read foreign powers through their own reflection. Having watched Britain, France, Germany, and their own country climb the ladder of empire through conquest and colonies, they assume any ascendant state will reach for the same rungs. Yet imputing European motives to an Asian civilization mistakes a particular history for a universal instinct. China’s rise unfolds inside a geography and a culture that make the sort of quick, broad conquest campaigns that defined European great powers extraordinarily hard to carry out.” (07/27/26)
“For over a decade, the FBI had been immersed in a vast, costly, but indisputably critical effort to build a modern digital case-management system. The bureau well understood the importance of information: gathering, organizing, sharing, assessing, and putting it to use to fight crime and protect national security. Yet what followed were countless missteps and misjudgments, more than $1 billion of public money squandered, and the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. And it still took more than 10 years to get it right.” (07/27/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Ted Snider & Nicolai N Petro
“On January 14, 2026, Mykhailo Fedorov was appointed Ukraine’s minister of defense. Just six months later, he was dismissed. One of Fedorov’s principal tasks, bigger even than addressing the shortage of Patriot interceptors, had been reforming his country’s recruitment and mobilization system. But manpower shortages remain a chronic issue …. But the real reason behind his firing may be something else—namely the risk of exposing the popular myth of how Ukraine has turned the tide both in the war and in its internal fight against domestic corruption.” (07/27/26)
“Homeschooling rates have steadily risen since the COVID-19 pandemic, when the difficulties of remote learning inspired many parents to pull their kids from school. This era exposed many parents to the widespread failures of the American education system. Many were confused why skyrocketing educational spending was not reversing plummeting student achievement nationwide.” (07/26/26)
“Since the US and Israel first struck Iran in February, the Trump administration has several times stopped fighting to negotiate, only to later escalate the war again. This may be because, as Michael Froman of the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan US foreign policy think tank, wrote on Friday, Trump is taking a middle-ground, simultaneous military and diplomacy approach to prevent extreme political fallout. He wants to avoid complete targeting of Iranian critical infrastructure and seizing oil with a military invasion or conceding to Iranian control of oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.” (07/26/26)
“The future is arriving, and America is entering a new infrastructure age. Much of the political class is succumbing to a familiar temptation: slow it down by stoking fear of the unknown and imagining worst-case scenarios without acknowledging the benefits. Nowhere is this clearer than with data centers.” (07/27/26)
“Even with much of their leadership and infrastructure decapitated over the last several months, the skeleton crew that remains of the Islamic Republic continues to maintain a slight upper hand over their colossal foes simply by using the Strait of Hormuz to create a heavy economic price for an oil-dependent globalized economy actively colluding with American imperialism and Israeli genocide. This is the only reason why Donald Trump pretends to play ceasefire on-and-off like a psychotic game of red-light-green-light. That rapist and his cuckholds in Tel Aviv are attempting to feign diplomacy just long enough to keep the world economy from imploding, at least until after the midterms, but those already desperate acts have been badly botched by an unexpected third party in the Persian Gulf named Oman.” (07/26/26)
“There are things in international law that we might not, in fact, desire to do. As we can see with this argument about Saudi Arabia and an enrichment plant. A straight reading of that international law insists that not only may they we should, in fact, be helping. There’s going to be an awful lot of smoke blowing, argument and shifty looks as people try to weasel a way out of obeying international law. Or argue that that should happen. Please note, we have no position at all on whether Saudi should gain an enrichment plant or not. Rather, if we can all decide that, y’know, this international law isn’t quite all it’s cracked up to be and we’d rather not have to obey it for practical reasons then, well, doesn’t that open up some vast number of interesting issues?” (07/26/26)
“Having experienced the dangers of judge-controlled tribunals, the Founders were determined to preserve the jury as a cornerstone of American justice. But when it comes to denying Americans the right to a jury trial, King George III could not hold a candle to modern American prosecutors. Today, approximately 95 percent of criminal cases in the United States are resolved through guilty pleas rather than trials. In so-called plea bargaining, prosecutors threaten unduly severe sentences for those defendants who dare go to trial or offer unduly lenient sentences for dangerous offenders looking to avoid responsibility. The result is the virtual elimination of criminal trials of any sort, jury or judge. How did this transformation occur? The short answer is that the Supreme Court let it happen, caving to Richard Nixon’s ‘law and order’ agenda.” (07/26/26)
“Not only are Black people losing political power at the hands of a hostile Supreme Court; they are also losing majority or plurality status in any number of big cities, as the in-migration of Latinos, which dwarfs that of gentrifying whites, transforms once heavily Black neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, the South-of-the-I-10-Freeway neighborhoods that for decades sent three Black representatives to the U.S. House, are now overwhelmingly Latino. For this reason, paradoxically, it may be that the kind of voting we’ve seen from the Mamdani electoral base will turn out to be the best guarantor of Black elected officials. Whatever allegations may be made against America’s new new left, they don’t include voting based on race.” (07/27/26)
