Reading archive 2025-08-19

Now it is the Old World’s turn to rescue the United States: As Trump met with European leaders on Ukraine, Churchill’s words from days long ago came to mind.

Maine police officer arrested by ICE agrees to voluntarily leave the country: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says a Maine police officer arrested by immigration authorities has agreed to voluntarily leave the country

Sherrod Brown raises $3.6 million in 24 hours for Senate campaign: The total includes $3 million raised by Brown’s campaign, and about $600,000 raised by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Ohio Democratic Party.

People Are Trying to ‘Deprogram’ Their MAGA Parents Through Book Clubs: Divisive politics have led people to go “no contact” with their right-wing parents. Some hope reading together could help bridge the gap.

The Only Plausible Path to End the War in Ukraine: Has the Trump administration misread Moscow? - "Ultimately, the diplomatic problem the Trump administration faces is how to persuade Russia to accept an independent and sovereign Ukraine. All the signs from Moscow are that it has not backed off from a maximalist position. The only plausible way to end the war is to create a battlefield reality that convinces Putin that he cannot make more gains, that he will pay a massive price for continuing the war, and that this reality is unlikely to change. That means that the United States and its allies need to, paradoxically, get serious about arming Ukraine for a protracted conflict and putting pressure on Russia. That is the only way to create the conditions for successful negotiations to end the war."

The Mainstreaming of Zohran Mamdani: Which flavor of socialism would the mayoral candidate bring to New York City? - "DSA's national political platform, rewritten when Mamdani was an assemblyman, is a gumbo of left-wing positions, many of which sit miles from the political mainstream. The organization would free all inmates from prisons and jails and decriminalize the drug trade, prostitution, and squatting in unoccupied homes. DSA endorses cutting police budgets 'annually towards zero,' disarming cops, and decertifying their unions."

A Nation of Lawyers Confronts China’s Engineering State: As the Chinese economy surges forward, the U.S. has lost its capacity for physical improvement. - "How did America lose so much productive capacity to China and end up in such a vulnerable position? Think about it this way: China is an engineering state, which treats construction projects and technological primacy as the solution to all of its problems, whereas the United States is a lawyerly society, obsessed with protecting wealth by making rules rather than producing material goods. Successive American administrations have attempted to counter Beijing through legalism levying tariffs and designing an ever more exquisite sanctions regime while the engineering state has created the future by physically building better cars, better-functioning cities, and bigger power plants.

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"The engineering state is effective at making military goods too. China produces about 80 percent of the world's consumer drones, which can easily be adapted for the battlefield. China has approximately 200 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States; according to the Government Accountability Office, many classes of U.S. Navy ships are delayed by up to three years. Last December, then National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said bluntly that the United States will experience 'exhaustion of munition stockpiles very rapidly' if it were ever to face the Chinese military. America has lost the productive capacity to sustain a major war. American manufacturing output has never recovered to its highs from 2008; the manufacturing workforce has shrunk by a million people since then."