“Biden is facing intensifying pressure across the Democratic Party to step aside, fueled by worries he’s falling further behind Trump in the polls and could also jeopardize efforts to win the House and Senate. Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.), Marc Veasey (D-Texas) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said in a joint message to Biden Friday that ‘it is now time for you to pass the torch to a new generation of Democratic leaders.’ The headline of an op-ed from Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) in the Chicago Tribune used the same ‘pass the torch’ phrase and separately cited Democratic voters’ ‘tremendous fear’ that Trump will win the White House. ‘It breaks my heart to say it, but Biden is no longer up for that job,’ he wrote. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) issued his own statement shortly afterward that repeated the ‘pass the torch’ language, adding that ‘I believe it is in the best interests of our country for him to step aside.’ Later on Friday, Reps. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) also called for Biden to step aside. More Democratic lawmakers are expected to publicly air their own concerns in coming days, according to a senior Hill Democrat granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. But a handful of additional defections by longer tenured Democratic senators with years-long relationships with the president would have a much larger impact, the Democrat said. The delicate goal, the Democrat added: Create enough public pressure to force the president’s hand, while allowing him some measure of dignity so that it appears he came to the decision on his own.” (Adam Cancryn, Jonathan Lemire and Eli Stokols/Politico)
“Just 12 million light-years away, Centaurus A (NGC 5128) is the nearest active galaxy to us, with a supermassive black hole at its core spitting material back out into the intergalactic medium. Famously, these outflows can be seen in radio emission as enormous lobes on either side of the galaxy. However, this Hα/OIII/LRGB image taken from the Atacama Desert in Chile with a robotic 24-inch scope (and nearly 24 hours of exposure) gives a detailed view of ejections of matter in visible light at bottom right.” (Astronomy.com)
“A notched wooden stick from South Africa’s Border Cave dating to 24,000 years ago contains the earliest evidence of humans using poison. The artifact was found in the 1970s, but new chemical analyses conducted by a research team led by Francesco d’Errico of Bordeaux University in France revealed trace amounts of substances from poisonous castor beans. The stick may have been used to apply poison to arrowheads just as a culture of modern-day hunter-gatherers called the San does today in southern Africa. According to d’Errico, poison is an important part of traditional San hunting methods because their bone-tipped arrows usually don’t cause enough damage to kill large prey on their own. In South Africa’s Border Cave, archaeologists found ostrich eggshell beads (top), wooden digging sticks (left), and notched sticks (right) used to apply poison to arrowheads.The poison applicator is just one of several artifacts, some dating to as early as 44,000 years ago, that resemble objects used by the San. Others include a digging stick, ostrich eggshell beads, carved pig tusks, bone arrowheads, and a lump of beeswax.” (Zach Morich/Archaeology)
“‘First they feel they were snookered at the time of German unification. As you noted with me, [former Secretary of State James] Baker's promises on not extending NATO military presence into what was East Germany were part of a perceived commitment not to expand the Alliance eastward,’ the memo continues. ‘In addition, the 1991 promise to begin to transform NATO from a military alliance into a political alliance was part of the Soviet explanation for accepting a unified Germany in NATO.’ Because these perceived promises were never made concretely, Ross says, the Russians were ‘taking the lessons of 1991 and are trying to apply them now in the negotiations on NATO expansion.’ Despite these roadblocks, Clinton and his Russian counterpart Boris Yeltsin nonetheless reached an agreement on a series of issues at a summit in Helsinki one month later. During a private conversation with Clinton at that summit — which was part of the set of declassified documents — Yeltsin would say that he reached an agreement with NATO not because he wanted to “‘but because it is a forced step’ … The consequences of choosing to ignore Russian concerns decades ago continue to have an impact on relations between the West and Moscow today, experts say. ‘These declassified documents underscore that U.S. officials clearly have long understood the depth of Moscow's objections to NATO's eastward expansion, going back to the Gorbachev era and Yeltsin's presidency. Yet Washington proceeded with this expansion anyway, judging that Russia would remain powerless to prevent it,’ George Beebe, director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute, told Responsible Statecraft. ‘Today, Russia is both embittered by this history and much more powerful than it was then, and it is resolved to block NATO's incorporation of Ukraine and Georgia by whatever means necessary.’” (Blaise Malley/Responsible Statecraft)
“The assassination attempt on Donald Trump drew an already sympathetic class of top tech executives even closer to the Republican presidential nominee. Elon Musk, who had promised as recently as March that he would not directly support a candidate, announced soon after the shooting that he ‘fully endorses’ Trump. Despite the seeming abruptness of the turn, Musk’s backing was a fait accompli: He and Trump have reportedly been speaking together frequently in recent months, and their bitterly reactionary politics obviously align. Within days, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk was committing a remarkable $45 million per month to America PAC, a new pro-Trump super PAC that would also be supported by Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, Mark Zuckerberg castoffs Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and several members of what’s sometimes called the Paypal mafia, a right-wing network of tech industry leaders with Peter Thiel as its presiding majordomo. If, two years ago The New York Times could make the dubious claim that tech giants like Musk were hard to pin down politically, there is no room now for even that level of credulousness. It’s official: Silicon Valley has been fully MAGA-pilled, and the tech authoritarians are bringing their money with them. On Monday, Trump unveiled as his VP pick Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, a former Thiel employee and venture capitalist who owes his election to the Senate to a $15 million campaign cash infusion from Thiel. For the tech industry, whose rightward swerve has been hard to ignore this campaign cycle, the Vance selection was sensational. ‘We have a former tech VC in the White House,’ crowed Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund who once drew notice for sharing a comic by the neo-Nazi cartoonist known as StoneToss. ‘Greatest country on Earth baby.’” (Jacob Silverman/The Nation)
“What can you say about a week when the attempted assassination of the once and quite possibly future President was not necessarily the biggest news? On Monday, less than forty-eight hours after the shooting in Pennsylvania, Trump chose as his Veep-in-waiting a thirty-nine-year-old first-term senator from Ohio who once called Trump ‘America’s Hitler.’ In writing, no less. In any other political moment, a headline for the ages. By Thursday, however, it became clear that the most extraordinary development of the 2024 election thus far was unfolding not inside the Republican convention hall in Milwaukee but among Democratic Party leaders so panicked about Trump’s resurgent political fortunes that they were attempting to push aside their own incumbent President. The coup against Joe Biden, should it succeed, would represent something as unprecedented in its own way as the fact that the Republican Party has now formally ratified the decision to stake its future on a deeply unpopular, rapidly aging demagogue who was repudiated by voters only four years ago. Against such a backdrop, with Biden’s fate uncertain after his disastrous debate performance three weeks ago and rumors of his imminent exit as abundant as the red Make America Great Again hats on the convention floor, Republicans, for once, seemed almost sublimely confident in their own chances of victory. ‘Right now the Democrats are the perfect circular firing squad and we have the run of the field,’ Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio told a panel convened by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, which included the Democratic strategist David Axelrod, one of the loudest voices publicly pushing for Biden to exit, even warning that Democrats risked a ‘landslide’ if he does not.” (Susan B. Glasser/TNY)
“My father and O. J. Simpson were passing ships in red Corvettes in Brentwood, Los Angeles. Circa 1977, the sunroofs of their nearly identical luxury cars open for maximum exposure, they would wave to one another like carnival jesters, my sister in the back seat squeamish at the irony, their white wives occupying the front seats in a Siamese dream, twin stars in the fantasy no one is aware of until it arrives in images. Such gestures were the requisite scenic signifiers for that era of post–New Negro black entertainers faced with the hedonism of psychedelia, blaxploitation, and the amphetamined economy of the Reagan years. They were transitioning from taboos to tabloids to well-adjusted, literal tokens, having made it to some sense of after all or ever after in a fairy tale blurring the wasteland upheld by the lucky-bland amusements of almost-suburbanites. Unkempt and illicit ambitions were their freedom and retribution. My father earned his living writing love songs that were ventriloquized by pop stars and peers such as Ray Charles; he agonized over the banality of spectacle in lyrics that rendered the banal uplifting. O. J. cradled footballs and ran very fast when chased, bowlegged, baffled at his own momentum. He accrued enough of it to become the first black athlete to garner corporate endorsements from companies like Hertz. He’d open in the typical format of vintage commercials, by reciting semi-didactic pleasantries as adspeak. Then he’d embody his embargoed alter ego, his own personal starship and space shuttle, and ramp up to cinematic sprinting through an airport terminal, wearing a three-piece suit and landing in a hideous car that made the Corvette with the top down seem like an inaccessible yearning, all while maintaining the plastic smile of a catalogue model. O. J.’s sad and vaguely distracted gaze revealed a self-deprecating narcissism contracted during the transition from being bullied as a child to outrunning everyone and every limitation he’d ever known.” (Harmony Holiday/The Paris Review)
“In Ukraine, the Russian offensive in Kharkiv has culminated. The Ukrainians have managed to stabilise this part of the frontline but it required the redeployment of forces from the eastern front to do so. There, the news is not as good - Russian forces continue a slow advance, although this is coming at a massive cost in lives. In May and June, according to a report from British defence intelligence, the Russians have lost an average of about 1200 soldiers per day in Ukraine. Given the small amount of territory seized - about 550 square kilometers for the entirety of 2024 so far, this is a poor return on investment. Finally, it was confirmed that Ukrainian marines have withdrawn from their positions on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River at Krynky. In the past day or so, it has been confirmed that Germany will be cutting its aid for Ukraine next year. While this is apparently because a $50 billion aid package has been secured for Ukraine based on seizing the interest on frozen Russian assets by G7 nations, it hardly seems like the time to be cutting aid. Germany is currently Ukraine’s second largest donor of assistance. And, finally, I can’t conclude without mentioning some of the events from the Republican National Convention this week. Two are noteworthy. First, in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Presidential contender Donald Trump stated that ‘Taiwan should pay us for defense…You know, we’re no different than an insurance company.’ Actually the U.S. is very different to, and much greater than, an insurance company. Alliances aren’t financial agreements - they are mutual commitments to protect shared values.” (Mick Ryan/Futura Doctrine)
“Irrespective of whether one considers that hybrid warfare excludes kinetic action or not, disinformation–understood as a strategic enterprise to alter the “epistemic integrity” of a society, to blur the distinction between what is real and what is not real (be it false, misleading, or synthetic)–plays a crucial role. Disinformation reduces the distinction between truth and falsehood, between facts and pseudo-facts to nothing but blurred lines: everybody gets their own version of facts, thus rendering objective, reality-based discourse almost impossible. Disinformation is a strategic enterprise to distort policy and mislead people in the target society, is aimed at both military and non-military targets, and is not an ad hoc manipulation of the (mainstream and social) media ecosystem for limited tactical, short-term gains. Moreover, its goal is not to persuade the target society of an arguably higher, superior political (or economic) model. Rather, it seeks to: 1) undermine decision-making processes (by postponing, delaying, blocking, or disrupting these processes); 2) polarize and weaken social cohesion; 3) cultivate a feeling of generalized suspicion, confusion, and disorientation; and 4) undermine trust in institutions, in democratic processes, in facts, and in knowledge. Perhaps the greatest danger of disinformation understood in this strategic, and not opportunistic, sense resides in its capacity to hijack public conversation in democratic societies altogether (its dominant themes, narratives and frames) and turn agenda-setting, framing, priming, and narrative building into instruments of power. Under conditions of hybrid attack on the communication and sense-making infrastructures in a democratic society, factual, reality-grounded conversations become less practical and, worse, not even desirable. The path that has led to the current situation, where democratic, open societies seem under constant attacks that seek to disrupt their epistemic integrity, has a long and winding history, and dissecting it thoroughly is beyond the scope of the present analysis. Nevertheless, it is our understanding that a considerable part of the problem lies in the emergence of a new, largely ungoverned online information space, systemic risks to which remain poorly understood. This new, hyper-connected, technologized, and digitized realm has become the vulnerable strategic underbelly of modern democracies.” (Prof. Alina Bârgăoanu and Dr. Elena Negrea-Busuioc/Irregular Warfare Center)
“There are no easy policy options out of Kenya’s fiscal crisis. There’s a decade-long “refinancing wall” ahead, with debt servicing already gobbling up about half of all revenues. Since access to and misappropriation of state resources is the glue that binds his political coalition, President William Ruto is unwilling to facilitate public finance management (PFM) reforms in the direction of better service delivery and less wastage/corruption. Talk of a national dialogue and the impending ‘unity’ Cabinet that includes opposition politicians are tactics to buy time and political cover, and not good faith responses to protesters’ demands. Ruto’s preferred course of action — riding out the protests and maintaining the status quo — has been revealed by his administration’s behavior so far. Police brutality has so far resulted in more than 53 deaths and dozens of abductions. Bizarrely, Ruto has been searching for scapegoats (and dabbling in increasingly incoherent misinformation campaigns) rather than confronting the well-known root causes of public anger at his administration. This is one reason why nationwide protests are unlikely to abate any time soon, despite Ruto’s decision to veto the 2024 Finance Bill and fire his Cabinet.” (Ken Opalo/The Africanist Perspective)
“Yes, I know The Gilded Age received a nomination for Outstanding Drama Series — and I'm thrilled voters also acknowledged the brilliance of Queen Christine Baranski as Lead Actress in a Drama for her performances as Agnes van Rhijn. But must the fates once again scorn Agnes' poor sister, Ada Brook, played with tremulous charm by Cynthia Nixon? Honestly, the actress deserves a special award for surviving the Che storyline in And Just Like That, but a nomination for Gilded Age seemed a lot more likely.? (EW)