Weekend Reading
What fresh hell is this? #Sportspocalypse #Incompetence #Corruption #Affordability
“We’re witnessing a ‘once in a generation confluence of incredible events,’ Fox analytics boss Michael Mulvihill says, calling this ‘the kind of week sports documentaries get made about.’ The World Cup is underway, with the US playing Paraguay in prime time tonight. Game 5 of the NBA Finals is tomorrow night. The UFC‘s highly controversial fight night at the White House is on Sunday, and so is Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final. If the World Cup seems like an even bigger spectacle than it was four years ago, that’s because it is. ‘The decision by FIFA to nearly double the size of the World Cup has not drawn universal praise, but it is an undeniable boost to U.S. media rights holders Fox and Telemundo,’ Deadline’s Dade Hayes writes. ‘The most recent men’s edition of the Cup, held in Qatar in 2022, featured 32 nations and 64 matches. This one, played in 16 cities across North America, will see 104 matches played by 48 nations.’ ‘For media partners, that extra inventory has been a significant boost,’ Hayes adds. ‘In what tends to be a sleepy time of year, the tournament will provide daily, ad-friendly programming with a larger footprint than the Olympics.’ Fox Sports exec Zac Kenworthy says it is ‘the biggest production Fox Sports has ever put on in our company’s history.’” (Brian Stelter/Reliable Sources)
“After taking office last year, President Trump unapologetically pushed a might-makes-right vision to remake the international order around a U.S. sphere of influence, a worldview not that dissimilar from Russia’s or China’s. The future seemed shaped by an oft-repeated line from ancient Greek historian Thucydides: ‘The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer as they must.’ The saying, originally uttered by invading Athenian forces to the doomed islanders of Melos in 416 B.C., featured prominently in Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech that sent ripples through the international conference in Davos in January, at the peak of Europe’s spat with Trump over his plans to seize the Danish island of Greenland. Yet now it seems that the weak aren’t as weak as many had believed. The strong can’t really do what they want, either. Despite spending a significant part of its long-range munitions and killing a large part of the Iranian leadership, the U.S. military hasn’t been able to secure a strategic victory over a middle power such as Iran. Tehran continues blockading the Strait of Hormuz. Its theocratic system is still in solid control and maintains the ability to lob missiles at Israel and Gulf states, with the latest exchange of salvos this week. Ukraine hasn’t crumbled, either. Trump cut off American aid more than a year ago and put a diplomatic squeeze on Kyiv to surrender its eastern region of Donetsk, as part of his understanding with Russia at August’s summit in Alaska. Despite that, Ukraine has managed to turn the tide of the war against Russia, holding the front line and inflicting increasingly painful strikes on the Russian heartland. These developments showed how much technological advances—such as drones and much cheaper precision missiles—have leveled the playing field between the smaller states and the great powers that are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on their armed forces.” (Yaroslav Trofimov/WSJ)
“RICK ROWLEY: So, Hell’s Army, I mean, I’ve been making films about war for most of my life, because war reveals us. At its moral extremities, our deepest sicknesses become visible not just as individuals, but as a culture. And so, the return of mercenary armies to the battlefield after centuries of absence is more than just a change in military tactics. Democracies don’t need mercenaries. They’re what states turn to when war has become a tool of private greed. They debase soldiers and turn them into murderers. They debase the entire nation by the thugs and the gangsters who run it. And that’s not only a problem in Russia, these processes, the rise of authoritarianism and oligarchy. We’re seeing them right here in the United States and around the world. So, this film is a warning sign of the horrors that lie ahead on this road. Authoritarianism and oligarchy are closing in all around us, but I still think that we can choose a kind of a different path. AMY GOODMAN: And remind us what the Wagner Group is, who Yevgeny Prigozhin was, and his fiery demise in 2023. RICK ROWLEY: Yeah. Well, so, I’ve been tracking mercenaries since 2004, when I first crossed paths with them in Iraq. And, you know, Blackwater there, which was exposed by the brilliant reporter named Jeremy Scahill, was an inspiration to the Russian Ministry of Defense to develop its own mercenary capability. But when Wagner emerged from the shadows first in Syria, it was clear that they’d realized an ideal, a terrifying ideal, that Blackwater and all of its descendants had failed to do. Wagner put 30,000 soldiers in the field at one time. They were larger than most of the armies in Europe. They’re the first private company to conquer a European city in 500 years. And, you know, as you saw in that clip, in countries like the Central African Republic, they’re propping up autocrats in order — while they seize oil fields and gold mines. I mean, when war is turned into a tool of private greed, I mean, it’s a — it’s a business that is always looking for areas to expand. And, you know, it’s a scourge that should have been banned from the battlefield centuries ago. So, Prigozhin’s story and Wagner’s story is incredible. It’s like — it’s like a parallel to the Hollywood film Scarface. Prigozhin was in a Soviet penal colony and was released into the chaos of post-Soviet St. Petersburg. He was a petty thug and a gangster who ran — probably ran money-laundering outfits, you know, casinos and restaurants, linked to other figures in the underworld in St. Petersburg, who happened to cross paths with a rising star there, a former KGB agent named Vladimir Putin. And when Putin became president, Prigozhin became a billionaire.” (Amy Goodman/Democracy Now)
“Dimension 1: Military — Russia’s ‘meat grinder’ and massed aerial attacks are consuming Russian resources for minimal return. The central premise of Putin’s military strategy since 2023 has been attritional: trade bodies and equipment for territory at a rate Ukraine and its supporters cannot sustain, while bringing Ukraine under sustained aerial attack, until Ukrainian resistance collapses or Western will fractures. That strategy requires Russia to absorb casualties at a rate it can replenish and for its aerial campaign to support battlefield gains with impacts on Ukraine’s defence industry and civilian morale. In 2026, the arithmetic of that calculation has turned against the Kremlin. Assessment: One of the most significant military data points of early 2026 is that Russia’s current offensive operations are yielding few gains. Indeed, over the past three months, territorial gains have favoured Ukraine and not Russia (see graph below from Russia Matters). For Russian commanders, given the enormous commitment of manpower along the front line, this is a very worrying trend as they progress into the summer months. This shortfall in territorial gains, contrary to recent comments by Putin who on 5 June claimed that Russia has seized territory four times the size of Ukraine, is exacerbated by combat losses. Now, for the first time since the invasion began, Russia is losing more troops than it is mobilising. Since the start of 2026, according to Ukrainian General Staff estimates, Russian forces lost over 160,000 personnel killed or seriously wounded. March 2026 alone produced 35,000 Russian casualties — a single-month record for the entire conflict. The Kremlin had targeted daily recruitment of between 1,100 and 1,150 personnel; the actual figure has fallen to approximately 940. For four consecutive months from December 2025, Russia’s losses have exceeded its intake.” (Mick Ryan/Futura Doctrina)
“The disgraced former president was back in Florida, licking his wounds after losing to Joe Biden, railing about election fraud as he plotted his return to power. (Jared) Kushner took a different tack. Instead of, say, spending more time with his young children or turning back to the New York real estate scene that had chewed him up and spit him out, he would try something new—something that didn’t require too much talent and hinged almost entirely on his proximity to power and wealth. He would be a private equity fund manager. And Affinity—which he launched the day after Biden was sworn in—would be Kushner’s vehicle to greater riches than he’d ever known before. But again, this was 2021. The world viewed Trump as little more than a twice-impeached former president who’d attempted a coup to remain in power. Kushner was tainted by association with his father-in-law, whose circle of contacts was increasingly worthless. Moreover, doing business with Kushner came with all sorts of hazards—not least the potential blowback from a Biden administration watching out for any foreign governments partnering with the Trump family. The Saudi officials tasked with screening investments had their answer. Affinity’s lack of clarity or strategy, the absence of other major investors, the ‘inexperience’ of its managers, and ‘public relations risks,’ as their report put it, all pointed to an unequivocal no. They would not back Affinity. They would not fund Kushner. But only one vote mattered. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—architect of the grisly assassination of Saudi Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, lord of the Saudi kleptocracy, a leader opposed to extending women or minorities or gay people anything resembling equal rights—would have the final say. And as MBS saw it, Affinity wasn’t just some panhandling, fly-by-night investment group looking for a handout. It was a fund overseen by a fellow princeling whom the Saudi dictator had already befriended. MBS also knew that if America’s political tides were to turn, Kushner could prove an indispensable asset. So he overruled his experts. Kushner and Affinity would have their funding—$2 billion to start, with potentially much more down the road. And MBS would again have an American partner he could steer in whichever way he wanted. The Saudi investment proved fruitful. Despite Kushner’s insistence during the 2024 campaign that he would have little involvement in a second Trump term, he is once more at the center of almost every major geopolitical event.” (Casey Mitchel/Mother Jones)
“According to Zack Rosen, founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, the problem with politics is Americans being too involved. Bemoaning the rise of small-dollar political donations in fundraising documents leaked to the Prospect, Rosen is blunt: ‘Small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber.’ Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance. Lamenting the current state of democratized influence, Rosen says ‘the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.’ This sentiment is laid out in substantial detail, filling 31 pages across two separate documents obtained by the Prospect. In an email exchange, Rosen confirmed the documents’ legitimacy. Rosen and his allies have no need for small-dollar donations or mass-membership politics: They come to do political battle with $260 million annually (yes, each year!) from billionaire benefactors, one document asserts. This ‘Abundance Capital Stack’ is being deployed to organize in all 50 states and consists of a $120 million annual commitment from ex-hedge fund manager and current Meta board member John Arnold, $40 million from Facebook/Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and $100 million from Steve Ballmer, the L.A. Clippers owner and former Microsoft executive. Ballmer, who is currently embroiled in a scandal surrounding alleged off-book pay for NBA star Kawhi Leonard, was not previously known as a funder of the abundance movement.” (Dylan Gyauch-Lewis/American Prospect)
“Your Freakshow guide is just back from a weekend in San Antonio, soaking up the sights and sounds at Turning Point USA’s Women’s Leadership Summit – and yes, coincidentally watching the Knicks kick the Spurs. The word ‘leadership’ was perhaps an oxymoron among the thousands of young women who sat through speech after speech about submitting to God, husband and female biology. The lineup featured high profile conservative women including Erica Kirk, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kayleigh McEnany, and even Texas State Sen. Angela Paxton (Ken Paxton’s estranged and cheated-on wife), alongside a bouquet of hip and pretty right-wing Gen Z influencers all advocating early marriage and pregnancy and putting husband and hearth ahead of worldly pursuits. The TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit is an annual, expensively produced and carefully packaged political propaganda product. This year, the organization occupied three floors of the San Antonio Marriott, plastering the hotel’s walls, doors, escalators and elevators with slick signage. The main co-sponsor was the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), whose founder said she flew in from Israel to encourage the gathered to repeat a Hebrew word offering themselves to God. To the naked eye, the event was more tent revival than political conference. The most reliable applause lines invoked the dangers of Muslims and ‘transgenders.’ No one needed a Trump button here. The politics of the participants was presumed … TPUSA’s project of selling Gen Z women on a submissive posture aligns with the Heritage Foundation’s latest manifesto. The overt push for submission – a concept that occupied white-nationalist fringe swamps merely a few years ago – has now become one of the ideological pillars enabling the predators’ ball assembled at the White House, headed by a convicted sex abuser and oft-accused serial sex pest.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“As Israeli warplanes pounded Beirut’s southern suburbs last March and residents fled in panic, one man found his opportunity. Amid the chaos, he slipped out of his imprisonment in a Hezbollah cell and made his way to the green hills overlooking the Lebanese capital. There, in the posh diplomatic quarter of Baabda, he disappeared inside the gates of the Ukrainian Embassy. Where he is now is a mystery, tangled up in an ongoing spy game as Hezbollah attempts to root out Israeli intelligence operatives that have infiltrated the militant group. The man identified by Lebanese officials as Khaled al-Aydi is said to be a Palestinian refugee from Syria who also holds Ukrainian citizenship. He had been detained by Hezbollah in the Beirut suburbs and accused by Lebanese officials of being part of a thwarted Israeli intelligence plot to carry out bombings and assassinations. Al-Aydi’s disappearance could have political implications for the Lebanese government, which has largely remained silent about the case. If evidence were to emerge that al-Aydi escaped Lebanon with help from the government, it could inflame tensions with Hezbollah’s largely Shiite Muslim base. The government already faces scrutiny for directly negotiating with Israel, which has been engaged in fierce fighting with Hezbollah since the early days of the Iran war. The Ukrainian Embassy asked Lebanese authorities in March to facilitate al-Aydi’s departure from the country after he escaped Hezbollah detention, according to a Lebanese government document obtained by The Associated Press.” (Abby Sewell and Sally Abbou Aljoud/AP)
“The normal display of African unity in the early stages of a football World Cup was notably absent from social media as many fans from across the continent backed Mexico in the tournament’s opening match against South Africa. The memes were light-hearted - including sombreros, mariachi bands and tacos - but they pointed to a dark underbelly. The banter reflected anger over the reports of xenophobic violence in South Africa. A poor South African performance on the pitch led to a 2-0 defeat against the World Cup co-hosts. As the final whistle blew, social media lit up with a flood of mocking posts. But some South Africans pushed back, praising the spirit of their team, nicknamed Bafana Bafana. South Africa is one of 10 African teams at this year’s expanded World Cup, with the US and Canada co-hosting along with Mexico. Ahead of the Thursday’s match, some African football fans justified their support for Mexico by linking it to the current tensions in South Africa over migration. ‘You want people to cheer for you when you play soccer just because we’re African?’ one X user asked citing reports of mistreatment of migrants. ‘We’re supporting Mexico so that South Africa can go back home early to protect their jobs,’ another user posted, playing on the unfounded accusation that foreigners were responsible for South Africa’s high unemployment rate.” (Wycliffe Muia/BBC)
“‘We have new elite scandals, raping women and children videos. We have two videos of famous singers – all for the low price of 10,000 Sudanese pounds ($2.30). We have a discount – 8,000 Sudanese Pounds ($1.86) for the first five subscribers.’ The horrific text above, advertising content as if selling everyday items, is not being promoted on the dark web or another sinister, cryptic network but openly via a common public platform. Telegram, a cloud-based, cross-platform instant messaging service, openly shares the post as an advertisement. This particular group boasts of having hundreds of subscribers, including a ‘luxury channel’ that includes ‘1,200 videos of kids, 1,000 harassment videos, 13,000 spying videos, and 1,600 videos of rape, all for 20,000 Sudanese Pounds ($4.60).’ It is not alone. An Ayin investigation has revealed a mass network selling pornography, including content involving minors and other content involving rape – all available through Telegram. These networks are expanding and are now posting more than ever. This ecosystem includes at least 100 Telegram networks. Dozens of ‘X’ (formerly ‘Twitter’) identities promote these hubs, guiding traffic and recruiting new users into private groups that monetise explicit content. ‘Visible’ is just a fragment. Ayin believes these 100+ channels make up fewer than 10% of the networks due to recurrent patterns, replicated structure, and constant revenue methods … The most alarming were the open advertisements for pornography involving children and others selling rape videos. One post even advertised child rape. After a data analysis using three separate platforms (see below), Ayin identified over 90 pieces of content involving children over a seven-month period along with two rape videos. In one case, the content claimed that members of the paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, were involved in the rape.” (Ayin Network)
“As Americans have grown tired of their global role, the track record and consequences of the U.S.-led order have been harshly and increasingly criticized from both sides of the political spectrum. The right, once internationalist but now dominated by Trump loyalists and ‘America first’ proponents, believes that American foreign policy elites have squandered vast amounts of blood and treasure in search of ‘permanent American domination of the entire world,’ as the 2025 National Security Strategy put it. In contrast to postwar American leaders such as President Harry Truman or Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and George Marshall, Trump sees the world in zero-sum terms. He has little appreciation for concepts such as public goods or the global commons. He sees alliances not as force multipliers but as mechanisms for allies to exploit the United States, and he harbors nothing but disdain for multilateral institutions, rules, laws, or norms. On the left is a different but overlapping critique: that the history of the U.S.-led world order has been one of an unnecessary quest for domination, excessive defense spending, failed military interventions, hypocrisy, and the neglect of human rights. Many progressives recognize the challenges posed by various U.S. adversaries but often blame American policies and provocations as much as the adversaries themselves. They note that high U.S. defense expenditures incentivized allies’ free-riding and came at the expense of American workers, and that U.S. bases abroad provided targets for Washington’s enemies as much as they deterred them. These critics question the United States’ capacity for responsible global leadership and oppose the defense spending that leadership requires. There are of course huge differences between (and within) these two schools of thought. But what they have in common is that neither believes the U.S.-led liberal order is in the United States’ continued interest. They also tend to take the benefits of U.S. leadership for granted and fail to recognize the dangers that would loom if Americans gave up on it. The biggest risk in a world without a strong United States committed to allies, rules, and norms would be a lower cost of aggression and a higher risk of major conflict as a result.” (Phillip H Gordon/Foreign Affairs)
“A U.S. citizen who leads a think-tank focused on Myanmar has been arrested in China on suspicion of spying, the Chinese government said on Friday. ‘Suspected of spying and endangering China’s national security, Min Zin has been placed under criminal coercive measures by the relevant authorities,’ China‘s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said at a regular press conference in Beijing … The detention of an American citizen on national security-related charges remains a rare occurrence in China. The arrest comes just weeks after President Donald Trump visited Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing, a high-profile summit aimed at stabilizing relations between the two global rivals … Min Zin is a Myanmar-born U.S. citizen who co-founded the Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar (ISP-Myanmar) in 2016. According to a Reuters report citing sources familiar with the matter, he was detained two weeks ago in Kunming, the capital of China’s southwestern Yunnan province, which borders Myanmar. Min Zin participated in Myanmar’s 1988 democracy movement. He later went into exile in the U.S. to avoid arrest and became a naturalized citizen. He studied political science at the University of California, Berkeley … While China is by far the world’s largest producer of rare earths—a group of 17 minerals critical to technologies ranging from electric vehicle batteries to missile guidance systems—Myanmar ranks among its most important suppliers. The country provided roughly two-thirds of China’s rare earth imports between 2017 and 2024, according to ISP-Myanmar. The ISP-Myanmar administration, which likely includes work by Min Zin, has also written about Beijing’s policy reset toward Myanmar following its coup.” ( John Feng and Micah McCartney/Newsweek)
“The matchmaker Blaine Anderson, who runs the high-end dating service Dating by Blaine, receives a lot of hyper-specific requests from her wealthy male clients, many of which she documents on her popular social media accounts. But no one was more difficult than the man she refers to as Daniel. (Anderson uses pseudonyms when discussing her clients to protect their privacy.) Daniel was in his early forties and had never been married, but was looking to start a family, according to Anderson. Like most of her clients, he’s fabulously wealthy, a successful tech founder who’d sold his company a few years prior. (Anderson, who works exclusively with men, charges anywhere between $30,000 to $50,000 for her services; she says she charged this particular client $49,000.) But Daniel had, as Anderson recounts, ‘very, very, very specific requests.’ He wanted to date a younger woman who prioritized getting married and having children. He wanted a woman from the Midwest (even though he, himself, did not live in the Midwest) and who worked in a caregiving profession—but she couldn’t be a doctor, ‘because that would mean she was too focused on her career,’ Anderson says. And he wanted someone conventionally beautiful, even specifying the degree to which her eyes sloped, or how many centimeters her nose should be from her upper lip. Needless to say, Anderson says, Daniel did not end up finding a match. But although he was a singular case, the qualities he was looking for in an ideal partner were not singular at all. Anderson and other professional matchmakers tell WIRED that the men they work with are increasingly asking to be set up with traditional religious conservative women—regardless of whether they themselves self-identify as traditional, religious, or conservative.” (EJ Dickson/WIRED)