Friday Links
The National Interest, War, Economy, and State, and I return to the Jenna Ellis Show
Happy Friday everyone!
I have been busy recently and have several links to share this week.
Time and Logistics are Working Against Ukraine
My coauthor, Matthew Bryant (who you should follow on Twitter), and I were in The National Interest with a piece called “Time and Logistics are Working Against Ukraine” that looks at the sorry state of military logostics and how the hard truth is that even if the West wanted to continue to fuel the proxy war in Ukraine we simply don’t have the equipment to do so. We rebuilt Ukraine a new army from scratch using everything that could be scraped together and most of it has been turned into scrap metal in the counter offensive that has barely managed to pierce the Russian screening line after 3 months of intense fighting. The it seems likely that the longer Ukraine waits to negotiate the worse deal they will get.
Somewhat amusingly, apparently this piece blew up on Russian Twitter. As the youth say, it was doing numbers. These are the stats from just one Russian who shared it.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how many Russians read it, what matters is that Westerners read it and realize we are on a course to nowhere with our current proxy-war policy and all the suffering and death is going to accomplish little but lining the pockets of the military industrial complex.
War, Economy, and State
Ryan McMaken and I released August’s episode of War, Economy, and State where in the context of the GOP debate we mention everything from the Volksturm and Call of Duty to Bon Jovi.
The Jenna Ellis Show
Jenna Ellis was kind enough to have me back on her show to discuss the recent “spontaneous disassembly” of the Wagner plane that was carrying the entire organizational leadership. We discuss the speculation about who was responsible and then I give an update on the Ukraine war. Check it out! (Click the picture to go to the tweet, tweets no longer embed, it seems).
CL Reprints
I forgot to mention in a previous update, but I am now working with CL Press, run by Dan Klein and Erik Matson, as the production manager of CL Reprints, which seeks to make old books avaliable at low cost. We have released two books so far this year, both of which are avalable for sale at very low cost, and also as free PDFs!
Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching, and Position in the History of Philosophy
by William R. Scott with a new foreword by Erik Matson.
Life of Adam Smith
by John Rae.
What I’m Reading
I recently finished Regime Change by Patrick Deneen to write a review. Spoiler alert, it was terrible; much worse than his previous book. He only offers the most vague platitudinous solutions. Review will be forthcoming soon (hopefully).
I recently started reading A Story of Us by Lesley Newson and Peter J. Richarson. It came on my radar thanks to Rob Henderson posting excerpts on Twitter. In short, it is supposed to be a very readable guide to the argument that humans have evolved not only genetically, but also culturally, and that this cultural evolution has played a huge role in our development. I find the speculations in the early section about chimps etc and supposed early humans 7 million to 1.5 million years ago to be very interesting, but in the end I find it to be a good bit too far back in time for us to know much for sure. I am about to get to the chapter dealing with humans circa 100k years ago and I suspect that will be where my interest really perks up.
I am reading this in part because of my growing interest in Indo-European studies, which is truly fascinating and encompasses a very wide array of fields, such as archeology and anthrolpology, but also linguistics (which is how the whole field got started), genetics (which has completely transformed the field in just the last ten years), and comparative mythology and brings them together in exciting ways that are very cool. Some day I will write up a post giving the gist of the field along with a really superb YouTube/podcast playlist.
In general I have become truly fascinated with pre-written history (in line with Collingwood, I think it is incorrect to call this things like “pre-history” and such). I have some more reading in the area lined up, though I am not sure when I will get through them.
I hope Jenna Ellis fares well with her legal troubles.