What's Inside This Mental Breakdown of Writing? Here, you'll find my wandering thoughts on economics, geopolitics, culture, technology, and daily ideas. Plus, I'll be dropping little peeks behind the curtain on my novel and nonfiction projects.
Surprisingly, Gladwell concludes that most American cities have small police forces compared to many G10 nations.
However, the USA is considered an extreme outlier, and the most dangerous wealthy democracy, regarding gun violence and gun homicides. The Second Amendment right to bear arms, combined with the lack of a national gun registry, creates an economic pathway for firearm associations and businesses to grow into a powerful political and economic force in American culture.
Among economically developed nations, the USA leads the world in both firearms per capita and gun homicides. Most…
As I read The Invention of an Epidemic The American Way of Killing by Malcolm Gladwell, I think of my years in university taking some of the most interesting Criminology and Sociology courses.
When most of us picture a murder, we think of Netflix crime dramas or detective novels. We imagine a calculated mastermind plotting for extreme wealth, a bank robber, or rival gangs fighting over drug turf. In those stories, violence is just a cold, rational tool used to get something tangible.
In The American Way of Killing, Malcolm Gladwell argues that most people completely misunderstand gun…
I really enjoy a minimalist blog platform.
I am in the process of migrating GaryArmstrong.blog over to Noted.do and if you are still writing on Listed.to ahead of its shutdown, making the switch is much easier than you might expect.
Noted.do was built specifically as a drop-in replacement for Standard Notes bloggers, you can keep your exact writing habit without starting over.
Getting your existing site across takes about a minute.
Once everything is imported, you connect a plugin inside Standard Notes and go right back to writing, editing, and publishing the exact same way you always…
Rain. Endlessly falling rain, thick mud, and a forgotten Hungarian collective farm quietly rotting from the inside out.
I purchased a must read!
For the next few days I am stepping into a dense, mesmerizing world of Sátántangó.
This masterpiece by László Krasznahorkai, is a living great author in modern literature, whose uncompromising long complex paragraph prose eventually earned him the International Booker Prize and the 2025 Noble Prize in Literature.
I am noticing there are no neat paragraphs here, no quick breaks to catch your breath. His sentences stretch out like fog over a deserted…
A well-educated population or nation-state builds deep social trust, keeps economic costs low, and creates flexible public policy capable of solving inter-generational problems. Historically, this model powered Canada and the United States, where world-class research institutions, technical innovation, and broad access to public education drove modern economic innovation. When transparent inquiry and shared facts are the norm for public life, a democracy maintains the resilience needed to self-correct, innovate, and navigate systemic crises domestically and internationally.
Today, the United…
Joaquin and his female pitbull Coco getting caught in a sudden torrential downpour while standing next to an old classical Hampton streetlight pole, where the pale, sickly beam of yellow light cut through the sheet of falling water to illuminate the slick asphalt beneath their feet, casting a shivering, distorted shadow of man and dog across the flooded curb while Coco pressed her sodden, muscle-bound flank against Joaquin’s knees in a desperate bid for shelter from the deafening roar of rain bouncing off the rusted cast-iron lamp base, leaving them both stranded beneath the useless glass…
Rain. Endlessly falling rain, thick mud, and a forgotten Hungarian collective farm quietly rotting from the inside out.
I purchased a must read!
For the next few days I am stepping into a dense, mesmerizing world of Sátántangó.
This masterpiece by László Krasznahorkai, is a living great author in modern literature, whose uncompromising long complex paragraph prose eventually earned him the International Booker Prize and the 2025 Noble Prize in Literature.
I am noticing there are no neat paragraphs here, no quick breaks to catch your breath. His sentences stretch out like fog over a…
The old rules of military encirclement are unraveling due to drone technology.
For centuries, if an army managed to cut off an enemy unit's ground supply lines, the clock started ticking. Without a steady stream of food, clean water, and fresh ammunition, trapped soldiers had two choices: surrender or starve. The use of drones have turned that siege playbook upside-down.
Take the defense of Kupyansk, where a small pocket of Russian soldiers managed to hold out while completely surrounded for approximately nine months. These soldiers stayed alive through a drone supply line. Ariel drones,…
Warfare is no longer strictly about who has the biggest manufacturing base with the most money, for heavy steel and explosives. It is increasingly about who are software/tech literate, who can secure microchips, and who can field autonomous Ai killer robots - land, air and sea drones the fastest.
Drones Are Inverting Military Power
Why are $10 million apiece tanks losing ground against $15,000 Ai-driven killer Drones?
The decline of armoured dominance comes down to a fundamental mismatch between legacy (1930s - 2010) design and modern economic 3D printing and Ai-guided technology.
Tanks…
Modern technology of warfare continues to change at breakneck speed.
There are moments in history when technology makes the old ways of fighting suddenly look ridiculous. One of the clearest examples came in 1914, when the German army marched into battle with 100,000 horses, still convinced that massive cavalry charges would break through enemy lines. Within one year, the Germans and the rest of the world learned quickly, machine guns and heavy artillery had turned those proud horses into easy targets and slaughtered the soldiers riding them.
Today, we might be facing that same kind of wake…
In the halls of geopolitical power, hate is an elegant statistic. It is the clinical click of a drone piloted from Nevada, threats of embargo and economic sanctions, a planned orchestrated propaganda press briefing carefully playing the blame game and cheerfully showcasing targeted assassinations and lethal air strikes on Iranians. To the unipolar power, the Middle East is just a grid of fragile and/or failed states and petrochemical gold to be managed with a cold, threatening air force to own and control the flow of 40% of the global exports.
In the Oval Office, for 73 years, hate is…
I was driving home along the Anthony Henday Ring Road when I noticed someone stopped on one of the overpasses. To my surprise, a tiny gopher was standing right in front of the car, staring at it as if it were trying to flag the driver down. Nearby, a few large black crows and magpies were perched and waiting, clearly watching for the little animal to make a run for the open field.
The driver got out of her vehicle and saw what was happening. She tried to herd the gopher toward the safety of the field and its burrows, but the little creature refused to budge because of the predators waiting…
$60 billion dollars of American taxpayer money!
For most Americans, it's just a number that flashes by in a headline. But it represents something concrete: a decade-long promise of taxpayer money to Israel's military, locked in through a 2016 memorandum of understanding that runs from 2019 through 2028.
Break down the tax dollars spent and the scale becomes clearer.
$33 billion dollars flows through Foreign Military Financing to Israel. Another $5 billion is earmarked specifically for missile defence, the kind that keeps systems like Iron Dome running.
Here's the part that rarely makes…
When an organization leads with empathy and real care for people, something changes.
The people it serves stop feeling like clients or items in a spreadsheet and start showing up as partners in the work. This matters a lot in a country like Canada, where the sheer size and multicultural geography mean that policies written in provincial legislators or federal Parliament often miss what's actually happening on a given street in a given municipality. The real fixes tend to come from people close enough to the problem to feel its friction.
Take housing and food insecurity, youth mental health,…
Is the total destruction of Gaza and mass killing of Palestinian Christians and Muslims of Gaza and the dropping of 70,000 tons of TNT (equivalent of 4 nuclear bombs) from Israel a war crime?
For decades, American backing for Israel has been one of the few constants in U.S. foreign policy. Presidents come and go, Congress flips from one party to the other, but the flow of military aid, intelligence sharing, diplomatic cover, and weapons shipments barely changes. Whether it's a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, the support holds steady. And because that support runs so deep and has…
