“The greatest pleasure of the Russian people is drunkenness, in other words, oblivion. Poor folk! they must dream to be happy.”

Astolphe de Custine, Letters From Russia - 1839

Vodka sales this year surged to a record high and policymakers are scrambling to halt a rise in alcohol-related deaths. What has changed is the war. It is becoming increasingly clear that the fabric of Russian society is falling apart.

As in the 1980s, Russian soldiers are returning from the frontline wounded and traumatized. Thousands more are dying, leaving grieving families at home.

But what is happening today is on a completely different scale. Around 15,000 Soviet soldiers died in Afghanistan. The Russian death toll in Ukraine is at least ten or more times that already.

Between Feb 24 2022 and Nov 19 this year, there have been at least 120,000 Russian military deaths in the war in Ukraine, according to analysis of probate records by Mediazona, a site that works in collaboration with BBC’s Russian service.

As many as 728,000 more have been injured, according to analysis by The Economist, based on leaked documents from America’s defense department.  Vast numbers of them have turned to vodka to drown their pain and trauma.

Mourners place flowers for the mass killing in Zhuhai, China on November 11

On November 30, Chinese social media posts showed what appeared to be half a dozen bodies left strewn across a busy road in Neijiang City in China’s Sichuan province, after another apparent attack using a car.

We will perhaps never know the truth of what happened, but since February, China has suffered one mass killing after another. In an especially horrific incident on the 11th of last month, a man drove his SUV on the exercise track of Zhuhai Stadium, killing 35 people and injuring 45 others. For decades, disaffected Chinese have resorted to violence as a first choice instead of the last one.

But the Communist Party’s reaction has been to censor news of incidents and prevent expressions of grief and mourning. These actions, by further bottling up emotions, are making a bad situation even worse.

CCP authorities are especially worried at the moment because the economy is suffering a prolonged downturn, the first since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.

Further, the gloom in Chinese society is forcing collapse of birth rates. “In this country, to love your child is to never let him be born in the first place,” has become a popular sentiment.

Was there ever anything fouler, trashier, stinkier, smellier than the six or so lawfare cases directed at President Trump during his campaign?

I'd say 'no.'

They were politicized justice of the worst sort, the Latin Americanization of U.S. politics, where the outgoing president always has to flee the country.

Now that Trump has won the election against all odds, by the wildest of coincidences, two of these dumpster fire cases, brought on from the flimsiest of charges, have been scrapped. Everyone knows they don't hold water.

According to Monday's (11/25) New York Post:

Russia’s strategy in executing its aggressive war against Ukraine, passing the 1,000-day mark last week (11/19(, puts the country’s economy, society, and armed forces under enormous pressure that Moscow’s militaristic propaganda cannot quite cover.

Relentless attacks, necessary for proving Russia’s control of the strategic initiative, produce Russian casualties so heavy that recruitment based on outlandish payments cannot compensate for the number of losses ( Mediazona, November 22). Public support for the war cannot be measured with any accuracy, but opinion polls show a steady increase in preferences for immediate peace talks (Levada.ru, November 6; The Moscow Times, November 22).

For Putin, escalation is the only way to alter the pattern of fast-progressing attrition.

Weekly we read of thousands of illegal immigrants arriving from areas controlled by violent Mexican cartel gangs or failed, strife-torn South American countries that have emptied their jails to send their felons northwards. Hundreds of thousands of them have been committing violent crimes while demanding still more free housing and support from strapped American taxpayers.

Big-city left-wing mayors and city councils boast that they will do all their best to nullify federal immigration laws, even as their cities face near insolvency housing, feeding, and monitoring the influx. Virtue-signaling Democrat governors have so far not dared to utter a word of criticism about what has been the Biden administration’s truly historic “massive importation” of illegal aliens into the U.S. over the last four years.

Why?  Because they could.  Very soon they won’t be able to any longer.  Their war on legality and morality is about to end...

The Office of Management and Budget is a less well-known entity within the executive branch, but few are as critical for ensuring the implementation of the president’s agenda. President-elect Donald Trump has once again placed that awesome responsibility in Russ Vought’s hands.

OMB is not just the president’s budget division. While OMB oversees the structure and execution of the budget, it also has oversight powers over federal agencies and federal regulations to ensure the commands of the president, bestowed executive powers by the American people, are being followed.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Vought explained how OMB can use those powers to kill the deep state—a death by a thousand cuts.

Vladimir Strangelove Putin

Vladimir Strangelove Putin

Over the past months, the increasing threat to resort to nuclear weapons has been observed not only in Russian propaganda but also in fairly reputable analytical platforms close to the Kremlin. Kremlin “experts” do not conceal that such threats are only intended to break the West psychologically, as they themselves are not prepared for full-scale nuclear war.

Russian nuclear blackmail is seemingly affecting Western politicians. Independent media reports that in President-elect Donald Trump’s entourage, it is considered essential to freeze the front line as it stands and postpone Ukraine’s accession to NATO in exchange for the continuation of arms supplies to the country (Istories.media, November 7).

Western concessions to Russia, however, are unlikely to reduce the risk of nuclear escalation. Russian radicals lobbying for the use of nuclear weapons live in a distorted reality and are simply incapable of understanding these concessions.

For example, experts on the website “Military Review,” which is closely associated with the Russian Defense Ministry, publish conspiracy theories about how a mysterious “World Government” controls the United States, of which Trump is just one of its adherents (Topwar.ru, November 5).

“Once they’re on the run, keep ’em running” is an old cavalry motto — and a strategy Donald Trump seems to have taken to heart.

Democrats are scared and fighting among themselves.

The publishers of newspapers like The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times that used to be hard-left propaganda outlets are now talking about the importance of hearing from both sides.

MSNBC and CNN viewership is in freefall; one or the other may wind up being purchased for small change by Elon Musk.

Universities are adopting political neutrality.

This is nice, but will it last?

The answer is: Only so long as the pressure is on. So how do Republicans keep the Dems and the Left on the run? Here’s how.

Only Donald Trump could have pulled off the kind of victory we witnessed just over one week ago. The victory achieved by, and for, the man himself is already the greatest political comeback in American history.

But it is entirely possible that his win now could set up an equally unprecedented comeback, but not for any one particular individual. If the Republican Party plays its cards right this time, it could build off of the massive coalition that President Trump has built for himself and ride this wave of momentum to a new era of dominance in American politics.

The Old Map and the New Map

Just as importantly as 2016, the 2024 election perfectly displays the best path forward for the new Republican Party when it comes to establishing and maintaining an electoral majority every four years.

Here’s a detailed analysis of how that works.

Powerful forces are out to derail Pete Hegseth’s bid to become secretary of defense and carry out President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to reform the Pentagon.

The Army veteran and former Fox News host has been hammered by a stream of inflammatory accusations in recent days, from past allegations of sexual assault to absurd and baseless claims that his faith-based tattoos reveal him as a white supremacist.

Hegseth, of course, has never faced criminal charges, has never been connected to any white supremacy groups or activities and has never deviated from his loyalty to country — so these preposterous attacks merely reveal the desperation of those seeking to subvert his confirmation.

Why? Because, after a groundless 10-year war in Iraq and a 20-year stalemate in Afghanistan, the US military is embroiled in a culture war — another war it seems to be losing. It’s a good thing they’ll lose it to Pete Hegseth.

As the love affair with so-called green energy cools and “net zero” commitments to eliminate “carbon emissions” wane, we see glimmers of acknowledgment for the benefits of carbon dioxide.

That’s right: More people are beginning to understand that the gas—widely demonized as a pollutant endangering Earth with excessive heat—is a life-giving substance needed in greater amounts.

U.S. voters know that President-elect Donald Trump has declared the Green New Deal a “scam” and promises to return common sense to environmental regulations and energy development. His return to office rests partly on that pledge.

Educating the public on the benefits of carbon dioxide is the mission of the CO2 Coalition, which I lead. We sponsor speakers and publish scientifically based materials for adults and children.

“Fossil Fuels Are the Greenest Energy Sources” by Dr. Indur Goklany is an example of our work. Did you know that up to 50% of the globe has experienced an increase in vegetation and that 70% of the greening is attributed to plant fertilization by carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels?

The biggest blunder in the history of American politics was the premeditated, unabashed, and overt theft of the 2020 presidential election by the Democrat Party, the legacy media, and their fellow left-wing elitists in the Ruling Class. This blunder set the stage for the 2024 Trump landslide and hastened the demise of the Democrat Party and the legacy media.

This cabal further compounded the original blunder of overtly stealing the 2020 election by adopting unprecedented lawfare against Donald Trump, insisting that an obviously addled Joe Biden be the Democrat nominee, ousting Biden four months before the election, and choreographing the nomination of the unlikeable and vacuous Kamala Harris.

This myopic and oblivious faction of the Ruling Class grossly underestimated and misunderstood the depth and breadth of support for Trump in 2020. Despite their legal and illegal efforts to manipulate the voting process, they would fall monumentally short of the anticipated landslide defeat of the incumbent.

Nuclear blast at the Bikini Atoll 1946. (Credit: Wikimedia, Public Domain)

Yesterday (11/12), the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit summarily vaporized 46 years of Federal environmental regulations.

Writing in a case called Marin Audubon Society, et al v. FAA, et al., the majority of a three-judge panel ruled that the Council on Environmental Quality, a cabal inside the Executive Office of the President charged with ensuring that National Environmental Protection Act requirements are interpreted uniformly across the federal government, had illegally used the Federal Register to publish that guidance thereby giving citizens, agencies, and even the courts the impression that their internal guidance had the authority of law.

The decision was written by Karen LeCraft Henderson (George H. W. Bush) and A. Raymond Randolph (George H. W. Bush) with Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan (Joe Biden) dissenting, and it found:

“As the parties argue the case, it centers on whether the Agencies complied with regulations of the Council on Environmental Quality, an entity within the Executive Office of the President.  We will not address these arguments.  The CEQ regulations, which purport to govern how all federal agencies must comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, are ultra vires.”

After his historic election win, President-elect Donald Trump promised to hit the ground running.

Boy oh boy, he wasn't kidding.

Trump first tapped his 2024 campaign manager Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff.

The veteran Republican operative – I use that term in a positive sense, here – is a no-nonsense, behind-the-scenes professional.

While Wiles avoids the spotlight, Trump puts his complete faith in her:

“Susie Wiles just helped me achieve one of the greatest political victories in American history and was an integral part of both my 2016 and 2020 successful campaigns. Susie is tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected.

Susie will continue to work tirelessly to Make America Great Again. It is a well deserved honor to have Susie as the first-ever female Chief of Staff in United States history. I have no doubt that she will make our country proud.”

Next up, Trump named former acting-ICE Director Tom Homan as his "border czar."

Now that that’s settled and Trump has achieved what seems to be a comfortable victory, from a historical perspective, there’s some virtue in killing all of your enemies, at least figuratively.

Julius Caesar didn’t and was killed almost immediately after having himself declared dictator for life.

In 49 BC, “dictator” meant something different than it does today.

Being the “dictator” was an honorable, temporary position implemented only when the Republic faced some dire or existential threat that required a firm hand to fix.

Although vested with almost absolute power, a dictator would often be appointed for a finite period, perhaps six months, to deal with the problem and then would return to being whatever he was before, whether a senator, a general, a citizen, or whatever.

Caesar’s reign starkly contrasts with that of his adopted son, Caesar Augustus. Augustus reigned for 41 years (the longest of any emperor) and ruled over a relatively peaceful period of consolidation and prosperity.

He set the stage for the Romans to remake the Western world, saying: “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.”

While speaking literally about the city, he was also metaphorically speaking about the Empire, having prepared the way for its long life.

The difference between Caesar and Augustus?

Augustus killed all his enemies when consolidating power….Fortunately, Trump doesn’t need to rely on political murder to achieve Augustus’s success. That’s because Augustus isn’t known as Rome’s greatest emperor because he killed all his enemies, something many later Roman emperors did without Augustus’s stellar reputation. Instead, he’s known as Rome’s greatest emperor because he laid the foundations for a relative time of peace and prosperity throughout the Roman world for the subsequent two centuries. Donald Trump can do the same in America without first killing his enemies.

The website, Dictionary.com defines kakistocracy as “a government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.”

Other sources concur, describing it as leadership by the least competent and most unscrupulous.

It’s a head-scratcher, really—how do these individuals manage to fail their way upward and claim the most powerful seats in government?

If you’ve been keeping up with current events, it’s hard not to conclude that the United States is stumbling into a kakistocracy.

Case in point is a president, an “elderly man with a poor memory,”  whose cognitive issues and frail health allowed him to dodge legal scrutiny under the guise of public sympathy.

Joe Biden was never known as the “sharpest knife in the drawer,” but his current level of performance became so glaringly destitute that he required strong “encouragement” to abandon his re-election ambitions.

And yet, the problem of obvious ineffectiveness isn’t just a “Joe thing.”

Glancing at the Cabinet and other key positions of this administration, does anyone inspire confidence or stand out as the poster child of competence? Anyone? Bueller?

History is littered with examples of kakistocracies.

My friend asked me a question. Did I think the Democrats will remove Biden if Harris loses the election? Yes.

Do I think the leading Democrats would jump at the chance to score so many firsts, even if it means depriving some future woman, Asian, Indian, or female of African descent who campaigned for and won the presidency? These grasping, corrupt, lying leftists? Yes.

November 5, 2024, through January 1, 2025, is 75 days. What might “President Harris” accomplish?

First and most obviously, moving the Bidens out and her family in. There’s no time to redecorate as she did as Vice President, although there might be time to change the stationery.

The first order of real business would be for Harris to nominate her Vice President.

Would it be Tim Walz? Would she opt out of that awkward relationship with a man about whom questions regarding his eligibility for a security clearance have been raised?

Her VP pick would need a majority vote from both the House and the Senate. Would Speaker Johnson require hearings if the nominee was one of today’s skeezy Dem leaders?

Ever since Trump first ran for president, a central theme among Democrats and the media has been that Trump is literally Hitler, and his supporters – namely, Republicans – are literally Nazis.

This has gone viral in the 2024 campaign featuring the New Republic’s infamous cover showing Trump as Hitler, published only a week before the first assassination attempt against Trump in July.

As a historian who has done considerable writing and research into the history of the Third Reich, I think it’s time for someone who actually knows something about Hitler and Nazis to provide an assessment of these charges.

I studied in Germany and for more than three decades I have spent many weeks in the German archives poring over documents of the Third Reich so I could write many books and academic articles on the Wehrmacht.

The historians of the Bundeswehr’s History Office (authors of outstanding scholarship on the Third Reich) thought enough of my scholarship to commission me to author a chapter on Nazi war crimes in a book on 20th-century war crimes.

I will focus on the two months of February 1933 to late March 1933 during which the democratic Weimar system was destroyed and replaced by a one-party Nazi totalitarian state.

In January 1933, the German electorate was hopelessly split.

Who do we blame for the terrible destruction of drug addiction?

The user, yes.

The pusher, certainly.

But most of all, the drug cartels -- these massive, secretive, corrupt foreign organizations that manufacture the product and run an illegal distribution operation, employing and training the pushers, waving enough cash around that it attracts a seemingly endless array of applicants to become pushers in their Cadillac-and-gold-chains black market business.

In all our efforts to bring our national drug problem under control, our efforts have been tragically unsuccessful in attacking those cartels.

Without destroying the cartels themselves, it’s an impossible battle, because new pushers arise to replace every pusher who’s imprisoned or killed.

Other kinds of crime work the same way, especially at the national and international level.

And the world got a lesson in how to respond this weekend in the Middle East.

__________________

Israel finally hit Iran in a long-awaited retaliation, on Saturday morning, October 26.

Regarding the border invasion of America, there are waves of people passing through Mexico from even as far as South America, requiring that they traverse the treacherous Darien Gap, but their journey is not without substantial patronage from the US government, United Nations, and sinister NGOs.

While it is expected that Catholics, Jews, and other mainline Christian agencies would contribute to America’s invasion, it is most unfortunate that evangelical Christian organizations are doing so too.

At the north end of the conveyor belt, the SBC’s Send Relief sponsors several projects in coordination with the Baptist River Ministry along with the progressive Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

At the beginning of the immigration conveyor belt would be Samaritan’s Purse, the Christian charity helmed by Franklin Graham.

Global liquidity is expanding. In the past three months, the global money supply has soared by $4.7 trillion.

This rapid increase started when the Federal Reserve panicked the first time and delayed the normalization of the balance sheet in June.

Since then, we have seen a chain of fresh stimulus policies implemented by developed economies, adding to the large fiscal packages already in place.

Multi-trillion-dollar investment packages like the EU Next Generation Fund now include massive deficit spending plans.

However, money velocity is not rising.

All these programs only lead to secular stagnation. Government projects and current expenditures are consuming money at an unprecedented rate.

Developed economies cannot live without new and larger spending plans. The result is more debt, weaker productivity growth, and declining real wages.

In a recent report, Bank of America showed that the rise of unproductive debt has created a significant problem for the United States economy.

For every dollar of new government debt, the gross domestic product impact has slumped to less than fifty cents. The United States is drowning in unproductive debt.

However, at least the United States has some productivity growth.

If we look at the euro area, the negative multiplier effect of new government debt is extremely evident.

Despite enormous stimulus plans and negative nominal rates, the euro area has been stagnating for years.

Many of you may believe that bad policies and careless government spending are to blame, but I think this is intentional.

It is a slow process of nationalizing the economy.

As Twitchy readers know, we have to be very very very very very (did we say very?) careful when writing about election interference in any way because we don't want Big Tech spanking us. So while we are sharing this post from Kylie Jane Kremer, we can neither confirm nor deny if this is true.

But we think it's important enough to share so here we are.

Sounds like Kremer believes that Secretary of State Bradfor Raffensperger may be up to no good.

Take a look:

?GA ELECTION INTERFERENCE?

The GA SOS is up to no good and gearing up to go after the Georgia State Election Board (SEB) members and others not willing to certify the election and/or those willing to shine the light on any potential fraud in this election

Raffensperger sent… pic.twitter.com/yMo29RZgzV

— Kylie Jane Kremer (@KylieJaneKremer) October 22, 2024

Her post continues:

“Raffensperger sent an email, in a private capacity, that went to a listserv of trial lawyers across Georgia soliciting $5 million by November 1st to help in his effort for a 501(c)4 called “Election Defense Fund,” asking lawyers to donate or contact him via his private gmail account & personal cell phone number.

 

In this email, Raffensperger states, “Election Defense Fund, Inc. is a 501(c) (4) dedicated to protecting this year's election results, and standing up against those who attempt to delay certification. EDF will identify local election officials who are most likely to not certify or otherwise attempt to interfere with results."

Harris and Walz have made a thing of “turning the page,” but the page that must be turned is the one they are on.

In recent years, beginning with Obama, the Democratic party has become unmoored from its basic center-left policies and embraced ideas and policies that are illogical, absurd, and increasingly unpopular. Things like these:

• Allowing open borders coupled with a very generous social welfare system to be tapped by all who enter;
• Endorsing chemical castration of children and allowing transgender women into the private spaces of actual women;
• Engaging in endless wars in which we have no genuine national stake;
• Supporting UNWRA, which exists solely to attack our longtime ally Israel;
• Issuing regulations that limit productivity in everything in the name of preventing the chimerical and unproven climate change;
• Fighting all efforts to make national elections auditable;
• Ignoring the violence on college campuses;
• Committing significant First Amendment violations and pursuing frivolous lawsuits against their opponents;
• Defunding the police and allowing crime to flourish in blue cities;
• Embracing corrupt dictatorial international bodies like WHO and WEF;
• Promoting DEI policies that are discriminatory and result in ethnic and racial identity, rather than merit, being the criteria for hiring and promoting employees.

Hypersonic technology is critically important, so it’s time to check in to see where we now stand. According to news reports, nothing much has changed.

Newsweek in March said, “China is winning the hypersonic weapons race and is moving full speed ahead with plans to expand the reach of these hard-to-target weapons.”

Jeffrey McCormick, senior analyst with the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, said in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, “China’s missile programs are comparable to top-tier producers internationally, and China now has the world’s leading hypersonic arsenal.”

He added, “Russia currently has three deployed hypersonic weapon systems, including two that have been used in conflict against Ukraine.”

Furthermore, “China has an extensive and robust research-and-development infrastructure, including many wind tunnels, devoted to the development of hypersonic systems.”

What defenses do we have against such systems? The answer is essentially none.

Nationalism has become the great bugaboo of global talking heads today. It is discussed in the marbled halls of Western capitals as a scourge that must be eliminated just as swiftly as its equally detested cousin, populism.

Policies that are popular with the people and nation-states that reflect the self-determination of the people cannot be permitted!

Who says? Some very important people who belong to august bodies such as the European Commission, the United Nations, the Bank for International Settlements, the World Economic Forum, and the World Health Organization.

International groups with lofty reputations have no time to trifle with the beliefs and needs of discrete peoples. The globalists are here to save democracy by ridiculing and rejecting whatever the people might want!

Today’s “elites” have global domination on their minds. The concerns of individual nation-states are too petty for those who covet the whole planet.

We used to have a pretty good word to describe an arrangement in which many separate countries are forced to bend the knee and pay tribute to a superior power: empire.

The 2024 race is still close.

But then so was the 1980 Carter-Reagan race at this same juncture.

Indeed, incumbent president Carter was then comfortably up in the last two October Gallup polls—before utterly and suddenly evaporating on Election Day.

But in the last seven days, there seems a sense of panic in the Harris campaign.

How do we know that?

Why are Democratic pundits—from Axelrod to Carville—blasting the Harris campaign and otherwise warning of bad things to come?

Why are some of the once Democrat sure-thing senate races—e.g., in Ohio, Wisconsin, and even Michigan—tightening up?

Pundit poll-watchers are suggesting that Trump is close, even, or slightly ahead in the swing-state polls, suggesting that he is nearing a margin that could cancel out anticipated “ballot irregularities.”

The expected October Harris-Biden surprises—the opportune Fed interest rate cut, the transparently desperate Jack Smith beefed-up re-indictment, the current new Hollywood Trump-hit movie, the desperate Zelensky fly-in to Pennsylvania, the election-cycle customary Bob Woodward unsourced gossip book—seemed so far to have had no effect.

“Kamala Harris plagiarized at least a dozen sections of her criminal-justice book, Smart on Crime, according to a new investigation,” reports Christopher Rufo. “

The current vice president even lifted material from Wikipedia.” You might say she was “unburdened by what has been” written by other people. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, has exposed plagiarists before — most famously former Harvard University President Claudine Gay last year.

There’s little reason to doubt his reporting on Harris, especially given “the receipts,” as he calls the proof in his X thread. He further lays out the case in a Substack column [Samples shown in full article.]

I first heard it, very faintly, in 2017.

At the time, President Donald Trump was accused of spying for Russia. If true, this would have been the biggest act of treason in American history, bigger than Aldrich Ames, bigger than the Rosenbergs, bigger than Benedict Arnold.

The New York Times and Washington Post published long articles that detailed Trump’s treachery, for which they shared a Pulitzer Prize.

Adam Schiff, head of the intelligence committee, stood up night after night on cable news, claiming he had secret “bombshell” information proving that Trump was a traitor.

The charges were investigated and ultimately dismissed.

Trump was not a Russian agent. He was not working for Putin.

The greatest security threat in the history of the country was -- a hoax.

And then I heard it:  nothing.

Very few outlets reported that Trump was innocent, that the attempt to rout him from office had failed.

Schiff disappeared from view.

There were no corrections, no apologies, no firings.

The Times and the Post did not return their Pulitzer Prizes.