P.M. Carpenter

The Japanese culture impresses the globe

The FIFA World Cup was a bit off about one of Japan's "greatest wins" — they lost to Costa Rica 1-0 — but the team's fans attending the game certainly won the hearts of the world afterward. They cleaned up their section of the stadium.

Tidying up after one of their greatest #FIFAWorldCup wins 👏

Huge respect to these Japanese fans 🙌 #Qatar2022 pic.twitter.com/RVwLwykPeq

— FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) November 24, 2022

Said Eiji Hattori, from Tokyo: "It’s a sign of respect for a place. This place is not ours, so we should clean up if we use it. And even if it is not our garbage, it’s still dirty, so we should clean it up."

Added the team's coach, Hajime Moriyasu: "For Japanese people, this is just a normal thing to do. When you leave a place, you have to leave it cleaner than it was before."

Wow.

The new House Republican committee chairs: Government by investigation

The Times' headline reads: "Meet the House Republicans Who Will Wield Power in the New Congress." But that's not quite right, not if by power the TImes means governing power. They'll wield bludgeons, bats and blackjacks, yet their power to actually get things done will be nil. A Democratic Senate and White House, plus a small, Republican subset voting with House Democrats, will decimate the committee chairs' wishful ability to legislate the U.S. back to the Stone Age.

One wonders how much they'll even "bedevil President Biden on a litany of issues," as the Times writes. The chairs and their backbenching committee majorities hoping to make a look-at-me splash back home will be a nuisance to Biden, for sure. Outside of the Republicans' core base, however, Americans will likely yawn at their increasingly tedious poo-throwing in the monkey cage. 

Meanwhile the base will gradually become disillusioned with the committees' absolute power to do absolutely nothing, governing-wise. Manifold investigations will produce nada of substance and the Holy Grail of impeachments — that of Mr. Biden — will fall flat, thanks to the few purpled Republicans voting with the near 50-50 House Democrats.

Somewhere along the line, reigning committee chairs and the Republican caucus will have no choice but to keep the federal government operational, notwithstanding opposing demands from the nihilistic Neanderthals in the reddest of congressional districts. As always, there shall be Social Security checks to be mailed, Medicare bills to be paid, a defense department to be funded, and unignorable discretionary spending to be met.

After two or three months, we'll barely even notice the House is in the hands of the nation's finest crackpots, such as Ohio's Jim Jordan, Kentucky's James Comer and Washington's Cathy McMorris Rodgers, whose primary mission as the Energy and Commerce Committee's chairwoman will be the dismissible defamation of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, (former) chief medical adviser to President Biden and fulltime bogeyman of the right. 

Accompanying Ms. Rodgers as an example of womanly degradation will be Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, who said in 2015 that Trump "definitely should not be" president — a rather loose conviction, turned out. She's slated to take the reins of the powerful Appropriations Committee — a bullseye for those in the GOP caucus who wish to burn it all down. But whatever her legislative headwinds, she'll still be in charge of gaveling all government spending, so we can expect an F-35 to soon be in every American garage. For the costly fighter jets are badly made in her district.  

As for Rep. Comer, he's been "eagerly awaiting his chance to lead" the Oversight Committee, notes the Times. And one can see why. For starters he'll be the chief combatant in the Hundred Years War against America's #2 foe, Hunter Biden. Better yet, reports the Times, at a recent news conference he and Mr. Jordan "detail[ed] their plans to take the inquiry’s focus beyond the younger Mr. Biden. 'This is an investigation of Joe Biden,'" said Comer. He'll be a busy boy, since he'll also be in charge of investigating "the administration's handling of the southern border, the origins of Covid-19, the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and whether there was mismanagement of pandemic relief funds, among other things." (Italics, my editorial touch.)

Which brings us to that human extravaganza of investigative excitability, Mr. Jim Jordan, discreet wrestling coach, founding chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, and quite possibly a psychotic. As chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jordan will sic the raw-meated Justice Department and FBI like an underfed chihuahua. To give you some idea of the substantive findings to come, the Times observes that "his staff recently released a 1,000-page report on the subject, but it was mostly a collection of letters the panel sent."

In cahoots with Comer, Jordan will also lead an investigation into Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Said incoming Speaker Kevin McCarthy — seriously, I think — the twosome will "determine whether to begin an impeachment inquiry." The articles are likely already written.  

The one laudable chairmanship will be that of Mike McCaul, of the Foreign Affairs Committee. McCaul has been a dedicated supporter of military aid to Ukraine, and as such he'll shut down the panel's Trumpian isolationist cries of severed assistance. (McCarthy, who knows better privately, will be glad McCaul is there to offset his silly cancellation of a "blank check.") To balance his Republican credentials, McCaul will investigate the Afghanistan withdrawal, too. 

In general, the new committee chairs will make a lot of noise, but go nowhere in terms of changing government. There shall be plentiful saber-rattling and brinkmanship on the debt, to be sure, but not much more than that. In short, the Republican House will be a sideshow. The main attractions will be Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis.  

America's gun laws are fascistically shutting down peaceful public events

The new gun laws in America do have one advantage. For example, in 2021, when an armed Proud Boy was chasing antifa members during a covid-lockdown protest in Olympia, Wash., he shot himself in the foot. Perhaps next time he'll fire about two meters higher.

Otherwise, our Pandora Box of a Supreme Court has opened up precisely what one would expect:

"This month, armed protesters appeared outside an elections center in Phoenix, hurling baseless accusations that the election for governor had been stolen from the Republican, Kari Lake. In October, Proud Boys with guns joined a rally in Nashville where conservative lawmakers spoke against transgender medical treatments for minors.

"In June, armed demonstrations around the United States amounted to nearly one a day. A group led by a former Republican state legislator protested a gay pride event in a public park in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Men with guns interrupted a Juneteenth festival in Franklin, Tenn., handing out fliers claiming that white people were being replaced. Among the others were rallies in support of gun rights in Delaware and abortion rights in Georgia." (Bold mine.)

An analysis by The New York Times "of more than 700 armed demonstrations found that, at about 77 percent of them, people openly carrying guns represented right-wing views, such as opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and abortion access, hostility to racial justice rallies and support for former President Donald J. Trump’s lie of winning the 2020 election."

States are finding that the adoption of newly "constitutional" gun restrictions is nearly impossible because of a 2020 Supreme Court decision. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court, almost unbelievably, ruled that "Not only must a modern gun restriction have a historical analog, the time period matters. The relevant period ... is from about 1791 — when the Second Amendment was ratified — to about 1868 — when the 14th Amendment, which the Supreme Court has interpreted to apply the Bill of Rights to the states, was ratified." 

The passage is from The Trace, "The Real Significance of the Supreme Court's Gun Decision."  The website's article notes that "Even then, the analogs need to be well-established — the existence of a regulation in history can be ignored if the regulation wasn’t adopted by enough states." To pass a rational gun law, states must clear hurdles atop hurdles atop hurdles.   

On behalf of right-winging gun nuts, America's gun laws are doing their intended work. Said Kevin Thompson, executive director of the Museum of Science & History in Memphis, Tenn., which had to cancel an L.G.B.T.Q. event in September because of armed protesters, "It’s disappointing we’ve gotten to that state in our country. What I saw was a group of folks who did not want to engage in any sort of dialogue and just wanted to impose their belief."

There's a word for this: fascism. 

I very much need to finish this year with a financial bang. Contributions have been off this year; there's always the competition of Twitter — independent political sites' most damaging bête noire — plus other and constant static, and lately, competing demands for political donations. I get it. But if you're a regular reader of this site, I need you. What's here, every day, is impossible without you. So please, right now, go to the "Make A Donation" button in the sidebar. It's somewhat painless with a credit card and, far better, it's extraordinarily rewarding. You shall know you have done your part. Thank you, —PM   

In one post, the Russian economy of corruption, inefficiency, recession, shortages. resistance, lost revenue, and a disastrous mobilization

The Russian president's smugness is at an end. After denying for months that Western sanctions were marring his economy and inhibiting his war effort, Vladimir Putin has established an economic coordination council as a "necessary" measure to enhance production, he conceded Thursday.

His principal challenge is that of gearing up for an anticipated — indeed, essential — spring offensive in Ukraine. He's "concerned he needs to interfere to make sure supplies will be available," said Sergei Guriev of France's Sciences Po, a research university, to The Washington Post. "He is concerned that sanctions have really hit the ability to produce goods."

Added Nikolai Petrov, a senior research fellow at the London think tank Chatham House, "The main problem ahead of the Kremlin is the question of when the army will be ready to begin new military action in Ukraine, and the preparation of arms and ammunition and so on will determine these plans." Should his newfound economic council falter, so shall his spring offensive.

Ukrainian, British and U.S. intelligence have speculated that were it not for missiles and drones supplied by Iran and North Korea, even Russia's current, war-crime assaults on Ukrainian civilians and their energy structures would have been hampered — its own arsenal has shrunk that low. In desperation, Putin is also using air defense missiles offensively to compensate for domestic shortages.

But from a larger economic perspective, Putin is trapped in even more trouble. "All objective indicators show there is a very strong drop in economic activity," said Vladimir Milov, a former Russian deputy energy minister now in exile. "The spiral is escalating, and there is no way out of this now."

After a relatively painless summer, "the situation has worsened considerably," reports the Post. Russia's finance ministry revealed last week that "a key economic indicator — tax revenue from the non-oil and gas sector — fell 20 percent [over a year] ... while the Russian state statistics agency Rosstat reported that retail sales fell 10 percent."

Putin's gas revenues have taken a self-imposed hit through his retaliatory restrictions on European supplies. Added to that economic harm will be Europe's price cap on Russian oil. Further squeezing Putin's economy are sanctions on technology imports, whose effects reverberate throughout Russian industry. Putin has also exacerbated labor shortages by conscripting more than 300,000 Russian men to die in Ukraine, while an equal number have fled the country to avoid that fate.

Warned Russia's central bank this month, GDP — as best it can be gauged in such a chaotic environment, it should be noted — will contract by more than 7 percent in the fourth quarter, after falling for two preceding quarters. The Russian economy has dropped into recession, said the bank's chairwoman, Elvira Nabiullina. What's more, the gloom is just beginning. "We really need to look at the situation very soberly and with our eyes open. Things may get worse," she said.

Affecting Russian industry as well is its tradition of pervasive corruption. As the Atlantic Council observed earlier this month, "Ever since the fall of the USSR, Western commentators have noted the debilitating impact of corruption at every level of the modern Russian state. In recent decades, some have branded the Putin regime a 'mafia state,' where the boundaries between the authorities and organized crime are blurred. Corruption has flourished under Putin amid a climate of stagnation inherited from the late Soviet era."

Russian businessmen are not pleased by Putin's creation of a coordination council. One confided to the Post that "many entrepreneurs" have been coerced into producing supplies for the Russian military at heavily discounted prices; understandably, they're afraid to raise objections. Even though a "quiet mobilization" has been in place for some time, said the businessman, the Russian press has complained about severe equipment shortages for new draftees.

In October, the Russian daily Kommersant reported "huge shortages in ammunition and uniform supplies for conscripts with manufacturers citing difficulties securing the necessary materials due to sanctions." Businessmen at large are saying that Putin’s catastrophic Ukrainian adventure has at last "exposed the huge inefficiencies and corruption in Russia’s military industrial complex." Said one banker, "There are huge questions over where all the trillions of rubles of the past decade have been spent."

Nevertheless, come spring this train wreck of an army is what Putin intends to deploy — mere cannon fodder, more cannon fodder. Realistically he has no options but one: the radioactive, whether a genuine nuclear weapon or a barrage of dirty bombs. Ukraine isn't about to yield, no matter how many innocent civilians he murders — and neither shall Putin retreat in disgrace.

Russia may be a chaotic amalgam of corruption, inefficiency, internal resistance and insolvency, but in its morbid disarray there still lies the nuclear. We must ask ourselves: Given the empirical horrors of Ukraine, is there yet any barbarity for which Vladimir Putin will not reach?    

The stench of Elon Musk is getting worse: Twitter is his Putinesque Ukraine

Having already staged one statistically meaningless "poll" to justify encore garbage from the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Project Veritas, a disinformation machine of astoundingly deceptive tactics, Elon Musk was at it again this week, asking "Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?"

No one knew what "egregious spam" meant, but what the hell, allowances must be made for men who have no idea what they're doing. Neither was anyone surprised that more than 72% of respondents said yes, let's further stink up Twitter with the sparkling genius of yet more Kanye Wests. Thus, wrote Mr. Musk, "Amnesty begins next week."

To whom does this matter? Does it matter? Should it matter? "Should" is something of an ethical question, which for the moment we'll overlook. As for the easier question of to whom Twitter matters, here are some facts about its usage in the United States, which I assume are comparable worldwide. 

According to Pew Research, about one-in-five adults (23%) say they use the social-media platform, a bit more than I thought — and more Democrats (32%) than Republicans (17%), which did surprise me.  

But what the right lacks in numbers, it makes up for in volume. "The top 25% of users by tweet volume produce 97% of all tweets," reports Pew. Perhaps it's just the algorithmic vicissitudes of my feed, but right-wing tweets dominate by far. Which leads to this: "Around one-in-five adult Twitter users in the U.S. have experienced harassing or abusive behavior on the platform." (I've tried gentle "engagement" with the right. It doesn't work.)

Finally, "a third say they see a lot of inaccurate or misleading information there." The other two-thirds must be dozing. Twitter is frontloaded, backloaded and overloaded with inaccurate or misleading information. It's everywhere, it's inescapable, and it's one of the reasons I glance at it. I find value in seeing what fallacies and fantasies the right is pumping out. Know your enemy.

Would that Twitter's malodorousness stopped at stink, and not proceeded to stench. Which is to say, "inaccurate or misleading information" is the least of Twitter's putrefaction. The other day I was too flippant in writing, "free speech on the right, to the right, means a poke in the eye — yours. At the same time, it is harmless, and rather humorous" — for this morning, The Washington Post disabused me of Twitter's amusement value.

The paper quotes one Alejandra Caraballo, of Harvard Law's cyberlaw clinic: "What Musk is doing is existentially dangerous for various marginalized communities. It’s like opening the gates of hell in terms of the havoc it will cause. People who engaged in direct targeted harassment can come back and engage in doxing, targeted harassment, vicious bullying, calls for violence, celebration of violence. I can’t even begin to state how dangerous this will be."

Said Nora Benavidez, director of a civil rights advocacy group: "Musk, under the auspices of democracy, is legitimizing decisions that will have deeply dangerous consequences in the real world.... You have journalists, activists in authoritarian regimes in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who are now at the mercy of even more vicious trolls with no ability to fight back. It’s literally life or death for people."

And wrote Hopewell Chin'ono, a journalist in Zimbabwe: "This would be a major disaster especially in Africa where State sponsored Ghost accounts were suspended for endangering human rights activists & journalists. You would have allowed vile people to put our lives in danger as journalists! You will have blood on your hands @elonmusk."

There is no amusement in these words. My unfortunate judgment lay in thinking U.S.-centrically; here, we've no theological regime calling for the harsher oppression of women; no organized gangs of homophobic cutthroats rambling the streets; no state-sponsored "ghost" accounts agitating for the murder of journalists. Unlike Ms. Benavidez, I neglected the "deeply dangerous consequences in the real world." 

As did Elon Musk. There's an upside to that guy, though: He is pissing away $44 billion. Where, for instance, shall his advertising revenue come from in the madman mecca of the world, America? As Media Matters' president, Angelo Carusone, notes, here at home Twitter will be treating us to the wit and wisdom of the American Nazi Party and "a whole bunch of 8chan, 4chan, conspiracy theorists who engage in harassment and abuse.” Racism and antisemitism will abound, "turning Twitter into a one-stop shop for operationalizing doxing and harassment, and an engine of radicalization."

Show of hands: How many believe AT&T will wish to adverstise that? Someone observed on Twitter the other day that at the rate Elon is going, the MyPillow dude will be his only sponsor. This, happily, is no exaggeration. Either Musk will flush tens of billions of dollars, or he'll revert to a moderation scheme. There is no middle path.

So there is a Plan B: time. I suspect he's already looking to unload Twitter along the lines of Vladimir's heavily discounted oil price.    

To my American readers, Happy Thanksgiving. I nearly forgot. As a bachelor living alone I'll be having my usual peanut butter and mayo sandwich, but with 10 fig newtons, a chocolate pudding cup and some mint chocolate chip ice cream — in other words, the traditional Pilgram fare. Or was it the Wampanoag?

***

Britain urges Ukraine to hit Russia hard - now!

Contrary to the incomprehensible advice of U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley — that Ukraine use winter's potential slowdown in fighting as a "window" for negotiations with Russia — Britain's Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace is smartly encouraging President Zelensky's armed forces to strike - to "keep up the pressure, keep up the momentum," and thus capitalize on their recent counteroffensive successes.

Said Wallace in an interview with the Daily Beast:

"Given the advantage the Ukrainians have in equipment training and quality of their personnel against the demoralized, poorly trained, poorly equipped Russians, it would be in Ukraine’s interest to maintain momentum through the winter. They have 300,000 pieces of arctic warfare kit from the international community."

His advice is as commonsensically smart as it is welcome. Ukrainian troops virtually danced through Russian "defenses" in the northeast — the Kharkiv region — and more recently they captured Kherson, President Putin's prize of an occupied city which he briefly, officially fancied as a part of Russia. For Ukrainian forces to let up now against the "demoralized, poorly trained, poorly equipped Russians" would be a damnable instance of military malpractice.

Wallace commented further on the deplorable state of the Russian army in Ukraine:      

"A Russian unit was recently deployed with no food and no socks, and not many guns. That is catastrophic for a person going in the field... The Russians have scale, but are not very good. Well, most of the good ones are dead. They are a meat grinder—they shove them in the meat grinder—and use massive quantities of artillery. Only a nation that does not care for its own people could send 100,000 of its own people to be either dead, injured, or deserted."

This is the army to which General Milley wished to provide a "window"? And negotiate with its commander in chief, Vladimir Putin? What is there to negotiate? Either Russia voluntarily removes itself from all of Ukraine's territory, including Crimea and the Donbas' entirety, or Ukraine must force it back to its borders. If Ukraine and Europe desire a permanent peace, this is the only acceptable term.  

In part because negotiating with Putin is like making an unsigned deal with the devil. He would use any peace settlement as mere biding time; a "window" to rebuild his military as best he could — and back to Ukraine he would go. In his mind Russia is still a formidable military power; he'll never capitulate to "little" Ukraine in any lasting way. As well, any land-for-peace settlement would only reward Putin's aggression.  

Fortunately, Zelensky "has declared that he will not negotiate with Russia while Putin remains in power," as the Daily Beast reminds us. He has also declared that any settlement must meet the conditions outlined above. Zelensky realizes that as long as Putin is president, "settlement" = "military resolution."     

We must also thank Britain's Ben Wallace for acknowledging what, again, is incomprehensively missing in Gen. Milley's thinking. 

Mike Pence and the short arm of the law

Here's an above-the-fold update on the imperial presidency — and that of all the president's men — via executive privilege:  

"The Justice Department is seeking to question former Vice President Mike Pence as a witness in connection with its criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election....

"Mr. Pence ... is open to considering the request."

If you had been present at the creation of the greatest crime in American history, imagine the guffaws echoing from the marbled halls of the Department of Justice after you told its prosecutors that you might be "open" to meeting their request to appear as a witness.   

Ah, but you weren't vice president of the United States at the time, thus eligible to claim executive privilege — or for the former president to do it for you. Mike Pense was vice president, hence no guffaws. 

On the other hand, in the United States v. Nixon, the Supreme Court ruled that in cases of criminal conduct your executive privilege claim would be no more valid than that of an "average" citizen. So cough it up.  

Such has been the law for nearly a half-century. And yet an ex-president and those within his closest circle persist in claiming executive privilege even in this case of the most outrageously obvious criminal conduct. Constitutionally, said the Court, the privilege is nonexistent. Nonetheless, official deference is paid. Indeed executive privilege has become much like the Senate filibuster: One need only utter the words, and "the system" backs down.  

It should be a matter of public astonishment that Vice President Pence, who quarreled with Trump about the president's insistence that he violate the Constitution, has never been officially interviewed about the events surrounding Jan. 6. "Despite Mr. Pence being a witness to a range of Mr. Trump’s actions in office," writes The NY Times, "an interview of the former vice president would be the first time that he has been questioned in a federal investigation of Mr. Trump."

Neither was Pence ever questioned during the Mueller investigation, even though he was also at the creation of Trump's obstruction of justice efforts. Pence "was in the room for many of the key events examined by Mr. Mueller in the obstruction investigation, but Mr. Pence’s lawyer at the time managed to get him out of having to testify." The lawyer simply informed Mueller "that Mr. Pence believed Mr. Trump had not obstructed justice." And that was that, for "privilege" would ensue.

No one disputes the legitimacy of executive privilege per se. It has primordial roots in America's constitutional system of government. George Washington was the first to invoke it; the House wanted documents pertaining to the Jay Treaty with London, but Washington refused, saying treaties are within the purview of the Senate only — to which he did provide the documents. 

President Eisenhower is known for having established the modern and more expansive form of executive privilege, during the Army-McCarthy hearings. In a DOJ memo he forbade the "provision of any data about internal conversations, meetings, or written communication among staffers, with no exception to topics or people." Before concluding his White House tenure Eisenhower went on to invoke the claim nearly four dozen more times. The idea was that "candid" exchanges among White House personnel were no one's business but theirs.  

This, President Nixon tried to take to criminal heights, but the Supreme Court shut him down. That, it would seem to most any reasonable mind, should have been the end of it — "it" being the invocation of executive privilege in presidential cases of criminal conduct. But, the law being the law — reams of byzantine language designed to evade straightforwardness — Trump has managed to gum up the works through virtually endless assertions of privilege. And WH Trumpers have done the same.

Executive privilege has become a go-to defense for obstruction of justice. After years of litigation, the privilege is often denied, but at times it seems DOJ has become too wearied for yet another, almost infinite court battle.

So Mike Pence can imperiously state that he "is open to considering" a Department of Justice request that he act as an eye witness to the greatest crime ever committed in American history.

And that's the way it is — Walter Cronkite, CBS News

To date, 217,000+ casualties, but Russia's loss of munitions may cost it this terrorist war

The story's lede states bluntly what may be Vladimir Putin's greatest enemy — material attrition. "Russia has been burning through equipment, ammunition and weaponry at rates that have raised questions about how effectively and for how long it can continue to prosecute its war against Ukraine," writes The Wall Street Journal.

Both sides are expending massive quantities of weaponry, of course. But while Ukraine can rely on a flow of fresh munitions from the West — especially from the Biden administration — Russia is left to its own failing devices. Because of technology-denying sanctions and a severely constricting economy, the Russians have been unable to adequately resupply their killing machines.   

"They are running low on everything," says Eliot Cohen of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Moreover, a fair amount of the armaments that Russia had stashed away in storage "has deteriorated because of corruption, mismanagement and poor maintenance, he said." 

Putin's depletion of, particularly, missiles threatens his ability to sustain the war. His army is too incompetent to fight much of a soldier-to-soldier ground war in Ukraine, so he has opted for either slaughtering civilians or freezing them into merely hoped-for submission. Stalin's famed Red Army of the Second World War, which accounted for three-fourths of German army casualties, has, under Vladimir Putin, devolved into nothing more than a terrorist organization.  

Russia's known or estimated expenditure of missiles tells the story. "The rate at which these missiles are used has dropped significantly from an average of two dozen daily launches in the first months of the war," reports the Journal. A spokesman for the Ukrainian air force "said last week that just 15 Kalibr cruise missiles were launched in the entire month of October."

One sign of Russian desperation is that it's using missiles in ways for which they were never designed. Antiship missiles, for instance, are being deployed against land targets — remember, Putin has millions of Ukrainian citizens to murder, however he can. These missiles are meant to compensate for Russia's draining supply of low-precision ammunition; for months its forces had been firing thousands of artillery shells each day, yet the rate of fire, say analysts, has now plunged.

Unknown to Western analysts is "the significance" of Iranian weapons being shipped to Russia; their quantity and future guarantees remain a mystery. What is known is that the Kremlin, which was once among the world's leading arms dealers, is having to plead for outside armaments. This is just "another indication that the Russian military-industrial base is struggling to resupply the country’s forces," observes the Journal.

The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, now estimates that Russia has suffered more than 100,000 soldiers killed or wounded, and probably about the same number of Ukrainian troops, he added. And yet civilian casualties are one-sided. As of Monday, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated that 16,784 Ukrainian civilians have been killed or wounded, including 1,170 children.

Then, as always, comes the even more heartbreaking disclaimer: "However, OHCHR specifi[es] that the real numbers could be higher." Much higher. 

And so Russia will lose this war while having lost a lesser number of lives while expending a greater amount of missiles to murder a vast and ever-increasing number of Ukrainian civilians. 

The America Civil War is known by military historians as the first Total War. The Russia-Ukraine War will be known to more than just military historians as the first true Terrorist War.   

And for what?

To much of the world, the U.S.A. is Tombstone, Ariz., circa 1880

Again ...

"A gunman fatally shot six people and wounded at least four others inside a Walmart in Chesapeake, Va., on Tuesday night, the authorities said, shattering the bustle of a holiday week."

And again ...

"It was the second high-profile mass shooting in the United States in three days, after five people were killed at a gay club in Colorado Springs over the weekend."

A few years ago my wife and I hosted two Japanese students who were visiting the United States for about 10 days. Neither spoke much English, but that never stopped one of the teenagers from touring our little city on his own. He would happily board a metro bus and go wherever it took him. He particularly enjoyed riding to stores such as Walmart. 

The other student wouldn't leave the house. It seems his parents made him come for "the experience." But he merely sat for days on end in a pitiable state of anxiety, which, with his poor English, he couldn't explain, nor was he inclined to.

His co-traveler finally informed us that his friend was terrified of the United States; he was sure that if he ventured outside, he'd be caught in some random shooting's crossfire. Such was America's image he had acquired from watching U.S. news on Japanese television.

I'm not so sure he was wrong.

Twitter: The far-right sewer you've been waiting for. Rejoice!

This piece of satire from The New Yorker's Andy Borowitz highlights what Musk is either unable to understand, or fails to appreciate: With Twitter's absolute democratization, we get the absolute lowest of common denominators.

With Musk's emancipation of reckless crackpots such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump (whether he indulges his thumbs or not), Twitter becomes less of a "free speech" forum than an unsupervised madhouse — an even more vulgar version of "The Gong Show," scarcely a business model to emulate.

He's flushing his investment,, he's pooping in his own mess kit, he appears to be giving the finger to folks who won't hang on Ms. Greene's every demented word — because he can. This is his way of showing, I gather, that billionaires can squander massive amounts of capital without heartache.  

Yet by and large, we are not impressed. Sure, the Dinesh D'Souzas are. I don't follow him but Twitter's algorithms push his middle-school opinions to the top of my feeds. Dinesh has been on an "own the libs" kick with unprecedented fury; 20 times a day he tells us the left is squealing because they no longer "own" Twitter. Such is Dinesh's fisheye view of the world, both funny and sad. Hence the right is but showing that crackpots can squander their days like some billionaires can blow through capital. How this harms the left escapes me.      

But what of Musk's "free speech" crusade? Has it any merit? His tweets suggest that he is convinced of his newfound anti-Savonarola stature — the lords of censorship no longer rule is his quotidian theme. He is endlessly proud of himself as he pecks at the erstwhile mites under his angelic wings. He is, at long last, giving us FREE SPEECH.

Well, it is "free" and it is "speech," but it's not "free speech." The freedom of speech is a positive right in philosophical terms and thus is attached to a certain nobility. Only fools, dunces and evildoers abuse it. They may if they wish; their negative right is guaranteed by the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law...."). Warnings of Jewish space lasers, then, tend to attenuate what the founders had in mind when they Constitutionally protected ideas expressed through the spoken word.         

What the right has to offer is just freely dishonorable speech as well as dazzling stupidity in limited characters. Our word "free," however, comes from Old English freo — principally meaning "exempt from"; secondarily, "noble; joyful." Do reasonable minds find any nobility in the right's Twitter fare?

Granted, my idea of authentic "free speech" is perhaps too sentimental. It's a right coupled by responsibility, although in Greene-, Trump- and MuskWorld it's a privilege wedded to recklessness. More than that, free speech on the right, to the right, means a poke in the eye — yours. At the same time it is harmless, and rather humorous. Crackpots such as Mr. D'Souza seem to believe they're really sticking it to the libs.

The right, in general, is a conglomeration of America's lowest possible denominators. By democratizing its reductios ad absurdum even further, Musk has only absolutely bottomed out what's proverbially known as The Great Unwashed — that is, it is freer than ever to make a fool of itself. Some on the left think this abominable. I find it rewarding.           

Ron DeSantis' "positively dystopian" future is on life support

In a case brought against the Florida state university system's board of governors, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker wrote a 17 November opinion that should be court-ordered reading for all the Republican pols and millions of duped voters who endlessly prattle about President Bidens's socialist hellhole while hailing Freedom! under the likes of a Goveror/President Ron DeSantis.

In his ruling Judge Walker confronted the state's — which is to say, DeSantis' — "Stop W.O.K.E." Act (the "Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees"), a particularly egregious piece of unconstitutional bullying that defines the modern right's Luntzian-Orwellian torture of the English language and its comcomitant delight in censoring ideas.

While wearing his best Sunday Goebbels uniform, Gov. DeSantis announced late last year that the legislation "will give businesses, employees, children and families tools to fight back against woke indoctrination." Like pseudoconservative bills designed to fight Sharia law where it doesn't exist, the "Stop W.O.K.E. Act will be the strongest legislation of its kind in the nation," brayed the governor, "and will take on" the phantom threat of "Critical Race Theory." 

The legisation, which took effect in July, accomplished this by neofasctically banning educators' academic freedom — which, as one might have guessed, a group of Florida university professors rather strongly objected to. Judge Walker objected just as strongly. Hence DeSantis' accomplishment was, for now, a brief one. Wrote Walker:   

"The powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the State has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of 'freedom.' To confront certain viewpoints that offend the powers that be, the State of Florida passed the so-called 'Stop W.O.K.E.' Act in 2022—redubbed (in line with the State’s doublespeak) the 'Individual Freedom Act.' The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints. Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy 'academic freedom' so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves. This is positively dystopian....

"One thing is crystal clear—both robust intellectual inquiry and democracy
require light to thrive. Our professors are critical to a healthy democracy, and the
State of Florida’s decision to choose which viewpoints are worthy of illumination
and which must remain in the shadows has implications for us all. If our 'priests of democracy' are not allowed to shed light on challenging ideas, then democracy will die in darkness. But the First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark."

Representative democracy, however, does allow demagogues to muzzle professors, impose orthodoxy, and cast us all into darkness. Unless, that is, a wise federal judge steps in.

Yet this fight is not over. After a thundering flash of unrepresentive democracy, a popularly unelected president was permitted to seat three ideological cave dwellers on the U.S. Supreme Court, which likely will rule on the Florida case in the potentially dystopian future. So there's life in it yet; although 5-4 against?

When DeSantis boasted that "the "Stop W.O.K.E. Act will be the strongest legislation of its kind in the nation," he threw in the geographical reference for a pointed, self-interested reason. He intends to remake the nation in Florida's image — a shining beacon of unibrow authoritarianism, with Reichsmarschall DeSantis at the refashioning light switch.  

First he must hoodwink just enough American voters into believing that a more muscular Trumpism (though perish the name) is the proper and, indeed, only way to protect "traditional America vlaues" — code for White cultural hegemony. This can be done — 2016, Q.E.D. — with an assist from the democratically unrepresentative Electoral College.

Its doing was happily complicated earlier this month by voters' rejection of most would-be governors and secretaries of state hellbent on election denialism. And yet, the College's bias toward vast wastelands of guns, gravy, country music and pickup trucks is just hefty enough to bastardize American democracy.

Every four years we are told by ubiquitous voices that this is the most important election of our lifetime. Though perhaps electorally energizing, this common rallying cry is a curious redundancy, since every presidential election is the most important of our lifetime, given that the nation's chief executive holds the wicked potential to go managerially barbaric on us.         

Congress has become the proverbial weak sister and the body politic seems to relish joining lugubrious pols who declare the dubiousness of other American instititions. POTUS, then, becomes the iconographic avatar of "the people's" soul — or at least half of them. As a political deity, he can do no wrong.

This democratic pathogen is expecially pronounced on the right. But their God is dead, long live God — Trump has transubstantiated into DeSantis. Damn, that was quick.

Do I believe in the governor's ineffable ascendence to the White House? Not for a minute. DeSantis may be Trump with a brain, but he can't conceal his equally ugly, authoritarian essence. The American electorate just renounced the nation's arc toward injustice, and by 2024 — especially after two years of a Republiican Monkey House — the electorate's blistering renunication will seem like a gentle warm-up.   

Alex Jones is still laughing at his victims

S.O.B.s like Alex Jones and Donald Trump rarely seem to suffer when they lose civil cases for millions of dollars. When those massive judgments against Jones came down, I noted this, asking if anyone actually believed he would be on the financial hook. 

I'm deeply sorry to say that that observation was likely correct. The Washington Post:

"Parents of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School had sued [Jones] and his media company for defamation after he repeatedly claimed the 2012 massacre in Connecticut was a hoax. Fans of the Infowars host had harassed and threatened grieving families. By the summer of 2020, two of the lawsuits weren’t going his way.

"As the potential for damages mounted, Jones began moving millions of dollars out of his company, Free Speech Systems, and into companies controlled by himself, friends or relatives.... The transfers potentially put those funds out of reach of the Sandy Hook plaintiffs."

There has to be a better way to nail bastards like Jones. That he's even still drawing breath is an abomination. 

Russia's staggering losses in Ukraine - which point to only one conclusion

These figures, originally posted on Facebook by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, were published today by The Kyiv Independent. The numbers are staggering. 

Some skepticism is called for as to the exact accuracy of these statistics, given the source and their propagandistic value. But not much skepticism. A month ago, for instance, Western intelligence also estimated Russian casualties as likely exceeding 80,000. 

Contemporaneously, Jeremy Fleming, the head of GCHQ — Britain’s intelligence, cyber and security agency — said in a speech to London's Royal United Services Institute think tank that "Russia’s forces are exhausted. The use of prisoners to reinforce, and now the mobilization of tens of thousands of inexperienced conscripts, speaks of a desperate situation."

Also in mid-October, the British ministry of defence assessed Russia's military leadership on Ukraine's battlefields as "increasingly dysfunctional," with a "worsening shortage of capable Russian junior officers." 

And one month before that, Oryx, an organization that tracks losses in military equipment throughout the world, reported that Russia had already lost 1,029 tanks —637 destroyed, 51 abandoned, 42 damaged, and 299 captured by Ukraine. It's far from inconceivable that in Ukraine's hugely successful counteroffensives in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions, Russia would have lost roughly another 2,000 tanks.      

In sum, for the past couple months, Western as well as Ukrainian intelligence have reported enormous losses in Russian manpower and equipment. Making matter worse for President Putin, he has been unable to replace men in the field with well-trained or experienced troops, and Western sanctions have severely inhibited his ability to replenish Russia's military hardware. Even drones he has had to beg from Iran, which Iran, after repeated denials, finally admitted to sending.  

In addition, Russia "is struggling with a shortage of high-precision, long-range missiles," announced Western officials last month. Thus even Putin's unconscienable air war on Ukrainian citizens is in jeopardy.  

As Russia's demoralized troops deplete their supply of trucks, tanks, artillery and the like, Ukraine's energized troops are stocking up with Western supplies. And so it will go throughout the winter. Is there much doubt, then, as to how spring will proceed militarily?