Executive Summary:

• Moscow’s forces in Ukraine face increasing problems with the military, both at the front and at home. These issues are bound to affect Russia’s ability to fight in the coming months.
• At the front, Russian commanders are dealing with fragging, desertions, and corruption. At home, Moscow has been compelled to offer larger bonuses to recruit more men and has even asked Russians to turn in their privately owned guns.
• Public hostility is growing toward veterans of the war, who are committing violent crimes upon their return. These are precisely the people Putin says will become Russia’s new elite.

For quite a considerable amount of time, the topics of job creation and unemployment have been central to every political campaign in almost every country.

It hasn’t been without good reason, either, since job security is one of the most important factors in a person’s career. Therefore, a candidate who can promise to create more jobs and sustain job growth would appear on paper to be the better candidate.

However, there are few policies that promote greater havoc than job-creation programs. This should not be a surprise since the state is ultimately not responsible for financing jobs, so it need not worry about profit or loss.

Politicians are inclined to include job-creation programs in their promises because they are often popular with voters.

After all, if there are more jobs in the economy, unemployment will be lower, and there is a greater likelihood that workers in the country will not fall on hard times.

Since nearly every household has a member of their family who works, job-creation programs have nearly universal appeal.

If a politician can position themselves as a job creator, they garner a massive boost toward their odds of being elected.

Thus, they all aim to one-up each other with what they promise to voters. Unfortunately, in this case, competition does not lead to better results.

Many people who know anything about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE, or ATF for short) will know they started off as a “harmless” tax collecting agency that eventually turned into a law enforcement agency in its own right.

In other words, they evolved from a bunch of glorified robbers with mechanical calculators and spreadsheets into a gang of violent thugs with guns and badges.

This transformation became obvious to the world in the famous Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco (1993) incidents, both having had heavy ATF involvement and with the latter event culminating in an open massacre of the Branch Davidians that included women and children.

Later as they have cooled their trigger fingers, the ATF’s side gig of deliberately allowing guns to flow into Mexico for “tracking purposes” was exposed in the Fast and Furious scandal after two of these guns turned up near the scene of the killing of Brian Terry, a border patrol officer, in 2010 (a whole of lot of good this “tracking” did).

In more recent years, ATF’s favorite pastime has been to send several car-loads worth of thugs LARPing with full tactical gear to raid and intimidate American licensed gun dealers for supposed infractions of federal firearms laws and confiscate their property.

Is Great Britain once again going in the opposite direction of the European Union?

Right-wing parties swept EU elections last month, but the British Tories are out.

After 14 years at the helm, Britain’s Conservative Party lost in a landslide as the left-wing Labour Party cleaned up, seizing at least 410 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.

It was a bruising defeat for the Tories, as their former majority has been reduced to just 121 seats. But it wasn’t entirely unexpected.

Furthermore, Labour’s victory wasn’t so much a mandate as it was a repudiation of the Tories and their recent lackluster leadership amid a slowing economy still trying to recover from the COVID pandemic.

Now, Labour will take up the reins, with its leader, Keir Starmer, becoming the country’s new prime minister.

Chief among their challenges will be turning around a struggling economy without further ballooning an already high national debt.

Furthermore, Labour’s win is not as big as it appears.

People of a certain age will remember the name “Donald Segretti.”

In the 1972 re-election campaign of President Richard Nixon, this youthful campaign aide made the phrase “dirty tricks” part of the American political lexicon.

Segretti’s mischief included sending embarrassing letters under the names of Nixon’s political rivals.

Although his dirty tricks had little or no effect on the election’s outcome, Segretti served four and a half months in prison.

With Segretti’s four and a half months as a baseline, the 51-plus dirty tricksters who conspired successfully to get Joe Biden elected president in 2020 would seem to deserve no less.

Confident to a fault about the Democrat control of the media, 51 intel officials signed on to the most flagrant disinformation campaign in anyone’s memory.

The U.S. State Department said that recent remarks from Russian President Vladimir Putin suggesting he would supply North Korea with weapons are “incredibly concerning.”

Earlier this week, in a visit to North Korea, Mr. Putin suggested that weapons supplies to the isolated, communist country would be a similar response to the West arming Ukraine in the midst of the two-year-long war with Russia.

The Russian leader also warned South Korea against supplying arms to Ukraine.

In comments at a news briefing on Thursday, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller was asked about the Russian president’s comments about possible arms supplies to Pyongyang. “It’s incredibly concerning,” he said in response.

“It would destabilize the Korean Peninsula, of course, and potentially ... depending on the type of weapons they provide, might violate U.N. Security Council resolutions that Russia itself has supported,” he added.

The spokesman said the United States “will continue to work with our allies in the region” such as “South Korea, Japan, others ... to respond to the threat posed by North Korea.”