Its massively depressing that this is the best we can do

is gutless and without heart. Odd that in a country with 330 million people, plenty of them loaded with courage and decidedly NOT crazy, we can't find better candidates.

…the vision of our political leadership is about staying in power, promoting and protecting a static political class. I laughed when people flipped out about GWB being elected to POTUS because of his family connection - much of those same people didn’t give much thought to Gore’s run, or calling for Hillary or Michelle Obama to run. But I digress.

We were told at the start of the UKR war that autocracies are brittle. This seems less and less the case to me, especially when the autocracies in question are nuclear. Instead we see democracies around the world easily invaded by populism fueled by feckless leadership and a laissez faire social media class. The US is a clown show right now, from the perspective of just about any institutional angle you could imagine. And much of this was brought about by self serving political and other elites.

We are really are just about too stupid to be a democracy anymore

An autocracy breaks at the first sign of trouble. It means there's often very little give between seeming like things are going swimmingly and revolution.

My medical analogy is someone who can't feel pain. They can push through annoyances with ease and can seem superhuman at times. But pain is there for a reason. Without the early warning system you stop suddenly when you've missed all the early warnings pain should have given you and now you're in deep.

At some point, Russia is going to have to mobilize people who aren't so easy to mobilize. Their labor shortages will get worse. They'll see more terrorism and the secret police spends more time trying to clamp down opposition. Hopefully we and the Europeans can keep Ukraine going long enough to make that happen.

I'm looking at you Mike Johnson. Please do the right thing.