WSJ reports that Trump has chosen Rep. Mike Waltz as his new National Security Adviser.

Waltz is a former Green Beret who has been very vocal about NATO allies having to significantly increase their defense spending if the alliance is to survive.

Oh God, I can’t believe it, Mike Walz instead of the weaselly Putinoid Jake Sullivan. What is this, Christmas?

It’s a happy, happy day. Mike Waltz is a serious person with a real vision. Strong, decisive, and real.

An online prankster sent the teachers of the Voronezh Oblast a notification that the authorities demanded that teachers make and wear patriotic tinfoil hats. The teachers complied:

The Ministry of Education found out about the prank and … praised the tinfoil hat teachers for their creativity and patriotism.

The bovine compliance and stupidity of everybody involved besides the prankster is very typical of Russia.

More information and photos at the link.

If Trump keeps pressuring Russia, he’ll end up like John Kennedy.

-Formed Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.

Yesterday was Russia’s worst day of troop losses in the entire war, so the leadership is tetchy.

One ticket costs $256,000. Of course, people could simply turn off the TV and achieve the same goal but where’s the fun of that?

Every Democrat who mentions “defund the police” as a reason for loss in 2024 is simply acting in bad faith. It has not been a term used for several cycles now by anyone of relevance (and even fringe people stopped using it a while ago). These Democrats know that.

https://x.com/HCTrudo/status/1855351754314875218?t=PB0Rp4hO2TQVRvpgg39I5A&s=19

How shocking that people actually have memories that don’t get erased every “several cycles”.

I want to help you change your thinking and escape from this trap you are in. You overvalue words and undervalue reality. Words can’t be a win or not. They are just words.

Now let’s look at this statement in stages. First, freezing the current lines. As I’m sure you know, a significant part of the Kursk Oblast is under Ukrainian control. That’s in Russia. What is the likelihood that Putin will even contemplate that? I’d say there’s no likelihood. Also, please read the post I wrote earlier today about Russia’s obligations to North Korea and Iran. What’s to happen to those? All this clearly demonstrates that the line about freezing the conflict is just that, a line. It’s aimed at looking at the reaction and then proceeding with the next step.

As for Ukraine’s membership in the NATO, I think we can all agree that there’s no chance the US will send American soldiers to fight in Ukraine. Right? So what did Biden’s oft-repeated promises to invite Ukraine to the NATO after Ukraine wins the war mean? They mean that Ukrainian soldiers, currently the most trained and effective in Europe, will be sent to die in American wars in the Middle East. I’m clearly opposed to that. I would much prefer that the NATO be disbanded and we all accept the reality that it’s a fiction. Then we can move on from these maddening fictions and adapt to the existing reality.

So to return to the point where we started, let’s step away from overvaluing words and start inhabiting reality.

In Anthony Trollope’s novel Can You Forgive Her?, Alice leaves the kind, stable and honorable man she loves to throw herself at a manipulative degenerate for whom she feels no passion. She believes that she’s made for greater things than staid and quiet family life, and hopes that the degenerate will let her make a mark in politics since he’s running for Parliament. Sacrificing even a deep feeling of love for another man on this altar seems like a good idea to her.

Alice’s cousin Glencora got exactly what Alice dreams of. She married the future Chancellor of the Exchequer and can dedicate herself to assisting his political career. Instead, Glencora is eager to throw herself at a loser degenerate of her own and be content with making no mark on anything.

The paucity of life paths that constrain Alice and Glencora is a thing of the past. Women no longer have to attach themselves to this or that husband in order to have a career in politics or anything else. But the topic of female fascination with bad boys is evergreen. Alice and Glencora have a supporting cast of aunts, cousins, grandpas, and other relatives who work together to prevent them from bestowing themselves on the first passing loser who winks at them. These days, on the other hand, we don’t brook any outside input into our personal lives. The cat of individual choice was let out of the bag and there’s no bringing it back in. It would be mistaken, however, to believe that today’s Alices and Glencoras don’t pay a price for their fascination with bad boys.

I keep getting asked what the reaction in Russia is to the election of Trump. Well, there’s been wall-to-wall coverage of Melanie’s naked photos in Russia. This apparently matters a lot to the Russian propaganda apparatus even if the rest of the world got over these photos a long time ago.

What do you expect? That’s the level of analysis they are capable of.

I’m not sure what this question is supposed to mean since Russia, Iran and North Korea are fighting against Ukraine and not against American presidents, be they who they are. I do know that the Russia appeasement strategy that has dominated the foreign policy of the US since 1991 has not worked. We can all agree it has been a complete failure, I’m sure. I’m eager to see the US try something different because only an absolute idiot keeps hitting his head against the wall for 30 years, expecting a different result.

As for Putin, he can sell absolutely anything to his people as a huge win. The narrative that the US needs to help Putin “save face” that has dominated US foreign policy is flawed because it doesn’t recognize the extent to which in Russia words have substituted reality. If Putin decides to end the war (and that’s a decision nobody else can make), he’ll easily be able to present it to his electorate as a win.

However, now that North Korean troops are fighting in Ukraine, this has become much harder. We don’t know what it is that Putin promised Kim Jong Un and how possible it is to just go back on it. From what I understand, the North Korean leader was promised extensive combat training and experience in the most modern weaponry and warfare for his troops. Iran was also promised a long conflict. This is no longer the situation of “let’s convince Putin.” Now it’s necessary to convince all those other dudes, too. Just in the past few weeks since North Korea joined the fighting, it’s become much harder to solve the situation fast.

We need completely new thinking, a new strategy, and for all the morons who shaped the foreign policy of the US since 1991 to be fired. I don’t know how possible this is but I’m definitely glad that the weak, hassled, confused Kamala won’t be supervising it during a very complicated international situation.

What we’ve been doing for the past 3 decades has been disastrous. We need to change course and do something else. I don’t know how anybody can reasonably disagree with this.

Have you, folks, heard Trump’s plan for changing education? If even 5% of it comes to pass, it will be a wonderful thing. I’m in Illinois, so giving the control over education back to the states won’t help much over here but everything else is such joy.

Great primary education, at least, is possible. I’m seeing it in my daughter’s private Christian school. It’s small, cosy, homey, everybody knows each other. The kids are outdoors a lot. It doesn’t have the industrial feel of the public schools in our town. Everything radiates normalcy. It’s a traditional nation-state education that promotes patriotism and love for the community. Kids are required to dress decently. There are no uniforms but it’s not allowed to inflict unnecessary body parts on others. The culture of bookishnes and real, paper books is promoted. But also a culture of sportsmanship, of outdoors life.

It’s not remotely perfect. Nothing in human existence is. But it’s significantly better than the public schools where the only kids who learn anything are those who have hypermotivated parents dragging them to every tutoring service in existence.

Public education needs to face stiff competition in order to improve. And it needs a lot less money because it’s currently being wasted on things like luxurious gender-neutral toilets (real story) and downgrading schools for not having many black students irrespective of the regional demographics (also true story).