There is no victory in this war. There are only bad and worse outcomes.

The Senate has put forward a proposal for $6 billion in more funding; in the House, McCarthy faces revolt.

While driving down the road today listening to Alexander Mercouris I suddenly realized that the United States and NATO have been pursuing a JENGA strategy against Russia. A lot of leaders in the NATO club are invested heavily in the belief that if enough pressure is applied to Russia then the country, the economy, the military and society will collapse like a JENGA tower. Only one little problem — that strategy has failed; the opposite happened.

A Chronology of Events and Case for Diplomacy

In November 1983, my late, dear friend Herbert E, Meyer, a brilliant Fortune magazine business writer whom Director of Central Intelligence William (“Bill”) Casey improbably raised up to be vice chairman of President Ronald Reagan’s National Intelligence Council, produced a memorandum arguing that official Soviet state economic statistics were so fictional that they bore no relationship to the true, far more dire living conditions of the peoples of the Soviet Union.

A year and a half into the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky may be finding himself back in the same dilemma he was confronted with at the beginning of his presidency, only magnified by the disaster of war.

NYT reports that despite nine months of heavy fighting, only about 500 square miles have changed hands in Ukraine this year

Moscow has avoided another unpopular call-up while Kiev resorts to draconian measures to get sufficient numbers to the front

Every night, air strikes by missile, drone, and aerial bombs destroy several times the amount of Kiev assets as Kiev destroys in a week. Rational people know Ukrainian deaths are in vain.

There’s a heartbreaking graphic going around right now showing the almost microscopic changes that have occurred to the frontline of the war in Ukraine this year despite nonstop death and destruction of unfathomable horror the entire time.