Somewhere in Washington, Jake Sullivan is frantically sprinting to a bunker convinced this escalation means Rishi Sunak is about to nuke Moscow.

When he's right he's right.

Many Russians did indeed experience a 10x improvement in their daily lives (provided they left Russia and moved to Germany, like this guy).

UK Customs Officers roaming the departure gates at Heathrow Airport testing people's handwriting for suspiciously doctoral illegibility and dragging anyone found carrying a stethoscope kicking and screaming back to Charing Cross Hospital.

If I believed that my side had lost the culture war so badly that gigantic souless corporations like Disney and huge capital funds like Blackrock are now willingly sacrificing profits on a DEI/ESG altar just to score wokeness points, that might prompt some self-reflection.

Hell yeah!

A great irony is that many of the loudest people accusing the US of waging a 'proxy war' in Ukraine are themselves using the conflict, and every other issue under the sun, as a proxy battlefield against their political opponents.

Sacks wasn't tweeting about the Donbas in 2015.

My bar for this kind of thing is so low that when I saw Rishi Sunak was proposing to pay for a massive defence increase with 'cuts to the civil service' my initial reaction was, 'at least he didn't claim cutting waste and cracking down on benefit fraud would cover it.'

Hooves clatter on cracked cobblestones
Royal steeds encarmine bay with fear
Big Ben falters marking Britain's darkest time
Because of Woke.
- The Lord Frost Prophecies, Vol. XXIV

Almost everyone in the Russian system is deeply corrupt, and the courts will just pretend you are if told to do so, so corruption charges are just a tool for punishing rivals who have for whatever reason lost the powerful patronage that would normally block such prosecutions.