Lima, Nov. 26 (Prensa Latina) Former Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra was sentenced today to 14 years in prison, to begin immediately, for bribery and other charges, by a court that found him guilty of receiving bribes from companies he favored.

The smile he wore when he arrived at court, encouraged by his supporters, disappeared when the lengthy reading of the verdict reached the most important part, which sent him to prison, dismissing his claims of innocence.

“Martín Vizcarra’s criminal responsibility in the commission of the alleged crime has been proven with a degree of certainty, and he must therefore be subject to criminal punishment,” stated the ruling, which added the State as an aggrieved party in the bribery case.

It considered valid the testimony and evidence that he received the equivalent of $676,470 from the companies Obrainsa and Lomas de Ilo in exchange for benefiting them with contracts for the construction of a hospital and a water project.

The court also imposed a nine-year ban on holding public office and ordered him to pay 2,363,000 soles ($695,000) in legal reparations, jointly with the companies involved.

The ruling came as no surprise, as lawyers and the media had been predicting a conviction for weeks based on evidence of crimes committed while he was governor of the southern region of Moquegua.

Vizcarra consistently declared himself innocent, arguing that the prosecution lacked sufficient evidence and denying the validity of the statements made by the contractors involved in the projects and his close friend José Hernández, who confessed to paying him bribes and acting as an intermediary in the bribery scheme, respectively.

The convicted man served as president from March 2018, when he was vice president and replaced the resigning neoliberal Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, until November 2020, when he was removed from office by Parliament.

Congress has also disqualified him from holding public office, which thwarted his attempt to run for president in next April’s elections.

The disqualification also prevented him from running in 2021 and deprived him of a seat in Congress as the legislator elected with the highest individual vote, which is also considered to be motivated by the alleged merit of having dissolved the unpopular neoliberal majority Parliament in September 2020.

Vizcarra will be the third inmate at the prison exclusively for former heads of state, where neoliberal Alejandro Toledo, who governed between 2001 and 2006, and nationalist Ollanta Humala (2011-2016) are serving their sentences.

Today we’ll be taking a tour through the Ukrainian army. Luckily for our health, a virtual one, relying on reports from Ukraine’s brave warriors for European Civilization. First, testimony from a man held in the dungeons of the Vinnytsia manpower distribution center. Commanders drill hidden phones to the wall, mobilized men cough up blood amidst the damp and mold, showers are only allowed twice a week at best, the healthy get sick, and escapees are beaten to a bloody pulp:

They bring in everyone here without distinction — chronic alcoholics who can’t stop shaking, drug addicts with burnt veins, skinny and toothless people. They even bring in homeless men in terrible condition — covered in sores, eczema, and all kinds of chronic illnesses. Everyone’s psychological state is horrible

Meanwhile, even nationalist militarists have been complaining about the mobilization of one of the country’s premier medical engineers, responsible for producing equipment that saves lives at the frontlines:

I asked Pavlo: “But you have eyesight problems!” (he wears glasses). “They don’t give a shit, they said I’m fit to serve…” — he replied.

Next, the future. Why complacency in the western media about the ‘100 year Russian offensive’

covers an ‘operational clusterfuck’ with a ‘strategic sedative.’

Meanwhile, how all this translates into the frontline. First, the situation in the south. Amidst Russian advances, the commander of a battalion from the 142nd brigade sent to save the situation is an

incompetent rogue and, according to some reports, arrives at the command post EXCLUSIVELY while intoxicated.

we should bring back calling people “rogues”, it’s a really cool insult

Besides his drunkenness, the commander’s proclivity towards lies has already led to ‘frightening… considerable losses’. This is apparently all in due course for the 142nd brigade, whose only purpose is to supply expendable infantry for other worn-out units:

It’s worth adding that these commanders had previously effectively annihilated the brigade on the Pokrovsk axis. In some companies fewer than ten people remained.

Meanwhile, recent proclamations by high command that the corps reform has been completed are ridiculed by military bloggers. In fact, the old practice of ruthlessly burning through the infantry of units ‘relocated’ from elsewhere continues. Our correspondents explain how this practice has meaninglessly expended lives on the Pavlohrad axis, where command has:

decided to fight an old problem with old methods that, as it turned out, only make the problems grow exponentially.

Finally, a more theoretical post I translated today begins with the premise that:

As of 2025, the Ukrainian military is a bizarre mutant in which the most talented and the most inept people coexist side by side. The brigades, battalions, staffs, tables, and positions are identical — but some cosplay the U.S. Army during the “Desert Storm,” while others resemble Iraqis.

Besides explaining the heterogenous tendencies existing in the army today, the text also explores the past. It argues that the only high-quality sections of the Ukrainian army destroyed themselves in the steppes of Kherson in 2023. That is, even before the failed counteroffensive of that year, which was simply ‘the nail in the coffin’. Since then, the army has become a Gogolesque phantom:

Our “classical” army has become an army on paper — an army of stillborn brigades, untrained personnel, and incompetent staffs. In this army people worry more about overpayments of additional pay and nonwritten-off equipment than about losing personnel. On paper you have a combat-ready battalion — respectable (not) members (fuck) of the commission signed off — but in reality there are 300 mobilized men: 150 of whom are fucked in the head, an incompetent commander, dreadful training, no commanders at most levels or NCOs, and a lack of supplies needed for modern war. On paper you have 100 trained soldiers, but in reality they literally know nothing, and every brigade asks that people be sent to complete basic combat training immediately within the units.

The future

The Economist put out an article on October 17, triumphantly proclaiming that Russia would have to keep fighting for 103 years to take all of Ukraine.

real WW2 nazi propaganda hours

also reminds me of those alt-history videogames/settings which are like “World War 1 has been going for a hundred years!” and it’s like, going on with what manpower, are they fucking breeding poilus and tommies in cloning vats? (this would at least be an actually interesting concept for a sci-fi dystopia setting, where a brutal WW1-style attritional war can only go on by virtue of the parties involved literally mass-manufacturing soldiers - the anime Ergo Proxy actually had an episode like this, where a post-apocalyptic arcology was fighting off a robot invasion and only surviving by just breeding more soldiers, but it was just the one episode)

But, Ukrainian ‘Officer’ did not feel reassured, writing the following the same day:

Shall we fight for another 100 years? Can somebody tell these ‘experts’ that it doesn’t work like that. I get really pissed off when those analysts try to calculate the time it would take Russia to capture certain territories based on what happened once before. First of all — to what end? What use is that information? Probably to soothe someone and cover an ‘operational clusterfuck’ with a ‘strategic sedative.’ Like: our stomach hurts, but we’re still a long way from needing an appendix removed, so we can keep eating whatever we want. Unfortunately, the snowball effect doesn’t occur to any of these authors. Second, war is not subject to any formulas, theorems, or axioms. Yet for some reason people still bluntly compute timelines for enemy territorial gains based on past events, while the factors that influence all this are not constants but variable inputs. Has the war of 2024 changed compared to 2025? — Obviously yes. If one side quickly adapts to new rules of warfare, pulls a trump card, or simply exploits the opponent’s problems — all your mathematical calculations collapse completely.

On October 18, Officer wrote about how the dangerous effects of winter. Since Ukrainian sources constantly complain of Russian drone superiority, he seems to be implying that the Russians are the ‘hunters’ with the advantage:

We’re entering a rather interesting phase of combat in the modern drone war: in this autumn–winter period, when kill-zones have already formed on both sides of the line of contact in most sectors, logistics will become maximally complicated because the greenery is almost gone, leaves have completely fallen — the terrain’s camouflage value is minimal, and the number of revealing factors (snow, etc.) will increase. The conditions for infantry being in the field and for their approaches to positions will become much harder; accordingly, whoever is hunting will have the advantage, and whoever is hiding will be in a less favorable position. The headaches for infantry will grow, because mechanization and lots of equipment are all well and good, but it is the infantry that actually forms the frontline battle zones—and we haven’t moved away from that.

Engineers to the infantry

On October 19, a telegram run by a veteran of the ultra-nationalist paramilitary ‘Shakhtarsk-Tornado’ (closed down years ago for extreme violence against civilians) complained that specialists were being mobilized:

️I’m asking for maximum reposts! And please read carefully what kind of *** is going on. Ternopil’s military enlistment officers have detained a man whose company is the only one in Ukraine that manufactures surgical instruments, without which not a single military hospital can operate — as well as civilian hospitals, including Ohmatdyt. They’ve already assigned him to a brigade, and the military medical commission was “passed” in a matter of minutes. I asked Pavlo: “But you have eyesight problems!” (he wears glasses). “They don’t give a shit, they said I’m fit to serve…” — he replied. He’d asked me many times to help him get enlisted, but I understood that his work was far too important. And not as a joke — quite seriously, I told him: “There are so many guys here who are crippled, and without your work it’s impossible. So keep doing what you do.”

…

Remember the story of another man from Ternopil — Bohdan Pokitko. The situation is almost identical. But Pavlo’s work is real help that saves lives — both military and civilian. I know many people who’ve been “taken.” But I’ve never written about anyone — until now. I can’t stay silent. … You might ask — what about an exemption from mobilization for such people? Well, apparently, you have to pay a lot for that. But a man who’s taken out loans and donates almost his entire salary to the Armed Forces of Ukraine can’t afford that! That’s how we damn live!

The Aidar Batallion’s Stanislav Buniatov also commented on the incident:

The military medical commission, as usual, was completed in just a few minutes. People like him, as always, have no exemption from mobilization — unlike McDonald’s employees, who do.

For my whole career in finance, I have distrusted the obvious. And yet, for many years there was one number I assumed was an actuarial fact: the U.S. poverty line. Yes, I saw Americans feeling poorer every year, despite economic growth and low unemployment. But ultimately, I trusted the official statistics. Until I saw a simple statement buried in a research paper. And I realized that number—created more than 60 years ago, with good intentions—was a lie. The statement was this: “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.” When I read it I felt sick. And when you understand that number, you will understand the rage of Americans who have been told that their lives have been getting better when they are barely able to stay afloat.

In 1963, Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration, observed that families spent roughly one-third of their income on groceries. Since pricing data was hard to come by for many items (e.g., housing), if you could calculate a minimum adequate food budget at the grocery store, you could multiply by three and establish a poverty line. Orshansky presented her findings in 1965. She was drawing a floor, a line below which families were clearly in crisis. For that time, that floor made sense. Housing was relatively cheap. A family could rent a decent apartment or buy a home on a single income. Healthcare was provided by employers and cost relatively little (Blue Cross coverage cost in the range of $10 per month). Childcare didn’t really exist as a market—mothers stayed home, family helped, or neighbors (who likely had someone home) watched each others’ kids. Cars were affordable, if prone to breakdowns. College tuition could be covered with a summer job. Orshansky’s food-times-three formula was crude, but as a crisis threshold—a measure of “too little”—it roughly corresponded to reality. But everything changed between 1963 and 2024. Housing costs exploded. Healthcare became the largest household expense for many families. Employer coverage shrank while deductibles grew. Childcare became a market, and that market became ruinously expensive. College went from affordable to crippling.

The labor model shifted. A second income became mandatory to maintain the standard of living that one income formerly provided. But a second income meant childcare became mandatory, which meant, for many, two cars became mandatory. The composition of household spending transformed completely. In 2024, food-at-home is no longer 33 percent of household spending. For most families, it’s 5 to 7 percent. Housing now consumes 35 to 45 percent. Healthcare takes 15 to 25 percent. Childcare, for families with young children, can eat 20 to 40 percent. If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three. It becomes 16. Which means if you measured income inadequacy today the way Orshansky measured it in 1963, the threshold for a family of four—the official poverty line in 2024—wouldn’t be $31,200. If the crisis threshold—the floor below which families cannot function—is honestly updated to current spending patterns, it lands at close to $140,000.

Consider this: The median household income is roughly $80,000. We have been told, implicitly, that a family earning $80,000 is doing fine—safely above poverty, solidly middle class, perhaps comfortable. But if Orshansky’s crisis threshold were calculated today using her own methodology, that $80,000 family would be living in deep poverty. To understand why, you need to look at the real costs of sustaining a family today. I wanted to see what would happen if I ignored the official stats and simply calculated the cost of existing. I built a basic needs budget for a family of four (two earners, two kids). No vacations, no Netflix, no luxury. Just the “participation tickets” required to hold a job and raise kids in 2024. Using conservative data for a family in New Jersey:

• Childcare: $32,773
• Housing: $23,267
• Food: $14,717
• Transportation: $14,828
• Healthcare: $10,567
• Other essentials: $21,857
• Required net income: $118,009

Add federal, state, and FICA taxes of roughly $18,500, and you arrive at a required gross income of $136,500. This is Orshansky’s “too little” threshold, updated honestly. This is the floor. The single largest line item isn’t housing. It’s childcare: $32,773. This is the trap. To reach the median household income of $80,000, most families require two earners. But the moment you add the second earner to chase that income, you trigger the childcare expense. If one parent stays home, the income drops to $40,000 or $50,000—well below what’s needed to survive. If both parents work to hit $100,000, they hand over $32,000 to a daycare center. Then take housing. Critics will immediately argue that I’m cherry-picking expensive cities. They will say $136,500 is a number for San Francisco or Manhattan, not “Real America.” So let’s look at “Real America.”

The model above allocates $23,267 per year for housing. That breaks down to $1,938 per month. This is the number that serious economists use to tell you that you’re doing fine. I analyzed a modest “starter home,” which turned out to be in Caldwell, New Jersey—the kind of place a Teamster could afford in 1955. I went to Zillow to see what it costs to live in that same town if you don’t have a down payment and are forced to rent. There are exactly seven 2-bedroom+ units available in the entire town. The cheapest one rents for $2,715 per month. So when I say the real poverty line is $140,000, I’m being conservative. I’m using optimistic, national-average housing assumptions. If we plug in the actual cost of living in the zip codes where the jobs are—where rent is $2,700, not $1,900—the threshold pushes past $160,000. The housing market isn’t just expensive; it’s broken. Seven units available in a town of thousands? That isn’t a market. That’s a shortage masquerading as an auction.

Then there is everything else you need to function in society, the cost of the “participation ticket.” Back in 1955, that included a $5 phone line. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $58. Except that in reality, to function today—to factor authenticate your bank account, to answer work emails, to check your child’s school portal (which is now digital-only)—you need a smartphone plan and home broadband. That’s not $58. It’s $200 or more. Economists will look at my $140,000 figure and scream about “hedonic adjustments.” And yes, cars today have airbags, homes have air conditioning, and phones are supercomputers. The quality of many goods has gotten markedly better. But we are not calculating the price of luxury. We are calculating the price of participation. Now run this kind of participation audit across the economy. In 1955, Blue Cross family coverage was roughly $10 per month ($115 in today’s dollars). Today, the average family premium is over $1,600 per month. That’s 14x inflation. In 1955, the Social Security tax was 2 percent on the first $4,200 of income. The maximum annual contribution was $84. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $960 a year. Today, a family earning the median $80,000 pays over $6,100. That’s 6x inflation. And childcare? In 1955, this cost was zero because the economy supported a single-earner model. Today, it’s $32,000. That’s an infinite increase in the cost of participation. The only thing that actually tracked official Consumer Price Index was… food. Everything else—the inescapable fees required to hold a job, stay healthy, and raise children—inflated at multiples of the official rate when considered on a participation basis. Yes, these goods and services are better. I would not trade my 65″ 4K TV mounted flat on the wall for the 25″ TV that dominated a living room, but I also don’t have the choice to pay less money and buy the old model.