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… and then wasted the rest? See DailyMail.com.

(Apologies to W.C. Fields.)

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Dreamland by Sam Quinones talks a little about the economics of America’s opiate epidemic. On one side was the evil Purdue Pharma, which collected tens of billions of dollars in revenue for OxyContin. But who was on the other side? Most drug addicts don’t have a lot of money. The answer turns out to be that you the taxpayer were on the other side:

And so the Medicaid card entered our story. The card provides health insurance through Medicaid, and part of that insurance pays for medicine—whatever pills a doctor deems that the insured patient needs. Among those who receive Medicaid cards are people on state welfare or on a federal disability program known as SSI (Supplemental Security Income). In Scioto County, annual SSI applicants almost doubled in the decade ending 2008—from 870 to 1,600. An untrained observer of Portsmouth’s bleak economic landscape might have understood; jobs, after all, were scarce. People needed money and that check helped. That was true, but by then pills and pain clinics had altered the classic welfare calculus: It wasn’t the monthly SSI check people cared so much about; rather, they wanted the Medicaid card that came with it. If you could get a prescription from a willing doctor—and Portsmouth had plenty of those—the Medicaid health insurance cards paid for that prescription every month. For a three-dollar Medicaid co-pay, therefore, an addict got pills priced at a thousand dollars, with the difference paid for by U.S. and state taxpayers. A user could turn around and sell those pills, obtained for that three-dollar co-pay, for as much as ten thousand dollars on the street.

Combined with pill mills, the Medicaid card scam allowed prolific quantities of prescription medication to hit the streets. The more pills that sloshed around the region, the more people grew addicted, and the bigger the business grew, and the more people died. The Oxy black market might never have spread and deepened so quickly had addicts been forced to pay for all those pills with cash at market prices.

“Twenty years ago they were drawing SSDI and full workers’ comp—say, eighteen hundred dollars a month,” said Brent Turner, the commonwealth prosecutor for that part of eastern Kentucky, whose career began in 2000, just as OxyContin became a business for impoverished families across Appalachia. “The checks were higher because they’d go work in the mines and pay into their [SSDI] disability. Now we’ve got people who aren’t working, who are drawing SSI, maybe five hundred dollars a month. We’ve got people who have kids and wives and the whole family trying to survive on five hundred dollars. I’m not making excuses for them. Many haven’t had a job. But it is what it is. When you don’t work, and never have had a job, or paid into the system, you don’t qualify for much. We have boatloads of people who qualify only for SSI. You wouldn’t believe the number of people we see, twenty or thirty years old, have never had a job and are drawing checks since they were teenagers. “That was one of the driving factors when pills exploded. We can talk morality all day long, but if you’re drawing five hundred dollars a month and you have a Medicaid card that allows you to get a monthly supply of pills worth several thousand dollars, you’re going to sell your pills.”

Other families, though, had been unemployed for generations and on government assistance. Up to then, they had resorted to small-time criminal activities, but remained minor irritants in holler life. When Oxy came along, however, the sorriest families were transformed into dominant and unruly forces.

Back home, [the pill dealer] made a killing on the first of the month when the SSI checks arrived in Floyd County.

He watched capable young people get themselves declared “simple” to get SSI and the Medicaid card, and thus access to pills.

The author elsewhere praises liberal Democrats and condemns conservative Republicans, so I don’t think the above passages were driven by a bias against government welfare programs. And in fact the author directly praises anyone working for the government as implicitly altruistic:

As I tried to chart the spread of the opiate epidemic, one thing dawned on me: Other than addicts and traffickers, most of the people I was speaking to were government workers. They were the only ones I saw fighting this scourge. We’ve seen a demonization of government and the exaltation of the free market in America over the previous thirty years. But here was a story where the battle against the free market’s worst effects was taken on mostly by anonymous public employees. These were local cops like Dennis Chavez and Jes Sandoval, prosecutors like Kathleen Bickers, federal agents like Jim Kuykendall and Rock Stone, coroners like Terry Johnson, public nurses like Lisa Roberts, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control, judges like Seth Norman, state pharmacists like Jaymie Mai, and epidemiologists like Jennifer Sabel and Ed Socie

The author lives in California so he is presumably aware that government workers do get paid (examples). He doesn’t explain why a police officer, DEA agent, prosecutor, judge, or prison guard would be upset to have a job, steady paycheck, and pension due to the existence of opiate addicts.

Related:

• The latest book: Dreamland
• Vote to legalize marijuana is a vote to further reduce labor force participation rate?

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Planning a Winter Solstice party? Here are some ideas from Catherine the Great (Massie):

Potemkin tried to distract himself by giving and attending receptions, dinners, and balls. The evening that surpassed anything ever seen in Russia occurred on April 28, 1791, at Potemkin’s Tauride Palace. Three thousand guests had been invited; all were present when the empress arrived. The prince was at the door, wearing a scarlet tailcoat with solid gold buttons, each button encasing a large solitaire diamond. Once the empress was seated, twenty-four couples, including Catherine’s two grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, entered to dance a quadrille. Afterward, the host led his guest through the rooms of the palace. In one, poets were reciting verse; in another, a choir was singing; in still another, a French comedy was being performed.

Maybe you need a bigger house to host this event?

“You should know our mania for building is stronger than ever,” Catherine wrote to Grimm in 1779. “It is a diabolical thing. It consumes money and the more you build, the more you want to build. It’s a sickness like being addicted to alcohol.”

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Follow-up on the Massachusetts rednecks who drove “through the [Wellesley College] campus waving a Trump flag out the truck window and yelling ‘Make America Great Again.'”: “Pro-Trump Babson students cleared in Wellesley incident” (Boston Globe)

I’m wondering if these guys should be classified as performance artists.

Related:

• Oberlin student shuts down campus by placing a “whites only” sign above a water fountain
• Hillary’s anti-poverty achievements (starts with a commencement speech at Wellesley)

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Sometimes 8th grade math assignments are unintentionally humorous. Today’s:

Find the volume of each cone. Round the answer to the nearest tenth. (use π = 3.14).

In other words, after telling students to round π to 3 digits of precision, answers with 6 digits of precision were sought. The answer sheet had “Volume =” prompts rather than “Volume ≈” (a wavy “approximately equal” sign, in case it doesn’t render correctly on your browser).

Related:

• Kansas has 10 digits of precision in its child support calculation system (a plaintiff suing someone who earned $1 trillion per month would be able to calculate monthly child support profit of more than $362 million to the nearest dime)

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Americans argue about how or if we will ever be able to pay the debts that we’ve built up from our various wars. Was it different in the 18th century? From Catherine the Great:

in May 1789, he summoned the Estates-General to meet at Versailles. Louis did not do this because he wished to, or because it was part of the usual practice of French kings. Rather, Louis acted because he had no choice; his government desperately needed to raise money to avoid national bankruptcy. Outwardly, France still seemed to be at the summit of European culture and power. Its population of twenty-seven million was the largest in Europe. It possessed the richest, most productive agriculture on the continent. It was the center of intellectual thought, and its language was the lingua franca of literate, educated people everywhere. Since William of Normandy had triumphed at Hastings in 1066, it had been the victor on numberless battlefields. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, the great kings of France—Francis I, Henri IV, Louis XIV—had been preeminent among the monarchs of Europe. But when, in 1715, the Sun King had been succeeded by his great-grandson, Louis XV, and still the endless wars continued, success had become intermittent. In the Seven Years’ War, ending in 1763, England had stripped away most of France’s important colonial possessions in North America and India. In return, by backing the American colonists in their fight for independence, France had taken revenge. The euphoria following the military triumph in America was as great in Paris as in Philadelphia. But wars cost money and the bills had to be paid. The nation’s finances had been depleted, then ravaged, by war; still, government expenditures continued to mount. The treasury responded by borrowing, and by 1788 interest on the debt absorbed half the government’s spending. Taxes, levied most heavily on the lower class, were crushing, and in the fertile land of France, common people were impoverished. Poor harvests in 1787 and 1788 resulted in grain shortages and rising food prices. Facing financial collapse, the king and the government had no choice but to call a meeting of the Estates-General, France’s long-dormant representative body. By summoning this assembly, the government was admitting that it could raise taxes no further without the consent of the nation.

The commoners of the Third Estate, represented by six hundred delegates, were there to speak for the people who made up 97 percent of the French population. The great majority of these people were agricultural peasants, although the Third Estate also included urban laborers. Bread constituted three-fourths of an ordinary person’s diet and cost one-third to one-half of his or her income. The bourgeoisie, or middle class—bankers, lawyers, doctors, artists, writers, shopkeepers, and others—were also reckoned among the Third Estate. Plagued by heavy taxes, food shortages, unemployment, poverty, and general restlessness, the Third Estate was anxious, even desperate, for change.

How about a prominent American being attacked for allegedly having sex with a 12-year-old?

There is another story related to this Russian war with Turkey—this one is true—which centers on a figure few connect with Catherine of Russia or Gregory Potemkin. This figure is John Paul Jones, whom Americans know as the father of the United States Navy. Jones began as nobody and he died alone, rejected, and, once again, nobody. In the interim, however, he achieved the fame he desperately craved. He was born John Paul—Jones was added later—an obscure, impoverished gardener’s son on the bank of Solway Firth in Scotland. At thirteen, he went to sea as an unpaid cabin boy aboard a merchant vessel bound for Barbados and Virginia. In 1766, at nineteen, he joined an African slave ship as third mate and remained in the slave trade for four years. At twenty-three, he became master of a merchant vessel on which his seamanship was unchallenged but men were wary of his prickly temper. He was slight and wiry, five feet five inches tall, with hazel eyes, a sharp nose, high cheekbones, and a strong cleft chin. He dressed neatly, more like a naval officer than a merchant captain, and always wore a sword. This blade was used in the West Indies to run through the ringleader of a group of mutineers in his crew. Uncertain whether the law would applaud him for suppression of mutiny or try him for murder, he changed his name from John Paul to John Jones and sailed on the next ship leaving the harbor. In the summer of 1775, Jones was in Philadelphia seeking a place in the infant navy of the rebellious American colonies; he became the first naval first lieutenant commissioned by the Continental Congress. A year later, after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he sailed for Europe, hoping to find a frigate to command. The French government, spurred by news of British general John Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, was moving toward full recognition of America’s independence, and Benjamin Franklin, the American representative in Paris, became Jones’s patron. With Franklin’s help, Jones took command of a French East Indiaman, a travel-worn merchant ship of nine hundred tons. Jones armed her with thirty cannon and named her Bonhomme Richard, after Franklin’s famous work Poor Richard’s Almanack. On August 14, 1779, Jones sailed on the voyage that made him famous. Off the North Sea Yorkshire coast, he encountered a forty-four-ship Baltic convoy laden with naval stores for England, under escort by a fast, maneuverable, fifty-gun British frigate, HMS Serapis, commanded by a veteran Royal Navy captain. Jones attacked. The battle, beginning at 6:30 p.m., continued for four hours under a harvest moon. The two ships, locked together yardarm to yardarm by American grappling hooks, pounded each other with shot. At one point amid the carnage, the British captain called across his deck to Jones, “Has your ship struck her colors?” He was referring to the signal of surrender. Someone heard—or perhaps a writer sitting at his desk later imagined—Jones call back, “I have not yet begun to fight.” The battle continued until, with Bonhomme Richard sinking and Serapis on fire, the British captain suddenly struck. Jones transferred his wounded and the rest of his crew to his captured prize, put out the fire, and returned to France. In Paris, he was a hero. At Versailles, Louis XVI made him a chevalier of the Military Order of Merit and presented him with a gold-hilted sword. His celebrity and self-confidence attracted women and he had a succession of affairs, one of which apparently resulted in a small, unexpected son.

He waited through the winter, passing time with his friend the French ambassador, Philippe de Ségur. During the first week of April 1789, the capital was startled by a report that Rear Admiral Jones had attempted to rape a ten-year-old girl, the daughter of a German immigrant woman who had a dairy business. The police had been told that the girl was peddling butter when Jones’s manservant told her that his master wanted to purchase some and led her to Jones’s apartment. There, the girl said, she found her customer, whom she had never seen before, dressed in a white uniform wearing a gold star and a red ribbon. He bought some butter, locked the door, knocked her down, dragged her into his bedroom, and assaulted her. She ran home and told her mother, who went to the police. Ségur defended his friend, both at the time and later in his memoirs. He said that the young girl had called on Jones to ask whether he had any linen to mend. He said no. “She then indulged in some indecent gestures,” Ségur quotes Jones as saying. “I advised her not to enter on so vile a career, gave her some money and dismissed her.” As soon as she left his front door, the girl ripped her dress, screamed “Rape!” and threw herself into the arms of her mother, who, conveniently, was standing nearby. Two weeks later, Jones wrote to Potemkin that he had learned that the mother had admitted that a gentleman with decorations had given her money to tell a damaging story about the American. She confessed that her daughter was twelve, not ten, and had been seduced by Jones’s manservant three months before she visited the admiral. Further, Jones said that immediately after the alleged rape, rather than rushing home to her mother, the girl had continued peddling butter. “The charge against me is an unworthy imposture,” Jones continued to Potemkin. “Shall it be said that in Russia, a wretched woman who abandoned her husband, stole away her daughter, lives in a house of ill repute and leads a debauched, lecherous life, has found credit enough on a simple complaint unsupported by any proof to affect the honor of a general officer of reputation who has merited and received the decorations of America, France and this empire? I love women, I confess, and the pleasures that one only obtains from that sex, but to get such things by force is horrible to me. I cannot even contemplate gratifying my passions without their consent, and I give you my word as a soldier and an honest man, that if the girl in question has not passed through hands other than mine, she is still a virgin.”

Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but Jones was ostracized by St. Petersburg society. Ségur believed that Jones had been duped and that the prince of Nassau-Siegen was responsible. “Paul Jones is no more guilty than I,” the ambassador declared, “and a man of his rank has never suffered such humiliation through the accusation of a woman whose husband certifies that she is a pimp and whose daughter solicits the inns.” Criminal charges against Jones were dropped, but the offer of a command in the Baltic Fleet also evaporated. (This command went to Nassau-Siegen, who promptly lost a naval battle to Sweden.) In lieu of outright dismissal, Catherine granted Jones a two-year leave of absence. On June 26, she gave him her hand to kiss in a public farewell and nodded a cool “Bon voyage.”

More: read Catherine the Great

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Short version of the below: If Democrats pack themselves into states that are already majority Democrat, are they helping Republicans to win the Presidency?

Today the Electoral College votes (timeline). Democrats are upset about the system and arguing in favor of a decision based on popular votes instead. I’m wondering if they have a good point. Based on my Facebook research, it seems that committed Democrats can’t tolerate political dissent. They don’t want anyone with doubts about Hillary as a Facebook friend and certainly wouldn’t want to share a street with a deplorable neighbor afflicted with racism, sexism, and sufficient stupidity to be swayed by a demagogue. Certainly they don’t want to share a dormitory with anyone who supports Trump. Hillary-loving academic friends approvingly posted this nytimes story, by an 18-year-old NYU student who doesn’t say why her roommate voted for Trump but that the roommate’s vote means they can’t live together. When I suggested that schools segregate out deplorables into special dorms, push them off campus, and/or expel any student who admits to having voted for Trump, the response was “Because this is my space and you are a guest here, I will exercise my prerogative by asking you to stop posting–not because we disagree, but because you are not capable of respecting others or showing empathy to people who are afraid or in pain.” (All of the Hillary supporters on the thread started from the assumption that anyone who voted for Trump is a racist, sexist, and anti-Muslim.)

The Russians whom I know in the Boston area say that there is narrower range of political expression tolerated in Massachusetts than there was in the former Soviet Union (you could disagree with the party line at social gatherings or at work, whereas if you did the same thing in Massachusetts you’d be an unemployed social outcast). Typical recent expression: “For a lot of Hillary supporters it’s not that we lost. Human decency lost. He’s a dangerous racist and wanna be demagogue.”

A cluster of my rich Google executive friends on Facebook talked about re-sorting American voters:

If 2% of California Hillary voters had been in OH/PA/WI (remained in/moved to/moved back), she would still have won CA by a landslide, and would be president-elect now.

Long term strategy for those with large funds: Establish a Stanford-like research university in Florida, along with a bunch of tech companies. Google, Facebook etc could open offices. Basically create a new tech center.

Strategy 2: Allow the Blue areas to build more housing, so that the population can go up, and in the long term get more electoral votes. Texas has gained more population than California in the last 15 years.

Idea: the tech industry decides to spread itself out. It builds offices in Red states and encourages employees to work from those locations. This decreases pressure on Bay Area Housing and has a ripple effect on national politics.

P, maybe you’re on to something. Why not organize this as a program for ‘unattached’ Californians to get airbnb places in swing states for a few months.

It is pretty interesting. Not sure about every state, but it seems like 30 days residency is the norm before you can register. And the deadline to register is different in different states, but yes, if you;re willing to move for 1 to 2 months, you could register and vote in another state. Not sure if that is the fairest approach, I was thinking more of people permanently moving.

Gives new meaning to the concept of buying an election. Let’s see, $500/month to rent a place and eat while living there (I assume they’ll mostly be renting in rural areas)*say 1M people means you could swing the election for about the current cost of campaigning….

Assuming that these folks don’t use their cash to send loyal Democrats out from San Francisco to the benighted Midwest, it seems that Democrats are increasingly sorting themselves into states with fewer electoral college votes per popular vote. Thus they are fighting against what would otherwise be a tide of sentiment in favor of a Democrat president (next time maybe don’t run a public “servant” who made $2+ billion via public “service”!).

What do readers think? Does the inability of Democrats to talk to, share a Facebook presence with, or live alongside Republicans combined with the Electoral College work against their chances to elect a president?

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Can one be great on the four-hour workweek? Sadly, no, according to Catherine the Great (Massie):

She rose every morning at five or six and worked fifteen hours a day. This left perhaps a single hour between the time her official duties ended—usually late in the evening—and the time she fell asleep, exhausted.

Travel did not alter Catherine’s daily schedule. She rose at six as she did in St. Petersburg, drank coffee, and then worked alone or with her secretary or ministers for two hours. At eight, she summoned her close friends to breakfast, and at nine, she entered her carriage to resume the journey. At two, she halted for midday dinner, then resumed an hour later. At seven, long after the fall of darkness, she stopped for the night. Usually, Catherine was not tired and would go back to work or join her companions for conversation, cards, or games until ten.

Before this assembly gathered, however, Catherine decided that she must provide its members with a set of guiding principles upon which she wished the new laws to be founded. The result was her Nakaz, published under the full title Instruction of Her Imperial Majesty Catherine the Second for the Commission Charged with Preparing a Project of a New Code of Laws. It was the work that Catherine considered the most significant intellectual achievement of her life and her greatest contribution to Russia. She began working on the Nakaz in January 1765 and devoted two to three hours a day to it for two years. The document was published on July 30, 1767, and is, in the view of Isabel de Madariaga, the preeminent historian of Catherine’s Russia, “one of the most remarkable political treatises ever compiled and published by a reigning sovereign.”

IN 1796, CATHERINE, in her thirty-fifth year on the Russian throne, was the preeminent royal personage in the world. Age had affected her appearance, but not her devotion to work or her positive attitude toward life. She was heavier, and her gray hair had turned to white, but her blue eyes were youthful, bright, and clear. Even at sixty-seven, her complexion was fresh, and dentures preserved the illusion that her teeth were intact. Dignity and grace were embodied in her bearing, particularly in the way she held her head high and nodded graciously in public. From friends, officials, courtiers, and servants, she drew deep affection as well as respect. She rose at six and wrapped herself in a silk dressing gown. Her movements awakened the family of small English greyhounds sleeping on a pink satin couch next to her bed. The oldest of them, whom she had named Sir Tom Anderson, and his spouse, Duchess Anderson, were gifts from Dr. Dimsdale, who had inoculated her and her son, Paul, against smallpox. They, with the help of Sir Tom’s second wife, Mademoiselle Mimi, had produced numerous litters. Catherine attended them; when the dogs wanted to go out, Catherine herself opened the door into the garden. This done, she drank four or five cups of black coffee and settled down to work on the mass of official and personal correspondence awaiting her. Her sight had weakened, and she read with spectacles and sometimes used a magnifying glass. Once when her secretary saw her reading this way, she smiled and said, “You probably don’t need this contrivance yet. How old are you?” He said that he was twenty-eight. Catherine nodded and said, “Our sight has been blunted by long service to the State and now we have to use spectacles.” Promptly at nine, she put down her pen and rang a little bell, which told the servant outside her door that she was ready for her daily visitors. This meant a long morning of receiving ministers, generals, and other government officials; of reading or listening to their reports; and of signing the papers they had prepared for her. These were working sessions; visitors were expected to object to her ideas and offer their own when they thought she was wrong. Her attitude almost always remained attentive, pleasant, and imperturbable.

Related:

• Sex Education for Catherine the Great
• Serfs in the Age of Catherine the Great and Minimum Wage Today
• Sexual Mores in the time of Catherine the Great

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Here’s some of the stuff that I inflict on Facebook friends. The latter two were posted with a caption of “This is why dogs do not like days when it is too cold for children to run around outside. (Was 2 degrees F this morning.)”

Photos were taken with an iPhone 7 Plus. I hate to say this, but although I love normal lenses on DSLRs I am falling out of love with the normal (“telephoto” in Applespeak) lens on the iPhone 7 Plus. It lacks image stabilization and the sensor behind the normal lens seems to have much worse low-light performance than the already-pretty-bad regular camera. In many indoor situations you could get a better 56mm-equivalent image by using the 28mm lens/camera and cropping. I am hoping to get a posting together about this. For now I think there is a moderately high risk that the Plus-sized Emperor Has No Clothes.

Readers: What do you think? Should I keep these conventional family pictures out of this weblog, reserving the space for discussion of issues and ideas? Or do you want to post your own family pictures in the comments?

For comparison, the same scene with a Sony A6300 camera on more-or-less-complete-idiot mode:

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The sexual revolution happened in the 1960s, right? Catherine the Great (Massie) suggests that things weren’t so simple 200 years earlier:

Zorich was replaced by a twenty-four-year-old Guards officer, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, whose term [as Catherine’s lover or “favorite”] lasted two years. … Despite Catherine’s praise, most in the Russian court expected Rimsky-Korsakov to last only briefly, because everyone except the empress saw that his heart was not in his work. He was expected to be in constant attendance, was forbidden to leave the palace, and became bored and restless. He escaped into the arms of Countess Bruce, Catherine’s principal lady-in-waiting and for years one of her closest friends. Foolishly, the couple believed that they could carry on their affair inside the palace. They managed for almost a year, but it ended abruptly one day when the empress opened a door and discovered them making love. Catherine sent a message to Rimsky-Korsakov informing him that she would be generous provided he left St. Petersburg immediately. Countess Bruce was commanded to return to her husband. … There was more to this tangled plot. Catherine, the court, and Countess Bruce soon learned that Rimsky-Korsakov had been using Bruce as a decoy with whom to pass the time and alleviate his boredom. His real object was a beautiful young countess, Catherine Stroganova, married to one of the wealthiest men in Russia. The Stroganovs had just returned from six years of living in Paris, and, on first seeing the handsome “king of Epirus,” the young countess fell in love. Only when the disgraced Rimsky-Korsakov left for Moscow and Countess Stroganova immediately followed him, was the extent of this operatic, labyrinthine double betrayal fully revealed. Count Stroganov behaved with patrician dignity. Worried that his young son would be affected by public scandal, he installed his wife in a Moscow palace, where she and her lover lived happily for thirty years. There, they brought up the three children they had together.

[The Empress Catherine] summoned [her apparently unfaithful young lover] Mamonov and Scherbatova and saw immediately that the young woman was pregnant. She pardoned Mamonov and granted the couple permission to marry, even insisting that the ceremony be performed in the palace chapel. She did not attend, but gave them a hundred thousand rubles and a country estate. “God grant them happiness,” she said, stipulating only that they leave St. Petersburg.

At four on Sunday morning, April 10, [eldest son and heir to the throne] Paul awakened his mother [Catherine] to tell her that his wife had been in labor since midnight. … Toward six in the evening on Friday, April 15, after five days of agony, Natalia died. … Beyond Natalia’s death and Paul’s uncontrolled grief, Catherine now faced the fact that three years of marriage and a pregnancy had produced no heir. To subdue this emotional storm, Catherine chose a cruel remedy. She broke into Natalia’s desk. There, as she expected, she found the love letters exchanged by the dead woman and Andrei Razumovsky. Furious at seeing her son weep over a wife who had betrayed him with his best friend, Catherine decided to use the letters to wrench him back to reality. She thrust the pages under Paul’s eyes. He read the proof that the two people he had loved most had deceived him; he did not even know whether the dead child had been his.

More: read Catherine the Great.

Related:

• Sex Education for Catherine the Great
• Russian Empress Stories to Comfort Hillary Supporters

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