European Politics > Islam plans to take-over Sweden; The Unspeakable is Spoken; Moral Integrity belongs to Brussels; Did UK FM skip geography classes? Disappointing end for Marine?

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Sweden: Islamic party declares that is on the way

‘to taking over all of Skåne’

FEB 11, 2022 4:00 PM 

BY ROBERT SPENCER

Oddly enough, Sweden’s celebration of diversity is quickly becoming rather monochromatic.

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“Islamist party promises ‘to take over Skåne,’”

translated by Gary Fouse from “Islamistparti lovar ”ta över hela Skåne,””

By Isac Boman, Nya Dagbladet, 

February 9, 2022:

In a Twitter posting, the Islamist party Nyans declares that is on the way “to taking over all of Skåne” and that Malmö is the first.

Nya Dagbladet has earlier drawn attention to the party which, among others, demands that Islamophobia should become its own crime classification and that Muslims should receive a special minority position in Sweden. They have also accused all other Swedish parties of being racists.

Founder and party leader Mikail Yüksel has a past in the Center Party but was forced out of the party after it was discovered that he had close contacts with the pan-Turkish, extreme right organization, Grey Wolves, and the party is believed to have close contacts with the Turkish dictator Recep Erdogan.

In a posting on Twitter, Mikail Yüksel posts a photo from the party’s candidate meeting and writes that, “Soon we will take over all of Skåne with Malmö at the top.”

Thus far, the interest on the part of the mass media for the party that describes itself as the obvious alternative for the country’s Muslims has been relatively cool, but the party, which among other things, wants to make it illegal to criticize religious extremism, has still received a certain space in which to market itself in both the tax-financed SVT (Swedish State TV) as well as the evening newspapers.

In Muslim-dominated and immigrant-dense areas, the Social Democrats till now have been the most popular party by far.

Remember, Muslims have a much higher birth rate than Europeans. And many European still have a protectionist attitude toward Muslims in spite of the skyrocketing criminal activity they bring and the dramatic loss of freedoms that will come with increasing political clout.

I'm inclined to believe that Islam's plans to take over Sweden are not a matter of if, but when, unless something dramatic changes.

Presidential candidate makes ‘Great Replacement’ comment

France’s Valerie Pecresse later said she had only used anti-immigration rhetoric

to show voters “another path is possible”

French Valerie Pecresse greets the audience during her rally at the Zenith de Paris, in Paris.

February 13, 2022. © AFP / Alain Jocard

Conservative French presidential candidate Valerie Pecresse has come under fire for using language linked to the far right and making references to border walls and the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory at her first major campaign rally on Sunday.

Addressing thousands of supporters at the Paris event, Pecresse – nominated by the center-right Republicans party – questioned whether France would “still be a sovereign nation” or would become a “US satellite or a Chinese trading post” if President Emmanuel Macron stayed in office for another decade.

“In ten years, will we still be the seventh power in the world? … Will we be a united nation or a fragmented nation? Faced with these vital questions, neither the great downgrading, nor the Great Replacement, are inevitable,” Pecresse was reported as saying by multiple news outlets.

According to Politico, it marked the first time that Pecresse has publicly referred to the far-right doctrine that white French Christians are being supplanted by Muslim immigrants at the direction of the country’s elites.

It's higher than the country's elites, it's at the level of George Soros and other oligarchs who control those 'elites'.

Far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour has previously voiced support for the theory, which influenced Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant. The outlet noted that Pecresse is currently battling two other right-wing candidates, Zemmour and Marine Le Pen, to secure a place in the run-off vote against Macron.

In her speech, Pecresse also reportedly referred to “overflowing” immigration having created “zones of non-France,” and supported building border “barriers” and “walls” requested by European countries that are “on the front line in the face of migratory blackmail.”

Political opponents and anti-racism groups slammed her remarks, with socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo accusing her of “[crossing] yet another Rubicon.” Meanwhile, Francois Patriat, a senator for Macron’s party, tweeted that the comments marked a “great disenchantment” for the “republican right.”

Facing criticism over the rhetoric, Pecresse appeared to walk back some of her comments on Monday, telling the RTL network that she had meant she would not “resign myself to Zemmour’s theories and extreme-right theories, because I know another path is possible.”

“It’s something I’ve been saying for months, so I don’t even understand this uproar,” Pecresse added, while maintaining that immigration had created “non-France” areas in the country.

Valerie, why would you expect the media to present your words in any kind of context? They are not smart enough to do that.

EU nations lose legal battle in bloc’s top court

The European Court of Justice has ruled that the EU may cut funding

to member states that violate its ‘rule of law’ standards

FILE PHOTO. ©  AFP / Wojtek Radwanski

The EU’s top court has dismissed a complaint filed by Poland and Hungary against a mechanism allowing Brussels to punish member states it deems ‘rule-of-law violators.’ The so-called “conditionality mechanism” gives the bloc the right and power to withhold aid funding from a member that is found to be failing to adhere to the union’s democratic principles.

"The court dismisses the actions brought by Hungary and Poland in their entirety," the European Court of Justice (ECJ) said in a statement on Wednesday.

The ECJ also argued that the democratic values countries should comply with to join the EU cannot be simply “disregarded” after accession. It also said that a member state committing rule-of-law violations might “seriously compromise” what it called the “sound financial management” of the EU budget and the bloc’s “financial interests.”

The court’s decision might see Hungary and Poland losing tens of billions of dollars in aid from Brussels. Warsaw and Budapest argued that such a move on the part of the EU is devoid of any proper legal basis. Both nations, each of which receives large portions of EU funding, have been at odds with the bloc over what the EU calls violation of its democratic principles, ranging from consolidating the government’s control over the judiciary to cracking down on the freedom of the media.

The mechanism, essentially designed to punish rule-of-law violations among the EU member states, has been in place since early 2021 but the EU Commission said it would wait for the ECJ decision before taking any action. The delay was agreed with Budapest and Warsaw in 2020 and secured the two nations’ consent for some EU budget decisions at that time.

Now, the court has said that “the European Union must be able to defend those values, within the limits of its powers.” It also ruled that the EU budget “is one of the principal instruments for giving practical effect, in the European Union’s policies and activities, to the fundamental principle of solidarity between member states.”

The court ruling was immediately welcomed by the EU Commission. “The Commission will defend the Union’s budget against breaches of the principles of the rule of law. We will act with determination,” its head, Ursula von der Leyen said. Other EU politicians also called for immediate action.

Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister and a longtime MEP, said on Twitter that von der Leyen “has to act now” and can no longer “hide behind the court.”

Budapest blasted the decision as a “political judgement.” “The ruling is another application of pressure against our country because we passed our child protection law during the summer,” Hungary’s Justice Minister Judit Varga wrote on her Facebook page, referring to new legislation in Hungary that bans the depiction of homosexuality and gender change to children in the media.

Warsaw blasted the decision as a “dark day” that “will be remembered in the history textbooks.” Poland’s Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro slammed the ECJ as a “political tool” of Brussels serving the interests of the EU elites, and accused the “largest EU countries” of attempting to transfer “sovereignty” from the member states to Brussels.

Poland has also reportedly said it would stop paying contributions to the EU budget if cut off from the bloc’s aid funding. 

Poland and Hungary had previously argued that the “conditionality mechanism” was not included in any of the EU treaties. They also said the ECJ would be overstepping its powers in approving such a mechanism.

I wonder if George Soros has any influence over the ECJ? Like he does over the EU.

I wonder if any EU country surrendered its moral or spiritual authority when it joined the EU?

Russia mocks UK over latest ‘invasion’ claim

Russia’s Foreign Ministry jokingly responded to the top UK diplomat’s claims

that the Baltic states may be the next aim for Putin

Liz Truss © Rob Pinney - WPA Pool / Getty Images

Moscow mocked the latest British "Russian invasion" claim on Sunday, with the Foreign Ministry taking a swipe at London's top diplomat. Liz Truss had suggested that Russia would not be satisfied once it invaded Ukraine, but rather would shift its focus to the Baltic states and even the western Balkans.

According to Truss, speaking in a Mail on Sunday interview, President Vladimir Putin “wants to turn the clock back to the mid-1990s or even before then.” Truss stressed that “it’s so important that we and our allies stand up to Putin,” because, in her view, “it could be Ukraine next week but then which country will it be next?”

Russia's top diplomatic spokeswoman Maria Zakharova gave a tongue-in-cheek response to the allegations on Telegram, writing that Truss “has nailed our insidious plans to invade the Kaliningrad region,” referring to the Russian enclave on the Baltic coast.

Her response is also an apparent nod to Truss’ talks with her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov earlier this month, when Russian media revealed that the foreign secretary, replying to a question from Lavrov, said the UK would “never recognize Russia’s sovereignty over” the Rostov and Voronezh regions. British Ambassador Deborah Bronnert reportedly had to intervene, informing her boss that the two regions in fact belong to Russia.

Western leaders have been claiming for months that Russia is planning to attack Ukraine – an accusation that has been repeatedly denied by Moscow.

In recent days, tensions in eastern Ukraine have escalated. The Ukrainian government and the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics blame each other for the flare-up. On Friday, the two breakaway regions began evacuating civilians to Russia. On Saturday, they issued a mobilization order, claiming that Kiev’s forces are poised to intervene.

Le Pen suspends presidential bid

The right-wing candidate is struggling to obtain sponsorship from local leaders

(FILE PHOTO) © Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images

National Rally candidate Marine Le Pen has suspended her campaign for the French presidency as she is struggling to obtain enough support from local leaders, her spokesman said on Tuesday. Le Pen’s press conference on Wednesday concerning education has been cancelled, as has her trip to the Somme at the weekend.

She told RTL on Tuesday morning that she lacked “just over 40” signatures of support from local elected officials.

Presidential candidates require the sponsorship of 500 local officials, such as mayors, in order to run for the top office.

Le Pen has seen her support from local officials dwindle amid competition from other right-wing candidates. The influential mayor of Beziers, Robert Menard, had given his support to Le Pen despite flirtations with ultra-right polemicist-cum-politician Eric Zemmour.  

The National Rally candidate has sought to sanitize her party’s image in recent years despite making it to the presidential run-off in 2017, losing to the country’s current leader, Emmanuel Macron.

She changed the party’s name and moved her politics towards the center, ridding it of the jackbooted imagery that clung to her Holocaust-denying father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Flying under the radar is OK if you don't fly too low and crash. I expected this would be Marine's last election, but I expected her to be in it. It must be heart-breaking for her.

Deep State > New JFK book proves conspiracy; If you're not in agreement with Deep State, you're unpatriotic! America's smartest Diplomat ignored

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America’s most controversial pathologist dissects

JFK’s assassination in explosive new book

The 1963 killing of the iconic US president has been pored over many times.

But one man thinks the ‘truth’ is in plain sight

Chris Sweeney is an author and columnist who has written for newspapers such as The Times, Daily Express, The Sun and the Daily Record, along with several international-selling magazines.

Texas Governor John Connolly adjusts his tie as President and Mrs. Kennedy, in a pink outfit, settled in rear seats,

prepared for motorcade into city from airport, Nov. 22. © Bettmann / Getty Images

Dr. Cyril Wecht is no nonsense, blunt and doesn’t shirk voicing an opinion. When I spoke to him about his new book, ‘The JFK Assassination Dissected,’ I was forewarned that, despite being a nonagerian, he’s still a formidable presence.

The veteran forensic pathologist turns 91 next month, yet continues to work solidly out of his Pittsburgh office. He’s performed 21,000 autopsies and been consulted on more than 41,000 other deaths. He also continues to teach at the city’s Duquesne University, but sees his deep dive into the murder of America’s most iconic president as his legacy project.

“It’s kind of a gift to myself to get it out there, before I will be unable to read it lying in my coffin,” he says matter of factly.

With a mission statement like that it’s hardly surprising the book, which took six years to write, is not a confirmation of the official account of what happened in Dallas back on that fateful day in 1963.

His contention is that a small group, perhaps of around six military and CIA powerbrokers, were behind the assassination: “They are people who saw America going to hell in a basket and they were looking at five more years of John Kennedy likely followed by eight years of Robert Kennedy. Thirteen years is a lifetime in the socio-political development of a country. There was no way they could defeat the Kennedys at the polls, no way they could have dealt with him in any way – there was only one way to deal with it and save America as they saw it, in their super patriotic zeal, and that was to eliminate him.”

The official record of what took place on that fateful day is that Lee Harvey Oswald, working as a lone assassin, shot JFK as the president rode by adoring crowds in an open top car. Two days later, Oswald, a former US Marine who had embraced Marxism and defected for a time to the Soviet Union, was shot dead himself in police custody by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner. 

The 888-page final report from the 10-month long Warren Commission in September 1964 judged that Oswald acted alone and there was no conspiracy, foreign or domestic.

Wecht doesn’t mince his words: “The Warren Commission report is pure bullshit.”

We all knew that! Well, most of us.

The smoking gun in Wecht’s book is that he claims to prove comprehensively that there was a second shooter.

“I get into some of the very specific technical findings explaining why there were two shooters, one from the rear and one from the front, simultaneous shots not just one from the rear,” he says. 

Part of his proof is provided by an acoustical study, thanks to a police motorcycle officer who made an unwitting mistake: “He was riding off the left rear tyre of the Presidential limousine and was splattered with blood, brain and tissue so much, that he thought he had been shot. 

“He had his motorcycle radio in the transmitting instead of the receiving mode which he should have had, and it was fortunate as the sounds at Dealey Plaza that day were recorded as they were transmitted from his radio. That acoustical study was performed by the top notch acoustic experts here in the United States and they conclusively show there were shots from the rear and the front – there were four shots, if not five – quite different from what the Warren Commission has portrayed.”

While he’s certain of a second person firing, Wecht doesn’t have any potential suspects.

“If I had the names I would disclose them. I haven’t been hesitant or fearful of anything. By now if anybody was going to knock me off, it would have happened.”

Another aspect that rankles with Wecht is geometry. JFK was accompanied that day by Texas governor John Connally, who was also shot but not killed.

In one breathless diatribe, Wecht recounts without pause the journey of Exhibit 399, the bullet that killed the 35th US president, explaining how it had to change angle and direction on several occasions as it went through both men.

Wecht explains: “I say to the Warren Commission defenders and sycophants, if you want Oswald as a shooter, fine. I want the second shooter because in the laws of the United States federal government, two or more people involved in a planning, execution, coverup of a crime makes it a conspiracy. The case has to be reinvestigated.”

The book takes no issue with JFK’s security detail or the medical staff who treated him.

Wecht believes strings were pulled from above, creating the conditions for a coverup that involved Kennedy’s body quickly being taken back to Washington for an autopsy.

“To begin with, you have the body of the president spirited out of Parkland Hospital in Dallas in violation of the laws of that county and the state of Texas. The autopsy should have been done by the local medical examiner, who was a board-certified, experienced, qualified forensics pathologist. I happen to know him, we met when we were both in the Air Force many years ago at different bases and [at] national conferences.”

Instead it was a pair of naval doctors, J. Thornton Boswell and James Humes, who carried it out at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. In Wecht’s eyes, they were out of their depth: “They were career naval people who had never done a single gunshot wound autopsy in their entire careers. You realize how difficult a task it is to deal with somebody that has multiple gunshot wounds to differentiate between entrance and exit, angle, trajectory, sequence and in the JFK case you then have to correlate all of his wounds, with the several wounds in John Connally? That is a formidable task.

“The idea of having two pathologists who had never done a gunshot wound autopsy in their entire careers, who had no training in forensic pathology, is deplorable and despicable.”

Another area of suspicion in the book is what happened to JFK’s brain. It could not be examined straightaway. Wecht explains how a brain can’t be dissected immediately as it’s too fragile, so a chemical is used to harden it: “You go back in two weeks and you can cut it like a hard boiled egg, I don’t mean to be crude but just think of that, cutting a hard boiled egg in parallel fashion, slice by slice. You do that with a brain.”

The problem is that two weeks later, JFK’s whole brain was not there. “It’s in the autopsy report, [that] sections of the brain are not made in order to ‘preserve the specimen’. Preserve the specimen? For whom? For Jackie Kennedy’s mantelpiece?”

Wecht says some of the facts he references in the book are out there in plain sight for anyone to discover by researching. In fact, some of the material is covered in other books, too, but he believes his is the most comprehensive demolition of the official account of Kennedy’s death, stating: “My book lays it out from the beginning to the end so to speak and covers all the things that were done improperly, negligently, deliberately, surreptitiously, malevolently to show that this was a planned execution, for the overthrow of the government in the United States.”

There will be many naysayers who will understandably feel that a killing of this magnitude could not have remained a secret for almost 60 years. After all, there have been countless movies, documentaries, books and podcasts made of the assassination, so why should Wecht’s be the one that calls it right after all this time?

The veteran doctor welcomes the challenge: “I’m prepared to debate anybody, draw an audience... but [let’s] deal with the facts. [When] I’ve talked about engaging in conjecture of the names of the people or how many were there and so on, I point that out. But everything else is hard facts and if anybody wants to dispute this, call me a conspiracist, then deal with the facts.”

Also pertinent for Wecht is how all but one of the US media have ignored his book, but he has received numerous interview requests from overseas.

“Here in America, nobody has contacted me even to attack me, as they know if they attack me, I’m going to rebut and challenge them, so they just ignore it and it’ll go away, that’s the way they’ve dealt with this for almost 60 years.”

Wecht feels Americans can’t countenance their commander in chief being shot dead in a conspiracy carried out by shadowy internal actors. He points out how Russian or Chinese national security operatives are often portrayed as rogue in US media, but American ones are awarded an honorable and patriotic image. “The book is for anybody interested in the JFK assassination, anybody interested in a good murder mystery, anybody interested in the way things are covered up and the ways in which governments can lie.”

Wecht also makes much of the fact that papers related to the death have still not been released, despite The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act ordering all government documents to be publicly released by October 2017. Donald Trump postponed that, releasing some, but most were heavily redacted.

Biden released more last December, but they were dismissed as not containing any new information. More than 10,000 documents remain, which have yet to be seen by anyone outside of The White House. They are due to be finally unveiled on December 15, 2022, but that is not guaranteed.

For Wecht, all the secrecy is more than enough reason to justify his book. “The reason they give when they deign to explain why they are not releasing it all is that it would compromise our national security. An act committed in 1963, by one person according to them, is going to compromise our national security today, in 2022 – you like that? That’s the kind of BS you get from them.”

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Another glimpse at how Deep State works...

If you’re American and oppose war with Russia,

expect to be smeared as unpatriotic

Pro-war hawks in the West have resorted to overt hostility toward those

who argue against conflict in Ukraine

Lauren Chen is a political and social commentator. She began as a YouTuber, and has since gained millions of views on the platform and hundreds of thousands of followers. She has also appeared on Fox News, BlazeTV, RT, OANN, Newsmax, The Daily Wire, Rebel Media, PragerU and The Rubin Report. 

Russian tanks leaving for Russia after joint exercises of the armed forces of Russia and Belarus near Brest.

© AFP / Handout / Russian Defence Ministry

On Tuesday, after weeks of international uncertainty and fears of conflict, Russia announced it would be pulling its troops back from the border with Ukraine. This news came after repeated assurances from President Vladimir Putin and officials that Moscow had no desire for war, and that troop movements and positioning were merely training exercises.

Markets immediately responded to this development with renewed optimism, as the Dow jumped 400 points, European stocks closed higher on Tuesday, and natural gas and power prices fell. However, one group curiously silent in light of the seemingly positive turn of events was the war hawks, goaded by Western media, intelligence, and politicians, (ie Deep State) who in the preceding hours had all but assured the public that an invasion and armed conflict were inevitable.

And while the establishment neo-cons and neo-libs may say that their hawkish warnings and preparations were simply the logical conclusion given the information available at the time, it’s important to remember that throughout the recent hysteria, there have been voices who attempted to pull back the mounting calls for war. However, rather than address their reasoning, the pro-war camp instead resorted to smears in order to justify their peculiar need to stoke tensions with another global superpower.

Specifically, in one attempt to contextualize the intelligence communities’ assurances that Russia’s troop actions were a build-up to aggression against Ukraine, Green Party member and former presidential candidate Jill Stein reminded her social media followers of how officials had not just been wrong about previous conflicts, but had actually lied to the public to garner support for action in Vietnam and Iraq, among other wars. Similarly, many of these same insiders had also been less than truthful about recent stories involving Julian Assange and Russiagate.

The general response to Dr. Stein’s post was positive overall, in keeping with polling which suggests the American public has no interest in involving their country in new foreign engagements. However, the reaction from the pro-war camp was to accuse Dr. Stein of being a Russian asset. Because, of course, what other reason could there be for someone to oppose costly military intervention based on shaky intelligence other than disloyalty to their own country?

And in this same vein, Tulsi Gabbard, another vocal anti-war advocate who has fiercely criticized interventionist American foreign policy, has also spent weeks warning of the conflicting interests motivating those banging the war drums. Often, as Gabbard has pointed out, officials who are most supportive of American military action overseas are also those who stand to gain monetarily through defense contracts and spending (ie Deep State).

What’s more, Gabbard has even gone so far as to suggest that by encouraging Ukraine to join NATO, certain American actors might actually be trying to spark a new Cold War, not to benefit US security interests, but rather the military industrial complex. After all, historically, American policy has considered breaches in spheres of influence occurring in countries close to them, such as Cuba, to be acts of aggression. What makes Western encroachment in Ukraine any different?

As with Dr. Stein, however, sadly Gabbard’s criticisms were met with the usual accusations of being a foreign asset, with little to no attempt to address the actual substance of her position.

Across the aisle on the political right, one of the most prominent anti-war voices that has emerged is Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who has likewise been attacked for his views. Carlson has frequently devoted time on his program to questioning whether, regardless of Russia’s intentions, involving the US in Ukrainian affairs is in America’s best interests, especially at a time when domestic problems abound. Additionally, Carlson has been skeptical of political attempts to paint Ukraine as a Western-style democracy in order to garner public support for any potential alliances or interventions.

It's a very old political technique when there is trouble on the homefront - start a war. 

For his efforts, Carlson has received especially vicious condemnation from the likes of David Frum, who in 2003 accused those who were against military action in Iraq of being “unpatriotic.”  In a scathing article in The Athletic, Frum accused Carlson and others on the antiwar right of spouting “Vladimir Putin’s talking points,” and ironically likened his position to “isolationists who hoped to profit politically from that passivity.”

Russia’s troop withdrawal may have temporarily neutered the pro-war momentum building in Western discourse. However, the overt hostility toward those who argue against escalating tensions with Russia may signal that it’s only a matter of time before establishment forces are once more arguing that it is not just beneficiary, but rather necessary, for Western militaries to strike before Russian forces can do the same.

Why isn’t America listening to the advice on NATO expansion

of its foremost 20th century expert on Russia?

“Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy

in the entire post-Cold War era,” George Kennan said

Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of 'Midnight in the American Empire,' How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream. @Robert_Bridge

FILE PHOTO. George Kennan. © Getty Images / Bettmann

The US diplomat George Kennan, an astute observer of Soviet Russia under Stalin, offered his observations later in life on the question of NATO expansion. The tragedy of our times is that those views are being ignored.

“Americans will always do the right thing,

but only after all other possibilities are exhausted.”

Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill once famously quipped that the “Americans will always do the right thing, but only after all other possibilities are exhausted.” That bit of dry British humor cuts to the heart of the current crisis in Ukraine, which is loaded with enough geopolitical dynamite to bring down a sizable chunk of the neighborhood. Yet, had the West taken the advice of one of its leading statesmen with regards to reckless military expansion toward Russia, the world would be a more peaceful and predictable place today.

The diplomatic doctrine of his era

George Kennan is perhaps best known as the US diplomat and historian who composed on February 22, 1946 the ‘Long Telegram’, a 5,400-word cable dispatched from the US embassy in Moscow to Washington that advised on the peaceful “containment” of the Soviet Union. That stroke of analytical brilliance, which Henry Kissinger hailed as “the diplomatic doctrine of his era,” provided the intellectual groundwork for grappling with the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin as ultimately enshrined in the ‘Truman Doctrine’.

Inside the fetid corridors of power, however, where the more hawkish Dean Acheson had replaced the ailing George Marshall in 1949 as secretary of state, Kennan and his more temperate views on how to deal with capitalism’s arch rival had already passed its expiration date. Such is the fickleness of fate, where the arrival of a single new actor on the global stage can alter the course of history’s river forever. Thus, having lost his influence with the Truman administration, Kennan eventually began teaching at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he remained until his death in 2005. Just because George Kennan was no longer with the State Department, however, didn’t mean that he stopped ruffling the feathers of predators.

In 1997, with Washington elves hard at work on a NATO membership drive for Central Europe, particularly those countries that once formed the core of the Soviet-era Warsaw Pact, Kennan pulled the alarm. Writing in the pages of the New York Times, he warned that ongoing NATO expansion toward Russia “would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”

"The most fateful error of American policy

in the entire post-cold-war era.”

George Kennan

Particularly perplexing to the former diplomat was that the US and its allies were expanding the military bloc at a time when Russia, then experiencing the severe birth pains of capitalism atop the smoldering ruins of communism, posed no threat to anyone aside from itself.

“It is … unfortunate that Russia should be confronted with such a challenge at a time when its executive power is in a state of high uncertainty and near-paralysis,” Kennan wrote.

He went on to express his frustration that, despite all of the “hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the cold war,” relations between East and West are becoming predicated on the question of “who would be allied with whom” in some “improbable future military conflict.”

In other words, had Western dream weavers just let things work themselves out naturally, Russia and the West would have found the will and the way to live side-by-side in relative harmony. One example of such mutual cooperation is evident by the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a bilateral project between Moscow and Berlin that hinges on trust and goodwill above all. Who needs to travel around the world for war booty when capitalism offers more than enough opportunities for elitist pillage right at home? Yet the United States, having snorted from the mirror of power for so long, will never be satisfied with the spectacle of Russians and Europeans playing nice together.

As for the Russians, Kennan continued, they would be forced to accept NATO’s program of expansionism as a “military fait accompli,” thereby finding it imperative to search elsewhere for “guarantees of a secure and hopeful future for themselves.”

Needless to say, Kennan’s warnings fell on deaf ears. On March 12, 1999, then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, an acolyte of geopolitical guru and ultimate Russophobe Zbigniew Brzezinski, formally welcomed the former Warsaw Pact countries of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into the NATO fold. Since 1949, NATO has grown from its original 12 members to thirty, two of which share a border with Russia in the Baltic States of Estonian and Latvia, which has been the site of massive NATO military exercises in the past.

So while it is impossible to say how things would be different between Russia and the West had the US heeded Kennan’s sage advice, it’s a good bet the world wouldn’t be perched on the precipice of a regional war over Ukraine, which has become a center of a standoff between Moscow and NATO.

"Against whom is this expansion intended?”

Vladimir Putin

Russia certainly does not feel more secure as NATO hardware moves inexorably toward its border. Vladimir Putin let these sentiments be known 15 years ago during the Munich Security Conference when he told the assembled attendees: “I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?”

Today, with Kiev actively pursuing NATO membership for Ukraine, and the West stubbornly refusing to acknowledge Moscow’s declared ‘red lines’, outlined in two draft treaties sent to Washington and NATO in December, the situation looks grim. What the West must understand, however, is that Russia is no longer the special needs country it was just 20 years ago. It has the ability – diplomatic or otherwise – to address the perceived threats on its territory. There has even been talk of Russia, taking its cue from NATO’s reckless expansion in Europe, building military alliances in South America and the Caribbean.

Last month, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reported that President Putin had spoken with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, for the purpose of stepping up collaboration in a range of areas, including military matters.

With each passing day it is becoming more apparent that had Kennan’s more realistic vision of regional cooperation been accepted, the world would not find itself at such a dangerous crossroads today. Fortunately, there is still time to reconsider the advice of America’s brilliant diplomat if it is peace that Washington truly desires.

Robert, you know darn well that it is not peace that America wants, it's a good war or two where they can keep the war inventory moving. War is great for business in countries where war machinery is manufactured and moral compasses belong to the lower classes.

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Canadian Convulsions > Trudeau is unable to handle people who disagree with him; RCMP sound worse than truckers

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Trudeau’s party takes hit in poll

Conservative Party of Canada overtakes Liberals, gains 10 percentage points,

in latest polling

FILE PHOTO © Dave Chan / AFP

New polling figures show Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has been overtaken by the Conservatives amid waning support among Canadians for Covid-19 vaccine and mask mandates, and against the backdrop of a major crackdown on the trucker-led protests.

The poll, conducted by Mainstreet Research, showed that voter support for the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) has increased by 10 percentage points in the past month. The CPC would be the leading vote-getter if an election were held today, garnering 36% of ballots, compared with 28% for the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC), the survey found.

And the CPC doesn't have a leader right now!

The polling was conducted last week, starting two days after Trudeau invoked Canada’s Emergencies Act. That move suspended civil liberties to quash the Freedom Convoy protests and take such actions as freezing the bank accounts of demonstrators without court orders, increasing police powers, and subjecting fundraising platforms to laws normally applied to money launderers and terrorist financiers. The survey was completed before footage from Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, showed protesters apparently being trampled by police-mounted horses, dispersed with tear gas, and pummeled with rifle butts.

Just 36% of Canadians still support Covid-19 restrictions, compared with 55% who favor ending all government pandemic measures, the Mainstreet poll showed. As recently as two months ago, 56% of Canadians said they would support another round of Covid-19 lockdowns. About 39% of respondents to the latest survey said they strongly oppose Trudeau’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act, while 38% strongly support the move.

A Maru Public Opinion poll released earlier this month showed that just 16% of Canadians would vote for Trudeau based on his actions during the first two weeks of the Freedom Convoy trucker protests. Nearly half of respondents said they believed he was “not up to the job of being prime minister.”

In my humble opinion, his reaction to the trucker convoy was like that of a frightened little boy. His complete inability to communicate with people who don't maintain his far-left ideals is beginning to catch up with him. However, there are still too many people who think he is Mr. Wonderful, even while he tears Canada apart and puts us into a debt from which we can never emerge.

On a separate topic, the Mainstreet survey showed relatively strong support, especially among LPC voters, for sending Canadian troops to Ukraine if Russia invades the country. More than 48% of respondents, including 58% of Liberal voters, said they favor sending Canadian forces to fight Russian invaders, while 38% said they oppose such a military deployment.

Madness! Thanks to our far-left national media in Canada.

An Economist/YouGov poll released earlier this month showed that only 13% of Americans believe it would be a “good idea” to send US troops to tangle with Russian forces in Ukraine.

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Police probe leaked messages where officers reportedly celebrated brutality

Purportedly leaked messages show Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers describe trampling of demonstrators as “awesome”

A tactical police officer stands on the base of a street advertisement as police move in to clear downtown Ottawa, Canada, February 19, 2022 © Getty Images / Justin Tang

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced on Sunday that it is “looking into” leaked messages apparently from an officers’ chat group, in which members appear to cheer on the trampling of Freedom Convoy demonstrators in Ottawa, and declared it “time for the protesters to hear our jackboots on the ground.” 

“The RCMP is aware of the material circulating on social media pertaining to a chat group that includes some of its members, and we can confirm that we are looking into the matter,” read a statement from the force. “This material is not representative of those who have committed themselves to serving Canadians with integrity and professionalism.”

A federal police force, the RCMP were brought in to assist Ottawa Police officers in clearing the Freedom Convoy protest that had occupied much of downtown Ottawa for the past three weeks. The crackdown was a brutal one, and as city and federal officers arrested nearly 200 people since Friday and seized 76 vehicles, video footage emerged showing baton beatings, attacks with projectile weapons, and a mounted cavalry charge into a crowd of demonstrators.

According to screenshots posted online on Saturday, RCMP officers cheered on this crackdown. The screenshots, purportedly taken from the force’s ‘Musical Ride’ group chat, showed a member named ‘Marca’ saying “just watched the horse video – that is awesome” and adding “we should practice that manoeuvre.”

Another member named ‘Andrew Nixon’ posted a picture of himself holding a pint of beer, telling his fellow officers “Don't kick all of them out until next week’s group gets our turn,” and saying that it was “time for the protesters to hear our jackboots on the ground.” 

The screenshots were posted on Twitter, and heavily publicized by Canada’s Rebel News, a right-wing outlet whose reporter said she was earlier shot with a non-lethal weapon at close range by an officer.

These attitudes and actions are much more like the descriptions Trudeau spoke of when describing the truckers and their supporters. But these are OK with Trudeau because they work for him, The Hypocrite and Chief!

The police crackdown came after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the never-before-used Emergencies Act last week. As well as empowering police to clear the streets, the act permits the government to freeze bank accounts and cryptocurrency wallets belonging to protest participants and donors. 

Interim Ottawa Police Chief Steve Bell declared the protest “over” on Saturday. However, Bell warned on Friday that his department would continue to hunt down those who had been involved in the protests and punish them financially. “If you are involved in this protest, we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges,” he threatened. 

While a number of Canadian provinces have relaxed their Covid-19 restrictions since the protest began, Trudeau’s nationwide vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers – the rule that sparked the demonstration in the first place – remains in force.

Covid-19 > Questions for Fauci; Vax shots while pregnant may help babies; CDC hides troves of data

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GOP lawmakers demand answers from Fauci

House Republicans want to know why the Covid-19 guru seemingly shut down

any debate about whether the virus came from a Wuhan lab

Dr. Anthony Fauci is shown testifying at a Senate hearing last month in Washington.

© Getty Images / Greg Nash

US Republican lawmakers have sent a letter pressing chief White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci for answers about his alleged silencing of concerns that the Covid-19 virus originally came from a Chinese lab.

The letter, sent on Monday by three US House members, cited emails suggesting that Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), tried in early 2020 to quash speculation among scientists that the virus may have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Instead of alerting national security officials to the pandemic’s potentially unnatural origin, Fauci and Collins sought to shut down the debate, the GOP lawmakers said.

The emails, which were obtained by media outlets under Freedom of Information Act requests, reportedly showed that some virology experts saw reason to believe that the virus was lab-created. Some of the messages made reference to a February 2020 conference call in which many scientists leaned toward the lab-leak theory. For instance, Tulane Medical School professor Robert Garry said he could see no “plausible natural scenario” for some aspects of Covid-19 otherwise.

“However, those same email communications, particularly when viewed in light of other publicly available information, demonstrate an apparent effort by you and Dr. Collins not only to cover up the concerns those virologists raised, but to suppress scientific debate about the origins of Covid-19,” the letter said.

Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington), Brett Guthrie (R-Kentucky) and Morgan Griffith (R-Virginia) signed the letter.

They demanded that Fauci provide details on how those conversations with scientists were initiated and who consulted him and Collins on Covid-19’s likely origins. The lawmakers also requested information on any communications by Fauci and Collins with Chinese scientists, as well as documents related to US funding of the research in Wuhan.

Even as scientists were speculating about Covid-19’s potentially manmade origins, Fauci told reporters in April 2020 that the sequencing of the virus was “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” Earlier that same day, Collins sent him a message of concern about the lab leak theory, asking how NIH might “put down this very destructive conspiracy.”

READ MORE: New documents allege Fauci funded gain-of-function research in China

Republican lawmakers have accused Fauci of directing taxpayer funding to gain-of-function research that could potentially make organisms more transmissible or lethal. In Monday’s letter, the House members claimed the efforts to quell the lab-leak theory may have stemmed at least partly from fears of those grants being exposed. “It appears you and Dr. Collins may have done so to protect China and avoid criticism about incredibly risky research that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was funding at the Wuhan lab,” the legislators said.

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Covid vaccines during pregnancy impact newborns – study

Immunity can be passed from jabbed mothers to babies, according to new research

(FILE PHOTO) © Photo by Fernando Gutierrez-Juarez/picture alliance via Getty Images

Babies born to mothers who took the Covid-19 vaccine during their pregnancy are likely to have some form of immunity against the virus, according to the latest research from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), published on Tuesday.

Researchers analyzed data from 379 hospitalized infants – 176 suffered from Covid-19 and 203 were admitted for other reasons. The children were all under six months old between July 2021 and January 2022.

Their study found that hospitalization risks were reduced by 61% in children whose mothers were vaccinated during pregnancy. 

Protection increased to 80% when the mothers got their jabs later in their pregnancy (21 weeks to 14 days before delivery). The effectiveness of the vaccinations dropped as low as 32% for babies whose mother was inoculated earlier during pregnancy.

The authors cautioned people not to read too much into the study, given the small sample size used.

“Right now we want to ensure that we are protecting both the mom and the infant,” CDC's Dana Meaney-Delman told reporters. “So, as soon as a pregnant woman is willing to be vaccinated, she should go ahead and do so.”

The CDC says that pregnant women are at greater risk of developing complications due to Covid-19, including risks to their own health, as well as preterm births and stillbirths. It is recommended that anyone expecting a baby or trying to get pregnant should keep up to date with their Covid shots.

Recommended by CDC - Big Pharma; the people who make money from you getting your shots.

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Is CDC protecting the government or Big Pharma, or both?

CDC withholds Covid-19 data that could be ‘misinterpreted’ – media

The US agency is declining to release troves of pandemic information it has gathered to date, according to the New York Times

© Getty Images / Elijah Nouvelage

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has kept reams of its Covid-19 data under wraps for more than a year, the New York Times reports, holding back figures at least partly because it doesn’t trust the public to interpret the information correctly.

The agency’s seemingly selective disclosure came to light in an article by the Times on Sunday. Among the data being withheld is a breakdown of Covid-19 hospitalizations by age, race, and vaccination status. The CDC also chose not to report on such findings as the efficacy of booster shots in 18- to 49-year-olds, even though it collected the information, the article added.

Although it’s the agency leading America’s Covid-19 response, the CDC has published only a “tiny fraction” of the data that it has collected, the Times said. In lieu of US data being made more widely available, experts were forced to look elsewhere for information – such as Israeli figures on booster shots – that would help them make informed recommendations.

CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund told the newspaper that the agency’s data priority has been to collect “accurate and actionable” information. Some data has been withheld because “it’s not yet ready for prime time,” she said.

Do the data have to age, like a fine wine, or do they require some massaging before they are ready?

Such omissions have included figures on Covid-19 infections among fully vaccinated Americans. According to the media report, the CDC has been reluctant to publish those figures because “they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.” Nordlund confirmed that concern as one of the reasons.

Epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera, part of an independent Covid-19 data-tracking project, told the Times that her group had been begging for such information for two years. “We are at much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with data vacuums than sharing the data with proper science, communication and caveats,” she argued.

The CDC has been criticized for a lack of transparency and consistency throughout much of the pandemic. For example, when the agency reversed course on mask-wearing guidance for vaccinated people last summer, it attributed the decision to only “unpublished data.” The New York Time’s revelations about the agency withholding data triggered a fresh round of opprobrium.

“It’s political manipulation of scientific data like this that makes people not ‘trust the science,’” said J. Michael Waller, a senior analyst at the Center for Security Strategy, in a tweet. “It is unscientific to withhold data because people might disagree with your policies.”

Big Pharma's influence is obvious here! Hiding the truth is never for the benefit of the public, or science.

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Christian Witness > Convoys, Convulsions in Canada - A Christian Perspective

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Convoys, Convulsions and the Future of Canada

By Bob Jones 

REVwords.com

February 20, 2022 

What says Canada more than someone wearing a snowmobile jacket in a snowstorm holding a maple leaf flag tied to the end of a hockey stick, eh? Except when the Canadian holding the stick is facing off against a line of police in riot gear brandishing batons and weapons.

Convulsions in the Fabric of Canada

The level of conflict that we are witnessing is, in many ways, inconceivable for Canadians. Images out of Ottawa at the end of the recent occupation will be seared into our collective memories. Anti-mandate convoys and rallies of flag-waving citizens are the new thing to do on weekends. The cumulative effects of the two-year pandemic have released cultural toxins into the bloodstream of our society, infecting politics, churches, civility, and in Michael Coren’s opinion, “likely causing lasting and even irreparable damage.”

Climate change isn’t the only thing heating up the true north.

Canadian culture is convulsing.

“Shifts in the collective consciousness are no merry ride,” says David Brooks, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a columnist for The New York Times. “They come amid fury and chaos, when the social order turns liquid and nobody has any idea where things will end. Afterward, people sit blinking, battered, and shocked: What kind of nation have we become?”

Tumultous

How did we get here? What’s on the horizon?

Anyone under 50 has no memory of the tumultuous 60s. On campuses and on city streets, the protest leaders of this decade favoured civil disobedience over the ballot box. Protest rallies, marches, sit-ins, and demonstrations were the tactics of choice.

The actions of members of the Students for a Democratic University are the epitome of those times. Using their newly acquired positions in the Simon Fraser Student Society, they passed a motion to change the name of the university to Louis Riel University. These activists argued that rather than being a “Loyalist, fur-trader and explorer,” Simon Fraser was actually a “member of the vanguard of pirates, thieves, and carpet baggers which dispossessed and usurped the native Indians of Canada from their rightful heritage.”

Sound eerily familiar?

We lived through the convulsions. And churches that chose the mission over their methods loved people and saw the birth of the Jesus People Revolution and revival.

A Cultural Pattern

Brooks suggests the moment we find ourselves in is a cultural pattern. “These moments share certain features. People feel disgusted by the state of society. Trust in institutions plummets. Moral indignation is widespread. Contempt for established power is intense.”

“A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.”

The Church in Canada

The church in Canada is not immune to upheaval or conflict. Fault lines and disunity existed over the last forty years of church life, but nothing as widespread as what the coronavirus exposed and the polarized response from Christians.

I don’t lead a local church but I talk with a lot of pastors and the level of division and anger they face has never been higher.

“We’re going into a season, “says Ed Stetzer, researcher, and missiologist, “where we’re going to have to build up, as leaders, greater reservoirs of resilience to face a higher level of conflict that’s going to be ongoing. And we’re going to have to grow accustomed to that level of conflict in our churches, our ministries, in our leadership positions, our businesses and more, and that’s not good news. I just think it’s factually true.”

Sobering words, but defining reality is the first job of leaders. The second is to offer hope.

There is a path forward.

Known for Obedience

Jesus never said his followers would be known for taking a stand, correcting one another, right doctrine, adherence to tradition, or for Sunday attendance. He said the world would know those in step with him as they obey him.

Obedience to Jesus is the north star for the church.

And the good news is that love is always the outcome of obeying Jesus. Love for those who are like us. Love for those of different political persuasions, social alignment, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Jesus calls us to a radical revolution of loving unconditionally, forgiving graciously, and giving no home to offence.

In the words of Jess Claire, Make Jesus known. Be passionate. Be strong. Defend who and what God puts on your heart. Let your voice be heard. But be kind and remember who you’re returning home to.

Home

As followers of Jesus our call is to exercise our “first” citizenship within God’s kingdom as well as our Canadian citizenship. We are commanded to live out our love for God and our love for others in such a way that those we live among may see our good deeds and glorify God.

We live among others as Jesus did, full of grace and truth.

Jesus, by Your Spirit, empower us to demonstrate your love, grace, and truth in the relationships where God has placed us. Amen.

Please go to the link at the top of this article to leave a comment.

Military Madness > Russia enters Ukraine; The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan; Finland buys $9.4 bn worth of F-35s

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Putin recognizes Donetsk & Lugansk then orders troops into them on 'peacekeeping mission'

By RACHAEL BUNYAN and NICK CRAVEN IN KIEV FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 16:58 EST, 21 February 2022 | UPDATED: 17:11 EST, 21 February 2022

Vladimir Putin has ordered his troops to enter Ukraine on a 'peacekeeping mission' after he officially recognised the country's eastern regions as independent states - a move that will pave the way for a long-feared Russian invasion of Kiev.

Mail Online is exaggerating the threat to Kiev here. This appears to be very similar to the takeover of Crimea. I would be surprised if Putin wanted any more than the two breakaway regions. 

The Russian President ordered his defence ministry to despatch Russian peacekeepers to eastern Ukraine's two breakaway regions - the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic - according to a decree signed by Putin recognising their independence.   

Moscow provided no details or date for any deployment, with the order saying only that it 'comes into force from the day it was signed'. 

Recognising the rebel regions' independence effectively shatters the Minsk peace agreements and opens the door for Russia to sign treaties with the 'states' and openly send troops and weapons there to defend them against Ukrainian 'threats'.

The move fuels further tension with the West and narrows the diplomatic options available to avoid war, since it is an explicit rejection of a seven-year-old ceasefire mediated by France and Germany, still touted as the framework for any future negotiations on the wider crisis.  

A framework that Ukraine never proceeded to build upon.

The Kremlin said that upon hearing that Putin will sign the order to recognise the independence of eastern Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had 'expressed disappointment' over the decision in phone calls with the Russian President.  

Mr Johnson said Putin's decision to recognise the two separatist Ukrainian republics was in breach of international law and an 'ill omen' and 'dark sign' that things are moving in the wrong while UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the move would not go 'unpunished' as she announced new sanctions on Russia. 

The EU's top officials also said they will impose sanctions, while the U.S. has ordered sanctions which will prohibit new investment, trade and financing in the two separatist regions of Ukraine recognised by Putin. 

Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg also condemned Putin, accusing Russia of 'trying to stage a pretext to invade Ukraine yet again'.

Earlier, Putin vowed to decide 'today' whether to recognise Ukraine's eastern regions as independent states. He made the remark at the end of an hours-long security council meeting that was broadcast on Russian TV during which the country's top security officials were called up one by one and asked to lay out the case for war - seemingly aimed at persuading a skeptical public of the need to attack. 

Having spent days staging what are widely believed to be false flag attacks on Ukrainian soil and blaming them on Kiev, ministers presented the 'evidence' to Putin today: Claiming Russians in Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions are under threat of 'genocide', that no peace deal can save them, and that he must intervene to save lives. 

But in evidence that the entire spectacle was being staged - with the West warning a decision to invade has already been made - eagle-eyed viewers noticed that defence minister Sergei Shoigu's watch was five hours behind Moscow time, suggesting the hearing was pre-recorded. 

All eyes will now turn to Ukraine's border regions for evidence that Russian troops have crossed, after videos published earlier in the day showed tanks and armoured vehicles in 'battle formations' - some of them less than three miles from the frontier. 

Dymtro Kuleba, Ukraine's defence minister, said after the council meeting that 'the entire world' will watch what Russia does next and that 'everyone realises the consequences' if Putin vows to recognise the breakaway regions. 'We all should calmly focus on de-escalation efforts, [there is] no other way,' he tweeted. 

It comes as two Ukrainian soldiers died on Monday and three were wounded in a shelling attack in Zaitseve, a village 18 miles north of the rebel stronghold Donetsk, Ukraine's national police said. 

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who had a phone call with Putin this evening, warned him that recognising the eastern regions would be a 'one-sided' breach of peace negotiations and that he has a 'responsibility' to de-escalate tensions by removing troops from the border. 

Meanwhile Joe Biden called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and convened a meeting of his National Security team after Putin slammed the U.S. for 'colonizing' Ukraine and using it as a 'puppet regime' in televised remarks before signing the decree.  

Pentagon names culprits behind disastrous Afghan withdrawal

US military points finger at President Joe Biden and other top officials for interfering

in evacuation Pentagon names culprits behind disastrous Afghan withdrawal

Taliban fighters guarding their new US-made aircraft after American troops leave

© Getty Images / Marcus Yam

The Pentagon’s exhaustive report on the haphazard US departure from Afghanistan has revealed many on the ground blamed constant meddling by American VIPs for “distracting” them from what needed to be done, creating the chaotic scenes that shocked observers at home.

According to the 2,000 page report, obtained by the Washington Post via the Freedom of Information Act request earlier this week, the senior officers in charge of the evacuation were even forced to change plans because of the nonstop interference from afar. The report includes numerous interviews, including testimony regarding the suicide bombing outside the airport that killed 170 Afghans and 13 Americans just days before they were supposed to leave Afghanistan for good after the longest war in US history.

“You had everyone from the White House down with a new flavor of the day for prioritization,” Rear Admiral Peter Vasely, the senior US figure in Kabul at the time of the evacuation, told the military interviewer. And it wasn’t just President Biden calling in favors, either – First Lady Jill Biden, members of Congress, journalists, and even the Vatican all weighed in on who needed rescuing the most, according to the rear admiral.

Having spent 13.5 years in the military, you would think I would know something about Military Intelligence. Apparently not! For the ranking military officer in Afghanistan was a Rear Admiral. Afghanistan is, of course, a land-locked country, so why they would put a Naval Officer in charge makes no sense to me. 

“I cannot stress enough how these high-profile requests ate up bandwidth and created competition for already-stressed resources,” Vasely continued, noting that he could “only speculate” regarding whether the confusion and chaos that resulted caused some Americans and friendly Afghans to be left behind.

With thousands of phone calls, texts, and emails descending on Kabul during the 17-day evacuation, Vasely said he had no choice but to pull personnel from other operations to form a “coordination cell” able to process all the communications. 

Social media, he said, only made things worse – giving people the ability to campaign for the military to rescue not just specific people, but specific dogs. 

Again, why allow communications from anyone other than your immediate superior to affect your operation is beyond me. They should all have been referred to the Pentagon where they had the personnel to deal with them.

While Biden insisted with less than a week to go before the US had promised to depart that no American who wanted to leave would be left behind, it soon became obvious that getting everyone out by August 31st would not be possible, and the administration reportedly considered extending the deadline into September – only to be met with a “visceral response” from the Taliban, who were effectively in charge of the country by that point.

The initial plan had been to evacuate American citizens, then lawful permanent residents, and finally Afghans who had helped the Americans during the two-decade occupation of their country. Military leaders had urged the White House and State Department to sign off on evacuation preparations weeks in advance, but complained the stateside authorities had “failed to grasp” the Taliban’s rapid progress toward Kabul, believing they had more time than they actually did.

Apparently, they were not aware of the lightning-like ISIS take-over of much of Syria and Iraq.

However, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has defended the administration’s sluggish response, insisting the National Security Council had been meeting on the topic of withdrawing from Afghanistan for “months,” plotting out responses to various crises – except the one that actually occurred. They couldn’t possibly have foreseen how easily the Afghan security forces would be vanquished by the Taliban, she said. 

They could have, but for their arrogance.

While the exact number of US citizens left behind vacillated between 100 and 450 depending on when one asked the State Department, a White House official who spoke to the Post believes every American who wanted to leave Afghanistan has had a chance to do so.

It’s not clear whether the Pentagon’s report also included statistics on how many of the Afghans who assisted the Americans in the war effort made it out of the country. Many attracted the unwanted attention of the Taliban when the Biden administration handed out a list of their names to the fundamentalist group so that they could be allowed through the perimeter to the airport. A Pentagon official told Politico at the time that the administration had effectively handed the Taliban a “kill list,” noting the group’s reputation for doing away with their countrymen who assisted the Americans.

I am not aware of anyone on that list having been killed. If you are, please inform me.

Finland makes massive military investment with US

Helsinki signs a deal for 64 US-built F-35 stealth jets, at a reported cost of $9.4 billion

Two Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning (FILE PHOTO)

© Photo by Nicolò Campo/LightRocket via Getty Images

Finland has penned a multibillion-dollar deal with the US to purchase 64 American-built F-35 fighter jets, the Finnish Defense Forces announced on Friday. The radar-evading warplanes will reportedly cost the European country, which is traditionally militarily non-aligned, some $9.4 billion.

The aircraft will not enter service for some years, with Finnish officials previously saying deployment of the planes would begin in 2027. The new jets are being brought in to replace Finland’s current Hornet fleet.

In addition to the 64 planes, the deal sees American defense contractor Lockheed Martin providing maintenance equipment, spare parts, and training services, the Finnish Defence Forces said in a statement. 

“The aim is to ensure that Finland’s F-35 system has the best possible performance going into the 2030s,” the statement added.

Mikko Hautala, Finland’s ambassador to the US, said the purchase was not linked to the current tensions between neighboring Russia and the West. “It is part of our long-term planning and has nothing to do with the current situation as such,” Hautala stated.

In selecting the F-35, Finland rejected alternative options from other planemakers including Dassault Rafale of France and Eurofighter Typhoon in the UK. 

The country remained strategically neutral during the Cold War but has strengthened ties with the West in recent years. In January, Prime Minister Sanna Marin said the government had no plans to join NATO, but would retain the right to join if it so wishes.

Finland was forced to cede territory, including parts of Karelia, Salla, and Kuusamo, to the Soviet Union in the so-called Winter War of 1939-40. Lands and cities such as Vyborg, historically claimed by Finland, now sit in Russia.