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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-07-14/nato-ukraine-stab-back/

Nato isn’t defending Ukraine. It’s stabbing it in the back

The Nato summit in Lithuania this week served only to underscore the utter hypocrisy of western leaders in pursuing their proxy war in Ukraine to “weaken” Russia and oust its president, Vladimir Putin.

Both the US and Germany had made clear before the summit that they would block Ukraine’s admission to Nato while it was in the midst of a war with Russia. That message was formally announced by Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fumed that Nato had reached an “absurd” decision and was demonstrating “weakness”. British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace lost no time in rebuking him for a lack of “gratitude”. 

The concern is that, if Kyiv joins the military alliance at this stage, Nato members will be required to leap to Ukraine’s defence and fight Russia directly. Most western states balk at the notion of a face-to-face confrontation with a nuclear-armed Russia – rather than the current proxy one, paid for exclusively in Ukrainian blood.  

But there is a more duplicitous subtext being obscured: the fact that Nato is responsible for sustaining the war it now cites as grounds for disqualifying Ukraine from joining the military alliance. Nato got Kyiv into its current, bloody mess, but isn’t ready to help it find a way out. 

It was Nato, after all, that chose to flirt openly with Ukraine from 2008 onwards, promising it eventual membership – with the undisguised hope that one day, the alliance would be able to flex its military muscles menacingly on Russia’s doorstep.

It was the UK that intervened weeks after Russia’s invasion in February 2022, and presumably on Washington’s orders, to scupper negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow – talks that could have ended the war at an early stage, before Russia began seizing territories in eastern Ukraine.

A deal then would have been much simpler than one now. Most likely, it would have required Kyiv to commit to neutrality, rather than pursuing covert integration into Nato. Moscow would have demanded, too, an end to the Ukrainian government’s political, legal and military attacks on its Russian-speaking populations in the east. 

Now the chief sticking point to an agreement will be persuading the Kremlin to trust the West and reverse its annexation of eastern Ukraine, assuming Nato ever allows Kyiv to re-engage in talks with Russia. 

And finally, it is Nato members, especially the US, that have been shipping out vast quantities of military hardware to prolong the fighting in Ukraine – keeping the death toll mounting on both sides. 

Damp squib

In short, Nato is now using the very war it has done everything to fuel as a pretext to stop Ukraine from joining the alliance. 

Seen another way, the message Nato has sent Moscow is that Russia made exactly the right decision to invade – if the goal, as Putin has always maintained, is to ensure Kyiv remains neutral. 

It is the war that has prevented Ukraine from being completely enfolded in the western military alliance. It is the war that has stopped Ukraine’s transformation into a Nato forward base, one where the West could station nuclear-tipped missiles minutes from Moscow. 

Had Russia not invaded, Kyiv would have been free to accelerate what it was already doing secretly: integrating into Nato. So what is Zelensky supposed to conclude from his exclusion from Nato, after he committed his country to an ongoing war rather than negotiations and neutrality?

So far, Ukraine’s much-vaunted “spring counter-offensive” has turned into a damp squib, despite western media spin about “slow progress”. Moscow is holding on to the Ukrainian territories it annexed. 

So long as Kyiv can’t “win the war” – and it seems it can’t, unless Nato is willing to fight Russia directly and risk a nuclear confrontation – it will be precluded from the military alliance. Catch-22. 

Do not expect this conundrum to be highlighted by a western establishment media that seems incapable of doing anything other than regurgitating Nato press releases and cheering on bigger profits for the West’s war industries. 

War crimes

Another such conundrum is the Biden administration’s decision last week to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions – small bomblets that, when they fail to explode, lie concealed like mini-landmines, killing and maiming civilians for decades. In some cases, as many as a third are “duds”, detonating weeks, months or years later.

Washington’s move follows Britain recently supplying Ukraine with depleted uranium shells, which contaminate surrounding areas with a radioactive dust during and after fighting. Evidence from areas such as Iraq, where the US and Britain fired large numbers of these shells, suggests the fallout can include a decades-long spike in cancer and birth defects. 

The White House was all too ready to denounce the use of cluster bombs as a war crime last year – when it was Russia that stood accused of using them. Now it is Washington enabling Kyiv to commit those very same war crimes.

More than 110 states – not including the US, of course – have ratified a 2008 international convention outlawing cluster munitions. Many are in Nato.

Given the high “dud” rate of US cluster bombs, President Joe Biden appears to be breaking US law in shipping stocks to Ukraine. The White House can invoke an exemption only if exporting such weapons satisfies a “vital US national security interest”. Apparently, Biden believes “weakening” Russia – and turning parts of Ukraine into a death zone for civilians for decades to come – qualifies as just such a vital interest. 

Desperate stop gap

While the official story is that this latest escalatory move by the US will help Kyiv “win the war”, the truth is rather different. Biden has not shied away from admitting that Ukraine – and Nato – are running out of conventional arms to fight Russia. This is a desperate stop-gap measure. 

While most Nato members might be signatories to the convention on banning cluster munitions, they appear more than willing to turn a blind eye to Washington’s decision. Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who signed the convention in his earlier role as foreign minister, said this week that Berlin should not block the US shipment because to do so “would be the end of Ukraine”. 

In other words, the resort to cluster munitions is an admission that it is Kyiv and its Nato partners – not Moscow – that have been weakened militarily by the war. 

Once again, a supposedly “humanitarian war” by the West – remember Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria – is becoming the opposite. Like every previous weapon delivered to Ukraine, the cluster bombs are being supplied to postpone the inevitable: the need for Kyiv to engage in talks with Moscow to end the fighting. 

And every day such talks are delayed, Ukraine loses more of its fighting men, and potentially more of its territory.

Horrors of cluster bombs

It is not as though Washington or the rest of Nato are unaware of the effects of using cluster bombs. The US is estimated to have dropped 270 million of them on Laos during its “secret war” on that country more than half a century ago. Up to 80 million of them did not detonate.

Since the bombing ended in 1973, at least 25,000 people – 40 percent of them children – are reported to have been killed or injured by these small landmines littered across Laos’s territory. 

More recently, the US used cluster munitions in its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Hun Sen, the prime minister of Cambodia, which was bombed alongside Laos by the US during the Vietnam War, reminded the world this week of the horrors in store. He noted that, half a century on, Cambodia had still not found a way to destroy all the explosives: “The real victims will be Ukrainians,” he said. 

But that warning is likely to fall on deaf ears in Ukraine. Zelensky, a leader who has been all but beatified by the western media, is no stranger to the use of cluster bombs. Though journalists prefer to mention their use by Russia only, human rights groups have documented Kyiv’s firing of cluster munitions on its own population in eastern Ukraine since 2014. 

The need to protect Russian-speaking communities in eastern Ukraine from their own government – and from Ukrainian ultra-nationalists in the Ukrainian military – was one of the main reasons given by Moscow for launching its invasion.

The danger hasn’t diminished subsequently. The New York Times reported Kyiv using cluster bombs last year on a small Ukrainian village in the country’s east. According to an investigation by Human Rights Watch, Ukrainian forces also fired cluster munitions on the Ukrainian town of Izium last year, killing at least eight civilians and wounding 15 others. 

Given this history, Washington would be foolish to take at face value reassurances from the Zelensky government that US supplies of cluster bombs will be fired only on Russian troops. All the evidence indicates that they will likely be used on civilian areas in eastern Ukraine too.

Double standard

Publicly, European leaders are trying to salve their consciences by implying that there are exceptional justifications for providing cluster munitions to Kyiv. The bomblets are supposedly essential if Ukraine is to defend its territory against Russian aggression and occupation.

But if that is really Nato’s yardstick, then there is another exceptional, oppressed state in no less need of such munitions: Palestine.

Like Ukraine, the Palestinians have had their territory seized by an implacable foe. And like Ukraine, the Palestinians face continuous military attacks by an occupying army. 

Occupation forces always end up committing war crimes, as Russia’s have. The United Nations accuses the Russian army of rapes, killings and torture, and attacks on civilian infrastructure.

The commission of war crimes is inherent in the task of invading another people’s sovereign territory and subduing the local population, as the US and UK proved in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Undoubtedly, both Israel and Russia’s actions are causing untold suffering. But where there are differences, they reflect worse on Israel than Russia. 

Israel’s occupation has lasted many decades longer than Russia’s, and it has throughout those years continued to commit war crimes, including creating hundreds of illegal, armed settlements exclusively for Jews on Palestinian land.

Further, there was an existing civil war in Ukraine that had killed more than 14,000 Ukrainians before Russia invaded. At least a proportion of Ukrainians – largely its ethnic Russian population in the east – welcomed Moscow’s intervention, at least initially. It would be hard to find a Palestinian who wants Israel or its settlers occupying their land. 

Is anyone in Nato considering supplying cluster munitions to the Palestinians to defend themselves? Would Nato endorse Palestinians firing cluster bombs at Israeli military bases or at militarised settlements in the occupied West Bank? 

And would Nato accept Palestinian reassurances that such munitions would not be fired into Israel, just as it has accepted Ukrainian assurances that they won’t be fired into Russia? 

These questions answer themselves. In the case of the Palestinians, western states don’t just apply a double standard. They even echo Israel in condemning Palestinian conventional attacks on Israeli forces. 

Dangerous delusions

But the hypocrisies do not end there. Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s hawkish foreign minister, wrote in the Guardian last week that her country had made a mistake in pursuing a policy of what she called “chequebook diplomacy”. 

Berlin, she added, had naively believed that political and economic interaction with the West would “sway the Russian regime toward democracy”. Instead, she concluded that “Putin’s Russia will remain a threat to peace and security on our continent and that we have to organise our security against Putin’s Russia, not with it.” 

Europe’s path forward, Baerbock suggests, is limited to either a forever war against Russia or imposing regime change on the Kremlin. All of this is dangerous nonsense. The fact that self-serving, delusional analysis of this kind is echoed so uncritically by western media should be a stain on its reputation. 

Baerbock implies that it was Moscow that rebuffed “our efforts to construct a European security architecture with Russia”. But Russia was never offered a meaningful place within Europe’s security umbrella after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

That contrasts strongly with West Germany’s treatment after the Second World War. With the Nazi regime barely gone, Germany received massive US aid via the Marshall Plan to rebuild its economy and infrastructure, and it was soon embraced by Nato as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was handled very differently. It was not viewed as an opportunity to bring Russia into the fold. 

Instead, the US and its western allies denied Russia both a proper aid plan and the cancellation of Soviet-era debts. The West preferred to prop up a weak president, Boris Yeltsin, insisting he commit to “shock therapy” privatisation that left the Russian economy open to asset-stripping by a new class of oligarchs.

Nefarious ambitions

While Russia was being hollowed out economically, Washington hurried to isolate its historic rival militarily and bring former Soviet states into the US “sphere of influence” via Nato. Successive US administrations developed and zealously pursued a hubristic foreign policy known as “full-spectrum global dominance” against its main great-power rivals, Russia and China.

Putin’s popularity among Russians grew the more he posed – often only rhetorically – as the strongman who would stop Nato’s expansion to Russia’s borders. 

Contrary to Baerbock’s suggestions, Moscow wasn’t wooed by a Nato “chequebook”. It was gradually and systematically cornered. It was turned, bit by bit, into a pariah. 

This isn’t the assessment simply of “Putin apologists”. Nato’s strategy was understood and warned against in real time by some of the biggest figures in US foreign policy-making – from George Kennan, the father of US Cold War policy, to William Burns, the current CIA director.  

In 2007, as US ambassador to Moscow, Burns wrote a diplomatic cable – later revealed by Wikileaks – arguing that “Nato enlargement and US missile defense deployments in Europe play to the classic Russian fear of encirclement”. Months later, Burns warned that offering Ukraine Nato membership would place Moscow in an “unthinkable” predicament. 

Washington simply ignored these endless warnings from its own officials, because maintaining peace and stability in Europe was not its goal. Permanently isolating and “weakening” Russia was. 

The Biden administration understands it is playing with fire. Last year, in a remark most likely unscripted, the president himself invoked the danger of Russia, faced with a defeat in Ukraine it viewed in existential terms, unleashing a nuclear “Armageddon”.

Tragically, Nato’s malevolence, deceit and betrayal means that the only alternative to Armageddon may be Ukraine’s downfall – and with it, the crushing of Washington’s nefarious ambitions to advance full-spectrum global dominance.

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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/targeted_for_tyranny_were_all_suspects_under_the_governments_precrime_program

Targeted for Tyranny: We’re All Suspects Under the Government’s Precrime Program

“There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.”― James Bamford, journalist

We’re all being targeted now.

We’re all guilty until proven innocent now.

And thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s spy network of fusion centers, we are all now sitting ducks, just waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.

Although these precrime programs are popping up all across the country, in small towns and big cities, they are not making us any safer but they are endangering individual freedoms.

Nationwide, there are upwards of 123 real-time crime centers (a.k.a. fusion centers), which allow local police agencies to upload and share massive amounts of surveillance data and intelligence with state and federal agencies culled from surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, gunshot sensors, social media monitoring, drones and body cameras, and artificial intelligence-driven predictive policing algorithms.

These data fusion centers, which effectively create an electronic prison—a digital police state—from which there is no escape, are being built in partnership with big tech companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which helped to fuel the rise of police militarization and domestic surveillance.

While these latest expansions of the surveillance state are part of the Biden Administration’s efforts to combat domestic extremism through the creation of a “precrime” crime prevention agency, they have long been a pivotal part of the government’s plans for total control and dominion.

Yet this crime prevention campaign is not so much about making America safer as it is about ensuring that the government has the wherewithal to muzzle anti-government discontent, penalize anyone expressing anti-government sentiments, and preemptively nip in the bud any attempts by the populace to challenge the government’s authority or question its propaganda.

As J.D. Tuccille writes for Reason, “[A]t a time when government officials rage against ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ that is often just disagreement with whatever opinions are currently popular among the political class, fusion centers frequently scrutinize peaceful dissenting speech.”

Indeed, while the Biden Administration was recently dealt a legal blow over its attempts to urge social media companies to do more to combat so-called dis- and mis-information, these fusion centers are the unacknowledged powerhouses behind the government’s campaign to censors and retaliate against those who vocalize their disagreement and discontent with government policies.

Already, the powers-that-be are mobilizing to ensure that fusion centers have the ability to monitor and lockdown sectors of a community at a moment’s notice.

For instance, a 42,000-square-foot behemoth of a fusion center in downtown Washington is reportedly designed to “better prepare law enforcement for the next public health emergency or Jan. 6-style attack.” According to an agency spokeswoman, “Screens covering the walls of the new facility will show surveillance cameras around the city as well as social media accounts that may be monitored for threatening speech.”

It’s like a scene straight out of Steven Spielberg’s dystopian film Minority Report, set in 2054, where police agencies harvest intelligence from widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs in order to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

Our world is now characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

The American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick have all been rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

In this way, the novel 1984 has become an operation manual for an omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state in which ordinary Americans find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s precrime sensors.

The technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate and then classifying you as a danger.

Computers now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

In this way, with the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.

It’s also a setup ripe for abuse.

For instance, an investigative report by the Brennan Center found that “Over the last two decades, leaked materials have shown fusion centers tracking protestors and casting peaceful activities as potential threats. Their targets have included racial justice and environmental advocates, right-wing activists, and third-party political candidates.”

One fusion center in Maine was found to have been “illegally collecting and sharing information about Maine residents who weren’t suspected of criminal activity. They included gun purchasers, people protesting the construction of a new power transmission line, the employees of a peacebuilding summer camp for teenagers, and even people who travelled to New York City frequently.”

In one Florida county, police have been using their precrime program to generate “lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts.” Then, according to the Tampa Bay Times, deputies are deployed “to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime. They swarm homes in the middle of the night, waking families and embarrassing people in front of their neighbors. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass, saddling residents with court dates and fines. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can.”

The goal? “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”

This is how the government is turning a nation of citizens into suspects and would-be criminals.

This transformation is being driven by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the agency notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.

Twenty years after being formed in the wake of 9/11, the DHS is a massive, costly, power-hungry bureaucracy working hard to ensure that the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful.

Yet here’s the thing: you don’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

In fact, all you need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious to a neighbor, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

The following activities are guaranteed to get you censored, surveilled, eventually placed on a government watch list, possibly detained and potentially killed.

Use harmless trigger words like cloud, pork and pirates. Use a cell phone. Drive a car. Attend a political rally. Express yourself on social media. Serve in the military. Disagree with a law enforcement official. Call in sick to work. Limp or stutter. Appear confused or nervous, fidget, whistle or smell bad. Allow yourself to be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun, such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane, for instance. Stare at a police officer. Appear to be pro-gun, pro-freedom or anti-government. Attend a public school. Speak truth to power.

It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

Combine predictive policing with surveillance, overcriminalization and precrime programs, then add in militarized police trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, you’ll be lucky to escape with your life.

If you’re not scared yet, you should be.

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/a-fun-day/

A Fun Day

“NATO has lost this war. Biden has lost this war. The lunatic Democrats have lost this war. The uni-party warmongers have lost this war. The EU has lost this war. Ukraine and Zelensky have lost this war.” — Kim Dotcom

 Somebody in the “Joe Biden” White House apparently thinks that the operations already underway are not enough to destroy our country fast enough, so a little extra push, such as nuclear annihilation, might get’er done.

      By operations underway I mean things like mRNA vaccines stealthily deleting kin, friends, and public figures from the scene… decriminalizing crime… undermining the oil industry by a thousand cuts… liquidating small business… making little children insane over sex… flooding the land with illegal immigrants… devaluing the currency… queering elections — all of these things done on purpose, by the way. And if you complain about any of it, here comes the FBI or the IRS knocking on your door.

      So, to make sure that a collapse of the USA comes on-schedule, there is the useful fracas created by our government geniuses over in Ukraine that creeps day-by-day toward a quick American assisted suicide. Just to remind you, here’s how that started: In 2014, the US fomented a coup against Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. In short order, the Russian language was banned (despite the fact that most Ukrainians speak Russian). A piqued Russia re-po’d the Crimean Peninsula. When ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine (the Donbas provinces) tried to go their own way, Ukraine shelled and rocketed them for eight years. That was the setup.

     All of the above was absolutely unnecessary, you understand. Ukraine had been going about its business the best it could since 1991 as a shlub nation with an aged-out Soviet infrastructure, some US-sponsored bioweapons labs, and no energy resources. It had been collecting royalties for allowing Russia to run oil pipelines across its fruited plain — of which, a lot of gas was siphoned off in transit by bandits. Ukraine attempted to compensate for its disadvantages by being an international money laundromat, though that only benefited its oligarch class (and the extended “Joe Biden” family).

     After “Joe Biden” got “elected” in 2020, and news of his family’s sketchy business activities in Ukraine and elsewhere finally dribbled out, Ukraine was turned into a giant grenade and “JB” (or persons acting on his behalf) pulled the pin. NATO was dragooned into the quarrel as backup against its better judgment. If the objective was to weaken Russia, as stated by one of our strategic geniuses, SecDef Lloyd Austin, it didn’t work out. Rather, it exposed the USA as a reckless global psychopath bent on wrecking every country it pretends to help — including the major countries in NATO.

    Two-thirds of the world’s other nations then started backpedaling away from the US and its protective services to form an economic and security coalition around the BRICs group, as led by Russia and China. The Ukraine campaign itself was a loser from the get-go, relying utterly, as it did, on US and NATO support. This week’s NATO meet-up in Vilnius, Lithuania, showed how that’s going now: Not too well. The Ukraine army is shredded. It’s out of munitions. The US is also out of those very artillery shells most in demand. What to do?

     The answer to that, as “Joe Biden” returns from Europe to a White House haunted by a cocaine-snorting ghost, is to send three-thousand fresh reserve troops to Europe and promise a bunch of F-16 fighter planes. Said planes, which were introduced in the early 1970s, will come out of our country’s “high-mileage” inventory. These F-16s will require a suite of highly technical ground support infrastructure. They will not come with the latest avionics upgrades and will be no match for Russian air defenses. Good luck with that, President Z!

     It’s all fakery, of course. What do we aim to do with those three-thousand US reservists? Send them into battle in Priyutnoye? I’m sure…. At this point, we can only pretend to prolong this stupid and unnecessary conflict with such lame gestures. Germany and France know this is a lost cause. The United Kingdom (so called) is such a mess that it literally doesn’t know what it’s doing in far off and irrelevant (to it) Ukraine. Without those countries, there is no NATO, really. So, the whole vaudeville this week was a sham — led by a US President who was too puny to attend the opening night banquet with fellow NATO leaders, and too incoherent to make a point on departure.

     Anyway, “Joe Biden’s” entire act is unspooling. He is a prank that the Democratic Party played on the American people. Sometime before Halloween he will have to exit the scene in disgrace, gruesome as the prospect might seem, with Kamala Harris anxiously draining vodka bottles as she awaits history’s call at the old Naval Observatory. That will be a fun day in the USA, all righty.