In other places I've done my best to follow the Sri Lankan economic crisis, particularly since it could be more geopolitically relevant than people realize as it simultaneously flushes out the roles of regional powers like China and India.

... and here we are with China taking the lead on restructuring the absolutely massive Sri Lankan debt:

The IMF bailout process made slow progress due to the need to restructure Sri Lanka’s nearly 50 billion dollar external debt.

A previous Chinese letter giving a two-year moratorium on debt repayment had been deemed inadequate by the IMF. Wickremesinghe said the IMF programme which will be there for over the next four years would be different from all of the previous 16 programmes with the Washington-based global lender. He said the government has to take many hard economic decisions in order to stabilise the economy and work towards growth. The government measures to order tax hikes, raise utility tariffs and end fuel subsidies had triggered political protests. “I would like to apologise to the people for the hardships”, he said. The IMF in September last year approved Sri Lanka a 2.9 billion dollar bailout package over 4 years pending Sri Lanka's ability to restructure its debt with creditors -- both bilateral and sovereign bondholders.

China owns about 20% of the Sri Lankan debt, so them having a big stay in how it is restructured makes sense.

China will be able to have Sri Lanka by the horns for the indefinite future, and maybe it is even the case that the Sri Lankans will get loans next time from the Chinese (and it'll be in Yuan!).

This is how you grow an empire.

India missed out on an opportunity to exercise more control over a nation traditionally in her sphere of influence - why they did that, I do not know.

Outlook India Magazine Online- Read News India, Latest News Analysis, World, Sports, Entertainment | Best Online Magazine India

Outlook covers the latest India news, analysis, business news and long-form stories on culture, money market and personal finance. Read India's best online magazine.

^{PTI (Outlook India)}

I don't know much or even anything about this current case of fraudulent financial statements being levied against the Trump empire, but I have heard some analysis that Ivanka is embarrassed by the rest of the Trumps, and she has no desire to be part of their next political campaign just like she has no stomach for the lawsuit.

That's fine by me.

Jared Kushner is not an interesting or skillful politician. I think there was even a conspiracy briefly in 2017-2018 where they wanted to portray Kushner as the brains behind the operation because it backed up the Jewish stereotype of goyim like Trump being incapable of holding their own without Jewish minders.

The further the couple gets away from Trump, the more appealing it would be to me.

Ivanka Trump throws brothers and father under bus in New York fraud suit

Ivanka Trump says she was not involved in preparing fraudulent financial statements that form the core of the $250m fraud suit against her father’s company

^{Andrew Feinberg (The Independent)}

I'd be amazed if it changes anything.

The Army is bringing back one of its most successful ad campaigns with the 1980s and 1990s-era slogan – "Be All You Can Be" – as it looks to appeal to Gen Z.

On Monday, the branch rolled out a new ad touting the slogan amid a slump in recruiting, as it recently came up 15,000 soldiers short of its goal of 60,000, Military.com reported.

We all know the reason is because many formerly excited red staters can think for themselves and just don't believe in serving the broken bureaucrats and devious deep state in Washington DC.

And good for them.

US Army goes retro, brings back 'Be All You Can Be' ad campaign to fight recruiting slump

The Army turned back time with its new "Be All You Can Be" marketing campaign on Monday.

^{Louis Casiano (Fox News)}

Actually rather surprised to see this:

The Russian front lines could collapse, warned Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin on his Telegram channel on Sunday, accusing the Russian Defense Ministry of cutting off his penal brigades from resupply. "For now, we are trying to figure out the reason: is it just ordinary bureaucracy or a betrayal," said Prigozhin.

That is certainly concerning when Pirghozin talks about the potential for the entire frontline to collapse.

But we do see some dubious analysis coming later on:

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian defenders “are continuing to inflict high casualties against the advancing mixed Russian forces,” according to the latest analysis from the Institute for the Study of War, which added that the Ukrainians are “likely setting robust conditions for a future Ukrainian counteroffensive.”

“The Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut remains strategically sound as it continues to consume Russian manpower and equipment as long as Ukrainian forces do not suffer excessive casualties,” the ISW said. “Ukrainian forces are unlikely to withdraw from Bakhmut all at once and may pursue a gradual fighting withdrawal to exhaust Russian forces through continued urban warfare.”

... Again, imagine thinking that you are really able to keep up with the Russians as Ukraine in a game of attrition when it is already clear that senior brass have wanted you to wihdraw.

The Institute for the Study of War shows itself again as not a very serious study group, but a mouthpiece for the US State Department.

Not so fast: Tenacious Ukrainian defense, Russian ammo shortage thwart Russian advance on Bakhmut

BACK ON DEFENSE FOR NOW: Just days after crowing that the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut was on the verge of falling, the head of Russia's Wagner mercenary group has appeared on a social media video complaining that a lack of ammunition has stalle…

^MSN

The new Israeli strike comes as the international airport in Aleppo is one of the main portals of entry for foreign airplanes carrying humanitarian aid to the victims of the country’s recent devastating earthquake.

The Israeli act of aggression followed another strike earlier in February when the regime's aircraft hit the Syrian capital and areas around it, especially a number of residential buildings in Kafr Sousa neighborhood in central Damascus. Tal al-Masih near the city of Shahba, north of al-Suwayda in southwestern Syria was another target of that attack.

Syria's Health Ministry said five people were killed in the strike, including one soldier, while fifteen others were wounded, some of whom critically.

New Israeli airstrike targets intl. airport in Syria’s Aleppo, putting it out of service

Israeli aircraft carry out a new strike against Syria, targeting the international airport in the northwestern city of Aleppo.

^PressTV

It's bad in the Ukraine:

During their brief visits to the nearby town of Kostiantynivka, Ukrainian infantrymen told the Kyiv Independent of unprepared, poorly-trained battalions being thrown into the front line meat grinder to survive as best they could with little support from armored vehicles, mortars, artillery, drones and tactical information. 

“We don’t get any support,” says a soldier named Serhiy, who has been fighting on the front lines in Bakhmut.

They say that Russian artillery, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers are often allowed to strike Ukrainian positions for hours or days without being shut down by Ukrainian heavy weapons. Some complained of poor coordination and situational awareness, allowing this to happen or making it even worse. 

Mortarmen spoke of extreme ammunition scarcity and having to use weapons dating back to World War II. Drones that are supposed to provide critical reconnaissance information are also scarce and are being lost at very high rates in some parts of the battlefield.

All this leads to terrifying casualties of both dead and wounded. "The battalion came in in the middle of December… between all the different platoons, there were 500 of us," says Borys, a combat medic from Odesa Oblast fighting around Bakhmut. "A month ago, there were literally 150 of us."

“When you go out to the position, it’s not even a 50/50 chance that you’ll come out of there (alive),” says the older Serhiy. “It’s more like 30/70.”

Some more analysis of the battlefield:

Multiple soldiers say that they are under massive assault from both Wagner Group mercenaries and regular Russian forces.

“There’s Wagner and there’s two brigades of airborne assault,” says Oleksandr, an infantryman from Sumy, who is part of a Ukrainian assault battalion in Bakhmut. “It’s rough. Constant waves, nonstop.”

Some have characterized the Russian attacks as huge waves of cannon fodder, while others say that the invaders’ tactics have evolved to keep up with the battlefield.

The older Serhiy says that the enemy likes to send a team of three or four expendable foot soldiers to attack and make the Ukrainians expose themselves by shooting at them. At that point, the more elite forces zero in on the defenders’ position.

Once they begin exchanging fire, the Ukrainians are struck with heavier weapons like Russian mortars and rockets from Grad multiple launch rocket systems or BMP infantry fighting vehicles and BTR armored personnel carriers with machine guns.

“They get the positions where we are, establish the coordinates, then they hit us from seven to nine kilometers out with mortars,” as well as from closer by with grenade launchers, says the older Serhiy. “They wait for the house to fall so we have to jump out. The building catches fire and then they try to finish us off.”

“Their birds come out and they chase us with fire,” adds the younger Serhiy, referring to Russian UAVs, like quadcopters and Orlan-10 fixed wing drones that spot distant heavy weapons. “They hit accurately.”

As Russians destroy more and more buildings, Ukrainians keep losing more places where they can reliably take cover. Borys the medic says people have been lost when their entrenched positions collapsed from heavy Russian fire, suffocating them.

“I’ll put it like this, we should get our people out because if we don’t take off, then in the next few weeks, it’s going to be bad,” says Oleksandr. A mortarman named Illia agrees that Bakhmut is “practically encircled.”

https://kyivindependent.com/national/ukrainian-soldiers-in-bakhmut-our-troops-are-not-being-protected

Iran has been plagued by a string of mysterious “mild” poisonings since last November, with the apparent attacks occurring at more than 50 schools across the country. More than 1,000 schoolgirls have been affected by the poisonings, triggering protests by parents and prompting some to take their children out of school altogether.

Naturally, the Supreme Leader has condemned it.

Last week, President Ebrahim Raisi suggested the poisonings might have been carried out by the country’s enemies conspiring “to create fear and despair in the people” and urged the interior ministry and intelligence groups to ramp up efforts in apprehending those responsible.

Earlier, the Deputy Health Minister Younes Panahi suggested hardline religious groups who oppose women’s education, might have had a hand in the affair. “It was found that some people wanted schools, especially girls’ schools, to be closed,” he commented without elaborating.

It'll be interesting to see if it is ever solved.

http://last week, president ebrahim raisi suggested the poisonings might have been carried out by the country s enemies conspiring to create fear and despair in the people  and urged the interior ministry and intelligence groups to ramp up efforts in apprehending those responsible. earlier, the deputy health minister younes panahi suggested hardline religious groups who oppose women s education, might have had a hand in the affair. it was found that some people wanted schools, especially girls  schools, to be closed,  he commented without elaborating.

They really let you know who calls the shots in Atlanta in terms of security:

However, a spokesperson for the same office later said that the YFN trial had been pushed back due to security issues. District Attorney Fani Willis stated last year that the war between the two street gangs resulted in at least 50 shootings and multiple murders; according to the spokesperson, the prospect of both street gangs in the same courthouse at the same time drove the decision to delay.

Other law-enforcement sources make similar claims. “Providing security for the YSL trial is a priority that requires the deployment of resources from various Fulton County Sheriff’s Office units,” a sheriff’s office spokesman said in a statement to RS. “Because some of the defendants are housed in other counties, the security protocol also involves daily coordination with other agencies regarding transportation and courthouse security. Due to the unprecedented nature of this trial, we are constantly assessing security and making the necessary adjustments to ensure the safety of those involved and the courthouse complex as a whole.”

The city has a massive crime problem but doesn't have the budget to provide comprehensive security at its own courthouse.

... Moreover:

Fulton County’s jail is overcrowded, with inmates sleeping in common areas in plastic boats, sheriff Pat Labat told county officials last year. Stabbings occur daily, he said. Fifteen people died in the sheriff’s custody in 2022, according to the Fulton County medical examiner’s office, compared to two or three in pre-pandemic years. The Southern Center for Human Rights and the ACLU issued a scathing report last year describing rampant malnourishment and neglect on the jail’s mental-health floor, where every single inmate was afflicted with lice, scabies, or both.

What is going on in Atlanta?

The YSL Case Is Stretching Fulton County’s Justice System to Its Breaking Point

Attorneys in Atlanta describe widespread delays and disruptions to other cases as the prosecution of Young Thug moves slowly onward, with months still to go

^{George Chidi (Yahoo Life)}

I am just not that much of a Capitalist.

I understand that the free market based theories accurately describes the circumstances by which business flows and the market booms, but it does not describe a world in which I want to live.

I also believe it is entirely possible to make the market subject to the desires of the people as opposed to making the people subject to the market.

Not that surprising:

When we looked at the happiness trend for unhappy people in the 2021 data, we found exactly the same pattern as was found in 2010; happiness rises relatively steeply with income and then plateaus.

The answer to this, though, is to just personally attempt to transcend this reality.

http://"when we looked at the happiness trend for unhappy people in the 2021 data, we found exactly the same pattern as was found in 2010; happiness rises relatively steeply with income and then plateaus." https//phys.org/news/2023-03-money-greater-happiness.html

Love the excerpt:

The version of monism most pertinent to the present discussion originated with Ernst Haeckel, a romantic-minded German zoologist who spent a large portion of his career ardently promoting the work of Charles Darwin. “Rooted in pre-Darwinian romanticism,” writes Daniel Gasman in Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology, “Haeckelian Monism [draws] upon the one of the oldest if not the oldest tradition in philosophy—the belief that all different phenomena are bound into unity by one common ‘sacred’ force.”

For Haeckel, the goal of life is to get back in touch with a “wholly other” substance found in the world. Achievement of this goal demands the rejection of several intertwined legacies: the Judeo-Christian tradition of transcendence (or dualism, as Haeckel would say); that tradition’s claim on the West’s many cultural and intellectual achievements; faith in human equality; and, for good measure, the movements stemming from that faith. (Examples of such movements include, most notably, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.) In place of this tradition, men must embrace the monist secular faith that nature provides the basis for all social laws, which science will uncover sooner or later. Science, as a reflection of the laws of nature, ought to provide the foundation for all sociological, religious, political, and philosophical thought.

You could say that the bodybuilder fascism has within it some element that is inherently contrary to Christian civilization if it is going towards this end... Unless, of course, this monism is reinterpretable, where the "mon" that unites all can be thought of as a reflection of the Holy Spirit. I am not so sure how elegant that is, but it might work.

The movement certainly sounds fascinating, though, and it isn't hard to see the parallels with the modern body fascists:

In practice, monism manifested as an “intense feeling of responsibility” toward elevating humankind through “unceasing endeavor toward refinement and perfection.” (Here we find a clear instance of Haeckel’s obsession with Darwinism.) Despite encompassing the whole of human striving, however, monism pursued refinement and perfection chiefly through the body. Haeckel thus partnered in 1906 with Wilhelm Ostwald, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. Together the two men founded the German Monist League. Dedicated to investigations into monist thought, as well as dispensing advice on health, hygiene, and similar matters, the league advised its members to “regulate” their lives so that the “prosperity of the community and of mankind is assured.” This was to be done through “keeping the individual in a healthy and vigorous condition.” The goal was to reveal the world as a “vast, living, striving, conscious organism,” as the league put it, of which humans are an integral part and through which they can realize the “kingdom of heaven” during their life on earth.

Here is also where the rubber meets the road for Christians:

Haeckel saw himself as leader of a scientific movement that aimed to free science from the bonds of metaphysics, irrationality, and a “dualistic” Christianity.

Also very fascinating to see its diverse influences:

Haeckelian monism found its way into politics, too. It was championed by Marxists and fascists alike, the groups giving it their signature twist. It was an integral part of the “revolutionary method” of the Italian scientific socialists, who saw the struggles of the working class as reflective of the natural evolutionary struggles of all life, and inspired the murky mysticism of German National Socialists, who sought to destroy the cultural and religious underpinnings of Western civilization and replace them with a fantastic and perverse interpretation of natural law.

Raw Egg Nationalist’s One Weird Trick

Compact Magazine, a radical American journal

^{www.compactmag.com}

One of the more interesting observations of 2023.

#kpop

I was a bit surprised to see not one but two intersections:

The US citizens were driving through Matamoros in Tamaulipas state in a white minivan when a group of unidentified gunmen shot at them.

They were then placed in a vehicle and taken away, the US government said.

The US has not confirmed Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's statement saying that the Americans had crossed the border to buy medication.

The missing Americans, who were kidnapped on 3 March, have not been identified.

"There was a confrontation between groups and they were kidnapped," Mr López Obrador said Monday.

The incident also resulted in the death of an innocent Mexican citizen, US ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar said in a statement.

"We have no higher priority than the safety of our citizens," the ambassador said.

"Officials from various US law enforcement agencies are working with Mexican authorities at all levels of government to achieve the safe return of our compatriots", he continued.

Not only is there the angle of Mexican criminals victimizing American tourists, which will have huge ramifications for tourism, but there is also the part where Americans are abroad to purchase cheap medicine.

Oddly enough, while politicians might want to utilize this for elections, it would seemingly become a poor juxtaposition when you consider the sore spot that is illegal immigration.

US hunts missing Americans after Mexico kidnapping

The unidentified US citizens crossed the border to purchase medication, Mexico's president says.

^{By Madeline Halpert & Will Grant, Mexico correspondent (BBC News)}

Full clown world:

Trans weightlifter JayCee Cooper began sending demanding letters and suing the sport starting in 2019 after the sports authority denied his bid to compete as a woman. Ultimately, Cooper filed a lawsuit in state court in 2021 and won against the organization based on a Minnesota state anti-discrimination law that maintains he can compete under his “chosen gender.”

...

“By denying Cooper the right to participate in the female category, the category consistent with her self-identification, USAPL denied her the full and equal enjoyment of the services, support, and facilities USAPL offered its members,” Diamond wrote in his ruling. “It separated Cooper and segregated her and, in doing so, failed to fully perform the contractual obligations it agreed to when it accepted Cooper’s money and issued Cooper a membership card.”

Women's sports are going to be completeley ruined - and ironically by the policies designed for equality that they themselves campaigned for.

Court Forces USA Powerlifting to Allow Biological Men to Compete as Women

Weightlifting authority USA Powerlifting is being forced to allow biological men who claim to be women to compete against natural-born women.

^{Warner Todd Huston (Breitbart)}

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday the state will not be doing business with Walgreens Boots Alliance over its decision not to dispense an abortion pill.

...

In a tweet, Newsom criticized the decision, writing, "California won't be doing business with Walgreens or any company that cowers to the extremists and puts women's lives at risk. We're done."

Abortionists are into scorched earth politics - you push back even in the slightest way against their agenda just by not actively participating and you become persona non grata. Conservatives need to behave in the same way or they cede the battlefield.

Gavin Newsom announces California is 'done' with Walgreens due to abortion pill

Walgreens said last week it would not dispense mifepristone in 20 states.

^{Mary Kekatos (ABC News)}

Local Christians actually have backbones:

The school’s mission statement has always stressed inclusivity in general terms, noting that following Jesus "opens up doors and makes room at the table." But last year it added a paragraph to its website, which read in part, "We are an affirming school. We stand with the LGBTQIA+ community and believe in their holiness. We celebrate the diversity of God's creation in all its varied and beautiful forms."

According to the school, that update prompted donors to stop contributing, many of them citing their interpretation of Christianity as the reason. Now, UCA has announced it will close at the end of the school year due to the loss of financial support.

Kalie Callaway-George, UCA’s executive director and co-founder, said this new language "is kind of what started the backlash from our donor base, which we anticipated. It was just that we anticipated a 50% loss in funding and made adjustments for that. We had an 80% loss in funding and that was too much to overcome."

This trend has been seen elsewhere -- everywhere that the Christians try to bow down to progress, they got golf claps from all the non-Christians and hte actual Christians stop showing up.

No surprises here.

Christian school that embraced the LGBTQ community is forced to close its doors

The school's mission statement has always stressed inclusivity.

^{Andy Fies (ABC News)}

This is honestly quite remarkable:

Some national-security and Pentagon officials have compared ship-to-shore cranes made by the China-based manufacturer, ZPMC, to a Trojan horse. While comparably well-made and inexpensive, they contain sophisticated sensors that can register and track the provenance and destination of containers, prompting concerns that China could capture information about materiel being shipped in or out of the country to support U.S. military operations around the world.

It makes perfect sense - a well located cargo crane can track vital military movements, whether it's our aid to the Ukraine or anything else.

Already, New Yorkers have been forced to spend some $650 million on newly arrived border crossers and the total figure is expected to exceed $4 billion by next year. Much of that cost is being spent on migrants whom Adams has placed in multiple luxury hotels, for free, which is transferring millions from local taxpayers to wealthy landlords.

... How much are these guys going to be adding to the American tax base..?

Not off to a very good start.

HunDriverWidow

2023-03-06 23:31:39

New Yorkers Charged $5 Million Every Day to House, Feed, Care for Migrants

breitbart.com/politics/2023/03…

New Yorkers Charged $5 Million Every Day to House, Feed, Care for Migrants

New Yorkers are being charged millions every day to house, feed, and care for newly arrived border crossers bused from Texas.

^{John Binder (Breitbart)}

Found at Gab.

I did not watch the video because I try to avoid seeing these things whenever I can.

Nonetheless, it's a sad thing to see.

I do understand the occasional necessity of meting out the ultimate punishment on the front lines of war, but there certainly is something sad about giving a man his final smoke and then recording yourself gunning him down.

Not entirely positive as to why Zelenskyy felt bold enough to lie about the consensus of his continued commitment to Bakhmut:

"The command unanimously supported this position. There were no other positions. I told the commander in chief to find the appropriate forces to help our guys in Bakhmut."

The comments followed a report by the German newspaper Bild quoting Ukrainian government sources that armed forces commander Valery Zaluzhny had disagreed with Mr Zelensky about the operation several weeks ago, recommending a retreat from the city.

Most defenders shared Gen Zaluzhny's view, the paper added.

Anyone following this closely understands that they are paying a steep price defending this place and that, in the long-term, they do not have any advantage in a war of attrition.

It seems less like the Russians are desperate for a victory and more like the Ukrainians are desperate to avoid the appearance of defeat.

Ukraine war: Bakhmut defenders double down - Zelensky

The president says the embattled eastern city's defence goes on, and that senior generals back the move.

^{By Robert Greenall (BBC News)}

At the health centre where she had gone for treatment, she says she overheard one doctor saying to a colleague: "When will these girls learn to keep their legs closed?"

...

She was eventually given a pill to end her pregnancy, but she says the nurses were reluctant to treat her and wanted to make her feel guilty: "After I expelled the pregnancy tissue, I could see the foetus."

"The nurses put it in a jar to make sure I saw it and they told me, 'This could have been your child.'"

Based.

Argentina relaxed its law on abortion in 2020, allowing a woman to choose to terminate her pregnancy in the first 14 weeks, Previously, it was only allowed in the case of rape or if the woman's life or health was at risk.

...

The new law allows health workers in Argentina to abstain from performing abortions.

"As soon as the law was passed, I declared myself a conscientious objector," says Dr Carlos Franco, a paediatrician from the same area as María, who estimates that 90% of health workers in the province's main public hospital have done the same.

He says his years studying embryology left him with the belief that life begins at fertilisation.

"My duty, as a doctor, is to take care and protect the human life from the embryonic stage," he adds.

This helps explain why women like María are having so much trouble accessing legal abortions.

Poor Maria - religious people don't want to be forced to commit murder and it has become your problem.

Doctors who do agree to perform abortions have been targeted with spurious legal complaints.

In September 2021, one doctor in Salta was briefly detained following an accusation by the aunt of a 21-year-old patient that she had performed an "illegal abortion".

The accusation was untrue, but it took a year for a court to dismiss the case.

Pro-liers in Argentina are wilding.

Abortion may be legal in Argentina but women still face major obstacles

Abortion may finally be legal in Argentina, but social attitudes in some areas are making it hard for women to exercise their rights.

^{By Agustina Latourrette (BBC News)}

Exclusive academic data plus testimony from Twitter users backs up their allegations, suggesting hate is thriving under Mr Musk's leadership, with trolls emboldened, harassment intensifying and a spike in accounts following misogynistic and abusive profiles.

The last part is especially funny - a spike in accounts following "wrongthink" profiles.

It's basically an admission that they're mad that a billion dollar mega-corporation isn't running interference for the managerial democracy of Western oligarchs.

Current and former employees of the company tell BBC Panorama that features intended to protect Twitter users from trolling and harassment are proving difficult to maintain, amid what they describe as a chaotic working environment in which Mr Musk is shadowed by bodyguards at all times.

There's a block button.

If Musk could prevent assassination attempts via the block button, I'm sure he'd just do that instead of hiring bodyguards.

She later resigned. Internal research by Twitter suggests those safety measures reduced trolling by 60%.

They banned & muted people who got snippy with protected minorities instead of allowing fair & round criticism from both sides. It's not exactly some magical set of fair policies that were done away with.

How does the Left like to phrase it...

>Equality feels like oppression to those who are used to privilege

Twitter can’t protect you from trolls any more, insiders say

Current and former employees of the company say there are serious ramifications from mass lay-offs.

^{By Marianna Spring (BBC News)}

I've been more skeptical of DeSantis since I've heard him essentially aim to limit the scope of criticism of Israel in Florida, and you can just see more now how he is probably a politician riding on the coattail's of Trump's populism to some degree.

This isn't completely bad... In fact, the more opportunists trying to capitalize off of Trump through imitation, the better. But why choose someone who is willing to abandon these principles when it is inconvenient when you can go with the originator?

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis once strongly supported arming Ukraine to fight Russia, urging then-President Barack Obama to do so as a deterrent to Russian aggression in Eastern Europe – a position at odds with his statements this week questioning the United States’ involvement in the conflict.

As a conservative congressman, DeSantis, now a potential presidential hopeful, urged sending “defensive and offensive” weapons to Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 and even voted to refuse to fund a new missile defense treaty with Russia until they withdrew from Ukraine, according to a review of DeSantis’ past comments by CNN’s KFile.

Once an advocate of a hardline, hawkish approach to Russia by supporting Ukraine, the Florida governor shifted course this week in anticipation of a potential presidential run in a changed, more isolationist Republican party, questioning whether it was in the United States’ interest to be involved in what he called, “things like the borderlands or over Crimea.” He added that Russia was not “the same threat to our country, even though they’re hostile” and downplayed the threats that Russia could invade NATO countries.

This was all very much in line with what you would have expected from regular Republican geopolitics back in the day.

I prefer the alternative.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/ron-desantis-supported-ukraine-russia-kfile/index.html

Excellent article from Vdare which points out that the Republican outreach to the Latino community ultimately results in a fifth column among the Republicans.

That is not to say that I think that Latinos should not be voted for - it is a case by case basis - but merely that we need a very clear idea onw here they stand on these issues when many of them have become advocates for policies fundamentally against what American conservatives want.

Solicitation

We inform the fight to keep America American

^VDARE.com

Azerbaijan will continue to try to fight Armenia and be a thorn in the side of Christians in the Middle East.

They are, of course, bad faith actors, and it's an undemocratic regime with an even worse trajectory.

Naturally, they are willing to cooperate with the Israelis, and to undermine the Iranians if it allows them to continue to wage their conflict with Armenia & build their military assets:

Israel has had a strategic alliance with Azerbaijan for the past two decades, and Israel sells the…country weapons worth billions of dollars – and in return, Azerbaijan, per sources, supplies Israel with oil and access to Iran.

According to foreign media reports, Azerbaijan has allowed the Mossad to set up a forward branch to monitor what is happening in Iran, Azerbaijan’s neighbor to the south, and has even prepared an airfield intended to aid Israel in case it decides to attack Iranian nuclear sites. Reports from two years ago stated that the Mossad agents who stole the Iranian nuclear archive smuggled it to Israel via Azerbaijan. According to official reports from Azerbaijan, over the years Israel has sold it the most advanced weapons systems, including ballistic missiles, air defense and electronic warfare systems, kamikaze drones and more.

You also got to love this:

These Silk Way aircraft (and others) have landed at Ovda almost 100 times since the permit was issued. The data expose an increasing pace of flights to Baku especially in the middle of 2016, in late 2020 and at the end of 2021 – which coincide with periods of fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh….

In the midst of fighting in Armenia, the Israelis are more active, as they are all about the money.

This effectively means that the United States is undermining the Armenians to empower the Azerbaijanis.

http://these silk way aircraft (and others) have landed at ovda almost 100 times since the permit was issued. the data expose an increasing pace of flights to baku especially in the middle of 2016, in late 2020 and at the end of 2021  which coincide with periods of fighting in nagorno-karabakh &.

In the latest from the Niccolo substack, we have an excellent excerpt from Thomas Fazi. Niccolo is so wonderful because he draws on a wide array of thinkers, including this writer with a Marxist background that is analyzing the COVID "crisis" and suggesting that they have capitalized off of it to try to create a 'bio-security complex.'

"In such a regime, “crisis” is the norm, the default starting point for all politics. Far from being a rational response to an objective reality, this narrative of permanent crisis or emergency should be understood as a way of shaping reality, and more specifically as one of the main tools through which Western ruling elites have attempted to overcome neoliberalism’s intrinsic tendencies toward stagnation and polarization, and its inability to generate societal consensus or hegemony in either material or ideological terms."

Saturday Commentary and Review #115

The Biosecurity Complex, Social Media Annihilating Teen Girls' Mental Health, No "Absolute Victory" for Ukraine, "The Dissident Fringe", "Fargo" Meets Montreal Mafia

^{Niccolo Soldo (Fisted by Foucault)}