Leonardo da Vinci (?) La Joconde nue or Monna Vanna 1515
Tucker 33 billion. With Biden klepto cameo
Lavrov: sanctions
“There is growing evidence that Russia used the previous stages of the war to prepare strategic ground for this one.”
• The West Misled the Public on Russia’s War Strategy (SWP)
The events in Donbass appear to have caught prominent western military analysts by surprise, who were otherwise quick to affirm an inevitable Russian failure. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) a known pessimist, was forced to concede on April 27th that Russia was making a “sounder pattern of operational movement” in Donbass and was even forced to admit that Ukrainian defenses in the north of the region were disorganized. Although the ISW continues to maintain that a broader Russian encirclement of the Ukrainian army won’t happen, it is difficult to see how Ukraine is going to turn the tide on this situation even with western support because they simply do not have the geographic advantage. Russia is gaining in the region every single day.
This speaks volumes about Russia’s strategy. When Moscow announced that it was withdrawing from the North and focusing on Donbass, this was marketed as a retreat and a failure, but on closer inspection it appears that the assault on this region was carefully planned in a logical sequence of preparatory steps. There is growing evidence that Russia used the previous stages of the war to prepare strategic ground for this one. Some people might have questioned: Why did Moscow not just charge into Donbass straight away? And seemingly went for Kyiv? And that’s a good question, and the answer is because with the highest concentration of Ukrainian forces there, “their best trained troops” as frequently eluded to, Russia would not have had the battlefield advantages or positions to push them back which they do now.
Before Russia proceeded with its current offensive on Donbass, it first undertaken a process of “shaping the battlefield” which involved distracting Ukraine by invading the North of the country (even if there was a hope Kyiv could be quickly encircled). As these multiple axis’ were opened, Russia then proceeded to invade from Crimea and seize Kherson oblast (to prevent a pre-emptive Ukrainian attack on the peninsula) and advanced into Zaporizhzhia (setting up a Southern launchpad). Mariupol was then encircled and cut off. These multiple fronts being opened allowed Russia to then invade Kharkiv and Luhansk Oblasts, which they then developed into a Northern flank with the capture of Izyum.
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People in the west must understand that the special military operation in Ukraine is seen as “essential” in Russia, and that this is closely linked to WWII, in which some 30 million Russians died. No, they really don’t like nazis. And they’re allergic to threats coming in through their western border.
• Letters from the Front (Faina Savenkova)
Hello, great-grandfather Vasily! We are again on the eve of the Victory Day. And I want to ask your forgiveness. Forgive us for failing, forgetting about your exploits and war heroes. In the eternal disputes we have lost the main thing – our history. After all, you defended Moscow, froze in the Belarusian swamps, liberated Prague. And now they say that it was in vain. That your victory was an occupation, that Leningrad could have been surrendered, that I should pity the Nazis, and that the Victory Parade is a victory psychosis. Can I do that? Of course not!
Hello, Grandpa Miron! They told me how you were chasing the Banderovites through the forests of Ukraine without thinking about sleep or warmth. Liberating and slowly advancing. Seeing villages burned down by them and children killed. You got rid of these scum, not sparing your life. And now their descendants say they were heroes. And I am now supposed to say: “Glory to the heroes” and disown you, the Soviet soldier. They say they won the war, but as before they are fighting children and old people, destroying towns and villages, leaving behind scorched earth and ash on their boots. Can it be so, if only 77 years have passed since the Victory? It can. I’m sorry we couldn’t destroy them all.
Hello, great-grandmother Elsa. Sorry for the yellow star being in vogue again, only this time for the Russians. Now they say that a Russian is not a liberator, but a subhuman. How familiar. They used to say the same thing about you during the pogroms in Lviv and Kiev. Who gave them the right to decide who is worthy to be called a human and who is not? We did. By our indifference to our history.
Hello, Russian soldier! Forgive us for not being able to keep our world from war. We calmed down and thought that a peaceful life was forever, and that freedom is granted without a fight. It turned out that it wasn’t. Fascism is all around us. It is once again marching across our land, flashing its flags and chevrons of Azov, Aydar and the Right Sector. It is all around us. It is already here. And that is why you are again back in line, as you were in that terrible year of 41. You are a Chechen, a Bashkir, an Ossetian, an Abkhaz, an Ukrainian, a Buryat or a Belarusian. You are a Russian soldier, whoever you are! You came to defend those who are weak and helpless. You have come to win. Again and again. As once in the trenches of Stalingrad, so now in the steppes of Donbass.
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That’s about 165 countries.
• On Ukraine, the World Majority Sides With Russia Over US (Antiwar)
The second pivotal event of 2014 was less noticed and in fact rarely mentioned in the Western mainstream media. In November of that year according to the IMF, China’s GDP surpassed that of the U.S. in purchasing power parity terms (PPP GDP). (This measure of GDP is calculated and published by the IMF, World Bank and even the CIA. Students of international relations like economics Nobel Laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, Graham Allison and many others consider this metric the best measure of a nation’s comparative economic power.) One person who took note and who often mentions China’s standing in the PPP-GDP ranking is none other than Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. From one point of view, the Russian action in Ukraine represents a decisive turn away from the hostile West to the more dynamic East and the Global South. This follows decades of importuning the West for a peaceful relationship since the Cold War’s end.
As Russia makes its Pivot to the East, it is doing its best to ensure that its Western border with Ukraine is secured. Following the Russian action in Ukraine, the inevitable US sanctions poured onto Russia. China refused to join them and refused to condemn Russia. This was no surprise; after all Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China had been drawing ever closer for years, most notably with trade denominated in ruble-renminbi exchange, thus moving toward independence from the West’s dollar dominated trade regime. But then a big surprise. India joined China in refusing to honor the US sanctions regime. And India kept to its resolve despite enormous pressure including calls from Biden to Modi and a train of high level US, UK and EU officials trekking off to India to bully, threaten and otherwise attempting to intimidate India. India would face “consequences,” the tired US threat went up. India did not budge.
India’s close military and diplomatic ties with Russia were forged during the anti-colonial struggles of the Soviet era. India’s economic interests in Russian exports could not be countermanded by US threats. Now India and Russia are now working on trade via ruble-rupee exchange. In fact, Russia has turned out to be a factor that put India and China on the same side, pursuing their own interests and independence in the face of US diktat. Moreover with trade in ruble-renminbi exchange already a reality and with ruble-rupee exchange in the offing, are we about to witness a Renminbi-Ruble-Rupee world of trade – a “3R” alternative to the Dollar-Euro monopoly? Is the world’s second most important political relationship, that between India and China, about to take a more peaceful direction? What’s the world’s first most important relationship?
it would probably be impossible for people to inhabit NYC for hundreds of years after a nuclear war. The life of Russia depends on stopping NATO
https://twitter.com/i/status/1519611295825203200
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“So Russia never gets to use such euros – which actually never see the light of day – and accordingly are not inflationary..”
“..should be considered the most childish proposal ever made in the history of trade..”
• The Schrödinger Euros (Vilches)
What ? Payment in Rubles ?? Unthinkable, don´t even mention the word say EU officials and authorities. Instead, Europe has formally demanded to pay for Russian imports with Schrödinger euros as explained below. So it´s high time for psychiatrists to step in as the livelihood of 800 million Europeans depends on whatever this incredible set of un-elected delusional EU leaders decide. Let´s get this straight folks: the EU does not want to pay in Rubles – or gold — because it is playing cutie by pretending to “pay” for Russian imports for free. Be it natural gas, or oil, or coal or whatever Russian, instead of really “paying” the EU pretends to pull a “print & deposit + freeze & hide” wise-up gimmick. To make it clear for any audience, the above would be the equivalent of you pretending to “pay” at the check-out counter of any store with a photo of a fully sealed box that you say contains “money” that you will keep hidden at your home – unopened — as long as you want. Please allow me to explain the EU trickery in layman´s terms.
the “print & deposit + freeze & hide” seizure trick In the past, Russian imports were paid through run-of-the-mill bank transfers made to accounts of Russian exporters at EU banks. Now the EU leadership has mandated for such transfers to be instantly frozen as soon as received so that Russia – or anybody else for that matter – can´t use those euros. So, the ECB would now “print” euros with a keyboard 100% for free and then transfer such euros over to the Russian exporters bank accounts in the EU albeit now under “frozen” status. So Russia never gets to use such euros – which actually never see the light of day – and accordingly are not inflationary in any and every sense of the term as nobody else can use them either. Thus, by not entering into any economy at all in no way, shape, or form the EU outsmarts Heaven and Earth and gets to import Russian produce for free. Easy see ?
It´d be a “print & deposit + freeze & hide” seizure and expect-the-Russians-to-fall-for-it trick…as if they were K6 kids. Now of course I can hear the maniacs in charge arguing that this would only be “temporary” – of course — and that as soon as Russia gets out of Ukraine under “acceptable” terms – of course, yet again — everything will get back to yankee doodle normal. Enter then the “Schrödinger´s euros” whereby the hypothetical ´money´ should be considered to be simultaneously existent and non-existent… a-la-EU. In today´s commercial environment only a fool would accept a Schrödinger payment for anything — not even bubble gum – and should be considered the most childish proposal ever made in the history of trade.
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How many other countries do the same?
• Mounting Evidence Canada Trained Ukrainian Military Extremists (CTV)
With mounting evidence pointing to the Canadian Armed Forces having trained members of Ukraine’s military who are also reported to be part of extremist groups, experts say Ottawa needs to strongly bolster its investigation and vetting of the soldiers it trains and arms in the embattled country. The Department of National Defence promised a thorough review of Canada’s mission in Ukraine after CTVNews.ca approached them for comment in October 2021, regarding a report from George Washington University that found extremists in the Ukrainian military were bragging about being trained by Canadians as part of Operation UNIFIER. The group in question – which calls itself Military Order Centuria, or simply Centuria, has links to the far-right Azov movement.
The Canadian military said they were alarmed by the report and denied any knowledge that extremists had taken part in training, adding that it does not have the mandate to screen the soldiers they train from other countries. In the month that followed, an investigation by the Ottawa Citizen found that not only did Canadian officials meet and get briefed by leaders from the Azov Battalion in 2018, they did not denounce the unit’s neo-Nazi beliefs – despite being warned about their views by their colleagues– and their main concern was that media would expose that the meeting had taken place. Officers and diplomats allowed themselves to be photographed with battalion officials which was then used online by Azov as propaganda. The federal government, which has spent more than $890 million training Ukrainian forces through Operation UNIFIER, has repeatedly stressed that it has not and will not ever train soldiers affiliated with Azov.
However, a recent investigation by Radio Canada into documents related to Canada’s mission in Ukraine found evidence that soldiers from the Azov regiment, identified by patches on their clothing and other insignias, have participated in training with the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) as recently as 2020 at the western-backed Zolochiv training centre in Western Ukraine. In a series of messages to CTVNews.ca, a spokesperson for the Azov regiment currently fighting in Mariupol, Ukraine said they were excluded as a group from training with Canadian instructors in Op. UNIFIER but that they “wrote a program” for their own courses and “were instructors in all disciplines in the National Guard of Ukraine training centre,” confirming Radio Canada’s previous reporting.
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” If the government could not stop someone from speaking in a public forum like a town square, Twitter should not do so through private means.”
• 1st Amendment: An Easy Way For Musk To Restore Free Speech on Twitter (Turley)
Free speech can be undermined by private corporations as well as government agencies. This threat is even greater when politicians openly use corporations to achieve indirectly what they cannot achieve directly. Corporations clearly have free speech rights. Ironically, Democrats have long opposed such rights for companies, but they embrace such rights when it comes to censorship. The Democratic Party embraced corporate governance of free speech once these companies aligned themselves with their political agenda. Starbucks and every other company have every right to pursue a woke agenda. Social media companies, however, sell communications, not coffee. They should be in the business of free speech.
Democrats have continued to treat the First Amendment as synonymous with free speech, as a way to justify greater censorship. Just last week, former President Barack Obama spoke at Stanford to flog this false line. Obama started by declaring himself, against every indication to the contrary, to be “pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist.” He then called for the censorship of anything that he considered “disinformation,” including “lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery, racist tracts and misogynist screeds.” He was able to do that by emphasizing that “The First Amendment is a check on the power of the state. It doesn’t apply to private companies like Facebook or Twitter.”
Well, what if it did? The Constitution does not impose the same standard on Twitter — but Musk could. He could order a new Twitter team to err on the side of free speech while utilizing First Amendment standards to maximize protections on the platform. In other words, if the government could not censor a tweet, Twitter would not do so. The key to such an approach is not to treat Twitter as akin to “government speech,” a category where the government has allowed major speech controls. Rather, tweets are very much as Musk has described them: akin to speech in “the digital town square.” If the government could not stop someone from speaking in a public forum like a town square, Twitter should not do so through private means.
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There’s James Baker again.
• WaPo’s Repulsive Defense Of Twitter Execs Makes Even Elon Musk Look Good (Fed.)
At 3:03 a.m. Wednesday, the Post dropped its story on the matter: “Elon Musk boosts criticism of Twitter executives, prompting online attacks: The targeting of employees by Musk’s massive Twitter megaphone is a major concern for workers.” The horror only compounds from there. “Musk’s response Tuesday was the first time he targeted specific Twitter executives by using his nearly singular ability to call attention to topics that interest him,” intoned the Post. “Supporters of Musk, a prolific and freewheeling tweeter with 86 million followers, tend to pile on with his viewpoints.” To be clear, Musk never said anything specific about Gadde, except to imply her role in the decision to ban The New York Post was wrong — an opinion that isn’t controversial, and was publicly stated by Twitter’s previous CEO.
As for Baker, Musk was commenting on his previous conduct as a public official, which by any accurate assessment was defined by poor judgment. Regardless, “sounds bad” is not exactly committing to a definitive judgment of the man, much less in his current role at Twitter. (As for what it says that the FBI’s former general counsel went from a disgraceful role in a spy scandal meant to influence the 2016 election to a lucrative gig at a tech company perhaps best known for its clumsy and dishonest attempts to influence the 2020 election… well, let your imagination run wild. There’s no explanation that isn’t disheartening.)
Neither person was “targeted.” The entire story is more accurately restated by the Washington Post expressing shock and dismay that millionaire tech executives might find themselves receiving public criticism from billionaire tech entrepreneurs. That’s a pretty questionable premise for one of the nation’s most influential news outlets to endorse. As Mike Solana, no stranger to observing the tech industry, put it, “This is a country of over 300 million people. If the rule for acceptable criticism of powerful executives and state propagandists is ‘can’t lead to *someone else* saying something awful,’ you effectively end all vital dissent. Then, that is of course the point.”
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Schwab 2.0.
• France Introduces Digital ID Days After Macron’s Re-election (TCS)
Just days after winning the federal election, President Emmanuel Macron authorized the creation of a digital ID for France. The “Digital ID Guarantee Service” (SGIN) was signed into decree following his victory over La Pen, which will allow France to be ‘compliant’ with the European Union’s digital ID. The backlash from the ‘Les Patriots’ group, which seeks independence from the EU, was immediate. “Just after the election, the government announces the launch of ‘a digital identity application’!” said leader Florian Philippot. “The goal: to put social credit in the Chinese way. Control and surveillance company!” [translated from French] “Let’s totally reject this app and fight by any means!”
Macron’s election victory has set off massive protests, wherein Macron has been pelted with tomatoes. France’s move towards a centralized digital ID, and the corresponding resistance from people concerned with a Chinese-style social credit system, is a conflict that’s intensifying in many countries throughout the world. Recently, for example, Nigeria blocked 73 million residents from making phone calls for not linking their cell phones to their national digital ID. In Italy, a municipal government just announced it’s rolling out a soft social credit score in the Fall, the first of its kind in Europe. Domestically, Canada hasn’t issued coercive tactics to this level, and provinces are torn on implementing a digital ID.
While Alberta and Ontario have already rolled theirs out, Saskatchewan recently scrapped its plan to launch one after polling citizens who wanted nothing to do with it. Instead, the provincial government now says they’ll monitor uptake and feedback from colleagues in other jurisdictions.
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Has the EU protested Twitter and Facebook censorship? If not, such laws have no credibility. Or use.
• As Europe Approves New Tech Laws, The US Falls Further Behind (NYT)
In just the last few years, Europe has seen a sweeping law for online privacy take effect, approved far-reaching regulations to curb the dominance of the tech giants and Saturday reached a deal on new legislation to protect its citizens from harmful online content. For those keeping score, that’s Europe: 3, United States: 0. The United States may be the birthplace of the iPhone and the most widely used search engine and social network, and it could also bring the world into the so-called metaverse. But global leadership on tech regulations is taking place more than 3,000 miles from Washington, by European leaders representing 27 nations with 24 languages, who have nonetheless been able to agree on basic online protections for their 450 million or so citizens.
In the United States, Congress has not passed a single piece of comprehensive regulation to protect internet consumers and to rein in the power of its technology giants. It’s not for lack of trying. Over 25 years, dozens of federal privacy bills have been proposed and then ultimately dropped without bipartisan support. With every major hack of a bank or retailer, lawmakers have introduced data breach and security bills, all of which have withered on the vine. A flurry of speech bills have sunk into the quicksand of partisan disagreements over freedoms of expression. And antitrust bills to curtail the power of Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, have sat in limbo amid fierce lobbying opposition.
Only two narrow federal tech laws have been enacted – one for children’s privacy and the other for ridding sites of sex-trafficking content – in the past 25 years. “Inertia is too kind of a word to describe what’s happened in the United States; there’s been a lack of will, courage and understanding of the problem and technologies,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a public interest group. “And consumers are left with no protections here and lots of confusion.” The prospects that any legislation will pass imminently are dim, though regulations at some point are almost inevitable because of the way tech touches so many aspects of life. Of all the proposals currently in front of Congress, an antitrust bill that would bar Apple, Alphabet and Amazon from boosting their own products on their marketplaces and app stores over those of their rivals has the best shot.
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“Just as we need trust, public health seems poised to destroy it.”
• The Fragmented Trust in Public Health (Prasad)
Building trust in institutions is vital to their success, but as we enter the third year of the pandemic, public health still seems hellbent on destroying itself. In recent weeks, we have seen flip flops on major policy proposal: a vaccine passport for domestic air-travel and authorizing the Pfizer vaccine for kids ages 6mo-4 years. These were publicly flirted with, but eventually abandoned. The administration has pushed medical products through, without the traditional advisory boards (as in the case of the 4th dose for Americans over 50). We have witnessed absurd contradictions – that Kyrie Irving can watch the basketball game from the first row, but not play on the court – and worse, that this rule only applies in New York city. Finally, the prospect that mask mandates may return in the fall looms over us, even as our rules become more absurd, with restaurant servers and preschoolers acting as the last, powerless people tasked with masking for all.
Public health, the institution, must own these absurdities and contradictions because the CDC has the scope and authority to correct them with clear guidance. Just as we need trust, public health seems poised to destroy it . Let’s consider these cases: In early October 2021 Ashish Jha, the newly selected Biden COVID Czar, suggested a vaccine mandate for domestic air travel, a view he reiterated in late January 2022. On Dec 27th, Anthony Fauci emphasized the idea of a vaccine passport for domestic air travel. Politico reports that Dr. Jha has long advised the administration on health policy, and Dr. Jha has confirmed he received “updates and announcements” from the administration prior to his appointment. Then silently, the proposal was abandoned with no action taken. As a close observer, I was confused as to what happened.
Similarly, in Feb 2022, the FDA asked Pfizer to submit data from an ongoing, and to date, negative trial for vaccination in kids ages 6mo to 4 years. An advisory committee was scheduled to discuss the results, which was leaked to news outlets as a reduction in symptomatic cases – one of the trial’s secondary objectives. Then, at the penultimate moment, the application was withdrawn and the advisory committee was cancelled. These flip flops were jarring. In the latter case, many parents were crushed, and felt as if the rug were pulled out from them. Scientists voiced protest, suggesting the vaccine be approved anyway. But I was most concerned that an approval based on inadequate data would further poison vaccine hesitancy at all ages, and for other vaccines (so called spillover effects). Even as it stands, this whipsaw news coverage may yet undermine parental trust.
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“Based on this concern alone, all of these experimental products as a class should have been completely contraindicated in women younger than menopause.”
• COVID Vaccine Side Effects on Pregnant Women (ET)
Among the adverse events, particularly alarming are the ones that affected pregnant women. The documents say that there were 274 pregnancy adverse events, of which 75, or 27 percent were “serious.” “49 non-serious and 75 serious, reported clinical events, which occurred in the vaccinated mothers. Pregnancy related events reported in these cases coded to the [patients] Abortion spontaneous (25), Uterine contraction during pregnancy, Premature rupture of membranes, Abortion, Abortion missed, and Foetal death (1 each). Other clinical events which occurred in more than 5 cases coded to the [patients] Headache (33), Vaccination site pain (24), Pain in extremity and Fatigue (22 each), Myalgia and Pyrexia (16 each), Chills (13) Nausea (12), Pain (11), Arthralgia (9), Lymphadenopathy and Drug ineffective (7 each), Chest pain, Dizziness and Asthenia (6 each), Malaise and COVID-19 (5 each),” reads the previously confidential Pfizer documents (pdf).
[..] Michael Yeadon is a big pharma veteran with 32 years in the industry. He retired from Pfizer whilst occupying the most senior research position in that field. “On December 1, 2020, We detailed a series of mechanistic toxicology concerns which we believed were reasonable to hold, unless & until proven not to occur,” Yeadon said in a statement to The Epoch Times. “Among those was that adverse impacts on conception and ability to sustain a pregnancy were foreseeable.” “It’s important to note that none of these gene-based agents had completed what’s called ‘reproductive toxicology.’ Over a year later, this battery of tests in animals still has not been done. So there was and still is no data package supporting safety in pregnancy or prior to conception.”
Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg and Yeadon detailed the concerns on the issue: the spike protein from the virus encoded in the vaccines was related to a minor extent to syncytin that plays a crucial part in the carrying of a baby to term. Yeadon had hoped, back then, that their concerns were paid attention to, since they had already seen the tragedy of thalidomide, a sedative drug that caused congenital malformation, over 60 years ago. “During 2021, I came across two further pieces of evidence which made it much more likely that there’d be adverse effects on pregnancy from COVID-19 ‘vaccines.’”
“It looked like someone had tried to dismiss our concerns by testing for evidence of the particular problem we’d warned about in Dec. 2020. Unfortunately, all they did is to reinforce our concerns. We’d envisioned the risk that, in responding to the synthetic piece of virus spike protein, women’s immune systems would also make an immune response to their own placental protein,” Yeadon said. “That’s exactly what was reported in the pre-print paper.” “Based on this concern alone, all of these experimental products as a class should have been completely contraindicated in women younger than menopause.”
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It’s a big club….
• The Sword & the Cross at Albright’s Funeral (CN)
It’s fitting that U.S. President Joe Biden and Bill and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should eulogize Madeleine Albright at the mammoth Episcopalian institution calling itself the “National Cathedral.” After all, just last year, Albright eulogized fellow war maker, “trailblazer” and fellow Episcopalian Colin Powell there for his “honesty, dignity, loyalty and an unshakable commitment to his calling and word.” Albright, Biden and the Clintons covered for each other’s criminal war making — and ultimately, they all enabled and covered for Republican criminality as well. All showed they were capable of murderous deceits.
It sparked some measure of attention during the 2020 election, but it’s largely been forgotten that the current sitting president, who with great hypocrisy calls Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal, Joe Biden, won’t tell the truth about his Iraq war record — and he hasn’t for years. Indeed, the death of Albright on March 23 seemed to almost be a case of Providence attempting to interject history into the current geopolitical situation, most obviously the war in Ukraine. But one should not have expected any reckoning to be heard from the podium at the National Cathedral at her funeral on Wednesday. The war planners have had time to prepare their convoluted case. “Secretary Albright was a trailblazing diplomat” and “a fierce advocate for women” said the Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith dean of the National Cathedral, echoing the mantra of official Washington.
[..] An examination of Albright’s tenure as secretary of state highlights extraordinary deceit, how we got to this stage — and what’s been lost as minimal democratic participation has atrophied. Most obviously, Albright was perhaps the most important advocate for NATO expansion which clearly antagonized Russia and was a major part of the provocation for the invasion of Ukraine. She stood over Clinton as he signed on to NATO enlargement “for stability and security in the 21st century.” Moreover, the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia was known as “Albright’s War.” That war was triggered by political fabrications perpetrated by Albright and her associates, particularly regarding the Rambouillet text.
It further aggravated Russia and China — whose embassy NATO intentionally bombed at a critical time. It may well have helped ensure the rise of China’s increased militarized posture and the rise of Putin. Further, this first-of-its-kind use of NATO in war in Europe paved the way for its use in Asia (Afghanistan) and Africa (Libya). These moves projected Western military power into each of those continents. Albright’s continuation of the sanctions on Iraq, regardless of Iraqi compliance with weapons inspectors, led to a horrific humanitarian disaster in Iraq as well as the collapse of the UNSCOM weapons inspection regime, a complete break against international law and paving the way for the ultimate invasion of Iraq in 2003. In this as well as the Yugoslavia war, Albright was allied with the Clintons and Joe Biden.
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Scott Ritter: it’s over
Average tree height across Africa
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