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‘There is a simple answer for every difficult question, and it is usually wrong. After deciphering the bloody mess in Ukraine, I’m even more convinced that is true.
Most people think contentious, controversial, and complex issues can be decided by identifying the good and the bad; however, the worse conflicts happen when both sides are equally right and wrong or, in this case, some right and much wrong on both sides. The war in Ukraine is not a choice between good and evil but between evil and more evil.
Whatever the level of blame in the mess, the horrific bombing of innocent people is enough to make a stone cry.
It must be remembered that NATO was formed in 1949 after WW II to protect Europe from the aggressive Soviet Union consisting of Russia and 15 “republics.” Ukraine was one of the republics. Russia has been a source of trouble, even evil, since 1917. So, a rule of thumb is if Russia is part of an equation, it includes duplicity, danger, and destruction.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine quickly became an independent state, with over 92% of its citizens voting for independence. The international community recognized their independence. Since breaking from the Soviet Union, Ukraine has wavered between Moscow and the West, surviving compromises, conflicts, and corruption yet maintaining its “democracy” intact. Ukraine has long been known as the most corrupt nation in Europe and remains the third-most-corrupt country in Europe, after Russia and Azerbaijan.
After you think of the oligarchs, think Joe and Hunter Biden, the Ukrainian gas company, and the laptop caper.
Ukrainians moved closer to the West and away from Russia as violence continued in two eastern Russian-speaking provinces (Donetsk and Luhansk) on Russia’s border and when Russia took Crimea. Spouting independence, the two provinces (known as the Donbas) remain internationally recognized as part of Ukraine while President Putin now recognizes them as “Russian.” Crimea has already been swallowed by the Russian Bear.
In April 2014, Russian-supported separatist forces attacked government buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk (consisting of almost 4 million people) whose major industries are coal mining and steel production. Those are two significant products vital to Russia. On February 21, 2022, Putin recognized the two provinces as independent states, and leaders of the two regions asked the world leaders to accept their independent status. That recognition was probably to lay a foundation for moving Russian troops into Ukraine to “keep order.”
The deadly bombing today by Russians is them trying to “keep order!” No, it is Russian control.
The eight-year Donbas war against the people in the two Ukrainian provinces is hardly mentioned in the media! It seems the killing of Ukrainians by other Ukrainians is not newsworthy. It doesn’t fit the narrative that all Ukrainians are good guys wearing white hats while Russians are bad guys wearing brown shirts with attached swastikas—neo-Nazis.
It appears that most of Putin’s reasons for his invasion of Ukraine revolve around his insistence that the Donbas belongs to Russia since most of the citizens have Russian roots. Russian-backed separatists took control of the region in 2014, and the violence in eastern Ukraine has killed more than 14,000 people in the eight years since.
It seems the mainstream media has little knowledge of those deaths.
The democratically-elected (in 2010) Ukrainian President Yanukovych began to pursue closer ties with Russia in November 2013, causing major street protests in Kyiv. The Ukrainians know their history of the 1932-1933 Stalin-organized famine where at least 4 million Ukrainians starved to death. As Ukrainians were dying, 1 million tons of grain were exported to the West by Stalin, a reason for deep hatred and fear of Russia. It was a staged famine or genocide.
Possibly because Yanukovych nuzzled his head into the fur of the Russian Bear, his government was overthrown by the Obama administration in February 2014 with the direct assistance of Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State under Obama. She was the State Department’s lead person for Ukrainian affairs pushing European nations to take a harder line against Putin’s expansion into Europe.
To be very clear, a new Ukrainian government was installed in a coup d’état orchestrated by U.S. agents under the corrupt Obama administration, with Victoria Nuland (currently the under Secretary of State in the Biden administration) as the mastermind. Keep in mind the U.S. Government wanted and got a Ukrainian government rabidly anti-Russian.
But then, our CIA has been removing and installing national “leaders” for decades, all financed by you and me. Yet, U.S. hypocritical leaders talk about honesty, integrity, legitimacy, fairness, and good government. Enough to gag a maggot.
Of course, an independent nation has a right to call the shots about what is a danger to their existence, but one must ask how independent Ukraine is after the U.S. installed its leaders. Furthermore, do U.S. officials want to control Ukraine to contain and conceal their own massive corruption?
Think, well, you know.
A January 28, 2014, recorded phone call was leaked on YouTube on February 4, 2014, between Nuland and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. The call reveals that after reviewing the three opposition candidates for the post of Prime Minister of Ukraine, the U.S. State Department had selected Arseniy Yatsenyuk!
About this time, sane people ask why U.S. Government officials make decisions about who serves in a European government. You need to understand that this was not a legitimate revolution by dissatisfied citizens wanting to change their government. It was a bloody coup d’état. Revolutions are legal, and coups are illegal, immoral, and often impossible to be differentiated from a revolution. That coup literally makes Obama and his henchmen (and women) international criminals.
The record must be clear when and if a nuclear war breaks out: those responsible must be held accountable for the dislocation, destruction, deprivation, and deaths.
Yanukovych fled Ukraine in February 2014 ahead of an impeachment vote, eventually arriving in Russia. He was followed in office by Oleksandr Turchynov, a Baptist minister, who served as acting president for 115 days. Maybe he didn’t last long because he said people who use drugs or promote sodomy were practicing perversions. I’m still trying to understand what is wrong with his statement. Don’t all sane, honest, moral, informed, and awake people believe that?
In May 2014, Petro Poroshenko was elected Ukrainian president and enthusiastically promoted the Ukrainian language, removed remnants of Communism such as street names, etc., and gave more authority to local leaders.
Sounds good to me.
In 2019, Poroshenko was defeated for president by comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy while the besieged nation suffered from a decaying economy and the conflict with Russia. Zelenskyy is being praised as brave, courageous, and fearless, and he may be. While he does not have the bloody history of Putin, he is not the brave warrior riding a white horse leading his troops into the fray.
One does not have to be a paragon of personal virtue to condemn the Russian invasion and constant bombing of civilians in Ukraine. Still, few wish to consider the Ukrainian government’s eight-year war on the Eastern Ukrainian provinces, which had refused to support the 2014 coup orchestrated by the U.S. State Department.
In an emotional speech on February 21, 2022, Putin made it clear that he believes all of Ukraine is a part of Russia. He also believes in Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, and Peter Pan. Putin praises and promotes nationalism in Russia but resists it in Ukraine, and he doesn’t seem to realize by bombing Ukraine, he has thrust the nation deeper into the arms of the West.
Of course, Putin already has Crimea and Belarus as part of his rebuilding of the disbanded, disgraced, and despised Soviet Empire. Still, he wants to add other nations such as Moldova, Romania, Poland, etc. It seems the Russian Bear has an insatiable appetite.
However, NATO or the U.N. is responsible for stopping him, not America.
After the 2014 coup, Ukrainian officials required the Ukrainian language to be used in courts, schools, politics, and most entertainment venues. Separatists in the eastern provinces threw a fit and rebelled against the government. And Russia invaded, backing the separatists, which led to a very bloody war that lasted eight years.
Alleged oppression of Russian-speaking Ukrainians was one of the key reasons cited by the Kremlin in spring 2014 to justify Russia’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. The language issue has also been central to the ongoing Kremlin-led separatist war in eastern Ukraine.
I think both Russian and Ukrainian officials are authoritarian thugs, and no decent western leader should shake their hands and smile, seemingly giving them undeserved respectability. At times, respectable national leaders must deal with thugs in striped pants but should not treat them as gentlemen. But then, many of those “respectable leaders” (Russian, Ukrainians, Americans, etc.) are little more than thugs themselves.
In May 2014, Putin jubilantly accepted the independence vote in Crimea (who voted to be annexed to Russia), but he rejected the votes in Donetsk and Luhansk, located on Russia’s border. Russian-backed separatist forces have occupied the region since the 2014 invasion.
Ukrainian neo-Nazis and other right-wing militias and Islamic fanatics were supplied with a bounty of weapons to kill ethnic Russians in the east resisting the political leadership in Kyiv.
Putin and Russian officials became apocalyptic when they discovered plans to place nuclear missiles in Ukraine, less than ten minutes flight-time from Moscow. Russia was promised by NATO in 1991 it would not expand westward.
Maybe Putin remembers Lenin’s statement, “Treaties are like pie crusts, made to be broken.” While the pledge not to expand NATO was not a treaty, it was a pledge or promise. The secretary-general of NATO lied, saying, NATO “has never promised not to expand.”
But it is even worse because when the USSR disbanded, promises made included that Ukraine was to remain non-aligned, meaning Ukraine would not climb into bed with the West or the East. NATO was to protect Europe from Russia, so Russia considers NATO an enemy.
To be fair and consistent, one must remember that each nation must do what is best for that nation, whether or not the free world approves. But that never justifies corruption, broken treaties, and aggression.
During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, America got her knickers in a knot when the Soviets placed nuclear missiles 103 miles from America’s border. Fact is, we almost went to war with the USSR because of those missiles. Similarly, after America’s Ukrainian coup in 2014, Russia has reason to fear NATO nuclear missiles not just near but on Russia’s border. To the Russians, that’s like a rattlesnake nest near a daycare center.
NATO promised in April 2008 that Ukraine would one day be a member of NATO without any definite promises as to when. From Putin’s perspective, he has a reason to be concerned if Ukraine joins NATO. After all, he has as much right to be concerned with missiles on his border as the U.S. has if missiles were placed in Mexico or Canada.
Do all nations have sovereignty or not? Do the bad guys have the same national rights as the good guys?
The mainstream media have twisted the events in Ukraine like a pretzel to convince their subscribers that the new regime in Kyiv consists of genuine, reformist, freedom-fighters, and committed patriots, standing against “Russian aggression.” Some are, however, while Russian aggression is obvious, the liberal media are loath to admit many of the Ukrainian “patriots” are neo-Nazi fighters, Muslim warlords, and ultra-nationalists who demand a Ukraine without ethnic Russians.
On July 7, 2015, even The New York Times admitted the importance of the neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalists in waging war against cultural Russian insurgents in the east. The Times also reported that these far-right forces had been joined by Islamic militants. Some of those jihadists have been called “brothers” of the hyper-brutal Islamic State. It seems acceptable for a mixture of various separatist groups, neo-Nazis, and Islamic terrorists to kill Russians.
With the attacks upon innocent Ukrainians in recent weeks, it is easy to detest Putin and praise Zelenskyy but it is for sure not right versus wrong. They are both wrong.
War does make strange bedfellows.
Not mentioned by the media is that this Ukrainian-Russian War has been managed by elite globalists such as Obama, Soros, Schwab, Gates, etc., who are not interested in your peace and your freedom but their power and their money.
But that’s another article. As for now, a pox on both their houses and a prayer for the innocent.’https://donboys.cstnews.com/russia-and-ukraine-trying-to-understand-both-sides-does-not-minimize-truth-and-freedom
at still love freedom!
If you live in Australia you still cannot obtain Ivermectin but ‘The New Hampshire House of Representatives has voted to make Ivermectin available at any pharmacy that wants to distribute this drug even without a prescription. It will likely pass the Senate and become law.
It’s a hugely positive breakthrough for medical and pharmaceutical freedom. It’s only tragic that this was not the situation two years ago. The doctors the world over who have rallied behind this treatment believe that many lives might have been saved. If one state in the Northeast had at least made the option available, outcomes might have been very different.
The Epoch Times reports that “Similar bills are pending legislative approval in Oklahoma, Missouri, Indiana, Arizona, and Alaska.”
Magnificent! What’s key here is the concept of human choice.
The irony is very bitter: the vaccine mandates have been universal and people have lost careers for refusing or been rejected for participation in public life. People were forced to get shots of doubtful efficacy in most cases that many people did not want or because they did not see the need and feared their side effects.
Meanwhile, a drug they would have chosen to take was denied to them, again by force, and physicians who believed they were saving lives had their licenses taken away for using their professional discretion.
For a good part of last year, many people in the world could freely buy Ivermectin, a generic drug that at least 8 quality studies have shown to be an effective treatment for Covid-19. It has long been part of the alternative treatment protocol for Covid since it was first tried in early 2020, but never recommended by the FDA, CDC, or NIH. At some point, the CDC was tweeting denunciations of it, somehow with the implication that this treatment was distracting from the main push of vaccine fanaticism.
A very strange political war broke out in the US over the drug, however, such that people’s acceptance or rejection of it somehow signaled political loyalties – an absurdist example of how politicized the entire pandemic became. In the end, it works well or does not: biology does not care about party affiliation.
Why did this happen? There are theories. It’s generic. It’s cheap. It’s widely available. Therefore the financial interest did not favor it. Another theory is that early talk of ways to live rationally and humanely with Covid would have distracted from the main and completely implausible message of lockdowns and then mandates: the goal of everyone should be to restructure life to avoid the bug no matter what.
In most parts of Central and Latin America, plus India and Eastern Europe, the drug was freely available to anyone. And the results are suggestively positive – though it would take a specialist fully to sort through all the noise in the data. The experience of on-the-ground Covid doctors, once fully free to prescribe what they believe is best, was positive from many reports.
In the US, however, the situation was very different. Getting a prescription was hard enough. In some states, getting it filled was nearly impossible. You would get a blank stare and a negative head shake from the pharmacist. As a result, the generic became in high demand in gray markets, with people returning from Mexico with stashes and also ordering from abroad.
The situation became utterly bizarre. Meanwhile, the NIH itself, which is supposed to promote randomized trials of repurposed drugs because major manufacturers have no incentive to do so, was in no rush to find out anything about its effectiveness. The NIH’s major study of repurposed drugs is due to show results more than a year from today.
Therapeutics in general have been woefully neglected throughout the pandemic. There was no “warp speed” for them. The NIH had all of February 2020 to kick off the investigations. But this apparently did not happen. People were not only denied access to timely testing but also to basic information about what to do if you got sick! As for ventilators, the waste and mess there deserves an article of its own.
Meanwhile, to get the drug, people had to find alternative paths. The group Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance was formed to find ways around the restrictions. In the interest of saving lives during a pandemic! The group MyFreeDoctor.com formed to get people the therapeutics they needed based on symptoms and checks and contacts with various pharmacists around the country who saw this as a true emergency. They asked only for contributions, which were entirely optional.
The doctors who have rallied around this drug as part of a full suite of therapeutics estimate that tens or hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved. As a complete nonspecialist in this area, I have no idea if this is correct. But we do know that the physicians who held out, stuck to their guns against all smears, and figured out a way to serve their patients, even against regulatory attacks, became models of courage.
One night early in January 2022, I caught up with Dr. Pierre Kory of New York, who sounded absolutely exhausted on the phone. He had been working for 18 hours daily, seven days per week, to see patients and take care of needs with precision and deep care, even as he had faced unrelenting attacks. No question of what drove him and does still: the desperate desire to carry out his vocation to save lives and improve public health.
Meanwhile, on the other side of this stands the CDC, NIH, and HHS. The HHS has actually just produced something of a comic book (though probably not intended as such) designed to train people to recognize “misinformation.” It has no specifics and contains no scientific studies or claims. Instead, it is page after page of hint, hint, nudge nudge. In particular, I was struck by the following frames, which seem directed precisely against all those doctors and organizations that worked so hard during the pandemic to help people.
You are welcome to peruse the entire document, the main message of which is that the government is always correct, always knows the most science at the time, while front-line doctors with experience are very likely quacks, crazies, or ruthless profiteers.
Sometimes it seems like the people who produce such propaganda are forever attempting to live in the world of the movie Contagion, where every alternative treatment is a scam promoted by a corrupt “blogger” and where the CDC knows all. This cartoon is a smear in every way.
Yet even now, after two years of incontrovertible proof of the gigantic age plus health disparity in Covid vulnerability to severe outcomes, after massive demographic data the world over that is highly consistent, Jen Psaki just today said during a press conference that “we don’t know” that Covid affects older people more than young people.
Such is the state of science at the highest levels. The deliberate cultivation of confusion is national policy. And these are the people we are supposed to trust?
This battle is much larger than the legal status of Ivermectin. That’s just one symbol. What’s really at stake here is the idea of medical freedom itself. And freedom is a precondition for scientific inquiry and the search for the truth. It is also essential for public health. This is one of many lessons of the disastrously botched pandemic.
The decisions of the New Hampshire legislature to enshrine that freedom into law in this one instance represent a mighty tribute to the principle and a repudiation of the use of force in disease management.’https://brownstone.org/articles/new-hampshire-votes-for-pharmaceutical-freedom/
‘The Online Safety Bill, the most far-reaching online censorship law to ever be proposed in the UK, has been presented to Parliament.
UK Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Secretary of State Nadine Dorries, said her aim with the bill was to “make the internet, in the UK, the safest place in the world for children and vulnerable young people to go online.”
However, as with many bills that are positioned as a way to keep children safe, this Online Safety Bill contains sweeping speech restrictions that will affect all UK internet users.
The bill requires Big Tech companies to take action against “priority legal but harmful” content which will be decided by the government. The DCMS Secretary of State has the power to add more categories of priority legal but harmful content via secondary legislation in the future.
According to the Financial Times, this secondary legislation “requires less scrutiny from MPs [Members of Parliament] than the original bill.”
Companies are also required to report “emerging harms” to the UK’s communications regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom).
Additionally, the Online Safety Bill outlaws sending “knowingly false” communications that are sent “with the intention to cause non-trivial emotional, psychological or physical harm,” requires large social media companies to introduce identity verification tools, gives Ofcom the power to force companies to use “better and more effective” proactive content moderation technology, tasks Big Tech with determining which of its advertisers are pushing scams, mandates that any website hosting pornography put “robust checks in place to ensure that users are 18 years old or over,” and more.
UK citizens who are found guilty of offenses under the Online Safety Bill can be imprisoned or fined.
Not only does the Online Safety Bill contain numerous provisions that can be used to silence UK citizens and punish them for their online speech but powerful “recognised media outlets” are exempt from any regulation in the bill. Some of the outlets that will be getting special carveouts under this bill have even been praised by politicians for pushing for stronger “online safety” laws.
Tech platforms already remove millions of “harmful” posts each quarter and if this bill becomes law, they’ll have an even stronger incentive to censor.
The punishments for companies that fail to censor enough under the Online Safety Bill include having their sites blocked and being hit with multi-billion dollar fines worth up to 10% of their annual turnover. Tech company executives can also be jailed if they fail to cooperate with Ofcom’s information requests.
Despite introducing strong punishments for tech companies that don’t remove enough harmful content, the Online Safety Bill has yet to reveal the categories of legal the harmful content that tech companies will have to target under this bill.
Earlier this week, Dorries said large platforms will be required to remove legal but harmful content “if it is already banned in their own terms and conditions.”
Yet today’s UK government press release for the Online Safety Bill says that the categories of legal but harmful content will be “set by the government and approved by Parliament.” The press release also lists “exposure to self-harm, harassment and eating disorders” as examples of harmful content that online platforms will be required to remove.
The introduction of the Online Safety Bill to Parliament is the first stage of its legislative journey.
Numerous UK rights groups have blasted the Online Safety Bill and warned that it will restrict free speech.
“The Online Safety Bill is set to rip up the rule book as far as traditional British free speech standards are concerned,” Mark Johnson, Legal and Policy Officer at civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, said. “This is a censor’s charter that will give state backing to big tech censorship on a scale that we have never seen before.”
Toby Young, General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, warned that the bill will have a “chilling effect on free speech.”
“We are particularly concerned that the government has said it will force social media platforms to remove ‘legal but harmful’ content, including ‘harassment,’” Young added. “That will enable political activists and interest groups claiming to speak on behalf of disadvantaged groups to silence their opponents by branding any views they disagree with as ‘harassment.’”
Matthew Lesh, Head of Public Policy at the think tank Institute of Economic Affairs said: “The UK threatening tech executives with jail time is eerily similar to how Russia and other authoritarian countries are currently behaving. It is an attack on free speech and entrepreneurialism.”
Before the bill was presented to Parliament, the UK’s main opposition party, the Labour Party, suggested that it would offer little obstruction to the Online Safety Bill and complained that it hadn’t been introduced fast enough.
Last October, Labour Leader Keir Starmer lamented that it has been “three years since the government promised an Online Safety Bill. Starmer also claimed that “the damage caused by harmful content online is worse than ever” and promised to support the bill if its second reading was brought forward to the end of 2021.
More recently, Labour Member of Parliament (MP) and Shadow Culture Secretary Lucy Powell said that Labour supports “the principles of the bill that is finally being published” and claimed that “delay up to this point has come with significant cost.”’https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-online-safety-bill-censorship-parliament/
whatyareckon 