Is Keir Starmer Selling Britain To BlackRock

The Australian social media limits for under-16s

Xi Jinping Signs 37 Deals with Socialist Brazil, Cementing Economic Stranglehold on Latin America

The British Army is ready to fight Russia “tonight” if it invades another European nation in addition to Ukraine, a top military official declared.

500 millions pounds cut from defence budget. Larger warships laid up in “ordinary”.

Image Dr Evil voice …. Riiiiiight

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The British Army is ready to fight Russia “tonight” if it invades another European nation in addition to Ukraine, a top military official declared.

And the Russian army was ready to invade Ukraine in February 2022.

It’d be funny if only so many lives weren’t at stake.

England vs. Elon Musk

This could be embarrassing!

Professor Ian Plimer launches Climate Change: The Facts 2025

Reading Antony Beevor’s account of D-Day and the battle for Normandy.

After the capture of Caen – the first major town in Normandy to be captured – the British Second Army held what was supposed to be a victory parade on the Place Saint – Martin.

A Scottish pipe band struck up, as the tricolore was raised. The bewilderment on the faces of the French crowd was plain.

They had never heard the “Marseillaise” played on bagpipes. (Page 273.)

https://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2024/11/albanese-right-at-home-with-terror-leader.html

Anthony Albanese slobbering over Yasser Arafat. Words fail me, they honestly do.

Huh.

The face of the Statue of Liberty is that of Isabella Eugenie. Isabella Eugenie Boyer’s face inspired the design of the Statue of Liberty’s face. The image dates back to June 17, 1885, and features Isabella Eugenie Boyer, whose visage was used as the model for the Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty and the statue’s head were designed before being transported to the United States. Isabella was the widow of Isaac Merritt Singer, inventor of the Singer sewing machine. She was considered one of the most beautiful women on the European continent. She met sculptor Frederic Bartholdi and inspired him, leading to her face becoming the model for the famous statue. (Statue of Liberty)

Nice interview in the WSJ with former Soviet dissident about Ukraine and what it all means.

Mr. Yarim-Agaev, 75, was born in Russia and attended the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In the 1970s he worked in physics, chemistry and applied mathematics at the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences. There, in 1976, he joined the Moscow Helsinki Group, an association of dissident scientists, writers, intellectuals and activists who openly demanded the U.S.S.R. abide by its commitments under the 1975 Helsinki Accords and guarantee its people freedom of thought, conscience and religion. (The government of Leonid Brezhnev had signed the accords in bad faith, as everybody knew.)

Proxy war against the US.

I’m barely able to explain what I want to ask him when he begins: “The main thing to understand about this war is that it is not a war between Russia and Ukraine. It’s a war between totalitarian bloc and democratic alliance. It’s proxy war.” (Mr. Yarim-Agaev speaks excellent English but with a pronounced Russian accent; articles, which don’t exist in Russian, often go missing.) Russia’s invasion had nothing to do with territorial claims or security concerns, he insists. “It is first and foremost war against America. Putin’s aggression is for one and only one reason: Ukraine shows democratic way of development and pro-Western way, pro-American way, and becoming ally with America and the West.”

That doesn’t sound to me like a situation from which lasting peace terms are likely to emerge.

It’s totalitarian ideology. So much for the “Regime” and “clergy” on our side of the totalitarian fence.

“No,” Mr. Yarim-Agaev says, “in totalitarian country, individual leaders don’t rule. Ideology rules. . . . Stalin, Mao, they never had power. They were always first priests and servants of ideology, and they couldn’t deviate from that ideology. If they did, that would be death for them. To stay in power, they must serve it.” Mr. Yarim-Agaev cites the example of Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet premier from 1958-64, whose modest attempts to soften state control of Soviet life ultimately got him ejected from power. To ask a dictator like Mr. Putin or Xi Jinping to behave in a way that contradicts his totalitarian ideology, Mr. Yarim-Agaev says, “would be to ask him to commit political suicide. He is not going to do that.” Mikhail Gorbachev was the exception that proved the rule.

The war has to be settled and won, he says:

With regard to Russia and its aims in Ukraine, he says, we aren’t dealing with an individual tyrant, Vladimir Putin. “We are dealing with ideology. And you cannot charm totalitarian ideology, you cannot have a good relationship with totalitarian ideology, you cannot make deals with it.”

So the question of Ukraine will have to be settled on the battlefield? “Yes,” he says.

It’s not Israel, it’s not Ukraine. It’s really all about the US.

In Mr. Yarim-Agaev’s view, Russian objectives in Ukraine aren’t substantively different from Iran’s designs on Israel, the Taliban’s on America, North Korea’s on South Korea and China’s on Taiwan. The vast cultural and political differences between these regimes obliges me to ask him to explain what he means by that term “totalitarian ideology.”

“It’s very simple,” he begins. “There is such a thing as totalitarian socialism. Now, all those countries are forms of totalitarian socialism. Totalitarian socialism can exist in three forms: international totalitarian socialism, which we also call communism; national totalitarian socialism, which we call Nazism, and religious totalitarian socialism, which we know in form of Islamism.” What these forms of tyranny have in common is an absolute commitment to destroy democratic capitalist nations, especially America.

Accordingly, Mr. Yarim-Agaev puts forward the provocative thesis that Iran wants to destroy Israel not because it’s a Jewish state. “Iran itself claims that Israel is little satan and big satan is the United States,” he points out. “So it always aims at America, and it does it through Israel. It’s not antisemitism, although the mullahs are antisemites. It’s because Israel is democratic country and American ally.”

Those of us who grew up during the Cold War aren’t accustomed to thinking of post-1991 Russia as a totalitarian country in the way Soviet Russia was. But Mr. Yarim-Agaev thinks Mr. Putin’s regime has combined some nationalistic elements of Nazism with the symbols and tactics of unreconstructed communism—“Lenin’s tomb still sits in the middle of Red Square,” he notes—to form a kind of hybrid totalitarianism.

The hotel balcony solution.

Today’s Kremlin doesn’t repress and control Russian citizens the way it did under Soviet communism. Yet critics of the regime have a nasty habit of dying in unnatural ways. Two years ago the renowned ballet dancer Vladimir Shklyarov was quoted on Facebook as expressing opposition to the Ukraine invasion. On the day I spoke to Mr. Yarim-Agaev, Shklyarov “fell” from the balcony of his fifth-floor apartment in St. Petersburg. Police ruled it an accident. He was 39.

How do unlikely partnerships end up working?

Mr. Yarim-Agaev moves around the globe to reinforce his point that totalitarian ideologies of all kinds are undergirded by anti-Americanism. Wars and conflicts are happening all over the globe, but North Korea sends 10,000 troops only to Ukraine to aid Russia, and Iran sends drone technology to Russia in its war with an American ally. Iran, he says, isn’t a theocratic country, although it is ruled in part by mullahs. “It is also, and maybe more so, ruled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which is a military and not a religious force.” If Iran considered the Islamic creed the most important thing, Mr. Yarim Agaev says, “it couldn’t have good relationship with China, which persecutes its Uyghurs population. It couldn’t have a good relationship with Russia, which twice made war on Chechnya,” a mostly Muslim region. “Anti-American totalitarian ideology is the important thing.”

Reckons the nuclear threat is just bullshit.

What about the fear of provoking Mr. Putin into the use of tactical nuclear weapons? “It’s blackmail, and nothing but that,” Mr. Yarim-Agaev says. “And first of all, all military experts say that tactical nuclear weapon doesn’t work. It is senseless—you cannot conquer with it because you shoot it in front of you and then you cannot enter the territory.” Never mind the assurance of counterattack, in which case “there would be no more Russia, and Russia knows that.”

The larger point, he says, is that Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and lesser totalitarian states—Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua—will do anything to avoid direct confrontation with the U.S. “They fight against America,” he says, “but they always fight through somebody else. They attack Israel, they attack Ukraine. China may attack Taiwan at any moment, maybe even the Philippines. But they don’t want confrontation with United States because they know that’s suicide.”