#russian induced corruption

[herukapadmajungiansworld]

Switzerland has for years been the destination of choice for Russian oligarchs and corrupt officials to hide their stolen money. Swiss banks are estimated to hold over $200 billion in stashed Russian cash.

The United States recently opened an investigation into Swiss banks helping #Russia to evade sanctions, subpoenaing the two largest Swiss banks at the time. Switzerland is also key to Russian #evasion of export controls meant to ensure Russia cannot resupply its military and continue its war.

Russian-induced corruption within the Swiss law enforcement system led to the resignation of the former top prosecutor of Switzerland and the conviction of a senior Swiss law enforcement official on bribery charges. Switzerland is now primed to send millions in frozen Russian dirty money related to the revelations of Sergei Magnitsky to the Russians who stole it.

This hearing will examine Switzerland’s key role in laundering Russian money. Witnesses will discuss how Switzerland came to be a favorite destination for Russian dirty money, how Russian corruption in Switzerland endangers U.S. national security and the ability of Ukraine to defend itself, and possible policy responses. This hearing builds on years of work by the #Commission to hold Switzerland to account for its role in Russian money laundering and corruption.

The following witnesses are scheduled to testify:

1Bill Browder, Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign

2Drew Sullivan, Co-Founder, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP)

3Olena Tregub, Secretary General, Independent Defense Anti-Corruption Committee (NAKO)

HEARING

Russia’s Alpine Assets: Money Laundering and Sanctions Evasion in Switzerland

July 18, 2023

1:00 p.m.

Senate Dirksen Building G50

Live stream:

youtube.com/watch?v=dxX98X…

[chalkrevelations]

Each of Trump's proposed appointments is a surprise.  It is comforting to think that he is simply a vengeful old man, lashing out this way and that.  This is unlikely.  He and Musk and Putin have been talking for years. And the whole idea of his campaign was that this time he had a plan. We should be wary of shock, which excuses inaction.  Who could have known?  What could I have done?  If there is a plan, shock is part of the plan.  We have to get through the surprise and the shock to see the design and the risk.  We don't have much time. Nor is outrage the point. Of course we are outraged. But our own reactions can distract is from the larger pattern. The newspapers address the surprise and the shock by investigating each proposed appointment individually.  And we need this.  With detail comes leverage and power.  But clarity must also come, and quickly.  Each appointment is part of a larger picture.  Taken together, Trump’s candidates constitute an attempt to wreck the American government.   In historical context we can see this. There is a history of the modern democratic state. There is also a history of engineered regime change and deliberate state destruction. In both histories, five key zones are health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. These people, with power over these areas of life, can make America impossible to sustain. ... Health is not only the central human good; it enables the peaceful interactions we associate with the rule of law and democracy. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the proposed secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, would undo all of this. On his watch, were his ideas implemented, millions of us would die. ... The rule of law depends on people who believe in the spirit of law. Matt Gaetz, the proposed attorney general, is the opposite of such a person. It is not just that he flouts law himself, spectacularly and disgustingly. It is that he embodies lawlessness, and can be counted upon to abuse law to pursue Trump's political opponents. ... Without a civil service, the law becomes mere paper, and all that works is the personal connection to the government, which the oligarchs will have, and which the rest of us will not.  This is the engineered helplessness promised by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are to head a black hole named after a cryptocurrency.  There are already oversight instruments in government.  DOGE is something entirely different: an agency of destruction, run by people who believe that government should exist for the wealthy or not at all. .... Pete Hegseth, Trump's proposed secretary of defense, defends war criminals and displays tattoos associated with white nationalism and Christian nationalism. He is a fundraiser and television personality, with a complicated sexual past and zero experience running an organization. ... Tulsi Gabbard, insofar as she is known at all, is known as a spreader of Syrian and Russian disinformation. She has no relevant experience. Were she to become director of national intelligence, as Trump proposes, we would lose the trust of our allies, and lose contact with much of what is happening in the world -- just for starters. We would be vulnerable to all of those who wish to cause us harm. Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States. How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective, Trump's proposed appointments -- Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard -- are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done. These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.

Yes, this is THAT Timothy Snyder.

Go read the entire thing.

[sereneabyyss]

Blind Watch BSD Season Five

I Feel Spiritually Unwell After That. Unfortunately @wafflesarecool and @animusmelodiam and I have completed season five of BSD. fortunately this means I can come back to Tumblr to not avoid spoilers Animus kept reblogging. However, as was pointed out by Animus before we started, this was very stroke inducing.

First off, as always, Animus Numbers:

Waffle disconnect count: 15

"what the fuck" count: 31 (thanks Amenogozen, Bram, and Fyodor!)

Animus numbers keep us pogging through the pain

We started off strong, immediately hating the Russians.

"he's fucking insane. but I'm rooting for him because I hate Fyodor more"

"'I hate both of them, but I hate this one slightly less so I'm rooting for him' is the entire mood"

Kyouka Lucy and Atsushi trio are top tier. We love them dearly.

"I believe Poe is a trained sniper over them not seeing a car in a flat area anyday."

"Waffle Ranpo is being the greatest detective to ever live. Stop dying."

Many, many, many "what the fuck that is a horrible idea" were said

WHY ARE VAMPIRES CANON???

"The most unprofessional UN meeting... why is waffle still dead"

"cuz he doesn't want to see the horrible UN meeting"

"true"

waffle becomes alive

"All you missed was a terrible UN meeting"

Oh look, we finally remember Atsushi has regenerative powers. How nice and convenient.

"where the fuck is emo at"

"How funny of you to ask"

"EMO!"

"EMO!"

All of these characters need to fucking consider getting some therapy

THE FUCKING LIGHTSABER??? IS A CHEAT SWORD!! FUCK THAT FUCKING SWORD I FUCKING HATE IT IT'S HORRIBLE FUCK THAT SWORD!!!

See Akutagawa cares too much about Dazai's approval, therefore, trying to make him betray that trust is tantamount to geeting tiger claws slashing you in the face.

Tachihara become Toph arc! You can learn from Jouno!

Speaking of Jouno what ever happened to that guy. Find out more next time I Guess!

bram pack

Aya and Bram have adopted each other. Kunikida and Bram get to have custody battle over Aya a la fist fighting her father.

"poor aya. I have a baked potato tho."

Never Fucking Piss Off The Happy Person.

Speaking of angered Kenji, how has the one power that was literally compared to Mother Nature itself not been played upon as Kenji being a vessel for a godly power similar to Chuuya and Atsushi? Like it's right there.

Yeet The Kenji.

"dazai don't try to drown Chuuya. Learn some humanity"

Chuuya deserves to kill Dazai As A Treat.

"Bram lives in an eternal state of going through it"

"Well he lives in an eternal state of being impaled, of course he's going through it."

The Fucking Shoujo Springtime Filer?????

"why is he being crucified? Why is bram jesu?"

The comparison of Bram to Jesus was found to be extra funny after Fyodor's last words.

"I love Sigma dearly, but he brought a gun to a knife fight and Lost."

SHOOT EM SHOOT EM DEAD

AYA NO BAD AYA- oh well ok fine sure.

"Atsushi your boyfriend is a vampire"

Bram has officially adopted Aya can't change my mind

"hey look, it's the cockroach" "dammit i was hoping Chuuya killed his ass"

THE END GOAL WAS SO FUCKING STUPID. THAT'S NOT HOW THAT WORKS. THAT'S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS. HUMANS CAN'T BE UNIFIED UNDER ONE LEADER AND FUCK THE PAGE IF THAT EVER WORKS LIKE THAT WITH IT'S STUPID LITTLE GOD ABILITIES. FUCKING DUMB AS HELL.

ALSO WHO THE FUCK IS THE UN TO DECIDE THQAT? THE UN ISN'T MADE UP OF EVERY SINGLE COUNTRY TO EXIST AND IT'S JUST LIKE 100 PEOPLE AT MAX DECIDINMG THE FATE OF THE WORLD SHOULD BE IN THE HANDS OF ONE ALL POWERFUL PERSON? NO FUCK YOU. LIKE CAT DAD SAID ABSOLUTE POWER CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY. THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS AND IT SHOULD NEVER WORK LIKE THAT FUCLK THE TRANSMITTER FUCK THAT END GOAL.

THE ARGUMENT OF WHAT A STATE IS IS LIKE A MIDDLE SCHOOL ANARCHISTS IDEOLOGY OF WHY GOVERNMENT IS BAD. THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS AND THAT'S NEVER HOW IT EVER COULD WORK.

Also Ranpo had way too much fun being a terrorist. But like, he deserved to commit crime. As a treat.

Anyway, I gotta go work. This was hell.

[mariacallous]

In 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev initiated an era of political reform in the Soviet Union by liberating political prisoners and internal exiles, including the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Andrei Sakharov. During the next three years, Sakharov presided as the moral leader of the democratic opposition in Moscow and spoke his mind from the rostrum of the Congress of People’s Deputies. On the eve of a major debate, he told his wife, “Tomorrow there will be a battle.” He went to his study to take a nap and never woke up. Sakharov had died of natural causes, a free man in a fleeting era of hope.

In 2020, Vladimir Putin set out to crush popular dissent in Russia once and for all, ordering his secret police to hunt down his nemesis Alexei Navalny, the eventual winner of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. For nearly a decade, Navalny had driven Putin to distraction, denouncing his regime as a “party of crooks and thieves.” He campaigned for high public office and employed open-source reporting techniques to uncover the gaudy corruption of the regime: the yachts, the planes, the villas, the billions stashed abroad.

Agents of the F.S.B. trailed Navalny to Siberia. They broke into his hotel room and, in a plot that might have been scripted by Gogol, spiked his underwear with Novichok, a deadly nerve agent. Navalny wore the poisoned garment aboard his flight home to Moscow and, sitting in seat 13-A, he soon found himself howling in agony, as his body began to shut down. The plane made an emergency landing in the city of Omsk. Somehow, Navalny survived. He was eventually flown to Germany and, with his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, at his side, he came out of a medically induced coma and steadily regained his strength. But he declined permanent refuge in the West. Do not be afraid, do not give up, was his constant refrain, and he refused to betray his own counsel and principles. In January, 2021, Navalny boarded a flight to Moscow, knowing full well that his moral prestige represented an intolerable threat to the regime. Putin had him arrested at the airport.

At his trial, Navalny showed that he was worthy of the Russian dissidents of the past, men and women who risked everything to tell the truth, whether it was at show trials where the verdict was never in question or in samizdat manuscripts that were passed hand to hand. But Navalny, who preferred to see himself as a politician, was also distinctly modern. Rather than attack his persecutor in court with high-flown metaphors and allusions, he referred to Putin plainly, comically, as “this thieving little man in his bunker,” as “Vladimir, the Poisoner of Underpants.”

Part of Navalny’s appeal was that he evolved over time. He set aside the crude nationalism of his early rhetoric and learned to deploy both his courage and his humor. He came off not as a luftmensch, an ethereal intellectual, but as a grounded member of a hopeful generation: interested in freedom and prosperity. He even spoke of “happiness”––hardly a common term in the Soviet and post-Soviet political lexicon. His methods were entirely new. One of his earliest ventures into protest was as an activist shareholder; he used his small investments to uncover the ways some of the biggest Russian companies illegally enriched their Kremlin patrons.

Navalny knew how to talk to people on their level. He consumed many of the Russian classics and prison memoirs, but he also spoke of his affection for “Harry Potter” and “Rick and Morty.” In a letter written to his friend Sergey Parkhomenko shortly before his death, Navalny referred not only to the portrait of despair in Chekhov’s story “In the Ravine” but also to the no less gloomy late-Soviet landscape depicted in the popular film by Aleksei Balabanov, “Cargo 200.”

Last week, forty miles north of the Arctic Circle, at a prison camp known as Polar Wolf, Navalny was pronounced dead. Or, to call things by their proper name, he was murdered. The cause provided by the local prison authorities—“sudden-death syndrome”––was just an additional form of contempt and violence.

Speculative history can be hollow, and a country in need of martyrs and saints is not to be envied, and yet it is hard to overstate the loss of Navalny. Imagine the course of South African history had Nelson Mandela been killed on Robben Island. Or the fate of Czechoslovakia had Václav Havel been poisoned in his cell at Ruzyne Prison, near the Prague airport. Navalny was fearless, and a man of faith. When his friend Yevgenia Albats confided that she feared dying in exile, he told her, “There is no death.” And yet, as Albats said the other day, the loss is devastating: for now, at least, “hope is lost.”

In this moment, Putin’s self-possession can only be outsized. He is a few weeks away from winning another phony election. He senses that the war in Ukraine, which just entered its third year, is going his way and that the Republican Party and its standard-bearer have little interest in resisting that dark trend. Putin has every reason to think he is secure. Cruelty is his ultimate protection. There are hundreds more political prisoners languishing in his jails, including Vladimir Kara-Murza (who has been poisoned twice) and the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich.

Certain reactions in the United States to Navalny’s death have been clarifying. Tucker Carlson, freshly returned from a Moscow grocery store and Putin’s knee, hustled to express Russia’s allure to Glenn Beck. Donald Trump went on Truth Social not to send his condolences but to compare his self-inflicted troubles to Navalny’s killing. President Biden, for his part, was admirably direct in his response: he squarely blamed Putin for Navalny’s death, met with his widow and his daughter in San Francisco, and announced a package of further sanctions as punishment for the murder and for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In 2007, Putin went to the Munich Security Conference in order to unburden himself of his resentments against the West and to make it clear that he would carry out a politics based on that fury. Now, seventeen years later, at the same conference, Yulia Navalnaya exemplified the courage of the husband she had just lost and took the same stage. She stood tall. She refused despair. There will come a day, she insisted, that Putin will be called to account for what he has done to her family, for what he has done to Russia. “And that day,” she said, “will come very soon.” ♦

[rumpocky]

Listen guys if I'm going to be sitting here deconstructing the lies that have made the format of the universe we know including breaking down the root and core sins of the country I've lived in my entire life you're begging for a presidential save from without understanding--

I'm gonna need you to do some work to break down your own blockages.

I won't name names, because they are a friend and I recognize it stems from trauma. But after all my years of work and fighting for what I believe in, and all angles and nuance I have shown, all support and carefully placed intent-- accusing me of racism on reaction of reading a mention about jewish investors making Blackrock is literally how this population has been controlled.

The DOES IT MATTER? Yes. Yes it does. We can't pretend not to be aware of the horrors being performed in Netanyahu's Israel, or what we have been funding for decades in the United States.

We are a little money making terrarium of inflated value, essentially owned by foreign mobs--Israel first, Kremlin occasionally wrestling out influence, and China slowly coming in the middle as the last surprise. But that Israel/Kremlin war, we've all been vaguely aware of it, whether or not you can track all the parts.

Like. We know it's there. But having to append seventeen flavors of disclaimer to every gods honest discussion of the truth of what is corrupting our planet to not get the "NOT ALL MEN" jewish edition reaction or an accusation to defend yourself from, that's literally. Why. This conversation. Has stayed buried too long.

Induced fear in the diaspora trying to still identify with what they claim to recognize is basically an inauthentic state to begin with, but then imagining there's like, some great hunt for them when truly yes their people are mostly controlling America and the rest of the world.

It doesn't make jewish INDIVIDUALS evil, they ARE NOT THEIR STATE OF ISRAEL, but when one continues to reactively identify in that sense of paranoia, you manage to be played for your own fears and anxieties.

Americans do/did it about America itself too, which is why everyone's getting an electric dose of culture shock from RedNote.

All countries do this. Russian and Korean soldiers are both leaving note about rebirth, god and glory opportunities for their empires. They literally all do it but only a few truly have global power and influence, like Blackrock, which is literally Israel's corrupt militia on US payroll but all at once a backbone of our banking and half the corporations flooding our daily lives.

So yeah. Sometimes we gotta talk about these things, fam. It's not about you. I don't know if you notice there truly is no great hunt for the jews. Nobody is threatening to deport jews. Nobody is talking about any of that, spare a few severe extreme shitbricks of nazis we're trying to root out of society. The Nazis are on about fuckin. Mexicans. And eggs. And Greenland. But we literally can't root out the problems if people shut down the genuine conversation from reactive egocentric nationalized identification while mutually claiming to reject what that nation is doing.

Like you have to pick one, and I promise, the anxiety will fucking stop once you do. Like, I must apologize, but I have specifically summoned the spirit of communism to beat the shit out of the infestation of israel in the US, and kremlin for that matter. It's not about the individual jews, that Israel barely even represents. It never will be, but they are ironically trained to react, own it, fear it, and quiet the conversation, and we're not doing that anymore.

I recognize the fears are valid but when we're at the absolute boundary for the fate of the human race, I'm past scaling my methods or discussions to liberal western Comfort.

[solardick]

These pills better not take away my creative genius. The tower card i made prior to the winter of 2024. Where there was no winter or any snow.

Compared to this winter

Where it looks like nature is going back to normal. And not being laced with hormones and Bs.

The news, which i dont beleive like any other peice of information coming my way. Where trump is pulling a “russia” by expanding its territory. To where theres untapped natural resources. In preparation for war. Still, people are still playingat aggrevating my natural tendenciies of being a teacher. I would have made a great father. Ugh.

To tarot amd the emperor using the roman numerals. Is the forst card that is a negation number. Which is fallowed up by the neo of nemural negation to a common base number. Is the death card. Wich is arrived at by addition. Fuck tarot. Leave it to the femme bots. There’s enough of them already.

For example i wasbtaught in school that alaska was bought from the indians from the states. And not from the russians in the 1800’s.

Originally this was the image i had in mind for letter Тт. Which combines cards for temperance and the tower respectfully. But a forge may also work.

Santé sécurité uh? Too bad no one cares about my santé sécurité. Keep dosing me with ass raping drugs. Like it feels good to be me. 40 fucken years. Fuck off

All these devils’s advocate fucken cocksucker s

Want to read something. Oh too bad! Want to study sething ? Oh! Too bad. Cant do anything but stare at a fuckem tv screen. And fucken chain dmoke.

Im judt going to dtop any motivation to make the world a berter p’a e cause nobody gices a fuck. Lunar fucktards.

Might as well support it with the three gate way frugs of sugars cafeene and nicotine. Marijuana? Fuck i hate life. Fuck you guys. Get all your children addicted before they can even spell the alphabet.

The subject was going to be on tempwrance and tolerance. But unfortunately. Tolerance is akin to suppression. And isn’t infinite. And brings it back to tarots strength card with is akin to the American independence day. And the lunar nations civic conditioning.

The word AND broken down, to tarot pictorially equals the fool(magician) strength and the emperor. And suggests continuation and expectation. Unlike the Cyrillic alphabet. There’s is only one word written for AND.

There is another perspective for AND. Separated from the consistency of civic conditioning. Which is touched by the biblical text. And that is the consistency of lunar needs agaist the “logos” function of solar productivity and advancement with its bipolar relationship to the lunar function.

The strenght card comes up repeatedly in national “holidays”

And now thatbim handicapped from ever knowing what feeling loved is like. Not much point is there.

Messing with me on gaming again. Now all im thinking is all the manipulations at work. Fun dun

Dont have mind for anything else.

40 straight years if being runned, governed and fucked with by other people.

I dont want to go to work anymore. Spend the rest of my shirt life on fucken welfare.

Chemically induced coccygeal Nerve Issues.

Massaging the tip of the tail bone helps elevate symptoms.

No ones ever going near my dick ever again. Fuck that. Sluts and femmes. Ugh.

If she cant say hello then im not even going to bother. Like all people. Assume and project. Women are the worst. Next in line are lunar males and dickheads.

The inorganic nature of this treatment. Obvious. Is depressing.

The growing concern of this Lucifer effect on these dicktwats. Breeding what its evhoed out into the world.

An angel born in hell.

The pillar of foundation is unalterable. And brings the old corrupted strength card to light on letter Тт.

Of course the lion has to go it denotes pride and ownership over the female body. But the plain old pillar and the women in lion’s clothing is perverse to the denotement of nature, and applies simulteaneously to “mother nature” whichbis again a bias to reason. Which eventually gives “birth” to the notion of the spirit of “masculinity” because its ethereal and not present without the form of structure. Which is non-existent paired to the notion on mother nature or “gaia” to cut it short.

Which unfortunately is part and base of all knowledge as is “known”.

“Mother nature” on its own doesn’t exactly take care of you. Its all trials and suffering. Holy masculinity. Which has been seperated from the scheme becomes the saving “grace”.

The world is green because the sky is blue and the sun is yellow.

[mightyflamethrower]

About half of America sympathizes with Ukraine’s plight and wishes to arm it.

After all, Kyiv was attacked preemptively by Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, in an effort to decapitate its government and turn the country into a Russian satellite, perhaps similar to the status of a Belarus or Chechnya.

The heroic ability of the Ukrainians to save Kyiv and to stop the Russian assault beyond the occupied Donbas and Crimea has hinged on Western weapons deliveries, specifically from European NATO countries and, to a far greater extent, the United States.

But now, after a reported 1 million combined dead, wounded, or missing Ukrainians and Russians (the actual figure is probably far higher), the war remains deadlocked with no end in sight.

Putin serially threatens to break the static front with tactical nuclear weapons. The Europeans are tiring. And no one in the United States has come up with a strategy to push back the Russians from either their February 2022 demarcation points or their post-2014 occupation of Ukrainian borderlands.

The result is a lot of disconnects, paradoxes, and mysteries about the war, the Biden administration’s role in it, and the general geostrategic landscape surrounding the conflict.

Ukrainian Election Interference?

Americans are demonized by the Uniparty elites for having doubts about their blank-check support for Ukraine. And while the American people are mostly anti-Putin, they are not always pro-Ukraine.

But why is that so?

For one, we know that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election.

Even leftwing Politico reported that Ukrainians in the U.S. gathered opposition research on Trump campaign officials and passed it to the Clinton campaign and thus likely her appendages in government.

In August 2016, at the height of that Trump-Clinton presidential race, Ukrainian ambassador Valeriy Chaly himself wrote an op-ed in the Hill attacking then-candidate Donald Trump for his comments about Crimea.

Ukrainian expatriate and U.S. citizen Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was the catalyst and likely source behind the “whistleblower’s” allegations that led to the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Yet in retrospect, given subsequent disclosures about the Biden family‘s quid pro quo enrichment, Trump likely had reason to worry about feeding the ongoing Biden family Burisma corruption and collusion with Ukrainian oligarchs.

Via Hunter and Joe Biden, the Bidens really were receiving money from Ukraine in exchange for selling their influence. Joe Biden really did leverage $1 billion in congressionally approved U.S. military assistance to Ukraine. He thereby sought to have fired prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was looking into the extravagant sums Hunter Biden was receiving from Ukrainian interests. And we know this because Biden later publicly bragged about how he threatened to cut off U.S. assistance unless Shokin was fired.

Vindman himself really was an anti-Trump partisan—and later cut a campaign commercial for the Lincoln Project. He likely had leaked a classified presidential phone call to the so-called whistleblower in order to prompt a third-party induced impeachment of a perceived anti-Ukraine Donald Trump.

He refused to disclose all the parties to whom he leaked the call. (Note that Joe Biden himself in May 2004 put a hold on congressionally approved 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, likely due to concerns of losing the Arab-American vote in key swing state Michigan—a better example of a president subordinating the national interest for his own political reelection agenda.)

Vindman was reportedly involved in a family company (as CEO of Trident Support) trying to facilitate repairs of U.S.-supplied military equipment to Ukraine. His wife recently and callously tweeted of the second assassination attempt on Trump, “No ears were harmed. Carry on with your Sunday afternoon.”

Ukraine’s efforts to compromise prominent Americans, interfere in U.S. elections, and use their American contacts to facilitate arms transfers still continue in outrageous fashion.

On September 23, just 43 days before Election Day, the Biden-Harris administration flew in, at taxpayer expense, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and accorded him secret service protection as he visited the critical swing state of Pennsylvania—where the deadlocked election will likely be decided.

Zelensky and Democrat politicos (no Republican counterparts were invited) toured a Pennsylvania munitions plant making artillery shells likely destined for his Ukraine. One subtext of the visit was that Biden-Harris aid for Ukraine—to be continued or increased by a President Harris—results in jobs for Pennsylvania voters.

In an interview with the left-wing, pro-Biden-Harris New Yorker magazine, Zelensky—who himself has canceled both 11 Ukrainian opposition political parties and scheduled elections, suspended habeas corpus, and censored the media—regrettably went further in his \efforts at U.S. election interference. Zelensky trashed Harris’s rival candidate Donald Trump as someone who “doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how.”

The Ukrainian president attacked even harder Trump’s running mate and vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, as “dangerous” and “too radical.”

Too radical for what or whom? The people of the United States or the Ukrainian hierarchy? Amid a firestorm, Zelensky later hurriedly met with Trump, which unfortunately only further highlighted his poor election timing.

One reason why many Americans are skeptical of helping Ukraine is, well, Ukraine itself—specifically its graft and corruption, its oligarchs’ disturbing history of bribing U.S. influential figures, its interference in U.S. elections, and its dictatorial suspension of human rights, political parties, and elections.

On to Moscow?

Strategically, it is understandable why Ukraine wishes to use European and American planes and missiles to strike depots and supply centers deep inside Russia, given Russia does the same to Ukraine—and focuses far more on civilian targets.

But to equip a proxy to attack far inside a nuclear rival’s homeland was always taboo in the Cold War—and for good reason, given the resulting lowered bar of nuclear escalation.

So, the Korean War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the wars in the Middle East all respected our ancestors’ Cold War rule: neither the U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. in their numerous proxy wars ever used their clients to attack the homeland of their nuclear opponents with either nuclear or conventional weapons.

When Nikita Khrushchev came close to doing just that by equipping Castro’s Cuba with missiles capable of becoming nuclear-tipped, along with nuclear-carrying strategic bombers that could hit the U.S. homeland, the Kennedy Administration went to Def Con 2.

It quickly blockaded the island. Kennedy further warned the Soviet Union that in case of any Cuban-based attack by missile or plane (conventional or nuclear) against the American homeland, the U.S. would retaliate against Russia itself.

So, we are caught in a very dangerous cycle.

Almost weekly, Putin himself, his generals, Russian politicians, or the Russian state media threaten to respond to attacks inside Russia by resorting either to tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine or strategic nuclear strikes against its suppliers.

In response, our retired generals and intelligence authorities, along with pundits and diplomats—and our de facto commander-in-chief at the press room dais, Kamala Harris—discount these threats as empty bombast. They offer no consideration that what has been mere Russian braggadocio in 2022-2023 (when casualties were in the few hundred thousand and no Ukrainians were fighting inside Russia) might not be so vacuous in late 2024 or 2025. Now casualties have soared by over a million. And Ukrainian forces, equipped with a new arsenal of jets and missiles, currently occupy 500 square miles of conquered Russian territory.

In truth, the West and the U.S. have no strategy for a Ukrainian victory over Russia. Much less do they worry much that a quarter of the Ukrainian population has fled the country, and the military is running out of recruits. The default assumption is to keep fueling the 1 million-man meat grinder to the last Ukrainian and hope that Russia tires first—the sort of non-strategy that the left used to lecture was amoral and senseless in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Why the Ukraine-Israeli asymmetry?

Israel, in many ways, is America’s closest ally. It is a constitutional state and the only nation in the Middle East that respects human rights. Its enemies are our enemies. And it is the target over the last half century of nonstop Arab and Iranian attacks.

Not so Ukraine that separated from Russia in August 1991, and yet still has a checkered history of corruption and authoritarianism.

In the present war, Ukraine has likely become the target of some 8,000-10,000 missiles launched from Russia. Yet that number is still smaller than the some 20,000 projectiles sent into Israel by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran. Israel, like Ukraine, was surprise attacked by its neighbor. And like Russia, Hamas started the war without concern for civilians. Or rather, in efforts well beyond Russian brutality, Hamas deliberately targeted civilians for Dark Age-style murder, torture, mass rape, incineration, beheading, and hostage-taking.

It is hard to outdo Russian wartime savagery, but Hezbollah has accomplished that easily. And unlike post-Soviet Russia, it has blatantly murdered lots of American diplomats and soldiers. Hamas still holds American hostages.

So why does the Biden-Harris administration, and many elites in Washington, treat the two wars so differently? Or more specifically, why do they deify Zelensky and Ukraine but demonize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel?

Note that Biden-Harris demand Israeli “proportionality” in responding to Hamas terror. But they encourage “disproportionality” for Ukraine to win the war. (Does America believe Russia is eviler than Hamas?)

They call for ceasefires nonstop in Gaza and the Hezbollah war. Yet do they ever commensurately instruct Ukraine to stop the war and negotiate with Putin?

Biden-Harris insist that Israel text or otherwise notify Gazans or Beirut civilians of any impending Israel attack. Do they demand the same of Ukraine when it shoots off missiles, shells, and drones into Russian-occupied civilian areas?

Netanyahu has formed a bipartisan war cabinet and will adhere to regularly scheduled elections. And yet he is still demonized as an authoritarian by Biden-Harris. Neither showed up for his recent congressional speech. In fact, in 1950s-Latin-American-coup-style, the U.S. government has been trying under the radar to remove the elected Israeli government.

Most certainly, Netanyahu would not be flown, Zelensky-style, by U.S. military transport to tour a Patriot battery facility in Pennsylvania or in any other election-year battleground state.

And if he was used by Republicans in such overtly partisan fashion, Netanyahu would be asked by the left to leave immediately—especially if he gave an interview from a swing state and, say, on Fox News, in which he trashed the Harris-Walz ticket.

We are warned by Biden-Harris that the Gaza/Hezbollah war should stop now, lest it ignite a theater war in which a possible nuclear Iran and a nuclear Israel would exchange missiles and blow up the region.

Yet, Russia is no putative nuclear power. It possesses somewhere between 6,000-7,000 deliverable nuclear weapons. And it has threatened to use them far more often than Iran has.

Ukraine is on the doorstep of NATO and any regional war would endanger America’s NATO allies far more than an Israel-Iranian conflict.

Is the Iran-Hezbollah/Hamas/Houthis Axis that has emerged from the war more dangerous than the new nuclear Russia/China/North Korea/Iran symbiosis that is fallout from our massive support for Ukraine?

So why are we lectured nonstop about the dangers of Israeli brinksmanship but almost encourage it on the part of Ukraine?

Do we believe that Putin is more rational and restrained and less likely to go medieval than Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei?

Again, what explains the vast difference in the way we oversee our ally Israel’s war and Ukraine’s conflict with Russia?

Is the explanation anti-Semitism?

Hundreds of thousands of Muslim-American voters in Michigan?

The airbrushing of Middle East terrorists unthinkable of Russian thugs?

The sheer hatred of Russia and Russians, but the pass given to Middle Eastern autocrats?

The absence of a large expatriate community of Russians in the U.S.?

Hating Russians?

The left’s hatred of Putin’s Russia is understandable given Putin’s 2022 aggression, but it’s generic nature is now also becoming obsessive. The loathing of all things Russian helps to explain the above paradoxes and obsessions—even in the trivial sense of Joe Biden in his recent The View appearance wearing a U.S./Ukraine flag lapel in a way he would likely not a U.S./Israel flag counterpart.

There is also the shame and embarrassment of left-wing past naiveté about Putin.

After all, it was Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who in 2009 gave us the performance art, red jacuzzi button, mistranslated Russian “reset.” All that hoopla was a direct partisan rebuke for the supposedly too-tough prior Bush administration response to Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia.

Recall that in 2013, Obama and John Kerry stupidly invited Putin back into the Middle East, supposedly to help corral Syria’s WMDs, after a near-35-year absence from the region.

It was also Obama, who, in a hot mic exchange in Seoul in 2012, promised that he would give up critical missile defense in Eastern Europe if Putin would just give him space during his last election. (Again, was that gambit impeachable under our new rules, given Obama clearly sacrificed America’s strategic interests to win temporary calm from an aggressive Russia to help his reelection?)

Both fulfilled their bargains: Putin waited until Obama was safely reelected and then invaded Ukraine in 2014, while Obama happily surrendered the nascent air defense project to protect eastern Europe from enemy missiles.

In contrast to Clinton-Obama appeasement of Russia, Trump killed Russian Wagner mercenaries in Syria. He gave previously Obama-banned offensive weapons to Ukraine. He opposed the Nord Stream 2 German-Putin pipeline. He got the U.S. out of an asymmetrical Russian-American missile deal. He jawboned NATO nations to up their collective defense expenditures by some $100 billion.

Trump also nearly bankrupted Russia by releasing oceans of cheap American oil and increased sanctions on Russian oligarchs. He made it clear to Putin that unfortunate things would follow from an invasion of Ukraine. Trump’s was the only administration of the last four when Putin stayed put within his borders.

As far as the 2016 Russian-Trump collusion, even Mr. Mueller’s “dream team” and “all-star” partisan “hunter-killer” cadre of lawyers found no such thing—as compared to the Russian-fed Steele dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton to smear Trump.

There was no “Russian disinformation” either in 2020 when team Biden rounded up corrupt ex-intelligence authorities to lie that Hunter’s genuine laptop was likely Russian fabricated.

So why the left’s hatred of Russians—other than the classic projection of blaming others for its own very disastrous appeasement of Putin that the left itself had inaugurated?

One other reason was that Trump endlessly rubbed left-wing noses in their Russian paranoias, joking that Putin might find Hillary’s missing emails, destroyed while in her custody and under subpoena.

When he was accused by Clinton partisans and hacks of being a “Russian asset” or “Russian poodle,” he deliberately bragged about his “deals” with Putin to inflame his critics even more.

In a larger context, Russians have replaced South African or Iranian villains in Hollywood action movies and popular entertainment. The new big-screen bogeyman is now nearly always a large brute with a shaved head, his torso dotted by orthodox Christian cross tattoos, gap-toothed, an exaggerated Russian accent, surrounded by creepy black-suited mafiosi—and full of racist and sexist hatred for liberal America.

In sum, there is an argument to help Ukraine survive Russian attacks.

But that consensus is daily being eroded by the present beltway messianic crusade for Ukraine, in a manner quite unlike our lukewarm and vacillating support for our far closer ally Israel.

The near-hysterical official Ukrainian narrative requires denying or ignoring the escalating dangers of our sophisticated weapons hitting deep inside Mother Russia, the Somme/Verdun-like endless wastage of over a million youths and counting, and the increasingly anti-democratic and election-interfering nature of President Zelensky and his Ukrainian entourage.

[bllsbailey]

What WAS That?

It’s been an insane news cycle—Joe Biden unintentionally revealed to the world that the left and the corrupt media have been lying to us for years and that he is actually mentally compromised—a fact that he made clear during one of the most consequential political debates in history, where he basically faceplanted—the former president and now-GOP nominee for president was shot, Biden quit his reelection campaign, and now Kamala Harris is being sold to us by that same corrupt media as the Second Coming despite her long record as a raging leftist.

I will quote Fox News political commentator Brit Hume, who said Wednesday night:

It’s as extraordinary period of news as I can remember; I’ve been in this for well over a half century, [and] in terms of news, this is the most tumultuous period I can think of.

Political junkies therefore tuned in Wednesday night for an Oval Office speech by Joe Biden, who was supposedly going to explain why he abandoned his reelection efforts despite vociferously assuring us for months that there was no chance that he would do so. Would the president deliver moving remarks, would he bring the country together in the way that Ronald Reagan did after the Challenger disaster or George W. Bush did after 9/11? Would he come clean on his health issues, which are so obvious to any sentient American, would he fully reveal his thought process surrounding the monumental decision to give up on his campaign? Would he explain how he’s still capable of running the country for six more months despite the fact that he’s now essentially a lame duck?

No, no, no, and no. He did none of those things. In fact, it was an inexplicable, sleep-inducing monologue that tried to throw in all sorts of high-minded ideals like “Democracy” and “who we are” but essentially said nothing.

RedState’s Bonchie didn’t feel the thrill up the leg:

A Confused Joe Biden Gives Address to the Nation, Only Deepens the Scandal Around Him and Kamala Harris

I cannot imagine who thought this was a good idea or thought it would quiet the questions that so many citizens have about what’s going on and what things look like going forward.

RedState held a lively Live Blog on the whisper-fest; you can see what we had to say here. As we watched, many of us thought that he was going to do the right thing and resign, but that did not happen.

The guest who wouldn't leave:

RedState Live Blogs the Biden 2024 Dropout Address to the Nation

My better half posted some excerpts:

Biden has delivered angry speeches, he’s delivered divisive speeches where he calls half of the electorate enemies of Democracy, he’s dropped remarks that he’s plagiarized from others, but this… this was a nothing speech. He revealed little of consequence, he assuaged no fears, he accomplished zero except perhaps to show that he’s still breathing. I have no idea what the point of it was, and except for shameless cheerleaders like CNN’s Van Jones—who was once again almost in tears, he was so moved—I don’t see how it helps Americans feel better about their security knowing that we have a lame-duck president who doesn’t make much sense. We all know that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are paying attention.

Speaking of which: was this incursion just a coincidence? Sure doesn’t feel like it, considering it happened on the exact same day as Biden’s tepid “farewell” speech:

Provocations: Russian, Chinese Military Aircraft Intercepted Off Alaskan Coast

[redrumedition]

⬛ PREMISE: AD INFINITUM 🏠☁️

Everyone knows that all sinners are destined to be sent down to Hell. Usually, it is often depicted in the Bible as a hot and fiery place where the souls of the sinners will continuously suffer under the torture of the hellish eternal fires of inferno underground, something like that. But in the Creamylinnie world, Hell or Ad Infinitum is seen as something that rather normal but unsettling at the same time.

⬛ Terminology

The word "ad infinitum" means "to infinity" in Latin, where it indicates that something or someone will lead on to a subject of interest that seems infinite and without anything that ends beyond it. On the other hand, the word "Ад" (ad) in Russian means hell (thank Slaughter to Prevail for that!), combining them together, you'll get: infinite hell. And why did I chose this word specifically? It has a little cute meaning in it that perfectly describes Creamylinnie's version of hell: infinite suffering.

🏠 Premise

In the realm, the suffering are not made as brutal as that in the biblical Hell, it's more towards causing psychological damages towards the sinners rather than watching them being eternally burn in the sea of hellish lava in the land down underground.

I decided to make it reminiscent of the film Vivarium, where every sinners in AI (Ad Infinitum) will be living in small, claustraphobic-inducing living spaces (instead of the one-storey, fitting houses in the film) and everything in AI is eeriely similar. From the cell shapes, the roads, the bland foods served, and they are required to wear the same uniform; it's all the same in every angle, almost like a kaleideoscope view. Solitary confinement is pretty much what these sinners would have endure, where their social interactions are pretty much limited and well, they have to find a way to get out of that eternal boredom. So, if anyone tried to look for an exit to the infinite landscape within AI, there's no way out - they'll end up within the same place, just like in the film Vivarium. Even with the pastelly colour schemes as well, lol.

Plus, in AI, the weather will never stop being bright and sunny and there are no nighttime or rainy days to come and cool down the realm, thus adding more suffering to these sinners.

Other than the similar looking houses and never-ending drought-summer weather in Ad Infinitum, there will be an eerie-looking giant cube hovering and gliding over the dry blue sky of Ad Infinitum, where the cube is completely and entirely acts as a giant mirror watching over the occupants of the realm from the sky, when it looks like something that came out of an Eric Prydz's music video. If you know which MV I'm talking about. Honestly, I don't know what purpose will that giant cube serve to the realm. I just kinda liked the idea of a humongous giant mirror cube just floating on top of our heads and it looks scary and aesthetically pleasing at the same time.

The dwellers of this realm? Well, I told you, the biggest sinners yet. Like killers, sexual offenders, thieves, robbers, corrupted and evil politicans and people of authority, PDF files, fraudsters, scammers, cultists, any people that are considered breaking the moral and/or religious compasses.

☁️ The symbols

So, Ad Infinitum can be represented in symbols, as follows:

Ａ Ｄ ：Ｎ Ｆ ：Ｎ ：＋ Ｕ Ｍ

or alternatively,

Δ ：Ｎ Ｆ ：Ｎ ：＋ Ｕ Ｍ

*all thanks to K-pop for using lots of texting symbols in the band names and releases a lot!

🔺️ The Delta/Triangle

The first thing that I'm so excited to spoil to the readers is the representation of the capitalised Greek letter Delta, or the triangle symbol (Δ) in the alternate logo. What intrigues me with this symbol is that, firstly, the Δ symbol can be read as "ad" at once, where the A is stylised as Λ (I know that this is basically Greek's letter L but the letter A is usually made for aesthetic with that letter) and the D remains as the Greek letter "delta", which is basically the letter D. And the triangle single-handedly combines both symbols, making it to be read as "ad".

I'm a Chemistry major in university, and I saw the symbol a lot when I skim out my 89-page slideshow notes and the symbol is usually used to represent heat change, or just heat during a reaction or a synthesis of a chemical compound. And coincidentally, in the olden alchemy symbols, it is used to represent the element fire. Since Hell is all about fire and eternal heat (and so does for Ad Infinitum, just without the obvious fire), the symbol can also be appropriately interpreted as the extreme heat that emits throughout the realm.

🔗 The colon (:) symbols

In the typography logo, each of the letter I from the word "Ad Infinitum" has been changed into colons (:) for "aesthetical purposes". But when I think back and relate it to the Δ symbol earlier, it's giving me another chemistry-related stuff (forgive me if I'm not excellent at explaining it, I'm not in any way, an honourary student on campus and organometallic chemistry is my weakest point so I'm just gonna use the Internet) the delta bonds.

Delta (δ, with lowercase Delta) bonds are chemical bonds that are covalent where four lobes (the petal-shaped thing, I believe, look at the diagram below) of an atomic orbital overlaps with that of another involved atomic orbital, causing the formation of a bonding molecular orbital with two nodal planes that contain the internuclear axis and goes through both atoms involved in the reaction.

And how is that related with the colon symbols? So, funny story: usually when we were taught the basics of the orbitals back in my pre-uni, the overlapped orbitals i.e. the part where two atoms have done a certain, common bond (with Greek letter names, of course), we are required to draw the colons in between the orbital overlapped area as a sign where each of the electron in the two atoms had made a bonding, thus completing the full electron requirement, which varies from each element (but 4 is the most common max. capacity for organic compounds lol).

But here in the typography logo, it only shows three colons instead of four, following the number of orbital nodes in the elements that underwent delta bonding. If all the symbols are gathered together, what we are left with are just ": : : +".

Given that the colons (:) represent a complete, two-way bonding of two atoms in the four parts of the orbital lobes (or in any normal chemical reactions, really), then in the typography logo it only showed three instead of four, and the fourth symbol is rather a plus (+) instead of another colon to complete the entirety of the Delta bonding. What does the + symbol could mean?

➕ The fourth symbol, plus symbol

Let's discuss about the lonely guy here, the addition symbol. The positive symbol. The Greek cross. Switzerland. The sign on hospitals and pharmacies. Whatever you wanna call it, we're gonna get a bit of exposition of it here.

In chemistry (not again!), the addition symbol often depicts a positively-charged atom, meaning that the atom affected are lacking electron(s) to complete itself, to become a rather stable atom (or compound if more than 1 involved). To achieve this stability, a positively-charged atom (or cation, to sound smart) will have to be reacted with another compound that contains electron(s) in excess, the negatively-charged atom (or anions), so it has to share its electron(s) with the cation. Sharing is caring, right?

In short, when we refer to the symbols found in Ad Infinitum's typography logo and combine it, we would get something like this, which is a Lewis structure (a method to show the structure of a chemical compound, with two dots indicating a pair of complete electron bonding, refer the diagram below) of a cation, or a positively-charged structure that needs an atom to donate an electron to achieve the compound's stability.

My best guess is that, in Ad Infinitum's context, the realm feels incomplete and unstable (given the realm itself and its residents of that realm are all unstable and problematic) and it needs another force, possibly an external force, to knock them out of their crazies and to make them feel stable and appreciated again. However, how will this thing can happen, and where does this external, completing force came from? We're not sure yet.

🎲 Cube theory

Okay, let's talk about the realm's favourite shape: the cube. Or the square, if you will. Again, some screencaps from the Eric Prydz's MV because why not? They're cubes, right?

Let's halt all the chemistry stuff and we shall go to the other subject that no one in the world but Ted Kaczynski would like: mathematics. But more specifically, geometry and shapes - and we're gonna do a dive-in on cubes itself.

As we all know, a cube is a 3-dimensional shape that has equal sides and it is pretty much one of the most stable shapes everyone has seen. So, a typical cube is derived from a square, which is made up of 4 equal sides with 4 vertices on every side. In a cube however, it has 6 equilateral square surfaces on it. The cube has 8 vertices in total, which is double of that in a square, and 12 sides (which are the straight lines used to draw on the shape). Hence, the number sequences that we got are something like this: 4, 6, 8, 12. What does the number trends show us? These numbers are multiples of 2. What else is 2? The colon symbol (:); it contains two dots in it. And what would two colon symbols form?

: :

That's right. A square. A damn square. Box. But in the symbol typograph logo, only 3 colons were given with a single plus symbol, so what does this mean? 1 ½ squares; i.e. a perfect a square and an imperfect square. And this diverts back to the colon theory earlier, where each of the colon symbolises a two-way, complete bonding.

: : : +

And what could this cube theory trying to tell the Delta symbol (Δ) in the alternate version of the logo? Could it mean the very thing that ever unite the missing part of the second square, or could it be the very thing that breaks down the formation of the squares slowly? The sole purpose of Ad (Δ) is yet to be uncovered.

And how about the unstylised letters, what do they represent? I'm not sure yet, so stay tuned for theory updates.

[leftonread247]

𝑁𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑒 | 𝐵．𝐵 🌩️

POV: Bucky Barnes 500 words TW: [somewhat graphic] violence, PTSD induced nightmare, unaliving of someone.

Please be kind <3

“You think you can wake up one day and decide who you wanna be?” The skeptical old man’s words echoed around the darkened corners of my mind. Not that there was much light up there to begin with. The words came and went, taunting me when I least needed to hear them and corrupting even the most pleasant of occasions.

I stood across from Isaiah now, my eyes running over each wrinkle. Time had not been kind to many of the people I’d spoken to but there was that same old spark of defiance in the old man’s face, and I wanted to snuff it out.

My eyes flickered to the window just past his shoulder. The grey sky threatened rain and the wind blew leaves around the yard, sprinkling the garden like confetti without anything to celebrate. The breeze caressed my face and blew my shoulder-length hair in untameable directions as I lifted my metal arm.

Sam, to my left, leaned in, his breath hot on my neck as he whispered in my ear in flawless Russian “Longing, rusted, furnace, daybreak, seventeen, benign, nine, homecoming, one, freight car.” And just like that I was gone, the winter soldier in my place.

“I’m not a killer anymore” my subconscious screamed as my hand tightened around the old man’s neck, his eyes bulging under the pressure of my grip. He grabbed my arm but any attempt to move the vibranium was futile, the metal was virtually indestructible, and Isaiah’s hands could do nothing to stop his throat from being crushed.

It was like I was no longer in my body. I am a man possessed so they say, no longer in control and the spark of defiance, of life that had danced so challengingly at me just two minutes ago were dwindling quickly. So many times I’d been here, a passenger in my own body, just watching my limbs do things I couldn’t prevent no matter how much I’d begged them to stop. At one point it was easier to detach myself completely, to compartmentalise and repress these events but my brain always found a way to remind me. I knew this would be no different and I couldn’t do that to Isaiah. I had to force myself to watch and live in the moment as his bones crunched under my grip and his final straggled breath escaped his lips. I’d wanted to snuff out that light and I had.

My grip relented and the lifeless corpse of my would-be forgiver crumbled to the ground like a sack of potatoes at my feet.

I gasped for air as I shot up from my laid position, the TV I’d left on, playing some weird cartoon and the clock next to it reading 2am. My own breath was fast and my chest felt tight. It had just been a dream, a horrible nightmare. I pulled my knees to my chest and let my head fall into my hands as silent tears rolled down my face. “I’m free.” I whispered to myself in the dark of my room. “I’m in control.”

[horizon-verizon]

Why the Sanctions of Syria Do Not Work and the European Union/U.S. Government's Slowness

Article #1:

Nine out of 10 Syrians are living in poverty and are unable to afford basic necessities such as bread, milk, and meat. The local currency devalued sharply over the last year in parallel with the crash in neighboring Lebanon, and food prices spiked by more than a 100 percent. Nearly 7 million remain internally displaced and cash-strapped with no means to rebuild their homes and communities.

The country’s economy collapsed as a result of devastation caused by war, decades-long corruption by the Assad government, and the crash of the banking sector in Lebanon, in which not just Lebanese but Syrians too lost their deposits. But Western sanctions that banned reconstruction of any sort, including of power plants and pulverized cities, certainly exacerbated Syrians’ miseries and eliminated any chance of recovery.

Syrians had no expectations from a government that turned their homes, shops, and schools into debris in the first place. But they had hoped that foreign investors might come to their aid, rebuild the country, and allow them to restart their lives. That hope evaporated when the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act came into force in June 2020. The U.S. law threatens sanctions on any entity, American or otherwise, if it provides “significant financial, material, or technological support” to the Syrian government.

AND

But others suggest a more practical approach to mitigate the suffering of the Syrian people and avoid another exodus. They say that since no one believes Assad will be toppled by the opposition or dropped by his Russian patron anytime soon, a more nuanced policy is required. If the United States keeps its vast array of sanctions in place until Assad gives way to meaningful political transition, which the Syrian government sees as regime change by other means, the crisis will simply aggravate over time. But if sanctions can be properly leveraged and Syria’s economic distress eased, it might encourage Syrians to stay home.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) has long recommended that the United States list “concrete and realistic” steps that Damascus and its allies must take in exchange for sanctions waivers. The Syrian leadership will not hold war criminals (or itself) accountable or even release all its prisoners. But it might deliver on other demands if sufficiently incentivized. The ICG says the regime could be induced to offer unrestricted access to international humanitarian actors, permit displaced persons to return home, and promise an end to indiscriminate airstrikes on areas outside regime control.

AND

“While this leverage is probably insufficient to elicit a change in leadership in Damascus, if wielded effectively it could achieve major objectives that are of strategic value to the West and life-or-death importance to millions of Syrians,” she said. But in order to better utilize their leverage, the United States and the EU need to define a clearer position demonstrating that while Damascus might not get things for free, there are achievable outcomes short of regime change that would elicit Western reciprocity, Khalifa added. “The starting point in negotiations can’t be that ‘Damascus won’t budge.’ The Syrian government, like any other conflict party, has and will continue to somewhat compromise when it feels like it has no other choice than to do so—at least as long as these compromises don’t touch the core of the regime.”

AND

Regional investors are keen to partake in Syria’s reconstruction and in exchange push the Syrian government to contain Iran. Last year, Jordan convinced the United States to let Egyptian gas and Jordanian electricity pass through Syrian territory to end Lebanon’s energy crisis but in the process also aid the Syrian economy. That move left analysts befuddled who wondered why the Biden administration had not leveraged sanctions and asked for something in return instead of handing out the concession for free. Andrew Tabler, a fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said: “To give everything in exchange for nothing is not wise.”

Article #2:

“I don’t think that this license will suddenly open the floodgates and allow for unhindered humanitarian access and delivery in Syria,” said Delaney Simon, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group’s US program. “There are just too many other access issues. But I hope that the license will ease the concerns of financial providers, the private sector and other actors, to show them that sanctions won’t be a risk for them to engage in Syria.”

AND

In announcing the license that grants a temporary reprieve for the regime, the deputy treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, said: “I want to make very clear that US sanctions in Syria will not stand in the way of life-saving efforts for the Syrian people. While US sanctions programs already contain robust exemptions for humanitarian efforts, today Treasury is issuing a blanket general license to authorize earthquake relief efforts so that those providing assistance can focus on what’s needed most: saving lives and rebuilding.”

AND

But since Damascus, along with allies like China and Russia, are eager to cast western sanctions as worsening the humanitarian situation, Washington’s exemption has its uses, Lister [Charles Lister, director of the Middle East Institute’s Syria program] said. “Sanctions is a complete side point, virtually irrelevant in terms of the flow of humanitarian assistance,” he said. “A lot of the complaints that we’re hearing around sanctions at the moment are just so, kind of, hypocritical, especially when they’re coming from supporters of the regime or from the Russians.”

Article #3:

At a press conference Tuesday in Damascus, Syrian Arab Red Crescent head Khaled Hboubati said his group is “ready to deliver relief aid to all regions of Syria, including areas not under government control.” He called for the European Union to lift its sanctions on Syria in light of the massive destruction caused by the earthquake.

Aid convoys and rescuers from several countries, notably key ally Russia, as well as the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Iran, and Algeria, have landed in airports in government-held Syria.

Still, the sanctions exacerbate the “difficult humanitarian situation,” Hboubati said. “There is no fuel even to send (aid and rescue) convoys, and this is because of the blockade and sanctions,” he said.

So far, the U.S. and its allies have resisted attempts at creating a political opening by way of the disaster response. U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters Monday that it would be “ironic, if not even counterproductive, for us to reach out to a government that has brutalized its people over the course of a dozen years now.”

Price said the U.S. would continue to provide aid through “humanitarian partners on the ground.”

Similarly, a spokesperson for the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office said the “sanctions regime was put in place in response to human rights violations and other abuses by the regime and their cronies.”

[virtue-and-beneviolence]

When I first saw timeskip Shuji I was shook. Because he just seemed like such a wild and spontaneous person that I couldn't believe that he was in a suit and was "obedient" enough to still be in the same gang as a higher up. A lot of documents and overall work hours are put into it. Kinda like a CFO, organized crime has similar structure. I know he always stuck by Kisaki but the fact the he matured enough to have a stable job, even if it's criminal had me shocked. Lol

And I headcanon that Kisaki took him along when shopping for suits because Hanma would've still be walking around in sweats and sandals.

This this this! He seems so deeply apathetic everytime we see him after time skips. "Oh. Meh. Thought I'd get you both at the same time. Oh well." Whomp whomp. I mean it reminds me of his origin story when he was like just a giraffe in middle school with hand tats, bored that no one could really rival him. If I'm thinking in terms of cannon, the bulk of what we see for him is that sensation seeker side, right? And he gets jaded as fuck once the danger is gone bc he's the best at fighting. He was more oriented toward the risk than the power.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the idea of smartass, power corrupted shuji who likes to flaunt his being above the law, but where's the adrenaline fix in being so thoroughly untouchable? Doesn't he seem the type to steal/cause problems just to get chased or caught/escape? Is there enough of a rush of you know you'll succeed after a while? (Okay sorry that's my guilty pleasure art thief shuji thoughts)

Anyway lmao I totally agree that I almost feel like the exec life is too stable for him. I assume his thrills gotta be chemically induced now. Fics do a him a service by giving him hands on shit to do. But I almost wonder if because he has to reign in his impulses (oh fun buzzword) so much in the timeskip, if he's more of a 6 shots deep ft. russian roulette guy in his free time. Maybe that's a sad hot take but adrenaline junkies share so many traits of addicts that homeboy has to still be getting the fix somehow, right? Kisaki is providing his good ol pal with SOMETHING that's keeping him there. Drugs, partners, idk ppl to interrogate?

Also yes kisaki had someone burn half of shujis closet (and house) and replace it with fuckin Armani suits or someth after hanma showed up to one too many exec meetings in sweats. Change my mind.

(thanks for prompting and coming to my ted talk ❤️🥺)

[theculturedmarxist]

14 OCTOBER—What causes national and civilizational decline? Can such decline be reversed? Is the American empire, with its hundreds of overseas military bases, destined for the historical graveyard wherein lie the corpses of all the once-grand empires of the past?

The U.S. currently exhibits multiple signs of national senescence to state the obvious. On the domestic front, the decay includes: a failed response to the Covid–19 pandemic, a pandemic of prescription drug overdoses-and a grotesque judicial settlement protecting the perpetrators, a catastrophic drought in the western half of the country and catastrophic storms elsewhere, infrastructure decay, extreme income inequality, a rent-extracting healthcare system that is one of the worst performing in the Western world, and a hollowed out industrial base.

In terms of military and foreign policy, the decay has manifested in the form of a wave of technical impotence and imperial over-extension: most prominently, a $2 trillion, two-decade failure in Afghanistan, a failure to abide by the standards of a treaty intended to govern Iran’s nuclear programs (perversely leading to an acceleration of said programs), a $1 trillion failure in Iraq (ironically leading to the expansion of Iranian influence in Iraq), a  $1.5 trillion expenditure on the ineffective F–35 fighter plane, being outclassed by Russian hypersonic missile technology, incessant, Sinophobic saber rattling, and, the most glaring example of American foreign failure, the emergence of an alliance among Russia, Iran, and China, induced in no small measure by hawkish American policies.

With all this in view, is it even possible America will prove an exception to the apparently inevitable force of historical decline?  Does the U.S. face a real-world version of Galadriel’s test in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga? Galadriel, an elf-like queen who is offered and resists the One Ring, a magical device that corrupts and eventually destroys any wielder, states: “I pass the test…. I will diminish, and pass into the West and remain Galadriel.”

What is our American “One Ring”? It is the myth of American exceptionalism, the assumption that we cannot fail, is it not? Is the consciousness of ourselves as humanity’s exceptions not the license we grant ourselves as we transgress every single one of the ideals that are—let us not miss this—the very basis of our claim to chosen-people status?

[nanshe-of-nina]

Favorite History Books || Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him by Donald Rayfield ★★★★☆

I have tried, rather than write a new biography of Stalin or another history of the USSR, to examine Stalin’s path to total power and the means—and the men—which enabled him to hold on to it. The careers and personalities of Stalin’s henchmen occupy the foreground, especially the five who headed the security forces and secret police which we call by a sequence of different names: the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission), GPU and OGPU ([United] State Political Directorate), NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs), and MGB (Ministry of State Security). After Stalin, the latter became known as the KGB and is today the Russian FSB. Of these five—Feliks Dzierżyński, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, and Lavrentiy Beria—the last two were appointed by Stalin, while the first three were induced to do his bidding. They were the instruments of a mind more malevolent than theirs. They looked after the means, while Stalin looked after the end. A study of their motivations and actions sheds a strong light on Stalin’s tyranny.

Every country has a heritage which its heirs cannot easily renounce, but Russia’s fate in the twentieth century cannot be dismissed as that of a barbarous, semifeudal country erupting into primeval violence. Russia in the 1900s and 1910s lagged behind the rest of Europe economically; its political institutions had grave flaws. But the culture that gave the world novelists like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy also had historians, newspaper magnates, philosophers, lawyers, doctors, and politicians the equal of any in the world. It had a small, highly motivated middle and professional class, as well as a gentry and merchant class that had not lost its social coherence. Nineteenth-century Russia was more brutal, corrupt, and ignorant than England or France, but not by many orders of magnitude.

[mariacallous]

In an article published last month in the scholarly journal Russian Politics, U.S. State Department Senior Analyst of Russian Politics Robert Otto challenges the theory — now common among anti-Kremlin dissidents and widespread in the West — that Vladimir Putin ordered the Federal Security Service (FSB) to bomb multiple apartment buildings in September 1999 in a murderous scheme to boost his presidential momentum. Otto argues that a plot by the oligarch Boris Berezovsky and Internal Affairs (MVD) Minister Vladimir Rushailo — intended to destabilize Russia’s domestic situation and delay the 2000 presidential election, not to ensure Putin’s rise — is the likelier explanation.

Otto focuses on the evidence presented by Mikhail Trepashkin, the ex-FSB officer whose allegations against the agency fuel claims that Putin ordered the bombings to help himself. Otto notes that Trepashkin identified one of the men who rented staging grounds for one of the attacks as Vladimir Romanovich, though Romanovich apparently died months before September 1999. A less obvious but more important strike against Trepashkin’s credibility is that Romanovich was part of an extortion ring scandal (the 1995 Bank Soldi affair) that linked corrupt officials in the FSB, MVD, and Defense Ministry to Chechen fighters. In his telling of the September 1999 events, Trepashkin described the Bank Soldi affair as intrepid police work led by then Moscow Regional Administration for Organized Crime (RUOP) chief Vladimir Rushailo. But the RUOP, explains Otto, was a kind of criminal protection racket itself and hardly the crew of white knights Trepashkin depicts.

Citing other evidence and reviewing rumors about the role political operative Stanislav Belkovsky allegedly played in strategizing a false flag operation involving apartment bombings, Otto speculates that Boris Berezovsky likely joined forces with Rushailo (his close ally at the MVD who had already helped him finance Chechen rebels through ransom payments to kidnappers) in order to thwart the rising political tandem of former Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov and Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. However, the whole thing went sideways when Berezovsky’s disgruntled protégés outmaneuvered him by getting Yeltsin to resign and force an election for Putin before Berezovsky could line up his preferred successor. Otto concludes that Putin and the Yeltsin clan nevertheless remain complicit in the bombings for failing to investigate them properly and for exploiting the atmosphere they induced.

[nychellraiser]

VILLAIN ALIAS : lucifer

coming from a religious house, taeyong was often faced with shouts of “devil child” from his parents. he took the name-calling to heart and turned it around into his identity. he didn’t decide on the name ‘til he began meeting with rowan and maverick.

BIRTH NAME : min taeyong

OTHER NAMES : yong(ie), luci, tae, devil child, demon blood

BIRTHDAY : august 15th, 1998

SEXUALITY : heterosexual

PRONOUNS : he/him

BIRTH PLACE : busan, south korea

LANGUAGES SPOKEN : korean, english

taeyong is a highly independent person. he believes that if he wants something done, he’ll have to do it himself. despite having his “do it yourself” mentality he can work with others should he be forced to, especially if it’s for the betterment of his conditions. he tries his best to be flexible. taeyong likes to account for (almost) every possibility so he’ll be prepared for anything. he’s known to be a skilled strategist for the hellraisers, changing plans in the heat of the moment has become his main strength. he likes a challenge so he can push himself to become better with his skills. forcing himself into poor situations have been the best way to hone his decision-making, especially when on important missions for his team even if it means putting them in danger.

in order to keep up appearances in his normal life taeyong has forced himself to live two separate lives. deceiving others has become second nature to him, even though those people may think of him as an important part of their lives. he takes on the persona of an irritable, sarcastic, but caring young adult that looks up to heroes like the avengers and spider-man.

FACECLAIM : kim jungwoo (nct 127)

HEIGHT : 5′11 (180cm)

AFFILIATION : hellraisers

POWERS : demon physiology

enhanced condition : taeyong's physical and mental abilities are above the peak human levels of other beings in his universe. this entails that he is faster, stronger, more intelligent and overall superior to beings at peak human level

weapon creation : taeyong can create weapons by shaping the existing matter or energy, he is capable of creating virtually any weapon and however many he wishes, so long as he has seen it before

apathy : taeyong can suppress or negate emotions in himself, allowing him to ignore emotional distractions, suffering from psychological/emotional stress, and feeling from affecting his thinking processes

corruption : taeyong is able to corrupt the people around him. depending on how clear their conscience is, they may take longer to corrupt. prolonged exposure to taeyong can also cause the corruption

telepathy : taeyong can read/sense another person's thoughts, communicate with them mentally or affect their minds/thoughts

fear inducement : taeyong can evoke and increase fear and horror in others causing the target’s brain to release fear-inducing chemicals. their perception may be altered, causing them to see their environment as ominous and him as a dark and foreboding monster

nightmare manipulation : taeyong can create, shape, enter and manipulate the nightmares of others, including modifying, suppressing, fabricating, influencing, manifesting, sensing, observing nightmares and turning dreams into nightmares. the overwhelming shock, fear, anxiety and terror can prove too suffocating for the victim in which their hearts might explode or brains might die. his power extends to the real world, such as wounds inflicted on a sleeping victim and even pulling someone from the waking world into the dream world

semi-immortality : taeyong cannot age, and as a result, he will stay young forever or at least never suffer the ravages of aging. he will retain his appearance of a twenty year old until someone finally kills him

luck manipulation : this ability cannot be controlled and it activates randomly. theoretically speaking, if he were to play russian roulette, he would get the empty chamber each time

he has two sisters with powers. min taeyeon, his older sister, is the heads to his tails. she has angelic powers that perfectly oppose him, though she would defeat him in a fight due to the difference in experience. min taemi, his younger sister, is a mix between her two older siblings. taemi is written as a fallen angel, a corrupted angel from being around taeyong.

taeyong moved to the states in 2014 with taeyeon and taemi. taeyeon had assumed responsibility of her younger siblings after their parents tried to abandon the younger two once they learned the truth of their powers.

he had a hard time making friends in high school, especially after moving at an awkward age. rowan and maverick had been living in the same apartment complex, which is how he met them and began scheming with the two older kids.