But, first he gives a history lesson. Full article translated from Russian:

Quote:Points of no return

Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev on the causes of the current geopolitical crisis and the guarantee of preserving the future for the whole world

Last year's anniversary - the 100th anniversary of the formation of the USSR - took place against the backdrop of tectonic processes that originated three decades ago and in 2022 provoked powerful, destructive upheavals. With a metallic roar, the foundations of the world order of the post-Soviet period collapsed, which until recently was considered, if not the best, but still more or less familiar. The international airbags did not work, and now the cracks are going wide and deep into the entire peacekeeping system on the planet.

The reasons for what is happening are looking for in the legacy of a long and relatively new history. After all, what we are seeing now happened more than once - at the moment when another world empire came to the end of its existence.

Let us turn to the events of the relatively recent past, which many of us have witnessed. The beginning of the tragedy that is unfolding today in Ukraine was laid at the end of the last century. Specifically, at the moment when the Soviet Union collapsed. The powerful country for a long time rested on post-war agreements and mutual interests of the participating countries, on bloc confrontation and nuclear missiles, on food supplies to its satellites, on tractors and tanks, on “socialist realism”, although the communist regime lasted much less than the centuries-old Russian empire.

I will not delve into what motives motivated the political leaders, through whose efforts the USSR collapsed so quickly. As in the arguments about who undermined the Soviet Union: the machinations of external enemies, an uncompetitive economy or an arms race. It is likely that his last leader, who left in the year of the centenary of the Union, sincerely believed that he was acting for the benefit of the multinational people of the great state, the head of which he became after the notorious "carriage race." At the same time, the leaders of the union republics cynically cared only about becoming the heads of independent states created on the still smoking remains of a large country. One way or another, then there were Foros and the August coup. And the end of the USSR, which remained for the older generation a beloved Fatherland and a wonderful dream of justice.

The Western world looked down on all this, with an arrogant squint of a winner and a sense of clear superiority. Thinking only about how to satisfy their selfish interests. And by all means continuing to push our country into the abyss to completely eliminate its longtime rival. All the good talk about equal partnership, a brave new world without dividing lines, and other beautiful-hearted rubbish was only a distraction. And they turned out to be just meaningless formulas that masked the perverted designs of our eternal enemies.

The various politicians who took power in the new Russia could not cope with the threat that had arisen. Someone due to thoughtlessness, lack of political culture and experience, and someone - sincerely mistaken in the intentions of our "new friends". Hard times have come: people are rapidly sliding into poverty, and the backbone sectors of the economy, which have fallen under the avalanche of privatization, have fallen into decay. Separatism flourished, hot spots formed inside the country, the Caucasus was on fire.

The then authorities - the presidents of the USSR and the RSFSR Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin - were often credited with the fact that after the death of the "communist monster" they managed to prevent anything resembling a civil war, as after the October 24, 1917 coup. It is both so and not so. The critical mass of discontent could turn into a full-fledged civil confrontation, on the threshold of which we found ourselves in 1993. But at that time no one tried to actively fan the fire of the conflict from abroad, because the Western world was satisfied with a weak, defeated, submissive Russia. All this will begin a little later, in the mid-90s. Yes, and our multinational people then showed wisdom, not allowing to "shake" the country and provoke destructive internal aggression.

The main thing that can be added as a plus to the leadership of the collapsed USSR and the first head of its successor Russia is that they did not make the most terrible mistake: they did not allow its most powerful nuclear potential to be pulled apart on the patchwork quilt newly formed on the site of a great country.

At the cost of incredible efforts, Russia gradually overcame the most difficult times. It forced them to reckon with themselves at the international level, fully paid off their external debt, and took up the restoration of the economy and the social sphere. She returned respect for her armed forces, continued to pursue a policy of nuclear deterrence and did not allow provocations.

But history is relentless. Rome and Constantinople. Arab caliphs and Genghis Khan. The rise and inglorious death of Napoleon. "Sunset" in the colonies of mighty Britain. Europe of Charlemagne. Incas and Persians. Ottoman Empire and Tsarist Russia. On which of these pages you open the volumes of the world chronicle, you will find the same thing. After the heyday of the empire and its golden age, there is a long way to the same final: to disintegration and war or war and disintegration. This is the world law. And so it happened with us, with the USSR, only in a delayed version. The war could have happened earlier, in the 1990s, in the first two decades of the 21st century, but it has flared up now. This development of events is connected with the inexorable and cruel course of world history. A large country dies - a war begins. Sooner or later. The accumulated internal contradictions and resentments are too strong. Dense nationalism, primitive envy and greed arise. And, of course, the strongest catalyst for war after the death of an empire is always the countries around it, which want to further divide the collapsed power. In our case, it was the frostbitten and cynical position of the Western world. The Anglo-Saxon civilization, completely outraged by its impunity, which simply went crazy on the basis of the ideas of exclusivity and fictitious messianism.

Two dates can be considered as points of no return. The first was in the fall of 2008, when the Western world supported Georgia's aggression against the Ossetian people and lifted to the skies the fool, drug addict and adventurer, who was later rejected not only by his own country, but also by a foreign one, where he cowardly fled. The aggressor was then given a quick and firm rebuff.

The second turning point is the spring of 2014, when the people of Crimea expressed their will in a legal referendum, returning forever to their historical homeland. In the Western world, this caused a frenzied, impotent hysteria, which continues to this day. Their convulsions are fueled by cavernous Russophobia and the desire to create a newly-minted Frankenstein in the person of Ukraine - a special “anti-Russia”, about which the president of our country wrote. What else is there to say? Only one thing: the wise predecessors of today's brainless Western politicians said this: Deus quos vult perdere dementat prius - whom God wants to punish, first deprives him of reason. It was this insane hysteria, the obsessive desire to tear apart our country that ultimately led to a special military operation.

History also demonstrates something else: any collapsed empire buries half the world under its ruins, or even more. It seems that those who first destroyed the USSR and now are trying to destroy the Russian Federation do not want to comprehend this. They have delusional illusions that, having sent the Soviet Union to the other world without a single shot, they will be able to bury present-day Russia without significant problems for themselves, throwing the lives of thousands of people involved in the conflict into the furnace. These are extremely dangerous misconceptions. As with the USSR it will not work. If the question of the existence of Russia itself is seriously raised, it will not be decided on the Ukrainian front. And together with the question of the further existence of the entire human civilization. And there should be no ambiguity here. We don't need a world without Russia.

Of course, one could continue to pump weapons into the neo-fascist Kiev regime and block any opportunity to revive negotiations. Our enemies are doing just that, not wanting to understand that their goals obviously lead to a total fiasco. Lose for everyone. collapse. Apocalypse. When the former life will have to be forgotten for centuries, until the smoky blockages cease to emit radiation.

Russia will not allow this. And we are not alone in this endeavor. Western countries with satellites - only 15% of the world's population. There are many more of us, and we are much stronger. The calm power of our great country and the authority of its partners are the key to preserving the future for our entire world.

I think he covers what has been going on for the last several years quite well. An invasion could be broken down into four steps: Infiltration... (the "long march through institutions" is what the Chinese actually call the program)....Collaboration.. buying and enticing useful idiots to sing your song of propaganda ... Destruction...but not in the way you might expect... and finally Subjugation which can take many forms such as silencing dissenting voices.. I do believe most thinking people can see much of what he says is really happening.

Good write-up about the danse macabre of public officials drinking all that dubious water in East Palestine, and elsewhere.

Quote:You’ve seen it before. An industrial disaster poisons a town’s food or water supply. Residents get angry. Public officials try to dispel that anger through a public act of self-sacrifice, of reassurance. They convene a press conference, whereupon some hapless courtier brings forth a chalice of the supposedly poisoned material. And then, in front of God and the television cameras, the public official imbibes.

Examples from recent history abound. In 2019, former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe ate possibly irradiated rice balls from Fukushima to demonstrate the progress made toward rebuilding the prefecture since its 2011 nuclear meltdown. In 2013, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper claimed he drank fracking fluid to assuage his constituents’ concerns around natural gas drilling. (Not “tasty,” he said.) And, most famous of all, in 2016 Barack Obama took a sip of (filtered) water from the lead-poisoned water supply of Flint, Michigan, to prove it was safe. (“This is not a stunt,” he noted of the stunt.)

Officials are already lining up to drink the forbidden poison issuing from East Palestine, Ohio. When a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed there earlier this month, producing an airborne toxic event of hazardous chemicals, concerns about the water inevitably arose. Enter one Troy Nehls, a Republican congressman from Texas, who became the first intrepid soul through the breach. On February 16, Nehls—who was inexplicably in Ohio, some fourteen hundred miles away from his district—posted a video to Twitter to get word out that the water was safe. To prove it, Nehls slurped it up. This was promptly followed by a video from Ohio lieutenant governor Jon Husted, wherein a group of public officials huddled together and threw back shots of supposed tap water like they were freshman college students out on the town.

But Nehls and Husted were just the undercard features. On February 21, following reports that Norfolk Southern had funded preliminary tests declaring the water totally safe, Ohio’s Republican governor Mike DeWine and a merry caravan, including an EPA official and a congressman, stalked around East Palestine with news cameras, gamely drinking from residents’ taps. (“That’s good,” the EPA official gushed. “That’s really cold coming from the tap.”) The photos and videos from this danse macabre mirrored Husted’s, but on a grander scale—half a dozen people standing around, toasting and clashing cups together like they were at a medieval banquet. If these dizzying trends hold, it’s probably a matter of time before Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, or even President Biden, follows suit.

Years ago, I surveyed the literature looking for a name or term to describe this phenomenon of consuming potentially tainted materials. After all, it seemed to be increasing in frequency, and I’d even started witnessing it at the level of local politics. But if there was a name, I couldn’t find it. So I gave it one: the Devil’s Milkshake.

The Devil’s Milkshake is bipartisan. Neither Democrats nor Republicans hold monopoly on it. Which means it can be multiple things, depending on who wields it. To some, it’s cynical political theater, meant to make the politician look invincible and brave. To others, it can be a genuine—yet transparently phony—attempt at showing solidarity. And to others still, it abets a kind of mass hysteria, in which public officials feel increasingly pressured to outdo each other for attention and admiration.

The Devil’s Milkshake can also be an effective way for a public official to shirk any commitment to doing something about the conditions that gave rise to the disaster in the first place. One time I was at a town hall in Martin County, Kentucky, where the water system has been degraded by years of coal mining, corruption, and neglect. Residents were getting sick, and they’d convened the town hall to demand action from the local government. But instead of committing to any substantive action, one local official ran to the front of the hall and demanded a glass of that sweet local tap, so he could drink it right there on the spot, and thus prove that nothing needed changing. A few awkward minutes passed, wherein the crowd grew uncomfortable with the prospect of witnessing a man poison himself in public. So they talked the official down. To this day, Martin County’s water is still unsafe to drink.

It’s likely the Devil’s Milkshake is a modern phenomenon. After all, medieval rulers used to employ taste testers precisely in order to avoid being poisoned. But historical examples are nonetheless difficult to track down because the phenomenon has been heretofore unnamed. So I’ve had to crowdsource its history. It’s clear, reviewing this data, that public officials have had to tweak, refine, and workshop the spectacle; it developed over time through a process of trial and error.

A PhD student at Indiana University, Justin Hawkins, sent me what is perhaps the earliest historical example. In the 1850s, New York City was in the middle of an adulterated milk scandal. Across the country, thousands of infants were dying every year from milk cut with “swill”—excess mash from nearby distilleries, whitened with plaster and drained of nutrients. Tammany Hall sent an Alderman named Michael Tuomey to investigate. But Tuomey vigorously defended the dairy owners and their milk supply. While visiting one dairy, Tuomey threw back some whiskey with the farmers, concluded the milk was perfectly safe, and slandered anyone who thought otherwise as “prejudice[d].” But, as Hawkins points out, it’s unclear whether or not Tuomey’s stunt was performed before a crowd. This highlights a crucial ingredient in the Devil’s Milkshake formula: for it to be a proper Devil’s Milkshake, it must be performed in public, or at least in front of cameras.

The second criteria of the Devil’s Milkshake is that one must actually go through with it. This example came to me by way of a researcher friend, Jack Norton. It’s the story of New York governor Hugh Carey who, in 1981, volunteered to drink a big glass of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, from a contaminated state office building in order “to satisfy the unions” that the building was safe. Carey, however, was warned that doing so might actually make him sick, and so he reportedly did not follow through. He nonetheless displayed a curious willingness to put his body on the line for the sake of scoring political points.

Occasionally, the Devil’s Milkshake can be fobbed off on the inferiors or family members of the elected official trying to harness its powers. To illustrate this, we turn to our cousins across the pond. In 1990, four years after the fatal mad cow disease was discovered in Britain’s beef supply, the nation’s agriculture minister, John Selwymn Gummer, carted his four-year-old daughter before news cameras and tried to feed her an “absolutely delicious” hamburger. Six years later, researchers confirmed humans could be infected with the degenerative neurological disease—and in 2007, the daughter of a Gummer family friend died of it. Perhaps Gummer’s logic was that of a hostage taker: if his audience saw his craven recklessness, they, too, might be willing to put their lives on the line to make beef sales go up.

But perhaps the grimmest example of the Devil’s Milkshake is that of Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori and his fisheries minister, Felix Alberto Canal Torres. This story was sent to me by Twitter user @JimmyFalunGong. In 1991, cholera was spreading throughout Peru by way of raw fish, resulting in massive profit losses to the Peruvian fishing industry. In order to get the industry back on its feet, President Fujimori and Minister Torres chowed down on some raw fish live on television, hoping to encourage the public to do the same. Unfortunately, the epidemic wore on for months, eventually killing over three thousand people, and Minister Torres reportedly wound up hospitalized with cholera, no doubt acquired from the raw fish.


The Gummer and Fujimori-Torres debacles show that, from the very beginning, the Devil’s Milkshake was always just that: a deal with the devil. A gamble. One that, if successful, could pay enormous dividends. But, if unsuccessful, could be very embarrassing. Perhaps that’s why nowadays, the Devil’s Milkshake is most likely just a stage trick. When that aide brings out the chalice, whatever’s inside almost certainly isn’t poison. It’s something harmless that is meant to look poisonous. (Someone on Twitter even pointed out that the officials taking shots of East Palestine’s water in lieutenant Governor Husted’s video had neglected to hide their bottle of Smart Water.) Besides, even if President Obama really did drink lead-poisoned water in Flint, his stunt missed the point: prolonged, chronic exposure is what leads to severe impairment, not a single sip. Race, class, and geography are the major determinants of environmental harm. Most people know this, which is why many Flint residents viewed Obama’s theatrics with skepticism.

Yet I would argue that leaders like President Obama are, like the constituents they seek to deceive, fully aware of this structural truth. It’s what makes the Devil’s Milkshake so strange. The stunt seems to be a tacit acknowledgement by the ruling class that they know the general public doesn’t trust them. (Only 19 percent of Americans believe they can trust the government “most of the time.”) Its recent proliferation must be seen as proof of a ruling class desperate to uphold the illusion of democracy. It is the last gasp of a dying order, drinking and eating its way to the grave, restrained or unwilling to fix anything, and thus doomed to play act a fantasy before klieg lights and newscasters. The dizzying amount of Devil’s Milkshake footage issuing from East Palestine only proves their desperation: these people could not be more unlike you. In fact, the only thing you have left in common with them is the fact that they, too, still have to eat food and drink water to stay alive. That’s it. The Devil’s Milkshake is a measure of the gaping chasm between you and them.

The sad thing is that, sometimes, the water or food in question is actually safe to consume. Watersheds can be hard to wrap your head around. A lot of hysterical and paranoid information leeched into the ether following the East Palestine toxic event. People upstream from the Ohio River worried that they, too, were at risk of exposure. Were boil water advisories fifty miles southeast in Pittsburgh related to the derailment—even though local officials said otherwise? Were birds dying in Kentucky because of the crash? All these places probably are under threat, but from other things entirely: chemical plants, microplastics, algae blooms, air pollution, you name it.

The public has by now seen so many of these large-scale pollution events that they well understand no one will be held accountable; that the clean-up will be, at best, half-assed; and that we’re just going to bide our time until the next one occurs. (Indeed, in the weeks since the East Palestine incident, a commercial tanker truck full of chemicals crashed outside Tucson, killing the driver and releasing a plume of nitric acid into the air; a train derailed in Texas, killing one; another train carrying coal derailed in Nebraska; and on and on.) People, naturally, have lost trust in their leaders to keep them safe. No amount of poisonous water consumed by governors, congressmen, or EPA officials will restore that trust.

This is why the Devil’s Milkshake is ultimately an insult to your intelligence. The point isn’t to give you actionable information about what’s going on. If it was, public officials would just do that, instead of histrionically parading around in front of the cameras to show off the sacrifice they’re making. Nor is the point to rebuild trust in institutions. After all, these figures could just fix the problems, and make our natural and infrastructural environments responsive to crises and safe to navigate.

No, the point of the Devil’s Milkshake is to arrest further complaint. To recycle anger back into “acceptable” forms of discourse and mechanisms of accountability. To move on, forget it ever happened. It’s almost as if, through this act of symbolic consumption, a public official telegraphs their willingness to die for corporate America’s sins. That, because they’re willing to literally metabolize the issue, it’s been addressed, processed, and fixed.

The problem with this is that no one ever forgets. People remember it all. Not just the fear and terror of seeing a black pillar of smoke towering over their community. Not just the health scares and medical bills, the family members and friends and pets dying before their time. Not just the agonizing mystery of it all, of wondering which recent toxic event is responsible for their debilitating sickness, or if they’re crazy for even having that thought.

They’ll also remember the most terrifying, mind-bending thing of all: that their leaders sacrificed them at the almighty altar of profit, and then mocked them for daring to question it. They’ll wake up in the middle of the night, their minds retracing the choreographed ritual of power known as the Devil’s Milkshake, their gleeful leaders sending up veritable toasts to the fact they were getting away with it all. And this remembering brings on a final realization: that the next time may be even worse.

Quote:Gun-Toting Wing of IRS Wants to ‘Put the Fear of God in People’: Ex-Agent

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) headquarters building in Washington, on Mar. 8, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

By Tom Ozimek
February 21, 2023Updated: February 22, 2023
biggersmaller
Print

0:007:54


As the Internal Revenue Service seeks to bolster the ranks of its weapon-carrying Criminal Investigation unit, a former special agent described the inner workings of the division and said its key function is “to put the fear of God in people” and intimidate Americans into tax compliance.
Former IRS Special Agent Robert Nordlander told Accounting Today, in a wide-ranging interview published on Feb. 20, that while most Americans have a sense of what IRS tax audits look like, the work of the IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) unit is shrouded in some mystery.
Dubbed “gun-toters,” the armed special agents in the unit are responsible for enforcing those parts of tax code whose violations amount to crimes, he said. “When crimes are committed, the IRS-CI are the ones that actually enforce” the law, Nordlander said.
The IRS-CI examines potential criminal activity related to tax crimes and makes recommendations for prosecution to the tax division of the Department of Justice (DOJ).
There are now around 2,100 “gun-toters” in the criminal investigations division, and the IRS—flush with funds from a new cash injection—is looking to hire more special agents.
Carissa Cutrell, a public affairs officer at IRS-CI, told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that the unit is hoping to hire between 300 and 350 special agents this year.
In the mid-1990s, the unit had around 3,500 special agents and Cutrell said they lose between 150 and 175 agents each year due to retirement and attrition.
‘Army of 87,000’ Tax Enforcers?
The idea of an “army of 87,000” new tax enforcement agents surged into the spotlight and became an internet meme after Republicans warned that the $80 billion in new IRS funding under the Inflation Reduction Act would squeeze ordinary Americans for “every last penny.”
“87,000 more IRS enforcers would make the IRS bigger than the Pentagon, the State Department, and Border Patrol COMBINED,” Republican National Committee (RNC) chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a tweet last summer, when the Inflation Reduction Act was passed and the IRS funding boost hit headlines.
President Joe Biden, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, former IRS commissioner Charles Rettig, and others have pushed back on such framing of the funding boost. They’ve insisted the money would be used to increase collections from high-earners and help with customer service, while Americans earning less than $400,000 wouldn’t face increased scrutiny from the agency.
Indeed, Yellen insisted that due to improved technology and customer service, people making less than $400,000 “will actually see a lower likelihood of audit.”
IRS officials have also said that whatever portion of the money would go toward new hires wouldn’t just be for tax enforcers.
Terry Lemons, IRS communications and liaison chief, said in an email that the new funding would be used to hire people across various departments. “In reality, the proposal would hire a variety of people across the agency to support not only enforcement but taxpayer service and technology improvements.”
Only part of the new funding will go to hire more special agents for the IRS-CI unit.
Deadly Force
Some have questioned why IRS agents would need to carry firearms at all.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson, for example, on Aug. 4, 2022, led a segment on his show by expressing concern that the government is “treating the IRS as a military agency” and is “stockpiling” ammunition.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) also raised the question of whether IRS agents need to be armed, while pointing to a 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) showing that the IRS-CI had some 2,500 rounds of ammo per armed agent.
The IRS-CI itself says agents might need to respond to “life-threatening situations” on the job, be willing and able to participate in “dangerous assignments” and protect themselves and others from physical attacks, and be willing to use “deadly force.”
And while the NRA said it’s not “difficult to be cynical about all of these new, and possibly armed, IRS agents” given Biden’s anti-gun rhetoric, the gun lobby group conceded that a “segment of the IRS does need to be armed,” given that, historically, tax laws have been used to prosecute drug traffickers and other criminals and the work of IRS-CI agents can be dangerous.
Nordlander, a former IRS-CI special agent, said agents need to carry weapons because they never know what hazards lurk behind closed doors when executing warrants.
“You don’t know if the guy is a drug dealer that happens to just file false tax returns,” he said, recalling a case where someone arrested for tax crimes ended up also being wanted for armed robbery.
In some cases, white-collar criminals can be even more dangerous than gang members who may have been in and out of prisons and have had repeated run-ins with law enforcement, he said.
“These people have a lot to lose,” Nordlander said, suggesting that some white-collar criminals who are confronted by IRS agents can react unpredictably when they realize the jig is up and their world come crashing down.
“They know that they did the fraud, and once they do the fraud, they’re going to go away for many years and their livelihood’s over with.”
While some cases do have guns-drawn moments, Nordlander estimated that around 90 percent of a special agent’s time is spent poring over bank statements, interviewing people, and doing paperwork.
“Accounting nerds” with a gun and a badge is how he described most IRS-CI special agents.
‘Fear of God’
Nordlander said in the interview that the IRS-CI unit is selective in the cases it pursues and refers to the DOJ for prosecution.
Typically, the unit focuses its resources on cases where tax crimes occur over a period of years in order to build a solid case to present before a judge and secure a high rate of conviction.
In its annual report for 2022, the IRS-CI highlighted more than 2,550 investigations and a 90.6 percent conviction rate.
Special agents last year spent around 70 percent of their time investigating tax-related crimes like tax fraud and tax evasion, according to the IRS. The other 30 percent was spent on cases related to money laundering and drug trafficking.
“Our team follows the money,” IRS-CI chief Jim Lee said in a statement.
“We’ve been doing it for more than 100 years, and we’ve followed criminals into the dark web and now into the metaverse. Tax and other financial crimes know no borders. If you violate the law and end up in the crosshairs of an IRS-CI special agent, you are likely going to jail,” he added.
Nordlander said that IRS-CI special agents think long and hard whether they’d be able to convince a jury before referring a case for prosecution.
“At the end of the day, you want the judge to think this crime is so bad that there has to be active sentence time,” he said. “Otherwise, why do this? Because the job of the IRS-CI is really to put the fear of God in people,” he continued.
“They can only take so many cases, and so if everybody’s getting probation … you’re picking the wrong cases,” he said, adding that agents pursue cases that yield sentences of several years and that are “worthy of a press release.”
“So the whole general public knows ‘don’t do this or you go to prison,’ that’s what they’re looking for.”
Cutrell told The Epoch Times that media coverage doesn’t drive case selection but instead “plays an important part in the agency’s deterrence messaging once a case is complete.”
“IRS-CI’s mission includes not only investigating criminals for crimes they’ve committed, but also deterring potential criminals from committing future crimes,” she said.
Reuters contributed to this report.

Seasons one two and three and no I have not watched any but thought someone might like the series.

This is happening to take the Persian Gulf offline. It's scorched earth strategy.




https://twitter.com/PeterZeihan/status/1...8602248192



Times of Israel


"There are very few instances when a prisoner would refuse a chance to get out of jail... In Russia, convicts have the opportunity to join the Wagner Group in exchange for a get-out-of-jail card." Wagner is considered to have low casualties because they don't count their convict cannon fodder as troops.

Quote:Wagner Group Likely 'Cut Off' From Russian Artillery Supply: ISW

The Wagner Group has reportedly lost access to its supply of weaponry by the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), according to the latest assessment from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Wagner and longtime ally to Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Monday that the Russian military had stopped providing his private mercenary group with artillery shells due to his "complicated relationships" with unspecified Russian officials, wrote the ISW.

The think tank reports that Prigozhin is likely referring to officials of the Russian MoD, as ties between the Wagner Group and Russian military continue to weaken.

"Prigozhin claimed that Wagner has 'complete shell hunger' as a result of Russian military officials ignoring his demands and introducing new limitations and restrictions on his ammunition procurement," read Monday's assessment.

As a result, Prigozhin claimed, Wagner mercenaries were facing "twice the number of causalities," the ISW wrote.

The Russian MoD has also halted Prigozhin's ability to recruit prisoners and blocked them from utilizing select Russian training grounds for its own troops. According to the Wagner founder, some Russian officers have "violated the military code" by still providing weapons to his mercenary group.

Despite sharing a friendly history with Putin, Prigozhin's troops have recently been caught in a feud with the Russian government after the two forces clashed over which troops played a leading role in Russia's advancement toward the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.

Wagner forces have played a pivotal role in Russia's invasion, but seem to be quickly losing influence in Ukraine, with the ISW previously reporting instances of Putin replacing "exhausted" Wagner troops with his own military along the front lines in the Donetsk region.

The Wagner Group has also reportedly faced heavy death tolls in its fight alongside Russia, particularly among its troops who were recruited from Russian prisons. The U.K. defense ministry reported Friday that Wagner's deployed convict recruits had likely experienced a casualty rate of up to 50 percent.

Last week, the Wagner Group blamed "hundreds" of its deaths on the Russian government in a post to its Telegram account, claiming that the Russian MoD had failed to send "weapons, ammunition and everything necessary on time" for its troops along the front lines in Ukraine.

However, on Saturday, Prigozhin continued his "informational campaign" against the Kremlin, reported the ISW, claiming that Wagner "is not subordinate to the [Russian MoD] and 'has nothing to do with the Russian Army.'"
Newsweek has reached out to the Russian MoD for comment.

Quote:Biden in Kyiv, pledges $500 million more in military aid; Japan commits $5.5 billion: Live Ukraine updates

Biden also announced an additional $500 million in weaponry for Ukraine. The State Department pegged the figure at $450 million, plus another $10 million in emergency aid for Ukraine's energy infrastructure, which has been damaged by Russian attacks.


King Charles III met with Ukrainian troops undergoing five weeks of basic training in Wiltshire, England.

A few days after his confrontational meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, China's top diplomat, Wang Yi, headed for Moscow to meet with Russian officials, possibly including President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin said.

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Pretty amazing video if you have not seen it -




https://vimeo.com/755806209

Choose a fav or two: Top 30 Songs About UFOs - Or one not on that list.

Megadeth, "Hanger 18" (1990)







Not on that list...Nina Hagen - UFO (1982)

This is some sad news IMO