Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage says it is high time that the Liberal government treats Alberta’s oil and gas reserves as a strategic asset, and not a liability to be phased out to the detriment of energy security.
Speaking at a press conference on March 11, Savage said the Russian invasion of Ukraine has put a spotlight on the weakness of North America’s energy policy, affirming the need to continue producing oil and gas to counter any supply disruption.
Just over a week ago I met a group of young men who had volunteered at a centre in Kyiv to fight for Ukraine.
Most of them were in their late teens, not long out of school. They told me that after three days’ basic training they would head for the front line – or very close to it.
Maksym Lutsyk, a 19-year-old biology student, told me he wasn’t fazed about trying to become a soldier after less than a week of instruction. He’d manage, after five years in the Scouts, not just learning backwoods skills, but also some weapons training. He was 10 when Ukraine’s long war with separatists sponsored by Moscow started in 2014.
Ukraine mourns its fallen as Zelenskiy says 1,300 soldiers killed
Ukraine’s announcement that at least 1,300 of its soldiers have been killed so far during Russia’s invasion has been accompanied by an increasingly public acknowledgement of the country’s losses.
Sombre funeral processions have become a daily sight, with photographs showing rows of flag-draped coffins being delivered for their funerals in cities including Lviv – with its historic garrison church of St Peter and St Paul.
When he launched his invasion of Ukraine over two weeks ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared like a man who knew what he was doing. In his televised session with the High Council of National Security, he gave the impression that he had a precise war plan with clear objectives.
Now, however, the possibility of that impression having been wrong cannot be dismissed. In other words: What if the Great Vladimir doesn’t know what he is doing or, worse still, doesn’t know what he wants?
During WW II Soviet generals would ask one another about their typically substantial losses in such callous terms of “How many pencils did you break.” Putin may have suffered up to 10K in deaths so far in a war he didn’t have to fight. He was winning by posturing and would have been rewarded for his patience.
The Walt Disney Co. has announced it is suspending all business in Russia in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The decision comes as Disney continues its close relationship with China despite the CCP’s well-established record of invasion and human rights atrocities.
A new group of social media stars are surging on TikTok: Mental health influencers. Most of them are teen girls and young women who post videos of themselves experiencing symptoms, like Tourette’s tics or rapid switches from one personality to another due to borderline personality disorder. Others, often without any medical credentials, post videos that help viewers “self-diagnose” their own mental conditions.
These videos are getting billions of views. On TikTok alone, the hashtag #BPD (borderline personality disorder) has 3.7 billion views, #bipolar 2 billion, and #DID (dissociative identity disorder) another 1.5 billion.
… We were told they were strong, minus the nukes, mostly because they were big, and that assumption continues to this day. But their actions in Ukraine are not that of a world-class military, not by a long-shot. It’s more like a drunken douchebag indiscriminately launching rockets, quite possibly because they lack anything with precision. We can drop a missile down a chimney with the accuracy of Santa Claus, but what if the Russians couldn’t even hit a brick in a brick factory?
Russian military’s corruption quagmire
“There are also reports that Russian advances in Ukraine were slowed by lack of fuel — and this in a country rich with oil and gas. But ineffective control over fuel consumption in the Russian military actually long preceded the war in Ukraine and had historically created opportunities for embezzlement — that is why fuel is often called the Russian military’s “second currency.” It is plausible that the long-standing tradition of corruption in fuel supply decreased the pace of Russian advancement in Ukraine.
It is also important to remember that the weapons currently targeting Ukraine were produced despite this level of corruption. Meanwhile, many technological innovations, including those that could increase the precision of Russian strikes, have never materialized due to graft, embezzlement and fraud.”
Interesting article on corruption – Thank you Oligarchs!
#Ukraine: The 10th Mountain Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian Army claimed to repel Russian attacks, and captured a (working) T-80BVM tank, MT-LB, a UR-77 Meterorit mine clearing vehicle, and a BMP-2. pic.twitter.com/JYGwVV6GDQ
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 13, 2022
#Ukraine: Russian forces abandoned a PAK-200 field kitchen truck.
As you can see, it doesn’t look very pleasant inside. pic.twitter.com/Az6reX2P57
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 13, 2022
As we’ve discussed here in the past, the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), created to study observed incidents of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs or just UFOs), was replaced by the UAP Task Force, and then by a new office with the annoyingly unpronounceable acronym of AOIMSG. All of the congressional activity revolving around this subject over the past couple of years has suggested that we were finally going to be seeing a bit more transparency out of the military and intelligence communities in terms of what they actually know about the entire UFO situation and what, if anything, they propose to do about it.
Russia’s space program has apparently threatened to leave an American astronaut aboard the International Space Station as it comes crashing down to Earth in a video shared by Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti.
Mark Vande Hei, a married 55-year-old father of two from Texas, is scheduled to return to Kazakhstan from the International Space Station (ISS) with two Russian cosmonauts aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on March 30 after spending nearly a year on board.
Brother Claims Jussie Smollett Placed in Psych Ward: ‘He Is in No Way, Shape, or Form at Risk of Self-Harm‘
“Jussie is currently in a psych ward at the Cook County Jail,” Jocqui Smollett said in a video posted to the Empire actor’s Instagram. “What’s very concerning is that there was a note attached to his paperwork today and put on the front of his jail cell saying that he’s at risk of self-harm.”
A Ukrainian monastery sheltering 1,000 people was struck by Russian missiles and a train heading to pick up evacuees was damaged by bomb debris last night as more than 2.6 million people have fled the country.
Families, including 200 children, sheltering in the Svyatogorsk Lavra, an Orthodox Christian monastery in the Donetsk region, were left terrified after it was damaged by a missile last night.
The monastery says the bomb exploded 50 metres from a bridge at the entrance to the site, injuring a number of people.
Huge equipment losses.
#Ukraine: The losses of the Russian army from the previous days keep appearing – a T-80BVM tank and Msta-S 152mm self-propelled howitzer, which were destroyed by the Ukrainian forces. pic.twitter.com/Tz87Mdg0yj
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 13, 2022
Russians have a sense of humour!
russia has attacked the International Center for Peacekeeping&Security near Lviv.Foreign instructors work here.Information about the victims is being clarified.This is new terrorist attack on peace&security near the EU-NATO border.Action must be taken to stop this.Close the sky!
— Oleksii Reznikov (@oleksiireznikov) March 13, 2022
h/t Billy
The race to become the next Conservative leader is officially on, with several declared candidates and a formal set of rules to guide the campaign.
So far, Pierre Poilievre, Jean Charest, Leslyn Lewis and Roman Baber are in the race, which culminates in a winner being announced on Sept. 10. More Conservatives, such as Patrick Brown and Scott Aitchison are expected to launch their own bids, the former on Sunday. Other prominent Conservatives, most recently Peter MacKay and earlier this week MP Michael Chong, have said they won’t be joining the fray.
A captured Russian soldier spoke about the use of “execution squads” to eliminate deserters as tensions within the Russian military rise, Interfax-Ukraine reported on Saturday.
It seems Putin does not believe in his own army and resorts to Stalinist methods of controlling soldiers.
“However, this does not save him from the riots that have already begun to arise among the Russian military.” Another captured soldier has said during questioning conducted by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) according to Interfax.
A report by Le Figarp, tells of French hospitals heavily infiltrated by Islamists where doctors refuse to treat women and Jews
… But how many territories are we talking about?
Officially the DGSE, the general directorate of internal security, has mapped 150 French districts “in the possession” of the Islamists, as revealed by the weekly Journal du dimanche. In Le Figaro, the historian Georges Bensoussan, who edited the book “The Lost Territories of the Republic” ten years ago, explained that “more than 500 districts in France are declared ‘sensitive’. To put it bluntly, we are talking about several million people who are subject to Islamist law ”.
Brent Renaud, an award-winning US film-maker whose work has appeared in the New York Times and other outlets, has been killed by Russian forces in the flashpoint town of Irpin, outside Kyiv. A US photographer, Juan Arredondo, was wounded.
Renaud, 51, was hit in the neck and died after coming under Russian fire while working on Sunday, according to local police officials and multiple Ukrainian sources.
GUNTER: More falsehoods about the convoy are now being retracted
The CBC has retracted a second story it reported about the Freedom Convoy that turned out to be fake.
The first was the absurd allegation that somehow Russians were behind the scenes pulling the convoy’s strings in an effort to destabilize the Canadian government.
The CBC was just doing its job as instructed by the Trudeau Liberal Party – reporting fake news.
