Russia Is Screwed

“… Douglas London, a former CIA operations officer, writes in the Wall Street Journal that the outlook for recruiting Russians spies has rarely looked better: “Some of the CIA’s best agents have been volunteers who finally are pushed over the edge by a life-altering event and offer their services to an intelligence service. Tolkachev, Polyakov and Kuklinski were volunteers. Thanks to Mr. Putin’s deplorable behavior, I expect an increase in Russian volunteers who have toyed with the idea of doing something to better Russia’s future and might now be receptive to an encouraging nudge.” The FBI is sending Russian-language recruitment ads to cellphones in and around the Russian embassy that read: “If you have information that could help the FBI, please contact us.”

But it is in the long term — say, a generation from now — that Russia is screwed . . . really, really screwed.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inRussia

Daughter of David Haines to confront his alleged Islamic State kidnapper in US trial

The daughter of a British man murdered by Islamic State will demand to know the whereabouts of his remains when one of his alleged kidnappers goes on trial in the US this week.

Bethany Haines, 24, will fly from her home in Perthshire, Scotland, to Virginia to confront El Shafee Elsheikh in person, nearly eight years after her father, David Haines, was killed.

Haines said she would plead with Elsheikh “to do the right thing” and reveal where the remains of her father and other western hostages lie. “Don’t do it for me,” she will tell him. “Do it for my son, so that he can finally say goodbye to his grandad.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Islamophobia", Islam, Islam and violence, Islamization of the West, UK

Watchdog Sues Voice of America News for Alleged Anti-American, Pro-Islamist Reporting

 

In light of Voice of America News’ (VOA) failure to respond to dozens of FOIA requests over alleged pro-Islamic bias in its Persian reporting, the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) filed a lawsuit last week accusing VOA of withholding communications that demonstrate the broadcasting service’s role in disseminating “messages opposed to American interest.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Islamophobia", Islam, Islamization of the West, USA, WTF?

Barbara Kay: Ukraine invasion and the forgotten virtues of duty and honour

At midday on Jan 20 1943, a little girl skipping on the playground of Sandhurst Road School in southeast London waved at what she thought was an RAF bomber. It was a German plane, whose pilot “sliced her down” in a round of machine-gun fire. He then turned and released a 500 kilogram bomb onto the school building, instantly killing 32 children and six staff. Sixty others were injured, some grotesquely. Parents searched the rubble frantically for their missing children.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Ukraine - Russia"

FUREY: Enough with the panic – lifting of mask mandates has gone just fine

The way British Columbia ended their mask mandate was the best. It was a Thursday morning a couple of weeks ago and they announced that the mandate would end the very next day – in fact, a minute beyond midnight that very evening.

It didn’t give people a lot of time to react and certainly no time to lobby for its reversal. The band-aid was ripped off real quick.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"China eats weird animals disease"

We Will Delete You

How liberal democracies acquired the power to end your participation in society with the push of a button

Before beating a hasty retreat, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went where no world leader has gone before. Last month, he became the first Western leader to wield the financial system as a push-button weapon of government enforcement against opinions and behaviors that he found politically distasteful or inconvenient. This is an entirely new form of power, which much of the world has not even begun to reckon with—but which may well define our politics in the years to come.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Surveillance Society", Justin Trudeau - Pissant

Russian soldier ‘surrenders with TANK in return for £7,500 and Ukrainian citizenship

A Russian soldier has handed himself and his tank over to Ukrainian troops for a reward of $10,000 (£7,500) and a chance at Ukrainian citizenship.

Misha, one of alleged war criminal Vladimir Putin’s invading soldiers, surrendered in a T-72B3 main battle tank after his two other crewmates escaped home and his commanding officer threatened to shoot him.

Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs Victor Andrusiv said Misha had contacted Ukraine’s national police by phone and arranged a place to meet.

h/t RM

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Ukraine - Russia"

Why we no longer care about the Oscars

Today’s dull filmstar scolds have turned a must-watch event into a hypocritical bore-fest.

The Oscars used to be massive, didn’t it? A few decades ago, it was a proper big deal in the TV calendar, a seismic cultural event.

You’d read the newspaper previews and predictions for weeks ahead of the air date. You’d have your favourite films and actors, rooting for them with a fan’s fervour as if this was the Premier League (of course, it was the Canon League Division One back then, but I digress).

The morning after the prizes were handed out, you’d try to avoid all mention of who won – mam, turn off the radio! – so you could enjoy that evening’s highlights on terrestrial telly. In the pre-internet days, that was relatively easy. But regardless of knowing the results, you’d tune in later anyway and enjoy every minute.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inHollywood

Why Biden’s off-script remarks about Putin are so dangerous

Over the past week, US President Joe Biden has made a series of unscripted remarks that have upped the temperature of US-Russia relations to near boiling point.

However, his ad-libbed line at the end of what was billed as a “major speech” in Poland on Saturday – seemingly calling for President Vladimir Putin to be removed from power – may have landed the hardest.

In his speech to a crowd of assembled Polish government officials and dignitaries at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, the US president once again warned that the world was in the midst of an era-defining conflict between democracies and autocracies.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"President Dementia AKA Joe Biden", "Ukraine - Russia"

Pioneer or squatter? YouTuber’s cabin sparks fight over Canada’s wilderness

As much of North America was locked down during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Matty Clarke was in a boat full of supplies, motoring up the Yukon River. He was searching for wild lands where he could strike it rich.

“Getting myself a goldmine,” he told viewers on his YouTube channel. “Everyone’s heard about all this gold up there. You must be curious yourself – what’s actually going on up there? Can I just show up with all this stuff and end up having a goldmine? I think so.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, WTF?

Experts disagree on violent threat posed by incels in Canada

VANCOUVER — Some experts say violent online rhetoric among so-called involuntary celibates is a concern as pandemic rules lift, but others say the threat of violence is overstated among a group of men who need mental health support.

Involuntary celibates or incels are made up predominantly of young heterosexual men who feel they are unable to attract romantic partners because of their looks or social status, says the think-tank Moonshot CVE. They often blame women, sexually active men and “oppressive societal structures” for their feelings of rejection and isolation, it says.

As attacks linked to the so-called movement mounted in recent years, authorities around the world began treating it as a terrorism threat.

Incels? Seriously? This was only ever a ludicrously overblown “threat” designed to smear the “right.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inTerrorism - Domestic

From Guernica to Mariupol

Whatever the outcome of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the crisis it triggered may have one lasting effect: the return of war as a routine instrument of politics on a global scale.

Before the invasion, there was an implicit consensus that war was something that happened in the so-called “developing world,” where Arabs fought Israelis, Africans slaughtered Africans, and Indian and Pakistanis were at each other’s throats.

Europe, however, was believed to have closed its book of wars for good. The Balkan wars of the 1990s were regarded as a multi-layered civil war involving component parts of the failed Yugoslav state.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Ukraine - Russia"