- “Rishi Sunak urged to stop ‘dithering’ over Ukraine funding” – Former defence secretaries call on the Prime Minister to pledge at least another £2.3 billion to the Ukrainian war effort, reports the Telegraph.
- “Drakeford’s rotten legacy in Wales is the nightmare future under Labour” – Be under no illusions, as bad as the Tories are, Labour will be much worse, warns Simon Heffer in the Telegraph.
- “The revenge of the Blob” – In 2023, the technocratic elite made big strides towards taking back control, remarks Mick Hume in Spiked.
- “What’s going wrong at Harvard?” – Once a centre of excellence, Harvard University is now mired in allegations of campus antisemitism and racism, writes Zoe Strimpel in the Telegraph.
- “The Great Christmas Trust the Evidence quiz” – On Substack, Dr. Tom Jefferson and Prof. Carl Heneghan pose a series of questions to test their readers’ pandemic knowledge.
- “Eco developers set to ruin Peak District by building a giant solar farm the size of 120 football pitches” – Furious residents living in stunning countryside are fighting plans to build a giant solar farm the size of 120 football pitches on a 200-acre greenbelt site in Leicestershire, reports the Mail.
- “Ed Miliband accepts £230,000 donation from billionaire family” – Labour’s green champion Ed Miliband has accepted a £230,000 contribution from the billionaire family behind the Tetra Pak packaging empire known for its contribution to global landfills, reports the Mail.
- “No one wants used EVs, making new ones a tougher sell too” – Drivers don’t want to buy second hand electric vehicles, which is damaging the market for new ones, writes Monica Raiment for Bloomberg.
- “Church nativity scene featuring two mothers of Jesus sparks accusation of blasphemy” – A church nativity scene featuring two mothers of the Baby Jesus, instead of the conventional Mary and Joseph, has sparked anger in Italy, according to Sky News.
- “The trans takeover of social work” – Social workers are being bullied and coerced into accepting a dangerous ideology, writes Ken McLaughlin in Spiked.
- “All I want for Christmas is a rise in birth rates” – As a society we need to think ahead to the empty cradles and classrooms of the future and ask if we have our collective priorities right, says Peter Franklin in UnHerd.
- “The Baby Boom” – In Aporia, Arctotherium examines the Baby Boom, drawing lessons for today’s West amid declining fertility rates.
- “Doctor Who writer Russell T. Davies brought ‘racism’ into anniversary specials” – The writer of the Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials has explained how he brought “racism” into a landmark episode, reports the Telegraph. Not what the Doctor ordered.
- “Hatred, brainwashing and mass psychosis behind Democrats’ war on democracy” – On the Public Substack, Michael Shellenberger gives his take on the recent Colorado Supreme Court ruling that Trump cannot be on the ballot because he supposedly encouraged insurrection on January 6th.
- “Is America heading towards civil war?” – In the Spectator’s Americano podcast, Freddy Gray speaks to classicist, military historian and author Victor Davis Hanson about antisemitism in the U.S., the battle between Right and Left since 2016 and a future Trump presidency.
- “A Christmas Eve election surprise” – On X, Tucker Carlson interviews House of Cards’ Francis Underwood (aka Kevin Spacey) about a possible 2024 presidential run.
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Peace in Ukraine, the destruction of Hamas, standing up to China: Europe should rejoice at the prospect of the re-election of Donald Trump – it will soon be emulating his policies
‘Trump has made it clear that he will move decisively to resolve the Ukraine War by conceding Russia most of what it has already occupied in exchange for absolute and permanent Russian guarantees, which will be reinforced by a general NATO guarantee, of the legitimate sovereignty of Ukraine within its revised borders.
These would be genuine guarantees and not the worthless promises that Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom made to Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, when they decommissioned the nuclear weapons they inherited from the Soviet Union in 1994.
Ukraine would be free to enter the EU when it met its criteria for admission, and while NATO is a matter to be discussed, it is somewhat academic given that Ukraine would benefit from an unconditional guarantee by the entire alliance of the integrity of its borders.’
There is only one problem with this nonsense: it entirely ignores the wishes of forty million Ukrainians.
They, understandably, have no confidence in ‘absolute and permanent Russian guarantees’. Such guarantees do not exist. Russian ‘guarantees’ are simply expediencies.
Will Russian interference in Moldova, the Czech republic, Serbia/Kosovo and elsewhere cease with these ‘guarantees’? Clue: No
Belarus is already a member of ‘Russkiy Mir’, the ‘Union State’. Belarus has just (05 April) withdrawn from the CFE treaty.
In February 2022, Belarus intentionally misled Western countries about the nature, parameters, and objectives of the Russian Armed Forces’ military presence on its territory. Not to mention the fact of providing Russian troops with Belarusian territory for committing military aggression against Ukraine, all under the guise of conducting joint exercises “Union Resolve – 2022”.
The CFE suspension now aims to hide Belarus’s preparation for entering a war by preventing international inspectors and verifiers from accessing military sites.
Putin has an entire department working on expanding this ‘Union State’: the Presidential Directorate for Cross-Border Cooperation, a subdivision of Putin’s Presidential Administration, which was established five years ago. The rather innocuously named directorate’s actual task is to exert control over neighbouring countries that Russia sees as in its sphere of influence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova.
And the cool thing is (not), as Lukashenko puts it:
‘It’s very simple. (Countries) should join the union of Belarus with Russia, that’s all: there will be nuclear weapons for everyone.”
That is what Putin means by permanent and absolute guarantees. Does Trump mean the same thing?
Nope.
So Putin will simply look at the Suwalki corridor (Polish territory) and ask himself: ‘Exactly how many armoured divisions do the Pope, Germany, France, Britain have?’
Clue: None.
There is a phrase, ”better to have the strong man in the tent with you throwing stones out, than to have him outside throwing stones in”. Why have we alienated Russia and why do we now regard this great country with so many related cultural ties as our dreadful enemy? It seems to me that we had the option when the Soviet Empire fell but we choose to alienate Russia rather than embrace them and now we are reaping the whirlwind.
As it is this Ukraine war seems to have strengthened Russia/China alliances and left the west in a weak position. Maybe we now need to eat humble pie and accept reality? Can we trust Putin? can Putin trust the west? probably No to both questions but nonetheless I feel we need to talk and formulate an agreement and then make it stick. Maybe we need to re-learn the art of strength through diplomacy, statesmanship, trade and trustworthiness.
True, but the other matter is that Ukraine is not a stable, united nation with it’s current borders. There has long been a pro-russian area in the south east, after all.
‘Monty’ always had a picture of Rommel on the wall of his caravan in North Africa to remind himself what he was up against.
Probably the best we can do on here is to look at what an acknowledged expert on Russia believes Putin is up to.
There are few greater experts on Russia than Sebag Montefiore.
Montefiore is in no doubt that Putin is simply an old fashioned Russian imperialist.
Documentary evidence from inside the Kremlin backs that up.
Putin had peace, with captured territory, Crimea, in 2014.
He chose war again in 2022.
It is completely beyond me how anyone can believe that Putin has any interest in peace. That ship sailed forever in 2022.
He quite clearly has no interest in peace whatsoever, except when expedient, in pursuit of his ultimate goal: control of Moldova, the Suwalki corridor and the Baltic States.
“Why have we alienated Russia and why do we now regard this great country with so many related cultural ties as our dreadful enemy?”
Agree.
Why on earth have we adopted such a negative, belligerent, nasty attitude to a great country? We should be building friendship and alliances with Russia and its people.
At this time whose government would I rather support, USA or Russia? Too many of the world’s problems are generated by the Americans, so my support goes to Russia.
I struggled with your comment initially, did some reading and then I understood.
There is a place where parallel Universes exist: within the idea of the multiverse.
Our observable Universe began 13.8 billion years ago with the hot Big Bang, but the Big Bang itself wasn’t the very beginning. There was a very different phase of the Universe that occurred previously to set up and give rise to the Big Bang: cosmological inflation. When and where inflation ends, a Big Bang occurs.
But inflation doesn’t end everywhere at once, and the places where inflation doesn’t end continue to inflate, giving rise to more space and more potential Big Bangs.
Once inflation begins, in fact, it’s virtually impossible to stop inflation from occurring in perpetuity at least somewhere. As time goes on, more Big Bangs — all disconnected from one another — occur, giving rise to an uncountably large number of independent Universes: a multiverse.
‘On Thursday, Putin appeared to threaten his people with a revival of Stalin’s Great Terror that began in 1937 and in which 1 million people were executed over 2½ years.
He’s dog-whistling 1937, so that’s pretty scary, and the reason he’s doing it is because he realises there’s opposition in the elite and among the populace.
He used all these keywords: ‘traitors,’ ‘enemy of the people,’ ‘scum,’ ‘bastards,’ all of which were from the ’30s, which a Russian would know he’s threatening massive repression in Russia.
He’s literally putting the fear, an ancestral, terrifying fear into these people. People who would have heard of these stories from their old parents, and grandparents and great-grandparents about the time when people didn’t sleep at night, they kept a bag packed in case they were deported. People were never seen again.
It was a terrifying speech in only a way the Russians would know’
Montefiore 20 March 2022
‘The data suggest that more than 1% of all Russian men aged between 20 and 50 could have either been killed or severely wounded in Ukraine since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine’
Meduza/Mediazona
As predicted, this insane Migration Pact has been passed in the EU, whereby countries will be forced to accept migrants or face paying hefty fines for every migrant they reject. So this is totally going to ”stop the boats”, deter human trafficking and reduce migrant ( another fatal stabbing in Bordeaux last night courtesy of a ”North African” reported ) crime going forward isn’t it? Hungary resolutely standing firm in their opposition, but for how long?
”The European Parliament has approved the controversial EU Asylum and Migration Pact, which will see countries forced to accept their fair share of new arrivals into the bloc or pay a fine for every migrant they reject.
The new asylum and migration package was passed largely with votes from lawmakers affiliated with the European People’s Party, the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), and Renew Europe, with MEPs being urged to swallow their criticisms of the scheme and vote for the compromise legislation.
“History made,” tweeted European Parliament President Roberta Metsola as she praised what she described as a “robust legislative framework on how to deal with migration and asylum,” noting it had been “10 years in the making” but the EU had kept its word.
Some MEPs on both the left and the center-right revealed they voted through the pact despite its many flaws.
“The new legislation is not perfect but we can only make migration manageable and humane with one European solution,” said Hilde Vautmans, foreign affairs coordinator for Renew Europe.
Nationalist politicians across Europe expressed their anger at the passing of the pact, which they claim cedes sovereignty to an ever-centralized European Union.
“The Migration Pact organizes the tutelage and control of nations, the legal impunity of NGOs complicit with smugglers,” tweeted Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally. She further vowed to “put an end to the accelerated pursuit of policies to encourage and organize mass immigration,” on June 9 at the EU elections in which her party is expected to win the most French seats.”
https://www.rmx.news/migration/european-parliament-approves-controversial-migration-pact-sparking-uproar-from-nationalists-who-vow-to-bring-it-down-after-eu-election/
“The European Parliament has approved the controversial EU Asylum and Migration Pact, which will see countries forced to accept their fair share of new arrivals into the bloc or pay a fine for every migrant they reject.”
All of which means that the firkin floodgates will be opened as millions more wash up on our shores.
As well as that it means the taxpayers have to pay to look after them if they stay and now have to pay for them should they be made to leave!
We’re just cash cows to the socialists agenda’s
What is so stupid about this migration issue in the EU is that they tried to implement a pact like this back in 2016 – quotas being sent to all EU countries (so all EU countries are destroyed simultaneously) and fining any country that refused. It didn’t go ahead then because the 4 countries in the Visegrad Group refused to implement it.
What is also so stupid is that if a quota of migrants are sent to a country that they don’t want to go to – there is no way of compelling them to stay there. Again back in 2016 a quota was sent to the Czech Republic but they only stayed for a few weeks – they left and moved to Germany.
I’m so impressed by all these commentators coming out of the woodwork against trans ideology, now that an official report has been produced that says that it’s insidious and destructive. What bravery. What independence of thought.
I suppose every so often lemmings go in the right direction.
Let’s not forget that, even before the current child-abuse epidemic, the evidence base for the benefit of adult “sex-change” treatment was, and remains, pretty damned poor.
I was getting ignored in correspondence with the Tavistock Clinic twenty years ago about two patients of ours left in a total physical and psychological mess as a result.
I believe it was another decade or so before the Scandinavian long-term follow up studies began to lift the lid on the massive suicide rate, which the enthusiasts have, of course, ignored by blaming it on societal transphobia rather than iatrogenic catastrophe.
Aye, the hypocrisy is deafening.
If anyone’s interested, CAN-SG (Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender) are posting highlights from their First Do No Harm conference. Welcome and keynote presentation by Professor Riittakerttu Kaltiala are available so far.
https://can-sg.org/
Cass Review itself available here:
https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
“No, the Foreign Office is not too ‘rooted in the past’”
Trees are rooted in the past, as are buildings that don’t fall down. It’s kind of a feature, not a bug.
How new UK legislation on foreign policy is now lobbied!
https://www.gbnews.com/news/lidl-palestine-protest-israel-products-shelves-stripped-cardiff-wales