Ukrainians to Israelis as Trump capitulates to their mutual eternal foe;

“It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." Henry Kissinger*

RT @BenjaminBadejo: You have no right to confidentiality when you openly, publicly say, under your own name, that you don’t like Jews. If y…

Stateside, a gas station. I drank a frozen blue beverage too quickly, and was struck down by a punishment this entire nation knows, and accepts, and has named. The drink is called a slush. Ice, sweetness, and a blue that does not occur in nature. The day was hot. I was thirsty. I drank like a soldier at a river. The pain arrived in my skull like a war horn. Behind the eyes. Above everything. Total. I gripped the roof of my car. I may have made a sound. "Brain freeze," said the cashier through the door, with no urgency whatsoever. It has a NAME. The affliction is so common it has a household name, like a cousin. "Tongue on the roof of your mouth," called a man at the pumps. He did not look over. He prescribed the remedy mid-pump, casually, the way one mentions weather. I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The war horn faded. The healer nodded at his pump, finished, and was gone in a Chevrolet. In my land, punishment follows crime by way of courts and seasons. Here, the sentence is instant. Drink with greed, and the ice strikes the mind directly. No trial. No appeal. Perfectly fair. And here is what moves me. EVERYONE has felt it. The cashier. The healer. Children. Elders. An entire nation united by the same small lightning, all taught the same cure, all passing it on to strangers at gas stations, free of charge. You cannot fully distrust a country once you know it shares one pain. The freeze does not punish thirst. It punishes haste. I finished the slush slowly, like a scholar. Blue tongue. Clear mind. Then at the door I forgot everything, drank deeply, and was struck down again. "Tongue, hon," said the cashier, without looking up. Discipline is a journey.

A yellowjacket in June is a fairly docile pest controller. A yellowjacket in late August wants to fight you for a soda. Same insect, but the colony has changed. All summer, the workers hunt protein. Caterpillars, flies, and other garden pests get chewed up and fed to the larvae back in the nest. In return, the larvae provide the adults with a sugary secretion that fuels the workers. So all season those workers are out killing the bugs eating your tomatoes because that's how they feed the babies that feed them. A single colony removes thousands of pest insects. Then late summer arrives. The colony reaches peak population. The queen shifts from producing mostly workers to producing males and next year's queens. Fewer larvae remain, and as those larvae pupate, the workers lose much of their built-in sugar supply. Now you have a huge population of aging wasps searching for carbs wherever they can find them. Fallen fruit, hummingbird feeders, your picnic, your soda, anything sweet. They're not suddenly mean. They're just hungry, unemployed, and nearing the end of their lives. You'd be itching to fight for a piece of candy too. By winter, the old queen, workers, and males are dead. Only newly mated queens survive to start fresh colonies the following spring, and old nests are almost never reused. A nest tucked away in a field corner or high in a tree is doing free pest control for a few more weeks, then it's gone. The nests worth dealing with are the ones in doorways, walls, or places where people, especially anyone with a severe allergy, could be at risk.

If russia will be ready to invade NATO in 2029 or earlier, sound policy would be for NATO countries to engage the russian invaders in combat in Ukraine now and defeat them – before it's too late.

Sorry, but this needs to be said again and again, until it is fully understood and accepted: 🇷🇺 The Russian Army has been fought to a standstill in Ukraine - 1.4 million casualties with about 400K deaths. The sheer scale of human and equipment losses is staggering. 🇷🇺 It means Russia is not going to precipitate a second war anytime soon. However, the Russian economy has proved to be much stronger and more resilient than Western analysts expected. Military spending has sustained growth even if inflation is high and energy export income has fallen. 🇷🇺 It is entirely possible that a peace deal could be concluded within the next 12 months. Any such agreement will only be signed off by Putin if it gifts him a large chunk of Ukraine. This will allow him to declare victory and remain in power. 🇷🇺 When the conflict with Ukraine ends, Russia will not immediately revert to a non-wartime economy. Peace will give Putin a much needed breathing space which he will use to rearm and retrain his battered army. It is likely to take a decade before Russia regains any credible military strength while the economy recovers — and it is entirely possible that China will support Russia’s rearmament process. So we could see a Russian military resurgence within 5 years. This is the risk. 🇷🇺 Whatever happens, there is no inexorable path to war with Russia. But if we do nothing, if we refuse to bolster our defences when time is on our side, it’s the same as leaving the door unlocked — we will invite aggression, because Putin is strategically ambitious and opportunistic. 🇷🇺 A strong Europe, fully prepared, with potent and flexible capabilities, plus resilient and scalable economic production, would definitely deter aggression, just as NATO’s Cold War presence in Europe kept the peace for almost half a century. 🇬🇧 So,we have a straightforward binary choice: deter aggression through strength. Invite aggression through weakness. I do not want to send my children to fight a war that could have been be avoided. If you are a parent, I hope you will agree.

Typical Lay’s chip bag composition:

This is going to be a game changer for small independent grocers and food processors. $1 billion in infrastructure. $750 million earmarked for year round greenhouse production. Conservatives and retail giants are going to hate this. I’m loving it. 💪🇨🇦

Excellent from @LordIanAustin on yet ANOTHER debate on the evils of Israel: As he says: ‘Over the last few years, Parliament has discussed Israel more than any other issue, not just any international issue, more than any domestic issue: more than the economy, unemployment, crime, the NHS. ‘The public out there look at Parliament and think this is utterly mad, utterly, utterly mad.’ Lord Ian blames Parliament for helping fuel antisemitism adding: ‘Does Parliament not understand that singling out the world's only Jewish state, holding its standards not applied to anywhere else, falsely accusing Israel of committing these terrible crimes? ‘This is bound to drive hostility towards people who are identified with Israel, which is the vast majority of the Jewish community, and I have to say this is why I believe Parliament is playing a large role in driving the explosion of anti-Semitism that we've seen on the streets of Britain.’

Colonialism is bad, right? Wrong. The Aztec Empire ran sacrifice at industrial scale. Excavations of the Huey Tzompantli, the skull rack next to the Templo Mayor, have uncovered hundreds of skulls of men, women, and children. Spanish eyewitnesses described tens of thousands. The Aztecs fought "Flower Wars" whose purpose was capturing live victims for the altar. Hearts were cut out of living people. Subject peoples hated Aztec rule so much that Tlaxcalans made up most of Cortes's army. The conquest was largely an indigenous uprising against an indigenous empire. The sacrifices ended under Spanish rule. India: burning a widow alive on her husband's funeral pyre. British records from Bengal alone documented thousands of cases between 1815 and 1828. The British, with Indian reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, banned it in 1829. When priests told General Napier it was sacred custom, he answered: my nation also has a custom, we hang men who burn women alive. You follow yours, we will follow ours. India: Thuggee cults murdered travelers by the tens of thousands over centuries as offerings to Kali. It was a hereditary profession. William Sleeman's campaign in the 1830s wiped it out. Slavery was a universal indigenous institution. Dahomey and Ashanti were built on slave raiding and sold captives for a thousand years to Arab traders before any European ship arrived. Pacific Northwest tribes held up to a quarter of some village populations as slaves and killed them ceremonially at potlatches. The Comanche ran a captive-raiding economy across the Southwest. What colonizers introduced after 1807 was the first attempt in history to abolish slavery globally. The Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron spent fifty years hunting slave ships and freed about 150,000 Africans. African kings protested. The King of Bonny complained that abolition was destroying a trade ordained by his gods and priests. The Dahomey kingdom's "Annual Customs" beheaded hundreds of captives and slaves every year to honor dead kings. Documented by European visitors for two centuries. It ended when France conquered Dahomey in 1894. Sailors called Fiji the Cannibal Isles. Chief Ratu Udre Udre kept a stone for every victim he ate. His pile holds nearly 900. Shipwrecked sailors were killed and eaten. Within a generation of missionaries and British administration after 1874, the practice was gone. Nigeria: In parts of Igboland, newborn twins were left in the bush to die and their mothers ostracized or killed. Missionary Mary Slessor spent decades in Calabar rescuing abandoned infants until the practice collapsed. Indigenous genocide of indigenous people. In 1835, two Maori tribes invaded the Chatham Islands and slaughtered the Moriori, whose own law forbade them to fight back. They killed, enslaved, and ate them. The Moriori population fell from about 2,000 to barely 100. No European did this. British colonial law ended it. Add headhunting in Borneo, the Philippines, and Nagaland. Female infanticide in India and Polynesia. Foot binding in China, dismantled partly by missionary campaigns. Every one of these ended under pressure from the colonial powers we are taught to treat as history's unique villains. Colonialism was not charity. The Belgian Congo was a horror, conquest was for profit, and rule was without consent. But the ledger has two sides and one has been erased. Pre-colonial societies practiced slavery, human sacrifice, widow burning, infanticide, and genocide, because cruelty is not a European invention. The first civilization that tried to abolish these practices worldwide is the one you were taught to be ashamed of. If "indigenous" means innocent and "colonizer" means guilty by definition, that is not history.

The West, so long burdened by Holocaust guilt, having—so it seemed—gone through its reckoning with millennia of Jew-hatred, will have to do it all again. At the very moment it thought it had finally shed that guilt, it did it again. The entire hate narrative against Israel after October 7 will not last. It will falter. The truth will prevail, as it always does. The West will be plunged again into shame. And those who stood in their convictions will triumph. They will reap the glory, not of power and mob rule, but of truth and justice.

“We understand the atrocities that have happened. I support them because they're like our own people.” The indigenous people of Canada stand with the indigenous people of Israel. 🪶 🇮🇱

Canada is exporting way more than it’s importing, with record high exports of $75.2 billion means that Canada businesses are selling massive volumes abroad. This means Canada is doing spectacular on the world stage with more jobs and a stronger economy. I voted for this. 🇨🇦

Still a bit early but the grass covered office in Hruby Šúr, Slovakia seems he holding up. Built in 2011 on a dome frame with straw-bale walls (covered in an EPDM pond lining and a layer of clay). 15 years so far, let's check back in 2031 and 2051.

🇺🇦 🇷🇺 F-16 DESTROYS 4 RUSSIAN HELICOPTERS IN LOW-LEVEL STRIKE ON TAGANROG BASE Ukrainian F-16 fighter jets reportedly carried out a bold airstrike against a Russian helicopter base near Taganrog in Russia's Rostov region. Flying at very low altitude to avoid radar detection, the aircraft allegedly struck helicopters parked on the airfield, destroying at least four, including Ka-52 attack helicopter models. The base, which had reportedly been used to support assaults on Ukrainian positions, was left engulfed in flames, with multiple secondary explosions reported across the site. If confirmed, the operation would mark the first deep manned strike inside Russian territory using Western-supplied fighter aircraft. 👇 Will Russia move more of its aviation assets farther from the front line after this raid?

The USS Liberty incident is the only case of misidentification in the entire history of warfare. A totally unique event without parallel in the annals of combat. That's the reason why so many people talk about it 60 years after it happened. There's no other reason.

The USS Liberty conspiracy theory asks you to accept that Israel, a nation of 2.5 million people fighting for its literal survival on six fronts simultaneously against 110 million Arabs equipped with Soviet tanks, Soviet aircraft, and Soviet warships, and with no formal American alliance, no American weapons, and no guarantee that anyone was coming to save them, is chose day four of that existential war to deliberately attack the one country on earth that might eventually become their ally, in broad daylight, in international waters, leaving 174 survivors who could identify the attacking forces, while fourteen separate investigations across two governments found zero evidence of intent, while Israel’s own military had accidentally bombed its own armored column the day before proving how catastrophically identification fails in wartime chaos, and while not a single one of the conspiracy theory’s proponents in nearly six decades of trying has ever managed to agree on what Israel was actually trying to accomplish by doing it. Heavy lift.

Almost half of B.C. voters want an alternative to the main political parties dailyhive.com/vancouver/bc-v…

This is called truth dysphoria.