[ZERO] Last week, Minneapolis was the scene of a nightmare. A transgender shooter stormed into a church, murdered two children, and then turned the gun on himself. Tragedy struck at the intersection of ideology and violence, but while the mainstream press will quietly move on from this story, the details demand closer inspection.
In the aftermath, investigators uncovered the shooter's personal journal. On it, a sticker of a gay pride flag emblazoned with an assault rifle and the words "defend equality." That very same flag is also displayed by the Minneapolis chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), a self-proclaimed left-wing gun club that advocates armed struggle.
Antifa/Black Bloc.
Andy Ngo shared the images here.
Say what you will about America's increasingly bitter culture wars, but we cannot ignore the fact that much of the rhetoric surrounding the modern trans movement isn't just about self-defense, but about "fighting back," like this flyer, advocating for a trans day of vengeance.
I read somewhere that the Minneapolis shooter bought his gun legally but I still haven't heard anything about a toxicology report. I wanna know how he was able to buy a gun legally if he was on psych meds.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
09/04/2025 12:11 Comments ||
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#3
The military have a program in each service that those individuals with duties dealing with nuclear weapons are suspended from duties when they are placed on certain drugs.
#4
With the Democrats being totally against all things Trump, as soon as Trump says crazy trans people should not have guns, the Dems will be forced to defend the right to bear arms. I can't wait!
#5
Yes; I imagine they have a second narrative already made, but they are dull people who don't get my opinion of what that may be. If so, I have a counter to it.
[AmmoForSale] If there is one firearm in a home, it's likely a 12-gauge shotgun. Powerful and versatile, this gauge has become the American standard for deer, upland bird, turkey, small game and maybe most importantly - home defense.
So what's the best go-to round for 12 gauge defense and preparedness?
#1
Why one?
Short barreled 870 with a policeman's buffet.
Short barreled 590 with Aquila no wad 00 shorties.
Looong barreled 870 with 3in 00 loads for hogs.
.410 snake charmer, #8 shot estate loads.
Are you hand-loading the Aquilas?
I'd like to take credit, but they're from my farrier. He's an old black powder, cowboy shooter. He convinced me that using wads to keep the shot clustered was 'inappropriate' at room clearing distances.
They weren’t doing a lot of things they ought to have, at that point. Like planning the extraction that President Trump had ordered several years earlier, and an orderly transition to the civilian government, however corrupt. Or how to protect the locals that had aided them.
[JustTheNews] There is no evidence military commanders had a plan for what to do about the terrorists held at Bagram — one of whom would end up attacking U.S. troops. One U.S. envoy said of the prisoners' escape: “Some of the most concerning, best-trained ISIS-K fighters were let out.”
The speed with which the U.S. military abandoned Afghanistan in 2021 — including the timing of the abandonment of the Bagram Air Base — was driven not just by President Joe Biden, but also by military commanders who adopted a “speed is safety” mantra while failing to plan for the Taliban’s jailbreak of ISIS-K terrorists.
Then-CENTCOM Commander General Frank McKenzie told Congress last year that “we believed that speed brought safety” when explaining why the U.S. military conducted its retreat so quickly in 2021. Politico reported that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff both insisted in May 2021 that “speed equals safety.” Although the transcript of the press conference has been deleted, a web archive shows that Biden publicly endorsed the U.S. military’s “speed is safety” argument in early July 2021, just after the U.S. had quietly left Bagram at the start of the month.
An ISIS-K suicide bomber named Abdul Rahman al-Logari — who had been freed by the Taliban from a prison at Bagram in mid-August 2021 — has been identified by CENTCOM as having carried out the suicide attack at Abbey Gate, killing 13 U.S. service members and an estimated 170 Afghan civilians on August 26, 2021.
Military had no plan to secure terrorist prisoners as Afghanistan crumbled
Two books and multiple news articles have reported that Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan asked the U.S. military leaders in June 2021 to consider pausing or delaying the closure of Bagram, but that Austin and Milley pushed back against this and insisted on closing Bagram quickly — which Biden approved.
General Austin “Scottie” Miller, the final U.S. commander of NATO’s Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan, admitted last year in congressional testimony that he did not know of any plan to secure the terrorists held at Bagram in the possible scenario that the Taliban marched on the base.
Command Sergeant Major Jacob Smith, who served as the Bagram senior enlisted advisor in 2021, also said he was not aware of any plan to handle the terrorist prisoners at Bagram if the prison fell to the Taliban or if the terrorists were sprung from jail there.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC), led at the time by then Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, released a report on the Afghan withdrawal last year titled, “Willful Blindness: An Assessment of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Chaos that Followed.”
The HFAC report attributed Milley’s rush to close Bagram to Miller, despite citing the two books which attributed the pushback to Milley. The report also did not include the revelatory admissions from Miller and Smith about the lack of U.S. military planning for the exact scenario that occurred, with the Taliban freeing ISIS-K terrorists from Bagram after the U.S. left the base.
Just the News previously reported that, less than two weeks before the Abbey Gate bombing, McKenzie held a mid-August 2021 meeting with Taliban leader Mullah Baradar in Doha, Qatar which would end with the Taliban taking control of Kabul and the U.S. relying upon the goodwill of Taliban fighters to provide security at the Kabul airport during the evacuation.
McKenzie is currently listed as the Executive Director for the Global and National Security Institute at the University of Southern Florida. The general did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to him through his email at the school. Nor did he respond to prior Just the News reporting about him.
Milley did not respond to requests for comment sent to him through Princeton University, where he was named a visiting professor last year, and through JPMorgan Chase, where he has been a senior adviser since 2024. He did not respond to previous Just the News reporting on him.
Austin did not respond to a request sent to him through the Clarion Strategies firm which he co-founded.
As for critiques of the HFAC report, "Chairman McCaul stands by his comprehensive report, the culmination of 18 transcribed interviews, seven public hearings, and 20,000 pages of documents obtained under subpoena from the State Department,” Emily Cassil, a spokesperson for former HFAC Chairman Michael McCaul, told Just the News.
Then-Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., said he went on a congressional delegation to Kabul prior to Biden’s April 2021 withdrawal decision, where he met with McKenzie, who told him that “if we get the green light to withdraw, I'm going to do it as fast as possible, because we will be vulnerable.”
Waltz, who went on to be Trump’s national security adviser and is currently Trump’s nominee to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, said he told McKenzie that that strategy would be like “looking at the issue with a soda straw on just the military operation.”
Waltz asked the general how that took into account NATO partners, ongoing support for the Afghan military, U.S. contractors, the U.S. embassy presence, and all of the languishing Special Immigrant Visa applicants, but he said McKenzie didn’t have much of an answer except to repeat that “if I get the green light, I’m putting my foot on the gas to get the heck out of there and limit our exposure.”
McKenzie appeared before the House Armed Services Committee on April 20, 2021 where he was pressed on the withdrawal.
During the hearing, Waltz asked McKenzie: “Would Bagram Air Base be valuable to you, being where it's located geographically, west of China, south of Russia, east of Iran?” McKenzie replied that “Bagram is key terrain.” Bagram was abandoned by the U.S. in early July of that year.
After finding out about the withdrawal order, one U.S. Special Forces operator said that after getting off the phone with Miller that he had been told that Austin “made the decision to pull everybody out starting immediately.” The retreat from the base in Helmand province lasted just ten days.
Posted by: Skidmark ||
09/04/2025 00:00 ||
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Link ||
[1815 views]
Top|| File under: Islamic State
#1
US military didn't plan for Taliban's ISIS-K jailbreak, forced a rush to close Bagram Air Base anything. Fixed it.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
09/04/2025 14:47 Comments ||
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#2
If the Military was even in charge at that point. The entire affair smells of state dept sensitivities.
Posted by: Difar Dave ||
09/04/2025 20:35 Comments ||
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Mikhail Moshkin and Mikhail Kucherov
[REGNUM] On September 3, a military parade was held in Beijing on Tiananmen Square to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Victory in World War II. The main guest was undoubtedly Russian President Vladimir Putin. "This has already become a good tradition in bilateral relations. And this convincingly demonstrates the great responsibility of China and Russia as the main countries that won World War II," emphasized Chinese President Xi Jinping at a meeting with the Russian leader.
The meeting took place on September 2, the 80th anniversary of Japan's capitulation, which - something that is often forgotten not only in the West but also in our country - was attended by representatives of the USSR and China, among other allies. On the eve of Victory Day in World War II, the Chinese leader's reminder of this was not superfluous.
The Soviet Union and China bore the brunt of the bloodiest war in human history.
The Second World War took away, according to various estimates, from 75 million to 80 million inhabitants of the Earth. The peoples of the USSR and China paid a comparable price for the defeat of Nazi Germany in Europe, and in East Asia - Hitler's closest ally Japan.
According to modern estimates by historians and demographers, 26.6 million Soviet citizens died in the Great Patriotic War.
These are only what are called in statistical language "direct losses from military action." "Indirect losses," including hunger and disease, took the lives of almost six and a half million more.
Western historians, estimating the losses of the Chinese civilian population from Japanese aggression, speak of 17-22 million dead. Together with the soldiers killed on the fronts, stretching for thousands of kilometers, the number of victims of the war may reach 27 million people.
THE REAL SECOND FRONT
Donald Trump seems to seriously believe that the main winner in World War II was the United States. That if it were not for the United States, the world would “speak German and maybe a little Japanese.” It is no longer surprising that not only overseas, but also in Europe, they prefer to “forget” who took Berlin and opened the gates of Auschwitz.
It is also not surprising that the Americans consider themselves the “exclusive” opponents and victors of Japan in the Pacific.
Yes, the naval battles of 1941–1945—from the repulse of the attack on Pearl Harbor to the landing on Iwo Jima—are far more significant in the American version of World War II than the US participation in the battles in Europe in 1944–1945. Thank you.
However, by the time of the treacherous Japanese attack on the American base in Hawaii, the Chinese armies had already been fighting for several years to liberate territories where at least 250 million people were under occupation. There can be no doubt about that.
But the Eurocentric view of World War II leaves everything that happened outside the continent in the shadows. Although the real second front of the global war ran in Asia - from the banks of the Amur to the islands of Indonesia.
The Eurocentric view suggests that Poland was the first victim of Axis aggression. But in fact, World War II began not on September 1, 1939, but on July 7, 1937, with the “ Marco Polo Bridge Incident,” after which Japan’s full-scale aggression against China began.
Or even earlier, in 1931, with the capture of Manchuria by the Japanese (which they turned into the puppet “state” of Manchukuo ).
That is, in any case, the war began before the Western democracies, as part of the policy of appeasing Hitler, “fed” Czechoslovakia to the Nazis – which was transformed into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the “state” of Slovakia.
Yes, Europe does not forget the atrocities of the Nazis in the occupied territories, the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane wiped off the face of the earth, Dachau, Treblinka, Auschwitz and the “experiments” of SS Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele.
But China has to remind the Western world (and Japan) of the Nanking Massacre of December 1937. Almost two years before the "official start" of World War II, Emperor Hirohito's troops killed up to 500,000 civilians and disarmed Chinese soldiers in occupied Nanking.
Thanks to historians and filmmakers, the world learned about the war crimes of Unit 731, led by Medical General Shiro Ishii, who surpassed "Dr. Death" Mengele in cruelty. But few people know about the fate of the prisoners of the death camp near the city of Anda in Heilongjiang Province, from where the "human material" for Unit 731 was supplied.
But China, even if it was the first victim of aggression, was not defenseless. Even in 1937, a peaceful year for Europe (if we “forget” about the war in Spain, in which Western democracies remained neutral), from September to November there was a battle on the Suzhou River near Shanghai. Then the Chinese managed to gain time to evacuate factories from the coast to the interior.
In the spring of 1938, when Hitler was “peacefully annexing” Austria, in the Battle of Taierzhuang, General Li Zongzhen’s 200,000-strong army took the Japanese group in Shandong Province in pincers.
In the autumn of the same year, when England and France were “peacefully” surrendering Czechoslovakia, more than 1 million soldiers of the Kuomintang army held back the Japanese advance on the city of Wuhan.
In the summer of 1942, during the most difficult months of the Battle of Stalingrad, on the other side of the continent, the 8th and New 4th Armies of the Chinese Communist Party bore the brunt of more than 60% of the Japanese occupation forces.
But China was not alone.
NOT LEND-LEASE, BUT AID
Western sources usually talk about the support that the United States provided to the government and army of Chiang Kai-shek in the last stage of the Second World War. American supplies to the Republic of China under Lend-Lease amounted to $1.6 billion. For comparison, Britain received supplies worth $31.4 billion.
But since the 1930s, the Soviet Union had been providing assistance to its struggling neighbor.
Since the beginning of the aggression, the two countries have maintained a common front against the aggressor. Aid has been sent through Soviet Central Asia to Chinese Xinjiang and further to the central provinces.
The USSR transferred to its neighbor about 1,300 aircraft, 1,600 guns, 82 T-26 tanks, 14 thousand machine guns, 110 thousand rifles. Soviet specialists repaired and built airfields and roads in border areas.
By 1939, by agreement between the USSR and the Republic of China, an aircraft factory was built near Urumqi, which produced more than a hundred Soviet I-16 fighters.
And in 1945, the Soviet Union came to China's aid, defeating one of the enemy's most combat-ready groups, the Kwantung Army. The last major operation of World War II, the Red Army's Japanese campaign was quick, but far from easy.
THE LAST ENEMY
In the summer of 1945, with fascist Italy and Germany out of the war, the Japanese Empire remained a serious threat.
The 7-million-strong army, scattered across the Pacific region, had no intention of surrendering, nor of putting up with losses: it was common practice to use single submarines with explosives and suicide pilots against the advancing allies.
"If these white devils land on our islands, the Japanese spirit will go to our great citadel, Manchuria, where we have the invincible and valiant Kwantung Army," said Hideki Tojo, Prime Minister and Army Minister of Japan.
Manchuria was indeed a military and resource stronghold for Tokyo. The area, the size of Germany and Italy combined, produced coal, ore, non-ferrous metals, and 55% of Japan's synthetic fuel.
There was also a little-known plan called "Jasper to Shattered Pieces," which proposed evacuating the imperial family to the Manchurian steppes if the islands of the Japanese archipelago were captured. The US military leadership understood that an invasion of the Japanese archipelago under the "Downfall" plan developed for this purpose would cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of soldiers, and the war would drag on for at least one and a half to two years.
The most favorable outcome for the allies was the defeat of the Manchurian group by the Red Army, which would force Japan to capitulate.
Generalissimo Joseph Stalin agreed, promising to begin the operation no later than three months after Germany's capitulation, but securing for the Soviet Union the coveted Southern Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands and, something that is not customary to remember, the island of Hokkaido.
On April 5, Stalin, fulfilling his obligations, denounced the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, thereby “warning” Tokyo of his intention.
"THE SECOND RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR"
Western leaders decided not to stand on ceremony with Tokyo, and on July 25, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill and the President of the Chinese National Government Chiang Kai-shek issued the "Potsdam ultimatum", according to which, if Japan refused to surrender, they promised to subject it to "the most speedy and complete destruction."
In Western historiography, it is generally accepted that the turning point in the war came after the nuclear bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. After this, on August 15, Mikado Hirohito read out an appeal to the subjects of the empire about surrender.
But in reality, the bombs dropped on unarmed cities did not force the Japanese command to peace. The Kwantung Army (in Soviet terminology - an army group or direction) stationed in Manchuria, numbering 1.5 million people, remained combat-ready.
The Kwantung Group did not receive an order to lay down their arms; the Imperial General Staff only instructed its commander, Otsuzo Yamada, to burn the banners, portraits, and important decrees of the Mikado.
Japanese troops built 17 fortified areas near the Soviet and Mongolian borders. The enemy expected that the USSR military units, having passed through them, would suffer losses that would force them to go on the defensive under the onslaught of the main forces of the Kwantung group.
The strategy was reminiscent of the actions of the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905.
But this time the enemy forgot that the supply of the neighboring country’s units no longer depended on the Trans-Siberian Railway alone, and the capabilities of the Red Army had increased significantly by 1945.
The commander of the operation, Marshal Alexander Vasilevsky, was already selecting those who would liberate East Asia during the fighting in Europe, realizing that the honor of putting an end to the war would be given to him:
"I first learned that I would have to go to the Far East in the summer of 1944. During the Belorussian operation, Joseph Stalin said that I would be entrusted with command of the troops in the war with Japan," the military leader recalled. By the beginning of August, having covered more than 10 thousand kilometers, 1.7 million soldiers, 5,500 tanks and 5,200 aircraft reached the Soviet-Manchurian border. A six-month supply of food and fodder was brought to arid Manchuria, and more than 1 thousand wells were dug on the spot to supply the troops with water.
"WHO? - PETROV!"
The offensive began from Transbaikalia and Primorye on the night of August 8-9, within the timeframe Stalin had promised the allies and before the start of the rainy season, during which the operation could not have been carried out. They attacked without artillery preparation, which meant that the Japanese troops did not have time to recover.
To avoid getting lost in the dark, the Red Army soldiers had white armbands on their hands, and when they shouted “Who?” everyone, without exception, had to answer “Petrov.”
With the start of our offensive on August 10, the commander-in-chief of the communist PLA (People's Liberation Army of China) Zhu De gave the order to begin an offensive against the Japanese along the entire front line. The following day, Chiang Kai-shek gave a similar order to his troops.
The surprise effect of the Soviet offensive worked - in some areas, Japanese soldiers who had not yet woken up were caught in their barracks. The speed of advance of the Transbaikal units was record-breaking: 110 kilometers per day in featureless terrain with an undeveloped road network.
"EVERYONE HAS A RED FLAG"
According to eyewitnesses, the Japanese were morally broken and tried not to leave their numerous pillboxes, which did not stop them from setting up “traps” even after the capitulation, as infantryman Dmitry Krutskikh witnessed :
"From the side of the height covered with sorghum, the Japanese opened heavy rifle fire. We had to lie down right next to the plane. The officer remained silent when we demanded that we cease fire. The paratroopers... in a short but brutal skirmish routed the Japanese company... I immediately interrogated the company commander, who was clearly lying, stating that he did not know about the capitulation and therefore conducted military operations."
Chinese greet Soviet soldiers on the streets of a city in Manchuria
Despite the continued resistance, the Japanese surrendered en masse. They sought to get under the protection of Soviet soldiers as quickly as possible because of the danger of reprisals against them by local residents, towards whom they sometimes acted even more cruelly during the occupation than the Nazis in Europe.
"At the very beginning, as soon as we found ourselves in Manchuria for the second time, we often saw such scenes: an ox pulling a cart, and a red flag tied to its horn. Or, let's say, several Chinese going to work - each with a red ribbon on their clothes, and someone else carrying one red flag," recalled artilleryman Viktor Gurov.
PEACE ON BOARD THE MISSOURI
General Yamada gave the order to the troops to stop fighting on August 16. However, individual Japanese units and divisions continued active resistance until September 7–8.
At the same time, the landings on South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, lost after the Russo-Japanese War, were coming to an end (here we should mention the last major operation of the Second World War - the battle for the island of Shumshu ). Stalin cancelled the occupation of Hokkaido, since this step had lost its expediency and would inevitably have led to great losses.
In Japan, the defeat in the war provoked a wave of suicides - soldiers and officers who could not bear the shame committed seppuku.
However, one of the generals had another duty to fulfill to the descendant of the goddess Amaterasu. Hirohito ordered the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Yoshijiro Umezu, a staunch opponent of the surrender, to sign the humiliating document. The political power of the empire was represented by the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Shigemitsu Mamoru, one of the architects of the aggression against China.
On September 2, 1945, at 9:02 am Japanese standard time (18:02 Moscow time), an act was signed on board the American battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo, beginning with the words:
“We, acting by order and on behalf of the Emperor, the Japanese Government and the Japanese Imperial General Staff, hereby accept the terms of the Declaration issued on July 26 in Potsdam by the Heads of Government of the United States, China and Great Britain, to which the USSR subsequently acceded…”.
The names of the American "signatories" of the capitulation often appear in popular materials.
Unlike the other allies, the United States was represented by two military leaders. The Harry Truman administration was represented by the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, Chester Nimitz, who had won several naval battles under his belt: at Midway Atoll, in the Solomon Islands campaign, during the landing on Saipan, and in the multi-day battle in the Philippine Gulf of Leyte.
Army General Douglas MacArthur, hero of the defense and then counteroffensive in the Philippines, figured as the Allied commander-in-chief.
Less often remembered is the British representative, Admiral Bruce Fraser, whose fleet covered the American landing on Okinawa and went on raids to the Japanese archipelago.
And the representatives of the main winners find themselves completely in the shadows.
The representative of the Supreme Command in the Far East, Lieutenant General Kuzma Derevyanko, accepted the capitulation from the USSR. It should be remembered that this military leader distinguished himself at the Kursk Bulge, in the Battle of the Dnieper, in the Korsun-Shevchenkovsk Operation (when his small homeland, the Cherkasy Region, was liberated) and in the Iasi-Kishinev " Cannes ". The troops under his command participated in the capture of Budapest and Vienna.
Less well known is that Derevyanko's track record also included a secret "proxy war" with the Japanese. And not only before the start of World War II, but also before the battles at Khalkhin Gol.
In 1938, Derevyanko, then a military intelligence officer, served in the border regions of the Kazakh SSR and coordinated military supplies to the Chinese Communist Party units fighting against the Japanese invaders.
On behalf of the Republic of China, the act of surrender was signed by First Class General Xu Yongchang.
He had been waging war against the Japanese since 1931, with the Mukden Incident – the blowing up of the railway near the present-day city of Shenyang, after which the Kwantung Army began occupying Manchuria. Later, General Xu served on the General Staff of Chiang Kai-shek’s army, and after the Kuomintang lost to the Communists, he emigrated to Taiwan.
But it should be noted that on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, the victory over the Japanese in World War II is considered a common one, not “white” or “red.” As PRC Chairman Xi Jinping recalled on August 31, “the Chinese people’s war of resistance against the Japanese invaders became the main battlefield of the world anti-fascist war in the East, making a colossal contribution to the struggle for peace throughout the world.”
President Putin also spoke about the fact that the victory over Nazism and Japanese militarism was the common merit of the USSR, China and the allies in his speech at the parade in honor of the 80th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War: “We highly value the contribution to our common struggle of the soldiers of the allied armies, the participants in the resistance, the courageous people of China - all who fought for a peaceful future. We faithfully preserve the memory of these historic, triumphant events. ”
#1
Without armor grade steel shipped in 1941-2 to make up for the loss of your industrial base not to mention the tonnage of other critical supplies, its unlikely you'd be writing this today.
#2
Since the Russians and the Red Chinese had things totally under control we shouldn't have bothered opening a second front in Europe. That would have saved a lot of American and Allied lives. Although I recall reading that the great democrat Josef Vissarionovich was rather insistent on the western Allies opening a second front at the time.
Posted by: Matt ||
09/04/2025 12:06 Comments ||
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#3
I wouldn't say the Chinese won. The communist bastards who rule them won but the people lost big time. And without Americans fighting the Japanese in the Pacific it's doubtful that Mao would have survived that war. The same with Russia. Stalin, Khrushchev and Zhukov won because Americans were fighting Hitler in the West. The Russian people died by the millions. When you're stuck between Hitler and Stalin, you're in a very bad place.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
09/04/2025 12:38 Comments ||
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#4
And if Japan had really been Hitler's ally they would have opened a second front against the USSR in Siberia.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
09/04/2025 12:42 Comments ||
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#5
The USSR and China survived WWII, they didn't win except relative to Germany and Japan.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
09/04/2025 15:53 Comments ||
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[ZeroHedge] The German government has launched a public campaign warning about Russian attempts to recruit so-called "disposable agents" through social media for espionage and sabotage, AFP reports.
The accusation comes after years of a shadow war which has involved apparent tit-for-tat sabotage attacks and assassinations both in Europe and in Russia. Mystery fires have erupted, for example, in defense sector manufacturing plants on the European continent and in the UK. Also, similar potential sabotage events have been observed inside Russia. Many observers see it as a behind the scenes 'dirty war' which parallels the Ukraine conflict.
German police and intelligence services allege these operations often involve untrained individuals committing acts like arson, property damage, or photographing or monitoring sensitive installations.
People are at first unwittingly recruited through online forums and popular social media sites, and as conversations proceed, targeted individuals are offered sums of money in return for carrying out criminal acts.
According to AFP's reporting on the fresh statements from Berlin authorities:
The campaign warns that suspected Russian spies aim "to destabilize Germany with the help of people in Germany".
"This gives them a decisive advantage: they don't have to 'get their hands dirty' themselves."
Chief of Germany's BND foreign spy agency Bruno Kahl, warned this week, "Sabotage, espionage and propaganda activities carried out by foreign intelligence services deliberately undermine the stability of free societies."
"They are an attack on our democracy through deception, intimidation and subversion," he added. The Czech Republic has reportedly issued a similar public alert.
Telegram is one specific platform named by European authorities as being used by Russian intelligence to recruit unwitting actors. Interestingly, it was of course Telegram which lately came under suspicion and a far-reaching crackdown by French authorities, especially during last year's Pavel Durov arrest saga.
Just this summer, 'Russian saboteurs' were alleged to be behind a suspected arson attack at a Bundeswehr facility in Erfurt, Germany - which destroyed half a dozen large military trucks. NATO and the Ukrainians have been suspected of doing their own dirty war sabotage operations inside Russia as well.
German authorities also just days ago charged that Russian intelligence has been utilizing small drones in order to monitor weapons shipments routes in German border states.
[JOHNKASSNEWS] I grew up in Chicago–which for 13 straight years now has been the murder capital of America–believing that the Democrats were just too crafty to ever fall stupidly into some Republican trap.
But I was dead wrong.
When I was a boy there was legendary Chicago mayor named Richard J. Daley‐who loved the city‐and was tough enough and ruthless enough to run it and protect it.
Now Chicago is run by a racist pinhead subject to increasing anxiety and panic attacks. The city's commercial real estate market is cratering as businesses flee, corporate offices close, and Democrat leaders refuse President Donald Trump's help to send in the National Guard to help with the murder epidemic
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, soft of mind and body, ridiculed the president's offer of assistance, saying crime really isn't an emergency, though more than 50 people were shot and at least 7 were murdered over the weekend.
The truth is that Mayor Pin Head and Gov. Fat Boy don't really care about black and brown people who are the true victims of violent crimes. They care about the Chicago Teachers Union. They care about shielding Democrat boss Toni Preckwinkle, the Cook County Board President and Cook County Democrat chairman.
Boss Toni is a hard leftist protected by the corrupt corporate legacy media. She is without a doubt the architect of Chicago's anarchy of crime.
The Democrats are now the pro-criminal party. They are eager to defund police and clear out the county jail that Boss Toni considers too black, too brown. Although the victims of violent crime in Chicago are black and brown. The city's public schoolchildren can't read or do math at grade level. All they're prepared to do is make a life of violent crime and prison.
Chicago circles the drain.
And mothers weep for their dead children as residents hide or sleep on their floors to avoid gang gunfire, as Pritzker and Johnson ridicule Trump's efforts to help black and brown people, the poorest among us.
The man who came up with the idea of using the National Guard in Chicago to suppress the gangs wasn't Donald Trump, but Robert Milan, longtime local prosecutor, who was a guest on The Chicago Way podcast that I co-host with WGN executive producer Jeff Carlin. I leave the link in this column so you may listen.
Milan along with former Chicago Police officer Jim Smith developed the idea of using the National Guard.
"Every alderman wants more police, right? Well, this would free them up to do it. And it would cut down carjackings dramatically. "
In the early 2000s, Chicago experimented with oversaturating the most troubled neighborhoods with cops. Milan was a senior supervisor with a great crime-fighting organization, the Cook County States Attorney's office.
Chicago Police shut down K-Town, the infamous West Side neighborhood. No one would drive through K-Town then. Pritzker and Johnson wouldn't dare walk those streets without armed guards.
"It was very, very dangerous. It was open air, drug markets, unbelievable amount of shootings and murders. And they shut it down for prolonged period of time, a couple of months. I mean, they saturated it. Listen, on the the wiretaps these gangbangers were saying ‘we gotta get out of here, man.' There wasn't a single shooting in that area the entire two months that they saturated it. So, I thought to myself, why don't we do this, you know? Across the West side, South side, the most dangerous areas, the 10th, the 15th, the 6th districts and, and bring in extra help, bring in the National Guard, bring in ATF, the Cook County Sheriff's, Illinois State Police, and FBI. And so that's how I first came up with the idea."
Why are Pritzker and Johnson so adamantly opposed? Why are they so threatened that the politicians are on the verge of hysterics?
Because it works.
It worked in Washington. It will work in Chicago. And they can't afford that. They'd rather people die than lose power.
They don't want to risk access to all those "violence interrupter" funds they use to organize voters. And they don't want public scrutiny on how do-nothing prosecutors and lenient judges are selected. Hint: DEI may be involved here. Chicago is still a machine town, though the machine was Irish, it is now black.
Every day brings grim and bloody news from the city of anarchy, violence, and corrupt politics. The mobs take over downtown, the street gangs shoot each other at the iconic landmark at Michigan Avenue called "The Bean" in Millennium Park.
The names may change. But the stories don't. And Boss Toni Preckwinkle doesn't. She helped engineer the election of the first George Soros do-nothing prosecutor, Kim Foxx, her hapless political aide and public liar who helped Jussie Smollett.
Boss Toni picks the judges now. And she was behind the abomination of the pro-criminal so-called Safety Act, which as Milan says should have been named the Danger Act.
She gave Johnson a political job after he failed as a teacher. He was a political hack even before he was elected.
She's behind the move to empty the Cook County Jail of criminals, because the criminals are black and brown, and Boss Toni doesn't like that. But the victims of violent crime are mostly black and brown too, and she and the other Democrats aren't worried about victims of crime.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
09/04/2025 06:18 ||
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The first responsibility of government is to provided security of a citizen's life, family and property. Any government that is unable or unwilling to do so is illegitimate.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Malek Dudakov
[REGNUM] The American public has increasingly begun to question the health of its key government officials, amid a clear aging of the US political class.
82-year-old Joe Biden has been replaced by 79-year-old Donald Trump. Of course, he is livelier than his predecessor, but he is also plagued by scandals related to his age and health.
It has been exactly ten years since Trump entered big politics. In June 2015, he walked down the escalator in his Trump Tower skyscraper in New York and gave his first campaign speech to supporters. Trump had very few of them at the time, so he even had to recruit paid extras.
If you compare Trump's speeches from ten years ago with his current ones, the changes that have happened to him become obvious. The current US president has begun to speak more slowly, the timbre of his voice has changed somewhat, and he misspeaks much more often.
But he is still a long way from Biden's fading cognitive state in his final years as president. Trump is not yet collapsing on stage, nor is he being handed cards telling him where to stand and what to say.
But opponents are ready to seize on any misstep that happens to him and declare it the beginning of the end for the 47th US president. And often it is the very same Democrats who have been furiously defending Biden who are doing this.
Meanwhile, American society as a whole is feeling the acute effects of the “political gaslighting” it has been subjected to over the past four years. For so long, Americans have been told that everything is fine with Biden and that they shouldn’t believe their eyes.
Only after the fact did it become clear that all decisions for Biden were made by a narrow circle of the so-called Politburo, consisting of close advisers and family members. They even signed almost all decrees for the president, using a special pen.
Nobody in the US wants a repeat of this madness with a president who is unconscious and being manipulated like a puppet by his entourage. So now Trump is also getting the short end of the stick: as soon as he shows weakness or starts turning into a late Biden, he will be immediately trashed.
The dress rehearsal for the "dressing down" could be seen over the past week, amid a huge number of rumors about Trump's health.
A few months ago, he was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, which manifests itself in large dark spots on the body and arms. The disease is common in older people and is not a fatal diagnosis in itself.
However, this did not stop liberal bloggers from immediately starting to hold a memorial service for the president. Numerous videos of “doctors” went viral on TikTok, convincing viewers that Trump supposedly had no more than six to eight months to live.
In many ways, this agenda is an attempt by Democrats to pass off wishful thinking as reality.
After the recent election defeat, they found themselves in a very depressed state. And now Trump's opponents are desperately hoping for nature and biological causes that could bring the current US president to the grave. They simply cannot torpedo his policy on their own.
At one point, Trump himself even began to play along with these sentiments - it’s not for nothing that he is an excellent showman.
This is precisely how one can explain the fact that for some time he stopped appearing in public. His absence from White House ministerial meetings immediately sent Democrats into a frenzy. They were sure that Trump was definitely incapacitated by now.
US Vice President J.D. Vance added fuel to the fire by transparently hinting at his complete readiness to take over the reins of power if something happened to Trump.
By the way, this fully embodies the short-sightedness of the current emotional swings of Trump's critics. Even if they are right and something happens to Trump, Vance will be the next president. And he is even more right-wing in his views than Trump, and also quite young: only 41 years old.
By modern Washington standards, the current vice president is practically a child. Vance was elected to the Senate when he was only 38. At the same time, the average age of congressmen in the current convocation is approaching 60 years, and senators - 65. And they, too, often experience the typical misfortunes of old age.
Take the same permanent former leader of the Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, who has had at least several strokes in recent years. Only after that did McConnell finally agree to resign.
Society is already showing a strong fatigue with the Washington gerontocracy, which is expressed, among other things, in such heightened attention to all of its health problems.
Of course, American history has seen presidents decline with age. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan all had serious problems. But they often showed up at the end of their presidencies, not throughout their entire tenure in the White House.
Typically, after scandals over the health of presidents, they are replaced by relatively young politicians who begin trying to change the status quo in Washington. The last time this happened was with the victory of Barack Obama in November 2008.
It is unlikely that one would call Obama's presidency a success. And it is not surprising that the next US president was Trump, who literally promised to cancel all of Obama's reforms and publicly "fire" his predecessor and throw him out of the White House.
The failures of the Obama years had the lasting effect of electing older presidents who had more life and leadership experience.
But the nearly decade-long period of dominance of older politicians in the White House will sooner or later come to an end. Most likely, both Republicans and Democrats will nominate younger candidates in the next election cycle. For the Republicans, the obvious candidate to succeed Trump is Vance. He is tipped to partner with current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is now 54 years old.
The Democrats currently lead in the emerging presidential race are 57-year-old California Governor Gavin Newsom, 43-year-old Pete Buttigieg and 35-year-old Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The latter represents the young left wing of the Democratic Party, which is now gradually gaining weight. Their representative Zohran Mamdani - an Indian, Muslim and socialist - may soon become the new mayor of New York.
A generational change in American politics will happen sooner or later. And it could happen as early as 2028. After that, we should expect serious changes to the status quo, both in domestic and foreign policy.
Trump has already given impetus to the restructuring of the United States, but as an older man, he still has the inertia of thinking and continues to believe in many of the old postulates of American politics. The younger generation, however, treats them more pragmatically.
Trump's approach is well illustrated by his attitude toward other countries: the president constantly complains that they do not listen to him. Attempts to apply pressure through tariffs or sanctions have the opposite effect.
But Trump, out of habit, continues to consider the United States the absolute world leader that everyone should obey. And he is unlikely to be able to break out of this mental paradigm.
But younger Republicans find it much easier to adjust to the new reality. It was not for nothing that Rubio acknowledged the advent of a multipolar world back in the spring. They, together with Vance, are unlikely to try to convulsively cling to the fading unipolarity.
Washington can live in a world of illusions for a very long time, but sooner or later it will have to abandon them and return to objective reality. And there is a possibility that this will happen only after a long-overdue change of generations.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
