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The Europe 1 report said the French military might be reluctant to provide a greater number of howitzers, considering it only had 76 of these weapons that were operational before the first shipment to Ukraine. It takes about one year to produce a new CAESAR weapon system, it said.

One year to produce a single howitzer. :farquaad-point:

I'm sorry but this sentence

Other grain stalwarts, like the U.S., are expecting better-than-expected yields that could make up for some of that.

is throwing me into a rage.

If they're expecting better-than-expected yields, aren't they then just expecting better yields? How can they expect things to be better than they expect? Isn't this some kind of spiraling paradox of expectations?

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We won’t invest in green energy, or safer crop farming with reduced fertilizers, or carbon negative buildings. We will however blow up close to a trillion over ukraine right to join nato. :meow-tableflip:

:meow-tableflip:

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German media right now is full of "If Ukraine loses, it's our/Scholz' fault" and I don't even know if that's supposed to be cope or what the fuck

I was reading about odessa shenanigans, I’m still baffled why ukraine insists that russians mined the waters and people print it like truth. Why in the fuck attacking side would mine waters, they can’t now attack :puzzled:

Maybe I’m missing some reports from early in the war about russian mining ships?

Also russia says there are around 60000 troops around sloviansk. This will be bad :deeper-sadness:

Oh the whole place is seething with sedition

Its Sinn Fein through and through

All the boys are joining local units

And the passwords Sinn Fein too

Well The IRA just sent me

A timebomb in the mail

And im shaking in my shoes

As im typing up the news

Said the man from the Daily Mail

You'd think they'd have better opsec

China's National Defence Ministry: The US arms sales to Taiwan region has gravely undermined China's sovereignty, security interests, peace &stability across Taiwan Strait. PLA's robust measures will smash external intervention &Taiwan secessionist forces.

pretty clear Message ....

To date, nine episodes of Súper Bigote have been broadcast on VTV. Each depicts the character using his superpowers to foil dastardly plots devised and financed by the “great villain” to the north, with the aim of sowing chaos and division in a fictional version of Venezuela.

It's like Captain Planet for imperialism, I love it

There was an article that drove me so insane that I need to quarantine it from the rest of Dipshittery and Cope. You will understand when you get to the end of the third paragraph. Put on your mental defences and proceed.

• The best China strategy? Defeat Russia. WaPo

“We are now living in a totally new era,” said the 99-year-old Henry Kissinger, commenting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In an op-ed last week, President Biden vividly outlined the stakes. “If Russia does not pay a heavy price for its actions,” he wrote, “it will send a message to other would-be aggressors that they too can seize territory and subjugate other countries. It will put the survival of other peaceful democracies at risk. And it could mark the end of the rules-based international order and open the door to aggression elsewhere, with catastrophic consequences the world over.”

In times like these, it seemed appropriate that Secretary of State Antony Blinken would deliver a major policy address, which he did late last month. Except that he chose to give the speech … on China. The talk itself contained nothing new; it was slightly more nuanced than the usual chest-thumping that passes for a China strategy these days. The real surprise was that, in the middle of the first major land war in Europe since 1945, with monumental consequences, Blinken chose not to lay out the strategy for victory but instead changed the subject. Washington’s foreign policy establishment is so wrapped up in its pre-crisis thinking that it cannot really digest the fact that the ground has shifted seismically under its feet.

Blinken declared that despite its aggression in Ukraine, Russia does not pose the greatest threat to the rules-based international order, instead giving that place to China. As Zachary Karabell suggests, this requires a willful blindness to decades of Russian aggression. Russia has invaded Georgia and Ukraine and effectively annexed parts of those countries. It brutally unleashed its air power in Syria, killing thousands of civilians. In responding to Chechnya’s desire for independence, it flattened large parts of the Russian republic, including its capital, with total civilians killed in that conflict estimated to be in the tens of thousands. Vladimir Putin has sent assassination squads to Western countries to kill his enemies, has used money and cyberattacks to disrupt Western democracies, and, most recently, has threatened the use of nuclear weapons. Does any other country even come close?

Ironically, one of the people who attended Blinken’s speech was Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who during his presidential campaign in 2012 warned that Russia posed the single largest threat to the United States. Those, including myself, who dismissed his prognosis were wrong, because we looked only at Russia’s strength, which was not impressive. But Romney clearly understood that power in the international realm is measured by a mixture of capabilities and intentions. And though Russia is not a rising giant, it is determined to challenge and divide America and Europe and tear up the rules-based international system. Putin’s Russia is the world’s great spoiler.

This phenomenon of a declining power becoming the greatest danger to global peace is not unprecedented. In 1914, the country that triggered World War I was Austria-Hungary, an empire in broad decline, and yet one determined to use its military to show the world it still mattered and to teach a harsh lesson to Serbia, which it regarded as a minor, vassal state. Sound familiar?

America’s dominant priority must be to ensure that Russia does not prevail in its aggression against Ukraine. And right now, trends are moving in the wrong direction. Russian forces are consolidating their gains in eastern Ukraine. Sky-high oil prices have ensured that money continues to flow into Putin’s coffers. Europeans are beginning to talk about off-ramps. Moscow is offering developing nations a deal: Get the West to call off sanctions, it tells them, and it will help export all the grain from Ukraine and Russia and avert famine in many parts of the world. Ukraine’s leaders say it still does not have the weapons and training it needs to fight back effectively.

The best China strategy right now is to defeat Russia. Xi Jinping made a risky wager in backing Russia strongly on the eve of the invasion. If Russia comes out of this conflict a weak, marginalized country, that will be a serious blow to Xi, who is personally associated with the alliance with Putin. If, on the other hand, Putin survives and somehow manages to stage a comeback, Xi and China will learn an ominous lesson: that the West cannot uphold its rules-based system against a sustained assault.

Most of the people in top positions in the Biden administration were senior officials in the Obama administration in 2014, when Russia launched its first invasion of Ukraine, annexed Crimea and intervened in eastern Ukraine. They were not able to reverse Moscow’s aggression or even make Putin pay much of a price for it. Perhaps at the time, they saw the greatest threat to global order as the Islamic State, or they were focused on the “pivot” to Asia, or they didn’t prioritize Ukraine enough. Now they have a second chance, but it is likely to be the last.

As U.S. LNG Expands in Europe, a Hidden Threat Grows Naked Capitalism

In March, President Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a joint task force with the goal of getting Europe off Russian gas and onto more of America’s fracked gas. Most Russian gas reaches Europe via pipeline, so getting U.S. gas to Europe will involve liquifying it and then shipping it across the Atlantic. And as shipments of liquified natural gas (LNG) from the United States increase, so too do the threats from an unwelcome intruder inherently part of America’s natural gas mix — radioactivity.

That’s because government figures indicate that much of the gas that will be shipped to Europe may come from the Marcellus and Utica, black shale formations in Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. About 40 percent of natural gas produced in the United States comes from these formations, and, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, they have particularly high radioactivity levels.

Radioactivity is a problem at multiple points along the natural gas production chain, and oilfield workers and communities in the Marcellus and Utica have been beleaguered by an array of radiological concerns, from fires and spills at facilities processing radioactive oilfield waste to the discharge of this waste into drinking water supplies to high levels of radioactivity found on public roads near a high school football field.

But radioactivity is a problem not only in the production of natural gas; it also haunts the distribution chain. The radioactive gas radon, which is the second leading cause of lung cancer deaths in the United States, travels with the natural gas stream itself. Radon will break down into radioactive lead-210 and polonium-210, one of the most toxic substances on earth, which was famously used in 2006 by Russian assassins to kill the former spy Alexander Litvinenko. Academics and industry professionals alike are concerned about the potential for these radioactive isotopes to build up along the LNG distribution chain and harm workers and communities in the United States and Europe.

“It is entirely appropriate to be discussing the radioactivity levels in LNG,” says Mark Baskaran, a geologist at Wayne State University in Michigan and a world-renowned expert on radon who has studied oilfield radioactivity in the Marcellus and Utica.

However, it appears nobody in the United States or European governments behind the recent LNG deal is discussing radioactivity. Enesta Jones, a spokesperson for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said, “EPA does not regulate radioactivity in oil and gas production, processing and transport systems.” Similarly, a representative from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said the agency does not track oilfield radioactivity and “is also not involved in monitoring which countries, ports, or facilities receive US LNG.”

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Apparently Lithuania wants to nullify some treaty the PLC signed in the 17th century and claim Smolensk.