To say that Merz is detached from reality doesn’t even begin to describe this. How many Germans agree with him? Well, given recent state votes and polling, a minority.

So if two people were caught having illicit sex in a church people will just look, laugh and pass? 🤔

Today marks 60 years since the Aberfan Disaster, one of the darkest days in our history.   The tragedy, which cut short so many lives, remains etched in the memory of our nation. We remember the 144 who died and pay tribute to a community of such strength and resilience.

and also this 1950 book dropbox.com/scl/fi/v5scphgj3…

Andriy Biletskyi: In Operation Vivaldi we attacked a stronger enemy and lost seven times fewer troops than Russia. Count only the dead and the gap is tenfold. Most Russian losses are killed, most of ours wounded. We can attack, and we can be effective — hromadske. 1/

It's worse than that. The real history of the Budapest Memorandum is not known (or is conveniently ignored). If it was, Sir Jacob's argument would be instantly exposed as a canard. Even @RnaudBertrand doesn't quite grasp it in his (excellent and worth reading) post below. The Budapest Memorandum *also* covered Belarus and Kazakhstan (who also gave up 'their' nuclear weapons, and who signed essentially identical, parallel documents at the same time as Ukraine signed its). All the documents contained a clause in which the USA, the UK and Russia promised "...to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by [Ukraine/Belarus/Kazakhstan] of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind." When the United States imposed sanctions on Belarus in early 2013, Minsk complained bitterly to the US State Department that the sanctions directly contravened the Budapest Memorandum (rightly so, given any reasonable reading of the text possible). Washington's official response was that these sanctions didn't count. What the US State Department argued was that its policy to economically coerce Belarus to do what the US wanted was not in fact against the spirit of an agreement in which the US agreed "to refrain from economic coercion to...secure advantages of any kind" because, in this case, the US had unilaterally decided that this was to the benefit of Belarussians. (The Memorandum of course included no such caveats.) In case this argument was not sufficiently decisive, however, the US State Department also said that, as far as it was concerned, "the Memorandum is not legally binding." I am not arguing that the US was the only guilty party here. But ask yourself this: If way back in 2013 the US believed it could break the Memorandum whenever it thought it was justified in doing so, and that the Memorandum was anyway not legally binding and so offered no legal constraints on US action, why do many British politicians (Sir Jacob is in the majority) contend that the Memorandum is a hard, legally binding, inviolable commitment to defend Ukraine? The answer, of course, is that it offers a patina of legality and moral force (one must fulfill one's promises!) to justify something that our elites wanted to do anyway -- hoping, of course, that nobody would bother reading the text or learning the history of the Budapest Memorandum. And, of course, nobody who actually counts does read the Memorandum or learn its history in action! None many of the politicians in whose hands we place decisions of war and peace. They just think it sounds about right and that it suits their prejudices, so they repeat it rote. Not our Press, whose job it is in a free, democratic society to explore and parse such matters so they may present them in clear terms to the engaged citizen while holding the powerful to account. The Press, on the contrary -- increasingly credulous as they are, increasingly seeing themselves as activists rather than journalists as they do -- also swallow it whole and repeat the narrative rote. Sadly, despite @TuckerCarlson's scepticism, he was not sufficiently prepared, so he was unable to make the above argument. Had he done so, he would have exposed Sir Jacob as ignorant or dishonest (one hopes the former, at which stage a man as honorable as I believe Sir Jacob is would have done the intellectually honest thing and reassessed his position on the matter). So, I guess it's up to people here to look into these matters and try to present the truth to our tiny followings. Not ideal: I don't have a sub-editor. But what's left?

‼️ It’s now come out that it’s not just the BBC, but ITV and Channel 4 have also had taxpayer funded civil servants working inside their newsrooms during general elections. Three major broadcasters.. all with government employees behind the scenes helping put together election coverage. 😲 How are we supposed to trust that any of this is impartial? It looks like newsrooms infested with civil servants helping push state crafted narratives, all at the taxpayers expense. And we’re supposed to call this independent journalism? Or democratic?! 🤦🏻‍♀️ We need an independent investigation into these broadcasters AND the governments that allowed this to happen. What influence did these arrangements have on the news people were watching, public opinion and ultimately how people voted? The public deserves to know.

Democrat Ro Khanna @RepRoKhanna is running for reelection in California's 17th Congressional District [CA-17] on November 3. ✅Voted for the Ukraine Support Act ✅Voted for most key aid packages ✅Voted for sanctions ✅Condemns trafficking of children

My uncle works at Yandex. He told me that when the data centers were struck, the troll bots underwent a forced ontological phase transition via a reverse dematerialization cascade, corporealizing across Europe as brown rioting students. Also, the whole thing was an inside job.

Good lord