The path to war in Asia – crossing the Rubicon.

The conditions for a war in Asia are ripening by the day, but be under no illusion, this situation is not organically happening. These conditions have been engineered for quite some considerable time. The unrelenting rhetoric, near constant media coverage and propaganda we are being subjected to daily is not in any way simply a result of ‘happenings’ or in response to ’emergent events’. On the contrary, this march to war has been a long and carefully orchestrated, craftfully engineered objective by the architects of this strategy.

NSW ministers will be barred from taking public sector jobs related to their portfolios for 18 months after leaving office.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet announced the crackdown on ministers’ future job prospects after getting an independent review into the recruitment of former deputy premier John Barilaro to a lucrative trade envoy job.

“The process was just flawed from the outset,” he said on Tuesday.

The much-touted review into the bungled appointment was conducted by former NSW Public Service commissioner Graeme Head.

“The entire process that has been undertaken has been incredibly disappointing,” Mr Perrottet said.

Scott Morrison has defied a call from a senior Liberal to resign, after it emerged he secretly took over five key portfolios while prime minister.

In an extraordinary lengthy post on Facebook on Tuesday afternoon, Mr Morrison again defended his actions – although he conceded that “in hindsight these arrangements were unnecessary”.

“I used such powers on one occasion only. I did not seek to interfere with ministers in the conduct of their portfolio as there were no circumstances which warranted their use, except in the case of the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources,” he wrote.

The Ukrainian military has not been able to pull off its promised counteroffensive, and Russian forces are now likely to take over the whole of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a former adviser to the secretary of defense in the Trump administration, has said.

Appearing on a livestream hosted by former US judge and columnist Andrew Napolitano last Tuesday, Macgregor dismissed as “utterly nonsensical” reports in some US media outlets that the Russian military has lost some 80,000 personnel in Ukraine so far. According to the decorated Gulf War veteran, “more accurate numbers are probably thirteen to fifteen thousand dead on the Russian side,” with Ukrainian forces having lost “sixty to eighty thousand.”

Accusations that Moscow is jeopardizing the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) contradict the facts and allow Kiev to undermine the International Atomic Energy Agency’s efforts to inspect the facility, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on Monday.

Russia’s response comes after the EU released a statement on Sunday condemning the “unprovoked invasion of Ukraine” and accusing the Russian military of attacking the ZNPP and preventing nuclear and radiation safety from being maintained at the facility.

“Western countries are once again descending to outright lies, arguing that the threats to the ZNPP are created by Russia,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in a statement published on the ministry’s website. 

The United States and its allies have spent years and billions of dollars providing weapons assistance and training support for Kiev, with aid ramped up dramatically since the escalation of the long-embering crisis in February.

New Zealand will deploy an additional 120 troops to provide training to their Ukrainian counterparts across four bases in the UK, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced.

Have you noticed the latest coming out of Eastern Europe—the Estonians, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Czechs, and let us not forget the Ukrainians? Suddenly everyone thinks it is a good idea to begin shutting Russians, as in all Russians, out of Europe. That’s it: No more Russians in Europe because…because they are Russian. End of story, as some people like to say. 

This is a sick business. There is a pathology at work in these proposals. We are listening to the utterances of desperate, insecure, frustrated people. I detect, beneath all the immediate animosity to do with the Ukraine crisis, a case of post-traumatic stress disorder lingering on from the Soviet era. 

By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

READ MORE:

https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/14/law-and-disorder/

AS THE FIRST COMMENT SAYS:

huh. I thought he was going to say ‘if we actually adhere to the rule of law and follow through with the prosecution of donald trump and serve justice and prove that our system of government isn’t just a mechanism to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority we’ll also have to prosecute bush, cheney, both clintons, obama, many bidens, a few pelosis…where would it end?!’

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don’t think many Americans appreciate just how tense and tenuous, how very touch and go the energy situation in Europe is right now.

For months, as news of the Ukraine war receded a bit, it was possible to follow the energy story unfolding across the Atlantic and still assume an uncomfortable but familiar-enough winter in Europe, characterized primarily by high prices.

The Business Council of Australia has released a discussion paper designed to kickstart a nationwide conversation about the best ways to shift Australia into the fast lane of growth.

The world is changing around us. Australia finds itself in the crosshairs of several major shifts including the rise of Asia, technological and digital advances and the global adoption of green energy sources.

Our failure to tackle the obstacles holding us back has left the nation out of pocket from where it could have been. That’s the ultimate opportunity cost we all pay for inaction.

With the prospect of a slower growing economy, record public debt, weak population growth and a tax system that will struggle to fund future spending demands, something has to give.

Both parties agree on one thing: More money for the military 

Political divisions stand in the way of most legislation, but both sides of the aisle are happy to keep feeding the beast at the Pentagon.

It was quite a week last week. Forest fires and floods testified to the devastating, inexorable march of global warming.

— Record high inflation, led by food and gas, continued to strike at American pocketbooks. (I’ll take the gas price increase if it incentivizes a more rapid move toward renewables, but it is a financial disaster for consumers, farmers, and shippers and a political disaster for the Democrats in the fall.)

On the day that the death of Sempé (one of the best cartoonists in the world) has been announced — he was 90 something — Gus Leonisky carries on with his crass nasty mischief — stealing other people's works and adding more nasty stuff, than less. 

He was seen in France as revealing amusing and sometimes caustic truths about the world – making people smile without resorting to cruelty or mockery.

The kindness that Sempé showed the diminutive characters that he placed in an outsized world was in contrast to the misery of his own upbringing. “You never get over your childhood,” he said when well into his 80s, having avoided the subject for decades. “You try to sort things out, to make your memories prettier. But you never get over it.”

After Russia invaded Ukraine last February, the European Union moved to block RT and Sputnik, two of the Kremlin's top channels for spreading propaganda and misinformation about the war.

Nearly six months later, the number of sites pushing that same content has exploded as Russia found ways to evade the ban. They've rebranded their work to disguise it. They've shifted some propaganda duties to diplomats. And they've cut and pasted much of the content on new websites — ones that until now had no obvious ties to Russia.

By DAVID KLEPPER

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has launched a legal bid to get back funding for his office and staff. The privileges were withdrawn in May by the Bundestag’s budget committee, his lawyers told broadcaster NDR on Friday.