The European Union has voted to keep Russian central bank assets frozen indefinitely despite opposition from member states. The bloc pushed through the controversial agenda by invoking emergency powers legislation to bypass the need for unanimous approval.
The European Commission, and its head Ursula von der Leyen, want to use the $246 billion in Russian sovereign funds immobilized by the bloc after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, to back a “reparations loan” for Kiev.
The loan scheme has been opposed by member states, including Hungary, Slovakia, which are against providing further aid to Kiev. Belgium, where most of the funds are held, has also raised concerns due to legal and financial risks. The European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund have warned that tapping Russian money would undermine the reputation of the euro and more broadly the Western financial system.
Russia has condemned the freeze as illegal and called any use of the funds as “theft,” warning of economic and legal retaliation.
The vote put forward by von der Leyen reframed the issue of frozen Russian assets as an economic emergency rather than a sanctions policy. This allowed the Commission to invoke Article 122 of the EU treaties, an emergency clause that permits decisions to be adopted by a qualified majority vote instead of unanimity, effectively bypassing veto threats from countries opposed to the move.
Invoking the clause is unprecedented and raises concerns about the sanctity of the fundamental principle of EU politics that major foreign policy, budget, and defense decisions are made by unanimous consent.
This isn’t even remotely surprising. It was always inevitable that, sooner or later, the EU was going to break its “fundamental principle” of unanimous consent and the national sovereignty of its member-states by granting itself permission to override the national vetoes. But it’s one thing to know it’s eventually coming, it’s another to actually see it happen and see for what that principle was sacrificed.
This marks the first major step toward the collapse of the EU since Britain voted to leave. I’d be surprised if four or more states, including Hungary and the Czech Republic, didn’t take this as a sign that it’s time to leave the union.
Fandom Pulse (FP): You just released a new book, Guns of Mars, what is it about?
Chuck Dixon: It’s set on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars series, set a thousand years after the last book.
Kal Keddiq is a thark on the run from his own tribe. A nameless bounty hunter is pursuing over the dying planet. But Kal’s not going back to face Warhoon justice without a fight. Think of the Mars series retold as an Italian western.
FP: What made you want to tell a story set on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom?
Chuck: I ate those books up as a kid. I spent a summer reading the entire Mars series and Lord of the Rings. After each Tolkien book I’d take a break and read a few of the John Carters before digging back into Middle-earth.
The idea for Guns of Mars occurred to me years ago, always in the back of my head. I finally had to write it just to get it out of my system. And it was intimidating. Burroughs was one hell of a writer and I wanted to try and match his skill at writing action and that wonderful sense of discovery that was such a feature of his work.
FP: How connected is this book to Burroughs’ Barsoom series?
Chuck: John Carter, Dejah Thoris, Tars Tarkas and the rest are long gone. The dying plant that ERB presented is now a millennium further along the doom spiral. There’s really very little to connect this to the series other than the setting, place names, flora and fauna.
FP: Do you have plans to do more stories set on Barsoom?
An Unmitigated Pedant defends the military elements of The Lord of the Rings. I read this with particular interest, because the military scenes and battles have tended to be the one area where Arts of Dark and Light have been said to actually exceed the master’s masterpiece. His core thesis is that it is primarily Peter Jackson who is to blame for the perception that Tolkien’s military setups and strategies were suboptimal, although he blames most of Jackson’s shortcomings on the medium in which he was working.
I’m not so sure about that, given Faramir’s cavalry charge against a fortified position being held by missile-armed forces. But never mind that for now.
The army Sauron sends against Minas Tirith is absolutely vast – an army so vast that it cannot fit its entire force in the available frontage, so the army ends up stacking up in front of the city:
The books are vague on the total size of the orcish host (but we’ll come back to this), but interview material for the movies suggests that Peter Jackson’s CGI team assumed around 200,000 orcs. This army has to exit Minas Morgul – apparently as a single group – and then follow the road to the crossing at Osgiliath. Is this operational plan reasonable, from a transit perspective?
In a word: no. It’s not hard to run the math as to why. Looking at the image at the head of the previous section, we can see that the road the orcs are on allows them to march five abreast, meaning there are 40,000 such rows (plus additional space for trolls, etc). Giving each orc four feet of space on the march (a fairly conservative figure), that would mean the army alone stretches 30 miles down a single road. At that length, the tail end of the army would not even be able to leave camp before the front of the army had finished marching for the day. For comparison, an army doing a ‘forced march’ (marching at rapid speed under limited load – and often taking heat or fatigue casualties to do it) might manage 20 to 30 miles per day. Infantry on foot is more likely to average around 10 miles per day on decent roads.
Ideally, the solution to this problem is to split the army up. By moving in multiple columns and converging on the battlespace, you split one impossibly long column of troops into several more manageable ones. There is a danger here – the enemy might try to overwhelm each smaller army in turn – but Faramir has had to pull his troops back out of Ithilien, so there is little risk of defeat in detail for the Army of Mordor. The larger problem is terrain – we’ve seen Ithilien in this film and the previous one: it is heavily forested, with few roads. What roads exist are overgrown and difficult to use. Worse yet, the primary route through the area is not an east-west road, but the North-South route up from Near Harad to the Black Gate. The infrastructure here to split the army effectively simply doesn’t exist.
A map from regular Earth, rather than Middle Earth. This is Napoleon’s Ulm Campaign (1805) – note how Napoleon’s armies (the blue lines) are so large they have to move in multiple columns, which converge on the Austrian army (the red box labeled “FERDINAND”). This coordinated movement is the heart of operations: how do you get your entire army all to the battlefield intact and at the same time? This actually understates the problem, because the army of Morder also needs supplies in order to conduct the siege. Orcs seem to be able to make do with very poor water supplies (Frodo and Sam comment on the foulness of Mordor water), so we can assume they use local water along the march, but that still leaves food. Ithilien (the territory they are marching through), as we have seen in the film, is unpopulated – the army can expect no fresh supplies here (or in the Pelennor beyond, for reasons we’ll discuss shortly). That is going to mean a baggage train to carry additional supplies, as well as materials for the construction of all of the fancy siege equipment (we, in fact, later see them bringing the towers pre-built – we’ll get to it). This would lengthen the army train even more.
All of that raises a second point – from a supply perspective, can this operation work? Here, the answer is, perhaps surprisingly, yes. Minas Morgul is 20 leagues (around 60 miles) from Minas Tirith. An infantryman might carry around (very roughly) 10 days or so of rations on his person, which is enough to move around 120 miles (these figures derive from K. Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (2003) – well worth a read! – but are broadly applicable to almost any army before the invention of the railroad). The army is bound to be held up a bit along the way, so the Witch King would want to bring some wagons with additional supplies, but as a matter of supply, this works. The problem is transit.
As a side note, the supply issue neatly explains the aggressive tactics the Witch king employs when he arrives at Minas Tirith, moving immediately for an assault rather than a siege. Because the pack animals which pull wagons full of food eat food themselves, there is literally no amount of wagons which would enable an army of this size to sustain itself indefinitely in a long siege. The Witch King is thus constrained by his operational plan: the raw size of his army means he must either take the city in an assault quickly enough to march most of his army back, or fail. He proceeds with the appropriate sense of urgency.
That said, the distances here are short: 60 miles is a believable distance for an army to make an unsupported ‘lunge’ out of its logistics network. One cannot help but notice the Stark (hah!) contrast with the multi-hundred-mile supply-free lunges in the TV version of Game of Thrones, which are far less plausible.
Great, now I have to re-read The Lord of the Rings from a strategic and logistics perspective. Hmmm, this might actually make for an interesting Darkstream series. Would that be of interest to anyone else or is this just another AI music sort of thing?
In a stunning display of tyrannical overreach, the EU’s unelected overlords are now threatening Belgium’s newly minted Prime Minister Bart De Wever with financial Armageddon simply because he refuses to play along with their insane plot to steal $200 billion in frozen Russian assets.
Yes, you read that right: STEAL. Like common thieves in the night, targeting a sovereign central bank’s holdings parked safely in Belgium’s Euroclear system. This isn’t just policy wonkery; it’s a full-throated assault on national sovereignty, international law, and basic common sense.
And if De Wever doesn’t cave, the EU – egged on by globalist mouthpieces like POLITICO – is ready to ostracize, humiliate, and economically strangle a founding member state.
Sound familiar?
It’s the same playbook the EU used to bully Hungary and Poland into submission.
But this time, it’s backfiring spectacularly, and it could be the spark that finally torches the whole rotten Brussels circus. In a blistering statement that’s gone viral across Europe, De Wever laid it out plain and simple: The countries screaming loudest for this asset grab – think the Baltic states and Poland, scarred by Soviet ghosts – are “psychologically at war” with Russia. Fair enough, they’ve got history.
But Belgium? “We are not at war with Russia,” De Wever thundered. “And we do not wish to be at war with Russia. We must negotiate based on reality, not fantasy.” Boom. Reality check delivered. Stealing from a foreign central bank, he warns, is no different than “robbing an embassy.”
t’s a violation of treaties, a slap in the face to diplomatic norms, and a one-way ticket to the courtroom for every EU hack who touches it. Remember that dusty 1989 bilateral investment treaty between Belgium and the Soviet Union? The Kremlin lawyers are sharpening their pencils already.
If this heist goes down, Belgium could be on the hook for hundreds of billions in reparations – capital plus damages – equaling a staggering 50% of its GDP. That’s not a debt; that’s national suicide.
Even POLITICO, the house organ of the Davos crowd, admits the emperor has no clothes. In a rare moment of clarity (better late than never!), they concede the only realistic fix is for the hawkish EU nations – the ones foaming at the mouth for more Ukraine cash – to pony up their own taxpayer dollars. No more freeloading off little Belgium, the unwitting host of these frozen funds. But oh, the irony burns! POLITICO whines that this would shatter the sacred “principle of solidarity” by forcing some countries to “bear the financial burden alone.”
Hello? That’s exactly what the EU has been strong-arming Belgium to do for months – dive solo into a $200 billion black hole while Berlin and Paris sip champagne!
Belgium should send its police forces in and arrest the entire EU commission. The EU has no power, no military, no nothing at all. Even its “laws” and “principles” are just rhetorical fictions that it heeds or ignores depending on the subject and the situation. Tear down that ersatz Tower of Babel and send all the MEPs back to their home nations.
It’s not just time for the member states of the European Union to leave it. It’s time for them to destroy that fake government and go full Scipio-in-Carthage on it. If this doesn’t prove to you that the unelected nonentities pretending to be the rulers of a nonexistent polity do not and cannot represent the interests of the various European nations at all, then you’re not paying attention.
I prepared these for a friend who wanted to make a basic ebook from a text file. I figured they might be useful to some readers here in case they wanted to do something similar. This will provide a basic ebook without much in the way of formatting.
Save the document in .docx or .rtf format.
Download Calibre for your operating system.
https://calibre-ebook.com/download
Open Calibre.
Click the big green “Add books” icon.
Locate the file and click Open. The file will be added to the list of titles in the middle.
Find the title of the file you added and click once to select it.
Click the big brown “Convert books” icon.
Add the metadata on the right. Title, Author, Author Sort, etc.
Click on the little icon next to the box under Change cover image in the middle.
Select your cover image.
Change Output format in the selection box in the top right to EPUB.
Click OK.
Click once to select the title and either hit the O key or right click and select Open Book Folder -> Open Book Folder.
In the aftermath of yesterday’s blog post about Larry Correia, and the subsequent Arkhaven Nights stream on UATV, a number of people have asked me about the facts of the matter to which Larry was referring in such a dishonest manner to the editor of Baen Books and science fiction professionals. First, here is the email Larry sent out to JDA, Toni Weisskopf, Jason Cordova, Brad Torgersen, and Sarah Hoyt:
I’d say I hope you have a nice Christmas with your family, but you probably can’t because of that domestic violence restraining order. Now I’m gonna block this email like I have all your other accounts, you sort of human shaped blob of herpes.
Now let’s address the facts. You may wish to note that I have read the relevant documents, including the restraining and custody orders.
There was a restraining order filed against JDA by his ex-wife in 2023, two months after she filed for divorce. It was not filed on the basis of domestic violence, nor is there any mention of violence, domestic or otherwise, in the order.
The restraining order was requested on the basis of text messages that criticized his ex-wife-to-be’s physically abusive behavior towards their children.
The three-year restraining order was granted eight months later as part of the divorce settlement because the text messages sent to his ex-wife-to-be about her behavior made her feel bad and were characterized as something that “disturbs the peace”.
JDA did not contest the restraining order since a) doing so would be expensive and b) he was not interested in having any contact with his ex-wife over the next three years anyhow.
JDA never committed any violence, never laid a hand on his ex-wife, and was never accused by her or by anyone else of doing so. He was not even within miles of his ex-wife when the exchange of texts that served as the basis for the restraining order took place.
JDA was granted full custody of the children by the court.
JDA absolutely can, and will, spend Christmas with his family, which includes his children by his ex-wife, of whom he has had custody since the divorce.
In other words, Larry Correia attempted to falsely portray a married father who proactively defended his children, and still has custody of those children, as a violent wife-beater who is not permitted to be around his family at Christmastime. And in doing so, he encouraged dozens hundreds of people on social media and on YouTube, including last night on Arkhaven Nights, to post messages saying things like “why did you beat your wife” repeatedly throughout the the stream. I personally witnessed at least 20 of these obnoxious comments from at least four different accounts during the stream.
This is absolutely inexcusable and unprofessional behavior, particularly on the part of a self-styled conservative who purports to be a family man. And that cancerous behavior further exposes Larry Correia’s undeniable lack of character, which we first observed when he encouraged hundreds of Sad Puppies to spend $40 to nominate him for Hugo awards, then fled the field and abandoned his followers the moment the mainstream media took notice of him and started to call him names.
The damning thing is that Larry knew exactly what he was doing. In fact, ten years ago, he was angry about the very sort of behavior he is exhibiting now.
I’m angry. When people who haven’t talked to my wife since high school reach out to her, worried for her safety, because they read about how her husband is a wife beater, I get angry.
GUNS OF MARS, the newest novel from The Legend Chuck Dixon, has gotten off to a very good start. In case you’re not sure you’re interested in his excursion onto the dying Red Planet of Barsoom, please enjoy the following sample from the text.
Kal Keddaq rested his full ten-foot height prone on the slope of a ring of ochre sand that surrounded a shallow depression. His rifle was cradled in the crooks of his upper set of arms. Raised on four elbows, he lifted his head until his eyes cleared the lip of the bowl to scan the broad plain to the south. He was careful to tilt his head back in order that the protruding ears atop his head be less visible.
All he could see was an uninterrupted horizon against an orange sky. The sun was setting, and the cold would be upon him once more. The days were shorter and nights longer as he rode farther to the north. The sand was still warm beneath him. The last of the sun’s rays touched the thick green flesh of his back, a mottled mix of olive and jade. He might risk a fire later if he were certain he’d shaken the man pursuing him.
Kal knew, deep in his bones, that he had not lost the man who’d been tracking him over the dead sea floor for the past three days. His only chance to escape the bounty man was to keep heading north to one of the settlements that ringed the pole. Even that was a risk as he could run out of water for himself or his mounts before ever reaching one of them. And there was every chance his kind would not be welcome in the mostly human polar refuges.
He turned on his side to glance back at the two thoats grazing on patches of yellow lichen at the bottom of the bowl. The larger one was his saddle mount. The second was a pack animal bearing his remaining supplies and his last skin of water.
Before returning to his vigil, Kal removed a telescopticon from a pouch on his harness. He set his rifle aside and extended the scope to its full length before fitting an eye to the lens cup. Shifting from left to right he fixed his gaze on the uninterrupted line of the horizon. Dervishes of dust danced across the plain as the night winds stirred the talc surface. Kal blinked a few times and strained to sharpen his sight.
There, past the curtain of swirling sand, the last light of the setting sun caught a thread of dust rising in the far distance. Kal squeezed his dry eyes shut and pressed his better eye to the cup once more.
Through the haze he could make out a dark figure at the base of the golden column. A lifetime of living in the near featureless barrens of the Great Sand Sea had trained his eyes to recognize details that might be missed by another. More from the approaching shape’s motion than any details he could make out, Kal recognized it as a man riding atop a thoat. From that distinct swaying cadence, he knew the man rode his mount at a walk. Even so, he would reach Kal’s position by the time the sun set. Kal collapsed the spyglass shut and returned it to its pouch.
“Damn this man,” Kal muttered as he snatched up his rifle and slid on sandaled feet to the floor of the bowl.
He quickly untied the reins of his thoats from the rock he’d hitched them to. He secured the long rifle in the boot under his saddle alongside the scabbard of his long saber. His thoat croaked and bleated as he swung into the saddle. The animals were thirsty. Hell, he was thirsty too.
He kicked his heels into the flanks of his mount and it rose on its ten legs to canter in a general northerly direction, the smaller pack animal following at the end of a lead line of braided hide.
The rim of the bowl would serve to hide him from the pursuer for the next hour or so. The cracked clay surface of the dead lake would not raise any dust to betray his position before that. With any luck, Kal would be out of sight in the gathering dark by the time the bounty man crested the slope. Kal recognized that his run of luck was nearing its end after three days of riding hard with little rest and dwindling supplies. If he could only reach Argon or Samarium, one of the two settlements that lay north against the edge of the ice cap! Or perhaps a camp of fellow tharks where his name was not known.
He was Warhoon, a tribe not welcome among the more civilized of the tharks. There was no hiding his allegiance, as the signature bands of Warhoon tattoos about his arms attested. The distinction between tribes was less important the farther north he rode. The need for water sourced from ice melt erased the differences between tharks, and even between tharks and men. In this pitiless country, thirst was a greater concern than tribal or species loyalties.
And there was little chance his reputation had preceded him to the settlements. But word would soon follow him and then there would be more than just this single human dogging his trail. Until he found a place remote enough, backward enough in which to hide, there would be no rest for him.
All because he had dallied with the bitch Tagas, the first daughter of a Warhoon elder hetman. He’d only agreed to the arrangement because he saw advantages for himself in the union. A warrior of little distinction and less property, he had few prospects of ever being more than a handy sword and lance for the many conflicts the tribe engaged in.
Then the harpy Tagas had become taken with him for some reason. It was she who proposed they become mates. And, after consuming enough briga, a drink made from fermented tojan root, he agreed to the match. But there was not enough briga on Barsoom to make Tagas attractive enough for more than a few ruts. And so, Kal mounted up and rode off leaving his bride to wail at his absence and her father to roar himself raw with rage.
For most of the twentieth century, creative ambition followed a single script. You studied the field, polished a manuscript, hunted for an agent, and prayed for a contract.
If you were in film or music, the process was different in details but identical in structure: Everything hinged on the approval of an institution. Success came from being chosen. Talent mattered, but luck mattered more. Most creators knew it but kept playing the game because the alternative seemed unthinkable.
That expectation didn’t come from nowhere. It grew out of a period when the gatekeepers could actually elevate an unknown. They possessed the distribution networks, the advertising budgets, the corporate partnerships, and the capacity to manufacture stardom.
That pattern repeated enough times to take on the aura of tradition. If you wanted a career, you knocked on the same doors everyone else knocked on. The problem is that the doors stopped opening long before artists realized the hinges had rusted shut.
By the late 1990s, the blockbuster mentality had consumed the traditional institutions. Every division—publishing, film, television, and music—became obsessed with scale. Risk tolerance flatlined. Executives seeking hits that could justify their salaries clung to anything that produced reliable profit and panicked at the unfamiliar. Innovation came to represent risk instead of opportunity.
At the same time, audiences aged. The properties that kept the lights on were the ones that debuted thirty, forty, or fifty years earlier. Instead of cultivating younger talent, the corporations recycled the same brands over and over, hoping nostalgia would substitute for relevance. You saw endless sequels, remakes, reboots, and spin-offs. The cultural oxygen was consumed by dying giants.
Creators sensed something was wrong, but most didn’t grasp how deeply the rot ran. The old structures no longer had the ability or the interest to launch new creators into the mainstream. The institutions that once acted as kingmakers had lost the will and the means to fulfill that role.
Yet legacy outlets continued promoting the old discovery narrative because it kept the talent pipeline flowing. As long as artists believed salvation waited inside the old system, they wouldn’t look for alternatives.
This conditioning left scars. Many creators still cling to the hope that one good pitch or lucky submission will unlock a career. They believe someone in a skyscraper will pluck them from obscurity and grant them access to an audience. This belief persists despite decades of evidence that the system has no interest in fulfilling creators’ expectations.
Worse, some artists internalized the idea that bypassing the old gatekeepers equates to failure. Seeing independence as a last resort, they imagine legitimacy comes only from institutional approval, even though the institutions abandoned their curatorial role.
That psychology runs deep: Creators were trained to think of themselves not as people who produce value for audiences, but as supplicants waiting for an authority figure to validate them.
The irony is that while creators waited for help, audiences changed faster than the institutions could track. Once internet access became ubiquitous, people stopped caring about traditional pipelines. Their interests moved to quality and authenticity, not pedigree.
The challenge now is that the playing fields are not even close to level. How can a podcaster compete on YouTube or Spotify when he’s banned from one, the other, or as in some cases, both? How can an author compete when the A9 algorithm, or whatever Amazon calls the way it makes winners out of losers and losers out of winners, fails to favor him?
The answer, as we were forced to figure out much, much earlier than most, is direct sales and patronage. That’s why Castalia thrives while many other publishers, including the big ones, are struggling more and more every year. It’s because we were forced to rely on you readers early on, long before
There are still challenges posed by structural elements like the payment processors, but even those challenges are starting to fade as Russia, China, and the BRICS countries improve their financial products. And what that means is that independent creators don’t have to go down with the collapsing mainstream infrastructure.
As AI improves, as the number of options improve, it’s only going to keep getting better for true independents and worse for those who still cling to the idea that the gatekeepers matter, no matter how propped up they might be.
Speaking of the collapse of the mainstream gatekeepers, shame on all of you Rabid Puppies. Shame!
I was in a small bookstore just after the Hugo blow up, and this old guy was asking the clerk for recommendations. She straight face recommended NKJemison, “She won 3 years in a row, and it’s never happened before!” Poor guy.
And that’s why it only takes 11 votes to get nominated for a Hugo these days.
I’ve tried to give the big fat coward the benefit of the doubt for a long time, but it’s just not possible anymore. His behavior is just too absurd for polite words.
You should understand three things about Larry Correia. First, he doesn’t give a fragment of a rat’s ass about anyone or anything but himself. He left all the people he led into Sad Puppies hanging and abandoned them without a second thought because he’s a little pussy who couldn’t take the heat once the mainstream press got involved. You needn’t take my word for it, just ask him about it and watch him dance like a Riverdancer on a hot plate.
I told him directly and unequivocally that it was a terrible mistake to simply cut and run, and he told me that he didn’t give a damn about the fact that people were spending $40 to participate in Sad Puppies even though he encouraged them to do so. I even told him it was wrong, but he simply did not care. Not even a little bit. The only reason Rabid Puppies came into being was because Larry and Brad were TERRIFIED of being splashed by the mainstream media’s criticism of me.
They’re total fucking cowards. They always have been. The SF-SJWs never understood me, but boy, did they nail him correctly. The International Lord of Hate was actually just the International Lord of Hurt Feelings. One would never have imagined that such a large individual could be such a sensitive little pansy.
And that’s the truth, one that I’ve been concealing for his benefit for more than ten years. But not anymore, because he’s become such an complete and unadulterated prick who just can’t control himself whenever anyone gets more attention than he does. Look at his response to Jon Del Arroz informing Baen Books and the Baen crowd that Fandom Pulse interviewed one of Baen’s authors.
I’d say I hope you have a nice Christmas with your family, but you probably can’t because of that domestic violence restraining order. Now I’m gonna block this email like I have all your other accounts, you sort of human shaped blob of herpes.
I haven’t respected Larry Correia since he ran out on Sad Puppies. But he’s become more and more despicable over the years, and the fact that now he’s taken the ticket shouldn’t surprise anyone. Now he’s openly engaging in libel.
So, Larry, your wife and your family are fair game now. Don’t cry about it, you’re the one who went there and no one made you do it.
Second, Larry’s a coward. He loves to own the libs on Facebook, but he’s too much of a coward to ever stand up for anything that actually matters. He’d disown literally anyone and everything in order to protect his precious book sales, even though he’s never been good enough to get signed by a major publisher in his life. He was afraid to go solo even though I told him he should nearly ten years ago, because he needed the Baen security blanket until it became evident that Baen is not long for this world.
The third thing is that Larry is deeply and fundamentally insecure. That’s why he lashes out at people unnecessarily. That’s what originally motivated Sad Puppies. I don’t know why JDA threatens him, but it’s impossible to miss.
I’ve kept my mouth shut about the fat cowardly cunt out of respect for his past accomplishments, which are legitimate and real. But I think a decade of silence about his observable and undeniable shortcomings is more than sufficient, considering that his behavior is actually getting worse over time. And, as you may recall, I gave him fair warning the last time he spouted off for no reason.
NATO chief Mark Rutte has warned that war with Russia ‘is at our door’ as he urged European allies to prepare for action now or risk facing a conflict on the scale ‘our grandparents and great-grandparents endured’.
Speaking in Berlin on Thursday, Rutte said too many NATO members remained ‘quietly complacent’ about the threat posed by Moscow and insisted Europe must urgently ramp up defence spending and weapons production to deter Vladimir Putin.
‘We are Russia’s next target,’ he said. I fear that too many are quietly complacent. Too many don’t feel the urgency. And too many believe that time is on our side. It is not. The time for action is now.’
The only reason “the time for action is now” is because in five years, the USA isn’t going to be a member of NATO. NATO may or may not still exist as a rudimentary parody of a transnational military force, but regardless, time is not on the side of either NATO or the EU because in five years, both China and Russia are going to be stronger in both economic and military terms, the USA will be trying to survive its self-inflicted demographic shocks and maintaining its preeminence in the Western hemisphere, and the European militaries won’t even be able to control their own populations.
So NATO can lose now or lose later. It makes zero difference. The smartest thing these Clown World puppets could do is surrender preemptively to Russia and stop constantly poking both the Bear and the Dragon. Doing so is in the interest of them and the European nations alike. But they won’t be permitted to do so, which is why we’re going to have to endure this charade for another few years.
