And because it’s getting funding from unknown sources, possibly spending over the legal limit in elections, and is acting as a Trojan horse for bringing MAGA idiocy to the UK.

And let’s not forget that the right-wing media (which is about 80% of the media in the UK) uncritically supports Farage.

The British government should expend as much effort serving its own people as it does supporting those genocidal colonialist gangsters.

The police were deliberately withholding services from the CHOP and were encouraging their criminal informants and other violent acquaintances to prey on people there. The other emergency services wouldn’t go in without police cover.

They need to investigate Reform, and if Reform are acting as agents of foreign influence, they should shut them down.

The same is true of Yaxley-Lennon’s mob.

He’s not even winning the war on his own incontinence and dementia.

There’s already a war going on against the EU. The fact that its leaders aren’t admitting it yet is a big mistake.

Russia still outproduces all of NATO in artillery shells, tanks, etc.

One of the reasons they’re producing so many tanks is the high attrition rate of tanks in the face of Ukrainian resistance.

Similarly, counting artillery shells is a crude measure of how effective their use has been. Blowing holes in the ground where the enemy isn’t is just burning money.

most European countries only have enough stocks to survive an Ukraine style war on their own for a few months without help

With the qualitative advantages of European materiel over those of Russia, especially fighter planes, how likely is a protracted war? And what would happen to Russia’s productive capacity in those first few months? It’s likely that those factories are very near the top of target lists, right after command and control centers and mobile air defense installations.

That was good analysis. You put some thought into that. One thing I disagree with though:

What is the state of Germany’s Infantry Fighting Vehicle and Main Battle Tanks?

Experience in the past few years makes it seem that the viability of tank-based warfare has dramatically declined.

The targeted 2% that the EU is spending on defense is about EU441 billion, which is roughly 1/7 the size or the total Russian economy.

And if the shit hits the fan, the EU has massive headroom to increase that spending. Russia is already nearly maxed out in productive capacity and spending, even without considering its ability to keep bringing in more young men as drone fodder.

That said, EU governments’ intelligence agencies should be working full-time to remove quislings like Orban and Fico. We’re rapidly reaching the point where fifth columnists should be correctly identified as enemy combatants and not part of normal political discourse.

They seem that way now, but they’ve repeatedly fucked over one another throughout history.

History is a nightmare from which we’re all trying to awake.

Go back a hundred years or more, and there was hardly any peace or justice anywere in the world.

Trump is projecting, as usual.

It’s indisputable that Trump is weak and decaying. He can hardly summon the energy to shit himself anymore, and his speeches are even more ignorant free-associative blithering than they used to be.

“Weak” meaning “not enough torchlight parades of jackbooted bulletheads” and “not enough pogroms.”

Trump’s getting desperate to deflect attention from the failure of his backstab… oh sorry, his “peace plan.”

Europe should be investigating every fascist party for serving as agents of hostile foreign influence. The leaders should be imprisoned and the parties themselves disbanded and proscribed and their assets seized. This is part of a propaganda war meant to undermine any place that’s less of a festering shithole than Russia.

You can always tell when Trump knows he’s in the shit because he doubles down.

Xitter. Pronounced “shitter.”

What do you get when you roll a turd in shit?

I don’t recall Tibetan Buddhists being involved in that.

If they thought it would increase the power of the party, they’d go full Lysenko in a nanosecond.

Different lama.

The Dalai Lama is the boss lama. The Panchen Lama is a second-tier Lama who has come under the control of the Chinese imperialists.

He’s a thing, all right. And not a good thing in any way.

Grassley built a reputation for abusing the oversight function for cheap partisan point-scoring.