Europe is using Ukraine as a reason to remilitarize. It’s not just Germany. Poland is going all in on spending. The Nordic countries are setting up a joint air defense plan. Even Italy is ramping up its military.

After all these years, they realized that 1) it was not the ‘end of history’, 2) they can’t depend on the US for everything, and 3) Russia is going to keep at it. People overly focus on what the US is doing, but Europe is changing too.

Reminds me of when MacArthur wanted to lay a sea of radioactive cobalt across North Korea to push back the Chinese.

>”You may ask what would have prevented the enemy’s reinforcements massing and crossing the Yalu in great strength, as they had before. It was my plan as our amphibious forces moved South to spread behind us—from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea—a belt of radioactive cobalt. It could have been spread from wagons, carts, trucks and planes. It is not an expensive material.

r/combatfootage got a good preview of what’s coming.

Russia is refusing to compromise as well. That’s why they rejected China’s peace proposal. As others have noted, they don’t even control all of the regions that they ‘annexed’, yet insist that they ‘belong’ to them.

Usually politics and diplomacy requires ‘compromise.’

I just have come to accept that's just how things are in the U.S..

>Scott Greytak, the advocacy director for the U.S. office of Transparency International, cited a broader “decay” in U.S. political institutions as a major contributor to the country’s declining rating. Gretyak noted that public confidence in U.S. elections has been undercut by disinformation and record-setting amounts of untraceable money in elections—especially in 2020, when twice as much was spent compared with 2016.
>
>“Second, and increasingly important, are these series of really bombshell exposés by media outlets that are demonstrating how much dirty money is flowing into the United States’ financial system,” he said, referencing a joint investigation published by BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists last year that revealed how major banks had knowingly allowed trillions of dollars of suspect financial transactions to go ahead, enabling drug kingpins, kleptocrats, and terrorists to move corrupt cash around the world.

All across the country, lobbyists and interest groups are rife, and our political system is crap. Both parties accuse the other of corruption, and both are right because both parties are infested with corruption. People like to bang on corruption of other countries, but arguably the U.S. is just as bad as a lot of them. We're not Russia levels of bad yet, but looking at the news, I feel that future is always looming in sight.

People say we shouldn't spend more money on foreign aid and spend it here. I'm not convinced that they are saying that because they are righteous, but more because they want the money here to steal themselves.

Technically not illegal to receive the funds as long as there is 'plausible deniability', I believe; otherwise, politicians would have been charged for this kind of activity a long time ago.

FTX is only the latest grift, but this has been going on for a long time. And neither side is going to truly fix it, because they're all crooks.

Yeah, and he's also not old money enough to have contacts that can help him long-term.

>That ship has sailed for at least the next few generations.

The ship has not only sailed, it's been hit by mysterious explosions and sunk in a light storm.

Look. I not saying you can’t bash billionaires. I bashed a few myself. But this is the r/upliftingnews Reddit. Where assumingly we focus on the better points of news articles. There are dozen of other subreddits where you could bash said billionaire and rightfully so. But this is not the r/unupliftingnews Reddit.

I like all the cynical, negative and bitter comments that have shown up.

During WW2, when the Soviets pulled out of Kiev/Kyiv, they rigged buildings to explode when the Germans moved in to occupy the city. So it’s reasonable to suspect a trap.