Ketanji Brown Jackson

 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/22/hawley-jackson-child-pornography-sentencing-record-00019481

Sen. Josh Hawley on Tuesday questioned Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s sentencing in a 2013 child pornography case where federal guidelines recommended a 10-year term and Jackson gave the defendant three months.

“I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it,” Hawley (R-Mo.) said to the Supreme Court nominee on the second day of her confirmation hearings. “We’re talking about 8-year-olds, 9-year-olds, 11-year-olds and 12-year-olds.”

In the 2013 case, United States v. Hawkins, Jackson sentenced 18-year-old Wesley Hawkins, who had been in possession of about two dozen child sexual abuse images and videos, to three months in prison, while the prosecution recommended at least two years and the PROTECT Act of 2003 recommended 97 to 121 months.

Ukraine: nationalinterest

 https://nationalinterest.org/article/the-dangers-of-expansive-realism-551

Between 1989 and 1991, a political miracle occurred. The Soviet regime, steeped in blood and obsessed with total control as it had been throughout most of its history, voluntarily gave up its Warsaw Pact empire, collapsed the Soviet system upon itself, and then acquiesced in its own demise--all with virtually no violence. 

Ukraine: Hunter Biden

 https://www.maciverinstitute.com/2022/03/the-hunter-biden-story-was-always-about-joes-corruption/

In April 2014, just two months after being discharged from the Navy for testing positive for cocaine, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest oil and natural gas company even though he neither spoke Ukrainian nor had any experience in the oil and natural gas industry.

What he did have was a father who happened to be the Vice President of the United States as well as the Obama Administration’s point man on Ukraine. In a press release announcing Hunter’s hiring, Burisma noted that he would be in charge of the company’s “legal unit and will provide support for the company among international organizations.” This, presumably, would include the United States Government.

Almost immediately after Hunter joined the board, Vadym Pozharskyi, one of Burisma’s top executives, asked in in an email in May 2014 for “advice on how you could use your influence” to aid Burisma in its international relations. Hunter apparently got to work immediately and even arranged a meeting between his father and Pozharskyi.

“Dear Hunter,” Pozharskyi wrote him the following April, “Thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s really an honor and pleasure. As we spoke yesterday evening, would be great to meet today for a quick coffee. What do you think?”

Less than eight months after this meeting, Vice President Biden pressured then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who just happened to be investigating Burisma for public corruption. If they wouldn’t, Biden promised, the U.S. would withhold a billion dollars in loan guarantees.

“I went over…to Kyiv and I was supposed to announce that there was another billion dollar loan guarantee and I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor and they didn’t,” Biden bragged during a 2018 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. “I said, ‘We’re not going to give you the billion dollars.’ They said, ‘You have no authority, you’re not the President.’

“I said, ‘Call him.’ I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting a billion dollars.’ I said, ‘You’re not getting a billion, I’m going to be leaving here and I think it was about six hours,’ and I look at him and say, ‘We’re leaving in six hours, if the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money.’

“Well son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

And that someone dropped the investigation into Burisma.

Ukraine: Carpenter

 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/28/nato-expansion-war-russia-ukraine

The Clinton administration proposed inviting Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to become members, and the US Senate approved adding those countries to the North Atlantic Treaty in 1998. It would be the first of several waves of membership expansion.

Even that first stage provoked Russian opposition and anger. In her memoir, Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, concedes that “[Russian president Boris] Yeltsin and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe’s dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated.”

Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state, similarly described the Russian attitude. “Many Russians see Nato as a vestige of the cold war, inherently directed against their country. They point out that they have disbanded the Warsaw Pact, their military alliance, and ask why the west should not do the same.” It was an excellent question, and neither the Clinton administration nor its successors provided even a remotely convincing answer.

George Kennan, the intellectual father of America’s containment policy during the cold war, perceptively warned in a May 1998 New York Times interview about what the Senate’s ratification of Nato’s first round of expansion would set in motion. “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” Kennan stated. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”

He was right, but US and Nato leaders proceeded with new rounds of expansion, including the provocative step of adding the three Baltic republics. Those countries not only had been part of the Soviet Union, but they had also been part of Russia’s empire during the Czarist era. That wave of expansion now had Nato perched on the border of the Russian Federation.

Moscow’s patience with Nato’s ever more intrusive behavior was wearing thin. The last reasonably friendly warning from Russia that the alliance needed to back off came in March 2007, when Putin addressed the annual Munich security conference. “Nato has put its frontline forces on our borders,” Putin complained. Nato expansion “represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”

activist-teachers

 https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/how-activist-teachers-recruit-kids?s=r

Last month, the California Teachers Association (CTA) held a conference advising teachers on best practices for subverting parents, conservative communities and school principals on issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. 

Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents.

what makes for a successful LGBTQ middle school club? What to do about meddlesome parents who don’t want their middle schoolers participating in such a club? What if parents ask a club leader—point blank—if their child is a member?

The advice to those who run middle school LGBTQ clubs is: keep no records, so you can plead ignorance of the membership with the members’ parents. In fact, middle school teacher Kelly Baraki can be heard in the same session describing having named her club “the Equity Club,” and then, “You be You,” rather than the more ubiquitous “GSA.”  

Middle school kids, apparently, did not have endless interest in sitting around with their teachers during lunch discussing their sexual orientations and gender identities. “So we started to brainstorm at the end of the 2020 school year, what are we going to do? We got to see some kids in-person at the end of last year, not many but a few. So we started to try and identify kids. When we were doing our virtual learning – we totally stalked what they were doing on Google, when they weren’t doing school work. One of them was googling ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ 

And we’re like, ‘Check.’ We’re going to invite that kid when we get back on campus. Whenever they follow the Google Doodle links or whatever, right, we make note of those kids and the things that they bring up with each other in chats or email or whatever,” Baraki can be heard to say. Beyond electronic surveillance of kids’ internet use, “we use our observations of kids in the classroom—conversations that we hear—to personally invite students. Because that’s really the way we kinda get the bodies in the door. Right? They need sort of a little bit of an invitation,” Baraki says in the clip.

Bernie Sanders on Ukraine

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/08/we-must-do-everything-possible-avoid-enormously-destructive-war-ukraine

Tabletmag on Ukraine and buffer states

 https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraines-deadly-gamble

By tying itself to an American administration that had shown itself to be reckless and dangerous, the Ukrainians made a geopolitical blunder that statesmen will study for years to come: A buffer state had staked its future on a distant power that had simply seen it as an instrument to annoy its powerful neighbor with no attachment to any larger strategic concept that it was willing to support. 

Russia then lopped off half of the Donbas region on its border and subjected Ukraine to a grinding, eight-year-long war, intended in large part to underline Russian capacity and Ukrainian and American impotence.

Also:

https://popularresistance.org/ukraine-intensifies-shelling-of-donbass-as-western-media-are-silent/