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It needs to be said. It’s unfortunate our lily-livered politicians don’t have the balls to have said it, and acted on it, long ago. It’s always been my contention that back in late 2021/early 2022 had NATO thrown everything it had, (none nuclear,) at the Black Sea : warships, planes, tanks and infantry, missiles, then told Putin to piss off or suffer the consequences, Putin would have stuck to his lie about it being just Russian military maneuvers, and high-tailed it back to Moscow.

Why did Putin insist the Russian military were only on maneuvers? To achieve exactly what it did. It threw NATO into a spin, not knowing if it were true or not. They hesitated, waited to see what would happen, Once Putin recognised there was to be no come back, in he went and left NATO looking like the useless organisation it proved to be. 

In the Guardian newspaper yesterday, James Nixey states in his article that it’s not the West escalating the war, but Putin himself.

“Even for a country that has been at war for more than 1,000 days, the past month has been rough for Ukraine: its nemesis, Russia, has acquired 11,000 troops from North Korea and mercenaries from Yemen to assist in its project to delete Ukraine. Russia has also pulverised Ukraine’s energy grid with renewed ferocity as temperatures fall below freezing and fired off experimental intermediate-range weaponry, and it continues to make gains in the east. As if that weren’t enough, Russia’s preferred candidate has been elected as the American president, promising to end the war in “24 hours” – and not in Ukraine’s favour.

And yet after all this, the question I have been asked continuously over the past week is: “Is the west escalating the war?” The question refers to the rescinding of some of the limitations imposed on Ukraine which forbade it from using western missiles to strike inside Russian territory. Far from being escalatory, western policy on the war is in fact best described as incrementalism – a drip-feed release of weaponry, which keeps Ukraine on a lifeline but certainly doesn’t allow it the possibility of pushing Russia out. The reason it has not been given this opportunity is twofold….”

Read the rest of his article HERE:

It needs to be said.

^{James Nixey leads the Russia-Eurasia programme at Chatham House.}

As I’ve grown older I’ve become more aware of what I can best describe as the ‘unrealities of life’. These are the things that we convince ourselves have some real value, whether moral, financial, or intellectual, when the truth is they either have no value at all, or they actually propagate negative values.

There have been many examples of these over time, the latest being what’s become known as the ‘6.2 million dollar banana’. If I take a 40 cent banana and duct tape it to my wall, does that make my house worth $6.2M? No, of course it doesn’t. The idea is ludicrous. It’s equally ludicrous for some egotistical billionaire to spend $6.2M on purchasing this idiocy at an art auction. It’s a good example of an unreality of life, and one with negative value.

Why is this an example of negative value? Because the only person who benefited from this lunacy is the ‘artist’ who had the idea. Maurizio Cattelan, is now millions of dollars better off, but he was hardly poverty-stricken before.

I’m not suggesting Cattelan lacks talent, merely that he uses his name rather than his talent, to make money. Think about it, if an old person with dementia had been persuaded to part with all their cash after being told a banana stuck to their wall with duct tape was worth a fortune, the fraudster would be just that, a criminal con artist.

Perhaps the true perpetrator of this ‘negative value’ is the purchaser of one banana and a piece of duct tape for an obscene sum of money. $6.2M can buy a lot of good in the world, help the homeless, heal sick people, further solutions to climate change.

The purchaser also receives a Certificate of Authenticity from the artist that grants the owner the permission and authority to reproduce the banana and duct tape on their wall as an original artwork by Maurizio Cattelan.

So, if I go out and buy a bunch of bananas and a large roll of duct tape and stick bananas all over the walls of my house, can Maurizio Cattelan then sue me? A wholly ludicrous idea!

The whole concept is just another example of how we human beings create such ‘unrealities of life’, in an attempt to avoid the often less palatable true reality.

It’s been five days of grind and search to find the problem that caused Sparrow Chat to crash, but finally we’re back up and running, hopefully better than ever.

There’s been so much said about the upcoming ascension of Donald Trump to the US Presidency that it’s hardly worth mentioning anything more about it. I will say one thing: those folk, (you know the determinably optimistic types), who say it won’t be that bad and could be the best thing to happen to Ukraine and the Palestinians, should escape their dreamworld and take a hard look at reality.

Trump is a monster of the worst sort. His ego is so far out of control that nothing good is going to come from the next four years. He is quite likely to go down in history (if anyone’s left alive to write it) as the destroyer of everything living on the planet. He’s decided there is no man-made climate change and all the scientists are wrong, or working for the mythical Deep State who are responsible for spreading the lies. Quite what reason this mythical cabal has for such actions is never made clear. For Trump acolytes the words “Deep State” alone are sufficient to rouse their adrenalin levels and pump up the ire ready for a fight.

“Locked and Loaded!” Yet another phrase guaranteed to get the adrenalin squirting. It’s been echoing across America much more frequently of late. It makes the little boys feel like they’re men.