Provocation..

 

Russian leaders and several Western policy experts were warning more than two decades ago that NATO expansion would turn out badly—ending in a new cold war with Russia at best, and a hot one at worst. 

George Kennan, the intellectual architect of America’s containment policy during the Cold War, perceptively warned in a May 2, 1998 New York Times interview what NATO’s move eastward would set in motion. 

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” he stated. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake.”

Kennan was speaking of the first round of enlargement that brought into the Alliance Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Later rounds. Washington’s subsequent attempt to make Ukraine and Georgia members was contemptuous of Russia’s core security interests.

Peace is not a goal of some ...... the outcome is disastrous.  Just a thought.

Démarche..

The White House confirmed that an official diplomatic reprimand, known as a démarche, had been given to the US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns following President Joe Biden’s comments comparing China’s Xi Jinping to a dictator at a political fundraiser in California earlier this week.

The Chinese government called in Burns for the meeting this week in Beijing to protest Biden’s remarks, according to two US officials familiar with the matter. 

National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby stressed that the White House does not view the move as one with particularly significant consequences and that the US has not seen any further ramifications to the already-precarious relationship with China.

What a great accomplishment here. Just a thought.

Relief..

 

What a relief. That calls for a celebration.!!

Save..

 

Morant..

 

On Friday, the NBA suspended Morant for 25 games without pay for conduct detrimental to the league. The suspension comes as a result of Morant's second incident involving holding a gun in a social media video. Morant will also have to meet other conditions before he can return to the court.

Coming..

 

Very..

 
No one is above the law...

Blame..

 

Censor..

 

A federal judge will decide whether President Joe Biden’s administration violated the First Amendment by censoring users on social media over topics like COVID and election security — and if so, what to do about it.

Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana brought the lawsuit last year, alleging that the Biden administration fostered a sprawling “federal censorship enterprise” that pressured social-media platforms to scrub away dissenting views, including criticism of mask mandates and objections to Covid-19 vaccination.

Early on in the litigation, the judge permitted plaintiffs to gather evidence, like emails exchanged between White House officials and leadership at social media companies, according to The Journal.

The lawsuit claims the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency colluded with social-media platforms “in hundreds of meetings about misinformation” and systematically flagged “huge quantities of First Amendment-protected speech to platforms for censorship.” 

Principle..

 

President Biden on Tuesday night called President Xi Jinping of China a “dictator” who had been kept in the dark by his own government about the spy balloon that crossed into United States airspace this winter before being shot down by an American fighter jet.

At a campaign fund-raiser in California, Mr. Biden set off into what appeared to be an unplanned riff about the incident that ruptured relations with China for months, revealing what United States intelligence agencies had learned about the internal confusion in Beijing during the incident...

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
― Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Principle