TheOldGuy @TheOldGuy@qoto.org
I am a Democrat who supports Ukraine in their battle against The Russian Z fascist invaders.
I am a 73 year old Covid hermit who
lives on 10 acres in a sparsely populated area of the Ozarks. I heat with wood that is leftover by the lumber industry. When cutting oak for lumber only the trunk is used.
The largest town is population 2992. The county is 13k people scattered over 713 square miles.
Joined Dec 2022
The fire at the oil depot in Feodosia, occupied Crimea, has ended after six days.
The fire affected 12 tanks, of which 8 were completely destroyed. Buildings on the territory were also burned.
UK SHAME ON SANCTIONS BUSTERS
The United Kingdom Treasury has opened 52 cases against companies in the UK responsible for breaking sanctions arrangements. These are mostly in relation to oil shipping and insurance for ships carrying Russian oil.
Of the 52 cases 15 have been closed - and not one has been fined or prosecuted despite all of them allegedly having carried out at the minimum, a technical breach.
The remaining 37 cases are still under investigation.
The UK has a far too cosy relationship between government, MP’s and the industry. Lloyds of London is the principal ship insurance market globally - and insurance is provided through firms who are paid large sums - of which profit is exceptionally high, unless a claim is made.
Theoretically those profits should be invested to pay any claims which can run into billions of pounds.
However those firms use what are called ‘Names’. These are individuals - many of them MP’s and wealthy individuals from all walks of business and politics, as well as global investors who are offered the possibility of being a ‘Name’.
These Names sign an agreement that places them as financially responsible for paying any claims in full if there is no money left from invested profits or reinsured assets to pay a claim.
In return they are paid dividends from the profits each year. It’s a very lucrative business.
However it doesn’t always work out.
For example if insurance company X insures a Russian oil tanker carrying crude that runs aground say in the English Channel, it breaks up in a storm and pollutes vast areas in the UK, France and Belgium, then X has to pay for the clean up. It might have £1.5 billion in assets it can liquidate to pay the bill. If the bill is £4 billion, it then turns to its Names to provide the money. The claim isn’t made based on your wealth it’s based on you being responsible in full for your percentage. If you are one of 1000 Names in that firm then you are responsible for 1/1000 of £2.5 billion - so £2.5 million. If you don’t have the cash you have to sell everything you own or raise the money somehow to offset your contribution. Many Names go bankrupt in such circumstances. Yet they’re very happy to take the profits when they’re being paid out.
Becoming a Name is like a right of social passage for top executives and long term MP’s and so on. The House of Lords is riddled with them.
The fact is that nobody in that ‘class’ want to be the first to see another one of their network prosecuted because it could just as easily be them. This is a case where those who make the decision on prosecution are just as likely to be a Name as the person they are expected to prosecute. So of course, it tends not to happen. It’s a long standing and miserable aspect of the British class and fiscal system that spreads its ugly tentacles from the City of London.
That is also its own problem. The City of London ‘the Square Mile’, is a political and legal institution that answers to nobody and has its own unique and very separate police force and administration few are even aware of. In fact in legal terms it’s almost a separate country inside London. Its ability to isolate financial interests is staggering.
This is why nothing ever happens and if anything ever does it’s usually just the minimum to make it appear as if something is being done.
This is the problem with ever getting sanctions and financial penalties imposed on those who breach them. It is the quintessential old boy network but in the modern age, Names can be almost anyone who knows the right people in the right places.
It is a form of corruption, state sanctioned and yet almost never discussed or debated. One of those ‘things’ that has developed over hundreds of years and still gives the UK control over almost 30% of global finance and private wealth management.
The Russians didn’t choose London just because of the shops.
5 questions. With NAACP legal fund president.
https://open.substack.com/pub/joycevance/p/five-questions-with-janai-nelson?r=70k1h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
A passenger on the "Intercity" train from Kramatorsk to Kyiv is Vasyl the cat, who spent a year at the positions in the Serebryansk Forest alongside the "Bureviy" brigade
🪐 Subscribe to Live: Ukraine
I feel the need to defend raw milk. It's good stuff as long as you carefully wash and rinse the cow's udder. I would not trust a MAGA to do that correctly.
Jeff Tiedrich. - The week in stupid
https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/this-week-in-stupid-october-12-edition
A list of things DeathSantis HAS regulated. Cranes not among them. Which explains why a crane crashed into an office building during Milton.
Where there is love, there is hope❤️
Source: Oriannalyla
🪐 Subscribe to Live: Ukraine
Russian Su-34 supersonic fighter-bomber allegedly shot down by F-16.
Several russian milbloggers claim that a Su-34 was shot down during an air bomb drop about 50 km from the front line by an F-16, and even claiming that "NATO has sent the F-16 to hunt."
The Z-channels therefore predict that their attacks with FAB glide bombs will be disturbed and their infantry will suffer even more more losses.
"Our Su-34 was shot down. The crew was killed. The airplane was shot down while dropping glide bombs, about 50 km from the front line. Our Su-34 was shot down apparently by an F-16, which was over enemy-controlled territory. There will be more such losses soon. NATO has released F-16s for hunting. Now there will be less FABs flying. Consequently, the losses of our infantry will increase."
There is no confirmation yet, but we keep fingers crossed.
@freerussia_report
Activist Disrupts Hungarian PM's EU Presidency News Conference In France.
An activist and municipal councilor for a Hungarian opposition party disrupted a news conference in the French city of Strasbourg on Tuesday, as Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was laying out his plans for Hungary’s six-month presidency of the European Union.
Márton Gyekiczki, interrupted Orbán as he was speaking about his opposition to immigration, running toward the podium where Orbán sat and throwing a stack of what appeared to be banknotes at the prime minister.
“How much did you sell out the country for? How much did you sell out the country for, Mr. Prime Minister?”, Gyekiczki yelled as the papers scattered. “He sold out to Putin, he sold out to Xi Jinping!”
The president of the Democratic Coalition party, former Prime Minister Ference Gyurcsány, later wrote on social media that he was “proud” of Gyekiczki for his actions. “We will say it everywhere and always: Hungary has a traitorous government!”
The reference about "sold to China" gets understandable when taking into consideration that Chinese police is now allowed to act legally in Hungary. This gives the Chinese regime the possibility to control and spy on their citizens legally, especially dissidents. In 2022 the Spanish NGO Safeguard Defenders denounced that China is operating almost 40 illegal police stations in the EU, targeting and seeking to intimidate mainly political dissidents and members of persecuted communities.
Moreover China is very interested in using Orban the same way as Putin - to influence the EU and get a foot inside. For Orban it's all about the money. China gets an important bridgehead in conquering European markets, Orban gets some sort of a 'strategic corruption' framework agreement with China, like the Budapest-Belgrade railway line renovation, covered to 85% by Chinese loans. It might take an entire century to pay back in full, and the regime "can take out several billion euros a year."
Meanwhile, EU officials have already stated they are looking to limit China's economic aspirations in Europe.
Orban got also thunder from Ursula von der Leyen in a fiery clash at the European Parliament.
“There are still some who blame this war not on Putin’s lust for power but on Ukraine’s thirst for freedom, so I want to ask them: would they ever blame the Hungarians for the Soviet invasion in 1956? There is no European language where peace is synonymous with surrender and sovereignty is synonymous with occupation.”
On Wednesday, some in the European Parliament fired back with a song. After his speech some members started singing “Bella Ciao,” an Italian antifascist resistance song from the World War II-era.
“You are not welcome here,” Terry Reintke, the co-leader of the Greens Party in the European Parliament, told Mr. Orban. “This is the house of European democracy.”
The champion for “illiberal democracy” again called for a change of policy and supported Putin painting a bleak future of an EU "falling apart." Also reiterated his support of Trump saying "We will open several bottles of Champagne if Trump is back,” at a news conference.
'Make Europe Great Again' is Orban's motto in lend-lease. I agree, start with suspending voting rights of every member country that is violating the rule of law.
🇪🇺@EU_Report 🇭🇺
@freerussia_report
"Let Zakharova and Olga Skabeeva come here and film it instead of talking any sh*t coming into their heads."
- a woman in Kursk region shares how Ukrainian soldiers took her husband to Sumy for surgery and gave the residents food and medicine.
@ukrainejournal
Olena Zelenska:
🇺🇦 "Resistance" for Ukrainians is a verb.
Because it means living. Act, care, support, love. To act, even if we are now in a state of maximum uncertainty, in the epicenter of bad news, even if we face pain on a daily basis.
Sustainability still means taking action. For his sake, for his sake and for his own sake. Thus, due to the stability of each, the stability of the whole country is formed.
On the International Day of Mental Health, together with Dmytro Monatyk, Roksolana Syrota, Vyacheslav Drofa, Kateryna Osadcha, Oleksandr Teren, Denys Kryvenk, Vladyslav Yeschenko, Yana Shemaeva, Zakhar Biryukov, Khrystyna Boychuk, and Vitaly Lytvyn, we urge you to take care of mental health is the norm.
And nurturing resilience is a daily action, a way of life.
@ukrainejournal
Let's hope they keep tricking them. Deliberately or accidentally, these young women are putting together defective drones.
Russia is tricking young girls from Africa, Asia and Latin America into assembling 'Shaheds' - Associated Press
About 200 foreign women are assembling Iranian drones in the Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan. Girls aged 18–22 are lured to Russia using the online program Alabuga Start: on the program’s website, they are promised education in Europe, a free plane ride, and work in the service and catering industries, but this turns out to be a scam.
As a result, the girls face constant monitoring, broken promises about wages, and dangerous work with caustic chemicals that ruin their skin. “I regret and curse the day I started doing this,” the newspaper quotes one of the women as saying. Along with the foreigners, there are 15-16-year-old Russian students from vocational schools who also complain about the working conditions.
Analysts have found that since July 29, about 95% of drones have not hit any visible targets in Ukraine. Instead, they fall into rivers and fields in Ukraine, fly into Latvia, and fall in Russia or Belarus. Before July, about 14% of Shaheds hit targets in Ukraine. The publication writes that one of the reasons for the decline in the quality of drones may be unskilled labor.
The Alabuga Special Economic Zone was created in 2006 to attract business and investment to Tatarstan. After February 2022, it quickly expanded, and parts of it switched to military production.
🇺🇦@ukraine_report 🇺🇦 Liz
I am a Democrat who supports Ukraine in their battle against The Russian Z fascist invaders.
I am a 73 year old Covid hermit who
lives on 10 acres in a sparsely populated area of the Ozarks. I heat with wood that is leftover by the lumber industry. When cutting oak for lumber only the trunk is used.
The largest town is population 2992. The county is 13k people scattered over 713 square miles.
Joined Dec 2022
TheOldGuy's choices:
