The New York Times turns itself into a pretzel trying to whitewash and excuse a Ukrainian state funeral held for WW2 Nazi collaborator Andriy Melnyk.

The headline?

"In Ukraine, a Divisive 20th-Century Hero Comes Home"

Remember when Nazism in Ukraine was dismissed as "Russian propaganda," that it was just a handful of "fringe" organizations the Western media and Western governments as early as 2014 would even sometimes condemn?

Remember how when it became too difficult to deny anymore, the US government even had to ban arms and training from reaching entire overt Nazi units within the Ukrainian military like "Azov?"

And Remember how after that, Nazism was so rampant it became impossible to cover up or work around so the US simply lifted the bans and began arming Ukrainian units openly operating under WW2 Nazi names and insignia?

Today, Ukraine is holding state funerals for World War 2 Nazi collaborators, burying them in official military cemeteries while its military operates under a vast collection of Nazi names and insignia.

The Western media is committed to now "complicating" a very uncomplicated chapter in history - by citing "divergent interpretations" (also known as lies) when objectively, historically, and from an international legal standpoint...

...the symbols used by official Ukrainian units and the collaboration of historical figures in Ukraine with Nazi Germany all have irrevocable meanings and roles rooted in the war crimes of Nazi Germany.

If what is considered modern-day "Ukraine" faces an existential fight and it is vast and growing numbers of modern day Nazis and extremists showing up to fight for it - that "Ukraine" probably shouldn't exist.

What this reveals about "Western values" is that those "values" themselves are but a facade the West hides behind - not upholds.

NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/world/europe/ukraine-melnyk-nationalist-collaborator.html

The Hill: https://thehill.com/policy/defense/380483-congress-bans-arms-to-controversial-ukrainian-militia-linked-to-neo-nazis/

BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1vv6p9k1z1o

About 10% of Argentina's electricity comes from nuclear power plants. But libertarian President Javier Milei wants to privatize the state-owned nuclear energy company.

So Milei appointed a 23-year-old internet libertarian activist, Ezequiel Acuña, to run the state nuclear company.

Acuña has ZERO experience in nuclear energy. He graduated high school in 2020 and started studying political science in college, but dropped out of the program. He never formally studied science, or even management.

Acuña is also being paid a starting salary that is 10 times larger than the average salary in the private sector, which he and Milei worship, as libertarians.

Acuña has never worked in nuclear energy or anything related. His only "qualification" is that he tweets libertarian propaganda in support of Milei. And the Milei regime thinks that is enough.

This is actually existing libertarianism.

https://xcancel.com/BenjaminNorton/status/2047485764423106793

European countries that produce weapons for Kiev risk a direct conflict with Moscow, the Defense Ministry has warned

Kiev’s Western backers want to ramp up production of long-range drones to prop up Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry has said, warning the move is bound to drag the European nations conserned into a direct conflict with Moscow.

The ministry said a network of facilities producing drones and their components is operating in a number of European countries, including the UK, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Poland. Additional sites were identified outside the continent, including in Türkiye and Israel. At least four facilities are located in Italy alone.

According to the ministry, Kiev’s Western backers are seeking to ramp up production of long-range unmanned aerial vehicles, a move Moscow described as a “deliberate step leading to a sharp escalation of the military-political situation throughout Europe.” It added that such efforts risk turning host countries into “Ukraine’s strategic rear area.”

“The implementation of terrorist attack scenarios against Russia… using supposedly ‘Ukrainian’ UAVs manufactured in Europe is leading to unpredictable consequences,” the ministry said, referring to repeated statements by Ukrainian officials about expanding long-range strikes.

Instead of strengthening the security of European states, the actions of European rulers are rapidly drawing these countries into a war with Russia.

The ministry named multiple drone manufacturing facilities located in the UK, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and Poland.

At least four sites producing drone components were identified in Italy, with several plants involved in such activities located in Türkiye, Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Israel.

Ukraine has been regularly launching one-way drones deep into Russian territory, targeting assorted civilian infrastructure, industrial sites, and residential buildings. The attacks have seemingly intensified in recent weeks, with Kiev sending in hundreds of fixed-wing UAVs daily.

Russian officials have described the strikes as indiscriminate “terrorist” attacks aimed at compensating for frontline setbacks the Ukrainian military has been suffering. Moscow has retaliated with a long-range strike campaign of its own against dual-use infrastructure and military installations, maintaining it never targets purely civilian sites.

I was debating with myself whether to post this in Funny, because frankly, critical support to scamming rich entitled tourists (and doubly so to scamming insurance companies), most of which shouldn't even be there in the first place... Everest is overcrowded and full of garbage because of them, and every year Nepali Sherpas die because of these rich assholes thinking the world is their playground, so doing this might have even saved a few lives.

To whoever snitched: shame on you.

The arrest of foreign mercenaries on the India–Myanmar border has once again drawn attention to the hidden mechanisms of external interference and the role of proxy structures in modern conflicts.

[Archive link for those whose ISP blocks access to the website: https://archive.is/F61MN]

India’s national media reported the arrest by Indian security services of US mercenary Matthew VanDyke and six Ukrainians for illegally crossing the border into neighboring Myanmar to provide military training to armed groups fighting Myanmar’s central government.

Indian security services have also linked the suspects to “importing huge consignments of drones from Europe to Myanmar via India” for “ethnic armed groups,” matching the established pattern of US proxy war waged around the globe throughout the 21st century.

The military support provided by groups like VanDyke’s “Sons of Liberty” and other US-linked organizations like former US Special Forces operator David Eubank’s “Free Burma Rangers,” together with overt US government funding and support for political opposition groups the US seeks to install into power, have fueled decades of conflict inside Southeast Asia’s nation of Myanmar.

US-Backed Militants in Myanmar

VanDyke has gravitated toward US wars and proxy wars of aggression around the globe, including the US war on Libya in 2011, against Syria also in 2011, and in Ukraine from 2022 onward, according to Western sources like Newsweek.

VanDyke’s recent operation in Myanmar involved not only training militants but also equipping them with “huge consignments” of drones, indicating a significant source of funding. Because the funding is not disclosed by VanDyke’s “non-profit security contracting firm,” it is very likely— as with all other aspects of Myanmar’s opposition — that it is funded by the US government and simply laundered through fronts like VanDyke’s.

Other similarly US-backed operations training and equipping militants in Myanmar include David Eubank’s “Free Burma Rangers” (FBR). US diplomatic cables made available by WikiLeaks revealed Eubank regularly reports to US government representatives at the US consulate in neighboring Thailand (here, here, here, here, and here).

While FBR poses as some sort of nongovernmental organization (NGO) that “assists ethnic resistance groups” with “humanitarian operations,” videos produced by Free Burma Rangers themselves and those by the militant groups they help train and equip depict the organization providing military training (including weapons training), as well as FBR members themselves carrying weapons on patrol with local militants.

The political opposition these armed groups seek to install into power, the so-called “National Unity Government” (NUG), is itself a documented whole-cloth creation of the US government.

In its earlier days it was referred to as the “National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma” (NCGUB) and was literally based in the US, just outside of Washington, D.C., in Rockville, Maryland. A 2013 “The World” article would admit the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was the “main supporter of the NCGUB.”

The NED’s website indicated an extensive list of politically invasive programs it was funding, interfering in virtually every aspect of Myanmar’s internal political affairs — everything from supposed “human rights” to media, the development of “youth leaders,” resource management, “political participation,” legal aid funds, election monitoring, labor, and information space.

The 2020 NED disclosure for Myanmar — stillreferred to by the NED by its British colonial nomenclature of “Burma”— focused extensively on targeting the specific ethnic groups among which the armed militants VanDyke, his Ukrainian counterparts, and other organizations like FBR have provided military support to.

The most recent iteration of the “NCGUB” is the NUG and is made up of mostly US government NED funding recipients.

For example, the NUG’s so-called “Minister of Foreign Affairs,” Zin Mar Aung, whose official NUG biography openly admits, “In 2012, she was awarded the International Women of Courage award by the United States Secretary of State,” and that she was a “fellow in the Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow of the National Endowment for Democracy program.”

Her profile on the NED’s official website also noted she “co-founded the Yangon School of Political Science, an NED-funded institution.”

In other words, the US government has a long, documented history of both building up and attempting to maneuver into power the Myanmar political opposition throughout its various iterations up to and including the current “NUG,” which in turn openly presides over many of the armed groups fighting the central government.

While the US government doesn’t openly supply arms and other military support to the NUG’s militant wings, Americans and now Ukrainians fighting amid America’s multiple wars and proxy wars elsewhere, clearly serve as a vector through which the US government can do so covertly.

The violence these armed militants are carrying out also happens to specifically advance US geopolitical objectives in the region — not just in regard to undermining and attempting to topple Myanmar’s government, but in the encirclement, containment, and attempted toppling of China itself.

America’s Dirty War against Myanmar is a War Against China

Myanmar, which shares a border with both India and China, is a key partner of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI infrastructure in Myanmar includes the Kyaukphyu deep-sea port in Myanmar’s Rakhine State along the Bay of Bengal and the Sino-Myanmar Oil and Gas Pipelines.

Together, these projects allow hydrocarbons imported from abroad to be off-loaded along Myanmar’s coasts and piped across the country toward China’s Yunnan province along the Myanmar-Chinese border, thus bypassing the Strait of Malacca.

Not only does the port and pipelines save up to 5-6 days versus transiting the Strait of Malacca toward China’s own shores, but it also hedges Chinese energy imports against the threat of a US-imposed maritime blockade either at the Strait of Malacca itself or anywhere beyond it in the Asia-Pacific, where tens of thousands of US forces are stationed specifically to encircle, contain, and, if possible, cut off China.

Beijing’s concerns are far from “paranoia.” They are a direct reaction to decades-spanning US policies describing the implementation of a global maritime oil blockade on China specifically at the Strait of Malacca. These policies have driven the deployment of the US military forces into the region to potentially impose it, as well as arms and force restructuring programs to better enable their ability to do so.

One such policy paper published by the US Naval War College Review in 2018 is literally titled “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China.” It introduced the concept of a “distant blockade” designed to reduce the threat of Chinese anti-access area-denial (A2AD) systems by being imposed just beyond the range of most of China’s military capabilities, including “the Strait of Malacca and a handful of other passages that the US Navy could seal off effectively.”

The purpose of the “distant blockade” would be to impose crippling pressure on China to impede, arrest, or even reverse its economic development, in addition to other forms of military, technological, and economic pressure the US has already spent years applying.

The 2018 paper mentioned the Sino-Myanmar Pipeline by name, explaining, “a distant blockade also would need to interdict the Myanmar – China oil pipeline,” and that “the area could be declared an exclusion zone for the duration of a conflict, and if the Myanmar authorities failed to comply, the facility could be disabled via air strikes, aerial mining, or other kinetic action.”

While the 2018 paper proposed a maritime oil blockade as a measure applied during an active conflict, the US has since used the armed militants it has backed in war against Myanmar’s central government for decades to begin carrying out attacks-by-proxy on the pipelines instead.

This has resulted in years of attacks killing security personnel guarding the pipelines, damaging equipment used to operate them, and, at various periods of the ongoing conflict, US-backed militants taking over entire sections of the pipelines themselves, including just last year.

Taken together with the recent US invasion and seizure of Venezuela’s government, drone strikes the New York Times admits are directed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) deep inside Russia at its energy production, as well as the ongoing US war on Iran — all three nations counting China as their largest energy export partner — the US dirty war in Myanmar is just one of many fronts the US is waging a proxy war on China itself.

Not only is a “maritime oil blockade” being imposed on China, it is being imposed on China worldwide — from Latin America to the Middle East and Eurasia — much further beyond China’s military reach than a closure at the Malacca Strait would have been.

Myanmar’s military, supplied and supported by both Russia and China, has failed to restore peace and stability across the country specifically because of the hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) the US has spent over decades propping up proxy political forces and covertly arming their militant wings.

The recent arrest of American and Ukrainian citizens providing these militants with additional training and modern combat drone technology is not just a war against Myanmar’s central government and the peace and stability of the nation and people of Myanmar, but also a war against China and the peace and stability of the entire Asia-Pacific region — even the world

As emergency workers sifted through the smouldering wreckage at Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex on Thursday morning, traders in Europe and Asia were waking up to a fresh energy crisis.

In normal times, a fifth of the world’s supply of liquefied natural gas (LNG) flows from Ras Laffan, a vast industrial site almost three times the size of Paris built over three decades at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.

LNG terminals are some of the biggest and most complex constructions in human history, and Ras Laffan is the largest of them all, turning Qatar’s huge gas reserves into a super-chilled fuel that can be shipped around the world. At least before the Iranian missiles arrived.

“I woke up this morning and thought, ‘No, please no,’” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a former head of gas analysis at BP who is now at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “This has always been my nightmare scenario, my Armageddon scenario, the one I didn’t want to happen.”

Two gas traders said they were struggling to process the news after Iran launched a double-tap strike, firing ballistic missiles into the facility, first on Wednesday night then again in the early hours of Thursday morning. “This is unprecedented,” said one of the traders.

Gas prices in Europe rose 30 per cent as markets reopened and have more than doubled since the start of the war, as traders try to calculate the impact of months, or longer, without Qatar’s gas flowing to world markets.

Oil prices also jumped 10 per cent to almost $119 a barrel, due to fears of further strikes on energy supplies.

State-owned QatarEnergy, the operator of Ras Laffan, told Reuters the damage to two of its LNG units, in which ExxonMobil was a co-investor, would take three to five years to repair, cost the company $20bn a year in lost revenue, and force it to cancel long term contracts with Italy, Belgium, Korea and China.

The volume of gas now lost for the foreseeable future is roughly 17 per cent of Qatar’s total capacity.

Before the attack, traders assumed that the flow of LNG from Ras Laffan would resume once the Middle East conflict eased and the Strait of Hormuz was safe for tankers to pass through. Gas prices, having risen last week, had stabilised far below the levels seen during Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

But that assumption has now been shattered.

One trader said that gas prices in Europe would be pushed higher “through 2027” and that Europe would find it harder to refill its gas storage tanks this summer as Asian buyers snapped up LNG from the US to make up for the lost supply.

Asia was already facing shortages and rationing due to the loss of supply from the Gulf.

Europe, which has become more reliant on LNG since Russia slashed pipeline exports during its war with Ukraine, is now expected to be pitched into direct competition against countries such as Japan and South Korea for limited cargoes.

Laurent Segalen, a clean energy investment banker, said: “It is apocalypse now. The coming months for gas importers are going to be a bloodbath.”

Ras Laffan has 14 gas liquefaction units that chill gas into 77mn tonnes a year of LNG, enough to meet the entire annual gas demand of Japan, or more than the UK and Italy combined.

The specialised equipment to super-chill gas into LNG is incredibly complicated and will have to be painstakingly replaced, a job that will start only when Qatar is confident that workers can access the site safely, without fear of further attacks.

“What we can conclude immediately is that regardless of when the conflict now ends, a resumption of normal production from Qatar is not going to happen in a matter of weeks,” said Tom Marzec-Manser, an LNG expert at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

He had previously estimated it would take around 40 days for Qatar to restart production at Ras Laffan, “but that cannot now be the case”.

Qatar’s plans to hugely expand Ras Laffan, adding a further six liquefaction units over this year and next, would also be delayed, he said. “There is an element of uncertainty, but we know now this is a months-long reduction in supply,” he added.

While some US projects are starting up shortly, there is no adequate compensation for Qatari gas that is “not politically very complicated”, said Corbeau, noting that some politicians had already been calling for a relaxation on bans on Russian gas.

Meanwhile, many countries are already starting to switch to coal-fired power generation, and some industrial sites across south-east Asia are having to ration their output or shut down. “The world of energy is going to fracture between the haves and the have-nots,” said Segalen

The US has, in all military operations throughout its history sought to exterminate all human life where and when possible, turning nations into failed states and inhibiting life for everyone, not just governments it targets.

In Serbia it targeted the power grid.

In Iraq the US starved half a million children to death even before its invasion and occupation killed another 1 million.

In Libya vital infrastructure for agriculture was deliberately destroyed.

In Syria the US seized and denied grain to deliberately starve the Syrian civilian population.

And now the US seeks to do ALL of these things to Iran and it IS.

As the US continues destroying Iran, and as more egregious crimes against humanity are required to do so, it will depend on its Israeli proxies to carry them out, or at least claim to carry them out, attacks that will cause immense human death and the destruction of vital infrastructure, all so the US can claim plausible deniability for itself.

However, every bomb, missile, plane and drop of fuel Israel uses was given to it by the US, every target is fixed by US intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and each sortie made possible by US capabilities Israel doesn't have including extensive aerial refueling, suppression of air defenses, region-wide radar enabling situational awareness, and even combat search and rescue.

Every "Israeli" action is an American action.

Thus every "protest" by the US is an act of theater primarily because if the US doesn't want these targets hit it will simply deny Israel the ISR and coordinated operational capabilities (aerial refueling, suppression of air defenses, electronic warfare etc.) required to hit them.

The US knows, however, no one knows or cares about these material realities and will instead allow their myopic obsessions and emotions convince themselves somehow the Israelis, not the Americans, are in the driver's seat and these actions were "Israeli," not American, despite the fact Israel wouldn't exist in the first place (just like Ukraine) without full and constant support.

Again, this DOES NOT absolve Israel for the war crimes carried out amid this war of aggression.

Like America's proxies in Ukraine, all involved in atrocities must be fought against and held accountable.

However, if you want the war to end and the danger eliminated, identity the root of the danger, not just obsess over the tips of the branches or their falling leaves.