Call it the yuck of the Irish.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi earned eye rolls Thursday by reading a St. Patrick's Day poem by Irish musician Bono that declared Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a modern-day version of Ireland's patron saint.

Pelosi (D-Calif.) read the poem near the conclusion of the Friends of Ireland luncheon at the Capitol after the U2 lead singer shared it with her earlier Thursday.

"Oh St. Patrick, he drove out the snakes with his prayers, but that's not all it takes," the speaker read. "With the smoke symbolizes an evil that arises and hides in your heart as it breaks."

1) Can we manage two thoughts in our heads at the same time?

I should not have to repeat the following, but we are where we are in history and so I find myself having to: I have long been a critic of Putin. I have probably opposed Putin before a wider audience than most of my critics. My animas against Putin is visible online for all to see. It started because I stood firmly with the Syrian Arab uprising against the dictator Assad in Syria, who Putin supported. I stood with the Syrian people then as I stand with all of the people in Ukraine today.

Our opposition to Putin in Syria by no means meant that any of us supported ISIS in Syria either. My opposition to ISIS-style extremism is too well documented even to need hyperlinked references. Most of us were able to oppose both Assad and his ally Putin, as well as oppose ISIS. This is because most of us were able to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. This is just like in history, where most of us can see that the Soviet Union and the Third Reich were two sides of the same totalitarian coin.


So why has it become so hard for most of us to condemn both Putin's attack on Ukraine while also condemning our and our ally Ukraine's state-funding, training and arming of the armed Nazi battalion Azov in Ukraine?

The "rules-based international order" - as in "our way or the highway" - is unraveling much faster than anyone could have predicted.

The Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and China are starting to design a new monetary and financial system bypassing the U.S. dollar, supervised by Sergei Glazyev and intended to compete with the Bretton Woods system.

Saudi Arabia - perpetrator of bombing, famine and genocide in Yemen, weaponized by U.S., UK and EU - is advancing the coming of the petroyuan.

India - third largest importer of oil in the world - is about to sign a mega-contract to buy oil from Russia with a huge discount and using a ruble-rupee mechanism.

Riyadh's oil exports amount to roughly $170 billion a year. China buys 17% of it, compared to 21% for Japan, 15% for the U.S., 12% for India and roughly 10% for the EU. The U.S. and its vassals - Japan, South Korea, EU - will remain within the petrodollar sphere. India, just like China, may not.

Sanction blowback is on the offense. Even a market/casino capitalism darling such as uber-nerd Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Poznar, formerly with the NY Fed, IMF and Treasury Dept., has been forced to admit, in an analytical note: "If you think that the West can develop sanctions that will maximize the pain for Russia by minimizing the risks of financial stability and price stability for the West, then you can also trust unicorns."

Unicorns are a trademark of the massive NATOstan psyops apparatus, lavishly illustrated by the staged, completely fake "summit" in Kiev between Comedian Ze and the Prime Ministers of Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, thoroughly debunked by John Helmer and Polish sources.

Poznar, a realist, hinted in fact at the ritual burial of the financial chapter of the "rules-based international order" in place since the early Cold War years: "After the end of this war [in Ukraine], 'money' will ‎never be ‎the same." Especially when the Hegemon demonstrates its "rules" by encroaching on other people's money.

And that configures the central tenet of 21st century martial geopolitics as monetary/ideological. The world, especially the Global South, will have to decide whether "money" is represented by the virtual, turbo-charged casino privileged by the Americans or by real, tangible assets such as energy sources. A bipolar financial world - U.S. dollar vs. yuan - is at hand.

There's no surefire evidence - yet. But the Kremlin may have certainly gamed that by using Russia's foreign reserves as bait, likely to be frozen by sanctions, the end result could be the smashing of the petrodollar. After all the overwhelming majority of the Global South by now has fully understood that the backed-by-nothing U.S. dollar as "money" - according to Poznar - is absolutely untrustworthy.

If that's the case, talk about a Putin ippon from hell.

The two sides are 'halfway' on the 'demilitarization' issue, though situation around 'denazification' of Ukraine remains 'strange'

Moscow and Kiev have achieved certain progress in the ongoing talks, getting their positions on Ukraine's potential status "as close as possible," the head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, said Friday.

"The topic of neutral status and non-accession of Ukraine to NATO is one of the key issues of the negotiations. This is the issue on which the parties have brought their positions as close as possible," Medinsky stated. "Then details begin relating to what security guarantees Ukraine receives in addition to the already existing in case of its refusal to join the NATO bloc."

Russia suspects Pentagon-funded bioresearch laboratories in foreign nations, including those in Ukraine, may pose a threat because of the secrecy surrounding their work, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told RT. Washington apparently didn't want to risk exposing its own people to the pathogenic threat, he suggested.

"The Americans some years ago decided that it was too dangerous to do [such research] on their own soil. So, they moved all these threatening and dangerous activities to other countries," Lavrov claimed.

"More and more they concentrate their research and experiments around the borders of the Russian Federation and China," he remarked.

Vladimir Putin gave a speech in which he blamed the 'western ruling elite' for creating the economic hardships impacting people in Europe and the United States.

During a speech that was broadcast live on Russian television, the Kremlin frontman also slammed Russian oligarchs fleeing to Israel as a "fifth column" of "national traitors" who see themselves as a "superior race" and "cannot make do without foie gras, oysters or gender freedom as they call it."

"Any nation, and even more so the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and will simply spit them out like an insect in their mouth, spit them onto the pavement," Putin ranted.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson returned from Saudi Arabia empty handed, after a trip aimed at getting the kingdom to boost oil production to help ease the cost of living crisis flopped.

Johnson met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, amid much criticism and being accused of going 'cap in hand from dictator to dictator' as he seeks to reduce Britain's reliance on Russian oil and gas following Putin's invasion of Ukraine.


The prime minister had been accused of gross hypocrisy for the visit, given Saudi Arabia's human rights record. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was personally responsible for ordering the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The kingdom also carried out 81 executions over the weekend and is currently engaged in a brutal bombing campaign in Yemen, where alleged war crimes have taken place.

A report from True North yesterday reveals that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland met with a Ukrainian neo-Nazi several times.

Andriy Parubiy is a member of the nationalist Svoboda Party and the equivalent of the legislative speaker for Ukraine's Parliament.

The Director-General of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Ambassador Ahmet Üzümcü, made a statement today marking the completion of the full destruction of the 39,967 metric tons of chemical weapons possessed by the Russian Federation.

The Director-General stated: "The completion of the verified destruction of Russia's chemical weapons programme is a major milestone in the achievement of the goals of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

I congratulate Russia and I commend all of their experts who were involved for their professionalism and dedication.

I also express my appreciation to the States Parties that assisted the Russian Federation with its destruction program and thank the OPCW staff who verified the destruction."

The US has been installing American-directed military bases in the Ukraine for stockpiling advanced weapons to strike Russia by land, sea, and air.

In these plans for attack deep across the Russian frontier, Ukraine was already a platform with the potential for nuclear battlefield operations without formal admission to the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO); without acceptance by the NATO member states; without comprehension or vote of approval by the Ukrainians themselves.

On December 17, the Russian Foreign Ministry proposed a non-aggression treaty with the US which included explicit provisions to negotiate the withdrawal of this threat. Article 3 proposed:

"the Parties shall not use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party."

Article 4 of the pact proposed:

"The Russian Federation and all the Parties that were member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as of 27 May 1997, respectively, shall not deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997."

Article 5 said:

"The Parties shall refrain from deploying their armed forces and armaments, including in the framework of international organizations, military alliances or coalitions, in the areas where such deployment could be perceived by the other Party as a threat to its national security, with the exception of such deployment within the national territories of the Parties."

Articles 6 and 7 were more explicit on the deployment of nuclear weapons:

"The Parties shall undertake not to deploy ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories...The Parties shall refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories."

The State Department reply released on February 2 dismissed each of these proposals.