Will the US-led bloc try to turn Ukraine into a Cold War-style 'frontier' state or is there something else in the works?

The failure of their proxy war bet is now motivating Western figures to consider negotiating a ceasefire in Ukraine with Russia, on the line of the current status quo and without firm political commitments. This would transform the conflict into a classic Cold War format.

The West will try to impose these negotiations from a position of strength, while Moscow's willingness to engage will depend on our successes or failures on the battlefield in the coming months.

In the Western press, the main stories about Ukraine in recent weeks have been about how poor the Ukrainian army (AFU) has performed and how strong the Russian army is in its defensive work. This means that Kiev's counteroffensive, while not formally over, has been almost definitively written off.

The country must decide on its borders or it risks destruction, Tamir Pardo warns

The Associated Press published an interview yesterday with former Israeli Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, who said that Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank.

The revelation is old news, of course, as the reality of apartheid is by now recognized within the consensus of the international human rights community. In fact, limiting the apartheid designation to only the West Bank is itself limited — since even organizations like Israel's B'tselem have belatedly framed apartheid as existing "from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea." What is new about the AP article, however, is who is admitting the reality of apartheid — a heavyweight of the Israeli security establishment.

Pardo did not mince words in describing the situation. "There is an apartheid state here," he said. "In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state."

By now, it's clear to almost everyone that the West versus East policy train wreck we are witnessing is as much about personalities and warped ideals as it is about hard truths, reality, or anything quantifiable. The Western world is a broken rollercoaster of paid or converted geopolitical psychopaths. Here are some of the latest churnings from the Washington asylum, with my comments.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (recognized in the Russian Federation as a foreign media agent). If you listen or read backward, you hear the creepy ghost voices of Russian haters like Zbigniew Brzezinski and sometimes the dearly departed former Arizona Senator John McCain. Consumer at average speed and in clockwise revolutions, you are apt to pick up Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize Winning Washington think tank superhero married to Poland's former defense minister. Her recent efforts come from an interview with RFE/RL's Georgia Service entitled "Anne Applebaum: Putin Is Really Destroying Modern Russia."

However, she makes no arguments as to just how Mr. Putin is destroying the new Russia he more or less built single-handedly. Her theme is that dastardly Russian oligarchs wanted the Ukraine war to steal factories and other assets for themselves. Yes, you read correctly. The whole interview is a juvenile Q&A with facets of recent headlines intertwined. Here's how she figures the Ukraine mess will be settled:

"But, you know, the Ukrainian position is that Ukraine has only one set of borders, which are the international borders agreed to in 1991. Therefore, the Russians will have to leave, and we'll have to find perhaps there has to be a way for them to make amends or make up for the damage they've caused."

Did you catch it? "We'll have to find" how the Russian people can pay for destroying a NATO/Nazi fortress 200 miles from Moscow. The woman is an idiot. A paid-off remora of the Neocon-run menace that America has become. She was one of the first to swear Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Her husband, also a member of the European Parliament, traveled to Afghanistan in the mid-1980s "to write about the war the mujahideen were waging against the Soviet Union." But enough about Polish family commitments to hating Russians.

Despite his status as the nation's oldest president in history, Joe Biden feels he is "babied" by his staff, setting off the 80-year-old's Irish temper, according to a new book peeling back the inner workings of the White House.

The gaffe-prone president's staff regularly scrambles to mop up the messes Biden makes with off-script comments, but the efforts are not always appreciated, according to Franklin Foer's The Last Politician, which went on sale Tuesday.

That tension came to a head in the early days of Russia's war on Ukraine when Biden, through excitement, bombed what otherwise would have been a triumphant speech supporting Kyiv, Foer writes.

The March speech was critically important to Biden.

It's been well over a year now since the health scare dubbed the Covid-19 pandemic has had any widespread impact upon the lives of the vast majority of humanity. Since the "fog of war" has lifted, so to speak, there has been very little introspection regarding the knee-jerk authoritarianism imposed upon humanity in the liberal press or mainstream academia. Eerie parallels connect the panic stirred up during the health crisis with the reaction to 9/11. There is also plenty of circumstantial evidence of prior knowledge and pre-planning for both of these events. In their wake, mass hysteria, government propaganda, tyranny, censorship, and irrational belief systems spawned out of each, supported by ruling class interests and mass media mouthpieces.

Although many policies related to the global war on terror and the pandemic certainly have fascistic and totalitarian impulses, there are key differences. Whereas the fascist and totalitarian rely on a single despot, and the marginalization of minority groups, postmodern tyranny operates according to the flows of late capitalism: diversity and inclusion are encouraged; power is spread through a corporate oligarchy, as well as political, military, and now medical hierarchies; and devastating economic and social effects are engendered by "absent causes"; i.e., abstract engines of capital: stock fluctuations, algorithms, financial instruments and various Finance/Insurance/Real Estate (FIRE) sector bubbles and scams.

The public is predictably bewildered by a revolving cast of bureaucrats and elites with varying amounts of sociopathic and narcissistic traits; however, the personal attributes of the cast members are extraneous to capital accumulation, imperialism, and the liquidation of nature. It is fine to use phrases like fascist or totalitarian in response to government policies for rhetorical effect; however, most Americans do not feel that way or use that terminology, which harkens back to a simpler era of boot stamping. We are rather enmeshed in a dictatorship of capital.

Austria's Chancellor, Karl Nehammer, believes that purchasing Russian gas is morally unpleasant but necessary to ensure the country's energy security. He made this statement on Monday during an interview on ORF channel.

Responding to the host's question about the need to refrain from buying Russian gas in order to avoid supporting Russia, Nehammer emphasized that gas is needed for the country's energy security.

"Our main priority is energy security. If it is compromised, our systems, production and people's energy supply will be affected. First and foremost, we are focused on ensuring energy supply security. It's unpleasant from a moral standpoint but it's a reality. And it's my duty as Chancellor to do so," Nehammer stated.

In June 2018, an agreement was signed to extend the existing contract between Gazprom Export LLC and OMV Gas Marketing & Trading GmbH for the supply of Russian natural gas to Austria until 2040. The head of OMV, Alfred Stern, had previously stated that OMV would continue to purchase Russian gas under the contract because it did not fall under EU sanctions.

Below is my column in USA Today on adoption of some Democrats of arguments and rationales once used against the left to silence or jail them. Pundits and politicians are becoming the very thing that they have long condemned in this age of rage. It is realization of Nietzsche's monster theory.

Here is the column:

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster." Those words from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche capture the fear that the struggle against the ideas and people we oppose will twist us into the very thing we hate.

For Democrats, that moment has come in an age of rage against former President Donald Trump in particular and conservatives in general. It's an age when reason and restraint are strangers.

In various areas, Democrats have embraced repellent concepts in the effort to silence or even jail their opponents. What is most striking is that legal arguments now used by the left were once used against the left.

A company managed to supply only one airworthy drone out of a batch of 55 ordered by Kiev, investigative outlet reports

A drone-manufacturing company has failed to deliver on a lucrative contract with the country's military, Ukrainian investigative outlet Bihus.info reported on Tuesday. Ukrainian Aviation Systems (UAS) failed to meet a deadline to provide the military with 55 HAWK reconnaissance drones in mid-August, delivering just four units, of which just one was deemed airworthy.

The HAWK drone is a small winged reconnaissance UAV capable of reaching speeds of up to 55 kilometers per hour (34mph), according to UAS. Each unit costs more than 14.5 million hryvnias (nearly $400,000), while the whole contract is worth 807 million hryvnias or almost $22 million, with at least $17.6 million paid to the company in advance, according to Bihus.info.

Russia overcame the existential assault by Nazi Germany. It will do so again against the despicable NATO axis.

This week saw widespread air strikes on the Russian Federation involving mass aerial drone attacks. Six regions were attacked including the capital, Moscow. Among the targets was the Kursk region where a nuclear plant is located. Several international airports across Russia were temporarily shut down. This is an incredible situation in which Russian territory is being targeted by a military assault not seen since the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany.

The U.S. media could barely contain its glee at the surge in air strikes on Russia. The New York Times hailed them as a "morale booster" for Ukraine, while CNN noted cryptically that the Kiev regime was "emboldened" to hit strategic targets inside Russia. The telling question of course not asked by CNN is: emboldened by whom?

Most of the incoming drones were shot down or disabled by Russian air defenses. But that is beside the point that Russian territory is now being targeted by mass attacks. And there can be no doubt that this "emboldened" military campaign is being enabled and directed by the United States and its NATO allies who are arming the Nazi regime in Kiev to the teeth.

The air strike, this week at Pskov airport is particularly revealing. Several Russian military cargo planes were reportedly destroyed. The location is only some 30 kilometers from Russia's northwestern border with Estonia and over 600 km from Ukraine. It is almost certain that NATO members Estonia and possibly Latvia enabled that attack on Pskov. Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has openly accused NATO of participating in the air assaults on Russian territory. The British publication, The Economist, also reported that NATO hardware, satellite and navigational logistics were vital for the drone campaign.

Dmitry Medvedev, the Deputy Chairman of Russia's National Security Council, this week stated that Russia now has legal justification for going to war with NATO members directly. He warned that the world is on the brink of a nuclear conflagration.

Kiev targeted the population of Russian-held Izyum with the controversial projectiles...

The Ukrainian military used cluster munitions to shell the city of Izyum and caused civilian deaths, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday. The attack happened months before the US provided Kiev with additional cluster shells, overruling the objections of many NATO members.

HRW's Mary Wareham told RIA Novosti:

"We figured this out after the Russians left and our investigators went there to look into the war crimes and atrocities that were committed - and they saw remnants of cluster munitions everywhere. After finding out the direction from which the fire came, they established that they had been used by Ukrainian forces."

The 110-page Cluster Munition Monitor 2022 report, published by HRW this week, lists deployments of such weapons by both sides in the conflict. It notes that the group had first reported on the attack on Izyum in July, but that the Ukrainian Defense Ministry officially denied ever using such munitions in or around the settlement.