Is Germany mulling a return to military conscription? The German defence minister Boris Pistorius has hinted at compulsory military service, as the Russia-Ukraine war drags on.

In fact, this isn't the first time that the German minister spoke about reintroducing compulsory military service. Last December too, Pistorius had said that the country was "looking at all options", adding that abolishing it had been a "mistake".


With this, it seems that Europe is looking at a rethink of military conscription, with an increasing number of countries mulling or implementing this measure.

Germany rethinks conscription

Ecuadorian police forcefully entered Mexico's embassy in Quito and arrested former Vice President Jorge Glas

Mexico has suspended diplomatic relations with Ecuador after the South American country's police stormed its embassy in Quito to arrest Ecuador's former vice president, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has said.

The development comes after Mexico granted political asylum on Friday to former Vice President Jorge David Glas Espinel, who had been convicted twice on corruption charges in his home country and has been staying in the embassy since late last year. Ecuador had asked Mexico's permission to arrest the politician, but to no avail. Glas insists that he has been subjected to political persecution.

While offering refuge to the former VP, Mexico's Foreign Ministry urged Quito to grant safe passage to Glas so he could leave the country. Ecuador, however, ruled out the possibility, saying "it is not legal to grant asylum to people convicted or prosecuted for common crimes."

On Friday evening, Ecuadorian police stormed the embassy, with videos from the scene showing a heavy law enforcement presence in the area. The government of Ecuador claimed that the raid was conducted to defend its national sovereignty.

This week marks the 75th anniversary of NATO's founding in April 1949. The organization has become a global danger to peace and security and should have been disbanded more than 30 years ago when the Cold War supposedly ended. That the alliance was not disbanded attests that its real purpose was always to serve as a weapon for U.S.-led Western imperialism.

Barely four years after the end of World War Two - the greatest calamity in world history - and amid the ruins of a devastated Europe and Asia, Western imperialism was once again reinventing its nefarious internal forces.

Nearly 30 million citizens of the Soviet Union had died at the hands of Nazi Germany. And yet despite the horror and evil of war, the Western powers were busy reconfiguring their military forces to confront again the Soviet Union. With the defeat of the Nazi war machine largely by the Soviet Red Army, the Western imperialists innovated a new instrument in the form of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The betrayal and treachery were not just to the Soviet people. All of humanity was once again subjected to the warmongering designs and necessities of a global elite under Western imperialism.

NATO's declared purpose was to defend Europe from Soviet aggression. The same pretense exists today in the claim that the alliance is defending Ukraine from Russian belligerence.

The proof of NATO's real function is demonstrated by the fact that the organization did not disband in 1991 when the Soviet Union was dissolved. Over the ensuing 33 years, the military bloc has doubled its membership to 31 nations. Russia has replaced the Soviet Union as the Western-designated security threat to Europe. But such rationale turns reality on its head. NATO has always existed as a tool of aggression for Western imperialism. Where Nazi Germany failed to do the job of conquering the Soviet Union, NATO tacitly took over the task, and when the Soviet Union disappeared, the new enemy of convenience became the Russian Federation.

If your situational awareness is well-tuned, you can put together a political weather report from the swirl of events that otherwise seem to confound the degenerate simps who pretend to report the news. Events are tending in the direction of self-reinforcing, ramifying chaos, and the people running the show are obviously insane as they do everything possible to hurry chaos along.

Case in point: Antony Blinken, our Secretary of State, who announced yesterday that Ukraine will get rushed into NATO ASAP. Do you understand that would mean a direct, automatic, peremptory declaration of war against Russia, requiring all of NATO — that is, their combined militaries — to go kinetic inside Ukraine and theoretically inside Russia, too, (a move that has not worked out well for anyone in all of history), because Article Five of the NATO charter states that an armed attack against one is an attack against all, and must be answered with counter-attack? Thus, you see, Mr. Blinken just announced World War Three.

One aspect of the recent revelations about the IDF's Lavender AI system that's not getting enough consideration is the fact that it is completely devastating to the narrative that Israel has been killing so many civilians in Gaza because Hamas uses "human shields".

If you missed this story, a major report from +972 revealed that Israel has been using an AI system called Lavender to compile kill lists of suspected members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad which have been carried out with hardly any human verification. One automated system, psychopathically named "Where's Daddy?", tracks suspects to their homes so that they can be killed along with their entire families. The IDF has been knowingly killing 15 to 20 civilians at a time to kill one junior Hamas operative, and up to 100 civilians at a time to take out a senior official.

The bloc's expansion and its involvement in the Ukraine conflict have put Europe's security in jeopardy, Dmitry Peskov has said

The current state of relations between Russia and NATO can be described as a "direct confrontation," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said. He claimed that the US-led military bloc has been a destabilizing force in Europe rather than ensuring the continent's security.

He made his comment on Thursday, as the bloc marked 75 years since the signing of its founding document, the North Atlantic Treaty.

The turn away from expansion, production and trade toward lending and speculation has precipitated decline for centuries

One of the curious features of the American landscape is the fact that these days the financialization of the economy is widely condemned as unhealthy, yet little is being done to reverse it. There was a time, back in the 1980s and '90s, when finance-driven capitalism was supposed to usher in a time of better capital allocation and a more dynamic economy. This is not a view one hears often anymore.

So, if such a phenomenon is overwhelmingly viewed negatively but isn't being amended, then perhaps it's not merely a failure of policymaking but rather something deeper - something more endemic to the very fabric of the capitalist economy. It is of course possible to lay the blame for this state of affairs at the feet of the current crop of cynical and power-hungry elites and to stop one's analysis there. But an examination of history reveals recurrent instances of financialization that bear remarkable similarities, which invites the conclusion that perhaps the predicament in the American economy in recent decades is not unique and that the ever-rising power of Wall Street was in a sense preordained.

Denis Kapustin leads an anti-Kremlin volunteer militia which is responsible for multiple attacks on villages

Exiled Russian neo-Nazi Denis Kapustin - the leader of the Ukraine-based Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) paramilitary group - admitted that he wants to be a "Hollywood-style bad guy," in an interview with Politico published on Wednesday.

The RDK has claimed responsibility for numerous cross-border attacks and incursions into Russian settlements, which have often resulted in the deaths of civilians. The group has been designated as a terrorist organization by Moscow.

As noted by the outlet, despite being recognized by Germany as "one of the most influential neo-Nazi activists" on the European continent, Ukraine has "embraced" Kapustin's "form of bad guy," seeing him and his group as allies against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats tho' unseen amongst us, -visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.-
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,-
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,-
Like memory of music fled,-
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

As the de facto North Atlantic Terror Organization celebrates its 75th birthday, taking Lord Ismay's motto to ever soaring heights ("keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down"), that thick slab of Norwegian wood posing as Secretary-General came up with a merry "initiative" to create a 100 billion euro fund to weaponize Ukraine for the next five years.

Translation, regarding the crucial money front in the NATO-Russia clash: partial exit of the Hegemon - already obsessing with The Next Forever War, against China; enter the motley crew of ragged, de-industrialized European chihuahuas, all in deep debt and most mired in recession.

A few IQs over average room temperature at NATO's HQ in Haren, in Brussels, had the temerity to wonder how to come up with such a fortune, as NATO has zero leverage to raise money among member states.

After all, the Europeans will never be able to replicate the time-tested Hegemon money laundering machine. For instance, assuming the White House-proposed $60 billion package to Ukraine would be approved by the U.S. Congress - and it won't - no less than 64% of the total will never reach Kiev: it will be laundered within the industrial-military complex.

Yet it gets even more dystopic: Norwegian Wood, robotic stare, arms flailing, actually believes his proposed move will not imply a direct NATO military presence in Ukraine - or country 404; something that is already a fact on the ground for quite a while, irrespective of the warmongering hissy fits by Le Petit Roi in Paris (Peskov: "Russia-NATO relations have descended into direct confrontation").

Now couple the Lethal Looney Tunes spectacle along the NATOstan front with the Hegemon's aircraft carrier performance in West Asia, consistently taking its industrial-scale slaughter/starvation Genocide Project in Gaza to indescribable heights - the meticulously documented holocaust watched in contorted silence by the "leaders" of the Global North.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese correctly summed it all up: the biblical psychopathology entity "intentionally killed the WCK workers so that donors would pull out and civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly. Israel knows Western countries and most Arab countries won't move a finger for the Palestinians."

The "logic" behind the deliberate three tap strike on the clearly signed humanitarian convoy of famine-alleviating workers in Gaza was to eviscerate from the news an even more horrendous episode: the genocide-within-a-genocide of al-Shifa hospital, responsible for at least 30% of all health services in Gaza. Al-Shifa was bombed, incinerated and had over 400 civilians killed in cold blood, in several cases literally smashed by bulldozers, including medical doctors, patients and dozens of children.

Nearly simultaneously, the biblical psychopathology gang completely eviscerated the Vienna convention - something that even the historical Nazis never did - striking Iran's consular mission/ambassador's residence in Damascus.

This was a missile attack on a diplomatic mission, enjoying immunity, on the territory of a third country, against which the gang is not at war. And on top of it, killing General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, commander of the IRGC's Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon, his deputy Mohammad Hadi Hajizadeh, another five officers, and a total of 10 people.

Translation: an act of terror, against two sovereign states, Syria and Iran. Equivalent to the recent terror attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow.

The inevitable question rings around all corners of the lands of the Global Majority: how can these de facto terrorists possibly get away with all this, over and over again?

Scotland, my home country, is leading the way into a new darkness with it Hate Crime Bill that just became law.