Maeve
- 6 Posts
- 16 Comments
2·4 days agoThis is also a concern for me.
5·8 days agoWhen I wrote an open letter to you a half year ago, I urged Germany to pursue diplomacy with Russia rather than the normalization of war. Six months later, the situation in Europe is dramatically worse. Europe and Russia are slipping into open war. And in that drift, Chancellor, your responsibility is singular. No European leader — not in Paris, not in Warsaw, not in Rome — holds the position that Germany holds, or has the power that you personally hold, to interrupt this catastrophe. Will you try for peace?
You yourself, with Prime Minister Meloni and President Macron, called in January 2026 for Europe to restart relations with Russia and described Russia as „a European country.“ Yet you did not pursue diplomacy. With the future of Europe at stake, this is an extraordinary abdication of leadership. Have you, in your months as Chancellor, attempted one substantive dialogue with President Putin? Has your foreign minister attempted one substantive dialogue with Foreign Minister Lavrov? Real conversations, the kind that ended the Cold War. The answer, as far as the public record reveals, is no. Not once. And not for want of recognizing the urgency.
The past days have brought a dangerous acceleration that should focus every European mind. Both capitals are now under sustained attack: Ukrainian long-range drones have struck deep into Moscow, including civilian sites; Russian missile and drone strikes against Kyiv have greatly intensified. Ukrainian drones have crossed into the airspace of the Baltic states, raising the immediate prospect of an incident that could pull Europe directly into the war. A horrific Ukrainian strike on a boys’ school in Lugansk has further eroded what little remains of restraint. And on May 25, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, acting on instructions from President Putin, formally notified the United States Secretary of State that the Russian Armed Forces are now launching „systematic and sustained strikes“ on facilities and decision-making centers in Kyiv, and the Russian Foreign Ministry has advised that the United States and other countries „ensure the evacuation of their diplomatic personnel and other citizens from the capital of Ukraine.“ That message is the prologue to a major escalation. Diplomacy is more urgent than ever.
The way to defend Ukraine is not continued slaughter, but peace on terms that are agreeable to all parties. Instead, we face escalation, with more deaths, more destruction, and the real prospect of a war that expands beyond Ukraine. By calling for ever more weapons, ever greater war-fighting capacity, and ever louder demonstrations of „resolve,“ and by signaling that Germany is preparing for war rather than working to end it, you have allowed Berlin to become an accelerant rather than a brake to a European-wide war…
First — the 2+4 Treaty and NATO’s eastward expansion. On 12 September 1990, in Moscow, Germany signed the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany — the „2+4 Treaty“ — that completed German reunification. That treaty was secured because Mikhail Gorbachev was given solemn assurances, by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, by Helmut Kohl, by James Baker, and by other Western leaders, that NATO would not move eastward. The declassified record — including the now-public memoranda assembled by the National Security Archive of George Washington University — is unambiguous: those assurances were given and were clearly meant at the time to apply beyond the territory of the former GDR to Eastern Europe. These assurances were reaffirmed through 1990 and 1991.
The 2+4 Treaty restricts the placement of NATO troops in the former GDR, and recalls the principles of the Helsinki Final Act, which emphasizes that no nation’s security should come at the expense of another’s. Does any serious person believe that the Soviet Union cared about Western troops on the territory of the former GDR but was indifferent to NATO armies in Warsaw, Vilnius, or Kyiv? Of course not.
The matter of NATO enlargement was discussed in detail and explicit assurances of non-enlargement to the East were given by Germany to the Soviet leaders — and then were broken. Germany was the principal beneficiary of those assurances, which were the quid pro quo for Germany’s reunification. Yet as early as 1993, German leaders began to promote the violation of those assurances…
10·13 days agoNyt is a Nazi collaborator, so…
6·13 days agoEvil 🤬, it’s your fault “especially with the deficit!” 🤬
3·17 days agoI wish I’d seen this comment on mbin so I could “boost” it.
I guess we’re about to see!
It doesn’t, anymore than Venezuela’s sour crude did. It appears the stable genius gets a bright idea, but lacks the ability to think it through or seek wise council. Now if the Pentagon and businessmen are advising him, I’d wager they have their own agendas and advise our Genius-in-Chief accordingly, with or without the ability to think it all the way through. Additionally, I can say I’m also guilty of this deficiency, or I can and the results aren’t what I’d imagined (and I’m guessing it’s a shared bane, regardless of station, status, education, mental acuity, or lack thereof). Finally, I’m not advising an emotionally unstable person in a global position of power, with codes to wreak wholesale nuclear destruction on the entire planet.
It’s quite an exercise in self-control to temper my expectations and patience, sometimes. My ID is champing at the bit.
2·23 days agoI particularly hope they publish US data. I hope USA becomes a global pariah exposed for every rotten thing we do, have done, contemplate, past, present, future. Shunning is the only way interested parties (wealth leeches) may be finally reckoned with.
Designed for external mounting, the device can measure carbon dioxide and methane concentrations at key emission sources across the globe’s mid-to-low latitudes. This will provide reliable, accurate, and high-frequency data to support greenhouse gas monitoring, reporting and verification. “This equipment will provide robust data support for China’s ‘dual carbon’ initiatives and contribute Chinese wisdom to the global response against climate change,” the National Space Science Center under the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in a statement. China has set the dual carbon goals of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060.
This is great news. I hope they publish global measurements.
It would serve us to recall that Republicans are split between actual conservatives who prefer some measure of decorum while dragging us backwards to pre - civil war conditions (chattel slavery for PoC and the wrong kind of whites, only the “right” whites can own private property, hold bank accounts, etc), and MAGA, who want the same things but can’t give a flying fig about decorum, and would even abandon those goals to grab as much wealth as fast as they can and exit the country if they sense the larger general population has finally awakened and are about to go after them with intentions of having their heads on pikes.
Reality > invented