Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast has changed how the world thinks about the war, according to U.S. Lieutenant General (Ret.) Ben Hodges.

Hodges, who served as commander of U.S. Army Europe from 2014-2017 and has helped train Ukrainian soldiers, said the operation ended “the mythology of Russia’s inevitable victory.”

“Now people around the world, in Europe and U.S., start thinking — wow, Ukraine can win,” he told the Kyiv Independent.

To achieve that victory, however, Ukrainians will need to keep the pressure up and deprive Russia of the chance to regroup. That won’t be easy.

Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee have obtained bombshell documents proving that Joe Biden was deeply involved in the family business of selling American natural gas to the Chinese–while he was planning to run for President. According to multiple whistleblowers, the Biden family made promises to those who worked with them in 2017 and onward that they would “reap the rewards in a future Biden administration.” These explosive revelations “pose national security concerns,” Oversight Republicans proclaimed Tuesday night.

The Biden clan enriched itself by selling the natural resources to a Chinese firm closely affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—just a few years before the cost of gas in the United States hit record highs, the Oversight Republicans stated.

In a letter to United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking Republican on the Oversight Committee, alleged that according to whistleblowers, Joe Biden was heavily involved in this treachery.

What once distinguished the United States from illiberal regimes following the Orwellian mantra “some are more equal than others” was the hallowed American idea of “equal justice under the law.”

The phrase is engraved above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court—an ideal that took centuries to achieve. Yet it is an ancient concept—what the Greeks called isonomia that distinguished classical democratic Athens from its anti-democratic rivals. Isonomia later became enshrined as the central criterion of all Western consensual governments.

Does it still exist in Joe Biden’s America?

The historical illiteracy of the Queen's critics is impressive, even for a bunch of hate-filled activists. But these professors and historians and activists don’t simply hate a woman who’s passed on: They deeply and viciously hate Queen Elizabeth II — a person they’ve never met and who, to much of the world, symbolized grace, dignity, and poise in the face of dramatic world events.

Where does this level of vitriol come from? It stems from the reality that the queen was one of our final connections to a Western Civilization that believed in itself — a civilization her critics wish to destroy.

Ron DeSantis is scaring the hell out of the Left. This makes me very very happy. As a huge fan of DeSantis I get shivers of delight every time the Leftists attack him.

How scared are they? Scared enough that they are developing a new appreciation for famed Devil, Russian mole, and confederate insurrectionist Donald Trump.

Suddenly Trump is a charming eccentric with soft edges, unlike the meaner and more competent Florida governor. It’s almost as if all those mean things said about Trump weren’t entirely warranted.

Voters, whatever their political views, should rise up against politicians who want to dilute the Bill of Rights to perpetuate their tenure in office. Ted Olson, former Solicitor General

When once a Republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.  Thomas Jefferson

War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is. Revolution is when you decide that for yourself. Benjamin Franklin

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” – James Madison, Federalist 47, 1788

Mark Twain tells us, “The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.”  Had an author written what has happened to America just over the last six years, no one would believe it.  The yarn would be just too far out to have any credence whatsoever.  But we’re living it!

After nearly two years of lies related to the events of January 6, 2021, the regime finally has admitted the truth: The widening legal dragnet to scoop up Donald Trump, his associates, and his voters has nothing to do with the four-hour disturbance on Capitol Hill that afternoon. It is, rather, a thus-far successful crusade to criminalize wrong thinking about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

A barrage of subpoenas issued recently by the Department of Justice—U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves’ office specifically—against Trump aides is not seeking  information about the Capitol protest but personal communications discussing what happened with the election and plans to fight the results.

In the history of American social movements, September 11 may take on new significance. September 11, 2022, is the day the powers that be allowed LGBWithoutTheT to trend on Twitter.

In broad daylight, lesbians and gays disassociated themselves from the transgender movement, and Twitter gave them a platform. This is a major turnaround. Just a month earlier Twitter had banned “Gays Against Groomers” for “hateful conduct.”

If Twitter chose to let #LGBWithoutTheT trend for me, it trended for everyone. I suspect someone above the Twitter brass encouraged them to do just that. With the elections just two months away, the increasingly noisy and oppressive trans movement was becoming too much of a political liability.

The resistance among LGBs to the Ts has been brewing for some time. Sunday, it percolated to the surface.

Liberals tell us that we are in the midst of a transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. The reality is that no such transition is taking place, nor will it. This video by Professor Simon Michaux, who doesn’t take issue with global warming hype, explains one of several reasons why this is true: the mineral requirements of a wind- and solar-based energy system can’t possibly be met.

This description accompanies the YouTube video:

The quantity of metal required to make just one generation of renewable tech units to replace fossil fuels, is much larger than first thought. Current mining production of these metals is not even close to meeting demand. Current reported mineral reserves are also not enough in size. Most concerning is copper as one of the flagged shortfalls.

Through deliberate and easily reversed policies, the cost-of-living in America is being elevated to empower the wealthy and impoverish everyone else in the name of equity and fighting climate change.

It’s getting harder and harder not to abandon faith in the institutions we once regarded as respectable and relied on to keep the country moving. It is harder still to avoid rejecting unequivocally what has become their core governing premises, which seem to be entirely different from what we once believed them to be.

So here goes: the entire “climate crisis” is an opportunistic hoax; the entire “equity” (along with “diversity” and “inclusion”) movement is a corrupt fraud. This hoax and this fraud have permeated and overwhelmed every formerly respectable sector of American life, with disastrous consequences we’ve only just begun to feel.

In 2016, Trump spoke to tens of thousands, and Hillary spoke to hundreds...and Trump won.  In 2020, despite COVID, Trump spoke to tens of thousands, and Biden spoke to...well, not even tens.  Maybe to fives, all of whom sat in little marked circles far away from each other.  And yet it's Biden who's in the White House.

Now it's 2022, and once again, Trump is speaking to tens of thousands, and Biden is speaking to tens.  What can and should we take away from that?

The head-to-head comparison comes from Benny Johnson, who put together a video showing Trump's and Biden's appearances in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.  It's important to note that Wilkes-Barre is part of Luzerne County, a Republican-majority county.  However, that majority is not equal to, say, San Francisco County, where Biden claimed 85.26% of the votes to Trump's 12.72% — something that's a totally believable result if one knows that San Francisco is self-destructing because of its unopposed leftism.

Joe Biden has made his obsession with President Trump known, most recently through his hellishly lit Mussolini-meltdown speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia last week, manically painting Trump and all his voters as "threats to the republic."

He may be doddering and insentient, but he still burns bright against his potential opponent in the 2024 presidential race, which even Democrats don't want him to get involved with. On Trump, Biden's as obsessed with Trump as Stalin was with Trotsky.

So it comes to light that not only has Biden tried to smear Trump as a danger to democracy and "threat to the republic," in a sorry public relations campaign that isn't working, he's also trying to eliminate President Trump from the entire 2024 presidential race by probably the gamiest maneuvers ever played by a politician in U.S. history.

It turns out that Biden was behind the raid on Trump's home in Mar-a-Lago on August 4.

As President Obama used to say of his clownish vice president: "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to f--- things up."

That brings us to Joe Biden's student loan debt forgiveness rollout, announced this week.

Let's set aside the issue of the legality of the matter.  The actual execution of the matter is Joe in Action.

According to Axios:

The implementation of President Biden's widespread, income-targeted student loan forgiveness is shaping up to be a bureaucratic challenge for the Department of Education.

Why it matters:

A Nobel Prize-winning German developmental biologist called the transgender movement’s claims “unscientific” and “nonsense,” and their plans to let teenagers determine their own gender “madness.”

In an interview published last week by the German feminist magazine EMMA, Dr. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard cited hard scientific facts to counter the trendy notion that there are multiple genders.

“All mammals have two sexes, and man is a mammal,” she explained. “There’s the one sex that produces the eggs, has two X chromosomes. That’s called female. And there’s the other one that makes the sperm, has an X and a Y chromosome. That’s called male.”

Language is important and words do matter. Through language we learn, we communicate our intentions, we develop plans, and we express our feelings. Through language we convey our affections and transmit our displeasures.

It is language that binds a family, a community, a region, or a culture together. Today, however, this fundamental cultural glue is purposefully being watered down and dissolved in order to break the bonds of our nation.

Wokeism in its purest forms breaks down clarity, and replaces truth with new grievance norms that masquerade as justice. Wokeists try to negate centuries of tradition, culture and science (!) by socially shaming opposing views and using coercive tactics on young children to adopt concepts that go against every grain of common sense and human understanding of the world around us.

Taiwan is warning that its military won't hesitate to exercise right of self-defense and to counter-attack in the event of Chinese forces entering its territory, following an unprecedented event on Tuesday wherein live ammunition was fired as 'warning shots' against a cluster of drones that appeared near the Taiwan-controlled Kinmen islands. Flares had initially been deployed to warn off the drones, but per Taiwan's defense ministry live ammo was then used to force the drones' departure.

Taipei followed Wednesday with this warning:

"We will continue defending our national security, firmly holding on to the median line, and doing whatever it takes to protect our homes, our families, and our sovereignty," according to the words of defense ministry spokesperson Li-Fang Sun.

Within hours after issuing the warning, another drone incident has been reported, with Taiwan's military saying it detected "three civilian drones" in the area of its offshore island possessions on Wednesday. It further confirmed that warning shots were again fired to fend off the unidentified drones, believed to have been dispatched from China's mainland.

For the Left, Donald Trump is synonymous with “fascism” (or “semi-fascism,” as Joe Biden put it the other day). And for Liz Cheney and most of the NeverTrumpers, he remains an existential threat to democracy.

But to quantify those charges, what exactly has Trump done extralegally—as opposed to his bombast and braggadocio about what he might have wished to have done?

And what are the standards by which to judge this supposed menace? Did Trump illegally and with a mere signature nullify over $300 billion of contracted student loans—to firm up his college-student and college-graduate base nine weeks before the midterm elections?

Did Donald Trump weaponize the feared IRS, the logical place to find fascistic tendencies of any president bent on using government to punish his enemies? Did he push through a plan to add 87,000 new IRS investigative agents at a time of national discord?

Attempts to transform the Russian Federation into a nation state, a civic state or a stable imperial state have failed.

The current structure is based on brittle historical foundations, possesses no unified national identity, whether civic or ethnic, and exhibits persistent struggles between nationalists, imperialists, centralists, liberals and federalists.

Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the imposition of stifling international economic sanctions will intensify and accelerate the process of state rupture.

Paradoxically, while Vladimir Putin assumed power to prevent Russia’s disintegration, he may be remembered as precipitating the country’s demise.  New territorial entities will surface as Moscow’s credibility crisis deepens amidst spreading ungovernability, elite power struggles, political polarization, nationalist radicalism, and regional and ethnic revivals.

Another slew of whistleblowers have come forward with misconduct claims against the FBI following the Bureau's raid on former President Donald Trump's Florida estate.

FBI field offices in Miami, Salt Lake City, Buffalo and Newark face accusations that their upper management coerced agents to sign false affidavits, inflated terrorism caseloads to improve their apparent performance, engaged in illicit sexual activities, or concealed those of others.

“The FBI is completely out of control and its culture and structure needs to change. Not only is the political bias completely out of control and disgustingly obvious, the FBI knows they will not be held accountable for their illegal behavior and misconduct,” said one Whistleblower in a letter to Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Tx) of the House Judiciary Committee.

A new group called Climate Intelligence (Clintel for short) has been founded in the Netherlands with the express purpose of combatting the extremism of the climate change campaigners.

One of their early efforts is a statement, signed by over 1,000 scientists and policy experts from around the world, that argues “There Is No Climate Emergency.”

This link goes to the complete PDF.  It contains the following statement, and the names and positions of, to date, 1,107 scientists from Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China & Hong Kong, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Paraguay, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and USA.

From 40 countries, they agree on this statement:

Most countries are slowly recovering from the disastrous demographic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Russia is not.

Instead, as new data shows, the Russian Federation has resumed its long-term demographic decline, a trend likely to intensify and profoundly affect not only the country’s self-image but also its prospects for economic recovery and fielding a large military.

The Kremlin is currently casting about for ways to limit or reverse this trend, but financial constraints—many of which arise from President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine and ideological blinders affecting much of the Russian leadership—are preventing Moscow from making real progress, according to independent demographers.

Many Russians see three demographic trends in particular as incredibly threatening.

Oberlin University is under fire over its Professor of Religion and Islamic Studies who once served as the Iran’s ambassador at the United Nations. He’s Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, who supports the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

His personal website further states his research is “focused on the ethics of peacemaking in Islam in the context of comparative religions.” Nothing says ethics and peace more than a lethal fatwa targeting dissenting authors. Right?

Few academics would support Iran’s blood-soaked interpretation of free speech. However, we need to address the creeping relativism that is sweeping across our campus.  It’s as fully 1984 Orwellian as Mahallati.

Back to the Principality of Muscovy?

[Note by JW:  The author, Jacob Fraden, is a very interesting fellow.  Born and raised in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) in Russia’s western Siberia 77 years ago, he earned his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at Ural Polytechnic there, and was able to escape the Soviet Union to America in the mid-70s. He has dozens of patents for medical inventions such as the Thermoscan Instant Thermometer, and has authored major textbooks plus autobiographies (one in Russian, the other in English).  This is a brilliant Renaissance man, and I encourage you to regard what he writes very seriously.]

Russia's bloody and senseless war against Ukraine has been going on for almost six months. Instead of the original goal of quickly seizing Ukraine and turning it into a puppet state or a province (the name "Ukraine" is derived from the Russian word for “outskirts"), Russia has suddenly encountered an impenetrable wall of resistance.

Two questions logically arise: 1) why did Russia attack Ukraine? and 2) how and when will the war end?