Putin's war

Quote:

Personal insults are the lowest form of debate and are used by people who cannot or will not support their positions with actual arguments.

Odd. You can cite the principle, but not grasp the principle.

Are you also irony-blind?

As part of its latest attempts to justify its invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials are once again pushing a false narrative that the Eastern European country is developing biological weapons with the assistance of the U.S.

On March 6, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed it had obtained evidence Ukraine and the U.S. had collaborated to develop biological weapons.

The claim was made by Major General Igor Konashenkov and widely reported in Russian media. Konashenkov alleged that pathogens for deadly diseases such as the plague, anthrax and cholera were being created to be used for biological warfare in Ukrainian laboratories funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.

"Obviously, with the start of a special military operation, the Pentagon had serious concerns about disclosing the conduct of secret biological experiments on the territory of Ukraine," Konashenkov said, as reported by the Russian news agency TASS.

This follows on from previous false claims peddled by Russia ahead of its invasion of Ukraine that the country was planning on developing so-called "dirty bombs."

According to a February 24 report by fact-checking website Snopes, Russian propaganda claiming the planned attack of Ukraine was actually to target secret U.S. biolabs in the country was also being widely shared on social media.

As noted by Snopes, the false claim that there exists U.S.-funded labs in Ukraine developing germ warfare capabilities has been pushed by Russia since 2018, and remerged in the wake of the outbreak of the coronavirus.

In May 2020, as the coronavirus had fully spread across the world, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) issued a statement urging politicians to stop spreading misinformation about the existence of U.S. military biological labs in Ukraine.

"No foreign biological laboratories operate in Ukraine. Statements recently made by individual politicians are not true and are a deliberate distortion of the facts," the statement said.

In April 2020, the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine also issued a statement saying they want to "set the record straight" regarding disinformation surrounding U.S.-funded biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine.

The statement explained that the U.S. and Ukraine have had a partnership since 2005 to prevent the threat of outbreaks of infectious diseases, as well as allowing for peaceful research and vaccine development

The partnership between the U.S. Defense Department and the Ukraine Ministry of Health is part of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which began in 1991 with the aim of reducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction following the fall of the Soviet Union.

As explained by Andy Weber, member of the Arms Control Association board of directors and former assistant secretary for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs, this partnership doesn't mean that there are U.S. military-run labs in Ukraine.

In fact, the U.S. Defense Department has never had a biological laboratory in Ukraine.

"Rather, the U.S. Department of Defense Cooperative Threat Reduction Program has provided technical support to the Ukrainian Ministry of Health since 2005 to improve public health laboratories, whose mission is analogous to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)," Weber told PolitiFact.

"These laboratories have recently played an important role in stopping the spread of COVID-19."

Filippa Lentzos, a bioweapons researcher and faculty member at King's College of London, also told the Agency France-Presse news agency that there are no indications that these labs in Ukraine are being used to develop biological weapons and actually aim to prevent preventing disease outbreaks.

"These are public health labs like those of the CDC or the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control," Lentzos said.

Not sure if she is just misinformed or pumping out Russian propaganda.

• Trump put out a statement repeating his false claims about NATO on Wednesday.

• He released the statement as Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy was wrapping an emotional address to Congress.

• Trump has repeatedly and wrongly claimed that NATO is "delinquent" and member countries need to "pay up."

Former President Donald Trump released a lengthy statement full of false claims about NATO while praising himself for bolstering the alliance. The statement came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was wrapping up an emotional address to Congress in which he called on the US government to take stronger action to counter Russia's devastating war in Ukraine.

Trump has repeatedly gotten basic facts of NATO wrong or been willfully lying about the alliance he's said was "obsolete" only to later correct himself because he did not know "much about NATO." Most of Trump's new statement repeated previous false claims he's made about the NATO alliance, including that several member countries were "delinquent" and that he was the one who got them to "pay up" in exchange for the US's protection.

"Nobody knew things would happen so rapidly, but NATO was poor and now it is rich, and all of the Fake News commentators that said Trump was tearing down NATO should be ashamed of themselves for telling lies," Trump's statement said.

He went on to say that unlike previous US presidents, "I acted, and acted strongly. I said to them, 'if you don't pay up, no protection.' They all paid up, and paid up quickly."

Contrary to Trump's claims, European members of NATO and Canada had increased their defense spending in 2015 and 2016, before Trump took office. Also, NATO countries don't pay up. They have pledged to spend a certain amount of their gross domestic product on their own militaries, and pay a small stipend to fund NATO headquarters.

And in 2014, two years before Trump came into office, all NATO members reached an agreement to spend at least two percent of their annual GDP on their own defense by 2024.

Trump's assertion that members of the alliance were "delinquent" in their contributions also doesn't add up, because countries decided on their own how much of their GDP to spend on their own defense. In other words, as fact checkers have pointed out, they don't "owe" NATO or the US money.

"There is no ledger that maintains accounts of what countries pay and owe," former Obama administration National Security Council staffer Aaron O'Connell told NPR. "NATO is not like a club with annual membership fees."

That said, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg did give Trump credit for pushing NATO countries to spend more, noting that Canada and European allies added $130 billion to their defense budgets for a total goal of $400 billion by 2024.

Trump "is committed to NATO," Stoltenberg told Fox News at the time. He added: "But at the same time, he has clearly stated that NATO allies need to invest more. And therefore at the summit in July last year, we agreed to do more to step up, and now we see the results."

Worse he has flatly refused to take action to increase our petroleum production...

A White House official said Tuesday that U.S. oil and gas companies should increase production if they want, pushing back against executives who’ve criticized Biden administration energy policies as prices soar.

“Prices are quite high, the price signal is strong. If folks want to produce more, they can and they should,” White House National Economic Council Deputy Director Bharat Ramamurti said in a Bloomberg Television interview.

Ramamurti said there are 9,000 unused leases that the U.S. government has provided for oil and gas production and, “people are free to use them if they’d like to.”

“The idea that there’s some kind of severe restriction on that production is simply untrue,” he added.

Like many industries during the pandemic, oil producers are struggling with a shortage of workers. They're also having trouble sourcing some of the equipment they would need to ramp up production, including pipes and specialized sand used in fracking to extract shale oil.

"They can't find people, and can't find equipment," said Robert McNally, president of consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group. "It's not like they're available at a premium price. They're just not available."

Our rather stupid, spineless and authoritarian President has dug a hole for himself and the rest of us.

THe NATO Allies indeed adopted a goal off 2%of their GDP for defense expenditures, though does not automatically cause such spending to occur , instead it remains, as the article indicated, a function of government internal actions. The fact is that Most NATO nations, Germany prominently included had consistently and significantly spent a good deal less than the goals to which they had committed themselves to their allies in the alliance.

One of the outcomes of the 2014 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit held in Wales was the recommendation that allies should strive towards spending at least 2% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on military expenditure by 2024. This has in recent years put the debate on burden sharing within the Alliance in the limelight. Within the Alliance, the interpretation of the guidelines is different. This is partly because the U.S.A, especially under President Trump, has consistently viewed the 2-% guideline as a binding agreement. Some allies have, however, indicated that their military expenditure will not increase to the recommended threshold by the set deadline. Critics of the guideline have also identified several shortfalls associated with it and consequently dismissed it. Those who support it emphasize for instance that it contributes to addressing grievances about free riding within the Alliance. This paper contributes to this discussion and literature on demand for military expenditure by assessing how NATO’s two percent guideline can be viewed from a demand for military expenditure perspective. It also proposes and estimates a dynamic panel model for this purpose. Empirical evidence presented suggests that fiscal conditions require attention in the debate on the two percent guideline.