The confrontation between Western nations and Russia amounts to “total war,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday during a meeting with the heads of Russian regions.

Russian society and major political forces support the government’s decision to face this challenge, he added.

Western nations “are doubling, tripling, and quadrupling their efforts to deter our nation. They use a wide array of tools, from unilateral economic sanctions to totally deceitful propaganda in the global media,” Lavrov said, noting that “low-level Russophobia, which to our deepest regret is promoted by a number of governments, has risen to unprecedented levels.”

“The West has declared total war against us, against the entire Russian world. Nobody even hides this fact now,” Lavrov stated.

Western leaders believe themselves to be exceptional and are driven by delusions of grandeur and irrational fears, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday in an interview with RT Arabic.

“We know that our Western friends have many phobias, many complexes. They have a superiority complex, the infallibility complex, and I believe they also have some paranoia,” Lavrov said.

“Any process that does not include the West, which the West does not control, they perceive as opposition, a challenge to their dominance,” he explained, referring to various regional economic integration groups and organizations that Russia participates in. “It’s high time for them to kick this habit.”

Budapest has spent weeks shooting down proposals by Brussels to ban Russian oil and gas in the European Union, with Prime Minister Viktor Orban warning that an embargo on Russian oil would be tantamount to “dropping an atomic bomb” on the Hungarian economy. Hungary purchases about 65 percent of its oil and 85 percent of its gas from Russia.

Kiev should make "something happen" to the Druzhba ("Friendship") pipeline carrying Russian oil through Ukraine to Hungary to teach Budapest a lesson, Lana Zerkal, an adviser to Ukrainian Energy Minister Herman Haluschenko, has suggested.

Washington and its allies have turned into a new “collective ministry of truth,” rigorously preserving their narrative on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN Dmitry Polyansky told RT on Thursday. The West has launched a massive smear campaign against Russia in the media and on the internet, the diplomat believes.

Western governments seek to spread views that are “beneficial to them but do not always correspond to the reality,” Polyansky said, adding that they ultimately seek to put their own population into a “bubble of lies” that makes it hard for an ordinary person to distinguish between factual information and a distorted picture of what is happening on the ground in Ukraine.

London: French President Emmanuel Macron agreed to start rebuilding a relationship with Australia based on “trust and respect” in his first phone call with new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Thursday evening.

Macron, who wrote privately to congratulate Albanese following his election victory on Saturday evening, reminded his new counterpart of the “deep breach of trust” which had occurred in an ugly chapter in Franco-Australian relations last year following the cancellation of a $90 billion submarine contract.

In a conversation that lasted more than 20 minutes, the pair agreed the two nations needed to repair the bond to jointly overcome global challenges, including the climate “emergency” and strategic challenges in the Indo-Pacific.

E T Gundlach's (satirical) book "Fact and Fetishes of Advertising" (1931) was poopooed by the advertising community, despite Gundlach having invented many of the TRICKS of advertising. The point of advertising is to sell more products, not for its boffins to be creative Picassos or being writers of literature. SIMPLE points have to be made — and SIMPLICITY CAN BE FAR MORE DIFFICULT than literature...

In some ways, Gundlach was a visionary and a master of understanding ways to manipulate individual's mind. The paragraphs above give an inkling about his insight, not only of advertising but of the greater TRADE. Trade and the price of fish do more to international relations than wars and political machinations. Above all, honesty in trade and advertising (and in politics) has been the key to progress...

Recent general elections in The Philippines appear to signal the island nation’s continued but gradual move out from under US subordination and its rise with the rest of Asia as China emerges as both a regional and global superpower.

With Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. set to become the next president along with his running mate, Sara Duterte, daughter of the outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte, the Western media appears convinced that it signals the continued building of relations between The Philippines and China and the gradual diminishing of American influence over both The Philippines and the rest of the region.

by Brian Berletic

I am pleased to be here for this meeting and thank you for organising it. In my introduction, I would like to raise two issues that seem to me fundamental for understanding the current events in Ukraine. The first aspect concerns the nature of this war. In the second part of my reflections, I will try to explain why, in my opinion, peace in Europe is currently impossible, or at least unlikely, and quite distant.

BY: Guy Mettan

30 April 2022. 

The nature of this war

julius

Voting is a humongous subject. It is at the core of the health of democracy. We refer thus to the father of MODERN ADVERTISING: E T Gundlach. The excerpt above from his (somewhat satirical) book "Facts and Fetishes in Advertising (published 1931)....

Promoting political belief is often crass because of ... read above.

Ukrainian presidential advisor Alexey Arestovich resorted to obscene language to criticize those in the West urging Kiev to cede part of the country's territory to Russia for the sake of peace.

“Go f**k yourselves with such proposals, you dumb f**ks, to trade Ukrainian territory a little bit! Are you f**king crazy? Our children are dying, soldiers are stopping shells with their own bodies, and they are telling us how to sacrifice our territories. This will never happen,” Arestovich said in an interview on Wednesday.

The proposition that Australians were disengaged from politics has become something of an orthodoxy in recent years. Polls showing high rates of undecided voters before the election seemed to confirm this analysis.

But come election night 2022, it became clear — horribly so, for the MPs who were personally escorted to the exit by their electorates — that the Australian voting public is engaged, alert, and has its BS detector dialled up to 11.

The voting patterns around the country were intricate, and runic analysts in the major parties will likely be going over them for years.

Peter Dutton has issued a rallying cry to a devastated Liberal Party, promising to bring together moderate and conservative wings fractured by the election loss and vowing to take the fight to Labor on the economy.

Dutton formally confirmed on Wednesday he will stand for the leadership of the Liberals as he warned “things are going to be tough under Labor – higher interest rates, cost of living, inflation and electricity prices”.

“Labor talked a big game on the economy. They now have to deliver and we will hold them to account,” he said in a statement.

More than 4 million Australian school students were at risk of unprecedented tracking and surveillance during remote learning as corporations exploited their access to children.

Key points:

• 
  Human Rights Watch analysed 164 educational apps and websites used in 49 countries
• 
  It found 89 per cent of EdTech products used globally could put children's privacy at risk
• 
  Several products used in Australia were found sharing children's data with advertisers

The findings come from the most comprehensive global study into the murky world of student data during COVID-19 lockdowns, and the privacy risks for both students and their families as education shifted from schools to homes.

The German government has rejected criticism by Polish President Andrzej Duda, who accused Berlin of failing to substitute tanks Warsaw had delivered to Ukraine. It might take Germany a long time to produce the heavy equipment Poland seeks to receive from Berlin, government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit told journalists on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Duda told the German news outlet Die Welt that Berlin had failed to replenish the Polish stocks in a timely fashion after Warsaw “weakened” its own military potential by sending “a large number” of tanks to Ukraine. Most Polish tanks are German-made ones and Warsaw expected Berlin to step in, the Polish leader added.

The war in Ukraine is a trompe l’oeil. Behind the appearances of the unity of NATO and its consolidation by new members, several big players run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. In reality, all those who are not blinded by their own propaganda know that their side is going to lose and is already planning other enemies on other battlefields. Washington is making the best of a bad situation and using Russian pressure to close ranks.

RISING TENSIONS (19)

A new war is being prepared for after the defeat in the face of Russia

by Thierry Meyssan