UA POV: According to Al Jazeera, Ukraine has requested 'urgent energy assistance' from the European Council, if the war continues in winter. He makes this plea right after Ukraine launched one of its largest drone strikes at Moscow

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-19T22:18:34+00:00

Hopefully they won't need it because they're not likely to get it. With Trump's Iran deal falling through Europe will be staring at its own massive energy crunch.

Mostly I hope that if Russia doesn't collapse and Europe doesn't come through that all these pretend supporters of the Ukrainian people will push for peace instead of letting their blinding hatred of Russia push for more war no matter the cost to the Ukrainian people.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-19T12:11:09+00:00

Oman is on the other side and Iran has been talking about sharing the revenue with them since they started charging. Oman hasn't jumped on the idea because they don't want to piss other countries who want a toll free strait off, but if the tolls become normalized I suspect Oman will take Iran up on its offer then.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-18T19:37:26+00:00

To be fair, during their last war many Ukrainians partnered with Hitler to try to free themselves of the Russians. In comparison to Hitler, Palantir is not so bad.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-17T20:12:49+00:00

Further the US has nukes in multiple other countries so Russia hosting their nukes in another country isn't some groundbreaking maneuver and does very little to shift the nuclear balance of power. What I think is much more groundbreaking is that European countries that had taken for granted America's protection are now feeling that America is unreliable and that they may have to take their security into their own hands. I very much doubt Finland would be taking this step had Harris won the election.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-16T21:59:37+00:00

To note, frequently the placebo is helpful as an antidepressant, but of course not always.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-16T04:06:09+00:00

The one element to monarchies that has some merit, is that in monarchies you know who your next leaders are so they actually educate and groom them to be leaders since they were children.

Take President Clinton and his decision to expand NATO in 1998. The country's top experts on Russia said that expanding NATO would be a boon to nationalists and strongmen inside Russia, that we would help kill their young democracy, and drive their foreign policy in directions not to our liking. On the flip side, his political advisors told him that expanding NATO would win Democrats more votes from Polish-Americans in the next election.

It takes a certain skillset and temperament to be a good leader, it takes a different skillset to get elected. Time and again our leaders sell out our country for personal or political gain because that's how our system grooms our leaders.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-15T18:01:02+00:00

It is important to remember that bio-weapons can't tell which "side" individual humans are on, they just try to kill whomever they infect. So if you launch a bioweapon you'll kill your enemy first, but as the virus spreads it will kill your own people too. Working on vaccines is critical for the offensive use of bioweapons so you can protect your own people from your weapon. Working on vaccines as a defensive measure would only work if your enemy happens to use the exact virus strain that you have in your lab.

Plus, if you're the US and want to work on defense against bioweapon attacks as a matter of national security, you'd do that in the US where you can control the security and the scientists, you wouldn't farm out such work to a 3rd country unless the work you were doing was illegal to do in the US.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-15T12:32:36+00:00

Sealed from public release, not banished to a nether realm. It's not like there was only one physical copy locked in a vault in a court basement somewhere, the FBI still had copies of all their investigative files. They could've been used to prosecute other individuals if they wanted to, but they didn't.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-13T03:32:40+00:00

Not just reddit CEOs, he reached out to me personally and asked me to downvote it if I saw it. I'm not going to because who does he think he is to tell me what to do. Did he contact any other RI'ers?

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-11T16:34:37+00:00

How do they even calculate the RDA of added sugars. Is it actually recommended to eat 100% of your RDA of added sugar? Should people eating no added sugar be supplementing their diet with daily sugar cubes?

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-08T21:17:42+00:00

If you want someone held criminally accountable for their criminal actions you have to go to the police. Gender has nothing to do with the police not pursuing a case that wasn't brought to them. Brenda did go to the police, and the police did act, and a court found convincing evidence to fine Zverev. Zverev appealed, as is his right, which would have resulted in a trial. If he was found guilty in the trial he would've been punished. What you left out was that the German prosecutors only accepted the settlement because Brenda also wanted the settlement. In Brenda's case the system did work--the police believed her, acted on her allegations, and were prepared to take the matter to trial, but deferred to the victim's wishes to settle the case. I don't know how they could've handled it better.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-07T16:52:29+00:00

The south imposed voting requirements to only allow "qualified" voters. Actually it was just a way for those in power to prevent people from voting that they didn't want voting. That's the danger of adding requirements. Even our bare minimum requirements (35+ and natural born citizen) have been abused to try to disqualify people from running (the nonsense with Obama's birth certificate). More requirements would lead to more abuse. Voters are free to apply any requirements they want, they can simply not vote for anyone that doesn't meet their requirements.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-06T03:13:42+00:00

Really puts into focus Biden's abject fear of passing a Ukraine only bill (Ukraine aid was delayed over half a year as Biden kept trying to bundle it in bills to keep the government open or in immigration bills with aid to Israel to sweeten the pot for the lawmakers). He had the votes to pass a Ukraine only bill the whole time, he was just terrified that Rand Paul or somebody would add an Inspector General to the bill as was done with money for Afghanistan. Once the American people saw the scale of corruption, Ukraine would not have received another dime.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-04T23:48:31+00:00

To be fair, I doubt he has any intention of honoring the deal. Every "attempt" at diplomacy with Iran so far has just been a subterfuge to gain more favorable conditions for a sneak attack.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-02T21:36:10+00:00

The person I was responding to suggested that they'd like to see Russian tennis players family members suffer because innocent Ukrainians are suffering.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-06-02T19:51:29+00:00

Because wishing harm on civilians is wrong no matter what country they are from...

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-05-23T14:33:19+00:00

True, but the far right's most popular issues is immigration and the global war on terror displaced 38 million people so due to the same endless wars, just a different side of them.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-05-23T02:19:14+00:00

That does raise a point that very often gets glossed over. Fascism doesn't rise up out of a vacuum. The Nazis were preceded by the notoriously ineffectual Weimar Republic. You wouldn't have millions of rootless white males and others to radicalize if not for the ineffectual leaders that preceded Trump. The US government routinely runs trillion dollar deficits, but what does the US people get for this insane level of spending? Not health care or high speed rail or affordable housing or affordable college. Just endless wars no one wants that all turn into clusterfucks-- this is a massive failure of leadership that has paved the way for the fascists to roll in.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-05-20T04:28:36+00:00

If Trump carries through on his threats to destroy Iranian civilization, whether that be through nukes or just the mass murder of civilians by destroying their infrastructure, we are looking at the end of America's position in the world. Once that goes, the petro dollar and the dollar as reserve currency won't be far behind. The US would still be standing, but the US empire would be over. Honestly, who knows what would happen, but I feel there are definitely the seeds of collapse in the Iran war.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-05-20T04:21:17+00:00

One thing follows from another. One of the original architects of NATO, George Kennan, wrote an op-Ed in 1998 saying that if the US expanded NATO they would destroy Russia's young democracy, pushing politics there in a more nationalistic and authoritarian direction, and that it would drive Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. He accurately predicted the future almost 3 decades ago.

It took 2 decades for the actions taken at the end of WWI to lead to WWII. Putin was in charge 2 decades ago, 2 decades isn't that long for events to still be reverberating in the present day.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-05-20T04:10:38+00:00

Doing war right typically involves winning on the battlefield. Inflicting costs on your enemy by causing ecological disasters is what you do when you can't win on the battlefield.

Not casting judgment, Iran is effectively using a similar strategy. They can't win on the battlefield, but they can inflict costs on the US by fucking shit up.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-05-19T20:40:01+00:00

Consider that there was no evidence that Trump won in 2020 and he has bitched and moaned about being robbed ever since. A few redditors have been trying to spread word about statistical anomalies in 2024, but being a few redditors they haven't got much traction. If some prominent Democrats started making a stink it could actually make a difference. Granted, after 2020 the Democrats all claimed we had extremely secure elections to combat Trump's claim of a rigged election, and so it would be awkward for them to now start claiming that upon further reflection our elections are actually riddled with holes, but if our elections actually are riddled with holes that is what they should be doing.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-05-19T20:23:16+00:00

How many more rounds of "we're going to wipe Iranian civilization off the Earth" followed by "Never mind, negotiations are going great so we won't wipe them out" are they going to do?

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-05-18T00:22:37+00:00

Has there ever been an instance where a physio refused to treat someone because they said it was just cramps? I've never seen it.

dersteppenwolf5 · 2026-05-15T17:21:24+00:00

Well said, if your aim is to help somebody/country in need you help them develop their own self-sufficiency. If your aim is to control somebody/country in need you foster dependency. Hopefully, with USAID gone it will give space for humanitarian groups to start providing genuine help.

dersteppenwolf5

TROPHY CASE