I do not blame Putin/Russia for the mess our country is in now. This is all on the American people……we have continued to put those like Biden, the Clintons, the Bushs, Pelosi, etc, for generations! These people have acquired fortunes while the American people have paid them to get rich and bring us closer to our demise.

Putin is also another person who has spent his life in power and has amassed a fortune, a very large fortune and yet he made the statement below….Has he really improved the lives of all the citizens of Russia? Is he not obsessed with his own self interest and super profits?

“These elites are not thinking about how to improve the lives of their citizens in Western countries. They are obsessed with their own self-interest and super profits.”

I don’t comment on most of the discussions on the Russian invasion of Ukraine because it is beyond my knowledge, however, I don’t see this as black and white as some of the members in these discussions. My sentiments are with the innocent victims of this mess!

And how many times have you sat down with Putin and had a personal chat? 😂

If she had a pro-Putin stance would you be declaring her to have an amazing resume? LOL!

IOW……branding her a neo-con is the best you could come up with!

Yep!

I’ll let you make a guess at my answer! 😉

Oh!.……is it possible? 😂😂😂😂

My children are in their 50’s…………😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Our border……..not secure!

But that doesn’t change any of the facts about your chosen country or it’s diabolical dictator and the CCP!

A round of applause!

Those doesn’t make Saudi are greatest ally! As you so often say……..Sigh! 🤗

https://www.khouse.org/articles/2014/1199/

This article was written in 2014 by Bill Salus. I think that it’s a possibility that it is referring to what may happen not too distant in the future of an Israeli attack of the nuclear facilities in Iran. I believe that, if it happens, we will see prophecy explode!

I see Ezekiel 38-39 also happening further down the road when the US has abandoned Israel. As to why that happens….who knows? Perhaps we are incapable at that point due to a catastrophic event of some kind or we have a President like the one we have now!

At this point, for me, I just take prophecy one day at a time. I have changed my mind so many times! We know the ending…..just not everything that happens before!

There’s a little more to it, right CD! 😉 The bottom line is…….. it is coming from China!


https://www.npr.org/2020/11/17/916890880/we-are-shipping-to-the-u-s-china-s-fentanyl-sellers-find-new-routes-to-drug-user

He is a slight, bespectacled man. Colleagues at the industrial materials company where he works describe him as a humorous but diligent employee, known for driving his white Jeep around town in northwestern China's Ningxia region to meet potential clients.

Unbeknownst to them, he goes by Benjamin Chen online, where he has a whole other business: He is a popular seller of the chemicals used to make the potent synthetic opioid fentanyl. NPR has identified him but is not using his real name because of the illegal activity in which he's involved.

Chen is one of more than 100 vendors who market fentanyl or related chemicals out of facilities across China, and his story illustrates how networks are getting around international efforts to crack down on the supply chain of lethal synthetic opioids. In an interview with NPR, however, Chen categorically denied that he manufactures or sells any illegal substances.

For years, China has been a primary source of fentanyl trafficked into the United States. It is a powerful prescription drug for severe pain that's made and sold illegally. It led to more than 37,000 overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2019, part of a national opioid crisis that has worsened this year during the coronavirus pandemic, according to federal health authorities.

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Street Fentanyl Surges In Western U.S., Leading To Thousands Of Deaths
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Street Fentanyl Surges In Western U.S., Leading To Thousands Of Deaths
Under international pressure, China's government banned the production and sale of fentanyl and many of its variants in May 2019, resulting in a significant reduction in the country's illicit fentanyl trade.

But more than a year later, Chinese vendors have tapped into online networks to brazenly market fentanyl analogs and the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, and ship them directly to customers in the U.S. and Europe as well as to Mexican cartels, according to an NPR investigation and research from the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, or C4ADS, a nonprofit data analysis group. (The center receives some of its funds from the U.S. and U.K. governments.)

Some of the substances are outlawed in China and internationally. Others are so new they are not yet banned, are harder to detect and regulate, and they can be used in basic chemical processes to produce illegal drugs.

Chinese vendors are often camouflaged by a complex network of corporate entities registered in far-flung cities along China's interior, where they use sophisticated shipping methods to bypass screening measures and where law enforcement scrutiny is often laxer than in bigger cities such as Beijing or Shanghai. Thousands of doses can be shipped together in small, hidden packages.

"Many Chinese networks involved in the production and advertising of fentanyl quickly adapted to increased legal constraints by modifying their techniques to exploit loopholes in chemical restrictions and disguise their activities," said Michael Lohmuller, a C4ADS analyst and report co-author.

Hard to ban

When China began banning fentanyl-related compounds, it was hailed as a major victory for U.S. narcotics authorities and diplomats, who had lobbied China for years to strictly regulate the substances more broadly as a class. Previously, Chinese narcotics authorities criminalized only specific fentanyl offshoots.

Months after China's class ban last year, as tensions escalated between the Trump administration and the government under China's leader Xi Jinping, Chinese-made fentanyl compounds once again became a divisive topic.

"President Xi said this would stop — it didn't," President Trump tweeted in August 2019.

China's government refutes this, saying its ban and crackdown on Internet advertising, sales and shipments have been effective.

"Currently, there is basically no information related to the illegal sales of fentanyl-class chemicals on websites within Chinese borders or pharmaceutical and chemical platforms," China's National Narcotics Control Commission said in a statement to NPR. "But due to the openness, anonymity, convenience, cross-border nature of the Internet, any country would have a difficult time completely eradicating illegal information."

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration notes that the detected amount of Chinese fentanyl shipments has dropped dramatically since the ban.

"It was all coming through the mail, aircraft, not in large quantities because it was so pure the fentanyl that they were making over in China ... but once they classified entire analogs of fentanyl, it made a huge difference," said Matt Donahue, the DEA deputy chief of operations who oversees the agency's work abroad.

Vendors create new distribution strategy

Despite the drop in fentanyl shipments from China, nimble Chinese vendors have developed new distribution strategies by producing and selling the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl.

Benjamin Chen is among the many vendors in the country who adopted these new strategies. He and his colleagues built up a robust online synthetic drug operation over the last decade at Shanghai Huilitongda Biological Technology Co. Ltd., which is registered as a pharmaceutical company, according to Chinese corporate records.

On Facebook, where he did much of his advertising, Chen had a reputation as a fast and reliable vendor, according to social media reviews left by nearly a dozen customers. "Benjamin Chen is the real deal," someone identified as a customer wrote in a Facebook post in December 2018. "If he can't do it, nobody can."

Potential clients could inspect grainy snapshots of nondescript powders and pills on Facebook. Occasionally, Chen replied directly to loyal customers, even paying for a Lyft ride to the hospital as compensation when one customer complained he had overdosed on Chen's product.

Sometimes operating under the pseudonym "King Sun" or "Sun King," he also advertised his chemical wares openly on LinkedIn, Twitter and Vimeo before and after the class ban last year.

Chen adapted to the ban by selling fentanyl precursors, or what he called "hot products for research chemicals" — compounds that are only a few chemical steps away from a fentanyl analog and that are not always criminalized. Other substances on sale included a sometimes deadly synthetic opioid also known as "pink," and synthetic cannabinoids. ( This is just part of this lengthy article )

I respect your opinion…….as I always do!

Like you always do!☺️ Where is your source for this one?

“No... He's had a good relationship with numerous German leaders...He speaks fluent German and admires much of their culture..”

And then there is the thread of Parky’s about Iran………statements with no source to back them up, even though I asked and you ignored!

I will stand on my statement as stated! LOL!

Still waiting for your source to prove that Saudi Arabia is our biggest ally! 😉

How disappointing……..just another one of your SA comments with no substance!

Pay close attention to this one paragraph…….

“The result is that today no country embodies threat to Israelis as does the Islamic Republic. Iran’s nuclear program appears to most Israelis to be an existential threat. The nuclear question and Iran’s extensive proxy operations in the Arab world have shaped Israel’s foreign policy in recent years and driven much of its actions on the global stage. Iran has become a near-singular focus of Israeli leaders and planners, identifying Iran’s hand in nearly every direction, and often with cause.”


https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/01/24/irans-revolution-40-years-on-israels-reverse-periphery-doctrine/

Iranian-Israeli hostility is actually quite odd. Tehran is well over a thousand miles from Jerusalem. The two countries do not border each other. They have no major bilateral claims toward one another. Whereas large Arab neighbors of Iran, like Iraq or Saudi Arabia, might be considered its natural competitors, Israel cannot. Even fans of the “ancient hatreds” school of Middle East conflict would come up short.

Natan Sachs

Director - Center for Middle East Policy Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Middle East Policy

What historical memory there is of Persian-Judaic interactions is largely positive in Jewish eyes: Streets in Israel are named for Cyrus the Great, who allowed the Jews to return to Judea from their Babilonian exile in 538 BCE. Conversely, Judea never rose to compete with Persia for regional prominence, as did Greek or later Arab forces.

All else being equal, then, we might have expected cool, uncomfortable relations—or more likely non-relations—between Israel and a large Muslim-majority country, not the foreign policy-defining struggle of present. Indeed, as is often noted, this hostility between the two modern states was not always there. It can be traced directly to one period, 40 years ago: the Iranian revolution and the birth of the Islamic Republic.

FRIENDS BECOME FOES

From its inception in 1948, Israel dealt with an acute security challenge: It faced a massive, largely hostile region unified by a common religion and a common antipathy toward Israel. All four of its immediate neighbor states were Arab, as were the Palestinian Arabs, and they were backed by dozens of Arab and Muslim-majority states beyond them. Israel’s natural posture was therefore to try and find fissures among its potential foes. Early in the state’s existence, this took the form of the “periphery doctrine“: first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s attempt to forge an alliance with non-Arab (yet mostly Muslim) countries in the Middle East as a counter-balance to the Arab states. Chief among these non-Arab partners were Turkey and pre-revolution Iran, countries who had (then) a common orientation toward the West and their own reasons to feel isolated in the Middle East.

Israeli-Iranian cooperation included official relations—Israel had two successive ambassadors to Tehran—and robust trade in oil, a prime concern for Israel, then under a crippling Arab boycott. The basic logic was simple: My enemy’s enemy can be my friend, and Iran and Israel shared common Arab foes.

The revolution upended these relations dramatically. Not only were ties cut off, but Israel was relegated by Ayatollah Khomeini to the status of “Little Satan” (the “Great Satan” being the United States). For the new Iranian regime, Israel became a central focus of ideological, religion-infused vitriol. The Islamic Republic became a central backer of any (mostly Arab) “resistance” to Israel. Iran seemingly became more Palestinian than the Palestinians. It opposed all peace negotiations between Arabs and Israelis, including the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Oslo Accords of 1993.

A street in Tehran was named for the assassin of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who first signed peace with Israel (the street was renamed “intifada” street in 2004 in an effort to improve relations with Egypt). Iran fostered the creation of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Israel’s most menacing guerilla adversary of recent years. It backed Sunni Islamist Palestinian groups, in particular the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and, at times, Hamas. In its fight against Israel, a seemingly endless tit-for-tat, even non-Israeli Jews were not safe. Most notably, Argentinean prosecutors, and several intelligence agencies, have accused Iran of direct involvement in the murder of 85 people in a suicide bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994.

THE THREAT INTENSIFIES

Israel’s approach to the Islamic Republic has been uneven. Despite the Iranian rhetoric, Israel did not see it, at first, as the implacable enemy of today. For much of the first decade of the Islamic Republic, it was engaged in a brutal war with another of Israel’s sworn enemies, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. (“I wish both sides success” was the rather gruesome way Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin put it.) Israel was a key player in the Iran-Contra affair, and the possibility that some in the Iranian regime might change their attitude toward Israel remained an option. By the 1990s, however, as Hezbollah grew in strength and the first signs of an Iranian nuclear program started emerging, Israelis became increasingly more concerned and increasingly active in their diplomatic efforts and covert operations against Iran.

Iran's revolution, 40 years onIdeological considerations, anger over Israel’s ties to the Shah, sympathy toward the Palestinians, and a generalized and foundational antipathy toward the West were all important elements of the about-face, but there were obvious structural advantages to this position as well. Israel is a useful enemy for the Islamic Republic. It is not merely a diversion from domestic woes, as it has been to many Middle Eastern regimes, but it is also part of an Iranian attempt to play in Middle Eastern affairs. For a large, Muslim-majority, non-Arab state committed in exporting its revolution to Arab countries, it is essential that the main fault lines in regional affairs not be national—Arab-Persian—but rather religious: Muslim-non-Muslim. For the major Shiite power, the minority Muslim strand, it is again important to draw the line not among and between streams of Islam, as many Sunnis do, but between Muslims and others, and there is no better “other” in the Middle East than Israel.

By carrying the mantle of unwavering resistance to Israel (and the United States) Iran can, in theory, appeal to solidarity with most Arabs. Moreover, engaging in the Palestinian cause allows Iran to expose hypocrisy and duplicity in the Arab states’ positions, whenever their commitment to the cause is tempered by pragmatic impulses.

The result is that today no country embodies threat to Israelis as does the Islamic Republic. Iran’s nuclear program appears to most Israelis to be an existential threat. The nuclear question and Iran’s extensive proxy operations in the Arab world have shaped Israel’s foreign policy in recent years and driven much of its actions on the global stage. Iran has become a near-singular focus of Israeli leaders and planners, identifying Iran’s hand in nearly every direction, and often with cause.

Is Iran a useful enemy to Israeli leaders as Israel is to Iranian ones? Like all politicians, Israeli leaders do appeal at times to foreign threats to divert attention from domestic affairs, and Iran has easily filled that need. Yet when it comes to Iran, unlike Palestinian affairs, the spectrum of opinions in Israel is quite narrow—there are very few Israelis, from across the political map, who do not see the Islamic Republic’s activity as a grave threat, whether they adopt the existential-threat rhetoric or not. There are very few Iran-doves in Israel, even if Israelis debate the means for confronting the threat.

NEW ALLIANCES, ENTRENCHED HOSTILITIES

As a result of the major shift in Israeli-Iranian relations, Israel today has a reverse periphery doctrine. It has strived and has had remarkable success in forging an alignment of sorts with major Arab countries—not only Egypt and Jordan, who have official peace with Israel, but even cooperation with the Gulf: Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E, Oman. These relations are far less developed or overt than the relations Israel had with the Shah’s Iran. They are limited in scope and entail no embassies. Yet the logic is the same as it was in the 1950s, but in reverse: My enemy’s enemy can be my friend and these Arab states and Israel share a common overriding foe—Iran. (They also share a common, though far less severe, hostility toward Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, Israel’s other main “peripheral” partner of old.)

The reverse periphery doctrine has been a boon to Israel in important ways. It now finds itself in one camp with major Arab players, limiting the short-term damage of the continued Israeli-Palestinian conflict (though not alleviating, and perhaps worsening, its long-term consequences) and allowing Israel to engage with world powers from a position of regional strength.

First of all, I don’t think someone is butting in when they respond to any comment! I consider any discussion open to all.

I didn’t comment on any specific statement. In order for me to answer your question I would have to research it. I have been very careful making any definitive statement on this invasion of Ukraine. I see and read every day both sides from members that I respect and some that I don’t. Both sides are convinced that their facts are factual and that their opinion of this invasion being necessary to protect Russia or was is to gain more territory for Russia! Tell me how either side can be sure of the validity of the many stories at this point? Both sides have been caught lying! I’ve read some excellent discussions from both sides. I admit that I knew very little about Ukraine when this all began, I know a bit more now! 👍

This is my opinion. The killing of the innocent Ukrainians is not necessary! The dispute between Putin and Zelinski needs to be negotiated and settled before this escalates to the point of no return. I am adamantly against sending our troops in! I know that you, CD, and dtucker are very sincere in your opinion of this matter and I will continue to follow these discussions!