John T. Reed’s news blog

I have been marveling at the silent for a century nations coming out of the woodwork to condemn Russia’s Ukraine invasion. Would you believe Monaco? Russian oligarchs like to hang around there. Monaco is honoring the sanctions against them. UK is voting on a law requiring the anonymous owners of UK properties be outed. That will raise hell not only in Russia but probably also in most of the rest of the world.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson seems obsessed with opposing any and every action taken by America and the world to discourage Russia from invading Ukraine and continuing that invasion. I do not know whether he would vote no if he were a UN General Assembly member. He surely would have abstained. He seems obsessed with Bill Kristol and his colleagues—editor of the died in 2017 Weekly Standard magazine. In Tucker’s demonology, Kristol et al. are “neocons” who have a need to get us involved in every possible overseas war and prolog that war forever. Setting aside whether that is true, Tucker surely...

Watters who has a new daily show at 4PM EST does not have the journalist’s fact checking habit. He strings together handfuls of “facts” each of which is overstated. If he does that regarding a living human, he could lose a libel suit notwithstanding his Times v. Sullivan actual malice protection. He is violating the “recklessly disregarding whether the statement presented as fact was true” standard. For example, he is talking about war crimes. Get too loose with that and you may get sued by billionaire Roman Abramovich or some such—and lose the suit. What Russia is doing in Ukraine,...

Crypto currencies are seeing increased activity in Ukraine and in Russia where converting rubles to foreign currencies is now illegal. Some cryptoexchanges are refusing to do business with Russians. The US government is considering using whatever authority they have to get cryptoexhanges to stop doing business with Russia. I guarantee Russia will ban or try to ban using cryptocurrency to convert rubles to crypto. If they did not, almost every ruble on earth would be converted to crypto. As I recently said, the problem with crypto currency is not crypto; it is the word currency. Nations want a monopoly on...

UN general Assembly voteThe UN General Assembly, as opposed to the Security Council, held a vote on a resolution to condemn the Russian invasion into Ukraine. The General Assembly voted 141 in favor and 5 opposed, with 35 nations abstaining on the draft resolution “Aggression against Ukraine” which has been co-sponsored by 94 countries. Noteworthy yes: Afghanistan who was invaded by USSR 1979-89.  We should temporarily recall our ambassadors from the nations who voted against or abstained from the vote. Enough of this crap. The five opposed are: • Russia (we should permanently withdraw the ambassador there and close the embassy)...