John T. Reed’s news blog

Dmitry Medvedev, who kept the Russian President office chair warm for Putin for a couple years, is now threatening nuclear war over the financial sanctions. A. I thought their official line was that they are not bothered by sanctions. If that’s the case, why would you go to nuclear war over them. B. What is this nonsensical Russian presumptions that nuclear war hurts NATO, but not Russia. A true nuclear war would devastate the central business districts, ports, factories, military facilities, aircraft carriers in Russia and in the US and other NATO nations.  Russia reportedly has thousands of nuclear warheads. I do...

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...