jeff wineguy 🇺🇸 🦅 🍁

restaurantuer sommelier husband & father of four. Canadian🇨🇦. I support all colours of humanity, a woman’s body is hers to control. Trumpf is dog 💩.

[jeff wineguy 🇺🇸 🦅 🍁 @jefflenz7]

Sending an open invitation to all of our humans being persecuted because of colour: CANADA would love to have you 🤗!! #abovegroundrailroad

[jeff wineguy 🇺🇸 🦅 🍁 @jefflenz7]

@BenBouguerra_ As a listener since the early ‘90’s I just dumbfounded! No warning just dead air. What a disgrace to honest journalism. Sorry to see this happen to you Ben.

[jeff wineguy 🇺🇸 🦅 🍁 @jefflenz7]

John Farnham | You're The Voice | Whispering Jack (With end credits) https://t.co/lIfDTnfStn via @YouTube
@BaddCompani Dude… this is the song.

[Scott Robertson @sarobertson_]

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew: "Maybe we should say that they need to release the Epstein files and then we'll remove the booze ban. Donald Trump obviously does not like talking about the Epstein files because he's mentioned in there so often. So maybe we should put that on the table."

[Meanwhile in Ukraine @MeanwhileInUA]

Ukraine gave up the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal for a promise. That promise wasn't broken. It was discarded.
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That's Prince Harry, speaking at the Kyiv Security Forum — and he didn't stop there.
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His read: this war is not a misunderstanding or fog of conflict. It is deliberate policy, planned and executed at the highest level of Russian leadership. It started with the Budapest Memorandum violation. And when guarantees of that scale are trashed, the damage doesn't stop at Ukraine's borders — it undermines every international agreement, every nonproliferation effort, every promise made between nations.
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Democracy, he said, is not inevitable. Not self-sustaining. Not safe from challenge. It has to be defended — actively, consistently, collectively.
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[Stephano🍁Barberis @HelloStephano]

This.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

Prince Harry:

I'm not here [in Kyiv] as a politician. I'm here as a soldier who understands service. As a humanitarian who has seen the human cost of conflict. And as a friend of Ukraine who believes the world must not grow used to this war or numb to its consequences.

Because what is happening here is not simply a war about territory. It is a war about values. About sovereignty. About whether the principles that underpin our shared democracy shall hold meaning.

[Marc Lévesque @MarcLevesqueEco]

Here's the RBC study on foreign investment that PP et al keep quoting.
https://t.co/O22hkM74Jq
Here's the first point:
"Canada is back on the radar of global investors. Last year, foreign direct investment in Canada reached nearly $100 billion, the highest level since 2015." 1/

[jeff wineguy 🇺🇸 🦅 🍁 @jefflenz7]

Royal with cheese burger 🍔

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

Well, admit it:

if you wrote a book or a screenplay for a TV series or a film in which the U.S. Secretary of Defense, with full seriousness, pomp, and performative pseudo-masculinity, publicly recites a “prayer,” not realizing that it’s actually a made-up parody of biblical verses from a famous Quentin Tarantino crime movie — you would, with a 99.99% probability, be told that you have an unhealthy imagination, that you’re a shitty writer, and that you shouldn’t be doing this at all, because only a complete idiot could imagine something like that happening in real life.

[jeff wineguy 🇺🇸 🦅 🍁 @jefflenz7]

Damn right, well said

[Dimitris Soudas 🇨🇦⚜️🇬🇷☦️ 13.12.1943 @DimitrisSoudas]

I’m a Conservative… but I’m begging us to get serious. I’m begging on my knees for someone else to write his speeches.

We can disagree with Mark Carney all day long on policy. Fair game.

Necessary, even.

But saying the guy has an “illusion of knowledge” is like saying Connor McDavid has an illusion of being able to skate.

We don’t win by pretending competence is fake.

We win by proving we can do better.

[jeff wineguy 🇺🇸 🦅 🍁 @jefflenz7]

Poignant

[ForMYCanada @ForMYCanada]

I genuinely can’t picture Poilievre leading the country on the world stage: building relationships with Nordic nations, the EU, ASEAN, Africa, or Australia.

Can you honestly imagine him sitting across from President Stubb? Chairing a G7 summit? Leading high-stakes CUSMA negotiations?

Instead, we’re handing out what feel like participation trophies because he shows up on podcasts and doesn’t trip over his words.

This is what a Prime Minister-in-waiting looks like? This is competence? Really?

#cdnpoli #Canada #G7 #CUSMA #LeadershipMatters #ForeignPolicy #Diplomacy #Poilievre

[ForMYCanada @ForMYCanada]

🇨🇦 Someone needs to write the field guide to Canadian Conservative disinformation.

Not a rant. A documented playbook.

Chapter 1: The Think Tank Pipeline. How Fraser Institute and MLI produce "research" that becomes Poilievre talking points within 48 hours, without a single journalist tracing the line.

Chapter 2: The Expert Laundering Machine. How a Loblaws-funded professor becomes the go-to "food inflation expert" on your feed, with no disclosure and no pushback.

Chapter 3: The Influencer Layer. Mario Zelaya. https://t.co/5qPZkaAaFc. Sites that look like accountability journalism and function as opposition research ops.

Chapter 4: The Recycled Lie. The same claim, debunked, buried, resurrected, cycling through the ecosystem until it becomes "what everyone knows."

Chapter 5: The Disinformation Courtroom. Small claims filings. RCMP allegations. Allegations PM Carney is planning to resurrect the Emergencies Act.

Legal-sounding documents designed not to win cases but to generate headlines.

This isn't chaos. It's infrastructure.

Built piece by piece. Funded deliberately. Optimized over years.

Canada thinks it's immune. That's exactly what makes it work.
#cdnpoli #Poilievre #ConservativeDisinformation #CdnMedia #CanadianPolitics

[jeff wineguy 🇺🇸 🦅 🍁 @jefflenz7]

I fivking love this

[Euromaidan Press @EuromaidanPress]

"For the first time in history, Ukraine is armed well enough to defend against Russia's strikes," Zelenskyy said.

Drones replaced artillery as the decisive battlefield factor. Next goal: domestic anti-ballistic air defense — Ukraine aims to lead Europe
https://t.co/fVKcKKqAvW

[jeff wineguy 🇺🇸 🦅 🍁 @jefflenz7]

@Garnet_2203 Damn well said

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

Sometimes, living in Kharkiv feels surreal. We focus on tasks and work, pretending everything is okay.

We plant flowers, ignoring the ruins that Russian missiles left behind.

​We face attacks almost daily without the ability to hide. Russian drones are nearly always in the skies above us. We turn up the volume in our cars and headphones just so we don't hear them. There is nothing else to do.

​Our children watch cartoons in the middle of the night in corridors to hide from the bombings. They watch them loudly so they won't be terrified if they hear the explosions. It doesn't work most of the time.

​We replace broken glass windows with cardboard.

​We are called "unbreakable," but we all feel broken.

​Only it doesn't matter at all, because our choices are few: keep resisting or die.

​And so we plant flowers while ignoring the ruins, replace shattered windows with cardboard, turn up the volume, and keep moving forward. Only forward.

(Photo found online)

[jeff wineguy 🇺🇸 🦅 🍁 @jefflenz7]

@gop @DNC

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

USA – Just Another Country Every Ally Gone. Every Bridge Burned.

For decades, the alliance had a problem member. Everyone knew it. The country that invaded Iraq on a lie, tanked the global economy in 2008, and elected its own demolition crew in 2016 and again in 2025. The others adjusted. Covered for it. Kept showing up. You don't abandon a friend just because he occasionally drives into a ditch. You wait until he drives into yours.

Then Trump made it simple. The friend who had always been difficult had finally done something unforgivable. The room went quiet. And then everyone moved on.

America was never strong alone. It was strong because it sat at the center of the most sophisticated network of power ever assembled. British diplomats carrying influence into Canberra and Wellington. French connections opening doors across Africa and the Middle East. Norwegian and Greek shipping moving a third of the world's cargo. German engineering. Japanese capital. South Korean semiconductors. Canadian stability. Australian intelligence. Dutch and Belgian ports as the gateway to 750 million consumers. Danish and Italian naval presence across two seas.

Every one of them a multiplier, lifting Washington into rooms it could never have entered alone. It was not one football team. It was hundreds of teams, running the same plays, on every field, simultaneously. Trump dismantled it the way a bored child dismantles a Lego set. Not to build something else. Just to watch the pieces fall.

What is left is 340 million people staring across the Pacific at 1.4 billion. China did not need to do anything during the Iran war. It watched. It waited. It took notes. While Washington burned its relationships one by one, Beijing made calls, signed deals, and let the silence do the work. Silence, it turns out, is a remarkably effective foreign policy.

The allies are not mourning. They are discovering something they perhaps always suspected: that Washington was often the ceiling, not the floor. The ally that needed managing. The friend whose chaos you had to absorb before you could get anything done. Turns out the meeting goes faster when he's not in the room.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said it plainly: "The old relationship we had with the United States is over. It's clear the US is no longer a reliable partner." At Davos he told world leaders the scaffold of American power was being abandoned. "Friends," he said, "it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down."

Germany said the war had nothing to do with NATO. France blocked arms flights. Spain closed its airspace. Italy denied landing rights. Poland kept its missile batteries home. Kallas delivered the European verdict: "This is not Europe's war. No one wants to actively get involved." Which, translated from diplomat into English, means: absolutely not.

Starmer condemned "regime change from the skies." Sanchez accused Washington of playing "Russian roulette with the destiny of millions." Macron said: "When we want to be serious, we don't say each day the opposite of what we said the day before." Coming from a Frenchman, that is essentially a controlled demolition.

These are the countries that sent their sons to the Gulf in 1991. That stood in line at NATO headquarters on September 12, 2001. They know what the alliance was. They have decided, with remarkable calm, that they are better off without the version currently on offer.
This is what it looks like when an alliance leaves one of its own members behind.

Professor Robert Pape put the result plainly: "Iran is far stronger than it was 40 days ago. It is in control of 20 percent of the world's oil. It is now an emerging fourth center of power." Washington went to war to prevent exactly this outcome. It succeeded, just not in the way it intended.

One country launched a war alone, begged Pakistan to broker peace talks, and came home empty-handed.

French Senator Claude Malhuret said it on the floor of the French Senate, viewed millions of times across the world: "Washington has become Nero's court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a buffoon on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service." Americans flooded his inbox asking why it had to be a French politician to say what nobody in Washington would.

A year later he corrected himself. Nero's court was too dignified. "I was wrong. It is the Court of Miracles." A medieval Parisian slum where criminals and thieves pretended to be something they were not. He listed the cabinet: an anti-vaxxer and former heroin addict as Secretary of Health, a climate denier running environmental policy, an alcoholic television host handed the world's most powerful military, a Qatari lobbyist as Attorney General, a Putin admirer as National Security Advisor. Then he cited a Turkish proverb: "When a clown moves into a palace, he does not become king. The palace becomes a circus."

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump had Truth Social and a golf cart. He posted images of himself as Jesus on Easter Sunday, then deleted them before breakfast. Threatened to erase "a whole civilization," then teed off by Monday morning. At least Nero stayed in Rome.

A country so institutionally broken that it took a French senator to say out loud what every American already knew. Congress watched. The Republicans said nothing, because nothing pays better than silence. The Democrats couldn't find their spine. The entire apparatus of the world's oldest democracy stood on the sidelines while one man helped himself to powers the constitution told him he couldn't have.

Either everyone in that building has decided this is perfectly fine. Or they've concluded it's already too late.

Either way, the word for that is not democracy.

The White House became the circus.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Katerina Horbunova @blue_eyedKeti]

The world around us was sleeping soundly and peacefully-right up until the moment reality knocked on the door. Ukraine, quite unwillingly, became a mirror. In it, world leaders and ordinary people saw everything: their own vulnerabilities and just how fragile a thing our "global security" truly is.

In May 2024, a post on the UNITED24 platform stated: "If Ukraine were a book, it would be an epic saga: with heroes, world-changing battles, and an incredible will for freedom. But we are not just a story; we are creating it right now. And if you are reading this, you are already a part of this plot."

My country has proven: you don't have to be a giant to fight back. We have shown that the world is full of those who care, and that silence only grants the enemy time and strength. But this book is not yet finished…

[jeff wineguy 🇺🇸 🦅 🍁 @jefflenz7]

Disgraceful

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

There is a particular kind of American politician who, upon achieving high office, feels compelled to announce publicly the things he is most proud of.

It is, when you think about it, a remarkable instinct – the urge to share, unprompted, the moments you consider your finest hours.

JD Vance has decided that one of his proudest achievements is cutting off military aid to Ukraine.

Not, you understand, brokering a ceasefire. Not negotiating anything at all, really. Simply stopping the flow of weapons to a country that has been defending itself, with considerable tenacity and very little outside help, against the largest land invasion in Europe since 1945.

That is the thing that makes him proud.
It is worth pausing on the word “proudest” for a moment, because it does a great deal of work in that sentence.

Previous generations of American leadership had, by most accounts, a somewhat different set of things to be proud of.

George Marshall, who served as Secretary of State after World War Two, oversaw the reconstruction of an entire continent.

He didn’t do it because Europe asked nicely. He did it because he understood, with the particular clarity that comes from having watched the alternative, that democracies left to collapse tend to produce outcomes nobody enjoys.

Dwight Eisenhower, who had seen rather more of war than most people ever will, spent the rest of his life trying to prevent the next one through alliances, commitments and the steady accumulation of trust between nations.

These were not perfect men. But they grasped something that appears to have been entirely lost in the current administration – that American credibility is not a renewable resource.

You spend it once. You don’t get it back.

Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and JD Vance have, between them, the collective historical memory of a particularly inattentive golden retriever.

They have confused loudness with strength, grievance with principle, and the act of abandoning allies with something they have inexplicably decided to call realism.

Vance flew to Budapest recently, had what was described as a warm meeting with Viktor Orbán, and returned apparently satisfied that something useful had occurred.

Vance flew to Budapest, embraced Orbán warmly, and flew home.
Three weeks later, Orbán lost the Hungarian election in the most decisive repudiation of his rule in twenty years.
The Midas touch, in reverse.

The men who planned the Normandy landings – who coordinated seventeen Allied nations, crossed the most heavily defended coastline in history, and did it in bad weather with inadequate maps – would have found the current American foreign policy apparatus quite difficult to explain to their grandchildren.

Proudest, he said.

There it is, I suppose.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[🪖MilitaryNewsUA🇺🇦 @front_ukrainian]

❗️🇺🇦Ukraine and 🇩🇪Germany Defense Ministers Meet in Berlin

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius welcomed Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov with full military honors. After the ceremony, which included the national anthems of both countries and an inspection of the honor guard, the ministers laid a wreath at the German Resistance Memorial to the Nazis. They then signed several official documents. Fedorov’s visit is part of German-Ukrainian government consultations.

It is worth recalling that Germany is Ukraine’s largest European donor, having provided approximately €55 billion in military assistance since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. For 2026, Berlin has allocated €11.5 billion for Kyiv in its budget.

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

When we were preparing this year’s Easter greeting, we learned that right nearby, also on the grounds of St. Sophia of Kyiv, children of Ukraine’s defenders from Kyiv and the Kyiv region had gathered at the same time – children whose parents, sadly, were killed in this war.

An excursion, an Easter egg-hunting quest, traditional spring and Easter songs, and workshops on making stained glass were organized for them by the Socially Responsible Business Platform “To the Children of Our Defenders,” which brings together entrepreneurs and the state to support children who have lost their parents because of the war.

The participants of the platform are always close to the families of defenders – organizing trips, rest, activities, and education, creating important moments of warmth and care.

So we joined this moment at St. Sophia and came to wish the children a Happy Easter. The smiles we were greeted with are priceless. We want and must do everything so that the children of those who gave the most precious thing for Ukraine’s security never lose their faith in the world.

We invite businesses, entrepreneurs, and all caring people across different regions to join the “To the Children of Our Defenders” Platform, support its initiatives, and launch their own efforts to help the children of defenders.

Not only on holidays – but every day, we are grateful to all who are fighting for Ukraine. And all our care is for their loved ones.

[The Figen @TheFigen_]

This was one of the funniest Olympic moments! 😂 😂
Greek rings champion Eleftherios Petrounias — who won gold— getting a hilarious boost from Brazil’s Arthur Zanetti during the closing gala.