A Knife in Search of a Gunfight.

Uncle Volodya says, “When a war breaks out, people say: “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.”

Sittin’ around the house,
watchin’ the sun trace shadows on the floor;
Searching for signs of life, but there’s nobody home…

Better Than Ezra, from “Good”

“There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.”

Frank Zappa

I imagine most of you have heard the expression, “Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight”. The meaning is pretty self-evident, but the Free Dictionary helpfully frames its intent: “To come poorly prepared or equipped for some task, goal, competition, or confrontation. Often used in the negative as a forewarning or piece of advice.“

You are far more likely to come ill-prepared for some task, goal, competition or confrontation if you are stupid. In recent years many of us have become accustomed to stupidity in our elected and appointed officials, but watching Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly’s performance of her duties is like being chained to the village idiot. To put the situation in the context of the expression above, sending her abroad to represent even the flailing country this one has become is like taking six inches of dental floss to a gunfight. Perhaps while wearing a T-shirt with a bullseye printed on it. It’s asking to be sent home with a red face and ruler-tracks on your bum.

Melanie Joly is the Canadian Sarah Palin; she was a cartwheeling disaster as Heritage Minster. Heritage Minister!! The department’s mandate centers on “fostering and promoting “Canadian identity and values, cultural development, and heritage”. Sounds like a job the average drugstore manager could perform with distinction, especially if he or she had a whole department of more than 1,800 employees to help and advise him or her. But tasked with management of the festivities and ceremony attendant upon the 150th anniversary of Canada Day, Melanie Joly rolled out a train wreck that earned comments like “I have never seen such a poor, chaotic display. Shame on you Ottawa.” And: “Please, (Minister Joly), I beg you to step out of your protective shell and acknowledge what a mess Canada Day was and take some responsibility for it.” And: “Time for you to resign!” The local news of the village she is idiot of – Le Journal de Montreal – said “she sounds like a living answering machine having a nervous breakdown”. No need to wonder any further where the inspiration came from for the Sarah Palin reference. “Joly’s penchant for bafflegab made her a frequent target of cartoonists and humorists in the province — hardly what Trudeau was hoping for when he made Joly his highest-profile Quebec minister.”

Sacked from the stress-magnet job of Heritage Minister, Joly was shuffled downward – not resoundingly kicked from the top step of Parliament, remember, she’s a personal friend of our talking wig-stand Prime Minister – to bring her administrative talents to bear on the minor portfolios of tourism, official languages and la Francophonie.

And then, just when things looked darkest…she vaulted straight to Minister of Foreign Affairs, promoted by her good friend Justin Trudeau in what critics claimed was a reward for her loyalty in the 2021 election which saw the Liberals re-elected, as well as toads raining from the sky and a lightning bolt straight from the finger of Jeebus. And things went rapidly downhill from there.

“My guess is that during that very challenging campaign, she cemented her status as a trustworthy lieutenant,” Mr. Reid said. “When you fall behind during a campaign and then mount a comeback, you see up close who can be counted on. I suspect he saw that in her and decided he wanted that in Foreign Affairs.”

What struck me on reading the reference, though, was a comment she made in describing her vision for the Foreign Affairs responsibility. She was speaking about possible disciplinary action which might be taken against China, but she claimed, “I can tell you, however, that we have no illusions. Our eyes will be wide open.”

And then the Canadian Minister for Foreign Affairs, with her eyes wide open, concurred with the United States that the Russians likely blew up their own gas pipeline, all part of Putin’s weaponization of energy.

Asked by CNN anchor Jim Sciutto during a conversation in Washington, hosted by the Atlantic Council, who was behind the damage, Joly did not mention Russia by name but pointed to allies’ assessments that the attacks were deliberate. “At this point we’re still investigating, but obviously we want to make sure that we do things the right way, but we’re not naïve,” she said. “You’re not naïve as to who’s behind it?” Sciutto responded.“As I said, we won’t speculate but at the same time, we want to make sure that — the world needs to understand that this is very important European infrastructure that was sabotaged,” the minister added.

She added no gas was flowing through either pipeline at the time the leaks occurred.

Really? No gas flowing through either pipeline…at the time of the leak? Then how could there be a leak? Leak of what? The very next paragraph confides,

“On Thursday, Swedish officials discovered a fourth leak along the Nord Stream gas pipelines, vital energy links for Europe that have been spewing methane into the Baltic Sea since Monday following two underwater explosions.” Spewing methane. Natural gas is almost completely methane.

And NATO muttonheads were quite happy to pontificate and puff over these ‘deliberate, reckless and irresponsible acts of sabotage’ while they believed the perpetrator would never be identified.

But then, Seymour Hersh – one of the most credible journalists alive – broke a story on how American Navy divers had planted the explosives under cover of a NATO exercise, assisted by Norway, which explosives were later detonated remotely, destroying the pipeline. America had threatened it, had tried to stop its construction through sanctions and international bullying, had shopped proposals to Europe that Europeans buy American ‘molecules of freedom’ instead, and had flatly promised to stop it ever going into operation. Means, motive and opportunity. And yet, when America announced that Russia must have done it itself, Melanie Joly agreed. After all, we’re not naive.

To this moment there has not been any statement of which I am aware in which Melanie Joly recants or expresses doubt in her conviction that Russia blew up its own pipelines.

The Smile on the Face of the Dragon.

Uncle Volodya says, “Whole nations are transported, exterminated, their name to be forgotten, except in the annual festival of their conquerors, when sycophants call the names of the vanquished countries to the remembrance of the victors.”

There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.

Attributed to William Monkhouse

The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.”

Genghis Khan

 The thrill of controlling a large, powerful and potentially dangerous animal is undeniable; to make it your servant and compel it to do your bidding is satisfying balm to the ego. How much more satisfying again it must be to control an entire country, and to bend the collective work and product of its people to your power and enrichment. America has long manipulated great-power politics to its own benefit, and the pleasure of doing so seems to be enhanced when the victim is helpless to resist. At least that’s the way it is consistently portrayed in the government-managed western media, for the enjoyment of the cheering assholes in the international bleachers.

Well, as another parable has it, riding the tiger is the easy part. The hard part is getting off. This is helpfully explained as “Once you have taken this path, there is no way back.”

The west – led, as usual, by The Exceptional Nation – climbed aboard the tiger in 2014, when it decided to initiate and support a coup in Ukraine and turn it into a heavily-armed foil to Russia. Admittedly the second part came later, but perhaps as early as 2015, when the Minsk II Agreements – with the ulterior motive for the west being the arming and strengthening of Ukraine until its army was powerful enough to not only take back the Donbas republics and Crimea by force, but powerful enough to drive Russia back over its borders if it dared to intervene – were signed. As I just suggested, the west took no serious note of the agreement’s provisions beyond opportunities to nag Russia that it was not holding to its responsibilities (although Russia is not mentioned in the accords at all), because the intent was to use the agreement to stall for time while Ukraine’s striking power was built up. Consequently when the time came to set The Great Game in motion once more, Russia massed troops on the border with Ukraine as a visible deterrent – we see what you’re doing, and if you try it, you’ll be sorry. It failed to deter President Zelensky, who ordered an artillery bombardment of the border regions of the Donbas Republics to soften up resistance prior to an armored and infantry attack…and now quite a few people are sorry. Just before the Russian military operation began, the state published a list of demands for the well-known supporters of chaos. The requirements were:

1. An end to NATO military activity in eastern Europe, including Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia;
2. No expansion of NATO membership, particularly to Ukraine;
3. No intermediate or shorter-range missiles deployed close enough to hit the territory of the other side;
4. No military exercises of more than one military brigade in an agreed border zone;
5. An agreement that parties do not consider each other as adversaries and will resolve disputes peacefully; and,
6. Neither Russia nor the United States can deploy nuclear weapons outside their national territories.

The referenced article was published well in advance of any formal reply from NATO, but Deutsche Welle was already confident the west would blow Russia off contemptuously. Why? Because riding the tiger is fun.

“Russia has released a series of security demands to NATO, including a veto on the alliance’s expansion. It is calling for an immediate dialogue, but NATO members aren’t likely to acquiesce to Moscow’s wish list.”

And the west did reject Russia’s demands, stingingly and entirely, because its combined coalition groupthink informed it that Russia would not bother with a warning unless it was weak, and knew it. Strong countries do not offer an opportunity to reconsider your options. They kick ass. And as many of us learned only recently, courtesy of Moon of Alabama, the pretense that nobody could have known what might happen will not be available this time. Because the influential RAND Corporation think tank warned the US government of potential consequences of each of its actions as far back as the Spring of 2019, all of which it took anyway. No longer content to simply ride the tiger, America began to hammer its ribs with its heels, and of course its simpleminded vassals loudly chorused approval.

It Will Be Easier to Blow Sunshine Up Your Ass When You Can’t Afford Pants.

Uncle Volodya says, “If talking to yourself when alone is a sign of madness, then listening to yourself in front of others is doubly so.”

“…But the fact remains, nevertheless, that you can’t help if they persist in the course of behaviour which originally got them into their trouble. For example, you can’t preserve people from the horrors of war if they won’t give up the pleasures of nationalism. You can’t save them from slumps and depressions so long as they go on thinking exclusively in terms of money and regarding money as the supreme good. You can’t avert revolution and enslavement if they will identify progress with the increase of centralization and prosperity with the intensifying of mass production. You can’t preserve them from their collective madness and suicide if they persist in paying divine honours to ideals which are merely projections of their own personalities – in other words, if they insist on worshiping themselves…”

Aldous Huxley, from “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan”

She likes to play for double or nothin’
tellin’ all the boys she’s hot;
And everybody knows she’s ready
To give it everything that she got:

She’s a roller, a high roller, baby, my, my..

April Wine, from “Roller”.

Yes, she’s a roller; my, my. The problem is, she’s rolling with your money – and if you live in Europe, the standard of living that you and your children can expect down the road depends on her telling you the truth. And I’m afraid the odds are just not on that possibility. Judging by performance to date, like.

In fact, although I’m not a psychologist and don’t even play one on TV, the conclusion I have reluctantly arrived upon is that Ursula Von Der Leyen believes you and all the other European voters are stupid. Oh, the extent of the global lumpenproletariat assumed to be too stupid to reason for itself goes considerably beyond Europe, and it’s causing problems which extend well beyond its shores. But it is Europe which is Ground Zero for her unwavering line of self-stroking bullshit, and it is Europe which will bear its effects, perhaps and conceivably to its ruin.

Did you think that if you could somehow struggle through this winter, the energy crisis would recede and the nightmare would be over? Au contraire, mon ami. But you could be forgiven your optimism, because Von Der Leyen – let’s just call her VDL, as her co-workers are said to do, for simplicity – wants you to think so, although the most elementary reading-between-the-lines analysis should give you that ice-water-down-your-back tickle of unease. Because the title of the article is fairly clear; the energy crisis could worsen next year. But never mind that for now – take a bow, says VDL; you guys were all brilliant with your self-sacrifice, wearing a sweater while you’re doing the supper dishes in cold water, skipping the shower…magnificent. You certainly showed that psychopath up in the Kremlin.

“We have been able to manage, we have been able to withstand the blackmail. We have acted, and we have acted successfully,” von der Leyen said at a press conference in Brussels. She touted Europe’s success in carrying out its plan to reduce Russian gas demand by two-thirds before the end of the year…

Considering NATO operatives blew up the twin pipelines carrying most of the supplied Russian gas to Europe in September, I’m not sure ‘blackmail’ is the right word. But keep that fact in mind, because other projections are not so sunny as VDL’s.

The bloc faces a potential gas gap between supply and demand of 27 billion cubic meters in 2023, according to the report. Such a situation could occur if Russia’s gas deliveries drop to zero and if China’s LNG imports rebound following a pandemic-related decline in 2022, the authors explained. “Many of the circumstances that allowed EU countries to fill their storage sites ahead of this winter may well not be repeated in 2023,” Birol said.

‘Such a situation’ IS going to occur; you can pretty much count on it. Russia could not send gas through either leg of the Nord Stream pipelines if it wanted to help such a worthless bunch of cretins as the Europeans are, those pipelines are now just so much scrap metal on the seabed. I think we can agree Russia is not going to send augmented gas supplies through the pipeline network which crosses Ukraine, and pay Ukraine transit fees that will immediately be turned into ammunition supplies to shoot at Russia’s soldiers; besides, the Ukrainian Gas Transit System is in nearly as bad shape as the destroyed Nord Stream lines. So this year, as horrible as it may have seemed to you, Europe got at least some Russian gas for an entire half of the year, and normal supplies for the first couple of months. Next year, it’s zero. Goose egg.

If Europe does not get any Russian gas next year, it is already looking at a deficit of nearly 60 BcM. Fifty-seven, according to the report. The Happy Days Are Here Again cheerleaders claim that the deficit will be partly offset – 30 BcM of it – by Even Greater Economies of consumption, mumble nuclear mumble and yes, even more renewables!!

The S-300 ‘Ground Attack’ Capability: Fabricated by Ukraine, Amplified by Western Media, Totally Fictitious.

Uncle Volodya says; “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.”

Well I’m accustomed to a smooth ride
Or maybe I’m a dog who’s lost it’s bite;
I don’t expect to be treated like a fool no more
I don’t expect to sleep through the night
Some people say a lie’s a lie’s a lie
But I say why deny the obvious child?
Why deny the obvious child?

Paul Simon, from “The Obvious Child“.

“That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.”

Joseph Goebbels

Tell it like it is, Joe. I daresay we all remember examples of propaganda which, in retrospect, it is hard to believe a wide audience fell for. “We know where the weapons of mass destruction are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat”, how about that one? I remember reading a critical response to it in which the writer congratulated Donald Rumsfeld on having, with the vagueness of his description, eliminated only international waters and deep space from consideration, and laughing in delighted appreciation; good times, my, yes.

But that and other completely fabricated martial fairy-tales successfully convinced huge western audiences of the smoldering malevolence of Saddam Hussein and, by extension, of Iraqis in general, and by even further extension, of more or less all Muslims. To the extent that tens of thousands of Muslim men were forced by the Bush administration to register with the US Government – a policy which “broke up families by triggering a wave of mass deportations and instilled fear throughout Muslim communities across the country, all while proving itself wholly ineffective at accomplishing its primary task: catching terrorists.” The same reference helpfully highlights that such propaganda ‘successes’, once internalized, contribute to longstanding bias even after they are outed as propaganda – there was no shortage of support for Trump, more than a decade later, calling for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States.

At its simplest, propaganda is little more than consistently and repeatedly expressing an allegation, while claiming it is supported by evidence, and then shouting down any source which attempts to correct the record, deflecting their arguments with insults and rhetoric. In fact, I covered the methodology in some detail on the old blog back in the Spring of 2015; re-reading it now, I find we are offered a priceless lead-in quote, from none other than Anne ‘Poland Makes Me Wet’ Applebaum.

“…[o]nce upon a time, it seemed as if the Internet would be a place of civilized and open debate; now, unedited forums often deteriorate to insult exchanges. Like it or not, this matters: Multiple experiments have shown that perceptions of an article, its writer or its subject can be profoundly shaped by anonymous online commentary, especially if it is harsh. One group of researchers found that rude comments “not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.” A digital analyst at Atlantic Media also discovered that people who read negative comments were more likely to judge that an article was of low quality and, regardless of the content, to doubt the truth of what it stated. “

It’s hard to argue with the forthrightness and accuracy of that opinion – but Annie was complaining about commentary which criticizes western intervention and regime-change operations, and the low-lifes in those instances were – you guessed it – Russian trolls and ‘spreaders of disinformation’. The west prides itself on open forums, respect for a wide range of opinion and a willingness to entertain alternate points of view. It would never stoop to trolling as a means of silencing dissent.

Ha, ha. Perhaps that was true once, but that kind of integrity went out of fashion in the west at approximately the same time as the top hat. Anyway, we’ll be coming back to this post later; I want to show you something. But for now, we’re going to look at a contemporary phenomenon – the tremendous investment by the west, and most especially the western media, in breathing life into propaganda from Ukraine.  In the example I’d like to discuss, the underlying theme is Ukraine’s brash public-relations technique of spinning every single negative thing that happens as having been the fault of The Russians, from the pitiful murders of  ‘collaborators’ in Bucha to the damage to civilian apartment buildings by falling or uncontrolled air-defense missiles fired by panicky Ukrainian crews…and the west’s role in polishing those stories’ credibility.

Long before what looks to have been an S-300 air-defense missile – designed and built in The Country That Doesn’t Make Anything, according to Obama – landed in neighbouring Poland and caused a couple of fatalities, missiles said to have been S-300’s struck a couple of apartment buildings in Kuh-yiv, and caused some fatalities among Ukrainian non-combatants. But when life hands you lemons, the smart move is to make lemonade, they say, and Ukraine quickly spun the situation so that the diabolical Russians had re-engineered some of their S-300 air-defense missiles so they could be used to attack ground targets such as apartment buildings full of helpless, shivering civilians. A bonus of this trope was that it could be used to argue Russia is running out of precision weapons, and has to repurpose existing stocks to do a job they were never designed for; the S-300 is old now. But journalists have given it new and malevolent life, and ‘S-300’ is apparently the only weapon system they can remember. So they make up for it by writing lurid fan-fiction about it.

This Year’s Recipient of the Double-Headed Eagle Prize for Being the Antithesis of the Degenerate and Hypocritical West.

Uncle Volodya says, “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

“For me, the most ironic token of it is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads: “We came in peace for all Mankind.” As the United States was dropping 7 ½ megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.”

Carl Sagan, from “Pale Blue Dot: a Vision of the Human Future in Space”

Before we congratulate the winner, a bit of background. This is an entirely new award, and its origins call for a bit of explanation. As most readers will be well aware, western nations – and most typified by the United States of America – have a wide range of honours and awards which recognize a significant and valuable contribution to the human condition. Recognition for advances in medicine, science, awards for inspiring moral courage, medals for bravery and skill and excellence in a plethora of professions.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Winners should be proud of the contribution their  skill and perseverance made to the betterment of mankind. There is also a number of awards made to advancement of more amorphous concepts – such as ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, two words that politicians like to sprinkle over everything like kids in control of the sugar bowl. The politically-minded have displayed a tendency in recent decades to honour those the west perceives as ‘Russian dissidents’ for no apparent reason other than that they appear to believe it makes Russians crazy with frustration and rage. Real contributions to such concepts as freedom and democracy – of which those handing out the honours have only the most rudimentary and imperfect understanding themselves – are much harder to measure. Being rewarded with a trophy for scientific excellence because you are the inventor of carbon fibre, for example, is easy to quantify and understand. Making a contribution to ‘freedom’ where most countries are already quite free is therefore often subjected to political spin, and politicians enjoy being able to give a shout-out to their proteges and friends, and to pretend that yahoos who are greatly disliked in countries those politicians regard as enemies are actually some kind of virtuous saints.

Look at the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for example. The highest civilian award in the United States, it was established by President John F. Kennedy in 1963. It is traditionally awarded by the President and is awarded to a person of his or her choice, or as a result of recommendations. It recognizes “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” It can be and frequently is awarded to non -Americans. Although it is a civilian decoration, it can be awarded to military figures, and when it is it may be worn on the uniform.

Colin Powell was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice. It would be difficult to deny his overall humanity and compassion in such cases as his obvious anguish in recall of how Saddam Hussein murdered the Kurds after they were persuaded to rise up against him by American instigators, who then whistled and looked out the window as if there were something interesting going on across the street while Saddam’s forces rolled over them like a sandstorm. The world turned its face away, blubbered Powell in memories of the event. It sure did – including Colin Powell, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time it happened. The President he served then – George H.W. Bush – is on record saying “There is another way for the bloodshed to stop: and that is, for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside and then comply with the United Nations’ resolutions and rejoin the family of peace-loving nations.” That was on February 15th, 1991. On February 24th, one of the ubiquitous ‘Free Insert Name of Nation Here’ radio stations the CIA frequently sets up to influence the national population, in this case Voice of Free Iraq, broadcast an exhortation to the people of Iraq to rise up and overthrow their leader.

Here’s an excerpt from CNN, with Brent Sadler: “Iraq’s infrastructure: bridges, roads, water, and electrical power systems were severely damaged. Many Iraqis lost services, vital to daily life. By war’s end, one of the most prosperous and modern Arab countries in the Middle East lay in economic ruin; if Iraqis had expected life to improve, they were mistaken. Indeed, 10 years on, their economy is barely functioning. Iraq’s oil revenues are managed by the United Nations, and strict sanctions remain in place on what can and cannot be imported. These trade restrictions have contributed to a spiraling humanitarian crisis for the country at large. A recent UNICEF study drawing a world health organization support and Iraqi data, states that half a million Iraqi children under 5 have died unnecessarily. Under prewar living conditions, they would have survived.”

But that wasn’t enough: the United States for some reason did not kill Saddam Hussein that time around, so it went back for another whack at Iraq, in 2003. Some countries were pretty reluctant, and required coaxing and convincing at the UN. Who convinced them? You know, don’t you? Colin Powell. Using fabricated evidence, pretending to be absolutely sure of facts when many were just assumptions based on Iraqi ‘defectors’ telling the Americans what they wanted to hear, and including Powell’s personal embellishments of recorded intercepts so that they appeared to show the Iraqis attempting to hide prohibited materials from inspectors. Those embellishments were not on the original intercepts.

But he got the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Twice.

The Rise of GloboHate; Washington’s Doctrine of Bullying and Ethno-Hatred Inspires its Admirers.

Uncle Volodya says, “Never do a wrong thing to make a friend, or to keep one.”

Well, we’ve come a long, long way..
Look at everything we know;
We’re getting smarter every day
Ah, but where’s it gonna go?
For all the words that go by,
I’ve got a feeling inside,
That after it’s all said and done:
Though we’ve come a long, long way.
This old world’s not much better than it was…

Ian Thomas, from “Long Long Way”

So we learned recently, via the intertubes, that celebrated American horror writer Stephen King has entered the political fray – unsurprisingly, on the side of Ukraine. In addition to sternly ordering Russia to get the fuck out of Ukraine, he has officially suspended the publication of all his new books in Russia, and also banned the renewal of expired previous rights.

Of course, that’s his privilege, and I wish I could say I never acted like an arsehole through ignorance, but that would be a lie. It’s not my purpose to hold him up to ridicule for his political beliefs or suggest his opinions are of no consequence; I’ve always enjoyed his fiction and have read nearly everything he’s ever written. In fact, in writing, I learned to use snatches of popular music or poetry to set the stage for things I wanted to say or to establish mood from reading King, and it remains a favourite technique. I think he’s wrong on this issue, but we can’t be right all the time, and in most cases we can say later, “You know, on that thing we talked about – I was wrong”, and the world will continue to turn with no serious harm done.

Nor can we guess much, from a short social-media statement, of what he actually knows about this subject, or if the belief he expresses holds true for all countries – if it’s not your country, you have no business there in a military capacity uninvited – although I am bound to say if the latter is true, he must not get out much. The country of his birth, residence and which he doubtless supports (considering he could probably live anywhere he likes) has never been shy about entering other countries with military forces, and when it cannot think of an excuse for doing so which will be broadly accepted, it simply makes one up.

No; the real reason I wanted to feature his declaration up front, together with all it implies about any belief he might harbor that he speaks for the nation, is because of a delicious serendipity. You see, in ‘The Stand’ – one of his best books, in my opinion – and through the character of Harold Lauder, King wrote a mini-manifesto that rings like he was speaking of America itself.

It’s said that the two great human sins are pride and hate. Are they? I choose to think of them as the two great virtues. To give away pride and hate is to say you will change for the good of the world. To embrace them, to vent them, is more noble. The world must change for the good of you.

If you ordered The United States from Jeff Bezos, when the Amazon box with the big smile showed up on your doorstep, the packing slip would read “The United States of America. The world must change for the good of you.” Because America considers itself the original model, upon which all others are based; you don’t have to pattern yourself after us. But if you want our endorsement, you will, and you can’t be a real country without it. And don’t try that “Hi; I’m your new neighbour. Any chance I could borrow a cup of democracy?” because we own the trademark on democracy, and if it don’t read “Made in the USA”, it ain’t the real thing.

Did the United States invent democracy? Hardly. The modern concept is generally acknowledged to have its origins in 5th-century BC Athens, although social groups which arrive at decisions through consensus predate that by a significant period, a social construct referred to as ‘tribalism’. That term, in fact, much more accurately describes the political environment in Washington today. Anyway, when democracy was a’borning, there wasn’t anything in what today is the United States, not even beavers and Indians, although it’s not polite to call them that anymore.

Oh: but look at this, though.

“Modern representative democracies attempt to bridge the gulf between the Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ and the grip of authoritarianism through ‘social contracts’ that enshrine the rights of the citizens, curtail the power of the state, and grant agency through the right to vote. While they engage populations with some level of decision-making, they are defined by the premise of distrust in the ability of human populations to make a direct judgement about candidates or decisions on issues.”

Is the present-day United States even a democracy? Is there a social contract between the US government and the people which enshrines the rights of citizens? Sure is; it’s called the Constitution; more accurately, the Bill of Rights, which is the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Saying a document has the force of law, though, is not the same as saying it protects citizens from violations of it by government. Let’s just look at a ‘for instance’; the First Amendment provides that the government “shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” But further back than The Creepiest White House Press Secretary Ever, Ari Fleischer, who told Americans they ‘have to watch what they say, watch what they do’, the United States government has taken steps to limit the freedom of speech, and along about 2020 they discovered the magic formula – if you say Things We Don’t Like To Hear, you are ‘spreading disinformation’, and we have to shut that down hard, to protect right-thinking citizens. Since then, Watching What You Say has gone into high gear.

An Ipsos survey in 2020 found that more than half of Americans said they had become more concerned about their online safety and were spending more time trying to determine if their Internet searches were safe. That’s good news but also an unfortunate sign of the times that so many of us have become paranoid about what we read online.

Determining if their internet searches were safe…from whom? The Russians? The Chinese? Or their own government? How many people said ‘their own government’?

How Many Frequent-Flyer Miles Would it Cost to Send Ursula von der Leyen Non-Stop to Hell?

Uncle Volodya says, “Desperate and dammed persons share an affinity for flirting with danger; an infectious case of erotic morbidity fetters them to self-destruction.”

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan;
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We’re all doing what we can

But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is, brother, you’ll have to wait…

The Beatles, from ‘Revolution‘

English is the language of a people who have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy, because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.

Paul Scott

Everyone is familiar with the quote, “The first casualty, when war comes, is the truth”. But there must be something special about this war – something unique and rare, which inspires public figures to heights of bullshit scarcely attainable without going on oxygen. And none has pushed the upper envelope of the craposphere the way Cowsmonaut Ursula von der Leyen has. Consider, for example, her parallel-universe speech to the World Economic Forum (WEF) on May 24th. We’ll get back to that in more detail, and I am confident that, like me, you will be shaking your head in wonder at its apparently-deliberate falsehoods. But first, a bit of background on Ms. von der Leyen; many of her colleagues in the European Clown Circus refer to her as ‘VDL’ because they are lazy, and so are we, so I’m going to refer to her the same way in this piece if that’s okay.

VDL is said to have been a ‘late bloomer’ in politics, completing medical studies and living for several years in the United States with her family before deciding to enter German politics. But she certainly started as she meant to go on, a series of disastrous failures of leadership and imagination as she quickly worked her way up to a black belt in incompetence.

“Fixing the German army, which had been starved of resources for years after the end of the Cold War, was a herculean task. Von der Leyen blamed many of the problems facing the armed forces on her predecessors. Now in her fifth year atop the ministry, she can no longer point fingers.

Her biggest failure at the ministry may have been in not winning over the officer corps and troops. As a woman in a male-dominated universe, von der Leyen was never going to have an easy task. But current and former aides describe her management style as distant and defensive. She surrounded herself at the ministry with a small group of aides who kept tight control on the flow of information. Many interactions with rank-and-file troops were in the form of photo-ops, which often showed the minister in dramatic poses alongside military equipment.

She offended many service members by saying publicly in 2017, after the discovery of a right-wing extremist in the ranks, that the Bundeswehr suffered from “weak leadership at various levels.”

Well, she was right about that; leadership at the very highest level sucked like a black hole. But I think we are well past the novelty phase of feminine leadership where you are being made to look like a failure because you’re a woman. It didn’t stop the political system from letting her hand-pick another woman – Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer – to succeed her, and she promptly proposed Germany acquire a first-strike nuclear capability as a deterrent to ‘Russian aggression or provocation’. Both these individuals were useless as a chocolate teapot at their jobs and it had not a thing to do with their gender, and everything to do with their overall uselessness at leadership. However, being a useless leader has not prevented VDL from pole-vaulting to leadership of the entire bloc.

And she might have offended some service members as Defense Minister of Germany, but by God it did not stop the Defense Ministry from trying to protect her from accountability by wiping her official phone records even after the Bundestag had ordered her phone held as evidence in an investigation.

Lindner also gave an exasperated interview to public broadcaster ARD on Friday, in which he described the Defense Ministry’s continued failure to produce the phone data, even though the Bundestag had declared the phone should be classified as evidence several months ago.

“First they said von der Leyen’s phone could not be found, they didn’t know where it was,” he said. “A week ago they said it was in the ministry, but only von der Leyen knew the PIN code, and yesterday they confessed that the relevant phone data had been deleted in August.”

Sound familiar? She might have only lived in the United States for a couple of years, but she certainly picked up a few tricks – remember the interrogation tapes from Abu Ghraib that were destroyed by the CIA even after a direct order to preserve them as evidence? And the woman who ordered them destroyed went on to be CIA Director from 2018 to 2021; poor thing, they probably promoted her because they felt guilty for picking on her because she is a woman.

The truth – according to a report by influential German publication Der Speigel – is that VDL has cocked up everything she touched since entering politics, blamed it on her predecessors, and shaken the dust of her last shattered ministry post off her heels too quickly for her to be punished for it . By the time investigators get their shit together, she has already moved on.

“VdL was in lots of ways a perfect appointment as President of the European Commission. She is good at grand promises, pledges of unity, and commitments to diversity. The problem comes when it’s actually time to deliver. At three major ministries in Berlin, she stumbled from one disaster to another. The vaccine debacle unfolding across the continent won’t have come as any surprise to those who have followed her career. When it came to buying vaccines, the Commission was too late, too chaotic, and too stingy. But when the problems emerged, VdL disappeared, and then tried to pin the blame on someone else: in this case first AstraZeneca, for failing to deliver supplies on time, and then on the British, for investing more, and earlier. ‘It is, to put it bluntly, a pattern that has occurred frequently throughout her career,’ concluded Spiegel.”

Stumbling from one disaster to another. Just the resume you want in the dreamweaver who is inspiring the eggheads at Davos. Well, I think that’s enough stage-setting – lets move on to her recent load of rubbish, introduced at the beginning of the post.

We Have Become the Soviet Union Our Parents Used to Frighten Us When We Were Children.

Uncle Volodya says, “Anger is an acid that destroys its own container.”

“Together, they would watch everything that was so carefully planned collapse, and they would smile at the beauty of destruction.”

Markus Zusak, from “The Book Thief”

And you tell me over and over again, my friend;
You don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction…

Bob Dylan, from, “Eve of Destruction”

Most of us are familiar, in that casual way of recognizing something heard before without really pondering its import, with this Nietzsche quote: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster . . . when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” It is just as apparent that the west’s political leaders have never read it, or if they have, have decided to ignore it in favour of becoming the monsters they condemn. And so, slowly at first but with gathering speed and breathless momentum, we are ‘fighting those who hate us for our freedoms’ by giving them up, or at least remaining silent while they are taken away for our own good.

Journalism such as we once knew, at least the older among us, has given way to ‘shaping the narrative’, and authors take pride in steering people’s beliefs in various directions regardless what is actually happening; I’ll give you an example. Give this a quick read.

Finished already? Let’s start with the opening sentence: “As the war in Ukraine goes on way longer than Vladimir Putin appears to have anticipated, the Russian leader is getting increasingly aggressive.” This is typical of a fairly-recent phenomenon in what used to be journalism, in which you tell your readers what the target’s objectives and reasoning are, and then mock him for failing to achieve the objectives and for commencing on such half-baked reasoning. Nobody outside Russia has the slightest real idea how long the Russian government expected a war it entered into with the greatest imaginable reluctance, and only after being pushed and baited and prodded by the west, to endure. The imagined and much-touted hammerstroke which would have had the Russians in Kiev in just 72 hours is and was always a western invention, based entirely on unsupported assumptions – in this case by America’s top soldier, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley. But you can google the phrase “Russia could be in Kiev in 72 hours analysts” and come up with pages of predictions by ‘people familiar with the assessments’ and unnamed ‘security officials’ which line up behind the purported lunge at Kiev, with the entirely fictional goal of “remov[ing] the country’s democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky.”

Russia has never said or published any timeline for the operation, has never said it intended to seize Kiev, has never in any way implied that removing Zelensky is an objective. In fact, as reported by Jacques Baud in The Postil Magazine’s “The Military Situation in the Ukraine—An Update“, there was never any reason to strike at Kiev, although a feint was made toward it simply (a) because that’s what the west expected based on the silliness broadcast by its quacking analysts and its soldier-politicians, and (b) to prevent reinforcement of the bulk of the Ukrainian Army, which was poised on the line of contact of the Donbas/Lugansk Republics to effect the violent capture and return to Ukrainian control of those republics, and for which military operation the artillery bombardment had already commenced.

“Moreover, Ukrainian forces are never indicated on our maps, as this would show that they were not deployed on the Russian border in February 2022, but were regrouped in the south of the country, in preparation for their offensive, the initial phase of which began on February 16th. This confirms that Russia was only reacting to a situation initiated by the West, by way of the Ukraine, as we shall see. At present, it is these forces that are encircled in the Kramatorsk cauldron and are being methodically fragmented and neutralized, little by little, in an incremental way, by the Russian coalition.

The vagueness maintained in the West about the situation of the Ukrainian forces, has other effects. First, it maintains the illusion of a possible Ukrainian victory. Thus, instead of encouraging a negotiation process, the West seeks to prolong the war. This is why the European Union and some of its member countries have sent weapons and are encouraging the civilian population and volunteers of all kinds to go and fight, often without training and without any real command structure—with deadly consequences.”

Another effect of this vagueness is that Ukrainian casualties are whatever Zelensky and his and the western PR machines say they are; consistently low-balling Ukrainian losses and wildly exaggerating  Russian casualties contribute to a tentative western belief that Ukraine is ‘winning’ and that pouring more weapons and money into Ukraine will propel it to success rather than condemn more Ukrainians to death by dragging out the war for as long as possible. Anyway, I could go on all day with that one sentence; let’s wrap up, because we have somewhere else to go. The opening sentence closed with “…the Russian leader is getting increasingly aggressive.” The ‘aggression’ referred to here is the shutting off of gas supply by Russia to Poland and Bulgaria, both transit countries for Europe, because they had refused to pay for gas in rubles as required by Russia and had let the compliance deadline pass. So, by refusing to sell gas to those countries on their terms, Russia is ‘being aggressive’. Why would it take such steps? I can explain in two words; “Michael McFaul”.

Offramps and Blind Alleys: NATO is Reduced to Directing Traffic.

Uncle Volodya says, “Mockery and derision have their place. Usually, it’s on the far side of the airlock.”

“Nothing is easier than self-deceit.
For what every man wishes,
that he also believes to be true.”

Demosthenes

“Stupid is as stupid does”

Forrest Gump

Mick Jagger taught the world that it can’t always get what it wants. But if I could get what I wanted, just once, I would hope for a moment of clarity in which the western ‘democracies’ looked back upon the events of the past decade with absolute objectivity – if necessary, viewing their own actions and reactions as if they had been carried out by someone else – and appropriately judged them with candor and responsibility. Once I would have hoped these executions and maneuvers would be assessed with a generous dose of “What the fuck were we thinking?” But I’ve grown a touch cynical since then, and I’m pretty confident much if not all of it was deliberate, planned. What in the name of God are we turning into?

Such a moment of clarity, too, might reveal the grotesque misjudgments which prevailed in the quickening events that resulted in Russia entering Ukraine upon a military operation. For months a substantial force of Russian military equipment and personnel remained near the Ukrainian border with Russia, within Russia but in plain sight of observers. The purpose of this seemed clear to everyone, not least the Ukrainians – we see you, and we know what you’re thinking. Don’t do it. Because unremarked by many and almost exactly a year ago, President Zelensky had issued a decree that Crimea was to be recaptured by Ukraine, and began to deploy his forces along the borders of the rebel eastern provinces. Most thought – I among them – that the Russian forces arrayed within easy striking distance would deter the Ukrainians from anything foolish. In this, NATO was in exactly the kind of no-lose position it relishes after months and years of careful plotting and instigation – if the Russians reacted, it would be an unwarranted invasion of Ukraine, exactly as NATO had been warning of with increasing stridency, because it was provoking just such a development. If it did not, the Ukrainian forces would inexorably roll over the eastern provinces, all the way to Crimea, and bring it back under Ukrainian control while Russia raged from the sidelines, impotent.

Anyway, I have no intention of simply lifting all the references from Jacques Baud’s seminal post, “The Military Situation in the Ukraine”; it is a dramatic departure from The Narrative, and I’m sure the Wikipedia Patrol is already hard at work painting him as some sort of compulsive loon, who occasionally escapes from the asylum long enough to expound a crazy conspiracy theory before the white coats seize him and hustle him back to medicated slumber. No matter – his work speaks for itself, and is impeccably referenced using official UN and national reports and documentation. Although it provides powerful substantiation for what we have been arguing here for years now, and could not have appeared in a more timely fashion unless it could have averted the crisis altogether; although I enthusiastically urge that it be shared widely – it’s not the piece I came here today to talk about. This is.

Putin needs an off-ramp.

Yes, that’s The Thinking Westerner’s position as laid down in The Atlantic: NATO has been handed the puzzler of how to make Putin think he won, while displaying to the entire rest of the world that he lost, convincingly. And it’s what makes Baud’s exposé so serendipitous, because he recounts how the west has completely lost its mind, to the extent it believes – or affects to believe – its own Hollywood nonsense.

And in precisely the moment of clarity and reflection I described in the beginning of this effort, the dedicated observer might note that western think-tanks were occupied with how they might rescue Putin from his crazy bad self, only three weeks into an invasion the Ukrainians were supposed to be winning on sheer guts.

How could that be? I guess we should take a closer look.

Hey, Democracy! Why Do You Bother to Vote?

Uncle Volodya says, “The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.”

“There are no nations, just large corporations
Flying the flag of the day;
From dawn of creation to civilization
Please don’t take my music away..”

From “Joe Fabulous“, by Bad Company

A quote which goes, “If voting actually made any difference, they wouldn’t let you do it” is often attributed – apparently incorrectly – to American humorist and author Mark Twain. Snopes doesn’t know who actually said it, or if anyone ever did, although there are various close versions. For instance, this rant by Robert S. Borden, from the Lowell Sun in 1976:

“Has it ever dawned on the editors that the attitudes of the 70 million projected non-voters may be very consistent with the reality that the concept of voting and electing representatives is basically dishonest and fraudulent? If voting could change anything it would be made illegal! There is no way any politicians can legally represent anyone because he was elected on a secret ballot by a small percentage of voters. He then claims to represent the people who voted against him and even those who wisely chose not to participate in such criminal activity.”

The sentiment was around long before 1976, so he certainly wasn’t the originator. But even without attribution, the notion that voting is just a pointless, slightly pathetic activity which provides the zealous and the patriotic with the illusion that their participation somehow informs and guides national leadership has been around for a long time, and has grown like jimson weed in the fertile ground of government brainlessness. More and more, the electorate is fed up with going dutifully to the polls, only to see another scion of a privileged family up there under the lights giving the clasped-hands victory sign. They see the national leadership forget all his/her promises before the air has even cooled where they were just standing, or within a couple of months when they acknowledge by God, it is going to be tougher than I thought.

Who would ever have imagined Justin Trudeau, poster-boy for quirky LGBTQ issues and social-justice causes – and eye-wateringly incompetent social-hand-grenade at everything else – would morph into an hysterical tyrant, yelling that you don’t have to get vaccinated, but don’t think that if you don’t, you will still be able to get on a plane or a train beside decent folks, and shed your COVID cooties all over them. All right, I might be paraphrasing a little. What he actually said was “If you don’t want to get vaccinated, that’s your choice. But don’t think you can get on a plane or a train beside vaccinated people and put them at risk!“

As the author of the linked reference piquantly pointed out – how does your unvaccinated proximity threaten the vaccinated? If you are vaccinated, aren’t you immune?

Perhaps this would be a good place to highlight the CDC’s latest venture into revisionist history; I’m sure everyone recalls their earlier below-the-radar reinvention of ‘herd immunity’ so that the new text made no mention of the possibility it could be acquired through natural infection and recovery – nope, it was the product of vaccination. Well, they’ve done it again; this time, to ‘vaccine’. See if you can spot the difference. Old definition.

Vaccine: A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease. Vaccines are usually administered through needle injections, but can also be administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose.

New definition.

Vaccine: A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases. Vaccines are usually administered through needle injections, but some can be administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose.

Did you spot the difference? Yeah; a vaccine no longer has to confer ‘immunity’, only ‘protection’, which is open to a much greater degree of interpretation. Given it mitigates your symptoms if you do get infected, isn’t that ‘protection’? The brighter among you may have noticed the definitions of ‘vaccination’ and ‘immunization’ have also been modified to remove any reference to ‘immunity’. The buzzword now is ‘protection’.

Talking of the redefining of herd immunity, let’s just take a closer look at that. Because the government keeps holding out the prospect – if only a few more people will roll up their sleeves and take the gene-jab – as if it were a realistic goal. Is it? You tell me. I’ll let math-boy sum it up, because, as Geoffrey Rush said in the character of Cap’n Barbosa of “Pirates of the Caribbean”, there were a lot of big words in there; we’re nobbut ‘umble pirates.

“So, to achieve herd immunity we need to make sure that at least a proportion of of the population is immune. For an of 2.5, the higher end of the estimates for COVID-19, this means that we need to get at least a proportion of of the population immune. This translates to at least 60%…How do we do this? Well, ideally we would do it by vaccinating at least 60% of the population. In the absence of a vaccine, we can hope that this level of immunity will be achieved naturally, by people becoming sick and then immune. But because a lot of people die of COVID-19 we can’t just let the disease wash over the population, confident in the knowledge that more infections mean more immunity. “

Fair warning; the referenced site is sympathetic to herd immunity being achieved through vaccination, although at the time of writing, none was available. It has since become fashionable to pretend this is our goal through vaccinations, and that if some of those crackpot conspiracy-theorist anti-vaxxers would just think of their community for a minute, why, we’d be there.