And If That Mockingbird Ain’t Proud, Papa’s Going To Buy You A Mushroom Cloud

If we knew what was really be happening, we would be screaming (which is why they make very sure we don't)

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Hey folks!

Today I want to combine a few simple bits of historical memory with a few bits of modern witness, to see if we can understand more about our present, by restoring some of the missing context to our ideas.

I also want to make use of a few fantastic ideas from others, which I will no doubt butcher and oversimplify (for which, my apologies in advance). As usual, my technician side is too interested in the functional value of the tools, not to share them. Please also read into the linked essays or thinkers below, so you can get the original stronger and more well thought-out ideas from the original writers. Definitely worthwhile!

But the first idea-tool I want to invoke is one which I noticed myself, (along with many others) just from being mister curious and reading a lot of very smart old whistle-blowers and young essay writers.

Pretty much all of the finest independent media writers whose work thrills me have a few areas where they are brilliant, often uniquely and inspiringly so (Matt Stoller, Ted Gioia, Glenn Greenwald), those who understand what they are good at and work that seam hard, bring us many fine insight-gifts.

We also see some writers who are truly brilliant at one thing, but don’t stick to that – they go all over the place and show just as much obtuse ignorance in some areas, as they show perception elsewhere.

I don’t like hard polarized Manichean thinking for anything. Emotionally, it feels like the ones who can’t tell when they are being foolish undermine their other stuff, with that blindness in particular – but as I’ve said many times, Caravaggio is a truly great painter, not so great as a tennis partner (famously murdered an opponent over a game). I can still love his paintings, even if he was a total creep!

So no – the ability to work the skills you actually do have, without ever once taking the intensity of emotion you feel in areas outside your grasp to mean you have adequate information for insight there also, is absolutely not a pass/fail test, it’s more of a tennis/painting question. The stand outs who do get it right are really just displaying the welcome and highly aspirational signs of any accomplished artist. The rest? Only human! As a man who played free-improv music for many years, I can really appreciate the value of passion risk and calling forth an open question – but that’s a very different (poetic, rather than journalistic) standard.

Now here’s the first tool I’m borrowing today, from Eric Hoel (to whom you should subscribe, no really – check out the link below). Many people write about how thinking works philosophically or scientifically, Hoel is wonderfully good at blending both of these approaches, that is, bringing both qualities of spirit into his courageous and yet rigorous thinking.

In one of his pieces he discussed the surprising recent discovery that especially smart people actually don’t know “more things” than less demonstrably accomplished ones, they just had a way of “chunking” the same few key things they really knew (for most of us – just three key insights), which was far more powerful. I immediately started thinking about fractals with infinitely regressive detail and also the way simple genes can create such complex living structures from a four-molecule code.

That idea of ‘chunking’ fits into that idea about new journalism perfectly, doesn’t it? Some people faithfully stick to the chunks they know – so that even when they are extrapolating, they’re doing it in a sphere where they actually know not just the formulae for the main tricks, but also their derivation history and purpose – and all the crucial modern values for the variables, too!

It also makes that old cliche “Write what you know” finally work. Obviously, Ursula K LeGuin could not write from her personal experience of Dragons (nor Doris Lessing, of space travel), but both of these extraordinary writers always wrote from their effective chunking of deep knowledge, so they could travel along that scale even into unreality, without ever losing the feeling of deep authenticity.

Do you know what “selling-out” is? I’m not trying to be funny, in asking, there is a real generational split when it comes to what this idea means to people. My long time readers might already be smiling, because they know of course that I can’t help pointing out that the generation which made this phrase famous with their scorn for sell-outs, were also the most numerous and by far the most destructive bunch of hypocrite sell-outs since the industrial revolution – the boomers, of course.

But for my younger chums I must also insist the old caution about not “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” even applies to that screwed-up anti-social generation of Karens – bear with me a moment, and let me see if I can back that assertion up in a way that persuades you.

First of all I have to invoke my early years yet again – but only because of what I directly witnessed. Growing up inside a commune, you really do believe the weird ideas of your particular group are “TRUTH” to an extent which does not ever apply to the adults involved (because they grew up inside consensus reality, even if they did decide to abandon it, for an alternative they thought would be better).

So when you escape, come far side of that, when you realize that everything you were ever told was contaminated by deeply twisted bullshit, your whole early life, patterns of striving and aims are called into question also. The ground you were standing on falls away. Were your best accomplishments really your worst errors, because you followed false icons in their pursuit, the way it feels like?

I have been blessed to have enjoyed deep conversations about these matters both with a scientologist (and one of my favourite local improv drummers), and also a man who was raised in the Hitler youth (a now retired, absolutely outstanding community college instructor). But I was actually most delighted by an insight which delivers the answer, without any of that moral freight of doubt and recrimination.

Decades ago there was an American Jazz drummer whose work was not especially appreciated here, but became incredibly influential to the thrillingly vital and regenerative African music scene. He had a way of using the bass drum in particular with unusual speed and density of hits, that they found both fantastic and worth learning from, so they could incorporate the technique into their own work.

The funny thing is, when they tried to do it they were breaking pedals (for the bass drum) all the time, and many ended up having to reinforce that most basic tool, to an outright weird degree. What none of those African drummers ever realized was that the American drummer they admired was using two pedals and both feet! And yet within a few years they had not only learned how to produce his sound with just one pedal (and some incredibly muscle, one presumes), they were teaching it to their students!

So, um, TRUTH. Do any of those fantastic drummers have to worry or feel weird about developing their surpassing excellence based upon an idea which was not in fact TRUTH? Really not, right?

This is absolutely not to say that we don’t have to guard against weird and persistent ideas which have a way of popping back up at strange phases in our lives, but excellence earned remains excellence, whether we had to crawl through mud or endure years of elaborate psychological torture, to get it.

But about that guarding against strange and resurgent ideas thing. I get frustrated with a lot of people, because so few share my habit of constantly daring myself to face the strongest valid critique of my own favourite ideas. I don’t do it to be irritating, I just want the best ideas I can get, and ideas are living things, they need new growth which means the breaking-up and overturning of hardened soil, to thrive.

But my impatience is unfair in a way, I had an early curse that later became a super-power, which forced me to learn to play fast while still very young, and with only one pedal. Being genuinely clueless in your own culture is a gift. A curse also (especially in terms of stress) but approaching everything – including all of the things that most people consider ‘settled questions’ not worth thinking any more about – as open and ongoing questions, reveals a shocking amount of falsity which we all take for granted and in a way, help erase from reality for each other. I hate to say this, but the worst parts of corrupt power rely on all of us to do some of the epic-scale grunt-work of memory-loss, compliance and distortion, or else their power would rapidly evaporate and then collapse.

Yes that’s objectively gross and scary, but turn it around too, eh? It is also as hopeful a thing as can be – because it means the real enabling power of every “System” has always been with us the people, and also that the end of every illegitimate power begins with us withdrawing our energy from their oppression games.

Mind you, that really is far easier said than done.

Do you remember those memory games, where you have a whole array of cards face down, and one only face up, and you can turn one card at at time to seek a match, but then have to turn it face down again? Whichever player remembers the most cards turned over in previous searches, wins the game (or when we’re playing solo, as far too many of us do nowadays, solves the puzzle in fewest moves).

I always end up thinking of those games and chuckling to myself when I watch BigNews, “Do people really not remember who this commentator is? What they did, on the record, just a few years ago?”

But I also get sad, because I remember that this was not always so, there actually was a time when BigMedia was far less concentrated (please note, it was Clinton who allowed that obviously long-term evil consolidation on his watch), and the people in corporation-media didn’t turn so many of the cards face down again after thirty seconds, so most of us had a far better idea of what was really going on.

My three big chunks? The weird dynamic (I refuse to say dialectic) between idealism and sell outs, the man from Mars perspective on art life and normalcy, and the highly propagandized and distorted, always war-driven politics and economics of the long twentieth century (just ending now, oh dear) which history has been my lifetime study, since I was a very small boy.

So when I say that BigNews (yes, including BBC and CBC) has been outright lying to us about crucially important matters for a quarter of a century now I’m not just saying I’m mad, I’m saying I remember all the cards we’ve been turning over for the last forty years (and have read about many which were turned over earlier) and if you had too, it would be beyond obvious to you also.

A simple example – the CIA did a study to figure out the best way to boost public support for the war in Afghanistan, and their think-tank geniuses said “Call them sexist,” so we had legions of people actively defending the bombing of outdoor weddings with anti-personnel weapons, because girls in school. Thing is, during the decades of active western occupation roughly fifty percent of Afghan children suffered permanent irreversible brain damage from malnutrition – under our “benevolent” supervision. You tell me, was sexism (yes, very infuriating and entirely wrong) really the top headline? Or was it a way for them to get us to join in on an industrial lynching, even while thinking ourselves anti-racist? (And if you’re still defending that war as moral, please tell me, who shows ANY sign of caring now?)

I know dear friends who still take MSNBC and CNN seriously, and yet both are endlessly “Platforming” outright demented war criminals like Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton and John Bolton so they can spout their war promoting dehumanizing hate speech. The goal is not delivery of clear and useful information, it is to flatter the emotional dynamics their audience craves most (lately, anything mean about Trump, both leads and sells – the true stuff and the BS in equal measure). I’m not kidding when I keep saying the FOX model is dominant. Even the NYT now runs editorial policy on this flatter the existing prejudice of one key sales-demographic basis.

What drives me crazy about this is that Trump is a creep and a nutcase in all kinds of ways, but these BigMedia imbeciles have spent so much time running so much bullshit about him, that no one can get a hold of the actual man anymore, they keep grasping for phantoms that they made up themselves!

I have another pal who sends me editorials from Robert Reich in the Guardian, and says “See?” and I wonder why he can’t, or else refuses to see. People, get this straight, Bill Clinton is the man who moved the Democrats so far to the right, the Republicans had to go extreme, just to find a definition. And yes, Clinton was deliberately trying to make the Dems the permanent governing party, by doing that (cheating the spirit of democracy completely, while still playing within the technical rules).

Robert Reich in particular was part of Clinton’s team of “brilliant minds” who made sure the Democrats did not in any way repeal Reaganomics, but rather enshrined Neoliberalism and Financialization as utterly inescapable structural members of our whole system for all time (one very big reason the whole damn financial system is now tilting so dangerously). If the working class really understood who the guy was and what he had cost them and their kids, he’d be served dishwater in every restaurant and always seated right next to the washroom! (Not a star editorialist for schmucks)

In a sane society, with citizens who had the whole deck of cards turned up at once for them by a responsible media, no one could “platform” Victoria Nuland, because people would say “Hey, she was Dick Cheney’s evil genius strategist!” (and someone even Cheney thinks is devious, wow). They would remember that she was personally responsible for a huge proportion of the bad ideas and hubris which led America in to a twenty first century of bankrupting forever war. She is a mass murderer and war criminal. But she is also a noted pundit at CNBC and CNN and teaches at Columbia, just like Hillary who remains very proud of destroying Libya, long the most powerful and genuinely independent Black nation on earth (she freakin’ shot Wakanda, folks, look into it). Black Americans who had all the cards turned-up for them in a useful way would have rioted before supporting her. But because BigMedia is now in the business of turning absolutely all of the cards down all of the time in favour of cheap thrills morality plays, while simultaneously trying to distract us with deck after deck made up of totally normal people who are trying (but non-compliant) so we stop thinking about the truly evil memory deck of the corrupting psychotic mass murderous and powerful altogether. Me? I don’t play that.

A nation that arrests thousands every year for rebellious speech (even that rebellion which is entirely principled and sound) like England, France and Germany have all been doing for several years now, has no right whatsoever to keep calling or thinking of itself as a part of Western civilization, because it has already knowingly discarded the main and most crucial virtue of the system, without having rejected any of the unprecedented (lethal) costs or sins we have always drawn and also under-weighed.

Now let me review a few bathwater babies that the boomers got sort-of right, just to see if I can make some of this clearer, before I do my best to tie all these tools and historical bits together.

I must start by being clear, this is from the man from Mars seeking kindness, chunk, nothing reactionary or ‘right-wing’ about it. Skepticism in the name of KINDNESS not anger or retribution, the way we are so habituated to using our thinking (thus making ourselves so much unhappier, out of self-harming habit).

Giving women a full range of life options has been an incalculable gain in intelligence, creativity and excellence for our global society as a whole (very differently realized as it has been, in many places).

On the other hand, anyone who ever told a young person that frequency of orgasm was more important than strength and depth of love, was (probably out of bitterness, a very dangerous toxin) being a traitor to humanity itself (and there were many entire theoretical schools, in this ruinous line). Worse still, disparaging the entire historical line of women who gave extraordinary level of care to others, as if all great mothers and nurturers were mere saps, who could have been so much more fulfilled being screamed-at in an office for decades by people who don’t know or care about them in any way, was also an error in two directions: a vast discarding of deep female tradition and wisdom, and also a loud unkindness to many young people today who are still well suited and inclined to roles which are now so widely and loudly disparaged, many consider their great and nurturing hearts a weakness to be ashamed of. (Women viciously bullying women). I can honestly testify that my life was outright saved by a few irrationally-caring women, who spent most of their lives as homemakers, and I know for sure I’m not nearly the only one. They were always playing for the good guys, aprons or not.

And this reveals a very important clue (and card that the culture side of BigMedia should be turning over for us constantly, so we can all do better together, as we construct our next phase of aspiration).

Where do you get if you power your movement mostly with anger, compared to love and principle?

I am going to say something unbelievably cynical now, that will make many angry. The only reason I share it, is that I have not ever been able to dismiss it, ever since it first hit me (many years ago).

The Civil Rights movement in America which finally destroyed the old structures of segregation was not powered by anger alone, but also by appeal to deep and abiding principles. It was also not won by people who were angry and undisciplined, but rather by people who put principle ahead of self.

The fact that there were both sincere religious factions and sincere leftist political factions back then, will seem like science fiction to some, but they really did exist (and the tone of rebels from the beat era, was altogether funnier, more grounded in principle and far less self-absorbed than the later boomers).

On one level (and only one), I can’t help thinking that one part of what made the ‘revolutionary’ (actually counter-revolutionary, but who’s counting these days) late sixties period so tumultuous was that a whole bunch of spoiled TV generation brats thought, hey, if a bunch of poor black folks and coffeehouse poets can get stuff by causing trouble, what do you think we can get, if we do the same?

That is, jealousy and avarice were at least one (ultimately fatally contaminating) part of the movement.

But again, this is in no way a rejection of gains made, I’m talking about staying relevant so we can stay useful, rather than distorting our perception (and the shape of the world) to avoid facing our errors.

Finally, without wishing to pile on to feminism (which even at it’s most strident in the sixties, was nowhere near as angry, anti-life or self-harmful as the modern identitarian variants), I have to share my second key borrowed tool for the day. One of Tara’s Van Dijk’s most powerful “Chunks” is using the intellectual techniques invoked by theorists and idealists, to reveal their errors – in their own terms!

This is gleefully devastating for her readers, because she robs her critics of the ability to say she doesn’t understand where they are coming from. In fact, she almost always understands it better than they do (and has proven this with several fantastic ripostes, after dishonest and ignorant critiques).

One of the best insights she has given me is the key distinction between an emotional game which has great appeal, because it always gives us a convenient “other” to blame for anything troubling, and a clear perception of functional mechanisms which truly shape (and forcibly re-shape) our lives.

She quotes Hanna Arendt (does not claim originality) but makes the incredibly important point that what is really oppressing us in the modern age is a faceless bureaucratic machine to which we cannot appeal, rather than a Patriarchy, much as the resemblance can be drawn with many of our financial aristocrats.

Being able to see this difference is important in the same way as being able to understand both that Trump is a crazy dickhead, but also that RussiaGate was a WAR PROMOTING FRAUD from start to finish, and every single journalist who told you it was true (and worse, still says it) is either active CIA or a brainless morality-free dupe.

Still addicted to the idea that BigNews delivers TRUTH? I’ll give you one more mental experiment.

Up until five years ago the word Vaccine meant four different very important and useful things.

1) Prevents Disease

2) Prevents Transmission

3) Lasts for Decades

4) Is at least 50,000 times safer than the malady itself (based on the withdrawal of previously introduced vaccines which injured one in 10,000 and were therefore considered totally unacceptable).

You lived through that whole mess too – so now you tell me, who you gonna believe, CNBC or your lying eyes?

Do you know the last time someone even seriously tried to turn over a few cards in the CIA deck of secrets? 1975 – fifty full years ago. You know how deep they got? (According to veteran CIA analysts who were serving at the time, and are now whistle-blowers about the evil agency and its influence) not even halfway down into the dirt. You know what they found? Corruption assassination coups and complicity in countless war crimes. By agencies of the state, with tax dollars, against citizen interest.

Do you know how many people were seriously punished for those misdeeds? Hard Zero. They did establish a special intelligence committee in the Senate to oversee such “Dark” operations, but they also immediately began to exert their influence to make sure ‘the right people’ were on it, and the skeptics were persuaded silenced or sidelined. That is, no effective supervision was ever established.

So what happens when creepy violence prone power-mad people get away with war crimes and mass murder for corporate profit and American hegemony? They do more of it, much much more, so much that it becomes the normal way of doing business, for the most powerful influencers of state policy.

Operation Mockingbird was a CIA operation designed to create so many powerful lies in mass media that no one would be sure exactly what was going on, and when they were sure, they were always wrong!

The extraordinary Ramparts magazine (then edited by the amazing Robert Scheer, who is still going strong with his courageous and excellent Scheerpost.com, today) broke the story in 1967, and back then (before all the corporate bribes showed up, to lure the boomers back into compliance) the idea of “Selling out” to the CIA of all institutions, was regarded with horror and disgust. Famous journalists were disgraced and shamed. Public fury that tax money was being used to lie was white-hot.

You know how many people got punished for Operation Mockingbird? Hard zero, folks.

So where are we – I mean really? How about a few bullet points?

Israel is in deep trouble because all of this violence has won them nothing and lost them all sympathy

The Palestinians are in deep trouble because the exact same moralizing and “Progressive” class of world leaders who talked about dead black bodies for years have spent the last two years saying it’s rude (or even outright illegal) to call murder, murder.

America is in deep trouble because on the way out, the Democrats issued short term bonds for TRILLIONS, when the usual custom was to make most of them long term, meaning Trump’s team is stuck trying to refinance a couple of trillion in T-bills before the midterms, Please understand, elevated interest rates are all part of making all Americans suffer, to bring Trump down (rather than, say, actually having better ideas).

America is also in deep trouble because its influence is collapsing fast, and it can’t mentally adjust to the idea of not being the boss of everyone.

I should do each of these as a separate entry, but the incredibly sad fact is that I don’t have to. England, France, Germany and Canada are all run by people who were deeply involved in the ruinous financialization and power-centre (mockingbird) lies which have brought us to this sad state, every one.

They are also all whores to American power, again, in every single case without exception. They also all have crazy economic policies based on clearly refuted idealisms (and generating dangerous debt), which reminds me, they are also all teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Germany has been in recession for two straight years, and it isn’t levelling out, it’s deepening (keeps setting records for bankruptcies, month after month). Both England and France are so badly in debt they are publicly discussing the idea of an IMF bailout for their economies, despite the harsh austerity (and emergency privatization) that will require. And bear in mind – even discussing this undermines confidence in their economies (meaning the debt-emergency is still much worse than they are saying, or else they’d say nothing at all).

Problem is, even the IMF isn’t actually big enough to bail out an economy as big as England OR France, let far alone both at once. What these bastards who have ruined their own nations all need now in common is capital, and tons of it (preferably in the form of resources they are already expert at pillaging) which is why every one of them is dead-set on war at all costs, and why they keep spitting in the face of the most powerful BRICS, even though the wind keeps blowing their own spit back at them.

Which reminds me, you know who is actually making some progress and making life steadily better for their citizens in large numbers? Yeah, that would be the BRICS. They do not seek hegemony control and war, they want general advance and progress (same as we in the west used to, back when we were hopeful and future facing, before we all got so mockingbird-addled and fearful about our loss of status)

I saw an especially fantastic video the other day (link below) from a Canadian who moved to China twenty years ago, then came back to Canada again recently for a vacation with his kids. He passed-on a lovely joke which is popular over there. “In China you can’t change the party, but you can change the system. In the West, it’s the other way around.”

He also explained this with a great story. One of the things that shocked him about returning to Canada was the different attitude toward policing. Here, authority is everything (and power dynamics go one-way only). He was especially aghast to be reminded that many cops here wait in spots where they know a lot of minor but expensive violations occur, just so they can get a good haul of ticket revenue.

By contrast, he described a scene in his neighbourhood in China, where a funny turn and ambiguous signage made a lot of drivers technically wrong, without meaning to be. One day he saw an old lady yelling at a policeman who was writing a ticket for one such infraction, and she pointed out that the signs were contradictory and said “why don’t you guys go up the hill and warn drivers about the weird signs so they don’t make the mistake in the first place?” And what did the policeman do? He checked out the signs, realized she was right, let the guy go with no ticket, then called his guys together, went up the hill and started warning drivers before they made the mistake, to both help and respect them. Unimaginable here, right? But so clearly sane it is almost painful.

Now let me return to that quick reality review, because this part is very important.

After studying the history of the CIA for forty years plus I can say that the operations directorate (the guys with guns, rather than slide-rulers and foreign newspapers) does not seek out factions of high principle and love in foreign countries. (There are exceptions, I don’t think the Dali Lama is actually evil, just because he took their money for decades, he’s just a whole lot less than he pretends to be).

The point is, they didn’t look for a principled faction of army officers to take out Allende, they picked Pinochet, because he was powered by anger, greed, vengeance, all of their favourite things to enable. To the paranoid thinkers of the early days especially (but still deep in the culture) this combination which some might consider evidence of serious mental illness, represents a uniquely useful “Will to power”.

I honestly can’t figure Zelensky out – he sure as heck isn’t who BigMedia pretends he is, but I do believe that when he was elected, he actually did intend to sign Minsk II (which would have prevented this entire tragic war from even starting). He might be a tragic figure, had he not brought so much tragedy to his nation, by his (actor, after all) inability to understand how he was being manipulated.

Ukraine is in deep deep trouble. You have NO IDEA how many people have been killed. BigNews has never once reported anything about this war honestly (having learned they don’t have to anymore, from a quarter century of increasingly less questioned state hyper-violence, from Dems and ‘Pubs alike).

I say this having followed the events daily throughout. I just turned sixty, and under the new Ukrainian law just recently passed – I could still be forcibly drafted and sent to the front lines. Some people are so reluctant to go that they are actually killed by the gang of thugs sent to “recruit” them (no rumour).

BigNews says “Look at the map” because they have glued the death-count card face-down to the table.

Here’s the thing, caring about Ukraine means making sure there are enough Ukrainians left to rebuild the place after all this mess is over. The whole economy needs skilled labour, and yet the army is in such desperate straights that it is sending many skilled technicians with years of training to the front line to be used as cannon-fodder. If they respect battle-needed skills that little, what of the doctors and professors and skilled craftspeople? What of the musicians and writers and painters and filmmakers?

One of the most deliberately evil CIA ideas that I ever learned about was “The Phoenix Program”. We must recall that the American invasion of Vietnam was being run in the early days, by a bunch of think-tank whiz-kids who were sure that mathematical models could solve every problem that mattered.

One outgrowth of this thinking is when you trace a line from cause to effect, without ever stopping-in along the way at “Wait a minute though, is this perhaps completely freakin’ crazy?”

The image being historical, picture a slick-haired Nasa-glasses pocket-protector patriarch with a nauseating smirk, saying something like “Cause? Effect!” And with that smile dismissing all the violence in his idea as unimportant, compared to the oh so clever and wonderful goal.

The basis for the Phoenix Program was the (correct) understanding that many of the people in the American dominated south, who were most sympathetic to the revolutionary North, were well educated. When they added to that the fact that the well educated were also best at persuasion, and collecting taxes for the rebels, and helping set up distribution networks, they decided the problem could really be generalized to – the real problem with Vietnam is that their smartest people defy us. The solution? Kill them, in huge numbers. I mean it. They sent in teams of Army snipers (on special “sheep dipped” secondment) to kill people who they identified as natural cultural village and community leaders.

The skeptical will insist that they must have been far more discriminating than that, and selected only people who were in key and definitely hostile roles, or had special unique skills that were too helpful to “the enemy” to let that even be a question. But if that was the case we would not expect a death toll of over fifty thousand souls, just from this special program alone, would we?

Just try to imagine how you’d feel if someone came into your country and killed the smartest most involved and useful fifty thousand people they could find (or find some jealous mediocrity, to betray).

That’s what we really mean when we say “The Deep State” – people who do stuff like that – and then get promoted, so they can teach whole legions to do way way way more stuff like that.

Wouldn’t work at all, if our media kept all the cards face up for us, would it?

So now have a think for a minute about what Ukraine will do next.

“The Collective West” which now represents entire (pathetic) political parties around the wealthy (smug) western nations, composed of nothing but corrupted sell-out American vassal-states, thinks that Ukraine should fight more, lose many many many more people, even though they are already so desperate they are recruiting by force, and drafting creaky fogeys my age, to go be bombed or droned to death in trenches.

They also think Ukraine should be equipped to do more and more harm to Russia, and they get away with this assertion because BigMedia has convinced everyone that Russia has been fighting all-out, this whole time, which is one of the most dangerous lies the modern world has ever known.

There should be war-crimes trials – of British and American politicians, military industrialists, bankers and so-called “Warfighters” (all Phoenix-fuckers, sadly) – and Britain and America who together started this war so that they could grab the resources of both Ukraine and Russia, once they were too smashed to resist, and thus re-float their own completely bankrupt economies (without having to change the insane worker-pillaging policies which screwed them up in the first place) owe Ukraine FULL reparations.

There is another thing which Britain, France, Germany and Canada have in common, aside from disgusting servility to the American financial and military hegemonic empire, even against the clearest interests of their own citizens. Every single one of them is now saying that the beloved and caring welfare state which to so many defined the most basic virtues of the state, is now much too expensive.

At the exact same time as they are saying this, they are sending billions more, to kill even more Russians and of course Ukrainians, which will set back their recovery and harm their culture even more deeply than those western scumbag global manipulators already have (which is too much to count, without weeping).

What do BRICS states want? Peace, advance and prosperity for more and more as we go.

China is not trying to dominate the world, they just want to secure markets (same as we’ve done for a couple of centuries now). Unlike every variation of righteous western culture, from hard left to hard right, they are not supremacists – not a proselytizing civilization. They feel no need whatsoever to ‘convert’ us to their ‘moral vision.’

Russia is more complicated, but they were attacked by the west every bit as much as Ukraine was used to launch the attack. That they have stood up this well against the combined money arms surveillance strategy and planning of the entire collective west is incredible, and absolutely NONE of the modern think-tank death-nerds in the western establishment ever once thought they could or would hold up. That is to say, to our supremacist rulers, the Russians are most evil for blocking their re-capitalization scheme, which they were so sure would work – they built no other lifeboats! As they panic more, they point fingers and scream harder, but Russia is just working a problem they didn’t choose in a very serious way. Would that we in the West could just once even try that much engagement with reality.

Thing is, the USA did more damage to the civilian infrastructure of Iraq (even bombing water treatment facilities, for fucks-sakes) in the first WEEK of war, than Russia did to Ukraine in the first YEAR.

Not because they didn’t have weapons which could do that, but because the Russians don’t screw around for media impact or to terrify and harm civilians, they study problems and solve them, with the best techniques they have.

Now be clear. If Canada and England and Germany and France do send troops to Ukraine, we will absolutely force this to change from a “Special military operation” into a full-blown war against NATO. Now here’s the headline card which should be glued face-up in your mind, whenever you are thinking about all of this.

We would not only be fighting (and dying in vast numbers) for western banking supremacy, globally corrupting military industrial complex hegemony, and the still deeper corruption (by CIA) of the domestic politics of every one of our individual nations (which is bad enough). We would also lose.

We don’t know how to fight the kind of war that the Russian army is now the best in the world at fighting, at all. Our weapons are wrong, our tactics (forced on Ukraine again and again by our arrogant generals, at huge cost in lives to their so-sacrificed soldiers) are useless. As Col Douglas MacGregor pointed out in a recent interview, the short war between Israel and Iran so badly depleted American missile stocks that the great and mighty USA could only fight a conventional war for eight days before they would either have to surrender, or else go nuclear. EIGHT FUCKING DAYS.

Or are you all of a sudden able to imagine an American general surrendering? (Really?)

It’s a mess, of lies, of harm denied and emboldened, of vast impersonal systems run amuck. But for the first time in my lifetime, they are genuinely absolutely terrified that we will just stop playing their games, stop believing them when they trick us.

And I don’t know about you, but I smile when I see that fear at the heart of the most concentrated evil corrupting force at the very centre of our dear beautiful wounded and once vital west, and I raise it!

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Is it just me? Anyhow, I for one can’t help but love someone so optimistic about human intelligence and knowledge that they can still begin a sentence, “I mean, we all remember what happened to the Cathars...”

Just got out of the chair after writing this piece, then sat down to watch these two wise men say almost the exact same things I was going after, with way more scholarship and diplomatic experience under their belts – so cool when that happens! (no folks, I don’t make this stuff up. Believe me, I really really REALLY wish I did!)

Alestair Crooke and Glenn Diesen

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Here’s that (visually minimal, and yet casually profound) piece by a Canadian well-adapted to China, looking again at the country in which he was born – SUPERB!

Reverse Culture Shock – From Canada to China back to Canada

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Here’s that brilliant thinker about thinking – Eric Hoel – always smart insightful and stimulating.

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And here (again, ‘cause I’m a huge fan, can’t help it) is Tara Van Dijk, with her powerful thesis. It’s not about takedowns, folks, it’s about coming back to the big love team and joining-in again. It isn’t just that we miss you, we needed you every second of all of this.

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Here are a few late additional links (when it’s steam engine time, it steam engines)

I do understand that some of the ideas I offer are challenging, to say the least (kind of the point of any perception re-framing operation on a large scale, and wartime is always that and much worse) but I do NOT ask you to just take my word for anything. Just dig more, with a critical (but not snarky) mind.

In the case of this especially challenging piece I have, for unimprovable further backup

-Amb. Jack Matlock – the actual diplomat who negotiated the end of the cold war (yay, Matlock time!)

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Thank you so much Lt Col Davis!

And for anyone who thought I was exaggerating the precarious weakness of western armies, or making up the idea that none of the western powers could fight a conventional war for even two weeks at a modern tempo, without needing to resort to the use of nuclear weapons, why not listen to an ex military whistleblower of rare courage (and great contacts) discussing the subject and implications further.

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