Waltzing through the ruins of what used to be an American-led world with some fine tree-house porn

“The ‘defactualization’ of America.”

Ukraine as mirror.

25 APRIL—It is perfectly obvious by now, to anyone who cares to look, that mainstream media in America and the other Western powers are not reporting the Ukraine crisis accurately.

Let me try that another way: The government-supervised New York Times and the rest of the corporate-owned media on both sides of the Atlantic lie routinely to their readers and viewers as to why Russia intervened in Ukraine, the progress of its military operation, the conduct of Ukrainian forces, and America’s role in purposely provoking and prolonging this crisis.

So far as I know, this is the first war in modern history with no objective, principled coverage in mainstream media of day-to-day events and their context. None. It is morn-to-night propaganda, disinformation and lies of omission—most of it fashioned by the Nazi-infested Zelensky regime in Kiev and repeated uncritically as fact.

There is one thing worse than this degenerate state of affairs. It is the extent to which the media’s malpractice is perfectly fine to most Americans. Tell us what to think and believe no matter if it is true, they say, and we will think and believe it. Show us some pictures, for images are all.

There are larger implications to consider here. Critical as it is that we understand this conflict, Ukraine is a mirror in which we see ourselves as we have become. For more Americans than I wish were so, reality forms only in images. These Americans are no longer occupants of their own lives. Risking a paradox, what they take to be reality is detached from reality.

This majority — and it is almost certainly a majority — has no thoughts or views except those first verified through the machinery of manufactured images and “facts.” Television screens, the pages of purportedly authoritative newspapers, the air waves of government-funded radio stations—NPR, the BBC—serve to certify realities that do not have to be real, truths that do not have to be true.

This leaves us in a sad and very parlous place.

Sad: Is there some state more pitiful than having no genuine connection to one’s own thoughts, perceptions, experience—altogether to one’s life? If Americans are not a profoundly sad people behind all the smiles we see in advertising, idiotic comedy shows, and on Facebook, then I must be missing something.

Parlous: Over the course of some decades—from the mid–Cold War years, I would say—Americans have been rendered highly vulnerable to the manipulations of those who control the images through which most people have come to live. Anyone who has read a history of the 20th century knows where this can lead.

The two months that have passed since the Russian intervention on 24 February have been shocking on both these counts. The derelictions of the press and broadcasters are without precedent in my lifetime, and with Vietnam, the Iraq War, and the covert operation in Syria among the wreckage in the rearview mirror, this is saying something.

I will let the American public’s enthusiasm for the sinkhole that is Ukraine, the Azov Battalion, and the ridiculous posturing of President Volodymyr Zelensky, the comedian who is no longer funny, speak for itself.

Ten days into the Russian intervention, the propaganda coming out of Kiev was already so preposterous The New York Times felt compelled to publish a piece headlined, “In Ukraine’s Information War, a Blend of Fact and Fiction.” This was a baldly rendered apologia for the many “stories of questionable veracity,” as The Times put it, then in circulation. I do love The Times for its delicate phrasing when describing indelicate matters.

There was the “Ghost of Kiev” story, featuring an heroic fighter pilot who turned out to derive from a video game. There were the Snake Island heroes, 13 Ukrainian soldiers who held out to the death on some small speck in the Black Sea, except that it turned out they surrendered, though not before Zelensky awarded them posthumous medals of honor that were not posthumous.

After railing against disinformation for years, The Times wants us to know, disinformation is O.K. in Ukraine because the Ukrainians are our side and they are simply “boosting morale.”

We cannot say we weren’t warned. The Ghost of Kiev and Snake Island turn out now to be mere prelude, opening acts in the most extensive propaganda operation of the many I can recall.

There was the maternity ward the Russians supposedly bombed in Mariupol. And then the theater, and then the art school. All filled with huddling citizens the Russian air force cynically targeted because “this is genocide,” as the ever-intemperate Zelensky does not hesitate to assert.

All of this has been reported as fact in the Times and other major dailies and, of course, by the major broadcasters. There have been pictures. There have been videos, all very persuasive to the eye.

And then, as evidence mounts that these incidents were staged as propaganda to frame the Russians and draw NATO forces directly into the war, a silence worthy of a Catholic chapel descends. We read no more of the maternity ward that turned out to be an improvised Azov base, or the theater, where citizens were herded, photographed in raggedy blankets, and sent away. Ditto the art school: Nothing more on this since the initial reports began to collapse. No body counts, no mention of the fact that Russian jets did not fly over Mariupol on the days in question.

Before proceeding to Bucha, the greatest of the outrages to date, I must reproduce a quotation from that propaganda-is-O.K. piece The Times published in its 3 March editions. It is from a Twitter user who was distressed that it became public that the Ghost of Kiev turned out to be a ghost and the Snake Island heroes didn’t do much by way of holding the fort.

“Why can’t we just let people believe some things?” this thoughtful man or woman wanted to know. What is wrong, in other words, if thinking and believing nice things that aren’t true makes people feel better?

America the beautiful, or something like that.

Bucha is a suburb of 35,000 souls a few miles north of Kiev and one of the cities Russian forces began to evacuate on 29 March as peace talks in Istanbul progressed. Two days later the mayor, Anatoly Fedoruk, celebrated the city’s liberation in a selfie-speech to his citizenry. He made no mention of anything untoward in Bucha’s streets, backyards, or public spaces.

Four days later, 2 April, a special unit of the Ukrainian national police deployed to Bucha. And suddenly the place turns out to be a hellhole: bodies in the streets — 410, according to the Prosecutor General’s office in Kiev — evidence of atrocities galore, people bound and shot point blank. The whole nine, in short.

The outrage from Washington, London and Paris—“worldwide outrage,” this would be — was instant. No demand for an impartial inquiry, forensic inspections, or any such thing. No one asked why corpses left in the street for five days appeared to be fresh, or why the relatives of the dead left them there until Kiev’s commando unit arrived.

António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, was level-headed enough to state, “It is essential that an independent investigation leads to effective accountability.” This is the only sound position at this point. But we know from a long history how far SGs  at the U.N. get with this sort of talk.

In my read this is yet another of the false flags the Kiev regime flies almost by the day now. Paying-attention people will not miss the striking similarity between these incidents and the numerous put-up jobs that featured in Washington’s covert operation in Syria and the campaign of those famous “moderate rebels” who desperately wanted to draw the U.S. into the conflict.

As a matter of principle we must await evidence of what happened in Bucha, even as we know we are likely to see as much about events there as we have in Mariupol. We also know that to most people neither evidence nor its absence matters.

We have been told once again what to think and believe, and most of us will think and believe it.

We are to add this to various other “truths” now almost universally accepted: The Russian intervention had nothing to do with NATO expansion and was “unprovoked”—that favored term in the Biden regime. Ukrainian forces have pushed the Russians into retreat: not that the pressure on Kiev was a Russian diversionary tactic to keep Ukrainian forces away from Donbass where the fighting  is.

After the Pentagon Papers came out in 1971, Hannah Arendt published an essay in The New York Review of Books called “Lying in Politics.” In it she wrote of America’s slide into a sort of collective psychosis she termed “defactualization.” Facts are fragile, Arendt wrote, in that they tell no story in themselves. They can be assembled to mean whatever one wants them to mean. This leaves them vulnerable to the manipulations of storytellers.

“The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts,” Arendt explained in this remarkable piece of work, “that is, with matters which carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are; factual truths are never compellingly true.”

A dead body in a Ukrainian street, in other words, can be assigned a meaning that, once it is established, evidence to the contrary cannot be used to erase.

It is a half-century since Arendt published “Lying in Politics.” And it is to that time, the 1960s and 1970s, that we must trace the formation of what now amounts to America’s great bubble of pretend. The world as it is has mattered less and less since Arendt’s time, the world as we have wished it to be has mattered more and more.

Nine years before Arendt published her NYRB piece, Daniel Boorstin brought out The Image: Or, What happened to the American Dream, an unjustly neglected work. “I describe the world of our making,” he wrote, “how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.”

The press, as you can imagine, did not escape Boorstin’s scrutiny. “The reporter’s task,” he wrote memorably, “is to find a way to weave these threads of unreality into a fabric the reader will not recognize as entirely unreal.”

This is our condition. The Ukraine crisis is the mirror that reflects us as we are.

Now I will relate a peculiar coincidence, pertinent to our case.

A few weeks ago I took it upon myself to watch Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity, all four hours of it. This is the famously explosive documentary that forced the French to come to terms with the extent to which they had collaborated with the Nazis during the three years and some they occupied France.

This film has a special meaning for me. It came out in 1969, just as I arrived in Paris for university studies. France was in an uproar over Ophuls’ film. It was banned from broadcast on French television until 1981. I did not understand much of this at the time.

The Sorrow and the Pity shredded to pieces, relentlessly, unblinkingly, the national myth that the French had all been heroes of the resistance, or had aided it, or had in some way stood against the collaborationist Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain, hero of Verdun in World War I, capitulationist in World War II. This was nothing like the case.

Now I understand what the young student long ago could not quite grasp. The French simply could not face Ophuls’ unyielding exposure of who they had been. Ophuls had punctured the enduring bubble of pretend within which they had lived for 25 years after the 1945 victory in Europe.

People can live in these bubbles a very long time. The unreality within them can be very persuasive. The French finally emerged from their bubble. It was painful, a passage full of angst, but they were fortunate to have escaped.

Will we have our interim of sorrow, of pity, and emerge from our bubble the better for it? May we someday be so blest.

Courtesy of Consortium News.

There are numerous readers that are related to, aor giving care to loved ones with mental illnesses. I, MM, did so for my wife with bipolar disorder for twenty years and it was hell. It really was. 

Here is some help and assistance for others who may still be in this situation. -MM

Cute Chinese girl

Girl. Dog. Lots and lots of eggs. video 4MB

“able to reach the target along a programmed route thanks to the GPS-adjusted INS, independently find the target by flying up to it at an altitude of 3-5 meters. When reaching the target, the NSM maneuvers and deploys electronic interference. A highly sensitive thermal imager is used as a homing system, which independently determines the most vulnerable places of the target ship.”

“no longer seems to have a ship equipped with a long-range anti-aircraft missile system”.

 “Per NSM (if we accept this version), even with its Low Observability and GPS guidance under normal (that is sea up to state 5-6) and normal radio-permeability, even the Moskva’s old frigate radar would have seen those missiles in distances of tens of kilometers, somewhere between 15-20 for sure. 

NSM, as any NATO anti-shipping missile, are subsonic, with their velocity roughly 300 meters per second. 

That leaves, even in a 15 kilometer range, 45 seconds to detect track and develop a firing solution for whatever ‘on duty’ AD complex. More than enough reaction time.”

“it is impossible to hide the external impact of the anti-shipping missile – one will immediately know what hit the ship. Moreover, to hit and sink such a target as the Moskva one has to launch a salvo and not only two missiles, likely 3-4 at least. 

In this case, Russia would know who attacked Moskva. 

Does NATO know? 

I am positive this event has NATO written all over it, if it is not an internal sabotage which absolutely cannot be excluded at this stage. I am sure if Nebo was operational it would have seen the salvo.”

“If NATO was involved, I am sure we will see some retaliation, after all, as I am on record all the time, US bases in Middle East and elsewhere are nothing more than fat prestigious targets.”

Underline statement

One thing is certain.

If the Russian Ministry of Defense finds out that NATO did it, they will let loose all the dogs from Hell on NATO, as in “asymmetrical, lethal and fast”.

Geopolitical analysis Links

Alexander Mercouris of The Duran puts up daily reports on YouTube. He says that he is not a military analyst, but his geopolitical commentary is brilliant and he provides an excellent overview of the Ukraine conflict on a daily basis.

Russell “Texas” Bentley lives in Donetsk and has been serving alongside troops from the Donetsk People’s Republic. He provides excellent first-person coverage of the conflict. His YouTube channel was removed, allegedly for “too much violent content,” which is what happens in wars, but you can find him making appearances on other channels.

Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian journalist and geopolitical analyst who is featured in a number of publications including The Nation, Al Jazeera News, and many others.

John Pilger, an award-winning investigative journalist from Australia, exposes lies in the mainstream media and calls out the liars and hypocrites.

Chris Hedges is an award-winning journalist and war correspondent and was the host of “On Contact” on RT. He has also worked for The New York Times and The Washington Post in years past.

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector. He lived in Russia during the Perestroika years and helped with nuclear disarmament there. He makes frequent appearances as a guest on Regis Tremblay’s YouTube channel and others. Scott is also a member of VIPS.

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is a group of former intelligence professionals from agencies such as the CIA and NSA who are now calling for deep changes in those agencies and in US foreign policy. Several members of VIPS write or make appearances to discuss geopolitics. Among many others, VIPS includes:

Ray McGovern is a former 27-year veteran of the CIA who served as an analyst and prepared the President’s Daily Briefs and was a senior national security advisor to President Reagan. He co-founded VIPS in 2003 to expose how intelligence was being falsified to justify the war in Iraq. His commentary is always brilliant and often full of information that makes your jaw drop.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer who served undercover in Pakistan and later served two years in prison for exposing the CIA’s torture program.

Independent Publications
All of these are worth bookmarking and following regularly for coverage of the conflict in Ukraine as well as general geopolitics.

The Vineyard of the Saker
Moon of Alabama
CGTN
South Front
Strategic Culture
Zero Hedge
Orinoco Tribune
Consortium News
Global Research
The Grayzone
Black Agenda Report
Covert Action Magazine
The Greanville Post
Veterans Today
Pro Publica
Tom Dispatch
Oriental Review
Voltaire Network
Fort Russ
Off Guardian
Common Dreams
TeleSur
Russia Insider
World Socialist Web Site
New Eastern Outlook
Shadowproof
Mint Press News
21st Century Wire
Katehon
Signs of the Times (SOTT.NET)
Unlimited Hangout
News from Underground — Mark Crispin Miller
Clusterfuck Nation — James Howard Kunstler
Oneworld.Press — Andrew Korybko
The Corbett Report — James Corbett
Gold, Goats ‘n Guns — Tom Luongo

Geopolitical analysis from other countries
Venezuelanalysis — Venezuela
Press TV — Iran
Granma — Cuba
The Tricontinental — Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, India
UK Column — UK
Syrian-Arab News Agency (SANA) — Syria
Electronic Intifada — mostly news about Palestine
Asia Times — mostly news about China and South Asia
New Matilda — Australian independent
The Tyee — UK independent
The Expose — UK independent

The Russian perspective
Though these are not actually “indies” per se, it’s important to be aware of what is being said in Russian news. Whether or not you agree with what you hear is up to you. Most importantly, Russian news will make you aware of what you are not hearing in western news. Some of these sites are blocked in certain countries, so you might need to download a VPN to access them.

Russia Today (RT) is smeared in the west as “propaganda,” but if you actually watch RT you will realize that it provides excellent and balanced coverage. Certainly, it does have its own innate biases, as all news does, but it’s not difficult to separate the bias from the facts. RT provides excellent coverage of the conflict in Ukraine.

Sputnik Also heavily-smeared in the west, Sputnik provides excellent English-language coverage from a Russian perspective as well as a platform for many independent journalists from around the world.

TASS is a Russian news agency which has existed since Soviet times. Again, this is the Russian perspective, which is important to know.

Additional names worth following:
Caitlin Johnstone
Andrei Martyanov
Christopher C. Black
Gonzalo Lira
Michael Hudson
Garland Nixon
Richard Medhurst
Aaron Maté
George Galloway
Eva Bartlett
Giorgio Bianchi
Sonja van den Ende
Vanessa Beeley
Graham Philips
Maximilian Clarke
Patrick Lancaster
Jimmy Dore
Benjamin Norton
Lee Camp
Max Blumenthal
F. William Engdahl
Craig Murray
Earl Grey

And, though he is certainly not least, I saved him for last:

Oliver Stone, the producer of Ukraine on Fire and The Putin Interviews as well as The Untold History of the United States, all of which should be mandatory viewing for anyone delving into geopolitics. That is, if you can find them before they are scrubbed from the internet.

How to make home-made root beer

It’s a lot easier than you think.

Chinese pretty girl

video 3MB

10 Stocks US Politicians Bought Before Russia’s Attack on Ukraine

I guess they knew what they were doing…

Full article HERE

Gonzalo Lira SPEAKS OUT About His Arrest in Ukraine

Our man Flint – 1966 (Subt Esp)

We end this installment with a 1966 James Bond spoof. If you have time on your hands, and want to go “deep” on a vacation to another time; a very silly time, this movie is for you. Yes, the video quality is poor, but what do you really expect? It’s from a video tape.

Do you want more?