jonathanturley | We have previously discussed how comedians have been objecting that
woke activists are killing comedy. The complaint is that a group of
perpetually pissed off, humorless people are remaking the world in their
own image. It began with college campuses which comedians are now
saying are dead as venues
since you cannot safely make any joke that insults any group other than
white straight males or Christians or conservatives. Others have objected to hate speech laws limiting comedians, particularly after some comedians have been prosecuted for “malicious communications” or insulting groups or religious figures. Six out of ten students
view offensive jokes as hate speech. This week, however, activists
appear to have met their match in a legend of comedy who has opposed the
cutting of a scene from the movie The Life of Brian. No,
activists are not upset with the endless jokes about Italians,
Christians, and Jews. It is the scene involving a man who wants to
become a women and have a child. John Cleese is refusing to yield.
The scene shows Stan declaring “I want to be a woman… It’s my right
as a man. I want to have babies… It’s every man’s right to have babies
if he wants them.” After Cleese’s protest, the character snaps, “Don’t
you oppress me!”
Some reported that Cleese had agreed to cut the scene. However, Cleese tweeted out a correction of the “misreporting.”
SCMP | Russia’s interior ministry has put US Senator Lindsey Graham on a wanted list, Russian media reported on Monday, citing the ministry’s database.
In an edited video released by the Ukrainian president’s office of Graham’s meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, Graham was shown saying “the Russians are dying” and then saying US support was the “best money we’ve ever spent”.
Russia MFA Spokeswoman ZAKHAROVA: "“The Russians are dying... it’s the best money we’ve ever spent,” US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said with a pleased smirk during his meeting with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.
After Russia criticised the remarks, Ukraine released a full video of the meeting which showed the two remarks were not linked.
Russia’s Investigative Committee said on Sunday that it was opening a criminal probe into Graham’s comments. It did not specify what crime he was suspected of.
In Russia, the comments caused a swell of outrage. Before the criminal proceedings were initiated, the Russian leadership had already verbally criticised Graham.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov spoke of a “disgrace” that such senators represented the United States. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova declared that US investments had caused World War II and the Holocaust.
Now
the US was funding “the neo-Nazi Kiev regime,” Zakharova added,
reprising the Russian position that its full-scale invasion of Ukraine
in February last year was necessary to defeat Nazism.
Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev called Graham, a 67-year-old Republican, an old fool.
“The
old fool Senator Lindsey Graham said that the United States has never
spent money so successfully as on the murder of Russians,” Medvedev
said. “He shouldn’t have done that.”
Graham disputed Russian criticism of his support for Ukraine on Sunday, saying he had simply praised the spirit of Ukrainians in resisting a Russian invasion with assistance provided by Washington.
“As usual the Russia propaganda machine is hard at work,” Graham told Reuters in an emailed statement on Sunday, referring to Medvedev’s comments about his Kyiv visit, which he had used to urge Washington to send more weapons to Ukraine.
Graham said he had mentioned to Zelensky “that Ukraine has adopted the American mantra, ‘Live Free or Die”. It has been a good investment by the United States to help liberate Ukraine from Russian war criminals”.
thehill | Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) took aim at the defense spending proposed in the debt ceiling deal, saying on Sunday that adopting what he labeled as President Biden’s defense budget would be a “joke.”
“I want to raise the debt ceiling, it would be irresponsible not to
do it,” Graham told Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday.” “I want to
control spending, I’d like to have a smaller IRS, I’d like to clawback
the unused COVID money. And I know you can’t get to perfect, but what I
will not do is adopt the Biden defense budget and call it as success.”
Graham’s comments comes despite a deal with Biden being struck by fellow Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.)
who came to an agreement in principle late Saturday to raise the debt
ceiling for two years and apply new caps on federal spending. Graham
pushed back on McCarthy saying that the defense is fully funded,
reiterating that he will give Congress a “hard time” if they send the
proposed defense budget to the Senate.
“So the Biden defense budget was a joke before and if we adopted it
as Republicans will be doing a great disservice to the party of Ronald
Reagan. The biggest winner of the Biden defense budget is China,” he
said.
He added that he wants to raise the debt ceiling, but not at the
expense of the military. He said that he will not be “intimidated” by
June 5, the deadline set by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to avoid a
national default.
“We should raise the debt ceiling but we should not cripple the
military’s ability to defend the nation as a trade off, spending below
inflation is not fully funding the military,” he continued.
err.ee | "Whataboutism" is not just a feature of Russian rhetoric. The U.S.
invasion of Iraq universally undercut U.S. credibility and continues to
do so. For many critics of the United States, Iraq was the most recent
in a series of American sins stretching back to Vietnam and the
precursor of current events. Even though a tiny handful of states have
sided with Russia in successive UN resolutions in the General Assembly,
significant abstentions, including by China and India, signal
displeasure with the United States. As a result, the vital twin tasks of
restoring the prohibition against war and the use of force as the
critical cornerstone of the United Nations and international system, and
of defending Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, get lost
in a morass of skepticism and suspicions about the United States.
In
the so-called "Global South," and what I am loosely referring to as the
"Rest" (of the world), there is no sense of the U.S. as a virtuous
state. Perceptions of American hubris and hypocrisy are
widespread. Trust in the international system(s) that the U.S. helped
invent and has presided over since World War II is long gone. Elites
and populations in many of these countries believe that the system was
imposed on them at a time of weakness when they were only just securing
their independence. Even if elites and populations have generally
benefitted from pax Americana, they believe the United States and its
bloc of countries in the collective West have benefitted far more. For
them, this war is about protecting the West's benefits and hegemony, not
defending Ukraine.
Russian
false narratives about its invasion of Ukraine and about the U.S.
resonate and take root globally because they fall on this fertile soil.
Russia's disinformation seems more like information—it comports with
"the facts" as others seem them. Non-Western elites share the same
belief as some Western analysts that Russia was provoked or pushed into
war by the United States and NATO expansion. They resent the power of
the U.S. dollar and Washington's frequent punitive use of financial
sanctions. They were not consulted by the U.S. on this round of
sanctions against Russia. They see Western sanctions constraining their
energy and food supplies and pushing up prices. They blame Russia's
Black Sea blockade and deliberate disruption of global grain exports on
the United States—not on the actual perpetrator, Vladimir Putin. They
point out that no-one pushed to sanction the United States when it
invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, even though they were opposed to U.S.
intervention, so why should they step up now?
Countries in the
Global South's resistance to U.S. and European appeals for solidarity on
Ukraine are an open rebellion. This is a mutiny against what they see
as the collective West dominating the international discourse and
foisting its problems on everyone else, while brushing aside their
priorities on climate change compensation, economic development, and
debt relief. The Rest feel constantly marginalized in world affairs. Why
in fact are they labeled (as I am reflecting here in this speech) the
"Global South," having previously been called the Third World or the
Developing World? Why are they even the "Rest" of the world? They are
the world, representing 6.5 billion people. Our terminology reeks of
colonialism.
The
Cold War era non-aligned movement has reemerged if it ever went away.
At present, this is less a cohesive movement than a desire for distance,
to be left out of the European mess around Ukraine. But it is also a
very clear negative reaction to the American propensity for defining the
global order and forcing countries to take sides. As one Indian
interlocutor recently exclaimed about Ukraine: "this is your conflict! …
We have other pressing matters, our own issues … We are in our own
lands on our own sides … Where are you when things go wrong for us?"
Most
countries—including many in Europe—reject the current U.S. framing of a
new "Great Power Competition"—a geopolitical tug-of-war between the
United States and China. States and elites bristle at the U.S. idea that
"you are either with us or against us," or you are "on the right or
wrong side of history" in an epic struggle of democracies versus
autocracies. Few outside Europe accept this definition of the war in
Ukraine or the geopolitical stakes. They don't want to be assigned to
new blocs that are artificially imposed, and no-one wants to be caught
in a titanic clash between the United States and China. In contrast to
the U.S., as well as others like Japan, South Korea and India, most
countries do not see China as a direct military or security threat. They
may have serious qualms about China's rough economic and political
behavior and its blatant abuse of human rights, but they still see
China's value as a trading and investment partner for their future
development. The United States and the European Union don't offer
sufficient alternatives for countries to turn away from China, including
in the security realm—and even within Europe the sense of how much is
at stake for individual countries in the larger international system and
in relations with China varies.
Outside Europe, the interest in
new regional orders is more pronounced. In this context, the
BRICS—which, for its members offers an alternative to the G7 and the
G20—is now attractive to others. Nineteen countries, including Saudi
Arabia and Iran, purportedly showed interested in joining the
organization ahead of its recent April 2023 summit. Countries see the
BRICS (and other similar entities like the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization or SCO) as offering flexible diplomatic arrangements and
possible new strategic alliances as well as different trade
opportunities beyond the United States and Europe. BRICS members and
aspirants, however, have very disparate interests. We need to consider
these as we look ahead to finding a resolution to the war in Ukraine and
as we consider the kinds of structures and networks we will have to
deal with in the future.
I am going to run through some of the factors that are most relevant to thinking about Ukraine in the BRICS context.
pbs | Judy Woodruff: Ultimately, what was your assessment of Donald Trump as a person and as a president?
Fiona Hill: Well, as a person, he was extremely vulnerable to manipulation. And that became a problem for him as a president.
And what I mean by that is, he had a very fragile ego, and he was very susceptible to flattery, as well as taking massive offense, as we all saw, to any kind of criticism. So, on a personal level, that was also a pretty dangerous flaw.
When you're the president of the United States, it becomes a fatal flaw, because President Trump couldn't disassociate or disentangle himself from many of the issues that were the critical ones to address. So, when people were concerned about Russian influence in the United States election, he only thought about how that affected him, for example.
When people talked about the changes in the U.S. economic structure, he would always think, first of all, about how that might affect him and about how that might affect how people would vote for him. So, as a president, he was uniquely preoccupied with himself, not with the country.
And that, of course, made all of the problems of intelligence risks even higher, because the Russians or others from the outside could also manipulate those tendencies.
Judy Woodruff: So, if you can answer this, is the world safer or is it more dangerous because of his presidency?
Fiona Hill: Well, I think it's become more dangerous, because he was also extremely divisive, because President Trump was very focused on getting reelected, and he wasn't going to do that by appealing to all Americans.
He wanted to appeal to a particular base of people who were attracted by his personality or attracted by the things that he said he was going to do for them. And, of course, that's on different parts of the economic scale and the socioeconomic lower levels. It's the people — he said he was going to find them a job. He was going to fix the economy, so they would have jobs.
At the top end, among millionaires and billionaires, it was that he was going to protect their fortunes, from — being from those circles himself.
Judy Woodruff: What I find so striking is that you weren't so concerned about Donald Trump being controlled by Vladimir Putin, being influenced by Vladimir Putin, as you were concerned about the United States following on the same political path that you see Russia follow under Vladimir Putin.
Fiona Hill: That's absolutely right, because Russia went through a similar wrenching economic period and political periods in the 1990s.
So, Russia had its equivalent of a kind of the Great Recession, and, at the end of that decade, President Putin comes in and says, I'm going to fix everything. I'm going to make America great again, which, of course, is what President Trump said in 2016. And what Putin did was basically tie himself up into all of these politics.
He, of course, has extended his terms in office through amending the Constitution. He can essentially be president until 2036. And Donald Trump has also said that he wants to be president in perpetuity. He wouldn't accept that he had lost the 2020 election. He's saying he's going to come back, that he has a right to come back because he was never kicked out of office in the first place.
And he's been spreading lies about essentially his own role in all the events that we have seen over the last years, January 6, for example, and the storming of the Capitol.
Judy Woodruff: Do you believe our democracy is in danger as a result of this?
Fiona Hill: I do.
And I think that danger is increasing by the day, because we're constantly seeing other political figures trying to emulate Trump. We're now in a situation where lies and deceit have become the coin of governance.
Judy Woodruff: It's a disturbing conclusion in this book.
kunstler | Would it surprise you to learn that
children well beneath the age of puberty are not inclined to think about
sex at all? In a well-ordered society that recognizes children as
different from adults, they don’t. And if something sexual comes to
their attention, they are generally perplexed by it. Unless they’re born
into an era when adults are busy erasing boundaries, guard-rails, and
cultural inhibitions, in which case I must imagine that young children
exposed to, say, pornography in a chaotic household find it
traumatically sinister. So, why the gleeful celebration about
sexualizing children now?
I’ll tell you why: because we are living in a very badly-ordered society these days, a society in which anything goes and nothing matters,
which is a poor principle for civilization. It’s the same principle
that has people shitting all over the sidewalks of San Francisco,
looting Walgreens stores in broad daylight, pushing ineffective and
unsafe vaccines (and lying about it), and arresting people for thought
crimes. It’s a degenerate society. Morally bankrupt. Wicked.
You might ask, how did it get that way?
The concise answer is that a broken business model for daily life and a
collapsing economy have so disordered millions of minds that values are
seen as having no value. The scaffold for truth, beauty, honor,
dignity, courage, prudence, generosity, etc., folded some time ago, in
slow-motion, so we didn’t notice.
The keepers of our culture have
replaced it with a tacky system of ritual virtue-signaling fakery that
they don’t really believe in, that persists simply because the moral
vacuum it stands for provokes such unbearable anxiety. The main lesson
of the recent Durham Report — missed by even the most punctilious
observers — is that our country does not want to fix itself, indeed the
whole broken apparatus of fixing it is in the hands of the people who
broke it.
This epic negligence leaves the doors
wide open for the broad range of lower-order criminal mischief we’re
seeing expressed all around us. Now I will venture into shadowland.
There is a rumor floating around the Internet that this seemingly
coordinated campaign to sexualize children and initiate them into
marginal behaviors was started to soften up the public for forthcoming
shocking revelations contained in the much-whispered-about Jeffrey
Epstein archive of videos that show eminent international figures caught
in compromising sexual situations that include sexual acts with
children.
I wouldn’t commit to saying there’s
anything to that, but there have been an awful lot of signs and portents
pointing in that direction, and so I also wouldn’t dismiss it
altogether. There can be little doubt that the videos exist, or did
exist — we know that Epstein’s various mansions were rigged to the eaves
with cameras, and that he was an “asset” of more than one nation’s
intel service trafficking in blackmail — and I’d expect that there are
at least a few copies of the videos out there, just like there are many copies of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard-drive out there.
There’s something definitely
programmatic about the way the drag queens were rolled out into the
kiddie korners the past year. It doesn’t feel organic, shall we say, but
rather directed, like a sinister grand opera. And the effort
to enlist and initiate schoolchildren into a psychodrama of hyperbolic
sexual confusion looks absolutely orchestrated.
What we might be seeing is the
convergence of a world-beating political scandal with an economy-killing
financial crisis that will destroy the entire post-WW2 armature of
money and credit. That event would usher in a period of appalling
turbulence in our everyday life, severing supply chains, killing
businesses, and disturbing every imaginable social arrangement as well
as public order. If that comes to pass, and it’s looking likely, then
that will be the last we hear about personal pronouns and trans
influencers for a thousand years.
NYTimes | Ever since Justin, a 15-year-old high school freshman, tried marijuana on his birthday two years ago, he has smoked almost every day, several times a day, he said.
“If I smoke a blunt, after that blunt I’m going to be chill,” he said on a recent morning at a corner deli near his school, the Bronx Design and Construction Academy. “I’m not going to be stressing about nothing at all.”
Another boy came by and flashed two glass tubes of smokable flower. More students were smoking across the street in a doorway and on a stoop. On another corner, a smoke shop frequented by children in backpacks and uniforms opened about half an hour before the first bell.
While it has long been common for some teens to smoke marijuana, teachers and students say that more and younger students are smoking throughout the day and at school.
There is little definitive data on marijuana use among children, and what information is available can sometimes offer a contradictory picture. Disciplinary data from the city education department reflects a 10 percent increase in alcohol- and drug-related offenses this year compared to 2019. But a city survey found teen cannabis use had declined in 2021, the same year that the state legalized marijuana for recreational use, to the lowest level recorded since the question was added to the survey in 1997.
Still, two dozen students and teachers at public, private and charter schools across the city said in interviews that some classrooms were in disarray as more pupils showed up late and high.
They said that with the proliferation of unlicensed smoke shops and the availability of vape pens and edible products, cannabis has never been more accessible and inconspicuous. They relayed accounts of students taking hits of vaping pens when teachers turned their backs, of bathrooms and stairwells becoming smoking lounges and of the smell of weed wafting through school hallways.
“It really feels like this unstoppable tide that we’re futilely trying to suppress,” said America Billy, 44, who has been teaching at a public high school in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, for over a decade. She said it was hard to know whether a student was out of it because of a lack of sleep, family stress or drugs.
In December, a former principal, April McKoy, described in a letter how students’ cannabis use had spiraled out of control during her last two years in charge of City Polytechnic High School of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology in Brooklyn.
“It felt like more and more were using without knowing the source, impact or consequences of early marijuana use,” Ms. McKoy said in the letter, adding that students had returned after the pandemic “sad, isolated and trying to find ways to cope.”
Freshmen were selling cannabis to each other, and she said she witnessed a smoke shop sell edibles to 14-year-olds with police officers nearby. On another occasion, she sent four students to the hospital because they were sickened from contaminated edibles, she said.
The proliferation of unlicensed smoke shops, which the city says may number as many as 1,500, could be one factor driving marijuana use among children, officials said.
Gale Brewer, a city councilwoman, said that though she had counted fewer than 10 of them in her district on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in September, there were 64 by March. Several school administrators have complained to her about merchants selling joints and infused candies as well as high-potency concentrates and vapes to students.
“We were all saying we need social workers, we need psychologists, we need mental health support in the schools,” she said. But dealing with smoke shops selling to children “was not on the list.”
richardhanania |Ron: That’s very interesting, Marius. But I’d
like to go back to the strangeness of this group and their complaints.
When you’re talking about crime and the destruction of our great cities,
aren’t you really talking about, well, since you like the euphemism of
“Foundational American,” I’ll call them “1619 Americans”…
Brahmin:
In a way, yes, but preserving the Foundational American stock is
important. Whenever there is diversity, you see division, chaos,
bloodshed. That’s the rule here, that’s the rule everywhere. Have you
ever read Precambrian Pederast? He taught us about all that is wrong
with this disgusting era. Ethnic homogeneity must be preserved, above
all else.
Ron: That certainly
doesn’t seem to be the rule here. Today, I live in the Bay Area.
California is a majority-minority state. And yet we see very little of
the violence you fear. In 1970, California was 76% white. It’s now 35%
white. You know what’s happened to the murder rate in that time? It’s
been cut by two-thirds! As far as racial strife, you may have seen
recent news stories about the California reparations commission and San
Francisco wanting to offer blacks ungodly amounts of money to compensate
them for past and present racism. The Bay Area is like 8% black,
they’re the smallest population of the major American “races.” Yet if
you follow racial issues in the state, if you went into a coma in the
late 1960s and woke up in 2020, you would be amazed at how little had
changed. Well, pronouns and that stuff would be new. But on race, you
have income and test score disparities, crime that we can’t be honest
about, so-called “police brutality.” Only if anything, California is a
lot more peaceful due to the demographic change you all decry so much…
Allison: But they vote, Ron! Who gave us these crazy policies?
Ron: I
won’t dispute that Hispanic and Asian immigrants tend to vote Democrat.
But look at it another way. Republicans in 2016 nominated the guy whose
main message was “Mexicans are rapists.” In 2020, he still won 40% of
them. Can you imagine if Republicans could actually pretend to like
these people? Italians ended up pretty evenly divided between the two
parties, and even Jews are headed in the conservative direction thanks
to differential birth rates. I see no reason why there’s some impossible
barrier to overcome between Mestizos and white Americans. I mean look
at this room…
[In addition to the clearly swarthy Romero
and Brahmin, at least a third of the room looks to be of either Hispanic
or South Asian descent.]
Ron: You doubt
that you can have a multiracial country? You all have built a
multiracial movement based on the idea of maintaining racial purity.
Don’t check your phones, you might see another alert of a Neo-Nazi
Mexican mass shooter, there have been a few of those lately, and a
right-wing Indian just tried to kill Biden I believe. Remember not that
long ago when there was a mass shooting, and everyone would either hope
it was a right-wing white male or a Muslim, depending on their politics?
Well, now we have the brown white supremacist, which right-wingers on
Twitter tell me can’t possibly exist, even though it’s like half their
movement now.
When was the last time you even heard of
Muslim terrorism? Is a brown mass shooter these days more likely to be a
Muslim extremist or someone whose brain has been melted by the online
right? This question would’ve been laughable a few years ago, and I
guess it’s still laughable now, but for a different reason.
And
the funniest part is that I suspect that all of this results from a fear
of talking about what is arguably the main issue at the heart of the
American experiment. That’s right, it’s the weird, sadomasochistic
relationship between whites and blacks that was so well dramatized by
Tom Wolfe when he was alive. Oh sure, you guys talk about race and
crime. But it seems like you need your “racism” to be more inclusive.
You need to pretend to exclude everyone, because it seems more
consistent with universalist principles. “We just want to preserve the
demographic majority, the same right that anyone else has. Oh, it’s not
any particular group that’s the problem, it’s the principle of
diversity. Can’t we just have a world where every nation is homogenous
to the greatest extent possible and then we can all get along?”
[At this point I burst out laughing]
Me: Ron, so wait, what you’re saying
is that when we see a Klansman walking around in a hood and screaming
about defending the white race, we should pity him for how much his mind
has been captured by political correctness? That’s quite a funny image,
in fact, it alone has made my night here worthwhile.
Ron:
Indeed, Richard, that is what I’m saying. And these poor kids worried
about the future of the American right, are digging their own grave,
because, guess what? The die has been cast, and we’re headed to a
non-white majority. And so conservatism is shaping up to be a movement
that represents a coalition of overweight rural whites from left behind
areas of the country and short Mestizos, all crying about the passing of
whiteness and also about how much the country sucks because everyone is
so fat. This probably isn’t a winning message. Of course, there’s
overwhelming public support for clamping down on crime and making
institutions color-blind, or, as you would put it, going after civil
rights law. This is what turned whites towards the Republican Party in
the first place, or the disgusting ways in which white elites have let
our cities be destroyed and gone to war with every American principle —
merit, freedom of speech, rule of law, you name it — in the name of
anti-racism.
But instead of focusing on those things and
fixing the country, the American right has decided to get distracted by
doubling down on becoming a movement of brown white nationalists, in a
country where the majority of children born are already non-white.
[At
this point, I can feel the energy go out of the room. A few of the
attendees pick at one or another of Ron’s points, but they’re clearly
deflated and realize that he has given them a lot to think about. An
hour and a half later, he is driving me home.]
Me: Wow,
Ron, that was something else. I really wish you would’ve elaborated on
the vaccine thing a little bit more. Their desire to “own the libs” has
really swallowed every other part of their brain, even though they like
to think they’re more sophisticated than regular conservatives, and I
appreciated you recently taking apart some of the most ridiculous claims
of the anti-vaxxers.
Ron: Thank you, Richard. We’ll have to do this again some time.
Me: Oh yeah, I had a lot of fun. What do you think you should try to convince people of next time?
Ron: I believe that covid-19 has a non-zoonotic origin.
Me:
So lab leak? That’s it? That’s very mainstream at this point, it’s
impossible to find a right-winger who doesn’t believe that this was all
the fault of the Chinese.
Ron: Who said anything about the Chinese?
Me: Wait,
is this another one of your anti-American conspiracy theories? You’re
now going to tell me that the US government accidentally inflicted covid
on the world?
Ron: Who said anything about it being an accident?
Me:
Please stop Ron, there are only so many mind-blowing ideas I can digest
in one night. Let’s talk about the pleasant California weather for the
rest of our trip, and how nice it is to live in a state with such
natural beauty and low levels of violent crime.
iu.edu |The omission of clothing from historians’ discussion of the effect of Nazi propaganda is not by accident. It was Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ Reich Minister of Propaganda, who famously said, “Propaganda becomes ineffective the moment we become aware of it.” Thepower in the uniform therein lies in its silence. The uniform is not a poster, a film, or a speech, but a silent, omnipresent actor that, like these media, is a piece of the Nazi propaganda machine. Goebbels’ quote perfectly encapsulates the propagandistic impact of the uniforms worn during the time of the Third Reich. Consequently, Nazi dress and regalia are not the most talked about aspects of the Nazis’ propaganda machine, but more than likely, the least touched upon.
Regardless of silence and scarcity in conversation however, Nazi uniforms may have been the most effective for the very reason that Goebbels outlined: German citizens, enemies of the Nazi regime and foreigners alike were unaware that the Nazis they viewed were walking advertisements for the Reich. These uniforms may have been mute, but they constantly operated in service of the regime through their utilisation of both style and menace.
Uniforms, which have come to be known as one of the most visually-striking elements of Nazi aesthetics, served as one of the principal vectors of propaganda in the Third Reich. In biology, a vector is an organism, typically of the biting sort, that transfers a disease from one being to another– Nazi uniforms did just that. However, instead of fleas transferring the plague, the Nazis used clothing to present propaganda that conveyed their message of racial dominance and militarism without uttering a word. Uniforms operated as an arm of the Nazi ideals of Volksgemeinschaft, in English, a people’s community andGleichschaltung, the idea of bringing everything in line with the values of national socialism. The Nazi uniform aided in the destruction of personal identity and smoothed out the differences between German citizens thereby constructing both an egalitarian and passive society.
The main question of this paper is: how did the Nazi Party use its uniforms to exude elegance whilst eliciting fear in order to further its ideology into the minds of wearers, viewers and enemies? In other words, how was the uniform a piece of propaganda? I will argue that the Nazis used uniforms to produce a fashionable aesthetic to serve as another arm of the Third Reich’s propaganda machine– specifically, through the stark uniform that so occupies our memory of the image of the Nazis. I will look at the structure and implementation of the Nazi uniform and how it pertained to the promotion of the ideals of the Reich. By then using primary sources from vantage points, the perception and effect of these uniforms can be analysed and their propagandistic effect better understood.
This paper arises out of my own interests in the ability fashion to speak. A natural reaction of impressedness from seeing images of Nazi men clad in strong and svelte clothing forced me to recognise this regalia as different from ordinary uniforms. In other words these were the propagandistic impacts of Nazi fashion, generated from viewing images of Nazi elites and soldiers, felt decades after their design to have just that effect. I was interested in separating the crimes of the Third Reich and understanding how the regime’s look could be evil, investigating whether the fear we associate with the Nazi uniform was an intention in design, or a function of the crimes committed by the Nazis. Did the Nazi uniform have a unique look for its time? Would an allied uniform look ‘evil’ if it was placed into the context of crimes such as the Holocaust? This question can be answered through the juxtaposition of the uniform against those of concurrent, non-German armies and peoples. Isolating an intention to create a uniform that functioned in such a multifaceted way spurred an interest within me to explore the possible depth of the Nazi uniform.
What I believe makes this paper special is that it explores an important and relevant topic: the usage of inanimate and non-vocal (through sound, text or image) techniques to disseminate information. My hope is that this paper will enlighten the reader to look more critically at the ability of potential actors at play in the political sphere. When it comes to gaining and maintaining power, anything can be in service of a regime– including fashion.
johnganz | A little while ago, I came up with the idea that that the difference
between Italian Fascism and German Nazism was that Fascism essentially
had “Jock-Douche” vibes while Nazism had “Creep-Loser” vibes. Now, I’m
going to try to develop this fancy into a full-blown (or rather,
half-baked) theory.
“But, John, this is absurd,” you might
immediately object, “How can you reduce an entire political ideology to
categories drawn from American high school movies.” Well, try to think
of them as ideal-types like the sociologist Max
Weber developed. Here’s what Weber wrote of his ideal-type methodology:
“An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more
points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete,
more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual
phenomena, which are arranged according to those onesidedly emphasized
viewpoints into a unified analytical construct...” That is to say, they
are sort of made up. Still, I believe that this theory, while it does
not pretend to be a definitive explanation, may help to illuminate
aspects of the far right today.
The Categories Considered in their Ideal-Typical Formation
First,
some preliminary definitions. The Jock-Douche ideal-type proceeds in
the world with confidence and the presumption of immediate physical
domination, while the Creep-Loser ideal-type has been thwarted some way
and is therefore reflective, and is resentful, a plotter, a schemer, and
a fantasist dreaming up grand historical vistas of triumph or doom.
Again, keep in mind these are purely ideal-types. Rarely does an
individual totally embody either one or the other idea. One could
speculate that in many cases the superficial confidence of the
Jock-Douche type is merely psychological compensation for the feelings
of inadequacy of the Creep-Loser. On the converse, the intellectual
limitations of the Jock-Douche type leads to an imaginative perspective
that cannot escape the relatively crude thought-world of Nerd-dom.
Considered from either an existential or psychoanalytic lens, it seems
likely that these two are actual facets of single complex or form of
being-in-the-world, manifested in different ways under different
circumstances. Fascism as its own ideal-type can be understood as a
synthesis between the Jock-Douche and the Creep-Loser: a cult of sheer
physical of strength and action wedded to a wounded and brooding
consciousness of impotence and humiliation.
I should address the
specifically national character of the division proposed here, that
Italian Fascism and German Nazism represent two different affective
dimensions of the fascist consciousness or self. Again, this is purely
ideal-typical: both movements and nationalities naturally contain
examples of the opposite tendency, but for the sake of illustration it
is convenient to divide them in this manner. I also believe one finds
that these two different spirits do actually predominate more or less in
these respective national movements. Now, one might object here that
making a division according to national origin recapitulates the very
sort of national or even racial essentialism of fascist ideology itself,
and that I am stereotyping Italians as impulsive, hot-blooded, and
unintellectual while painting Germans, from “the land of poets and
thinkers,” as either speculative dreamers or ratiocinators. I would just
say to that to a large degree that these different modes of behavior
and thinking are representations and projections of fascists’ own
fantasies about their national qualities.
The Categories Expressed in Historical Examples
The
most obvious representation of the Jock-Douche and Creep-Loser duality
is in the leadership of the respective movements: Benito Mussolini vs.
Adolf Hitler. Mussolini was socially successful, a popular and esteemed
figure in the Italian socialist party. In fact, his turn to nationalism
and war-mongering can be considered as a result of the desire for
continued popularity, or even identification with popular enthusiasm as
such, when his initial pacifist line as editor of the socialist
newspaper failed to capture the national imagination.
The
turn to war-making and nationalism also appealed to Mussolini’s belief
in a mystique of violence and action, leavened by his interest in
Georges Sorel’s irrationalism and political vitalism. Here’s how a
fellow socialist described him in 1914: “Nothing matters to him now
except to win. What matters is to triumph over timidity, fear and
prudence which impede and arrest the revolutionary advance of the
proletariat.” And Mussolini adulated the proletariat, not so much for
its Marxist-assigned historical role of overthrowing the capitalist mode
of production, but for its heroism, masculinity and toughness.
Mussolini’s he-man histrionics as fascist leader, the jaw-jutting and
arm crossing etc. project this pure masculinity. And although he was an
intellectual, his statements reflect a proud and defiant
anti-intellectualism. Speaking of an anti-fascist newspaper, Mussolini
famously remarked, “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our programme? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” In other words, bullying brought to the level of political theory.
On
the other hand, Hitler was a loser. A marginal type in post-war Munich,
he was a failure at his chosen vocation as artist. In an
unintentionally revealing passage in Mein Kampf, Hitler
describes how he was bullied and chased away from a construction job by
union organizers. The fact this probably never happened in reality is
all the more revealing: it reveals an essential fantasy at play. Mein Kampf itself
is the ranting and grandiose fantasies of an embittered man, which
provided a good deal of its rhetorical appeal to other members of his
pseudo-intellectual milieu, the “intellectual precariat of bohemians and
academic dropouts, throwing together various elements that they have
found in the neurotic overproduction of private mythologies” as Albert
Koschorke describes them in his essay on Mein Kampf.
Even
the most casual observer of Nazism has no doubt noted the absurd
difference in Hitler’s actual meager appearance and silly histrionics
with his professed Aryan ideal. This feature extends across the Nazi
leadership, and is especially notable in the figure of Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler’s unassuming appearance betrays his essential difference from
the mob figures of the early Nazi party, men like the predatory bully
Ernst Röhm. He was a petit bourgeois philistine preoccupied with eugenic
fantasies drawn from his time as a chicken farmer. He also believed
himself to be the reincarnation of an ancient Aryan king.
consentfactory | GloboCap, Inc. and its innumerable subsidiaries, agents, assigns,
political puppets, media goons, and other loyal minions are desperately
endeavoring to enshrine the official Covid-19 narrative in the annals of
“history.” According to new figures from the WHO, “almost 15 million excess deaths” (or “a total of 336.8 million lost life-years”) had been caused by the virus by the end of 2021, none of which had anything to do with ventilators, or the classification of anyone who died of anything (i.e., cancer, heart disease, an auto accident, etc.) who had also tested positive as a “Covid death.”
When the globalist establishment realize they do not control the narrative anymore........ pic.twitter.com/o30WQpRmyt
Previously perfectly healthy young people are dropping dead left and
right from heart attacks and other “natural” (or “undisclosed”) causes
that have nothing to do with the experimental “vaccines” that they did
not need but were coerced into taking, which saved millions or 100 million lives. The masks that didn’t work worked, except that they didn’t, but that was only if you studied how they worked in reality.
Being locked down, forced to wear medical-looking masks, gaslighted and
terrorized by official propaganda, bullied, segregated, censored,
demonized, and otherwise systematically tortured, was actually good for people’s mental health,
except for “people with existing mental health conditions, and
children, and people with disabilities, and adolescents, and people
without financial or social security nets.”
Meanwhile, cognitively dissonant New Normals are taking to the
Internet to claim that no one knew better at the time, and that, OK,
sure, “mistakes were made,” but if we “science-denying conspiracy
theorists,” who they censored, demonized, and systematically persecuted
for over two years, had just spoken up …
I could go on, but you get the picture … or, rather, you either do or
you don’t. Because it’s not just the folks at GloboCap, Inc. that are
fanatically waging this War on Reality. Everybody and their brother is
trying to ram their “reality” down everyone’s throat. You got the
“Viruses Do Not Exist” people. You got the “There Are No Neo-Nazis in
Ukraine” people. The “Putin Is Our Savior” people. The Vote Blue Cult.
The Multipolar people. The Transgendered People’s Army. The Doomsday
Clock Hucksters. The Folks Who Still Listen to NPR. The Insurrection
Truthers. The Insurrection Deniers. The 9/11 Truthers. The Moon-Landing
Truthers. The Cult of Trump. The Church of Russiagate. The Rothschild
Obsessives. The Anti-Racism Racists. The Anti-Anti-Semitism
Anti-Semites. The Mass Formation Movement. The Cult of Marx. The Cult of
Capital. The Climate Change Fanatics. The Musk Cult. The list goes on
and on.
Historically, we humans have not done very well in such psychotic
ontological environments. When “reality” is shattered into a thousand
little shards, and things fall apart, and the center does not hold, we
tend to get rather scared, and confused, and agitated. We start to
panic. We try to put “reality” back together again. This does not work.
This worsens our panic. We start looking around for a new “reality
WaPo | As
government attorneys unravel Jeffrey Epstein’s complex finances and sex
trafficking ring, officials are training their focus on other
high-wealth individuals with whom the disgraced financier may have done
business.
One
of the most closely watched cases comes from the U.S. Virgin Islands,
where Epstein maintained a residence, as it pursues a lawsuit against
JPMorgan Chase, Epstein’s bank of 15 years. The suit alleges that the
institution profited from keeping Epstein on as a client and was
complicit in funding his long history of abuse and child sex
trafficking.
Deutsche Bank, where Epstein took much of his wealth after leaving JPMorgan in 2013, has already settled
a similar case for $75 million. But legal observers say the claims
against JPMorgan are far more sweeping than those against Deutsche Bank,
covering a period when his trafficking operation was more robust and
sophisticated.
Here are the figures surrounding the JPMorgan-Epstein case, and what you need to know about them.
theautomaticearth | In Bakhmut/Artyomovsk, all of NATO, all 31 member nations, were
defeated by a restaurant owner and a bunch of convicts, is how I saw
someone describe it. That of course caricatures the situation somewhat
(Wagner is well-organized), but it’s not that far off. And that spells a
serious problem for NATO. All of those 31 members may have lots of
control over their media, but in the end you can’t endlessly deny being
defeated.
So what will NATO do now? They will double down, and then again. And
at the end of the “doubling down road” lie nuclear weapons. Not Russian
nukes, because as my friend Wayne wrote the other day, their
high-precision hypersonic missiles make nukes look crude and primitive,
Middle Ages territory. But NATO/US never developed such weapons. They
spent 10+ times as much money on weapons, still do, and -comparatively –
ended up with bows and arrows.
Nuclear bombs are good only to create widespread panic and
destruction. But that includes your own destruction, because of Mutually
Assured Destruction protocols. Which also go back almost as far as the
bow and arrow. If you fire a nuclear missile, one very much like it will
land on your head a few minutes later. End of story, end of you.
US/NATO, the “collective west”, the hegemon, has lost. And has missed
the moment when that occurred. Because hegemon equals hubris. Look at
what they’ve all still been saying, and you notice they can’t see, and
can’t acknowledge, that -and how- the world has changed. Not just this
weekend, and the 9 months before, in Artyomovsk. It’s the entire story
of Ukraine: it illustrates how the West “lost it”.
The US plotted a coup and moved NATO’s borders east, and Russia
reacted exactly how they said they would. No nukes, no nazis, no NATO.
They got the last two, and know they can expect the first too. But still
the west maintains Russia’s special operation was entirely unprovoked.
Look, they’re not even listening anymore. They would like to negotiate
and end all this, but negotiate about what? Putting AZOV back on the
borders of the Donbass, so they can kill more Russians there? Not going
to happen.
It’s not only about weaponry, though that plays a major role: the
hegemon can no longer make its demands based on military might. It’s
been surpassed. Nor can it make demands based on the dollar’s reserve
currency status, and it caused that itself. Weaponization of the
currency has backfired to the extent that de-dollarization has become a
process that can no longer be halted.
The moment that Saudi prince MbS turned his back on “Joe Biden” is a
milestone. Because once he did that, it was obvious many would follow.
In central Asia, if you are Kazachstan or Uzbekistan, why on earth would
you opt to go with G7/US/NATO instead of BRICS? Why go with the power
that is waning, and not the one in ascendancy? Russia is your biggest
neighbor, strongly connected to China which is building its BRI network
in your region, and the nearby Arab states are about to join that
network. Why would you link yourself to the G7? When you know all your
neighbors do not?
Then there are the voices that say the US will push for a bigger and
wider war, perhaps including American troops. First, because NATO is
losing, and second, because it could mean American boots on the ground,
and presidents don’t lose elections in wartime. I’ve said before, I
would expect them to go with Polish troops first, possibly on Polish
territory too. But the Polish don’t appear all that eager anymore. And
neither would any other European NATO country. German and French and
Dutch troops are in no shape for war, and in the US over 70% of
potential troops are grossly overweight and/or handicapped in some other
way.
Ukraine had perhaps the best boots on the ground force in Europe,
financed and trained since 2014 by NATO, and they lost to a caterer and a
loose group of hired hands. You’re not going to win that. Your only
option is long distance weapons, missiles, planes, you name it. But NATO
has no advantage in that over Russia. To put it mildly.
The sole thing that’s in your favor is that Russia doesn’t seek to
destroy you. They want to live in peace and trade with you. Same thing
for China. NATO equals unipolar. But the world has moved towards
multipolar. Ergo, NATO is obsolete. Ukraine will never reconquer its
“lost” territories, and Zelensky will move to some property in Italy or
Florida, never to be heard from again, unless perhaps in his obituary.
The deaths of some 300,000 of his countrymen will be on his conscience.
But also on that of all the “leaders” who have sent their second-hand
armory to Kiev. They are just as responsible for all those deaths. The
world has changed a lot in the past few years, and ignorance is no
excuse if you are a “leader”, or a “Joe Biden”. Not even if you’re
“just” a voter or reader. Those deaths will be on your head when you go
see St. Peter at the gate.
PS: Don’t be surprised if “Joe Biden” sends US boots on the ground
anyway. No hegemon has ever given up power lightly. That part of the
road is yours, US and EU voters. You may have to fill up the streets
like you’ve never seen. The rest, the majority, of the world will be
waiting to see if you do or not. They’re prepared for either of the two
options.
AmericanConservative | Until the fighting begins, national military
strategy developed in peacetime shapes thinking about warfare and its
objectives. Then the fighting creates a new logic of its own. Strategy
is adjusted. Objectives change. The battle for Bakhmut illustrates this
point very well.
When General Sergey Vladimirovich Surovikin,
commander of Russian aerospace forces, assumed command of the Russian
military in the Ukrainian theater last year, President Vladimir Putin
and his senior military advisors concluded that their original
assumptions about the war were wrong. Washington had proved incurably
hostile to Moscow’s offers to negotiate, and the ground force Moscow had
committed to compel Kiev to negotiate had proved too small.
Surovikin was given wide latitude to streamline command relationships
and reorganize the theater. Most importantly, Surovikin was also given
the freedom of action to implement a defensive strategy that maximized
the use of stand-off attack or strike systems while Russian ground
forces expanded in size and striking power. The Bakhmut “Meatgrinder” was the result.
When it became clear that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and
his government regarded Bakhmut as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance to
Russian military power, Surovikin turned Bakhmut into the graveyard of
Ukrainian military power. From the fall of 2022 onward, Surovikin
exploited Zalenskiy’s obsession with Bakhmut to engage in a bloody
tug-of-war for control of the city. As a result, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers died in Bakhmut and many more were wounded.
Surovkin’s performance is reminiscent of another Russian military officer: General Aleksei Antonov.
As the first deputy chief of the Soviet general staff, Surovikin was,
in Western parlance, the director of strategic planning. When Stalin
demanded a new summer offensive in a May 1943 meeting, Antonov, the son
and grandson of imperial Russian army officers, argued for a defensive
strategy. Antonov insisted that Hitler, if allowed, would inevitably
attack the Soviet defenses in the Kursk salient and waste German
resources doing so.
Stalin, like Hitler, believed that wars were won with offensive action, not defensive operations.
Stalin was unmoved by Soviet losses. Antonov presented his arguments
for the defensive strategy in a climate of fear, knowing that
contradicting Stalin could cost him his life. To the surprise of
Marshals Aleksandr Vasilevsky and Georgy Zhukov, who were present at the
meeting, Stalin relented and approved Antonov’s operational concept.
The rest, as historians say, is history.
If President Putin and his senior military leaders wanted outside
evidence for Surovikin’s strategic success in Bakhmut, a Western
admission appears to provide it: Washington and her European allies seem to think that a frozen conflict—in
which fighting pauses but neither side is victorious, nor does either
side agree that the war is officially over—could be the most politically
palatable long-term outcome for NATO. In other words, Zelensky’s supporters no longer believe in the myth of Ukrainian victory.
The question on everyone’s mind is, what’s next?
In Washington, conventional wisdom dictates that Ukrainian forces
launch a counteroffensive to retake Southern Ukraine. Of course,
conventional wisdom is frequently high on convention and low on wisdom.
On the assumption that Ukraine’s black earth will dry sufficiently to
support ground maneuver forces before mid-June, Ukrainian forces will
strike Russian defenses on multiple axes and win back control of
Southern Ukraine in late May or June. Roughly 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers
training in Great Britain, Germany, and other NATO member states are
expected to return to Ukraine and provide the foundation for the
Ukrainian counterattack force.
General Valery Gerasimov, who now commands the Russian forces in the
Ukrainian theater, knows what to expect, and he is undoubtedly preparing
for the Ukrainian offensive. The partial mobilization of Russian forces
means that Russian ground forces are now much larger than they have been since the mid-1980s.
Given the paucity of ammunition
available to adequately supply one operational axis, it seems unlikely
that a Ukrainian offensive involving two or more axes could succeed in
penetrating Russian defenses. Persistent overhead surveillance makes it
nearly impossible for Ukrainian forces to move through the twenty- to
twenty-five-kilometer security zone and close with Russian forces before
Ukrainian formations take significant losses.
Once Ukraine’s offensive resources are exhausted Russia will likely
take the offense. There is no incentive to delay Russian offensive
operations. As Ukrainian forces repeatedly demonstrate,
paralysis is always temporary. Infrastructure and equipment are
repaired. Manpower is conscripted to rebuild destroyed formations. If
Russia is to achieve its aim of demilitarizing Ukraine, Gerasimov surely
knows he must still close with and complete the destruction of the
Ukrainian ground forces that remain.
Why not spare the people of Ukraine further bloodletting and
negotiate with Moscow for peace while Ukraine still possesses an army?
Unfortunately, to be effective, diplomacy requires mutual respect, and Washington’s effusive hatred for Russia
makes diplomacy impossible. That hatred is rivaled only by the
arrogance of much of the ruling class, who denigrate Russian military
power largely because U.S. forces have been lucky enough to avoid
conflict with a major power since the Korean War. More sober-minded
leaders in Washington, Paris, Berlin, and other NATO capitols should
urge a different course of action.
gilbertdoctorow | The many months long battle for the provincial Donbas city of
Bakhmut, or Artyomovsk as it is known in Russia, has been described
variously from on high in Washington, London and Berlin. When the likely
outcome was unclear, the defense of Bakhmut was called heroic and
demonstrative of the brave fighting spirit of the Ukrainians.
👴🇺🇸🇺🇦🇷🇺"The Russians have suffered over 100 000 cssualties in Bakhmut...I'ts hard to make up. It's hard to make up" - Joe Biden
Casualty figures issued by Kiev and then trumpeted from Washington
suggested that the Russians were stupidly throwing away the lives of
their fighting men by using WWI style human waves of attackers who were
decimated by the defenders. Russian lives are cheap was the message. The
fact that Russian artillery on site outnumbered and outperformed
Ukrainian artillery by a factor of five or seven to one was freely
admitted by the Western propagandists as they pleaded for increased
supplies to Kiev. They, nonetheless, issued casualty reports for the
Russians that inverted the force correlation. It was assumed, obviously
with reason, that the public was too lazy or too uninterested to do the
arithmetic.
At one moment, the spin doctors in Washington, London and Berlin said
that Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut made sense because it was pinning
down Russian forces and giving time to the Ukrainians to train and
position their men for the heralded “counter offensive” during which
they would overrun Russian positions at chosen points in the 600 mile
line of combat and drive a wedge through to the Sea of Azov, opening the
way for recapture of Crimea. Those were grand words and ambitions to
justify continued and ever rising Western military assistance to Kiev.
At another point, the spin doctors said it would be better if Ukraine
stopped losing men in Bakhmut and launched instead that much vaunted
counter-offensive. Now we were told that Bakhmut is just a Russian
fantasy, that it has no strategic value.
In the past couple of weeks, the Russian command has issued daily
reports on the progressive capture by Russian forces of Bakhmut, square
kilometer after square kilometer. We were told they controlled 75%, then
80% and most recently more than 90% of the city proper while artillery
bombardment of the remaining blocks of high rise residential buildings
that were being used by Ukrainian defenders for their sniper attacks and
intelligence reports on Russian troop movements pulverized everything
in their path.
At this point, the attention of Western media defending truth against
Russian disinformation was directed at the Ukrainian “successes” in
recapturing settlements on the flanks of Bakhmut. Just three days ago The New York Times
was telling its readers that these “breakthroughs” by the Ukrainians
put in jeopardy the Russian forces holding the city proper: they might
be surrounded and compelled to surrender or die. The possibility that
the offensives on the flanks were only intended to facilitate withdrawal
of remaining Ukrainian soldiers from Bakhmut and were tolerated by the
Russians to avoid bloody fights to the death – that possibility crossed
no one’s mind at the NYT, it seems.
Midday yesterday, 20 May, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner
Group which did most of the fighting for Bakhmut on the ground, claimed
total victory. In the evening, President Vladimir Putin announced to
the Russian public that Bakhmut was taken. Joyous messages of
congratulations filled the internet message services in Russia as the
broad public celebrated a victory as iconic as the Battle for
Stalingrad.
Meanwhile, the defenders of the Western public against Russian
“disinformation” were hard at work, straining their brains to find what
to say. This morning’s New York Times still speaks of the battle for Bakhmut as undecided, pointing yet again to the Ukrainian hold on the flanks.
Given their losses in men and materiel defending Bakhmut, the
surrender of the city to the Russians will be a great blow to Ukrainian
fighting morale when it is finally admitted. So will the fate of their
Commander in Chief General Zaluzhny who, according to Russian sources,
has been hospitalized for the past two weeks and remains in critical
condition after falling victim to a Russian strike on a provincial
command center which killed most of the high officers around him. If
nothing else, this speaks to the amazing success of Russian military
intelligence directing their firepower.
Meanwhile, Western media attention to Ukraine is conveniently
redirected at the nonstop travels of President Zalensky who went from
his European tour on to the Middle East, where he attended the meeting
of the Arab League, and thence via French military jet to the G7
gathering in Hiroshima where he held talks with fellow heads of state
and joined them for the obligatory group photos. All the talk was about
when the U.S. will formally give its consent to the dispatch of F16s to
Kiev. For the disseminators of Western disinformation this is a
wonderful distraction from a war that clearly is going badly for Kiev
and in particular a distraction from the counter offensive that looks
less likely with each passing day of Russian military strikes on the
command centers and weapons stores of the Ukrainian side.
The plume of radioactive smoke and ash that rose from the Khmelnitsky
store of British depleted uranium artillery shells in Western Ukraine
after a Russian missile strike, just like the extensive damage to the
Patriot air defense installation near Kiev by a Russian Kinzhal
hypersonic missile tell us all what will be the fate of future Western
arms deliveries to Ukraine. It is an interesting question how much
longer the Ukrainian military or politicians will put up with their high
flying, good life President while the country is well on its way to
hell.
Rejuvenation Pills
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careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid
means you s...
Death of the Author — at the Hands of Cthulhu
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from au...
9/29 again
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the heavenly power of St. Michael the Archangel, sharing a powerful prayer
for pro...
Return of the Magi
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immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
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Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
