The cognitive dissonance in our anti-Russia propaganda

It's truly a challenge trying to suss out what's real and what's not in the fog of war.

Lot's of experts telling us Putin's war is a complete failure. Not only that, he's succeeded in uniting NATO as never before!

Then comes the daily impassioned plea from the heroic Zelensky himself, the guy who's fighting Putin in Ukraine so we don't have to fight him on the Plains of Abraham, begging his NATO masters to "close the sky." 

Zelensky keeps having to up the rhetorical ante, since the hot air support he's gotten so far isn't what he had in mind. Today he issued his gravest warnings thus far. 

If NATO doesn't act fast, it's gonna be too late. Once he's taken Ukraine, Poland is next, etc...

Wait a minute.

If he's hopelessly bogged down before he even takes Kyiv, how is he ever gonna be a threat to Poland and beyond?

Canada gives tip 'o the cap to white privilege

Not often I find myself on the same page as the wokelings at CBC News. Brodie Fenlon's got another excruciating essay on view today making excuses for the pathetic "journalism" he's responsible for. One of the great injustices of the universe is he takes home a decent dollar to write that crap, while I do better journalism on this blog for free.

But I digress. CBC has featured a number of stories contrasting our government's approach to Ukrainian vs. Afghan refugees.

For the brown Muslim refugees, we set a quota, provide oodles of hoops to jump through, and close our embassy in Afghanistan to make that hoop-jumping paper-shuffling all but impossible.

For the white Christian refugees, COME ON IN!!! 

No paperwork! No hoops! Automatic two year work visa at the door!

Hmm...

Hey Brodie, good on you and your team for not letting that slide!

Now if I may make a suggestion.

CBC's news coverage has for three weeks excluded virtually anything from other conflict zones. How are things going in the Afghanistan we once loved so much 158 Canadians died for... I'm not sure what, but let's not forget their sacrifice so readily.

How's things going with Somalia, another shithole where Canada left its mark. Remember that?

We're owed updates on a few other unstable shitholes where we were all-in to help Uncle Sam and our NATO allies restore stability, like Libya, Kosovo, Mali, and other non-white zones.

Zoom out a little from that white-on-white spectacle playing itself out in Ukraine. The news should be about more than stupid white people.

Sanctions force Russian oligarchs to choose between Putin or their super-yachts

My hunch is that the Russian oligarchs who choose their boats over their boss won't be oligarchs much longer.

Putin will strip their Russian assets.

Their buddies in the West will strip them of everything else, including their super-yachts, for the crime of being Russian.

If I'm a Russian oligarch, that's a no-brainer.

What remains unexplained, is why anyone should give a shit about what oligarchs, Russian or otherwise, think or do.

Communicating with your cat

The resident house-cat is maybe 12-14 years old. Originally she was christened "Mew," by one of the kids, when we still had those hanging around the place.

She came from a woman in town, a workmate of the Farm Manager, who was a prosperous and well-educated person, who for some reason didn't believe in having her cats fixed, and therefore had multiple batches of kittens to give away every year.

Having a farm and a big old barn, this person assumed we were delighted to take in her surplus kittens, and over the years we took in at least half a dozen.

We were not delighted.

We had three dogs at the time. One of them had a taste for pussy, so to speak. Mew is the sole survivor.

Anyway, after the last kid left, I re-christened her "Doublewide," because, while I never brought it up with the kid in question, I found the original moniker lacking in any sort of imagination or creativity.

At least "Doublewide" more accurately captured her essence.

She is with us still.

She's still got a touch of PTSD from the first day we brought Bruno into her life. It was at least three months before we saw her again.

But she's pretty much back to normal.

Every time I walk through the kitchen, she shrieks at me. The shrieking all sounds the same, but I know what she means by where she's hollering from.

If she's under the sink behind the water dish, she's saying, "there's too much dog drool and fix it now."

If she's under the sink in front of the water dish, she needs you to give her a sprinkle of tap water for her daily ablutions.

And if she's half way between the sink and the back stairs, she's saying "throw a few treats on the third step from the bottom, thanks!"

In return, this cat, who used to be a first-class mouser, does absolutely nothing.

Other than nap.

It's not about Ukraine; the American Empire is fighting for its survival

Here's something I wrote the day before Russia invaded Ukraine; In a war between serious people and the seriously deluded, the serious people are bound to prevail.

Putin's war is now in it's 15th day. We are told his imagined glorious three day triumph has been shut down, due to the the heroism of the Ukrainian military, and more especially, the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people.

Claims of Russian failure become ever more strident and extravagant. Ukraine's ambassador at the UN was today rhapsodising about the corpses of thousands of Russian solders rotting in the rubble they died in.

For some reason, no one in the vicinity of any of this heroic resistance ever has a cellphone handy to record and broadcast the heroism of the resistance. The little bit of video evidence of Russian atrocities has been sketchy, to say the least.

Meanwhile, 2.5 million Ukrainians, obviously not true patriots, have smelled the coffee and decided they don't want to be in the middle of Uncle Sam's ritual sacrifice of Ukraine on the altar of American Exceptionalism.

Let's face it - the US Empire wan't looking all that serious anymore. China, Russia, and Iran were openly thumbing their noses. That encouraged a lot of pipsqueak nations like Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and so on to get uppity.

For the American Empire to remain top dog, a course correction was required.

That's what we're in the midst of now.

So far, it's gone pretty good. NATO allies are rallying round and promising more purchases of armaments from the US defence contractors who fund the myriad think tanks and media operations of the Empire, where US policy is designed and promoted.

But...

This flare-up of solidarity is bound to be a flash in the pan. All Putin has to do is nothing. 

Russian forces can afford to stay "bogged down" for months, if not years. 

Cracks in the so-called alliance get bigger every day. Note the hilarious hot-potato skit that played out when somebody suggested Poland deliver its obsolete Mig-29 jets to Ukraine.

Germany's economy is doomed at current energy prices. With every day that goes by, the Germans too will more and more realize that their best interests are not aligned with the interests of those in Washington to whom they have forfeited their sovereignty. 

Unfortunately for most of my friends and neighbours who get all their information from CBC, BBC, CNN etc, they can't see any of that. I read those too, but I think you gotta balance our propaganda with their propaganda to have any hope of getting near the actual reality of things.

Here's a link to Andrei Martyanov's blog.

He's a Russian expat living in the US. There's a definite pro-Russia slant, but I highly recommend it to balance your consumption of anti-Russian hysteria, promoted 24/7 by our legacy media.

How to tell the difference between a pending fart and a pending shit

The key word here is "pending."

Once the crisis is no longer pending, it's too late.

That's happened to me a couple of times. You think it's all under control, but it isn't.

First time was at the Saint John Hilton. Nice joint. Right on the water.

I'd been having some gas issues, and when I ripped forth a fart in the shower, well...

The other time, I was attending a tobogganing party with my extended family. The toboggan hill was a twenty minute hike through deep snow from the farmhouse where the nearest flush toilet was located.

We had a grand chilli chow-down before we hit the hill. Unfortunately, I had seriously underestimated both the chilli and the distance to that flush toilet, and therefore was forced to exempt myself from the party for a couple of hours while I went home for a quick shower and a change of clothes.

Luckily, I have learned from my errors in judgement.

Don't know if it was the pickled eggs or the pickled beets, or the sauerkraut I had on that Reuben sandwich the other day, but I've been crazy gassy.

I've been dropping stink bombs left right and centre for days...

But tonight, as I was enjoying a breath of fresh air on the stoop, I had a gut feeling that feeling in my gut would turn into more than a fart.

Fortunately, I made it in the house and up the stairs to the flush toilet in the nick of time.

So, when you're wondering what's gonna be what, go with your gut feeling.

   

Map of countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia

We're led to believe by CBC, BBC, CNN, etc that the world is behind America's call for sanctioning Russia over the Ukraine invasion.

Not really. The countries shown in blue are following Uncle Sam's orders.

The rest of the world is not. To wit; no sanctions from the Western hemisphere south of the Rio Grande, none from Africa, the Middle East, or Asia, aside from Singapore and Japan.

The countries in blue represent approx 1/8 of the world's population.

Yet CBC et al never tire of declaring that Russia is becoming totally isolated!

I lifted that map from the Moon of Alabama blog. I highly recommend you read the entire article.