This video came to mind this morning for two reasons: One, listening to RT news I was reminded of the courage of the Russian people in defeating fascism. Here is JFK speaking at American University, June of 1963:

No nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland – a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.

I do not think I was supposed to learn about World War Two this way, not as an American. The European War started on D-Day. That’s when fearlessness struck at the heart of evil.

The Russians know their own history. They know about fascism. People on the streets of Odessa interviewed by RT speak freely on the neo-Nazis and fascists that have taken control of their country. RT is a Russian propaganda outlet, of course. These days it has more viewers than the American propaganda outlet, CNN.

I also listened to the American propaganda outlet NPR. There I learned that Americans are worried that Russia will try to disrupt the election to be held later this month in Ukraine. That is so typical of American treachery – to disrupt a country, instigate a violent coup d’état, support a reign of terror, and also call for an election. If they like the election outcome, fair or not, it will be a fair election. If they dislike the election outcome, fair or not, it will be ignored.

Which is why this video came to mind of that stupid, stupid movie. As John Wayne and the young boy head down the beach, it is sunset. The only problem is that the Vietnam coastline faces east, so that there is no sunset from that direction. It is ass backwards.

The American world view is ass backwards too, just like that movie.

I’ll get to the Monkees in a minute.

In the video above, it is suggested to us that the man firing the gun is shooting at people trying to escape the fire at the union hall in Odessa. That would be SOP in terrorist acts, the same reason why the US will attack with drones, and then later return when people are helping the victims to attack again. It’s called the “double tap.”

RT presents an interesting chronology of events that led up to that fire. Judge for yourself.
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From my vantage point, it helps to remember that the Americans are very good at agitation by use of media and professional agents provocateur. Some of the most memorable battles in our history involved people sent in to stir up violence to justify a police response. Two such events in my lifetime were at the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968, where a police riot was depicted as rioting kids, and the so-called Battle in Seattle in 1999, where a peaceful demonstration against the WTO become a bloody confrontation due to agents provocateur.

So much of what became media spectacle in our past was put there on purpose, to keep public opinion under control. I don’t think that Kiev set out to create the Odessa fire, but that is certainly the source of the agitation that led to the event (which it is now blaming on the victims).
Continue reading “You thought it was just the Monkees?” →

Here’s some advice to readers on how to read American news coverage of any event where the truth is being kept from us: Look for “scare quotes” and passive voice.

Examples: Soviet President Putin says “American agents” are behind violence in Eastern Ukraine. Those quotation marks are a signal to American readers not to believe the words contained therein.

Passive voice merely means events occur without cause. When the US is fomenting violence, wars break out, violence occurs, tensions mount, all in the same manner that rain storms occur. The Russians have strong evidence that Kiev agents set the fire that killed so many in Odessa, but according to American sources, people were arguing and the damned fire just broke out! Huffington Post tells us that sides clashed and unrest gripped the place.

“Sides” and “unrest” are the agents behind the violence. Thanks HuffPo. You’re on top of your game, as usual.

That’s how it rolls here. That’s now our news media covers the news without actually giving us any useful information or saying anything true.
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Update: UK’s Daily Mail does not use passive voice, and says that violence is caused by “pro-Russian thugs with baseball bats.” We all know that baseball is a big sport over there, so those bats surely came from Russia. In fact, the bats say right on them that they are “Moscow Sluggers.”

31 people have died in fire in a trade union facility in Odessa.

The Trade Unions House was set on fire by pro-Kiev radicals after they surrounded and destroyed the tent camp of anti-government activists that stood in front of the building on Odessa’s Kulikovo Field Square. It was torched in a storming attempt after some of the anti-Maidan activists rallying in the square barricaded themselves inside the building.

What is interesting to me is how the US, at least within our borders (under our bubble), manages to distance itself from this violence, just like it has from the massive violence against Syria since 2011. Russian President Putin makes no bones, saying the US is orchestrating everything. The possibility – even the possibility – is never broached on our state-controlled news media in any its thousands of outlets. Such control of information is impressive.

Some regard the Lucas trilogy of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi as great movie-making, and classic fiction. Indeed the characters that came out of that series are memorable and that action was enthralling. Special effects impossible before brought it all to life for a young generation. One person said to me that it was Harrison Ford that made the series successful, but that is an oversimplification. Carrie Fisher as Leia, on top of her hotness game and dressed down so that (as she said) “you could see all the way to Cuba”, had a lot to do with young boys and sexual fantasies. Fisher, as Leia, was accessible. Casting hit on the right qualities in choosing her and Ford as Hans Solo.

George Takei put up the photo to the right here on his Facebook page, and I think he has uncovered a fatal flaw. This kind of mistake in writing destroys willing suspension of disbelief, and destroys the whole of Star Wars. I have always been more a Trekkie myself, TNG, so I don’t care but will add one more failing of the Star Wars fantasy: At the end of Return, there is great joy and celebration that the Death Star is destroyed and that the Ewoks and everyone are now free of domination by the Dark Side. It won’t last. Lucas never thought it through. All they did, with the help, of course, of the Great White Interlopers Solo and Skywalker, was to win a battle. But there is no ground-level organizing. Solo and Leia are going off to make babies, Luke to save other planets. This one, the moon Endor, will shortly be taken over some other evil force. They are, after all, mighty warriors, these Ewoks, but they don’t think so good. If they did, they would not have needed a rescue.

Freedom, like dignity, strength or courage, cannot be given. It must be taken by force, and kept by fierce vigilance. I would like to know the exact date that the nascent Republic on the North American continent lost its freedom, but I don’t know. It was not 1947, though that date is important. I suspect that the Enlightenment window that had opened by 1776 had closed by 1812. Ours was a short and failed experiment, kept alive only by smoke and mirrors and two oceans that prevented invasions by the Dark Side. Consequently, we never needed a rescue, never had our cities destroyed. Our (white) people have not been tortured and put behind barbed wire.

Instead, we do that to others, and call it rescue.

Also while perusing Orwell below, just for the fun of it, I stumbled on this, again from 1984:

The invention of print … made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.

This reminds me of something Marshall McLuhan wrote, that with each advance in technology comes a corresponding loss of freedom. His example was an agent of a bank working out west before the telegraph, pretty much left to his own. Comes the telegraph, and he now has to be at his post all day long, as his bosses back east are monitoring him. Instant communication produced the first technology slave.

The Internet did not just stumble out into the open to be discovered by horny teenagers. The technology long existed, Kissinger having an early version in his brief case when he went to China in 1972. When it became available for public use it was already adapted to snooping, both by government and commercial enterprises. The “information superhighway” quickly became dot.commerce. Google started out as a good search engine because it did not sell its results to merchants, so that a query produced honest results. Now look at them. They are nothing but marketplace whores.

Worse yet, however, was the web browser itself, deliberately designed with back doors so advertisers could monitor our behavior. I only know what I know, and that due to some software I installed. Every time I open a page, in the upper right of my screen a list of companies attempting to monitor my activities appears. Google is always among them even though I do not use GMail, Google the search engine, or any Google product. Microsoft designed the Internet Explorer with merchants in mind, creating all kinds of back doors for entry into our private lives. They always claimed, when various entry points were discovered, that it was an accident.

We should not be surprised that NSA uses those same back doors. I do not have a whole lot of faith in outfits like Microsoft – that is, I do not think they are creative or innovative so much as having been lucky, and so were chosen to be the vehicle for entry of snoops into our private lives. Bill Gates is not that smart. It is not hard to see. Read into him what you will, but vision is not one of his strong traits. He ain’t got any. As the story goes, Netscape made the first browser, and Microsoft stole it. but in my heart of hearts, I wonder if Netscape made the first browser, NSA stole it, and then gave it to Microsoft and said “pretend you invented it, and make sure you leave room for us to move in too.”

The technology is not accidental, and the government and large corporations knew about it long before it became available to us. It would not have become available to us if it could not be compromised. It should come as no surprise that they are using it as Orwell’s two-way technology that ended our private lives.

I was looking up something else and stumbled on this familiar passage from 1984, which describes perfectly the reaction of people when they encounter clear and persuasive evidence that the major events of our time, such as the assassinations, 9/11 and Boston are not at all what we are told to believe they are:

The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to the young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest of arguments if the are inimical to Ingsoc [English Socialism], and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.