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| Laura Boushnak/NYT |
Explosion kills over fifty Ukrainian prisoners of war at a Russian-operated detention camp in Donetsk; Russia says Ukraine used ‘precision weapons supplied by the United States’ - Most people are not good people: The hard lesson we all need to be learning, but too many of us simply refuse to acknowledge. Over and over in this post-truth world, I keep futilely asking myself: ‘How can anyone believe such obvious crap?’ It applies to everything having to do with Donald Trump’s political career: The most obvious conman of all-time that any kindergartner should be able to see through. People of reason were baffled by his ascendancy, but Trump proved to be crazy like a fox. Trump understood that millions would support and vigorously defend him to absurd degrees if he told those people what they wanted to hear, and presented himself as their protector and weapon against the rest of a society they hate. Donald Trump gives the defiant license to be their true, awful selves. For this, he has their undying loyalty, and now they are on the cusp of cementing #Murica as a Christofascist state. Vladimir Putin and Russia know that people will willingly believe an obvious lie, demand others accept said lie as fact, and even kill and die for it if said lie appeals to an individual’s innate biases and desires. Confirmation bias. If a Trump or a Putin tell their followers the sky is yellow, their followers are going to say the sky is yellow and anyone who disagrees is a lunatic and a traitor. Ask oneself, why were all the characters in the fairy tale afraid to tell the Emperor he has no clothes? Why do the words of Voltaire - ‘Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’ - resonate through the ages, and why are people so eager to adopt absurdities as their guiding principles to begin with? ‘Because, f**k you, that’s why.’ Yeah, in a nutshell, that really is it: Ignorance, resentment, tribalism, and an inherent lust for violence and domination. The majority of human beings in most any given time and place are not overly enlightened creatures - to varying degrees of degradation, of course; #Murica now is boiling on that scale. Grievance is the most powerful drug on earth, and reality and reason matter not to the aggrieved. Now, if only those who are of reason, empathy, and intelligence would stop their own pretending, and finally put a rest to this obnoxious lie we enforce upon ourselves: The lie that says people are basically good by nature. NO, just the opposite: The entire purpose of civilization is to contain our base instincts, else we wipe ourselves out and all ceases to be. (New York Times 7/30)
‘The mouth of a bear.’ Ukrainian refugees sent to Russia - Detailing how desperate Ukrainians from devastated eastern regions are lured, or otherwise compelled, into Russia. Often forced to be propaganda tools, although just as often left abandoned thousands of miles from home with no money or documents. Some ordinary Russians, however, are displaying kindness and bravery in helping the refugees find their way out of the belly of the beast. (AP 7/20)
The Kremlin is bribing school teachers to move to occupied parts of Ukraine, in order that students get a ‘corrected’ (propagandized) education - Our Republicans, particularly in the Southern U.S., are learning well from their Russian masters: The far-right, heretical Christofascist crusade to control what people see, learn, think, and feel becomes more violent and aggressive with each day. The attack on education and the anti-intellectual undertones are all by design. Those who are adhering to this radical ideology, wherever in the world they are, need to do some real soul searching. It is not God who they are serving with their zealotry, and His very first commandment is mere lip service to them, at very best. (Washington Post 7/18)
A second wave of Russians flee Putin’s regime - No exact numbers available, but it is well into the hundreds of thousands and could exceed a million in short order. Smart Russians are seeing the writing on the wall: Russia is doomed, and there is no future there except for more tyranny, misery, and death. The same is going to occur in #Murica once the Fascists have consolidated their power completely, the exodus will be epic (and may already be starting, at least internally, as ‘red states’ become more authoritarian and intrusive into the private lives of citizens.) Europe has been overrun in recent years by refugees from the Middle East, and now Ukraine and Russia, and it will not be able to accommodate millions of North Americans, to say nothing of millions escaping from Africa, India, etc. in large part due to climate change. Where is everybody going to live on this planet if most of it is uninhabitable? The answer, of course, is that most will no longer be living, period. (CNBC 7/14)
Russian state media gave an inordinate amount of attention to the ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests in Ottawa earlier this year, and Fox News followed suit - Excerpt: ‘(R)ecently, Russia has focused less on tipping the scale towards specific electoral outcomes. Rather, according to an FBI official who spoke out earlier this year, the country has focused on sowing chaos and distrust abroad. “The primary objective is not to create a particular version of the truth but rather cloud the truth and erode our ability to find it, creating a sentiment that no narrative or news source can be trusted at all,” David Porter, an assistant section chief with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, told a U.S. election security conference in March. “To put it simply, in this space, Russia wants to watch us tear ourselves apart.”’ (Global News 7/13)
The Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation releases a list of American public figures who are propagating Vladimir Putin’s lies and distortions - The list includes Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), and the ‘journalist’ Glenn Greenwald of the New York Times. The next step is placing international sanctions on these people, and expanding the list to include all Americans - lawmakers, media figures, and rank-and-file, private citizens alike; the entire fifth column - who can reasonably be proven to be spreading disinformation and propaganda straight out of Putin’s troll factories. It is war; enemies of humanity will either be stopped, or humanity will be slaughtered in numbers that may make most past mass atrocities pale in comparison. (Newsweek 7/26)
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld/Steven Tian: Actually, Russia’s economy is imploding - It’d be nice if Western economists wouldn’t go by the Russian government’s fabricated numbers when analyzing the state of Russia’s economy since heavy sanctions were put in place. The sanctions are working; albeit, it is clear that Putin is willing to do tremendous, even fatal, harm to his own nation and people to satiate his grievances. Advice to any Russian who may already be suffering a degree or two of economic deprivation: Get the hell out of that s**thole now, before you are all starving and your leader has to regularly threaten nations with nuclear annihilation unless said countries provide food and other aid - see the last thirty years or so of North Korea. Russia’s only real advantage over us is psychological warfare, and on that count they are winning and it is a devastating advantage to have. Vladimir Putin has committed great psychological harm upon the collective psyche of America with his propaganda war. As with the old Soviet Union, the facade will collapse in time. America and Russia are dying nations, and the Fascists of both intuitively know they are heading to the ashbins of history, hence their desperation to reverse course at all costs. (Foreign Policy 7/22)
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Senators strike a bipartisan deal on legislation to overhaul the Electoral Count Act in order to prevent future coup attempts - For once, the clowns in this chamber are doing what all Americans should be demanding of them. But does it go far enough? (NBC News 7/20)
New findings detail Trump plan to use Census for partisan gain; A proposal to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, struck down by the Supreme Court, would have intended to create an undercount favoring the GOP - I’m not certain non-citizens should be counted toward apportioning representatives, either, but am certain that the cabal’s objections were solely to benefit themselves at the expense of everybody else. It has never been this apparent: The barely-unspoken fear and understanding among much of white America, and nearly all who identify as Republicans, is that we are being replaced and we must act now to repress those replacing us. I have no interest in seeing my race perish, nor am I very fearful that Whites are going to go extinct in my lifetime or in the lifetimes of anyone alive now. Let us remember, that at no point in history have Caucasians ever been a majority of people on this planet. Nor are we entitled to anything; all of that is in the hands of God, and anyone attempting to speak for God is committing heresy. The Republican Party is not entitled to eternal power, and neither is the Democratic Party. The two-party deathgrip on America is choking the life out of it. (New York Times 7/20)
Harvard University study: J6 insurrectionists were motivated solely by obedience to Trump - If he tells them the election was rigged, it was rigged. If he tells them that Putin is our friend, then they love Putin. No critical thinking going on there. (NBC News 7/20)
Study: People in Republican counties have higher death rates than those in Democratic counties - From a point of relative parity in 2001, mortality rates between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ regions have diverged. And dramatically so since COVID-19 appeared. Political environments are a ‘core determinant of health.’ (Scientific American 7/18)
HERE & THERE
Climate change wake-up call: Record heatwave causes fires in the UK and Western Europe. (BBC News 7/20)
Long overdue: Pinup queen Bettie Page to be posthumously honored by her hometown of Nashville with a historical marker. (USA Today 7/20)
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