Going Down Fighting

The neocons look like they may drag us into nuclear war rather than admit they've been wrong in their vision of global community.  I am in favor of global community.  Modern civilizations are interconnected to a high degree, and we have to learn to live with one another, or perish.  

Perhaps singling out "neocons" is less useful than the older binary concepts of hawks and doves.  Hawks is a broader term than neocons, and we can see that there is broad bipartisan support for our current hawkish policy with regard to Russia.  For example, the new executive director of the Disinformation Governance Board is a progressive Democrat, and a hawk on Russia.

My view is that the hawks have bitten off more than they can chew in Russia.  Russia is gaining ground in Ukraine and will achieve their objectives.  This seems to be clear to the Western leadership which seems to be in panic mode -- almost every day promising to give more military aid to Ukraine.  The latest $33 billion aid package was proposed just a couple of days ago by the White House.  

I have no trouble with government spending in general, including spending to maintain peace and enforce laws.  The problem I've seen with the US military intelligence spending is corruption.  In much the same way that the West's rich have been accumulating capital but not finding productive ways to invest the capital, our military intelligence sector is glutted with money.  Enormous sums are available for think tanks and media operations that seek to further the propaganda war against Russia.  Likewise, the US political system is awash with lobbyists with vested interests in promoting increased military and intelligence spending.  

Thus, the Democratic chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Trump impeachment manager, Adam Schiff, was either taken in or corrupted by the false Steele Dossier on Trump - Russian collusion.  His campaign contributors include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Orbital ATK, Harris Corporation, and Raytheon.  Long before Russia invaded Ukraine, Schiff approvingly quoted State Department official George Kent who said:

"The United States aids Ukraine and her people, so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here."

My view is that the US resumed the cold war against Russia in 2014, and that truth has been subservient to our war aims ever since.  Truth is the first casualty of war, and the US government has not hidden its hostility toward Russia and its indifference to the truth with regard to Russia.  Greenwald, Taibbi, and others tried to warn us that this association of Trump and Putin followers as hated outgroups could lead to a hot war, so it should not be shocking that this has happened. Schiff and company were making the same argument and identifying Ukraine in particular as the location.  Constructive discussion of how to get along with Russia has been off the table.

Stepping back, I find it illuminating to compare the Ukraine war with the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The US was determined to go to war in Cuba if Russia did not back down in supplying weapons to Cuba.  Fortunately, Kennedy and Khrushchev desperately wanted to avoid war and were able to negotiate an agreement that successfully achieved this objective.  However, Kennedy was assassinated within a couple of years, not coincidentally in my understanding, and Khrushchev was also deposed, probably for the same reason.

At any rate, it is difficult to imagine a scenario where Russia is supplying weapons and whipping up anti-US hatred in a country on our border, where the US does not intervene militarily.  This is all the more unimaginable given that large sections of Ukrainian are Russian speaking and voted for pro-Russian politicians as opposed to pro-Western politicians before 2014 coup/revolution.  Imagine if the Trump/Republican states were to break off and then Russia was to start supplying them with weapons and anti-US cultural assistance.  The US would not hesitate to intervene militarily.

Such discussion is well outside the mainstream in the West.  We have such confidence in our anti-Russian world view that we cannot imagine that Russia could actually win in Ukraine.  Thus, when the evidence comes in, we try to ignore it by devoting even more resources to "fighting Russia over there so that we don’t have to fight Russia here."  We're going to go down fighting, it seems.

But how deep is our resolve?  Will we actually continue to escalate until such time that the physical war reaches the West as well as the Russian homeland?  Will there be (another) electoral revolt in November 2022 that will lead again to divided government and an ability to focus on the common enemy (Putin)?  Will the US go down fighting with one another rather than fighting the great enemy on the other side of the earth?  Or we will start to deal with our problems constructively rather than looking for scapegoats?

 

Nazis v Hitler

 Two viewpoints stand out with regard to this war:

1. The Ukrainian forces are Nazis.
2. It's all Putin's fault.  He's like Hitler.

I agree with #1 but not #2.

The Ukrainian forces are Nazis

The Ukrainian government and forces are literally Nazis in many instances.  Obviously they have evolved from the days of WWII.  But the essence of Nazism was preaching hatred against outgroups and my observation is that this is what many of the Uke forces have been doing leading up to the coup in 2014 and increasingly ever since.  

From my perspective in the United States, this hatred of Russians has been encouraged by the Ukrainian allies (neocons and friends of the military-intelligence complex) in the United States government.  Putin and the Russians have been used as scapegoats in disinformation promulgated by the intelligence services, mainstream media, Democratic party, and others.  I pointed this out in my post, The Facts Matter.  It's not just that we've been lying, it's that these venal lies have demonized one ethnic / national group that is far away and not able to defend itself.  

• Don't like the fact that Trump won?  Blame Russia and Putin!
• Don't like the fact that the Democrats are corrupt (in Ukraine and elsewhere)?  Blame Russia and Putin!
• Don't like the fact that the great US military was defeated by the Taliban?  Blame Russia and Putin!
• Dubious US supported biolabs revealed in Ukraine?  Warn that Russia and Putin are about to use biological weapons against us!
• Civilian deaths revealed in Ukraine?  Reflexively accuse Russia and Putin of genocide!

The venomous false accusations have taken a toll on our collective moral compasses in the United States and Ukraine.  For those in the West who are not literally Nazis, we've too often been driven to hatred of Russians via government sponsored propaganda.

It's all Putin's fault.  He's like Hitler

The absurd hatred of Trump has been amplified by association with Putin, and vice versa.  Trump is a narcissist.  His administration was tougher on Russia and Putin than was the Obama Administration.  The Mueller inquisition came up with nothing yet led to impeachment over hesitation in providing arms to Ukraine.  In short, the US government absurdly blamed Russia/Putin for Trump and has continued to double down on this for 6 years despite being proven wrong again and again.   The verdict is in but has been swept under the rug.  Trump is onboard with the Ukraine war from the US perspective and is basically irrelevant with regard to foreign affairs other than being used temporarily as a scapegoat in the service of anti-Russian hatred.

Putin himself has a successful record in foreign policy in standing up to the West.  First, he opposed the 2003 Iraq War and has been proven right.  His harshest critics in the US, those promoting hatred of Russia and putting him on a Hitleresque pedestal, were on the wrong side of that disastrous war that led to more than a million deaths, refugees, and the destruction of large swaths of civilization in the Middle East.

Next Russia opposed the expansion of NATO and anti-Russian posturing in Georgia.  Russia successfully intervened so that Russian majority territories are independent of the anti-Russian sentiments encouraged by the West.  Georgia has been peaceful ever since.

Russia and the US were on different sides in Syria.  The US supported Islamic terrorists who were defeated by the Syrian government with Russia's help.

In 2014, the US supported a coup in Ukraine which led to an anti-Russian government.  Russia successfully annexed Crimea and has dug in its heels against not only the expansion of NATO, but also against the anti-Russian hatred and lied emanating from the US.  

In 2022, Russia has taken a big step in militarily opposing NATO and the US militarization of Ukraine against Russia.  While Russia has been harshly criticized by the West for this, Putin has in no way behaved like Hitler or Trump in leading this battle.  The Russian military has avoided civilian targets and casualties, while the Nazis in Ukraine and the US have responded with false flag operations.  At least this my best guess based upon observation of Russia's behavior in Syria and the US behavior over the course of my lifetime including Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, as well as the facts (or lack of interest in them) in Ukraine.  Unlike Trump, Putin seems thoughtful and focused on Russia rather than on himself.  Unlike Hitler, Putin doesn't seem to be driven by hate or delusions of racial superiority.  Confronted by Nazis, he calls them out but recognizes that his actions in Ukraine will be worthless if he commits atrocities against the Russians there that he wants to win over.

Hitler, by contrast, came up through the ranks violently and with hatred against outgroups as a major component of his political stance.  Hitler was also far more aggressive and reckless than Putin has behaved in the 20+ years that he's led Russia.

Systemic Problems in West

The serious dysfunction in the US is not Trump's fault.  He's a symptom.  The desire to find one or two people to blame for our problems (Trump, Putin) is puerile.  We have systemic problems tied to our intelligence agencies and the enormous amounts of money allocated to maintaining and promoting the global empire that we inherited from the British.  Let's deal with that by focusing on true democracy at home, including freedom of speech, constitutional rights for all regardless of party affiliation, and respect for those institutions and authorities that do work well.  

The Dam Has Burst

 It feels to me like the dam has burst -- people in the West are starting to realize the truth about the destruction of Ukraine.  Ukraine, I barely knew you. 

The West is Losing the Information War

For a time it seemed that the West was winning the information war if not the real war in Ukraine.  But I'm beginning to the think that the opposite is true.  The censorship and opinion policing being undertaken by the social media giants and mainstream media doesn't work when work arounds are readily available.

If in fact Russia is winning the real war, then the West will take a real hit in the information war.  The initial propaganda blast from the West was so overwhelming that it will be a Vietnam / Iraq / Afghanistan blow to Western credibility.  I've been following a Singapore based analyst of the war who tries to be neutral, but has concluded that the Ukraine partisans cannot be believed whereas the Russian Ministry of Defense is reasonably accurate.  

Here's a more in-depth look at this phenomenon: Russia is NOT Losing the Information War.  Excerpts:

I frequently see the claim that Russia is losing the information war in Ukraine. This idea is widely believed, even by people who support Russia, and even some Russians themselves. As someone with relevant experience in that field, I can confidently say this is not true.

There is this idea that “both sides are equally bad” and everyone spreads disinformation. No. If a general or government spokesman says something, it should and absolutely must be a true statement, not a lie. If he says that 20 enemy tanks have been destroyed, that must be a true statement. If he says that we have had 500 soldiers killed in action, this must be a true statement. See, if a general lies about enemy casualties, and his own casualties, nothing he says can be trusted. This is why it is so important for official spokesmen and outlets to not tell lies.

The Nazi regime in Ukraine has lied, and lied repeatedly about everything. They have also gone to extraordinary lengths to make their lies appear credible with faked photo and video evidence. Absolutely nothing they say can be trusted. We cannot believe any claim coming out of their mouths. We cannot even believe a claim that appears to be true. It is better to ignore the Ukronazis altogether. Why waste precious time and mental bandwidth analyzing the words of someone who constantly lies? Just don’t. The more attention we give to fake news, the more people die (see my post Fake News Killed the Ukrainians and it is Our Fault)

Official institutions and media outlets are deliberately spreading lies, this is poisonous and destroys their credibility. I can never again listen to an American military spokesman and trust a single word coming out of his mouth...

As far as I can reasonably tell, the Russian MoD have told the truth and done their best to not distribute false information. This is the first and main reason I argue that Russia is not losing the information war. Both Ukraine and their NATO masters utterly destroyed their credibility, nothing they say can be believed. Russia still has their credibility intact, and that’s is a crucial part of winning the information war.

This is how I see the war news.  Biden and the West accept Ukrainian claims immediately and indiscriminately.  I've seen this before -- in Venezuela, for example, the US government and mainstream rushed to report atrocities by Maduro's troops when they were in fact committed by the anti-Maduro forces.  The NY Times eventually released video footage and commentary proving the US deception, but this was never acknowledged by the MSM in general or by the US government.  So I don't believe them now.

There's a pattern (from Intercept (NY Times indirect) link above):

EVERY MAJOR U.S. WAR of the last several decades has begun the same way: the U.S. government fabricates an inflammatory, emotionally provocative lie which large U.S. media outlets uncritically treat as truth while refusing to air questioning or dissent, thus inflaming primal anger against the country the U.S. wants to attack. That’s how we got the Vietnam War (North Vietnam attacks U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin); the Gulf War (Saddam ripped babies from incubators); and, of course, the war in Iraq (Saddam had WMDs and formed an alliance with Al Qaeda).

Since then, we've had the horrific false flag chemical weapons attack in Syria.

I believe the initial information war victory by the West will prove as illusory as the real war victory.  I believe Putin and Russia are doing the world a favor by calling our bluff.  I've suffered a lifetime of disappointment at the conduct of our military-political-media leaders with regard to war related information, and its time for the truth to come out.

I could be wrong.  I love our country and the greater freedom of speech we enjoy.  It's time to use that freedom.

The Facts Matter

 A few days ago, Anne Applebaum was confronted with the falsity of charges of Russian disinformation.  Her response was that she doesn't care.  

I was discussing the falsity of charges of Russian information with a friend recently, writing a lengthy post documenting said falsity.  The response was that this is boring.

I've documented the fact that Adam Schiff was wrong in vouching for the veracity of the Steele Dossier:

Schiff has been notoriously wrong about Trump's involvement with Russia, claiming repeatedly, for example, that the Steele dossier was legitimate.  

Back in 2017, (Schiff) was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and therefore the man Democrats counted on to lead the charge that Trump had colluded with the Kremlin in order to steal the election. He did so with gusto. Quoting from a dossier prepared by ex-British MI6 agent Christopher Steele, he regaled a March 2017 committee hearing with tales of how Russia bribed Trump adviser Carter Page by offering him a hefty slice of a Russian natural-gas company known as Rosneft and of how Russian agents boosted Trump’s political fortunes by hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails and passing them on to WikiLeaks...   

Hours later, he assured MSNBC that the evidence of collusion was “more than circumstantial.” Nine months after that, he informed CNN’s Jake Tapper that the case was no longer in doubt: “The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help, the Russians gave help, and the president made full use of that help.” In February 2018, he told reporters: “There is certainly an abundance of non-public information that we’ve gathered in the investigation. And I think some of that non-public evidence is evidence on the issue of collusion and some … on the issue of obstruction.”

We now know definitely that this was false.  The primary sub-source for the Steele Dossier was Igor Danchenko, a DC-based Brookings Institution researcher who obtained incorrect information from Charles Dolan, a longtime Democrat tied to the Clintons since the early 1990s.

With the Steele Dossier discredited, the famous Mueller investigation of Trump was supposedly initiated based upon a Trump aide's meeting with Russian agent Joseph Mifsud.  Mifsud is a western intelligence asset, and not an agent of Putin as alleged, but nobody's cares to discuss this possibility.

Atrocities in the Ukraine war are routinely ascribed to Russians, whereas evidence of Ukrainian responsibility is not even considered in the "free world".  This repeats the coverage of the recent Syrian war with regard to chemical attacks.  Investigation is not important to the "free world".  Rather, there is a frenzy of immediate commendation based upon tribal emotions.

Nobody in the "free world" cares how the anti-Russian faction came to power in 2014.  Revolution or coup?  That question is central to the ongoing conflict, but there is no serious discussion.

Republicans attack Biden as being too soft on Putin.  Putin is a bipartisan scapegoat, justifying aggressive anti-Russian military behavior including increased military spending, censorship, and group think.

I appreciate the freedom of speech we have in the West, but it's no good if we don't speak up.  We are racing toward nuclear war based on lies.

Russiagate => Nuclear War

 It's hard to speak out on this, but this is the road we are on, in my opinion:

Russiagate => Trump Impeachment => War in Ukraine => Nuclear War

I'd like to speak up before it's too late to stop the last of these.

Clash of Civilizations

In my last post, Quagmire for Whom, I discussed the Western strategy in Ukraine to create a quagmire for Putin, with the aim of forcing regime change.  I predict that this will not work since Putin's Russia can trade with its neighbor, the enormously powerful country of China.  Meanwhile, western culture is being undermined by a cancerous system, bloated with trillions of dollars which are doled out to propagandists, weapons manufacturers, politicians, think tanks, media conglomerates, and anyone else willing to do the bidding of the military industrial complex.  By contrast, Putin, in my view, is something of a philosopher king -- an intelligent man able to run his country coherently.  This post expands on the cultural themes underlying this worldview.

My understanding of Putin's worldview has been shaped by the following:

• Russia's Nationalist Turn, by Anatoly Karlin, 9/28/2021
• Regathering of the Russian Lands, by Anatoly Karlin, 2/16/2022
• President Putin’s February 21, 2022 speech to the nation – full text
• Transcript: Vladimir Putin’s Televised Address on Ukraine, 2/24/2022

I've titled this post Clash of Civilizations, taken from a reference by Karlin to Samuel Huntington's 1996 book:

The Clash of Civilizations is a thesis that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post–Cold War world...  Huntington began his thinking by surveying the diverse theories about the nature of global politics in the post–Cold War period. Some theorists and writers argued that human rights, liberal democracy, and the capitalist free market economy had become the only remaining ideological alternative for nations in the post–Cold War world... Huntington posits that the concept of different civilizations, as the highest category of cultural identity, will become increasingly useful in analyzing the potential for conflict.

China's leadership is emphasizing the need to focus on its distinctive culture:

Examining China in the midst of Deng’s rapid opening to the world, Wang perceived a country “in a state of transformation” from “an economy of production to an economy of consumption,” while evolving “from a spiritually oriented culture to a materially oriented culture,” and “from a collectivist culture to an individualistic culture.” ... 

Wang Huning appears to have won a long-running debate within the Chinese system about what’s now required for the People’s Republic of China to endure. The era of tolerance for unfettered economic and cultural liberalism in China is over...  Wang has now seemingly convinced Xi that they have no choice but to take drastic action to head off existential threats to social order being generated by Western-style economic and cultural liberal-capitalism—threats nearly identical to those that scourge the U.S.

And Putin is taking Russia in a similar direction:

Putinism has developed into ethno-aware nationalism..  For the first time in more than a century, the Russians have a state that they can call their own, a state run by and for the Russian people... So broad and all-encompassing is the shift that, just as academics came to classify what happened between Putin’s rejection of Western moral supremacism in the Munich speech of 2007 to the gay propaganda law in 2013 as a “Conservative Turn” (Nicolai Petro), so I believe future historians will classify the 2018-21 period as a “Nationalist Turn.” Thus, just as the First Age of Putinism in the 2000s was marked by unideological technocracy, and its Second Age during the 2010s was defined by conservative retrenchment, so I believe that the Third Age, the 2020s, will be defined by the political ascent of ethno-aware (as distinct from ethno-nationalist) Russian nationalism.

So a backlash to Fukuyama's The End of History is on the ascent, with multiple superpowers standing up to the West along with stalwarts such as Iran and Venezuela.  Huntington appears to have the more prescient world view, and Putin is on board.  

Meanwhile, the West is facing a crisis as described by Martin Gurri in The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.  From Trump to Brexit to the Yellow Vests in France, the west is increasingly divided against itself, with a strong reaction against globalist liberal democracy.  It is certainly conceivable that Putin and Xi are evolutionarily ahead of the West in using ethno-nationalism to restrain global capitalism.   

Coca Cola, McDonald's, Ford, Tesla, Facebook, Google, and Amazon may be on the wane globally, with sanctions accelerating this trend.  Ethnonationalism may serve an important purpose for the foreseeable future as a check against cultural decay.  Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity may no longer be symbols of backwardness, but rather signs of cultural strength as they were in previous eras.  The Hegelian dialect, in which cultural tradition competes with technological advance, lives on and the woke West may be forced to come to terms with this new modernity.   

Liberal values, as manifested in woke, cancel culture politics, have been coopted by the cancer of the military industrial complex.  Anti-Putin liberalism is an extension of corrupt liberal intolerance.  Incoherently, liberals militarily and morally support the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists that have invaded Ukraine in recent years.  Putin has called their bluff.

Liberal, enlightenment, values must balance majority rule with minority rights.  The corrupt West vilifies majority rule when it suits their purposes, as during Trump's presidency, and vilifies minority rights when it suits their purposes, as in Ukraine.  We must reclaim balance in both foreign and domestic affairs, which means that we must resist cooptation by the "intelligence agencies".

Quagmire for Whom?

Executive Summary

The current situation in Ukraine is analogous to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria.  The U.S. media is full of accounts of our side winning, whatever that means.  Eventually we realize we are not winning but rather stuck in a quagmire.  In Ukraine, winning for Russia means self-determination for Russian speaking parts of Ukraine, and this is slowly but surely being accomplished.  Also, Russia now has the ability to attack Ukraine military forces at will, and it seems this will continue for the indefinite future.  So Russian victory can be attained without any surrender by Ukraine and western allies. 

The new de facto situation will be an expanded Russian sphere of influence, and an increasing independent Russian economy more closely tied to China, India, and other third world nations.  Victory for Ukraine could only come about via WW III and western destruction of Russia, but this would be lose lose and west/NATO should not seek this outcome.  There can be no Ukrainian victory.  Time is on Russia's side as in Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, and, ultimately, Afghanistan.  The U.S. empire is facing another quagmire.  Eventually, Putin will die and future generations of leaders will be able to do the sensible thing and come to detente, where Ukraine will emerge as a healthy country similar to Finland, but not a staging ground for the U.S. in a Cold War.

Flawed Western Position

As Niall Ferguson points out, the U.S. and its western allies want to keep the war going, in the mistaken belief that time is on the west's side:

I conclude that the U.S. intends to keep this war going... “The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime." ... I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms. There is a belief that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such language. It helps explain, among other things, the lack of any diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire.

The optimism, however, is the assumption that allowing the war to keep going will necessarily undermine Putin’s position; and that his humiliation in turn will serve as a deterrent to China. I fear these assumptions may be badly wrong and reflect a misunderstanding of the relevant history.

Begin with the military situation, which Western analysts consistently present in too favorable a light for the Ukrainians. As I write, it is true that the Russians seem to have put on hold their planned encirclement of Kyiv, though fighting continues on the outskirts of the city. But the theaters of war to watch are in the east and the south...

Also on Friday, the Russians claim, they used a hypersonic weapon in combat for the first time: a Kinzhal air-launched missile which was used to take out an underground munitions depot at Deliatyn in western Ukraine. They could have achieved the same result with a conventional cruise missile. The point was presumably to remind Ukraine’s backers of the vastly superior firepower Russia has at its disposal. Thus far, around 1,100 missiles have struck Ukraine. There are plenty more where they came from.

And, of course, Putin has the power — unlike Saddam or Qaddafi — to threaten to use nuclear weapons, though I don’t believe he needs to do more than make threats, given that the conventional war is likely to turn in his favor...

In any case, Putin has other less inflammatory options if he chooses to escalate. Cyberwarfare thus far has been Sherlock Holmes’s dog that didn’t bark. On Monday the Biden administration officially warned the private sector: “Beware of the dog.” Direct physical attacks on infrastructure (e.g., the undersea cables that carry the bulk of global digital traffic) are also conceivable.

In contrast to reports in the western media, Russia has been holding back quite a bit in recognition that this war in their backyard could go on for years or even decades.  They have avoided hitting most civilian infrastructure, instead targeting their attacks on military targets and fuel supplies which could be used to support Ukrainian military operations.  They are avoiding the cities, with the exception of the neo-Nazi stronghold of Mariupol which is being taken over by the Russians.  Russia can not walk away from this conflict, even if they want to.  Crimea is now part of Russia, and Donbass is similarly situated.  The U.S. is a concerned observer, providing weapons and moral support from afar.

Eurocentrism

Daniel Berman recently provided his take on the war after four weeks.  He finds Russia losing badly, but sees no end to the conflict.  He provides some historical references, from 19th century and 20th European history, and compares German psychology in that era with that of Russia and Putin today.  Berman neglects to mention China, a major economy and ally of Russia.  We need to grapple with the reality that the west no longer monopolizes global technology and resources.  Just as in the previous Cold War the Communist bloc presented a credible challenge to the west and prevailed in Vietnam, the current alliance of Russia and China presents a credible challenge to the U.S. centric global empire.

Austria-Hungary and Germany were surrounded and did not have sufficient resourced to prevail against western Europe and the U.S.  Russia is not surrounded by enemies and is rich in strategic resources.  

Psychology

Berman, like Biden and the western political establishment, spends much time considering Putin's psychological state, but this leads him nowhere:

Putin needs respect...  One of the errors Chamberlain made at Munich was misunderstanding what Hitler wanted... 

Historical analogies are awkward, and the “Putler” ones are cringe. But if Putin’s problem is that the small states around Russia do not respect Russia as much as they do the United States, ending the conflict with an agreement in which Washington takes pity on Russia and generously grants concessions reinforces rather than challenges that impression.

So Berman concludes that that Putin wants respect and that he cannot get respect by making concessions to stop the war.  This is where his analysis stops, as does that of the western political establishment.  They see regime change in Russia as the only viable path.

If we are to understand the enemy, we must look further into Putin's options.  Everyone agrees that victory on the western front via defeat of NATO and total defeat of Ukraine is not possible.  Russia itself has publicly recognized this:

Russia Signals It Will Limit Scope To "Complete Liberation Of Donbas"...   In what's looking like a hugely significant first sign that Russia could be pulling back on the scope of its Ukraine operations, Bloomberg reports Friday that the Kremlin may be limiting its key military objectives to taking full control over the Donbas region. This despite multiple parts of the county, including outside the capital of Kiev, still witnessing intense fighting and shelling.

The hugely important Friday Bloomberg report says that "After a month of fighting that’s yielded limited territorial gains, the Russian military said it’s focusing efforts on taking full control of Ukraine’s Donbas region, potentially a sign it’s backing away from hopes of taking larger swathes of the country."

This doesn't sound like Hitler.  Rather, this sounds like somebody who recognizes better options than fighting a losing war.  Putin/Russia can scale back their territorial ambitions, although it is far from clear that they ever intended to conquer all of Ukraine.  How can Russia do this without losing respect?  

1. They will have achieved significant territorial claims.
2. They will have demonstrated an ability and willingness to fight the west.

The latter is the sticking point with regard to ending the war.  It is not only the Russians who demand respect as a condition for ending the war.  It is also the west who demand the Russians surrender their ability and willingness to fight the west on their borders.  Russia can take the Russian speaking parts of Ukraine, then unilaterally pull back, yet continue to fight Ukraine militarily should Ukraine attack Russian held lands.

Thus, Putin is likely to remain standing with respect.  Russia will take an economic hit, but will not be isolated into submission, because of China.  The west will also take an economic hit.  As time goes by, western psychology, already unhinged in my view, will come under greater scrutiny.

What are we to make of the U.S. point person on Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, for example: 

From 1993 to 1996, during Bill Clinton's presidency, Nuland was chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott before moving on to serve as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs. From 2003 to 2005, Nuland served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, exercising an influential role during the Iraq War.

Or the DNC:

Former DNC contractor and opposition researcher Alexandra “Ali” Chalupa not only worked closely with the Ukrainian Embassy and Clinton campaign, trading dirt on Manafort and Trump, but also Congress and the Obama White House, State Department and even the FBI. 

Or Biden's National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan:

Last month Washington was rocked by the indictment of Michael Sussman, former counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee...   In testimony to Congress, Sullivan also insisted that he did not know the Alfa Bank scandal was the work of a Clinton lawyer and people associated with the campaign...  Sullivan will have to argue that, despite being one of the top campaign advisers, he was unaware of the campaign’s prior work on developing the allegation.  

and:

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)... isn’t alone in promoting these past CIA-backed insurgencies as a model for “covert” US aid to Ukraine. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose State Department helped to create the “moderate rebel” insurgency in Syria and oversaw the US and NATO-backed destruction of Libya, appeared on MSNBC on February 28th to say essentially the same. In her interview, Clinton cited the CIA-backed insurgency in Afghanistan as “the model that people [in the US government] are now looking toward” with respect to the situation in Ukraine. She also references the insurgency in Syria in similar fashion in the same interview. It is worth noting that Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff when she was Secretary of State, Jake Sullivan, is now Biden’s National Security Adviser. 

Essentially the same people who have bungled U.S. foreign policy from the days of Boris Yeltsin, through the 2003 Iraq War, the Arab Spring, and 20 year long failure in Afghanistan, are directing the western policy regarding the Ukraine War.  These people falsely vilified Russia as having compromised the U.S. electoral process, and impeached a U.S. president for hesitating regarding the sale of lethal weapons to Ukraine.  

What do we say about the psychology of this foreign policy blob?  I think of it as a cancer, bloated with trillions of dollars which are doled out to propagandists, weapons manufacturers, politicians, think tanks, media conglomerates, and anyone else willing to do the bidding of the military industrial complex.  Much like the projected Putin mind set, this amorphous power structure has acted so brazenly at such a massive scale that it cannot afford to admit mistakes with regard to Russiagate and Ukraine.   In Berman's terminology with regard to Putin, the west needs an off-ramp with regard to Ukraine and Russia.  It hopes that Putin will die.  Failing that, we are faced with more failures -- death and destruction in pursuit of elusive world domination.  The alternative is regime change in the west.

Russian Trolling and US Propaganda

There is a lot to digest with regard to information sent to me by a friend regarding Russia's trolling in social media.  I just finished reading the NY Times piece by Adrian Chen written in 2015.  That doesn't mention Trump at all but instead describes one side of an apparent propaganda war between the U.S. and Russia. I found it quite interesting.  

In response, for now, I'll just provide a couple of points regarding my understanding of the situation with regard to Trump and Russia that are related to the Russian IRA and the NY Times reporting on Russiagate.  

Excerpting The New York Times’ Insidious Ongoing Disinformation Campaign on Russia & Elections, by Gareth Porter in Consortium News, 3/17/2020:

The Times service to the narrative was introduced by its February 2017 story  headlined, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts with Russian Intelligence.” We now know from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign that the only campaign aide who had contacts with Russian intelligence officials was Carter Page, and those had taken place years before in the context of Page’s reporting them to the CIA. The Horowitz report revealed that FBI officials had hidden that fact from the FISA Court to justify its request for surveillance of Page.

But the Times coverage of the Horowitz report in December 2019 failed to acknowledge that the calumny about Page’s Russian intelligence contacts, which it had published without question in 2017, had been an FBI deception.

Two more Times Russiagate stories in 2018 and 2019 featured spectacular claims that proved on closer examination to be grotesque distortions of fact.  In September 2018 a 10,000-word story by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti sought to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans. 

But that turned to be an outrageously deceptive claim, because Shane and Mazzetti failed to mention the fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017), had been engulfed in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people’s news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts.

and

Even putting aside the complete absence of a Kremlin role, the case that the Russian government sought to influence the U.S. election via a social media campaign is hard to grasp given how minuscule it was. Mueller says the IRA spent $100,000 between 2015 and 2017.  Of that, just $46,000 was spent on Russian-linked Facebook ads before the 2016 election. That amounts to about 0.05% of the $81 million spent on Facebook ads by the Clinton and Trump campaigns combined -- which is itself a tiny fraction of the estimated $2 billion spent by the candidates and their supporting PACS.

and

The Facebook ads placed by a Russian troll farm and released on Wednesday show that the Russian propaganda campaign of 2016 didn’t favor either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Instead, it mocked and goaded America, holding up a distorted but, in the final analysis, remarkably accurate mirror.  This directly contradicts previous U.S. intelligence community assessments.

Compare that with the U.S. involvement in Ukraine in 2014:

In 2014 in Ukraine, there was also the circumstantial evidence of NED involvement. Then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland told the U.S.-Ukrainian Foundation on Dec. 13, 2013, that Washington had spent $5 billion over a decade to support Ukraine’s “European aspirations,” in other words to pull it away from Russia.

But there was also a smoking gun. It came in the form of the leaked telephone call between Nuland and the then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in which they discussed who the new Ukrainian leader would be, weeks before the coup occurred.

and

If World War III Happens, You Can Thank Russiagate...   A delegation of US Senators jetted off to Kiev last month in a show of grandiose solidarity, mirroring a previous trip made in December 2013 by a different group of Senators infamously led by John McCain. That earlier group endured the mild inconvenience of appearing on stage alongside an “opposition leader” who was inordinately preoccupied with the alleged threat of “organized Jewry.” For all the recent domestic frenzy over the claimed scourge of homegrown “Nazis,” most US politicians and think tankers at the time seemed conspicuously blasé about backing a government-toppling initiative largely organized by unabashed sympathizers with the actual, historical Nazis....McCain on that fateful trip was accompanied by Chris Murphy (D-CT) — then a freshman senator who now, eight years later, regularly pontificates as a point-person for the Senate Democrats on foreign policy matters. Undeterred by the embarrassment of the 2013 trip, Murphy lept at the first opportunity to make another high-profile jaunt to Ukraine during the current “crisis.” Included in his 2022 bipartisan delegation was Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), who as of December was suggesting the brilliant idea of a nuclear first strike against Russia, as well as conventional US airstrikes and ground troops to “rain destruction on Russian military capability.” This, among other things, raises the question of what exactly it means anymore to “interfere” in foreign countries’ affairs. Because according to the common definition in US parlance, democracy-threatening “interference” can consist of a Russian internet marketing firm dispatching a few absurd Twitter trolls and Facebook memes to mildly toy with voters during election season. But physically going to a conflict hotzone after threatening nuclear annihilation is… par for the course?

Also, it has now been confirmed that the Steele Dossier, which was one of the first and most publicized of the Trump-Russia conspiracy allegations, was produced by agents of the Clinton campaign and then fed to the FBI and mainstream media (MSM).  That the Steele Dossier was discredited was recognized by the Mueller commission and the intelligence agencies early on (but not by the MSM and Adam Schiff, Chair of House Intelligence Committee).  They then shifted to other justifications for investigating Trump-Russia collusion, all of which I believe are untrue and have been silently recognized as such by the MSM (see Joseph Mifsud - George Papadopoulos, for example, which was the justification for the Mueller investigation after the Steele Dossier collapsed).  

I don't doubt that there's a propaganda war ongoing, and that Russians participate vigorously and often twist the truth.  Both sides clearly do it, so it's important to take the claims on all sides with a grain of salt, so to speak.  Ex-CIA analyst Martin Gurri wrote a book called The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium which describes our predicament with the torrent of information available via the Internet.  It's harder to coalesce around a set of shared beliefs when elite narratives can be investigated so easily and questioned so broadly.  My personal take is to try to avoid nihilism -- the belief that everyone is corrupt and the truth is not knowable.  I'm looking to be constructive.

A Healthy Attitude in a Dying Empire

I've been dismayed by the recent events in Ukraine, where I believe the United States is in the process of getting outsmarted once again by Russia.  As a U.S. citizen, this is disturbing and I want to shout out our folly to all my friends and family and community.  But that would jeopardize many of my personal relationships, and I've been persuaded by my friend Steve Randy Waldman to pursue a more positive and focused path -- Dreams and kindness are all we have: 

Nothing is broken in the world without something else being born. Any creature’s death at the very least yields a corpse, which yields succor for some other’s hungry mouth, or soil upon which new life may grow. If we do slip the chain of our outworn institutions, perhaps it triggers civil war, famine, holocaust, or autocracy. But it is also possible that we jump to something hopeful, a revision of our constitutional order that is more capable, more democratic, both...

Much of what I do as a writer is propose speculative blue-sky social arrangements, on the theory that with the passage of time or in a time of crisis things that once seemed ridiculous or unthinkable become possible, even inevitable. Please consider joining me. It’s fun! There has never been a better time to imagine and promote any of the huge variety of arrangements that would be more virtuous and functional than our own, but that for reasons of practicality and inertia seem unachievable. We need to build a portfolio of dreams, each one unlikely, but from which some few will perhaps draw us away from cataclysm and destruction as familiarities unravel...

Unmediated, outside of the temptations of commerce, the humans are mostly remarkably good to one another. It’s people being awful that goes viral on the apps, but those videos are absurdly unrepresentative. When our imaginations and conversations are dominated by salacious, mediated events, we become tempted to override our own gentleness, to prosecute cruelties in the service of an imagined cause with little connection to actual humans here and now. The result is rarely just. If we do start killing one another en masse, the killers will be electric with self-righteousness. Don’t be. Be kind.

So that's my message today.  Thanks Steve! 

Men's Groups, Proud Boys, & Demented Warmongers

I'm rereading the article on the extreme men's group.  A few excerpts:

Most men suffer in silence, Keuilian wrote, because they feel disconnected from their larger purpose in life. They gorge themselves on distraction: TV, social media, food, booze, pornography. These vices lead men further astray, jeopardizing their income, marriage, family, and sense of self-worth....  Schmidt is a work in progress, he knows that. Thanks to The Project, he’s trying. But if not for meeting these men, he swears, he’d still be shuffling through life like a zombie, rotting away, dead inside and out. Now he acts like a real man, driven, strong, family-oriented, just like The Project leaders he admires....   Earlier this year, British researchers analyzed data from the 2018 BBC Loneliness Experiment, a survey of 55,000 people around the globe, and discovered that young men living in individualistic cultures were those most vulnerable to loneliness. Likewise, a 2017 study reported that young men aged 18 to 30 from the US, UK, and Mexico said that ideally they’d like to spend most of their time with friends or a romantic partner, but in actuality, the majority spent their free time on their own. When feeling sad or depressed, men from the study most often sought help from their mother or romantic partner...  Suddenly, I understood what Keith Schmidt and all the other Project graduates kept telling me about brotherhood.

“True masculinity is showing love, showing compassion, showing all these things that are traditionally not spoken of as masculinity,” Schmidt told me. “And I think that scares some people.” 

So this seems healthy (if overly expensive).  I'd worry more if the men were finding community via the demonization of others.  

I don't know much about Proud Boys -- All the articles on the web seem to be warning that they are bad.  I can't find anything from the Proud Boys themselves.  They seem to be thoroughly marginalized in our culture. From the NYTimes 9/25/2021:

 As scores of Proud Boys made their way, chanting and shouting, toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, one member of the far-right group was busy texting a real-time account of the march.

The recipient was his F.B.I. handler...  As more and more Proud Boys have been arrested in connection with the attack, the group has been increasingly plunged into an atmosphere of suspicion about the presence of informants in their ranks.  The dark mood started three weeks after the riot when it suddenly emerged that Enrique Tarrio, the group’s leader, had himself worked as a F.B.I. informant well before he joined the Proud Boys.

 

So I think we can rest easy about the possibility of groups like Proud Boys taking over our government.

I do worry about a bi-partisan propaganda campaign aimed at demonizing Russia. My view is that the same group that led us into the disaster in Iraq in 2003 (and Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, etc.) is calling the shots and demonizing anyone who speaks out against their latest demented warmongering.  We're rushing headlong into another losing war.  I'm trying to figure out how I should deal with this unpleasant situation, but haven't yet had time to write down my thoughts.

The Self-Fulfilling Half Full Glass

 Another letter to friends:

Hello Gentlemen,

It seems that a number of us are circling around a similar theme -- Is the human condition hopeless?  Should we therefore give up on humanity and just worry about our narrow corner of the world and the small sliver of time that we have left before we pass on?  Alternatively, we can reject nihilism and make our own purpose and meaning as recommended in the podcast that Glenn circulated (see transcript here):

Chabon understood why a person would feel that way about the world, and, in particular, about the world right now. Chabon had felt that way himself once, too. But he also knew, having lived here on Earth for a while, that nihilism is a dead end — no path out. The alternative need not be false hope, or even the belief that the world is not essentially broken and absurd. The alternative is to make your own purpose and meaning, whatever the situation.

I'm right now in the middle of another article with a similar theme -- Sneer if You'd Like, But Engineered Solutions Are a Lot More Plausible Than Behavioral Change in 2022.  This is reminiscent of Jerry's writing on transhumanism -- i.e. we've got a better chance of solving problems technologically than politically.  Excerpt:

I have become, against my will, quite fatalistic about solutions to social problems that require any kind of widespread public buy-in. And though I’m somewhat antagonistic to the cultures that tend to advocate for engineering solutions, such as those of Silicon Valley or the finance industry, I feel drawn to such solutions because social change seems so impossible. We’re riven by partisanship and internet-fueled culture war, we don’t trust institutions or each other, and in my anecdotal experience the rise of casual nihilism - the bitter, I’m-joking-but-not-really insistence that everything is broken and can’t be fixed - is rising fast. All of that in a winner-take-all socioeconomic system that incentivizes being selfish. It’s not a combination that lends itself to a lot of hope. So I dream of moonshots.

Reasonable people can have differing opinions on how best to proceed.  Personally, I sense a rising consciousness of the need to be more constructive and less nihilistic.  Let's call it the doctrine of the self-fulfilling half full glass, or something like that.

Hugs,
Dan

Channeling Sorrow -- Insurrection Edition

I've been deeply saddened by the Democrats embrace of Dick Cheney as an ally in the debate over the "insurrection".  I choose not to hate Dick Cheney and the Democrats who have embraced him.  They may be genuinely trying to get society to a better place by joining ranks against Trump the demagogue and his rowdy followers.  With that charitable spirit, let's examine the issue at hand. Here's what a friend said:

In both your 1-4-22 piece titled “The January 6 Non-Insurrection” and your March or April 2021 piece “On Republicans” you opine that the mob that invaded the Capitol on 1-6-21 was “unarmed”.  The police officers and others who were injured by the mob’s hockey sticks, baseball bats, crutches, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bear spray and stolen police batons would surely disagree with your assessment.  Just because guns were not used does not mean the mob was unarmed.

First of all, there was no bear spray and no fire extinguisher used on January 6, in spite of mainstream media reports to the contrary:

Washington (CNN) April 27, 2021  The Justice Department on Tuesday abandoned the idea that pro-Trump rioters had used bear spray against US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick during the January 6 riot, a major change after implying for weeks that bear spray, not pepper spray, had been deployed...  The clarification came a week after Washington's chief medical examiner ruled that Sicknick had suffered strokes and died of natural causes a day after the attack...  The narrative was already muddled by prosecutors repeatedly citing the bear spray, unsanctioned speculation from the former US attorney who led the probe, exaggerated statements from law enforcement and inaccurate early press reports about a fire extinguisher hitting Sicknick.  [CNN]

More significantly, how do riots involving "hooligans" (friend's term in a previous email) who killed no one compare with acts of state sponsored war such as Pearl Harbor and terrorist acts of mass murder (Kamala Harris)?  I guess one can make the case that Dick Cheney's invasion of Iraq on false pretenses was well intentioned, and that the Japanese in 1945 and Al Qaeda in 2001 were foreign actors and therefore somehow less of a threat than homegrown hooligans armed with crutches and hockey sticks, but it seems a stretch.  

With regard to the definition of insurrection, here is another perspective:

No one from a country where these things actually happen could mistake 1/6 for “a coup .” In the real version, the mob doesn’t take selfies and blaze doobies after seizing the palace, and the would-be dictator doesn’t spend 187 minutes snacking and watching Fox before tweeting “go home.” Instead, he works the phones nonstop to rally precinct chiefs, generals, and airport officials to the cause, because a coup is a real attempt to seize power. Britannica says the “chief prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the police, and other military elements.” We saw none of that on January 6th

Glenn Greenwald describes the danger of overreacting to scary news:

The Democratic Party, eager to cling to their majoritarian control of the White House and both houses of Congress ... hopes that this concocted drama will help them win — just as they foolishly believed about Russiagate. With the threat of Al Qaeda and ISIS faded if not gone, and the attempt to scare Americans over Putin a failure, the U.S. security state, always in need of a scary enemy, has settled on the claim that right-wing “domestic extremists" are the greatest threat to U.S national security; though they claimed this before 1/6, casting 1/6 as an insurrection allows them to classify an entire domestic political movement as an insurrectionary criminal group and thus justify greater spying powers and budgetary authorities.

 

Asserting that the U.S. suffered an attempted coup by a still-vibrant armed faction of insurrectionists is a self-evidently inflammatory claim. It has been used to allocate billions more to the Capitol Police and to radically expand their powers; justify the increased domestic use of FBI tactics including monitoring and infiltration; and agitate for the mass imprisonment of political adversaries, including elected members of Congress. Hapless defendants who are not even accused of using violence have been held in harsh solitary confinement for close to a year, then sentenced to years in prison — while self-styled criminal justice reform advocates say nothing or, even worse, cheer. If one genuinely believes that the U.S. came close to a violent overthrow of American democracy and still faces the risk of an insurrection, then it is rational to sanction radical acts by the U.S. security state that, in more peaceful and normal times, would be unthinkable. 

 

Where is this “insurrection"? What happened to it? Where did it go? The January 6 protest barely lasted four hours until it was easily subdued. Copying the Bush/Cheney model of keeping fear levels high by constantly issuing vague warnings of looming violence and doom, the Department of Homeland Security issued at least six separate "heightened threat” warnings last year, not a single one of which materialized. There were no violent protests in Washington, D.C. or in state capitols on Inauguration Day; no violent protests materialized the week after Biden's inauguration; no violent protest erupted once COVID lockdowns were eased due to social media provocations; none happened on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack; there was no right-wing violence perpetrated in connection with the commemoration of the 100th year anniversary of the Tulsa massacre. Each time such a warning was issued, cable outlets and liberal newspapers breathlessly reported them, ensuring fear levels remained high. 

This is really important to me.  I want to cry for my country. Have we come to a point where hooligans armed with crutches and hockey sticks are equated state sponsored war costing millions of lives and mass murder of thousands of innocent people carried out by terrorists?  Do we dehumanize tens of millions of Americans as violent racists based upon a minority of hooligans (probably egged on by the FBI)?  Let's love another and not assume the worst about our fellow humans.

The January 6 Non-Insurrection

 The January 6 Non-Insurrection

It's now clear to me what happened with regard to the riot on January 6.  I am indebted to Darren Beattie of Revolver News for providing a coherent explanation with a ton of supporting evidence including video from the capitol area on January 6 and in the days leading up to the riot.  Informants and operatives connected to the FBI removed the barriers around the capitol and herded people leaving a Trump rally into the capitol building.  This was captured on video and the leaders have been disappeared from public view, including one who was on the FBI most-wanted list until his identity was revealed by Beattie.  The people were unarmed and had no intention of overthrowing the government, despite widespread news reports to the contrary.

There may have been other legal, political, and military intrigues about, but the riot was designed to discredit these, not implement them.

Restrain Technoloty or Die

 Restrain Technology or Die

A friend of mine wrote an interesting paper on transhumanism: Trans or Not to Trans, Accompanying Slides.  He asked for my thoughts, and here is what I wrote:

I just got around to reading Jerry's Transhumanism paper.  The slides shared previously make a lot more sense now!

This is a great paper, describing as it does human evolution, our current position, and prospects for the future, using a scientific and technological perspective.  With regard to the ultimate question -- "To Trans or not to Trans – That is the Question. What do you think?" -- I would reply that the question is "How should we proceed in the direction of transhumanism?".

As well documented in the paper, the process is already well underway.  While many are recommending we proceed with caution or try to put the cat back in the bag, how can we do that?  The paramount goal must be the same as in natural selection -- survival.  Genes survive which are most well adapted to their environment.  Our environment is changing at breakneck speed and the genes / human technology will not be able to keep up.  Therefore, we need to slow down environmental change.  Above all, this means clamping down on technological change.  

To address one issue with this mentioned in the paper -- "any effort in the West to regulate implementation of the TH agenda will largely fail because the Chinese will never agree to conform to Western ethical values".  I don't think this possibility should be dismissed out of hand.  The Chinese are probably better placed to control technology than "the West" because they have a more top down government and are not as subject to capitalist anarchy.  To the extent that "we" have any power with regard to transhumanism, "we" need to control our own behavior.  That means strict regulation on technological development.

Just my 2 cents.  Thanks for writing this and sharing!

P.S. The book I'm "reading" now (on Audible) is discussing the evolutionary and genetic basis of feelings such as goodwill and guilt (the conscience).  Let's get working on increasing those.

 Revolt of the Public, FBI Edition

My world view is that the CIA assassinated JFK and RFK, and the FBI assassinated MLK.  I now know these things to be true following a lifetime (~ 50 years) of uncertainty.  I believe that it is much easier to uncover the truth in the Internet era.  Whereas in the 20th century it was possible for the elite to control the discourse, this is now impossible as discussed by former CIA analyst Martin Gurri in his book The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.

Another thing that has changed since the 1960s is the ubiquity of the cell phone camera.  Imagine if these had been available during the assassination decade (the 1960s).  Well they are available today and we have extensive video evidence indicating the the so-called January 6 insurrection was actually a riot orchestrated by the FBI.  See:

• Meet Ray Epps: The Fed-Protected Provocateur Who Appears To Have Led The Very First 1/6 Attack On The U.S. Capitol - Revolver 
• Meet Ray Epps, Part 2: Damning New Details Emerge Exposing Massive Web Of Unindicted Operators At The Heart Of January 6

This seems to me to be conclusive evidence of how the FBI orchestrated the riot.  This sort of documentation was never before possible, and people still can't believe it.  

The larger issue is how we, the public, make use of this new power.  Do we ignore the evidence before our eyes in favor of ratcheting up tribal warfare?  Or do we expand our horizons to understand that our  democracy is not what it has seemed to be according to the conventional wisdom?  I advocate the latter, accompanied by renewed dedication to improving our democracy, and improving our public discourse.  Perhaps if we recognize that our understanding of the world has been flawed, we will be more understanding of one another, and better able to engage in civil discourse.  

Nihilism, the Web, and Grandchildren

 A friend of mine shared a short story he has written, asking for feedback.  It was a good story in a haunting post modernist style.  Here was my response:

Thanks for sharing your story, Jerry   Quite evocative and somewhat descriptive of our lonely times.  It brings to mind the book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber:

He contends that over half of societal work is pointless, and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labor with virtuous suffering is recent in human history

I looked up Maus and it fits well with your story:

it depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodernist techniques and represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, the English as fish, the French as frogs, and the Swedish as deer. Critics have classified Maus as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992, it became the first (and is still the only) graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize (the Special Award in Letters). Spiegelman depicts these experiences, from the years leading up to World War II to his parents' liberation from the Nazi concentration camps. Much of the story revolves around Spiegelman's troubled relationship with his father, and the absence of his mother, who committed suicide when he was 20. Her grief-stricken husband destroyed her written accounts of Auschwitz.  

Life is good these days, while it lasts.  Technology is amazing and infinite knowledge is just an Internet connection away.  My current interest is in combating nihilism.  

Nihilism (/ˈnaɪ(h)ɪlɪzəm, ˈniː-/; from Latin nihil 'nothing') is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects general or fundamental aspects of human existence,[1][2] such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values or meaning.[3][4] Different nihilist positions hold variously that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities do not exist or are meaningless or pointless.[5][6]

I followed up with this personal reflection:

Jerry's check-in and short story inspire me to do the same.  I will build upon one of my comments in response to Jerry's short story:

infinite knowledge is just an Internet connection away

Here are a couple of examples of this in my life from the past two days:

1. I replaced a 3-way light switch on Wednesday, something I had never done before.  I looked it up on YouTube and instantly found a couple of videos showing how to do this, making it relatively easy.  I followed up later with another video that included an animation showing the mechanism, giving the why it works in addition to the how to do it. 
2. I picked up Lawrence's kids (ages 7, 9, and 12) from school yesterday and they wanted to play math and geography games in the car.  They were able to answer most of my questions.  It turned out that Chase was using his cell phone to get the answers with a calculator or Siri lookup.  Sean ratted him out for using the cell phone in the back seat, but I think it's impressive that a 10 year old can instantly find the answers to many basic questions.  It reminds me of the wisdom of the old proverb:  "Give a person a fish, (s)he eats for a day.  Teach a person to fish, (s)he eats for a lifetime."

I find creative works such as your "On Watch" meaningful, in something of a paradox.  The fact that you write this and share it with friends demonstrates a desire to find meaning in life, in my view.