“Look at a map! Russia definitely invaded!”
“But Ukraine has Nazis!”
– from a Twitter conversation
The first lesson a sane human might draw from witnessing the above exchange might be: Don’t go on Twitter. That’s a perfectly reasonable solution, and further observation will confirm that, yes, Twitter is full of terrible people taking out their bad days on one another. So far so good.
(more…)“Vladimir Putin can call up all the troops he wants, but Russia has no way of getting those new troops the training and weapons they need to fight in Ukraine any time soon.”
So says Brad Lendon, CNN’s chief military affairs analyst. He’s not alone in his opinion. Other well-known commentators and military logistics experts have said much the same, pointing to the massive equipment losses suffered by Russian forces and chronic shortages of ammunition and supplies.
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Northern Africa is heading into a season of shortage, one that may lead to widespread starvation. There is no famine; climate change is not responsible. Instead, we’re told it’s due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent shortages.
But it turns out, that’s not entirely true. It’s partly true, but this is not -just- about Ukraine. Read for a bit; we’ll see why that matters.
(more…) “You might as well appeal against a thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war. War is cruelty, there is no use trying to reform it; the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
― William Tecumseh Sherman
Doing this is hard sometimes.
When I started The Not Fake News, I set some ground rules. One of them is to always tell the truth as I see it, however painful that might be and without regard to the number of readers it will cost us. From time to time, that truth is harder to write about than not. This is one of those times.
Because the truth is that Russia, under Vladimir Putin, has won his war. And we lost.
(more…)Some of the most inane fake news I’ve ever seen has been coming from pro-Russian media.
Bear in mind, both sides of the war are quite capable of propagandizing; in fact, Zelensky’s shown himself to have a natural talent. The more official Russian outlets have, by all reports, been quite competent at keeping their own nation focused on Putin’s talking points, and the formal separation of East from West information feeds, be they television or internet, have made this much easier. If it’s moderately difficult for citizens of the western world to get the official Russian party line, it’s harder by far for most Russians to access, for example, CNN.
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The Nazis of the Second World War are reviled, and rightly, for their crimes; the Holocaust comes to mind. One might sympathize with an underdog country, afflicted with crippling poverty, seeking to recover their lost national pride — but never a government philosophy that burns books, stifles thought and expression, and slaughters their own citizens wholesale. Italian fascist militarism was barbaric; German Naziism was inhuman.
If there are Nazis in Ukraine, it’s worth our time to examine and our attention if it’s true.
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Of the hundreds of women and children that had taken shelter in Mariupol’s 150-year-old theater, we’re told now that many survived. The shelter in the basement withstood the bombing, and rescue workers are presently engaged in getting people out.
This is the good news.
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Filed under “Notes On The Collapse”. Image is of the only real Ukrainian biological Labrador we could find that isn’t on the Russian side of the border.
ANALYSIS
Tulsi Gabbard has been making headlines again, this time for her ongoing feud with Mitt Romney over Ukrainian biolabs. A lot of people listen to Tulsi and even more to Mitt, and it appears that neither is acknowledging the whole truth here.
So let’s talk about what’s real and what’s not with respect to Ukrainian bio labs.
(more…) Putin tried but failed to justify his war to the West. He did fool a lot of people leading up to the conflict, but since then he’s been overmatched; Europe has learned to fear and mistrust him, and much of the United States loves an underdog too much to want to believe him. In another article, we dealt with a few of his claims (and some others from across the internet), and the actual truth behind them. The bottom line is, there’s just not much truth to them.
But if not the plight of expatriate Russians, what could possibly motivate a modern dictator to get involved in a land war in Eurasia?
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Surrounding every conflict are rumors, innuendo, and error — and that’s not even considering deliberate disinformation along the lines of what we’re now seeing in the Ukraine conflict. Putin is a past master at this; leading up to the war were so many denials that it was going to happen, announcements of withdrawal, and so on that, for many of us, the waters were effectively muddied. And Zelensky himself is a consummate performer, a trained and experienced actor playing the greatest role of all time.
So what’s real, and what’s not? What’s worth worrying about and what’s worth forgetting? Above all: What’s about to happen?
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