Press TV Discussion of Ukraine War (23 May 2022)

My discussion Saturday, May 23rd, on Press TV Spotlight regarding Russia-Ukraine War. I have a few things to say regarding Western media narratives about who is winning, how significant the fascist presence is, etc.

Critical Hour Discussion of PayPal Blocking Consortium News & Other Outlets (5/3/2022)

My appearance on The Critical Hour with WIlmer Leon on May 3rd, discussing my article in Consortium News about the full-court wartime censorship that includes blocking and potentially seizing independent media funds.

Critical_Hour_963(4)JImKav.mp3

What Good Are Notebooks? Life During Wartime Censorship

What Good Are Notebooks? Life During Wartime Censorship

Jim Kavanagh

After seeing the news about, and doing a radio segment on, the new Disinformation Governance Board and PayPal blocking  the accounts of Caleb Maupin, Mnar Adley, Alan MacLeod, and  MintPress News, I now see that PayPal has “permanently limited,” and may seize, the account of Consortium News, “because of”—get this: “potential risk associated with this account.”

This is utterly outrageous, and true political censorship. Consortium News, founded in 1995 by the late, great Robert Parry, and continuing under Joe Lauria, has been and still is one of the most honest, trustworthy, unimpeachable sources of information and analysis in the world—infinitely more trustworthy and unassailable than the NYTs and NPRs of the world. It is completely ridiculous, an obviously hollow pretext, to brand it as a "potential risk" to anything but ignorance.

But, of course, that’s the point: The United States Government and the ideological and financial apparatuses of the state are now blatantly determined to keep you ignorant of anything but what they want you to know. There is a risk: that people will hear something true that smashes the heavily-tinted Overton window. The establishment of a Ministry of Truth within the Department of Homeland Security—a repressive state apparatus—coordinated (and you’d have to be quite a fool to think it’s not coordinated) with the sanctions-come-home blockage of the paltry sums independent journalists’ and media platforms’ barely get by on is part of what is now a full-court censorship offensive.

Critical Hour Discussion of "Disinformation Board," Paypal Block, etc. (4/29/2022)

• Biden Creates Orwellian "Disinformation Governance Board 
• PayPal Blocks Multiple Alternative Media Figures Critical Of US Empire Narratives
• Biden asks Congress for $33 billion to support Ukraine through September
• Pro-Ukraine Rally Attendees Cheer For Nazi Azov Battalion in NYC
• US and Pacific allies panic over Solomon Islands-China security deal

with Wilmer Leon, Garland Nixon, and Steve Poikonen

Critical Hour 962 seg 4 (29 Ap 2022)

Critical Hour Discussion of DOJ Leak Investigations and Ongoing Plight of Julian Assange (6/17/2021)

Biden and Putin say Talks Went Well; Senate to Vote on AUMF; Russia and China Work on Space Program

Jim Kavanagh joins us to discuss Julian Assange. Trevor Timm, the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, has penned an article on Consortium News in which he discusses the attempt by the Biden administration to criminalize news gathering in the case against Julian Assange. Also, Boris Johnson has been railing about the free media while he supports the persecution of Assange.

My segment begins at ~86:50

Listen to "Biden and Putin say Talks Went Well; Senate to Vote on AUMF; Russia and China Work on Space Program" on Spreaker.

[My related articles: Avoiding Assange and Swedish Sex Pistol Aimed at Assange]

The Critical Hour is a daily 60-minute hard-hitting news analysis and talk radio program hosted by Dr. Wilmer Leon & Garland Nixon.

Critical Hour Discussion of MSNBC Bernie-Warren Disgrace (1/17/2020)

Will 2020 Be the Year of Bernie and Progressives or the Demise of Trump?

It’s Friday, so that means it's panel time.

"The third impeachment trial in US history officially began Thursday amid a swirl of new allegations about President [Donald] Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, which several Republicans rushed to downplay as they dismissed Democrats’ calls for further investigation," the Washington Post reported. "Lev Parnas, a former associate of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, has alleged that Trump knew of his role in the effort to dig up dirt in Ukraine that could benefit the president politically." Are these new revelations making it tougher for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to hold his line?
[Related articles: Defeat or Impeach? The (Il)Logic of Impeachment; Dead Man’s Hand: The Impeachment Gambit; Impeachment: What Lies Beneath?]

"[Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth] Warren and [Vermont Sen. Bernie] Sanders remain at odds over whether he told her, during a private dinner in 2018 about the presidential election, that a woman couldn't win -- neither backed off their previous statements," CNN reported Wednesday. "But both of the populist politicians seemed intent on avoiding a debate stage crack-up."

Week in Review Discussion on Loud & Clear (12/27/2019)

The Week in Review

Friday is Loud & Clear’s weekly hour-long segment The Week in Review, about the week in politics, policy, and international affairs. Today they focus on a new Rachel Maddow critique and a broader Russiagate wrapup, the history of American politics, CIA-funded propaganda and arts, the 2020 race, one positive Sanders piece, Warren’s chameleon-like practices, Biden’s standing, Israel’s Likud election, and the new interviews out with the Navy Seal accusers of Ed Gallagher. Brian and John speak with Jim Kavanagh, editor of thepolemicist.net, and Sputnik News analyst and producer Nicole Roussell.
[My related article: Investigation Nation: Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics] 

Listen to "The Week in Review" on Spreaker.

Loud & Clear is a daily program of news, commentary, and political analysis on Radio Sputnik, hosted by Brian Becker and John Kiriakou, featuring independent experts, activists, and political writers. (Introduction above is theirs, with related articles of mine referenced in brackets.)

Swedish Sex Pistol Aimed at Assange

ExtremeTech

In my article, Avoiding Assange, a month ago, right after the first US indictment was issued, I addressed two diversionary arguments that I knew would be used by those who want to hide their complicity with American imperialism under leftish cover—that is, those who don't want to be seen as endorsing the United States government’s prosecution of Assange for, and intimidation of every journalist in the world from, reporting the embarrassing truth about American war crimes, but who also don't really want to stand in the way of Assange’s extradition to the United States.

Loud & Clear Discussion on Media Campaign Aganist Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard (5/20/2019)

Corporate media smears Sanders, Gabbard for refusing to toe Pentagon line on foreign policy

Corporate media came out with a new line of attack on the Democratic presidential candidates most closely identified with the peace movement. The New York Times recently published a magazine article accusing Bernie Sanders of embracing left-wing and liberation movements and involving himself in the Cold War when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont. And The Daily Beast wrote this weekend that Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign is being “boosted by Putin apologists.” Is this the Democrats’ version of McCarthyism for the 2020 campaign? Jim Kavanagh, the editor of thepolemicist.net, and Dan Kovalik, a human rights and labor lawyer who is the author of the book “The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela: How the US is Orchestrating a Coup for Oil,” joins the show.

[My related articles: Bernie's End, Plan B Is Not Bernie, Bernie Wriggles On The Obama Hook, What Does Bernie Want?, What Does Bernie Want? - Part 2]

Listen to "Corporate media smears Sanders, Gabbard for refusing to toe Pentagon line on foreign policy" on Spreaker.

Loud & Clear is a daily program of news, commentary, and political analysis on Radio Sputnik, hosted by Brian Becker and John Kiriakou, featuring independent experts, activists, and political writers. (Introduction above is theirs, with related articles of mine referenced in brackets.)

Investigation Nation: Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics

Washington Examiner

So the Mueller investigation is over. The official “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election” has been written, and is in the hands of Attorney General William Barr, who has issued a summary of its findings. On the core mandate of the investigation, given to Special Counsel Mueller by Rod Rosenstein as Acting Attorney General in May of 2017—to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump”—the takeaway conclusion stated in the Mueller report, as quoted in the Barr summary, is that "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.¹"

Fighting Fake Stories: The New Yorker Serves Up A Doozie

State Department

On July 8^th, The New Yorker published a short piece by Adam Entous, under the graphic above, titled “The Maps of Israeli Settlements That Shocked Barack Obama.” In the article, Entous purports to tell us the heretofore unknown inside story of how the Obama administration came to the surprising realization that Israeli settlements were taking over the West Bank. In the kind of irony The New Yorker might best appreciate, the magazine’s latest promotional tag line is: “Fighting Fake Stories With Real Ones,” and this Adam Entous article is the epitome of fake.

As Entous narrates it, in 2015, the third year of Obama’s second term, as his “Presidency was winding down,” a gentleman called Frank Lowenstein—who was, and still is, the Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations and Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State—stumbled upon a map of West Bank settlements “that he had never seen before.” Though Lowenstein—as, you know, Special Envoy for Palestinian Negotiations and all—had seen “hundreds of maps of the West Bank” and had one “adorning” his office, this “new map in the briefing book” was a revelation to him. It showed clearly that “not only were Palestinian population centers cut off from one another but there was virtually no way to squeeze a viable Palestinian state into the areas that remained.”

Shocked, shocked, Lowenstein scurried off to show the map to Secretary of State John Kerry, telling him: “Look what’s really going on here.” After studiously having the map’s information “verified by U.S. intelligence agencies,” Kerry then unfurled the map on a coffee table in the White House for President Obama to see. As Ben Rhodes, “one of Obama’s longest-serving advisers,” recounted, Obama, too, was “shocked” at Israel’s “systematic” use of settlements to “cut off Palestinian population centers from one another.”

Sacrificing Gaza: The Great March of Zionist Hypocrisy

The Great March of Return is a startling, powerful expression of Palestinian identity and resistance. Thousands of Palestinians have come out, bravely and unapologetically, to say: “We refuse to remain invisible. We reject any attempt to assign us to the discard pile of history. We will exercise our fundamental right to go home.” They have done this unarmed, in the face of Israel’s use of deadly armed force against targets (children, press, medics) deliberately chosen to demonstrate the Jewish state’s unapologetic determination to force them back into submissive exile by any means necessary. By doing this repeatedly over the last few weeks, these incredibly brave men, women, and children have done more than decades of essays and books to strip the aura of virtue from Zionism that's befogged Western liberals' eyes for 70 years.

What the Israelis have done over the past few weeks—killing at least 112 and wounding over 13,000 people (332 with life-threatening injuries and 27 requiring amputation)—is a historical crime that stands alongside the Sharpeville Massacre (69 killed), Bloody Sunday (14 killed), and the Birmingham Fire Hoses and Police Dog Repression as a defining moment in an ongoing struggle for justice and freedom. Like those events, this month’s slaughter may become a turning point for what John Pilger correctly calls “the longest occupation and resistance in modern times”—the continuing, unfinished subjugation of the Palestinian people, which, like apartheid and Jim Crow, requires constant armed repression and at least occasional episodes of extermination.

The American government, political parties, and media, which support and make possible this crime are disgraceful, criminal accomplices. American politicians, media, and people, who feel all aglow about professing their back-in-the-day support (actual, for some; retrospectively-imagined, for most) of the Civil-Rights movement in the American South and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa but continue to ignore the Palestinian struggle for justice against Zionism, because saying peep one about it might cost them some discomfort, are disgraceful, cowardly hypocrites.

You know, the millions of ant-racist #Resistors who are waiting for a quorum of Natalie Portmans and cool elite, preferably Jewish, personalities to make criticism of Israel acceptable before finding the courage to express the solidarity with the Palestinian people they've always had in their hearts. Back in the day, they’d be waiting for Elvis to denounce Jim Crow before deciding that it’s the right time to side with MLK, Malcolm, and Fred Hampton against Bull Connor, George Wallace, and William F. Buckley.

Honoring Robert Parry

(Diane Duston/AP)

Robert Parry’s death is a profound loss to our country as a political and intellectual community. It’s a shame that most Americans don’t know that—and, indeed, don’t even know who Robert Parry is. That ignorance is a sign of how impoverished our political and intellectual community has already become.

Those of us who have been following his work for decades know how principled and reliable, and what a great resource, that work was. We took him for granted as a touchstone of journalist integrity, to which we could always return to get a take on important issues that, whether we agreed with it or not, was unfailingly honest, thoroughly-researched, and demanding of our attention.

We also took for granted his own life story of being blocked from doing that honest, principled work in the mainstream media, and having to continue his career through a self-financed independent newsletter and website (Consortium News), a trajectory that guaranteed his continuing integrity and his relative obscurity.

We took too much for granted.

Fast and Furious: Now They’re Really Gunning for Trump

Here’s what I saw unfold in the media during the 24 hours from Monday to Tuesday afternoon (May 15-16).

On Monday, I saw blaring headlines throughout the day on Twitter about how Trump had betrayed some “highly-classified” intelligence secrets to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during their meeting last week. I was busy and paid little attention to this news, but I figured Trump must have committed one of his hallmark impetuous faux-pas involving some massive security breach, given the hysterical tone of the coverage.

I awoke Tuesday to read the stories in the New York Times (NYT), and the Washington Post (WaPo), sourced to anonymous “current and former government officials,” recounting that Trump had told the Russians a big secret—the NYT did not specify what, but WaPo identified it as an “Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.” As both papers acknowledge—though WaPo makes the irrelevant point that it would be illegal “for almost anyone in government”—Trump, as president, did nothing illegal in telling the Russians this, and, according to the NYT’s own sources, and to National Security advisor Lt. Gen. McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—the only people cited who were actually in the room—Trump “discussed the contents of the intelligence, but not the sources and methods used to collect it.”

Per McMaster: “The president and the foreign minister reviewed common threats from terrorist organizations to include threats to aviation. At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed, and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly.” Neither of the articles, and no one cited in them, disputed this. Per WaPo: “He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances.”

So far, I was seeing nothing to break a sweat over. Is there some problem with notifying Russia—or anyone else, for that matter—of an Islamic State threat to blow up civilian aircraft with laptop bombs? Is the idea that we’re supposed to sit back and let it happen? What sane person wouldn’t be glad this warning was given to Russia, and wouldn’t want Russia to give it to us if the circumstances were reversed? Is this not a routine exchange of threat information in a closed principals’ meeting?

Prime Directive: Trust the System, Blame the Russians

There are increasing doubts about the trustworthiness of America’s now ubiquitous electronic voting systems. For all the reasons I put forth in my previous post, including the suspicious results in the Democratic primary this year (analyzed in detail in a Stanford study), wider swaths of the public are aware and concerned about whether voters can have confidence that their votes will be counted for whom they are cast.

So the establishment media had to address this issue in some way. I guess that’s why the New York Times put David E. Sanger and Charlie Savage on the case, with their September 14^th article, “Prime Danger in Vote Hack: Sowing Doubt.”

As the title indicates, the prime objective of this article is to allay any doubt voters might have about the reliability of the American electoral process, while at the same time acknowledging (kinda, sorta) that there’s some “danger” involved in the opaque, proprietary technologies that now determine the outcome of our elections. It’s a tricky needle to thread, and the convoluted and self-contradictory argument they use to do it is woven around the first two words of the article: “Russian hackers.”

Bernie's End

Today, the morning after the Associated Press and other media outlets declared Hillary Clinton the presumptive Democratic nominee. Glenn Greenwald gave the perfect headline: 

Perfect End to Democratic Primary: Anonymous Superdelegates Declare Winner Through Media

On the one hand, I understand why Bernie supporters are pissed-off about the media making this announcement on the eve of the California primary (taking place as I write). Bernie defeating Hillary in California would demonstrate her political weakness (always a good thing). Today’s announcement will likely depress the vote and make that less likely, and it would be naïve not to suspect that this announcement was made because someone wanted just that.

On the other hand, what we’re seeing here is only the reality of the Democratic Party made blatant. Pace Bernie and his supporters, the problem here is not that the media is reporting about superdelegates and how they say they’re going to vote. The problem is the superdelegate system itself, and what it exemplifies about the Democratic Party. Sandernistas love to show the math and the dates, and insist that, really, the 750 superdelegates have not yet voted. But the reality here—the political math—is that Bernie is not going to persuade hundreds of superdelegates to switch to him. The political reality is that those superdelegates were put in place to prevent someone like him from ever getting the nomination. And they are going to do their job. For which they are well paid in various ways. Bernie and his supporters are running into the Democratic Party wall, and they don’t want to hear it.

It’s not the media, but the Sanders campaign, that is perpetuating a diversionary myth—in this case, about who and what the superdelegates are. They are, in the main, not political actors amenable to reason or ethics in figuring out who is the best candidate, but agents of the money and power interests that control the Party, appointed to vote as those interests wish. Which is worse: To report the political truth or perpetuate a political myth? 

The Invisible Woman: Dorothy Thompson Didn't "Quake in Fear"

• Obama quoted her inspirational words about "the exercise of liberty" at the White House correspondents' dinner.

• She was an early critic of the Nazis and the first reporter to be expelled by Hitler.

• She was the second most admired woman in the US after Eleanor Roosevelt.

• She was the model for the Katharine Hepburn character in "Woman of the Year."

• She was one of the most respected and celebrated 20th-century American journalists, male or female.

• She was married to well-known American author Sinclair Lewis.

• She is a "fascinating woman who deserves to be an icon of the feminist movement." Yet today she is "unknown and unremembered... rarely, if ever, mentioned as an important female historical figure." 

Israel's "Human Shield" Hypocrisy

“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much…”– Joseph Conrad “Heart of Darkness” [h/t William A. Cook]

The Israeli-American (Let’s never forget this is a team effort!) slaughter in Gaza is so horrifying that I’ve been at a loss to find the words to comment on it without letting anger get the better of me. The media coverage of what’s happening, dominated by the ridiculous notion that Israel is “defending” itself, is so grotesquely mendacious, hypocritical, and racist (imbued with colonialist ethno-supremacism) that it is hard to know where to begin critiquing it—without, again, becoming enraged.

For the moment, I’ll focus on one particular, insistent meme, constantly being promoted by Israel and its apologists, namely that Hamas is using civilians as “human shields.” The idea is that for Hamas to place any kind of military personnel anywhere in or near a civilian neighborhood constitutes using all the civilians in that neighborhood as “human shields.” Furthermore, it makes of that neighborhood a legitimate “military” target for devastating Israeli attack, absolves Israel from any culpability for the scores of resulting dead, blown-apart civilians including children, and places all moral and legal responsibility for those victims on the Palestinian resistance fighters who dared appear anywhere near civilians.

Resurrecting the Lede: The New York Times on the F.C.C. and Net Neutrality

Yesterday (May 15^th), the New York Times published a story by Edward Wyatt on the FCC’s “net neutrality” decision.  Here are the first two paragraphs of the story, and what I believe was the headline (See note below), as it appeared on the  NYT web site yesterday:

F.C.C. Votes to Move Ahead on Net Neutrality Plan

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 Thursday to move forward with a set of proposed rules aimed at guaranteeing an open Internet, prohibiting high-speed Internet service providers from blocking or discriminating against legal content flowing through their pipes. 

While the rules are meant to prevent Internet providers from knowingly slowing data, they would allow content providers to pay for a guaranteed fast lane of service. Some opponents of the plan, those considered net neutrality purists, argue that allowing some content to be sent along a fast lane would essentially discriminate against other content.

When I read this, I contributed the following comment (slightly edited):

This story is published in a seriously deceptive way. The headline and the first paragraph make it sound like the decision reinforces openness and equality, with language about "guaranteeing an open Internet, prohibiting high-speed Internet service providers from blocking or discriminating against legal content."  Only when you read the second paragraph, after the introductory "while"--which actually means "in contradiction with what we just implied"--does the reader learn that the decision will "allow content providers to pay for a guaranteed fast lane of service," which means precisely that everyone else will be relegated to a slower lane, creating, ipso facto, "discriminat[ion] against legal content"! The headline could and should have read: "FCC Votes to Allow Internet Content Discrimination"!  Why did the NYT feel the need to present the case so misleadingly? 

When I went to write about this for the blog today, I found that the story had been substantively re-written, including the headline.* The article now begins like this:

F.C.C. Backs Opening Net Neutrality Rules for Debate

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators appear to share one view about so-called net neutrality: It is a good thing.

But defining net neutrality? That is where things get messy.

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to open for public debate new rules meant to guarantee an open Internet. Before the plan becomes final, though, the chairman of the commission, Tom Wheeler, will need to convince his colleagues and an array of powerful lobbying groups that the plan follows the principle of net neutrality, the idea that all content running through the Internet’s pipes is treated equally.

While the rules are meant to prevent Internet providers from knowingly slowing data, they would allow content providers to pay for a guaranteed fast lane of service. Some opponents of the plan, those considered net neutrality purists, argue that allowing some content to be sent along a fast lane would essentially discriminate against other content.

Yesterday’s lead paragraph, with its flat claim that the FCC’s proposal is “aimed at guaranteeing an open Internet,” has been changed to a kind of “Well, ‘net neutrality’ means different things to different people” plaint.  This at least implicitly recognizes that the FCC’s claim that it’s working for net neutrality is not accepted by everyone. “Moving Ahead on Net Neutrality” also has significantly different implications than “Opening Net Neutrality Rules for Debate.”

Still, the article maintains the misleading and contradictory sentence that now begins the fourth paragraph.  This sentence, beginning with “While the rules,” contains, in its first clause, an assertion about what the rules “are meant” to do--prevent some data from being provided more slowly--that is proved false by the second clause, which states that the rules allow some data to be provided more quickly for a fee. The article then goes on to treat the idea that allowing paid fast lanes on the internet means actual discrimination in content delivery as if that idea were a peculiar conceit of net neutrality “purists.”

This is another example of the construction of a false ambiguity that complexifies a clear distinction—an ambiguity that pretends the point of the FCC’s proposed rules may not be what it obviously is.  FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, former cable industry lobbyist, is trying to approve a system of differential speeds of content delivery on the internet in order to provide cable and telecom companies with a new profit stream. That is the opposite of net neutrality. There’s no ambiguity or debate or mystery about this. 

Wheeler’s claim—namely, that such a system is “meant” to “guarantee an open internet” and preserve net neutrality—is not of equal credibility with the claim that the system he proposes will undermine net neutrality. The attempt to present these as equally compelling claims is an egregious example of the journalistic tactic of constructing a false equivalence in order to avoid identifying the weakness and mendacity of positions promoted by those who are powerful and respected.

You know, we must consider the idea that Republican Voter ID laws are “meant” to preserve the integrity of the vote as equally credible as the idea that they are meant to reduce voter turnout by disfavored populations.

I’d also ask: Should not the NYT acknowledge its re-write of the story? The paper very carefully acknowledges one edit: a change in the number of protesters cited in the article. But it gives no hint of the much more substantial re-write from the "earlier version," which changed the lede significantly.

All the news we print in fits.

Note

*Thus my uncertainty about the headline. The original story has been preserved on local news sites that picked up the NYT feed yesterday; some have the headline: “FCC votes to pursue net neutrality rules.” I cannot remember specifically, but the headline strongly suggested that the FCC had ratified net neutrality, as my comment to the NYT implies. See also the post on this at DailyKos.

Good for the Gander:Ukraine's Demise Accelerates

A further look at the Ukraine debacle, in seven pieces.

Montagueski and Capuletovitch

(Cool Photo. Remember what happened to Romeo and Juliet.)

Ukraine, Interrupted

“Ukraine” means “borderland,” and if there were ever a country suffering a borderline personality disorder—barely “keeping itself together,” as we say—it is Ukraine. Suddenly, it’s been deprived of its meds (discounted gas and other Russian-provided subsidies), and goaded into a schizophrenogenic family crisis (the American-sponsored overthrow of its elected government, resented by half the country).  After the maidan mania, came the Crimea depression, and now, it seems, rapid and radical decompensation.

Before the maidan winter games, if some in the country (Kiev “liberals”) were looking for the cure from Dr. America and Nurse NATO, standing by to treat the flailing patient with their straitjacket of austerity and electroshock-and-awe therapy, perhaps some are now realizing that these practitioners’ cures only increase the crazy.

Since my last detailed post, the Ukraine situation has indeed been devolving rapidly, both within the country and on the level of international geopolitics.  It’s hard to see where Ukraine is going—whether it will survive as a unified state at all (even sans Crimea), and it is hard to see how seriously the world will be riven by a “new Cold (or even hot) War.” American political and media discourse is now completely dominated by the “aggressive Russia/nasty Putin” meme, but it would be wise to look carefully at the different axes of major, and lesser-included subsidiary, contradictions to see the real web of tensions which the “new Cold War” narrative is designed to occlude.