Shocker: #Russiagate Is a Big Fat Fraud

*Updated below.

As much as the US government has been infiltrating and pressuring both the corporate media and social media platforms in a fear and censorship campaign to soften up Americans for its proxy war on Russia, we're now learning that some Twitter executives, at least, were disturbed enough to feebly push back against the overreach. 

In Twitter Files #15, journalist Matt Taibbi reports that the Hamilton 68 Dashboard's list of hundreds of Twitter accounts, supposedly run by "Russian bots," is mainly comprised of innocent human users. The contrivance of an USAID-funded bipartisan think tank called the Alliance For Securing Democracy, the Dashboard has been a prime source of disinformation for such outlets as the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC,  CNN, and MSNBC. Even so-called "fact-checking" sites have treated the specious Hamilton Dashboard as a bona fide source of information for the relentless parade of anti-Russia media reports over the past several years.

Although it's long been obvious, to  some of us anyway, that the McCarthyite dashboard of dangerous Twitter accounts was pure fake news propaganda, Twitter itself was able to discern that they were, in fact, mostly legitimate accounts from the U.S., Canada and Great Britain. But its executives apparently were too cowed by the "Deep State" operatives who  persistently browbeat them into censorship compliance at the time to blow the whistle publicly. Taibbi was finally granted access to the true identities behind the list of "Russian bots," and has proceeded to notify many of them of their dubious distinction as designated Kremlin plants and stooges.

“I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is,” Taibbi quotes Twitter Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth as having written when the fraud was first proven beyond a doubt. 

“The selection of accounts is… bizarre and seemingly quite arbitrary,” wrote Roth. “They appear to strongly preference pro-Trump accounts (which they use to assert that Russia is expressing a preference for Trump… even though there’s not good evidence any of them are Russian).”

Even Twitter execs were stunned to read who was listed. The names ranged from well-known media figures like David Horowitz to conservatives like Dennis Michael Lynch and progressives like Consortium editor Joe Lauria. It’s crucial to understand that the list captured not just Trump supporters but a range of political dissidents, including leftists, anarchists and humorists. Wrote policy chief Nick Pickles, upon seeing the name of British satirist @Holbornlolz:

“A wind-up merchant,” he wrote. “I follow him and wouldn’t say he’s pro-Russian… I can’t even remember him tweeting about Russia.”

These people never knew they were used for years to drive hundreds if not thousands of media headlines about supposed Russian bot infiltration of online discussions: about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign, the #ReleaseTheMemo affair, the Parkland shooting, Donald Trump’s election, the #WalkAway and #IStandWithLaura hashtags, U.S. missile strikes in Syria, the Bernie Sanders campaign, the “Blexit” movement to peel black voters away from Democrats, calls to fire National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, “attacks” on the Mueller investigation, and countless other issues.

Read Taibbi's whole piece for more on the neocon/neoliberal personalities involved with the Hamilton Dashoard fraud, along with reactions from some of their many unwitting victims. One Dashboard fraudster that Taibbi doesn't mention is Jake Sullivan, who is currently Joe Biden's national security adviser and a chief architect-cheerleader of the Ukraine-Russia proxy war.

Both the think tank running the Hamilton Dashboard propaganda scam and the Twitter managers who eventually uncovered the scam were well-stocked with other future Biden people, many of them alumni of both the Bush and Obama administrations. Taibbi writes:

...Twitter is not guiltless. Though people like Roth wanted to go hard at the fabulists — “My recommendation at this stage is an ultimatum: you release the list or we do,” he wrote — ultimately people like future White House and National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne advised caution. “We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” she wrote. Carlos Monje, future senior advisor to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, concurred.

“I also have been very frustrated in not calling out Hamilton 68 more publicly, but understand we have to play a longer game here,” Monje decided.

Taibbi is expecting neither media nor political class culprits to be held accountable for the fraud, given that Twitter execs already did privately warn both complicit Congress members and media people to steer clear of the Hamilton propaganda as a source of their news and information. Don't look for any mea culpas from anybody in the halls of political and information power for their own roles in this massive deceit of the public.

As I wrote here nearly four years ago, the Hamilton 68 fraud, designed to grease the skids for their desired war on Russia, uses the same m.o. that the media-political complex sold to the public as the casus belli for the illegal invasion of Iraq:

The initial public acceptance of the invasion of Iraq, as well as the "belief" of the majority of polled subjects in Russian meddling in the presidential election stays alive thanks largely to the process of amplification.

The first part of the conflict-creation recipe involves bellicose think tanks and defense industry-beholden politicians planting scary stories in the mainstream media, whose stenographers graciously grant the planters anonymity due to the "sensitivity" of the situation and fears that national security will be threatened if the public gets too much detailed information  The second step is for the warmongers to then point to these planted stories as proof positive that they are full of facts, the actual details of which must unfortunately be withheld to protect the interests of the planters. These two steps are like yeast. They make the disinformation cake rise and rise.

This is what former Vice President Dick Cheney did in 2002.  His office fed New York Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon the "scoop" that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium from Africa and using it to build nuclear weapons. Then Cheney went on Meet the Press and pointed to the New York Times as his proof that Saddam did indeed plan to attack the US.  To give the disinformation an added dose of verisimilitude, "investigative" reporter Miller even went to jail for a time to protect the powerful sources of the false information. Rather than out herself as a stenographer, she made herself a martyr - until the whole scam fell apart, and she lost her job at the Times'

Now, with another manufactured debt ceiling crisis rapidly approaching, it might be a good time to remember that the gaslighting Hamilton 68 fraudsters had also blamed Russia for the shutdown mess in 2018, and that all legitimate Twitter criticism of the hapless Senate leader Chuck Schumer came not from independent-thinking Americans, but from the Kremlin, which had stealthily infiltrated the brains of Americans!

Current New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen had just (temporarily) migrated to the Democratic veal pen known as the Huffington Post from her previous top post at the Times when the former unquestioningly and breathlessly reported:

#SchumerShutdown has surpassed #ReleaseTheMemo as the highest trending hashtag among Russian influence campaigns. They seized on that hashtag earlier this month in an effort to pressure Republican lawmakers to release a classified memo written by House GOP aides that allegedly describes abuses in FBI surveillance practices. Conservative organizations like Breitbart and the Daily Caller have given major coverage to the memo, but Democratic lawmakers have denounced it as deeply misleading.

Alliance for Securing Democracy tracks activity from 600 monitored Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations. It has found that Russian bots and trolls frequently amplify content attacking the United States, conspiracy theories and misinformation.

As I'd reported at the time:

Coincidentally (of course) Twitter has just sent emails to 677,775 users informing them that they were being monitored for the thought-less crime of having read and/or shared tweets from Kremlin propaganda mills.

Also, totally coincidentally, HuffPo has just sent its own emails to its entire stable of unpaid freelance contributors informing them that their "content" would no longer be accepted. This  includes all content from writers like Joe Lauria who dare to express healthy skepticism that RussiaGate has any basis in reality, or that endless war might not be in the best interests of humanity.

  HuffPo editor Lydia Polgreen, late of the New York Times, told the New York Times that she's banned the messy, noisy, free-thinking bloggers so as to "declutter" the site and give more room to quality journalism, such as, presumably, the pro-war propaganda provided by neocon think tanks.

Guess who one of those Hamilton Dashboard-identified Russian bots turned out to be?

Why, it was Joe Lauria, the current editor of Consortium News, which is critical of the war and surveillance policies of the United States. Matt Taibbi has Lauria's reaction at the above-linked Twitter Files article. Lauria was disgusted, but not all that shocked.

Even though the Hamilton Dashboard has been completely discredited,  thanks to the last bastions of independent journalism still standing, it will doubtlessly be reborn under a different name, in another think tank, another corporate newsroom, another corrupt politician beholden to the war racket and to the interests of the oligarchy. 

All that we can do is keep chipping away at their various pathological disinformation campaigns, and shooting all the disinfecting sunlight at them that we can. Since they have no shame, they will never go away quietly or voluntarily. 

*Far from it, actually. In a detailed rebuttal of Taibbi's revelations, the Alliance for Securing Democracy website pleads that its critics were either taking their dashboard way too seriously, or else all those stupid journalists, Twitter executives and doubters of all stripes were themselves irresponsible in the way that they used it.

The dashboard’s original methodology acknowledged that “the content within the network is complex and should be understood in a nuanced way.” Members of the media, pundits, and even some lawmakers often failed to include appropriate context when using the dashboard’s data, despite ASD experts’ extensive efforts to correct misconceptions at the time. Because the data was consistently misunderstood or misrepresented, we published multiple follow-up instructions clarifying key points, including: “Some accounts we track are automated bots, some are trolls, and some are real users. Some are in Russia, but many are not”.

This, of course, is the same kind of techno-legal babble used by many dishonest players whenever they are caught out in a crime or a scam.  For example, the Justice Department could not possibly prosecute Wall Street after the 2008 financial collapse, because the complex financial instruments of the experts could  never be understood by mere mortals. As a matter of fact, some of the same malefactors who precipitated the crisis in the first place were often elevated to government positions, the better to sort everything out while absolving themselves, if not outright proclaiming themselves saviors. If anyone was to blame, it was those greedy people who took out subprime liar loans on houses they couldn't afford.

The Alliance  fatuously adds that they (unlike, they insinuate, Elon Musk and Taibbi) were sensitive to their victims' privacy rights and never "doxxed" the people whose Twitter accounts ended up on their dashboard. It's the "shoot the messenger" ploy all over again. They try to change the topic from their own bad behavior to the worse offense of the leaking of their own bad behavior.  What the people whose accounts were linked to Russia didn't know didn't hurt them, the Alliance asserts. How could anyone possibly construe that the Dashboard was a McCarthyite blacklist, when they only linked Twitter accounts to Russian influence, and were not directly responsible for anybody losing their job or getting de-platformed as a result. All they really did was warn other people to beware of the provenance of the listed accounts. And Twitter did it too, sending its users those thousands of emails warning them of certain suspicious accounts they had been reading.

The whole disclaimer is just another layer on a disinformation cake puffed up with a very generous helping of enriched gaslight. These people not only have no shame, they've severely overdosed on their own chutzpah.

All They Are Saying Is, Give War a Chance

 Only days after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was heckled at a town hall in her Queens district for her support for the US's proxy war with Russia, what with the increasing chance of nuclear weapons, the House Progressive caucus sent a polite letter to Joe Biden, asking that he at least consider diplomacy at some vague point in the future.

The reaction to the dreaded D word was swift and it was hysterical. It came from what can now only be termed the Neocon Party, a consortium of Democrats and "moderate" Republicans and their assorted partners in the Deep State/Permanent Ruling Class/Blob, along with their shills in the corporate media. With such a tsunami of outrage coming at them, Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal quickly withdrew their baby toes from the shallow River of Peace and hastened to strenuously wipe them dry with the American flag of freedom. 

 Jayapal contended the letter was released by staff without proper vetting and said it improperly conflated her caucus’ position with GOP divisions over providing more aid to Ukraine aid, which Democrats back. She withdrew the letter after the embarrassing intra-party feud.

“The Congressional Progressive Caucus hereby withdraws its recent letter to the White House regarding Ukraine,” Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington state, said in a statement. “The letter was drafted several months ago, but unfortunately was released by staff without vetting. As Chair of the Caucus, I accept responsibility for this.”

Nobody wants to be accused of being a Putin puppet or a Trump cultist,  or even of whispering the reality that Ukraine itself has been a full-fledged American puppet state for almost a decade, if not longer.  Its first post-coup finance minister was, after all not only American, she was an alumna of both the US Treasury and State Departments. She became a Ukraine citizen one day after getting the chief financial officer post in 2014. Its president, Zelensky, is a made-for-American TV actor whose last gig was, in fact, the lead in a hit Ukrainian TV show.  But to even hint that the United States is shamelessly using one of the poorest, most oppressed European countries as cover for its rapacious war for the globe's energy and other resources would be an insult to a weakening Superpower. 

 So would mentioning that Joe Biden is a consummate hypocrite. The man now mouthing such concern for the suffering Ukrainian people  himself increased their suffering when as vice president, he ordered their parliament to raise their retirement ages and to stop subsidizing their high energy costs. The imposition of austerity on regular people was necessary, he said, to pay back a fortune in predatory IMF loans and to atone for the country's political corruption. This was during the same time that his own son was raking in millions sitting on the board of a corrupt Ukrainian energy company.  

Instead of directly confronting Biden in her letter, Jayapal flattered him, gushing:

 Your support for the self-defense of an independent, sovereign, and democratic state has been supported by Congress, including through various appropriations of military, economic and humanitarian aid in furtherance of this cause. Your administration’s policy was critical to enable the Ukrainian people, through their courageous fighting and heroic sacrifices, to deal a historic military defeat to Russia, forcing Russia to dramatically scale back the stated goals of the invasion.

She then ever so so gently pivots to the specter of World War III and nukes, suggesting that it might behoove Biden to talk to Putin, despite the White House's insistence that it will prevent any such meeting from taking place at an upcoming summit, lest a ceasefire ensue. This avoidance might prove to be very difficult, given Biden's penchant for losing his way when departing from various stages, and even forgetting how to get home after a tree-planting ceremony right in his own backyard this week. So wouldn't it be something if Biden's senile confusion led to the inadvertent beginning of the end of the war? Anyway, it's fun to imagine Biden barging into Putin in the VIP steam-room or in a soundproof gold-plated bathroom stall.

But I digress. Even before her forced "clarification" followed by the full retraction, Jayapal's entire letter reads like a case study in Orwellian "war is peace" Newspeak. Although war is indeed hell and a prime cause of worldwide inflation, famine, poverty and death, she agreed that it is simply not US Superpower's place to put pressure on its vassal state to sit down with Putin.

This specious argument for endless grinding war and death is like a mafia boss complaining that he doesn't have the power to call off a hired hit, let alone a full fledged mob war. Not only would stopping the bloodbath be unethical, it would hurt the feelings and disrespect the dignity of his devoted hired hitmen. Worst of all, the godfather himself would lose face and the respect of his entire extended family of consiglieres and capos.

So even as the world starves and burns, American hegemony will gorge itself, all the while covering its own rear end by feigning subservience to the very puppet regime that it created in the first place.

And thus, sensibly sensing that she and her progressive caucus were on the verge of violating the sacred principle of Omerta, with possible consequences including loss of access to the Neocon Party's ATM machine, Jayapal quickly backtracked, even before her formal retraction, vowing: "Let me be clear. We are united as Democrats in our unequivocal commitment to supporting Ukraine in their fight for their democracy and freedom in the face of the illegal and outrageous Russian invasion, and nothing in the letter advocates for a change in that support.”

Repeat after me and write it on the blackboard a hundred times: "D stands for Democrat - not for Diplomacy!"

Jayapal and her caucus have shown themselves to be more devoted to their careers ("party unity") than they are to saving the world from poverty, starvation, displacement, hunger, and even from a nuclear holocaust. That is some dedication! To Jayapal's credit, though, she at least wrote her retracted, wishy-washy letter, thus making the slightest little crack in the hegemonic propaganda. Whether this crack widens despite herself, or whether her caucus is able to mend their booboo with multiple gobs of Superpowerglue and billions of dollars more in war appropriations remains to be seen.

True to party-politics form, Jayapal is passive-aggressively blaming the release of the letter on an underling who sent it out by total mistake - but of course Jayapal is taking full responsibility for the "slipup".

Now get out there, proles, and vote as if your very lives depended on it. You can even use the write-in option while doing your democratic duty. Or, you can just leave it blank in the French way, as I did for the New York State Senate contest several election cycles in a row. Even though it turned out that "Blank" got way more votes than my unopposed GOP Senator John Bonacic, Senator Blank was still denied the election, and Bonacic usurped the will of the voters and took office again and again. It was a real slap in the face to Our Democracy™. Go figure. 

On the bright side, when I do vote next month, I will be the lucky recipient of this award-winning sticker from the Ulster County Board of Elections:

It's the creation of 14-year-old Hudson Rowan of Marbletown, NY, who on the urging of his mom, entered the county's art contest for teenagers, most of whom are of course too young to vote. Hudson told the media that his multicolored "robot spider crab" is meant to symbolize the globe-encompassing chaos that is electoral politics. His entry actually got more votes than there are registered voters in all of Ulster County.

So much for the voter apathy that the politicians are always kvetching about.

The Unbearable Brightness of Democratic Being

 Another week, another New York Times article about elite Democratic Party angst. The gaslighting theme, as ever, is that voters are ungrateful wretches who refuse to hear the message about all the great things that Joe Biden and his party have accomplished.

The electorate just doesn't get it. After all, writes the Paper of Record with an apparent straight face, "many Democratic candidates are raising vast sums of money, a sign of voter engagement."

Actually, it's an unmistakable sign of the record engagement of wealthy donors who, as that famous Princeton study proved way back when, usually get whatever they want in the way of tax breaks, antisocial policies and investment opportunities (private gains via socialized losses.)

But still, the Democrats will go through the requisite motions. They'll most of all have us reminisce over those long-expired, long-exhausted Rescue Plan benefits. And Joe Biden, to prove how much he cares about you, is carefully considering limited and mean-tested student debt forgiveness. He will begin hitting the road with a vengeance to spread the feel-good message in order to, as the Times headline puts it, "brighten his presidency and the national mood."

One of his very first stops to help lift our spirits will be on Tuesday at a Lockheed weapons plant in Alabama.  This facility manufactures the thousands of anti-tank Javelin missiles that his administration is sending to unknown hands in Ukraine. So if your mood is not instantaneously brightened by the sight of the Commander in Chief surrounded by all those shiny phallic symbols of death, then you probably need a mental health intervention to strengthen your libido. For as Theodore Roosevelt himself famously thundered over a century ago in the lead-up to the War To End All Wars: "By war alone can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life!"

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi virtue-signaled the importance of gender parity in equating killing with caring. She cares so much about human struggles, in fact, that she did both T.R., and Joe Biden one better, all but unilaterally declaring war on Russia on Sunday. "America stands firmly with Ukraine. We are here until victory is won," she orgasmically gushed upon being gifted the Order of Princess Olga medal from heartthrob Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Not for nothing is this powerful feminist icon royally described by corporate media as "third in line to the presidential succession" in her own country.

The peasants just don't get it. The Dems have to fight "the Russians"  over there so that they don't have to fight for you over here. Over There, Say a Prayer, and Beware, for the Yanks are coming and they won't stop till it's Over, Over There. Or, as the New York Times a tad less jingoistically puts the party's existential exasperation with the lower orders not getting with the Neo World Order:

How much time should they spend trying to show voters they grasp the pain of inflation, compared with efforts to remind them of low unemployment? Should they pursue ambitious policies that show Democrats are fighters, or is it enough to hope for more modest victories while emphasizing all that the party has passed already?

My published comment on the article:

 It seems that every time a prominent Democrat appears on the corporate news shows, it's to agitate for war and billions of dollars in weaponized "humanitarian" aid for the people of Ukraine, the latest designated pawns in the endless US wars for oil, for profit, for global real estate. War is an investment opportunity for the wealthy donors who fund both our major political parties.

But student loan forgiveness, continuation of subsidized Covid treatment for poor uninsured people, renewal of modest cash aid to children? Where is the profit in that? Of course, since they can't say that directly because it would hurt their re-election chances, they turn to the usual cynical platitudes. Their go-to refrain is that helping people in their everyday lives would unfairly benefit the "undeserving". Take your pick of who the undeserving are: if they aren't residents of "crime ridden communities" who'd only use the benefits to score drugs, then they are those ubiquitous children of millionaires champing at the bit to avoid paying their alleged student loans. As far as his devotion to the working stiff is concerned, Joe Biden has yet to cancel the lucrative government contracts with Amazon, which is trying to squash labor unions. So far, he is ignoring his "good friend" Bernie Sanders's appeal to rectify this oversight. Voters are noticing the political cynicism as well as the money-soaked corruption which exists all across the designated A-to-B political spectrum.

Orwell In the Arctic

From an official Pentagon document:

Our Army exists to protect our nation and to preserve the peace. To meet that core requirement, the Army must man, train, equip, and organize to win in the Arctic. The Arctic is simultaneously an arena of competition, a line of attack in conflict, a vital area holding many of our nation’s natural resources, and a platform for global power projection. The Army is committed to defending our Arctic interests. Accordingly, the Army will field a Multi-Domain Task Force-enabled division and adjust our Alaskan-based brigade combat teams to regain the U.S. Army’s Arctic dominance. This rejuvenated Arctic capability will increase the Army’s ability to operate in extreme cold-weather, mountainous, and high-altitude environments. This strategy poises the Army to adapt how it generates, postures, trains, and equips our forces to execute extended, multi-domain operations in extreme conditions in support of the Joint warfighter. Restoring Arctic dominance also requires an inherently Total Army approach incorporating the Army Reserve and National Guard. 

The opening paragraph of this grossly under-reported 2021 manifesto, effectively announcing the ultimate extension of the current proxy war of the US vs Russia (the physical battlefield being limited thus far to the impoverished, IMF-indebted US vassal state of Ukraine), is a near-perfect example of the Doublethink defined by George Orwell in his semi-fictional classic, 1984:

 The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them to forget the fact that has become inconvenient and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge and so on indefinitely, with the lie always  one step ahead of the truth.

But even going beyond the self-contradictory and mind-numbing  "war for peace" rhetoric is the arrogant assumption that the entire Arctic region is the sole property of the US-based oil companies, which are euphemized as "our national interests."

In point of fact, under international law, although no one nation-state can "own" the Arctic Ocean or the North Pole, the rapidly-melting sea ice means that Canada and Russia each own most of the Arctic coast-line. The United States owns only Alaska, which the Russian foreign minister only half-facetiously demanded be returned to it as the Ukraine invasion began.

But back to the Army's Orwellian manifesto. While readily admitting that the melting of the sea ice is directly attributable to the burning of fossil fuels, the US hegemon will fight to the death for the right of its subsidized oil companies to continue extracting these fossil fuels, even to the point of global suicide. And as the largest consumer of oil and the single largest contributor to pollution and climate change in the entire world, the Pentagon knows whereof it speaks. This is, at its essential rotten core, a fight for its own continued existence as a deadly force.

As the world's sole remaining Superpower, possessing nearly one thousand military bases compared to Russia's nine, the US hegemon nevertheless feels threatened by Russia's geographic Arctic advantage, in that the European Arctic, largely controlled by Russia, is far more accessible than the North American sections.  So, while the Army is ramping up severe weather training for its human troops in Alaska, it is also quietly occupying sections of Norway in preparation for an Arctic war for oil on the Eastern front.

Even as US troops have been surged to an increasingly vulnerable Poland, they're also playing war games in Norway, which itself owns quite a decent chunk of the thawing Arctic. Last week, this under-reported reality was brought to light with news that four Marines had been killed in a helicopter crash during "Exercise Cold Response 2022."

The official narrative of the accident, via the reliably non-critical oil and war-subsidized CNN, is every bit as Orwellian as you might expect:

According to NATO’s website, Cold Response 2022 is “a long-planned exercise bringing together thousands of troops from NATO Allies and partners, testing their ability to work together in cold weather conditions across Norway – on land, in the air and at sea.”

“This year’s exercise was announced over eight months ago,” the NATO site said. “It is not linked to Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, which NATO is responding to with preventive, proportionate and non-escalatory measures.”

Preparations for an escalation of the war for oil have been duly euphemized as a triathlon of athletic competition, with the ultimate aim being the fostering of good will, peace and understanding among the good weaponized people of the earth. Russian oil and gas have zilch, nothing, nada to do with it.

As reported here, the US Marines actually landed on Norway's melting shores five years ago, for what was promised to be only a temporary, six-month-long training exercise:

For the first time since Hitler assaulted much of Europe in World War II, the American military is setting up a "rotational" base in the Scandinavian nation as a sign of chest-thumping strength against an allegedly threatening Russia. Not even during the Communist era of Cold War expansionism did Norway, always a fiercely independent social democratic country, ever invite any foreign military power to help it defend itself against a potential enemy. As a matter of fact, the Norwegian government signed an agreement with the Soviet Union immediately after World War II promising, after it joined NATO, that it would never allow foreign troops to be permanently stationed on its own soil.

So, now that the "allegedly" has finally been removed from the Russian threat, perhaps the hearts and minds of the then-recalcitrant Norwegian locals, so shocked and dismayed by the sight of Marines slogging through the snow in their jungle fatigues, will be softened enough to accept their occupation graciously. Goodness knows, judging from the civilian and media chest-thumping on display here in The Homeland, the relentless propaganda has worked its magic, and most of us have overcome the "sickly inhibitions" or unreasonable aversion to slaughter of innocents, a malady which so long ago was caustically diagnosed by the ever-ascendant Neocons as the "Vietnam Syndrome."

There are, in any case, no signs yet of another 60s-style antiwar movement. Maybe we'll protest if/when they reinstitute the draft. Never say never, because despite having outsize military strength and obscene wealth in the hands of a few oligarchs and corporations, our ruling elites are feeling more than a little paranoid. Their status of sole remaining Superpower is dwindling fast. Russia may lack the military strength, but both its existing and potential fossil fuel wealth (and possible partnership with both China and the Saudis) have made it an incipient economic superpower. Ergo, the increasing and increasingly ineffective economic sanctions by the Biden administration against it.

It's becoming a multipolar world, and as John Mearsheimer writes in "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" multipolarity is the most dangerous kind. The bipolarity of the previous Cold War between the US and Russia was not as dangerous as the current situation, because MAD (mutually assured destruction of two competing nuclear powers) actually served to cancel out nuclear war.

Russia, the de facto re-emerging economic hegemon, coupled with the rise of China, has caused the US and its NATO allies to recklessly court nuclear war. Mearsheimer warned two decades ago that 

"A potential hegemon does not have to do much to generate fear among other states in the system. Its formidable capabilities alone are likely to scare neighboring great powers and push at least some of them to create a balancing coalition against their dangerous opponent. Because a state's intentions are difficult to discern, and because they can change quickly, rival great powers are inclined to assume the worst about the potential hegemon's intentions, further reinforcing the threatened states' incentive to contain it and maybe even weaken it, if the opportunity presents itself."

The upshot, Mearsheimer presciently concluded more than two decades ago, is that "hegemons generate spirals of fear that are hard to control. This problem is compounded by the fact that they possess considerable power and thus are likely to think they can solve their security problems by going to war."

Both Russia and the US are contributing mightily to the "spiral of fear," and the American oil and weapons-funded corporate media are doing their best to both speed it up and drill it down. President Joe Biden, who ghoulishly acknowledged at his NATO press conference the other day that since he is "long in the tooth" he is an expert at war, is doing his own best to contribute to the endless spiral, warning the public about incipient chemical and biological and cyber weapons attacks from the latest reincarnation of Hitler. By calling Putin a thug, a butcher and a war criminal (even if arguably true) Biden is being recklessly provocative, even now stating he is open to a first strike nuclear attack - with kinder, gentler, "smarter" bombs, no doubt.

Meanwhile, back in The Homeland, the official policy is to studiously ignore the more pressing biological problem of Covid-19 and to appoint a new Covid "czar" whose own ballyhooed talent is calming the public into even more complacency, submission and denial than has already been engendered within it. Biden would be better advised to tone down some of his taunts to Russia and save just a little of his playground name-calling for Congress. But he won't, because they're all members of the same corrupt club, and the status quo suits him just fine.

The New Orwellian Normal can be defined as learning to live with our own utterly preventable and unnecessary misery, destruction, and even deaths. We are urged to "share the sacrifice" of record food shortages and cost of living increases and endless wars for profit with the very same demented fools who cause all the problems in the first place. This foolery is not just limited to Uncle Joe or Vlad the Impaler Hitler, not by a long shot. Next in line for the US imperialist throne:

Doublethink is not only the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts and beliefs in an elite brain at the same time, but to communicate the nonsense to one's subjects effectively and with the requisite obfuscation posing as sanity. So, should we call the above example a Sad Semantic Spiral, or DoubleNegativethink?

Notwithstanding the insanity of Daylight Saving Time, the least that Kamala Harris could have done was to mangle Shakespeare and admit that the significance of the passage of time signifies nothing at all. She and her cohort should celebrate their nihilism with their words as well as with their foul deeds.