Between the unanimous standing O’s in the Canadian Parliament for former Waffen SS thug Yaroslav Hunka, Trudeau’s weak-ass mea culpas and their tippety-top general still refusing to apologize for applauding the sonofabitch
and doubling down on the “fuck you”, I gotta say — I can’t pretend I’m
not enjoying this. The vaunted Western World showed us its whole entire
pasty, pimply, naked ass that day, and if you still #StandWithUkraine
after THIS, then I don’t know what else to say to you indoctrinated losers.
Whooaaa… that much,huh?
So, just how much of the value of your average European’s labor was
stolen from them to build a bunch of these bad boys to arm up gangs of
Nazi hillbillies? How much more of their healthcare and other social
programs will they be giving up in order to #StandWithUkraine?
“In 2020, U.S. Congress imposed secondary sanctions on banks that processed transactions related to the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines and on ship insurers that serviced them.
When
construction of Nord Stream 2 was finished in 2021, Washington imposed
new sanctions on insurance and certification companies to keep it from
opening.
Finally, both pipelines were sabotaged in an undersea explosion in September 2022.
As
a result, the industries that had made Germany preeminent in Europe,
such as steel, chemicals, machinery, and automotives, are suffering from
high energy costs and the loss of Russia’s aluminum, titanium, and
palladium.
As a consequence, one in four German companies is considering moving production to other countries, amid the energy crisis…”
"What is HIMARS?" asked an Al Jazeera "Explainer" feature about a week or so back, and it actually got me seriously wondering... what IS the High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System? I mean, like — what exactly the hell goes into this beast? Didn't take much searching and reading to reach the answer fairly quickly — our COVID relief, our universal healthcare, our minimum wage raise, our student debt cancellation, our eviction moratorium...
...and with that in mind, to clear up all the brouhaha about these death factories we're selling to the Nazi-infested Ukrainian state, I offer this meticulous infographic, precisely labeled, detailing the features of this helping hand we're extending to all those feisty little old Ukrainian ladies hunkered down in their basements, mixing up the Molotovs and learning how to handle an AK.
They’re non-binary, declare their pronouns,
wave their trans flags high, wear their revolutionary cred on their
sleeves — and they’re ready to stomp down dissent at a moment’s notice,
and be “woke” as hell while they do it.
“Don’t wanna be an American Idiot,
one nation, controlled by the media —
Information Age of hysteria
is calling out to Idiot America!”
— Green Day
In January of 2018, I found myself rooting around for alternative social media spaces shortly after receiving this note
full of thinly-veiled threats from Twitter regarding my following and
retweeting “Russian-influenced” accounts. All the cool kids got one.
That spring, after taking a quick peek at Gab (and a long, hot shower
afterwards), I was turned on to Mastodon by a fellow “Russian dupe” on
Twitter. It was during that first wave of Left voices and publications
being bounced off of Twitter for “Russian influence” — i.e.
contradicting the official US media party line. Of course, I got my ass
over there pronto and set up a presence. I didn’t mind that the traffic
was a bit thin; it was basically what Twitter would’ve been without the
trolls, bots, shills, spammers and Nazis — like, detoxed Twitter.
It was sweet for those first 3 or 4 years, speaking and creating
freely in that peaceful non-toxic space without the DNC trolls, clueless
celebrities, shit-take-dropping pundits and Nazi instigators creating
endless background noise, without the threat of mass reporting by DNC
flunkies. I grew to enjoy the light traffic flow, being able to
associate and converse with fellow Lefties, anarchists, socialists
without having to fight through the cacophony of Twitter. Even through
the percolating zaniness of this past January and February I happily
passed along the latest from Grayzone,MintPress,Breakthrough News,Multipolarista,Sputmik, and RT with no problems.
Then, after 30 years of US/NATO bullying, provocation, instigation and broken US promises,
Russia moved in on the Ukraine to de-nazify the place — and the
hysteria in the US, already surging to fever pitch, broke loose and
flooded peoples’ minds with a tsunami of Krazy surpassing even the
kraziest days of Post-9/11 and Iraq War v2.0. The Western bosses’ media
cranked the krazy up to 11 and busted off the knob. Meanwhile, I naively
thought Mastodon and the Fediverse would provide me with a “safe space”
to hunker down and shelter myself from the krazy.
Oh, what a goddamn idiot.
“Welcome to a new kind of tension
all across the alien nation
where everything isn’t meant to be OK…”
—Green Day
One morning in the middle of this past April, a couple of weeks after
returning home from a month’s vacation — and an entirely separate
adventure in krazy — I was greeted by this jarring message from the mods at mastodon.social in reference to my short series of posts containing quotes from and links to an article on Grayzone about neo-Nazi Azov Battalion involvement
in the Mariupol theater bombing …accompanied by the usual — and by now,
just plain banal — claims of sharing “intentionally false or misleading
information” in the Grayzone article.
Now, I challenge anyone reading this to have a look at the Grayzone
piece and show me anything in there that’s intentionally (or otherwise)
false or misleading or anything other than the posing of honest valid
questions, stating plain facts about neo-Nazi influence in Ukraine, and
reporting the real situation from “on the ground” in Mariupol. It should
be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the mods
at mastodon.social — along with virtually all US/Western corporate
media — have chosen to redefine “false and misleading” as “contradicting
the official US/Western media line”.
While not being actually thrown off of mastodon.social, I could sure
as hell take a hint, and it was at this point where — as Maya Angelou
reminds us — it was time to believe it when Mastodon showed me who they
really were the first time not just at mastodon.social, but at instances
all over the Fediverse. At the time, I also had a couple of other
accounts running simultaneously, at kolektiva.social and mastodon.art; I
figured it’d be a simple matter to just migrate my followers over to
kolektiva, put a redirect on the old mastodon.social account, and get
back at it.
Oh, what a goddamn idiot.
“Well maybe I’m the faggot, America
I’m not a part of a redneck agenda —
Now everybody, do the propaganda
and sing along to the age of paranoia…!”
—Green Day
It was barely two weeks later when I got this curt notice from the mods at kolektiva.social.
Unlike the mastodon.social mods, the kolektiva crew’s irony-free,
catchphrase- and buzzword-packed missives — they actually said
“whataboutism”, f’crissake — were a little more old-skool McCarthyist,
blatantly accusing me of being “pro-Kremlin” for posting news items from
outlets other than Western boss media in “a very credulous way”. Oh,
how I laughed — as if they and nearly everybody around me wasn’t happily
guzzling US media hype and horseshit with off-scale credulity. The real
howler is that in the midst of all the Red-baiting, the kolektiva mods
openly admit that the RT and Sputnik reports were “more or less valid”
but — well, y’know, RT and Sputnik. That’s basically all they had — the
reporting was entirely factual, but it was Russian media, so they’re
giving me the equivalent of five minutes to clean out my desk.
Being asked to leave a Mastodon instance with a supposed reputation
for “revolutionary” thought, expression and action for posting content
contradicting official Western capitalist media pegged my irony meter so
hard it busted the needle off.
And this, kiddies, is why Mastodon takes the pipe big-time — not
because of the underlying principles or philosophy behind it, or how
their network is built, but the people. It’s a problem that’s plagued
online communities ever since the days of local BBS systems and Usenet —
people in positions of unaccountable authority. When you peel away all
the “cuteness” on Mastodon, that’s basically what you have left — people
just as heavily indoctrinated by Western capitalist media as anyone on
Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, happily inflicting the same kind of
damage on free thought, speech and creativity. All the federated,
decentralized, happy-time furry trans flag avatar “woke” goodness you
can slather on isn’t worth jack if everybody there is infected with the
same “disinformation” brain worms as almost everybody else in America
and the Western World™.
The real “cancel culture” isn’t about some trash-mouthed racist
comedian whining about being kicked off TV; it’s about the very real
suppression of dissident voices on the Left by corporate media and their
indoctrinated flunkies in supposedly dissent-friendly “free” spaces
like Mastodon — which I’ve now realized is basically Twitter, but with
dungeonmasters and “furry” art. Who need an AI — who needs an algorithm when you've got cadres of
thoroughly-brainwashed, free open locally-sourced, real 100% organic
humans beating down dissent in your space?
Take a look at this graph.Go on, kiddos — take a big, long, steamy gawk.
Same shit, different day: They can never afford housing, healthcare or education, but there’s always money for war.
Getting a single, lousy-ass $1400 “stimulus check” out of those
geezers on Capitol Hill was like pulling teeth. They never would extend
unemployment or rent relief for the people still out of work because
they were still in quarantine, or because the companies they worked for
went under during the pandemic — and the bastards’n'bitches still refuse
to discuss national healthcare despite this country being ravaged by a
worldwide pandemic.
Whenever it comes to funding national healthcare, or free college, or
subsidized housing, we have to have a “national conversation” about it,
we can’t afford it, we have to “make some hard choices”. But, when it’s
time to fund the Pentagon? No prob, guys, here’s $800bn. Wait, y’sure
that’s enough? How about an extra hundred billion big boys just in case?
Don’t let anybody tell you whose war this is.
It’s not for the Ukrainian people, or Democracy, or freedom, or Western
values, or any of that horseshit. It’s Joe Biden’s war, it’s NATO’s
war, it’s the EU’s war, Boris Johnson’s war, Emmanuel Macron’s war, Olaf
Scholz’s war, the IMF’s war, Wall Street’s war, Boeing and Raytheon and
Lockheed Martin’s war.
Inspired by the rip-roaring coverage of atrocities, war crimes, and miscellaneous ruthlessness by America's Official Enemy against the Ukraine in the very same corporate-owned Western media who worked itself to death to cover up atrocities, war crimes, and miscellaneous ruthlessness by the Earth's enemy against Iraq and Afghanistan — not to mention pushing the most insane-ass kind of comic-book lies about (ahem) Weapons Of Mass Destruction — about 18, 20 years or so ago. But, now...? Cripes, man, the Boss Media in the US and its "international community" are all about war crimes and atrocities and bombed civilians and the Hague n'shit. Wotta goddamn joke.
I shit you not, kiddies — if this were a foto of a similar scene in Gaza, of Palestinian women getting ready to resist the terrorism of the IDF and Israeli colonists, do you honestly think Reuters — and MSNBC, CNN, the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, all the usual suspects — would run some noble, heart-wrenching piece on ordinary women rushing to the defense of their country against invaders?
Naaaaahhhhhhhhhh. It'd be some horseshit about defenseless, peaceful little Israelis just minding their own while the mean, evil terrorist Palestinians try to resist the defenseless, peaceful little Israelis' attempts to drive them out of their homes and murder them.
The likes of Reuters didn't give a shit about civilians during the US invasion of Iraq, and they don't really give a shit now. They didn't give a shit about war crimes during the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and they don't really give a shit now.
After that remix of some old Yipster Times cartoons went so well, I thought it might be fun to find some more BFYP candidates among my old cartoons from around the turn of the century. This one has always remained a personal favorite, and is also special because it promoted the first event I ever worked on with long-time comrade and BBF Adam Eidinger of DCMJ and Prop 71 fame -- the "Not A Victory Parade" protesting the US/NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999.
Here's the art in action, printed as a placard and carried in the march. You can see it right there behind and to the left of that boring-ass IAC/ANSWER placard.
After that remix of some old Yipster Times cartoons went so well, I thought it might be fun to find some more BFYP candidates among my old cartoons from around the turn of the century. This one has always remained a personal favorite, and is also special because it promoted the first event I ever worked on with long-time comrade and BBF Adam Eidinger of DCMJ and Prop 71 fame -- the "Not A Victory Parade" protesting the US/NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999.
Here's the art in action, printed as a placard and carried in the march. You can see it right there behind and to the left of that boring-ass IAC/ANSWER placard.
A victory for the Libyan people?D’ah ha ha ha ha ha hah, nahh, I’m just givin’ y’all some shit. Of course not. Gadhafi is claiming that the US, NATO, and their proxy “rebel” armies in Libya are still in for a “long war” and I, for one, hope he’s right — not because I don’t think that Gadhafi is a rat bastard, but because it would mean that Obama and the Cruise Missile Liberals would finally get their very own “Mission Accomplished” albatross hung on them.
Since Colonel Gaddafi has lost his military hold in the war against NATO and the insurgents/rebels/new regime, numerous talking heads have taken to celebrating this war as a “success”. They believe this is a “victory of the Libyan people” and that we should all be celebrating. Others proclaim victory for the “responsibility to protect,” for “humanitarian interventionism,” and condemn the “anti-imperialist left”. Some of those who claim to be “revolutionaries,” or believe they support the “Arab revolution,” somehow find it possible to sideline NATO’s role in the war, instead extolling the democratic virtues of the insurgents, glorifying their martyrdom, and magnifying their role until everything else is pushed from view. I wish to dissent from this circle of acclamation, and remind readers of the role of ideologically-motivated fabrications of “truth” that were used to justify, enable, enhance, and motivate the war against Libya—and to emphasize how damaging the practical effects of those myths have been to Libyans, and to all those who favoured peaceful, non-militarist solutions… >more here.
Here’s a fun game you can play while reading or watching the “news”: every time you see a report from Libya and hear the phrase “Libyan rebels”, insert the phrase “supported by US and NATO airstrikes” after it, to get a more accurate picture of what’s going on.
Political cartoonist. Information terrorist. Old Indymedia dude. Dirtbag Leftist. Spaceflight geek, MSTie, Deadhead. Find me at flugennock at sinkers dot org.
In January of 2018, I found myself rooting around for alternative social media spaces shortly after receiving 
