A Couple of Things

 

CIVIL LIBERTIES IN PUTIN'S RUSSIA

First of all, the arrests of anti-war protesters in Russia.  I'm against it.  The censorship of protesters here in Canada or the United States  against our wars is pretty bad.  And the harrassment of the peace movement by militarist numbskulls that is permitted by the authorities is worrying.  But so far as I know there haven't been arrests of anti-war protesters simply for protesting.  Of course, since 1945, the USA hasn't been really existentially threatened by, say, North Korea, the Vietnamese, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, etc., and Canada was threatened by Afghanistan either.  Not in the way that Russia is existentially threatened by the USA and NATO.  In World War I, the US government passed The Sedition Act which essentially made criticism of the government and of the war it was fighting illegal. And Canada had The War Measures Act that became more famous for its use attacking the Japanese and other ethnic minorities with cultural ties to the countries we were fighting overseas.  I don't doubt for a minute that were Canada or the USA engaged in a truly existential conflict, that the governments would crack down hard on anti-war protesters.

Kherson Counter-Offensive Part II

 I know that I'm a detestable Putin-puppet, but maybe some of you former fans of mine who have slowed down to look at the automobile accident that is my blog can explain what's going on in this picture from last July:

That's US President Joseph R. Biden fist-bumping Saudi Arabia's defacto ruler "MBS" aka "Clown-Prince Bonesaw."  (Saudi Arabia's dejure ruler is some older man whose name I can't be bothered to look up who is hopelessly senile.  [As opposed to Biden who is still in the early stages of his dementia.])

This took place during Biden's trip to the Middle East where Biden also visited the murderously racist apartheid state of Israel (who refrained from killing any more US-American journalists and then attacking their funerals while Biden was visiting) and then he had some sort of geo-political "security" meeting with MBS and other disgusting autocrats and he also pleaded with OPEC to increase oil production because he couldn't think of any other way to fight inflation other than throwing working people out of work.

There was a lot of silly talk about Biden sullying the good name of the United States by treating with MBS as anything other than the international "pariah" that Biden said he would treat him as.  The USA is ruled by a blood-soaked oligarchy of degenerate monsters who are at least the equal of Clown-Prince Bonesaw.

I mention all these facts (or, in the parlance of shit-head liberal imperialist hacks "whataboutism") to continue talking about the Ukrainians recent counter-offensive.  First of all, let me say that the media coverage of this entire crisis has been abysmal.  Surrenders into captivity have been described as "evacuations."  Putin has been on his last legs since the beginning of the conflict.  (Sort of like how "the walls were closing in" on Trump for three years.)  Every Russian atrocity story is trumpeted as true.  Every Ukrainian accusation is reported as verified fact.  (Are Russian soldiers, like any other soldiers, capable of war crimes? Of course they are.  Is the US corporate media capable of lying through their fucking teeth as well as being detestable hypocrites? Of course they are.)  Whatever its quality; one can't deny that Western media coverage of the Ukrainian conflict has been extensive.  Much more so than, say, Clown Prince Bone-Saw's genocide in Yemen.

But the other side; both the genuine anti-war/anti-imperialists and the pro-Putin partisans appear to have almost as shaky a grasp on what is actually happening as the hypocrites, liars and stooges of the West.

So it seems to me that the Ukrainian military had more pep left in it than I or other anti-NATO watchers thought possible.  While middle-aged Ukrainian conscripts were literally being served-up as cannon-fodder to slow the Russian advance, the Ukraine's best elite troops were being armed and trained by NATO and (together with an unknown number of foreign mercenaries) thrown against some less well trained forces from the Donbas "People's Republics" forcing the Russians back across a river.  

The Ukraine still has no airforce capable of contesting the Russians.  They lack the Russians' artillery capabilities.  They can't win this war.  However, Putin clearly can't afford to do much more.  He has kept this operation small because, while the Russian economy is clearly not as moribund as it had been portrayed, it is still not able to afford a massive mobilization.  Even still, with his damaging of the Ukraine's actual power grid (in retaliation for moronic Ukrainian attacks on Russian and Donbas civilian power systems) he has shown that with little effort he could bring real pain to the Zelensky/Nazi/Oligarch Stooges' country.

Despite the fact that there seem to be a lot of genuine Nazis running around in the remaining rump-state of Ukrainie, I do not think that fascism is a popular political movement there.  But it is the one to which the USA psychopaths have given disproportionate power and influence to.  That is what Putin and Russia are fighting.

This is not the story of a plucky democracy having been invaded by an imperialist authoritarian madman.  This is the story of a country being taken over by a fascist-dominated US-puppet government that was abusing its ethnic Russian citizens and (like the shit-heads they are) seeking to threaten Russia on the USA's behalf.  The USA is conducting a fundamentally evil policy in the Ukraine and all you "liberals" who support it are hopelessly stupid.

I was going to put some links in here and there, but fuck-it.  I'm lazy.

The Kherson Counteroffensive

In Shakespeare's "Othello" the villain of the piece is supposed to be Iago. Today a lot of people would condemn Othello as a villain too, and not a tragic hero "who loved not wisely, but too well." That's because Othello was the one who actually plunged the dagger into Desdemona and killed her.

Still, nobody would let Iago off the hook, since he manipulated Othello to make that happen.

And none of this is to say that Putin's Russia loved the Ukraine and that this invasion is the result of jealousy. But just as Othello would not have killed Desdemona but for Iago's scheming, neither would Putin have invaded the Ukraine but for the USA's installing an anti-Russian government and giving control over its military policy to anti-Russian Nazis. (The descendents of people like our own Crystia Freeland's grandfather.)

Bobak and Lamb-Bobak

 Or, maybe I should have entitled this post "Bobak and Lamb" because Bruno Bobak's wife Molly is often referred to by her father's name; as in "Molly Lamb."  Her father was British Columbia mining engineer and aspiring photographer Henry Mortimer Lamb.  She was born out of wedlock to him and her mother Alice Mary Price.  Price was a free-spirited woman.  When Henry Mortimer later asked to marry her she refused.  He raised Molly as a member of his "legal" [?] family.  As an aspiring photographer, Henry Mortimer often had artists and bohemian types over to his house.  Jack Shadbolt became Molly's artistic mentor.  Anyhoooo, ... when Molly had to find her birth certificate for something decades into adulthood, she found out the name on the birth certificate wasn't even "Lamb."

Anyhow, I mention reading a book about them in the 2022-09-03 entry at my Giant Book Depository, and this is the page where I shall show four examples of their work, chosen pretty much at random.

First, Bruno Bobak:

This image was supposed to go under the war artist image that had been painted earlier and, actually, inserted into my post earlier.  Blogger decided to put it above the first image.  Even though the blinking cursor had been blinking its little blink two lines below the first image.

Bruno and Molly met in England as offical Canadian war artists

Sackville Wire Station (watercolour on paper) 

Now, Molly Lamb:

Private Roy

Fucking blogger keeps inserting images all over the place and moving the captions around.
Anyway, Molly Lamb Bobak's flower paintings were a big part of her output.

See what I mean about the images and captions?  All over the fucking place.  Anyway, she also painted crowd scenes.  This is the lighting of the Christmas tree in front of the New Brunswick legislature.

Holy fucking Christ!  Before pressing "Publish" for this post, the Christmas Tree painting's image had been below the second water colour of flowers.  Mother-fucker.