Russian retreat? Russian shortcomings! Defending Substack. Malone muses about your DNA.

20220329

I wrote yesterday afternoon that I heard more regular, systematic booms coming from the direction of Irpin. My guess was that it was Ukrainian artillery. It may have been going both directions.  Poster Kit and my wife Oksana noted that the mayor was claiming that the Russians had been expelled. As you can see from the map, they still have work to do recapturing Bucha and Hostomel. The small string of towns north of there are probably already pretty much destroyed and evacuated – they would not seem to offer much shelter for the Russians.

Today I am mostly focusing on useful posts by other writers. Twitter poster Trent Telenko has observations on Russian maintenance, or lack thereof, which would account for the stalled 30 mile column into which the forces retreating north from Irpin will be heading. With luck it will be a glorious mess, with nonfunctional equipment all over the place, blocking the retreat to Russia. Trent reinforces an observation that Gary in London has made from the beginning. The Russians use an IFR strategy – I follow roads. Trent says that this handicapped them 83 years ago in Finland and they still haven't learned.

I apologize again for yesterday's gaffe, attributing a piece written by Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal to the NYT. Here is another useful piece from a source that I don't generally trust on the Ukrainian drone operators. I think you will find it interesting.

Just about everybody on the right would like to blame Joe Biden for having allowed Russia to initiate this war. Trump would not have let it happen, they say! While I am certainly not a fan of Joe Biden – a senile old man, the first president since Bush I to be born before I was – he may not be totally to blame. Streamfortyseven has a compelling take to the effect that Russia has had a takeover in mind for decades.  You can also read his long, useful comments on my blog of yesterday.

I posted my review of Alexander Dugin's nonsensical book, The Fourth Political Theory, on this blog.  Streamfortyseven's observation is that it was written to be obscure, to pull the wool over the eyes of credulous Westerners. While I at least recognized it as total nonsense, I did not discern the design behind the nonsense. Stream points us to an earlier book entitled Foundations of Geopolitics that presents a more concrete plan for reassembling the Russian/Soviet empire.

This platform, Substack, represents a terrible threat to the establishment media. If you are reading me, not only are you getting an unbiased (though of course, error-prone like anything) view of what is going on, but you are depriving them of both revenue and control. The establishment cannot stand that.

Matt Taibbi has a beautiful, long article on just that phenomenon today. His conclusion is that the establishment simply cannot allow Substack to continue. It represents too much of a threat to government, traditional media, and every other purveyor of the lies about which I wrote yesterday.

My little operation here is vulnerable in a couple of ways. Operating in a war zone carries its own liabilities. I could lose my Internet or worse. I might do something to offend my host Substack.  Their automated sniffers blocked me once before when I made a post using roll-your-own encryption meant to foil automated sniffers. Fortunately they are decent people, and they reinstated me after I explained what happened. Lastly, Substack itself might be taken down one way or another.

You subscribers have, perhaps unwittingly, vested a little faith in me.  Substack shares your emails with me. Here is my backup plan in case I disappear. I am going to send an encrypted copy of my subscriber list a longtime friend via protonmail, with a request that he leave it in his inbox and not open it.

Protonmail provides strong end-to-end encryption. As long as he doesn't touch the email, it should remain beyond the prying eyes of the forces of evil. Not that they could not get it if they wanted, but they certainly have better things to waste their time on than trying to figure out who is subscribing to this blog. If for whatever reason I go dark, I hope I will be able to let him know what happened and he can open up the contact list and send you a message.

Returning to the theme of Matt Taibbi, his topic of the day is the systematic, piecemeal, effective censorship of former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges. Hedges' crime was attempting to tell the truth. The establishment first drove him to the fringes, and then demonized those fringes. One of the fringe publications was RT – Russia Today. Like Al Jazeera, it is among the few publications that the establishment does not control. It is therefore dismissed as nothing more than Russian propaganda, just like Al Jazeera is demonized as anti-Israeli propaganda.

Both of these publications are smart enough to realize that there is an appetite for the other side of the story and a widespread appreciation that the powers that be will not let the full truth be told on mainstream media. While you certainly cannot believe everything you find in these two, it is worth reading them for what you will not find elsewhere.

I recommend that you subscribe to Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Alex Berenson and others now while you can, before the powers that be (Gigi Sohn?) manage to shut them down.  As for your accidental war correspondent, I do not depend on this gig for income. When the war is over I'm going to go back to raising children to survive in the dark age to come.

My task at the moment is teaching my son how to read and write. I have to assume that however dark our future some books will survive, if only those on my shelf. Some people will survive, whatever the jabs may bring. There should be enough purebloods left here in Ukraine that my children can find partners and carry on.

Which brings me to another Substack writer with whom you should be familiar, Robert Malone. He seems to be at the center of everything. His article today is on how the mRNA injections are likely to permanently alter your DNA, and the unknown and unknowable consequences of that. He is one of those voices that the establishment would dearly love to shut up, especially because he was raised in the very midst of that Washington establishment and knows it intimately. His article today is long and demanding, but absolutely compelling. Voices like his must not be silenced!

Zooming way out, Doug Casey published an article entitled The End Of Progress today on the sickness that affects Western society. All of you recognize that your freedoms have been being curtailed bit by bit for several decades. Most of you have a foreboding that the erosion has accelerated over the past couple of years.

One of the things I have enjoyed about spending time in less developed countries such as Vietnam, Argentina, Nicaragua, Brazil and now Ukraine is their lack of interest and perhaps inability to totally control you. We do not have, for instance, electronic medical records, credit rating agencies, central-bank currencies or social credit scores. We probably do not have the facility to implement them, which is all fine with me. Their absence gives me and my children a degree of freedom that you do not enjoy.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where at 9:45 the war is just getting underway, a little bit late this morning. With luck the booms will be a little bit farther away today. The children are waiting for me to wrap this up so we can go out for a walk (past enterprises that sell sweets, of course) and the good-looking woman is looking forward to the children being out of the house for a couple of hours.

Graham