It's 7:10 AM. I'm sitting at the desk staring out the window trying to prod the muse into something readable. It's funny how the muse works. Some of my best writing comes to me when I sit down an hour before the deadline and just let it flow. The stuff I ponder over and fidget with to perfection many times goes over like a lead balloon.

I seem pretty brain dead this morning. Probably because I've been doing brain dead things like gardening and landscaping all week. But there has been an idea rolling around my head like a boulder bouncing through a rock crusher. So here goes.

Is it collective amnesia? Have people forgotten the lie of WMD's? How about the democracy we brought to Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan? Do people think those countries are better off now than before we destroyed them? Are we so propagandized we've become blind? Sure seems so. The acceptance of absurdity seems systemic to me... down to and including today's time change. As usual, it may be that we're a dollar short and a day late ...but today we're also an hour early
(to give you an extra hour to shop after work)

NOTE:The title and much of the quoted text are from Jackson Browne's brilliant Before the Deluge

Some of them were dreamers
And some of them were fools
Who were making plans and thinking of the future
With the energy of the innocent
They were gathering the tools
They would need to make their journey back to nature
While the sand slipped through the opening
And their hands reached for the golden ring
With their hearts they turned to each other's hearts for refuge
In the troubled years that came before the deluge

As we head into the abyss...

For far too long far too many of us have mostly ended up just going along with some of the worst acts against humanity, ever. Either in outright denial of reality or via superhuman feats of rationalization...or by being misled in one way or another, or by simple exhaustion, pummeled as we are by the constant torrent of media-borne propaganda.

This is what I wrote in 2017, about US propaganda and the Russian "hack". I described a Ukrainian connection back then, which may help some to understand our current circumstances. One prediction I made back then would be that we'd be in a war in Ukraine within a year. I was wrong. It took five years:

The okeydoke that Americans were supposed to get

Submitted by Bob In Portland on Sun, 04/02/2017 - 4:42pm

Media Manipulation

The failure of legacy media to inform and educate is clear to see. The goal of the media is to push desired narratives. Several events this week caused me to think in this direction... Ukraine, the Durham Report, and the freedom convoy among them.
Have we finally arrived at 1984's Newspeak?
Some Newspeak words include:
Thoughtcrime - Anti-Party thoughts
Facecrime - Occurs when the face reveals the existence of thoughtcrime (either lacking in anti-Party vigor, or expressing distaste for Party actions).
Goodthinkful - Describes a person who thinks just as the Party wishes.
Unperson - Someone the Party has vaporized; someone that no longer exists.(think Joe Rogan)

https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/pharma-industry-calls...

The drug industry is lamenting the lack of "stronger IP protections" on drugs, now that they have such a friend in Washington.

Too many drugs are not expensive enough for them to get their pounds of flesh. Thanks Joe! Thanks Demogops!

A few more thoughts on left and right
(cobbled together partly from responses to JtC)

We could have saved ourselves. But we were too lazy. And too damned cheap.
--Kurt Vonnegut

A few thoughts about "right" and "left."