SAY WHAT? - Despite a flood of fake news about some slight disturbance in some backwater place called Ukraine, it turns out the true fight for liberty has been unfurling for weeks in our own, troubled, mask-enslaved country, where a noble Freedom Convoy of truckers - at one time touted to draw up to 100,000, but currently topped out at about 100 diesel-guzzling souls stubbornly impervious to reality - has come to save us. The story behind the convoy is long and winding. We told it a while ago in a lengthy post our computer then devoured in one malignant gulp, so we're not dredging up the links again; here's two to prove we're not making it up.) In brief: In thrall to the Flu Trucks Klan hordes who invaded Canada this winter, two truck convoys set out from California on Feb. 23 for Washington D.C., or possibly not really into D.C. but somewhere around there, unless a select few decided to actually go into D.C., but they weren't sure. Their initial goal was to disrupt Biden's State of the Union speech - yes it was that long ago - and occupy D.C. (or not) to protest evil, life-saving COVID restrictions like vaccine mandates behind lofty if QAnon-flavored slogans like "Let's Go Brandon" "Rise Up!" "Blinded by the Mask" "Jesus Saves" and other stuff for freedumb. Also to whine about other things in guvment, like CRT and socialism, they might not like though they're not sure what they are, but still. Unfortunately, by the time they left, mandates were largely a thing of the past. Also, unfortunately, the next day, a bloodthirsty madman invaded Ukraine, which swiftly garnered the attention of a famously fickle media, as, in this case, it should have.

SAY WHAT? - As Russia's brutal assault uproots the lives of nearly a quarter of Ukraine's population, the world rises in striking unanimity, and in  wildly disparate ways, against it. Especially brave, given a mad czar who's taken to calling critics "gnats," “bastards and traitors” to be purged, is resistance from Russia itself. This week, Putin forced out Arkady Dvorkovich, head of a prominent technology foundation and the International Chess Foundation, after he "took the side of the enemy" by telling Mother Jones, "My thoughts are with Ukrainian civilians” and, "Wars kill hopes and aspirations." In response, Mother Jones has joined a global campaign by alternative media outlets to save Meduza, Russia's last remaining independent newsroom, still working to "get the truth about the war to Russians every day." Improbably but effectively joining that effort is America's own Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who posted a heartfelt, now-viral video addressed directly to Russian soldiers, who evidently love him. Refuting the lies to blame only the Kremlin - "This is not the Russian people's war” - he echoed a video he made after Jan. 6 that summoned dark Nazi history he witnessed as a child that turned his father and many others into "broken men drinking away the guilt." "You already know much of the truth I have been speaking," he said. "I don't want you to be broken like my father." 

SAY WHAT? - As Russia's war against Ukraine grinds on - and its captured, troubled foot-soldiers begin to concede, "We all will be judged" - activists in France and the U.K. affirmed private property is theft, especially when owned by accomplices to war crimes, by seizing two massive "Mafia castles" owned by Russian oligarchs, claiming them for homeless Ukrainian refugees. In London, squatters calling themselves London Makhnovists - for Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian anarchist and commander who fought to form a stateless society during the Bolshevik Revolution - occupied a £50-million (about $75-million) mansion owned by Russian aluminum magnate and Putiin bestie Oleg Deripaska, who's accumulated over £2.3 billion in ill-gotten gains, not counting his now-sanctioned, multimillion-pound property portfolio in the UK. After entering what they dubbed the "filthy fancy" monolith in the city's upscale Belgrave Square, the anarchists hung a Ukrainian flag and two banners at the front of the balcony declaring, "This Property Has Been Liberated" and "Putin Go Fuck Yourself"; at the other end, they hung one that read, "Power Breeds Parasites. All Tories Are Oligarchs." They danced, played music, sang the Dirty Dancing song "(I've Had) The Time of My Life," and reportedly, when they noticed people peering out the windows next door, called, "We're your new neighbors - we'll come over tomorrow with some brisket."

SAY WHAT? - Bewailing that "war crimes are happening right now," fake newscaster and master of profanity Jonathan Pie - the creation of British comic actor Tom Walker - has lambasted a "gutless" UK, and by extension many Western democracies, for enabling Putin's atrocities in Ukraine by long and blindly doing business with him - in the U.K.'s case, by becoming "the money laundering capitol of the world" for billionaire Russian oligarchs. Having made a name for himself as a television journalist who often takes  withering detours to rail about political hypocrisy in foul-mouthed tirades, Pie filmed a furious New York Times op-ed to decry sketchy U.K. loopholes - "Welcome to Londongrad" - that have encouraged Russian billionaires, many with direct links to the Kremlin, to hide their money there. They've bought ritzy real estate - many thousands of homes bought by anonymous billionaires through off-shore companies - soccer clubs, vodka companies, newspapers, yachts. "Rinsing dirty money clean" is "the only industry we have left," he says. "For 20 years, Putin's been using our own greed against us."

SAY WHAT? - Over 400 years after trafficking African slaves to the New World and through a century of nearly 200 failed efforts during seven U.S. presidential administrations, Congress has at long last rendered it a hate crime to hang from the limb of a tree until dead the overwhelmingly innocent African-American descendants of those slaves. Named for the 14-year-old black boy savagely murdered 67 years ago for allegedly whistling at a white woman, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act makes lynching a federal hate crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison. It passed the Senate Monday night by almost-unheard-of unanimous consent, and now goes to Biden to be signed. Not long ago, the grotesquerie of lynching was such a popular crowdpleaser that enterprising capitalists sold postcards of the events: "Token of A Great Day." The Equal Justice Initiative has documented at least 4,081 lynchings in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950; the NAACP,looking even closer to the here and now, reports at least 4,743 lynchings, with almost all black victims, between 1882 and 1968. Still, it's taken over 100 years for America to agree black lives should matter at least enough to stop the grisly carnage.

SAY WHAT? - Even as global media outlets halt broadcasts across Russia in response to Putin's increasingly dystopian censorship efforts, Russian authorities pulled their shroud of paranoia and repression ever tighter by shutting down what is reportedly the country's last independent media outlet, the youth-focused TV Rain. State officials announced the suspension after TV Rain reporters flouted Putin's Stalin-esque "special operation" moniker for his savage invasion of Ukraine by speaking truth to power and calling it what it obviously is, a "war." The country's Orwellian censors surreally turned that act, in other parts of the world deemed doing their job, into the "purposeful and systematic" posting of “information calling for extremist and violent acts.”