It's a fucking remarkable speech that lays it all out—or at least the preponderance—in 30 minutes.

I chose to watch this rather than America's—most vote-getter ever LOL—senile old fuck read from a script he had little to do with writing. Putin likely wrote every word of this.

It's a fucking solid speech that covers swaths of Russian and Soviet history. He mentions Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula a number of times. I spent a week there in 1991 and was rather enchanted by both the Soviet Navy and the citizens. Amazing the difference, between narratives and first-hand accounts.

His speech wholly signals that I have been dead-on right in my previous two posts on this matter.

• The Definitive Thinking On Russia and Ukraine
• Noam Chomsky’s Astute Take On Russia and Ukraine

Who's afraid to get it straight from the horse's mouth? Or, would you rather listen to talking-head ignoramuses on your TVs? Even Tucker Carlson on Fox is not great—though he's about the only mildly counter-narrative guy out there. But he's unsatisfying, because he's not being fully honest—which means he's lying, too. Maybe he doesn't know it. That's not good, either.

Why do so many people sit down in comfy chairs to watch people lie to them with great production value?