UPDATE 11JUN25: completely forgot to mention Leo XIV showing his true colors, not to mention his organization operating some of the most active NGOs trafficking humans across borders.

Somewhere in my vast collection of digital media, I have a group of books I’ve carried around for decades now: The Poor Man’s James Bond, and The Anarchist’s Cookbook. Be careful with the latter. I’m of the opinion that the FBI published it in the early 1970s, for reasons only the FBI knows. I think a number of the recipes are deliberately incomplete or incorrect to provide entertainment for investigators cleaning up the messes.

That said, since the early days of the Marxist/Socialist movements in the 1920s, and well into the Weather Underground, SLA and similar groups of the 1960s and 1970s, rich privileged trust-funded kids have been the primary drivers behind these groups. Like mafia bosses, the rich kids kept the dirty work at arm’s length, legitimizing themselves behind charitable and non-governmental organizations.

These little sweethearts converted universities into revolutionary think tanks and recruiting stations. They parleyed their exclusive degrees and pedigrees into high-level jobs, where they could influence hiring, investment, legal and political cronyism, and essentially steer society to favor themselves.

These little privileged darlings built up networks of taxpayer-funded operations, using corporate cut-outs and special grant writing circles. For instance, a group ostensibly promoting 2SLGBTIA+ interests would hang a shingle in Ghana, apply for a multi-million dollar grant to liberate non-existent queers in Ghana, then launder the funds through a web of interrelated “service” organizations into a global slush fund to be used for disruptive activities we might generally call “color revolutions”.

Another example? Do you really think that superhero movies with wall-to-wall Marxist ideology messaging and laughable special effects costs $400 million to produce? Certainly not. Vast amounts of money are being paid to animation farms in Myanmar, Vietnam and the Philippines, where just pennies are spent on actual product, while the rest is funnelled through various layers of entities and into the global slush funds.

To what end, I hear the astute reader ask? Every instance of Socialism that has ever arisen involves authoritarian control over society, a small inner circle of super-elites who own and control everything, and the power of life and death over everything these pathetic shrivelled individuals survey.

When it comes to media circuses like the Los Angeles riots (most recent edition), folks need to realize these are not organic populist events. They are carefully planned around some trigger event (immigration raid), with the media pumping out pre-arranged messages, trained agitators bused in and paid, integrated with at least some aspects of local power structures (mayor, police, governor, etc.), complete with pre-arranged Kodak moments to get dramatic images of “the Great Struggle” against oppression.

None of it, at any level, location, or participation, is real in any way shape or form. It is all staged to support a narrative of underprivileged masses being abused and hounded by an authoritarian State. In reality, it is the authoritarians and the privileged few who are running the scam to promote themselves as the solution to the problem they created, thus channelling ultimate power to themselves.

But why, the clever reader asks. Because when you are a privileged spawn, who has everything handed to them—including wealth and privilege—life is pretty boring without some big challenge, like taking over the world, to play with.

This may seem overly simplistic, even stupid, but observe history. It is always the children of privilege who are the greatest tyrants. Oh sure, some dynasties manage to produce a sense of noblesse oblige, but for the most part, the spawn prefer to amass power and wealth for its own sake, like collecting stamps or glass figurines. For them, the wealth and power are meaningless trinkets, whose accumulation only represents abstractions like money and control.

You and I are nothing but status markers to be collected and stored in a warped game of global Monopoly.

Coming back to where we started, every tactic you see used in the various riots and revolutions have been published for decades in the aforementioned books. Every motive has been known since ancient times. The NGOs and corporate cut-outs are simply puppetry and shadows. There is nothing new, only rediscovery.

We owe these people nothing, and they have earned nothing from us. We have no obligation to them, and they certainly and obviously feel no obligation to us. What they really need is to be taken behind the barn and given a good switching. In fact, the worst punishment they could possibly receive is to be irrelevant and ignored.

Suppose Bill Gates flew into town and no one greeted him, no one took his calls, and no one cared if he lived or died. Suppose the same thing happened to the Soros clan, or the Schwabs, or the Rockefellers. Suppose they woke up one day and all their wealth and power couldn’t get them a cut in line at the donut shop?

We have the power to change the world by simply changing what we care about and pay attention to. That may seem ridiculously simplistic, but when you start thinking about it, it really is that easy.

Stop giving those people our power, and they will have none to use against us.

=====

Though a bit plodding in places, The Riot Club (2014) is probably one of the better dramatizations of today’s screed. The world really is nothing more than a bunch of bored rich kids playing with daddy’s empire.

Playing with a glass menagerie on the Far Side:

• Telegram / Locals / TwiX

• Rumble / BitChute / YouTube

• Home Site / Old Blogger Site

• E-book: Paper Golem: Corporate Personhood & the Legal Fiction

• Contact Bernard Grover: bernard (at) radiofarside (dot) com

Radio Far Side, published (mostly) every Sun/Wed at 7a CST/7p WIB, is a labour of love. We don’t use a paywall, and we don’t sell stuff. We just create things to inform and entertain. But like any good busker on the digital mean streets, we put our hat down and if you feel inspired, drop a coin in to show your appreciation:

Buy Me A Coffee / PayPal Tips

• BTC wallet: bc1qth6drgzcyt7vlxxpvqh6erjm0lmaemwsvf0272

• XRP wallet: rMSQzLyE3RHacCLwYPADBbq4RHQ71HpCzw

Are these people stark raving nuts?

• What they want:

  • EU POV

    • Reversal of BREXIT and rejoining of UK;

    • Issuance of ECB bonds;

    • US security backstop;

    • Further integration of EU into a single political body.

  • Russia POV

    • Halt eastward expansion of NATO;

    • Stop slaughter of Russian religious and ethnic groups in the Ukraine;

    • Stable trading platform with Europe.

  • US POV

    • Arms sales;

    • War financing secured by resources;

    • End of BRICS threat;

    • US economic and political hegemony.

• What they are all willing to risk:

  • Global thermo-nuclear war;

  • All life on planet Earth.

During World War I, Edward V of England, Wilhelm II of Germany and Nicholas II of Russia were all first cousins via their grandmother Queen Victoria. Even at the height of the war, they were addressing letters to each other as Georgie, Williie and Nicky, while thousands suffered and died in the trenches.

In the 1930s, British and American industrialists and financiers supported the Nazi Party, with Hitler sporting a full-sized portrait of Henry Ford in his office. The support was predicated on ideological opposition to Marxist Communism, which had taken hold in Russia, though the same powers ended up allied with Russia against Germany by the end of the 1940s.

In the early 1990s, the Soviet Union was collapsing and Western powers were offering sweet promises of allowing Russia to attend unmolested to its internal affairs, with the US, UK and Germany assuring Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “an inch eastward,” beyond the unification of Germany.

By the mid-1990s, the sickly and corrupt Boris Yeltsin was being propped up by the Clinton administration, while British and German banks were buying up Russian assets at pennies on the dollar through Russian oligarchs via loans-for-shares scams. Russian’s economy was collapsing and the oligarchs were essentially running a shadow state alongside the clueless Yeltsin.

By the end of the 1990s, a man named Vladimir Putin had become Prime Minister, charged with salvaging Russia’s assets and economy. He was effective enough that the CIA and MI-6 mounted a color revolution in Chechnya, launching terror attacks in Moscow, much like those being carried out by the Ukraine now.

By the mid-2010s, Putin had been so successful that he was polling higher in popularity in the US than Barack Obama. In less than 15 years, Putin had almost single-handedly brought the corrupt oligarchs to heel, put down the Chechen rebellion, reversed Russia’s economic hemorrhaging, navigated round after round of Western sanctions trying to unseat him, and launched a successful Special Military Operation in eastern Ukraine and Crimea to protect ethnic Russians from the neo-fascist Azov attacks, by essentially retaking the old Russian state of Novorossiya, which itself was taken from the Ottoman Empire in the mid-1700s.

Putin stopped the wholesale looting of Russia by both internal and external interests. He turned an economy from freefall into a growing powerhouse with just 20% debt-to-GDP and projected growth of 4% in 2025. He managed these feats while faced with what should have been crippling sanctions and financial attacks. And he did it with a national approval rating of 86%, and 87% of the vote in last year’s election.

So why is Europe absolutely hell-bound to destroy Russia, and especially Putin? Russia has not been particularly expansive, nor has it tried to convert EU nations. The BRICS are expanding, but primarily in the Global South and Asia. Europe has immolated itself in its hysteria to destroy Russia. With recent attacks on civilian infrastructure by means of its Ukraine cut-out, Europe is now a state sponsor of terror, in addition to everything else.

The only thing we can possibly surmise in this situation is that Europe feels its relevance on the global stage waning fast, and it doesn’t have the resources to project power without its traditional colonial status quo. With Russia aligning with China to create the BRICS, which in turn is attracting much of Asia, Africa and South America—Europe’s traditional supply chain—Europe has no other choice.

European powers have pissed off pretty much most of the world, and the world is in no hurry to convert ancient adversarial relationships to commercial (especially submissive) ones. Europe perceives itself as having little choice but to regain its dominant position, or destroy the planet trying.

The only viable boogy man the EU has is Russia. Any other adversary would lead to charges of neo-colonialism, thus further isolating the EU. Russia is also a primary source of energy that the EU views as a domestic supply, for which they should have first refusal, and at preferable prices compared to China and India. Finally, Russia is a competitor for religious hegemon. The histories of Western Russia and Europe have been intricately intertwined for centuries, and Europe is feeling a kind of alienation of affection.

In other words, it’s a nasty divorce and Europe thinks it deserves all the friends and assets, and it’s quickly losing both.

Trump is the only wild card left in Europe’s scorched-earth plans. Trump should have walked away on Day One, but his messianic self-delusion won’t let him. As a consequence, his poor personnel choices and lack of go-for-the-juggler political instincts are bringing us all right to the brink of global war. The Deepsters surrounding Trump know they need a major war every 50 years to keep refreshing the economy and destroy the evidence of horrific crimes. Like Europe, they have an existential imperative to wipe the slate clean.

Except for the brains of two men—Putin and Trump—the world would be on fire right now. We had better hope these two men can find a path through the mine field, and fast. I have considerably more hope for Putin than Trump at the moment. If ever there was a time for The Don to signal he really is playing 4-D chess, this would be it.

From St. Seraphim of Sarov to Fatima to Tolstoy to Edgar Cayce, Russia is predicted to save the world—and especially Europe. If ever there was a time for prophesy to come true, this would be a prime candidate.

=====

I don’t know about you, but I need a comedy today, and The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming (1966) is made to order. This is one of those classic 60s comedies with everyone in it, and the performances of Jonathan Winters and Alan Arkin alone are worth the price of admission.

Роем бункеры на Обратной Стороне:

• Telegram / Locals / TwiX

• Rumble / BitChute / YouTube

• Home Site / Old Blogger Site

• E-book: Paper Golem: Corporate Personhood & the Legal Fiction

• Contact Bernard Grover: bernard (at) radiofarside (dot) com

Radio Far Side, published (mostly) every Sun/Wed at 7a CST/7p WIB, is a labour of love. We don’t use a paywall, and we don’t sell stuff. We just create things to inform and entertain. But like any good busker on the digital mean streets, we put our hat down and if you feel inspired, drop a coin in to show your appreciation:

Buy Me A Coffee / PayPal Tips

• BTC wallet: bc1qth6drgzcyt7vlxxpvqh6erjm0lmaemwsvf0272

• XRP wallet: rMSQzLyE3RHacCLwYPADBbq4RHQ71HpCzw

Well, would you look at that. It’s June, and for once, my inbox isn’t drowning in rainbow-tinged marketing emails from mattress companies trying to sell me a “QUEEN-size for your inner queen.” The LinkedIn logos remain their staid corporate blue. Starbucks hasn’t launched a unicorn frappuccino called The Ally-Latte. And not a single brand has tweeted “Love is Love 💅” before going radio silent for the next eleven months.

Pride Month 2025 has entered her quiet era—and frankly, it’s kind of a vibe.

For the first time in years, Pride doesn’t feel like a hostage situation between queer people and the marketing departments of multinational conglomerates. There’s no rainbow Doritos. No limited-edition LGBTQ+-themed car wraps. No supermarket sandwich wrapped in “representation.”

Instead: calm. Stillness. A whiff of introspection, even. It's like everyone suddenly realized, “Wait... was that a bit over the top?” (Yes. It was.)

Corporations, once desperate to wrap themselves in Pride like it was a tax deduction, have suddenly remembered they have shareholders. Turns out, there’s only so many rainbow-themed sneakers you can hawk before the backlash starts hitting the bottom line. And with outrage culture in full swing—on both sides of the aisle—many brands are sitting this one out. Not because they’ve learned anything, mind you, but because risk management called and said “maybe don’t.”

I’ve spent my entire life in entertainment, so very little shocks me anymore. However, having watched many Pride parades dating back to the early 1980s, I saw a distinct decline from fun shows of solidarity (think poodles in the park), to grotesque displays of fetishist behavior and simulated sex acts that would make Caligula demurely glance away.

The gay lifestyle is a marketing dream. Here you have a group of people whose raison d’être is to party, decorate and live out loud. Add in civil unions and you have households with dual incomes and no future to save for, an entire demographic segment of narcissistic nihilistic consumers whose sole focus is self-gratification.

So now, with all that noise dialled down, Pride feels... saner. Smaller, sure. Less Instagrammable. But also less cringe. It’s backyard BBQs with exclusive guest lists and a chic pinot grigio, not rooftop parties with crypto bros in crop tops. It’s drag shows at the local bar, not PR executives deciding which shade of fuchsia screams “diversity.” It’s remembering that Pride started as a riot—not a VIP-only sponsored mixer.

Support of Pride events has cost a number of large corporations a lot of money and market share. Stockholders are underwhelmed. In the general population, folks are reawakening to the concept that rights aren’t customized party favors, but rather freedoms and liberties that apply to everyone equally, and among those fundamental rights include not being accosted by offensive behavior and content.

Having diverse festivals centered around cultural and ethnic groups is great. No one denies that St. Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo are tailor-made for fun, but they aren’t forced on us as entire months of mandatory observation, or festivals of ever-escalating social offense and outrage.

I’ve seen some wonderfully creative Pride parades that are hilariously satirical send-ups of Main Street USA. I’ve also seen Pride parades that are grotesque and mean-spirited rejection of social norms. Perhaps this year’s more subdued events become an opportunity for introspection—a quality not normally associated with this particular demographic group—and a chance to re-evaluate the propriety of shoving one’s lifestyle choices down everyone’s throats.

The “gay” community has always existed. As far back as one cares to look, there have been individuals who march to different drums, and they have disproportionately congregated around the entertainment industry. When their antics were discretely relegated to certain quarters and venues, these folks have become fabulously wealthy and influential. The primary concern has always been to keep certain behaviors out of the eyes of children, regardless of sexual bent or predilection.

The past decade or so has seen the removal of long-standing restraints in the name of “rights,” apparently forgetting that the rights of one group end where they impede on the rights of others. Social mores and norms exist to provide a minimal set of universally acceptable behaviors. In the proprietary environments of personal space and consenting individuals, there is rarely issues of public concern, since no one knows what goes on behind closed doors, to quote that ancient advice.

At the same time, we must condemn witch hunts that seek to expose otherwise discrete behavior in order to publicly shame and punish the folks engaged in it. Some societies, such as the one I currently live in, have decided that men should not engage in certain behaviors together in public, but when the authorities take unusual steps and extraordinary efforts to hunt down and arrest groups who were otherwise discrete and out of the public eye, this is equally shameful and infringing on the peaceful coexistence concept.

Personally, I find it ludicrous that a group of people identify themselves and take pride in with whom and how they have sex. These things hardly seem like achievements worthy of defining self-worth, but I am not here to judge the standards of others. I have been to some fantastic Pride-themed parties, and seen some disgusting displays in the name of shocking people into stunned silence. It is well past time to dial back the outrageous in favor of quiet dignity.

There is no reason why children and those of modest constitutions should be forced to accept and observe certainly “adult” behaviors. Nor is there anything wrong with allowing safe spaces for expressing one’s proclivities on private property with appropriate screens in place. Neither side should be allowed to dominate the lives of others.

I don’t want to see someone caned in public for the “crime” of enjoying certain activities with someone of the same sex, but neither do I want to see someone caned in public because they enjoy it and receive masochistic gratification from it. I would rather no one be caned in the public square at all.

Instead, let’s rebalance the public discourse and square so that everyone can feel a little Pride in one’s community, and reserve the more extreme elements to their proper places.

=====

For today’s artistic flight on topic, I nominate one of my favorite David Lynch films, Blue Velvet (1986). However, in keeping with today’s theme of being sensitive to sensitivities, I offer The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), with similar themes but more subdued expression. If you’re feeling adventurous, try them as a double-feature.

Oscar’s getting Wilde on the Far Side:

• Telegram / Locals / TwiX

• Rumble / BitChute / YouTube

• Home Site / Old Blogger Site

• E-book: Paper Golem: Corporate Personhood & the Legal Fiction

• Contact Bernard Grover: bernard (at) radiofarside (dot) com

Radio Far Side, published (mostly) every Sun/Wed at 7a CST/7p WIB, is a labour of love. We don’t use a paywall, and we don’t sell stuff. We just create things to inform and entertain. But like any good busker on the digital mean streets, we put our hat down and if you feel inspired, drop a coin in to show your appreciation:

Buy Me A Coffee / PayPal Tips

• BTC wallet: bc1qth6drgzcyt7vlxxpvqh6erjm0lmaemwsvf0272

• XRP wallet: rMSQzLyE3RHacCLwYPADBbq4RHQ71HpCzw

For those readers who have been lurking around since about 2010 already know, I never get a little sick. I get skin-of-my-teeth, life-threatening, call a priest or a hippie or something sick. One of my first series on this blog was about my experimentation with acupuncture after my first (and so far only touching wood) bout with multiple sclerosis and loss of eyesight.

Acupuncture does work, by the way.

Next, it was dengue, typhus and amoebic dysentery all at the same time. You ain’t lived until you’ve had a horse needle shoved into your liver and blobs of amoeba stuff come flowing out.

This time, it was pneumonia. It was so bad that by Sunday afternoon last I was literally biting at the air trying to get something into my lungs. Since this is me we’re talking about, it couldn’t be that simple. Apparently, my pericardial sac was filling up with fluid, causing arrhythmia and palpitations, along with a swollen aorta and flop sweats. But we couldn’t leave it there either.

I had some kind of parasitic infection in my gut that was causing swelling that was pushing up on my diaphragm. Basically, there was a three-way offensive on my air supply, and I was left in a kind of analogical ballroom in Istanbul, waiting for Zelensky, Putin and Trump to show up.

Mrs. FarSide was ecstatic! Despite the fact that there is rarely anything wrong with me, and when there is, it occurs about every 10 years and no amount of health maintenance program would have stopped it, the missus absolutely lives to have me at the doctor’s office on the off chance there might something to worry about.

For myself, I would rather have my fingernails torn out through my tonsils than to be anywhere near a doctor of any kind. The only reward for my travails was once again proving the old joke: ask 5 Indonesian doctors a questions, and you’ll get 27 opinions. That’s one opinion based in each of the major religious groups, plus a handful or so based on old wives’ tales, jungle magic and Pfizer informational inserts.

I was pleased to note that Indonesian healthcare has advanced somewhat. My first interaction lo these many years ago was a 6-bed ward with wall fans. Now they have modern 2-bed rooms with A/C that penguins would love, but only at night when one least needs it. The hospital has its own app too, which I was regularly reminded to download and give 5 stars.

What buggers the living daylights out of me concerning modern Western-style “healthcare” is the constant need to take “samples” of everything. My wrists are swollen and bruised from the incessant poking and prodding with needles to suck a bit more lifeblood out of me for more lab tests which maddeningly refused to show I was anything but dead-center normal except for the obvious infection that had a stranglehold on me.

It also annoyed me that the serious chin-stroking and hushed conversations moved away to a corner with the missus, since I had this annoying habit of looking up every prescription and diagnosis, to see if I agreed with it. When I refused to take beta blockers, noting that I do not now nor have I ever had a cholesterol problem, well that was the last straw. Patients are expected to be credulous and passive in their healthcare regimens, and certainly never question someone with a decade of expensive indoctrination.

So I spent seven days literally tied to a hospital bed by a catheter with one end in my bladder and a specimen bag anchored to the bed rail on the other end. This gave me all of about one meter of free range, which I used to keep my mind engaged, by playing with topology to get my self into the most bizarre positions possible before the next round of nursing came along.

I survived the ordeal, as I typically do, though my kids extracted a promise from me to see the heart specialist tomorrow. I expect this will result in yet another pile of pills to ignore and another EKG tape showing a reasonably healthy adult male who was triple-ganged by three infections at once and lived to tell the tale.

At least I’m good to go now until 2035.

=====

There’s only one film that fits today’s narrative, and that is the greatest showbiz movie ever made: All That Jazz (1979). The hospital party scene, specifically. Only show people get to live, die and tell their own story like this, and Bob Fosse was among the greatest of show people.

The only good bug is a dead bug on the Far Side:

• Telegram / Locals / TwiX

• Rumble / BitChute / YouTube

• Home Site / Old Blogger Site

• E-book: Paper Golem: Corporate Personhood & the Legal Fiction

• Contact Bernard Grover: bernard (at) radiofarside (dot) com

Radio Far Side, published (mostly) every Sun/Wed at 7a CST/7p WIB, is a labour of love. We don’t use a paywall, and we don’t sell stuff. We just create things to inform and entertain. But like any good busker on the digital mean streets, we put our hat down and if you feel inspired, drop a coin in to show your appreciation:

Buy Me A Coffee / PayPal Tips

• BTC wallet: bc1qth6drgzcyt7vlxxpvqh6erjm0lmaemwsvf0272

• XRP wallet: rMSQzLyE3RHacCLwYPADBbq4RHQ71HpCzw