This video features the antiwar, antipropaganda work of the late Graeme MacQueen, a professor at MacMaster University in Hamilton. No extremism. No hyperbole. Just the very human reaction and research of an academic with the courage to ask questions when confronted with obvious lies that have led us into our current upside down world.

I'm publishing this on Dad's birthday, seven years after his passing. It's a kind of tribute to his legacy and character.

Most of my life was spent trying to hide from his overbearing pragmatism and bullying. Dad was very much a practical man with a real world orientation to getting things done. I was a dreamer and an idealist. After finishing school, I couldn't wait to escape to the other side of Canada and make a life there.

Nearly thirty years later, I returned. Dad and I got to know each other again as different people and we became closer than we had ever been before. Things and perceptions do change. We learn things.that were not as we thought or as we were told. Both of us changed and adapted to the fresh reality, and that change of perception provided me with many wonderful years of a relationships with a man who was not only my father, he became a friend and comrade too.

I grew up with the perception of Israel being a heroic underdog project in the face of violent and backward religious zealots. There was endless media that romanticized Israeli courage and innovation - movies like Exodus with Paul Newman - and TV news coverage of Middle East wars that reinforced the idea that God was naturally on the side of Israel.

It was all propaganda, and it persisted as long as TV and movies were monopolized by a handfull of people who had reason to shape public perception in favor of Israel. But now there is the Internet and with it, independent journalists who have the resources to tell a different version of the truth.

In his final years, I was amazed to see how receptive Dad was to hearing my point of view on various subjects, even when they challenged his views. He really did try to understand and sometimes he even came around. True to his nature, that was indeed practical. After all, what's the point of clinging to ideas when doing so in the face of contrary evidence can distance you from the love of family?

Attached to this post is a twenty minute video, The Untold History of Palestine and Israel. If you click on the Einstein meme, you'll be able to see a two minute clip to get a taste of it. It will propably conflict with everything that you thought you knew about the Israelis and Palestinians. We were all raised with Israeli propaganda and shared it as the indisputable consensus of truth. Me too, up until five or six years ago when I started to listen to the other side of  stories. Since then, for me nothing has been indisputable and I've discovered why so many people now say we live in an Empire of Lies.

It takes courage and integrity to listen to ideas that challenge authority and the consensus of all those around you. If you dare even speak of them, you will risk ridicule and shunning from the majority of people who adopt their beliefs on the basis of primitive tribalism, the philosophy of 'Go along to get along.' ... even if that means WW3. 

Dad was a very practical man in his later years. He dropped his ideologies and fixed beliefs in order to hear with his heart.

Watch the whole video on YouTube by clicking here: The Untold History of Palestine and Israel.

This is pretty damned funny, unless you're refusing to believe you've been brainwashed by overwhelming nato propaganda. From the Twitter feed of @wyattreed13 - Wyatt Reed of @thegrayzonenews.

After threatening to "hunt down" so-called "Russian propagandists" around the world, Kiev's infamous spokesperson Sarah Ashton-Cirillo was fired, then rehired. Now Cirillo is likely to be fired once again after being fooled by Russian pranksters posing as former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. In the conversation, Cirillo:

• Admits their company has been reduced to 14 soldiers by disastrous counter-offensive
• Claims“Russians are not European… Russians are Asian. Ultimately they do come from the Mongols, they come from a grouping of people who want to be slaves.”
• “I wish the rest of Europe and the Western world understood that we are protecting European values and Western values... These people [Russians] are not human. They are enemies of humanity.”
• Claims Dugin’s daughter “wasn’t some woman who accidentally killed. This was an evil creature who died a death they deserved.”
• Admits decision to fire Cirillo was “political” and came “the highest level” — so high that it didn’t come from Ukraine itself but “New York.”
• Claims they were fired because they served as the “expert witness” in trial of fellow U.S. citizen Gonzalo Lira.
• “The Republicans are trying to use the case of Gonzalo Lira —the ‘Russian asset’ that I testified against — as to try to say we don’t like free speech.”
• “I do believe that they were very angry in Washington that I was being talked about with Gonzalo Lira, that the two Americans were being discussed, and [the Ukrainians] were told, ‘make it go away.’”
• “Because I made it clear: Russian propagandists will be hunted down.”
• Acknowledges that the Kiev regime's constant lies are jeopardizing relations with other Western states: “If we are making promises we can’t keep and not being realistic, our partners can’t trust us.”
• “One of the problems is that the messaging that we have coming out is truly fantastic [based in fantasy].”
• “That’s good for fighting the Russians. It’s not good when we’re using this in discussions with our partners in Washington, our partners in Brussels, and our partners in especially the Eastern European nations.”
• Throws Zelensky under the bus — “it’s been 19 months. It’s not about theatre anymore. It’s not about populism on the world stage.”
• Brags about personally convincing the Kiev regime’s “partners” at CNN to self-censor their coverage of foreign mercenaries in Ukraine. But when asked later about the British merc recently executed by his own people, Cirillo's tune changes.
• “We have a terrible problem with most foreign fighters here because they are just a step above mercenaries, and they come here because all they know is warfare.”
• “And while I defend them in public, in private I know many of them have very far-right leanings, so there’s some Nazi groups… many of them are doing this because they have no lives in their own countries.”
• “We have security risks, and more importantly we have morale and psychological issues because foreign soldiers are here for the money — most of them.”
• “And those people are gonna be the ones that are willing to engage in drugs, willing to engage in fundraising where they’re putting the money in their own pocket.” “It did not surprise me that someone was murdered. What surprises me is that we’re still allowing this to happen.”
• Claims Maria Butina was a “terrible spy” and “a step above a whore,” and insists she her current political position was a reward from Putin, which is “the reason that we know the [Russian] Duma can never be taken seriously.”
• Then, after being offered a (fake) deputy position Ukraine’s rubber-stamp legislature by (fake) Poroshenko, Cirillo takes the bait, literally jolting upright and immediately accepting: “Wow, sir. I would be honored, sir.”