 The phoniest, most PR-intensive war of all time. The President and First Lady of Ukraine have posed for a romantic photo shoot with Vogue magazine, wherein President Voldemire Zelensky waxes poetical about his love for his darling wife. Now, I know what you're thinking. How is Zelensky making time for a Vogue photo shoot amidst his busy schedule of PR appearances for other major Western institutions? I mean, this is, after all, the same Voldemire Zelensky, who has been so busy making video appearances for the Grammy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, the World Economic Forum, and probably the Bilderberg group as well, and having meetings with celebrities like Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, and Bono in the Edge from U2. It's as busy a PR tour as he could possibly have without having a discussion about the strategic importance of long-range artillery with Elmo on Sesame Street. Oh, yeah, and also, isn't there like a war or something happening in Ukraine? You'd think he'd probably be somewhat busy with that, too. Call me crazy, but I'm beginning to suspect that there might be a concerted effort to manipulate the way we think about the war in Ukraine. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say it's the most aggressively perception-managed war we've ever experienced. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, we have not only been smashed with mass media propaganda unlike anything we've ever seen, while Russian media are purged from the airwaves, we've also seen the new media element of unprecedented amounts of online censorship, algorithm-boosted propaganda, and social media trolling. So we've literally never seen this much overall effort put into manipulating the way the public thinks about a war, which makes sense given that it's a profoundly dangerous proxy war which stands to benefit ordinary people in no way, shape, or form. I mean, can you imagine if people were allowed to just think their own thoughts about their government's economic warfare against Russia, which is hurting them financially and pushing millions towards starvation with the full awareness and approval of the U.S. government? Or if Americans were allowed to wonder if the billions they are pouring into this proxy conflict could be better spent at home? Or if people started objecting to a needless conflict for geostrategic domination threatening their lives and the lives of everyone they know with the risk of total nuclear annihilation? Can't have that. There is a night and day difference between wanting to tell people the truth about something and wanting to manipulate their perception of something. There are times when true facts can be used to influence people's perception one way or the other, but if your agenda is to manipulate perception rather than tell the truth, you will necessarily be forced to rely on lies, half-truths, distortion, and lies by omission wherever the truth doesn't serve that agenda. If they were telling us the truth about this war, they wouldn't be censoring Russian media. They wouldn't be censoring online voices who disagree with the official narratives about Ukraine. They wouldn't be continually blasting us in the face with mass media perception management, and they sure as hell wouldn't be putting Ukraine's celebrity in chief on the cover of Vogue magazine. We are being manipulated, and we are being deceived. And we are being manipulated and deceived because our perceiving clearly on our own would go against the interests of the Empire. They are lying to us because the interests of the people and the interests of the Empire are, as usual, squarely at odds.