Reckoning With Insanity, Part One

The time many people will have to grasp the insanity of the Russian situation may be measured in microseconds.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

What they fear the most is you, thinking for yourself. Within those three words are two implicit concepts. Thinking is the fundamental essential for human existence. It can be hard work, but nobody will disparage it on that basis. Attacks on thought, and there have been many, tend to be more subtle.

The for yourself is more problematic. For one thing, it sounds selfish. Nowadays you can present yourself as damn near any kind of humanitarian, even when you’re carrying all sorts of obviously hypocritical baggage, and you’ll go unchallenged. State that your first concern is your own welfare, not the common good or the public interest, and most people will mentally consign you to the ninth circle of hell. Sixty-five years after publication, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s tribute to the self-interested mind, is still denounced. Soon it will be banned in those jurisdictions that have not already done so.

And who wants to be consigned to the ninth circle of hell? Think for yourself and worse, dare to speak your questions, speculations, hypotheses, and conclusions, and you open yourself to isolation and attack. The killer bees in the hive mind mind are viscous, relentless, and remorseless, inflicting stinging, sometimes deadly, cancellation. Then there’s that part of thinking many don’t like—the hard work. It’s easier to join the hive. Never underestimate laziness as a human motivation.

For those that do think for themselves, dispelling the smokescreen of obfuscation, propaganda, and lies that now constitute communications from politicians, other public officials, their allies, and their string-pullers has become routine, Citizens of totalitarian regimes know well the guiding precept: all such communications are lies unless conclusively demonstrated otherwise.

Armed with skepticism, adepts see the lie machine for what it is. They dismiss virtually everything and are rarely wrong. As the U.S. has slid towards totalitarianism, a not exhaustive list of such instances includes the second Iraq war, Obamacare promises, Russiagate, the fixed 2020 election, the government-prompted January, 6, 2020 “insurrection,” and the supposed scientific consensus concerning both global climate and Covid-19. Anyone who doubts that these were detectable lies from inception can check the record. In every instance there were publicly expressed doubts.

Raw power allows liars to get away with lying. Policies are promulgated, protest stifled, protestors confined to the fringe, and although the truth sometimes surfaces into a more general awareness, liars are rarely called to account or punished. They’re often rewarded. Those who understand the game are resigned to it, but now we are confronted with two situations—one developing for decades, one recent—that threaten the livelihoods and lives of every person on the planet. These consequences cannot be met with resignation.

Lying every step of the way, monetary mandarins have incrementally shifted the U.S. from the gold-exchange standard of the late 1800s and early 1900s to a system in which the government and Federal Reserve, joined at the hip, issue unlimited fiat debt instruments. The Federal Reserve’s must—by force of legal tender laws—be accepted as a means of exchange. The Fed buys the government’s fiat debt instruments with its fiat debt instruments and calls it sound economic policy rather than the shell game it is. The coup de grâce lie was President Nixon’s in 1971, when he claimed his suspension of the last vestiges of the gold exchange-standard would be temporary. Fifty-one years later, pure fiat is still in place. The skeptics of 1971 are not surprised.

Nobody knows what random wind will blow away the towering pile of debt. It’s probably already begun; the breeze is certainly picking up force. If so, it’s the nature of financial crises that they accelerate into collapse. Whether or not we’re in the midst of it, the mathematics of ever-increasing principle and compounding interest mean that collapse is inevitable. Production and existing wealth are not enough to cover debt service and principle repayment on the debt already incurred; a problem exacerbated by rising interest rates. Debt having become the liars’ all-purpose economic and political tool, you can be sure that as debt implodes, they’ll throw more of it at the ensuing crisis. It won’t work.

The debt situation is an insanity that has become almost normalized because it’s gone on for so long. There has not yet been the kind of catastrophic financial and economic crash that will serve as conclusive proof of its insanity. Absent such a crash, many people ignore, or worse, actively court the looming disaster, dancing on the rim of a rumbling, smoking volcano. Perhaps to divert attention, the liars have started a war with Russia.

The time many people will have to grasp the insanity of the Russian situation may be measured in microseconds. A brilliant, blinding flash and millions are instantly incinerated. The U.S. government is playing chicken with the one nation on the planet that has more nuclear weapons than it does. And for what? The claimed right to expand NATO to the most corrupt nation in Europe, whose kleptocratic government and military are riddled with neo-Nazis. A nation that Barack Obama noted is far more important to Russia than it is to the U.S.

The Ukraine-Russia war began on March 12, 1999, when former Warsaw pact nations Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic were admitted to NATO. Their admittance broke a promise that was made to the Russian government after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 that NATO would not expand eastward. Since then that promise has been broken repeatedly. Although Ukraine’s prospective NATO membership is in limbo, it appears that Finland and Sweden will also join.

Knowledge of history, comprehending any perspective other than one’s own, or even glancing at a map are considered weaknesses and markers of traitorous tendencies in Washington. A glance at a map reveals that Russia does not have the benefit of the U.S.’s Atlantic and Pacific moats. And here’s a brief history lesson: Russia has been invaded repeatedly from both the east and west.

Vladimir Putin’s oft-stated objections to NATO on Russia’s western doorstep stem from that history, yet the West has dismissed those objections as irrational paranoia. How can Putin doubt the West’s sincerity and goodwill, notwithstanding: the repeatedly broken NATO promise, the 2014 coup in Ukraine, the U.S. withdrawal from arms control treaties, the missiles positioned a few minutes flight time from Moscow in eastern Europe, Ukrainian bioweapons labs, the ongoing demonization of Putin, and the publicly expressed desire for Russian regime change? He’s a madman, they tell us, without ten seconds thought as to how he and the rest of Russia might perceive the situation.

It’s a wonder anybody in Russia sleeps at night. The U.S. and Europe are clearly waging war on them via their Ukrainian proxy and the U.S. is upping the ante $40 billion. Ignoring the Minsk agreement it signed, Ukraine’s government waged war on the Donbass region—which has strong ties to Russia—for eight years and escalated in mid-February. This was the last straw and Russia invaded.

Previous straws were Ukraine’s desire for NATO membership, president Volodymyr Zelensky’s pledge to take back Crimea, and his February 19 Munich speech in which he threatened to withdraw from the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. Per that agreement Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for security guarantees from the U.S., Great Britain, and Russia. How well would you sleep if Russia had nuclear weapons in Mexico or Canada and its officials publicly speculated about “winnable” nuclear wars? The Soviet Union’s deployment of nukes in Cuba in 1962 caused a lot of insomnia. The crisis was only resolved through skillful negotiations between Kennedy and Khrushchev, cooler heads than the lunatics on both sides plumping for nuclear war.

How well would you sleep if Russia had bioweapons labs in Mexico or Canada that were doing research aimed at American genotypes? What part of the $40 billion appropriation will be covertly directed towards eliminating incriminating evidence concerning Ukraine’s U.S.-funded bioweapons labs and the nature of their research? And what part will buy off accomplices and eliminate evidence that Ukraine has been a bribe spigot and money laundromat for Democrat eminences since the U.S.-sponsored coup?

Part Two will be posted June 2.