Which country’s capital has the most berserk discussion going on?
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy today stated that the reason no North Korean soldier, supposedly fighting against Ukraine in Kursk, has yet been located is because a) they just don’t surrender; b) when wounded, the clever Russians get them off the battlefield too rapidly; and c) when they are killed, they have Russian passports and the Russians take time out to burn their faces before leaving them for the Ukrainians to find.
Kiev’s Ukrainska Pravda published the argument of Mikheil Saakashvili that the diabolical Russians are plotting a ceasefire so as to trick Ukraine into having elections, which, of course, is not a good thing for Western democracy. And the neo-Nazi leader of Kiev’s C14 gang, Yevhen Karas, told Ukrainian radio listeners that the new Oreshkin hypersonic missile is not to be feared, because nuclear war is a good thing, Ukraine will come out stronger, and Ukraine’s new post-apocalyptic video game, “S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl,” will equip Ukrainians to deal with a nuclear Armageddon. Ukraine’s Office of the President is pushing the video game, through its Center for Countering Disinformation subunit.
Pretty impressive stuff—but it can be excused as the products of mental processes in a breakdown mode, as the Russian army advances. What of Washington, D.C.?
Capitol Hill is debating whether to keep unofficially ignoring the debt ceiling—it was suspended three years ago at $31.42 trillion—or reinstate it on Jan. 1st, 2025, somewhere north of $36 trillion, so that it can be regularly extended and officially ignored. There’s been a fantasy life stranger than Kiev’s as leaders in both of the U.S. political parties debate everything but tying the issuance of credit to farming, industry, and physical science breakthroughs. The dance with the devil continues. But how much military muscle does it take to induce countries to keep accepting the dollar as the reserve currency?
Speaking of which, today Russian President Vladimir Putin took dozens of questions from his population for four-and-a-half hours. Of some note, when challenged that some experts claim that Western defensive systems can handle Russia’s new hypersonic ballistic missile, the Oreshnik, Putin called out such experts to put up or shut up. Are they willing to name a spot in Kiev where they place any and all missile defenses that they want, and then let one Oreshnik missile be fired at that spot?
Years ago, Moscow confronted the ugly reality that there was a method to the madness of the Anglosphere push of nuclear weapons up to their border. Yesterday, the core of Chief of the Russian General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov’s briefing to foreign military attachés in Moscow, was that armed conflicts are escalating and the “main reason of escalation is the desire of the Collective West led by the U.S.A. to preserve their global dominance, continue to implement the so-called ‘rules-based international order,’ which has no legal bases from the international law standpoint, by forceful method.” The Russians instead, bet on forcing nonlinear scientific breakthroughs, and last month’s revolutionary success with its hypersonic missile was just one loud confirmation. The U.S. has been trumped on its vaunted military muscle.
Also yesterday, Russia’s Ambassador in London Andrey Kelin offered that some in the “expert community” in the West “undoubtedly [did] a serious study of the abilities, capabilities of the Oreshnik missile” and have “realized that a completely new factor had appeared on the scene.” It is past time when citizens of the West, with some vague appreciation of “democracy,” put up or shut up, as it were, and join that “expert community” and amplify it.
Or, as the invite to this Friday’s International Peace Coalition meeting puts it: “The Schiller Institute’s just-released pamphlet 'Development Drive Means Billions of New Jobs, No Refugees, No War' presents the essentials of the urgently needed policy of U.S. cooperation with China, Russia and the BRICS, and it deserves the widest possible circulation and deliberation, both nationally and internationally.”
The way to end berserk behavior in your country’s capital involves going “cold turkey” on your and your neighbor’s fantasies (e.g., that the dollar must be worth something, because it is too horrible to think otherwise; or that nuclear bombs will hit Europe, not the good old U.S., etc.) and figuring out the connection between real development (agriculture, industry, and scientific advances) and peaceful solutions amongst nations.
