"Reckoning With Insanity," Part Two
by Robert Gore
"The Russian military doesn’t do shock and awe. It does grind, advance... and win. Contrary to Western propaganda, it is well on its way to achieving its objectives in Ukraine. In what looks like a watershed moment, most of the holdouts at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol recently surrendered. (The New York Times couldn’t bring itself to use the term “surrender” in its account of the capitulation.) This gives Russia a land corridor on the Black Sea from southwestern Russia to the Crimean Peninsula.
Left to their own devices the Russians and Ukrainians would eventually reach an agreement that leaves eastern and southern Ukraine in Russia’s hands or closely aligned with it as one or more autonomous states, with pledges from what remained of Ukraine not to join NATO or station nuclear weapons on its territory. Some such resolution was available before the war began. Facts on the ground mean it would now be more far more favorable to Russia than it would have been if war had never started. The war may cost Ukraine direct access to the Black Sea.
The $40 billion war appropriation indicates that the U.S. has no intention of leaving Ukraine and Russia to their own devices. Instead, the U.S. wants to promote a long Ukrainian insurgency that drains Russia politically and economically and in the best of all possible worlds, topples Putin. The concern has been expressed that backed into a corner, madman Putin might then take the conflict nuclear. The more pressing concern: that is the outcome America’s madmen and madwomen want. A generally unrecognized possibility (in the Western media) is that it could be the American contingent who find themselves backed into a corner.
The U.S. may get its Ukrainian quagmire, but it would be a quagmire for both sides, with all sorts of unintended consequences and ramifications. Is the Biden administration adroit enough to create a tar baby for the Russians without getting itself stuck? Is the Biden administration adroit enough to turn on the White House’s Christmas tree lights? As it became clear that Vietnam was a quagmire, some advocated a nuclear strike on North Vietnam. Finding itself stuck, whoever makes the decisions may decide, unlike the Vietnam experience, that nuclear escalation, either outright or in response to a false flag, is just the answer for the situation.
That danger is heightened by the obvious boomerang of the sanctions imposed on Russia. A leading exporter of grains, oil, natural gas, and minerals, the sanctions and Western fiat debt creation have jacked up the prices Russia receives and left the nation with large current account surpluses. Linking the ruble to gold and insisting on payment in rubles were adroit moves, and the ruble’s exchange value is now higher than it was before Russia invaded Ukraine. By population most of the rest of the world, including China and India, are either actively supporting Russia or refusing to align with the U.S. bloc.
Cutting themselves off from Russian exports, the U.S. and Europe are scrambling for substitutes that in some cases are unavailable at any price and in other cases present problems of quality, reliability of delivery, or suitability for existing infrastructure. For instance, refineries can’t take just any old oil. They are built for certain grades, a fact to which Western policymakers seem oblivious. Rising prices present a host of real economy problems, including compressed margins, that are being reflected in sinking Western stock and bond markets as stagflation looms.
Counterproductive is not a strong enough adjective for Western moves, they’ve been suicidal. If the goal was to force an existential choice on Putin, they may instead force on existential moment on all of us, about which we’ll have no choice. Amidst crashing economies and financial markets, sky-high unemployment, civil unrest, debt funding unavailable or available only at ruinous interest rates, fiat currencies reaching their intrinsic value—zero—and war raging that has leapt its borders in Ukraine and spread out in all directions, can it be said with certainly that our cornered rulers wouldn’t push the nuclear button?
Advocates of nuclear warfare usually talk of “tactical” nuclear weapons - just another bomb in the arsenal. The enemy would supposedly either surrender after their use or limit its counterstrike to similar bombs. The U.S. does have a low-yield nuclear bomb, the B61-3, whose blast can be limited to .3 kilotons, the energy release of 300 tons of TNT. That’s one-fiftieth of the 15-kiloton yield that destroyed Hiroshima.
However, the yield on the B61-3 can be “dialed-up” to 170 kilotons, over 11 times the Hiroshima bomb’s yield, and the U.S.’s highest yielding bomb is 1200 kilotons, 1.2 megatons, 80 times the Hiroshima bomb’s yield. The U.S. tested a 15 megaton bomb, Castle Bravo, in 1954, and the Soviet Union tested bombs in 1961 and 1962 with yields ranging from 20 megatons to the Tsar Bomba’s 50 megatons. That’s over 2,600 times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. They don’t need bombs that big now because missiles can carry multiple warheads, which can be independently targeted. Ten 1.2 megaton warheads would be 12 megatons.
No assurances can be offered that conflict wouldn’t escalate after the first nuclear weapon was detonated. Start tossing megaton-yield bombs around and the casualties would range from millions of people, assuming population centers were bombed, to the elimination of the human race. Even if the blasts themselves didn’t wipe us out, fallout, radiation poisoning, nuclear winter, and the destruction of agriculture might. To advocate use of nuclear weapons that could lead to humanity’s extinction is insane.
Insane, but not inexplicable. Why has the Ruling Caste buried the world in debt that is destroying the global economy? Why are they inflicting deadly medical and pharmacological nightmares? Why are we being forced to abandon nuclear and fossil-fuel power for intermittent and less efficient wind and solar power, which require environmentally unsound extraction, production, and energy-storage technologies? Why is the production and processing of food under attack? Why do they openly embrace massive population reduction and the impoverishment and enslavement of those who are left alive? Why are individual rights relentlessly attacked while collectivism, the separation of income from production, equality of outcomes, status dictated by race, ethnicity, and gender rather than merit, the elimination of personal privacy, and perverse sexual propensities and practices promoted and inflicted on children? Why have they started a war that could lead to the annihilation of the human race?
We keep returning to the same answer. "They want to rule you because they want to kill you because they want to kill existence and themselves. Hard as it may be to comprehend, don’t we know them by their works: by the slavery, carnage, and wars they’ve imposed, the freedoms they’ve robbed, the joy they’ve extinguished? Look at the world with eyes wide open. What do you see?" -
“The Last Gasp,” Robert Gore, SLL, 3/24/20
What you see is the only explanation that fits. They are trying to kill themselves and everyone else: suicidal genocide. Don’t choke on this last red pill, although it’s the hardest to swallow. It leaves you standing at the edge of an abyss, a soulless void, but it has the virtue of explanation. And it leaves you with certainty: you must protect yourself and those you love - you’re stronger than you think, and fight them with everything you have - they’re weaker than you, or they, think.
There is no way to prepare for nuclear holocaust and you might not want to be one of the survivors. If humanity stops short of that final destination we must do everything we can to fight our suicidal murderers. Murderous hatred builds nothing, it only destroys. Tax theft, regulatory extortion, and mountains of debt that will never be repaid mark their inability to produce. They need us for that. It’s the linchpin of their schemes for subjugation and our point of attack.
Many people don’t realize that when they deposit the debt-scrip that’s absurdly called money into a financial institution, their only claim on that scrip is as an unsecured creditor of the institution. The institution is free to lend or invest that scrip and their recipients often lend or invest it again. In this way debt pyramids and systemic leverage builds. When the system crashes, as it eventually must, depositors are told to take a number. Perhaps they’ll receive a fraction of the scrip they deposited. Or perhaps not.
"It is a matter of some urgency that the payers apply their leverage while they still have it. Simply put, they need to bankrupt the government before the government bankrupts them. On present course it will go broke, perhaps sooner than most people expect. In its desperate rapacity, it will seize every stream of income and asset it can get its kleptocratic hands on. It is incumbent on those with streams of income and assets to launch a preemptive strike or lose everything, which would surely usher in that dystopian apocalypse."
You don’t have to be David to fight Goliath and you don’t have to be Atlas to shrug. In “Revolution in America,” I made the case that withdrawal of scrip en masse from America’s highly leveraged financial system would undermine the foundation of the Ruling Caste’s tawdry empire. I’m not going to make that case again - interested readers can click the link - but it still stands. In a system as leveraged as ours, mass withdrawal, a preemptive bank run, would be David’s rock and sling.
The situation is more urgent now because Americans will soon be denied yet another freedom - the freedom to withdraw their money from their bank or other financial institution. What’s rarely mentioned in the discussions of central bank digital currencies is that digital scrip will be electronically trapped. Bank withdrawals will be tightly controlled and runs will be no more permitted than disclosures of government criminality or criticisms of the Ruling Caste.
Right now you can withdraw scrip from the system and turn it into
Real Money: physical gold or silver. Perhaps you want to keep enough in the system for the transactional convenience of paying your bills. If you take out the rest - your savings - and buy precious metals, with one toss of the rock you’ve increased your personal freedom and autonomy from the government while waging war against it. And it’s legal...for now.
The government is bankrupt. Its only remaining financial strategies are rapacious taxation, endless central bank debt monetization, and consequently, infinite log (99.99999999999⇾ percent) scrip debasement, which leads to the outcome Washington Irving described so well.
Could this delusion always last, the life of a merchant would indeed be a golden dream; but it is as short as it is brilliant. Let but a doubt enter, and the “season of unexampled prosperity” is at end. The coinage of words is suddenly curtailed; the promissory capital begins to vanish into smoke; a panic succeeds, and the whole superstructure, built upon credit and reared by speculation, crumbles to the ground, leaving scarce a wreck behind: “It is such stuff as dreams are made of.” - Washington Irving, “The Crayon Papers,” 1820
As the “promissory capital” vanishes the financial system implodes - it too will be bankrupt because bankrupt governments are its ultimate guarantor. The question is not whether or not it will implode, but whether you choose to be an instigator or a victim of the implosion. You can protect yourself, withdraw your scrip, and exchange it for real-money gold or silver. If enough people do that it’s a run and the rickety edifice collapses. Or you can keep your money within the system. In the dead of night a law or regulation is announced and the next day your scrip is “bailed-in” or converted to central bank digital scrip, which is the same thing. Good luck to you after that.
Collapsed governments won’t have the wherewithal to implement a Great Reset nor, it is to be hoped, wage nuclear war. The collectivist left has long dreamed of collapsing government - Cloward-Piven, Saul Alinsky, and all that - which would be replaced by bigger, supposedly better, but actually more tyrannical government that they control.
The Principled Productive can play Collapse the Government as well, and far better, because government depends on their productivity and amidst the rubble they will be the ones who can actually build back better. Atlases will greet efforts to resurrect and “improve” collapsed welfare-warfare states not with shrugs but with firearms and other weaponry, some of it seized from those collapsed states. In successful enclaves freedom will be the order of the day, simply because freedom works by allowing those who work to work, and there will be much work to be done.
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brushfires of freedom in the minds of men." - Samuel Adams
I and other bloggers are sometimes criticized as keyboard warriors who only highlight problems without proposing solutions. Okay, here’s a strategy at least, although it’s not a complete solution: attack the Ruling Caste and their governments at their weakest point - indebtedness and inability to produce. I can’t envision a solution that wouldn’t require the commitment and action of a Samuel Adams’ “tireless minority,” which would still have to number in the millions. However, this strategy has the virtues of present legality, no bloodshed, implementation by individuals in whose interests it would clearly be, and compounding effectiveness as more individuals participate. It can be a personal first step, self-protection that takes the initiative against those who would enslave or kill us. These isolated sparks might then become brushfires that merge into a conflagration. If anyone has a better idea, the forum is yours in the comments section."
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Hat tip to The Burning Platform for this material.
