If you *know* before you start talking, you are unlikely to listen. On this blog I offer my readers my ‘version’ of events, past and present, aware of the fact that I may be wrong about certain things which are crucial to understanding what went down, hence I may be wrong about what is going to happen. I constantly look ‘over my shoulder’ to see if something emerges which offers a different perspective from what I assume to be correct, aware of the fact that we tend to hold on to what we *thought* was true and confirmed, yet it was ‘shaky’ at best. Or even 'out of the ballpark’ wrong.
The theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger described a famous ‘thought experiment’ concerning quantum superposition, where a cat locked in a closed box could either be dead or alive, and there was no way of *knowing*, unless you opened the box. Unless you start to listen, you may fool yourself. If you were betting on finding the cat alive, *knowing* it would be, and you opened the box to find a deceased cat, it was not your curiosity which killed it.
In real world affairs we rely on ‘sources’ if we want to form our own opinion. Or we rely on ‘authority’ we trust. Oddly, if that ‘authority’ has been caught lying again and again, many people are prone to ‘explain’ these lies as ‘smart’. Now, I’m not being naive, and in love and war, and in many other cases, people are tempted to hide the truth, going as far as putting lipstick on a pig if they have to. Masking unfavorable developments and conspiracies shouldn’t be encouraged, but we do it all the time, because we do not like the uncertainty. We pick our poison, and live with it. That cat is alive, or dead, and that is it. If opening the box reveals the cat is dead after all, while we insisted that we *knew* it was alive, we will ‘explain’ it away through saying that it was our curiosity which killed it, and move on.
As a phenomenon it has been known for ages. Many religious people stick to fairy tales which serve their religious community, unable to recognize these tall stories for what they are, and ‘consensus scientists’ offer ‘explanations’ which cannot be true, and on more than one occasion were proven false, but they serve their community well, producing ‘models’ which are used extensively without ever taking a look at the real world again. Acting on those ‘models’, instead of reality, produces economic warfare and a sprawling industry of wishful thinking techniques to influence developments in the world. No lack of warnings from *real* scientists, *exact* scientists, about what happens if you insert ‘garbage’ in a carefully crafted ‘model’. And if the ‘model’ is not even carefully crafted, don’t pay any attention to the outcome, or you will regret it.
Tonight, European time, Trump is going to meet Putin in Alaska for talks. There is absolutely nobody I know who insists that Trump is correct on *anything* he says, because creating confusion and chaos is his strategy to emerge with ‘results’. He uses words to shape the environment, not to describe it. Aim high, settle for what you wanted to pay, or less, and leave the seller with the illusion that he got the best deal. On the other side of the table we’ve got Putin, who is a ‘straight-shooter’ and a chess-player, where you can see the board with all the remaining pieces on it. Nothing to hide, save for his strategy to end the game victorious. From at least 2007 he told us *exactly* what would happen if NATO kept expanding, absorbing Georgia and/or Ukraine in particular, but not how. And he hasn’t disappointed.
There is no doubt in my mind that Putin, and those who accompany him to Alaska, an impressive list of members of his cabinet, are going to ‘enlighten’ Trump on what is real, and what is religious fervor. My only fear is that ‘someone’, ‘somewhere’, might try to crash the ‘party’, or Putin’s plane, thinking that would be the upset needed to change reality and bring about a world in which our fantasies flourish. I read what the European ‘leaders’ are aiming for, and I noticed that Zelensky is now upgrading his demands from ‘wishful thinking’ to ‘out of the ballpark’ unrealistic. What is apparently ill understood in the ‘Collective West’, is what Medevedev was hinting at when he posted about the ‘Dead Hand’-response to a nuclear attack on Russia. That ‘Cold War’ term refers us to ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, or ‘MAD’. You *really* need to be quite mad to go down that path to see if the other guy will destroy you as well, after you crossed his ‘Red Line’.
Putin and his ‘team’ are going to Alaska to strike a deal with Trump. Not to settle the war in Ukraine. Not to please the Europeans. They are aware of the fact that settling the war in Ukraine will require negotiations with Ukraine, since the Russian demands require ‘Kiev’ to let go of its ambition to join NATO and become a permanent threat to Russia. The Russians *have* been ready for negotiations since 2007, and they are still talking to the Ukrainians in Istanbul, though there is little or no progress, because Ukraine isn’t listening. They *know* the cat is alive. The realities on the battlefield, the destruction, the dead, the debt, the dying hand feeding them, absolutely *nothing* can convince Zelensky that he put his money on the wrong horse. The very fact that all the horses he embraced as his champions are either gone of going, struck by the ‘Zelensky Curse’, doesn’t inform him that his days as the leader of Ukraine are numbered.
The real question mark is Trump. What Putin has to offer is to ‘Make America Great Again’ in a very real, economical sense. Exploring the Arctic, and joined ventures which will include other BRICS countries. Provided Trump finds a way to pull the rug out from under the ‘Warparty’. Not merely vis a vis Russia, but saving *all* the BRICS-countries. That would cement Trump’s standing in his own country, most certainly among his voters, and turn him into a ‘historical figure’. But does he have the leverage? Or do we need to believe those commentators who insist that Trump is ‘bought and paid for’, and that everything he does is an act, while ‘continuity of agenda’, towards world domination, is set in stone? If that is true, Putin and his ‘team’ are in danger, and so are we. Not because Putin is our savior, but because reality will hit us where it hurts as those who are set to replace Putin will pull the plug when someone proceeds to kill the Russian president. In fact, even if a very real accident would hit that Russian delegation, that would be the outcome. Not even because the Russians will pull the plug without thinking twice, but because the religious fervor in our part of the world will reach fever pitch and feed into the illusion of a victory, with further escalation seen as a ‘last step towards victory’. In the ‘Collective West’ we came to see developments as tied to individuals, believing that a regime change would solve everything. One look over our shoulder, and we would *know* that it is a fantasy. Or rather, a nightmare we created in all those countries we hit. With Ukraine only being the latest example. And Russia, China, Iran and India resisting successfully.
Those Europeans, and Zelensky, effectively suppressing all the talk coming out of Moscow, Beijing, or from highly regarded realists like Mearsheimer, Sachs, Baud, Diessen and many, many others, have blood on their hands. With every development they opted to set the stage for events which were meant to support their fiction, angering military professionals I follow closely, who insist that propaganda has to be build on real events, not the other way around. But no use, so far. The cherry on that turd would be an attempt to kill the individuals hated the most by those who live ‘Out There’, somewhere far removed from the real world, with its limitations. I’m not saying they *will*, but after two or three attempts on Trump’s life on American soil, I wouldn’t be surprised if they went for the jugular. Those clumsy attempts on Trump’s life moreover suggest that someone, somewhere, ‘perfected’ the work of the ‘MK-Ultra’-team, which sought to created mind-controlled zombies for this line of ‘work’. Mad scientists and politicians at ‘work’. It was kind of funny, if you like your parody dark and scary, when Peter Sellers played the part in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’, but who could have thought that life would imitate art in that particular sense as well? Yet, here we are.
Now drop what you are doing, and start to listen to *others*. Stop talking for a moment. Appreciate that others may not see the world through the same lens. And pay attention to possible dangers on the road ahead before they hit you where it hurts. Leave that box with the cat alone, unless you truly want to save the cat, if it still alive.