These days I find myself thinking back to Steven Spielberg's 1989 movie 'Always.'
In the movie, 'Pete' flies a water bomber putting out forest fires. Early in the movie, one of his fellow ‘smoke-jumpers’ has his plane’s engine set on fire by getting too close to a raging fire. Pete saves his buddy by dropping a load of fire-retardant on the other's plane, extinguishing the flaming engine.
For about 30 seconds, Pete and the audience relax. Whew, that was a close one!
Then suddenly Pete realizes his own plane's engine has caught fire.
Seconds later - BOOM! He's blown out of the sky just moments after we thought the crisis was over. (If you missed the movie, that scene is here.)
Two weeks ago I was full of hope. An impending return to normal was highly anticipated. I was looking forward to returning to the YMCA and losing the pounds I have put on during COVID. Our family was planning to travel around BC camping this summer, followed by a trip to Ecuador to visit my wife's family.
Now normal is gone. We're back into the Cold War, a Cold War that threatens to turn hot, perhaps incandescently hot.
Am I the only one that can't help but think this new crisis was deliberately manufactured?
The powers that be have given themselves a whole new set of permissions to squelch what little remains of North America's free press.
It's been a great distraction from COVID at exactly the time it was becoming possible to ask questions about whether the management of the pandemic had been horribly botched. Information about excess deaths in the working age population was starting to come out, as was damning information on vaccine side-effects.
And, then there was the story about how the original Wuhan COVID virus contained a 12-nucleotide sequence that Moderna had patented in 2017. How weird is that!
All that's been pushed aside and forgotten now.
Justin Trudeau can even say with a straight face that Canada was “taking a stand against authoritarianism.” And Canada's state-run media won't even call him on it.
North America was already headed for recession/depresssion and rampant inflation well before Russia entered Ukraine. But now the unfolding economic meltdown won't be seen as the end result of two years of ineffective lock-downs and rampant money-printing. Now it will all be Russia's fault. How very convenient.
Those in charge have brought us all to the brink of nuclear war in an attempt to save their own sorry asses from a just reckoning for their abject incompetence.
Though the mainstream media are all shamelessly cheerleading the rush towards Armageddon, the crisis in which we find ourselves has been predicted by dozens of eminent authorities over the past decade - George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Stephen Cohen, John Mearsheimer, Jack Matlock, William Perry, Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Sachs, Bill Burns, Paul Keating, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Gates, and Pat Buchanan, to name a few. Arnaud Bertrand goes through that long list of learned people who stated very clearly that if the West did what the West has done, war in Ukraine would be the inevitable result, and that Ukraine would be wrecked.
What’s happened in Ukraine was an entirely predictable and preventable disaster. If we still had a free press in North America, we'd be talking about the horrible mistakes that Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnston and Joe Biden made in bringing us to this point.
Putin is not the only one here guilty of a horrible mistake here. Too bad no-one in the mainstream press is allowed to talk about that.
Occasionally I can feel nostalgia for the days when nuclear war was unlikely enough we could satirize it.
Here's Tom Lehrer with So Long Mom, I'm Off to Drop the Bomb.
Here's another classic: We'll All Go together When We Go.
Big Brother has decided the only way to continue to keep the masses under control is to engineer a new war between Europa and Eurasia. Let's hope humanity survives their reckless sociopathy.
PS: The biases of the press are present in how they cover things, and what they don’t talk about. I’ve seen lots of media pieces describing this as ‘the greatest crisis since the Second World War.’ But there’s a way better historical equivalent: the Cuban missile crisis. President John F. Kennedy made clear to Russia that he would invade Cuba if Russian ICBMs were not removed from Cuba, that it was unacceptable to have Russian nukes next door to American soil. The Russians sensibly backed down. The Russians found it equally untenable that American nukes could be in a NATO Ukraine. They warned NATO for months but NATO was too stupid - or too hungry for war - to back down.
The Uko-Nazis of Ukraine have spent the last eight years trying to ethnically cleanse the Donbass region of Ukraine of ethnic Russians. They’ve killed 10,000 civilians and 4,000 members of the Donbass defense forces. They’ve caused 500,000 Russian-speaking Ukrainians to flee to Russia as refugees. When was the last time you saw a Western news report about those atrocities? Or saw this recently released report on said war crimes? (Download “FULL TEXT” for the report.)
I remember listening to Tom Lehrer as a teenager and loving his satirical lyrics and phrasing - a unique treat of the day! I listened to a few again just now, so thanks for the flashback! My thinking is the same around the whole Russia-Ukraine situation, as I suspect it has been manufactured to take the heat off those responsible for the covid response and management catastrophe. How did we get so jaded in such a relatively short time? I guess it’s called waking up! Thanks for this and keep your hopes up for that trip to Ecuador!
Big thumbs up for the Tom Lehrer references! My favorite nuke song of his is "Who's Next?", but I think my favorite on any topic is "Irish Ballad". What's not to love about a math teacher who writes biting political satire songs?
Regarding the distraction of the day, I agree that most of what is happening is manufactured and choreographed by globalist elites. However, while I plan (and prep) for the worst, I continue to do my best to go about my life as normally as possible. I'm stronger and fitter now than I was two years ago, thanks to working out in my barn or outdoors on our acreage, and I periodically camp out overnight in the woods and practice bushcrafting and survival skills. Too many people are giving in to the continual barrage of crises and letting that run their lives. We need to stand firm and live like free citizens rather than getting jerked around as pawns by the media and big tech.
Keep doing what you do here on Substack, and know that you are appreciated!