Nina’s Version Of Nuclear Armageddon Is Better Than Hilary’s

In the song 99 Red Balloons by Nina, a boy and a girl blow up a bag of balloons and let the wind take them, only to have radar systems detect them and mistake them for incoming missiles, touching off a nuclear war that destroys the planet. A pretty absurd way to start a nuclear war, but I can’t really think of a smart way of doing it. Honestly, can you think of a scenario where you would say, “Yeah, our planet is dead, but it’s better than what the alternative would have been.”?

I’d like to present to you an equally absurd way in which a nuclear war might be started, if you’d care to hear it. Keep in mind that all I am about relate to you is not insane conspiracy theory but based solidly upon facts provided by CNN and the FBI. Not that I hold the testimony of CNN and the FBI in particularly high regard, but when the very parties that have convinced so many of a certain narrative reveal facts that run contrary to that narrative, you can hardly accuse them of doing it for self-serving purposes, can you?

Let me sum up this story for you: https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/20/politics/hillary-clinton-robby-mook-fbi/index.html You’re welcome read it all yourself but I know your time is important, and I like to think I have a bit more critical an eye when reading than most do:

In the waning days of the 2016 Presidential Campaign, “Hillary Clinton personally approved her campaign’s plans in fall 2016 to share information with a reporter about an uncorroborated alleged server backchannel between Donald Trump and a top Russian bank, her former campaign manager testified Friday in federal court.”

The story was passed to a sympathetic journalist with Slate, which published this article: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_server_registered_to_the_trump_organization_communicating_with_russia.html

I want to make a couple of assertions now that while they may not be facts derived from sources you trust, are so self-evident that I hardly think you will have room to argue. Assertion one is that last minute surprise accusations are often thrown out by politicians and the machinery that’s working for them in order to make the other side look bad. Part of the reason they are left for the last minute is so that they might make maximum impact, but another reason they are left for the last minute is because there is little substance to them and that if revealed too soon, they would be debunked and therefore ineffectual.

Assertion two is that powerful politicians and their staff have many working relationships within the media and are quite astute at dropping them leads and stories when it so suits them. Check out the many self-congratulating journalist celebrations to realize just how cozy the media and those who they cover really are. (If you have any disagreements with the assumptions I make, please share them with me. It’s just that I consider them to be so self-evident as to be worthy of making).

“The greatest miracle of the internet is that it exists — the second greatest is that it persists. Every so often we’re reminded that bad actors wield great skill and have little conscience about the harm they inflict on the world’s digital nervous system.” Quoted from the Slate article

So — the Slate article written after the Hillary campaign decided to hand the story to them with Hillary’s approval — Hillary then tweets this, as though she’s just heard about these accusation from reading it in Slate:

You can see how this is less than honest, right? I’m not asking politicians not to be sneaky, but I am asking that those who vote for these people know who they are and what dishonesty they’re capable of, even the ones who say they’re on your side. (Jake Sullivan, by the way, is now Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor).

Pause for a moment and appreciate what you are witnessing: the birth of an echo chamber. Its inception began when the Hillary campaign impregnated the media with an unverified story, which the media did nothing to verify. From there, Hillary held up the unverified story that had already cleared two hurdles to say “Look what the media drug up!”

From there, Hilarity ensued, if one can find humor in the potential destruction of most all life on earth. The story ping-ponged between the media and the Democratic Party, growing more intense with each swat of the paddle like a game of Pong. But the game was just beginning, morphing from a simplistic 70’s video game into a modern-day video game with graphics so intense it’s hard to even know if it’s real or not anymore.

Things really began to take on a life of their own when Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman went to the FBI with the story, claiming to be doing so as a concerned citizen acting on his own, when in fact as he was doing so he was billing the Clinton campaign for his services. He also went to the New York Times. Things began to get really crazy from then on, and in the ensuing nearly six years, things have not abated a whit.

Now here’s the important part: according to this article by CNN, “Federal investigators ultimately concluded there weren’t any improper Trump-Alfa cyber links.” If you click on the link provided in the quote you will find this statement: “It’s been public for years that the FBI determined there weren’t improper cyber links.” I include that quote because I wonder how many people are aware that the FBI determined there weren’t improper Trump/Russian secret communication channels as was alleged.

FBI special agent Scott Hellman said of the information packet shared with the FBI, “”I thought perhaps the person who had drafted this document was suffering from some mental disability.” This is the same information Slate ran with without bothering to investigate.

Many other similar stories accusing Russia of various crimes have later been debunked by intelligence agencies and the very media that originally pushed them. Seldom does the impact of the retractions match the initial impact of the accusations.

So there you have it, we are now at a point where we are fighting a proxy war with Russia over Ukraine. It is impossible to say how much this particular, very fake, story had to do with us arriving at this juncture. But we know that it and other similarly debunked stories have had a very large impact in our perception of Russia and its government overall. The moral and intellectually honest response to this truth would be to issue a sincere apology to Vladimir Putin, to the Russian government, and to the Russian people for the utter hysteria we have engaged in for the last six years. You still have the right to hate Russia and Russians if you wish, but it’s still the right thing to do to admit when you were wrong. And perhaps this might even permit you to see the current situation in Ukraine with a nuanced perspective rather than instantly believing that everything any Russian says is a lie and everything any Russian does is evil.

And if you’re not adult enough to do that, maybe just blow up some balloons and let them loose near a NORAD station. If we’re going to blow up the planet, we might as well have a decent theme song for the occasion.